Strange indeed is the attraction of the forest for the minds of men. Not
one or two only, but a great chorus of grateful voices have arisen to
spread abroad its fame. Half the famous writers of modern France have
had their word to say about Fontainebleau. Chateaubriand, Michelet,
Béranger, George Sand, de Senancour, Flaubert, Murger, the brothers
Goncourt, Théodore de Banville, each of these has done something to the
eternal praise and memory of these woods. Even at the very worst of
times, even when the picturesque was anathema in the eyes of all Persons
of Taste, the forest still preserved a certain reputation for beauty. It
was in 1730 that the Abbé Guilbert published his _Historical Description
of the Palace_, _Town_, _and Forest of Fontainebleau_. And very droll it
is to see him, as he tries to set forth his admiration in terms of what
was then permissible. The monstrous rocks, etc., says the Abbé ‘sont
admirées avec surprise des voyageurs qui s’écrient aussitôt avec Horace:
Ut mihi devio rupee et vacuum nemus mirari libet.’ The good man is not
exactly lyrical in his praise; and you see how he sets his back against
Horace as against a trusty oak. Horace, at any rate, was classical. For
the rest, however, the Abbé likes places where many alleys meet; or
which, like the Belle-Étoile, are kept up ‘by a special gardener,’ and
admires at the Table du Roi the labours of the Grand Master of Woods and
Waters, the Sieur de la Falure, ‘qui a fait faire ce magnifique endroit.’
But indeed, it is not so much for its beauty that the forest makes a
claim upon men’s hearts, as for that subtle something, that quality of
the air, that emanation from the old trees, that so wonderfully changes
and renews a weary spirit. Disappointed men, sick Francis Firsts and
vanquished Grand Monarchs, time out of mind have come here for
consolation. Hither perplexed folk have retired out of the press of
life, as into a deep bay-window on some night of masquerade, and here
found quiet and silence, and rest, the mother of wisdom. It is the great
moral spa; this forest without a fountain is itself the great fountain of
Juventius. It is the best place in the world to bring an old sorrow that
has been a long while your friend and enemy; and if, like Béranger’s your
gaiety has run away from home and left open the door for sorrow to come
in, of all covers in Europe, it is here you may expect to find the truant
hid. With every hour you change. The air penetrates through your
clothes, and nestles to your living body. You love exercise and slumber,
long fasting and full meals. You forget all your scruples and live a
while in peace and freedom, and for the moment only. For here, all is
absent that can stimulate to moral feeling. Such people as you see may
be old, or toil-worn, or sorry; but you see them framed in the forest,
like figures on a painted canvas; and for you, they are not people in any
living and kindly sense. You forget the grim contrariety of interests.
You forget the narrow lane where all men jostle together in unchivalrous
contention, and the kennel, deep and unclean, that gapes on either hand
for the defeated. Life is simple enough, it seems, and the very idea of
sacrifice becomes like a mad fancy out of a last night’s dream.
Your ideal is not perhaps high, but it is plain and possible. You become
enamoured of a life of change and movement and the open air, where the
muscles shall be more exercised than the affections. When you have had
your will of the forest, you may visit the whole round world. You may
buckle on your knapsack and take the road on foot. You may bestride a
good nag, and ride forth, with a pair of saddle-bags, into the enchanted
East. You may cross the Black Forest, and see Germany wide-spread before
you, like a map, dotted with old cities, walled and spired, that dream
all day on their own reflections in the Rhine or Danube. You may pass
the spinal cord of Europe and go down from Alpine glaciers to where Italy
extends her marble moles and glasses her marble palaces in the midland
sea. You may sleep in flying trains or wayside taverns. You may be
awakened at dawn by the scream of the express or the small pipe of the
robin in the hedge. For you the rain should allay the dust of the beaten
road; the wind dry your clothes upon you as you walked. Autumn should
hang out russet pears and purple grapes along the lane; inn after inn
proffer you their cups of raw wine; river by river receive your body in
the sultry noon. Wherever you went warm valleys and high trees and
pleasant villages should compass you about; and light fellowships should
take you by the arm, and walk with you an hour upon your way. You may
see from afar off what it will come to in the end—the weather-beaten
red-nosed vagabond, consumed by a fever of the feet, cut off from all
near touch of human sympathy, a waif, an Ishmael, and an outcast. And
yet it will seem well—and yet, in the air of the forest, this will seem
the best—to break all the network bound about your feet by birth and old
companionship and loyal love, and bear your shovelful of phosphates to
and fro, in town country, until the hour of the great dissolvent.
Or, perhaps, you will keep to the cover. For the forest is by itself,
and forest life owns small kinship with life in the dismal land of
labour. Men are so far sophisticated that they cannot take the world as
it is given to them by the sight of their eyes. Not only what they see
and hear, but what they know to be behind, enter into their notion of a
place. If the sea, for instance, lie just across the hills, sea-thoughts
will come to them at intervals, and the tenor of their dreams from time
to time will suffer a sea-change. And so here, in this forest, a
knowledge of its greatness is for much in the effect produced. You
reckon up the miles that lie between you and intrusion. You may walk
before you all day long, and not fear to touch the barrier of your Eden,
or stumble out of fairyland into the land of gin and steam-hammers. And
there is an old tale enhances for the imagination the grandeur of the
woods of France, and secures you in the thought of your seclusion. When
Charles VI. hunted in the time of his wild boyhood near Senlis, there was
captured an old stag, having a collar of bronze about his neck, and these
words engraved on the collar: ‘Cæsar mihi hoc donavit.’ It is no wonder
if the minds of men were moved at this occurrence and they stood aghast
to find themselves thus touching hands with forgotten ages, and following
an antiquity with hound and horn. And even for you, it is scarcely in an
idle curiosity that you ponder how many centuries this stag had carried
its free antlers through the wood, and how many summers and winters had
shone and snowed on the imperial badge. If the extent of solemn wood
could thus safeguard a tall stag from the hunter’s hounds and houses,
might not you also play hide-and-seek, in these groves, with all the
pangs and trepidations of man’s life, and elude Death, the mighty hunter,
for more than the span of human years? Here, also, crash his arrows;
here, in the farthest glade, sounds the gallop of the pale horse. But he
does not hunt this cover with all his hounds, for the game is thin and
small: and if you were but alert and wary, if you lodged ever in the
deepest thickets, you too might live on into later generations and
astonish men by your stalwart age and the trophies of an immemorial
success.
For the forest takes away from you all excuse to die. There is nothing
here to cabin or thwart your free desires. Here all the impudencies of
the brawling world reach you no more. You may count your hours, like
Endymion, by the strokes of the lone woodcutter, or by the progression of
the lights and shadows and the sun wheeling his wide circuit through the
naked heavens. Here shall you see no enemies but winter and rough
weather. And if a pang comes to you at all, it will be a pang of
healthful hunger. All the puling sorrows, all the carking repentance,
all this talk of duty that is no duty, in the great peace, in the pure
daylight of these woods, fall away from you like a garment. And if
perchance you come forth upon an eminence, where the wind blows upon you
large and fresh, and the pines knock their long stems together, like an
ungainly sort of puppets, and see far away over the plain a factory
chimney defined against the pale horizon—it is for you, as for the staid
and simple peasant when, with his plough, he upturns old arms and harness
from the furrow of the glebe. Ay, sure enough, there was a battle there
in the old times; and, sure enough, there is a world out yonder where men
strive together with a noise of oaths and weeping and clamorous dispute.
So much you apprehend by an athletic act of the imagination. A faint
far-off rumour as of Merovingian wars; a legend as of some dead religion.
VI.
A MOUNTAIN TOWN IN FRANCE {175}
A FRAGMENT
1879
_Originally intended to serve as the opening chapter of_ ‘_Travels with a
Donkey in the Cevennes_.’
Le Monastier is the chief place of a hilly canton in Haute Loire, the
ancient Velay. As the name betokens, the town is of monastic origin; and
it still contains a towered bulk of monastery and a church of some
architectural pretensions, the seat of an arch-priest and several vicars.
It stands on the side of hill above the river Gazeille, about fifteen
miles from Le Puy, up a steep road where the wolves sometime pursue the
diligence in winter. The road, which is bound for Vivarais, passes
through the town from end to end in a single narrow street; there you may
see the fountain where women fill their pitchers; there also some old
houses with carved doors and pediment and ornamental work in iron. For
Monastier, like Maybole in Ayrshire, was a sort of country capital, where
the local aristocracy had their town mansions for the winter; and there
is a certain baron still alive and, I am told, extremely penitent, who
found means to ruin himself by high living in this village on the hills.
He certainly has claims to be considered the most remarkable spendthrift
on record. How he set about it, in a place where there are no luxuries
for sale, and where the board at the best inn comes to little more than a
shilling a day, is a problem for the wise. His son, ruined as the family
was, went as far as Paris to sow his wild oats; and so the cases of
father and son mark an epoch in the history of centralisation in France.
Not until the latter had got into the train was the work of Richelieu
complete.
It is a people of lace-makers. The women sit in the streets by groups of
five or six; and the noise of the bobbins is audible from one group to
another. Now and then you will hear one woman clattering off prayers for
the edification of the others at their work. They wear gaudy shawls,
white caps with a gay ribbon about the head, and sometimes a black felt
brigand hat above the cap; and so they give the street colour and
brightness and a foreign air. A while ago, when England largely supplied
herself from this district with the lace called _torchon_, it was not
unusual to earn five francs a day; and five francs in Monastier is worth
a pound in London. Now, from a change in the market, it takes a clever
and industrious work-woman to earn from three to four in the week, or
less than an eighth of what she made easily a few years ago. The tide of
prosperity came and went, as with our northern pitmen, and left nobody
the richer. The women bravely squandered their gains, kept the men in
idleness, and gave themselves up, as I was told, to sweethearting and a
merry life. From week’s end to week’s end it was one continuous gala in
Monastier; people spent the day in the wine-shops, and the drum or the
bagpipes led on the _bourrées_ up to ten at night. Now these dancing
days are over. ‘_Il n’y a plus de jeunesse_,’ said Victor the garçon. I
hear of no great advance in what are thought the essentials of morality;
but the _bourrée_, with its rambling, sweet, interminable music, and
alert and rustic figures, has fallen into disuse, and is mostly
remembered as a custom of the past. Only on the occasion of the fair
shall you hear a drum discreetly in a wine-shop or perhaps one of the
company singing the measure while the others dance. I am sorry at the
change, and marvel once more at the complicated scheme of things upon
this earth, and how a turn of fashion in England can silence so much
mountain merriment in France. The lace-makers themselves have not
entirely forgiven our country-women; and I think they take a special
pleasure in the legend of the northern quarter of the town, called
L’Anglade, because there the English free-lances were arrested and driven
back by the potency of a little Virgin Mary on the wall.
From time to time a market is held, and the town has a season of revival;
cattle and pigs are stabled in the streets; and pickpockets have been
known to come all the way from Lyons for the occasion. Every Sunday the
country folk throng in with daylight to buy apples, to attend mass, and
to visit one of the wine-shops, of which there are no fewer than fifty in
this little town. Sunday wear for the men is a green tailcoat of some
coarse sort of drugget, and usually a complete suit to match. I have
never set eyes on such degrading raiment. Here it clings, there bulges;
and the human body, with its agreeable and lively lines, is turned into a
mockery and laughing-stock. Another piece of Sunday business with the
peasants is to take their ailments to the chemist for advice. It is as
much a matter for Sunday as church-going. I have seen a woman who had
been unable to speak since the Monday before, wheezing, catching her
breath, endlessly and painfully coughing; and yet she had waited upwards
of a hundred hours before coming to seek help, and had the week been
twice as long, she would have waited still. There was a canonical day
for consultation; such was the ancestral habit, to which a respectable
lady must study to conform.
Two conveyances go daily to Le Puy, but they rival each other in polite
concessions rather than in speed. Each will wait an hour or two hours
cheerfully while an old lady does her marketing or a gentleman finishes
the papers in a café. The _Courrier_ (such is the name of one) should
leave Le Puy by two in the afternoon and arrive at Monastier in good on
the return voyage, and arrive at Monastier in good time for a six-o’clock
dinner. But the driver dares not disoblige his customers. He will
postpone his departure again and again, hour after hour; and I have known
the sun to go down on his delay. These purely personal favours, this
consideration of men’s fancies, rather than the hands of a mechanical
clock, as marking the advance of the abstraction, time, makes a more
humorous business of stage-coaching than we are used to see it.
As far as the eye can reach, one swelling line of hill top rises and
falls behind another; and if you climb an eminence, it is only to see new
and father ranges behind these. Many little rivers run from all sides in
cliffy valleys; and one of them, a few miles from Monastier, bears the
great name of Loire. The mean level of the country is a little more than
three thousand feet above the sea, which makes the atmosphere
proportionally brisk and wholesome. There is little timber except pines,
and the greater part of the country lies in moorland pasture. The
country is wild and tumbled rather than commanding; an upland rather than
a mountain district; and the most striking as well as the most agreeable
scenery lies low beside the rivers. There, indeed, you will find many
corners that take the fancy; such as made the English noble choose his
grave by a Swiss streamlet, where nature is at her freshest, and looks as
young as on the seventh morning. Such a place is the course of the
Gazeille, where it waters the common of Monastier and thence downwards
till it joins the Loire; a place to hear birds singing; a place for
lovers to frequent. The name of the river was perhaps suggested by the
sound of its passage over the stones; for it is a great warbler, and at
night, after I was in bed at Monastier, I could hear it go singing down
the valley till I fell asleep.
On the whole, this is a Scottish landscape, although not so noble as the
best in Scotland; and by an odd coincidence, the population is, in its
way, as Scottish as the country. They have abrupt, uncouth, Fifeshire
manners, and accost you, as if you were trespassing, an ‘Où’st-ce que
vous allez?’ only translatable into the Lowland ‘Whaur ye gaun?’ They
keep the Scottish Sabbath. There is no labour done on that day but to
drive in and out the various pigs and sheep and cattle that make so
pleasant a tinkling in the meadows. The lace-makers have disappeared
from the street. Not to attend mass would involve social degradation;
and you may find people reading Sunday books, in particular a sort of
Catholic _Monthly Visitor_ on the doings of Our Lady of Lourdes. I
remember one Sunday, when I was walking in the country, that I fell on a
hamlet and found all the inhabitants, from the patriarch to the baby,
gathered in the shadow of a gable at prayer. One strapping lass stood
with her back to the wall and did the solo part, the rest chiming in
devoutly. Not far off, a lad lay flat on his face asleep among some
straw, to represent the worldly element.
Again, this people is eager to proselytise; and the postmaster’s daughter
used to argue with me by the half-hour about my heresy, until she grew
quite flushed. I have heard the reverse process going on between a
Scotswoman and a French girl; and the arguments in the two cases were
identical. Each apostle based her claim on the superior virtue and
attainments of her clergy, and clenched the business with a threat of
hell-fire. ‘_Pas bong prêtres ici_,’ said the Presbyterian, ‘_bong
prêtres en Ecosse_.’ And the postmaster’s daughter, taking up the same
weapon, plied me, so to speak, with the butt of it instead of the
bayonet. We are a hopeful race, it seems, and easily persuaded for our
good. One cheerful circumstance I note in these guerilla missions, that
each side relies on hell, and Protestant and Catholic alike address
themselves to a supposed misgiving in their adversary’s heart. And I
call it cheerful, for faith is a more supporting quality than
imagination.
Here, as in Scotland, many peasant families boast a son in holy orders.
And here also, the young men have a tendency to emigrate. It is
certainly not poverty that drives them to the great cities or across the
seas, for many peasant families, I was told, have a fortune of at least
40,000 francs. The lads go forth pricked with the spirit of adventure
and the desire to rise in life, and leave their homespun elders grumbling
and wondering over the event. Once, at a village called Laussonne, I met
one of these disappointed parents: a drake who had fathered a wild swan
and seen it take wing and disappear. The wild swan in question was now
an apothecary in Brazil. He had flown by way of Bordeaux, and first
landed in America, bareheaded and barefoot, and with a single halfpenny
in his pocket. And now he was an apothecary! Such a wonderful thing is
an adventurous life! I thought he might as well have stayed at home; but
you never can tell wherein a man’s life consists, nor in what he sets his
pleasure: one to drink, another to marry, a third to write scurrilous
articles and be repeatedly caned in public, and now this fourth, perhaps,
to be an apothecary in Brazil. As for his old father, he could conceive
no reason for the lad’s behaviour. ‘I had always bread for him,’ he
said; ‘he ran away to annoy me. He loved to annoy me. He had no
gratitude.’ But at heart he was swelling with pride over his travelled
offspring, and he produced a letter out of his pocket, where, as he said,
it was rotting, a mere lump of paper rags, and waved it gloriously in the
air. ‘This comes from America,’ he cried, ‘six thousand leagues away!’
And the wine-shop audience looked upon it with a certain thrill.
I soon became a popular figure, and was known for miles in the country.
_Où’st que vous allez_? was changed for me into _Quoi_, _vous rentrez au
Monastier_ and in the town itself every urchin seemed to know my name,
although no living creature could pronounce it. There was one particular
group of lace-makers who brought out a chair for me whenever I went by,
and detained me from my walk to gossip. They were filled with curiosity
about England, its language, its religion, the dress of the women, and
were never weary of seeing the Queen’s head on English postage-stamps, or
seeking for French words in English Journals. The language, in
particular, filled them with surprise.
‘Do they speak _patois_ in England?’ I was once asked; and when I told
them not, ‘Ah, then, French?’ said they.
‘No, no,’ I said, ‘not French.’
‘Then,’ they concluded, ‘they speak _patois_.’
You must obviously either speak French or _patios_. Talk of the force of
logic—here it was in all its weakness. I gave up the point, but
proceeding to give illustrations of my native jargon, I was met with a
new mortification. Of all _patios_ they declared that mine was the most
preposterous and the most jocose in sound. At each new word there was a
new explosion of laughter, and some of the younger ones were glad to rise
from their chairs and stamp about the street in ecstasy; and I looked on
upon their mirth in a faint and slightly disagreeable bewilderment.
‘Bread,’ which sounds a commonplace, plain-sailing monosyllable in
England, was the word that most delighted these good ladies of Monastier;
it seemed to them frolicsome and racy, like a page of Pickwick; and they
all got it carefully by heart, as a stand-by, I presume, for winter
evenings. I have tried it since then with every sort of accent and
inflection, but I seem to lack the sense of humour.
They were of all ages: children at their first web of lace, a stripling
girl with a bashful but encouraging play of eyes, solid married women,
and grandmothers, some on the top of their age and some falling towards
decrepitude. One and all were pleasant and natural, ready to laugh and
ready with a certain quiet solemnity when that was called for by the
subject of our talk. Life, since the fall in wages, had begun to appear
to them with a more serious air. The stripling girl would sometimes
laugh at me in a provocative and not unadmiring manner, if I judge
aright; and one of the grandmothers, who was my great friend of the
party, gave me many a sharp word of judgment on my sketches, my heresy,
or even my arguments, and gave them with a wry mouth and a humorous
twinkle in her eye that were eminently Scottish. But the rest used me
with a certain reverence, as something come from afar and not entirely
human. Nothing would put them at their ease but the irresistible gaiety
of my native tongue. Between the old lady and myself I think there was a
real attachment. She was never weary of sitting to me for her portrait,
in her best cap and brigand hat, and with all her wrinkles tidily
composed, and though she never failed to repudiate the result, she would
always insist upon another trial. It was as good as a play to see her
sitting in judgment over the last. ‘No, no,’ she would say, ‘that is not
it. I am old, to be sure, but I am better-looking than that. We must
try again.’ When I was about to leave she bade me good-bye for this life
in a somewhat touching manner. We should not meet again, she said; it
was a long farewell, and she was sorry. But life is so full of crooks,
old lady, that who knows? I have said good-bye to people for greater
distances and times, and, please God, I mean to see them yet again.
One thing was notable about these women, from the youngest to the oldest,
and with hardly an exception. In spite of their piety, they could twang
off an oath with Sir Toby Belch in person. There was nothing so high or
so low, in heaven or earth or in the human body, but a woman of this
neighbourhood would whip out the name of it, fair and square, by way of
conversational adornment. My landlady, who was pretty and young, dressed
like a lady and avoided _patois_ like a weakness, commonly addressed her
child in the language of a drunken bully. And of all the swearers that I
ever heard, commend me to an old lady in Gondet, a village of the Loire.
I was making a sketch, and her curse was not yet ended when I had
finished it and took my departure. It is true she had a right to be
angry; for here was her son, a hulking fellow, visibly the worse for
drink before the day was well begun. But it was strange to hear her
unwearying flow of oaths and obscenities, endless like a river, and now
and then rising to a passionate shrillness, in the clear and silent air
of the morning. In city slums, the thing might have passed unnoticed;
but in a country valley, and from a plain and honest countrywoman, this
beastliness of speech surprised the ear.
The _Conductor_, as he is called, _of Roads and Bridges_ was my principal
companion. He was generally intelligent, and could have spoken more or
less falsetto on any of the trite topics; but it was his specially to
have a generous taste in eating. This was what was most indigenous in
the man; it was here he was an artist; and I found in his company what I
had long suspected, that enthusiasm and special knowledge are the great
social qualities, and what they are about, whether white sauce or
Shakespeare’s plays, an altogether secondary question.
I used to accompany the Conductor on his professional rounds, and grew to
believe myself an expert in the business. I thought I could make an
entry in a stone-breaker’s time-book, or order manure off the wayside
with any living engineer in France. Gondet was one of the places we
visited together; and Laussonne, where I met the apothecary’s father, was
another. There, at Laussonne, George Sand spent a day while she was
gathering materials for the _Marquis de Villemer_; and I have spoken with
an old man, who was then a child running about the inn kitchen, and who
still remembers her with a sort of reverence. It appears that he spoke
French imperfectly; for this reason George Sand chose him for companion,
and whenever he let slip a broad and picturesque phrase in _patois_, she
would make him repeat it again and again till it was graven in her
memory. The word for a frog particularly pleased her fancy; and it would
be curious to know if she afterwards employed it in her works. The
peasants, who knew nothing of betters and had never so much as heard of
local colour, could not explain her chattering with this backward child;
and to them she seemed a very homely lady and far from beautiful: the
most famous man-killer of the age appealed so little to Velaisian
swine-herds!
On my first engineering excursion, which lay up by Crouzials towards
Mount Mezenc and the borders of Ardèche, I began an improving
acquaintance with the foreman road-mender. He was in great glee at
having me with him, passed me off among his subalterns as the supervising
engineer, and insisted on what he called ‘the gallantry’ of paying for my
breakfast in a roadside wine-shop. On the whole, he was a man of great
weather-wisdom, some spirits, and a social temper. But I am afraid he
was superstitious. When he was nine years old, he had seen one night a
company of _bourgeois et dames qui faisaient la manège avec des chaises_,
and concluded that he was in the presence of a witches’ Sabbath. I
suppose, but venture with timidity on the suggestion, that this may have
been a romantic and nocturnal picnic party. Again, coming from Pradelles
with his brother, they saw a great empty cart drawn by six enormous
horses before them on the road. The driver cried aloud and filled the
mountains with the cracking of his whip. He never seemed to go faster
than a walk, yet it was impossible to overtake him; and at length, at the
comer of a hill, the whole equipage disappeared bodily into the night.
At the time, people said it was the devil _qui s’amusait à faire ca_.
I suggested there was nothing more likely, as he must have some
amusement.
The foreman said it was odd, but there was less of that sort of thing
than formerly. ‘_C’est difficile_,’ he added, ‘_à expliquer_.’
When we were well up on the moors and the _Conductor_ was trying some
road-metal with the gauge—
‘Hark!’ said the foreman, ‘do you hear nothing?’
We listened, and the wind, which was blowing chilly out of the east,
brought a faint, tangled jangling to our ears.
‘It is the flocks of Vivarais,’ said he.
For every summer, the flocks out of all Ardèche are brought up to pasture
on these grassy plateaux.
Here and there a little private flock was being tended by a girl, one
spinning with a distaff, another seated on a wall and intently making
lace. This last, when we addressed her, leaped up in a panic and put out
her arms, like a person swimming, to keep us at a distance, and it was
some seconds before we could persuade her of the honesty of our
intentions.
The _Conductor_ told me of another herdswoman from whom he had once asked
his road while he was yet new to the country, and who fled from him,
driving her beasts before her, until he had given up the information in
despair. A tale of old lawlessness may yet be read in these uncouth
timidities.
The winter in these uplands is a dangerous and melancholy time. Houses
are snowed up, and way-farers lost in a flurry within hail of their own
fireside. No man ventures abroad without meat and a bottle of wine,
which he replenishes at every wine-shop; and even thus equipped he takes
the road with terror. All day the family sits about the fire in a foul
and airless hovel, and equally without work or diversion. The father may
carve a rude piece of furniture, but that is all that will be done until
the spring sets in again, and along with it the labours of the field. It
is not for nothing that you find a clock in the meanest of these mountain
habitations. A clock and an almanac, you would fancy, were indispensable
in such a life . . .
VII.
RANDOM MEMORIES: _ROSA QUO LOCORUM_
Through what little channels, by what hints and premonitions, the
consciousness of the man’s art dawns first upon the child, it should be
not only interesting but instructive to inquire. A matter of curiosity
to-day, it will become the ground of science to-morrow. From the mind of
childhood there is more history and more philosophy to be fished up than
from all the printed volumes in a library. The child is conscious of an
interest, not in literature but in life. A taste for the precise, the
adroit, or the comely in the use of words, comes late; but long before
that he has enjoyed in books a delightful dress rehearsal of experience.
He is first conscious of this material—I had almost said this
practical—pre-occupation; it does not follow that it really came the
first. I have some old fogged negatives in my collection that would seem
to imply a prior stage ‘The Lord is gone up with a shout, and God with
the sound of a trumpet’—memorial version, I know not where to find the
text—rings still in my ear from my first childhood, and perhaps with
something of my nurses accent. There was possibly some sort of image
written in my mind by these loud words, but I believe the words
themselves were what I cherished. I had about the same time, and under
the same influence—that of my dear nurse—a favourite author: it is
possible the reader has not heard of him—the Rev. Robert Murray M’Cheyne.
My nurse and I admired his name exceedingly, so that I must have been
taught the love of beautiful sounds before I was breeched; and I remember
two specimens of his muse until this day:—
‘Behind the hills of Naphtali
The sun went slowly down,
Leaving on mountain, tower, and tree,
A tinge of golden brown.’
There is imagery here, and I set it on one side. The other—it is but a
verse—not only contains no image, but is quite unintelligible even to my
comparatively instructed mind, and I know not even how to spell the
outlandish vocable that charmed me in my childhood:
‘Jehovah Tschidkenu is nothing to her’;—{190}
I may say, without flippancy, that he was nothing to me either, since I
had no ray of a guess of what he was about; yet the verse, from then to
now, a longer interval than the life of a generation, has continued to
haunt me.
I have said that I should set a passage distinguished by obvious and
pleasing imagery, however faint; for the child thinks much in images,
words are very live to him, phrases that imply a picture eloquent beyond
their value. Rummaging in the dusty pigeon-holes of memory, I came once
upon a graphic version of the famous Psalm, ‘The Lord is my shepherd’:
and from the places employed in its illustration, which are all in the
immediate neighbourhood of a house then occupied by my father, I am able,
to date it before the seventh year of my age, although it was probably
earlier in fact. The ‘pastures green’ were represented by a certain
suburban stubble-field, where I had once walked with my nurse, under an
autumnal sunset, on the banks of the Water of Leith: the place is long
ago built up; no pastures now, no stubble-fields; only a maze of little
streets and smoking chimneys and shrill children. Here, in the fleecy
person of a sheep, I seemed to myself to follow something unseen,
unrealised, and yet benignant; and close by the sheep in which I was
incarnated—as if for greater security—rustled the skirt, of my nurse.
‘Death’s dark vale’ was a certain archway in the Warriston Cemetery: a
formidable yet beloved spot, for children love to be afraid,—in measure
as they love all experience of vitality. Here I beheld myself some paces
ahead (seeing myself, I mean, from behind) utterly alone in that uncanny
passage; on the one side of me a rude, knobby, shepherd’s staff, such as
cheers the heart of the cockney tourist, on the other a rod like a
billiard cue, appeared to accompany my progress; the stiff sturdily
upright, the billiard cue inclined confidentially, like one whispering,
towards my ear. I was aware—I will never tell you how—that the presence
of these articles afforded me encouragement. The third and last of my
pictures illustrated words:—
‘My table Thou hast furnished
In presence of my foes:
My head Thou dost with oil anoint,
And my cup overflows’:
and this was perhaps the most interesting of the series. I saw myself
seated in a kind of open stone summer-house at table; over my shoulder a
hairy, bearded, and robed presence anointed me from an authentic
shoe-horn; the summer-house was part of the green court of a ruin, and
from the far side of the court black and white imps discharged against me
ineffectual arrows. The picture appears arbitrary, but I can trace every
detail to its source, as Mr. Brock analysed the dream of Alan Armadale.
The summer-house and court were muddled together out of Billings’
_Antiquities of Scotland_; the imps conveyed from Bagster’s _Pilgrim’s
Progress_; the bearded and robed figure from any one of the thousand
Bible pictures; and the shoe-horn was plagiarised from an old illustrated
Bible, where it figured in the hand of Samuel anointing Saul, and had
been pointed out to me as a jest by my father. It was shown me for a
jest, remark; but the serious spirit of infancy adopted it in earnest.
Children are all classics; a bottle would have seemed an intermediary too
trivial—that divine refreshment of whose meaning I had no guess; and I
seized on the idea of that mystic shoe-horn with delight, even as, a
little later, I should have written flagon, chalice, hanaper, beaker, or
any word that might have appealed to me at the moment as least
contaminate with mean associations. In this string of pictures I believe
the gist of the psalm to have consisted; I believe it had no more to say
to me; and the result was consolatory. I would go to sleep dwelling with
restfulness upon these images; they passed before me, besides, to an
appropriate music; for I had already singled out from that rude psalm the
one lovely verse which dwells in the minds of all, not growing old, not
disgraced by its association with long Sunday tasks, a scarce conscious
joy in childhood, in age a companion thought:—
‘In pastures green Thou leadest me,
The quiet waters by.’
The remainder of my childish recollections are all of the matter of what
was read to me, and not of any manner in the words. If these pleased me
it was unconsciously; I listened for news of the great vacant world upon
whose edge I stood; I listened for delightful plots that I might re-enact
in play, and romantic scenes and circumstances that I might call up
before me, with closed eyes, when I was tired of Scotland, and home, and
that weary prison of the sick-chamber in which I lay so long in durance.
_Robinson Crusoe_; some of the books of that cheerful, ingenious,
romantic soul, Mayne Reid; and a work rather gruesome and bloody for a
child, but very picturesque, called _Paul Blake_; these are the three
strongest impressions I remember: _The Swiss Family Robinson_ came next,
_longo intervallo_. At these I played, conjured up their scenes, and
delighted to hear them rehearsed unto seventy times seven. I am not sure
but what _Paul Blake_ came after I could read. It seems connected with a
visit to the country, and an experience unforgettable. The day had been
warm; H--- and I had played together charmingly all day in a sandy
wilderness across the road; then came the evening with a great flash of
colour and a heavenly sweetness in the air. Somehow my play-mate had
vanished, or is out of the story, as the sages say, but I was sent into
the village on an errand; and, taking a book of fairy tales, went down
alone through a fir-wood, reading as I walked. How often since then has
it befallen me to be happy even so; but that was the first time: the
shock of that pleasure I have never since forgot, and if my mind serves
me to the last, I never shall, for it was then that I knew I loved
reading.