AN OLD HOUSE AND A BOOK--WILTSHIRE
The country is deserted in the rain, and I have the world to myself,
a world of frenzied rain among the elms of the lowland, an avenue of
elms up to a great house, hidden sheep tinkling and bleating, shepherds
muffled, huge slopes of grass and pearled clover above a coombe where a
grey heron sails and clanks alone, a farm desolate among elder and ash
at the highest part of the hills, and then miles of pathless pasture
and stubble descending past an old camp and a tumulus to the submerged
vale, where yellow elms tremble about a church tower, a cluster of
red cottages and bowed yellow dahlias and chrysanthemums, and a house
standing aloof. This house is some way from the Downs themselves, but
just at the foot of a lesser slope, a fair golden hill--golden with
cowslips in May--that rises on one side with a swift, short ascent and
then shoots forward, as if with the impetus, almost level until, after
crowning itself with beeches, it descends in a lazy curve to a field,
roughened by the foundations of a vanished house, at one corner of
which the chimneys join with another group of elms in the haze of rain.
Hanging from the wall in rags, too wet even to flap, are the remains
of an auctioneer’s announcement of a sale at the house behind.
Mahogany--oak chests--certain ounces of silver--two thousand
books--portraits and landscapes and pictures of horses and game--of all
these and how much else has the red house been disembowelled? It is
all shadowy within, behind the windows, like the eyes of a corpse, and
without sound, or form, or light, and it is for no one that the creeper
magnificently arrays itself in bediamonded crimson and gold that throbs
and wavers in the downpour. The martins are still there, and their play
up and down before the twenty windows is a senseless thing, like the
play of children outside a chamber of agony or grief. They seem to be
machines going on and on when their master and purpose are dead. But
then, too, there is gradually a consolation, a restfulness, a deceit,
a forgetting, in the continuity of their movement and their unchanged
voices. The two hundred autumns perpetuated in the tones of the bricks
are in vain. Strangers will come, no doubt--I hope they will not--and
be pleased, actually proud, at this mellowness, which ought to have
died with the last of the family that built the house.
The tall horse-chestnuts throw down their fruit out of the crisp,
rusty foliage and it rolls darkly burnished out of the pods white
as mushrooms in the rain, and where it falls it lies, and no child
gathers it, and the harvest waggons have crushed a thousand under
their wheels. The moss is beginning to encrust the gravel for the
soft feet of the ghosts, of the old men and the mothers and the maids
and the school-boys and tottering babes that have trodden it once.
Now that they are all gone, every one, they seem always to have been
ghosts, with loud, happy voices and wails of sorrow, with smiles, dark
looks, passionate splendours, bright hair, the bright brown hair as
of red deer in the men, the long, heavy coils of living odorous gold
in the women, but flitting to and fro, footless, unconfined, like the
swallows, returning and wandering up and down, as if they had left
something behind in their home.
When I first entered the house by an accident in passing that way,
a great-grandfather, a granddaughter and her son were alone in the
house, with two servants. The mother, early widowed, had come with her
child to minister to the last days of the ancient man. The house was
by then full of the reports of death. In almost every room there had
been a deathbed. For it had always been full of life; there was never
such a house for calling back its children; the sons of it brought
their wives, and the daughters their husbands, and often an excuse
was made for one pair to stay on indefinitely; and thus it came to be
full also of death. This granddaughter, however, had stayed, as she
wished to believe, against her will, because the old man was so fond
of his great-grandchild. She was a beautiful, strong woman, with the
dark, lustrous skin, gold hair, perfect clear features, proud step and
prouder voice, of all the family; she had shone before a thousand eyes;
and yet she stayed on and on, obsessed by the multitudinous memories of
the house alone under the Downs.
Her grandfather would talk of nothing but his father and his
grandfather, the lawyers, the captains, the scholars, whose bones were
under the churchyard elms, and his sons and their sons, all of them
also now dead. He had their childish ways by heart, the childish ways
of men who were white-haired at his birth as well as of those who went
golden-haired but yesterday into the grave; and all their names, their
stately, their out-of-the-way names, and those which recorded the
maiden names of their mothers; their nicknames, too, a whole book of
them; the legends about the most conspicuous, their memorable speeches
and acts, down to the names of their very dolls, and their legends
also, which, of course, recurred again and again in the family fantasy.
Every tree and field and gate and room was connected with some one of
the dear and beauteous or brave dead, with their birth, their deeds,
their ends.
The portraits of many of them, at least one to every generation, hung
on the walls, and it was curious to notice, what never any one of them
could see, except the granddaughter, the progress and the decline
from generation to generation. The earliest of all had sailed and
buccaneered with Henry Morgan, a great lover and destroyer of life. It
was from him that the expression and air of them all had descended.
Love and battle had carved his face. Out from behind his bold but easy
face peered a prophetic pitifulness, just as behind the loaded brown
clouds of drifting storm peers the innocence of blue, and upon it white
clouds that are thin and waved like an infant’s hair. Upon this model
his descendants’ faces had been carved, not by love and battle, but
by his might alone. Even the tender women flaunted it. It nestled, an
eagle, among the old man’s snows; it possessed the little child, and he
had nothing but the face of the buccaneer, like an eaglet in a cage.
A house is a perdurable garment, giving and taking of life. If it
only fit, straightway it begins to chronicle our days. It beholds our
sorrows and our joys; its untale-bearing walls know all our thoughts,
and if it be such a house as grows after the builders are gone, our
thoughts presently owe much to it; we have but to glance at a certain
shadow or a curve in the wall-paper pattern to recall them, softened
as by an echo, and that corner or that gable starts many a fancy that
reaches beyond the stars, many a fancy gay or enriched with regrets.
It is aware of birth, marriage and death; and who dares say that there
is not kneaded into the stones a record more pleasing than brass? With
what meanings the vesperal beam slips through a staircase window in
autumn! The moon has an expression proper to us alone, nested among
our limes, or heaving an ivory shoulder above the neighbour roofs.
As we enter a room in our house we are conscious of a fitness in its
configuration that defies mathematics. Rightly used, such a space will
inspire a stately ordering of our lives; it is, in another respect, the
amplest canvas for the art of life. It becomes so much a part of us
that we exclaim--
“This beautiful house in sand and stone:
What will it be in heaven?”
This beautiful house under the Downs was already more than “sand and
stone.” It was a giant, very gentle but very powerful, and adding to
its power the lore of the family it was irresistible. This young mother
had all the lore by heart and loved it, yet had fought against it. She
had been happy when her child had grown at first unlike her own family
and much like her husband’s; but no! his hair grew lighter, his nose
was as those of her brothers’ in bud, and now that he was five he was
not a child so much as an incarnation of the family, a sort of graven
image to which the old man bowed down, and with all the more fervour
because of that weakness in the boy which others thought imbecility.
The old man, too, had been not only a man but a family; now that the
child was there he waited, garrulously contented, for his release from
the post. So contented was he that when the granddaughter left her
child with him, and after delays and excuses and delays disappeared
into the blank, indifferent abyss of the multitude far away who knew
not the house and the family, he was not only contented but glad at
heart, for it was a rebel that was gone.
For several years the white beard and the poor child lived together
happily, turning over old memories, old books, old toys, taking the old
walks through the long garden, past, but not into, the beech wood that
a whim of the old man’s had closed against even himself, against all
save the birds and the squirrels; over the high downs and back into the
deep vale which had produced that delicate physical beauty and those
gracious lusty ways beyond which it seemed that men and women could
hardly go in earthly life. Very happy were those two, and very placid;
but within a week their tragic peace was perfected. The boy fell out
of one of the apple-trees and was killed. The old man could not but
stumble over that small grave into his own, and here is the end, the
unnoted, the common end, and the epitaph written by the auctioneer and
the rain.
Much as I love rain, heavy or light, freakish or continuous, I am glad
to be out of it for a little while and to open a book of ballads by a
solitary fire at “The White Horse,” and soon to close it after reading
again the lines--
“O then bespake her daughter dear,
She was baith jimp and sma’:
‘O row me in a pair o’ sheets,
And tow me owre the wa’!’
They row’d her in a pair o’ sheets,
And tow’d her owre the wa’;
But on the point o’ Gordon’s spear
She gat a deadly fa’.
O bonnie, bonnie was her mouth,
And cherry were her cheeks,
And clear, clear was her yellow hair,
Whereon the red blood dreeps.
Then wi’ his spear he turn’d her owre;
O gin her face was wan!
He said, ‘Ye are the first that e’er
I wish’d alive again.’
He cam’ and lookit again at her;
O gin her skin was white!
‘I might hae spared that bonnie face
To hae been some man’s delight.
‘Busk and boon, my merry men a’,
For ill dooms I do guess;
I cannot look on that bonnie face
As it lies on the grass.’
‘Wha looks to freits, my master dear,
Its freits will follow them;
Let it ne’er be said that Edom o’ Gordon
Was daunted by a dame....’”
I cannot help wondering whether the great work done in the last century
and a half towards the recovery of old ballads in their integrity will
have any effect beyond the entertainment of a few scientific men and
lovers of what is ancient, now that the first effects upon Wordsworth
and his contemporaries have died away. Can it possibly give a vigorous
impulse to a new school of poetry that shall treat the life of our time
and what in past times has most meaning for us as freshly as those
ballads did the life of their time? It is possible; and it is surely
impossible that such examples of simple, realistic narrative shall be
quite in vain. Certainly the more they are read the more they will be
respected, and not only because they often deal with heroic matters
heroically, but because their style is commonly so beautiful, their
pathos so natural, their observation of life so fresh, so fond of
particular detail--its very lists of names being at times real poetry.
Sometimes the style is equal and like to that of the most accomplished
poetry, as in the stanza--
“The Ynglyshe men let ther boys (bows) be,
And pulde owt brandes that were brighte;
It was a hevy syght to se
Bryght swordes on basnites lyght.”
Or in--
“God send the land deliverance
Frae every reaving, riding Scot!
We’ll sune hae neither cow nor ewe,
We’ll sune hae neither staig nor stot.”
It is equally good in passages where the poet simply expresses his
hearty delight in something which his own eyes have seen among his
neighbours, as in--
“He had horse and harness for them all,
Goodly steeds were all milke-white:
O the golden bands an about their necks,
And their weapons, they were all alike....”
And, by the way, do not touches like these often reveal the stamp of
individuals upon pieces which are loosely said to have been “composed
by the folk”? They quite do away with the notion that ballads were
composed by a number of people, after the fashion of a story in the
game of “Consequences.” In fact, it is one of the pleasures of reading
ballads to watch for those things which show us the heart of one man
who stands out by himself. Such a one was the man who said--
“I dreamt I pu’d the heather green
Wi’ my true love on Yarrow.”
And who was that unhappy one who served a king for seven years and only
once saw the king’s daughter, and that was through a gimlet-hole? Two
were putting on her gown, two putting on her shoes, five were combing
down her hair--
“Her neck and breast was like the snow--
Then from the bore I was forced to go.”
Was he the man who made it a common thing to speak in ballads of
“combing her yellow hair”?
What a poet, too, was he who put that touch into “Bewick and Grahame,”
where the father throws down his glove as a challenge to his son and
the son stoops to pick it up, and says--
“O father, put on your glove again,
The wind hath blown it from your hand.”
It is one of the most delicate things, and with it the stanza in the
same ballad where the father praises the son for his victory over a
friend, but the son, hating the battle which would not have been fought
if the fathers had not quarrelled in their wine, says--
“Father, could ye not drink your wine at home
And letten me and my brother be?”
And the mind of a poet is to be seen in the whole of some ballads and
in every detail, as for example in the three perfect verses--
“O lang, lang may their ladies sit
Wi’ their fans into their hand,
Or ere they see Sir Patrick Spens
Come sailing to the land.
O lang, lang may the ladies stand,
Wi’ their gold combs in their hair,
Wailing for their ain dear lords,
For they’ll see them na mair.
Half-owre, half-owre to Aberdour,
It’s fiftie fadom deep,
And there lies guid Sir Patrick Spens,
Wi’ the Scots lords at his feet.”
This ballad is one peculiar to our island, and no one can seriously
deny that some one of its authors was one of the greatest writers of
narrative poetry that ever lived.