It was four o’clock on an August morning. Our little party had made the
sleeping streets ring with jests and greetings, as it collected on the
pier. Some dozen young men and women, sons and daughters of the
wealthier coasting captains and owners of fishing-smacks, chaperoned by
our old landlord, whose delicate and gentlemanlike features and figure
were strangely at variance with the history of his life,—daring smuggler,
daring man-of-war sailor, and then most daring and successful of
coastguard-men. After years of fighting and shipwreck and creeping for
kegs of brandy; after having seen, too—sight not to be forgotten—the
Walcheren dykes and the Walcheren fever, through weary months of
pestilence, he had come back with a little fortune of prize-money to be a
village oracle, loving and beloved, as gentle and courteous as if he had
never ‘stato al inferno,’ and looked Death in the face. Heaven bless
thee, shrewd loyal heart, a gentleman of God’s making, not unrecognized
either by many of men’s making.
The other chaperone was a lady of God’s making, too; one who might have
been a St. Theresa, had she been born there and then; but as it was, had
been fated to become only the Wesleyan abbess of the town, and, like
Deborah, ‘a mother in Israel.’ With her tall, slim, queenly figure,
massive forehead, glittering eyes, features beaming with tenderness and
enthusiasm, and yet overcast with a peculiar expression of
self-consciousness and restraint, well known to those who have studied
the physiognomies of ‘saints,’ she seemed to want only the dress of some
monastic order to make her the ideal of a mediæval abbess, watching with
a half-pitying, half-complacent smile, the gambols of a group of innocent
young worldlings. I saw Claude gazing at her full of admiration and
surprise, which latter was certainly not decreased when, as soon as all
had settled themselves comfortably on board, and the cutter was slipping
quietly away under the magnificent deer-park cliffs, the Lady Abbess,
pulling out her Wesleyan hymn-book, gave out the Morning Hymn, apparently
as a matter of course.
With hardly a demur one sweet voice after another arose; then a man
gained courage, and chimed in with a full harmonious bass; then a rich
sad alto made itself heard, as it wandered in and out between the voices
of the men and women; and at last a wild mellow tenor, which we
discovered after much searching to proceed from the most unlikely-looking
lips of an old dry, weather-bleared, mummified chrysalis of a man, who
stood aft, steering with his legs, and showing no sign of life except
when he slowly and solemnly filled his nose with snuff.
‘What strange people have you brought me among?’ asked Claude. ‘I have
been wondering ever since I came here at the splendid faces and figures
of men, women, and children, which popped out upon me from every door in
that human rabbit-burrow above. I have been in raptures at the
gracefulness, the courtesy, the intelligence of almost everyone I meet;
and now, to crown all, everyone among them seems to be a musician.’
‘Really you are not far wrong, and you will find them as remarkable
morally as they are physically and intellectually. The simplicity and
purity of the women here put one more in mind of the valleys of the Tyrol
than of an English village.’
‘And in proportion to their purity, I suppose,’ said Claude, ‘is their
freedom and affectionateness?’
‘Exactly. It would do your “naturalist” heart good, Claude, to see a
young fellow just lauded from a foreign voyage rolling up the street
which we have just descended, and availing himself of the immemorial
right belonging to such cases of kissing and being kissed by every woman
whom he meets, young and old. You will find yourself here among those
who are too simple-minded, and too full of self-respect, to be either
servile or uncourteous.’
‘I have found out already that Liberty, Fraternity, and Equality, in such
company as this, are infinitely pleasanter, as well as cheaper, than the
aristocratic seclusion of a cutter hired for our own behoof.’
‘True; and now you will not go home and, as most tourists do, say that
you know a place, without knowing the people who live in it—as if the
human inhabitants of a range of scenery were not among its integral and
most important parts—’
‘What! are Copley Fielding’s South Down landscapes incomplete without a
half-starved seven shillings a-week labourer in the foreground?’
‘Honestly, are they not a text without a sermon? a premise without a
conclusion? Is it not partly because the land is down, and not
well-tilled arable, that the labourer is what he is? And yet, perhaps,
the very absence of human beings in his vast sheets of landscape, when
one considers that they are scraps of great, overcrowded, scientific
England in the nineteenth century, is in itself the bitterest of satires.
But, hush! there is another hymn commencing—not to be the last by many.’
* * * * *
We had landed, and laughed, and scrambled, eaten and drunk, seen all the
sights of Lundy, and heard all the traditions. Are they not written in
Mr. Bamfield’s Ilfracombe Guide? Why has not some one already written a
fire-and-brimstone romance about them? ‘Moresco Castle; or, the Pirate
Knight of the Atlantic Wave.’ What a title! Or again—‘The Seal Fiend;
or, the Nemesis of the Scuttled West Indiaman.’—If I had paper and
lubricité enough, and that delightful carelessness of any moral or
purpose, except that of fine writing and money-making, which possesses
some modern scribblers—I could tales unfold—But neither pirate legends,
nor tales of cheated insurance offices, nor wrecks and murders, will make
us understand Lundy—what it is ‘considered in its idea,’ as the new argot
is. It may be defined as a lighthouse-bearing island. The whole three
miles of granite table-land, seals, sea-birds, and human beings, are mere
accidents and appendages—the pedestal and the ornaments of that great
white tower in the centre, whose sleepless fiery eye blinks all night
long over the night-mists of the Atlantic. If, as a wise man has said,
the days will come when our degenerate posterity will fall down and
worship rusty locomotives and fossil electric-telegraphs, the relics of
their ancestors’ science, grown to them mythic and impossible, as the
Easter-islanders bow before the colossal statues left by a nobler and
extinct race, then surely there will be pilgrimages to Lundy, and prayers
to that white granite tower, with its unglazed lantern and rusting
machinery, to light itself up again, and help poor human beings! Really,
my dear brothers, I am not in jest: you seem but too likely now-a-days to
arrive at some such catastrophe—sentimental philosophy for the
‘enlightened’ few, and fetish-worship (of which nominally Christian forms
are as possible as heathen ones) for the masses.—At that you may only too
probably arrive—unless you repent, and ‘get back your souls.’
* * * * *
We had shot along the cliffs a red-legged chough or two, and one of the
real black English rat, exterminated on the mainland by the grey
Hanoverian newcomer; and weary with sight-seeing and scrambling, we sat
down to meditate on a slab of granite, which hung three hundred feet in
air above the western main.
‘This is even more strange and new to me,’ said Claude, at length, ‘than
anything I have yet seen in this lovely West. I now appreciate Ruskin’s
advice to oil-painters to go and study the coasts of Devon and Cornwall,
instead of lingering about the muddy seas and tame cliffs of the Channel
and the German Ocean.’
‘How clear and brilliant,’ said I, ‘everything shows through this
Atlantic atmosphere. The intensity of colouring may vie with that of the
shores of the Mediterranean. The very raininess of the climate, by
condensing the moisture into an ever-changing phantasmagoria of clouds,
leaves the clear air and sunshine, when we do get a glimpse of them, all
the more pure and transparent.’
‘The distinctive feature of the scene is, in my eyes, the daring
juxtaposition of large simple masses of positive colour. There are none
of the misty enamelled tones of Lynmouth, or the luscious richness of
Clovelly. The forms are so simple and severe, that they would be
absolutely meagre, were it not for the rich colouring with which Nature
has so lovingly made up for the absence of all softness, all picturesque
outline. One does not regret or even feel the want of trees here, while
the eye ranges down from that dappled cloud-world above, over that sheet
of purple heather, those dells bedded with dark green fern, of a depth
and richness of hue which I never saw before—over those bright grey
granite rocks, spangled with black glittering mica and golden lichens, to
rest at last on that sea below, which streams past the island in a swift
roaring torrent of tide.’
‘Sea, Claude? say, ocean. This is real Atlantic blue here beneath us.
No more Severn mud, no more grass-green bay-water, but real ocean
sapphire—dark, deep, intense, Homeric purple, it spreads away, away,
there before us, without a break or islet, to the shores of America. You
are sitting on one of the last points of Europe; and therefore all things
round you are stern and strange with a barbaric pomp, such as befits the
boundary of a world.’
‘Ay, the very form of the cliffs shows them to be the breakwaters of a
continent. No more fantastic curves and bands of slate, such as
harmonize so well with the fairyland which we left this morning; the
cliffs, with their horizontal rows of cubical blocks, seem built up by
Cyclopean hands.’
‘Yet how symbolic is the difference between them and that equally
Cyclopic masonry of the Exmoor coast. There every fracture is fresh,
sharp-edged, crystalline; the worn-out useless hills are dropping to
pieces with their own weight. Here each cube is delicately rounded off
at the edges, every crack worn out into a sinuous furrow, like the scars
of an everlasting warfare with the winds and waves.’
‘Does it not raise strange longings in you,’ said Claude, ‘to gaze out
yonder over the infinite calm, and then to remember that beyond it lies
America!—the new world; the future world; the great Titan-baby, who will
be teeming with new Athens and Londons, with new Bacons and Shakspeares,
Newtons and Goethes, when this old worn-out island will be—what? Oh!
when I look out here, like a bird from its cage, a captive from his
dungeon, and remember what lies behind me, to what I must return
to-morrow—the over-peopled Babylon of misery and misrule, puffery and
covetousness—and there before me great countries untilled, uncivilized,
unchristianized, crying aloud for man to come and be man indeed, and
replenish the earth and subdue it. “Oh that I had wings as a dove, then
would I flee away and be at rest!” Here, lead me away; my body is
growing as dizzy as my mind. I feel coming over me that horrible longing
of which I have heard, to leap out into empty space. How the blank air
whispers, “Be free!” How the broad sea smiles, and calls, with its ten
thousand waves, “Be free!”—As I live, if you do not take me away I shall
throw myself over the cliff.’
I did take him away, for I knew the sensation and its danger well. It
has nothing to do with physical giddiness. Those who are cliff-bred, and
who never were giddy for an instant in their lives, have often felt
themselves impelled to leap from masts, and tree-tops, and cliffs; and
nothing but the most violent effort of will could break the fascination.
I cannot but think, by the bye, that many a puzzling suicide might be
traced to this same emotion acting on a weak and morbid brain.
We returned to the little landing cove. The red-sailed cutter lay
sleeping below us—‘floating double, ship and shadow.’ Shoals of
innumerable mackerel broke up, making acres of water foam and sparkle
round their silvery sides, with a soft roar (call it ‘a bull’ if you
like, it is the only expression for that mysterious sound), while among
them the black head of a huge seal was slowly and silently appearing and
vanishing, as he got his dinner, in a quiet business-like way, among the
unhappy wanderers.
We put off in the boat, and just halfway from the cutter Claude gave a
start, and the women a scream, as the enormous brute quietly raised his
head and shoulders out of the water ten yards off, with a fish kicking in
his mouth, and the water running off his nose, to take a deliberate stare
at us, after the fashion of seals, whose ruling passion is curiosity.
The sound of a musical instrument, the sight of a man bathing—anything,
in short, which their small wits cannot explain at first sight, is enough
to make them forget all their cunning, and thrust their heads suicidally
into any danger; and even so it fared with the ‘black man,’ as the girls,
in their first terror, declared him to be. Some fellow’s gun went off—of
itself I should like to believe—but the whole charge disappeared into his
sleek round visage, knocking the mackerel from between his teeth; and he
turned over, a seven-foot lump of lifeless blubber.
‘Wretch!’ cried Claude, as we dragged the seal into the boat, where he
lay with his head and arms hanging helplessly over the bows, like a
sea-sick alderman on board a Margate steamer. ‘What excuse can he give
for such a piece of wanton cruelty?’
‘I assure you his skin and oil are very valuable.’
‘Pish!—Was he thinking of skin and oil when he pulled the trigger? or
merely obeying the fleshly lust of destructiveness—the puppet of two
bumps on the back of his head?’
‘My dear Claude, man is the microcosm; and as the highest animal, the
ideal type of the mammalia, he, like all true types, comprises in himself
the attributes of all lower species. Therefore he must have a tiger-vein
in him, my dear Claude, as well as a beaver-vein and a spider-vein; and
no more shame to him. You are a butterfly; that good fellow a beast of
prey; both may have their own work to do in this age just as they had in
the old ones; and if you do not like that explanation, all I can say is,
I can sympathise with you and with him too. Homo sum—humani nihil a me
alienum puto. Trim the boat, lads, or the seal will swamp us, and, like
Samson, slay more in his death than ever he slew in his life.’
We slipped on homeward. The cliff-wall of Lundy stood out blacker and
blacker every moment against the gay western sky; greens, greys, and
purples, dyeing together into one deep rich monotone, for which our
narrow colour-vocabulary has no word; and threw a long cold shadow
towards us across the golden sea; suddenly above its dark ridge a wild
wreath of low rack caught the rays of the setting sun, and flamed up like
a volcano towards the dun and purple canopy of upper clouds. Before us
the blue sea and the blue land-line were fading into mournful grey, on
which one huge West Indiaman blazed out, orange and scarlet, her crowded
canvas all a-flame from the truck to the water’s edge.—A few moments and
she, too, had vanished into the grey twilight, and a chill night-wind
crisped the sea. It was a relief to hear the Evening Hymn rise rich and
full from one voice, and then another and another, till the men chimed in
one by one, and the whole cutter, from stem to stern, breathed up its
melody into the silent night.
But the hymn soon flagged—there was more mirth on board than could vent
itself in old Charles Wesley’s words; and one began to hum a song tune,
and then another, with a side glance at the expression of the Lady
Abbess’s face, till at last, when a fair wife took courage, and burst out
with full pipe into ‘The sea, the sea,’ the ice was fairly broken; and
among jests and laughter one merry harmless song after another rang out,
many of them, to Claude’s surprise, fashionable London ones, which
sounded strangely enough out there on the wild western sea. At
last—‘Claude, friend,’ I whispered, ‘you must sing your share too—and
mine also, for that matter.’
‘What shall I sing?’
‘Anything you will, from the sublime to the ridiculous. They will
understand and appreciate it as well as yourself. Recollect, you are not
among bullet-headed South Saxon clods, but among wits as keen and
imaginations as rich as those of any Scotch shepherd or Manchester
operative.’
And up rose his exquisite tenor.
This was his first song, but it was not allowed to be his last. German
ballads, Italian Opera airs, were all just as warmly, and perhaps far
more sincerely appreciated, as they would have been by any London
evening-party; and the singing went on, hour after hour, as we slipped
slowly on upon the tide, till it grew late, and the sweet voices died
away one by one; and then the Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity which had
reigned so pleasantly throughout the day took a new form, as the women
huddled together to sleep in each other’s arms; and the men and we
clustered forwards, while from every mouth fragrant incense steamed
upwards into the air. ‘Man a cooking animal?’ my dear Doctor
Johnson—pooh! man is a smoking animal. There is his ergon, his
‘differential energy,’ as the Aristotelians say—his true distinction from
the ourang-outang. Ponder it well.
The men were leaning on the trawl capstan, while our old landlord, with
half-a-dozen pipes within a foot of his face, droned out some long
sea-yarn about Ostend, and muds, and snow-storms, and revenue-cruisers
going down stern foremost, kegs of brandy and French prisons, which I
shall not repeat; for indeed the public has been surfeited with
sea-stories of late, from many sufficiently dull ones up to the genial
wisdom of ‘Peter Simple,’ and the gorgeous word-painting of ‘Tom
Cringle’s Log.’ And now the subject is stale—the old war and the wonders
thereof have died away into the past, like the men who fought in it; and
Trafalgar and the Bellerophon are replaced by Manchester and ‘Mary
Barton.’ We have solved the old sea-going problems pretty well—thanks to
wise English-hearted Captain Marryat, now gone to his rest, just when his
work was done; and we must turn round and face a few land-going problems
not quite so easy of solution. So Claude and I thought, as we leant over
the sloop’s bows, listening neither to the Ostend story forwards nor the
forty-stanza ballad aft, which the old steersman was moaning on, careless
of listeners, to keep himself awake at the helm. Forty stanzas or so we
did count from curiosity; the first line of each of which ended
infallibly with
‘Says the commodo—ore;
and the third with
‘Says the female smuggler;’
and then gave up in despair; and watched in a dreamy, tired, half-sad
mood, the everlasting sparkle of the water as our bows threw it gently
off in sheets of flame and ‘tender curving lines of creamy’ fire, that
ran along the glassy surface, and seemed to awaken the sea for yards
round into glittering life, as countless diamonds, and emeralds, and
topazes, leaped and ran and dived round us, while we slipped slowly by;
and then a speck of light would show far off in the blank darkness, and
another, and another, and slide slowly up to us—shoals of medusæ, every
one of them a heaving globe of flame; and some unseen guillemot would
give a startled squeak, or a shearwater close above our heads suddenly
stopped the yarn, and raised a titter among the men, by his ridiculously
articulate, and not over-complimentary, cry; and then a fox’s bark from
the cliffs came wild and shrill, although so faint and distant; or the
lazy gaff gave a sad uneasy creak; and then a soft warm air, laden with
heather honey, and fragrant odours of sedge, and birch, and oak, came
sighing from the land; while all around us was the dense blank of the
night, except where now and then some lonely gleam through the southern
clouds showed the cliff-tops on our right.—It was all most unearthly,
dreamlike, a strange phantasmagoria, like some scene from ‘The Ancient
Mariner’—all the world shut out, silent, invisible, and we floating along
there alone, like a fairy ship creeping through Chaos and the unknown
Limbo. Was it an evil thought that rose within me as I said to
Claude—‘Is not this too like life? Our only light the sparkles that rise
up round us at every step, and die behind us; and all around, and all
before, the great black unfathomable eternities? A few souls brought
together as it were by chance, for a short friendship and mutual
dependence in this little ship of earth, so soon to land her passengers
and break up the company for ever?’
He smiled.
‘There is a devil’s meaning to everything in nature, and a God’s meaning,
too. Your friends, the zoologists, have surely taught you better than
that. As I read Nature’s parable to-night, I find nothing in it but
hope. What if there be darkness, the sun will rise to-morrow. What if
there seem a chaos: the great organic world is still living, and growing,
and feeding, unseen by us, all the black night through; and every
phosphoric atom there below is a sign that even in the darkest night
there is still the power of light, ready to flash out, wherever and
however it is stirred. Does the age seem to you dark? Do you, too, feel
as I do at times, the awful sadness of that text,—“The time shall come
when ye shall desire to see one of the days of the Lord, and shall not
see it”? Then remember that
“The night is never so long
But at last it ringeth for matin song.”
And even as it is around us here, so it is in the world of men. The
night is peopled not merely with phantoms and wizards, superstitions and
spirits of evil, but under its shadow all sciences, methods, social
energies, are taking rest, and growing, and feeding, unknown to
themselves, that they may awake into a new life, and intermarry, and
beget children nobler than themselves, when “the day-spring from on high
comes down.” Even now, see! the dawn is gilding the highest souls, as it
is those Exmoor peaks afar; and we are in the night only because we crawl
below. What if we be unconscious of all the living energies which are
fermenting round us now? Have you not shown me in this last week every
moorland pool, every drop of the summer sea, alive with beautiful
organizations, multiplying as fast as the thoughts of man? Is not every
leaf breathing still, every sap vein drinking still, though we may not
see them? “Even so is the kingdom of God; like seed sown in the ground;
and men rise, and lie down and sleep; and it groweth up they know not
how.”’
We both fell into a reverie. The story and the ballad were finished, and
not a sound broke the silence except the screaming of the sea-fowl, which
led my thoughts wandering back to nights long past, when we dragged the
seine up to our chins in water through the short midsummer night, and
scrambled and rolled over on the beach in boyish glee, after the skate
and mullet, with those now gone; and as I thought and thought, old voices
seemed to call me, old faces looked at me, of playmates, and those nearer
than playmates, now sleeping in the deep deep sea, amid far coral
islands; and old figures seemed to glide out of the mysterious dark along
the still sea floor, as if the ocean were indeed giving up her dead. I
shook myself, turned away, and tried to persuade myself that I was
dreaming. Perhaps I had been doing so. At least, I remember very little
more, till I was roused by the rattling of the chain-cable through the
hawse-hole, opposite the pier-head.
And now, gentle readers, farewell; and farewell, Clovelly, and all the
loving hearts it holds; and farewell, too, the soft still summer weather.
Claude and I are taking our last walk together along the deer-park
cliffs. Lundy is shrouded in the great grey fan of dappled haze which
streams up from the westward, dimming the sickly sun. ‘There is not a
breath the blue wave to curl.’ Yet lo! round Chapman’s Head creeps a
huge bank of polished swell, and bursts in thunder on the cliffs.—Another
follows, and another.—The Atlantic gales are sending in their
avant-courriers of ground-swell: six hours more, and the storm which has
been sweeping over ‘the still-vexed Bermoöthes,’ and bending the tall
palms on West Indian isles, will be roaring through the oak woods of
Devon. The old black buck is calling his does with ominous croakings,
and leading the way slowly into the deepest coverts of the glens. The
stormy petrels, driven in from the Atlantic, are skimming like black
swallows over the bay beneath us. Long strings of sea-fowl are flagging
on steadily at railroad pace, towards the sands and salt-marshes of
Braunton. The herring-boats are hastily hauling their nets—you may see
the fish sparkling like flakes of silver as they come up over the
gunwale; all craft, large and small, are making for the shelter of the
pier. Claude starts this afternoon to sit for six months in Babylonic
smoke, working up his sketches into certain unspeakable pictures, with
which the world will be astonished, or otherwise, at the next Royal
Academy Exhibition; while I, for whom another fortnight of pure western
air remains, am off to well-known streams, to be in time for the autumn
floods, and the shoals of fresh-run salmon trout.