valleys; the cows that graze on the steep fields that surround it look
down into the chimney-pots and back gardens. One of the converging
valleys is rich in woods, and has a pleasant trout-stream, that flows
among elders, bickers along by woodland corners, and runs brimming
through rich water meadows, full of meadowsweet and willow-herb—the
place in summer has a hot honied smell. You need not follow the road,
but you may take an aimless footpath, which meanders from stile to stile
in a leisurely way. After a mile or so a little stream bubbles in on the
left; and close beside it an old deep farm-road, full of boulders and
mud in winter, half road, half water-course, plunges down from the wood.
All the hedges are full of gnarled roots fringed with luxuriant ferns.
On a cloudy summer day it is like a hothouse here, and the flowers know
it and revel in the warm growing air. Higher and higher the road goes;
then it passes a farm-house, once an ancient manor: the walls green with
lichen and moss, and a curious ancient cognizance, a bear with a ragged
staff clasped in his paws, over the doorway. The farm is embowered in
huge sprawling laurels and has a little garden, with box hedges and
sharp savoury smells of herbs and sweet-william, and a row of humming
hives. Push open the byre gate and go further yet; we are near the crest
of the hill now: just below the top grows a thick wood of larches, set
close together. You would not know there was a house in here. There is
a little rustic gate at the corner of the plantation, and a path, just a
track, rarely trodden, soft with a carpet of innumerable larch-needles.
Presently you come in sight of a small yellow stone house; not a
venerable house, nor a beautiful one—if anything, a little pretentious,
and looking as if the heart of the plantation had been cut out to build
it as indeed it was; round-topped windows, high parapets, no roof
visible, and only one rather makeshift chimney; the whole air of it
rather sinister, and at the same time shamefaced—a little as though it
set out to be castellated and had suddenly shrunk and collapsed, and been
hastily finished. A gravel walk very full of weeds runs immediately round
the house; there is no garden, but a small enclosure for cabbages grown
very rank. In most of the windows hang dirty-looking blinds half pulled
down; a general air of sordid neglect broods over the place. Here in this
house had lived for many years—and, for all I know, lives there still—a
retired gentleman, a public school and University man, who had taken high
honours at the latter; not rich, but with a competence. What had caused
his seclusion from the world I do not know, and I am not particular to
inquire; whether a false step and the forced abandonment of a career, a
disappointment of some kind, a hypochondriacal whim, or a settled and
deliberate resolution. I know not, but always hoped the last.
From some slight indications I have thought that, for some reason or
other, in youth, my recluse had cause to think that his life would not
be a long one—his selection of a site was apparently fortuitous. He
preferred a mild climate, and, it seems, took a fancy to the very remote
and sequestered character of the valley; he bought a few acres of land,
planted them with larches, and in the centre erected the unsightly house
which I have described.
Inside the place was rather more attractive than you would have expected.
There was a pinched little entry, rather bare, and a steep staircase
leading to the upper regions; in front of you a door leading to some
offices; on the left a door that opened into a large room to which all
the rest of the house had been sacrificed. It had three windows, much
overshadowed by the larches, which indeed at one corner actually touched
the house and swept the windows as they swayed in the breeze. The room
was barely furnished, with a carpet faded beyond recognition, and high
presses, mostly containing books. An oak table stood near one of the
windows, where our hermit took his meals; another table, covered with
books, was set near the fireplace; at the far end a door led into an ugly
slit of a room lighted by a skylight, where he slept. But I gathered
that for days together he did not go to bed, but dozed in his chair. On
the walls hung two or three portraits, black with age. One of an officer
in a military uniform of the last century with a huge, adumbrating
cocked-hat; a divine in bands and wig; and a pinched-looking lady in blue
silk with two boys. His only servant was an elderly strong-looking woman
of about fifty, with a look of intense mental suffering on her face,
and weary eyes which she seldom lifted from the floor. I never heard
her utter more than three consecutive words. She was afflicted I heard,
not from herself, with a power of seeing apparitions, not, curiously,
in the house, but in the wood all round; she told Mr. Woodward that
“the dead used to look in at the window at noon and beckon her out.” In
consequence of this she had not set foot outside the doors for twenty
years, except once, when her master had been attacked by sudden illness.
The only outside servant he had was a surly man who lived in a cottage
a quarter of a mile away on the high-road, who marketed for them, drew
water, and met the carrier’s cart which brought their necessaries.
The man himself was a student of history: he never wrote, except a few
marginal notes in his books. He was totally ignorant of what was going
on, took in no papers, and asked no questions as to current events. He
received no letters, and the only parcels that came to him were boxes
of books from a London library—memoirs, historical treatises, and
biographies of the last century. I take it he had a minute knowledge
of the social and political life of England up to the beginning of the
present century; he received no one but Mr. Woodward who saw him two or
three times a year, and it was with Mr. Woodward that I went, making the
excuse (which was actually the case) that some literary work that I was
doing was suspended for want of books.
We were shown in; he did not rise to receive us, but greeted us with
extreme cordiality, and an old-fashioned kind of courtesy, absolutely
without embarrassment. He was a tall, thin man, with a fair complexion,
and straggling hair and beard. He seemed to be in excellent health; and I
learnt that in the matter of food and drink he was singularly abstemious,
which accounted for his clear complexion and brilliant eye. He smoked in
moderation a very fragrant tobacco of which he gave me a small quantity,
but refused to say where he obtained it. There was an air of infinite
contentment about him. He seemed to me to hope for nothing and expect
nothing from life; to live in the moment and for the moment. If ever I
saw serene happiness written on a face in legible characters, it was
there. He talked a little on theological points, with an air of gentle
good-humour, to Mr. Woodward, somewhat as you might talk to a child, with
amiable interest in the unexpected cleverness of its replies; he gave me
the information I requested clearly and concisely but with no apparent
zest, and seemed to have no wish to dwell on the subject or to part with
his store of knowledge.
His one form of exercise was long vague walks; in the winter he rarely
left the house except on moonlight nights; but in the summer he was
accustomed to start as soon as it was light, and to ramble, never on the
roads, but by unfrequented field-paths, for miles and miles, generally
returning before the ordinary world was astir. On hot days he would sit
by the stream in a very remote nook beneath a high bank where the water
ran swiftly down a narrow channel, and swung into a deep black pool;
here, I was told, he would stay for hours with his eyes fixed on the
water, lost in some mysterious reverie. I take it he was a poet without
power of expression, and his heart was as clean as a child’s.
[Sidenote: MODERN LIFE]
It is the fashion now to talk with much affected weariness of the hurry
and bustle of modern life. No doubt such things are to be found if you go
in search of them; and to have your life attended by a great quantity of
either is generally held to be a sign of success. But the truth is, that
this is what ordinary people like. The ordinary man has no precise idea
what to do with his time. He needs to have it filled up by a good many
conflicting and petty duties, and if it is filled he has a feeling that
he is useful. But many of these duties are only necessary because of the
existence of each other; it is a vicious circle. “What are those fields
for?” said a squire who had lately succeeded to an estate, as he walked
round with the bailiff. “To grow oats, sir.” “And what do you do with the
oats?” “Feed the horses, sir.” “And what do you want the horses for?” “To
plough the fields, sir.” That is what much of the bustle of modern life
consists of.
Solitude and silence are a great strain; but if you enjoy them they are
at least harmless, which is more than can be said of many activities.
Such is not perhaps the temper in which continents are explored, battles
won, empires extended, fortunes made. But whatever concrete gain we make
for ourselves must be taken from others; and we ought to be very certain
indeed of the meaning of this life, and the nature of the world to which
we all migrate, before we immerse ourselves in self-contrived businesses.
To be natural, to find our true life, to be independent of luxuries, not
to be at the mercy of prejudices and false ideals—that is the secret of
life: who can say that it is a secret that we most of us make our own?
My recluse, I think, was nearer the Kingdom of Heaven, where places are
not laid according to the table of precedence, than many men who have
had biographies and statues, and who will be, I fear, sadly adrift in the
world of silence into which they may be flung.
22
_Nov. 6, 1890._
To-day the gale had blown itself out; all yesterday it blustered round
corners, shook casements, thundered in the chimneys, and roared in the
pines. Now it is bright and fresh, and the steady wind is routing one by
one the few clouds that hang in the sky. I came in yesterday at dusk,
and the whole heaven was full of great ragged, lowering storm-wreaths,
weeping wildly and sadly; now the rain is over, though in the morning a
sudden dash of great drops mingled with hail made the windows patter; but
the sun shone out very low and white from the clouds, even while the hail
leapt on the window-sill.
I took the field-path that wanders aimlessly away below the house; the
water lay in the grass, and the sodden leaves had a bitter smell. The
copses were very bare, and the stream ran hoarse and turbid. The way
wound by fallows and hedges—now threading a steep copse, now along the
silent water-meadows, now through an open forest space, with faggots
tied and piled, or by a cattle byre. Here and there I turned into a
country lane, till at last the village of Spyfield lay before me, with
the ancient church of dark sandstone and the little street of handsome
Georgian houses, very neat and prim—a place, you would think, where every
one went to bed at ten, and where no murmurs of wars ever penetrated.
Just beyond the village, my friend, Mr. Campden, the great artist, has
built himself a palace. It is somewhat rococo, no doubt, with its marble
terrace and its gilded cupolas. But it gleams in the dark hanging wood
with an exotic beauty of its own, as if a Genie had uprooted it from a
Tuscan slope, and planted it swiftly, in an unfamiliar world, in an hour
of breathless labour between the twilight and the dawn. Still, fantastic
as it is, it is an agreeable contrast to the brick-built mansions, with
their slated turrets, that have lately, alas, begun to alight in our
woodlands.
[Sidenote: MR. CAMPDEN]
Mr. Campden is a real prince, a Lorenzo the Magnificent; not only is he
the painter of pictures which command a high price, though to me they
are little more than harmonious wallpaper; but he binds books, makes
furniture, weaves tapestry, and even bakes tiles and pottery; and the
slender minaret that rises from a plain, windowless building on the
right, is nothing but a concealed chimney. Moreover, he inherited through
a relative’s death an immense fortune, so that he is a millionaire as
well. To-day I followed the little steep lane that skirts his domain,
and halted for a moment at a great grille of ironwork, which gives the
passer-by a romantic and generous glimpse of a pleached alley, terminated
by a mysterious leaden statue. I peeped in cautiously, and saw the
great man in a blue suit, with a fur cloak thrown round his shoulders,
a slouched hat set back from his forehead, and a loose red tie gleaming
from his low-cut collar. I was near enough to see his wavy white hair
and beard, his keen eyes, his thin hands, as he paced delicately about,
breathing the air, and looking critically at the exquisite house beyond
him. I am sure of a welcome from Mr. Campden—indeed, he has a princely
welcome for all the world—but to-day I felt a certain simple schoolboy
shyness, which ill accords with Mr. Campden’s Venetian manner. It is
delightful after long rusticity to be with him, but it is like taking
a part in some solemn and affected dance; to Mr. Campden I am the
student-recluse, and to be gracefully bantered accordingly, and asked
a series of questions on matters with which I am wholly unacquainted,
but which are all part of the setting with which his pictorial mind has
dowered me. On my first visit to him I spoke of the field-names of the
neighbourhood, and so Mr. Campden speaks to me of Domesday Book, which I
have never seen. I happened to express—in sheer wantonness—an interest
in strange birds, and I have ever since to Mr. Campden been a man who,
in the intervals of reading Domesday Book, stands in all weathers on
hilltops, or by reedy stream-ends, watching for eagles and swans, like a
Roman augur—indeed Augur is the name he gives me—our dear Augur—when I am
introduced to his great friends.
Mr. Campden has an infinite contempt for the gentlemen of the
neighbourhood, whom he treats with splendid courtesy, and the kind of
patronising amusement with which one listens to the prattle of a rustic
child. It is a matter of unceasing merriment to me to see him with a
young squire of the neighbourhood, an intelligent young fellow who has
travelled a good deal, and is a considerable reader. He has a certain
superficial shyness, and consequently has never been able to secure
enough of the talk for himself to show Mr. Campden what he is thinking
of; and Mr. Campden at once boards him with questions about the price
of eggs and the rotation of crops, calling him, “Will Honeycomb” from
the _Spectator_; and when plied with nervous questions as to Perugino or
Carlo Dolce, saying grandiloquently, “My dear young man, I know nothing
whatever about it; I leave that to the critics. I am a republican in art,
a red indeed, ha, ha! And you and I must not concern ourselves with such
things. Here we are in the country, and we must talk of _bullocks_. Tell
me now, in Lorton market last week, what price did a Tegg fetch?”
Mr. Campden is extraordinarily ignorant of all country matters, and
has a small stock of ancient provincial words, not indigenous to the
neighbourhood, but gathered from local histories, that he produces with
complacent pride. Indeed, I do not know that I ever saw a more ludicrous
scene than Mr. Campden talking agriculture to a distinguished scientific
man, whom a neighbouring squire had brought over to tea with him, and
whom he took for a landowner. To hear Mr. Campden explaining a subject
with which he was not acquainted to a courteous scientist, who did not
even know to what he was alluding, was a sight to make angels laugh.
But to-day I let Mr. Campden pace like a peacock up and down his
pleasaunces, with his greyhound following him, and threaded the
water-meadows homewards. I gave myself up to the luxurious influences
of solitude and cool airs, and walked slowly, indifferent where I went,
by sandstone pits, by brimming streams, through dripping coverts, till
the day declined. What did I think of? I hardly dare confess. There are
two or three ludicrous, pitiful ambitions that lurk in the corners of my
mind, which, when I am alone and aimless, I take out and hold, as a child
holds a doll, while fancy invests them with radiant hues. These and no
other were my mental pabulum. I know they cannot be realised—indeed, I
do not desire them—but these odd and dusty fancies remain with me from
far-off boyish days; and many a time have I thus paraded them in all
their silliness.
[Sidenote: HOME]
But the hedgerow grasses grew indistinguishably grey; the cattle splashed
home along the road; the sharp smell of wood smoke from cottage fires,
piled for the long evenings, stole down the woodways; pheasants muttered
and crowed in the coverts, and sprang clanging to their roosts. The
murmur of the stream became louder and more insistent; and as I turned
the corner of the wood, it was with a glow of pleasure that I saw the
sober gables of Golden End, and the hall window, like a red solemn eye,
gaze cheerily upon the misty valley.
23
_July 7, 1891._
[Sidenote: IN THE WOODS]
I cannot tell why it is, but to be alone among woods, especially towards
evening, is often attended with a vague unrest, an unsubstantial awe,
which, though of the nature of pleasure, is perilously near the confines
of horror. On certain days, when the nerves are very alert and the woods
unusually still, I have known the sense become almost insupportable.
There is a certain feeling of being haunted, followed, watched, almost
dogged, which is bewildering and unmanning. Foolish as it may appear, I
have found the carrying of a gun almost a relief on such occasions. But
what heightens the sense in a strange degree is the presence of still
water. A stream is lively—it encourages and consoles; but the sight of
a long dark lake, with the woods coming down to the water’s edge, is a
sight so solemn as to be positively oppressive. Each kind of natural
scenery has its own awe—the _genius loci_, so to speak. On a grassy down
there is the terror of the huge open-eyed gaze of the sky. In craggy
mountains there is something wild and beastlike frowning from the rocks.
Among ice and snow there is something mercilessly pure and averse to
life; but neither of these is so intense or definite as the horror of
still woods and silent waters. The feeling is admirably expressed by Mr.
George Macdonald in _Phantastes_, a magical book. It is that sensation
of haunting presences hiding behind trees, watching us timidly from the
fern, peeping from dark copses, resting among fantastic and weather-worn
rocks, that finds expression in the stories of Dryads and fairies, which
seem so deeply implanted in the mind of man. Who, on coming out through
dark woods into some green sequestered lawn, set deep in the fringing
forest, has not had the sensation of an interrupted revel, as festivity
suddenly abandoned by wild, ethereal natures, who have shrunk in silent
alarm back into the sheltering shades? If only one had been more wary,
and stolen a moment earlier upon the unsuspecting company!
But there is a darker and cloudier sensation, the _admonitus locorum_,
which I have experienced upon fields of battle, and places where
some huge tragedy of human suffering and excitement has been wrought.
I have felt it upon the rustic ploughland of Jena, and on the grassy
slopes of Flodden; it has crept over me under the mouldering walls and
frowning gateways of old guarded towns; and not only there, where it may
be nothing but the reflex of shadowy imaginations, but on wind-swept
moors and tranquil valleys, I have felt, by some secret intuition, some
overpowering tremor of spirit, that here some desperate strife has been
waged, some primeval conflict enacted. There is a spot in the valley of
Llanthony, a grassy tumulus among steep green hills, where the sense came
over me with an uncontrollable throb of insight, that here some desperate
stand was made, some barbarous Themopylæ lost or won.
[Sidenote: A DARK SECRET]
There is a place near Golden End where I encountered a singular
experience. I own that I never pass it now without some obsession
of feeling; indeed, I will confess that when I am alone I take a
considerable circuit to avoid the place. An ancient footway, trodden deep
in a sandy covert, winds up through a copse, and comes out into a quiet
place far from the high-road, in the heart of the wood. Here stands a
mouldering barn, and there are two or three shrubs, an escalonia and a
cypress, that testify to some remote human occupation. There is a stretch
of green sward, varied with bracken, and on the left a deep excavation,
where sand has been dug: in winter, a pool; in summer, a marshy place
full of stiff, lush water-plants. In this place, time after time as I
passed it, there seemed to be a strange silence. No bird seemed to sing
here, no woodland beast to frisk here; a secret shame or horror rested
on the spot. It was with no sense of surprise, but rather of resolved
doubt, that I found, one bright morning, two labouring men bent over
some object that lay upon the ground. When they saw me, they seemed at
first to hesitate, and then asked me to come and look. It was a spectacle
of singular horror: they had drawn from the marshy edge of the pool
the tiny skeleton of a child, wrapped in some oozy and ragged cloths;
the slime dripping from the eyeless cavities of the little skull, and
the weeds trailing over the unsightly cerements. It had caught the eye
of one of them as they were passing. “The place has always had an evil
name,” said one of them with a strange solemnity. There had been a house
there, I gathered, inhabited by a mysterious evil family, a place of
dark sin and hideous tradition. The stock had dwindled down to a wild
solitary woman, who extracted a bare sustenance out of a tiny farm, and
who alternated long periods of torpid gloom with disgusting orgies of
drunkenness. Thirty years ago she had died, and the farm had remained
so long unlet that it was at last pulled down, and the land planted
with wood. Subsequent investigations revealed nothing; and the body had
lain there, it was thought, for fully that time, preserved from decay
by an iron-bound box in which it had been enclosed, and of which some
traces still remained in reddish smears of rust and clotted nails. That
picture—the sunlit morning, the troubled faces of the men, the silent
spectatorial woods—has dwelt with me ineffaceably.
[Sidenote: OBSESSION]
Again, I have been constantly visited by the same inexplicable sensation
in a certain room at Golden End. The room in question is a great bare
chamber at the top of the house: the walls are plastered, and covered in
all directions by solid warped beams; through the closed and dusty window
the sunlight filters sordidly into the room. I do not know why it has
never been furnished, but I gathered that my father took an unexplained
dislike to the room from the first. The odd feature of it is, that in
the wall at one end is a small door, as of a cupboard, some feet from
the ground, which opens, not as you would expect into a cupboard, but
into a loft, where you can see the tiles, the brickwork of the clustered
chimney-stacks, and the plastered lathwork of the floor, in and below
the joists of the timber. This strange opening can never have been a
window, because the shutter is of the same date as the house; still less
a door, for it is hardly possible to squeeze through it; but as the loft
into which it looks is an accretion of later date than the room itself,
it seems to me that the garret may have been once a granary up to which
sacks were swung from the ground by a pulley; and this is made more
possible by the existence of some iron staples on the outer side of it,
that appear to have once controlled some simple mechanism.
[Sidenote: THE EVIL ROOM]