cane me at one school, and they did try once, but I never went back
again after.” ... On finishing her lunch, she got up and strode out
of the room silently, without a farewell. She was shorter than I had
guessed, but more unforgettable than Prince Lee Boo. I put the book
away unopened. Even what passes for a good book is troublesome to read
after a few days out of doors, and the highest power of most of them
is to convey an invitation to sleep. And yet I thought of one writer
at Wells, and that was Mr. W. H. Hudson, who has written of it more
than once. He says that it is the only city where the green woodpecker
is to be heard. It comes into his new book, “Adventures among Birds,”
because it was here that he first satisfied his wish to be in a belfry
during the bell-ringing and hear “a symphony from the days of the
giants, composed (when insane) by a giant Tschaikovsky to be performed
on ‘instruments of unknown form’ and gigantic size.” But the book is
really all about birds and his journeys in search of them, chiefly in
the southern half of England. It is one of his best country books.
It is, in fact, the best book entirely about birds that is known to
me. The naturalist may hesitate to admit it, though he knows that no
such descriptions of birds’ songs and calls are to be found elsewhere,
and he cannot deny that no other pages reveal English birds in a wild
state so vividly, so happily, so beautifully. Mr. Hudson is in no need
of recommendation among naturalists. This particular claim of his is
mentioned only in order to impress a class of readers who might confuse
him with the fancy dramatic naturalists, and the other class who will
appreciate the substantial miracle of a naturalist and an imaginative
artist in one and in harmony.
Were men to disappear they might be reconstructed from the Bible and
the Russian novelists; and, to put it briefly, Mr. Hudson so writes of
birds that if ever, in spite of his practical work, his warnings and
indignant scorn, they should cease to exist, and should leave us to
ourselves on a benighted planet, we should have to learn from him what
birds were.
Many people, even “lovers of Nature,” would be inclined to look for
small beer in a book with the title of “Adventures among Birds.” If
they are ignorant of Mr. Hudson’s writings, they are not to blame,
since bird books are, as a rule, small beer. Most writers condescend
to birds or have not the genius to keep them alive in print, whether
or not they have the eternal desire “to convey to others,” as Mr.
Hudson says, “some faint sense or suggestion of the wonder and delight
which may be found in Nature.” He does not condescend to birds, “these
loveliest of our fellow-beings,” as he calls them, “these which give
greatest beauty and lustre to the world.” He travels “from county to
county viewing many towns and villages, conversing with persons of all
ages and conditions,” and when these persons are his theme he writes
like a master, like an old master perhaps, as everybody knows, who
has read his “Green Mansions,” “The Purple Land,” and “South American
Sketches.” It might, therefore, be taken for granted that such an
artist would not be likely to handle birds unless he could do so with
the same reality and vitality as men. And this is what he does.
His chief pleasure from his childhood on the Pampas has been in wild
birds; he has delighted in their voices above all sounds. “Relations,”
he calls the birds, “with knowing, emotional, and thinking brains like
ours in their heads, and with senses like ours, only brighter. Their
beauty and grace so much beyond ours, and their faculty of flight which
enables them to return to us each year from such remote, outlandish
places, their winged, swift souls in winged bodies, do not make them
uncanny, but only fairy-like.”
Only the book itself can persuade the reader of the extraordinary love
and knowledge of birds which have thus been nourished. If I were to
quote the passage where he speaks of his old desire to pursue wild
birds over many lands, “to follow knowledge like a sinking star, to
be and to know much until I became a name for always wandering with
a hungry heart;” or where he declares that the golden oriole’s clear
whistle was more to him “than the sight of towns, villages, castles,
ruins, and cathedrals, and more than adventures among the people;” or
where he calls being “present, in a sense invisible”--with the aid of
silence and binoculars--“in the midst of the domestic circle of beings
of a different order, another world than ours,” nearly every one would
probably pronounce him an extravagant sentimentalist, a fanatic, or,
worst of all, an exaggerator. He is none of these. When he writes of
his first and only pet bird and its escapes, there is no pettiness
or mere prettiness: it is not on the human scale, yet it is equal to
a story of gods or men. He is an artist, with a singular power of
sympathizing with wild life, especially that of birds. Their slender
or full throated songs, the “great chorus of wild, ringing, jubilant
cries,” when “the giant crane that hath a trumpet sound” assembles, the
South American crested screamers counting the hours “when at intervals
during the night they all burst out singing like one bird, and the
powerful ringing voices of the incalculable multitude produce an effect
as of tens of thousands of great chiming bells, and the listener is
shaken by the tempest of sound, and the earth itself appears to tremble
beneath him;” the colouring of birds, brilliant or delicate, their
soaring or manœuvring or straight purposed flight, their games and
battles, all their joyous, or fierce, passionate, and agitated cries
and motions, delight him at least as much as music delights its most
sensitive and experienced lovers. At sight of the pheasant he cannot
help loving it, much as he hates the havoc of which it is the cause.
There is a very large variety in his enjoyment. It is exquisite and it
is vigorous; it is tender and at times almost superhuman in grimness.
It is a satisfaction of his senses, of his curious intelligence, and
of his highest nature. The green eggs of the little bittern thrill
him “like some shining supernatural thing or some heavenly melody.”
He is cheerful when his binoculars are bringing him close to birds
“at their little games”--a kestrel being turned off by starlings, a
heron alighting on another heron’s back, a band of starlings detaching
themselves from their flock to join some wild geese going at right
angles to their course; for “the playful spirit is universal among
them.” The songs of blackbird, nightingale, thrush, and marsh warbler
delight him, and yet at other times the loss of the soaring species,
eagles and kites, oppresses him, and he speaks contemptuously of “miles
on miles of wood, millions of ancient noble trees, a haunt of little
dicky birds and tame pheasants.” His vision of the Somerset of the
lake-dwellers, of “the paradise of birds in its reedy inland sea, its
lake of Athelney,” makes a feast for the eyes and ears. Moreover, he
is never a mere bird man, and the result of this variety of interest
and pleasure on the part of a man of Mr. Hudson’s imagination, culture,
and experience, is that while his birds are intensely alive in many
different ways, and always intensely birdlike, presenting a loveliness
beyond that of idealized or supernaturalized women and children, yet
at the same time their humanity was never before so apparent. The
skylark is to him both bird and spirit, and one proof of the intense
reality of his love is his ease in passing, as he does in several
places, out of this world into a mythic, visionary, or very ancient
world. This also is a proof of the powers of his style. At first sight,
at least to the novice who is beginning to distinguish between styles
without discriminating, Mr. Hudson’s is merely a rather exceptionally
unstudied English, perhaps a little old-fashioned. Nothing could be
farther from the truth. It is, in fact, a combination, as curious as
it is ripe and profound, of the eloquent and the colloquial, now the
one, now the other, predominating in a variety of shades which make it
wonderfully expressive for purposes of narrative and of every species
of description--precise, humorous, rapturous, and sublime. And not
the least reason of its power is that it never paints a bird without
showing the hand and the heart that paints it. It reveals the author in
the presence of birds just as much as birds in the presence, visible or
invisible, of the author. The series of his books is now a long one,
not enough, certainly, yet a feast, and the last is among the three or
four which we shall remember and re-read most often.
I left Wells by a road passing the South-Western Railway station, and
admired the grass island parting the roads to the passengers’ and the
goods’ entrances. The curved edge of the turf was as clean as that
of the most select lawn; the grass looked as if it had never been
trodden. I now rode close to Hay Hill on my right--a dull, isolated
heave of earth, striped downwards by hedges so as to resemble a country
umbrella and its ribs. Motor cars overtook me. At Coxley Pound I
overtook a peat-seller’s cart. The air was perfumed with something like
willow-plait which I did not identify. The wind was light, but blew
from behind me, and was strong enough to strip the dead ivy leaves from
an ash tree, but not to stop the tortoiseshell butterfly sauntering
against it.
[Illustration: GLASTONBURY TOR.
“For three miles I was in the flat green land of Queen’s Sedge Moor
drained by straight sedgy water-courses along which grow lines of elm,
willow, or pine. Glastonbury Tor mounted up out of the flat before me
like a huge tumulus--almost bare, but tipped by St. Michael’s Tower.”
]
For three miles I was in the flat green land of Queen’s Sedgemoor,
drained by straight sedgy watercourses, along which grow lines of elm,
willow, or pine. Glastonbury Tor mounted up out of the flat before
me, like a huge tumulus, almost bare, but tipped by St. Michael’s
tower. Soon the ground began to rise on my left, and the crooked apple
orchards of Avalon came down to the roadside, their turf starred by
innumerable daisies and gilt celandines. Winding round the base of the
Tor, I rode into Glastonbury, and down its broad, straight hill past
St. John the Baptist Church and the notoriously mediæval “Pilgrim’s
Inn,” and many pastry cooks. Another peat cart was going down the
street. The church stopped me because of its tower and the grass
and daisies and half-dozen comfortable box tombs of its churchyard,
irregularly placed and not quite upright. One of the tombs advertised
in plain lettering the fact that John Down, the occupant, who died in
1829 at the age of eighty-three, had “for more than sixty years owned
the abbey.” He _owned_ the abbey, nothing more; at least his friends
and relatives were content to introduce him to posterity as the man
who “for more than sixty years owned the abbey.” If the dead were
permitted to own anything here below, doubtless he would own it still.
Outside the railings two boys were doing the cleverest thing I saw on
this journey. They were keeping a whip-top, and that a carrot-shaped
one, spinning by kicking it in turns. Which was an accomplishment more
worthy of being commemorated on a tombstone than the fact that you
owned Glastonbury Abbey. The interior of the church is made equally
broad at both ends by the lack of screen or of any division of the
chancel. It is notable also for a marble monument in the south-west
corner, retaining the last of its pale blue and rose colouring. A high
chest, carved with camels, forms the resting-place for a marble man
with a head like Dante’s, wearing a rosary over his long robes.
At first I thought I should not see more of the abbey than can be seen
from the road--the circular abbot’s kitchen with pointed cap, and the
broken ranges of majestic tall arches that guide the eye to the shops
and dwellings of Glastonbury. While I was buying a postcard the woman
of the shop reminded me of Joseph of Arimathea’s thorn, and how it
blossomed at Christmas. “Did you ever see it blossoming at Christmas?”
I asked. “Once,” she said, and she told me how the first winter she
spent in Glastonbury was a very mild one, and she went out with her
brothers for a walk on Christmas day in the afternoon. She remembered
that they wore no coats. And they saw blossom on the holy thorn. After
all, I did go through the turnstile to see the abbey. The high pointed
arches were magnificent, the turf under them perfect. The elms stood
among the ruins like noble savages among Greeks. The orchards hard
by made me wish that they were blossoming. But excavations had been
going on; clay was piled up and cracking in the sun, and there were
tin sheds and scaffolding. I am not an archæologist, and I left it. As
I was approaching the turnstile an old hawthorn within a few yards of
it, against a south wall, drew my attention. For it was covered with
young green leaves and with bright crimson berries almost as numerous.
Going up to look more closely, I saw what was more wonderful--Blossom.
Not one flower, nor one spray only, but several sprays. I had not
up till now seen even blackthorn flowers, though towards the end of
February I had heard of hawthorn flowering near Bradford. As this had
not been picked, I conceitedly drew the conclusion that it had not been
observed. Perhaps its conspicuousness had saved it. It was Lady Day. I
had found the Spring in that bush of green, white, and crimson. So warm
and bright was the sun, and so blue the sky, and so white the clouds,
that not for a moment did the possibility of Winter returning cross my
mind.
Pleasure at finding the May sent me up Wearyall Hill, instead of along
the customary road straight out of Glastonbury. The hill projects
from the earth like a ship a mile long, whose stern is buried in the
town, its prow uplifted westward towards Bridgwater; and the road took
me up as on a slanting deck, until I saw Glastonbury entire below me,
all red-tiled except the ruins and the towers of St. John and St.
Benedict. At the western edge the town’s two red gasometers stood
among blossoming plum trees, and beyond that spread the flat land. The
Quantocks, fifteen miles distant, formed but a plain wall, wooded and
flat-topped, on the horizon northward.
Instead of continuing up the broad green deck of Wearyall Hill, I went
along the west flank of it by road, descending through meadows and
apple trees to the flat land. I crossed the river Brue immediately by
Pomparles bridge, and in half a mile was in the town of Street. It is
a mostly new conglomeration of houses dominated by the chimney and the
squat tower of Clark’s Boot Factory; and since it is both flat and
riverless, it sprawls about with a dullness approaching the sordid. A
rough-barked elm tree, a hundred and fifty years old, slung on a timber
carriage outside the “Street Inn,” was the chief sign of Spring here
after the dust.
I was very glad to see the flat slowly swelling up at last to the
long ridge of the Polden Hills, which was soon to carry my road.
Walton, the next village, is a winding hamlet of thatched cottages,
pink, yellow, and stone-coloured, alternating with gardens, plums in
blossom, the vicarage trees and shrubbery, and the green yard of a
quaint apsidal farmhouse, once the parsonage. It has a flagged pavement
on the right, trodden solely by a policeman. The road was in the
power of a steam-roller and its merry men, but the fowls of the old
parsonage presented the only immediate signs of life. The plum blossom
and new green leaves in hedge and border were spotless at Walton, its
wallflowers very sweet on the untroubled air.
Thus I came clear of Street and the flat land. Outside of Walton I was
in a country consisting of ups and downs rather than undulations, a
grass country mainly, with orchards and hedges, elms in the hedges,
pigs and sheep in the orchards. After the flat it was blessed. Perhaps
it was not beautiful. It had character, but without easily definable
features, and it fell an easy victim to such an accident as the
absurdly dull stucco “Albion” inn, which appeared to have been designed
for Pevensey or Croydon. Nevertheless, a sloping orchard of bowed apple
trees sweeping the grass with their long, arched branches, and the
smell of peat smoke, counterbalanced the “Albion.” At Ashcott, where
a man is free to choose between very good water from a fountain on the
right and the coloured drinks of the “Bell” opposite, I was two hundred
feet up. I went into the church--a delightful place for a retired
deity--and enjoyed this inscription on an oval tablet of marble, behind
the pulpit, relating to the “remains” of Joseph Toms, who died in 1807,
at the age of sixteen,--
“This youth was an apprentice to a grocer in Bristol, and as long as
health permitted proved that inclination no less than duty prompted
the union of strict integrity with industry. During his illness unto
death he was calm, resigned, and full of hope. His late master has
erected this small tribute to perpetuate the worth of so promising a
character.”
My road ran along the ridge of the Poldens, and, after Ashcott, touched
but a solitary house or two. One set of villages lay to the south or
left, just above the levels of Sedgemoor, but below the hills. Another
set lay below to the north, each with its attendant level--Shapwick
Heath, Catcott Heath, Edington Heath, Chilton Moor, Woolavington
Level--beyond. Shapwick I turned aside to visit. The village is
scattered along a parallelogram of roads and cross lanes. An old manor
house, low and screened by cedars, stands apart. The church, of clean,
rough stone, with a central tower, is in a cedared green space at
a corner, having roads on two sides, a farm and an apple orchard on
the others; and trees have supplanted cottages on one roadside. A
flagged path leads among the tombstones to the church door. One of the
inscriptions that caught my eye was that in memory of Joe Whitcombe,
fifty years a groom and factotum in the Strangways family at the manor
house, who died at the age of sixty-four in 1892. Along with these
facts are the lines,--
“An orchard in bloom in the sunny spring
To me is a wondrous lovely thing.”
Very different from Old Joe’s are the epitaphs inside the church, the
work largely, I believe, of a former vicar, G. H. Templer, who built
the big blank vicarage with its square, high-walled fruit garden and
double range of stables, and planted cedars and cork trees. The epitaph
of Lieut.-Col. Isaac Easton of the East India Company is a fair sample
of this practically imperishable prose,--
“Through all the gradations of military duty, his love of Enterprise,
his Valour, his Prudence, and Humanity, obtained the admiration and
affection of his fellow-soldiers with the confidence and commendation
of that government which knew as well to distinguish as to reward real
merit. In the more familiar walks of private life, all who knew him
were eager to approve and to applaud the brilliant energy of his mind
and the polished affability of his manners. His heart glowed with
all the sensibility which forms the genuine source of real goodness
and greatness, with gratitude to his benefactor, with generosity to
his friend, and liberality to mankind. The sudden loss of so many
virtues and so many amiable qualities, who that enjoyed his confidence
or shared his conviviality can recall without a sigh or a tear? With
a constitution impaired by the severities of unremitted service and
the rigours of an oppressive climate, he returned, to the fond hope
of enjoying on his native soil the well-earned recompense of his
honourable labours, when a premature death hurried him to his grave in
1780, at the age of 45.”
Templer’s position in prose is the same as that of Jolliffe’s encomiast
in verse at Kilmersdon. The relation of his work to life at Shapwick in
the eighteenth century is about as close as that of the “Arcadia” to
Sidney’s age. More telling are the inscriptions of two men named Cator
and Graham, who were killed during a fight with a French privateer
in the Bay of Bengal in October 1800. The Bulls and Strangways have
big slabs; the Bulls adding the blue and crimson of their arms to
the chancel. Not less silent than the church was the street leading
down towards the manor house and railway station, silent except for a
transitory twitter of goldfinches. The one shop had its blinds drawn
in honour of early closing day. It is a peaceful neighbourhood, where
every one brews his own cider and burns the black or the inflammable
ruddy peat from the moor. A corner where there are a beautiful chestnut
and some waste grass provides a camping ground for gypsies from
Salisbury and elsewhere; and it seemed fitting that men and boys should
spend their idle hours in the lane at marbles. It is famous, if at all,
since the battle of Sedgemoor, for giving a home to F. R. Havergal and
an occasional resting-place to Churton Collins.
Very still, silvery, and silent was the by-road by which I rode up
through ploughland back again to the ridge. Lest I had missed anything,
I turned away from my destination for a mile towards Ashcott. I was for
most of the distance in Loxley Wood. Primroses, as far as I could see,
clustered thick round the felled oaks, the fagot heaps, and the tufts
of last year’s growth on the stoles. A few stones on the right inside
the wood are called Swayne’s Jumps, and it is related that a prisoner
of the name, whether in Monmouth’s or Cromwell’s time I forget, escaped
by means of some tremendous jumps there, taken when he was pretending
to show his captors how they ought to jump.
Even without the wood this road was beautiful. For it was bordered for
some way on the left by a broad grass strip planted with oaks, and not
common oaks, but trees all based on small moss-gilded pedestals of
their own roots above the earth, their bark and branches silver, their
main limbs velveted with moss and plumed with polypody ferns. Moreover,
they have filled the few gaps with young trees. On the right, after
coming to the end of Loxley Wood and before the signpost of Greinton, I
saw a rough waste strip of uneven breadth, partly overgrown by bushes
from the hedge and by pine trees. Here ran the rank of telegraph posts,
and in the grass were remains of fires. A hundred yards later, and as
far as the turning of Shapwick, the waste was quite a little rushy
common fed by horses.
Turning once more westward and again piercing Loxley Wood, the wayside
strip there consecrated to the oak avenue ceased, but that it had
once been prolonged far along the road was plain, whether it had been
swallowed up by wood or meadow, or hedged off and planted with larches
or apple trees, or ploughed up, or usurped by cottage and garden. Shorn
thus, the road travels four miles of a ridge as straight and sharp as
the Hog’s Back. It was delicious easy riding, with no company but that
of a linnet muttering sweetly in the new-green larches, and a blackbird
or two hurrying and spluttering under the hedge.