SOME LITERARY ASSOCIATIONS
From Barnstaple to Dunster, and from Tiverton to Lynton, this beautiful
piece of country is peculiarly rich in literary associations. Nor is
this to be wondered at when we consider the variety and the loveliness
of the scenery, the great open, heathery wastes of Exmoor, the
wind-swept cliffs and highlands, the fair and luxuriant valleys where
the pure bright waters of these hill-fed streams flow through a green
tunnel of overarching trees, making a fertile paradise of flower and
fern in their course. And the magnificent bold rocks and forelands of
the coast, the streams broken into feathery spray falling down the
precipitous face of the cliffs, creek and gully and cave, the
wave-washed golden sands of the bays, or the line of foam fretting ever
at the foot of these granite crags. And beyond is the sea; from every
hilltop the eye turns to it, in the sheltered orchards the air is salt
with it, the thunder of its great breakers on the coast can be heard
far inland, an undercurrent beneath the singing of birds and the hum of
bees; it is never far from the eyes or from the mind, blue as faery
under a June sun, when the wheeling gulls are dazzling white flashes
above it, broken into greys and greens and purples by the sudden hail
of quick spring squalls, a heaving grey waste of waters under steady
rain, or a wild and elemental force, terrible and splendid, under the
fury of a gale.
It is a land for poets and dreamers, a land to touch the fancy and stir
the imagination of men, a land of beauty and of adventure.
It will not, therefore, be without interest to pick up thread after
thread by which the ports and hamlets, woods and waterfalls, are woven
into the history of our literature.
[Illustration: Dunkerry Beacon]
We find a trace, firstly, of the chief of poets and greatest name of
all--Shakespeare--in the municipal records of Barnstaple, where under
the date 1605 an entry records: "Geven to the Kynges players being in
the town this year xs." That is all, and Shakespeare is not named; but
we know that he was associated with the Kynges Players for many years,
and Mr. Halliwell-Phillipps, who is a well-known authority on this
subject, asserts that at this date Shakespeare was still one of the
company. It is a shadowy trace enough, but in view of the bare
outlines of the life and death of this man, whose name is almost
universal and whose history is almost completely obscure, we seize on
any tiny fact that may help to bring before us so wonderful a
personality. That Shakespeare was in Barnstaple, went up and down
Boutport Street, the old street that half encircles the town, running
"about the port," that he acted here, lodged here, if only for a week
or two, talked in the tavern and walked in the old town, with that
observant inner eye which noted the veriest detail of life, the swing
of a flower, the swallow under the eaves, the idiosyncrasy of dress or
gesture in the passers-by, and at the same time comprehended and
recorded the springs of action, the fumbling thoughts, the consciences,
the strivings, and the pretences, of the world of men and women that
moved around him--that Shakespeare was, once in his short and wonderful
life, actually in Barnstaple gives even to the most unreflective an
interest and a romance to this town.
It was near Barnstaple, also, and during Shakespeare's lifetime, that
Thomas Westcote, gentleman, was born at Westcote, in the parish of
Marwood, in 1567. He wrote, towards the end of his life, a description
of the country called "A View of Devon," and a genealogy of the
principal families. It was not published until 1845, but is well
worthy of being preserved, not only for its antiquarian interest, as
being the earliest account of Devonshire, its agriculture and its
industries, but also for the pleasure of its quaint turns of phrase,
the ponderous classic authorities which he marshals to support a simple
fact--and there are indeed some strange wild-fowl among his
authorities--and above all for a gentle and unobtrusive humour which
seasons all the narrative. Westcote gives a list of the fish afforded
by the Devon seas (a very imperfect list by modern computation), and
adds:
"It might be much more enlarged, but your server shall stand no longer
at the dresser, lest the first dish be stale ere the last come to the
table. Yet, notwithstanding, I will here confess that had you supped
with Aulus Gellius, the Roman Emperor, you might say my bill came much
too short; yea! by 1800; for as Suetonius, in lib. 9, and Josephus,
lib. 5, alledge, he was served at one meal with 2,000; (if you please
to believe there are so many species of fish;) but he had indeed a
large country to make his provision in, the whole then known
world. . . . But for the other supper of 7,000 divers kinds of fowls,
I will not undertake to name them here, nor in Africa, and Asia, with
all the assistance that Gesnerus can afford me."
This is a style without hurry, indeed, in a peaceable rambling world,
and one can imagine Westcote, with his pointed beard and his tall hat
of the fashion of James I., taking a little walk in the afternoon sun
after having spent the morning with his quill-pen and his calf-bound,
close-printed classics--Suetonius, and Gesnerus, and Diodorus Siculus.
His book is interspersed with little rhymes, couplets or longer verses,
in the style of the "Arabian Nights" stories, and which George Meredith
in the "Shaving of Shagpat" has used with such quaint effect; on every
subject and for every statement Westcote has an authority and an
aphorism, whether it is of "Day labourers in Tin-works, and Hirelings
in Husbandry," of fishermen or merchantmen, of trade or
agriculture--"for, as Horace speaketh," says he,
"Who much do crave, of much have need;
But well is he whom God indeed,
Though with a sparing hand, doth feed."
Or again, speaking of "the commodities this country yields":
"England hath store of bridges, hills, and wool,
Of churches, wells, and women beautiful."
He is no mere antiquarian, however, and quotes Chaucer and Robert of
Gloucester as well as Theocritus and Horace; he is seriously perturbed
at the decline of agriculture in Devonshire; in spite of the fertility
of the soil, he says, it yields insufficience of bread, beer, and
victual, to feed itself, for which the country has to have recourse to
Wales or Ireland, so much so that in 1610 there was 60,000 pounds of
corn brought into one harbour alone. The reason for this is the
increase in trades, so that . . . "the meanest sort of people will now
rather place their children to some of these mechanical trades than to
husbandry"; in spite, also, of the almost sacred character of
husbandry, which was clearly recognized in "elder times," so that even
the rudest and most savage peoples respected ploughmen and tillers of
the soil in time of war. He then quotes some melancholy verses of
Virgil, and gives the whole chapter a twist of humour by ending up
with--"But not a word of this in any case, especially that I told you
so; and we will proceed to the next and speak of mines."
I will also "proceed to the next," and speak of Bishop Jewel, a
fellow-countryman of Westcote's, and one about whom he speaks in the
highest praise: "a perfect rich gem and true jewel indeed . . . so that
if anywhere the observation of Chrysostom be true, that there lies a
great hidden treasure in names, surely it may rightly be said to be
here: grace in John, and eminent perfection in jewel."
John Jewel was born at Berrynarbor, near Ilfracombe, in 1522; he went
to Merton College, Oxford, where he had for tutor John Parkhurst, under
whom he early acquired a bent towards Protestantism. After the
accession of Mary he allowed himself, in a moment of weakness, to sign
an adherence to the Romish faith, but his recantation weighed upon his
conscience, he fled to the Continent, and there publicly withdrew it.
In the reign of Elizabeth he returned to England, and was one of the
Protestant doctors chosen to dispute before her at Westminster with a
like number of Catholic divines. He became Bishop of Salisbury in
1560, and held that office till his death in 1571. His chief work was
an "Apology for the Anglican Church"; and his chief opponent was Thomas
Harding, who was born at Comb Martin, the next parish, and who, like
Jewel, went to the grammar-school at Barnstaple in his early boyhood,
so that they were near neighbours and dear enemies. "As I cannot well
take a hair from your lying beard, so I wish I could pluck malice from
your blasphemous heart," says Harding to Jewel, in that savage personal
invective that religious controversialists have permitted themselves in
all ages. Jewel does not seem ever to have answered in this unworthy
strain, and the singular purity of his life, the sincerity of his
opinions, and a certain lovable quality to which all his contemporaries
bear witness, gave even his political adversaries a personal attachment
to him. "I should love thee, Jewel, wert thou not a Zwinglian," cries
one. "In thy faith thou art a heretic, but sure in the life thou art
an angel"--surely the most splendid tribute that a man can have, when
we consider the bitterness and animosity bred by a difference of
religious belief. To all who loved him--and it seems to have been his
whole generation--his name gave the opportunity of affectionate puns,
quips, and little epigrams; to Queen Elizabeth he was "my Jewel," and
the epitaph Westcote makes upon him is that of St. Gregory upon St.
Basil: "His words were thunder, and his life lightning," and his memory
"a fragrant sweet-smelling odour, blown abroad . . . throughout the
whole kingdom."
We may find a lingering trace at Barnstaple, also, before going farther
north, of another eager spirit and earnest reformer, Shelley, whose
gift of poetry we accept, and whose quick courage we profit by, in a
world of thought where we breathe a little freer because of his efforts
and ideals, while we still despise or half shamefacedly apologize for
the strivings and struggles of his life. He prevailed upon Syle, a
printer of Barnstaple, to publish his "Letter to Lord Ellenborough,"
which was in effect a violent and heated attack upon this Judge for the
sentence he had passed on the publisher of Tom Paine's "Age of Reason,"
which was considered by Lord Ellenborough and that generation as a
dangerous and revolutionary document, subversive of the political
morals of the world. Those were the days of the French Revolution, and
it seemed to many, as honest as Shelley, that the whole social fabric
was threatening to crumble before the rising flood of anarchy,
bloodshed, and disorder. Syle was prevailed upon to withdraw the
greater number of copies--it speaks much for his courage and
convictions that he ever published it--and Shelley found it advisable
to leave Devon.
For Shelley had been living at Lynton during the early days of his
ill-fated first marriage with the Harriet; the cottage where they lived
can still be seen, though much altered and modernized since the unhappy
young man and woman tried to work out together a means of right living
and mutual happiness, and made so tragic a failure of it.
It was to Lynton, too, that Wordsworth, his sister Dorothy, and
Coleridge, came on a visit, and were so ravished by the beauty of the
place that they were nearly decided to settle here, and might have
founded a school of Devon poets instead of Lake poets. It was at
Lynton, also, that "The Ancient Mariner" was planned, to pay for the
expenses of the holiday, and was begun by Wordsworth and Coleridge
together, though there is actually very little of Wordsworth's work in
it, and the spirit of it, the air of mystery and the sense of brooding
elemental forces with which its simplest lines are somehow invested,
belongs to Coleridge alone, and to that strange genius of his, which
only twice or thrice in his life--in "Christabel," "The Ancient
Mariner," and "Kubla Khan"--produced poetry of inimitable, strange
beauty and wonder.
If Lynton is beautiful now, with its new houses and hotels, and that
air of snugness that prosperity gives to places and persons, the poetic
appeal of its loveliness to Wordsworth and Coleridge can be well
imagined when only the low-browed, thatched little cottages clung to
the steep cliff-paths and clustered round the small harbour, and from
the surrounding heights and hills one looked down upon nothing but
green valleys, and from the valleys one looked up to the bare cliffs
and crags.
Southey also was drawn to this corner of England by the fame of its
beauty; on one occasion, when walking across Exmoor, he was driven to
take refuge at Porlock from the heavy rain, and visitors to the Ship
Inn are still shown the corner by the wide old fireplace where the
poet, presumably, dried his knees and wrote the ode which begins with
the following inadequate description:
"Porlock, thy verdant vale, so fair to sight,
Thy lofty hills, with fern and furze so brown,
Thy waters that so musical roll down
Thy woody glens, the traveller with delight
Recalls to memory, and the channel grey
Circling it, surging in thy level bay."
Then, George Eliot and Lewes discovered this north-west coast, and came
to Ilfracombe, with which they were delighted; and the unconventional
lady, with her broad-brimmed straw hat tied under her chin (in the days
when people wore bonnets), was soon a familiar enough figure, to be
seen scrambling over the rocks of the bay which is haunted by the
spirit of Tracy, or looking for seaweed and anemones in the clear
rock-pools at low-tide. Ilfracombe then, in the middle of the last
century, kept much of its original character as a seaport of
importance, which in its day had sent representatives to a shipping
council in the fourteenth century, had contributed six ships towards
the Siege of Calais--at a time when Liverpool was only of sufficient
size to send one--and had had enough strategical value to be the scene
of a projected French invasion under Napoleon. Already Ilfracombe was
beginning to be, however, what it now is pre-eminently, a "holiday
resort." It was patronized by royalty, and, following royalty, by "the
aristocracy and military," who came to enjoy the "overwhelming charms"
Nature poured forth here "with a tremendous and prolific grandeur which
we shall not pretend to describe," as Mr. Cornish mellifluously
exclaims in his "Rise and Progress of the Towns in North Devon." In
the seventies the present German Emperor, then Prince William of
Prussia, was sent here with his tutors; and there is a story, preserved
with great pride, of a fight on the beach between him and a
bathing-machine boy, at whose father's property the Prince was throwing
stones. An account of this historic battle is preserved in a doggerel
ballad, printed and sold locally, and composed Heaven knows where,
which is called "Tapping the War-Lord's Claret: Why Kaiser Bill hates
England."
"When Kaiser Will'um was a y'uth
He com'd t' Combe one day,
And at the big hotel out there
He stopped on holiday. . . ."
He went bathing in Rapparee Cove, and when his tutors were out of sight
began blazing at the numbers on the boxes, though warned by "young
Alfie Price" not to; and after a wordy altercation the Kaiser knocked
down Alfie, who got up and went for him "just like a Devon bull."
"He knacked the Kaiser on the nose,
And tapped the ry'al blid. . . ."
The tutors came up and intervened, and Alf was given thirty shillings
to keep the matter quiet; but Kaiser Bill swore implacable hate of the
English, because of the affront, built his Dreadnoughts and drilled his
army to avenge the insult of Rapparee Cove upon the English nation.
Local publications are always, I think, of some interest, even when
they are as rough and simple a doggerel as the above; and there are two
magazines, printed and published at Barnstaple in the early years of
the nineteenth century, and which may be seen in the Athenaeum Library
of the town. They are the _Lundy Review_ and _The Cave_, and they
contain stories, poetry, puns, epigrams, acrostics, all with the mild,
faint flavour of a curate's tea-party in a cathedral town, and yet
invested with a kind of charm by the old-fashioned type, the yellowing
paper, and a small, dim picture--like the images of ourselves and our
furniture which we see in those old, round, diminishing mirrors--of the
life of a century ago. There is poetry of the Lake School fashion,
exhortations to Bideford and Woody Bay, to Lynton or "The Beauties of
Devon"; there is more poetry of the Byronic fashion, fierce and satiric
invective (yet never, be it understood, transgressing the bounds of
decency or good manners!) against the lady of the poet's affection;
there are stories, in which love and virtue triumph over temptation and
evil-doing; there is, of course, at least one story of a blind girl,
and one of a consumptive; there is much harmless punning, and in the
acrostics which the ladies of 1820 so much loved are fantastically
woven the names of the handsome young women of Barnstaple whose only
other record is now upon a tombstone.
There is a strong tone of "patriotism," if by that we mean a dignified
contempt for foreign manners and customs, foreign thought and foreign
speech. I call to mind one article, where the writer is
good-humouredly but supremely contemptuous of the French, because of
their manner of pronouncing classical names. What can you expect of a
nation, says he, for whom Titus Livy is no better than a
"tom-tit-liv-ing" in a hedge, and Marcus Aurelius, the Emperor
philosopher, becomes "Mark O'Rail," a mere beggerly, abusive Irishman?
This insularity of ours, which appears in a comic aspect in this
article in _The Cave_, continued throughout the nineteenth century, and
withstood the shock of the Crimea and the Indian Mutiny without
apparently being in any way shaken; it is breaking now, indeed, under
the humiliations of the South African War, when we were made to feel
our isolation in Europe, and under the stress of this greatest war of
all, when at last we feel and say that we are proud to stand with the
nations of the Continent in a common cause.
But, in the nineteenth century, not only was our insular prejudice
extreme, but there was a pride in our very prejudice, which made it
seem hopelessly fixed and stultified. There is a trail of it through
all but the greatest writings of that time, Tennyson was not without
it, Charles Kingsley, Froude. . . . To the novel it became actually a
stock-in-trade, and as such it was used by Henry Kingsley in his novel
of "Ravenshoe." He was a younger brother of Charles, and his life was
as restless and adventurous as a novel. He was, besides being an
author, an explorer to the Australian goldfields--from which he came
back rich in observation of men and manners, but without having made a
pecuniary fortune--the editor of a paper, the _Edinburgh Daily Review_,
and a correspondent in the Franco-Prussian War. He was a prolific and
too hasty writer, but his novel of "Ravenshoe," whose scene is
principally laid on the northern strip of Somerset coast, bordering the
Bristol Channel, and which was his own favourite among his works, is
considered by many critics to reach a high level, and to stand
comparison with the work of his more famous brother. In the _Academy_
of 1901 the following tribute to the book appeared under the initials
C.K.B.: "I first read 'Ravenshoe' at that period when absolute romance
and absolute fact have to live together; and very turbulent partners
they make. The appeal of the book was instant and permanent. Even
now, after a dozen years I cannot read the story unmoved. . . . Each
point holds me of old, by sheer force of its human presentation, its
resourceful dialogue, its unwearied vitality."
I first read "Ravenshoe" in this year of 1917, and to me the world
seems to have travelled so far since its publication in 1862, that its
aims, its ideals, and its point of view, are hardly credible. Through
it all runs that facile spirit of optimism which seems to me to have
distinguished much of the thought of the mid-Victorian era, that air of
"All is for the best in this best of all possible worlds," that insular
pride of which I have been speaking, but which to us now appears the
narrowest and worst form of parochialism, a certainty that English
beef, English beer, English morals, and English standards, were the
ultimate excellence towards which a world of misguided foreigners might
ultimately aspire, that self-satisfaction, different from pride, that
glorying in prejudice, and wilful blindness to all features of national
life which do not bear out the theory of an earthly paradise. "Tell me
one thing, Lord Saltire; you have travelled in many countries. Is
there any land, east or west, that can give us what this dear old
England does--settled order, in which each man knows his place and his
duties? It is so easy to be good in England."
"Well, no. It is the first country in the world. A few bad harvests
would make a hell of it, though."
This was written at a time, remember, when the invention of machinery,
the rapid growth of industrialism, and the increasing mobility of the
population of the world, had broken down the old order of things, had
created large fortunes and reduced thousands to destitution; when men
poured into cities and lived crowded and unhealthy in slums, when the
opening phase of the grim battle between employer and employed was
fought, when trade-unionism was wrested from an unwilling Government,
when housing regulations, health regulations, and poor-laws, were
incapable of dealing with the wars of misery, poverty, and sickness,
they were designed to meet, when little by little vested interests and
class prejudices were brought before the judgment of reason and found
wanting--it was in such a period of our national history that Harry
Kingsley could write of "settled order, in which each one knows his
place and his duties."
This attitude of mind is characteristic of a whole school of
mid-Victorian novelists, and George Meredith--whose earliest novel,
"Richard Feverel," was published about this date--broke many a lance
against it, and scolded us and laughed at us, and upset our dignified
conception of ourselves, and sometimes, in his irritable affection for
his countrymen, took a bludgeon to us, and broke our heads.
I find it also in another and much greater novel, to attack which in a
book dealing with this corner of Devon and Somerset is indeed a sort of
_lèse-majesté_--for, to most people, who says "Exmoor" says "Lorna
Doone."
Yet rereading the book in these present days--and even amid the scenes
whose beauty and whose character Blackmore has so firmly reproduced--I
find the parochialism, the self-satisfaction, and the prejudice, which
lumps the whole un-English world, with its revolutions, and ideals, and
racial problems, under one heading, as "dam-furriners." John Ridd is
English, therefore he despises what is not English; he is rather
stupid, therefore he despises intellect. "She was born next day with
more mind than body--the worst thing that can befall a man," he says of
his sister Eliza. He is a man, so, at the last stage of
self-satisfaction, he despises what is not man--woman. "Now I spoke
gently to Lorna, seeing how much she had been tried; and I praised her
for her courage, in not having run away, when she was so unable; and my
darling was pleased with this. . . . But you may take this as a
general rule, that a woman likes praise from the man she loves, and
cannot stop always to balance it." "But he led me aside in the course
of the evening, and told me all about it; saying that I knew, as well
as he did, that it was not women's business. . . . Herein I quite
agreed with him, because I always think that women, of whatever mind,
are best when least they meddle with things that appertain to men." As
the matter under discussion was a question of their all having their
throats cut by the Doones, and the farm being burnt over their heads,
it seems to us to have been, at least in some slight degree, the
women's business.
The hero of "Ravenshoe," Charles, is of the same type, though not drawn
with the firmness of touch with which Blackmore depicts John Ridd, and
which makes him indeed a living personality to us, even if one to
quarrel with.
Charles Ravenshoe is of the type which for many years we have striven
to present to the contemplation of the outside world as the perfect
Englishman. He is a bluff, hearty fellow, without serious vices,
without, also, serious virtues; he has, of course, a perfect
self-satisfaction, and a deep and unconscious selfishness, tempered by
an easy good-nature and a superficial benevolence, of wishing to get on
well with everybody, and to see everybody round him comfortable. He is
without ideals or spiritual aims, and has a contemptuous tolerance for
them, as in the case of his brother Cuthbert, who is deeply religious
and desirous of entering a monastery, and yet is held by the
temptations of the world, so that his mind is a continual striving and
renunciation. Charles's relationship with the lady of his choice may
be gauged by the following: "How is Adelaide?" asks his adopted sister.
"Adelaide is all that the fondest lover could desire," he answers. Did
the Englishmen of the nineteenth century really talk like that about
their dearest and most intimate affairs?
And yet here is John Ridd, the accepted lover of Lorna, an honest,
clumsy, self-satisfied couple of yards of a man, for whom she has to be
properly grateful in a world of villains, and yet, for my part, I can
never look upon her marriage with him as other than a _mésalliance_.
Of course, it must be understood, even by those who most violently
disagree with me, that these strictures are passed, not upon
Blackmore's novel, but upon the spirit of the age which made John Ridd
the hero of such a novel, the spirit which in the dress of "John Bull"
has insistently presented our less attractive qualities to the outside
world as the true Englishman, and which has been, by the outside world,
adopted and disliked; while such admirable traits as sincerity,
disinterestedness, and self-criticism, have been neglected by us and
ignored by them.
For the novel itself it is difficult to have anything but praise. The
admirable sense of locality, and the art with which Blackmore has so
identified his persons of fiction with actual places till we no longer
disassociate them, but in the church of Oare, or the Doone Valley, or
Porlock, or Badgeworthy Water, think and speak of Lorna and John Kidd
as if they had had an actual existence; the firm and lively drawing of
the lesser characters, the charming pastoral scenes of the life on the
Ridds' farm, the really magnificent descriptions of the scenery of
Exmoor, and a particular gift of narrative, all place this novel of
Blackmore's on a high level in the literature of the nineteenth
century. His other novel, of which the scene is laid on this coast, is
"The Maid of Sker," less well known and of less artistic weight, but of
interest to anyone visiting the country between Barnstaple and Lynton,
and containing a particularly vivid account of old Barnstaple Fair.
[Illustration: The Doone Valley]
I have spoken of Henry Kingsley's novel "Ravenshoe," and it is
impossible to write of the literary associations of this district
without mention of his elder and more famous brother; for though
"Westward Ho!" deals with Bideford and its adjacent villages of
Appledore and Northam--it was at the latter village that Amyas Leigh
lived with his mother---and this book elects to deal only with the
country from Barnstaple northwards and westwards, yet Charles Kingsley
is the presiding local deity and guardian spirit, who has loved and
lived in and written in praise of the many beautiful spots, cliff and
cove, or valley and orchard, from the boundaries of Cornwall to
Somerset.
The family of Kingsley, also, is intimately connected with many of the
families of these villages. The Rev. J. R. Chanter, Vicar of
Parracombe, married a Miss Kingsley. He himself is the author of a
short monograph on Lundy, a book which is now very scarce, but which
can be seen at the London Library, at the Bideford Public Library, and
at the Athenaeum at Barnstaple. The Kingsleys and the Chanters are
closely connected through two generations, and the strain of authorship
seems to persist in them, one member after another displaying an
exceptional talent. Miss Vallings, the young author of a quickly
celebrated novel, "Bindweed," is a granddaughter of Mr. Chanter, and a
grandniece of Kingsley's; and the bold and original writer "Lucas
Mallet" is Canon Kingsley's daughter, and a niece of Henry Kingsley.