A RAILWAY CARRIAGE--SURREY--SUSSEX
I left London as quickly as possible. The railway carriage was
nearly full of men reading the same newspapers under three or four
different names, when a little grizzled and spectacled man of middle
age entered--a printer, perhaps--with a twisted face and simple
and puzzled expression that probably earned him many a laugh from
street-corner boys. As he sat down he recognized a sailor, a tall,
ponderous, kind-faced man made in three distinct storeys, who supported
his enormous red hands upon knees each fit to have been the mould of a
hero’s helmet.
“Well, I never did, and how are you, Harry?”
They looked at one another kindly but with a question piercing through
the kindness and an effort to divine the unknowable without betraying
curiosity. The kindness did, in fact, melt away the almost physical
obstacle of twenty years spent apart and in ignorance of one another.
“When did you leave the old place?” said the sailor.
“Soon after you did yourself, Harry; just after the shipwreck of the
_Wild Swan_; twenty-one, twenty-two--yes, twenty-two years ago.”
“Is it so long? I could have sworn you had that beard when I saw you
last,” and the sailor looked at him in a way that showed he had already
bridged the twenty-two years and knew the man.
“Yes, twenty-two years.”
“And do you ever go back to the old place? How’s Charlie Nash, and
young Woolford, and the shepherd?”
“Let me see----”
“But how is Maggie Looker?” broke in the sailor upon a genial answer in
the bud.
“Oh, didn’t you know? She took ill very soon after you went away, and
then they thought she was all right again; but they could not quite get
rid of the cough, and it got bad in the winter, and all through the
spring it was worse.”
“And so she died in the summer.”
“So she did.”
“Oh, Christ! but what times we had.”
And then, in reminiscences fast growing gay--the mere triumph of
memory, the being able to add each to the other’s store, was a
satisfaction--they told the story of a pretty country girl whom they
had quarrelled over until she grew too proud for both; how heavy was
her hair; how she could run, and nobody was like her for finding a
wasps’-nest. Her boldness and carelessness filled them with envy still.
“I reckon we old ones would call her a tomboy now,” said the sailor.
“I should say we would.”
“Now, I wonder what sort of a wife she would have made?”
“Hum, I don’t know....”
“Do you remember that day her and you and me got lost in the forest?”
“Yes, and we were there all night, and I got a hiding for it.”
“Not Maggie.”
“Not poor Maggie.”
“And when we couldn’t see our way any more we lifted her up into that
old beech where the green woodpecker’s nest was.”
“Yes, and you took off your coat and breeches to cover her up.”
“And so did you, though I reckon one would have been enough now I come
to think of it.”
“I don’t know about that. But how we did have to keep on the move all
night to keep warm.”
“And dared not go very far for fear of losing the tree.”
“And in the morning I wondered what we should do about getting back our
clothes.”
“You wanted me to go because my shirt hadn’t any holes in it.”
“But we both went together.”
“And, before we had made up our minds which should go first and call,
up she starts. Lord, how she did laugh!”
“Ay, she did.”
“And says, ‘Now, that’s all my eye and Betty Martin, boys’; and so did
we laugh, and I never felt a bit silly either. She was a good sort of
girl, she was. Man and woman, I never met the likes of her, never heard
tell of the equal of her,” said the sailor musingly.
“Married, Harry?”
“No, nor likely to be, I don’t think. And yourself?”
“Well, I was.... I married Maggie.... It was after the first baby....”
A small boy in a corner could not get on with his novelette: he stared
open-mouthed and open-eyed, now and then unconsciously imitating
their faces; or he would correct this mere wonderment and become shy
and uncomfortable at the frank ways of these men talking aloud in
a crowded carriage, and utterly regardless of others, about private
matters.
A trim shop assistant pretended to read about the cricket, but
listened, and could not conceal his cold contempt for men so sunken as
to give themselves away like this.
A dark, thin, genial, pale-faced puritan clerk looked pitifully--with
some twinkles of superiority that asked for recognition from his
fellow-passengers--these _children_, for as such he regarded them, and
would not wholly condemn.
Others occasionally jerked out a glance or rolled a leaderless eye
or rustled a newspaper without losing the dense veil over their
individuality that made them tombs, monuments, not men.
One sat gentle, kindly, stupidly envying these two their spirited free
talk, their gestures, the hearty draughts of life which they seemed to
have taken.
All were botanists who had heard and spoken words but had no sense
of the beauty and life of the flower because fate had refused, or
education destroyed, the gift of liberty and of joy.
SURREY.
Then I saw a huge silence of meadows, of woods, and beyond these, of
hills that raised two breasts of empurpled turf into the sky; and,
above the hills, one mountain of cloud that beamed as it reposed in the
blue as in a sea. The white cloud buried London with a _requiescat in
pace_.
I like to think how easily Nature will absorb London as she absorbed
the mastodon, setting her spiders to spin the winding-sheet and her
worms to fill in the grave, and her grass to cover it pitifully up,
adding flowers--as an unknown hand added them to the grave of Nero.
I like to see the preliminaries of this toil where Nature tries her
hand at mossing the factory roof, rusting the deserted railway metals,
sowing grass over the deserted platforms and flowers of rose-bay on
ruinous hearths and walls. It is a real satisfaction to see the long
narrowing wedge of irises that runs alongside and between the rails
of the South-Eastern and Chatham Railway almost into the heart of
London. And there are many kinds of weather when the air is full of
voices prophesying desolation. The outer suburbs have almost a moorland
fascination when fog lies thick and orange-coloured over their huge
flat wastes of grass, expectant of the builder, but does not quite
conceal the stark outlines of a traction engine, some procumbent
timber, a bonfire and frantic figures darting about it, and aërial
scaffolding far away. Other fields, yet unravished but menaced, the
fog restores to a primeval state. And what a wild noise the wind makes
in the telegraph wires as in wintry heather and gorse! When the waste
open spaces give way to dense streets there is a common here and a
lawn there, where the poplar leaves, if it be November, lie taintless
on the grass, and the starlings talk sweet and shrill and cold in the
branches, and nobody cares to deviate from the asphalte path to the
dewy grass: the houses beyond the green mass themselves gigantic,
remote, dim, and the pulse of London beats low and inaudible, as if
she feared the irresistible enemy that is drawing its lines invisibly
and silently about her on every side. If a breeze arises it makes that
sound of the dry curled leaves chafing along the pavement; at night
they seem spies in the unguarded by-ways. But there are also days--and
spring and summer days, too--when a quiet horror thicks and stills the
air outside London.
The ridges of trees high in the mist are very grim. The isolated trees
stand cloaked in conspiracies here and there about the fields. The
houses, even whole villages, are translated into terms of unreality as
if they were carved in air and could not be touched; they are empty
and mournful as skulls or churches. There is no life visible; for the
ploughmen and the cattle are figures of light dream. All is soft and
grey. The land has drunken the opiate mist and is passing slowly and
unreluctantly into perpetual sleep. Trees and houses are drowsed beyond
awakening or farewell. The mind also is infected, and gains a sort of
ease from the thought that an eternal and universal rest is at hand
without any cry or any pain.
SUSSEX.
The road skirts the marshland, the stream and the town, and goes
through a gap in the Downs towards another range and more elms
and farms at its feet. Stately walks the carter’s boy with his
perpendicular brass-bound whip, alongside four waggon-horses, while the
carter rides. It is a pleasant thing to see them going to their work in
the early gold of the morning, fresh, silent, their horses jingling,
down the firm road. If they were leading their team to yoke them to the
chariot of the sun they could not be more noble. They are the first men
I have seen this morning, and truly they create for a little while the
illusion that they are going to guide the world and that all will be
well in the golden freshness under the blue.
The road now divides to go round the base of the Downs, but a farm
track sets out to climb them. There, at the corner, is a church, on
the very edge of the flat vale and its elms and ashes in the midst of
meadows; a plain towered church, but with a rough churchyard, half
graveyard and half orchard, its grass and parsley and nettle uncut
under the knotty apple trees, splashed with silver and dull gold-green,
dotted by silver buds among yellow-lichened branches that are matted
densely as a magpie’s nest. The dust from the high road powders the
nettles and perfects the arresting melancholy of the desolation, so
quiet, so austere, and withal as airy as a dream remembered. But above
are the Downs, green and sweet with uplifting grass, and beyond them
the sea, darkly gleaming under lustrous white cliffs and abrupt ledges
of turf, in the south; in the south-east a procession of tufted trees
going uphill in single file; in the south-west the dazzling slate
roofs of a distant town, two straight sea walls and two steamers and
their white wakes; northward the most beautiful minor range in all the
downland, isolated by a river valley at the edge of which it ends in a
gulf of white quarry, while on the other side it heaves and flows down
almost to the plain, but rises again into a lesser hill with woods,
and then slowly subsides. Within a few square miles it collects every
beauty of the chalk hill; its central height is a dome of flawless
grass only too tender to be majestic; and that is supported by lesser
rounds and wavering lines of approach in concavity and convexity,
playgrounds for the godlike shadows and lights, that prolong the
descent of the spent wave of earth into the plain.
An uncertain path keeps to the highest ridge. The sides of the Downs
are invaded by long stream-like gorse-sided coombes, of which the
narrow floor is palest green grass. The highest points command much of
earth, all of heaven. They are treeless, but occasionally the turf is
over-arched by the hoops of a brier thicket, the new foliage pierced by
upright dead grey grass. They are the haunt of the swift, the home of
wheatear and lark and of whatsoever in the mind survives or is born in
this pure kingdom of grass and sky. Ahead, they dip to a river and rise
again, their sweep notched by a white road.
At the inland end of this river valley is an antique red-tiled
large village or small town, a perfect group of human dwellings, as
inevitable as the Downs, dominated by a mound and on it a windmill
in ruin; mothered by a church at the river’s edge. Under the sign
of “Ye Olde ----” is a room newly wainscoted in shining matchboard.
Its altar--its little red sideboard--is symmetrically decorated by
tiers and rows of lemonade, cherry cider and ginger ale bottles,
many-coloured, and in the midst of these two syphons of soda-water. The
doorways and windows are draped in white muslin, the hearth filled by a
crinkled blue paper fan; the mantelpiece supports a dozen small vases.
The oilcloth is new and odorous and bright. There are pink geraniums in
salmon-coloured bowls on the table; a canary in a suspended cage; and
on the walls a picture of a girl teasing a dog with a toy mouse.
At the cross-roads is a group of old slated white farm buildings and a
tiled farmhouse of brick and flint; and above, at the top of a slope of
down, is a grey spire and two orange roofs of cottages amidst a round
cluster of trees; the sheep graze and their bells tittle-tattle. The
seaward-going road alongside but above the river dips then under steep
banks of blackthorn and parsley to a village of flint where another
spire rises out of the old roofs of a farmhouse and its family of barns
and lodges; a nightingale sings at hand, a wheeling pewit cries and
gleams over the blue ripples of the river. Across the water a shallow
scoop has been carved by Nature out of the side of the down; it is
traversed by two diverging paths which alone are green, for the rest
of the surface is of gorse and, full in the face of the sun, forms a
mossy cirrus over the mist of its own warm shade. The down beside the
road is now all cowslips among its scattered bramble and thorn, until
it is cloven by a tributary bay, a quarter of a mile in length, marshy
at first and half-filled by elms and willows, but at its higher end
occupied, behind ash trees and an orchard, by a farmhouse, a circular
domed building and a barn, all having roofs of ochre tile, except the
thatched barn, and grey stained walls; a straight road goes to the
house along the edge of the marsh and elms. Grey plover whistle singly
on the wet borders of the stream or make a concerted whimper of two or
three.
A little beyond is a larger bay of the same kind, bordered by a long
curving road entirely lined by elms dividing it from the broad meadow
that has an elm rookery in a corner under the steep clean slope of
down; at the end is a church singing to itself with all its bells in
the solitude. And the hedges are full of strong young thrushes which
there is no one to frighten--is there any prettier dress than the
speckled feathers of their breasts and the cape of brown over their
shoulders and backs, as they stir the dew in May?
Then the valley opens wide and the river doubles in gleaming azure
about a narrow spit of grass, in sight of a sharp white fall of chalk,
into the lucid quiet sea. At this bend a company of sycamores girds
and is one with a group of tiled and thatched and gabled buildings,
of ochre, brown and rose. The road crosses the river and a path leads
near the sea, between mustard flower, lucerne, beans, corn and grass,
in flint-walled fields, to a church and farm of flint, overtopped by
embowering chestnuts, ilex and the elms of rooks; and below there
is another valley and river, a green pathless marsh, at whose edge
five noisy belching chimneys stand out of a white pit. The path, over
turf, rises to the Downs, passing a lonely flint barn with rich dark
roof and a few sycamores for mates. This is the cornland, and the
corn bunting sings solitary and monotonous, and the linnets twitter
still in flocks. Above and around, the furzy coombes are the home of
blackbirds that have a wilder song in this world of infinite corn
below and grass above, and but one house. Violets and purple orchis
(and its white buds) cloud the turf. On the other side the Downs sink
to gently clustered and mounded woods and yet more corn surrounding a
thatched flint barn, a granary and cart-lodge, and, again, a farm under
sycamores.
The soft-ribbed grey sky of after-sunset is slowly moving, kindly and
promising rain. The air is still, the road dusty, but the hedges tender
green, and the grasshopper lark sings under the wild parsley of the
roadside and the sedge-warbler in the sallows.
Just beyond is the town by the beautiful domed hill, a town of steep
lanes and wallflowers on old walls and such a date as 1577 modestly
inscribed on a doorway; its long old street, sternly adapted to the
needs of shopkeepers and gentry, looks only old-fashioned, its age
being as much repressed as if it were a kind of sin or originality.
This is that spirit which would quarrel with the stars for not being
in straight lines like print, the spirit of one who, having been
disturbed while shaving by the sight of a favourite cat in the midst
of her lovers and behaving after the manner of her kind, gives orders
during the long mid-day meal that she shall be drowned forthwith,
or--no--to-morrow, which is Monday. This is that spirit which says--
Nature is never stiff, and none recognizes this fact better than
---- & Son, and their now well-known and natural-looking rockeries
have reclaimed many a dreary bit of landscape. At ---- they showed
me photographs of various country seats where the natural-looking
scenery has been evolved by their artistic taste and ingenuity out of
the most ordinary efforts of Nature. Thus a dull old mill-stream has,
with the aid of rockeries and appropriate vegetation, been converted
into a wonderfully picturesque spot, an ordinary brook was transformed
into a lovely woodland scene, with ferns, mosses, and lichens growing
among the rockeries, and the shores of an uninteresting lake became
undulating banks of beauty by the same means; while the beautiful
rockeries in ---- Park were also the work of this firm. ---- & Son
have other ways, too, of beautifying gardens and grounds by the
judicious use of balustrades, fountains, quaint figures, etc., made
of “---- terra-cotta,” or artificial stone, which is far more durable
than real stone or marble, not so costly, and impervious to frost and
all weathers, although it takes the vegetation in the same way, and
after a year’s exposure it can scarcely be distinguished from antique
stone. In it the great _spécialité_ here just now is “sundials,” the
latest craze; for without a sundial no ancient or up-to-date garden is
considered complete.
Nevertheless the town smells heartily of cattle, sheep, and malt; a
rookery and white orchard confront the railway station, and in the
midst of the streets the long grass is rough and wet and full of
jonquils round ancient masonry: seen from a height the town shares the
sunlight equally with massy foliage and finds its place as a part of
Nature, and the peregrine takes it in its sweep.
The turtle-doves have come and the oaks are budding bronze in the
Weald. The steep roadside banks are cloaked in grass, violet, and
primrose still, and robin-run-in-the-hedge and stitchwort and cuckoo
flowers, and the white-throats talk in the hazel copses. A brooklet
runs in a hollow that would almost hold the Thames, and crossing the
road fills a rushy mill-pond deep below, and makes a field all golden
and shining with marigold. Just beyond, a gnarled lime avenue leads to
a grey many-windowed house of stone within a stately park. Opposite the
gate an old woman sits on the grass, her feet in the dust at the edge
of the road; motor-cars sprinkle her and turn her black to drab; she
sits by the wayside eternally, expecting nothing.
Turn out of this main road, and by-ways that tempt neither cyclists
nor motorists go almost as straight. Here is no famous house, not a
single inn or church, but only the unspoilt Weald, and far away, a long
viaduct that carries noiseless trains against the sky above hollow
meadows. Bluebell, primrose, anemone--anemone, primrose, bluebell--star
and cloud the lush banks and the roots of the blackthorns, hazels and
maples of the hedge. A stream washes the roots of many oaks, and flows
past flat fields of dusky grass, cuckoo flower and marigold,--black
pines at the verge. The light smoke of a roadside fire ascends into
the new leaves of the hazels where two tramps are drying their clothes.
Many oaks are down, and lie pale and gleaming like mammoth bones among
the bluebells in plantations roughened by old flint pits.
The faggots of oak tops and cords of twisted timber are being made up;
the woodmen light a fire and the chips fly from the axes. It is only to
these men that I am a stranger as I walk through the land. At first I
admire the hardihood and simplicity of their necessary toil among the
oaks, but they lift their dark eyes, and then--it is as strange as when
I pass a white embowered house, and the road is muffled with straw,
and I hear by chance that some one unknown is dying behind that open
window through which goes the thrush’s song and the children’s homeward
chatter. Neither townsman or countryman, I cannot know them. The
countryman knows their trades and their speech, and is of their kind;
the townsman’s curiosity wins him a greeting. But in May at least I am
content, in the steep little valley made by a tributary of the Medway,
its sides wooded with oak and the flowers glad of the sun among the
lately cleared undergrowth, and the cuckoo now in this oak and now in
that, and the turtle-doves whose voices, in the soft lulls after rain,
make the earth seem to lie out sleek in the sun, stretching itself to
purr with eyes closed. The cuckoo is gone before we know what his cry
is to tell us or to remind us of.
There are few things as pleasant as the thunder and lightning of May
that comes in the late afternoon, when the air is as solid as the earth
with stiff grey rain for an hour. There is no motion anywhere save of
this perpendicular river, of the swaying rain-hit bough and quivering
leaf. But through it all the thrushes sing, and jolly as their voices
are the roars and echoes of the busy thunder quarrying the cliffs of
heaven. And then the pleasure of being so wet that you may walk through
streams and push through thickets and be none the wetter for it.
Before it is full night the light of the young moon falls for a moment
out of a troubled but silent sky upon the young corn, and the tranquil
bells are calling over the woods.
Then in the early morning the air is still and warm, but so moist that
there is a soul of coolness in the heat, and never before were the
leaves of the sorrel and wood sanicle and woodruff, and the grey-green
foliage and pallid yellow flowers of the large celandine, so fair.
The sudden wren’s song is shrewd and sweet and banishes heaviness.
The huge chestnut tree is flowering and full of bees. The parsley
towers delicately in bloom. The beech boughs are encased in gliding
crystal. The nettles, the millions of nettles in a bed, begin to smell
of summer. In the calm and sweet air the turtle-doves murmur and the
blackbirds sing--as if time were no more--over the mere.
The roads, nearly dry again, are now at their best, cool and yet
luminous, and at their edges coloured rosy or golden brown by the
sheddings of the beeches, those gloves out of which the leaves have
forced their way, pinched and crumpled by the confinement. At the bend
of a broad road descending under beeches these parallel lines of ruddy
chaff give to two or three days in the year a special and exquisite
loveliness, if the weather be alternately wet and bright and the long
white roads and virgin beeches are a temptation. What quests they
propose! They take us away to the thin air of the future or to the
underworld of the past. This one takes us to the old English sweetness
and robustness of an estate of large meadows, sound oak trees not too
close together, and a noble house within an oak-paled park. A poet
and a man lives there, one who recalls those other poets--they are
not many--who please us over the gulf of time almost as much by the
personal vigour and courage which we know to have been theirs or is
suggested by their work, men like Chaucer, Sidney, Ben Jonson, Drayton,
Byron, William Morris, and among the living ---- and ---- and ----.
I think we should miss their poems more than some greater men’s if
they were destroyed. They stand for their time more clearly than the
greatest. For example, Chaucer’s language, ideas and temper make it
impossible for us to read his work, no matter in how remote a study
or garden, shut out from time and change, without feeling that he and
all those who rode, and talked and were young with him are skeletons
or less, though Catullus or Milton may be read with no such feeling.
Chaucer seems to remind us of what once we were. His seems a golden
age. He wrote before Villon had inaugurated modern literature with the
cry--
_Mais où sont les neiges d’antan?_
before men appear to us to have learned how immense is the world and
time. But we, looking back, with the help of this knowledge, see in
the work of this man who filled a little nook of time and space with
gaiety, something apart from us, an England, a happy island which his
verses made. His gaiety bathes the land in the light of a golden age
and the freshness of all the May days we can never recover. He “led a
lusty life in May”: “in his lust present was all his thought.” And the
gaiety is no less in the sorrowful passages than in the joyful; when,
for example, he compares the subjection of the fierce, proud Troilus to
love, with the whipping of a spirited horse; when he uses the apparent
commonplace about age creeping in “always as still as stone” upon fresh
youth; when he exclaims to the false Jason--
Have at thee, Jason! now thy horne is blowe;
or cries at the fate of Ugolino’s children--
Allas, Fortune! it was greet crueltee
Swiche briddes for to putte in swich a cage!
Even in Griselda’s piteous cry--
O tendre, O deere, O yonge children myne,
there is an intimation that in those words her sorrow is being spent
and that, though it will be renewed, it will be broken up by joyfulness
many times before her death. For, as Chaucer’s laughter is assuredly
never completed by a sigh, so there is something hearty in his tears
that hints of laughter before and after. His was a sharp surprising
sorrow that came when he was forced to see the suffering of lovely
humanity. He is all gaiety; but it has two moods. Sorrow never changes
him more than shadow changes a merry brook. In both moods he seems to
speak of a day when men had not only not so far outstripped the lark
and nightingale as we have done, but had moments when their joy was
equal to the lark’s above the grey dew of May dawns. And thus, if we
only had to thank Chaucer for the gaiety which is left behind in his
poems, as the straw of a long-past harvest clings to the thorns of a
narrow lane, we could never be thankful enough.
I feel that Chaucer was the equal of those of whom he wrote, as Homer
was the equal of Achilles and Odysseus, just as Byron was the peer of
the noblest of the Doges and of the ruined Emperor whom he addressed
as--
Vain froward child of Empire! say
Are all thy playthings snatched away?
Byron is one of the few poets whose life it was ever necessary to
write. His acts were representative; from his Harrow meditations on
a tomb to his death on the superb pedestal of Missolonghi, they are
symbolic. His life explains nearly everything in his poetry. The life
and the poetry together make an incomparable whole. Most lives of
poets stand to their work as a block of unhewn marble stands to the
statue finished and unveiled; if the marble is not as much forgotten
as was Pygmalion’s when Galatea breathed and sighed. Byron’s poetry
without his life is not finished; but with it, it is like a statue
by Michael Angelo or Rodin that is actually seen to grow out of the
material. He was a man before he was a poet. Other poets may once have
been men; they are not so now. We read their lives after their poetry
and we forget them. It is by their poetry that they survive--blithe
or pathetic or glorious, but dim, ghosts who are become a part of
the silence of libraries and lovers’ hearts. They are dead but for
the mind that enjoys and the voice that utters their verse. I had
not the smallest curiosity about Mr. Swinburne when he was alive and
visible. When I think of him, I think of Rosamund speaking to Eleanor
or Tristram to Isoud; he has given up his life to them. But with Byron
it is different. If all record of him could be destroyed, more than
half of him would be lost. For I think that it is upon the life and the
portraits and the echoes that are still reverberating in Europe, that
we found our belief that he is a great man. Without them he would be
an interesting rhetorician, perhaps little more. There are finer poems
than his “Mazeppa,” but the poet is the equal of that wild lover and of
the great King who slept while the tale was told.
And Shelley, too, is an immortal sentiment. Men may forget to
repeat his verses; they can never be as if Shelley had never been.
He is present wherever love and rapture are. He is a part of all
high-spirited and pure audacity of the intellect and imagination, of
all clean-handed rebellion, of all infinite endeavour and hope. The
remembered splendour of his face is more to us than Parliaments; one
strophe of his odes is more nourishing than a rich man’s gold....
Under those oaks in May I could wish to see these men walking together,
to see their gestures and brave ways. It is the poet there who all but
creates them for me. But only one can I fairly see because I have seen
him alive and speaking. Others have sent up their branches higher among
the stars and plunged their roots deeper among the rocks and waters.
But he and Chaucer and Jonson and Byron have obviously much plain
humanity in their composition. They have a brawn and friendliness not
necessarily connected with poetry. We use no ceremony--as we do with
some other poets--with Morris when we read--
The days have slain the days, and the seasons have gone by,
And brought me the summer again; and here on the grass I lie,
As erst I lay and was glad ere I meddled with right and with wrong.
Or the end of “Thunder in the Garden”--
Then we turned from the blossoms, and cold were they grown:
In the trees the wind westering moved;
Till over the threshold back fluttered her gown,
And in the dark house was I loved.
There is a humanity of this world and moment in Morris’s feeling for
Nature with which no other poet’s except Whitman’s can be compared.
Except in the greatest--the unaccomplished things--in “Leaves of Grass”
there is no earth-feeling in the literature of our language so majestic
and yet so tender as in “The Message of the March Wind.” With him
poetry was not, as it has tended more and more to be in recent times,
a matter as exclusive as a caste. He was not half-angel or half-bird,
but a man on close terms with life and toil, with the actual, troublous
life of every day, with toil of the hands and brain together; in short,
a many-sided citizen. He was one whom Skarphedin the son of Njal of
Bergthorsknoll would not have disdained, and when he spoke he seemed
indignant at the feebleness of words, one that should have used a sword
and might have lamented with the still later poet--
The Spirit stands and looks on infamy,
And unashamed the faces of the pit
Snarl at their enemy;
Finding him wield no insupportable light,
And no whirled edge of blaze to hit
Backward their impudence, and hammer them to flight;
Although ready is he,
Wearing the same righteous steel
Upon his limbs, helmed as he was then
When he made olden war;
Yet cannot now with foulness fiercely deal.
There is no indignation among men,
The Spirit has no scimitar
Wilt thou not come again, thou godly sword,
Into the Spirit’s hands?
That he may be a captain of the Lord
Again, and mow out of our lands
The crop of wicked men....
O for that anger in the hands
Of Spirit! To us, O righteous sword,
Come thou and clear our lands,
O fire, O indignation of the Lord![2]
[2] From _Poems and Interludes_, by Lascelles Abercrombie.
Bitter it is to think of that talk and laughter of shadows on the long
lawns under those oaks; for though their shadows are even yet better
than other men’s bone or blood, never yet did dead man lift up a hand
to strike a blow or lay a brick. In a churchyard behind I saw the
tombstone of one Robert Page, born in the year 1792 here in Sussex, and
dead in 1822--not in the Bay of Spezzia but in Sussex. He scared the
crows, ploughed the clay, fought at Waterloo and lost an arm there,
was well pleased with George the Fourth, and hoed the corn until he
was dead. That is plain sense, and I wish I could write the life of
this exact contemporary of Shelley. That is quite probably his great
granddaughter, black-haired, of ruddy complexion, full lips, large
white teeth, black speechless eyes, dressed in a white print dress and
stooping in the fresh wind to take clean white linen out of a basket,
and then rising straight as a hazel wand, on tiptoe, her head held back
and slightly on one side while she pegs the clothes to the line and
praises the weather to a passer-by. She is seventeen, and of such is
the kingdom of earth.
Now at the coming on of night the wind has carried away all the noises
of the world. The lucid air under the hazels of the lane is dark as if
with dream, and the roadway leads glimmering straight on to a crystal
planet low in the purple of the west. I cannot hear my footsteps, so
full charged is the silence. I am no more in this tranquillity than
one of the trees. The way seems paved that some fair spirit may pass
down in perfect beauty and bliss and ease. The leaves will hail it and
the blue sky lean down to bless, and the planet lend its beams for a
path. Suddenly, the name of Mary is called by some one invisible. Mary!
For a little while the cry is repeated more loudly but always sweetly;
then the caller is entranced by the name, by the sound of her own voice
and the silence into which it falls as into a well, and it grows less
and less and ceases and is dead except in the brain of the bearer.
I thought of all the music to ear and mind of that sound of “m.” I
suppose the depth of its appeal is due to its place at the beginning of
the word “mother,” or rather to the need of the soul which gave it that
place; and it is a sound as dear to the animals as to us, since the ewe
hears it first from her lamb and the cow from her calf as the woman
from her child. It is the main sound in “music,” “melody,” “harmony,”
“measure,” “metre,” “rhythm,” “minstrel,” “madrigal.” It endears even
sadness by its presence in “melancholy,” “moan” and “mourn.” It makes
melody on the lips of friends and lovers, in the names of “mistress,”
“comrade,” “mate,” “companion.” It murmurs autumnally in all mellow
sounds, in the music of wind and insect and instrument. To “me” and
“mine” it owes a meaning as deep as to “mother.” And this mild air
could bear no more melodious burden than the name that floated upon it
and sank into it, down, down, to reveal its infinite depth--Mary!
There are parks on both sides of the road, bounded by hedges or high
brick walls, and the public road has all the decorum of a drive. For a
mile the very ivy which is destined to adorn the goodly wall and spread
into forms as grand as those at Godstow Nunnery is protected by wire
netting. Doves croon in the oaks: underneath, hazel and birch flicker
their new leaves over the pools of bluebells. The swallows fly low over
every tuft of the roadside grass and glance into every bay of the wood,
and then out above the white road, from which they rebound suddenly
and turn, displaying the white rays of their tails. Now and then a
gateway reveals the park. The ground undulates, but is ever smooth. It
is of the mellow green of late afternoon. Bronzed oak woods bound the
undulations, and here and there a solitary tree stands out on the grass
and shows its poise and complexity with the added grace of new leaf.
The cattle graze as on a painted lawn. A woman in a white dress goes
indolent and stately towards the rhododendrons and rook-haunted elms.
The scene appears to have its own sun, mellow and serene, that knows
not moorland or craggy coast or city. Only a thousand years of settled
continuous government, of far-reaching laws, of armies and police, of
roadmaking, of bloody tyranny and tyranny that poisons quietly without
blows, could have wrought earth and sky into such a harmony. It is a
thing as remote from me here on the dusty road as is the green evening
sky and all its tranquillity of rose and white, and even more so
because the man in the manor house behind the oaks is a puzzle to me,
while the sky is always a mystery with which I am content. At such an
hour the house and lawns and trees are more wonderfully fortified by
the centuries of time than by the walls and gamekeepers. They weave
an atmosphere about it. We bow the head and reverence the labour of
time in smoothing the grass, mellowing the stone and the manners of the
inhabitants, and yet an inevitable conflict ensues in the mind between
this respect and the feeling that it is only a respect for surfaces,
that a thousand years is a heavy price to pay for the maturing of
park and house and gentleman, especially as he is most likely to be a
well-meaning parasite on those who are concerned twenty-four hours a
day about the difficulty of living and about what to do when they are
alive.
No, it is the alien remote appearance of the house and land serene in
the May evening light which creates this reverence in the mind. It is
not feudalism, or the old nobility and gentility, that we are bowing
down to, but only to Nature without us and the dream within us. It is
certainly not pure envy. Nor yet is it for the same reason as made
Borrow reflect when he saw the good house at the end of an avenue of
noble oaks near Llandovery--
“... A plain but comfortable gentleman’s seat with wings. It looked
south down the dale. ‘With what satisfaction I could live in that
house,’ said I to myself, ‘if backed by a couple of thousand a year.
With what gravity could I sign a warrant in its library, and with what
dreamy comfort translate an ode of Lewis Glyn Cothi, my tankard of
rich ale beside me. I wonder whether the proprietor is fond of the old
bard and keeps good ale. Were I an Irishman instead of a Norfolk man I
would go in and ask him.’”
Not if he were a Welshman, either. For I at least know that in no
other man’s house should I be better off than I am, and I lack the
confidence to think I could make any use of his income. I would as soon
envy a tramp because he has no possessions, or a navvy because he walks
like a hero as he pushes a heavy trolley before him, his loose jacket
fitting him as a mane fits a lion. To envy a man is to misunderstand
him or yourself.
Nor yet is it pure admiration. That is what I feel for something
external that can be described as right, as having absolute
individuality and inevitableness of form. For example, I admire certain
groups that are the result of what we call chance--an arrangement of
fishing boats going out to sea, first one, then at a long interval two
close together, a fourth a little behind, and then by ones and pairs
and clusters at different intervals; or the four or five oaks left in
a meadow that was once a copse; or the fruit fallen on autumn rime;
or sunset clouds that pause darkly along the north-west in a way that
will never be seen again; or of tragic figures at such a moment as when
Polyxena, among the Grecian youths, gave her throat to the dagger of
Neoptolemus, and fell beautiful in death.
No. Those houses are castles in Spain. They are fantastic architecture.
We have made them out of our spirit stuff and have set our souls to
roam their corridors and look out of their casements upon the sea or
the mountains or the clouds. It is because they are accessible only
to the everywhere wandering irresistible and immortal part of us that
they are beautiful. There is no need for them to be large or costly or
antique. The poorest house can do us a like service. In a town, for
example, and in a suburb, I have had the same yearning when, on a fine
still morning of May or June, in streets away from the traffic, I have
seen through the open windows a cool white-curtained shadowy room,
and in it a table with white cloths and gleaming metal and glass laid
thereon, and nobody has yet come down to open the letters. It all seems
to be the work of spirit hands. It is beautiful and calm and celestial,
and is a profound pleasure--tinged by melancholy--to see. It gives a
sense of fitness--for what? For something undivined, imperfectly known,
guessed at, or hoped for, in ourselves; for a wider and less tainted
beauty, for a greater grace. Or it may not be a house at all, but a
hill-top five miles off, up which winds a white road in two long loops
between a wood and the turf. The grass is smooth and warm and bright at
the summit in the blue noon; or in the horizontal sunbeams each stem
is lit so that the hill is transmuted into a glowing and insubstantial
thing; and then, at noon or evening, something in me flies at the
sight and desires to tread that holy ground. It is an odd world where
everything is fleeting yet the soul desires permanence even for fancies
so unprofitable as this.
And so these thoughts at the sight of the great houses mingle with
the thoughts that grow at twilight and fade gradually away in the
windless night when the sky is soft-ridged all over with white clouds
and in the dark vales between them are the stars. Then, for it is
Saturday, follows another pleasure of the umbrageous white country
roads at night--the high contented voices of children talking to father
and mother as they go home from the market town. The parents move
dark-clothed, silent, laden; the children flit about them with white
hats or pinafores. Their voices travel far and long after they are
invisible in the mist that washes over the fields in long white firths,
but die away as the misty night blots out the hills, the clouds, the
stars, the trees, and everything but the branches overhead and the
white parsley flowers floating along the hedge. There is no breath of
wind. The owls are quiet. The air is full of the scent of holly flower
and may and nettles and of the sound of a little stream among the
leaves.