CHILDREN OF EARTH--HAMPSHIRE AND SUSSEX
At the end of the lane, at the head of one of the beechen chalky
coombes, just where the beeches cease and the flinty clay begins,
stands a thatched cottage under five tall ash-trees. A grassy lane runs
by, but on three sides the place is surrounded by huge naked concave
sweeps of grey ploughland which take the February sunshine and cloud
shadow as delicately as beaten silver. The walls are of grey-white
soft stone, but only a little of them is visible, because the steep
thatch sweeps almost to the ground and overhangs the gables, in each of
which is a small window and under one a door. In hot summer or windy
winter, if the field happens to be without a crop, the earth is of the
same colour as the thatch, and the cottage looks as if it were the
work--like a mole-hill--of some creature that has worked underground
and risen up just there and rested, peering out of the two dark windows
upon the world. It is impossible to find any point of view from which
any house can be seen along with this, except one--the ash-trees, the
tall hazels of the lane, or the swelling fields hide them away. But the
pewits loop their flight every spring over and round about the cottage,
and the dark eyes under the thatch can always see a hare, and often
half-a-dozen. Whether the ashes are purple in spring, yellow in autumn
or grey in winter, whether the surrounding fields are bare, or green
with turnips, or yellow with charlock, or empurpled gold with ripe
wheat, the cottage is always the same stubborn, dull, simple mound
raised up out of the earth. The one other house is not so high; nor has
it eyes; nor do an old man and a girl and two children go in and out of
it; it is, in fact, not a house of the living, but of the dead, a round
tumulus at the edge of the hill.
The grey mound of the dead and the grey house of the living are at
their best in the midst of winter and in the midst of summer. Standing
upon the tumulus in the north-west wind, the cottage could be seen
huddled under the lashing trees. Many a thousand beech-trees on the
steep slopes below gave out a roar, and it was a majestic position
to be up there, seeing and feeling that the strong wind was scouring
the world with a stream miles deep and miles wide. Far underneath,
two beechen promontories with bald white brows projected into the
vast valley; not really much lower than the hill of the tumulus, but
seeming so in that more than Amazonian stream of air. Beyond these
promontories the broad land was washed bright and clear. Nearer at hand
the thrice cleaned traveller’s-joy was as silken foam surging upon the
surface of black yews and olive hazels. The kestrel swayed and lunged
in his flight. Branches gleamed, hard and nervously moving. Rain-pools
glittered, and each brittle stem and flower of a dead plant, each
grass-blade and brown lock of beech or oak-leaf, gave out its little
noise to join the oceanic murmur of the earth. Now and then a dead
leaf took flight, rose high and went out over the valley till it was
invisible, never descending, in search of the moon. Near the horizon
a loose white drift went rapidly just over the summits of the highest
woods; but in the upper air were the finest flowers of the wind--hard
white flowers of cloud, flowers and mad tresses and heaven-wide
drapery of gods, and some small and white like traveller’s-joy, as
if up there also they travelled and knew the houseless joy along the
undulating highway of the deep wind. And the little house was as
a watch-tower planted in the middle swirl of the current that was
scouring valley and wood and sky and water and, as far as it could, the
dull eyes and duller brains of men.
In summer I saw it at the end of one of those days of sun and wind and
perfectly clear air when the earth appears immensely heavy and great
and strong--so that for a moment it is possible to know the majesty of
its course in space--and the sheep very light, like mere down, as they
crawl in a flock over the grass. Swathes and wisps of white cloud were
strewn over the high blue sky as if by haymakers. But the lanes were
deep, and for miles at a time nearly shut out the sky, and all the day
the lanes were empty and wholly mine. Here the high banks were thickly
grown with wild parsnip, and its umbels of small yellow-green flowers,
fragrant and a little over-sweet, were alive and, as it were, boiling
over with bees and the sunniest flies. There the hazel was laced with
white bryony, whose leaves and pale tendrils went hovering and swimming
and floating over the hedge. In one place an elder-tree stood out of
the hedge, stiff, with few branches, and every leaf upon them red as
a rose. Wherever there was a waste strip beside the road the tall
yellow ragwort grew densely, each of the nearer flowers as hard and
clear as brass, the farther ones dimly glowing and half lost in the
green mist of their leaves and the haze of the brightness of their
multitudes. Where the road changed into an unused lane the grass was
tall, and under the hazels, yet fully seen, were the wild basil and
marjoram and centaury and knapweed and wood-betony, and over them hung
moths of green crimson-spotted silk. There, too, were the plants that
smell most of the dry summer--the white parsleys and the white or rosy
cow-parsnip, the bedstraws white and yellow, the yellow mugwort. Now
and then the hedges gave way and on either hand was open turf; sloping
steep and rough on one side, grooved by ancient paths of men and
cattle, dotted by thorns, with the freshly flowering traveller’s-joy
over them, ash-trees at the top; on the other side, level, skirted by
cloudy wych-elms and having at one corner a white inn half shadowed by
a walnut, and two sycamores and cattle below them; and at another, a
stately autumnal house veiled by the cedars and straight yews on its
darkly glowing lawn.
All these things I saw as if they had been my own, as if I were going
again slowly through old treasures long hidden away, so that they were
memoried and yet unexpected. Nothing was too small to be seen, and
ascending the chalk hill among the beeches every white flint was clear
on the sward, each in its different shape--many chipped as the most
cunning chisel would be proud to chip them; one, for example, carved
by the loss of, two exquisitely curved and balanced flakes into the
likeness of a moth’s expanded upper wings.
A dark beech alley, paved with the gold and green of moss and walled by
crumbling chalk, brought me to the tumulus. There lay the old house in
shadow, its ash crests lighted yellow by horizontal beams that caught
here the summit of a wood, and there the polished grass stems on a
rising field. It was the one house, and at that hour it gathered to
itself all that can be connected with a home. It was alone, but its
high cool thatch was full of protection and privacy, sufficient against
sun or rain or wind or frost, yet impregnated with free air and light.
Its ash-trees communed with the heavens and the setting sun. The wheat
glowed at its gates. The dark masses of the lower woods enhanced by a
touch of primeval gloom and savagery the welcoming expression of the
house. Slowly the light died out of the ash-tops and the wheat turned
to a mist. The wood seemed to creep up close and lay its shadows over
the house. But, stronger than the wood and the oncoming tide of night
that enveloped it, the spirits of roof and wall and hearth were weaving
a spell about the house to guard it, so that it looked a living,
breathing, dreaming thing. Nimble, elvish, half-human but wholly kind
small spirits I fancied them, creeping from corners in stone and thatch
and rafter, at war with those that dwelt in lonely and dark places,
that knew not fire and lamp and human voices save as invaders. For a
little while there was a pause, a suspense, a hesitation--Could the
small spirits win?--Were not the woods older and more mighty?--Was not
that long black bar of cloud across the cold west something sinister,
already engulfing the frail white moon? But suddenly, as if the life of
the house had found a powerful voice, one eye in the nearer gable was
lit by a small lamp and a figure could be guessed behind it. The first
Promethean spark of fire stolen from the gods was hardly a more signal
victory than that at which the house and I rejoiced when the white
light glimmered across the corn. It seemed the birth of light.
* * * * *
The man who lives under that roof and was born there seventy years ago
is like his house. He is short and immensely broad, black-haired, with
shaved but never clean-shaven face creased by a wide mouth and long,
narrow black eyes--black with a blackness as of cold, deep water that
had never known the sun but only the candle-light of discoverers. His
once grey corduroys and once white slop are stained and patched to
something like the colour of the moist, channelled thatch and crumbling
“clunch” of the stone walls. He wears a soft felt hat with hanging
broad brim of darker earthy hues; it might have been drawn over his
face and ears in his emergence from his native clay and flint. Only
rarely does his eye--one eye at a time--gloom out from underneath,
always accompanied by a smile that slowly puckers the wrinkled oak-bark
of his stiff cheeks. His fingers, his limbs, his face, his silence,
suggest crooked oak timber or the gnarled stoles of the many times
polled ash. It is barely credible that he grew out of a child, the son
of a woman, and not out of the earth itself, like the great flints that
work upwards and out on to the surface of the fields. Doubtless he did,
but like many a ruined castle, like his own house, he has been worn to
a part of the earth itself. That house he will never give up except by
force, to go to workhouse or grave. They want him to go out for a few
days that it may be made more weather-tight; but he fears the chances
and prefers a rickety floor and draughty wall. He is half cowman, half
odd-job man--at eight shillings a week--in his last days, mending
hedges, cleaning ditches, and carrying a sack of wheat down the steep
hill on a back that cannot be bent any farther. Up to his knees in the
February ditch, or cutting ash-poles in the copse, he is clearly half
converted into the element to which he must return.
When the underwood is for sale it is a pleasure to read the notices
fixed to the doors of barn and shed, with the names of the copses and
woods. At Penshurst lately, for example, I saw these names--
Black Hoath Wood.
Heronry Pond.
Marlpit Field.
Tapner’s Wood.
Ashour Farm.
Sidney’s Coppice.
Weir Field.
Well Place.
I was back in Sidney’s time, remembering that genial poem of Ben
Jonson’s, “To Penshurst,” and especially the lines--
“Thy copse too, named of Gamage, thou hast there,
That never fails to serve thee season’d deer,
When thou wouldst feed or exercise thy friends.
The lower land, that to the river bends,
Thy sheep, thy bullocks, kine, and calves do feed;
The middle grounds thy mares and horses breed.
Each bank doth yield thee conies; and the tops
Fertile of wood, Ashore and Sidney’s copps,
To crown thy open table, doth provide
The purple pheasant with the speckled side, ...”
and so onward to that opulence and ease three centuries old--
“Then hath thy orchard fruit, thy garden flowers,
Fresh as the air, and new as are the hours.
The early cherry, with the later plum,
Fig, grape, and quince, each in his time doth come;
The blushing apricot and woolly peach
Hang on thy walls, that every child may reach.
And though thy walls be of the country stone,
They’re reared with no man’s ruin, no man’s groan;
There’s none, that dwell about them, wish them down;
But all come in, the farmer and the clown;
And no one empty handed, to salute
Thy lord and lady, though they have no suit.
Some bring a capon, some a rural cake,
Some nuts, some apples; some that think they make
The better cheeses, bring them; or else send
By their ripe daughters, whom they would commend
This way to husbands; and whose baskets bear
An emblem of themselves, in plum or pear....”
Almost to such a time as that does the old man carry back the thoughts.
His old master was the fifth in the direct line to work one farm in the
vale; he left money in his will to pay for new smocks, all of the best
linen, to be worn by the labourers who should carry him to the grave.
The old man has three companions under that roof. The hand that lit
the lamp is his daughter’s, the youngest by the second wife, whom he
married when he was fifty. The other two are her children, and she is
unmarried. She earns no money except by keeping a few fowls and bees.
When the younger child was born--the old man having to go six miles
out at midnight for the parish doctor--the married women commented:
“There’s forgiveness for the first, but not for the second; no”:
for the first showed indiscretion, carelessness, youth; the second,
helplessness. The old man can hardly leave the children, and though he
is deaf he will, when he is told that the baby is crying, go to the
room and listen carefully for the pleasure of the infant voice. That
voice means colder winter nights for him and less cheer of meat and
ale. But for all young life he has a passion equal to a mother’s, so
he laces up his boots and does not grieve. See him in the dim outlying
barn with the sick heifer which is sure to die. The wet killed several
in the open field; this one is to die on dry hay. She lies with stiff,
high-ridged back, patient and motionless, except that her ears move
now and then like birds--they alone seem alive. There is a deep blue
gleam in her eyes. Her head is stretched forward upon the ground. She
is alone. Through the open door the sunlight falls, and the swallows
fly in and out or hang twittering at the dark beams over her head.
Twice a day the cowman comes to the door and salutes her with deep,
slow voice, hearty and blithe: “Hoho! Cowslip; how’s Cowslip?” He pulls
away the foul hay from under her and puts in fresh, talking now in a
high falsetto voice as to a child; he raises her head that she may lap
the bucket of gruel, still talking unintelligible baby talk interlarded
with her pretty name. She holds up her head for a minute or two,
heartened by her moist lips and full stomach and that friend’s voice.
He stands in the doorway watching and silent now, as her head slowly
sinks down, and she sighs while her limbs find their position of least
pain. “She’s going to die,” he mutters in the deep voice as he goes.
A very different earth child, an artist, used to live in a cottage at
the foot of the opposite Downs. The village itself, whether you saw
it from its own street or from the higher land, was wrought into such
a rightness of form as few other artists than Time ever achieve; it
made a music to which the hands unconsciously beat time. But though
apparently complete in itself, it was as part of a huge and gentle
harmony of sky, down and forest that the village was most fascinating.
Like all beautiful things in their great moments the whole scene was
symbolic, not only in the larger sense by expressing in an outward
and visible way an inward grace, but in the sense that it gathered up
into itself the meanings which many other scenes only partly and in a
scattered way expressed.
Two roads of a serpentining form that was perpetually alluring from
afar climbed the Down from the village and, skirting the forest, ended
in the white mountains of the moon. At the tail of one of these roads
the artist lived. His work still further enlarged the harmony of sky
and down and village. For a short time I used to wonder why it was that
when I entered his studio the harmony was prolonged into something
even more huge and gentle than seemed to have been designed. How came
it that he could safely hang his pictures on the wall of the Down, as
practically they were hung?
It is not enough to say merely that it was because they did not, as
some landscapes seem to do, enter into competition with Nature. The
spirit that raised and sculptured the Downs, that entered the beech and
made a melody of its silent towering and branching, that kept the sky
above alive and beautiful with the massiveness of mountains and the
evanescence of foam, was also in this man’s fingers. He was a great
lover of these things, and in his love for them combined the ecstasy
of courtship with the understanding of marriage. But he loved them too
well to draw and paint them. He was not of those who tear themselves
from a mistress to write a sonnet on her face. No. He painted the
images which they implanted--such was their love of him and his of
them--in his brain. There many a metamorphosis as wonderful as Ovid’s
was made. The beech-trees mingled with the fantasies of the brain and
brought forth holes that are almost human forms, branches that are
thoughts and roots that are more than wood. Often, I think, he hardly
looked at Nature as he walked, except to take a careless pleasure in
the thymy winds, in the drama of light and shade on the woods and
hills, in the sound of leaves and birds and water. Within him these
things lived a new life until they reached forms as different from
their beginnings as we are from Palæolithic man. They attained to that
beauty of which, as I have said, Nature was so little jealous, by
this evolution. Some of his pictures of the leaf-dappled branch-work
of beeches always remind me of the efflorescence of frost on a
window-pane, and the comparison is not purely fantastic but has a real
significance.
And yet the landscapes of this metamorphosis are not, as might have
been expected, decorations that have lost all smell of earth and light
of sun and breath of breeze. Decorative they certainly are, and I know
few pictures which are less open to the accusation of being scraps from
Nature, which it is more impossible to think of extending beyond the
limits of the frame. But such is the personality of the artist that
all this refinement only made more powerful than ever the spirit of
the motionless things, the trees, the pools, the hills, the clouds.
Frankly, there is a deep fund of what must narrowly, and for the moment
only, be called inhumanity in the artist, or he could not thus have
reinforced or intensified the inhumanity of Nature. Consider, for
example, his “Song of the Nightingale.” Those woods are untrodden woods
as lonely as the sky. They are made for the nightingale’s song to rule
in solitude under the crescent moon. No lovers walk there. Mortal who
enters there must either a poet or a madman be.
Look again at his “Castle in Spain,” how it is perched up above that
might of forest, like a child that has climbed whence it can never
descend. And the little house at the edge of the high, dark wood--in
“The Farm under the Hill”--is as frail and timid as if it heard the
roaring of wild beasts, and the little white road winds into the
darkness as to death. So, too, with the children who make a pretence
of playing hoops at the edge of just such another wood, though mortal
has never come out of it since the beginning of the world. The ship in
the “Fall of the Leaf” is subdued to the spirit of autumn as is the
poet subdued to the immense scenes of “Alastor.” To introduce an elvish
figure, as he has done, in “Will o’ the Wisp” was an unnecessary aid
to the elvishness of the scene itself. Indeed, his human or fantastic
figures seem to be sometimes as much out of place as a Yankee at the
court of King Arthur, though there are two notable exceptions--“The
Sower” and “The Weed Burner”--both figures towards which idolatry might
be excusable, so nobly do they represent labour in the field. And even
in “The Weed Burner” the boy seems bemused by the motion and savour
of the smoke that curdles up through the autumn air. The picture of a
forest pool is magical, but it repudiates the fairy altogether. Nothing
would be more out of place here than the kind of sucking harlequin or
columbine which is commonly foisted upon us as a fairy; for here is
something more desirable, the very forces which begot the fairies upon
a different age from ours. Even when he draws a house it is, I think,
for the house’s sake, for the sake of whatever soul it has acquired,
which men cannot take away. Was there ever such an inn as “The
Wispers”? The landlord is dead, the casks are dry, a rat has littered
on the top stair of the cellar, and the landlord says--
“’Tis late and cold, stir up the fire:
Sit close, and draw the table nigher;
Be merry, and drink wine that’s old,
A hearty medicine ’gainst a cold:
Your beds of wanton down the best,
Where you shall tumble to your rest;
I could wish you wenches too,
But I am dead, and cannot do.
Call for the best the house may ring,
Sack, white, and claret let them bring,
And drink apace, while breath you have;
You’ll find but cold drink in the grave:
Plover, partridge, for your dinner,
And a capon for the sinner,
You shall find ready when you’re up,
And your horse shall have his sup:
Welcome, welcome, shall fly round,
And I shall smile, though underground.”
I like the inn, but the spider loves it, and his webs bar the door
against all but ghostly travellers. The barn, again, with its doorway
opening upon the summer night, has a life of its own. The two figures
at the door are utterly dwarfed by its ancientness, its space, and the
infinite silence without.
The picture in which there is most humanity is that of a high wall,
ruinous and overgrown. The deep gap in it is tragical. But even here I
am not sure that it is a wall that was raised by hand of mason, and as
to the inhabitants who left it desolate I feel more doubtful still, I
believe it was built in a dream, long ago lost in some victory gained
by the forest over men, and quite forgotten until this artist thought
it would be a happy lair for a faun. He has not shown us the faun--I
wish he had; he ought to know what it was like--but that gap is its
gateway out from the forest into the dew of the river lawns.
It induces an awful sense of the infinite variety of human character to
think of the love of earth first in this man and then in that cowman
old. I wonder tolerance is not deeper as well as wider than it is.