To write at Oxford of anything but Oxford requires, on the part of
the sentimental tourist, no small power of mental abstraction. Yet
I have it at heart to pay to three or four other scenes recently
visited the debt of an enjoyment hardly less profound than my relish
for this scholastic paradise. First among these is the cathedral city
of Lichfield—the city, I say, because Lichfield has a character of
its own apart from its great ecclesiastical feature. In the centre
of its little market-place—dullest and sleepiest of provincial
market-places—rises a huge effigy of Dr. Johnson, the _genius loci_,
who was constructed, humanly, with very nearly as large an architecture
as the great abbey. The Doctor’s statue, which is of some inexpensive
composite painted a shiny brown, and of no great merit of design, fills
out the vacant dulness of the little square in much the same way as
his massive personality occupies—with just a margin for Garrick—the
record of his native town. In one of the volumes of Croker’s “Boswell”
is a steel plate of the old Johnsonian birth-house, by the aid of
a vague recollection of which I detected the dwelling beneath its
modernised frontage. It bears no mural inscription and, save for a
hint of antiquity in the receding basement, with pillars supporting the
floor above, seems in no especial harmony with Johnson’s time or fame.
Lichfield in general appeared to me indeed to have little to say about
her great son beyond the fact that the smallness and the sameness and
the dulness, amid which it is so easy to fancy a great intellectual
appetite turning sick with inanition, may help to explain the Doctor’s
subsequent almost ferocious fondness for London. I walked about the
silent streets, trying to repeople them with wigs and short-clothes,
and, while I lingered near the cathedral, endeavoured to guess the
message of its gothic graces to Johnson’s ponderous classicism. But I
achieved but a colourless picture at the best, and the most vivid image
in my mind’s eye was that of the London coach facing towards Temple Bar
with the young author of “Rasselas” scowling near-sightedly from the
cheapest seat. With him goes the interest of Lichfield town. The place
is stale without being really antique. It is as if that prodigious
temperament had absorbed and appropriated its original vitality.
If every dull provincial town, however, formed but a girdle of quietude
to a cathedral as rich as that of Lichfield, one would thank it for
letting one alone. Lichfield cathedral is great among churches,
and bravely performs the prime duty of objects of its order—that
of seeming for the time (to minds unsophisticated by architectural
culture) the finest, on the whole, of all such objects. This one
is rather oddly placed, on the slope of a hill, the particular spot
having been chosen, I believe, because sanctified by the sufferings
of certain primitive martyrs; but it is fine to see how its upper
portions surmount any crookedness of posture and its great towers
overtake in mid-air the conditions of perfect symmetry. The close is
extraordinarily attractive; a long sheet of water expands behind it
and, besides leading the eye off into a sweet green landscape, renders
the inestimable service of reflecting the three spires as they rise
above the great trees which mask the Palace and the Deanery. These
august abodes edge the northern side of the slope, and behind their
huge gate-posts and close-wrought gates the atmosphere of the Georgian
era seems to abide. Before them stretches a row of huge elms, which
must have been old when Johnson was young; and between these and the
long-buttressed wall of the cathedral, you may stroll to and fro among
as pleasant a mixture of influences (I imagine) as any in England.
You can stand back here, too, from the west front further than in
many cases, and examine at your ease its lavish decoration. You are
perhaps a trifle too much at your ease, for you soon discover what
a more cursory glance might not betray, that the immense façade has
been covered with stucco and paint, that an effigy of Charles II,
in wig and plumes and trunk-hose, of almost gothic grotesqueness,
surmounts the middle window; that the various other statues of saints
and kings have but recently climbed into their niches; and that the
whole expanse is in short an imposture. All this was done some fifty
years ago, in the taste of that day as to restoration, and yet it but
partially mitigates the impressiveness of the high façade, with its
brace of spires, and the great embossed and image-fretted surface, to
which the lowness of the portals (the too frequent reproach of English
abbeys) seems to give a loftier reach. Passing beneath one of these
low portals, however, I found myself gazing down as noble a church
vista as any you need desire. The cathedral is of magnificent length,
and the screen between nave and choir has been removed, so that from
stem to stern, as one may say, of the great vessel of the church, it
is all a mighty avenue of multitudinous slender columns, terminating
in what seems a great screen of ruby and sapphire and topaz—one of the
finest east windows in England. The cathedral is narrow in proportion
to its length; it is the long-drawn aisle of the poet in perfection,
and there is something grandly elegant in the unity of effect produced
by this unobstructed perspective. The charm is increased by a singular
architectural fantasy. Standing in the centre of the doorway, you
perceive that the eastern wall does not directly face you, and that
from the beginning of the choir the receding aisle deflects slightly
to the left, in reported suggestion of the droop of the Saviour’s head
on the cross. Here again Mr. Gilbert Scott has lately laboured to no
small purpose of _un_doing, it would appear—undoing the misdeeds of
the last century. This extraordinary period expended an incalculable
amount of imagination in proving that it had none. Universal whitewash
was the least of its offences. But this has been scraped away and the
solid stonework left to speak for itself, the delicate capitals and
cornices disencrusted and discreetly rechiselled and the whole temple
æsthetically rededicated. Its most beautiful feature, happily, has
needed no repair, for its perfect beauty has been its safeguard. The
great choir window of Lichfield is the noblest glasswork before the
spell of which one’s soul has become simple. I remember nowhere colours
so chaste and grave, and yet so rich and true, or a cluster of designs
so piously decorative and yet so vivified. Such a window as this seems
to me the most sacred ornament of a great church; to be, not like vault
and screen and altar, the dim contingent promise to the spirit, but the
very redemption of the whole vow. This Lichfield glass is not the less
interesting for being visibly of foreign origin. Exceeding so obviously
as it does the range of English genius in this line, it indicates at
least the heavenly treasure stored up in continental churches. It dates
from the early sixteenth century, and was transferred hither sixty
years ago from a decayed Belgian abbey. This, however, is not all of
Lichfield. You have not seen it till you have strolled and restrolled
along the close on every side, and watched the three spires constantly
change their relation as you move and pause. Nothing can well be finer
than the combination of the two lesser ones soaring equally in front
with the third riding tremendously the magnificently sustained line
of the roof. At a certain distance against the sky this long ridge
seems something infinite and the great spire to sit astride of it
like a giant mounted on a mastodon. Your sense of the huge mass of the
building is deepened by the fact that though the central steeple is of
double the elevation of the others, you see it, from some points, borne
back in a perspective which drops it to half their stature and lifts
them into immensity. But it would take long to tell all that one sees
and fancies and thinks in a lingering walk about so great a church as
this.
[Illustration: LICHFIELD CATHEDRAL]
[Illustration: THE THREE SPIRES OF LICHFIELD]
To walk in quest of any object that one has more or less tenderly
dreamed of, to find your way, to steal upon it softly, to see at
last, if it be church or castle, the tower-tops peeping above elms or
beeches—to push forward with a rush, and emerge and pause and draw that
first long breath which is the compromise between so many sensations:
this is a pleasure left to the tourist even after the broad glare of
photography has dissipated so many of the sweet mysteries of travel;
even in a season when he is fatally apt to meet a dozen fellow pilgrims
returning from the shrine, each as big a fool, so to speak, as he
ever was, or to overtake a dozen more telegraphing their impressions
down the line as they arrive. Such a pleasure I lately enjoyed quite
in its perfection, in a walk to Haddon Hall, along a meadow-path
by the Wye, in this interminable English twilight which I am never
weary of admiring watch in hand. Haddon Hall lies among Derbyshire
hills, in a region infested, I was about to write, by Americans.
But I achieved my own sly pilgrimage in perfect solitude; and as I
descried the grey walls among the rook-haunted elms I felt not like
a dusty tourist, but like a successful adventurer. I have certainly
had, as a dusty tourist, few more charming moments than some—such as
any one, I suppose, is free to have—that I passed on a little ruined
grey bridge which spans, with its single narrow arch, a trickling
stream at the base of the eminence from which those walls and trees
look down. The twilight deepened, the ragged battlements and the low,
broad oriels glanced duskily from the foliage, the rooks wheeled and
clamoured in the glowing sky; and if there had been a ghost on the
premises I certainly ought to have seen it. In fact I did see it, as
we see ghosts nowadays. I felt the incommunicable spirit of the scene
with the last, the right intensity. The old life, the old manners,
the old figures seemed present again. The great _coup de théâtre_ of
the young woman who shows you the Hall—it is rather languidly done
on her part—is to point out a little dusky door opening from a turret
to a back terrace as the aperture through which Dorothy Vernon eloped
with Lord John Manners. I was ignorant of this episode, for I was not
to enter the place till the morrow, and I am still unversed in the
history of the actors. But as I stood in the luminous dusk weaving
the romance of the spot, I recognised the inevitability of a Dorothy
Vernon and quite understood a Lord John. It was of course on just such
an evening that the romantic event came off, and by listening with the
proper credulity I might surely hear on the flags of the castle-court
ghostly footfalls and feel in their movement the old heartbeats. The
only footfall I can conscientiously swear to, however, is the far
from spectral tread of the damsel who led me through the mansion in
the prosier light of the next morning. Haddon Hall, I believe, is one
of the sights in which it is the fashion to be “disappointed;” a fact
explained in a great measure by the absence of a formal approach to
the house, which shows its low, grey front to every trudger on the
high-road. But the charm of the spot is so much less that of grandeur
than that of melancholy, that it is rather deepened than diminished
by this attitude of obvious survival and decay. And for that matter,
when you have entered the steep little outer court through the huge
thickness of the low gateway, the present seems effectually walled out
and the past walled in, even as a dead man in a sepulchre. It is very
dead, of a fine June morning, the genius of Haddon Hall; and the silent
courts and chambers, with their hues of ashen grey and faded brown,
seem as time-bleached as the dry bones of any mouldering mortality. The
comparison is odd, but Haddon Hall reminded me perversely of some of
the larger houses at Pompeii. The private life of the past is revealed
in each case with very much the same distinctness and on a scale small
enough not to stagger the imagination. This old dwelling indeed has
so little of the mass and expanse of the classic feudal castle that
it almost suggests one of those miniature models of great buildings
which lurk in dusty corners of museums. But it is large enough to be
delectably complete and to contain an infinite store of the poetry of
grass-grown courts looked into by wide, jutting windows and climbed
out of by crooked stone stairways mounting against the walls to little
high-placed doors. The “tone” of Haddon Hall, of all its walls and
towers and stonework, is the grey of unpolished silver, and the reader
who has been in England need hardly be reminded of the sweet accord—to
eye and mind alike—existing between all stony surfaces covered with
the pale corrosions of time and the deep living green of the strong
ivy which seems to feed on their slow decay. Of this effect and of a
hundred others—from those that belong to low-browed, stone-paved empty
rooms where life was warm and atmospheres thick, to those one may note
where the dark tower stairway emerges at last, on a level with the
highest beech-tops, against the cracked and sun-baked parapet which
flaunted the castle standard over the castle woods—of every form of sad
desuetude and picturesque decay Haddon Hall contains some delightful
example. Its finest point is undoubtedly a certain court from which
a stately flight of steps ascends to the terrace where that daughter
of the Vernons whom I have mentioned took such happy thought for
our requiring, as the phrase is, a reference. These steps, with the
terrace, its balustrade topped with great ivy-muffled knobs of stone
and its high background of massed woods, form the ideal _mise en scène_
for portions of Shakespeare’s comedies. “It’s exactly Elizabethan,”
said my companion. Here the Countess Olivia may have listened to the
fantastic Malvolio, or Beatrix, superbest of flirts, have come to
summon Benedick to dinner.
The glories of Chatsworth, which lies but a few miles from Haddon,
serve as a marked offset to its more delicate merits, just as they
are supposed to gain, I believe, in the tourist’s eyes, by contrast
with its charming, its almost Italian shabbiness. But the glories of
Chatsworth, incontestable as they are, were so effectually eclipsed
to my mind, a couple of days later, that in future, when I think of an
English mansion, I shall think only of Warwick, and when I think of an
English park, only of Blenheim. Your run by train through the gentle
Warwickshire land does much to prepare you for the great spectacle
of the castle, which seems hardly more than a sort of massive symbol
and synthesis of the broad prosperity and peace and leisure diffused
over this great pastoral expanse. The Warwickshire meadows are to
common English scenery what this is to that of the rest of the world.
For mile upon mile you can see nothing but broad sloping pastures of
velvet turf, overbrowsed by sheep of the most fantastic shagginess
and garnished with hedges out of the trailing luxury of whose verdure
great ivy-tangled oaks and elms arise with a kind of architectural
regularity. The landscape indeed sins by excess of nutritive
suggestion; it savours of larder and manger; it is too ovine, too
bovine, it is almost asinine; and if you were to believe what you see
before you this rugged globe would be a sort of boneless ball covered
with some such plush-like integument as might be figured by the down on
the cheek of a peach. But a great thought keeps you company as you go
and gives character to the scenery. Warwickshire—you say it over and
over—was Shakespeare’s country. Those who think that a great genius
is something supremely ripe and healthy and human may find comfort
in the fact. It helps greatly to enliven my own vague conception of
Shakespeare’s temperament, with which I find it no great shock to be
obliged to associate ideas of mutton and beef. There is something as
final, as disillusioned of the romantic horrors of rock and forest, as
deeply attuned to human needs in the Warwickshire pastures as there is
in the underlying morality of the poet.
[Illustration: WARWICK CASTLE]
With human needs in general Warwick Castle may be in no great accord,
but few places are more gratifying to the sentimental tourist. It is
the only great residence he may have coveted as a home. The fire that
we heard so much of last winter in America appears to have consumed but
an inconsiderable and easily spared portion of the house, and the great
towers rise over the great trees and the town with the same grand air
as before. Picturesquely, Warwick gains from not being sequestered,
after the common fashion, in acres of park. The village street winds
about the garden walls, though its hum expires before it has had time
to scale them. There can be no better example of the way in which stone
walls, if they do not of necessity make a prison, may on occasions make
a palace, than the prodigious privacy maintained thus about a mansion
whose windows and towers form the main feature of a bustling town. At
Warwick the past joins hands so stoutly with the present that you can
hardly say where one begins and the other ends, and you rather miss
the various crannies and gaps of what I just now called the Italian
shabbiness of Haddon. There is a Cæsar’s tower and a Guy’s tower and
half a dozen more, but they are so well-conditioned in their ponderous
antiquity that you are at loss whether to consider them parts of an
old house revived or of a new house picturesquely superannuated. Such
as they are, however, plunging into the grassed and gravelled courts
from which their battlements look really feudal, and into gardens
large enough for all delight and too small, as they should be, to be
amazing; and with ranges between them of great apartments at whose
hugely recessed windows you may turn from Vandyck and Rembrandt to
glance down the cliff-like pile into the Avon, washing the base like
a lordly moat, with its bridge, and its trees and its memories, they
mark the very model of a great hereditary dwelling—one which amply
satisfies the imagination without irritating the democratic conscience.
The pictures at Warwick reminded me afresh of an old conclusion on this
matter; that the best fortune for good pictures is not to be crowded
into public collections—not even into the relative privacy of Salons
Carrés and Tribunes—but to hang in largely-spaced half-dozens on the
walls of fine houses. Here the historical atmosphere, as one may call
it, is almost a compensation for the often imperfect light. If this
be true of most pictures it is especially so of the works of Vandyck,
whom you think of, wherever you may find him, as having, with that
thorough good-breeding which is the stamp of his manner, taken account
in his painting of the local conditions and predestined his picture to
just the spot where it hangs. This is in fact an illusion as regards
the Vandycks at Warwick, for none of them represent members of the
house. The very finest perhaps after the great melancholy, picturesque
Charles I—death, or at least the presentiment of death on the pale
horse—is a portrait from the Brignole palace at Genoa; a beautiful
noble matron in black, with her little son and heir. The last Vandycks
I had seen were the noble company this lady had left behind her in the
Genoese palace, and as I looked at her I thought of her mighty change
of circumstance. Here she sits in the mild light of midmost England;
there you could almost fancy her blinking in the great glare sent up
from the Mediterranean. Intensity for intensity—intensity of situation
constituted—I hardly know which to choose.
Oxford, 1872.
[Illustration]
[Illustration]