For those fanciful observers to whom broad England means chiefly the
perfection of the rural picturesque, Devonshire means the perfection of
England. I, at least, had so complacently taken for granted here all
the characteristic graces of English scenery, had built so boldly on
their rank orthodoxy, that before we fairly crossed the border I had
begun to look impatiently from the carriage window for the veritable
landscape in water-colours. Devonshire meets you promptly in all its
purity, for the course of ten minutes you have been able to glance
down the green vista of a dozen Devonshire lanes. On huge embankments
of moss and turf, smothered in wild flowers and embroidered with the
finest lacework of trailing ground-ivy, rise solid walls of flowering
thorn and glistening holly and golden broom, and more strong, homely
shrubs than I can name, and toss their blooming tangle to a sky which
seems to look down between them, in places, from but a dozen inches
of blue. They are oversown with lovely little flowers with names as
delicate as their petals of gold and silver and azure—bird’s-eye and
king’s-finger and wandering-sailor—and their soil, a superb dark red,
turns in spots so nearly to crimson that you almost fancy it some
fantastic compound purchased at the chemist’s and scattered there
for ornament. The mingled reflection of this rich-hued earth and the
dim green light which filters through the hedge is a masterpiece of
produced beauty. A Devonshire cottage is no less striking an outcome of
the ages and the seasons and the manners. Crushed beneath its burden
of thatch, coated with a rough white stucco of a tone to delight a
painter, nestling in deep foliage and garnished at doorstep and wayside
with various forms of chubby infancy, it seems to have been stationed
there for no more obvious purpose than to keep a promise to your fancy,
though it covers, I suppose, not a little of the sordid side of life
which the fancy likes to slur over.
[Illustration: A DEVONSHIRE LANE]
I rolled past lanes and cottages to Exeter, where I had counted
upon the cathedral. When one has fairly tasted of the pleasure of
cathedral-hunting the approach to each new possible prize of the chase
gives a peculiarly agreeable zest to the curiosity. You are making a
collection of great impressions, and I think the process is in no case
so delightful as applied to cathedrals. Going from one fine picture
to another is certainly good; but the fine pictures of the world are
terribly numerous, and they have a troublesome way of crowding and
jostling each other in the memory. The number of cathedrals is small,
and the mass and presence of each specimen great, so that as they
rise in the mind in individual majesty they dwarf all the commoner
impressions of calculated effect. They form indeed but a gallery of
vaster pictures; for when time has dulled the recollection of details
you retain a single broad image of the vast grey edifice, with its
head and shoulders, its vessel and its towers, its tone of colour,
its still green precinct. All this is especially true perhaps of one’s
sense of English sacred piles, which are almost alone in possessing,
as pictures, a spacious and harmonious setting. The cathedral stands
supreme, but the close makes, always, the _scene_. Exeter is not one
of the grandest, but, in common with great and small, it has certain
points in favour of which local learning discriminates. Exeter indeed
does itself injustice by a low, dark front, which not only diminishes
the apparent altitude of the nave, but conceals, as you look eastward,
two noble Norman towers. The front, however, which has a gloomy
impressiveness, is redeemed by two fine features: a magnificent
rose-window, whose vast stone ribs (enclosing some very pallid
last-century glass) are disposed with the most charming intricacy; and
a long sculptured screen—a sort of stony band of images—which traverses
the façade from side to side. The little broken-visaged effigies of
saints and kings and bishops, niched in tiers along this hoary wall,
are prodigiously black and quaint and primitive in expression; and as
you look at them with whatever contemplative tenderness your trade
of hard-working tourist may have left at your disposal, you fancy
that they are broodingly conscious of their names, histories, and
misfortunes; that, sensitive victims of time, they feel the loss of
their noses, their toes, and their crowns; and that, when the long June
twilight turns at last to a deeper grey and the quiet of the close to
a deeper stillness, they begin to peer sidewise out of their narrow
recesses and to converse in some strange form of early English, as
rigid, yet as candid, as their features and postures, moaning, like
a company of ancient paupers round a hospital fire, over their aches
and infirmities and losses and the sadness of being so terribly old.
The vast square transeptal towers of the church seem to me to have the
same sort of personal melancholy. Nothing in all architecture expresses
better, to my imagination, the sadness of survival, the resignation of
dogged material continuance, than a broad expanse of Norman stonework,
roughly adorned with its low relief of short columns and round arches
and almost barbarous hatchet-work, and lifted high into that mild
English light which accords so well with its dull-grey surface. The
especial secret of the impressiveness of such a Norman tower I cannot
pretend to have discovered. It lies largely in the look of having
been proudly and sturdily built—as if the masons had been urged by a
trumpet-blast, and the stones squared by a battle-axe—contrasted with
this mere idleness of antiquity and passive lapse into quaintness. A
Greek temple preserves a kind of fresh immortality in its concentrated
refinement, and a gothic cathedral in its adventurous exuberance; but
a Norman tower stands up like some simple strong man in his might,
bending a melancholy brow upon an age which demands that strength shall
be cunning.
[Illustration: THE NORMAN TOWERS OF EXETER]
The North Devon coast, whither it was my design on coming to Exeter
to proceed, has the primary merit of being, as yet, virgin soil as
to railways. I went accordingly from Barnstable to Ilfracombe on
the top of a coach, in the fashion of elder days; and, thanks to
my position, I managed to enjoy the landscape in spite of the two
worthy aboriginals before me who were reading aloud together, with a
natural glee which might have passed for fiendish malice, the “Daily
Telegraph’s” painfully vivid account of the defeat of the Atalanta
crew. It seemed to me, I remember, a sort of pledge and token of the
invincibility of English muscle that a newspaper record of its prowess
should have power to divert my companions’ eyes from the bosky flanks
of Devonshire combes. The little watering-place of Ilfracombe is seated
at the lower verge of one of these seaward-plunging valleys, between
a couple of magnificent headlands which hold it in a hollow slope
and offer it securely to the caress of the Bristol Channel. It is a
very finished little specimen of its genus, and I think that during
my short stay there I expended as much attention on its manners and
customs and its social physiognomy as on its cliffs and beach and
great coast-view. My chief conclusion perhaps, from all these things,
was that the terrible “summer-question” which works annual anguish in
so many American households would rage less hopelessly if we had a
few Ilfracombes scattered along our Atlantic coast; and furthermore
that the English are masters of the art of not losing sight of ease
and convenience in the pursuit of the pastoral life—unlike our own
people, who, when seeking rural beguilement, are apt but to find a
new rudeness added to nature. It is just possible that at Ilfracombe
ease and convenience weigh down the scale; so very substantial are
they, so very officious and business-like. On the left of the town
(to give an example) one of the great cliffs I have mentioned rises in
a couple of massive peaks and presents to the sea an almost vertical
face, all muffled in tufts of golden broom and mighty fern. You have
not walked fifty yards away from the hotel before you encounter half a
dozen little sign-boards, directing your steps to a path up the cliff.
You follow their indications and you arrive at a little gate-house,
with photographs and various local gimcracks exposed for sale. A most
respectable person appears, demands a penny and, on receiving it,
admits you with great civility to commune with nature. You detect,
however, various little influences hostile to perfect communion.
You are greeted by another sign-board threatening legal pursuit if
you attempt to evade the payment of the sacramental penny. The path,
winding in a hundred ramifications over the cliff, is fastidiously
solid and neat, and furnished at intervals of a dozen yards with
excellent benches, inscribed by knife and pencil with the names of
such visitors as do not happen to have been the elderly maiden ladies
who now chiefly occupy them. All this is prosaic, and you have to
subtract it in a lump from the total impression before the sense of
the beguilement of nature becomes distinct. Your subtraction made,
a great deal assuredly remains; quite enough, I found, to give me an
ample day’s refreshment; for English scenery, like most other English
commodities, resists and rewards familiar use. The cliffs are superb,
the play of light and shade upon them is a perpetual study, and the
air a particular mixture of the breath of the hills and moors and the
breath of the sea. I was very glad, at the end of my climb, to have
a good bench to sit upon—as one must think twice in England before
measuring one’s length on the grassy earth; and to be able, thanks
to the smooth foot-path, to get back to the hotel in a quarter of an
hour. But it occurred to me that if I were an Englishman of the period,
and, after ten months of a busy London life, my fancy were turning
to a holiday, to rest and change and oblivion of the ponderous social
burden, it might find rather less inspiration than needful in a vision
of the little paths of Ilfracombe, of the sign-boards and the penny-fee
and the solitude tempered by old ladies and sheep. I wondered whether
change perfect enough to be salutary does not imply something more
pathless, more idle, more unreclaimed from that deep-bosomed nature to
which the overwrought mind reverts with passionate longing; something
after all attainable at a moderate distance from New York and Boston. I
must add that I cannot find in my heart to object, even on grounds the
most æsthetic, to the very beautiful and excellent inn at Ilfracombe,
where such of my readers as are perchance actually wrestling with the
question of “where to go” may be interested to learn that they may live
_en pension_, very well indeed, at a cost of ten shillings a day. I
have paid the American hotel-clerk a much heavier tax on a much lighter
entertainment. I made the acquaintance at this establishment of that
strange fruit of time the insular table d’hôte, but I confess that,
faithful to the habit of a tourist open to the _arrière-pensée_, I have
retained a more vivid impression of the talk and the faces than of
our joints and side-dishes. I noticed here what I have often noticed
before (the truth perhaps has never been duly recognised), that no
people profit so eagerly as the English by the suspension of a common
social law. A table d’hôte, being something abnormal and experimental,
as it were, resulted apparently in a complete reversal of the supposed
national characteristics. Conversation was universal—uproarious almost;
old legends and ironies about the insular _morgue_ seemed to see their
ground crumble away. What social, what psychologic earthquake, in our
own time, had occurred?
These are meagre memories, however, compared with those which cluster
about that place of pleasantness which is locally known as Lynton.
I am afraid I may seem a mere professional gusher when I declare how
common almost any term appears to me applied to Lynton with descriptive
intent. The little village is perched on the side of one of the great
mountain-cliffs with which this whole coast is adorned, and on the
edge of a lovely gorge through which a broad hill-torrent foams and
tumbles from the great moors whose heather-crested waves rise purple
along the inland sky. Below it, close beside the beach where the little
torrent meets the sea, is the sister village of Lynmouth. Here—as
I stood on the bridge that spans the stream and looked at the stony
backs and foundations and overclambering garden verdure of certain
little grey old houses which plunge their feet into it, and then up
at the tender green of scrub-oak and fern, at the colour of gorse and
broom and bracken climbing the sides of the hills and leaving them
bare-crowned to the sun like miniature mountains—I read an unnatural
blueness into the northern sea, and the village below put on the grace
of one of the hundred hamlets of the Riviera. The little Castle Hotel
at Lynton is a spot so consecrated to supreme repose—to sitting with
a book in the terrace-garden, among blooming plants of aristocratic
magnitude and rarity, and watching the finest piece of colour in
all nature, the glowing red and green of the great cliffs beyond the
little harbour-mouth, as they shift and change and melt, the livelong
day, from shade to shade and ineffable tone to tone—that I feel as if
in helping it to publicity I were doing it rather a disfavour than a
service. It is in fact a very deep and sure retreat, and I have never
known one where purchased hospitality wore a more disinterested smile.
Lynton is of course a capital centre for excursions, but two or three
of which I had time to make. None is more beautiful than a simple walk
along the running face of the cliffs to a singular rocky eminence whose
curious abutments and pinnacles of stone have inevitably caused it
to be named the Castle. It has a fantastic resemblance to some hoary
feudal ruin, with crumbling towers and gaping chambers tenanted by
wild sea-birds. The late afternoon light had a way, at this season,
of lingering on until within a couple of hours of midnight; and I
remember among the charmed moments of English travel none of a more
vividly poetical tinge than a couple of evenings spent on the summit of
this all but legendary pile in company with the slow-coming darkness
and the short, sharp cry of the sea-mews. There are places whose very
aspect is a story or a song. This jagged and pinnacled coast-wall, with
the rock-strewn valley behind it, the sullen calmness of the unbroken
tide at the dreadful base of the cliffs (where they divide into low
sea-caves, making pillars and pedestals for the fantastic imagery of
their summits), prompted one to wanton reminiscence and outbreak, to a
recall of some drawing of Gustave Doré’s (of his good time), which was
a divination of the place and made one look for his signature under a
stone, or, better still, to respouting, for sympathy and relief, some
idyllic Tennysonian line that had haunted one’s destitute past and
that seemed to speak of the conditions in spite of being false to them
geographically.
The last stage in my visit to North Devon was the long drive along
the beautiful remnant of coast and through the rich pastoral scenery
of Somerset. The whole broad spectacle that one dreams of viewing in
a foreign land to the homely music of a postboy’s whip I beheld on
this admirable drive—breezy highlands clad in the warm blue-brown of
heather-tufts as if in mantles of rusty velvet, little bays and coves
curving gently to the doors of clustered fishing-huts, deep pastures
and broad forests, villages thatched and trellised as if to take a
prize for improbability, manor-tops peeping over rook-haunted avenues.
I ought to make especial note of an hour I spent at midday at the
little village of Porlock in Somerset. Here the thatch seemed steeper
and heavier, the yellow roses on the cottage walls more cunningly
mated with the crumbling stucco, the dark interiors within the open
doors more quaintly pictorial, than elsewhere; and as I loitered, while
the horses rested, in the little cool old timber-steepled, yew-shaded
church, betwixt the high-backed manorial pew and the battered tomb of
a crusading knight and his lady, and listened to the simple prattle
of a blue-eyed old sexton, who showed me where, as a boy, in scantier
corduroys, he had scratched his name on the recumbent lady’s breast, it
seemed to me that this at last was old England indeed, and that in a
moment more I should see Sir Roger de Coverley marching up the aisle.
Certainly, to give a proper account of it all, I should need nothing
less than the pen of Mr. Addison.
1872.
[Illustration]
[Illustration]