_A RETROSPECT._
As I approach the end of my pleasant task, the contrast between the
‘Sweet Hampstead’ of Constable’s (and even of my own) time with the
present, makes itself felt with a sense of loss and change that is almost
pathetic, so many of its lovely accessories are now missing. It is like
contrasting the simplicity and grace of childhood with the conventional
man or woman it has subsequently developed.
Instead of rejoicing in its enlargement, and the importance of the
townlike outgrowths on its skirts, at the increase of its wealth, and the
growing numbers of its population, I like to think of it as it was in
those far-away days, when the walk to it through Gospel Oak Fields was
such an easy one to me, and the toil of the ascent of what is now the
East End Road repaid itself in refreshing draughts of the ‘impalpable
thin air’ one breathed upon its summit.
Then Hampstead was a street of village shops upon the slope of the
hill, with a broken sky-line of red-roofed, one-storied, brown-brick or
weather-boarded houses, with small windows, often glazed with glass that
darkened light. Some of the shops had still hanging shutters, and open
shop-boards, and many of them half-hatch doors, a few of which, with
a fine vein of what was called independence, were comfortably bolted
against all comers during meal-times. Not many years ago I met with the
same custom in practice at Totnes, on the river Dart.
A narrow footway paved with cobble-stones followed the irregular outlines
of the street, and made Hampstead, like other places of pilgrimage, a
place of penance also for the pilgrims who chose that narrow way. The
shops then were dusky little places, with not much choice of goods; and
what there were, were exhibited with little taste in the arrangement
of them. What did it signify? Everyone knew of what his neighbours’
stock consisted, and consequently where to get what he wanted. There
was no hurry in those days, and plenty of time for everything. Very few
people except visitors were to be seen about, and there was a delightful
freedom from the sounds of vehicles—a stillness in the uphill street that
suggested somnolence. The little windows seemed to blink at the sunshine
like the half-shut eyes of the sleek tabby I used to see there taking her
afternoon nap amongst the soft goods in one of them.
There was another peculiarity in many of the Hampstead shops: the earth
had so accumulated outside the houses that the difference in the level
of the street with the floor had to be taken into consideration when
entering them, otherwise the unaccustomed customer was very likely
to make a more precipitate than graceful entry. This state of things
continued even as late as 1895, at the old post-office and elsewhere.
Such things as these only proved the antiquity of the delightful suburb,
and its unlikeness to other places.
In the old sunny days South End lay, a picturesque little hamlet of
red-roofed houses, embosomed in green trees—an integral part of the
parish of St. John, but unenfolded in it—a sort of Hagar’s child, outside
Hampstead.
I am told that part of South End still remains in South End Road, close
to Hampstead Heath Station, and that South End Green—with a few houses
that have not been converted to shops, with their palings and gardens,
in a very dilapidated condition—also exists. The Green has on it a
fountain, erected in 1880 by a lady resident (Miss Crump) to the memory
of a relative. It stands on a piece of greensward, surrounded by iron
railings, nearly opposite her house, and no doubt answers a very useful
purpose, for South End Green is now the terminus of the tramcars, which
in summer bring many thirsty children and travellers to Hampstead.
In the days I am recalling, a road ran out of South End over the sloping
fields, sweet with white clover flowers, to Parliament Hill, and the
mounds like tumuli on the sunk road in the field at the east end of the
Heath. I used to think these mounds were barrows, but am told that they
only cover the dead hopes of a rapacious Lord of the Manor, who between
forty and fifty years ago intended building houses on the field, but,
having only a life interest in the estate, was prevented doing so. The
road and ground delved for foundations, and thrown up in great heaps
here and there, was left neglected and desolate. But Nature soon covered
the scarred earth with a green mantle, and turned its unsightliness
to beauty. Only a few years ago a subscription was raised amongst the
inhabitants of Hampstead, and the fields, with Parliament Hill, and the
storied Pancras meadows, were purchased and added to the Heath.
But in my time there were what Shelley, who knew the whole of Hampstead
by heart, and remembered it with yearning amidst the lovely landscapes
of Italy, called the beautiful meadows near Shepherd’s Fields, and tells
his friend Hunt that he often longs for them, and the Hendon Road, and
Hampstead lanes, and the pretty entrance to the village from Kentish Town.
How well I remember the Shepherd’s Fields,[286] and the old conduit in
them, round the margins of which the yellow stars of the lesser celandine
first opened, and Shakespeare’s ladies’ smocks were soonest seen.
Then there were other pretty meadows near Chalk Farm, the peacefulness of
which had often been desecrated by duellists, and of which some tragic
stories might be told, but not here.
[Illustration: Old Chalk Farm.]
In those days my walk from the White Stone Pond often led to the Nine
Elms and the old bench beneath them. The trees grew in a sort of
irregular half-circle around it, tall and straight, of no great girth,
being planted too close together; they drew one another, as gardeners
say, but the boughs and upper branches afforded plenty of shade. The
floor was paved with a sort of natural parquetry, made by the interlacing
of the roots, which was smooth and polished in places by innumerable feet
of loiterers. This was said to have been the favourite resting-place of
Pope and Murray.
It did not need much imagination to see them in the serene moonshine of
a summer’s night, approaching from the Upper Flask towards the elms.
They walked slowly across the turf, on which the moonlight played freaks
of exaggeration with the crooked figure of the poet, and caricatured
the wide-skirted coat, and three-cornered hat, and the little sword he
wore. But Pope is familiar with the ugly shadow, knows himself superior
to it, and is indifferent about it. Moreover, at noonday, into whatever
assemblage of his fellow-men he takes that defective frame of his, the
people crowd around him; or else, as when Sir Joshua Reynolds saw him
at a book auction, they make a lane for him to walk through, he bowing
prince-like right and left as he passes. I saw the same thing happen to
plain little Charlotte Brontë at the Hanover Square Rooms, a compliment
at least on a par with the homage shown to the physical beauty of the two
lovely Irish girls, the Miss Gunnings.
But to return to the Nine Elms. Here, with the stillness and solitary
beauty of Nature, the wits became philosophers, and gave their spirits
air and space in higher realms, and exercised themselves in profounder
thoughts than any of the salons, clubs, courts of law, or the great town
itself, suggested to them. At such times the gravest and profoundest
cogitations of the human soul by some celestial attraction rise to the
surface, and compel us to oracular confession. At such seasons one can
imagine the nature of the little satirist enlarged, and softened, the
spirit of the ‘Universal Prayer’ filling his heart, and the natural
influence of their surroundings imparting a gravity, mingled with poetic
exaltation, to their converse, that must have made it as solemn, and
yet more sweet than Johnson’s talk with Boswell in Dr. Taylor’s garden
on that serene autumn night, when, emboldened by his friend’s ‘placid
and benignant frame of mind,’ his hereafter biographer ‘directed the
discourse to a future state.’
Seated here, how often must Pope have seen the shades of friends and
kindred spirits flit across the old familiar paths,
‘Under the silent blue,
With all its diamonds trembling through and through,[287]
Steele, Gay, Arbuthnot, and the rest, who, as we know, had slipped out of
the daylight of the sweet landscape, years and years before, but now
‘Revisiting the glimpses of the moon,’
with nothing earthly about them but the still clinging likeness of their
old humanity. No one will ever more dream dreams or see visions under the
Nine Elms, that made such a charming landmark from the East Heath, and of
which it was locally said that when they fell Windsor Castle would fall
also. This prophecy was, of course, attributed to Mother Shipton, whose
power to prophesy had ceased long before the Nine Elms were planted, and
which, I cannot help thinking, had its origin in a transverse reading of
two lines of Edward Coxe’s poem, ‘To Commemorate the Preservation of the
Nine Elms on Hampstead Heath’:
‘While yonder castle towers sublime
These elms shall brave the threats of time.’
In the years I am writing of, the Heath possessed more natural beauty
than at present; then the grove of pine-trees opposite the old citizen’s
house who had reared and planted them looked much as it looked when
Constable painted it, or as it appeared in Blake’s illustration of Dante,
which gave these trees (amongst the artist’s friends) the name of ‘the
Dante Wood.’ Twenty years farther on in my remembrance of them, time and
winter storms had thinned their boughs, and bared them of their foliage
(if one can apply this phrase to their needle-shaped leaves); moreover,
the sand and gravel diggers had excavated under and between their roots,
leaving them bare, and with scarcely any hold upon the earth, an easy
prey to the first hurricane.
[Illustration: _Judge’s Walk._]
But the contrast of the tall, orange-brown trunks with the dusky green,
jagged and stretched-out branches made them picturesque objects; and
seeing how well they once flourished on that windy eminence, and the
proofs some of the best artists have given of the eminently pictorial
effect of these trees, let us hope that the conservators of the Heath may
be induced to plant others.
In those far-off days the Judge’s Walk, though greatly despoiled of
its primal beauty, retained sufficient of it to show what a handsome
double grove this triple row of elms, magnificent in height and form in
the amplitude of spreading boughs and summer foliage, must have made. A
friend of mine possessed a very fine lithographed drawing of the walk
when at the apparent acme of its perfection, the recollection of which
makes one grieve at its present almost hopeless decadence, the trees
pollarded and lopped out of all resemblance of their old forms, and more
than three parts of their number dead.
I hear of the planting of flowering shrubs and trees, and of artificial
cascades, and as I do so my heart goes back to the wild picturesqueness
of the uncared-for Heath, with its groups of storm-bent old hawthorns,
its thickets of blackthorn, and twisted crab-apple-trees, pink all over
with their rosy blossoms in May.
It was under the Hawthorn bushes on the Heath that Gerard found lilies of
the valley growing. I remember its coverts of swarthy furze, twice yearly
glorified with golden blossoms, and how on one of these occasions, when
every hillock was ablaze with its brightness, Frederika Bremer, whom her
friend Mary Howitt had brought with her to the Heath, burst into tears at
the first sight of the floral splendour. Her great countryman, Linnæus,
is said to have fallen on his knees and thanked God for the sight.
It was on a gorse bush on North End Hill that I first found dodder, ‘like
a red harp string winding about it.’ Black alders grew on the margin of
the Leg of Mutton Pond, and there used to be wide spaces covered with
the creeping willow, and great beds of close-growing whortleberry, which
turns red in autumn, and dyed portions of the Upper Heath at that season
with its crimson leaves; and upon North End Hill, breast-high coverts of
branching ling, with ferns of other species, besides the common _Lastrea
felix mas_, and _Athyrium felix femina_.
The vari-coloured clay and sand and gravel that overlies the Heath were
then the cause of very picturesque effects. The deep orange and yellows
of the gravel-pits were contrasted by the glistering hollows scooped
in the hillside beyond Jack Straw’s Castle, where brown gipsies dug the
‘lily-white sand’ with which they supplied London and other housewives
for domestic purposes; while in various places there cropped up little
hillocks, patched with blue and yellow and ferruginous brown clay,
occasionally verging to red, dashing in bits of colour in the landscape
with charming pictorial effect. The very irregularity of the surface
made one of its chiefest charms, and the wide beds of treacherous
sphagnum bordering the old watercourse that drained into the deep-set,
sullen-looking Leg of Mutton Pond were full of interest for the botanist.
There grew, with their roots in the stream, clusters of turquoise-blue
forget-me-nots, and the pretty yellow pimpernel, the ‘creeping Jenny’ of
the London area and attic, with purple brook-lime, and pink ragged-robin
with torn petals, between groups of straight brown rushes, and beds of
flags, and water-mint. The silken flocks of the greater cotton-grass that
lie before me grew there once, as did the little red-leaved _Rosa solis_
or sundew, with its crook-shaped flower-scape, and atomic insect remains
still held in its hinged leaves; and this brown bit of dried vegetation,
a specimen of one of the loveliest of wild flowers, ‘buck-bean,’ with
its curiously-feathered corolla, and these unfaded rosy flowers of
bog-pimpernel, looking so large by comparison with the slender stems
and tiny leaves set in couplets on them—all lived upon those pale-green
sphagnum beds.
It was a delight to trace the descendants of the plants old Gerard found
upon the Heath, still lingering in their ancient habitats, all but the
primrose, the odorous violet, and the lily of the valley, which, before
the fashion of the Wells had waned, retired from the Heath to Turner’s
Wood, and was wholly lost sight of by outsiders when Lord Mansfield
enclosed it in Caen Wood.
In those far-away times gipsies, with glittering eyes, bangled arms,
and bright orange or red kerchiefs snooding their blue-black hair, were
not the only picturesque figures to be met with on the Heath. It was no
unusual thing to meet with speculative lace-makers from Buckinghamshire,
in their short red cloaks, frilled with black lace, and wonderful black
bonnets, with cushion and pendent vari-coloured bobbins swinging from it,
selling their thread lace to chance customers, and taking orders from
others who had learned the value of their wares.
But, after all, their appearance was an accident, while the gipsies’ was
of common occurrence. You passed a furze clump or a sheltered hollow,
and saw no one, but an instant later a nut-brown palmist stood in your
path, with speculation in her eyes, and promises of love and fortune on
her lips. We have changed all this. The brown hand goes uncrossed with
silver, and faith in palmistry is reserved for drawing-room professors of
it.