One of the most attractive bits of green and wooded country near London
I know lies between Reading and Basingstoke and includes Aldermaston
with its immemorial oaks in Berkshire and Silchester with Pamber Forest
in Hampshire. It has long been one of my favourite haunts, summer and
winter, and it is perhaps the only wooded place in England where I have
a home feeling as strong as that which I experience in certain places
among the South Wiltshire downs and in the absolutely flat country on
the Severn, in Somerset, and the flat country in Cambridgeshire and East
Anglia, especially at Lynn and about Ely.
I am now going back to my first visit to this green retreat; it was in
the course of one of those Easter walks I have spoken of, and the way
was through Reading and by Three Mile Cross and Swallowfield. On this
occasion I conceived a dislike to Reading which I have never quite got
over, for it seemed an unconscionably big place for two slow pedestrians
to leave behind. Worse still, when we did leave it we found that Reading
would not leave us. It was like a stupendous octopus in red brick
which threw out red tentacles, miles and miles long in various
directions--little rows and single and double cottages and villas, all
in red, red brick and its weary accompaniment, the everlasting hard
slate roof. These square red brick boxes with sloping slate tops are
built as close as possible to the public road, so that the passer-by
looking in at the windows may see the whole interior--wall-papers,
pictures, furniture, and oftentimes the dull expressionless face of the
woman of the house, staring back at you out of her shallow blue eyes.
The weather too was against us; a grey hard sky, like the slate roofs,
and a cold strong east wind to make the road dusty all day long.
Arrived at Three Mile Cross, it was no surprise to find it no longer
recognizable as the hamlet described in Our Village, but it was
saddening to look at the cottage in which Mary Russell Mitford lived and
was on the whole very happy with her flowers and work for thirty years
of her life, in its present degraded state. It has a sign now and calls
itself the "Mitford Arms" and a "Temperance Hotel," and we were told
that you could get tea and bread and butter there but nothing else. The
cottage has been much altered since Miss Mitford's time, and the open
space once occupied by the beloved garden is now filled with buildings,
including a corrugated-iron dissenting chapel.
From Three Mile Cross we walked on to Swallowfield, still by those
never-ending roadside red-brick cottages and villas, for we were not yet
properly out of the hated biscuit metropolis. It was a big village with
the houses scattered far and wide over several square miles of country,
but just where the church stands it is shady and pleasant. The pretty
church yard too is very deeply shaded and occupies a small hill with the
Loddon flowing partly round it, then taking its swift way through the
village. Miss Mitford's monument is a plain, almost an ugly, granite
cross, standing close to the wall, shaded by yew, elm, and beech trees,
and one is grateful to think that if she never had her reward when
living she has found at any rate a very peaceful resting-place.
The sexton was there and told us that he was but ten years old when
Miss Mitford died, but that he remembered her well and she was a very
pleasant little woman. Others in the place who remembered her said the
same--that she was very pleasant and sweet. We know that she was sweet
and charming, but unfortunately the portraits we have of her do not
give that impression. They represent her as a fat common-place looking
person, a little vulgar perhaps. I fancy the artists were bunglers. I
possess a copy of a very small pencil sketch made of her face by a dear
old lady friend of mine, now dead, about the year 1851 or 2. My friend
had a gift for portraiture in a peculiar way. When she saw a face that
greatly interested her, in a drawing-room, on a platform, in the street,
anywhere, it remained very vividly in her mind and on going home she
would sketch it, and some of these sketches of well known persons are
wonderfully good. She was staying in the country with a friend who drove
with her to Swallowfield to call on Miss Mitford, and on her return to
her friend's house she made the little sketch, and in this tiny portrait
I can see the refinement, the sweetness, the animation and charm which
she undoubtedly possessed.
But let me now venture to step a little outside of my own province, my
small plot--a poor pedestrian's unimportant impressions of places and
faces; all these p's come by accident; and this I put in parenthetically
just because an editor solemnly told me a while ago that he couldn't
abide and wouldn't have alliteration's artful aid in his periodical. Let
us leave the subject of what Miss Mitford was to those of her day who
knew her; a thousand lovely personalities pass away every year and in a
little while are no more remembered than the bright-plumaged bird that
falls in the tropical forest, or the vanished orchid bloom of which some
one has said that the angels in heaven can look on no more beautiful
thing. Leaving all that, let us ask what remains to us of another
generation of all she was and did?
She was a prolific writer, both prose and verse, and, as we know, had an
extraordinary vogue in her own time. Anything that came from her pen had
an immediate success; indeed, so highly was she regarded that nothing
she chose to write, however poor, could fail. And she certainly did
write a good deal of poor stuff: it was all in a sense poor, but books
and books, poor soul, she had to write. It was in a sense poor because
it was mostly ambitious stuff, and, as the proverb says, "You cannot fly
like an eagle with the wings of a wren." She was driven to fly, and gave
her little wings too much to do, and her flights were apt to be mere
little weak flutterings over the surface of the ground. A wren, and
she had not a cuckoo but a devouring cormorant to sustain--that dear,
beautiful father of hers, who was more to her than any reprobate son to
his devoted mother, and who day after day, year after year, gobbled up
her earnings, and then would hungrily go on squawking for more until he
stumbled into the grave. Alas! he was too long in dying; she was worn
out by then, the little heart beating not so fast, and the bright little
brain growing dim and very tired.
Now all the ambitious stuff she wrote to keep the cormorant and,
incidentally, to immortalize herself, has fallen deservedly into
oblivion. But we--some of us--do not forget and never want to forget
Mary Russell Mitford. Her letters remain--the little friendly letters
which came from her pen like balls of silvery down from a sun-ripened
plant, and were wafted far and wide over the land to those she loved.
There is a wonderful charm in them; they are so spontaneous, so natural,
so perfectly reflect her humour and vivacity, her overflowing sweetness,
her beautiful spirit. And one book too remains--the series of sketches
about the poor little hamlet, in which she lived so long and laboured
so hard to support herself and her parents, the turtledove mated with a
cormorant. Driven to produce work and hard up for a subject, in a happy
moment she took up this humble one lying at her own door and allowed her
self to write naturally even as in her most intimate letters. This is
the reason of the vitality of Our Tillage; it was simple, natural, and
reflected the author herself, her tender human heart, her impulsive
nature, her bright playful humorous spirit. There is no thought, no mind
stuff in it, and it is a classic! It is about the country, and she has
so little observation that it might have been written in a town, out of
a book, away from nature's sights and sounds. Her rustic characters
are not comparable to those of a score or perhaps two or three score of
other writers who treat of such subjects. The dialogue, when she makes
them talk, is unnatural, and her invention so poor that when she puts in
a little romance of her own making one regrets it. And so one might go
on picking it all to pieces like a dandelion blossom. Nevertheless it
endures, outliving scores of in a way better books on the same themes,
because her own delightful personality manifests itself and shines in
all these little pictures. This short passage describing how she took
Lizzie, the little village child she loved, to gather cowslips in the
meadows, will serve as an illustration.
They who know these feelings (and who is so happy as not to
have known some of them) will understand why Alfieri became powerless,
and Froissart dull; and why even needlework, the most effective
sedative, that grand soother and composer of women's distress, fails
to comfort me today. I will go out into the air this cool, pleasant
afternoon, and try what that will do.... I will go to the meadows, the
beautiful meadows and I will have my materials of happiness, Lizzie and
May, and a basket for flowers, and we will make a cowslip ball. "Did
you ever see a cowslip ball, Lizzie?" "No." "Come away then; make haste!
run, Lizzie!"
And on we go, fast, fast! down the road, across the lea,
past the workhouse, along by the great pond, till we slide into the deep
narrow lane, whose hedges seem to meet over the water, and win our way
to the little farmhouse at the end. "Through the farmyard, Lizzie; over
the gate; never mind the cows; they are quiet enough." "I don't mind
'em," said Miss Lizzie, boldly and' truly, and with a proud affronted
air, displeased at being thought to mind anything, and showing by her
attitude and manner some design of proving her courage by an attack on
the largest of the herd, in the shape of a pull by the tail. "I don't
mind 'em." "I know you don't, Lizzie; but let them, alone and don't
chase the turkey-cock. Come to me, my dear!" and, for wonder, Lizzie
came.
In the meantime my other pet, Mayflower, had also gotten into a scrape.
She had driven about a huge unwieldy sow, till the animal's grunting
had disturbed the repose of a still more enormous Newfoundland dog, the
guardian of the yard.
The beautiful white greyhound's mocking treatment of the surly dog on
the chain then follows, and other pretty scenes and adventures, until
after some mishaps and much trouble the cowslip ball is at length
completed.
What a concentration of fragrance and beauty it was! Golden and sweet to
satiety! rich in sight, and touch, and smell! Lizzie was enchanted, and
ran off with her prize, hiding amongst the trees in the very coyness
of ecstasy, as if any human eye, even mine, would be a restraint on her
innocent raptures.
Here the very woman is revealed to us, her tender and lively
disposition, her impulsiveness and childlike love of fun and delight in
everything on earth. We see in such a passage what her merit really
is, the reason of our liking or "partiality" for her. Her pleasure in
everything makes everything interesting, and in displaying her feeling
without art or disguise she succeeds in giving what we may call a
literary expression to personal charm--that quality which is almost
untranslatable into written words. Many women possess it; it is in them
and issues from them, and is like an essential oil in a flower, but too
volatile to be captured and made use of. Furthermore, women when they
write are as a rule even more conventional than men, more artificial and
out of and away from themselves.
I do not know that any literary person will agree with me; I have
gone aside to write about Miss Mitford mainly for my own satisfaction.
Frequently when I have wanted to waste half an hour pleasantly with
a book I have found myself picking up "Our Village" from among many
others, some waiting for a first perusal, and I wanted to know why this
was so--to find out, if not to invent, some reason for my liking which
would not make me ashamed.
At Swallowfield we failed to find a place to stay at; there was no
such place; and of the inns, named, I think, the "Crown," "Cricketers,"
"Bird-in-the-Hand," and "George and Dragon," only one, was said to
provide accommodation for travellers as the law orders, but on going to
the house we were informed that the landlord or his wife was just dead,
or dangerously ill, I forget which, and they could take no one in.
Accordingly, we had to trudge back to Three Mile Cross and the old
ramshackle, well-nigh ruinous inn there. It was a wretched place,
smelling of mould and dry-rot; however, it was not so bad after a fire
had been lighted in the grate, but first the young girl who waited on us
brought in a bundle of newspapers, which she proceeded to thrust up the
chimney-flue and kindle, "to warm the flue and make the fire burn," she
explained.
On the following day, the weather being milder, we rambled on through
woods and lanes, visiting several villages, and arrived in the afternoon
at Silchester, where we had resolved to put up for the night. By a happy
chance we found a pleasant cottage on the common to stay at and pleasant
people in it, so that we were glad to sit down for a week there, to
loiter about the furzy waste, or prowl in the forest and haunt the old
walls; but it was pleasant even indoors with that wide prospect before
the window, the wooded country stretching many miles away to the hills
of Kingsclere, blue in the distance and crowned with their beechen rings
and groves. Of Roman Calleva itself and the thoughts I had there I will
write in the following chapter; here I will only relate how on Easter
Sunday, two days after arriving, we went to morning service in the old
church standing on a mound inside the walls, a mile from the village and
common.
It came to pass that during the service the sun began to shine very
brightly after several days of cloud and misty windy wet weather, and
that brilliance and the warmth in it served to bring a butterfly out of
hiding; then another; then a third; red admirals all; and they were seen
through all the prayers, and psalms, and hymns, and lessons, and the
sermon preached by the white-haired Rector, fluttering against the
translucent glass, wanting to be out in that splendour and renew their
life after so long a period of suspension. But the glass was between
them and their world of blue heavens and woods and meadow flowers; then
I thought that after the service I would make an attempt to get them
out; but soon reflected that to release them it would be necessary to
capture them first, and that that could not be done without a ladder and
butterfly net. Among the women (ladies) on either side of and before
me there were no fewer than five wearing aigrettes of egret and
bird-of-paradise plumes in their hats or bonnets, and these five all
remained to take part in that ceremony of eating bread and drinking wine
in remembrance of an event supposed to be of importance to their souls,
here and hereafter. It saddened me to leave my poor red admirals in
their prison, beating their red wings against the coloured glass--to
leave them too in such company, where the aigrette wearers were
worshipping a little god of their own little imaginations, who did not
create and does not regard the swallow and dove and white egret and
bird-of-paradise, and who was therefore not my god and whose will as
they understood it was nothing to me.
It was a consolation when I went out, still thinking of the butterflies
in their prison, and stood by the old ruined walls grown over with
ivy and crowned with oak and holly trees, to think that in another two
thousand years there will be no archaeologist and no soul in Silchester,
or anywhere else in Britain, or in the world, who would take the trouble
to dig up the remains of aigrette-wearers and their works, and who would
care what had become of their pitiful little souls--their immortal part.