If I spoke just now of Winchelsea as haunted, let this somewhat
overworked word stand as an ineffectual tribute to the small, sad,
civic history that the place appeals to us to reconstruct as we gaze
vaguely about. I have a little ancient and most decorative map of
Sussex—testifying remarkably to the changes of relation between sea
and land in this corner of the coast—in which “Old Winchelsey Drowned”
figures as the melancholy indication of a small circular spot quite
out at sea. If new Winchelsea is old, the earlier town is to-day but
the dim ghost of a tradition, with its very site—distant several miles
from that of its successor—rendered uncertain by the endless mutation
of the shore. After suffering, all through the thirteenth century, much
stress of wind and weather, it was practically destroyed in 1287 by
a great storm which cast up masses of beach, altered the course of a
river, and roughly handled the face of many things. The reconstruction
of the town in another place was thereupon decreed by a great English
king, and we need but a little fuller chronicle to help us to assist
at one of those migrations of a whole city of which antiquity so often
gives us the picture. The survivors of Winchelsea were colonised, and
colonised in much state. The “new” community, whose life was also to be
so brief, sits on the pleasant table of a great cliff-like hill which,
in the days of the Plantagenets, was an admirable promontory washed by
the waves. The sea surrounded its base, came up past it to the east and
north in a long inlet, and stretched away, across the level where the
sheep now graze, to stout little neighbouring Rye, perched—in doubtless
not quite equal pride—on an eminence more humble, but which must have
counted then even for more than to-day in the pretty figure made, as
you stand off, by the small, compact, pyramidal port. The “Antient
Towns” looked at each other then across the water, which made almost an
island of the rock of huddled, church-crowned Rye—which had too much
to say to them alike, on evil days, at their best time, but which was
too soon to begin to have too little. If the early Winchelsea was to
suffer by “drowning,” its successor was to bear the stroke of remaining
high and dry. The haven on the hill-top—a bold and extraordinary
conception—had hardly had time to get, as we should now say, “started,”
before it began to see its days numbered. The sea and the shore were
never at peace together, and it was, most remarkably, not the sea that
got the best of it. Winchelsea had only time to dream a great dream—the
dream of a scant pair of centuries—before its hopes were turned to
bitterness and its boasts to lamentation. It had literally, during its
short career, put in a claim to rivalship with the port of London. The
irony of fate now sits in its empty lap; but the port of London has
never suggested even a frustrate “Denis Duval.”
[Illustration: RYE, FROM THE MARSHES]
While Winchelsea dreamed, at any rate, she worked, and the noble
fragment of her great church, rising solid from the abortive symmetry
of her great square, helps us to put our hand on her deep good faith.
She built at least as she believed—she planned as she fondly imagined.
The huge ivy-covered choir and transepts of St. Thomas of Canterbury—to
whom the structure was addressed—represent to us a great intention.
They are not so mighty, but they are almost as brave, as the wondrous
fragment of Beauvais. Walled and closed on their unfinished side, they
form at present all the church, and, with its grand lines of arch and
window, its beautiful gothic tombs and general hugeness and height,
the church—mercifully exempt as yet from restoration—is wonderful for
the place. You may at this hour—if you are given to such emotions—feel
a mild thrill, not be unaware even of the approach of tears, as you
measure the scale on which the building had been planned and the ground
that the nave and aisles would have covered. You murmur, in the summer
twilight, a soft “Bravo!” across the ages—to the ears of heaven knows
what poor nameless ghosts. The square—apparently one of many—was to
have been worthy of New York or of Turin; for the queerest, quaintest,
most touching thing of all is that the reinstated city was to have
been laid out on the most approved modern lines. Nothing is more
interesting—to the mooning, sketching spectator—than this evidence that
the great Edward had anticipated us all in the convenient chessboard
pattern. It is true—attention has been called to the fact—that Pompeii
had anticipated _him_; but I doubt if he knew much about Pompeii. His
abstract avenues and cross-streets straggle away, through the summer
twilight, into mere legend and mystery. In speaking awhile since of the
gates of these shattered strongholds as “stiff,” I also spoke of their
walls as “tight;” but the scheme of Winchelsea must have involved,
after all, a certain looseness of cincture. The old vague girdle is
lost to-day in the fields where the sheep browse, in the parkish acres
where the great trees cluster. The Sussex oak is mighty—it was of
the Sussex oak that, in the old time, the king’s ships were built; it
was, in particular, to her command of this material that Rye owed the
burdensome honour of supplying vessels, on constant call, to the royal
navy. Strange is this record, in Holloway’s History of that town, and
in presence of the small things of to-day; so perpetual, under stress,
appears to have been the demand and so free the supply and the service.
Rye continued indeed, under her old brown south cliff, to build big
boats till this industry was smitten by the adoption of iron. That was
the last stroke; though even now you may see things as you stand on the
edge of the cliff: best of all on the open, sunny terrace of a dear
little old garden—a garden brown-walled, red-walled, rose-covered on
its other sides, divided by the width of a quiet street of grass-grown
cobbles from the house of its master, and possessed of a little old
glass-fronted, panelled pavilion which I hold to be the special spot
in the world where Thackeray might most fitly have figured out his
story. There is not much room in the pavilion, but there is room
for the hard-pressed table and the tilted chair—there is room for
a novelist and his friends. The panels have a queer paint and a
venerable slant; the small chimney-place is at your back; the south
window is perfect, the privacy bright and open. How can I tell what
old—what young—visions of visions and memories of images come back to
me under the influence of this quaint receptacle, into which, by kind
permission, I occasionally peep, and still more under the charm of the
air and the view that, as I just said, you may enjoy, close at hand,
from the small terrace? How can I tell why I always keep remembering
and losing there the particular passages of some far-away foolish
fiction, absorbed in extreme youth, which haunt me, yet escape me, like
the echo of an old premonition? I seem to myself to have lain on the
grass somewhere, as a boy, poring over an English novel of the period,
presumably quite bad,—for they were pretty bad then too,—and losing
myself in the idea of just such another scene as this. But even could I
rediscover the novel, I wouldn’t go back to it. It couldn’t have been
so good as this; for this—all concrete and doomed and minimised as it
is—is the real thing. The other little gardens, other little odds and
ends of crooked brown wall and supported terrace and glazed winter
sun-trap, lean over the cliff that still, after centuries, keeps its
rude drop; they have beneath them the river, a tide that comes and
goes, and the mile or more of grudging desert level, beyond it, which
now throws the sea to the near horizon, where, on summer days, with a
depth of blue and a scattered gleam of sails, it looks forgiving and
resigned. The little old shipyards at the base of the rock are for the
most part quite empty, with only vague piles of brown timber and the
deposit of generations of chips; yet a fishing-boat or two are still
on the stocks—an “output” of three or four a year!—and the ring of the
hammer on the wood, a sound, in such places, rare to the contemporary
ear, comes up, through the sunny stillness, to your meditative perch.
The tidal river, on the left, wanders away to Rye Harbour and its
bar, where the black fishing-boats, half the time at lop-sided rest
in the mud, make a cluster of slanting spears against the sky. When
the river is full we are proud of its wide light and many curves; when
it is empty we call it, for vague reasons, “rather Dutch;” and empty
or full we sketch it in the fine weather as hard as ever we can. When
I say “we” I mean _they_ do—it is to speak with hospitality. They
mostly wear, as I have hinted, large sunbonnets, and they crouch on low
camp-stools; they put in, as they would say, a bit of white, in places
often the least likely. Rye is in truth a rudimentary drawing-lesson,
and you quite embrace the question when you have fairly seized the
formula. Nothing so “quaint” was ever so easy—nothing so easy was
ever so quaint. Much more to be loved than feared, she has not, alas,
a scrap of “style,” and she may be effectively rendered without the
obligation of subtlety. At favoured seasons there appear within her
precinct sundry slouch-hatted gentlemen who study her humble charms
through a small telescope formed by their curved fingers and thumb, and
who are not unliable to define themselves as French artists leading
a train of English and American lady pupils. They distribute their
disciples over the place, at selected points, where the master, going
his round from hour to hour, reminds you of nothing so much as a busy
_chef_ with many saucepans on the stove and periodically lifting their
covers for a sniff and a stir. There are ancient doorsteps that are
fairly haunted, for their convenience of view, by the “class,” and
where the fond proprietor, going and coming, has to pick his way among
paraphernalia or to take flying leaps over genius and industry. If
Winchelsea is, as I gather, less beset, it is simply that Winchelsea
enjoys the immunity of her greater distinction. She is full of that and
must be even more difficult than she at first appears. But I forsook
her and her distinction, just now, and I must return to them; though
the right moment would quite have been as we stood, at Rye, on the
terrace of the little old south-garden, to which she presents herself,
beyond two or three miles of flat Dutch-looking interval, from the
extreme right, her few red roofs almost lost on her wooded hill and her
general presence masking, for this view, the headland of Hastings, ten
miles, by the coast, westward.
[Illustration: THE SANDGATE, RYE]
It was about her spacious solitude that we had already begun to stroll;
for the purpose, however, mainly, of measuring the stretch, south
and north, to the two more crumbled of her three old gates. They are
very far gone, each but the ruin of a ruin; but it is their actual
countrified state that speaks of the circuit—one hundred and fifty
acres—they were supposed to defend. Under one of them you may pass,
much round about, by high-seated villages and in constant sight of the
sea, toward Hastings; from the other, slightly the less dilapidated,
you may gather, if much so minded, the suggestion of some illustration
or tail-piece in a volume of Italian travel. The steep white road
plunges crookedly down to where the poor arches that once were massive
straddle across it, while a spreading chestnut, beside them, plays
exactly the part desired—prepares you, that is, for the crack of the
whip of the _vetturino_ trudging up beside his travelling-carriage.
With a bare-legged urchin and a browsing goat the whole thing would
be there. But we turn, at that point, to mount again and cross the
idle square and come back to the east gate, which is the aspect of
Winchelsea that presents itself most—and in fact quite admirably—as
the front. Yet by what is it that, at the end of summer afternoons, my
sense of an obliterated history is fed? There is little but the church
really to testify, for the extraordinary groined vaults and crypts
that are part of the actual pride of the place—treasure-houses of old
merchants, foundations of upper solidities that now are dust—count
for nothing, naturally, in the immediate effect. The early houses
passed away long ago, and the present ones speak, in broken accents
and scant and shabby signs, but of the last hundred, the last couple
of hundred, years. Everything that ever happened is gone, and, for
that matter, nothing very eminent, only a dim mediocrity of life,
ever did happen. Rye has Fletcher the dramatist, the Fletcher of
Beaumont, whom it brought to birth; but Winchelsea has only the last
preachment, under a tree still shown, of John Wesley. The third Edward
and the Black Prince, in 1350, overcame the Spaniards in a stout
sea-fight within sight of the walls; but I am bound to confess that
I do not at all focus that performance, am unable, in the changed
conditions, to “place” anything so pompous. In the same way I fail
to “visualise,” thank goodness, either of the several French inroads
that left their mark of massacre and ruin. What I do see, on the other
hand, very comfortably, is the little undistinguished picture of a
nearer antiquity, the antiquity for a glimpse of which I reopened
“Denis Duval.” Where, please, was the barber’s shop of the family of
that hero, and where the apartments, where the preferred resorts, the
particular scenes of occupation and diversion, of the dark Chevalier de
la Motte? Where did this subtle son of another civilisation, with whom
Madame de Saverne had eloped from France, _en plein ancien régime_,
without the occurrence between them of the least impropriety, spend
his time for so long a period; where had he his little habits and his
numerous indispensable conveniences? What was the general geography,
to express it synthetically, of the state of life of the orphaned
Clarisse, quartered with a family of which one of the sons, furiously
desirous of the girl, was, at his lost moments, a highwayman stopping
coaches in the dead of night? Over nothing in the whole fragment does
such vagueness hover as over the domestic situation, in her tender
years, of the future Madame Denis. Yet these are just the things I
should have liked to know—the things, above all, I should have liked
most to tell. Into a vision of _them_, at least, we can work ourselves;
it is exactly the sort of vision into which Rye and Winchelsea, and all
the land about, full of lurking hints and modest memories, most throws
us back. I should, in truth, have liked to lock up our novelist in our
little pavilion of inspiration, the gazebo at Rye, not letting him out
till he should quite have satisfied us.
Close beside the east gate, so close that one of its battered towers
leans heavily on the little garden, is a wonderfully perched cottage,
of which the mistress is a very celebrated lady who resorts to the
place in the intervals of an exacting profession—the scene of her
renown, I may go so far as to mention, is the theatre—for refreshment
and rest. The small grounds of this refuge, supported by the old
town-wall and the steep plunge of the great hill, have a rare position
and view. The narrow garden stretches away in the manner of a terrace
to which the top of the wall forms a low parapet; and here it is that,
when the summer days are long, the sweet old soul of all the land
seems most to hang in the air. It is almost a question indeed whether
this fine Winchelsea front, all silver-grey and ivy-green, is not even
better when making a picture itself from below than when giving you
one, with much immensity, from its brow. This picture is always your
great effect, artfully prepared by an absence of prediction, when you
take a friend over from Rye; and it would appear quite to settle the
small discussion—that may be said to come up among us so often—of which
is the happier abode. The great thing is that if you live at Rye you
have Winchelsea to show; whereas if you live at Winchelsea you have
nothing but Rye. This latter privilege I should be sorry to cry down;
but nothing can alter the fact that, to begin with, the pedestal of
Winchelsea has twice the height, by a rough measure, of that of its
neighbour; and we all know the value of an inch at the end of a nose.
Almost directly under the Winchelsea hill, crossing the little bridge
of the Brede, you pass beyond a screen of trees and take in, at the
top of the ascent, the two round towers and arch, ivied and mutilated,
but still erect, of the old main gate. The road either way is long
and abrupt, so that people kind to their beasts alight at the foot,
and cyclists careful of their necks alight at the head. The brooding
spectator, moreover, who forms a class by himself, pauses, infallibly,
as he goes, to admire the way the great trees cluster and compose on
the high slope, always striking, for him, as day gathers in and the
whole thing melts together, a classic, academic note, the note of
Turner and Claude. From the garden of the distinguished cottage, at
any rate, it is a large, melancholy view—a view that an occasional
perverse person whom it fails to touch finds easy, I admit, to speak of
as dreary; so that those who love it and are well advised will ever,
at the outset, carry the war into the enemy’s country by announcing
it, with glee, as sad. Just this it must be that nourishes the sense
of obliterated history as to which I a moment ago wondered. The air is
like that of a room through which something has been carried that you
are aware of without having seen it. There is a vast deal of level in
the prospect, but, though much depends on the day and still more on
the hour, it is, at the worst, all too delicate to be ugly. The best
hour is that at which the compact little pyramid of Rye, crowned with
its big but stunted church and quite covered by the westering sun,
gives out the full measure of its old browns that turn to red and its
old reds that turn to purple. These tones of evening are now pretty
much all that Rye has left to give, but there are truly, sometimes,
conditions of atmosphere in which I have seen the effect as fantastic.
I sigh when I think, however, what it might have been if, perfectly
placed as it is, the church tower—which in its more perverse moods
only resembles a big central button, a knob on a pincushion—had had
the grace of a few more feet of stature. But that way depression lies,
and the humiliation of those moments at which the brooding spectator
says to himself that both tower and hill _would_ have been higher
if the place had only been French or Italian. Its whole pleasant
little pathos, in point of fact, is just that it is homely English.
And even with this, after all, the imagination can play. The wide,
ambiguous flat that stretches eastward from Winchelsea hill, and on
the monotone of whose bosom, seen at sunset from a friendly eminence
that stands nearer, Rye takes the form of a huge floating boat, its
water-line sharp and its bulk defined from stem to stern—this dim
expanse is the great Romney Marsh, no longer a marsh to-day, but,
at the end of long years, drained and ordered, a wide pastoral of
grazing, with “new” Romney town, a Port no more,—not the least of
the shrunken Five,—mellowed to mere russet at the far end, and other
obscure charms, revealed best to the slow cyclist, scattered over its
breast: little old “bits” that are not to be described, yet are known,
with a small thrill, when seen; little lonely farms, red and grey;
little mouse-coloured churches; little villages that seem made only for
long shadows and summer afternoons. Brookland, Old Romney, Ivychurch,
Dymchurch, Lydd—they have positively the prettiest names. But the point
to be made is that, comparing small things with great,—which may always
be done when the small things are amiable,—if Rye and its rock and its
church are a miniature Mont-Saint-Michel, so, when the summer deepens,
the shadows fall, and the mounted shepherds and their dogs pass before
you in the grassy desert, you find in the mild English “marsh” a recall
of the Roman Campagna.
[Illustration]
[Illustration]