Part 3

The man who wrote _The Lover's Melancholy_, _'Tis Pity She's a Whore_, _The Broken Heart_ and _Love's Sacrifice_ was born in this sylvan scene and his cradle rocked to the murmur of wood doves. True he vanished early from Devonshire, and though uncertain tradition declares his return, asserting that, while still in prime and vigour, he laid by his gown and pen and came back to Bagtor, to end his days where he was born, and mellow his stormy heart before he died, no proof that he did so exists. His life's history has been obliterated and contemporary records of him have yet to appear.

As an artist he must surely have loved horror for horror's sake, and, too often, our terror arouses not that pity to which tragedy should lift man's heart, but rather generates disgust before his extraordinary plots and the unattractive and inhuman characters which unravel them. One salutes the intellectual power of him, but merely shudders, without being enchained or uplifted by the nature of his themes. It has been well said of Ford that he "abhorred vice and admired virtue; but ordinary vice or modern virtue were to him as light wine to a dram drinker.... Passion must be incestuous or adulterous; grief must be something more than martyrdom, before he could make them big enough to be seen."

There is a little of Michaelangelo about Ford--something excruciating, tortured. The tormented marble of the one is reflected in the wracked and writhing characters of the other; but whether Ford felt for the sorrow of earth as the Florentine; whether he shared that mightier man's fiery patriotism, enthusiasm of humanity and tragic griefs before the suffering of mankind, we know not. One picture we have of him from old time, and it offers a gloomy, aloof figure, little caring to win friendship, or court understanding from his fellows:--

Deep in a dump John Ford was alone got, With folded arms and melancholy hat.

So depicted the gloomy artist might serve for tragedy's self--arms crossed, brows drawn, eyes darkling under the broad-brimmed beaver, with the plotter's night-black cloak swept round his person. Or to a vision of Michaelangelo's "Il Penseroso" we may exalt the poet, and see him in that solemn and stately stone, finally at peace, his last word written and the finger of silence upon his gloomy lips.

Hazlitt finds John Ford finical and fastidious. He certainly is so, and one often wonders how this mind and pen should have welcomed such appalling subjects. He plays with edged tools and too well knows the use of poisoned weapons, says Hazlitt; and the criticism is just in the opinion of those who, with him, account it an artist's glory that he shall not tamper with foul and "unfair" subjects, or sink his genius to the kennel and gutter. That, however, is the old-world, vanished attitude, for artists recognise no "unfair" subjects to-day.

Indeed, Ford can be not seldom beautiful and tender and touched to emotion of pity; but by the time of Charles, the golden galaxies were gone; their forces were spent; their inspiration had perished; England, merry no more, began to shiver in the shadow of coming puritan eclipse; and that twilight seems to have cast by anticipation its penumbra about Ford.

There is in him little of the rollicking, superficial coarseness of the Elizabethans; the stain is in web and woof. His great moments are few; he is mostly ferocious, or absurdly sentimental, and one confesses that the bulk of his best work, judged against the highest of ancient or modern tragedy, rings feebly with a note of too transparent artifice. He is moved by intellectual interest rather than creative inspiration; there is far more brain than heart in his writings.

Perhaps he knew it and convinced himself, while still at the noon of intelligence, that he was no creator. Perhaps he abandoned art, through failure to satisfy his own ideals. At any rate it would seem that he stopped writing at a time when most men have still much to give.

One would like at least to believe that he found in his birthplace the distinguished privacy he desired and an abode of physical and mental peace. He may, indeed, have come home again to Devon when his work was ended; he may have passed the uncertain residue of life in seclusion with wife and family at this estate of his ancestors; his dust may lie unhonoured and unrecorded at Ilsington, as Herrick's amid the green graves not far distant at Dean Prior.

It is all guesswork, and the truth of John Ford's life, as of his death, may be forever hidden. One sees him a notable, silent, subtle man, prone to pessimism as a gift of heredity--a man disappointed in his achievement, soured by inner criticism and comparison with those who were greater than he.

So, weary of cities and the company of wits and poets, he came back to the country, that he might heal his disappointments and soothe his pains. His life, to the unseeing eyes around him, doubtless loomed prosperous and complete; to himself, perchance, all was dust and ashes of thwarted ambition. Again he roamed the woods where he had learned to walk; won to the love of nature; underwent the thousand new experiences and fancied discoveries of a townsman fresh in the country; and, through these channels, came to contentment and sunshine of mind, bright enough to pierce the night of his thoughts and sweeten the dark currents of his imagination. It may be so.

OKEHAMPTON CASTLE

A high wind roared over the tree-tops and sent the leaf flying--blood-red from the cherry, russet from the oak, and yellow from the elm. Rain and sunshine followed swiftly upon each other, and the storms hurtled over the forest, hissed in the river below and took fire through their falling sheets, as the November sun scattered the rear-guard of the rain and the cloud purple broke to blue. A great wind struck the larches, where they misted in fading brightness against the inner gloom of the woods, and at each buffet, their needles were scattered like golden smoke. Only the ash trees had lost all their leaves, for a starry sparkle of foliage still clung to every other deciduous thing. The low light, striking upon a knoll and falling on dripping surfaces of stone and tree trunk, made a mighty flash and glitter of it, so that the trees and the scattered masonry, that ascended in crooked crags above their highest boughs, were lighted with rare colour and blazed against the cloud masses now lumbering storm-laden from the West.

The mediaeval ruin, that these woods had almost concealed in summer, now loomed amid them well defined. Viewed from aloft the ground plan of the castle might be distinctly traced, and it needed no great knowledge to follow the architectural design of it. The sockets of the pillars that sprang to a groined entrance still remained, and within, to right and left of the courtyard, there towered the roofless walls of a state chamber, or banqueting hall, on the one hand, a chapel, oratory and guard-room on the other. The chapel had a piscina in the southern wall; the main hall was remarkable for its mighty chimney. Without, the ruins of the kitchens were revealed, and they embraced an oven large enough to bake bread for a village. Round about there gaped the foundations of other apartments, and opened deep eyelet windows in the thickness of the walls. The mass was so linked up and knit together that of old it must have presented one great congeries of chambers fortified by a circlet of masonry; but now the keep towered on a separate hillock to the south-west of the ruin, and stood alone. It faced foursquare, dominated the valley, and presented a front impregnable to all approach.

This is the keep that Turner drew, and set behind it a sky of mottled white and azure specially beloved by Ruskin; but the wizard took large liberties with his subject, flung up his castle on a lofty scarp, and from his vantage point at stream-side beneath, suggested a nobler and a mightier ruin than in reality exists. One may suppose that steps or secret passages communicated with the keep, and that in Tudor times no trees sprang to smother the little hill and obscure the views of the distant approaches--from Dartmoor above and the valleys beneath. Now they throng close, where oak and ash cling to the sides of the hillock and circle the stones that tower to ragged turrets in their midst.

Far below bright Okement loops the mount with a brown girdle of foaming waters that threads the meadows; and beyond, now dark, now wanly streaked with sunshine, ascends Dartmoor to her border heights of Yes Tor and High Willhayes. Westerly the land climbs again and the last fires of autumn flicker over a forest.

I saw the place happily between wild storms, at a moment when the walls, warmed by a shaft of sunlight, took on most delicious colour and, chiming with the gold of the flying leaves, towered bright as a dream upon the November blue.

At the Conquest, Baldwin de Redvers received no fewer than one hundred and eighty-one manors in Devon alone, for William rewarded his strong men according to their strength. We may take it, therefore, that this Baldwin de Redvers, or Baldwin de Brionys, was a powerful lieutenant to the Conqueror--a man of his hands and stout enough to hold the West Country for his master. From his new possessions the Baron chose Ochementone[1] for his perch; indeed, he may be said to have created the township. With military eye he marked a little spur of the hills that commanded the passes of the Moor and the highway to Cornwall and the Severn Sea; and there built his stronghold,--the sole castle in Devon named in Domesday. But of this edifice no stone now stands upon another. It has vanished into the night of time past, and its squat, square, Norman keep scowls down upon the valleys no more.

[1] "Okehampton" is a word which has no historic or philological excuse.

The present ruins belong to the Perpendicular period of later centuries, and until a recent date the second castle threatened swiftly to pass after the first; but a new lease of life has lately been given to these fragments; they have been cleaned and excavated, the conquering ivy has been stripped from their walls, and a certain measure of work accomplished to weld and strengthen the crumbling masonry. Thus a lengthened existence has been assured to the castle. "Time, which antiquates antiquities," is challenged, and will need reinforcement of many years wherein again to lift his scaling ladders of ivy, loose his lightnings from the cloud, and marshal his fighting legions of rain and tempest, frost and snow.

THE GORGE

Reflection swiftly reveals the significance of a river gorge, for it is upon such a point that the interest of early man is seen to centre. The shallow, too, attracts him, though its value varies; it must ever be a doubtful thing, because the shallow depends upon the moods of a river, and a ford is not always fordable. But to the gorge no flood can reach. There the river's banks are highest, the aperture between them most trifling; there man from olden time has found the obvious place of crossing and thrown his permanent bridge to span the waterway. At a gorge is the natural point of passage, and Pontifex, the bridge-builder, seeking that site, bends road to river where his work may be most easily performed, most securely founded. But while the bridge, its arch springing from the live rock, is safe enough, the waters beneath are like to be dangerous, and if a river is navigable at all, at her gorges, where the restricted volume races and deepens, do the greatest dangers lie. In Italy this fact gave birth to a tutelary genius, or shadowy saint, whose special care was the raft-men of Arno and other rivers. Their dangerous business took these _foderatore_ amid strange hazards, and one may imagine them on semi-submerged timbers, swirling and crashing over many a rocky rapid, in the throats of the hills, where twilight homed and death was ever ready to snatch them from return to smooth waters and sunshine. So a new guardian arose to meet these perils, and the boldest navigator lifted his thoughts to Heaven and commended his soul to the keeping of San Gorgone.

Sublimity haunts these places; be they great as the Grand Canyon of Arizona and the mountain rifts of Italy and France, or trifling as this dimple on Devon's face of which I tell to-day, they reveal similar characteristics and alike challenge the mind of the intelligent being who may enter them.

Here, under the roof of Devon, through the measures that press up to the Dartmoor granite and are changed by the vanished heat thereof, a little Dartmoor stream, in her age-long battle with earth, has cut a right gorge, and so rendered herself immortal. There came a region in her downward progress when she found barriers of stone uplifted between her and her goal; whereupon, without avoiding the encounter, she cast herself boldly upon the work and set out to cleave and to carve. Now this glyptic business, begun long before the first palaeolithic man trod earth, is far advanced; the river has sunk a gulley of near two hundred feet through the solid rock, and still pursues her way in the nether darkness, gnawing ceaselessly at the stone and leaving the marks of her earlier labours high up on either side of the present channel. There, written on the dark Devonian rock, is a record of erosion set down ages before human eye can have marked it; for fifty feet above the present bed are clean-scooped pot-holes, round and true, left by those prehistoric waters. But the sides of the gorge are mostly broken and sloping; and upon the shelves of it dwell trees that fling their branches together with amazing intricacies of foliage in summer-time and lace-like ramage in winter. Now bright sunshine flashes down the pillars of them and falls from ledge to ledge of each steep precipice; it brightens great ivy banks and illuminates a thousand ferns, that stud each little separate knoll in the great declivities, or loll from clefts and crannies to break the purple shadows with their fronds. The buckler and the shield fern leap spritely where there is most light; the polypody loves the limb of the oak; the hart's tongue haunts the coolest, darkest crevices and hides the beauty of silvery mosses and filmy ferns under cover of each crinkled leaf. And secret waters twinkle out by many a hidden channel to them, bedewing their foliage with grey moisture.

On a cloudy day night never departs from the deepest caverns of this gorge, and only the foam-light reveals each polished rib and buttress. The air is full of mist from a waterfall that thunders through the darkness, and chance of season and weather seldom permit the westering sun to thrust a red-gold shaft into the gloom. But that rare moment is worth pilgrimage, for then the place awakens and a thousand magic passages of brightness pierce the gorge to reveal its secrets. In such moments shall be seen the glittering concavities, the fair pillars and arches carved by the water, and the hidden forms of delicate life that thrive upon them, dwelling in darkness and drinking of the foam. Most notable is a crimson fungus that clings to the dripping precipices like a robe, so that they seem made of polished bloodstone, and hint the horror of some tragedy in these loud shouting caves. Below the mass of the river, very dark under its creaming veil of foam, shouts and hastens; above, there slope upwards the cliff-masses to a mere ribbon of golden-green, high aloft where the trees admit rare flashes from the azure above them. Beech and ash spring horizontally from the precipices, and great must be the bedded strength of the roots that hold their trunks hanging there. With the dark forces of the gorge dragging them downward and the sunshine drawing them triumphantly up--between gravitation and light--they poise, destruction beneath and life beckoning from above. They nourish thus above their ultimate graves, since they, too, must fall at last and join those dead tree skeletons whose bones are glimmering amid the rocks below.

Here light and darkness so cunningly blend that size is forgotten, as always happens before a thing inherently fine. The small gorge wrought of a little river grows great and bulks large to imagination. The soaring sides of it, the shadow-loving things beneath, the torture of the trees above, and the living water, busy as of yore in levelling its ancient bed to the sea, waken wonder at such conquest over these fire-baked rocks. The heart goes out to the river and takes pleasure to follow her from the darkness of her battle into the light again, where, flower-crowned, she emerges between green banks that shelve gently, hung with wood-rush and meadow-sweet, angelica and golden saxifrage. Here through a great canopy of translucent foliage shines the noon sunlight, celebrating peace. Into the river, where she spreads upon a smooth pool, and trout dart shadowy through the crystal, the brightness burns, until the stream bed sparkles with amber and agate and flashes up in sweet reflections beneath each brier and arched fern-frond bending at the brink.

Nor does the rivulet lack correspondence with greater streams in its human relation; she is complete in every particular, for man has found her also; and dimly seen, amid the very tree-tops, where the gorge opens, and great rocks come kissing close, an arch of stone carries his little road from hamlet to hamlet.

THE GLEN

There is a glen above West Dart whence a lesser stream after brief journeying comes down to join the river. By many reaches, broken with little falls, the waters descend upon the glen from the Moor; but barriers of granite first confront them, and before the lands break up and hollow, a mass of boulders, piled in splendid disorder and crowned with willow and rowan, crosses the pathway of the torrent. Therefore the little river divides and leaps and tumbles foaming over the mossy granite, or creeps beneath the boulders by invisible ways. Into fingers and tresses the running waters dislimn, and then, that great obstacle passed, their hundred rillets run together again and go on their way with music. By a descent that becomes swiftly steeper, the burn falls upon fresh rocks, is led into fresh channels and broken to the right and left where mossy islets stand knee-deep in fern and bilberry. Here spring up the beginnings of the wood, for the glen is full of trees. Beech and alder, with scrub of dwarf willow at their feet, cluster on the islets and climb the deepening valley westward; but in the glen stand aged trees, and on the crest of the slope haggard spruce firs still fight for life and mark, in their twisted and decaying timbers and perishing boughs, the torment of the unsleeping wind. Great is the contrast between these stricken ruins with death in their high tops, and the sylva beneath sheltered by the granite hill. There beech and pine are prosperous and sleek compared with the unhappy, time-foundered wights above them; but if the spruces perish, they rule. The lesser things are at their feet and the sublimity of their struggle--their mournful but magnificent protest against destiny--makes one ignore the sequestered woodland, where there is neither battle nor victory, but comfortable, ignoble shelter and repose. The river kisses the feet of these happy nonentities; they make many a stately arch and pillar along the water; in spring the pigeon and the storm-thrush nest among their branches; and they gleam with newly-opened foliage and shower their silky shards upon the earth; in autumn they fling a harvest of sweet beech mast around their feet. The seed germinates and thousands of cotyledon leaves appear like fairy umbrellas, from the waste of the dead leaves. The larger number of these seedlings perish, but some survive to take their places in fulness of time.

By falls and rapids, by flashing stickles and reaches of stillness, the little river sinks to the heart of the glen; but first there is a water-meadow under the hills where an old clapper-bridge flings its rough span from side to side. This is of ancient date and has been more than once restored against the ravages of flood since pack-horses tramped that way in Tudor times. Here the streamlet rests awhile before plunging down the steeps beyond and entering the true glen--a place of shelving banks and many trees.

In summer the dingle is a golden-green vision of tender light that filters through the beeches. Here and there a sungleam, escaping the net of the leaf, wins down to fall on mossy boulder and bole, or plunge its shaft of brightness into a dark pool. Then the amber beam quivers through the crystal to paint each pebble at the bottom and reveal the dim, swift shades of the trout, that dart through it from darkness back to darkness again. In autumn the freshets come and the winds awaken until a storm of foliage hurtles through the glen, now pattering with shrill whispers from above and taking the water gently; now whirling in mad myriads, swirling and eddying, driven hither and thither by storm until they bank upon some hillock, find harbour among holes and the elbows of great roots, or plunge down into the turmoil of the stream. The ways of the falling leaf are manifold, and as the rock delays the river, so the trees, with trunk and bough, arrest the flying foliage, bar its hurrying volume and deflect its tide. In winter the glen is good, for then a man may escape the north wind here and, finding some snug holt among the river rocks, mark the beauty about him while snow begins to touch the tree-tops and the boughs are sighing. Then can be contrasted the purple masses of sodden leaves with the splendour of the mosses among which they lie; for now the minor vegetation gleams at this, its hour of prime. It sheets every bank in a silver-green fabric fretted with liquid jewels or ice diamonds; it builds plump knobs and cushions on the granite, and some of the mosses, now in fruit, brush their lustrous green with a wash of orange or crimson, where tiny filaments rise densely to bear the seed. Here, also, dwelling among them, flourishes that treasure of such secret nooks by stream-side, the filmy fern, with transparent green vesture pressed to the moisture-laden rocks.

Man's handiwork is also manifested here; not only in the felled trees and the clapper-bridge, but uniquely and delightfully; for where the river quickens over a granite apron and hastens in a torrent of foam away, the rocks have tongues and speak. He who planted this grove and added beauty to a spot already beautiful, was followed by his son, who caused to be carved inscriptions on the boulders. You may trace them through the moss, or lichen, where the records, grown dim after nearly a hundred years, still stand. It was a minister of the Church who amused himself after this fashion; but in no religious spirit did he compose; and the scattered poetry has a pleasant, pagan ring about it proper to this haunt of Pan.

Upon one great rock in the open, with its grey face to the south-west and its feet deeply bedded in grass and sand, you shall with care decipher these words:--

Sweet Poesy! fair Fancy's child! Thy smiles imparadise the wild.

Beside the boulder a willow stands, its finials budding with silver; upon the north-western face of the stone is another inscription whose legend startles a wayfarer on beholding the bulk of the huge mass. "This stone was removed by a flood 17--."