T. B.

THE RED DRAGON,

COMPTON FEREDAY,

April 10, 1904.

DEAR HERBERT,--I was really too busy to write last week, but I am going

to try and make up for it. This letter is going to be a diary. Expect

more of it.--T. B.

April 7.--I find myself, after all, compelled to begin my walking tour

alone. At the last moment Murchison has thrown me over. His father is

ill, and he is compelled to spend his holidays at home. I do not

altogether like to set off by myself, but it is too late to try and

arrange for another companion. I had rather, however, go by myself than

with some one who is not absolutely congenial. One requires on these

occasions to have a companion whose horizon is the same as one's own. I

daresay I could find an old friend, who is not also a colleague, to go

with me, but it would mean a certain amount of talk to bring us into

line. Then, too, I have had a very busy term; besides my form work, I

have had a good deal of extra teaching to do with the Army Class boys.

It is interesting work, for the boys are interested, not in the

subjects so much, as in mastering them for examination purposes. Yet it

matters little how the interest is obtained, as long as the boys

believe in the usefulness of what they are doing. But the result is

that I am tired out. I have lived with boys from morning to night, and

my spare time has been taken up with working at my subjects. I have had

hardly any exercise, and but a scanty allowance of sleep. Now I mean to

have both. I shall spend my days in the open air, and I shall sleep, I

hope, like a top at nights. Gradually I shall recover my power of

enjoyment; for the worst of such weeks as I have been passing through

is that they leave one dreary and jaded; one finds oneself in that dull

mood when one cannot even realise beautiful things. I hear a thrush

sing in a bush, or the sunset flames broadly behind the elms, and I say

to myself, "That is very beautiful if only I could feel it to be so!"

Boys are exhausting companions--they are so restless, so full-blooded,

so pitilessly indifferent, so desperately interested in the narrow

round of school life; and I have the sort of temperament that will

efface itself to any extent, if only the people that I am concerned

with will be content. I suppose it is a feeble trait, and that the best

schoolmasters have a magnetic influence over boys which makes the boys

interested in the master's subjects, or at least hypnotises them into

an appearance of interest. I cannot do that. It is like a leaden weight

upon me if I feel that a class is bored; the result is that I arrive at

the same end in my own way. I have learnt a kind of sympathy with boys;

I know by instinct what will interest them, or how to put a tiresome

thing in an interesting way.

But I shudder to think how sick I am of it all! I want a long bath of

silence and recollection and repose. I want to fill my cistern again

with my own thoughts and my own dreams, instead of pumping up the muddy

waters of irrigation. I don't think my colleagues are like that. I sate

with half-a-dozen of them last night at supper. They were full of all

they meant to do. Two of the most energetic were going off to play

golf, and the chief pleasure of the place they were going to was that

it was possible to get a round on Sundays; they were going to fill the

evening with bridge, and one of them said with heart-felt satisfaction,

"I am only going to take two books away with me--one on golf and the

other on bridge--and I am going to cure some of my radical faults." I

thought to myself that if he had forborne to mention the subjects of

his books, one might have supposed that they would be a Thomas-a-Kempis

and a Taylor's Holy Living, and then how well it would have seemed! Two

more were going for a rapid tour abroad in a steamer chartered for

assistant masters. That seemed to me to be almost more depressing. They

were going to ancient historical places, full of grave and beautiful

associations; places to go to, it seemed to me, with some single

like-minded associate, places to approach with leisurely and untroubled

mind, with no feeling of a programme or a time-table--and least of all

in the company of busy professional people with an academical cicerone.

Still, I suppose that this is true devotion to one's profession. They

will be able, they think, to discourse easily and, God help us,

picturesquely about what they have seen, to intersperse a Thucydides

lesson with local colour, and to describe the site of the temple of

Delphi to boys beginning the Eumenides. It is very right and proper, no

doubt, but it produces in me a species of mental nausea to think of the

conditions under which these impressions will be absorbed. The

arrangements for luncheon, the brisk interchange of shop, the cheery

comments of fellow-tradesmen, the horrible publicity and banality of

the whole affair!

My two other colleagues were going, one to spend a holiday at

Brighton--which he said was very bracing at Easter, adding that he

expected to fall in with some fellows he knew. They will all stroll on

the Parade, smoke cigarettes together, and adjourn for a game of

billiards. No doubt a very harmless way of passing the time, but not to

me enlivening. But Walters is a conventional person, and, as long as he

is doing what he would call "the correct thing," he is perfectly and

serenely content. The sixth and last is going to Surbiton to spend the

holidays with a mother and three sisters, and I think he is the most

virtuously employed of all. He will walk out alone, with a terrier dog,

before lunch; and after lunch he will go out with his sisters; and

perhaps the vicar will come to tea. But then it will be home, and the

girls will be proud of their brother, and will have the dishes he

likes, and he will have his father's old study to smoke in. I am not

sure that he is not the happiest of all, because he is not only

pursuing his own happiness.

But I have no such duties before me. I might, I suppose, go down to my

sister Helen at the Somersetshire vicarage where she lives so full a

life. But the house is small, there are four children, and not much

money, and I should only be in the way. Charles would do his best to

welcome me, but he will be in a great fuss over his Easter services;

and he will ask me to use his study as though it was my own room, which

will necessitate a number of hurried interviews in the drawing-room, my

sister will take her letters up to her bedroom, and the doors will have

to be carefully closed to exclude my tobacco smoke.

This is all very sordid, no doubt, but I am confronted with sordid

things to-day. The boys have just cleared off, and they are beginning

to sweep out the schoolrooms. The inky, dreary desks, the ragged books,

the odd fives-shoes in the pigeon-holes, the wheelbarrows full of

festering orange-peel and broken-down fives-balls: this is not a place

for a self-respecting person to be in. I want to be mooning about

country lanes, with the smell of spring woods blowing down the valley.

I want to be holding slow converse with leisurely rustic persons, to be

surveying from the side of a high grassy hill the rich plain below, to

hear the song of birds in the thickets, to try and feel myself one with

the life of the world instead of a sordid sweeper of a corner of it.

This is all very ungrateful to my profession, which I love, but it is a

necessary reaction; and what at this moment chiefly makes me grateful

to it is that my pocket is full enough to let me have a holiday on a

liberal scale, without thinking of small economies. I may give pennies

to tramps or children, or a shilling to a sexton for showing me a

church. I may travel what class I choose, and put up at a hotel without

counting the cost; and oh! the blessedness of that. I would rather have

a three-days' holiday thus than three weeks with an anxious calculation

of resources.

April 8.--I am really off to the Cotswolds. I packed my beloved

knapsack yesterday afternoon. I put in it--precision is the essence of

diarising--a spare shirt, which will have to serve if necessary as a

nightgown, a pair of socks, a pair of slippers, a toothbrush, a small

comb, and a sponge; that is sufficient for a philosopher. A pocket

volume of poetry--Matthew Arnold this time--and a map completed my

outfit. And I sent a bag containing a more liberal wardrobe to a

distant station, which I calculated it would take me three days to

reach. Then I went off by an afternoon train, and, by sunset, I found

myself in a little town, Hinton Perevale, of stone-built houses, with

an old bridge. I had no sense of freedom as yet, only a blessed feeling

of repose. I took an early supper in a small low-roofed parlour with

mullioned windows. By great good fortune I found myself the only guest

at the inn, and had the room to myself; then I went early and

gratefully to bed, utterly sleepy and content, with just enough sense

left to pray for a fine day.

My prayer is answered this morning. I slept a dreamless sleep, and was

roused by the cheerful crowing of cocks, which picked about the back

yard of the inn. I dressed quickly, only suspending my task to watch

the little dramas of the inn yard--the fowls on the pig-sty wall; the

horse waiting meekly, with knotted traces hanging round it, to be

harnessed; the cat, on some grave business of its own, squeezing

gracefully under a closed barn door; the weary, flat-footed duck,

nuzzling the mud of a small pool as delicately as though it were a rich

custard. I was utterly free; I might go and come as I liked. Time had

ceased to exist for me, and it was pleasant to reflect, as I finished

my simple breakfast, that I should under professional conditions have

been hurrying briskly into school for an hour of Latin Prose. The

incredible absurdity and futility of it all came home to me. Half the

boys that I teach so elaborately would be both more wholesomely and

happily employed if they were going out to farm-work for the day. But

they are gentlemen's sons, and so must enter what are called the

liberal professions, to retire at the age of sixty with a poor

digestion, a peevish wife, and a family of impossible children. But it

is only in such inconsequent moments that I allow myself to think thus

slightingly of Latin Prose. It is a valuable accomplishment, and, when

I have repaired the breaches made by professional work in the mental

equilibrium, I shall rejoin my colleagues with a full sense of its

paramount importance.

I scribble this diary with a vile pen, and ink like blacking, on the

corner of my breakfast-table. I have packed my knapsack, and in a few

minutes I shall set out upon my march.

April 9.--I spent an almost perfect day yesterday. It was a cool bright

day, with a few clouds like cotton-wool moving sedately in a blue sky.

I first walked quietly about my little town, which was full of delicate

beauties. The houses are all built of a soft yellow stone, which

weathers into a species of rich orange. Heaven knows where the

designers came from, but no two houses seem alike; some of them are

gabled, buttressed, stone-mullioned, irregular in outline, but yet with

a wonderful sense of proportion. Some are Georgian, with classical

pilasters and pediments. Yet they are all for use and not for show; and

the weak modern shop-windows, which some would think disfigure the

delicate house-fronts, seem to me just to give the requisite sense of

contrast. At the end of the street stands the church, with a stately

Perpendicular tower, and a resonant bell which tells the hour. This

overlooks a pile of irregular buildings, now a farm, but once a great

manor-house, with a dovecote and pavilions; but the old terrace is now

an orchard, and the fine oriel of the house looks straight into the

byre. Inside the church--it is open and well-kept--you can trace the

history of the manor and its occupants, from Job Best, a rich mercer of

London, whose monument, with marble pillars and obelisks, adorns the

south aisle; his son was ennobled, whose effigy--more majestic still,

robed and coroneted, with his Viscountess by his side, and her dog

(with his name, Jakke, engraven on his shoulder)--lies smiling, the

slender hands crossed in prayer. But the house was not destined to

survive. The Viscount's only daughter, the Lady Penelope, looks down

from the wall, a fair and delicate lady, the last of her brief race,

who, as the old inscription says with a tender simplicity, "dyed a

mayd." I cannot help wondering, my pretty lady, what your story was;

and it will do you no hurt if one, who looks upon your gentle face,

sends a wondering message of tenderness behind the veil to your pure

spirit, regret for your vanished charm, and the fragrance of your soft

bloom, and sadness for all sweet things that fade.

The manor, so I learn, was burnt wantonly by the Roundheads--there was

a battle hereabouts--on the charge that it had harboured some followers

of the king; and so our dreams of greatness and permanence are

fulfilled.

The whole church was very neat and spruce; it had suffered a

restoration lately. The walls were stripped of their old plaster and

pointed, so that the inside is now rougher than the outside, a thing

the ancient builders never intended. The altar is fairly draped with

good hangings behind, and the chancel fitted with new oak stalls and

seats, all as neat as a new pin. As I lingered in the church, reading

the simple monuments, a rosy, burly vicar came briskly in, and seeing

me there, courteously showed me all the treasures of his house, like

Hezekiah. He took me into the belfry, and there, piled up against the

wall, were some splendid Georgian columns and architraves, richly

carved in dark brown wood. I asked what it was. "Oh, a horrible pompous

thing," he said; "it was behind the altar--most pagan and unsuitable;

we had it all out as soon as I came. The first moment I entered the

church, I said to myself, 'THAT must go,' and I have succeeded, though

it was hard enough to collect the money, and actually some of the old

people here objected." I did not feel it was worth while to cast cold

water on the good man's satisfaction--but the pity of it! I do not

suppose that a couple of thousand pounds could have reproduced it; and

it is simply heart-rending to see such a noble monument of piety and

careful love sacrificed to a wave of so-called ecclesiastical taste.

The vicar's chief pride was a new window, by a fashionable modern firm;

quite unobjectionable in design, and with good colour, but desperately

uninteresting. It represented some mild, unemphatic, attenuated saints,

all exactly alike, languidly and decorously conversing together,

weighed down by heavy drapery, as though wrapped in bales of carpets.

In the lower compartments knelt some dignified persons, similarly

habited, in face exactly like the saints above, except that they were

fitted out with unaccountable beards--all pretty and correct, but with

no character or force. I suppose that fifty years hence, when our taste

has broadened somewhat, this window will probably be condemned as

impossible too. There can be no absolute canon of beauty; the only

principle ought to be to spare everything that is of careful and solid

workmanship, to give it a chance, to let time and age have their

perfect work. It is the utter conventionality of the whole thing that

is so distressing; the same thing is going on all over the country, the

attempt to put back the clock, and to try and restore things as they

were; history, tradition, association, are not considered. The old

builders were equally ruthless, it is true; they would sweep away a

Norman choir to build a Decorated one; but at all events they were

advancing and expanding, not feebly recurring to a past period of

taste, and trying to obliterate the progress of the centuries.

About noon I left the little town, and struck out up a winding lane to

the hills. The copses were full of anemones and primroses; birds sang

sharply in the bushes which were gemmed with fresh green; now and then

I heard the woodpecker laugh as if at some secret jest among the

thickets. Presently the little town was at my feet, looking small and

tranquil in the golden noon; and soon I came to the top. It was grassy,

open down-land up here, and in an instant the wide view of a rich

wooded and watered plain spread before me, with shadowy hills on the

horizon. In the middle distance I saw the red roofs of a great town,

the smoke going peacefully up; here was a shining river-reach, like a

crescent of silver. It was England indeed--tranquil, healthy,

prosperous England.

The rest of the day I need not record. It was full of delicate

impressions--an old, gabled, mullioned house among its pastures; a

hamlet by a stream, admirably grouped; a dingle set with primroses; and

over all, the long, pure lines of upland, with here and there, through

a gap, the purple, wealthy plain.

I write this in the evening, at a little wayside inn, in a hamlet under

the hill. The name alone, Wenge Grandmain, is worth a shilling. It is

very simple, but clean, and the people are kind; not with the

professional manner of those who bow, smiling, to a paying guest, but

of those who welcome a wanderer and try to make him a home. And so, in

a dark-panelled little parlour, with a sedate-ticking clock, I sit

while the sounds of life grow fainter and rarer in the little street.

THE CROSSFOXES INN,

BOURTON-ON-THE-WOLD,

April 16, 1904.

DEAR HERBERT,--I have now been ten days on my travels, but for the last

week I have pitched my moving tent at Bourton. Do you shudder with the

fear that I am going to give you pages of description of scenery? It is

not a SHUDDER with me when I get a landscape-letter; it is merely that

leaden dulness which falls upon the spirit when it is confronted with

statements which produce no impression upon the mind. I always, for

instance, skip the letters of travel which appear about the third

chapter of great biographies, when the young gentleman goes for the

Grand Tour after taking his degree.

But imagine this: a great, rich, wooded, watered plain; on the far

horizon the shadowy forms of hills; behind you, gently rising heights,

with dingles and folds full of copsewood, rising to soft green downs.

There, on the skirts of the upland, above the plain, below the hill,

sits the little village, with a stately Perpendicular church tower. The

village itself of stone houses, no two alike, all with character;

gabled, mullioned, weathered to a delicate ochre--some standing back,

some on the street. Intermingled with these are fine Georgian houses,

with great pilasters, all of stone too; in the centre of the street a

wall, with two tall gate-posts, crowned with stone balls; a short lime

avenue leads to a stately, gabled manor-house, which you can see

through great iron gates. The whole scene incredibly romantic,

exquisitely beautiful.

My favourite walk is this. I leave the little town by a road which

winds along the base of the hill. I pass round a shoulder, wooded and

covered to the base with tangled thickets, where the birds sing

shrilly. I turn up to the left into a kind of "combe." At the very

farthest end of the little valley, at the base of the steeper slopes

but now high above the plain, stands an ancient church among yews. On

one side of it is a long, low-fronted, irregular manor-house, with a

formal garden in front, approached by a little arched gate-house which

stands on the road; on the other side of the church, and below it, a no

less ancient rectory, with a large Perpendicular window, anciently a

chapel, in the gable. In the warm, sheltered air the laurels grow

luxuriantly; a bickering stream, running in a deep channel, makes a

delicate music of its own; a little farther on stands a farm, with barn

and byre; in the midst of the buildings is a high, stone-tiled

dovecote. The roo-hooing of the pigeons fills the whole place with a

slumberous sound. I wind up the hill by a little path, now among

thickets, now crossing a tilted pasture. I emerge on the top of a down;

in front of me lie the long slopes of the wold, with that purity and

tranquillity of outline which only down-land possesses. Here on a spur

stands a grass-grown camp, with ancient thorn-trees growing in it.

Turning round, the great plain runs for miles, with here and there a

glint of water, where the slow-moving Avon wanders. Hamlets, roads,

towers lie out like a map at my feet--all wearing that secluded,

peaceful air which tempts me to think that life would be easy and happy

if it could only be lived among those quiet fields, with the golden

light and lengthening shadows.

I find myself wondering in these quiet hours--I walk alone as a

rule--what this haunting, incommunicable sense of beauty is. Is it a

mere matter of temperament, of inner happiness, of physical well-being;

or has it an absolute existence? It comes and goes like the wind. Some

days one is acutely, almost painfully, alive to it--painfully, because

it makes such constant and insistent demands upon one's attention. Some

days, again, it is almost unheeded, and one passes through it blind and

indifferent. It is an expression, I cannot help feeling, of the very

mind of God; and yet the ancient earthwork in which I stand, bears

witness to the fact that in far-off days men lived in danger and

anxiety, fighting and striving for bare existence. We have established

by law and custom a certain personal security nowadays; is our sense of

beauty born of that security? I cannot help wondering whether the old

warriors who built this place cared at all for the beauty of the earth;

and yet over it all hangs the gentle sadness of all sweet things that

have an end. All those warriors are dust; the boys and girls who

wandered a century ago where I wander to-day, they are at rest too in

the little churchyard that lies at my feet; and my heart goes out to

all who have loved and suffered, and to those who shall hereafter love

and suffer here. An idle sympathy, perhaps, but none the less strong

and real.

But now for a little human experience that befell me here. I found the

other day, not far from the church, an old artist sketching. A refined,

sad-looking old fellow, sunburned and active, with white hair and

pointed beard, and a certain pathetic attempt, of a faded kind, to

dress for his part--low collar, a red tie, rough shooting-jacket, and

so forth. He seemed in a sociable mood, and I sate down beside him. How

it came about I hardly know, but he was soon telling me the story of

his life. He was the tenant, I found, of the old manor-house, which he

held at a ridiculous rent, and he had lived here nearly forty years. He

had found the place as a young man, wandering about in search of the

picturesque. I gathered that he had bright dreams and wide ambitions.

He had a small independence, and he had meant to paint great pictures

and make a name for himself. He had married; his wife was long dead,

his children out in the world, and he was living on alone, painting the

same pictures, bought, so far as I could make out, mostly by American

visitors. His drawing was old-fashioned and deeply mannerised. He was

painting not what was there, but some old and faded conception of his

own as to what it was like--missing, I think, half the beauty of the

place. He seemed horribly desolate. I tried, for his consolation and my

own, to draw out a picture of the beautiful refined life he led; and

the old fellow began to wear a certain jaunty air of dignity and

distinction, which would have amused me if it had not made me feel

inclined to cry. But he soon fell back into what is, I suppose, a

habitual melancholy. "Ah, if you had known what my dreams were!" he

said once. He went on to say that he now wished that he had taken up

some simple and straightforward profession, had made money, and had his

grandchildren about him. "I am more ghost than man," he said, shaking

his dejected head.

I despair of expressing to you the profound pathos that seemed to me to

surround this old despondent creature, with his broken dreams and his

regretful memories. Where was the mistake he made? I suppose that he

over-estimated his powers; but it was a generous mistake after all; and

he has had to bear the slow sad disillusionment, the crushing burden of

futility. He set out to win glory, and he is a forgotten, shabby,

irresolute figure, subsisting on the charity of wealthy visitors! And

yet he seems to have missed happiness by so little. To live as he does

might be a serene and beautiful thing. If such a man had large reserves

of hope and tenderness and patience; if he could but be content with

the tranquil beauty of the wholesome earth, spread so richly before his

eyes, it would be a life to be envied.

It has been a gentle lesson to me, that one must resolutely practise

one's heart and spirit for the closing hours. In the case of successful

men, as they grow older, it often strikes me with a sense of pain how

passionately they cling to their ambitions and activities. How many

people there are who work too long, and try to prolong the energies of

morning into the afternoon, and the toil of afternoon into the peace of

evening. I earnestly desire to grow old gracefully; to know when to

stop, when to slip into a wise and kindly passivity, with sympathy for

those who are in the forefront of the race. And yet if one does not

practise wonder and receptivity and hope, one cannot expect them to

come suddenly and swiftly to one's call. There comes a day when a man

ought to be able to see that his best work is behind him, that his

active influence is on the wane, that he is losing his hold on the

machine. There ought to come a patient, beautiful, and kindly dignity,

a love of young things and fresh flowers; not an envious and regretful

unhappiness at the loss of the eager life and its brisk sensations,

which betrays itself too often in a trickle of exaggerated

reminiscences, a "weary, day-long chirping."

This is a harder task, I suppose, for an old bachelor than for a father

of children. I have sometimes felt that adoption, with all its risks,

of some young creature that you can call your own, would be a solution

for many loveless lives, because it would stir them out of the

comfortable selfishness that is the bane of the barren heart.

Of course, a schoolmaster suffers from this less than most professional

men; but, even so, it is melancholy to reflect how the boys one has

cared for, and tried to help, drift out of one's sight and ken. I have

no touch of the feeling which they say was characteristic of

Jowett--and indeed is amply evidenced by his correspondence--that once

a man's tutor he was always his tutor, even though his pupil became

grey-headed and a grandfather. One must do the best for the boys and

look for no gratitude; it often comes, indeed, in rich measure, but the

schoolmaster who craves for it is lost.

Well, it is time to stop. I sit in a little, low raftered parlour of

the old inn; the fire in the big hearth flickers into ash, and my

candles flare to their sockets. I leave the place to-morrow; and such

is the instinct for permanence in the human mind, that I feel depressed

and melancholy, as though I were leaving home.--Ever your affectionate,