Part 10

Chapter 103,375 wordsPublic domain

It is, of course, common knowledge that Lady Barnard of Abington was a lineal descendant of William Shakespeare. She died (without issue, as was until recently supposed) at the end of the seventeenth century. But two almost simultaneous finds made in the early part of the present year have tended to modify the old-established conviction that this lady was the last descendant of the poet.

The first of these finds was made by Mr. Vesey, of the British Museum, well known for his monograph on _The Family of Barnard of Abington_. It consisted in a small diary or notebook belonging to the Lady Barnard in question, in which, among other entries, was the record of the payment of twenty guineas made to a “Mrs. M.” just before Christmas of the year 1678. Mr. Vesey published this document in pamphlet form at the beginning of March, 1908.

In the April number of _Cambridgeshire Notes and Queries_ Major Pepper, of Bellevue Villa, Teversham (not far from the Gog Magog Hills), published, as a matter of curiosity, a letter which he had purchased in a sale of MSS., but only so published on the chance that it might have an interest for those who follow the history of the county. It was a letter from one Joan Mandrell, the governess of Anne Hall, praying her correspondent to send “twenty guineas for the payment of rent.” The interest of this document to the students of local history lay in the fact that this Anne Hall was the ancestress of the Pooke family. Joan Mandrell’s letter was addressed upon the back of the sheet, though the name of the addressee was no longer decipherable, but the letters “...bington Hall” were, and are, clearly legible, as also the date. The letter further contains a minute description of Anne Hall’s return to London from a foreign school and of the writer’s devotion to the addressee, whom she treats throughout as mother of the young woman committed to her care. This Anne Hall later married Henry Pooke, whose son Charles made his fortune in politics under Walpole’s administration, founding the family and estate of Understoke, which is so familiar to every Cambridgeshire man.

More than one student noted the coincidence between these two publications appearing but a fortnight apart; and at the end of May a paper was already prepared to be read to the Genealogical Society showing that the lineage of the poet had been continued in the Pookes.

So far the matter was of merely antiquarian interest, for Charles Pooke’s great grandson, General Sir Arthur Pooke, had died in 1823 at Understoke without issue. It was, however, of some importance to all those who care for the literary history of their country to know that the blood of the poet could be traced so far.

Just before the paper was read a further discovery came in to add a much greater and more living interest to the matter.

Mr. Cohen, a charming and cultivated genealogist, whose business is mainly with America and the Colonies, had been for some months actively engaged for Mr. Hopper in tracing the arms of his, Mr. Hopper’s, maternal grandfather--a Mr. Pooke. When Mr. Cohen became acquainted with the facts mentioned above he cabled to Mr. Hopper, who sent by return of post copies of certain family documents which clearly proved that this Mr. Pooke was identical with a younger brother of Sir Arthur. This younger brother was an erratic and headstrong lad who had enlisted in early youth under Cornwallis, and had been killed, as it was believed, at Yorktown. He was as a fact wounded and made prisoner; he was not killed. He was released at the Peace of 1783, preferred remaining in the New World to facing his creditors in the Old, married the daughter of Peter Kymers, of Orange, N.J., and soon afterwards went West. In 1840 his only daughter Cassiopea, who was then keeping a small store in Cincinnati, married the Rev. Mr. Aesop Hopper, a local minister of the Hicksite persuasion. Charlemagne K. Hopper is the only issue of that marriage.

The genealogy stands thus:

This family tree is now so well established that a full publication of the lineage, with a commentary upon the whole romantic story, is about to appear in one of the reviews from the pen of “Thersites,” a pseudonym which, as many of our readers are aware, barely hides the identity of one of our best-known experts upon Foreign Affairs.[1]

Mr. Hopper did not remain in London beyond the close of the season. He had proposed to leave for Biskra a week or so after I made his acquaintance, but the change in the weather decided him to go no farther south than Palermo, whence he will return by Naples, Rome, Assisi, Genoa, and Boulogne, visiting on the way the quaint old city of Strasbourg. He will reach England again some time in the month of April, 1910, and on his return he proposes to devote some part of his considerable fortune to the erection of a suitable monument at Stratford-on-Avon in memory of his great ancestor. This generous gift will be accompanied by certain conditions, but there is little doubt that the town will accept the same, and that a fine fountain surrounded with symbolical figures of Justice, Prudence, and Mercy, and adorned with medallions of Queens Elizabeth and Victoria, George Washington and President Roosevelt, will soon adorn the quiet little Warwickshire town.

Mr. Hopper also proposes to found a Shakespeare Scholarship at Sidney-Sussex College in Cambridge, and another at Wadham College in Oxford, each of the value of £300 a year, on the model of the Rhodes Scholarships, such scholarships to be granted not merely for book work but for business capacity and physical development. He has also planned a Chair for the propagation of Shakespearean knowledge in Glasgow, and he will endow a Reader in Shakespeare to the University of Aberdeen.

Mr. Hopper is himself no mean _littérateur_, though a characteristic modesty has hitherto restrained him from publishing his verse, whether rhyme, blank, or in sonnet form. It is possible that now he is acquainted with his great descent his reluctance may be overcome and he may think better of this decision. I may add that Mr. Hopper places no credence in the Baconian theory, and hopes by diligent search among his family papers to prove the authenticity of at least the five major tragedies and _A Midsummer Night’s Dream_.

Mr. Hopper is a total abstainer; he neither smokes nor chews; his religious views, always broad and tolerant, incline him strongly towards the New Theology, and, in common with many other men of exceptional intelligence, he has been profoundly affected by the popular translation of Dr. Haeckel’s _Riddle of the Universe_.

Though delighting in social intercourse, Mr. Hopper has the true gentleman’s instinct against being lionised, and in particular stands in dread of the Duchess of Dundee. He has therefore begged me to insist as little as possible on his identity in anything I thought it my duty to record in print upon so interesting a matter, and I have so far acceded to his request as to have refrained from publishing these lines until he had left our shores; but I make little doubt that on his return in the spring this missing link between the two branches of the Anglo-Saxon kin cannot but receive the public recognition he deserves.

On the Approach to Western England

How difficult it is to say what one really feels about the landscapes and the countrysides and the subtle souls of Europe! I think that all men who are of European blood feel those countrysides and the soul of them very strongly; but I think that they feel as I feel now, as I write, a difficulty of expression. There is something in it like the difficulty of approaching a personality. One may admire, or reverence, or even love, but the personality is different from one’s own; it has a chastity of its own that must be respected, it has its boundaries and its honour, and one always fears that one will transgress such boundaries if one so much as speaks of the new thing one has come upon and desired to describe.

With distant travel it is not so. One comes far over seas to a quite strange land and one treats it brutally. One’s appreciation is a sort of conquest; and you will note that those who speak of the Colonies, or of America, or of Africa, or of Asia speak of them with a hard intolerance as of something quite alien, or with a conventional set of phrases, as of something not worth the real expression of emotion. Now it is not so with our ancient provinces of Europe.

A man coming out of the Cis-Alpine Gaul into old Italy across the Apennines feels something; indeed he feels it! What it is he feels very few men have written down; none has said it fully. You get out of one thing into something other when you climb up out of the Valley of the Parma and cross the High Apennines and look southward into the happy Garfagnana, and hear the noise of the little Serchio beginning in its meads. In the same way no one has described (to my knowledge at least) that shock of desolation and yet of mystery which comes upon a man when he crosses the River Couesnon and passes from Normandy into Brittany. Normandy is rich, Brittany is poor. Normandy loves ritual, Brittany religion. Normandy can make things, Brittany prayers. Normandy lives by Brittany in the matter of the soul, Brittany not by Normandy in the matter of the body. What Norman ever gave a Breton anything? You cross that river and everything changes. The men and women have dreamier eyes, the little children play more wonderfully, everybody is poor.

Or, again, the passage from the hard industry of the Lancashire Plain suddenly on to the moors, where the farming men and women are so quiet and silent and self-respectful and seem so careful rather to preserve what they own than to add to it. Or, again, the startling passage over Carter Fell from the Englishmen of Rede-Dale to the Scotchmen of Jedburgh; or the sharp passage from the violent, active, sceptical, cruel, courageous, well-fed, ironical Burgundians into the gentle Germans of the Vosges: here is a boundary which is not marked in any political way, and yet how marked it is!

Now in England we have many such approaches and surprises. I will not speak of that good change which comes upon a man as he travels south from Victoria Station and hears, almost at the same time that he first smells earth, the South Country tongue; nor will I speak of that other change which perhaps some of my readers know very well, the change from the active and grasping Cockney into the quiet tenacity of East Anglia. It is not my province--but if I am not wrong one strikes it within half an hour in the fast expresses--these people push with quants, they sail in wherries, they inhabit flat tidal banks, they are at peace. Nor will I here speak of the Marches and how, between a village and a village, one changes from the common English parish with the Squire’s house and the church and the cottages and all, into the hard slate roofs and the inner flame of Wales. Rather I would speak of something the boundary of which has never yet been laid down, but which people call (I think) “The West Country.”

* * * * *

One never knows, when one is tackling a thing like this, where one should first begin to tackle it, or by what end one should take it. Every man according to his own study, every man according to his own bent or accident of experience, takes it by his own handle, and the one man speaks of the language, the other of the hills, another of the architecture, another of the names. For my part I would desire to speak of all.

When one gets over a certain boundary one is in a peculiar district of this world, a special countryside of Europe, a happy land with a conviction and a tradition of its own which may not have a name, but which is in general the West Country, and which by its hills and by its men and women convinces any true traveller at once of its personality. More than one man after a dreary wandering southwards through the Midlands has walked by night up one of its fresh streets to an inn and cried: “What! Have I come upon Paradise?” And this feeling comes also when one has climbed up the Cotswold through the little places of stone and suddenly sees the valley floor of the Severn so full of orchards, or has come over the flat deserts of the Upper Thames and had revealed to him the Golden Valley; or, after plodding through Wiltshire, has smelt an air which told him that not far off were the heavy tides of that haunted sea which runs between the Welsh hills and the peninsula of Cornwall and Devon. Men are lost in these seas and are saved in them perpetually as by miracles: I can appeal, in this print, to how many? They have been saved by the miracle of that water. Here Arthur was cast up by the waves: on to that flat salt, in its calm, full of mists, looked out those who gave us our legend of his Court.

The boundary into this particular land is not only fetched by men on foot; in no matter what kind of travel one pursues, one recognises that boundary in a flash as one traverses it. It is not only the orchards, nor the abrupt and pointed hills, nor those domestic towns, happy with memories, nor those clear waters, nor those meadows, bounded by careful walls of stone, but something much more which tells one that one has got into the enchanted land. That spirit in it which made the stuff of our early history, which gave us the landing of Joseph of Arimathea and the glorious bush of Glastonbury and the cycle of the Round Table and those good verses with regard to passion unrestrained:

... well you wot that of such life There comes but sore battaille and strife And blood of men and hard Travail....

And the prophecies of Merlin, and the story of Tristan and Iseult and all the vision of immortality and of resurrection inhabits it still.

I never can believe (I speak for myself alone) that man can be dissociated from his earth any more than I can believe that the soul can be dissociated from the body. When men say to me that there is no soul, they can go on saying. But when men say that the soul can neglect the body then there is matter for argument; and when the argument is finished one finds it is not so. Now thus it is with the earth that breeds us and into which if we are content to die at home (and since we must die somewhere, better die there) we should at last return. The landscapes of Europe make European men, and it is not for nothing that the climate and the shapes of the hills and the nature of the building stuff change just where man changes.

There is enchantment upon every high place of England, but the enchantment of the Devonshire Moors and of the Tors to the North and upwards from them is different from the enchantment of the Downs. There is a great delight in the proper fireplaces of the English people, but who, thoroughly alive, could mistake a fireplace in the West Riding for a fireplace on the Western Rother or either of these for a fireplace a little before Sherborne in the tumbles and the hollows where Dorset and Somerset meet? There is a richness of the speech and a contentment of the tongue which any man from the new countries might think common to all English agricultural men: yet there was a man from Sussex who, hearing the Sussex tongue in the Choughs at Yeovil, felt himself indeed come home. Our provinces differ very much.

I have sometimes wondered whether in the process of time these little intimate differences of ours will survive. I wish they would! I wish they would, by the Lord! The Greeks were a little people, yet their provinces have survived, and the contempt that Aspasia felt for the Peloponnesus is (or should be) yet recorded. The hill tribes behind the Phoenician coast were a little people, but the fame of their religion, of their civil wars, has survived that of the merchants of Tyre. Rome, Veii, and the others were little places like Arundel and Pulborough, quite close together; but they were talked of, and men know much of them to-day.

I could wish the differences of this island were so known and that people coming from a long way off would be humble and learn those differences. Surely a nation grows great in this way, by many provinces reacting one upon the other, recognised by the general will, sometimes in conflict with it. At any rate the West Country is a province of Europe; no one can get into it without touching his youth again and putting his fingers to earth, and getting sustenance from it, as a man does when he turns at the turning point of a race and touches earth with his fingers and is strong again to spring forward.

The Weald

Among the changes that have come upon England with the practice and facility for rapid travel many would put first the conquest (some would call it the spoiling) of little-known and isolated stretches of English landscape; and men still point out with a sort of jealous pride those districts, such as the upper Cotswolds, which modern travel has not disturbed. It seems to me that there is another feature attaching to the facility for travel, and that is this, that men can now tell other men what their countrysides are like; men can now compare one part of England with another in a way that once they could not do, and this facility in communication which so many deplore has so much good about it at least, in that it permits right judgments. There have been men in the past who have travelled widely for the mere pleasure of seeing many parts of their own country--Cobbett was one--but they were rare. As the towns grew, commercial travelling led men only to the towns, but now the thing is settling down. Men travel everywhere, all kinds of men, and no part of England remains of which a man can say that he loves it without knowing why he loves it, or that its character is indefinable. So it is with the Weald.

All that roll of land which lies held between and above the chalk of South-Eastern England, the clay and the sand, and the uncontinuous short trees, the muddy little rivers, the scattered homesteads, the absence of levels, and almost the absence of true hills, the distant prospects northwards and southwards of quite another land, the blue lines and naked heights a day’s journey away against the sky--all that is the Weald. And it runs from the place where the two lines of chalk meet in Hampshire beyond Selborne, and beyond Petersfield, right away to the sea which it sweeps upon in a grand curve, between Pevensey (which was once the chief port of the Weald) and the heights round Hastings: for though these heights are in a manner part of the Weald, yet between them and the chalk again by Folkestone no true Wealden country lies.