I am not sure that before entering the county of Suffolk in the early
part of August, I had been conscious of any personal relation to it
save my share in what we all inevitably feel for a province enshrining
the birthplace of a Copperfield. The opening lines in David’s history
offered in this particular an easy perch to my young imagination;
and to recall them to-day, though with a memory long unrefreshed,
is to wonder once more at the depth to which early impressions
strike down. This one in especial indeed has been the privilege of
those millions of readers who owe to Dickens the glow of the prime
response to the romantic, that first bite of the apple of knowledge
which leaves a taste for ever on the tongue. The great initiators
give such a colour to mere names that the things they represent have
often, before contact, been a lively part of experience. It is hard
therefore for an undefended victim of this kind of emotion to measure,
when contact arrives, the quantity of picture already stored up,
to point to the nucleus of the gallery or trace the history of the
acquaintance. It is true that for the divine plant of sensibility in
youth the watering need never have been lavish. It flowered, at all
events, at the right moment, in a certain case, into the branching
image of Blunderstone—which, by the way, I am sorry to see figure as
“Blunderston” in gazetteers of recent date and more than questionable
tact. Dickens took his Rookery exactly where he found it, and simply
fixed it for ever; he left the cradle of the Copperfields the benefit
of its delightful name; or I should say better, perhaps, left the
delightful name and the obscure nook the benefit of an association
ineffaceable: all of which makes me the more ashamed not as yet to
have found the right afternoon—it would have in truth to be abnormally
long—for a pious pilgrimage to the distracting little church where, on
David’s sleepy Sundays, one used to lose one’s self with the sketchy
Phiz. One of the reasons of this omission, so profane on a prior view,
is doubtless that everything, in England, in old-time corners, has
the connecting touch and the quality of illustration, and that, in
a particularly golden August, with an impression in every bush, the
immediate vision, wherever one meets it, easily attaches and suffices.
Another must have been, I confess, the somewhat depressed memory of
a visit paid a few years since to the ancient home of the Peggottys,
supposedly so “sympathetic,” but with little left, to-day, as the event
then proved, of the glamour it had worn to the fancy. Great Yarmouth,
it will be remembered, was a convenient drive from Blunderstone; but
Great Yarmouth, with its mile of cockneyfied sea-front and its overflow
of nigger minstrelsy, now strikes the wrong note so continuously that
I, for my part, became conscious, on the spot, of a chill to the spirit
of research.
This time, therefore, I have allowed that spirit its ease; and I may
perhaps intelligibly make the point I desire if I contrive to express
somehow that I have found myself, most of the month, none the less
abundantly occupied in reading a fuller sense into the lingering
sound given out, for a candid mind, by my superscription and watching
whatever it may stand for gradually flush with a stronger infusion.
It takes, in England, for that matter, no wonderful corner of the land
to make the fiddle-string vibrate. The old usual rural things do this
enough, and a part of the charm of one’s exposure to them is that they
ask one to rise to no heroics. What is the charm, after all, but just
the abyss of the familiar? The peopled fancy, the haunted memory are
themselves what pay the bill. The game can accordingly be played with
delightful economy, a thrift involving the cost of little more than a
good bicycle. The bicycle indeed, since I fall back on that admission,
may perhaps, without difficulty, be too good for the roads. Those of
the more devious kind often engender hereabouts, like the Aristotelian
tragedy, pity and terror; but almost equally with others they lead, on
many a chance, to the ruddiest, greenest hamlets. What this comes to
is saying that I have had, for many a day, the sweet sense of living,
æsthetically, at really high pressure without, as it were, drawing
on the great fund. By the great fund I mean the public show, the show
for admission to which you are charged and overcharged, made to taste
of the tree of possible disappointment. The beauty of old Suffolk in
general, and above all of the desperate depth of it from which I write,
is that these things whisk you straight out of conceivable relation to
that last danger.
I defy any one, at desolate, exquisite Dunwich, to be disappointed in
anything. The minor key is struck here with a felicity that leaves no
sigh to be breathed, no loss to be suffered; a month of the place is
a real education to the patient, the inner vision. The explanation of
this is, appreciably, that the conditions give you to deal with not,
in the manner of some quiet countries, what is meagre and thin, but
what has literally, in a large degree, ceased to be at all. Dunwich
is not even the ghost of its dead self; almost all you can say of it
is that it consists of the mere letters of its old name. The coast,
up and down, for miles, has been, for more centuries than I presume to
count, gnawed away by the sea. All the grossness of its positive life
is now at the bottom of the German Ocean, which moves for ever, like a
ruminating beast, an insatiable, indefatigable lip. Few things are so
melancholy—and so redeemed from mere ugliness by sadness—as this long,
artificial straightness that the monster has impartially maintained.
If at low tide you walk on the shore, the cliffs, of little height,
show you a defence picked as bare as a bone; and you can say nothing
kinder of the general humility and general sweetness of the land than
that this sawlike action gives it, for the fancy, an interest, a sort
of mystery, that more than makes up for what it may have surrendered.
It stretched, within historic times, out into towns and promontories
for which there is now no more to show than the empty eye-holes of
a skull; and half the effect of the whole thing, half the secret of
the impression, and what I may really call, I think, the source of
the distinction, is this very visibility of the mutilation. Such at
any rate is the case for a mind that can properly brood. There is a
presence in what is missing—there is history in there being so little.
It is so little, to-day, that every item of the handful counts.
The biggest items are of course the two ruins, the great church and
its tall tower, now quite on the verge of the cliff, and the crumbled,
ivied wall of the immense cincture of the Priory. These things have
parted with almost every grace, but they still keep up the work that
they have been engaged in for centuries and that cannot better be
described than as the adding of mystery to mystery. This accumulation,
at present prodigious, is, to the brooding mind, unconscious as the
shrunken little Dunwich of to-day may be of it, the beginning and the
end of the matter. I hasten to add that it is to the brooding mind
only, and from it, that I speak. The mystery sounds for ever in the
hard, straight tide, and hangs, through the long, still summer days
and over the low, diked fields, in the soft, thick light. We play with
it as with the answerless question, the question of the spirit and
attitude, never again to be recovered, of the little city submerged.
For it _was_ a city, the main port of Suffolk, as even its poor relics
show; with a fleet of its own on the North Sea, and a big religious
house on the hill. We wonder what were then the apparent conditions
of security, and on what rough calculation a community could so build
itself out to meet its fate. It keeps one easy company here to-day
to think of the whole business as a magnificent mistake. But Mr.
Swinburne, in verses of an extraordinary poetic eloquence, quite brave
enough for whatever there may have been, glances in the right direction
much further than I can do. Read moreover, for other glances, the
“Letters of Edward FitzGerald,” Suffolk worthy and whimsical subject,
who, living hard by at Woodbridge, haunted these regions during most
of his life, and has left, in delightful pages, at the service of
the emulous visitor, the echo of every odd, quaint air they could
draw from his cracked, sweet instrument. He has paid his tribute, I
seem to remember, to the particular delicate flower—the pale Dunwich
rose—that blooms on the walls of the Priory. The emulous visitor,
only yesterday, on the most vulgar of vehicles—which, however, he is
quite aware he must choose between using and abusing—followed, in the
mellow afternoon, one of these faint hints across the land and as far
as the old, old town of Aldeburgh, the birthplace and the commemorated
“Borough” of the poet Crabbe.
FitzGerald, devoted to Crabbe, was apparently not less so to this small
break in the wide, low, heathery bareness that brings the sweet Suffolk
commons—rare purple and gold when I arrived—nearly to the edge of the
sea. We don’t, none the less, always gather the particular impression
we bravely go forth to seek. We doubtless gather another indeed that
will serve as well any such turn as here may wait for it; so that if
it was somehow not easy to work FitzGerald into the small gentility of
the sea-front, the little “marina,” as of a fourth-rate watering-place,
that has elbowed away, evidently in recent years, the old handful of
character, one could at least, to make up for that, fall back either
on the general sense of the happy trickery of genius or on the special
beauty of the mixture, in the singer of Omar Khayyam, that, giving him
such a place for a setting, could yet feed his fancy so full. Crabbe,
at Aldeburgh, for that matter, is perhaps even more wonderful—in the
light, I mean, of what is left of the place by one’s conjuring away
the little modern vulgar accumulation. What is left is just the stony
beach and the big gales and the cluster of fishermen’s huts and the
small, wide, short street of decent, homely, shoppy houses. These
are the private emotions of the historic sense—glimpses in which we
recover for an hour, or rather perhaps, with an intensity, but for the
glimmer of a minute, the conditions that, grimly enough, could engender
masterpieces, or at all events classics. What a mere pinch of manners
and customs in the midst of winds and waves! Yet if it was a feature
of these to return a member to Parliament, what wonder that, up to the
Reform Bill, dead Dunwich should have returned two?
The glimpses I speak of are, in all directions, the constant company of
the afternoon “spin.” Beginning, modestly enough, at Dunwich itself,
they end, for intensity, as far inland as you have time to go; far
enough—this is the great point—to have shown you, in their quiet
vividness of type, a placid series of the things into which you may
most read the old story of what is softest in the English complexity.
I scarce know what murmur has been for weeks in my ears if it be not
that of the constant word that, as a recall of the story, may serve
to be put under the vignette. And yet this word is in its last form
nothing more eloquent than the mere admonition to be pleased. Well, so
you are, even as I was yesterday at Wesselton with the characteristic
“value” that expressed itself, however shyly, in the dear old red inn
at which I halted for the queer restorative—I thus discharge my debt to
it—of a bottle of lemonade with a “dash.” The dash was only of beer,
but the refreshment was immense. So even was that of the sight of a
dim, draped, sphinx-like figure that loomed, at the end of a polished
passage, out of a little dusky back parlour which had a windowful of
the choked light of a small green garden—a figure proving to be an
old woman desirous to dilate on all the years she had sat there with
rheumatism “most cruel.” So, inveterately—and in these cases without
the after-taste—is that of the pretty little park gates you pass to
skirt the walls and hedges beyond which the great affair, the greatest
of all, the deep, still home, sits in the midst of its acres and
strikes you all the more for being, precisely, so unrenowned. It is the
charming repeated lesson that the amenity of the famous seats in this
country is nothing to that of the lost and buried ones. This impression
in particular may bring you round again harmoniously to Dunwich and
above all perhaps to where the Priory, laid, as I may say, flat on its
back, rests its large outline on what was once the high ground, with
the inevitable “big” house, beyond and a little above, folded, for
privacy, in a neat, impenetrable wood. Here as elsewhere the cluster
offers without complication just the signs of the type. At the base of
the hill are the dozen cottages to which the village has been reduced,
and one of which contains, to my hearing, though by no means, alas, to
his own, a very ancient man who will count for you on his fingers, till
they fail, the grand acres that, in his day, he has seen go the way of
the rest. He likes to figure that he ploughed of old where only the sea
ploughs now. Dunwich, however, will still last his time; and that of as
many others as—to repeat my hint—may yet be drawn here (though not, I
hope, on the instance of these prudent lines) to judge for themselves
into how many meanings a few elements can compose. One never need be
bored, after all, when “composition” really rules. It rules in the way
the brown hamlet really disposes itself, and the grey square tower of
the church, in just the right relation, peeps out of trees that remind
me exactly of those which, in the frontispieces of Birket Foster,
offered to my childish credulity the very essence of England. Let me
put it directly for old Suffolk that this credulity finds itself here,
at the end of time, more than ever justified. Let me put it perhaps
also that the very essence of England has a way of presenting itself
with completeness in almost any fortuitous combination of rural objects
at all, so that, wherever you may be, you get, reduced and simplified,
the whole of the scale. The big house and its woods are always at hand;
with a “party” always, in the intervals of shooting, to bring down to
the rustic sports that keep up the tradition of the village green. The
russet, low-browed inn, the “ale-house” of Shakespeare, the immemorial
fountain of beer, looking over that expanse, swings, with an old-time
story-telling creak, the sign of the Marquis of Carabas. The pretty
girls, within sight of it, alight from the Marquis’s wagonette; the
young men with the one eye-glass and the new hat sit beside them on
the benches supplied for their sole accommodation, and thanks to which
the meditator on manners has, a little, the image, gathered from faded
fictions by female hands, of the company brought over, for the triumph
of the heroine, to the hunt or the county ball. And it is always Hodge
and Gaffer that, at bottom, _font les frais_—always the mild children
of the glebe on whom, in the last resort, the complex superstructure
rests.
[Illustration: IN OLD SUFFOLK]
The discovery, in the twilight of time, of the merits, as a
building-site, of Hodge’s broad bent back remains surely one of the
most sagacious strokes of the race from which the squire and the parson
were to be evolved. He is there in force—at the rustic sports—in force
or in feebleness, with Mrs. Hodge and the Miss Hodges, who participate
with a silent glee in the chase, over fields where their shadows are
long, of a pig with a greased tail. He pulls his forelock in the tent
in which, after the pig is caught, the rewards of valour are dispensed
by the squire’s lady, and if he be in favour for respectability and
not behind with rent, he penetrates later to the lawn within the wood,
where he is awaited by a band of music and a collation of beer, buns,
and tobacco.
I mention these things as some of the light notes, but the picture
is never too empty for a stronger one not to sound. The strongest, at
Dunwich, is indeed one that, without in the least falsifying the scale,
counts immensely for filling in. The palm in the rustic sports is for
the bluejackets; as, in England, of course, nothing is easier than for
the village green to alternate with the element that Britannia still
more admirably rules. I had often dreamed that the ideal refuge for a
man of letters was a cottage so placed on the coast as to be circled,
as it were, by the protecting arm of the Admiralty. I remember to
have heard it said in the old country—in New York and Boston—that the
best place to live in is next to an engine-house, and it is on this
analogy that, at Dunwich, I have looked for ministering peace in near
neighbourhood to one of those stations of the coast-guard that, round
all the edge of England, at short intervals, on rock and sand and
heath, make, with shining whitewash and tar, clean as a great state is
at least theoretically clean, each its own little image of the reach
of the empire. It is in each case an image that, for one reason and
another, you respond to with a sort of thrill; and the thing becomes
as concrete as you can wish on your discovering in the three or four
individual members of the simple staff of the establishment all sorts
of educated decency and many sorts of beguilement to intercourse. Prime
among the latter, in truth, is the great yarn-spinning gift. It differs
from man to man, but here and there it glows like a cut ruby. May the
last darkness close before I cease to care for sea-folk!—though this,
I hasten to add, is not the private predilection at which, in these
incoherent notes, I proposed most to glance. Let me have mentioned it
merely as a sign that the fault is all my own if, this summer, the arm
of the Admiralty has not, in the full measure of my theory, represented
the protection under which the long literary morning may know—abyss of
delusion!—nothing but itself.
DUNWICH, August 31, 1879.
[Illustration]