That American from Indiana! As it was market day at Salisbury I asked
him before we parted if he had seen the market, also if they had market
days in the country towns in his State? He said he had looked in at the
market on his way back from the cathedral. No, they had nothing of the
kind in his State. Indiana was covered with a network of railroads and
electric tram lines, and all country produce, down to the last new-laid
egg, was collected and sent off and conveyed each morning to the towns,
where it was always market day.
How sad! thought I. Poor Indiana, that once had wildness and romance
and memories of a vanished race, and has now only its pretty meaningless
name!
"I suppose," he said, before getting on his bicycle, "there's nothing
beside the cathedral and Stonehenge to see in Wiltshire?"
"No, nothing," I returned, "and you'll think the time wasted in seeing
Stonehenge."
"Why?"
"Only a few old stones to see."
But he went, and I have no doubt did think the time wasted, but it would
be some consolation to him, on the other side, to be able to say that he
had seen it with his own eyes.
How did these same "few old stones" strike me on a first visit? It was
one of the greatest disillusionments I ever experienced. Stonehenge
looked small--pitiably small! For it is a fact that mere size is very
much to us, in spite of all the teachings of science. We have heard of
Stonehenge in our childhood or boyhood--that great building of unknown
origin and antiquity, its circles of stones, some still standing, others
lying prostrate, like the stupendous half-shattered skeleton of a giant
or monster whose stature reached to the clouds. It stands, we read or
were told, on Salisbury Plain. To my uninformed, childish mind a plain
anywhere was like the plain on which I was born--an absolutely level
area stretching away on all sides into infinitude; and although the
effect is of a great extent of earth, we know that we actually see
very little of it, that standing on a level plain we have a very near
horizon. On this account any large object appearing on it, such as a
horse or tree or a big animal, looks very much bigger than it would on
land with a broken surface.
Oddly enough, my impossible Stonehenge was derived from a sober
description and an accompanying plate in a sober work--a gigantic folio
in two volumes entitled "A New System of Geography", dated some time in
the eighteenth century. How this ponderous work ever came to be out on
the pampas, over six thousand miles from the land of its origin, is
a thing to wonder at. I remember that the Stonehenge plate greatly
impressed me and that I sacrilegiously cut it out of the book so as to
have it!
Now we know, our reason tells us continually, that the mental pictures
formed in childhood are false because the child and man have different
standards, and furthermore the child mind exaggerates everything;
nevertheless, such pictures persist until the scene or object so
visualized is actually looked upon and the old image shattered. This
refers to scenes visualized with the inner eye, but the disillusion is
almost as great when we return to a home left in childhood or boyhood
and look on it once more with the man's eyes. How small it is! How
diminished the hills, and the trees that grew to such a vast height,
whose tops once seemed "so close against the sky"--what poor little
trees they now are! And the house itself, how low it is; and the rooms
that seemed so wide and lofty, where our footfalls and childish voices
sounded as in some vast hall, how little and how mean they look!
Children, they are very little,
the poet says, and they measure things by their size; but it seems odd
that unless we grow up amid the scenes where our first impressions
were received they should remain unaltered in the adult mind. The most
amusing instance of a false picture of something seen in childhood and
continuing through life I have met was that of an Italian peasant I knew
in South America. He liked to talk to me about the cranes, those great
and wonderful birds he had become acquainted with in childhood in his
home on the plains of Lombardy. The birds, of course, only appeared in
autumn and spring when migrating, and passed over at a vast height above
the earth. These birds, he said, were so big and had such great wings
that if they came down on the flat earth they would be incapable of
rising, hence they only alighted on the tops of high mountains, and as
there was nothing for them to eat in such places, it being naked rock
and ice, they were compelled to subsist on each other's droppings. Now
it came to pass that one year during his childhood a crane, owing
to some accident, came down to the ground near his home. The whole
population of the village turned out to see so wonderful a bird, and
were amazed at its size; it was, he said, the strangest sight he
had ever looked on. How big was it? I asked him; was it as big as an
ostrich? An ostrich, he said, was nothing to it; I might as well ask
him how it compared with a lapwing. He could give me no measurements:
it happened when he was a child; he had forgotten the exact size, but he
had seen it with his own eyes and he could see it now in his mind--the
biggest bird in the world. Very well, I said, if he could see it plainly
in his mind he could give some rough idea of the wing-spread--how
much would it measure from tip to tip? He said it was perhaps fifty
yards--perhaps a good deal more!
A similar trick was played by my mind about Stonehenge. As a child I had
stood in imagination before it, gazing up awestruck on those stupendous
stones or climbing and crawling like a small beetle on them. And what at
last did I see with my physical eyes? Walking over the downs, miscalled
a plain, anticipating something tremendous, I finally got away from the
woods at Amesbury and spied the thing I sought before me far away on
the slope of a green down, and stood still and then sat down in pure
astonishment. Was this Stonehenge--this cluster of poor little grey
stones, looking in the distance like a small flock of sheep or goats
grazing on that immense down! How incredibly insignificant it appeared
to me, dwarfed by its surroundings--woods and groves and farmhouses, and
by the vast extent of rolling down country visible at that point. It was
only when I had recovered from the first shock, when I had got to
the very place and stood among the stones, that I began to experience
something of the feeling appropriate to the occasion.
The feeling, however, must have been very slight, since it permitted
me to become interested in the appearance and actions of a few sparrows
inhabiting the temple. The common sparrow is parasitical on man,
consequently but rarely found at any distance from human habitations,
and it seemed a little strange to find them at home at Stonehenge on the
open plain. They were very active carrying up straws and feathers to the
crevices on the trioliths where the massive imposts rest on the upright
stones. I noticed the birds because of their bright appearance: they
were lighter coloured than any sparrows I have ever seen, and one cock
bird when flying to and fro in the sunlight looked almost white. I
formed the idea that this small colony of about a dozen birds had been
long established at that place, and that the change in their colouring
was a direct result of the unusual conditions in which they existed,
where there was no shade and shelter of trees and bushes, and they were
perpetually exposed for generations to the full light of the wide open
sky.
On revisiting Stonehenge after an interval of some years I looked for
my sparrows and failed to find them. It was at the breeding-season, when
they would have been there had they still existed. No doubt the little
colony had been extirpated by a sparrow-hawk or by the human guardians
of "The Stones," as the temple is called by the natives.
It remains to tell of my latest visit to "The Stones." I had resolved to
go once in my life with the current or crowd to see the sun rise on the
morning of the longest day at that place. This custom or fashion is a
declining one: ten or twelve years ago, as many as one or two thousand
persons would assemble during the night to wait the great event, but the
watchers have now diminished to a few hundreds, and on some years to
a few scores. The fashion, no doubt, had its origin when Sir Norman
Lockyer's theories, about Stonehenge as a Sun Temple placed so that
the first rays of sun on the longest day of the year should fall on the
centre of the so-called altar or sacrificial stone placed in the middle
of the circle, began to be noised about the country, and accepted by
every one as the true reading of an ancient riddle. But I gather from
natives in the district that it is an old custom for people to go and
watch for sunrise on the morning of June 21. A dozen or a score of
natives, mostly old shepherds and labourers who lived near, would go
and sit there for a few hours and after sunrise would trudge home, but
whether or not there is any tradition or belief associated with the
custom I have not ascertained. "How long has the custom existed?" I
asked a field labourer. "From the time of the old people--the Druids,"
he answered, and I gave it up.
To be near the spot I went to stay at Shrewton, a downland village
four miles from "The Stones"; or rather a group of five pretty little
villages, almost touching but distinct, like five flowers or five
berries on a single stem, each with its own old church and individual
or parish life. It is a pretty tree-shaded place, full of the crooning
sound of turtle-doves, hidden among the wide silent open downs and
watered by a clear swift stream, or winter bourne, which dries up during
the heats of late summer, and flows again after the autumn rains, "when
the springs rise" in the chalk hills. While here, I rambled on the downs
and haunted "The Stones." The road from Shrewton to Amesbury, a straight
white band lying across a green country, passes within a few yards
of Stonehenge: on the right side of this narrow line the land is all
private property, but on the left side and as far as one can see it
mostly belongs to the War Office and is dotted over with camps. I
roamed about freely enough on both sides, sometimes spending hours at
a stretch, not only on Government land but "within bounds," for the
pleasure of spying on the military from a hiding-place in some pine
grove or furze patch. I was seldom challenged, and the sentinels I came
across were very mild-mannered men; they never ordered me away; they
only said, or hinted, that the place I was in was not supposed to be
free to the public.
I come across many persons who lament the recent great change on
Salisbury Plain. It is hateful to them; the sight of the camp and troops
marching and drilling, of men in khaki scattered about everywhere over
a hundred square leagues of plain; the smoke of firing and everlasting
booming of guns. It is a desecration; the wild ancient charm of the land
has been destroyed in their case, and it saddens and angers them. I was
pretty free from these uncomfortable feelings.
It is said that one of the notions the Japanese have about the fox--a
semi-sacred animal with them--is that, if you chance to see one crossing
your path in the morning, all that comes before your vision on that day
will be illusion. As an illustration of this belief it is related that
a Japanese who witnessed the eruption of Krakatoa, when the heavens were
covered with blackness and kindled with intermitting flashes and the
earth shaken by the detonations, and when all others, thinking the
end of the world had come, were swooning with extreme fear, viewed it
without a tremor as a very sublime but illusory spectacle. For on that
very morning he had seen a fox cross his path.
A somewhat similar effect is produced on our minds if we have what
may be called a sense of historical time--a consciousness of the
transitoriness of most things human--if we see institutions and works
as the branches on a pine or larch, which fail and die and fall away
successively while the tree itself lives for ever, and if we measure
their duration not by our own few swift years, but by the life
of nations and races of men. It is, I imagine, a sense capable of
cultivation, and enables us to look upon many of man's doings that would
otherwise vex and pain us, and, as some say, destroy all the pleasure
of our lives, not exactly as an illusion, as if we were Japanese and
had seen a fox in the morning, but at all events in what we call a
philosophic spirit.
What troubled me most was the consideration of the effect of the new
conditions on the wild life of the plain--or of a very large portion
of it. I knew of this before, but it was nevertheless exceedingly
unpleasant when I came to witness it myself when I took to spying on
the military as an amusement during my idle time. Here we have tens of
thousands of very young men, boys in mind, the best fed, healthiest,
happiest crowd of boys in all the land, living in a pure bracing
atmosphere, far removed from towns, and their amusements and
temptations, all mad for pleasure and excitement of some kind to fill
their vacant hours each day and their holidays. Naturally they take to
birds'-nesting and to hunting every living thing they encounter during
their walks on the downs. Every wild thing runs and flies from them, and
is chased or stoned, the weak-winged young are captured, and the nests
picked or kicked up out of the turf. In this way the creatures are being
extirpated, and one can foresee that when hares and rabbits are no
more, and even the small birds of the plain, larks, pipits, wheatears,
stonechats, and whincats, have vanished, the hunters in khaki will take
to the chase of yet smaller creatures--crane-flies and butterflies and
dragon-flies, and even the fantastic, elusive hover-flies which the
hunters of little game will perhaps think the most entertaining fly of
all.
But it would be idle to grieve much at this small incidental and
inevitable result of making use of the plain as a military camp and
training-ground. The old god of war is not yet dead and rotting on his
iron hills; he is on the chalk hills with us just now, walking on the
elastic turf, and one is glad to mark in his brown skin and sparkling
eyes how thoroughly alive he is.
A little after midnight on the morning of June 21, 1908, a Shrewton
cock began to crow, and that trumpet sound, which I never hear without a
stirring of the blood, on account of old associations, informed me that
the late moon had risen or was about to rise, linking the midsummer
evening and morning twilights, and I set off to Stonehenge. It was a
fine still night, without a cloud in the pale, dusky blue sky, thinly
sprinkled with stars, and the crescent moon coming up above the horizon.
After the cock ceased crowing a tawny owl began to hoot, and the long
tremulous mellow sound followed me for some distance from the village,
and then there was perfect silence, broken occasionally by the tinkling
bells of a little company of cyclists speeding past towards "The
Stones." I was in no hurry: I only wished I had started sooner to enjoy
Salisbury Plain at its best time, when all the things which offend the
lover of nature are invisible and nonexistent. Later, when the first
light began to appear in the east before two o'clock, it was no false
dawn, but insensibly grew brighter and spread further, until touches
of colour, very delicate, palest amber, then tender yellow and rose
and purple, began to show. I felt then as we invariably feel on such
occasions, when some special motive has called us forth in time to
witness this heavenly change, as of a new creation--
The miracle of diuturnity
Whose instancy unbeds the lark,
that all the days of my life on which I had not witnessed it were wasted
days!
O that unbedding of the lark! The world that was so still before now all
at once had a sound; not a single song and not in one place, but a sound
composed of a thousand individual sounds, rising out of the dark earth
at a distance on my right hand and up into the dusky sky, spreading far
and wide even as the light was spreading on the opposite side of the
heavens--a sound as of multitudinous twanging, girding, and clashing
instruments, mingled with shrill piercing voices that were not like
the voices of earthly beings. They were not human nor angelic, but
passionless, and it was as if the whole visible world, the dim grassy
plain and the vast pale sky sprinkled with paling stars, moonlit and
dawnlit, had found a voice to express the mystery and glory of the
morning.
It was but eight minutes past two o'clock when this "unbedding of the
lark" began, and the heavenly music lasted about fourteen minutes, then
died down to silence, to recommence about half an hour later. At first I
wondered why the sound was at a distance from the road on my right hand
and not on my left hand as well. Then I remembered what I had seen on
that side, how the "boys" at play on Sundays and in fact every day hunt
the birds and pull their nests out, and I could only conclude that the
lark has been pretty well wiped out from all that part of the plain over
which the soldiers range.
At Stonehenge I found a good number of watchers, about a couple of
hundred, already assembled, but more were coming in continually, and
a mile or so of the road to Amesbury visible from "The Stones" had
at times the appearance of a ribbon of fire from the lamps of this
continuous stream of coming cyclists. Altogether about five to six
hundred persons gathered at "The Stones," mostly young men on bicycles
who came from all the Wiltshire towns within easy distance, from
Salisbury to Bath. I had a few good minutes at the ancient temple when
the sight of the rude upright stones looking black against the moonlit
and star-sprinkled sky produced an unexpected feeling in me: but the
mood could not last; the crowd was too big and noisy, and the noises
they made too suggestive of a Bank Holiday crowd at the Crystal Palace.
At three o'clock a ribbon of slate-grey cloud appeared above the eastern
horizon, and broadened by degrees, and pretty soon made it evident that
the sun would be hidden at its rising at a quarter to four. The crowd,
however, was not down-hearted; it sang and shouted; and by and by, just
outside the barbed-wire enclosure a rabbit was unearthed, and about
three hundred young men with shrieks of excitement set about its
capture. It was a lively scene, a general scrimmage, in which everyone
was trying to capture an elusive football with ears and legs to it,
which went darting and spinning about hither and thither among the
multitudinous legs, until earth compassionately opened and swallowed
poor distracted bunny up. It was but little better inside the enclosure,
where the big fallen stones behind the altar-stone, in the middle, on
which the first rays of sun would fall, were taken possession of by a
crowd of young men who sat and stood packed together like guillemots on
a rock. These too, cheated by that rising cloud of the spectacle they
had come so far to see, wanted to have a little fun, and began to be
very obstreperous. By and by they found out an amusement very much to
their taste.
Motor-cars were now arriving every minute, bringing important-looking
persons who had timed their journeys so as to come upon the scene a
little before 3:45, when the sun would show on the horizon; and whenever
one of these big gentlemen appeared within the circle of stones,
especially if he was big physically and grotesque-looking in his
motorist get-up, he was greeted with a tremendous shout. In most cases
he would start back and stand still, astonished at such an outburst, and
then, concluding that the only way to save his dignity was to face the
music, he would step hurriedly across the green space to hide himself
behind the crowd.
The most amusing case was that of a very tall person adorned with an
exceedingly long, bright red beard, who had on a Glengarry cap and
a great shawl over his overcoat. The instant this unfortunate person
stepped into the arena a general wild cry of "Scotland for ever!" was
raised, followed by such cheers and yells that the poor man actually
staggered back as if he had received a blow, then seeing there was no
other way out of it, he too rushed across the open space to lose himself
among the others.
All this proved very entertaining, and I was glad to laugh with the
crowd, thinking that after all we were taking a very mild revenge on our
hated enemies, the tyrants of the roads.
The fun over, I went soberly back to my village, and finding it
impossible to get to sleep I went to Sunday-morning service at Shrewton
Church. It was strangely restful there after that noisy morning crowd
at Stonehenge. The church is white stone with Norman pillars and old oak
beams laid over the roof painted or distempered blue--a quiet, peaceful
blue. There was also a good deal of pleasing blue colour in the glass
of the east window. The service was, as I almost invariably find it in
a village church, beautiful and impressive. Listening to the music
of prayer and praise, with some natural outdoor sound to fill up the
pauses--the distant crow of a cock or the song of some bird close by--a
corn-bunting or wren or hedge-sparrow--and the bright sunlight filling
the interior, I felt as much refreshed as if kind nature's sweet
restorer, balmy sleep, had visited me that morning. The sermon was
nothing to me; I scarcely heard it, but understood that it was about
the Incarnation and the perfection of the plan of salvation and the
unreasonableness of the Higher Criticism and of all who doubt because
they do not understand. I remembered vaguely that on three successive
Sundays in three village churches in the wilds of Wiltshire I had heard
sermons preached on and against the Higher Criticism. I thought it would
have been better in this case if the priest had chosen to preach on
Stonehenge and had said that he devoutly wished we were sun-worshippers,
like the Persians, as well as Christians; also that we were Buddhists,
and worshippers of our dead ancestors like the Chinese, and that we were
pagans and idolaters who bow down to sticks and stones, if all these
added cults would serve to make us more reverent. And I wish he could
have said that it was as irreligious to go to Stonehenge, that ancient
temple which man raised to the unknown god thousands of years ago, to
indulge in noise and horseplay at the hour of sunrise, as it would be to
go to Salisbury Cathedral for such a purpose.