Part 10
Thus I rode up hill through more steep banks of gray sand draped in ivy, overhung with pine trees. Dipping again, I came to a park-like meadow, a pond, and a small house above rather stiff, ineffectual green terraces, on my right; while on the left the wall of the Plain was carved from top to bottom by three parallel even rolls like suet puddings, and these again carved across horizontally. A little farther on Coulston Hill was hollowed out into a great round steep bay which had once been a beech wood. Now all the beeches were lying anyhow, but mostly pointing downward, on the steep where they had fallen or slid, some singly, some in raft-like masses. Not a tree remained upright. The bared, blackish earth and the gray stems--of the colour of charred wood and ashes--suggested fire. The disorder of the strewn debris suggested earthquake. All was silent. A stiff man of fifty was endeavouring to loiter without stopping still in the road while his daughter of eighteen tried to keep her distance behind him by picking anemones without actually stopping.
Before Tinhead there were more vertical rolls and corresponding troughs on the hillside, and at the foot again three or four wide terraces, and below them a cornfield reaching to the road. To the low, dark-blue elm country away from the Plain--that is, northward--and to the far wooded ridge on its horizon, the westering light was beginning to add a sleeplike softness of pale haze. Over the low hedges I saw league after league of this lower land, and the drab buttresses of Beacon Hill near Devizes on its eastern edge. It had the appearance of a level, uninhabitable land of many trees. Several times a hollow cleft in the slope below the road--a cleft walled by trees, but grass-bottomed--guides the eye out towards it. All along good roads led down to the vale, and an equal number of rough roads climbed the hillside up to the Plain. I was to go down, not up, and I looked with regret at the clear ridge and the rampart of Bratton Castle carved on it against the sky, the high bare slopes, the green magnificent gulleys and horizontal terraces, the white roads, and especially a rough cartway mounting steeply from Edington between prodigious naked banks. For I had formerly gone up this cartway on a day so fine that for many nights afterwards I could send myself to sleep by thinking of how I climbed, seeing only these precipitous banks and the band of sky above them, until I emerged into the glory and the peace of the Plain, of the unbounded Plain and the unbounded sky, and the marriage of sun and wind that was being celebrated upon them. But it was no use going the same way, for I was tired and alone, and it was near the end of the afternoon, though still cloudily bright and warm. I had to go down, not up, to find a bed that I knew of seven or eight miles from Tinhead and Edington.
These two are typical downside villages of brick and thatch, built on the banks of the main road, a parallel lane or two, and some steep connecting lanes at right angles. When I first entered them from below I was surprised again and again how many steps yet higher up the downside they extended. From top to bottom the ledges and inclines on which they stand, and the intervening spaces of grass and orchard, cover about half a mile. Tinhead has an “Old George” inn of an L shape, with a yard in the angle. Edington, almost linked to Tinhead by cottages scattered along the road, has a “Plough” and “Old White Horse.” They were beginning to advertise the Tinhead and Bratton inns as suitable for teas and week-end parties. Hence, perhaps, the prefix “Old.” For hereby is the first station since Lavington on the line that goes parallel to the wall of the Plain and a mile or two below the road, all along the Pewsey vale to Westbury.
I turned away from the hills through Edington, which has a big towered church among its farmyards, cottage gardens, and elm slopes--big enough to seat all Edington, men and cattle. Like Salisbury Cathedral, this church looks as if it had been made in one piece. All over, it is a uniform rough gray without ivy or moss or any stain. On first entering the churchyard, what most struck my eye was the name of the Rev. Hussy Cave-Browne-Cave, for his name is on the fifth step of the cross erected during his vicarship; and next to that a prostrate cross within a stone kerb, six yards long by three yards wide, in memory of a member of the Long family. The church is the centre of a village of big box tombs, some ornamented by carving, one covered by a stone a foot thick, mossed, lichened, stained orange and black, pitted deep by rain, and retaining not a letter of its inscription. I saw the names Pike, Popler, Oram, and Fatt. Inside, out of the rain, lie the Longs, Carters, and Taylers, the days of their lives conspicuously recorded, and more than this in the case of George Tayler, since he died in 1852, and left money for a sixpenny cake to be given to each Sunday-school teacher, and a threepenny one to each scholar, once a year, “immediately after the sermon” (I think, at Easter). Mr. Tayler was either an enemy to sermons, or did not know as much as Sir Philip Sidney about schoolboys. One transept is the exclusive domain of an Augustinian canon, his head on a cushion, his feet against a barrel, while the coping-stone of his monument is capped by a barrel and a tree sprouting from it. The locked chancel is peopled by effigies of great or of rich men lying on their backs or kneeling and clasping their hands in prayer, as they have done for centuries; one of them a Welshman from Glamorgan, Sir Edward Lewys. Round about I read the names Lewis, Price, Roberts, Phillips, and Ellis. And speaking of names, I noticed that the landlord of the “Plough” was Pavy, a name which I had seen at Stapleford, and long before that in the epitaph Ben Jonson wrote on “a child of Queen Elizabeth’s Chapel,” a boy actor, Salathiel Pavy--
“Weep with me all you that read This little story; And know, for whom a tear you shed, Death’s self is sorry. ’Twas a child, that so did thrive In grace and feature, As Heaven and nature seemed to strive Which owned the creature. Years he numbered scarce thirteen When fates turned cruel; Yet three filled zodiacs had he been The stage’s jewel; And did act, what now we moan, Old men so duly, As, sooth, the Parcæ thought him one, He played so truly. So, by error, to his fate They all consented; But viewing him since, alas, too late They have repented; And have sought, to give new birth, In baths to steep him; But, being so much too good for earth, Heaven vows to keep him.”
The conceit and the babbling metre play most daintily with sadness; yet I think now it would touch us little had we not a name to attach to it, the name of a boy who acted in Jonson’s “Cynthia’s Revels” and “Poetaster” in 1600 and 1601.
A motor car overtook me in the village, scattering a group of boys. “Look out!” cried one, and as the thing passed by, turned to the next boy with, “There’s a fine motor; worth more than you are; cost a lot of money.” Is this not the awakening of England? At least, it is truth. One pink foxy boy laughed in my face as if there had been iron bars or a wall of plate glass dividing us; another waited till I had started, to hail me, “Long-legs.”
Rapidly I slid down, crossed the railway, and found myself in a land where oaks stood in the hedges and out in mid-meadow, and the banks were all primroses, and a brook gurgled slow among rush, marigold, and willow. High above me, on my left hand, eastward, was the grandest, cliffiest part of the Plain wall, the bastioned angle where it bends round southward by Westbury and Warminster, bare for the most part, carved with the White Horse and with double tiers of chalk pits, crowned with the gigantic camps of Bratton, Battlesbury, and Scratchbury, ploughed only on some of the lower slopes, and pierced by the road to Imber. The chimneys of Trowbridge made a clump on ahead to my right. In the west the dark ridge of the Mendips made the horizon.
I turned out of my way to see Steeple Ashton. It has no steeple, being in fact Staple Ashton, but a tower and a dial on a church, a very big church, bristling with coarse crockets all over, and knobby with coarse gargoyles, half lion and half dog, some spewing down, some out, some up. It is not a show village, like Lacock, where the houses are packed as in a town, and most of the gardens invisible; but a happy alternation of cottages of stone or brick (sometimes placed herring-bone fashion) or timber work, vegetable gardens, orchard plots, and the wagon-maker’s. On many a wagon for miles round the name of Steeple Ashton is painted. It is on level ground, but well up towards the Plain, over the wall of which rounded clouds, pure white and sunlit, were heaving up. Rain threatened again, but did no more. The late afternoon grew more and more quiet and still, and in the warmth I mistook a distant dog’s bark, and again a cock’s crowing, for the call of a cuckoo, mixed with the blackbird’s singing. I strained my ears, willing to be persuaded, but was not. I was sliding easily west, accompanied by rooks going homeward, and hailed by thrushes in elm trees beside the road--through West Ashton and downhill on the straight green-bordered road between Carter’s Wood and Flowery Wood. I crossed the little river Biss and went under the railway to North Bradley. This is a village built partly along the road from Westbury to Trowbridge, partly along two parallel turnings out of it. The most conspicuous houses on the main road are the red brick and stone villas with railings and small gardens, bearing the following names: The Laurels, East Lynn, Cremont, Lyndhurst, Hume Villa, Alcester Cottage, Rose Villa, and Frith House, all in one row. On a dusty, cold day, when sparrows are chattering irresolutely, this is not a cheerful spot; nor yet when an organ-grinder is singing and grinding at the same time, while his more beauteous and artistic-looking mate stands deceitfully by and makes all the motions but none of the music of a baritone in pain. To the outward eye, at least, the better part of North Bradley is the by-road which the old flat-fronted asylum of stone faces across a small green, the church tower standing behind, half hid by trees. I went down this road, past farms called Ireland and Scotland on the left, and on the right a green lane, where, among pots and pans, a gypsy caravan had anchored, belonging to a Loveridge of Bristol. Venus, spiky with beams, hung in the pale sky, and Orion stood up before me, above the blue woods of the horizon. All the thrushes of England sang at that hour, and against that background of myriads I heard two or three singing their frank, clear notes in a mad eagerness to have all done before dark; for already the blackbirds were chinking and shifting places along the hedgerows. And presently it was dark, but for a lamp at an open door, and silent, but for a chained dog barking, and a pine tree moaning over the house. When the dog ceased, an owl hooted, and when the owl ceased I could just hear the river Frome roaring steadily over a weir far off. Before I settled into a chair I asked them what the weather was going to be like to-morrow. “Who knows?” they said; “but we do want sun. The grass isn’t looking so well as it was a month ago: it’s looking browny.” Had any eggs been found? “Not one; but we’ve heard of them being found, and we’ve been looking out for plovers’ eggs.” I asked what they did with the song birds’ eggs, and if they were ever eaten. The idea of eating such little eggs disgusted every one over fifteen; but they were fond of moorhens’, and had once taken twenty-two from a single nest before the bird moved to a safe place. Yes, they had plenty of chicks, and some young ducks half grown. The turkeys were laying, but it was too early to let them sit.... Again I heard the weir, and I began to think of sleep.
V.
THREE WESSEX POETS.
Before I decided that sleep was better than any book, some bad poetry I was reading put me in mind of Stephen Duck. I had been thinking of him earlier in the day at Erlestoke, because it occurred to me that the sculpture was as inappropriate on the cottages there as were the frigid graces on the thresher’s mortal pages. This man, a labourer from Charlton, some way east of Erlestoke, was made a Yeoman of the Guard in 1733 for his services to literature, and rector of Byfleet in 1752. He drowned himself in 1755, when he was fifty. His great achievements were, first, to show that an agricultural labourer could write as well as ninety-nine out of a hundred clergymen, gentlemen, and noblemen, and extremely like them, for his verses rarely had more to do with rural life than the sculpture at Erlestoke; second, to show, conversely, that a poet could use a scythe, which he tells us he did--and made “the vanquished mowers soon confess his skill”--when revisiting his birthplace.
Instead of Stephen, George, and John, he sang of Colin, Cuddy, and Menalcas; of Chloe and Celia, instead of Ann and Maria. When he set himself to write of shepherds, whom he must often have met, it fell out thus,--
“From Bath, I travel thro’ the sultry vale, Till Sal’sb’ry Plains afford a cooling Gale: Arcadian Plains where Pan delights to dwell, In verdant Beauties cannot these excel: These too, like them, might gain immortal Fame, Resound with Corydon and Thyrsis’ Flame; If, to his Mouth, the Shepherd would apply His mellow Pipe, or vocal Music try.”
But, alas, the poor shepherd has not heard of pastoral poetry, and does not know--oh, happy if his happiness he knew--that his country is Arcadia; for, as Duck laments,--
“Propt on his Staff, he indolently stands; His Hands support his Head, his Staff his Hands; Or, idly basking in the sunny Ray, Supinely lazy, loiters Life away.”
This is a good deal more like a poet than a shepherd. The fellow might have retorted that even if he converted his sheep hook into a pen he might not be the one of whom the poet wrote,--
“Great Caroline her Royal Bounty show’d To one, and raised him from the grov’ling Crowd”--
that Queen Caroline could not be expected to replenish the Yeomen with Arcadians only.
Duck was at least as much awed by the Queen as by Nature. Richmond Park and the Royal Gardens so disturbed his judgment that he believed it possible, if Pope’s Muse would visit him,--
“Then Richmond Hill renown’d in Verse should grow, And Thames re-echo to the Song below; A second Eden in my Page should shine, And Milton’s Paradise submit to mine.”
The Queen’s Grotto in Richmond Gardens inspired him with the line,--
“The sweetest Grotto and the wisest Queen.”
And yet the poor man said, and in a preface published in his lifetime, “I have not myself been so fond of writing, as might be imagined from seeing so many things of mine as are got together in this Book. Several of them are on Subjects that were given me by Persons, to whom I have such great Obligations, that I always thought their desires commands.”
Leaving school about his fourteenth year for “the several lowest employments of a country life,” and marrying before he was twenty, he had to work at top pressure in order to make time to read the _Spectator_, which he did “all over sweat and heat, without regarding his own health.” He “got English just as we get Latin.” He studied “Paradise Lost” as others study the classics, with the help of a dictionary. When he wrote about the life best known to him, it was usually as any of those gentlemen who helped him would have done. He made very little advance on Sir Philip Sidney.
Nevertheless, some things he did write which were true and were unlikely to have been written by any one else, as when he described the thresher’s labour,--
“When sooty Pease we thresh, you scarce can know Our native Colour as from Work we go: The Sweat, the Dust, and suffocating Smoke, Make us so much like Ethiopians look. We scare our Wives, when Ev’ning brings us home, And frighted Infants think the Bugbear come. Week after Week, we this dull Task pursue, Unless when winn’wing Days produce a new; A new, indeed, but frequently a worse, The Threshal yields but to the Master’s Curse. He counts the Bushels, counts how much a Day; Then swears we’ve idled half our Time away: ‘Why, look ye, Rogues, d’ye think that this will do? Your neighbours thresh as much again as you.’ Now in our Hands we wish our noisy Tools, To drown the hated Names of Rogues and Fools; But, wanting these, we just like Schoolboys look, When angry Masters view the blotted Book: They cry, ‘Their Ink was faulty, and their Pen;’ We, ‘The Corn threshes bad, ’twas cut too green.’”
He might have equalled Bloomfield, he might have been a much lesser Crabbe, if he could have thrown Cuddy and Chloe on to the mixen and kept to the slighted homely style. Instead of merely writing as if he had been to Oxford, he might have reached men’s ears with his appeal,--
“Let those who feast at Ease on dainty Fare, Pity the Reapers, who their Feasts prepare.”
As a rule his work--I mean his writing--is so remote from Wiltshire and Duck, or the sort of reality connected with them which we to-day look for, that even the grain or two about Salisbury Plain or the Pewsey Vale not quite dissolved in his floods of Alexanderpopery delight us, as when he calls the lambs bleating,--
“Too harsh, perhaps, to please politer Ears, Yet much the sweetest Tune the Farmer hears:”
or when he compares the haymakers to sparrows at the approach of storm,--
“Thus have I seen, on a bright Summer’s Day, On some green Brake, a Flock of Sparrows play; From Twig to Twig, from Bush to Bush they fly; And with continued Chirping fill the Sky: But, on a sudden, if a Storm appears, Their chirping Noise no longer dins our Ears. They fly for Shelter to the thickest Bush, There silent sit, and all at once is hush.”
He says little more than enough to make us feel how much he could have said if--well, if, for example, he had been the sort of man to wish to employ his flail, not to drown the master’s curses, but to break his head. But he was ineffectual, if not beautiful. The only known material effect of his verse was to draw charity from Lord Palmerston for providing an annual threshers’ dinner, which is still given at Charlton on June 30. This feast proves him greater as prophet than as poet in writing,--
“Oft as this Day returns, shall Temple cheer The Threshers’ Hearts with Mutton, Beef, and Beer; Hence, when their Children’s Children shall admire This Holiday, and, whence deriv’d, inquire, Some grateful Father, partial to my Fame, Shall thus describe from whence, and how it came: ‘Here, Child, a Thresher liv’d in ancient Days; Quaint Songs he sung, and pleasing Roundelays; A gracious Queen his Sonnets did commend, And some great Lord, one Temple, was his Friend. That Lord was pleas’d this Holiday to make, And feast the Threshers for that Thresher’s sake.’”
A hundred years were to pass before a countryman came to do something of what Duck left undone, but, however honestly, did it from the point of view of a spectator, a clergyman, a schoolmaster, an archæologist, a reader of Tennyson, and the refined contemplators of rural life. He lived and died in a country of which most of the conditions are to be paralleled on Salisbury Plain and the Pewsey Vale. I mean William Barnes.
Dorset is a county of chalk hills divided by broad valleys and, in particular, by the valleys of the Stour and the Frome. William Barnes is the poet of the valleys, the elm and not the beech being his favourite tree. In the first year of last century he was born in Blackmoor Vale, which is watered by a tributary of the Stour: at his death, only fourteen years from the century’s end, he was rector of Came, which is in the valley of the Frome. The son of a Dorset farmer, and for most of his life a schoolmaster or clergyman within the county, the Dorset dialect was his mother tongue, his “only true speech.” He wrote of Dorset, and for Dorset, and strangers, perhaps natives also, might say that the man was Dorset. His poems are full of the names and the aspects of its towns and villages, its rivers and brooks, and the hills that lie around its great central height of Bulbarrow, which is mid-way between the homes of his childhood and old age.
In his “Praise o’ Dorset” the poet is very modest, with a kind of humorous modesty, about the county. Though we may be homely, is the beginning, we are not ashamed to own our place; we have some women “not uncomely,” and so on. Homeliness, in fact, is characteristic of Barnes and of his Dorset. He became in some ways a learned man, but when he wrote in his mother tongue and from the heart, he was the Dorset farmer’s son and nothing else. From the humble homeliness of his work he might have been a labourer, and he did more or less deliberately make himself the mouth-piece of the Dorset carters, cowmen, mowers, and harvesters. These songs, narratives, and dialogues bring forward the men at their labours, walking with their club flags to church, singing the songs of Christmas or Harvest Home. Here they court, wed, grow old together, build a new house, or return with money saved to their “poor fore-fathers’ plot o’ land.” He celebrates the horses, Smiler, Violet, Whitefoot, Jack, and “the great old wagon uncle had.” Separate poems are given to notable trees--“the great oak tree that’s in the dell,” the cottage lilac tree, the solitary may tree by the pond, an aspen by the river at Pentridge, the great elm in the little home-field and its fall. “Trees be Company” is the title of one of his poems.
Many of his best passages are about old houses, with hearths “hallowed by times o’ zitten round,” and fires that made the heart gay in storm or winter, and some of them, like “the great old house of mossy stone,” with memories of stately ladies that once did use
“To walk wi’ hoops an’ high-heel shoes”
along its terraces. It makes me think of a man whose ancestors, at any rate, had often been cold, homeless, and tired, when I see how often he speaks of the hearth, the fire, the shelter of house walls, at evening, in hard weather, or in old age. Again and again he shows us the men forgetting their work for a little while, as they sit among children or friends, watching the flames in the window glass, or listening to the wind and rain. Give me, he says in one poem, even though I were the squire, “the settle and the great wood fire.” In another, he feels that he can endure all if only evening bring peace at home. A man with work, a family, and a store of wood for the winter, has everything: the evening meal and the wife smiling make bliss.
Barnes felt the pathos of the labourer’s rest, and one of his finest poems depicts a cottage under a swaying poplar, with the moonlight on its door,--
“An’ hands, a-tired by day, wer still, Wi’ moonlight on the door.”
He uses the same effect a second time, adding the reflection that the children now sleeping in the moonlit house will rise again to fun, and their widowed mother to sorrow. These people are pathetic because in their “little worold” they want and have so little,--
“Drough longsome years a-wanderen, Drough lwonesome rest a-ponderen.”