Chapter 18
‘My dear Claude, man is the microcosm; and as the highest animal, the ideal type of the mammalia, he, like all true types, comprises in himself the attributes of all lower species. Therefore he must have a tiger-vein in him, my dear Claude, as well as a beaver-vein and a spider-vein; and no more shame to him. You are a butterfly; that good fellow a beast of prey; both may have their own work to do in this age just as they had in the old ones; and if you do not like that explanation, all I can say is, I can sympathise with you and with him too. Homo sum—humani nihil a me alienum puto. Trim the boat, lads, or the seal will swamp us, and, like Samson, slay more in his death than ever he slew in his life.’
We slipped on homeward. The cliff-wall of Lundy stood out blacker and blacker every moment against the gay western sky; greens, greys, and purples, dyeing together into one deep rich monotone, for which our narrow colour-vocabulary has no word; and threw a long cold shadow towards us across the golden sea; suddenly above its dark ridge a wild wreath of low rack caught the rays of the setting sun, and flamed up like a volcano towards the dun and purple canopy of upper clouds. Before us the blue sea and the blue land-line were fading into mournful grey, on which one huge West Indiaman blazed out, orange and scarlet, her crowded canvas all a-flame from the truck to the water’s edge.—A few moments and she, too, had vanished into the grey twilight, and a chill night-wind crisped the sea. It was a relief to hear the Evening Hymn rise rich and full from one voice, and then another and another, till the men chimed in one by one, and the whole cutter, from stem to stern, breathed up its melody into the silent night.
But the hymn soon flagged—there was more mirth on board than could vent itself in old Charles Wesley’s words; and one began to hum a song tune, and then another, with a side glance at the expression of the Lady Abbess’s face, till at last, when a fair wife took courage, and burst out with full pipe into ‘The sea, the sea,’ the ice was fairly broken; and among jests and laughter one merry harmless song after another rang out, many of them, to Claude’s surprise, fashionable London ones, which sounded strangely enough out there on the wild western sea. At last—‘Claude, friend,’ I whispered, ‘you must sing your share too—and mine also, for that matter.’
‘What shall I sing?’
‘Anything you will, from the sublime to the ridiculous. They will understand and appreciate it as well as yourself. Recollect, you are not among bullet-headed South Saxon clods, but among wits as keen and imaginations as rich as those of any Scotch shepherd or Manchester operative.’
And up rose his exquisite tenor.
This was his first song, but it was not allowed to be his last. German ballads, Italian Opera airs, were all just as warmly, and perhaps far more sincerely appreciated, as they would have been by any London evening-party; and the singing went on, hour after hour, as we slipped slowly on upon the tide, till it grew late, and the sweet voices died away one by one; and then the Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity which had reigned so pleasantly throughout the day took a new form, as the women huddled together to sleep in each other’s arms; and the men and we clustered forwards, while from every mouth fragrant incense steamed upwards into the air. ‘Man a cooking animal?’ my dear Doctor Johnson—pooh! man is a smoking animal. There is his ergon, his ‘differential energy,’ as the Aristotelians say—his true distinction from the ourang-outang. Ponder it well.
The men were leaning on the trawl capstan, while our old landlord, with half-a-dozen pipes within a foot of his face, droned out some long sea-yarn about Ostend, and muds, and snow-storms, and revenue-cruisers going down stern foremost, kegs of brandy and French prisons, which I shall not repeat; for indeed the public has been surfeited with sea-stories of late, from many sufficiently dull ones up to the genial wisdom of ‘Peter Simple,’ and the gorgeous word-painting of ‘Tom Cringle’s Log.’ And now the subject is stale—the old war and the wonders thereof have died away into the past, like the men who fought in it; and Trafalgar and the Bellerophon are replaced by Manchester and ‘Mary Barton.’ We have solved the old sea-going problems pretty well—thanks to wise English-hearted Captain Marryat, now gone to his rest, just when his work was done; and we must turn round and face a few land-going problems not quite so easy of solution. So Claude and I thought, as we leant over the sloop’s bows, listening neither to the Ostend story forwards nor the forty-stanza ballad aft, which the old steersman was moaning on, careless of listeners, to keep himself awake at the helm. Forty stanzas or so we did count from curiosity; the first line of each of which ended infallibly with
‘Says the commodo—ore;
and the third with
‘Says the female smuggler;’
and then gave up in despair; and watched in a dreamy, tired, half-sad mood, the everlasting sparkle of the water as our bows threw it gently off in sheets of flame and ‘tender curving lines of creamy’ fire, that ran along the glassy surface, and seemed to awaken the sea for yards round into glittering life, as countless diamonds, and emeralds, and topazes, leaped and ran and dived round us, while we slipped slowly by; and then a speck of light would show far off in the blank darkness, and another, and another, and slide slowly up to us—shoals of medusæ, every one of them a heaving globe of flame; and some unseen guillemot would give a startled squeak, or a shearwater close above our heads suddenly stopped the yarn, and raised a titter among the men, by his ridiculously articulate, and not over-complimentary, cry; and then a fox’s bark from the cliffs came wild and shrill, although so faint and distant; or the lazy gaff gave a sad uneasy creak; and then a soft warm air, laden with heather honey, and fragrant odours of sedge, and birch, and oak, came sighing from the land; while all around us was the dense blank of the night, except where now and then some lonely gleam through the southern clouds showed the cliff-tops on our right.—It was all most unearthly, dreamlike, a strange phantasmagoria, like some scene from ‘The Ancient Mariner’—all the world shut out, silent, invisible, and we floating along there alone, like a fairy ship creeping through Chaos and the unknown Limbo. Was it an evil thought that rose within me as I said to Claude—‘Is not this too like life? Our only light the sparkles that rise up round us at every step, and die behind us; and all around, and all before, the great black unfathomable eternities? A few souls brought together as it were by chance, for a short friendship and mutual dependence in this little ship of earth, so soon to land her passengers and break up the company for ever?’
He smiled.
‘There is a devil’s meaning to everything in nature, and a God’s meaning, too. Your friends, the zoologists, have surely taught you better than that. As I read Nature’s parable to-night, I find nothing in it but hope. What if there be darkness, the sun will rise to-morrow. What if there seem a chaos: the great organic world is still living, and growing, and feeding, unseen by us, all the black night through; and every phosphoric atom there below is a sign that even in the darkest night there is still the power of light, ready to flash out, wherever and however it is stirred. Does the age seem to you dark? Do you, too, feel as I do at times, the awful sadness of that text,—“The time shall come when ye shall desire to see one of the days of the Lord, and shall not see it”? Then remember that
“The night is never so long But at last it ringeth for matin song.”
And even as it is around us here, so it is in the world of men. The night is peopled not merely with phantoms and wizards, superstitions and spirits of evil, but under its shadow all sciences, methods, social energies, are taking rest, and growing, and feeding, unknown to themselves, that they may awake into a new life, and intermarry, and beget children nobler than themselves, when “the day-spring from on high comes down.” Even now, see! the dawn is gilding the highest souls, as it is those Exmoor peaks afar; and we are in the night only because we crawl below. What if we be unconscious of all the living energies which are fermenting round us now? Have you not shown me in this last week every moorland pool, every drop of the summer sea, alive with beautiful organizations, multiplying as fast as the thoughts of man? Is not every leaf breathing still, every sap vein drinking still, though we may not see them? “Even so is the kingdom of God; like seed sown in the ground; and men rise, and lie down and sleep; and it groweth up they know not how.”’
We both fell into a reverie. The story and the ballad were finished, and not a sound broke the silence except the screaming of the sea-fowl, which led my thoughts wandering back to nights long past, when we dragged the seine up to our chins in water through the short midsummer night, and scrambled and rolled over on the beach in boyish glee, after the skate and mullet, with those now gone; and as I thought and thought, old voices seemed to call me, old faces looked at me, of playmates, and those nearer than playmates, now sleeping in the deep deep sea, amid far coral islands; and old figures seemed to glide out of the mysterious dark along the still sea floor, as if the ocean were indeed giving up her dead. I shook myself, turned away, and tried to persuade myself that I was dreaming. Perhaps I had been doing so. At least, I remember very little more, till I was roused by the rattling of the chain-cable through the hawse-hole, opposite the pier-head.
And now, gentle readers, farewell; and farewell, Clovelly, and all the loving hearts it holds; and farewell, too, the soft still summer weather. Claude and I are taking our last walk together along the deer-park cliffs. Lundy is shrouded in the great grey fan of dappled haze which streams up from the westward, dimming the sickly sun. ‘There is not a breath the blue wave to curl.’ Yet lo! round Chapman’s Head creeps a huge bank of polished swell, and bursts in thunder on the cliffs.—Another follows, and another.—The Atlantic gales are sending in their avant-courriers of ground-swell: six hours more, and the storm which has been sweeping over ‘the still-vexed Bermoöthes,’ and bending the tall palms on West Indian isles, will be roaring through the oak woods of Devon. The old black buck is calling his does with ominous croakings, and leading the way slowly into the deepest coverts of the glens. The stormy petrels, driven in from the Atlantic, are skimming like black swallows over the bay beneath us. Long strings of sea-fowl are flagging on steadily at railroad pace, towards the sands and salt-marshes of Braunton. The herring-boats are hastily hauling their nets—you may see the fish sparkling like flakes of silver as they come up over the gunwale; all craft, large and small, are making for the shelter of the pier. Claude starts this afternoon to sit for six months in Babylonic smoke, working up his sketches into certain unspeakable pictures, with which the world will be astonished, or otherwise, at the next Royal Academy Exhibition; while I, for whom another fortnight of pure western air remains, am off to well-known streams, to be in time for the autumn floods, and the shoals of fresh-run salmon trout.
FOOTNOTES
{1} _Fraser’s Magazine_, June 1867.
{29} _Fraser’s Magazine_, September 1858.
{74} The Ripon list of natural flies contains several other species of small Nemouridæ unknown to me, save one brown one, which is seen in the South, though rarely, in June.
{103} For these details I am indebted to a paper in the ‘Annals of Natural History,’ for September 1862, by my friend, Professor Alfred Newton, of Cambridge.
{135} _Fraser’s Magazine_, January 1858.
{225a} _Fraser’s Magazine_, July 1849.
{225b} Some years after this was written, the very book which was needed appeared, as “The Chase of the Red Deer,” by Mr. Palk Collyns.
{235} Written before the Volunteer movement.
{287} Most wise and noble words upon this matter, worth the attention of all thinking men, and above all of clergymen, have been written by Mr. J. S. Mill, in his tract on ‘Liberty.’