1879
I
Toward the last of April, in Monmouthshire, the primroses were as big as
your fist. I say "in Monmouthshire," because I believe that a certain
grassy mountain which I gave myself the pleasure of climbing, and to
which I took my way across the charming country, through lanes where the
hedges were perched upon blooming banks, lay within the borders of this
ancient province. It was the festive Eastertide, and a pretext for
leaving London had not been wanting. Of course it rained,--it rained a
good deal,--for man and the weather are usually at cross-purposes. But
there were intervals of light and warmth, and in England a couple of
hours of fine weather, islanded in moisture, assert their independence
and leave an uncompromised memory. These bright episodes were even of
longer duration; that whole morning, for instance, on which, with a
companion, I scrambled up the little Skirrid. One had a feeling that one
was very far from London; as, in fact, one was, after six or seven hours
in a smooth, swift English train. In England this is a great remoteness;
it seemed to justify the half-reluctant confession which I heard
constantly made, that the country was extremely "wild." There is
wildness and wildness, I thought; and though I had not been a great
explorer, I compared this rough district with several neighbourhoods in
another part of the world that passed for tame. I went even so far as to
wish that some of its ruder features might be transplanted to that
relatively unregulated landscape and commingled with its suburban
savagery. I went over the elements of this English prospect and of human
life in the midst of it, and wondered whether, if I were to enumerate
them and leave them to be added up by the dwellers beyond the sea, the
total would be set down as a wilderness. We were close to the Welsh
border, and a dozen little mountains in the distance were peeping over
each other's shoulders. But nature was open to the charge of no worse
disorder than this. The Skirrid (I like to repeat the name) wore, it is
true, at a distance, the aspect of a magnified extinguisher; but when,
after a bright, breezy walk through lane and meadow, we had scrambled
over the last of the thickly-flowering hedges which lay around its
shoulders like loosened strings of coral and began to ascend the grassy
cone (very much in the attitude of Nebuchadnezzar), it proved as
smooth-faced as a garden-mound. Hard by, on the flanks of other hills,
were troops of browsing sheep, and the only thing in which there was any
harshness of suggestion was the strong, damp wind. But even this had a
good deal of softness in it, and ministered to my sense of the agreeable
in scenery by the way it blew about the pearly morning mists that were
airing themselves upon neighbouring ridges, and kept shaking the
vaporous veil that fluttered down in the valley over the picturesque
little town of Abergavenny. A breezy, grassy English hill-top, looking
down on a country full of suggestive names and ancient memories, belongs
(especially if you are exhilarated by a beautiful walk, and you have a
flask in your pocket) decidedly to the category of smooth scenery. And
so with all the rest of it.
On Sunday I stayed away from church, because I learned that the sacred
edifice had a mediæval chill, and that if I should sit there for a
couple of hours I might inherit a lumbago three hundred years old. The
fact was formidable, but the idea was, in a certain way, attractive;
there was nothing crude in a rheumatism which descended from the Norman
times. Practical considerations, however, determined me not to expose
myself to this venerable pain; so in the still hours, when the roads and
lanes were empty, I simply walked to the churchyard and sat upon one of
the sun-warmed grave-stones. I say the roads were empty, but they were
peopled with the big primroses I just now spoke of--primroses of the
size of ripe apples, and yet, in spite of their rank growth, of as pale
and tender a yellow as if their gold had been diluted with silver. It
was indeed a mixture of gold and silver, for there was a wealth of the
white wood-anemone as well, and these delicate flowers, each of so
perfect a coinage, were tumbled along the green wayside as if a prince
had been scattering largesse. The outside of an old English
country-church in service-time is a very pleasant place; and this is as
near as I often care to approach to the celebration of the Anglican
mysteries. A just sufficient sense of their august character may be
gathered from that vague sound of village-music which makes its way out
into the stillness, and from the perusal of those portions of the
Prayer-Book which are inscribed upon mouldering slabs and dislocated
headstones. The church I speak of was a beautiful specimen of its
kind--intensely aged, variously patched, but still solid and useful, and
with no touch of restoration. It was very big and massive, and, hidden
away in the fields, it had a kind of lonely grandeur; there was nothing
in particular near it but its out-of-the-world little parsonage. It was
only one of ten thousand; I had seen a hundred such before. But I
watched the watery sunshine upon the rugosities of its ancient masonry;
I stood a while in the shade of two or three spreading yews which
stretched their black arms over graves decorated for Easter, according
to the custom of that country, with garlands of primrose and dog-violet;
and I reflected that in a wild region it was a blessing to have so quiet
a place of refuge as that.
Later, I chanced upon a couple of other asylums which were more spacious
and no less tranquil Both of them were old country-houses, and each in
its way was charming. One was a half-modernised feudal dwelling, lying
in a wooded hollow--a large concavity filled with a delightful old park.
The house had a long gray façade and half a dozen towers, and the usual
supply of ivy and of clustered chimneys relieved against a background of
rook-haunted elms. But the windows were all closed and the avenue was
untrodden; the house was the property of a lady who could not afford to
live in it in becoming state, and who had let it, famished, to a rich
young man "for the shooting." The rich young man occupied it but for
three weeks in the year, and for the rest of the time left it a prey to
the hungry gaze of the passing stranger, the would-be redresser of
æsthetic wrongs. It seemed a great æsthetic wrong that so charming a
place should not be a conscious, sentient home. But in England all this
is very common. It takes a great many plain people to keep a gentleman
going; it takes a great deal of wasted sweetness to make up a property.
It is true that, in the other case I speak of, the sweetness, which here
was even greater, was less sensibly squandered. If there was no one else
in the house, at least there were ghosts. It had a dark red front and
grim-looking gables; it was perched upon a sort of terrace, quite high
in the air, which was reached by steep, crooked, mossy steps. Beneath
these steps was an ancient bit of garden, and from the hither side of
the garden stretched a great expanse of turf. Out of the midst of the
turf sprang a magnificent avenue of Scotch firs--a perfect imitation of
the Italian stone-pine. It looked like the Villa Borghese transplanted
to the Welsh hills. The huge, smooth stems, in their double row, were
crowned with dark parasols. In the Scotch fir or the Italian pine there
is always an element of grotesqueness; the open umbrella in a rainy
country is not a poetical analogy, and the case is not better if you
compare the tree to a colossal mushroom. But, without analogies, there
was something very striking in the effect of this enormous, rigid vista,
and in the grassy carpet of the avenue, with the dusky, lonely,
high-featured house looking down upon it. There was something solemn and
tragical; the place was made to the hand of a romancer, and he might
have found his characters within; the leaden lattices were open.