“Oh, your country, how wonderful it is. Who should think to find choice
works of ancient Greece with a roof of what you call the Thetch. In
another house I find antiquities of Egypt, in another the Oriental
porcelain and the lacquer, in another I find pictures most superb. Where
originals do not exist, I find reproductions of the greatest works.
Surely your England is the most artistic country in the world.”--I fear
that England is Artistic in another sense. One day a shopman was showing
me things all covered with clumsy ornament, and I asked if there was
nothing of good design, without all these excrescences. He seemed
puzzled at this, and then it dawned upon him, “Oh, I see, sir. You want
something less Artistic.”
This was a secluded place until the railway came. My grandfather writes
on 23 September 1849, “I find most people like Wreyland, that is, those
advancing in years: so quiet and so sheltered.” And then on 3 January
1864, “I cannot fancy that any railway improves scenery, but this will
not so disturb it as one might imagine.... They fancy it is cutting up
the country and letting in more people, which will destroy the scenery
and the quiet of the neighbourhood; but they think more of its
introducing new society than destroying the scenery.”
People who live amidst fine scenery are apt to treat it with contempt,
partly from familiarity and partly (I think) because they do not see the
scenery as other people see it. You form a higher opinion of a man if
you have only seen him at his best, than if you have also seen him at
his worst and in all intermediate states. It is the same with scenery.
Most strangers see this district in the height of summer, whereas the
natives see it in the winter time as well, and have both aspects of it
in their mind when they are looking at it; and they sometimes show
impatience when strangers praise it overmuch. A farmer here was leaning
over a gate from which there is a glorious view. Seeing the view, a
passer-by remarked to him how glorious it was. The farmer answered,
“Durn the view. I bain’t lookin’ at no view. I be lookin’ how they
dratted rabbits ’as ated up my tunnips.”
When the railway came, a plan was drawn up showing how the hillsides
were to be laid out with winding roads and villas in the accepted
Torquay style; and two such villas were built, but happily no further
harm was done.--Torquay had spread out with its winding roads all over
the unsheltered hills, and was trading on the reputation it had gained
when it was all in shelter. After wintering there, a lady told me it was
the first time she had wintered in a place where the ink froze on her
writing table.
The old houses here are generally down in hollows, as the old people
thought more of shelter than of anything else: they never dreamt of
building houses in unsheltered places for the sake of views. In 1849-50
a house was built on the hill behind Lustleigh, facing Lustleigh Cleave.
My grandfather writes, 5 January 1851, “I told them last summer, when
they were talking of their view, that they had not yet experienced a
South Wester. Now they have experienced one, they have packed off, bag
and baggage: one window blown in and smashed to pieces, wood and all,
and others damaged.”
Since then that house has been much altered and enlarged, and now has a
set of turrets. Turrets were a novelty here; and, looking at it, someone
said to me, “Bain’t shaped proper, like a house: more like a cruet, I
call’n.” Architects so often spoil their work by thinking only of
design, without considering whether it will suit the district and the
site. Two great houses have been built within ten miles of here in
recent years. One is by an Oxford architect--now dead--and would look
very well in Oxford, in the Broad, or even in the country, if it stood
on level ground and had big trees behind. Half-way up a steep hill-side,
it is hardly a success. The other is by Lutyens. It stands on a hill-top
that was better without it; but, if there had to be a house there, this
was the very thing.
Another edifice is by a man I cannot call an Architect: a simple Tect,
and nothing more. There happened to be a corrugated iron shed close by;
and a man remarked to me, “That is one of the few buildings of which I
can conscientiously say that its appearance is improved by having a
corrugated iron shed in front of it.”
All over Devon our A1 villages are being converted into C3 towns; but
this is being done by people who have only C3 minds and little
experience of anything above C3. I hate their works, but resent their
want of culture far less than I resent the want of breeding in the
people who appreciate a view and build a house where they can see it,
well knowing that their house will spoil the view for everybody else.
There was a copse of nut-bushes growing wild amongst the rocks on the
way to Lustleigh Cleave. In early years I felt quite sure that
Providence had put it there to give us a supply of nuts to take to the
Nut Cracker--a logan-stone at the top of the Cleave, so delicately
poised that it just cracked the nuts and did not crush them. And now the
bushes are cut down and the rocks rolled over, and in their place there
is a cluster of corrugated iron huts.
When a War Memorial was projected here, I thought that the names of the
dead might be carved on one of the great rocks on Lustleigh Cleave, with
the date and nothing more. As it is, they have been carved on a neat
little wooden tablet with an inscription of the usual kind, and put up
in the church. I fancy our memorial might have been more worthy of them,
had their names been on the granite in the solitude up there with that
wild ravine below.
We have another memorial here, of which we all are proud. It is at the
railway station. “Beneath this slab, and stretched out flat, lies Jumbo,
once our station cat.” That cat had many lives: jumped in and out
between the wheels of trains, and yet died in its bed.
A tombstone is primarily a label for identifying what is down below; but
survivors will not always face that brutal fact. They merely give the
name and age; and in after years this may not be enough. I had to find
the next-of-kin to an old servant of ours who was over ninety when she
died. (She had always kept them at a distance, as they often wished to
borrow money that she did not wish to lend.) There was an entry in a
Family Bible, say, A.B. born 1 January 1820; and there were tombstones
of three persons named A.B. who died at ages answering to that.--They
ought to give the birthday and the parents’ Christian names, to show
exactly who is there. Instead of that, they usually give texts and
verses out of hymns.
This has always been a healthy district, and so very quiet that people
had no worries; and they usually lived on till a great age. I have heard
it said regretfully, “Ah, her died young,” and then heard it explained,
“Her ne’er saw sixty.” Times are changing now. Looking at the tombstones
of some kindred of my own, I was observing how the ages fell from
nineties and eighties to seventies and sixties. I said nothing aloud,
but the sexton read my thoughts and put them into words, “Aye, zir, they
do say as each generation be weaker and wiser than the last.”
* * * * *
_BY THE SAME AUTHOR_
SMALL TALK AT WREYLAND
FIRST SERIES
Demy 8vo. Illustrated. 8_s._ net.
“Mr Torr chats to us. We feel that we have been invited to Wreyland and
are sitting with him over the fire while he turns through his
grandfather’s and his father’s letters and reads us little extracts, and
lets his talk wander as it will from suggestion to suggestion.... A
quaint ingenuity and originality of idea plays about it all: a sly wit
flashes here and there. But always, behind everything, we feel Wreyland,
the Devon home, the rooted life. We should like to give some examples;
but choosing them is as difficult as choosing raspberries when all are
ripe; for, in the classic phrase of the reviewer, there is not a dull
page in Mr Torr’s book. We confess to skipping a single paragraph. On
turning back to read it we found that we had missed a fragrant bit of
social history.... As to good stories, open any page that you will and
you will find one.... The only point of capping a good talker’s stories
is to egg him on to tell more. We hope that Mr Torr will take the
hint.”--_Times Literary Supplement._
“He has travelled far afield in Europe, and he comes back to Wreyland
and dips into his grandfather’s and his father’s letters, and his own
memory as well, and tells us what he thinks of things that were and are.
And what we like is the easy balance of his mind. The old times were not
always the good times, and modern days are not altogether bad; so Mr
Torr has taken each as it has come, and has been content
therewith.”--_Morning Post._
“Wreyland is Mr Torr’s home near Dartmoor, and his book gives us a sort
of comic mirror of life at Wreyland during his own life and the life of
his grandfather. For Mr Torr sees life comically as surely as Jane
Austen herself.... It would be difficult, indeed, to define the reasons
of its astonishing attractiveness. Probably one of them is that Mr Torr
was born with a genius for enjoyment, and that he somehow infects us
with his happiness in his most trivial pages.”--_Daily News._
“This short book is worth a dozen of the silly volumes that now flood
the book-market. It preserves country lore of the sort that is fast
decaying, mingled with travel notes, a few details of scholarship and
family history. The ordinary local historian is industrious, but wanting
in other ways. Mr Torr is a scholar: he has, too, an excellent sense of
humour, an inquiring mind and an observant eye.”--_Saturday Review._
“A man who takes a keen interest in his ancestral place and in his
humble neighbours, and who at the same time is in touch with the world
of scholarship through his special studies, may be said to make the most
of life.... Mr Torr, like a true scholar, wastes no words. The essence
of the ordinary book of memoirs, as he knows, is in the anecdotes. He
therefore gives the anecdotes without the usual framework, telling them
neatly and briefly, and passing from one subject to another without even
a chapter-heading to break the flow of good talk.”--_Spectator._
“Mr Torr’s book is as typically English as a Christmas pudding.... His
book is far more than a local history, however; it should be read as a
complementary volume to _Mansfield Park_ and _Pendennis_, to _Life’s
Little Ironies_ and _The Way of all Flesh_.... From Mr Torr we learn
just how good life could be for a wealthy, self-contained, enterprising
Englishman in the last hundred years or so. It was all more or less
comic relief to him. Old walls are almost serious, and old roofs, and
the beauty of fine days and fine landscape; the rest is good
fun.”--_Athenæum._
“He has travelled and written books, he is a depository of odd lore,
sometimes local, sometimes classical, sometimes smacking of the great
world. Intermixed with his own chatty reminiscences he gives us extracts
from old family letters and other glimpses of days which the war has
caused to seem further off than they are. Reading this charming little
book is very much like listening to the squire gossiping by his own
fireside.”--_Guardian._
“And when we close his book and try to recollect what it was in it that
made it so hard to lay down, we begin to be aware that his converse with
us has flowed on in just that artless inevitable way: one thing, as the
saying goes, leads to another.... He has charm; and the charm of this
extraordinary book we despair of conveying by any quotation or any
description; we can only say it is there.”--_Field._
“He goes from story to story, from oddment to oddment, wasting no time
in generalisations or connecting platitudes. The result is an
extraordinary medley that might almost (save only for a few dates) have
been written fifty years ago, or fifty years hence, by a man of Mr
Torr’s knowledge, habits, and temperament, and that could have been read
with as much pleasure by a man of George I’s reign as it probably will
be by people who accidentally run across it in the reign of George
XII.”--_Land and Water._
“If by ‘small talk’ is meant gossip, Mr Torr will not be offended if we
say that this is one of the pleasantest books of gossip which we ever
came across.... The district is a little out of the world, and it is no
wonder that some of the pleasant superstitions of rural England have not
died out there.... The family were great travellers, and many parallel
examples from other countries are adduced to illustrate the
superstitions of Devonshire.”--_Country Life._
“Mr Torr was well advised by his friends to publish these jottings,
originally intended for private circulation. They will specially
interest Devonians, as they are mostly about the manners and customs,
superstitions and traditions of that fascinating county in the days
before railways, but they give you glimpses also of later days and of
places of more general interest, of Italy, for example, when under the
intolerable tyranny of Austria, and of France when in the throes of the
Franco-Prussian War, and even a glimpse of Napoleon the
First.”--_Truth._
“We are grateful that in days like these he has drawn from his store of
reminiscences such a delightful and varied assortment of small talk. He
brings to his aid, too, diaries and letters of relatives as keenly
observant and as alert and shrewd as himself.”--_Queen._
“My first thought was, ‘What on earth is the University Press doing with
small talk in an obscure village?’ My second was, ‘How enterprising they
were to get hold of such an odd and excellent book!’... I do not know
any book in which so many characteristic and uniformly good stories of
Devonshire people are to be found.... But he has gone far beyond the
locality. He is liable to touch on anything in the world except his
inner self. That is a pity. A little more egoism would have made his
book even better.”--_The New Statesman._
“‘I meant,’ writes the author of this attractive miscellany, ‘to keep to
local matters, but it has gone much further than that.’ It has. _Small
Talk at Wreyland_ travels over half the world and many centuries of
history.... The ordinary reader who merely wishes to roam the world
without leaving his own fireside will find Mr Torr a delightful
companion.”--_Outlook._
“It is seldom that one comes on so good a volume of gossip as _Small
Talk at Wreyland_.... _Emma_ itself hardly throws more light on the
comic side of human nature than do some of these old letters.... But it
is for its glimpses of life in Wreyland, not of the larger world, that
one will return again and again to Mr Torr’s most entertaining
book.”--_Everyman._
“So we look for the kind of book an accomplished scholar produces, and
we are not disappointed, though Mr Torr has left his materials in ‘most
admired disorder.’... With Mr Torr some new theme is always turning
up--we never know quite how or when.... We are obliged to him for some
capital gossip, and we shall be glad to have more.”--_Notes and
Queries._
“Mr Torr, of Wreyland (a Devonshire hamlet), has a super-excellent
memory, a pleasant sense of humour, and a useful aptitude for keeping
old diaries and letters. Not only does Mr Torr keep these, but he
actually reads them, and extracts from them the juiciest morsels for our
delectation.... Perhaps, after all, it is manner even more than matter
which makes the charm of this book.”--_Literary World._
“Wreyland is a hamlet in Devonshire; and Mr Torr’s book of gossip gives
us the life at Wreyland in his own, his father’s, and his grandfather’s
days. The concrete pleasure and happiness of it, the deep association
between man and man, and between man and nature, bring one back to
reality and life. There is a richness in country life, whether of
peasant or squire, which makes the epigram of the pulpit and the
philosophy of the school seem thin and foolish. The unconscious wisdom
of life radiates through Mr Torr’s pages, and it is a bigger thing and a
better than any despair or mockery, than any explanations or
excuse.”--_Bookman._
“The book is exceedingly interesting, diverting, and informing. To me it
has been better than many discourses of the learned, and some
exhortations of the pious.”--_Methodist Recorder._
“A book, if it is a good book, must be natural, unforced, something that
has ‘grow’d’ as Topsy herself grow’d in _Uncle Tom’s Cabin_. Well,
_Small Talk at Wreyland_ has grow’d, as a regard for it grows as one
turns its pages and reads of peaceful days and pleasant journeys, and,
sometimes, of notable people. It has all the qualities of good talk by a
good host who has gathered a few friends about him in his home in some
interesting part of the country.”--_Church Family Newspaper._
“I wish we could fence off a district of Mr Torr’s Devonshire, and
preserve it and its population as an exhibit.... I wish quite
passionately that the inhabitants of Wreyland as a type could be
preserved. It is a rest to pause and contemplate them. They are so
mellow.”--_Saturday Westminster Gazette._
CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
LONDON: FETTER LANE, E.C. 4
C. F. CLAY, MANAGER