It is four o’clock on a May morning, and Claude and I are just embarking
on board a Clovelly trawling skiff, which, having disposed of her fish at
various ports along the Channel, is about to run leisurely homewards with
an ebb tide, and a soft north-easterly breeze.
So farewell, fair Lynmouth; and ye storm-spirits, send us a propitious
day; and dismiss those fantastic clouds which are coquetting with your
thrones, crawling down one hill-side, and whirling and leaping up
another, in wreaths of snow, and dun, and amber, pierced every minute by
some long glittering upward arrow from the rising sun, which gilds grey
crags and downs a thousand feet above, while underneath the gorges still
sleep black and cold in shade.
There, they have heard us! The cap rises off the ‘Summer-house hill,’
that eight hundred feet of upright wall, which seems ready to topple down
into the nest of be-myrtled cottages at its foot; and as we sweep out
into the deeper water the last mist-flake streams up from the Foreland,
and vanishes in white threads into the stainless blue.
‘Look at the colours of that Foreland!’ cried Claude. ‘The simple
monotone of pearly green, broken only at intervals by blood-red stains,
where the turf has slipped and left the fresh rock bare, and all
glimmering softly through a delicate blue haze, like the bloom on a
half-ripened plum!’
‘And look, too, how the grey pebble beach is already dancing and
quivering in the mirage which steams up, like the hot breath of a
limekiln, from the drying stones. Talk of “glazings and scumblings,” ye
artists! and bungle at them as you will, what are they to Nature’s own
glazings, deepening every instant there behind us?’
‘Mock me not. I have walked up and down here with a humbled and broken
spirit, and had nearly forsworn the audacity of painting anything beyond
a beech stem, or a frond of fern.’
‘The little infinite in them would have baffled you as much as the only
somewhat bigger infinite of just the hills on which they grow.’
‘Confest: and so farewell to unpaintable Lynmouth! Farewell to the
charming contrast of civilized English landscape-gardening, with its
villas, and its exotics, and its evergreens, thus strangely and yet
harmoniously confronted with the chaos of the rocks and mountain-streams.
Those grounds of Sir William H—’s are a double paradise, the wild Eden of
the Past side by side with the cultivated Eden of the Future. How its
alternations of Art and Savagery at once startle and relieve the sense,
as you pass suddenly out of wildernesses of piled boulders, and
torrent-shattered trees, and the roar of fern-fringed waterfalls, into
“trim walks, and fragrant alleys green;” and the door of a summer-house
transports you at a step from Richmond to the Alps. Happy he who
“possesses,” as the world calls it, and happier still he whose taste
could organize, that fairy bower.’
So he, magniloquently, as was his wont; and yet his declamations always
flowed with such a graceful ease,—a simple, smiling earnestness,—an
unpractised melody of voice, that what would have been rant from other
lips, from his showed only as the healthy enthusiasm of the passionate,
all-seeing, all-loving artist.
‘Look yonder, again,’ said he, gazing up at the huge boulder-strewn
hill-side above us. ‘One wonders at that sight, whether the fable of the
giants be not true after all,—and that “Vale of Rocks,” hanging five
hundred feet in air, with all its crag-castles, and tottering
battlements, and colossal crumbling idols, and great blocks, which hang
sloping, caught in act to fall, be not some enormous Cyclopean temple
left half-disinterred: or is it a fragment of old Chaos, left
unorganized?—or, perhaps, the waste heap of the world, where, after the
rest of England had been made, some angel put up a notice for his
fellows, “Dry rubbish shot here”?’
‘Not so, unscientific! It is the grandfather of hills,—a fossil bone of
some old continent, which stood here ages before England was. And the
great earth-angel, who grinds up mountains into paint, as you do bits of
ochre, for his “Continental Sketches,” found in it the materials for a
whole dark ground-tone of coal-measures, and a few hundred miles of warm
high-lights, which we call New Red Sandstone.’
What a sea-wall they are, those Exmoor hills! Sheer upward from the sea
a thousand feet rise the downs; and as we slide and stagger lazily along
before the dying breeze, through the deep water which never leaves the
cliff, the eye ranges, almost dizzy, up some five hundred feet of rock,
dappled with every hue; from the intense dark of the tide-line, through
the warm green and brown rock-shadows, out of which the horizontal cracks
of the strata loom black, and the breeding gulls show like lingering
snow-flakes; up to the middle cliff, where delicate grey fades into pink,
pink into red, red into glowing purple; up to where the purple is
streaked with glossy ivy wreaths, and black-green yews; up to where all
the choir of colours vanishes abruptly on the mid-hill, to give place to
one yellowish-grey sheet of upward down, sweeping aloft smooth and
unbroken, except by a lonely stone, or knot of clambering sheep, and
stopped by one great rounded waving line, sharp-cut against the brilliant
blue. The sheep hang like white daisies upon the steep; and a solitary
falcon rides, a speck in air, yet far below the crest of that tall hill.
Now he sinks to the cliff edge, and hangs quivering, supported, like a
kite, by the pressure of his breast and long curved wings, against the
breeze.
There he hangs, the peregrine—a true ‘falcon gentle,’ ‘sharp-notched,
long-taloned, crooked-winged,’ whose uncles and cousins, ages since, have
struck at duck and pheasant, and sat upon the wrists of kings. And now
he is full proud of any mouse or cliff-lark; like an old Chingachgook,
last of the Mohicans, he lingers round ‘the hunting-field of his
fathers.’ So all things end.
‘The old order changeth, giving place to the new;
And God fulfils Himself in many ways,
Lest one good custom should corrupt the world.’
‘Ay, and the day may come,’ said Claude, ‘when the brows of that huge
High Vere shall be crowned with golden wheat, and every rock-ledge on
Trentishoe, like those of Petra and the Rhine, support its garden-bed of
artificial soil.’
‘And when,’ I answered, ‘the shingly sides of that great chasm of
Headon’s Mouth may be clothed with the white mulberry, and the summer
limestone-skiffs shall go back freighted with fabrics which vie with the
finest woof of Italy and Lyons.’
‘You believe, then, in the late Mrs. Whitby of Lymington?’
‘Seeing is believing, Claude: through laughter, and failures, and the
stupidity of half-barbarous clods, she persevered in her silk-growing,
and succeeded; and I should like to put her book into the hands of every
squire in Devon, Cornwall, and the South of Ireland.’
‘Or require them to pass an examination in it, as one more among the many
books which I intend, in my ideal kingdom, all landlords to read and
digest, before they are allowed to take possession of their estates. In
the meantime, what is that noble conical hill, which has increased my
wonder at the infinite variety of beauty which The Spirit can produce by
combinations so simple as a few grey stones and a sheet of turf?’
‘The Hangman.’
‘An ominous name. What is its history?’
‘Some sheep-stealer, they say, clambering over a wall with his booty
slung round his neck, was literally hung by the poor brute’s struggles,
and found days after on the mountain-side, a blackened corpse on one side
of the wall, with the sheep on the other, and the ravens—You may fill up
the picture for yourself.’
But, see, as we round the Hangman, what a change of scene—the
square-blocked sandstone cliffs dip suddenly under dark slate-beds,
fantastically bent and broken by primeval earthquakes. Wooded combes,
and craggy ridges of rich pasture-land, wander and slope towards a
labyrinth of bush-fringed coves, black isolated tide-rocks, and
land-locked harbours. There shines among the woods the Castle of
Watermouth, on its lovely little salt-water loch, the safest harbour on
the coast; and there is Combe-Martin, mile-long man-stye, which seven
centuries of fruitless silver-mining, and of the right (now deservedly
lost) of ‘sending a talker to the national palaver,’ have neither
cleansed nor civilized. Turn, turn thy head away, dear Claude, lest even
at this distance some foul odour taint the summer airs, and complete the
misfortune already presaged by that pale, sad face, sickening in the
burning calm! For this great sun-roasted fire-brick of the Exmoor range
is fairly burning up the breeze, and we have nothing but the tide to
drift us slowly down to Ilfracombe.
Now we open Rillage, and now Hillsborough, two of the most picturesque of
headlands; see how their round foreheads of glistening grey shale sink
down into two dark, jagged moles, running far out to seaward, and
tapering off, each into a long black horizontal line, vanishing at last
beneath its lace-fringe of restless hissing foam. How grand the contrast
of the lightness of those sea-lines, with the solid mass which rests upon
them! Look, too, at the glaring lights and Tartarean shadows of those
chasms and caves, which the tide never leaves, or the foot of man
explores; and listen how, at every rush of the long ground-swell,
mysterious mutterings, solemn sighs, sudden thunders, as of a pent-up
earthquake, boom out of them across the glassy swell. Look at those
blasts of delicate vapour that shoot up from hidden rifts, and hang a
moment, and vanish; and those green columns of wave which rush mast-high
up the perpendicular walls, and then fall back and outward in a waterfall
of foam, lacing the black rocks with a thousand snowy streams. There
they fall, and leap, and fall again. And so they did yesterday, and the
day before; and so they did centuries ago, when the Danes swept past
them, battleworn, and sad of heart for the loss of the magic raven flag,
from the fight at Appledore, to sit down and starve on ‘the island of
Bradanrelice, which men call Flat Holms.’ Ay, and even so they leapt and
fell, before a sail gleamed on the Severn sea, when the shark and the
ichthyosaur paddled beneath the shade of tropic forests—now scanty turf
and golden gorse. And so they will leap and fall on, on, through the
centuries and the ages. O dim abyss of Time, into which we peer
shuddering, what will be the end of thee, and of this ceaseless coil and
moan of waters? It is true, that when thou shalt be no more, then, too,
‘there shall be no more sea;’ and this ocean bed, this great grave of
fertility, into which all earth’s wasted riches stream, day and night,
from hill and town, shall rise and become fruitful soil, corn-field and
meadow-land; and earth shall teem as thick with living men as bean-fields
with the summer bees? What a consummation! At least there is One
greater than sea, or time: and the Judge of all the earth will do right.
But there is Ilfracombe, with its rock-walled harbour, its little wood of
masts within, its white terraces, rambling up the hills, and its capstone
sea-walk, the finest ‘marine parade,’ as Cockneydom terms it, in all
England, except that splendid Hoe at Plymouth, ‘Lam Goemagot,’
Gog-magog’s leap, as the old Britains called it, over which Corineus
threw that mighty giant. And there is the little isolated rock-chapel,
where seven hundred years ago, our west-country forefathers used to go to
pray St. Nicholas for deliverance from shipwreck,—a method lovingly
regretted by some, as a ‘pious idea of the Ages of faith.’ We, however,
shall prefer the method of lighthouses and the worthy Trinity Board, as
actually more godly and ‘faithful,’ as well as more useful; and,
probably, so do the sailors themselves.
But Claude is by this time nearly sick of the roasting calm, and the
rolling ground-swell, and the smell of fish, and is somewhat sleepy also,
between early rising and incoherent sermons; wherefore, if he takes good
advice, he will stay and recruit himself at Ilfracombe, before he
proceeds further with his self-elected cicerone on the grand tour of
North Devon. Believe me, Claude, you will not stir from the place for a
month at least. For be sure, if you are sea-sick, or heart-sick, or
pocket-sick either, there is no pleasanter or cheaper place of cure (to
indulge in a puff of a species now well nigh obsolete, the puff honest
and true) than this same Ilfracombe, with its quiet nature and its quiet
luxury, its rock fairyland and its sea-walks, its downs and combes, its
kind people, and, if possible, its still kinder climate, which combines
the soft warmth of South Devon with the bracing freshness of the Welsh
mountains; where winter has slipped out of the list of the seasons, and
mother Earth makes up for her summer’s luxury by fasting, ‘not in
sackcloth and ashes, but in new silk and old sack;’ and instead of
standing three months chin-deep in ice, and christening great snowballs
her ‘friends and family,’ as St. Francis of Assisi did of old, knows no
severer asceticism than tepid shower-baths, and a parasol of soft grey
mist.