"Well, you see, I'm a great botanist myself," he explained, "and have
been familiar with his name and work all my life. Of course," he added,
"I don't mean I'm great in the sense that Sibthorpe was. I'm only a
little local botanist, quite unknown outside my own circle; I only mean
that I'm a great lover of botany."
I left him there, and had the curiosity to look up the great man's
life, and found some very curious things in it. He was a son of Humphrey
Sibthorpe, also a great botanist, who succeeded the still greater
Dillenius as Sherardian Professor of Botany at Oxford, a post which
he held for thirty-six years, and during that time he delivered one
lecture, which was a failure. John, if he did not suck in botany with
his mother's milk, took it quite early from his father, and on leaving
the University went abroad to continue his studies. Eventually he
went to Greece, inflamed with the ambition to identify all the plants
mentioned by Dioscorides. Then he set about writing his Flora Graeca;
but he had a rough time of it travelling about in that rude land, and
falling ill he had to leave his work undone. When nearing his end he
came to Bath, like so many other afflicted ones, only to die, and he
was very properly buried in the abbey. In his will he left an estate
the proceeds of which were to be devoted to the completion of his work,
which was to be in ten folio volumes, with one hundred plates in each.
This was done and the work finished forty-four years after his death,
when thirty copies were issued to the patient subscribers at two hundred
and forty guineas a copy. But the whole cost of the work was set down
at 30,000 pounds! A costlier work it would be hard to find; I wonder how
many of us have seen it?
But I must go back to my subject. I was not in Bath just to die and lie
there, like poor Sibthorpe, with all those strange bedfellows of his,
nor was I in search of a vacant space the size of my hand on the walls
to bespeak it for my own memorial. On the contrary, I was there, as we
have seen, to knock five years off my age. And it was very pleasant, as
I have said, so long as I confined my attention to Bath, the stone-built
town of old memories and associations--so long as I was satisfied to
loiter in the streets and wide green places and in the Pump Room and the
abbey. The bitter came in only when, going from places to faces, I began
to seek out the friends and acquaintances of former days. The familiar
faces seemed not wholly familiar now. A change had been wrought; in some
cases a great change, as in that of some weedy girl who had blossomed
into fair womanhood. One could not grieve at that; but in the
middle-aged and those who were verging on or past that period, it was
impossible not to feel saddened at the difference. "I see no change in
you," is a lie ready to the lips which would speak some pleasing thing,
but it does not quite convince. Men are naturally brutal, and use no
compliments to one another; on the contrary, they do not hesitate to
make a joke of wrinkles and grey hairs--their own and yours. "But, oh,
the difference" when the familiar face, no longer familiar as of old,
is a woman's! This is no light thing to her, and her eyes, being
preternaturally keen in such matters, see not only the change in you,
but what is infinitely sadder, the changed reflection of herself. Your
eyes have revealed the shock you have experienced. You cannot hide it;
her heart is stabbed with a sudden pain, and she is filled with shame
and confusion; and the pain is but greater if her life has glided
smoothly--if she cannot appeal to your compassion, finding a melancholy
relief in that saddest cry:--
O Grief has changed me since you saw me last!
For not grief, nor sickness, nor want, nor care, nor any misery or
calamity which men fear, is her chief enemy. Time alone she hates and
fears--insidious Time who has lulled her mind with pleasant flatteries
all these years while subtly taking away her most valued possessions,
the bloom and colour, the grace, the sparkle, the charm of other years.
Here is a true and pretty little story, which may or may not exactly
fit the theme, but is very well worth telling. A lady of fashion,
middle-aged or thereabouts, good-looking but pale and with the marks
of care and disillusionment on her expressive face, accompanied by her
pretty sixteen-years-old daughter, one day called on an artist and asked
him to show her his studio. He was a very great artist, the greatest
portrait-painter we have ever had and he did not know who she was, but
with the sweet courtesy which distinguished him through all his long
life--he died recently at a very advanced age--he at once put his work
away and took her round his studio to show her everything he thought
would interest her. But she was restless and inattentive, and by and by
leaving the artist talking to her young daughter she began going round
by herself, moving constantly from picture to picture. Presently she
made an exclamation, and turning they saw her standing before a picture,
a portrait of a girl, staring fixedly at it. "Oh," she cried, and it was
a cry of pain, "was I once as beautiful as that?" and burst into tears.
She had found the picture she had been looking for, which she had come
to see; it had been there twenty to twenty-five years, and the story of
it was as follows.
When she was a young girl her mother took her to the great artist to
have her portrait painted, and when the work was at length finished she
and her mother went to see it. The artist put it before them and the
mother looked at it, her face expressing displeasure, and said not one
word. Nor did the artist open his lips. And at last the girl, to break
the uncomfortable silence, said, "Where shall we hang it, mother?" and
the lady replied, "Just where you like, my dear, so long as you hang it
with the face to the wall." It was an insolent, a cruel thing to say,
but the artist did not answer her bitterly; he said gently that she need
not take the portrait as it failed to please her, and that in any case
he would decline to take the money she had agreed to pay him for the
work. She thanked him coldly and went her way, and he never saw her
again. And now Time, the humbler of proud beautiful women, had given
him his revenge: the portrait, scorned and rejected when the colour and
sparkle of life was in the face, had been looked on once more by its
subject and had caused her to weep at the change in herself.
To return. One wishes in these moments of meeting, of surprise and
sudden revealings, that it were permissible to speak from the heart,
since then the very truth might have more balm than bitterness in
it. "Grieve not, dear friend of old days, that I have not escaped the
illusion common to all--the idea that those we have not looked on this
long time--full five years, let us say--have remained as they were while
we ourselves have been moving onwards and downwards in that path in
which our feet are set. No one, however hardened he may be, can escape
a shock of surprise and pain; but now the illusion I cherished has
gone--now I have seen with my physical eyes, and a new image, with
Time's writing on it, has taken the place of the old and brighter one,
I would not have it otherwise. No, not if I could would I call back the
vanished lustre, since all these changes, above all that wistful look
in the eyes, do but serve to make you dearer, my sister and friend
and fellow-traveller in a land where we cannot find a permanent
resting-place."
Alas! it cannot be spoken, and we cannot comfort a sister if she cannot
divine the thought; but to brood over these inevitable changes is as
idle as it is to lament that we were born into this mutable world. After
all, it is because of the losses, the sadnesses, that the world is so
infinitely sweet to us. The thought is in Cory's Mimnernus in Church:
All beauteous things for which we live
By laws of time and space decay.
But oh, the very reason why
I clasp them is because they die.
From this sadness in Bath I went to a greater in Wells, where I had not
been for ten years, and timing my visit so as to have a Sunday service
at the cathedral of beautiful memories, I went on a Saturday to Shepton
Mallet. A small, squalid town, a "manufacturing town" the guide-book
calls it. Well, yes; it manufactures Anglo-Bavarian beer in a gigantic
brewery which looks bigger than all the other buildings together, the
church and a dozen or twenty public-houses included. To get some food I
went to the only eating-house in the place, and saw a pleasant-looking
woman, plump and high-coloured, with black hair, with an expression of
good humour and goodness of every description in her comely countenance.
She promised to have a chop ready by the time I had finished looking at
the church, and I said I would have it with a small Guinness. She could
not provide that, the house, she said, was strictly temperance. "My
doctor has ordered me to take it," said I, "and if you are religious,
remember that St. Paul tells us to take a little stout when we find it
beneficial."
"Yes, I know that's what St. Paul says," she returned, with a heightened
colour and a vicious emphasis on the saint's name, "but we go on a
different principle."
So I had to go for my lunch to one of the big public-houses, called
hotels; but whether it called itself a cow, or horse, or stag, or angel,
or a blue or green something, I cannot remember. They gave me what they
called a beefsteak pie--a tough crust and under it some blackish cubes
carved out of the muscle of an antediluvian ox-and for this delicious
fare and a glass of stout I paid three shillings and odd pence.
As I came away Shepton Mallet was shaken to its foundations by a
tremendous and most diabolical sound, a prolonged lupine yell or yowl,
as if a stupendous wolf, as big, say, as the Anglo-Bavarian brewery, had
howled his loudest and longest. This infernal row, which makes Shepton
seem like a town or village gone raving mad, was merely to inform the
men, and, incidentally, the universe, that it was time for them to knock
off work.
Turning my back on the place, I said to myself, "What a fool I am to be
sure! Why could I not have been satisfied for once with a cup of coffee
with my lunch? I should have saved a shilling, perhaps eighteen-pence,
to rejoice the soul of some poor tramp; and, better still, I could
have discussed some interesting questions with that charming rosy-faced
woman. What, for instance, was the reason of her quarrel with the
apostle; by the by, she never rebuked me for misquoting his words; and
what is the moral effect (as seen through her clear brown eyes) of
the Anglo-Bavarian brewery on the population of the small town and the
neighbouring villages?"
The road I followed from Shepton to Wells winds by the water-side, a
tributary of the Brue, in a narrow valley with hills on either side.
It is a five-mile road through a beautiful country, where there is
practically no cultivation, and the green hills, with brown woods in
their hollows, and here and there huge masses of grey and reddish Bath
stone cropping out on their sides, resembling gigantic castles and
ramparts, long ruined and overgrown with ivy and bramble, produce the
effect of a land dispeopled and gone back to a state of wildness.
A thaw had come that morning, ending the severest frost experienced this
winter anywhere in England, and the valley was alive with birds, happy
and tuneful at the end of January as in April. Looking down on the
stream the sudden glory of a kingfisher passed before me; but the
sooty-brown water-ouzel with his white bib, a haunter, too, of this
water, I did not see. Within a mile or so of Wells I overtook a small
boy who belonged there, and had been to Shepton like me, noticing the
birds. "I saw a kingfisher," I said. "So did I," he returned quickly,
with pride. He described it as a biggish bird with a long neck, but
its colour was not blue--oh, no! I suggested that it was a heron, a
long-necked creature under six feet high, of no particular colour. No,
it was not a heron; and after taking thought, he said, "I think it was a
wild duck."
Bestowing a penny to encourage him in his promising researches into the
feathered world, I went on by a footpath over a hill, and as I mounted
to the higher ground there before me rose the noble tower of St.
Cuthbert's Church, and a little to the right of it, girt with high
trees, the magnificent pile of the cathedral, with green hills and the
pale sky beyond. O joy to look again on it, to add yet one more enduring
image of it to the number I had long treasured! For the others were
not exactly like this one; the building was not looked at from the same
point of view at the same season and late hour, with the green hills lit
by the departing sun and the clear pale winter sky beyond.
Coming in by the moated palace I stood once more on the Green before
that west front, beautiful beyond all others, in spite of the strange
defeatures Time has written on it. I watched the daws, numerous as ever,
still at their old mad games, now springing into the air to scatter
abroad with ringing cries, only to return the next minute and fling
themselves back on their old perches on a hundred weather-stained broken
statues in the niches. And while I stood watching them from the palace
trees close by came the loud laugh of the green woodpecker. The same
wild, beautiful sound, uttered perhaps by the same bird, which I had
often heard at that spot ten years ago! "You will not hear that woodland
sound in any other city in the kingdom," I wrote in a book of sketches
entitled "Birds and Man", published in 1901.
But of my soul's adventures in Wells on the two or three following days
I will say very little. That laugh of the woodpecker was an assurance
that Nature had suffered no change, and the town too, like the hills and
rocks and running waters, seemed unchanged; but how different and how
sad when I looked for those I once knew, whose hands I had hoped to
grasp again! Yes, some were living still; and a dog too, one I used
to take out for long walks and many a mad rabbit-hunt--a very handsome
white-and-liver coloured spaniel. I found him lying on a sofa, and down
he got and wagged his tail vigorously, pretending, with a pretty human
hypocrisy in his gentle yellow eyes, that he knew me perfectly well,
that I was not a bit changed, and that he was delighted to see me.
On my way back to Bath I had a day at Bristol. It was cattle-market day,
and what with the bellowings, barkings, and shoutings, added to the buzz
and clang of innumerable electric tramcars and the usual din of street
traffic, one got the idea that the Bristolians had adopted a sort of
Salvation Army theory, and were endeavouring to conquer earth (it is
not heaven in this case) by making a tremendous noise. I amused myself
strolling about and watching the people, and as train after train came
in late in the day discharging loads of humanity, mostly young men and
women from the surrounding country coming in for an evening's amusement,
I noticed again the peculiarly Welsh character of the Somerset
peasant--the shape of the face, the colour of the skin, and, above all,
the expression.
Freeman, when here below, proclaimed it his mission to prove that
"Englishmen were Englishmen, and not somebody else." It appeared to me
that any person, unbiassed by theories on such a subject, looking
at that crowd, would have come to the conclusion, sadly or gladly,
according to his nature, that we are, in fact, "somebody else."