Chapter 4
My prayer is answered this morning. I slept a dreamless sleep, and was roused by the cheerful crowing of cocks, which picked about the back yard of the inn. I dressed quickly, only suspending my task to watch the little dramas of the inn yard--the fowls on the pig-sty wall; the horse waiting meekly, with knotted traces hanging round it, to be harnessed; the cat, on some grave business of its own, squeezing gracefully under a closed barn door; the weary, flat-footed duck, nuzzling the mud of a small pool as delicately as though it were a rich custard. I was utterly free; I might go and come as I liked. Time had ceased to exist for me, and it was pleasant to reflect, as I finished my simple breakfast, that I should under professional conditions have been hurrying briskly into school for an hour of Latin Prose. The incredible absurdity and futility of it all came home to me. Half the boys that I teach so elaborately would be both more wholesomely and happily employed if they were going out to farm-work for the day. But they are gentlemen's sons, and so must enter what are called the liberal professions, to retire at the age of sixty with a poor digestion, a peevish wife, and a family of impossible children. But it is only in such inconsequent moments that I allow myself to think thus slightingly of Latin Prose. It is a valuable accomplishment, and, when I have repaired the breaches made by professional work in the mental equilibrium, I shall rejoin my colleagues with a full sense of its paramount importance.
I scribble this diary with a vile pen, and ink like blacking, on the corner of my breakfast-table. I have packed my knapsack, and in a few minutes I shall set out upon my march.
April 9.--I spent an almost perfect day yesterday. It was a cool bright day, with a few clouds like cotton-wool moving sedately in a blue sky. I first walked quietly about my little town, which was full of delicate beauties. The houses are all built of a soft yellow stone, which weathers into a species of rich orange. Heaven knows where the designers came from, but no two houses seem alike; some of them are gabled, buttressed, stone-mullioned, irregular in outline, but yet with a wonderful sense of proportion. Some are Georgian, with classical pilasters and pediments. Yet they are all for use and not for show; and the weak modern shop-windows, which some would think disfigure the delicate house-fronts, seem to me just to give the requisite sense of contrast. At the end of the street stands the church, with a stately Perpendicular tower, and a resonant bell which tells the hour. This overlooks a pile of irregular buildings, now a farm, but once a great manor-house, with a dovecote and pavilions; but the old terrace is now an orchard, and the fine oriel of the house looks straight into the byre. Inside the church--it is open and well-kept--you can trace the history of the manor and its occupants, from Job Best, a rich mercer of London, whose monument, with marble pillars and obelisks, adorns the south aisle; his son was ennobled, whose effigy--more majestic still, robed and coroneted, with his Viscountess by his side, and her dog (with his name, Jakke, engraven on his shoulder)--lies smiling, the slender hands crossed in prayer. But the house was not destined to survive. The Viscount's only daughter, the Lady Penelope, looks down from the wall, a fair and delicate lady, the last of her brief race, who, as the old inscription says with a tender simplicity, "dyed a mayd." I cannot help wondering, my pretty lady, what your story was; and it will do you no hurt if one, who looks upon your gentle face, sends a wondering message of tenderness behind the veil to your pure spirit, regret for your vanished charm, and the fragrance of your soft bloom, and sadness for all sweet things that fade.
The manor, so I learn, was burnt wantonly by the Roundheads--there was a battle hereabouts--on the charge that it had harboured some followers of the king; and so our dreams of greatness and permanence are fulfilled.
The whole church was very neat and spruce; it had suffered a restoration lately. The walls were stripped of their old plaster and pointed, so that the inside is now rougher than the outside, a thing the ancient builders never intended. The altar is fairly draped with good hangings behind, and the chancel fitted with new oak stalls and seats, all as neat as a new pin. As I lingered in the church, reading the simple monuments, a rosy, burly vicar came briskly in, and seeing me there, courteously showed me all the treasures of his house, like Hezekiah. He took me into the belfry, and there, piled up against the wall, were some splendid Georgian columns and architraves, richly carved in dark brown wood. I asked what it was. "Oh, a horrible pompous thing," he said; "it was behind the altar--most pagan and unsuitable; we had it all out as soon as I came. The first moment I entered the church, I said to myself, 'THAT must go,' and I have succeeded, though it was hard enough to collect the money, and actually some of the old people here objected." I did not feel it was worth while to cast cold water on the good man's satisfaction--but the pity of it! I do not suppose that a couple of thousand pounds could have reproduced it; and it is simply heart-rending to see such a noble monument of piety and careful love sacrificed to a wave of so-called ecclesiastical taste. The vicar's chief pride was a new window, by a fashionable modern firm; quite unobjectionable in design, and with good colour, but desperately uninteresting. It represented some mild, unemphatic, attenuated saints, all exactly alike, languidly and decorously conversing together, weighed down by heavy drapery, as though wrapped in bales of carpets. In the lower compartments knelt some dignified persons, similarly habited, in face exactly like the saints above, except that they were fitted out with unaccountable beards--all pretty and correct, but with no character or force. I suppose that fifty years hence, when our taste has broadened somewhat, this window will probably be condemned as impossible too. There can be no absolute canon of beauty; the only principle ought to be to spare everything that is of careful and solid workmanship, to give it a chance, to let time and age have their perfect work. It is the utter conventionality of the whole thing that is so distressing; the same thing is going on all over the country, the attempt to put back the clock, and to try and restore things as they were; history, tradition, association, are not considered. The old builders were equally ruthless, it is true; they would sweep away a Norman choir to build a Decorated one; but at all events they were advancing and expanding, not feebly recurring to a past period of taste, and trying to obliterate the progress of the centuries.
About noon I left the little town, and struck out up a winding lane to the hills. The copses were full of anemones and primroses; birds sang sharply in the bushes which were gemmed with fresh green; now and then I heard the woodpecker laugh as if at some secret jest among the thickets. Presently the little town was at my feet, looking small and tranquil in the golden noon; and soon I came to the top. It was grassy, open down-land up here, and in an instant the wide view of a rich wooded and watered plain spread before me, with shadowy hills on the horizon. In the middle distance I saw the red roofs of a great town, the smoke going peacefully up; here was a shining river-reach, like a crescent of silver. It was England indeed--tranquil, healthy, prosperous England.
The rest of the day I need not record. It was full of delicate impressions--an old, gabled, mullioned house among its pastures; a hamlet by a stream, admirably grouped; a dingle set with primroses; and over all, the long, pure lines of upland, with here and there, through a gap, the purple, wealthy plain.
I write this in the evening, at a little wayside inn, in a hamlet under the hill. The name alone, Wenge Grandmain, is worth a shilling. It is very simple, but clean, and the people are kind; not with the professional manner of those who bow, smiling, to a paying guest, but of those who welcome a wanderer and try to make him a home. And so, in a dark-panelled little parlour, with a sedate-ticking clock, I sit while the sounds of life grow fainter and rarer in the little street.
THE CROSSFOXES INN, BOURTON-ON-THE-WOLD, April 16, 1904.
DEAR HERBERT,--I have now been ten days on my travels, but for the last week I have pitched my moving tent at Bourton. Do you shudder with the fear that I am going to give you pages of description of scenery? It is not a SHUDDER with me when I get a landscape-letter; it is merely that leaden dulness which falls upon the spirit when it is confronted with statements which produce no impression upon the mind. I always, for instance, skip the letters of travel which appear about the third chapter of great biographies, when the young gentleman goes for the Grand Tour after taking his degree.
But imagine this: a great, rich, wooded, watered plain; on the far horizon the shadowy forms of hills; behind you, gently rising heights, with dingles and folds full of copsewood, rising to soft green downs. There, on the skirts of the upland, above the plain, below the hill, sits the little village, with a stately Perpendicular church tower. The village itself of stone houses, no two alike, all with character; gabled, mullioned, weathered to a delicate ochre--some standing back, some on the street. Intermingled with these are fine Georgian houses, with great pilasters, all of stone too; in the centre of the street a wall, with two tall gate-posts, crowned with stone balls; a short lime avenue leads to a stately, gabled manor-house, which you can see through great iron gates. The whole scene incredibly romantic, exquisitely beautiful.
My favourite walk is this. I leave the little town by a road which winds along the base of the hill. I pass round a shoulder, wooded and covered to the base with tangled thickets, where the birds sing shrilly. I turn up to the left into a kind of "combe." At the very farthest end of the little valley, at the base of the steeper slopes but now high above the plain, stands an ancient church among yews. On one side of it is a long, low-fronted, irregular manor-house, with a formal garden in front, approached by a little arched gate-house which stands on the road; on the other side of the church, and below it, a no less ancient rectory, with a large Perpendicular window, anciently a chapel, in the gable. In the warm, sheltered air the laurels grow luxuriantly; a bickering stream, running in a deep channel, makes a delicate music of its own; a little farther on stands a farm, with barn and byre; in the midst of the buildings is a high, stone-tiled dovecote. The roo-hooing of the pigeons fills the whole place with a slumberous sound. I wind up the hill by a little path, now among thickets, now crossing a tilted pasture. I emerge on the top of a down; in front of me lie the long slopes of the wold, with that purity and tranquillity of outline which only down-land possesses. Here on a spur stands a grass-grown camp, with ancient thorn-trees growing in it. Turning round, the great plain runs for miles, with here and there a glint of water, where the slow-moving Avon wanders. Hamlets, roads, towers lie out like a map at my feet--all wearing that secluded, peaceful air which tempts me to think that life would be easy and happy if it could only be lived among those quiet fields, with the golden light and lengthening shadows.
I find myself wondering in these quiet hours--I walk alone as a rule--what this haunting, incommunicable sense of beauty is. Is it a mere matter of temperament, of inner happiness, of physical well-being; or has it an absolute existence? It comes and goes like the wind. Some days one is acutely, almost painfully, alive to it--painfully, because it makes such constant and insistent demands upon one's attention. Some days, again, it is almost unheeded, and one passes through it blind and indifferent. It is an expression, I cannot help feeling, of the very mind of God; and yet the ancient earthwork in which I stand, bears witness to the fact that in far-off days men lived in danger and anxiety, fighting and striving for bare existence. We have established by law and custom a certain personal security nowadays; is our sense of beauty born of that security? I cannot help wondering whether the old warriors who built this place cared at all for the beauty of the earth; and yet over it all hangs the gentle sadness of all sweet things that have an end. All those warriors are dust; the boys and girls who wandered a century ago where I wander to-day, they are at rest too in the little churchyard that lies at my feet; and my heart goes out to all who have loved and suffered, and to those who shall hereafter love and suffer here. An idle sympathy, perhaps, but none the less strong and real.
But now for a little human experience that befell me here. I found the other day, not far from the church, an old artist sketching. A refined, sad-looking old fellow, sunburned and active, with white hair and pointed beard, and a certain pathetic attempt, of a faded kind, to dress for his part--low collar, a red tie, rough shooting-jacket, and so forth. He seemed in a sociable mood, and I sate down beside him. How it came about I hardly know, but he was soon telling me the story of his life. He was the tenant, I found, of the old manor-house, which he held at a ridiculous rent, and he had lived here nearly forty years. He had found the place as a young man, wandering about in search of the picturesque. I gathered that he had bright dreams and wide ambitions. He had a small independence, and he had meant to paint great pictures and make a name for himself. He had married; his wife was long dead, his children out in the world, and he was living on alone, painting the same pictures, bought, so far as I could make out, mostly by American visitors. His drawing was old-fashioned and deeply mannerised. He was painting not what was there, but some old and faded conception of his own as to what it was like--missing, I think, half the beauty of the place. He seemed horribly desolate. I tried, for his consolation and my own, to draw out a picture of the beautiful refined life he led; and the old fellow began to wear a certain jaunty air of dignity and distinction, which would have amused me if it had not made me feel inclined to cry. But he soon fell back into what is, I suppose, a habitual melancholy. "Ah, if you had known what my dreams were!" he said once. He went on to say that he now wished that he had taken up some simple and straightforward profession, had made money, and had his grandchildren about him. "I am more ghost than man," he said, shaking his dejected head.
I despair of expressing to you the profound pathos that seemed to me to surround this old despondent creature, with his broken dreams and his regretful memories. Where was the mistake he made? I suppose that he over-estimated his powers; but it was a generous mistake after all; and he has had to bear the slow sad disillusionment, the crushing burden of futility. He set out to win glory, and he is a forgotten, shabby, irresolute figure, subsisting on the charity of wealthy visitors! And yet he seems to have missed happiness by so little. To live as he does might be a serene and beautiful thing. If such a man had large reserves of hope and tenderness and patience; if he could but be content with the tranquil beauty of the wholesome earth, spread so richly before his eyes, it would be a life to be envied.
It has been a gentle lesson to me, that one must resolutely practise one's heart and spirit for the closing hours. In the case of successful men, as they grow older, it often strikes me with a sense of pain how passionately they cling to their ambitions and activities. How many people there are who work too long, and try to prolong the energies of morning into the afternoon, and the toil of afternoon into the peace of evening. I earnestly desire to grow old gracefully; to know when to stop, when to slip into a wise and kindly passivity, with sympathy for those who are in the forefront of the race. And yet if one does not practise wonder and receptivity and hope, one cannot expect them to come suddenly and swiftly to one's call. There comes a day when a man ought to be able to see that his best work is behind him, that his active influence is on the wane, that he is losing his hold on the machine. There ought to come a patient, beautiful, and kindly dignity, a love of young things and fresh flowers; not an envious and regretful unhappiness at the loss of the eager life and its brisk sensations, which betrays itself too often in a trickle of exaggerated reminiscences, a "weary, day-long chirping."
This is a harder task, I suppose, for an old bachelor than for a father of children. I have sometimes felt that adoption, with all its risks, of some young creature that you can call your own, would be a solution for many loveless lives, because it would stir them out of the comfortable selfishness that is the bane of the barren heart.
Of course, a schoolmaster suffers from this less than most professional men; but, even so, it is melancholy to reflect how the boys one has cared for, and tried to help, drift out of one's sight and ken. I have no touch of the feeling which they say was characteristic of Jowett--and indeed is amply evidenced by his correspondence--that once a man's tutor he was always his tutor, even though his pupil became grey-headed and a grandfather. One must do the best for the boys and look for no gratitude; it often comes, indeed, in rich measure, but the schoolmaster who craves for it is lost.
Well, it is time to stop. I sit in a little, low raftered parlour of the old inn; the fire in the big hearth flickers into ash, and my candles flare to their sockets. I leave the place to-morrow; and such is the instinct for permanence in the human mind, that I feel depressed and melancholy, as though I were leaving home.--Ever your affectionate,
T. B.
THE BLUE BOAR, STANTON HARDWICK, April 21, 1904.
DEAR HERBERT,--I have made a pilgrimage to Stratford-on-Avon. I now feel overwhelmed with shame to reflect that, though my chief preoccupations apart from my profession have been literary, I have never visited the sacred place before. For an Englishman who cares for literature not to have been to Stratford-on-Avon is as gross a neglect as for an Englishman who has any sense of patriotism not to have visited Westminster Abbey.
And now that I have been there and returned, and have leisure to think it all over, I feel that I have been standing on the threshold of a mystery. Who, when all is said and done, was this extraordinary man? What were his thoughts, his aims, his views of himself and of the world? If Shakespeare was Shakespeare, he seems, to speak frankly, to have had a humanity distinct and apart from his genius. Here we have the son of a busy, quarrelsome, enterprising tradesman--who eventually indeed came to grief in trade--of a yeoman stock, and bearing a common name. His mother could not write her own signature. Of his youth we hear little that is not disreputable. He married under unpleasant circumstances, after an entanglement which took place at a very early age; he was addicted to poaching, or, at all events, to the illegal pursuit of other people's game. Then he drifts up to London and joins a theatrical company--then a rascally kind of trade--deserting his wife and family. His life in London is full of secrets. He is a man of mysterious passions and dangerous friendships. He writes plays of incomparable depth and breadth, touching every chord of humour, tragedy and pathos; certain rather elaborate poems of a precieux type, and strange sonnets, revealing a singular poignancy of unconventional feelings. But here, again, it is difficult to conceive that the writer of the Sonnets, who touched life so intensely at one feverish point, should have had the amazing detachment and complexity of mind and soul that the plays reveal. The notices of his talk and character are few and unenlightening, and testify to a certain easy brilliance of wit, but no more. Before he is thirty he is spoken of as both "upright" and "facetious"--a singular combination.
Then he suddenly appears in another aspect; at the age of thirty-two he is a successful, well-to-do man. And then his ambition, if he had any, seems to shift its centre, and he appears to be only bent upon restoring the fortunes of his family, and attaining a solid municipal position. He buys the biggest house in his native place; from the proceeds of his writings, his professional income as an actor, and from his share in the playhouse of which he is part owner, he purchases lands and houses, he engages in lawsuits, he concerns himself with grants of arms. Still the flood of stupendous literature flows out; he seems to be under a contract to produce plays, for which he receives the magnificent sum of L10 (L100 of our money). He writes easily and never corrects. He seems to set no store on his writings, which stream from him like light from the sun. He adapts, collaborates, and has no idea of what would be called a high vocation.
At forty-seven it all ceases; he writes no more, but lives prosperously in his native town, with occasional visits to London. At fifty-two his health fails. He makes business-like arrangements in the event of death, and faces the darkness of the long sleep like any other good citizen.
Who can co-ordinate or reconcile these things? Who can conceive the likeness of the man, who steps in this light-hearted, simple way on to the very highest platform of literature--so lofty and unattainable a place he takes without striving, without arrogance, a throne among the thrones where Homer, Virgil, and Dante sit? And yet his mind is set, not on these things, but on acres and messuages, tithes and investments. He seems not only devoid of personal vanity, but even of that high and solemn pride which made Keats say, with faltering lips, that he believed he would be among the English poets after his death.
I came through the pleasant water-meadows and entered the streets of the busy town. Everything, from bank to eating-shop, bears the name of Shakespeare; and one cannot resist the thought that such local and homely renown would have been more to our simple hero's taste than the laurel and the throne. I groaned in spirit over the monstrous playhouse, with its pretentious Teutonic air; I walked through the churchyard, vocal with building rooks, and came to the noble church, full of the evidences of wealth and worship and honour. I do not like to confess the breathless awe with which I drew near to the chancel and gazed on the stone that, nameless, with its rude rhyme, covers the sacred dust. I cannot say what my thoughts were, but I was lost in a formless, unuttered prayer of true abasement before the venerable relics of the highest achievements of the human spirit. There beneath my feet slept the dust of the brain that conceived Hamlet and Macbeth, and the hand that had traced the Sonnets, and the eye that had plumbed the depths of life. That was a solemn moment, and I do not think I ever experienced so deep a thrill of speechless awe. I could not tear myself away; I could only wonder and desire.
Presently, by the kind offices of a pleasant simple verger, I did more. I mounted on some steps he brought, and looked face to face at the bust in the monument.