WE were riding up from Lynmouth, on a pair of ragged ponies, Claude
Mellot and I, along the gorge of Watersmeet. And as we went we talked of
many things; and especially of some sporting book which we had found at
the Lyndale Hotel the night before, and which we had not by any means
admired. {225b} I do not object to sporting books in general, least of
all to one on Exmoor. No place in England is more worthy of one. There
is no place whose beauties and peculiarities are more likely to be thrown
into strong relief by being looked at with a sportsman’s eye. It is so
with all forests and moorlands. The spirit of Robin Hood and Johnny of
Breadislee is theirs. They are remnants of the home of man’s fierce
youth, still consecrated to the genius of animal excitement and savage
freedom; after all, not the most ignoble qualities of human nature.
Besides, there is no better method of giving a living picture of a whole
country than by taking some one feature of it as a guide, and bringing
all other observations into harmony with that original key. Even in
merely scientific books this is very possible. Look, for instance, at
Hugh Miller’s ‘Old Red Sandstone,’ ‘The Voyage of the Beagle,’ and
Professor Forbes’s work (we had almost said epic poem) on ‘Glaciers.’
Even an agricultural writer, if he have a real insight in him—if he have
anything of that secret of the _più nel’ uno_, ‘the power of discovering
the infinite in the finite;’ of seeing, like a poet, trivial phenomena in
their true relation to the whole of the great universe into which they
are so cunningly fitted; if he has learned to look at all things and men,
down to the meanest, as living lessons written with the finger of God;
if, in short, he has any true dramatic power: then he may impart to that
apparently muddiest of sciences a poetic or a humorous tone, and give the
lie to Mephistopheles when he dissuades Faust from farming as an
occupation too mean and filthy for a man of genius. The poetry of
agriculture remains as yet, no doubt, unwritten, and the comedy of it
also; though its farce-tragedy has been too often extensively enacted in
practice—unconsciously to the players. As for the old ‘pastoral’ school,
it only flourished before agriculture really existed—that is, before
sound science, hard labour, and economy were necessary—and has been for
the last two hundred years simply a dream. Nevertheless, as signs of
what may be done even now by a genial man with so stubborn a subject as
‘turnips, barley, clover, wheat,’ it is worth while to look at old Arthur
Young’s books, both travels and treatises; and also at certain very
spirited ‘Chronicles of a Clay Farm,’ by Talpa, which teem with humour
and wisdom.
In sporting literature—a tenth muse, exclusively indigenous to
England—the same observation holds good tenfold. Some of our most
perfect topographical sketches have been the work of sportsmen. Old
Izaak Walton, and his friend Cotton, of Dovedale, whose names will last
as long as their rivers, have been followed by a long train of worthy
pupils. White’s ‘History of Selborne;’ Sir Humphry Davy’s ‘Salmonia;’
‘The Wild Sports of the West;’ Mr. St. John’s charming little works on
Highland Shooting; and, above all, Christopher North’s
‘Recreations’—delightful book! to be read and re-read, the tenth time
even as the first—an inexhaustible fairy well, springing out of the
granite rock of the sturdy Scotch heart, through the tender green turf of
a genial boyish old age. Sporting books, when they are not filled—as
they need never be—with low slang, and ugly sketches of ugly
characters—who hang on to the skirts of the sporting world, as they would
to the skirts of any other world, in default of the sporting one—form an
integral and significant, and, it may be, an honourable and useful part,
of the English literature of this day; and, therefore, all shallowness,
vulgarity, stupidity, or bookmaking in that class, must be as severely
attacked as in novels and poems. We English owe too much to our field
sports to allow people to talk nonsense about them.
Claude smiled at some such words of mine that day. ‘You talk often of
the poetry of sport. I can see nothing in it but animal excitement, and
a certain quantity, I suppose, of that animal cunning which the Red
Indian possesses in common with the wolf and the cat, and any other beast
of prey. As a fact, the majority of sportsmen are of the most unpoetical
type of manhood.’
‘More unpoetical than the average man of business, or man of law, Claude?
Or even than the average preacher? I believe, on the contrary, that for
most of them it is sport which at once keeps alive and satisfies what you
would call their æsthetic faculties, and so—smile if you will—helps to
make them purer, simpler, more genial men.’
‘Little enough of æsthetic appears either in their conversation or their
writing.’
‘Esau is a dumb soul, especially here in England; but he has as deep a
heart in him as Jacob, nevertheless, and as tender. Do you fancy that
the gentleman over whose book we were grumbling last night, attached no
more to his own simple words than you do? His account of a stag’s run
looks bald enough to you: but to him (unless Diana struck him blind for
intruding on her privacy) what a whole poem of memories there must be in
those few words,—“Turned down * * Water for a mile, and crossed the
forest to Watersmeet, where he was run into after a gallant race.”’
‘A whole poem?’
‘Why not? How can there be less, if he had eyes to see?’
‘Does he fancy that it is an account of a run to tell us that “Found at *
* * * cover, held away at a slapping pace for * * * * Barn, then turned
down the * * * Water for a mile, and crossed the Forest; made for * * *
Hill, but being headed, went by ** ** woods to D * * * where he was run
into after a gallant race of * * * * hours and * * * *miles”? It is
nearly as dull as a history book!’
‘Nay, I never rode with those staghounds: and yet I can fill up his
outline for him, wherever the stag was roused. Do you think that he
never marked how the panting cavalcade rose and fell on the huge
mile-long waves of that vast heather sea; how one long brown hill after
another sunk down, greyer and greyer, behind them, and one long grey hill
after another swelled up browner and browner before them; and how the
sandstone rattled and flew beneath their feet, as the great horses, like
Homer’s of old, “devoured up the plain;” and how they struggled down the
hill-side, through bushes and rocks, and broad slipping rattling sheets
of screes, and saw beneath them stag and pack galloping down the shallow
glittering river-bed, throwing up the shingle, striking out the water in
long glistening sheets; and how they too swept after them, down the flat
valley, rounding crag and headland, which opened one after another in
interminable vista, along the narrow strip of sand and rushes, speckled
with stunted, moss-bearded, heather-bedded hawthorns, between the great
grim lifeless mountain walls? Did he feel no pleasant creeping of the
flesh that day at the sound of his own horse-hoofs, as they swept through
the long ling with a sound as soft as the brushing of a woman’s tresses,
and then rang down on the spongy, black, reverberating soil, chipping the
honey-laden fragrant heather blossoms, and tossing them out in a rosy
shower? Or, if that were really too slight a thing for the observation
of an average sportsman, surely he must recollect the dying away of the
hounds’ voices, as the woodland passes engulfed them, whether it were
Brendon or at Badger-worthy, or any other place; how they brushed through
the narrow forest paths, where the ashes were already golden, while the
oaks still kept their sombre green, and the red leaves and berries of the
mountain-ash showed bright beneath the dark forest aisles; and how all of
a sudden the wild outcry before them seemed to stop and concentrate,
thrown back, louder and louder as they rode, off the same echoing crag;
till at a sudden turn of the road there stood the stag beneath them in
the stream, his back against the black rock with its green cushions of
dripping velvet, knee-deep in the clear amber water, the hounds around
him, some struggling and swimming in the deep pool, some rolling and
tossing and splashing in a mad, half-terrified ring, as he reared into
the air on his great haunches, with the sparkling beads running off his
red mane, and dropping on his knees, plunged his antlers down among them,
with blows which would have each brought certain death with it if the
yielding water had not broken the shock. Do you think that he does not
remember the death? The huge carcass dragged out of the stream, followed
by dripping, panting dogs; the blowing of the mort, and the last wild
halloo, when the horn-note and the voices rang through the autumn woods,
and rolled up the smooth flat mountain sides; and Brendon answered
Countisbury, and Countisbury sent it on to Lynmouth hills, till it swept
out of the gorge and died away upon the Severn sea? And then, does he
not remember the pause, and the revulsion, and the feeling of sadness and
littleness, almost of shame, as he looked up for the first time—one can
pardon his not having done so before—and saw where he was, and the beauty
of the hill-sides, with the lazy autumn clouds crawling about their tops,
and the great sheets of screes, glaciers of stone covering acres and
acres of the smooth hill-side, eating far into the woods below, bowing
down the oak scrubs with their weight, and the circular sweeps of down,
flecked with innumerable dark spots of gorse, each of them guarded where
they open into the river chasm by two fortresses of “giant-snouted
crags,”—delicate pink and grey sandstone, from which blocks and crumbling
boulders have been toppling slowly down for ages, beneath the frost and
the whirlwind, and now lie in long downward streams upon the slope, as if
the mountain had been weeping tears of stone? And then, as the last
notes of the mort had died away, did not there come over him an awe at
the silence of the woods, not broken, but deepened, by the unvarying
monotone of the roaring stream beneath, which flashed and glittered,
half-hidden in the dark chasm, in clear brown pools reflecting every leaf
and twig, in boiling pits and walls of foam, ever changing, and yet for
ever the fleeting on past the poor dead reeking stag and the silent
hounds lying about on the moss-embroidered stones, their lolling tongues
showing like bright crimson sparkles in the deep rich Venetian air of the
green sombre shades; while the startled water-ousel, with his white
breast, flitted a few yards and stopped to stare from a rock’s point at
the strange intruders; and a single stock-dove, out of the bosom of the
wood, began calling sadly and softly, with a dreamy peaceful moan? Did
he not see and hear all this, for surely it was there to see and hear?’
‘Not he. The eye only sees that which it brings within the power of
seeing; and all I shall say of him is, that a certain apparition in white
leathers was at one period of its appearance dimly conscious of
equestrian motion towards a certain brown two-horned phenomenon, and
other spotted phenomena, at which he had been taught by habit to make the
articulate noises “stag” and “hounds,” among certain grey, and green, and
brown phenomena, at which the same habit and the example of his fellows
had taught him to say, “Rock, and wood, and mountain,” and perhaps the
further noises of “Lovely, splendid, majestic.”’
‘As usual, sir! You dwellers in Babylon fancy that you have the monopoly
of all the intellect, and all the taste, because you earn your livings by
talking about pretty things, and painting pretty things: little do you
suspect, shut up together in your little literary worlds, and your
artistic worlds, how many thousands of us outside barbarians there are
who see as clearly, and enjoy as deeply as you do: but hold their tongues
about their own feelings, simply because they have never been driven by
emptiness of pocket to look round for methods of expressing them. And,
after all—how much of nature can you express? You confest yourself
yesterday baffled by all the magnificence around you.’
‘Yes! to paint it worthily one would require to be a Turner, a Copley
Fielding, and a Creswick, all in one.’
‘And did you ever remark how such scenes as this gorge of the
“Watersmeet” stir up a feeling of shame, almost of peevishness, before
the sense of a mysterious meaning which we ought to understand and
cannot?’
He smiled.
‘Our torments do by length of time become our elements; and painful as
that sensation is to the earnest artist, he will feel it, I fancy, at
last sublime itself into an habitually gentle, reverent, almost
melancholy tone of mind, as of a man bearing the burden of an infinite
and wonderful message which his own frivolity and laziness hinder him
from speaking out.’
‘Then it should beget in him, too, something of merciful indulgence
towards the seeming stupidity of those who see, after all, only a very
little shallower than he does into the unfathomable depths of nature.’
‘Well, sporting books and sportsmen seem to me, by their very object, not
to be worth troubling our heads about. Out of nothing, comes nothing.
See, my hands are as soft as any lady’s in Belgravia. I could not, to
save my life, lift a hundredweight a foot off the ground; while you have
been a wild man of the woods, a leaper of ditches, a rower of races, and
a wanton destroyer of all animal life: and yet—’
‘You would hint politely that you are as open as me to all noble, and
chivalrous, and truly manly emotions?’
‘What think you?’
‘That you are far worthier in such matters than I, friend. But do not
forget that it may be your intellect, and your profession—in one word,
Heaven’s mercy—which have steered you clear of shoals upon which you will
find the mass of our class founder. Woe to the class or the nation which
has no manly physical training! Look at the manners, the morals, the
faces of the young men of the shopkeeping classes, if you wish to see the
effects of utterly neglecting the physical development of man; {235} of
fancying that all the muscular activity he requires under the sun is to
be able to stand behind a counter, or sit on a desk-stool without
tumbling off. Be sure, be sure, that ever since the days of the Persians
of old, effeminacy, if not twin-sister of cowardice and dishonesty, has
always gone hand in hand with them. To that utter neglect of any
exercises which call out fortitude, patience, self-dependence, and
daring, I attribute a great deal of the low sensuality, the conceited
vulgarity, the want of a high sense of honour, which is increasing just
now among the middle classes; and from which the navigator, the engineer,
the miner, and the sailor are comparatively free.’
‘And perhaps, too, that similar want of a high sense of honour, which
seems, from the religious periodicals, to pervade a large proportion of a
certain more venerable profession?’
‘Seriously, Claude, I believe you are not far wrong. But we are getting
on delicate ground there: however I have always found, that of whatever
profession he may be—to travestie Shakspeare’s words,—
“The man that hath not sporting in his soul,
Is fit for treason’s direst stratagems”—
and so forth.’
‘Civil to me!’
‘Oh, you have a sporting soul in you, like hundreds of other Englishmen
who never handled rod or gun; or you would not be steering for Exmoor
to-day. If a lad be a genius, you may trust him to find some original
means for developing his manly energies, whether in art, agriculture,
science, or travels, discovery, and commerce. But if he be not, as there
are a thousand chances to one he will not be, then whatever you teach
him, let the two first things be, as they were with the old Persians, “To
speak the truth, and to draw the bow.”’
By this time we had reached the stream, just clearing from the last
night’s showers. A long transparent amber shallow, dimpled with fleeting
silver rings by rising trout; a low cascade of green-veined snow; a deep
dark pool of swirling orange-brown, walled in with heathery rocks, and
paved with sandstone slabs and boulders, distorted by the changing
refractions of the eddies,—sight delicious to the angler.
I commenced my sport at once, while Claude wandered up the glen to sketch
a knoll of crags, on which a half-wild moorland pony, the only living
thing in sight, stood staring and snuffing at the intruder, his long mane
and tail streaming out wildly against the sky.
I had fished on for some hour or two; Claude had long since disappeared
among the hills; I fancied myself miles from any human being, when a
voice at my elbow startled me:—
‘A bleak place for fishing this, sir!’
I turned; it was an old grey-whiskered labouring man, with pick and spade
on shoulder, who had crept on me unawares beneath the wall of the
neighbouring deer-cover. Keen honest eyes gleamed out from his brown,
scarred, weather-beaten face; and as he settled himself against a rock
with the deliberate intention of a chat, I commenced by asking after the
landlord of those parts, well known and honoured both by sportsman and by
farmer.
‘He was gone to Malta—a warmer place that than Exmoor.’
‘What! have you been in Malta?’
Yes, he had been in Malta, and in stranger places yet. He had been a
sailor: he had seen the landing in Egypt, and heard the French cannon
thundering vainly from the sand-hills on the English boats. He had
himself helped to lift Abercrombie up the ship’s side to the death-bed of
the brave. He had seen Caraccioli hanging at his own yard-arm, and heard
(so he said, I know not how correctly) Lady Hamilton order out the barge
herself, and row round the frigate of the murdered man, to glut her eyes
with her revenge. He had seen, too, the ghastly corpse floating upright,
when Nelson and the enchantress met their victim, returned from the
sea-depths to stare at them, as Banquo’s ghost upon Macbeth. But she was
‘a mortal fine woman, was Lady Hamilton, though she was a queer one, and
cruel kind to the sailors; and many a man she saved from flogging; and
one from hanging, too; that was a marine that got a-stealing; for Nelson,
though he was kind enough, yet it was a word and a blow with him; and
quite right he, sir; for there be such rascals on board ship, that if you
ain’t as sharp with them as with wild beastesses, no man’s life, nor the
ship’s neither, would be worth a day’s purchase.’
So he, with his simple straightforward notions of right and wrong worth,
much maudlin unmerciful indulgence which we hear in these days: and yet
not going to the bottom of the matter either, as we shall see in the next
war. But, rambling on, he told me how he had come home, war-worn and
crippled, to marry a wife and get tall sons, and lay his bones in his
native village; till which time (for death to the aged poor man is a
Sabbath, of which he talks freely, calmly, even joyously) ‘he just got
his bread, by the squire’s kindness, patching and mending at the stone
deer-fences.’
I gave him something to buy tobacco, and watched him as he crawled away,
with a sort of stunned surprise. And he had actually seen Nelson sit by
Lady Hamilton! It was so strange, to have that gay Italian bay, with all
its memories,—the orgies of Baiæ, and the unburied wrecks of ancient
towns, with the smoking crater far above; and the world-famous
Nile-mouths and those great old wars, big with the destinies of the
world; and those great old heroes, with their awful deeds for good and
evil, all brought so suddenly and livingly before me, up there in the
desolate moorland, where the deer, and birds, and heath, and rushes were
even as they had been from the beginning. Like Wordsworth with his
Leech-Gatherer (a poem which I, in spite of laughter, must rank among his
very highest),—
‘While he was talking thus, the lonely place,
The old man’s shape, and speech—all troubled me;
In my mind’s eye I seemed to see him pace
About the weary moors continually,
Wandering about alone and silently.
. . . and when he ended,
I could have laughed myself to scorn to find
In that decrepit man so firm a mind.’
Just then I heard a rustle, and turning, saw Claude toiling down to me
over the hill-side. He joined me, footsore and weary, but in great
excitement; for the first minute or two he could not speak, and at last,—
‘Oh, I have seen such a sight!—but I will tell you how it all was. After
I left you I met a keeper. He spoke civilly to me—you know my antipathy
to game and those who live thereby: but there was a wild, bold,
self-helping look about him and his gun alone there in the waste—and
after all he was a man and a brother. Well, we fell into talk, and
fraternized; and at last he offered to take me to a neighbouring hill and
show me “sixty head of red-deer all together;” and as he spoke he looked
quite proud of his words. “I was lucky,” he said, “to come just then,
for the stags had all just got their heads again.” At which speech I
wondered; but was silent, and followed him, I, Claude the Cockney, such a
walk as I shall never take again. Behold these trousers—behold these
hands! scratched to pieces by crawling on all-fours through the heather.
But I saw them.’
‘A sight worth many pairs of plaid trousers?’
‘Worth Saint Chrysostom’s seven years’ nakedness on all-fours! And so I
told the fellow, who by some cunning calculations about wind, and sun,
and so forth, which he imparted to my uncomprehending ears, brought me
suddenly to the top of a little crag, below which, some hundred yards
off, the whole herd stood, stags, hinds—but I can’t describe them. I
have not brought away a scrap of sketch, though we watched them full ten
minutes undiscovered; and then the stare, and the toss of those antlers,
and the rush! That broke the spell with me; for I had been staring
stupidly at them, trying in vain to take in the sight, with the strangest
new excitement heaving and boiling up in my throat; and at the sound of
their hoofs on the turf I woke, and found the keeper staring, not at
them, but at me, who, I verily believe, had something very like a tear in
these excitable eyes of mine.’
‘“Ain’t you well, sir?” said he. “You needn’t be afeard; it’s only at
the fall of the year the stags is wicked.”
‘I don’t know what I answered at first; but the fellow understood me when
I shook his hand frantically, and told him that I should thank him to the
last day of my life, and that I would not have missed it for a thousand
pounds. In part-proof whereof I gave him a sovereign on the spot, which
seemed to clear my character in his eyes as much as the crying at the
sight of a herd of deer had mystified it.’
‘Claude, well-beloved,’ said I, ‘will you ever speak contemptuously of
sportsmen any more?’
‘“Do manus,” I have been vilifying them, as one does most things in the
world, only for want of understanding them. How shall I do penance? Go
and take service with Edwin Landseer, as pupil, colour-grinder, footboy?’
‘You will then be very near to a very great poet,’ quoth I, ‘and one
whose works will become, as centuries roll on, more and more valuable to
art and to science, and, possibly, to something higher than either.’
‘I begin to guess your meaning,’ answered Claude.
‘So we lounged, and dreamt, and fished, in heathery Highland,’ as Mr.
Clough would say, while the summer snipes flitted whistling up the
shallow before us, and the soft, south-eastern clouds slid lazily across
the sun, and the little trout snapped and dimpled at a tiny partridge
hackle, with a twist of orange silk, whose elegance for shape and colour
reconciled Claude’s heart somewhat to my everlasting whipping of the
water. When as last:—
‘You seem to have given up catching anything. You have not stirred a
fish in this last two pools, except that little saucy yellow shrimp, who
jumped over your fly, and gave a spiteful slap at it with his tail.’
Too true; and what could be the cause? Had that impudent sand-piper
frightened all the fish on his way up? Had an otter paralysed them with
terror for the morning? Or had a stag been down to drink? We saw the
fresh slot of his broad claws, by the bye, in the mud a few yards back.
‘We must have seen the stag himself, if he had been here lately,’ said
Claude.
‘Mr. Landseer knows too well by this time that that is a non sequitur.’
‘“I am no more a non sequitur than you are,” answered the Cornish
magistrate to the barrister.’
‘Fish and deer, friend, see us purblind sons of men somewhat more quickly
than we see them, fear sharpening the senses. Perhaps, after all, the
fault is in your staring white-straw hat, a garment which has spoilt many
a good day’s fishing. Ah, no! there is the cause; the hat of a mightier
than you—the thunder-spirit himself. Thor is at hand, while the breeze,
awe-stricken, falls dead calm before his march. Behold, climbing above
that eastern ridge, his huge powdered cauliflower-wig, barred with a grey
horizontal handkerchief of mist.’
‘Oh, profane and uncomely simile!—which will next, I presume, liken the
coming hailstorm to hair-powder shaken from the said wig.’
‘To shot rather than to powder. Flee, oh, flee to yonder pile of crags,
and thank your stars that there is one at hand; for these mountain
tornadoes are at once Tropic in their ferocity and Siberian in their
cutting cold.’
Down it came. The brown hills vanished in white sheets of hail, first
falling perpendicularly, then slanting and driving furiously before the
cold blast which issued from the storm. The rock above us rang with the
thunder-peals; and the lightning, which might have fallen miles away,
seemed to our dazzled eyes to dive into the glittering river at our feet.
We sat silent some half-hour, listening to the voice of One more mighty
than ourselves; and it was long after the uproar had rolled away among
the hills, and a steady, sighing sheet of warmer rains, from banks of low
grey fog, had succeeded the rattling of the hail upon the crisp heather,
that I turned to Claude.
‘And now, since your heart is softened towards these wild, stag-hunting,
trout fishing, jovial west-countrymen, consider whether it should not be
softened likewise toward those old outlaw ballads which I have never yet
been able to make you admire. They express feelings not yet extinct in
the minds of a large portion of the lower orders, as you would know had
you lived, like me, all your life in poaching counties, and on the edges
of one forest after another,—feelings which must be satisfied, even in
the highest development of the civilization of the future, for they are
innate in every thoughtful and energetic race,—feelings which, though
they have often led to crime, have far oftener delivered from swinish
sensuality; the feelings which drove into the merry greenwood “Robin
Hood, Scarlet, and John;” “Adam Bell, and Clym of the Cleugh, and William
of Cloudislee;” the feelings which prompted one half of his inspiration
to the nameless immortal who wrote the “Nutbrown Maid;”—feelings which
could not then, and cannot now, be satisfied by the drudgery of a
barbaric agriculture, which, without science, economy, or enterprise,
offers no food for the highest instincts of the human mind, its yearnings
after Nature, after freedom, and the noble excitement of self-dependent
energy.’
Our talk ended: but the rain did not: and we were at last fain to leave
our shelter, and let ourselves be blown by the gale (the difficulty being
not to progress forward, but to keep our feet) back to the shed where our
ponies were tied, and to canter home to Lynmouth, with the rain cutting
our faces like showers of pebbles, and our little mountain ponies
staggering against the wind, and more than once, if Londoners will
believe me, blown sheer up against the bank by some mad gust, which
rushed perpendicularly, not down, but up, the chasms of the glens below.