Afoot in England

W >> W.H. Hudson >> Afoot in England

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18

She was a prolific writer, both prose and verse, and, as we
know, had an extraordinary vogue in her own time. Anything
that came from her pen had an immediate success; indeed, so
highly was she regarded that nothing she chose to write,
however poor, could fail. And she certainly did write a good
deal of poor stuff: it was all in a sense poor, but books and
books, poor soul, she had to write. It was in a sense poor
because it was mostly ambitious stuff, and, as the proverb
says, "You cannot fly like an eagle with the wings of a
wren." She was driven to fly, and gave her little wings too
much to do, and her flights were apt to be mere little weak
flutterings over the surface of the ground. A wren, and she
had not a cuckoo but a devouring cormorant to sustain--that
dear, beautiful father of hers, who was more to her than any
reprobate son to his devoted mother, and who day after day,
year after year, gobbled up her earnings, and then would
hungrily go on squawking for more until he stumbled into the
grave. Alas! he was too long in dying; she was worn out by
then, the little heart beating not so fast, and the bright
little brain growing dim and very tired.

Now all the ambitious stuff she wrote to keep the cormorant
and, incidentally, to immortalize herself, has fallen
deservedly into oblivion. But we--some of us--do not forget
and never want to forget Mary Russell Mitford. Her letters
remain--the little friendly letters which came from her pen
like balls of silvery down from a sun-ripened plant, and were
wafted far and wide over the land to those she loved. There
is a wonderful charm in them; they are so spontaneous, so
natural, so perfectly reflect her humour and vivacity, her
overflowing sweetness, her beautiful spirit. And one book too
remains--the series of sketches about the poor little hamlet,
in which she lived so long and laboured so hard to support
herself and her parents, the turtledove mated with a
cormorant. Driven to produce work and hard up for a subject,
in a happy moment she took up this humble one lying at her own
door and allowed her self to write naturally even as in her
most intimate letters. This is the reason of the vitality of
Our Tillage; it was simple, natural, and reflected the author
herself, her tender human heart, her impulsive nature, her
bright playful humorous spirit. There is no thought, no mind
stuff in it, and it is a classic! It is about the country,
and she has so little observation that it might have been
written in a town, out of a book, away from nature's sights
and sounds. Her rustic characters are not comparable to those
of a score or perhaps two or three score of other writers who
treat of such subjects. The dialogue, when she makes them
talk, is unnatural, and her invention so poor that when she
puts in a little romance of her own making one regrets it.
And so one might go on picking it all to pieces like a
dandelion blossom. Nevertheless it endures, outliving scores
of in a way better books on the same themes, because her own
delightful personality manifests itself and shines in all
these little pictures. This short passage describing how she
took Lizzie, the little village child she loved, to gather
cowslips in the meadows, will serve as an illustration.

They who know these feelings (and who is so happy as not to
have known some of them) will understand why Alfieri became
powerless, and Froissart dull; and why even needlework, the
most effective sedative, that grand soother and composer of
women's distress, fails to comfort me today. I will go out
into the air this cool, pleasant afternoon, and try what
that will do. . . . I will go to the meadows, the beautiful
meadows and I will have my materials of happiness, Lizzie
and May, and a basket for flowers, and we will make a
cowslip ball. "Did you ever see a cowslip ball, Lizzie?"
"No." "Come away then; make haste! run, Lizzie!"

And on we go, fast, fast! down the road, across the lea,
past the workhouse, along by the great pond, till we slide
into the deep narrow lane, whose hedges seem to meet over
the water, and win our way to the little farmhouse at the
end. "Through the farmyard, Lizzie; over the gate; never
mind the cows; they are quiet enough." "I don't mind 'em,"
said Miss Lizzie, boldly and' truly, and with a proud
affronted air, displeased at being thought to mind anything,
and showing by her attitude and manner some design of proving
her courage by an attack on the largest of the herd, in the
shape of a pull by the tail. "I don't mind 'em." "I know
you don't, Lizzie; but let them, alone and don't chase
the turkey-cock. Come to me, my dear!" and, for wonder,
Lizzie came.

In the meantime my other pet, Mayflower, had also gotten
into a scrape. She had driven about a huge unwieldy sow,
till the animal's grunting had disturbed the repose of a
still more enormous Newfoundland dog, the guardian of the
yard.

The beautiful white greyhound's mocking treatment of the
surly dog on the chain then follows, and other pretty
scenes and adventures, until after some mishaps and much
trouble the cowslip ball is at length completed.

What a concentration of fragrance and beauty it was!
Golden and sweet to satiety! rich in sight, and touch, and
smell! Lizzie was enchanted, and ran off with her prize,
hiding amongst the trees in the very coyness of ecstasy, as
if any human eye, even mine, would be a restraint on her
innocent raptures.

Here the very woman is revealed to us, her tender and lively
disposition, her impulsiveness and childlike love of fun
and delight in everything on earth. We see in such a passage
what her merit really is, the reason of our liking or
"partiality" for her. Her pleasure in everything makes
everything interesting, and in displaying her feeling without
art or disguise she succeeds in giving what we may call a
literary expression to personal charm--that quality which is
almost untranslatable into written words. Many women possess
it; it is in them and issues from them, and is like an essential
oil in a flower, but too volatile to be captured and made use
of. Furthermore, women when they write are as a rule even more
conventional than men, more artificial and out of and away
from themselves.

I do not know that any literary person will agree with me; I
have gone aside to write about Miss Mitford mainly for my own
satisfaction. Frequently when I have wanted to waste half an
hour pleasantly with a book I have found myself picking up
"Our Village" from among many others, some waiting for a first
perusal, and I wanted to know why this was so--to find out, if
not to invent, some reason for my liking which would not make
me ashamed.

At Swallowfield we failed to find a place to stay at; there
was no such place; and of the inns, named, I think, the
"Crown," "Cricketers," "Bird-in-the-Hand," and "George and
Dragon," only one, was said to provide accommodation for
travellers as the law orders, but on going to the house we
were informed that the landlord or his wife was just dead, or
dangerously ill, I forget which, and they could take no one
in. Accordingly, we had to trudge back to Three Mile Cross
and the old ramshackle, well-nigh ruinous inn there. It was a
wretched place, smelling of mould and dry-rot; however, it was
not so bad after a fire had been lighted in the grate, but
first the young girl who waited on us brought in a bundle of
newspapers, which she proceeded to thrust up the chimney-flue
and kindle, "to warm the flue and make the fire burn," she
explained.

On the following day, the weather being milder, we rambled on
through woods and lanes, visiting several villages, and
arrived in the afternoon at Silchester, where we had resolved
to put up for the night. By a happy chance we found a
pleasant cottage on the common to stay at and pleasant people
in it, so that we were glad to sit down for a week there, to
loiter about the furzy waste, or prowl in the forest and haunt
the old walls; but it was pleasant even indoors with that wide
prospect before the window, the wooded country stretching many
miles away to the hills of Kingsclere, blue in the distance
and crowned with their beechen rings and groves. Of Roman
Calleva itself and the thoughts I had there I will write in
the following chapter; here I will only relate how on Easter
Sunday, two days after arriving, we went to morning service in
the old church standing on a mound inside the walls, a mile
from the village and common.

It came to pass that during the service the sun began to shine
very brightly after several days of cloud and misty windy wet
weather, and that brilliance and the warmth in it served to
bring a butterfly out of hiding; then another; then a third;
red admirals all; and they were seen through all the prayers,
and psalms, and hymns, and lessons, and the sermon preached by
the white-haired Rector, fluttering against the translucent
glass, wanting to be out in that splendour and renew their
life after so long a period of suspension. But the glass was
between them and their world of blue heavens and woods and
meadow flowers; then I thought that after the service I would
make an attempt to get them out; but soon reflected that to
release them it would be necessary to capture them first, and
that that could not be done without a ladder and butterfly
net. Among the women (ladies) on either side of and before me
there were no fewer than five wearing aigrettes of egret and
bird-of-paradise plumes in their hats or bonnets, and these
five all remained to take part in that ceremony of eating
bread and drinking wine in remembrance of an event supposed to
be of importance to their souls, here and hereafter. It
saddened me to leave my poor red admirals in their prison,
beating their red wings against the coloured glass--to leave
them too in such company, where the aigrette wearers were
worshipping a little god of their own little imaginations, who
did not create and does not regard the swallow and dove and
white egret and bird-of-paradise, and who was therefore not my
god and whose will as they understood it was nothing to me.

It was a consolation when I went out, still thinking of the
butterflies in their prison, and stood by the old ruined walls
grown over with ivy and crowned with oak and holly trees, to
think that in another two thousand years there will be no
archaeologist and no soul in Silchester, or anywhere else in
Britain, or in the world, who would take the trouble to dig up
the remains of aigrette-wearers and their works, and who would
care what had become of their pitiful little souls--their
immortal part.

Chapter Seven: Roman Calleva

An afternoon in the late November of 1903. Frost, gales, and
abundant rains have more than half stripped the oaks of their
yellow leaves. But the rain is over now, the sky once more a
pure lucid blue above me--all around me, in fact, since I am
standing high on the top of the ancient stupendous earthwork,
grown over with oak wood and underwood of holly and thorn and
hazel with tangle of ivy and bramble and briar. It is
marvellously still; no sound from the village reaches me; I
only hear the faint rustle of the dead leaves as they fall,
and the robin, for one spied me here and has come to keep me
company. At intervals he spurts out his brilliant little
fountain of sound; and that sudden bright melody and the
bright colour of the sunlit translucent leaves seem like one
thing. Nature is still, and I am still, standing concealed
among trees, or moving cautiously through the dead russet
bracken. Not that I am expecting to get a glimpse of the
badger who has his hermitage in this solitary place, but I am
on forbidden ground, in the heart of a sacred pheasant
preserve, where one must do one's prowling warily. Hard by,
almost within a stone's-throw of the wood-grown earthwork on
which I stand, are the ruinous walls of Roman Calleva--the
Silchester which the antiquarians have been occupied in
uncovering these dozen years or longer. The stone walls, too,
like the more ancient earthwork, are overgrown with trees and
brambles and ivy. The trees have grown upon the wall, sending
roots deep down between the stones, through the crumbling
cement; and so fast are they anchored that never a tree falls
but it brings down huge masses of masonry with it. This slow
levelling process has been going on for centuries, and it was
doubtless in this way that the buildings within the walls were
pulled down long ages ago. Then the action of the earth-worms
began, and floors and foundations, with fallen stones and
tiles, were gradually buried in the soil, and what was once a
city was a dense thicket of oak and holly and thorn. Finally
the wood was cleared, and the city was a walled wheat field
--so far as we know, the ground has been cultivated since the
days of King John. But the entire history of this green
walled space before me--less than twenty centuries in
duration--does not seem so very long compared with that of
the huge earthen wall I am standing on, which dates back to
prehistoric times.

Standing here, knee-deep in the dead ruddy bracken, in the
"coloured shade" of the oaks, idly watching the leaves fall
fluttering to the ground, thinking in an aimless way of the
remains of the two ancient cities before me, the British and
the Roman, and of their comparative antiquity, I am struck
with the thought that the sweet sensations produced in me by
the scene differ in character from the feeling I have had in
other solitary places. The peculiar sense of satisfaction, of
restfulness, of peace, experienced here is very perfect; but
in the wilderness, where man has never been, or has at all
events left no trace of his former presence, there is ever a
mysterious sense of loneliness, of desolation, underlying our
pleasure in nature. Here it seems good to know, or to
imagine, that the men I occasionally meet in my solitary
rambles, and those I see in the scattered rustic village hard
by, are of the same race, and possibly the descendants, of the
people who occupied this spot in the remote past--Iberian and
Celt, and Roman and Saxon and Dane. If that hard-featured and
sour-visaged old gamekeeper, with the cold blue unfriendly
eyes, should come upon me here in my hiding-place, and scowl
as he is accustomed to do, standing silent before me, gun in
hand, to hear my excuses for trespassing in his preserves, I
should say (mentally): This man is distinctly English, and
his far-off progenitors, somewhere about sixteen hundred years
ago, probably assisted at the massacre of the inhabitants of
the pleasant little city at my feet. By and by, leaving the
ruins, I may meet with other villagers of different features
and different colour in hair, skin, and eyes, and of a
pleasanter expression; and in them I may see the remote
descendants of other older races of men, some who were lords
here before the Romans came, and of others before them, even
back to Neolithic times.

This, I take it, is a satisfaction, a sweetness and peace to
the soul in nature, because it carries with it a sense of the
continuity of the human race, its undying vigour, its
everlastingness. After all the tempests that have overcome
it, through all mutations in such immense stretches of time,
how stable it is!

I recall the time when I lived on a vast vacant level green
plain, an earth which to the eye, and to the mind which sees
with the eye, appeared illimitable, like the ocean; where the
house I was born in was the oldest in the district--a century
old, it was said; where the people were the children's
children of emigrants from Europe who had conquered and
colonized the country, and had enjoyed but half a century of
national life. But the people who had possessed the land
before these emigrants--what of them? They, were but a
memory, a tradition, a story told in books and hardly more
to us than a fable; perhaps they had dwelt there for long
centuries, or for thousands of years; perhaps they had come,
a wandering horde, to pass quickly away like a flight of
migrating locusts; for no memorial existed, no work of their
hands, not the faintest trace of their occupancy.

Walking one day at the side of a ditch, which had been newly
cut through a meadow at the end of our plantation, I caught
sight of a small black object protruding from the side of the
cutting, which turned out to be a fragment of Indian pottery
made of coarse clay, very black, and rudely ornamented on one
side. On searching further a few more pieces were found. I
took them home and preserved them carefully, experiencing a
novel and keen sense of pleasure in their possession; for
though worthless, they were man's handiwork, the only real
evidence I had come upon of that vanished people who had been
before us; and it was as if those bits of baked clay, with a
pattern incised on them by a man's finger-nail, had in them
some magical property which enabled me to realize the past,
and to see that vacant plain repeopled with long dead and
forgotten men.

Doubtless we all possess the feeling in some degree--the sense
of loneliness and desolation and dismay at the thought of an
uninhabited world, and of long periods when man was not. Is
it not the absence of human life or remains rather than the
illimitable wastes of thick-ribbed ice and snow which daunts
us at the thought of Arctic and Antarctic regions? Again, in
the story of the earth, as told by geology, do we not also
experience the same sense of dismay, and the soul shrinking
back on itself, when we come in imagination to those deserts
desolate in time when the continuity of the race was broken
and the world dispeopled? The doctrine of evolution has made
us tolerant of the thought of human animals,--our progenitors
as we must believe--who were of brutish aspect, and whose
period on this planet was so long that, compared with it, the
historic and prehistoric periods are but as the life of an
individual. A quarter of a million years has perhaps elapsed
since the beginning of that cold period which, at all events
in this part of the earth, killed Palaeolithic man; yet how
small a part of his racial life even that time would seem if,
as some believe, his remains may be traced as far back as the
Eocene! But after this rude man of the Quaternary and
Tertiary epochs had passed away there is a void, a period
which to the imagination seems measureless, when sun and moon
and stars looked on a waste and mindless world. When man once
more reappears he seems to have been re-created on somewhat
different lines.

It is this break in the history of the human race which amazes
and daunts us, which "shadows forth the heartless voids and
immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from behind
with the thought of annihilation."

Here, in these words of Hermann Melville, we are let all at
once into the true meaning of those disquieting and seemingly
indefinable emotions so often experienced, even by the most
ardent lovers of nature and of solitude, in uninhabited
deserts, on great mountains, and on the sea. We find here the
origin of that horror of mountains which was so common until
recent times. A friend once confessed to me that he was
always profoundly unhappy at sea during long voyages, and the
reason was that his sustaining belief in a superintending
Power and in immortality left him when he was on that waste of
waters, which have no human associations. The feeling, so
intense in his case, is known to most if not all of us; but we
feel it faintly as a disquieting element in nature of which we
may be but vaguely conscious.

Most travelled Englishmen who have seen much of the world and
resided for long or short periods in many widely separated
countries would probably agree that there is a vast difference
in the feeling of strangeness, or want of harmony with our
surroundings, experienced in old and in new countries. It is
a compound feeling and some of its elements are the same in
both cases; but in one there is a disquieting element which
the other is without. Thus, in Southern Europe, Egypt, Syria,
and in many countries of Asia, and some portions of Africa,
the wanderer from home might experience dissatisfaction and be
ill at ease and wish for old familiar sights and sounds; but
in a colony like Tasmania, and in any new country where there
were no remains of antiquity, no links with the past, the
feeling would be very much more poignant, and in some scenes
and moods would be like that sense of desolation which assails
us at the thought of the heartless voids and immensities of
the universe.

He recognizes that he is in a world on which we have but
recently entered, and in which our position is not yet
assured.

Here, standing on this mound, as on other occasions past
counting, I recognize and appreciate the enormous difference
which human associations make in the effect produced on us by
visible nature. In this silent solitary place, with the
walled field which was once Calleva Atrebatum at my feet, I
yet have a sense of satisfaction, of security, never felt in a
land that had no historic past. The knowledge that my
individual life is but a span, a breath; that in a little
while I too must wither and mingle like one of those fallen
yellow leaves with the mould, does not grieve me. I know it
and yet disbelieve it; for am I not here alive, where men have
inhabited for thousands of years, feeling what I now feel
--their oneness with everlasting nature and the undying human
family? The very soil and wet carpet of moss on which their
feet were set, the standing trees and leaves, green or yellow,
the rain-drops, the air they breathed, the sunshine in their
eyes and hearts, was part of them, not a garment, but of their
very substance and spirit. Feeling this, death becomes an
illusion; and the illusion that the continuous life of the
species (its immortality) and the individual life are one and
the same is the reality and truth. An illusion, but, as Mill
says, deprive us of our illusions and life would be
intolerable. Happily we are not easily deprived of them,
since they are of the nature of instincts and ineradicable.
And this very one which our reason can prove to be the most
childish, the absurdest of all, is yet the greatest, the most
fruitful of good for the race. To those who have discarded
supernatural religion, it may be a religion, or at all events
the foundation to build one on. For there is no comfort to
the healthy natural man in being told that the good he does
will not be interred with his bones, since he does not wish to
think, and in fact refuses to think, that his bones will ever
be interred. Joy in the "choir invisible" is to him a mere
poetic fancy, or at best a rarefied transcendentalism, which
fails to sustain him. If altruism, or the religion of
humanity, is a living vigorous plant, and as some believe
flourishes more with the progress of the centuries, it must,
like other "soul-growths," have a deeper, tougher woodier root
in our soil.

Chapter Eight: A Gold Day At Silchester

It is little to a man's profit to go far afield if his chief
pleasure be in wild life, his main object to get nearer to the
creatures, to grow day by day more intimate with them, and to
see each day some new thing. Yet the distance has the same
fascination for him as for another--the call is as sweet and
persistent in his ears. If he is on a green level country
with blue hills on the horizon, then, especially in the early
morning, is the call sweetest, most irresistible. Come away
--come away: this blue world has better things than any in
that green, too familiar place. The startling scream of the
jay--you have heard it a thousand times. It is pretty to
watch the squirrel in his chestnut-red coat among the oaks in
their fresh green foliage, full of fun as a bright child,
eating his apple like a child, only it is an oak-apple,
shining white or white and rosy-red, in his little paws; but
you have seen it so many times--come away:

It was not this voice alone which made me forsake the green
oaks of Silchester and Pamber Forest, to ramble for a season
hither and thither in Wiltshire, Dorset, and Somerset; there
was something for me to do in those places, but the call
made me glad to go. And long weeks--months--went by in my
wanderings, mostly in open downland country, too often under
gloomy skies, chilled by cold winds and wetted by cold rains.
Then, having accomplished my purpose and discovered
incidentally that the call had mocked me again, as on so many
previous occasions, I returned once more to the old familiar
green place.

Crossing the common, I found that where it had been dry in
spring one might now sink to his knees in the bog; also that
the snipe which had vanished for a season were back at the old
spot where they used to breed. It was a bitter day near the
end of an unpleasant summer, with the wind back in the old
hateful north-east quarter; but the sun shone, the sky was
blue, and the flying clouds were of a dazzling whiteness.
Shivering, I remembered the south wall, and went there, since
to escape from the wind and bask like some half-frozen serpent
or lizard in the heat was the highest good one could look for
in such weather. To see anything new in wild life was not to
be hoped for.

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18