I had been wandering over the centre of Exmoor, killing trout as I went,
through a country which owes its civilization and tillage to the spirit
of one man, who has found stag-preserving by no means incompatible with
large agricultural improvements; among a population who still evince an
unpleasant partiality for cutting and carrying farmers’ crops by night,
without leave or licence, and for housebreaking after the true classic
method of Athens, by fairly digging holes through the house walls; a
little nook of primeval savagery fast reorganizing itself under the
influences of these better days. I had been on Dartmoor, too; but of
that noble moorland range so much has been said and sung of late, that I
really am afraid it is becoming somewhat cockney and trite. Far and wide
I had wandered, rod in hand, becoming a boy again in the land of my
boyhood, till, once more at Ilfracombe, opposite me sat Claude Mellot,
just beginning to bloom again into cheerfulness.
We were on the point of starting for Morte, and so round to Saunton
Court, and the sands beyond it; where a Clovelly trawler, which we had
chartered for the occasion, had promised to send a boat on shore and take
us off, provided the wind lay off the land.
But, indeed, the sea was calm as glass, the sky cloudless azure; and the
doubt was not whether we should be able to get on board through the surf,
but whether, having got on board, we should not lie till nightfall, as
idle
‘As a painted ship,
Upon a painted ocean.’
And now behold us on our way up lovely combes, with their green copses,
ridges of rock, golden furze, fruit-laden orchards, and slopes of emerald
pasture, pitched as steep as house-roofs, where the red longhorns are
feeding, with their tails a yard above their heads; and under us, seen in
bird’s-eye view, the ground-plans of the little snug farms and homesteads
of the Damnonii, ‘dwellers in the valley,’ as we West-countrymen were
called of old. Now we are leaving them far below us; the blue hazy sea
is showing far above the serrated ridge of the Tors, and their huge bank
of sunny green: and before us is a desolate table-land of rushy pastures
and mouldering banks, festooned with the delicate network of the little
ivy-leaved campanula, loveliest of British wild-flowers, fit with its
hair-like stems and tiny bells of blue to wreathe the temples of Titania.
Alas! we have passed out of the world into limbum patrum, and the region
of ineffectuality and incompleteness. The only cultivators here, and
through thousands of acres in the North of Devon, are the rook and mole:
and yet the land is rich enough—the fat deep crumbling of the shale and
ironstone returning year by year into the mud, from whence it hardened
ages since. There are scores of farms of far worse land in mid-England,
under ‘a four-course shift,’ yielding their load of wheat an acre. When
will that land do as much? When will the spirit of Smith of Deanston and
Grey of Dilston descend on North Devon? When will some true captain of
industry, and Theseus of the nineteenth century, like the late Mr. Warnes
of Trimmingham, teach the people here to annihilate poor-rates by growing
flax upon some of the finest flax land, and in the finest flax climate,
that we have in England? The shrewd Cornishmen of Launceston and Bodmin
have awakened long ago to ‘the new gospel of fertility.’ When will North
Devon awake?
‘When landlords and farmers,’ said Claude, ‘at last acknowledge their
divine vocation, and feel it a noble and heaven-ordained duty to produce
food for the people of England; when they learn that to grow rushes where
they might grow corn, ay, to grow four quarters of wheat where they might
grow five, is to sin against God’s blessings and against the English
nation. No wonder that sluggards like these cry out for protection—that
those who cannot take care of the land feel that they themselves need
artificial care.’
‘We will not talk politics, Claude. Our modern expediency mongers have
made them _pro tempore_ an extinct science. “Let the dead bury their
dead.” The social questions are now-a-days becoming far more important
than the mere House of Commons ones.’
‘There does seem here and there,’ he said, ‘some sign of improvement. I
see the paring plough at work on one field and another.’
‘Swiftly goes the age, and slowly crawls improvement. The greater part
of that land will be only broken up to be exhausted by corn-crop after
corn-crop, till it can bear no more, and the very manure which is drawn
home from it in the shape of a few turnips will be wasted by every rain
of heaven, and the straw probably used to mend bad places in the road
with; while the land returns to twenty years of worse sterility than
ever; on the ground that—
‘“Veather did zo, and gramfer did zo, and why shouldn’t Jan do the
zame?”’ * * * *
‘But here is Morte below us. “The little grey church on the windy
shore,” which once belonged to William de Tracy, one of your friend
Thomas à Becket’s murderers. If you wish to vent your wrath against
those who cut off your favourite Saxon hero, there is a tomb in the
church which bears De Tracy’s name; over which rival Dryasdusts contend
fiercely with paper-arrows: the one party asserting that he became a
priest, and died here in the wilderness; the others that the tomb is of
later date, that he fled hence to Italy, under favour of a certain
easy-going Bishop of Exeter, and died penitent and duly shriven,
according to the attestations of a certain or uncertain Bishop of
Cosenza.’
‘Peace be with him and with the Bishop! The flight to Italy seems a very
needless precaution to a man who owned this corner of the world. A
bailiff would have had even less chance here then than in Connemara a
hundred years ago.’
‘He certainly would have fed the crabs and rock-cod in two hours after
his arrival. Nevertheless, I believe the Cosenza story is the safer
one.’
‘What a chaos of rock-ridges!—Old starved mother Earth’s bare-worn ribs
and joints peeping out through every field and down; and on three sides
of us, the sullen thunder of the unseen surge. What a place for some
“gloom-pampered man” to sit and misanthropize!’
‘“Morte,” says the Devonshire proverb, “is the place on earth which
heaven made last, and the devil will take first.”’
‘All the fitter for a misanthrope. But where are the trees? I have not
seen one for the last four miles.’
‘Nor will you for a few miles more. Whatever will grow here (and most
things will) they will not, except, at least, hereafter the sea-pine of
the Biscay shore. You would know why, if you had ever felt a
south-westerly gale here, when the foam-flakes are flying miles inland,
and you are fain to cling breathless to bank and bush, if you want to get
one look at those black fields of shark’s-tooth tide-rocks, champing and
churning the great green rollers into snow. Wild folk are these here,
gatherers of shell-fish and laver, and merciless to wrecked vessels,
which they consider as their own by immemorial usage, or rather right
divine. Significant, how an agricultural people is generally as cruel to
wrecked seamen, as a fishing one is merciful. I could tell you twenty
stories of the baysmen down there to the westward risking themselves like
very heroes to save strangers’ lives, and beating off the labouring folk
who swarmed down for plunder from the inland hills.’
‘Knowledge, you see, breeds sympathy and love. But what a merciless
coast!’
‘Hardly a winter passes without a wreck or two. You see there lying
about the timbers of more than one tall ship. You see, too, that black
rock a-wash far out at sea, apparently a submarine outlier of the north
horn of this wide rock-amphitheatre below us. That is the Morte stone,
the “Death-rock,” as the Normans christened it of old; and it does not
belie its name even now. See how, even in this calm, it hurls up its
column of spray at every wave; and then conceive being entrapped between
it and the cliffs, on some blinding, whirling winter’s night, when the
land is shrouded thick in clouds, and the roar of the breakers hardly
precedes by a minute the crash of your bows against the rocks.’
‘I never think, on principle, of things so painful, and yet so
irrelievable. Yet why does not your much-admired Trinity House erect a
light there?’
‘So ask the sailors; for it is indeed one of the gateway-jambs of the
Channel, and the deep water and the line of coast tempt all craft to pass
as close to it as possible.’
‘Look at that sheet of yellow sand below us now, banked to the inland
with sand-hills and sunny downs, and ending abruptly at the foot of that
sombre wall of slate-hill, which runs out like a huge pier into the sea
some two miles off.’
‘That is Woollacombe: but here on our right is a sight worth seeing.
Every gully and creek there among the rocks is yellow, but not with sand.
Those are shells; the sweepings of the ocean bed for miles around, piled
there, millions upon millions, yards deep, in every stage of destruction.
There they lie grinding to dust; and every gale brings in fresh myriads
from the inexhaustible sea-world, as if Death could be never tired of
devouring, or God of making. The brain grows dizzy and tired, as one’s
feet crunch over the endless variety of their forms.’
‘And then one recollects that every one of them has been a living thing—a
whole history of birth, and growth, and propagation, and death. Waste it
cannot be, or cruelty on the part of the Maker: but why this infinite
development of life, apparently only to furnish out of it now and then a
cartload of shell-sand to these lazy farmers? But after all, there is
not so much life in all those shells put together as in one little child:
and it may die the hour that it is born! What we call life is but an
appearance and a becoming; the true life of existence belongs only to
spirits. And whether or not we, or the sea-shell there, are at any given
moment helping to make up part of some pretty little pattern in this
great kaleidoscope called the material universe, yet, in the spirit all
live to Him, and shall do so for ever.’
And thereon he rambled off into a long lecture on ‘species-spirits,’ and
‘individual-spirits,’ and ‘personal spirits,’ doubtless most important.
But I, what between the sun, the luncheon, and the metaphysic, sank into
soft slumbers, from which I was only awakened by the carriage stopping,
according to our order, on the top of Saunton hill.
We left the fly, and wandered down towards the old gabled court, nestling
amid huge walnuts in its southward glen; while before us spread a
panorama, half sea, half land, than which, perhaps, our England owns few
lovelier.
At our feet was a sea of sand—for the half-mile to the right smooth as a
floor, bounded by a broad band of curling waves, which crept slowly
shorewards with the advancing tide. Right underneath us the sand was
drifted for miles into fantastic hills, which quivered in the heat, the
glaring yellow of its lights chequered by delicate pink shadows and
sheets of grey-green bent. To the left were rich alluvial marshes,
covered with red cattle sleeping in the sun, and laced with creeks and
flowery dykes; and here and there a scarlet line, which gladdened
Claude’s eye as being a ‘bit of positive colour in the foreground,’ and
mine, because they were draining tiles. Beyond again, two broad
tide-rivers, spotted with white and red-brown sails, gleamed like avenues
of silver, past knots of gay dwellings, and tall lighthouses, and
church-towers, and wandered each on its own road, till they vanished
among the wooded hills. On the eastern horizon the dark range of Exmoor
sank gradually into lower and more broken ridges, which rolled away,
woodland beyond woodland, till all outlines were lost in purple haze;
while, far beyond, the granite peaks of Dartmoor hung like a delicate
blue cloud, and enticed the eye away into infinity. From hence, as our
eyes swept round the horizon, the broken hills above the river’s mouth
gradually rose into the table-land of the ‘barren coal-measures’ some ten
miles off,—a long straight wall of cliffs which hounded the broad bay,
buried in deepest shadow, except where the opening of some glen revealed
far depths of sunlit wood. A faint perpendicular line of white houses,
midway along the range, marked our destination; and far to the westward,
the land ended sheer and suddenly at the cliffs of Hartland, the
‘Promontory of Hercules,’ as the old Romans called it, to reappear some
ten miles out in the Atlantic, in the blue flat-topped island of Lundy,
so exactly similar in height and form to the opposite cape, that it
required no scientific imagination to supply the vast gap which the
primeval currents had sawn out. There it all lay beneath us like a map;
its thousand hues toned down harmoniously into each other by the summer
haze, and ‘the eye was not filled with seeing,’ nor the spirit with the
intoxicating sight of infinitely various life and form in perfectest
repose.