Part 11

Anything may eclipse, though nought can extinguish, their little joy; yet they seem made rather for sorrow than joy. They have longings, but hardly passions. They want to rest after all, not to become discontented ghosts like “the weeping lady.” They are prepared for the worst in this life, but the worst is tempered. The dead, for example, are safe from all weathers, better off than the bereaved who grieve for them “with lonesome love.” The dead even seem beautiful in memory. There is a “glory round the old folk dead,” the old uncle and aunt who used to walk arm in arm on Sunday evenings about the farm, the grandmother who wore “a gown with great flowers like hollyhocks,” and told tales of ancient times, the old kindly squire who so enjoyed life,--

“But now I hope his kindly feäce Is gone to vind a better pleäce.”

Many poems are given to another and not very different kind of memories, those of childhood, and the essence of them, with a hundred pretty variations, is,--

“How smoothly then did run my happy days, When things to charm my mind and sight were nigh.”

Most are memories of the open air, of “lonesome woodlands, sunny woodlands,” the river and the harvest fields, to the accompaniment of the songs of birds and milkmaids. The children are always laughing, playing, dancing in their “tiny shoes,” but their heavy elders and the home under the elm or in the “lonesome” grove of oak remind us, if not them, of age and death.

The love-poems further illustrate Barnes’s Dorset homeliness and humbleness. Young maidens delight him much as children do; yet even while he is praising the Blackmoor maidens he says,--

“Why, if a man would wive An’ thrive, ’ithout a dow’r, Then let en look en out a wife In Blackmwore by the Stour.”

The girls all have something wifely about them. The wooer never forgets that the sweetheart may be the wife; he wishes her less care than her mother had, and looks forward to old age in her company. He is not a wild wooer. He is content to sit in a gathering and hear his Jane “put in a good word now and then,” and have a smile and a blush from her at the door on parting: having carried her pail he is satisfied to know that she would have bowed when she took it back had it not been too heavy. He wants a maid who is “good and true,” “good and fair,” and healthy, and to have always beside him the “welcome face and homely name.” Once he may have been ruffled by a mere beauty in a scarlet cloak, but probably he soon sets his heart on one who may bring him happiness with children, contentment with age, and perhaps help him to a little fortune in the thatched cottage “below the elems by the bridge.” The lovers, like the poet himself, go with heads a little bowed, as if in readiness for blows. It is in contrast with these rather stiff, darkened men and women, who have winter and poverty on their horizon, that the children in Barnes’s poetry are so blithe, his Spring days so buoyant, and his flowers and birds among the brightest and freshest in any of the poets.

But there is a greater than Duck or Barnes still among us, a wide-ranging poet, who is always a countryman of a somewhat lonely heart, Mr. Thomas Hardy. For I do notice something in his poetry which I hope I may with respect call rustic, and, what is much the same thing, old-fashioned. It enables him to mingle elements unexpectedly, so that, thinking of 1967 in the year 1867, he spoke not only of the new century having “new minds, new modes, new fools, new wise,” but concluded,--

“For I would only ask thereof That thy worm should be my worm, Love”--

which is as antique as Donne’s Flea that wedded the lovers by combining blood from both of them within its body. The same rusticity manifests itself elsewhere as Elizabethanism, and the poet is something of a “liberal shepherd” in his willingness to give things their grosser names or to hint at them. He has a real taste for such comparisons as that made by a French officer looking at the English fleet at Trafalgar,--

“Their overcrowded sails Bulge like blown bladders in a tripeman’s shop The market-morning after slaughter-day.”

Then, how his illustrations to his own poems--such as the pair of spectacles lying right across the landscape, following “In a Eweleaze near Weatherbury”--remind us of a seventeenth-century book of emblems!

Sometimes his excuse is that he is impersonating a man of an earlier age, as in the Sergeant’s song,--

“When Husbands with their Wives agree, And Maids won’t wed from modesty, Then little Boney he’ll pounce down, And march his men on London town. Rollicum-rorum, tol-lol-lorum, Rollicum-rorum, tol-lol-lay.”

He has written songs and narratives which prove his descent from some ancient ballad-maker, perhaps the one who wrote “A pleasant ballad of the merry miller’s wooing of the baker’s daughter of Manchester,” or “A new ballade, showing the cruel robberies and lewd life of Philip Collins, _alias_ Osburne, commonly called Philip of the West, who was pressed to death at Newgate in London the third of December last past, 1597,” to be sung to the tune of “Pagginton’s round.” Some of the lyric stanzas to which he fits a narrative originated probably in some such tune.

And how often is he delighted to represent a peasant’s view, a peasant’s contribution to the irony of things, a capital instance being the Belgian who killed Grouchy to save his farm, and so lost Napoleon the battle of Waterloo.

With this rusticity, if that be the right name for it, I cannot help connecting that most tyrannous obsession of the blindness of Fate, the carelessness of Nature, and the insignificance of Man, crawling in multitudes like caterpillars, twitched by the Immanent Will hither and thither. Over and over again, from the earliest poems up to the “Dynasts,” he amplifies those words which he puts into the mouth of God,--

“My labours, logicless, You may explain; not I: Sense-sealed I have wrought, without a guess That I evolved a Consciousness To ask for reasons why.”

And, referring to the earth,--

“It lost my interest from the first, My aims therefor succeeding ill; Haply it died of doing as it durst. Lord, it existeth still.”

“Sportsman Time” and “those purblind Doomsters” are characteristic phrases. The many things said by him of birth he sums up at the end of a death-bed poem,--

“We see by littles now the deft achievement Whereby she has escaped the Wrongers all, In view of which our momentary bereavement Outshapes but small.”

As gravely he descends to the ludicrous extreme of making a country girl planting a pine-tree sing,--

“It will sigh in the morning, Will sigh at noon, At the winter’s warning, In wafts of June; Grieving that never Kind Fate decreed It could not ever Remain a seed, And shun the welter Of things without, Unneeding shelter From storm and drought.”

He puts into the mouths of field, flock, and tree--because while he gazed at them at dawn they looked like chastened children sitting in school silent--the question,--

“Has some Vast Imbecility, Mighty to build and blend, But impotent to tend, Framed us in jest, and left us now to hazardry?”

Napoleon, in the “Dynasts,” asks the question, “Why am I here?” and answers it,--

“By laws imposed on me inexorably. History makes use of me to weave her web.”

Twentieth century superstition can no farther go than in that enormous poem, which is astonishing in many ways, not least in being readable. I call it superstition because truth, or a genuine attempt at truth, has been turned apparently by an isolated rustic imagination into an obsession so powerful that only a very great talent could have rescued anything uninjured from the weight of it. A hundred years ago, Mr. Hardy would have seen “real ghosts.” To-day he has to invent them, and call his Spirits of the Years and of the Pities, Spirits Sinister and Ironic, Rumours and Recording Angels, who have the best seats at the human comedy, “contrivances of the fancy merely.”

Even his use of irony verges on the superstitious. Artistically, at least in the shorter poems, it may be sound, and is certainly effective, as where the old man laments on learning that his wife is to be in the same wing of the workhouse, instead of setting him “free of his forty years’ chain.” But the frequent use and abuse of it change the reader’s smile into a laugh at the perversity.

Mr. Hardy must have discovered the blindness of Fate, the indifference of Nature, and the irony of Life, before he met them in books. They have been brooded over in solitude, until they afflict him as the wickedness of man afflicts a Puritan. The skull and crossbones, Death the scythed skeleton, and the symbolic hour-glass have been as real to him as to some of those carvers of tombstones in country churchyards, or to the painter of that window at St. Edmund’s in Salisbury who represented “God the Father ... in blue and red vests, like a little old man, the head, feet, and hands naked; in one place fixing a pair of compasses on the sun and moon.” If I were told that he had spent his days in a woodland hermitage, though I should not believe the story, I should suspect that it was founded on fact.

But the woodland, and the country in general, have given Mr. Hardy some of his principal consolations. And one, at least, of these is almost superstitious. I mean the idea that “the longlegs, the moth, and the dumbledore” know “earth-secrets” that he knows not. In the “Darkling Thrush” it is to be found in another stage, the bird’s song in Winter impelling him to think that “some blessed Hope” of which he was unaware was known to it. He compares town and country much as Meredith does. The country is paradise in the comparison; for he speaks of the Holiday Fund for City Children as temporarily “changing their urban murk to paradise.” Country life, paradise or not, he handles with a combination of power and exactness beyond that of any poet who could be compared to him, and for country women I should give the palm to his “Julie-Jane,”--

“Sing; how ’a would sing, How ’a would raise the tune, When we rode in the wagon from harvesting By the light of the moon.... Bubbling and brightsome eyed, But now--O never again! She chose her bearers before she died From her fancy-men.”

Such a woman has even made him merry like his fiddling ancestor, in the song of “The Dark-eyed Gentleman,”--

“And he came and he tied up my garter for me.”

And what with Nature and Beauty and Truth he is really farther from surrender than might appear in some poems. His “Let me enjoy”--

“Let me enjoy the earth no less Because the all-enacting Might That fashioned forth its loveliness Had other aims than my delight”--

is in the minor key, but by no means repudiates or makes little of Joy, and is at least as likely as,

“Lord, with what care hast thou begirt us round,”

to make a marching song.

VI.

THE AVON, THE BISS, THE FROME.

Once in the night I awoke and heard the weir again, but the first sound in the morning was a thrush singing in a lilac next my window. For the main chorus of dawn was over. It was a still morning under a sky that was one low arch of cloud, a little whiter in places, but all gray. Big drops glistened on the undersides of horizontal rails. There had been a white frost, and, as they said, we seldom have many white frosts before it rains again. But not until I went out could I tell that it was softly and coldly raining. Everything more than two or three fields away was hidden.

Cycling is inferior to walking in this weather, because in cycling chiefly ample views are to be seen, and the mist conceals them. You travel too quickly to notice many small things; you see nothing save the troops of elms on the verge of invisibility. But walking I saw every small thing one by one; not only the handsome gateway chestnut just fully dressed, and the pale green larch plantation where another chiff-chaff was singing, and the tall elm tipped by a linnet pausing and musing a few notes, but every primrose and celandine and dandelion on the banks, every silvered green leaf of honeysuckle up in the hedge, every patch of brightest moss, every luminous drop on a thorn tip. The world seemed a small place: as I went between a row of elms and a row of beeches occupied by rooks, I had a feeling that the road, that the world itself, was private, all theirs; and the state of the road under their nests confirmed me. I was going hither and thither to-day in the neighbourhood of my stopping place, instead of continuing my journey.

At a quarter-past nine it drizzled slightly more, but by ten the sky whitened, the grass gleamed. Over the broad field where the fowls and turkeys feed, and a retriever guards them, the keeper was walking slow and heavy, carrying a mattock, and after him two men, one in gaiters. While they were disappearing from sight in the corner where the field runs up into the wood, the chained retriever stood and whined piteously after them. I understood him very well. And somehow the men setting out thus for a day’s work in the woods prophesied fine weather. Yet at half-past ten the gray thrust the white down again to the horizon, where the elms printed themselves against it.

The sun came out in earnest at eleven, and shone upon a field of tall yellow mustard and a man loading a cart with it, and I ceased to bend my back and crook my neck towards violet, primrose, anemone, and dog’s mercury in the blackthorn hedges, and I let the sun have a chance with me. I was trespassing, but, alas! no glory any longer attaches to trespassing, because every one is so civil unless you are a plain or ill-dressed woman, or a child, or obviously a poet. So I came well-warmed to Rudge, a hamlet collected about a meeting of roads and scattered up a steep hill, along one of these roads. The collection includes a small inn called the “Half Moon,” a plain Baptist chapel, several stone cottages, several ruins, solid but roofless, used solely to advertise sales, and a signpost pointing to Berkley and Frome past the ruined cottages, to Westbury and Bradley downhill from the inn, through the woods about the river Biss, and uphill to Road and Beckington. Southward I saw the single bare hump of Cley Hill five miles away, near Warminster: northward, the broad wooded vale rising up to hills on the horizon. I went uphill, between two bright trickles of water. The steep roadside bank, strengthened by a stone wall, was well-grown with pennywort and cranesbill, overhung by goose grass and ivy, and bathed at its foot by grass and nettles. The wall in one place is hollowed out into a cavernous, dark dip-well or water-cupboard. The rest of the village is built upon the banks. First comes a Wesleyan chapel, a neat, cold, demure little barn of the early nineteenth century, having a cypress on either side of its front door, and a few gravestones round about. One of these caught my eye with the verse--

“And am I born to die, To lay this body down, And must my trembling spirit fly Into a world unknown?”--

and the name of Mary Willcox, who died in 1901 at the age of eighty-eight. A cottage or two stand not quite opposite, behind gardens of wallflowers, mezereon, periwinkle, and tall copper-coloured peony shoots, and a wall smothered in snow-on-the-mountains or alyssum. On the same side, beyond, a dark farm-house and its outbuildings project and cause the road and water to twist. The bank on that side, the left, covered with celandines and topped with elms, now carries a footpath of broad flagstones a yard or two above the road. Where this footpath ends, the road, still ascending, forks, and at once rejoins itself, thus making a small triangular island, occupied by a ruinous, ivy-mantled cottage and a cultivated vegetable garden. At the lower side a newish villa with a piano faces past the ruin uphill. At the upper side, facing past the ruin and the villa downhill, is a high-walled stone house of several gables, small enough, but possessing dignity and even a certain faint grimness: it is backed on the roadside by farm buildings. I saw and heard nobody from the “Half Moon” to this house, except a chicken. Here I turned off from the road along a lane which ended a mile away at a cottage and a farm-house, and in one of the ploughed fields I came upon a plain stone tower, consisting of two storeys, round-arched, roofless, in the company of a tall lime tree. It looks over the low land towards the White Horse at Westbury. Once, they told me, the upper storey held a water tank; but as the map shows an ancient beacon at about this spot, I thought of it as a beacon rather than as a water tower.

I returned and went some way along the road to Beckington. A few people were walking in towards Rudge, children were picking primroses from both sides of the hedges, watched silently and steadfastly by a baby in a perambulator, not less happy in the sun than they. For the sun shone radiant and warm out of a whitewashed sky on the red ploughlands and wet daisy meadows by Seymour’s Court Farm, on the teams pulling chain harrows and pewits plunging round them, and on the flag waving over Road Church as if for some natural festival. I found my first thrush’s egg of the year along this road, in which I was fortunate; for the bank below the nest had been trodden into steps by boys who had examined it before me.

I went downhill again through Rudge and took the road for North Bradley, keeping above the left bank of the river Biss and commanding the White Horse on the pale wall of the Plain beyond it. This took me past Cutteridge, a modest farm, all that remains of a great house, whose long avenues of limes, crooked and often as dense as a magpie’s nest, still radiate from it on three sides. This is a country of noble elms, spreading like oaks, above celandine banks.

Turning to the right down a steep-sided lane after passing Cutteridge I reached the flat, rushy, and willowy green valley of the Biss. The road forded the brook and brought me up into the sloping courtyard of Brook House Farm. On the right was a high wall and a pile of rough cordwood against it; on the left a buttressed, ecclesiastical-looking building with tiers of windows and three doorways, some four or five centuries old; and before me, at the top of the yard, between the upper end of the high wall and the ecclesiastical-looking building, was the back of the farm-house, its brass pans gleaming. This is the remnant of Brook House. What is now a cowshed below, a cheese room above, has been the chapel of Brook House, formerly the seat of Paveleys, Joneses, and Cheneys. The brook below was once called Baron’s brook on account of the barony conferred on the owner: the family of Willoughby de Broke are said to have taken their name from it. The cows made an excellent congregation, free from all the disadvantages of believing or wanting to believe in the immortality of the soul, in the lower half of the old chapel; the upper floor and its shelves of Cheddar cheeses of all sizes could not offend the most jealous deity or his most jealous worshippers. The high, intricate rafter-work of the tiled roof was open, and the timber, as pale as if newly scrubbed, was free from cobwebs--in fact, chestnut wood is said to forbid cobwebs. Against the wall leaned long boards bearing the round stains of bygone cheeses. Every one who could write had carved his name on the stone. Instead of windows there were three doors in the side away from the quadrangle, as if at one time they had been entered either from a contiguous building or by a staircase from beneath. Evidently both the upper and the lower chambers were formerly subdivided into cells of some kind.

The farmhouse is presumably the remnant of the old manor house, cool and still, looking out away from the quadrangle over a garden containing a broad, rough-hewn stone disinterred hereby, and a green field corrugated in parallelograms betokening old walls or an encampment. The field next to this is spoken of as a churchyard, but there seems to be no record of skeletons found there. Half a mile off in different directions are Cutteridge, Hawkeridge, and Storridge, but nothing nearer in that narrow, gentle valley....

The afternoon was as fine as Easter Monday could be, all that could be desired by chapel-goers for their Anniversary Tea. It was the very weather that Trowbridge people needed on Good Friday for a walk to Farleigh Castle, for beer or tea and watercress at the “Hungerford Arms.” As I bicycled into Trowbridge at four o’clock the inhabitants were streaming out along the dry road westward.

I am not fond of crowds, but this holiday crowd caused no particular distaste. Away from their town and separated into small groups they had no cumulative effect. They were for the time being travellers as much as I was. In any case, a town like Trowbridge is used to strangers of all kinds passing through it: it would take a South Sea Islander in native costume to make it stare as a village does. The crowd that I dislike most is the crowd near Clapham Junction on a Saturday afternoon. Though born and bred a Clapham Junction man, I have become indifferently so. Perhaps I ought to call my feeling fear: alarm comes first, followed rapidly by dislike. It is a crowd of considerable size, consisting of women shopping, of young men and women promenading, mostly apart, though not blind to one another, and of men returning from offices. They take things fairly easily, even these last, and can look about. I shall not pretend to define the difference between them and a village or a provincial town crowd. It is less homely than a village, less compact and abounding in clear types than a town. It is a disintegrated crowd, rather suspicious and shy perhaps, where few know, or could guess much about, the others. When I find myself among them, I am more confused and uneasy than in any other crowd. I cannot settle down in it to notice the three or four or half a dozen types, as I should do at Swindon, or Swansea, or Coventry; nor yet to please myself as with the general look of a village mob of forty or fifty, and a few of the most remarkable individuals. Here, at Clapham Junction, each one asks a separate question. In a quarter of an hour I am bewildered and dejected.

How different it is from a London crowd. In London everybody is a Londoner. Once in the Strand or Oxford Street I am as much at home as any one. If I were to walk up and down continuously for a week I should not be noticed any more than I am now. For all they know I am an Old Inhabitant. So is every one else from Cartmel or Tregaron. There are no lookers on: all are lookers on. I look hard at every one as at the pictures in a gallery, and no offence is taken. I can lose myself comfortably amongst them, and wake up again only when I find myself alone. Each day, except in the shops, an entirely new set of faces is seen, so far as memory tells me. A burly flower-girl, a white-haired youth, and a broken-down, long-haired actor or poet, are the only strangers in London I have seen more than once. Yet the combination is familiar. I am a Londoner, and I am at home. But I am not a Clapham Junction man any more than I am a Trowbridge man. Perhaps the reason of my discontent is that there are no Clapham Junction men, that all are strangers and aware of it, that they never truly make a mob like the factory men at New Swindon, and yet are too numerous to be regarded as villagers like the people of Rudge.