HISTORY AND THE PARISH--HAMPSHIRE--CORNWALL
Some day there will be a history of England written from the point of
view of one parish, or town, or great house. Not until there is such a
history will all our accumulations of information be justified. It will
begin with a geological picture, something large, clear, architectural,
not a mass of insignificant names. It must be imaginative: it might,
perhaps, lean sometimes upon Mr. Doughty’s _Dawn in Britain_. The
peculiar combination of soil and woodland and water determines the
direction and position and importance of the ancient trackways; it will
determine also the position and size of the human settlements. The
early marks of these--the old flint and metal implements, the tombs,
the signs of agriculture, the encampments, the dwellings--will have to
be clearly described and interpreted. Folk-lore, legend, place-names
must be learnedly, but bravely and humanly used, so that the historian
who has not the extensive sympathy and imagination of a great novelist
will have no chance of success. What endless opportunities will he have
for really giving life to past times in such matters as the line made
by the edge of an old wood with the cultivated land, the shapes of the
fields, with their borders of streams or hedge or copse or pond or wall
or road, the purpose and interweaving of the roads and footpaths that
suggest the great permanent thoughts and the lesser thoughts and dreams
of the brain.... As the historic centuries are reached, the action of
great events, battles, laws, roads, invasions, upon the parish--and of
the parish upon them--must be shown. Architecture, with many of its
local characteristics still to be traced, will speak as a voice out of
the stones of castle, church, manor, farm, barn and bridge. The birds
and beasts cannot be left out. The names of the local families--gentle
and simple--what histories are in them, in the curt parish registers,
in tombstones, in the names of fields and houses and woods. Better a
thousand errors so long as they are human than a thousand truths lying
like broken snail-shells round the anvil of a thrush. If only those
poems which are place-names could be translated at last, the pretty,
the odd, the romantic, the racy names of copse and field and lane and
house. What a flavour there is about the Bassetts, the Boughtons,
the Worthys, the Tarrants, Winterbournes, Deverills, Manningfords,
the Suttons: what goodly names of the South Country--Woodmansterne,
Hollingbourne, Horsmonden, Wolstanbury, Brockenhurst, Caburn, Lydiard
Tregoze, Lydiard Millicent, Clevancy, Amesbury, Amberley (I once tried
to make a beautiful name and in the end it was Amberley, in which Time
had forestalled me); what sweet names Penshurst, Frensham, Firle,
Nutley, Appleshaw, Hambledon, Cranbrook, Fordingbridge, Melksham,
Lambourn, Draycot, Buscot, Kelmscot, Yatton, Yalding, Downe, Cowden,
Iping, Cowfold, Ashe, Liss.... Then there are the histories of roads.
Every traveller in Hampshire remembers the road that sways with airy
motion and bird-like curves down from the high land of clay and
flint through the chalk to the sand and the river. It doubles round
the head of a coombe, and the whole descent is through beech woods
uninterrupted and all but impenetrable to the eye above or below except
where once or twice it looks through an arrow slit to the blue vale and
the castled promontory of Chanctonbury twenty miles south-east. As the
road is a mere ledge on the side of a very steep hill the woods below
it hurry down to a precipitous pit full of the glimmering, trembling
and murmuring of innumerable leaves and no sight or sound of men. It
is said to have been made more than half a century ago to take the
place of the rash straight coach road which now enters it near its
base. A deeply-worn, narrow and disused track joining it more than
half-way down suggests that the lower part was made by the widening of
an old road; but much of the upper half is new. Certainly the road as
it now is, broad and gently bending round the steep coombe, is new,
and it was made at the expense of the last of a family which had long
owned the manor house near the entrance of the coombe. His were all
the hanging beech woods--huge as the sky--upon the hill, and through
them the road-makers conducted this noble and pleasant way. But near
the top they deviated by a few yards into another estate. The owner
would not give way. A lawsuit was begun, and it was not over when the
day came for the road to be open for traffic according to the contract
or, if not, to pass out of the defaulter’s hands. The day passed; the
contract was broken; the speculation had failed, and the tolls would
never fill the pockets of the lord of the manor. He was ruined, and
left his long white house by the rivulet and its chain of pools, his
farms and cottages, his high fruit walls, his uncounted beeches, the
home of a hundred owls, his Spanish chestnuts above the rocky lane, his
horse-chestnut and sycamore stately in groups, his mighty wych elms,
his apple trees and all their mistletoe, his walnut trees, and the long
bay of sky that was framed by his tall woods east and north and west.
There are many places which nobody can look upon without being
consciously influenced by a sense of their history. It is a
battlefield, and the earth shows the scars of its old wounds; or a
castle or cathedral of distinct renown rises among the oaks; or a manor
house or cottage, or tomb or woodland walk that speaks of a dead poet
or soldier. Then, according to the extent or care of our reading and
the clearness of our imagination, we can pour into the groves or on the
turf tumultuous or silent armies, or solitary man or woman. It is a
deeply-worn coast; the spring tide gnaws the yellow cliff, and the wind
files it with unceasing hiss, and the relics of every age, skull and
weapon and shroudpin and coin and carven stone, are spread out upon the
clean, untrodden sand, and the learned, the imaginative, the fanciful,
the utterly unhistoric and merely human man exercises his spirit upon
them, and responds, if only for a moment. In some places history has
wrought like an earthquake, in others like an ant or mole; everywhere,
permanently; so that if we but knew or cared, every swelling of
the grass, every wavering line of hedge or path or road were an
inscription, brief as an epitaph, in many languages and characters.
But most of us know only a few of these unspoken languages of the
past, and only a few words in each. Wars and parliaments are but dim,
soundless, and formless happenings in the brain; toil and passion of
generations produce only an enriching of the light within the glades,
and a solemnizing of the shadows.
Out of a whole century or age we remember nothing vividly and in a
manner that appeals to the eye, except some such picture as that which
Gerald of Wales gives of a Welsh prince, Cyneuric, son of Rhys. He was
tall and handsome, fair-complexioned, his hair curled; his dress was
a thin cloak, and under that a shirt, his legs and feet being bare,
regardless of thistle and brier; a man to whom nature and not art had
given his beauty and comely bearing. Outside Wales, and in ages far
removed from the twelfth century, this figure of a man will follow us,
and help to animate any wild scene that is coloured by antiquity. It
is some such man, his fair hair perhaps exchanged for black, and his
nobility more animal and clothed in skins, that we see, if we see a
man at all, when we muse deeply upon the old road worn deep into the
chalk, among burial mound and encampment; we feel rather than see the
innumerable companies of men like this, following their small cattle to
the stream or the dew-pond, wearing out the hard earth with their naked
feet and trailing ash staves. Going up such a road, between steep banks
of chalk and the roots and projecting bases of beeches whose foliage
meets overhead--a road worn twenty feet deep, and now scarce ever used
as a footpath except by fox and hare--we may be half-conscious that we
have climbed that way before during the furrowing of the road, and we
move as in a dream between this age and that dim one which we vainly
strive to recover.
But because we are imperfectly versed in history, we are not therefore
blind to the past. The eye that sees the things of to-day, and the
ear that hears, the mind that contemplates or dreams, is itself an
instrument of an antiquity equal to whatever it is called upon to
apprehend. We are not merely twentieth-century Londoners or Kentish
men or Welshmen. We belong to the days of Wordsworth, of Elizabeth,
of Richard Plantagenet, of Harold, of the earliest bards. We, too,
like Taliesin, have borne a banner before Alexander, have been with
our Lord in the manger of the ass, have been in India, and with the
“remnant of Troia,” and with Noah in the ark, and our original country
is “the region of the summer stars.” And of these many folds in our
nature the face of the earth reminds us, and perhaps, even where there
are no more marks visible upon the land than there were in Eden, we
are aware of the passing of time in ways too difficult and strange for
the explanation of historian and zoologist and philosopher. It is this
manifold nature that responds with such indescribable depth and variety
to the appeals of many landscapes.
We come to a huge, flat-bottomed, grassy coombe, smooth as a
racecourse, that winds out of the cornland into the heart of the Downs.
It is like the bed of a river of great depth. At its entrance beeches
clothe either side; but presently they cease, and up the steep juniper
slopes go the paths of hares, of the herds and flocks of earliest
ages and of the men and women and children also, whose children’s
children’s children have forgotten them though not perhaps their
philosophy. The grass of the slope is mingled with small sweet herbage,
the salad burnet rosy-stemmed, the orange bird’s-foot trefoil, the
purple thyme, the fine white flax, the delicatest golden hawk-bit, and
basil and marjoram, and rosettes of crimson thistles, all sunny warm
and fragrant, glittering and glowing or melting into a simmering haze,
musical with grasshoppers and a-flutter with blue butterflies, so that
the earth seems to be a thick-furred, genial animal. At length the
windings shut out the plain, and the coombe is a green hall roofed by
the hot blue sky. Its walls are steeper than ever, and the burrowings
of the rabbits have streaked the grasses with long splashes--like
those made by sea-birds on rocks--of white chalk. The curves of these
walls are like those of the flight of the swifts that dive overhead.
Here there are no human paths, no sign of house, of grave, of herd, of
cultivation. It is the world’s end, and the rabbits race up and down as
in a dream of solitude.
Yet the mind is not discontented and unfed. This is no boundless
solitude of ocean where one may take a kind of pleasure
To float for ever with a careless course
And think himself the only being alive.
It is not an end but a beginning that we have reached. These are the
elements--pure earth and wind and sunlight--out of which beauty and joy
arise, original and ancient, for ever young. Their presence restores us
not to the Middle Ages, not to the days of Mr. Doughty’s heroic princes
and princesses of Britain,[4] not to any dim archæologist’s world of
reeking marsh and wood, of mammoth and brutish men, but to a region out
of space and out of time in which life and thought and physical health
are in harmony with sun and earth, fragrant as the flowers in the
grass, blithe as the grasshopper, swift as the hares, divine; and out
of it all arises a vision of the man who will embody this thought, a
man whom human infelicity, discontented with the past, has placed in a
golden age still farther back, for the sufficient reason that in every
age he has been a dream, and our dreaming is of the dawn or the night,
always disappointed but undaunted by the day that follows. And so no
storied valley or hillside is richer in humanity than this coombe. It
is one of the countless Edens where we are in contact not with the
soldier and ploughman and mason that change the surface of the earth,
but with prophet and poet who have ever lived to trace to Nature and
to the early ages the health and vigour of men. There is the greatest
antiquity of all, peace and purity and simplicity, and in the midst is
the mother Earth, the young mother of the world, with a face like Ceres
before she had lost Persephone in the underworld. In fact, so blessed
is this solitary hall that after climbing out it is mournful to see the
rabbit-worn tunnels and the Roman camp on the ridge.
[4] _The Dawn in Britain_, by Charles M. Doughty.
CORNWALL.
In Cornwall, where the wrinkles and angles of the earth’s age are
left to show, antiquity plays a giant’s part on every hand. What a
curious effect have those ruins, all but invisible among the sands, the
sea-blue scabious, the tamarisk and rush, though at night they seem
not inaudible when the wild air is full of crying! Some that are not
nearly as old are almost as magical. One there is that stands near a
great water, cut off from a little town and from the world by a round
green hill and touched by no road but only by a wandering path. At the
foot of this hill, among yellow mounds of sand, under blue sky, the
church is dark and alone. It is not very old--not five centuries--and
is of plainest masonry: its blunt short spire of slate slabs that leans
slightly to one side, with the smallest of perforated slate windows at
the base, has a look of age and rusticity. In the churchyard is a rough
grey cross of stone--a disc supported by a pillar. It is surrounded by
the waving noiseless tamarisk. It looks northward over the sandhills
at a blue bay, guarded on the west by tall grey cliffs which a white
column surmounts.
For a time the nearer sandhills have rested and clothed themselves in
bird’s-foot trefoil, thyme, eyebright and short turf: but once the
church was buried beneath them. Between the round hill and the church
a tiny stream sidles along through a level hiding-place of flags and
yellow flag flowers, of purple figwort and purple orchis and green
grass.
A cormorant flies low across the sky--that sable bird which seems to
belong to the old time, the time of badger and beaver, of ancient men
who rose up out of the crags of this coast. To them, when the cuckoo
first called one April, came over the blue sea a small brown ship,
followed by three seals, and out of it descended a Christian from
Ireland, black-haired, blue-eyed, with ready red lips and deep sweet
voice and spoke to them, all alone. He told them of a power that ruled
the blue waters and shifting sands, who could move the round green hill
to the rock of the white gulls; taller and grimmer than the cloven
headland yet sweet and gentle as the fennel above; deep-voiced as the
Atlantic storm, tender also as the sedgewarbler in the flags below the
hill; whose palace was loftier than the blue to which the lark was now
soaring, milder and richer than the meadows in May and everlasting; and
his attendants were more numerous and bright than the herring under a
moon of frost. The milkpails should be fuller and the grass deeper and
the corn heavier in the car if they believed in this; the pilchards
should be as water boiling in the bay; and they should have wings as
of the white birds that lounged about the precipices of the coast. And
all the time the three seals lay with their heads and backs above the
shallows and watched. Perhaps the men believed his word; perhaps they
dropped him over the precipice to see whether he also flew like a gull:
but here is the church named after him.
All along the coast (and especially where it is lofty and houseless,
and on the ledges of the crags the young grey gulls unable to fly bob
their heads seaward and try to scream like their parents who wheel far
and near with double yodeling cry), there are many rounded barrows
looking out to sea. And there are some amidst the sandhills, bare and
corrugated by the wind and heaved up like a feather-bed, their edges
golden against the blue sky or mangily covered by drab marram grass
that whistles wintrily; and near by the blue sea, slightly roughened
as by a barrow, sleeps calm but foamy among cinder-coloured isles;
donkeys graze on the brown turf, larks rise and fall and curlews go
by; a cuckoo sings among the deserted mines. But the barrows are most
noble on the high heather and grass. The lonely turf is full of lilac
scabious flowers and crimson knapweed among the solid mounds of gorse.
The brown-green-grey of the dry summer grass reveals myriads of the
flowers of thyme, of stonecrop yellow and white, of pearly eyebright,
of golden lady’s fingers, and the white or grey clover with its purest
and earthiest of all fragrances. Here and there steep tracks descend
slantwise among the thrift-grown crags to the sea, or promise to
descend but end abruptly in precipices. On the barrows themselves,
which are either isolated or in a group of two or three, grow thistle
and gorse. They command mile upon mile of cliff and sea. In their sight
the great headlands run out to sea and sinking seem to rise again a
few miles out in a sheer island, so that they resemble couchant beasts
with backs under water but heads and haunches upreared. The cliffs
are cleft many times by steep-sided coves, some with broad sand and
shallow water among purple rocks, the outlet of a rivulet; others
ending precipitously so that the stream suddenly plunges into the black
sea among a huddle of sunless boulders. Near such a stream there will
be a grey farm amid grey outbuildings--with a carved wooden eagle from
the wreckage of the cove, or a mermaid, once a figure-head with fair
long hair and round bosom, built into the wall of a barn. Or there
is a briny hamlet grouped steeply on either side of the stream which
gurgles among the pebbles down to the feet of the bearded fisherman and
the ships a-gleam. Or perhaps there is no stream at all, and bramble
and gorse come down dry and hot to the lips of the emerald and purple
pools. Deep roads from the sea to the cliff-top have been worn by
smuggler and fisherman and miner, climbing and descending. Inland shows
a solitary pinnacled church tower, rosy in the warm evening--a thin
line of trees, long bare stems and dark foliage matted--and farther
still the ridges of misty granite, rough as the back of a perch.
Of all the rocky land, of the sapphire sea white with quiet foam, the
barrows are masters. The breaking away of the rock has brought them
nearer to the sea as it has annihilated some and cut off the cliff-ways
in mid-career. They stand in the unenclosed waste and are removed from
all human uses and from most wayfaring. Thus they share the sublimity
of beacons and are about to show that tombs also have their deaths.
Linnet and stonechat and pipit seem to attend upon them, with pretty
voices and motions and a certain ghastliness, as of shadows, given
to their cheerful and sudden flittings by the solemn neighbourhood.
But most of their hold upon the spirit they owe to their powerful
suggestion that here upon the high sea border was once lived a bold
proud life, like that of Beowulf, whose words, when he was dying from
the wounds of his last victory, were: “Bid the warriors raise a funeral
mound to flash with fire on a promontory above the sea, that it may
stand high and be a memorial by which my people shall remember me, and
seafarers driving their tall ships through the mist of the sea shall
say: ‘Beowulf’s Mound.’”
In Cornwall as in Wales, these monuments are the more impressive,
because the earth, wasting with them and showing her bones, takes their
part. There are days when the age of the Downs, strewn with tumuli and
the remnants of camp and village, is incredible; or rather they seem
in the course of long time to have grown smooth and soft and kind,
and to be, like a rounded languid cloud, an expression of Earth’s
summer bliss of afternoon. But granite and slate and sandstone jut
out, and in whatsoever weather speak rather of the cold, drear, hard,
windy dawn. Nothing can soften the lines of Trendreen or Brown Willy
or Carn Galver against the sky. The small stone-hedged ploughlands
amidst brake and gorse do but accentuate the wildness of the land
from which they have been won. The deserted mines are frozen cries of
despair as if they had perished in conflict with the waste; and in a
few years their chimneys standing amidst rotted woodwork, the falling
masonry, the engine rusty, huge and still (the abode of rabbits, and
all overgrown with bedstraw, the stern thistle and wizard henbane) are
in keeping with the miles of barren land, littered with rough silvered
stones among heather and furze, whose many barrows are deep in fern and
bramble and foxglove. The cotton grass raises its pure nodding white.
The old roads dive among still more furze and bracken and bramble and
foxglove, and on every side the land grows no such crop as that of grey
stones. Even in the midst of occasional cornfield or weedless pasture
a long grey upright stone speaks of the past. In many places men have
set up these stones, roughly squaring some of them, in the form of a
circle or in groups of circles--and over them beats the buzzard in
slow hesitating and swerving flight. In one place the work of Nature
might be mistaken for that of man. On a natural hillock stands what
appears to be the ruin of an irregularly heaped wall of grey rock,
roughened by dark-grey lichen, built of enormous angular fragments like
the masonry of a giant’s child. Near at hand, bracken, pink stonecrop,
heather and bright gold tormentil soften it; but at a distance it
stands black against the summer sky, touched with the pathos of man’s
handiwork overthrown, yet certainly an accident of Nature. It commands
Cape Cornwall and the harsh sea, and St. Just with its horned church
tower. On every hand lie cromlech, camp, circle, hut and tumulus of
the unwritten years. They are confused and mingled with the natural
litter of a barren land. It is a silent Bedlam of history, a senseless
cemetery or museum, amidst which we walk as animals must do when they
see those valleys full of skeletons where their kind are said to go
punctually to die. There are enough of the dead; they outnumber the
living; and there those trite truths burst with life and drum upon the
tympanum with ambiguous fatal voices. At the end of this many-barrowed
moor, yet not in it, there is a solitary circle of grey stones, where
the cry of the past is less vociferous, less bewildering, than on the
moor itself, but more intense. Nineteen tall, grey stones stand round
a taller, pointed one that is heavily bowed, amidst long grass and
bracken and furze. A track passes close by, but does not enter the
circle; the grass is unbent except by the weight of its bloom. It bears
a name that connects it with the assembling and rivalry of the bards
of Britain. Here, under the sky, they met, leaning upon the stones,
tall, fair men of peace, but half-warriors, whose songs could change
ploughshare into sword. Here they met, and the growth of the grass, the
perfection of the stones (except that one stoops as with age), and the
silence, suggest that since the last bard left it, in robe of blue or
white or green--the colours of sky and cloud and grass upon this fair
day--the circle has been unmolested, and the law obeyed which forbade
any but a bard to enter it. Sky-blue was the colour of a chief bard’s
robe, emblematic of peace and heavenly calm, and of unchangeableness.
White, the colour of the Druid’s dress, was the emblem of light, and of
its correlatives, purity of conduct, wisdom, and piety. Green was the
colour of the youthful ovate’s robe, for it was the emblem of growth.
Their uniformity of colour signified perfect truth. And the inscription
upon the chair of the bards of Beisgawen was, “Nothing is that is not
for ever and ever.” Blue and white and green, peace and light and
growth--“Nothing is that is not for ever and ever”--these things and
the blue sky, the white, cloudy hall of the sun, and the green bough
and grass, hallowed the ancient stones, and clearer than any vision
of tall bards in the morning of the world was the tranquil delight of
being thus “teased out of time” in the presence of this ancientness.
It is strange to pass from these monumental moors straight to the
sea which records the moments, not the years or the centuries. In
fine weather especially its colour--when, for example, it is faintly
corrugated and of a blue that melts towards the horizon into such a
hue that it is indistinguishable from the violet wall of dawn--is a
perpetual astonishment on account of its unearthliness and evanescence.
The mind does not at once accept the fact that here underneath our eyes
is, as it were, another sky. The physical act of looking up induces
a special mood of solemnity and veneration, and during the act the
eyes meet with a fitting object in the stainless heavens. Looking
down we are used to seeing the earth, the road, the footpath, the
floor, the hearth; but when, instead, it is the sea and not any of
these things, although our feet are on firm land, the solemnity is of
another kind. In its anger the sea becomes humanized or animalized: we
see resemblances to familiar things. There is, for instance, an hour
sometimes after sunset, when the grey sky coldly lights the lines of
white plumes on a steely sea, and they have an inevitable likeness
to a trampling chivalry that charges upon a foe. But a calm sea is
incomparable except to moods of the mind. It is then as remote from the
earth and earthly things as the sky, and the remoteness is the more
astonishing because it is almost within our grasp. It is no wonder
that a great idea was expressed by the fortunate islands in the sea.
The youthfulness, the incorruptibility of the sea, continually renewing
itself, the same from generation to generation, prepares it as a fit
sanctuary of the immortal dead. So at least we are apt to think at
certain times, coming from the heavy, scarred, tormented earth to that
immense aëry plain of peacock blue. And yet at other times that same
unearthliness will suggest quite other thoughts. It has not changed
and shrunken and grown like the earth; it is not sun-warmed: it is a
monster that has lain unmoved by time, sleeping and moaning outside
the gates within which men and animals have become what they are.
Actually that cold fatal element and its myriad population without a
sound brings a wistfulness into the mind as if it could feel back and
dimly recall the dawn of time when the sea was incomprehensible and
impassable, when the earth had but lately risen out of the waters and
was yet again to descend beneath: it becomes a type of the waste where
everything is unknown or uncertain except death, pouring into the brain
the thoughts that men have had on looking out over untrodden mountain,
forest, swamp, in the drizzling dawn of the world. The sea is exactly
what it was when mountain, forest, swamp were imperturbable enemies,
and the sight of it restores the ancient fear. I remember one dawn
above all others when this restoration was complete. When it was yet
dark the wind rose gustily under a low grey sky and a lark sang amidst
the moan of gorse and the creak of gates and the deeply-taken breath
of the tide at the full. Nor was it yet light when the gulls began to
wheel and wind and float with a motion like foam on a whirlpool or
interwoven snow. They wheeled about the masts of fishing-boats that
nodded and kissed and crossed in a steep cove of crags whose black
edges were slavered by the foam of the dark sea; and there were no men
among the boats or about the grey houses that looked past the walls
of the cove to the grim staircase and sea-doors of a black headland,
whose perpendicular rocks stood up far out of the reach of the wings
fashioned in the likeness of gigantic idols. The higher crags were
bushy and scaly with lichen, and they were cushioned upon thrift and
bird’s-foot trefoil and white bladder campion. It was a bristling sea,
not in the least stormy, but bristling, dark and cold through the slow
colourless dawn, dark and cold and immense; and at the edge of it the
earth knelt, offering up the music of a small flitting bird and the
beauty of small flowers, white and gold, to those idols. They were
terrible enough. But the sea was more terrible; for it was the god of
whom those rocks were the poor childish images, and it seemed that
the god had just then disclosed his true nature and hence the pitiful
loveliness of the flowers, the pitiful sweetness of the bird that sang
among the rocks at the margin of the kind earth.
Now and then the sea will startle by some resemblance to the earth.
Thus I have come unexpectedly in sight of it on a strange coast
and have not known that it was the sea. A gale from the north-east
was blowing, and it was late afternoon in mid-winter. The land was
sandy moorland, treeless and dark with iron-coloured heather. A mile
away I saw rising up into the sky what seemed a peaty mountain in
Cardiganshire, as it would be in a tempest of rain, and it was only
when I was near the cliff and could see the three long walls of white
waves towards the shore that I knew it was the sea. More common is the
calm dark-blue sea in mid-summer, over which go criss-cross bands of
lighter hue, like pale moorland paths winding about a moor.
In a stern land like Cornwall that so often refuses the consolations of
grass and herb and tree, the relentings are the more gracious. These
are to be found in a whole valley where there are sloping fields of
corn and grass divided by green hedges, and woods rich and misty and
warm, and the bones of the land are buried away until it ends in a
bay where high and cavernous dark rocks stand on either side of blue
water and level sand. Often all the sweetness of the country round
seems to have run into one great roadside hedge as dewdrops collect in
the bosom of a leaf. The stones of the original wall are themselves
deeply hidden in turf, or from the crevices ferns descend and the pale
blooms of pennywort rise up; the lichen is furry and the yellow or
pink stonecrop is neat and dense; ivy climbs closely up and hangs down
in loose array. Up from the top of the wall or mound rise bramble and
gorse and woodbine over them, or brier and thorn and woodbine again;
and the tallest and massiest of foxgloves cleave through these with
their bells, half a hundred of them in rows five deep already open and
as many more yet in bud, dense as grapes, dewy, murmurous; and below
the foxgloves are slender parsleys, rough wood sage and poppies. At the
foot of the wall, between it and the road, is a grassy strip, where
the yarrow grows feathery with gilded cinquefoil and tormentil--or
above nettles as dense as corn rise large discs of white hog parsnip
flower, a coarse and often dirty flower that has a dry smell of
summer--or bramble and brier arch this way and that their green and
rosy and purple stems, bright leaves, flowers pink and white. Only
the shin-breaking Cornish stiles of stone, interrupting the hedge and
giving a view of barren hills or craggy-sided sea, destroy the illusion
created by this exuberance of herb and bush and the perfume of woodbine
and rose.
Nowhere is the stateliness or grace or privacy of trees more
conspicuous than about the Cornish towns and farms. The tall
round-topped elms above Padstow, for example, would be natural and
acceptable unconsciously elsewhere; but above those crossing lines of
roof they have an indescribable benevolence. The farmhouses are usually
square, dry and grey, being built of slate with grey-slated roofs
painted by lichen; some are whitewashed; in some, indeed, the stones
are of many greys and blues, with yellowish and reddish tinges, hard,
but warm in the sun and comforting to look at when close to the sea
and some ruinous promontory; few are screened by ivy or climbing rose.
The farm buildings are of the same kind, relieved by yellow straw, the
many hues of hay, the purple bracken stacks, the dark peat. The gates
are coarse and mean, of iron or of cheap or rough wood, lightly made,
patched, held together by string, and owing their only charm to the
chance use of the curved ribs of ships as gate-posts. But to many of
the buildings sycamore and ash and apple trees bent above tall grass
lend their beauty of line, of mass, of colour, of shade, of sound and
of many motions. I can never forget the rows of ash trees, the breezy
sycamores and the tamarisks by ancient Harlyn, with its barrows on the
hill, its ruins of chapel and church among rushes and poppies, its
little oak wood by the sandy river mouth where the men of old time
buried their dead, the poppied corn, the white gulls and their black
shadows wheeling over sunny turf. The file of lean woods seen between
Perranporth and St. Agnes inland. The sycamores above the farm near
Towan cross where the road dips and the deep furrow of a little valley
winds, with hay upon its slopes, out to sea. The green wood, long and
beautiful, below the gentle brown slopes of Hudder Down. The several
companies of trees in the valley by the Red River, and the white farm
of Reskajeage near by, under ash and elm, sycamore and wych-elm and
lime, a rough orchard of apples and a gnarled squat medlar to one
side--the trees grouped as human figures are when they begin to move
after some tense episode. The wych-elm, sycamore and ash round the
tower of Gwithian church and in amongst the few thatched cottages
alongside the yellow towans and violet sea. In a land of deserted
roofless houses with solid chimneys that no man wants, the narrow copse
of small spindly oaks upholding with bare crooked stems as of stone a
screen of leaves, above a brooklet that runs to the sea through dense
rush and foxglove and thistle where the sedge-warbler sings. The long
low mound of green wood nearest to Land’s End. Between Tregothal and
Bosfranken, the wet copse in a narrow valley, where red campion and
bracken and bramble are unpenetrated among flowery elders, sallows,
thorns and sycamores. A farm that has a water-mill and water gloomy
and crystal under sycamore and ash. The thin halting procession of
almost branchless trees on the ridge of the Beacon above Sancreed--a
procession that seems even at mid-day to move in another world, in the
world and in the age of the stone circles and cairns and cromlechs of
the moor beyond. The sycamore and elder that surround and tower above
Tregonebris near Boscawen Un. The avenue of ash and elm and wych-elm
and sycamore, very close together, leading from grey Nancothan mill,
where the dark-brown water mingles its noise with the rustling trees.
The wych-elms and golden-fruited sycamores about the roads near St.
Hilary, and the long avenue of ash up to the church itself, and the
elms through which the evening music floats, amidst the smell of hay,
in a misty mountained sunset.
Under the flaming fleeces of a precipitous sky, in a windless hush
and at low tide, I descended to a narrow distinct valley just where
a stream ran clear and slow through level sands to a bay, between
headlands of rocks and of caves among the rocks. The sides of the
valley near the sea were high and steep and of grass until their abrupt
end in a low but perpendicular wall of rock just above the river
sands. Inland the valley began to wind and at the bend trees came
darkly trooping down the slopes to the water. Immediately opposite the
ford--the wet sands being unscathed by any foot or hoof or wheel--a
tributary ran into the river through a gorge of its own. It was a
gorge not above a hundred feet across, and its floor was of sand save
where the brook was running down, and this floor was all in shadow
because the banks were clothed in thick underwood and in ash, sycamore,
wych-elm and oak meeting overhead. And in these sands also there was no
footprint save of the retreated sea. There was no house, nor wall, nor
road. And there was no sound in the caverns of foliage except one call
of a cuckoo as I entered and the warbling of a blackbird that mused in
the oaks and then laughed and was silent and mused again and filled
the mind with the fairest images of solitude--solitude where a maid,
thinking of naught, unthought of, unseen, combs out her yellow hair and
lets her spirit slip down into the tresses--where a man fearful of his
kind ascends out of the deeps of himself so that his eyes look bravely
and his face unstiffens and unwrinkles and his motion and gesture is
fast and free--where a child walks and stops and runs and sings in
careless joy that takes him winding far out into abysses of eternity
and makes him free of them, so that years afterward the hour and place
and sky return, and the eternity on which they opened as a casement,
but not the child, not the joy.
I like trees for the cool evening voices of their many leaves, for
their cloudy forms linked to earth by stately stems--for the pale
lifting of the sycamore leaves in breezes and also their drooping,
hushed and massed repose, for the myriad division of the light ash
leaves--for their straight pillars and for the twisted branch work,
for their still shade and their rippling or calm shimmering or dimly
glowing light, for the quicksilver drip of dawn, for their solemnity
and their dancing, for all their sounds and motions--their slow-heaved
sighs, their nocturnal murmurs, their fitful fingerings at thunder
time, their swishing and tossing and hissing in violent rain, the roar
of their congregations before the south-west wind when it seems that
they must lift up the land and fly away with it, for their rustlings
of welcome in harvest heat--for their kindliness and their serene
remoteness and inhumanity, and especially the massiest of the trees
that have also the glory of motion, the sycamores, which are the chief
tree of Cornwall, as the beeches and yews are of the Downs, the oaks
of the Weald, the elms of the Wiltshire vales.
Before I part from trees I should like to mention those of
mid-Somerset--and above all, the elms. I am thinking of them as they
are at noon on the hottest days of haymaking at the end of June. The
sky is hot, its pale blue without pity and changing to a yellow of mist
near the horizon. The land is level and all of grass, and where the hay
is not spread in swathes the grass is almost invisible for the daisies
on its motionless surface. Here and there the mower whirrs and seems
natural music, like the grasshopper’s, of the burning earth. Through
the levels wind the heavy-topped grey willows of a hidden stream.
In the hedges and in the wide fields and about the still, silent
farmhouses of stone there are many elms. They are tall and slender
despite their full mounded summits. They cast no shade. In the great
heat their green is all but grey, and their leaves are lost in the mist
which their mingling creates. Grey-hooded, grey-mantled, they seem to
be stealing away over the fields to the sanctuary of the dark-wooded
hills, low and round and lapped entirely in leaves, which stand in
the mist at the edge of the plain--to be leaving that plain to the
possession of the whirring mower and the sun of almighty summer.
Sycamores solemnized the Cornish farm in the twilight, where I asked
the farmer’s wife if she could let us have two beds for the night. She
stood in the doorway, hands on hips, watching her grandchildren’s last
excited minutes of play in the rickyard.
“He’s the master,” she replied, pointing to the farmer who was talking
to his carter, between the rickyard and the door, under the sycamores.
“Two beds?”
“That is what we should like,” said my friend and I.
“What do you want with two beds?” he asked with a tinge of scorn as
well as of pity in his frank amusement. “My missus and I have only had
one bed these forty years.”
Here he laughed so gaily that he could not have embarrassed the very
devil of puritanism, and turning to his man he called forth a deep
bass laughter and from his wife a peal that shook her arms so that she
raised them to the sides of the porch for better support; the children
also turned their laughter our way.
“But perhaps one of you kicks in his sleep?... We don’t.... Come
inside. I dare say you are tired.... Good-night, John. Now, children,
up with you.”
I think they were the most excellent pair of man and woman I ever
saw. Both were of a splendid physical type, she the more energetic,
black-haired, black-eyed, plump and tall and straight; he the more
enduring, fair-haired and bearded, blue-eyed, hardly her equal in
height, certainly not in words. In forty years neither had overpowered
the other. They had not even agreed to take separate paths, but like
two school-boys, new friends, they could afford to contend together
in opinions without fear of damage or of lazy truce. He had ploughed
and sowed and reaped: she had borne him seven children, had baked and
churned and stitched. They had loved sweet things together, and, with
curses at times, their children and the land. Physical strength and
purity--that were in them the whole of morality--seemed to have given
them that equality with the conditions of life which philosophy has
done nothing but talk about. They of all men and women had perhaps
jarred least upon the music of the spheres. They had the right and
power to live, and the end was laughter.
In all those years they had been separated but once. Until four years
ago she had not been out of Cornwall except to bury her mother, who had
suddenly died in London. Two hundred pounds fell to her share on that
death and the money arrived one morning after the harvest thanksgiving.
For a week she continued to go about her work in the old way save that
she sent rather hurriedly for a daughter who had just left her place
as cook in Exeter. At the end of the week, having stored the apples
and shown her daughter how to use the separator, she walked in to
Penzance in her best clothes but without even a handbag; her husband
was out with his gun. By the next day she was at Liverpool. She sent
off a picture postcard, with a little note written by the shopkeeper,
saying that she would be back by Christmas, and telling her husband
to sell the old bull. Then she sailed for New York. She saw Niagara;
she visited her nephew, John Davy, at Cincinnati; she spent two weeks
in railway travelling west and south, and saw the Indians. Four days
before Christmas she was back in the rickyard, driving before her a
young bull and carrying in her hand a bunch of maize.
“Well, Ann, you’re back before your time,” said her husband, after
praising the beast.
“Yes, Samuel, and I feel as if I could whitewash the dairy, that I do,”
said she.
“Suppose you wait till to-morrow,” proposed Sam Davy.
“I think I will, for I can hear that Mary is behind with the separator.”
“She’s a good girl, but she hasn’t got your patience, my dear.”
“Oh, here, Sam, here’s the change,” she said, giving him the bunch of
maize.
* * * * *
In Cornwall many of the women looked less English than the men. The
noticeable men were fair-haired and, of fair complexion, blue-eyed and
rather small-headed, upright and of good bearing. The noticeable women
had black hair, pale, seldom swarthy, faces, very dark eyes. Perhaps
the eyes were more foreign than anything else in them: they were
singularly immobile and seldom changed in expression with their voices.
Several of the dark-eyed, black-haired women had a beauty of a fearless
character like gypsy women, in their movement and expression. But the
wives of small farmers and miners on piecework look old very soon and
are puckered and shadowy in the face. Some of these middle-aged and
old women suggested an early and barbarous generation. The eyes were
small and deep-set, and the face narrowed forward like an animal’s;
which gave the whole a peering expression of suspicion and even alarm.
The eyes of most human beings are causes of bewilderment and dismay
if curiously looked at; but the strangest I ever saw were in an old
Cornish woman. They were black and round as a child’s, with a cold
brightness that made them seem not of the substance of other eyes, but
like a stone. They were set in a narrow, bony face of parchment among
grey hair crisp and disarrayed. I saw them only for a few minutes
while I asked a few questions about the way, and it was as much as I
could do to keep up the conversation, so much did those motionless eyes
invite me to plunge into an abyss of human personality--such intense
loneliness and strangeness did they create, since they proclaimed
shrilly and clearly that beyond a desire to be fed and clothed we had
nothing in common. Had they peered up at me out of a cromlech or hut at
Bosporthennis I could not have been more puzzled and surprised.
Men and women were hospitable and ready to smile as the Welsh are; and
they have an alluring naïveté as well as some righteousness. One family
was excessively virtuous or had a wish to appear so: I do not know
which alternative to like the less, since it was in a matter of game.
They rented land on a large estate and had a right to the rabbits: the
hares were sacred to the great landowner. The farmer’s wife assured me
that one of her sons had lately brought in a lame hare and proposed to
put it out of its pain, but that she had said: “No, take it out and
let it die outside anywhere. The best thing is to be afraid in things
of this kind and then you won’t go wrong.” Doing much the same kind or
quantity of manual work as their husbands and being much out of doors,
the women’s manners were confident and free. Their speech was as a rule
fluent and grammatical and clearly delivered, with less accent than in
any part of England. Coming into a mining village one day and wanting
tea, I asked a woman who was drawing water from a farmyard well if she
could make me some, thinking she was the farmer’s wife. She said she
would, but took me to one of a small row of cottages over the way,
where her husband was half-naked in the midst of his Saturday wash.
Taking no notice of him she led me into the sitting-room and, with a
huge loaf held like a violin, began buttering and cutting thin slices
while she talked to me, to the little children and to her husband, from
the adjacent kitchen. She was tall, straight as a pillar, black-haired,
with clear untanned but slightly swarthy skin, black eyes, kindly
gleaming cheeks and red lips smiling above her broad breast and hips.
Her clothes were black but in rags that hardly clung to her shoulders
and waist. She was barely five and twenty, but had six young children
about her, one in a cradle by the hearth and another still crawling
at her feet. Her only embarrassment came when I asked to pay for my
tea--she began adding up the cost, a pennyworth of bread and butter, a
halfpennyworth of tea, etc.! The kitchen consisted simply of a large
grate and baking oven, plain tables and chairs on a flagged floor.
But the sitting-room was a museum--with photographs of a volunteer
corps, of friends and relations on the wall over the fire; foxgloves in
jam-pots surrounded by green crinkled paper in the fireplace; on the
mantelpiece, cheap little vases and scraps of ore and more photographs.
On the walls were three pictures: one of two well-dressed children
being timidly inspected by fallow deer; another of a grandmother
showing a book to a child whose attention is diverted by the frolics
of two kittens at her side; and a third of Jesus, bleeding and crowned
with thorns, high on a cross over a marble city beneath a romantic
forest ridge, behind which was the conflagration of a crimson sunset.
Other sitting-rooms were similarly adorned, with the addition of a
picture of John Wesley as a child escaping from the window of a
burning house, with many anxious men holding up their hands from below.
The smell of flowers and of sun-warmed furniture and old upholstery
mingles in such rooms.
But the kitchens are often as charming as in Wales. I remember one
especially near Carn Galver. The farmhouse was of whitened stone under
a steep thatch. In front were fuchsia trees in the corner of a stony
yard; to one side, the haystacks and piles of furze and bracken and
peat. The farmer’s wife was carrying peat on an iron hook into the
kitchen and I followed her. A pan of yellow scalded cream stood inside.
The fireplace was a little room in itself, with seats at each side and
a little fire of wood and three upright turves in one corner of the
great stone hearth: over the fire the kettle boiled. Horse ornaments
of polished brass surmounted the fireplace. The wallpaper had given
up its pattern long since to a smoky uneven gold; nailed to it were
calendars and lists of fairs and sales; against it were two small
tables, one to support a Bible and an almanac, the other spread with a
white cloth on which was a plate and a bowl of cream. Behind the door
and between it and the fire was a high-backed settle of dark wood,
with elbow-rests. The floor was flagged and sanded. The light came in
through a little square window on to the Bible by the opposite wall,
and through the open door on to the figure of the housewife, a woman
of forty. A delicate white face shone beneath a broad untrimmed straw
hat that was tied tightly under her chin so as to hide her ears and
most of her black hair. Her black skirt was kilted up behind; a white
apron contrasted with black shoes, black stockings and black clothes.
At first her face was hardly seen, not only because but a part of
it emerged from the shell of her hat, but because the spirit that
emanated from it was more than the colour and features and so much in
harmony with the sea and crag and moor and dolmen of her land. It is
evading an insuperable difficulty to say that this spirit was not so
much human as fay. It was the spirit of which her milky complexion,
the bright black eyes, white teeth and fine red lips of her readily
smiling and naïvely watching fearless face, her slender form, her
light and rapid movements upon small feet, were only the more obvious
expressions. Her spirit danced before her--not quite visibly, not quite
audibly--as she moved or spoke or merely smiled; if it could have been
seen it would have been a little singing white flame changing to blue
and crimson in its perpetual flickering. It was a spirit of laughter,
of laughter unquenchable since the beginning of time, of laughter in
spite of and because of all things, the laughter of life like a jewel
in desolate places. It was a spirit most ancient and yet childlike,
birdlike: it belonged to a world outside any which other human beings
ever seemed to touch, but the laughter in it made it friendly, for
it was far deeper than humour, it was gaiety of heart. Her goings
to and fro on those light feet had the grace, quickness, suddenness
of a bird, of a wren that slips from twig to twig and jets out its
needle of song, of a moorhen flicking its tail and hooting sharply.
Her laugh startled and delighted like the laugh of the woodpecker as
it leaps across the glades--like the whistling of birds up amongst
the dark clouds and the moon. But most of all she called to mind the
meadow pipit of her own crags, that rises from green ledges out over
the sea and then, falling slantwise with body curved like a crescent,
utters his passionate pulsating song, so rapid and passionate that it
seems impossible and unfit that it should end except in death, yet
suddenly ceasing as it lands again upon the samphire or the thrift. The
spirit was as quicksilver in the corners of her eyes, as quicksilver
in the heart. Such a maid she must have been as the bard would have
thought to send out the thrush to woo for him, when he heard the bird
of ermine breast singing from the new-leaved hazel at dawn, on the
edge of a brook among the steep woods--singing artfully with a voice
like a silver bell--solemnly, too, so as to seem to be performing a
sacrifice--and amorously, bringing balm to lovers’ hearts and inspiring
the bard to send by him a message to the sun of all maidens that she,
white as the snow of the first winter night, should come out to the
green woods to him. She had lived for generations on the moor, for
generations upon generations, and this was what she had gained from
heather and furze and crag and seawind and sunshine tempered by no
trees--inextinguishable laughter. But she was inarticulate. She milked
the cows, made butter, baked bread, kept the peat fire burning and
tended her children. When she talked, I asked for more cream. Perhaps
after several more generations have passed she will be a poet and
astonish the world with a moorland laughter of words that endure.
* * * * *
Everything in that house was old or smooth and bright with use, and
the hollowed threshold of the doorway in the sun put me in mind of
a hundred old things and of their goodliness to mortal eyes--the
wrecked ship’s ribs, their bolt-holes rusty, that stand among nettles
as gate-posts--the worn dark stones that rock to the tread among the
ripples of an umbrageous ford--many a polished stile and gate--the
group of rigid but still gracious bowery thorns dotted with crimson
haws in the middle of a meadow, their holes and lower branches rubbed
hard and smooth and ruddy like iron by the cows--the ash staff
beginning to bend like its master, the old man upon the roads who once
wore scarlet and wound the horn for Mr. ----’s hounds. Odd it is how
old use sanctifies a little thing. There was once a hut where a good
man, but a poor and a weak and unwise, stayed all one fair summer and
talked of English roads--he was a lord of the roads, at least of South
Country roads--and of ships, which he knew. Now on the first night of
his stay, needing a candlestick he kicked off the top of a pointed
wooden paling, so as to make a five-angled piece on which he stuck the
candle in its own grease. All through his stay he used the candlestick,
when he read the _Divina Commedia_ and _Pantagruel_ and _Henry Brocken_
and recollected airs of Italy and Spain, amidst the sound of nightjars
and two leafy streams: the light flickered out as he mused about the
open sea, calm but boundless and without known harbour, on which he was
drifting cheerfully, regardless of Time, pied with nights and days.
The hut was burnt and the man went--to drown a little afterwards with
a hundred unlike himself in the sea--but among nettle and dock the
candlestick was picked up safe. It had broken off straight and the
simple shape was pleasant; it was dark with age; along with the mound
and little pillar of wax remaining it had the shape of a natural thing;
and it was his.
Animate as well as inanimate things are open to this sanctification
by age or use. I am not here thinking of ceremonious use--for which
I have small natural respect, so that I have been denied the power
of appreciating either a great religious pomp or the dancing of
Mademoiselle Genée. But some men, particularly sailors and field
labourers, but also navvies and others who work heavily with their
hands, have this glory of use. Their faces, their clothes, their
natures all appear to act and speak harmoniously, so that they cause
a strong impression of personality which is to be deeply enjoyed in a
world of masks, especially of black clerical masks. One of the best
examples of this kind was a gamekeeper who daily preceded me by twenty
or thirty yards in a morning walk up through a steep wood of beeches.
He was a short, stiffly-built and stoutish man who wore a cap, thick
skirted coat and breeches, leather gaiters and heavy boots, all patched
and stained, all of nearly the same colour as his lightish-brown hair
and weathered skin, but not so dark as the gun over his shoulder. The
shades of this colour were countless and made up like the colour of a
field of ripe wheat, which they would have resembled had they not been
liberally dusted all over, just as his brown beard was grizzled. He
went slowly up, swinging slightly at the shoulders and always smoking a
pipe of strong shag tobacco of which the fumes hovered in the moist air
with inexpressible sweetness and a good brown savour: if I may say so,
the fit emanation of the brown woodland man who, when he stood still,
looked like the stump of a tree.