Guide-books are so many that it seems probable we have more than any
other country--possibly more than all the rest of the universe together.
Every county has a little library of its own--guides to its towns,
churches, abbeys, castles, rivers, mountains; finally, to the county
as a whole. They are of all prices and all sizes, from the diminutive
paper-covered booklet, worth a penny, to the stout cloth-bound octavo
volume which costs eight or ten or twelve shillings, or to the gigantic
folio county history, the huge repository from which the guide-book
maker gets his materials. For these great works are also guide-books,
containing everything we want to learn, only made on so huge a scale
as to be suited to the coat pockets of Brobdingnagians rather than of
little ordinary men. The wonder of it all comes in when we find that
these books, however old and comparatively worthless they may be, are
practically never wholly out of date. When a new work is brought out
(dozens appear annually) and, say, five thousand copies sold, it
does not throw as many, or indeed any, copies of the old book out of
circulation: it supersedes nothing. If any man can indulge in the luxury
of a new up-to-date guide to any place, and gets rid of his old one
(a rare thing to do), this will be snapped up by poorer men, who will
treasure it and hand it down or on to others. Editions of 1860-50-40,
and older, are still prized, not merely as keepsakes but for study
or reference. Any one can prove this by going the round of a dozen
second-hand booksellers in his own district in London. There will
be tons of literary rubbish, and good stuff old and new, but few
guidebooks--in some cases not one. If you ask your man at a venture for,
say, a guide to Hampshire, he will most probably tell you that he has
not one in stock; then, in his anxiety to do business, he will, perhaps,
fish out a guide to Derbyshire, dated 1854--a shabby old book--and offer
it for four or five shillings, the price of a Crabbe in eight volumes,
or of Gibbon's Decline and Fall in six volumes, bound in calf. Talk to
this man, and to the other eleven, and they will tell you that there is
always a sale for guide-books--that the supply does not keep pace with
the demand. It may be taken as a fact that most of the books of this
kind published during the last half-century--many millions of copies in
the aggregate--are still in existence and are valued possessions.
There is nothing to quarrel with in all this. As a people we run about a
great deal; and having curious minds we naturally wish to know all there
is to be known, or all that is interesting to know, about the places we
visit. Then, again, our time as a rule being limited, we want the whole
matter--history, antiquities, places of interest in the neighbourhood,
etc. in a nutshell. The brief book serves its purpose well enough; but
it is not thrown away like the newspaper and the magazines; however
cheap and badly got up it may be, it is taken home to serve another
purpose, to be a help to memory, and nobody can have it until its owner
removes himself (but not his possessions) from this planet; or until
the broker seizes his belongings, and guide-books, together with other
books, are disposed of in packages by the auctioneer.
In all this we see that guide-books are very important to us, and that
there is little or no fault to be found with them, since even the worst
give some guidance and enable us in after times mentally to revisit
distant places. It may then be said that there are really no bad
guide-books, and that those that are good in the highest sense are
beyond praise. A reverential sentiment, which is almost religious in
character, connects itself in our minds with the very name of Murray. It
is, however, possible to make an injudicious use of these books, and by
so doing to miss the fine point of many a pleasure. The very fact that
these books are guides to us and invaluable, and that we readily acquire
the habit of taking them about with us and consulting them at frequent
intervals, comes between us and that rarest and most exquisite enjoyment
to be experienced amidst novel scenes. He that visits a place new to him
for some special object rightly informs himself of all that the book can
tell him. The knowledge may be useful; pleasure is with him a secondary
object. But if pleasure be the main object, it will only be experienced
in the highest degree by him who goes without book and discovers what
old Fuller called the "observables" for himself. There will be no
mental pictures previously formed; consequently what is found will not
disappoint. When the mind has been permitted to dwell beforehand on
any scene, then, however beautiful or grand it may be, the element
of surprise is wanting and admiration is weak. The delight has been
discounted.
My own plan, which may be recommended only to those who go out
for pleasure--who value happiness above useless (otherwise useful)
knowledge, and the pictures that live and glow in memory above albums
and collections of photographs--is not to look at a guide-book until the
place it treats of has been explored and left behind.
The practical person, to whom this may come as a new idea and who wishes
not to waste any time in experiments, would doubtless like to hear how
the plan works. He will say that he certainly wants all the happiness to
be got out of his rambles, but it is clear that without the book in his
pocket he would miss many interesting things: Would the greater degree
of pleasure experienced in the others be a sufficient compensation?
I should say that he would gain more than he would lose; that vivid
interest and pleasure in a few things is preferable to that fainter,
more diffused feeling experienced in the other case. Again, we have to
take into account the value to us of the mental pictures gathered in our
wanderings. For we know that only when a scene is viewed emotionally,
when it produces in us a shock of pleasure, does it become a permanent
possession of the mind; in other words, it registers an image which,
when called up before the inner eye, is capable of reproducing a measure
of the original delight.
In recalling those scenes which have given me the greatest happiness,
the images of which are most vivid and lasting, I find that most of them
are of scenes or objects which were discovered, as it were, by chance,
which I had not heard of, or else had heard of and forgotten, or which
I had not expected to see. They came as a surprise, and in the following
instance one may see that it makes a vast difference whether we do or do
not experience such a sensation.
In the course of a ramble on foot in a remote district I came to a small
ancient town, set in a cuplike depression amidst high wood-grown hills.
The woods were of oak in spring foliage, and against that vivid green
I saw the many-gabled tiled roofs and tall chimneys of the old timbered
houses, glowing red and warm brown in the brilliant sunshine--a scene of
rare beauty, and yet it produced no shock of pleasure; never, in fact,
had I looked on a lovely scene for the first time so unemotionally.
It seemed to be no new scene, but an old familiar one; and that it had
certain degrading associations which took away all delight.
The reason of this was that a great railway company had long been
"booming" this romantic spot, and large photographs, plain and coloured,
of the town and its quaint buildings had for years been staring at me
in every station and every railway carriage which I had entered on that
line. Photography degrades most things, especially open-air things;
and in this case, not only had its poor presentments made the scene too
familiar, but something of the degradation in the advertising pictures
seemed to attach itself to the very scene. Yet even here, after some
pleasureless days spent in vain endeavours to shake off these vulgar
associations, I was to experience one of the sweetest surprises and
delights of my life.
The church of this village-like town is one of its chief attractions; it
is a very old and stately building, and its perpendicular tower,
nearly a hundred feet high, is one of the noblest in England. It has a
magnificent peal of bells, and on a Sunday afternoon they were ringing,
filling and flooding that hollow in the hills, seeming to make the
houses and trees and the very earth to tremble with the glorious storm
of sound. Walking past the church, I followed the streamlet that runs
through the town and out by a cleft between the hills to a narrow marshy
valley, on the other side of which are precipitous hills, clothed from
base to summit in oak woods. As I walked through the cleft the musical
roar of the bells followed, and was like a mighty current flowing
through and over me; but as I came out the sound from behind ceased
suddenly and was now in front, coming back from the hills before me. A
sound, but not the same--not a mere echo; and yet an echo it was, the
most wonderful I had ever heard. For now that great tempest of musical
noise, composed of a multitude of clanging notes with long vibrations,
overlapping and mingling and clashing together, seemed at the same time
one and many--that tempest from the tower which had mysteriously ceased
to be audible came back in strokes or notes distinct and separate and
multiplied many times. The sound, the echo, was distributed over the
whole face of the steep hill before me, and was changed in character,
and it was as if every one of those thousands of oak trees had a peal
of bells in it, and that they were raining that far-up bright spiritual
tree music down into the valley below. As I stood listening it seemed
to me that I had never heard anything so beautiful, nor had any man--not
the monk of Eynsham in that vision when he heard the Easter bells on
the holy Saturday evening, and described the sound as "a ringing of a
marvellous sweetness, as if all the bells in the world, or whatsoever is
of sounding, had been rung together at once."
Here, then, I had found and had become the possessor of something
priceless, since in that moment of surprise and delight the mysterious
beautiful sound, with the whole scene, had registered an impression
which would outlast all others received at that place, where I had
viewed all things with but languid interest. Had it not come as a
complete surprise, the emotion experienced and the resultant mental
image would not have been so vivid; as it is, I can mentally stand in
that valley when I will, seeing that green-wooded hill in front of me
and listen to that unearthly music.
Naturally, after quitting the spot, I looked at the first opportunity
into a guide-book of the district, only to find that it contained not
one word about those wonderful illusive sounds! The book-makers had not
done their work well, since it is a pleasure after having discovered
something delightful for ourselves to know how others have been affected
by it and how they describe it.
Of many other incidents of the kind I will, in this chapter, relate one
more, which has a historical or legendary interest. I was staying with
the companion of my walks at a village in Southern England in a district
new to us. We arrived on a Saturday, and next morning after breakfast
went out for a long walk. Turning into the first path across the fields
on leaving the village, we came eventually to an oak wood, which was
like an open forest, very wild and solitary. In half an hour's walk
among the old oaks and underwood we saw no sign of human occupancy, and
heard nothing but the woodland birds. We heard, and then saw, the cuckoo
for the first time that season, though it was but April the fourth. But
the cuckoo was early that spring and had been heard by some from the
middle of March. At length, about half-past ten o'clock, we caught sight
of a number of people walking in a kind of straggling procession by a
path which crossed ours at right angles, headed by a stout old man in
a black smock frock and brown leggings, who carried a big book in one
hand. One of the processionists we spoke to told us they came from a
hamlet a mile away on the borders of the wood and were on their way to
church. We elected to follow them, thinking that the church was at some
neighbouring village; to our surprise we found it was in the wood, with
no other building in sight--a small ancient-looking church built on a
raised mound, surrounded by a wide shallow grass-grown trench, on the
border of a marshy stream. The people went in and took their seats,
while we remained standing just by the door. Then the priest came from
the vestry, and seizing the rope vigorously, pulled at it for five
minutes, after which he showed us where to sit and the service began. It
was very pleasant there, with the door open to the sunlit forest and
the little green churchyard without, with a willow wren, the first I had
heard, singing his delicate little strain at intervals.
The service over, we rambled an hour longer in the wood, then returned
to our village, which had a church of its own, and our landlady, hearing
where we had been, told us the story, or tradition, of the little church
in the wood. Its origin goes very far back to early Norman times, when
all the land in this part was owned by one of William's followers on
whom it had been bestowed. He built himself a house or castle on
the edge of the forest, where he lived with his wife and two little
daughters who were his chief delight. It happened that one day when he
was absent the two little girls with their female attendant went into
the wood in search of flowers, and that meeting a wild boar they turned
and fled, screaming for help. The savage beast pursued, and, quickly
overtaking them, attacked the hindermost, the youngest of the two little
girls, anal killed her, the others escaping in the meantime. On the
following day the father returned, and was mad with grief and rage on
hearing of the tragedy, and in his madness resolved to go alone on foot
to the forest and search for the beast and taste no food or drink until
he had slain it. Accordingly to the forest he went, and roamed through
it by day and night, and towards the end of the following day he
actually found and roused the dreadful animal, and although weakened by
his long fast and fatigue, his fury gave him force to fight and conquer
it, or else the powers above came to his aid; for when he stood spear
in hand to wait the charge of the furious beast he vowed that if he
overcame it on that spot he would build a chapel, where God would be
worshipped for ever. And there it was raised and has stood to this day,
its doors open every Sunday to worshippers, with but one break, some
time in the sixteenth century to the third year of Elizabeth, since when
there has been no suspension of the weekly service.
That the tradition is not true no one can say. We know that the memory
of an action or tragedy of a character to stir the feelings and impress
the imagination may live unrecorded in any locality for long centuries.
And more, we know or suppose, from at least one quite familiar instance
from Flintshire, that a tradition may even take us back to prehistoric
times and find corroboration in our own day.
But of this story what corroboration is there, and what do the books
say? I have consulted the county history, and no mention is made of
such a tradition, and can only assume that the author had never heard
it--that he had not the curious Aubrey mind. He only says that it is
a very early church--how early he does not know--and adds that it was
built "for the convenience of the inhabitants of the place." An odd
statement, seeing that the place has every appearance of having always
been what it is, a forest, and that the inhabitants thereof are weasels,
foxes, jays and such-like, and doubtless in former days included wolves,
boars, roe-deer and stags, beings which, as Walt Whitman truly remarks,
do not worry themselves about their souls.
With this question, however, we need not concern ourselves. To me,
after stumbling by chance on the little church in that solitary woodland
place, the story of its origin was accepted as true; no doubt it had
come down unaltered from generation to generation through all those
centuries, and it moved my pity yet was a delight to hear, as great
perhaps as it had been to listen to the beautiful chimes many times
multiplied from the wooded hill. And if I have a purpose in this book,
which is without a purpose, a message to deliver and a lesson to teach,
it is only this--the charm of the unknown, and the infinitely greater
pleasure in discovering the interesting things for ourselves than in
informing ourselves of them by reading. It is like the difference in
flavour in wild fruits and all wild meats found and gathered by our own
hands in wild places and that of the same prepared and put on the table
for us. The ever-varying aspects of nature, of earth and sea and cloud,
are a perpetual joy to the artist, who waits and watches for their
appearance, who knows that sun and atmosphere have for him revelations
without end. They come and go and mock his best efforts; he knows that
his striving is in vain--that his weak hands and earthy pigments cannot
reproduce these effects or express his feeling--that, as Leighton said,
"every picture is a subject thrown away." But he has his joy none the
less; it is in the pursuit and in the dream of capturing something
illusive, mysterious, and inexpressibly beautiful.