THE SOUTH COUNTRY
THE HEART OF ENGLAND SERIES
This Series opens with a new work by Mr. EDWARD THOMAS, that curious
and enthusiastic explorer of the English Countryside, whose prose
style gives him a claim to be regarded as the successor, as he is the
biographer, of Richard Jefferies. The Series includes a new edition
of Mr. THOMAS’S other work, “The Heart of England,” and Mr. HILAIRE
BELLOC’S “The Historic Thames.” These two volumes were originally
issued in limited editions at one Guinea net per volume.
THE SOUTH COUNTRY. By EDWARD THOMAS. Small crown 8vo. 3s. 6d. net.
Mr. Thomas in this new book gives his impressions of a year’s
wanderings afoot as the seasons change through Kent, Sussex, Hampshire,
Wiltshire and Cornwall. It is a prose-poem of the most beautiful
counties in England.
THE HEART OF ENGLAND. By EDWARD THOMAS. Small crown 8vo. 3s. 6d. net.
THE HISTORIC THAMES. By HILAIRE BELLOC, M.P. 3s. 6d. net.
_Prospectus of above Books sent post free on application._
J. M. DENT & CO.
29-30, BEDFORD STREET, LONDON, W.C.
[Illustration]
THE SOUTH
COUNTRY
[Illustration]
_by Edward Thomas_
[Illustration]
LONDON
_J. M. DENT & CO._
_1909_
RICHARD CLAY & SONS, LIMITED,
BREAD STREET HILL, E.C., AND
BUNGAY, SUFFOLK.
“As I can’t leap from cloud to cloud, I want to wander from road to
road. That little path there by the clipped hedge goes up to the high
road. I want to go up that path and to walk along the high road, and
so on and on and on, and to know all kinds of people. Did you ever
think that the roads are the only things that are endless; that one
can walk on and on, and never be stopped by a gate or a wall? They are
the serpent of eternity. I wonder they have never been worshipped.
What are the stars beside them? They never meet one another. The roads
are the only things that are infinite. They are all endless.”
PAUL RUTTLEDGE in
_Where there is Nothing_,
by W. B. YEATS.
TO
EDWARD GARNETT
CONTENTS
CHAP. PAGE
I. THE SOUTH COUNTRY 1
II. THE END OF WINTER--SUFFOLK--HAMPSHIRE 15
III. SPRING--HAMPSHIRE--KENT--SURREY 40
IV. AN ADVENTURER 61
V. SUSSEX 68
VI. A RETURN TO NATURE 73
VII. A RAILWAY CARRIAGE--SURREY--SUSSEX 95
VIII. JUNE--HAMPSHIRE--THE GOLDEN AGE--TRAHERNE 121
IX. HISTORY AND THE PARISH--HAMPSHIRE--CORNWALL 147
X. SUMMER--SUSSEX 180
XI. HAMPSHIRE--AN UMBRELLA MAN 186
XII. CHILDREN OF EARTH--HAMPSHIRE AND SUSSEX 196
XIII. AUGUST--GOING WESTWARD--HAMPSHIRE AND WILTSHIRE 210
XIV. AN OLD HOUSE AND A BOOK--WILTSHIRE 235
XV. AN OUTCAST--WILTSHIRE 245
XVI. THE END OF SUMMER--KENT--BERKSHIRE--HAMPSHIRE--SUSSEX--THE
FAIR 255
Several short passages from this book have been printed in “The
Saturday Review,” “The Nation,” “The New Age,” “The Daily Chronicle,”
and “The Daily News,” and are reprinted by permission.
THE SOUTH COUNTRY
CHAPTER I
THE SOUTH COUNTRY
The name of “South Country” is taken from a poem by Mr. Hilaire Belloc,
beginning--
“When I am living in the Midlands,
They are sodden and unkind,
I light my lamp in the evening,
My work is left behind;
And the great hills of the South Country
Come back into my mind.”
The name is given to the south of England as distinguished from the
Midlands, “North England”, and “West England” by the Severn. The poet
is thinking particularly of Sussex and of the South Downs. In using
the term I am thinking of all that country which is dominated by the
Downs or by the English Channel, or by both; Cornwall and East Anglia
have been admitted only for the sake of contrast. Roughly speaking,
it is the country south of the Thames and Severn and east of Exmoor,
and it includes, therefore, the counties of Kent, Sussex, Surrey,
Hampshire, Berkshire, Wiltshire, Dorset, and part of Somerset. East and
west across it go ranges of chalk hills, their sides smoothly hollowed
by Nature and the marl-burner, or sharply scored by old roads. On
their lower slopes they carry the chief woods of the south country,
their coombes are often fully fledged with trees, and sometimes their
high places are crowned with beech or fir; but they are most admirably
themselves when they are bare of all but grass and a few bushes of
gorse and juniper and some yew, and their ridges make flowing but
infinitely variable clear lines against the sky. Sometimes they support
a plateau of flint and clay, which slopes gradually to the level of
the streams. Sometimes they fall away to the vales in well-defined
ledges--first a long curving slope, then a plain of cornland, and
below that a steep but lesser slope covered with wood, and then again
grassland or sandy heaths and rivers. Except on the plateau, the
summits have few houses and very small hamlets; the first terrace
has larger villages and even a town or two; but most of the towns
are beneath on the banks of the rivers, and chiefly where they are
broadest near the sea, or on the coast itself. The rivers flow mainly
north and south, and can have but a short course before they enter the
sea on the south or the Thames on the north. Those I remember best
are the Stours, the two Rothers, but especially the one which joins
the Arun, the Medway, the Len, the Eden, the Holling, the Teise, the
Ouse, the Itchen, the Meon, the Wey, the Mole, the Kennet, the Ray,
the Winterbournes, the Wiltshire Avon, the Wylye, the Ebble, and many
little waters running gold over New Forest gravel or crystal over the
chalk of Hampshire, and not least of all that unlucky rivulet, the
Wandle, once a nymph that walked among her sisters--
So amiable, fair, so pure, so delicate,
So plump, so full, so fresh, her eyes so wondrous clear:
And first unto her lord, at _Wandsworth_ doth appear,
That in the goodly court, of their great sovereign _Tames_,
There might no other speech be had amongst the streams,
But only of this Nymph, sweet Wandel, what she wore;
Of her complexion, grace, and how herself she bore.
Nor can I omit the Wiltshire and Berkshire canal, as it was fifteen
years ago, between Swindon and Dauntsey, an unfrequented by-way through
a quiet dairy country, and full of pike and tench among the weeds and
under the tall water docks and willow herbs which even then threatened
to subdue it as they now have done.
The chief roads make south, south-east, south-west and west from
London; almost the only road going east and west and not touching
London is the old road known between Winchester and Canterbury as the
Pilgrims’ Way.
Most of the towns are small market towns, manufacturing chiefly beer;
or they are swollen, especially in the neighbourhood of London, as
residential quarters on lines of railway or as health and pleasure
resorts on the sea. But any man used to maps will be wiser on these
matters in an hour than I am. For what I have sought is quiet and as
complete a remoteness as possible from towns, whether of manufactures,
of markets or of cathedrals. I have used a good many maps in my
time, largely to avoid the towns; but I confess that I prefer to do
without them and to go, if I have some days before me, guided by the
hills or the sun or a stream--or, if I have one day only, in a rough
circle, trusting, by taking a series of turnings to the left or a
series to the right, to take much beauty by surprise and to return
at last to my starting-point. On a dull day or cloudy night I have
often no knowledge of the points of the compass. I never go out to
see anything. The signboards thus often astonish me. I wish, by the
way, that I had noted down more of the names on the signboards at the
cross-roads. There is a wealth of poetry in them, as in that which
points--by a ford, too--first, to Poulner and Ringwood; second, to
Gorley and Fordingbridge; third, to Linwood and Broomy: and another
pointing to Fordingbridge, to Ringwood, and to Cuckoo Hill and Furze
Hill: and another in the parish of Pentlow, pointing to Foxearth and
Sudbury, to Cavendish and Clare, and to Belchamps and Yeldham. Castles,
churches, old houses, of extraordinary beauty or interest, have never
worn out any of my shoe leather except by accident. I like to come
upon them--usually without knowing their names and legends--but do
not lament when chance takes me a hundred times out of their way. Nor
have I ever been to Marlow to think about Shelley, or to Winterslow
for Hazlitt’s sake; and I enter Buriton many times without remembering
Gibbon. They would move me no more than the statue of a man and a fat
horse (with beribboned tail), which a grateful countryside erected to
William III in the market square at Petersfield. I prefer any country
church or chapel to Winchester or Chichester or Canterbury Cathedral,
just as I prefer “All round my hat,” or “Somer is icumen in,” to
Beethoven. Not that I dislike the cathedrals, or that I do not find
many pleasures amongst them. But they are incomprehensible and not
restful. I feel when I am within them that I know why a dog bays at
the moon. They are much more difficult or, rather, I am more conscious
in them of my lack of comprehension, than the hills or the sea; and I
do not like the showmen, the smell and look of the museum, the feeling
that it is admiration or nothing, and all the well-dressed and flyblown
people round about. I sometimes think that religious architecture
is a dead language, majestic but dead, that it never was a popular
language. Have some of these buildings lived too long, been too well
preserved, so as to oppress our little days with too permanent an
expression of the passing things? The truth is that, though the past
allures me, and to discover a cathedral for myself would be an immense
pleasure, I have no historic sense and no curiosity. I mention these
trivial things because they may be important to those who read what I
am paid for writing. I have read a great deal of history--in fact, a
university gave me a degree out of respect for my apparent knowledge
of history--but I have forgotten it all, or it has got into my blood
and is present in me in a form which defies evocation or analysis. But
as far as I can tell I am pure of history. Consequently I prefer the
old brick houses round the cathedral, and that avenue of archaic bossy
limes to the cathedral itself with all its turbulent quiet and vague
antiquity. The old school also close at hand! I was there after the end
of the term once, and two boys were kicking a football in a half-walled
court; it was a bright, cold, windy April afternoon; and the ancient
brick was penetrated with their voices and the sound of the ball, and
I thought there could be nothing lovelier than that court, the pleasant
walls, and the broad playing fields in sight of a smooth noble hill and
a temple of dark firs on top. I was not thinking of Winchester or of
any one older than the fondest son of that “mother, more than mother,”
and little of him; but was merely caught up by and with the harmony of
man and his work, of two children playing, and of the green downs and
windy sky.
And so I travel, armed only with myself, an avaricious and often
libertine and fickle eye and ear, in pursuit, not of knowledge, not
of wisdom, but of one whom to pursue is never to capture. Politics,
the drama, science, racing, reforms and preservations, divorces, book
clubs--nearly everything which the average (oh! mysterious average man,
always to be met but never met) and the superior and the intelligent
man is thinking of, I cannot grasp; my mind refuses to deal with
them; and when they are discussed I am given to making answers like,
“In Kilve there is no weathercock.” I expect there are others as
unfortunate, superfluous men such as the sanitation, improved housing,
police, charities, medicine of our wonderful civilization saves from
the fate of the cuckoo’s foster-brothers. They will perhaps follow
my meanders and understand. The critics also will help. They will
misunderstand--it is their trade. How well they know what I ought, or
at least ought not, to do. I must, they have said, avoid “the manner
of the worst oleographs”; must not be “affected,” though the recipe is
not to be had; must beware of “over-excitation of the colour sense.”
In slow course of years we acquire a way of expression, hopelessly
inadequate, as we plainly see when looking at the methods of great
poets, of beautiful women, of athletes, of politicians, but still
gradually as fitted to the mind as an old walking-stick to the hand
that has worn and been worn by it, full of our weakness as of our
strength, of our blindness as of our vision--the man himself, the poor
man it may be. And I live by writing, since it is impossible to live by
not writing in an age not of gold but of brass.
Unlearned, incurious, but finding deepest ease and joy out of doors,
I have gone about the South Country these twenty years and more on
foot, especially in Kent between Maidstone and Ashford and round
Penshurst, in Surrey between London, Guildford and Horley, in Hampshire
round Petersfield, in Wiltshire between Wootton Bassett, Swindon and
Savernake. The people are almost foreign to me, the more so because
country people have not yet been thrown into quite the same confusion
as townspeople, and therefore look awkwardly upon those who are not in
trade--writing is an unskilled labour and not a trade--not on the land,
and not idle. But I have known something of two or three men and women,
and have met a few dozen more. Yet is this country, though I am mainly
Welsh, a kind of home, as I think it is more than any other to those
modern people who belong nowhere. Here they prefer to retire, here they
take their holidays in multitudes. For it is a good foster-mother,
ample-bosomed, mild and homely. The lands of wild coast, of mountains,
of myriad chimneys, offer no such welcome. They have their race, their
speech and ways, and are jealous. You must be a man of the sea or of
the hills to dwell there at ease. But the South is tender and will
harbour any one; her quiet people resent intrusion quietly, so that
many do not notice the resentment. These are the “home” counties. A man
can hide away in them. The people are not hospitable, but the land is.
Yet there are days and places which send us in search of another kind
of felicity than that which dwells under the Downs, when, for example,
the dark wild of Ashdown or of Woolmer, some parcel of heathery land,
with tufted pines and pale wandering roads, rises all dark and stormy
out of the gentle vale, or on such an evening as when the sky is solemn
blue save at the horizon where it is faint gold, and between the blue
and the gold, across the north-west, lies an ashen waste of level
cloud. This sky and its new moon and evening star below, is barred
by the boles of beeches; through them the undulations of deserted
ploughland are all but white with dewy grass and weed. Underfoot winds
a disused path amid almost overlapping dog’s mercury. The earth is like
an exhausted cinder, cold, silent, dead, compared with the great act in
the sky. Suddenly a dog-fox barks--with melancholy and malice in the
repeated hoarse yells--a sound that awakens the wildest past out of the
wood and the old path. He passes by me at a trot, pausing a little to
bark. He vanishes, but not his voice, into the wood, and he returns,
still barking, and passes me again, filling the wood and the coombe
below with a sound that has nothing to match it except that ashen waste
in the beech-barred, cold blue and golden sky, against which the fox
is carved in moving ebony. Or again, when a rude dark headland rises
out of the mist of the plain into the evening sky. The woods seem but
just freed from the horror of primeval sea, if that is not primeval
sea washing their bases. Capella hangs low, pale, large, moist and
trembling, almost engulfed between two horns of the wood upon the
headland, the frailest beacon of hope, still fluttering from the storm
out of which the land is emerging. Then, or at home looking at a map of
Britain, the West calls, out of Wiltshire and out of Cornwall and Devon
beyond, out of Monmouth and Glamorgan and Gower and Caermarthen, with
a voice of dead Townsends, Eastaways, Thomases, Phillipses, Treharnes,
Marendaz, sea men and mountain men.
Westward, for men of this island, lies the sea; westward are the great
hills. In a mere map the west of Britain is fascinating. The great
features of that map, which make it something more than a picture
to be imperfectly copied by laborious childish pens, are the great
promontories of Caernarvon, of Pembroke, of Gower and of Cornwall,
jutting out into the western sea, like the features of a grim large
face, such a face as is carved on a ship’s prow. These protruding
features, even on a small-scale map, thrill the mind with a sense of
purpose and spirit. They yearn, they peer out ever to the sea, as
if using eyes and nostrils to savour the utmost scent of it, as if
themselves calling back to the call of the waves. To the eyes of a
child they stand for adventure. They are lean and worn and scarred with
the strife and watching. Then gradually into the mind of the child
comes the story that justifies and, still more, inspires and seems
to explain those westward-pointing promontories. For, out towards
them continually have the conquered races of the world retreated,
and their settlements give those corners a strangeness and a charm to
our fantastic sympathies. Out from them conquerors in their turn have
gone to found a legend like the Welsh Madoc, an empire like the men
of Devon. The blood of conquered and conqueror is in our veins, and
it flushes the cheek at the sight or thought of the west. Each man of
us is as ancient and complicated, as lofty-spired and as deep-vaulted
as cathedrals and castles old, and in those lands our crypts and
dark foundations are dimly remembered. We look out towards them from
the high camps at Battlesbury and Barbury: the lines of the Downs
go trooping along to them at night. Even in the bosom of the South
Country, when the tranquil bells are calling over the corn at twilight,
the westward-going hills, where the sun has fallen, draw the heart
away and fill us with a desire to go on and on for ever, that same
way. When, in the clear windy dawn, thin clouds like traveller’s joy
are upon the high air, it seems that up there also, in those placid
spaces, they travel and know the joy of the road, and the sun--feeding
on the blue, as a child said yesterday, as Lucretius said before--goes
the desired way. London also calls, making the needle whirl in the
compass. For in London also a man may live as up “a great river wide
as any sea”; and over some of the fairest of the South Country hangs
the all-night glimmer of the city, warning, threatening, beckoning
anon. Some of this country has already perished, or is so ramparted
about that there is no stranger country in the world unless it be those
perpendicular valleys cloven among the Blue Mountains, their floors
level and of the purest grass, but accessible only at the end nearest
the plain, where the cleft is sometimes so narrow that not even a dog
can enter.
This, then, is my South Country. It covers the North Downs and
the South Downs, the Icknield Way and the Pilgrims’ Way, and the
cross-roads between them and the Thames and the sea, a land of hops,
fruit, corn, high pasture, meadow, woodland, heath and shore. But there
is no man of whose powers I stand more in awe than the topographical
writer, from Mr. A. G. Bradley or Mr. E. V. Lucas downwards. I shall
not attempt to compete with them. I should only be showing my ignorance
and carelessness were I to label every piece of country which I
chance to mention or describe. Any one can point out my omissions, my
blindness, my exaggeration. Nor can I bring myself to mention the names
of the places where I walked or sat down. In a sense this country is
all “carved out of the carver’s brain” and has not a name. This is not
the South Country which measures about two hundred miles from east to
west and fifty from north to south. In some ways it is incomparably
larger than any country that was ever mapped, since upon nothing less
than the infinite can the spirit disport itself. In other ways it is
far smaller--as when a mountain with tracts of sky and cloud and the
full moon glass themselves in a pond, a little pond.
It would need a more intellectual eye than mine to distinguish county
from county by its physical character, its architecture, its people,
its unique combination of common elements, and I shall not attempt
it. As often as not I have no doubt mingled parts of Kent with my
Wiltshire, and so on. And positively I cannot say to which belongs one
picture that occurs to me as characteristic of the South Country--
A crossing of roads encloses a waste place of no man’s land, of dwarf
oaks, hawthorn, bramble and fern, and the flowers of knapweed and
harebell, and golden tormentil embroidering the heather and the minute
seedling oaks. Follow one of these roads past straight avenues of elms
leading up to a farm (built square of stone, under a roof of thatch or
stone slate, and lying well back from the road across a level meadow
with some willows in the midst, elms round about, willow herb waving
rosy by the stream at the border), or merely to a cluster of ricks; and
presently the hedges open wide apart and the level white road cools
itself under the many trees of a green, wych elms, sycamores, limes
and horse-chestnuts, by a pool, and, on the other side, the sign of
the “White Hart,” its horns held back upon its haunches. A stone-built
farm and its barns and sheds lie close to the green on either side,
and another of more stateliness where the hedges once more run close
together alongside the road. This farmhouse has three dormers, two rows
of five shadowy windows below, and an ivied porch not quite in the
centre; a modest lawn divided by a straight path; dense, well-watered
borders of grey lavender, rosemary, ladslove, halberds of crimson
hollyhock, infinite blending stars of Michaelmas daisy; old apple
trees seeming to be pulled down almost to the grass by glossy-rinded
fruit: and, behind, the bended line of hills a league away, wedding the
lowly meadows, the house and the trees to the large heavens and their
white procession of clouds out of the south and the sea. The utmost
kindliness of earth is expressed in these three houses, the trees on
the flat green, the slightly curving road across it, the uneven posts
and rails leaning this way and that at the edge of the pond. The trees
are so arranged about the road that they weave a harmony of welcome,
of blessing, a viaticum for whosoever passes by and only for a moment
tastes their shade, acknowledges unconsciously their attitudes, hears
their dry summer murmuring, sees the house behind them. The wayfarer
knows nothing of those who built them and those who live therein, of
those who planted the trees just so and not otherwise, of the causes
that shaped the green, any more than of those who reaped and threshed
the barley, and picked and dried and packed the hops that made the
ale at the “White Hart.” He only knows that centuries of peace and
hard work and planning for the undreaded future have made it possible.
The spirit of the place, all this council of time and Nature and men,
enriches the air with a bloom deeper than summer’s blue of distance; it
drowses while it delights the responding mind with a magic such as once
upon a time men thought to express by gods of the hearth, by Faunus and
the flying nymphs, by fairies, angels, saints, a magic which none of
these things is too strange and “supernatural” to represent. For after
the longest inventory of what is here visible and open to analysis,
much remains over, imponderable but mighty. Often when the lark is
high he seems to be singing in some keyless chamber of the brain; so
here the house is built in shadowy replica. If only we could make a
graven image of this spirit instead of a muddy untruthful reflection of
words! I have sometimes thought that a statue, the statue of a human
or heroic or divine figure, might more fitly than in many another stand
in such a place. A figure, it should be, like that benign proud Demeter
in marble now banished to a recess in a cold gallery, before which a
man of any religion, or class, or race, or time might bow and lay down
something of his burden and take away what makes him other than he was.
She would be at home and blithe again, enshrined in the rain or in this
flowery sunlight of an English green, near the wych elm and sycamore
and the walls of stone, the mortar mixed, as in all true buildings,
with human blood.