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"Death takes away the commonplace of life; and
positively, when one looks on the thousand and one poor, foolish,
ignoble faces of this world, and listens to the chatter as poor and
foolish as the faces, one, in order to have any proper respect for them,
is forced to remember that solemnity of death which is silently waiting.
The foolishest person will look grand enough one day. The
features are poor now, but the hottest tears and the most passionate
embraces will not seem out of place then. Then the
most affected look sincere, the most volatile serious—all noble, more or
less."
Again:—
"The sense of impermanence brightens beauty and elevates
happiness. Melancholy is always attendant on beauty, and
that melancholy brings out its keenness as the dark green, corrugated
leaf brings out the wan lowliness of the primrose. The
spectator enjoys the beauty; but his knowledge that it is
fleeting and that
he is fleeting adds a pathetic something to it. Sunset
affects us more powerfully than sunrise, simply because it is a setting
sun, and suggests a thousand analogies. A mother is never
happier than when her eyes fill over her sleeping child, never does she
kiss it more fondly, never dues she pray for it more fervently; and yet
there is more in her heart than visible red cheek and yellow curl;
possession and bereavement are strangely mingled in the exquisite
maternal mood, the one heightening the other. And that joy
is the greatest which, while felt to be joy, can include the thought of
death and clothe itself with that crowning pathos."
As brief samples of the lighter style and livelier
vein we quote the following:—
"A man receives the shocks of life on the buffer of his
vanity. Vanity acts as his second and bottle-holder in the World's
prize-ring, and it fights him well, bringing him smilingly up to time
after the fiercest knock-down blows. * * The most lugubrious
poetry is written by very young and tolerably comfortable persons.
When a man's mood becomes really serious he has little taste for such
foolery. The man who has a grave or two in his heart does
not need to haunt churchyards."
His remarks on the essay-writer in general, and old
Montaigne in particular, are good:—
"Montaigne values obtainable Gascon bread mid cheese more
than the unobtainable stars. He thinks crying for the moon
the foolishest thing in the world. He will remain where he
is. He will not deny that a new world may exist beyond the
sunset, but he knows that to reach the new world there is a troublesome
Atlantic to cross, and, for his part, he will embark with no Columbus.
He feels that life is but a sad thing at best, but as he has little hope
of making it better, he accepts it, and will not make it worse by
murmuring. When the chain galls him, he can at least revenge
himself by making jests on it. He will temper the despotism
of Nature by epigrams. Of nothing under the sun was
Montaigne quite certain, except that every man, whatever his station,
might travel farther and fare worse: and that the playing with his own
thoughts in the shape of essay-writing, was the most harmless of
amusements."
But this is anybody's ground: we prefer our author on
that little bit of peculiar ground chosen and made his own under the
title of 'Dreamthorp.'—
"Every village has its fool, and, of course, Dreamthorp
is not without one. Him I get to run my messages for me, and
he occasionally trims my garden borders with a neat hand enough.
He and I hold frequent converse, and people here, I have been told,
think we have certain points of sympathy. Although this is
not meant for a compliment, I take it for one. The poor faithful
creature's brain has strange visitors. Now 'tis fun, now
wisdom, and now something which seems in the queerest way a compound of
both. He lives in a kind of twilight which obscures objects,
and his remarks seem to come from another world than that in which
ordinary people live. He is the only original person of my
acquaintance; his views of life are his own, and form a singular
commentary on those generally accepted. He is dull enough,
at times, poor fellow! but anon he startles you with something
that makes you think he must have wondered out of Shakspeare's plays
into this out-of-the-way place."
Here and there we find that smack of acidulous
flavour which gives to humour the pungency of satire. As for
example:—
"Your patient woman, in books and in life, does not draw
on our gratitude. When her goodness is not stupidity—which
it frequently is—it is insulting. She walks about an
incarnate rebuke. Her silence is an incessant complaint.
A teacup thrown at your head is not half so alarming as her meek,
much-wronged, unretortinq face. You begin to suspect that
she consoles herself with the thought that there is another world where
brutal brothers and husbands are settled with for their behaviour to
their angelic wives and sisters in this!"
There are readers—we say not of which sex —who will
enjoy that heartily with all the zest that can he added by the
triumphing force of contrast!
One of the best discourses in the book is that on
Vagabonds:—not exactly the kind of vagabongs alluded to in those
parochial notices placed at the entrance to many old country towns.
Thus discourse was delivered in the Dreamthorp schoolroom; and the
lecturer tells us, that when he took his place behind the small desk and
tumbler of water, the
—"couple of hundred eyes struck into me a certain awe.
I discovered in a moment why the orator of the hustings is so
deferential to the mob. I addressed the people with the most
unfeigned respect. When I began, too, I found what a
dreadful thing it is to hear your own voice inhabiting the silence.
You are related to your voice, and yet divorced from it. It is
you, and yet a thing apart. All the time it is going on, you
can be critical as to its tone, volume, cadence and other qualities, as
if it was the voice of a stranger. Gradually, however, I got
accustomed to my voice, and was able at last to look my audience in the
face. I saw the doctor and the clergyman smile
encouragingly, and my half-witted gardener looking at me with open
month, which made me take refuge in my paper again."
But, to the discourse:—
"The fresh, rough, heathery parts of human nature, where
the air is freshest, and where the linnets sing, is getting encroached
upon by cultivated fields. Every one is making himself and
herself useful. Every one is producing something.
Everybody is clever. Everybody is a philanthropist.
I don't like it. I love a little eccentricity. I
respect honest prejudices. I admire foolish enthusiasm in a
young head better than a wise scepticism. It is high time,
it seems to me, that a moral game low were passed for the preservation
of the wild and vagrant feelings of human nature. Ah, me!
what a world this was to live in two or three centuries ago, when it was
getting itself discovered,—when the sunset gave up America.
Then were the Arabian Nights commonplace, enchantments a matter of
course, and romance the most ordinary thing in the world.
Then man was courting Nature; now he has married her! Yet,
for all that time has brought and taken away, I am glad to know that the
vagabond sleeps in our blood, and awakes now and then.
Overlay nature as you please, here and there some bit of rock or mound
of aboriginal soil will crop out with the wild flowers growing upon it,
sweetening the air. Genius is a vagabond; Art is a vagabond;
Enterprise is a vagabond. The first fine day in spring
awakes the gipsy in the blood of the English workman, and incontinently
he 'babbles of green fields.' On the English gentleman, lapped in
the most luxurious civilization, and with the thousand powers and
resources of wealth at his command, descends oftentimes a fierce unrest,
a Bedouin-like horror of cities and the cry of the money-changer, and in
a month the fiery dust rises in the track of his desert steed, or in the
six-months' polar midnight he bears the big wave dashing on the icy
shore. Vagabonds have moulded the world into its present
shape. Respectable people swam in the track of the vagabond
as rooks in the track of the ploughshare. Respectable people
do little in the world, except storing wine-cellars and amassing
fortunes for the benefit of spendthrift heirs. Respectable
well-to-do Grecians shook their heads over Leonidas and his three
hundred when they went down to Thermopylae. Respectable
Spanish churchmen, with shaven crowns, scouted the dream of Columbus.
Respectable German folks attempted to dissuade Luther from appearing
before Charles and the princes and electors of the empire.
Nature makes us vagabonds: the world makes us respectable.
Commend me to Shakspeare's vagabonds, the most delightful in the world!
His sweet-blooded and liberal nature blossomed into all fine
generosities as naturally as an apple-bough into pink blossoms and
odours. It would be better if we could have along with our
modern enlightenment, our higher tastes and purer habits, a greater
individuality of thought and manner; better that every man should be
allowed to grow in his own way, so long as he does not infringe on the
rights of his neighbour, or insolently thrust himself between him and
the sun. A little more air and light should be let in upon
life. I should think the world has stood long enough under the
drill of Adjutant Fashion. It is hard work; the posture is
wearisome, and Fashion is an awful martinet, and has a quick eye and
comes down mercilessly on the unfortunate wight who cannot square his
toes to the approved pattern, or who appears upon parade with a darn in
his coat or with a shoulder-belt insufficiently pipe-clayed.
It is killing work. Suppose we try 'standing at ease' for a
little."
Readers about to escape from the crowd that is not
company, and the talk that is only a tinkling cymbal, to get a little
outlet for the vagabond spirit, far away from the smoke and dust and
turmoil of city life, will find in this book a capital pocket-companion
to carry with them into the many quiet Dreamthorps of our native land,
the shy and shady nooks of woodland and green lane, or the open spaces
of ripe, brown sand and breezy, blue sea; a book to be read in a spirit
of lazy leisure to the sound of babbling brook and whispering wood, and
long, drowsy wash of the cool summer wave. It is exquisitely
printed, handy, handsome, and cheap.
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DREAMTHORP
by
Alexander Smith.
From... Dreamthorp, a Book
of Essays Written in the Country.
IT MATTERS not to relate how or when I became a
denizen of Dreamthorp; it will be sufficient to say that I am not a born
native, but that I came to reside in it a good while ago now. The
several towns and villages in which, in my time, I have pitched a tent
did not please, for one obscure reason or another: this one was too
large, t'other too small; but when, on a summer evening about the hour
of eight, I first beheld Dreamthorp, with its westward-looking windows
painted by sunset, its children playing in the single straggling street,
the mothers knitting at the open doors, the fathers standing about in
long white blouses, chatting or smoking; the great tower of the ruined
castle rising high into the rosy air, with a whole troop of swallows—by
distance made as small as gnats—skimming about its rents and
fissures;—when I first beheld all this, I felt instinctively that my
knapsack might be taken off my shoulders, that my tired feet might
wander no more, that at last, on the planet, I had found a home.
From that evening I have dwelt here, and the only journey I am like now
to make, is the very inconsiderable one, so far at least as distance is
concerned, from the house in which I live to the graveyard beside the
ruined castle. There, with the former inhabitants of the place, I
trust to sleep quietly enough, and nature will draw over our heads her
coverlet of green sod, and tenderly tuck us in, as a mother her sleeping
ones, so that no sound from the world shall ever reach us, and no sorrow
trouble us any more.
The village stands far inland; and the streams that trot through the soft
green valleys all about have as little knowledge of the sea, as the
three-years' child of the storms and passions of manhood. The
surrounding country is smooth and green, full of undulations; and
pleasant country roads strike through it in every direction, bound for
distant towns and villages, yet in no hurry to reach them. On
these roads the lark in summer is continually heard; nests are plentiful
in the hedges and dry ditches; and on the grassy banks, and at the feet
of the bowed dikes, the blue-eyed speedwell smiles its benison on the
passing wayfarer. On these roads you may walk for a year and
encounter nothing more remarkable than the country cart, troops of tawny
children from the woods, laden with primroses, and at long intervals—for
people in this district live to a ripe age—a black funeral creeping in
from some remote hamlet; and to this last the people reverently doff
their hats and stand aside. Death does not walk about here often,
but when he does, he receives as much respect as the squire himself.
Everything round one is unhurried, quiet, moss-grown, and orderly.
Season follows in the track of season, and one year can hardly be
distinguished from another. Time should be measured here by the
silent dial, rather than by the ticking clock, or by the chimes of the
church. Dreamthorp can boast of a respectable antiquity, and in it
the trade of the builder is unknown. Ever since I remember, not a
single stone has been laid on the top of another. The castle,
inhabited now by jackdaws and starlings, is old; the chapel which
adjoins it is older still; and the lake behind both, and in which their
shadows sleep, is, I suppose, as old as Adam. A fountain in the
market-place, all mouths and faces and curious arabesques—as dry,
however, as the castle moat—has a tradition connected with it; and a
great noble riding through the street one day several hundred years ago,
was shot from a window by a man whom he had injured. The death of
this noble is the chief link which connects the place with authentic
history. The houses are old, and remote dates may yet be
deciphered on the stones above the doors; the apple-trees are mossed and
ancient; countless generations of sparrows have bred in the thatched
roofs, and thereon have chirped out their lives. In every room of
the place men have been born, men have died. On Dreamthorp
centuries have fallen, and have left no more trace than have last
winter's snowflakes. This commonplace sequence and flowing on of
life is immeasurably affecting. That winter morning when Charles
lost his head in front of the banqueting-hall of his own palace, the
icicles hung from the eaves of the houses here, and the clown kicked the
snowballs from his clouted shoon, and thought but of his supper when, at
three o'clock, the red sun set in the purple mist. On that Sunday
in June while Waterloo was going on, the gossips, after morning service,
stood on the country roads discussing agricultural prospects, without
the slightest suspicion that the day passing over their heads would be a
famous one in the calendar. Battles have been fought, kings have
died, history has transacted itself; but, all unheeding and untouched,
Dreamthorp has watched apple-trees redden, and wheat ripen, and smoked
its pipe, and quaffed its mug of beer, and rejoiced over its newborn
children, and with proper solemnity carried its dead to the churchyard.
As I gaze on the village of my adoption, I think of many things very far
removed, and seem to get closer to them. The last setting sun that
Shakspeare saw reddened the windows here, and struck warmly on the faces
of the hinds coming home from the fields. The mighty storm that
raged while Cromwell lay a-dying made all the oak-woods groan round
about here, and tore the thatch from the very roofs I gaze upon.
When I think of this, I can almost, so to speak, lay my hand on
Shakspeare and on Cromwell. These poor walls were contemporaries
of both, and I find something affecting in the thought. The mere
soil is, of course, far older than either, but it does not touch
one in the same way. A wall is the creation of a human hand, the
soil is not.
This place suits my whim, and I like it better year after year. As
with everything else, since I began to love it I find it gradually
growing beautiful. Dreamthorp—a castle, a chapel, a lake, a
straggling strip of gray houses, with a blue film of smoke over all—lies
embosomed in emerald. Summer, with its daisies, runs up to every
cottage door. From the little height where I am now sitting, I see
it beneath me. Nothing could be more peaceful. The wind and
the birds fly over it. A passing sunbeam makes brilliant a white
gable-end, and brings out the colours of the blossomed apple-tree
beyond, and disappears. I see figures in the street, but hear them
not. The hands on the church clock seem always pointing to one
hour. Time has fallen asleep in the afternoon sunshine. I
make a frame of my fingers, and look at my picture. On the walls
of the next Academy's Exhibition will hang nothing half so beautiful!
My village is, I think, a special favourite of summer's. Every
window-sill in it she touches with colour and fragrance; everywhere she
wakens the drowsy murmurs of the hives; every place she scents with
apple-blossom. Traces of her hand are to be seen on the weir
beside the ruined mill; and even the canal, along which the barges come
and go, has a great white water-lily asleep on its olive-coloured face.
Never was velvet on a monarch's robe so gorgeous as the green mosses
that be-ruff the roofs of farm and cottage, when the sunbeam slants on
them and goes. The old road out towards the common, and the hoary
dikes that might have been built in the reign of Alfred, have not been
forgotten by the generous adorning season; for every fissure has its
mossy cushion, and the old blocks themselves are washed by the loveliest
gray-green lichens in the world, and the large loose stones lying on the
ground have gathered to themselves the peacefulest mossy coverings.
Some of these have not been disturbed for a century. Summer has
adorned my village as gaily, and taken as much pleasure in the task, as
the people of old, when Elizabeth was queen, took in the adornment of
the May-pole against a summer festival. And, just think, not only
Dreamthorp, but every English village she has made beautiful after one
fashion or another—making vivid green the hill slope on which straggling
white Welsh hamlets hang right opposite the sea; drowning in
apple-blossom the red Sussex ones in the fat valley. And think,
once more, every spear of grass in England she has touched with a
livelier green; the crest of every bird she has burnished; every old
wall between the four seas has received her mossy and licheny
attentions; every nook in every forest she has sown with pale flowers,
every marsh she has dashed with the fires of the marigold. And in
the wonderful night the moon knows, she hangs—the planet on which so
many millions of us fight, and sin, and agonise, and die—a sphere of
glow-worm light.
Having discoursed so long about Dreamthorp, it is but fair that I should
now introduce you to her lions. These are, for the most part, of a
commonplace kind; and I am afraid that, if you wish to find romance in
them, you must bring it with you. I might speak of the old
church-tower, or of the church-yard beneath it, in which the village
holds its dead, each resting-place marked by a simple stone, on which is
inscribed the name and age of the sleeper, and a Scripture text beneath,
in which live our hopes of immortality. But, on the whole, perhaps
it will be better to begin with the canal, which wears on its
olive-coloured face the big white water-lily already chronicled.
Such a secluded place is Dreamthorp that the railway does not come near,
and the canal is the only thing that connects it with the world.
It stands high, and from it the undulating country may be seen
stretching away into the gray of distance, with hills and woods, and
stains of smoke which mark the sites of villages. Every now and
then a horse comes staggering along the towing-path, trailing a sleepy
barge filled with merchandise. A quiet, indolent life these
barge-men lead in the summer days. One lies stretched at his
length on the sun-heated plank; his comrade sits smoking in the little
dog-hutch, which I suppose he calls a cabin. Silently they come
and go; silently the wooden bridge lifts to let them through. The
horse stops at the bridge-house for a drink, and there I like to talk a
little with the men. They serve instead of a newspaper, and retail
with great willingness the news they have picked up in their progress
from town to town. I am told they sometimes marvel who the old
gentleman is who accosts them from beneath a huge umbrella in the sun,
and that they think him either very wise or very foolish. Not in
the least unnatural! We are great friends, I believe—evidence of
which they occasionally exhibit by requesting me to disburse a trifle
for drink-money. This canal is a great haunt of mine of an
evening. The water hardly invites one to bathe in it, and a
delicate stomach might suspect the flavour of the eels caught therein;
yet, to my thinking, it is not in the least destitute of beauty. A
barge trailing up through it in the sunset is a pretty sight; and the
heavenly crimsons and purples sleep quite lovingly upon its glossy
ripples. Nor does the evening star disdain it, for as I walk along
I see it mirrored therein as clearly as in the waters of the
Mediterranean itself.
The old castle and chapel already alluded to are, perhaps, to a stranger,
the points of attraction in Dreamthorp. Back from the houses is
the lake, on the green sloping banks of which, with broken windows and
tombs, the ruins stand. As it is noon, and the weather is warm,
let us go and sit on a turret. Here, on these very steps, as old
ballads tell, a queen sat once, day after day, looking southward for the
light of returning spears. I bethink me that yesterday, no further
gone, I went to visit a consumptive shoemaker; seated here I can single
out his very house, nay, the very window of the room in which he is
lying. On that straw roof might the raven alight, and flap his
sable wings. There, at this moment, is the supreme tragedy being
enacted. A woman is weeping there, and little children are looking
on with a sore bewilderment. Before nightfall the poor peaked face
of the bowed artisan will have gathered its ineffable peace, and the
widow will be led away from the bedside by the tenderness of neighbours,
and the cries of the orphan brood will be stilled. And yet this
present indubitable suffering and loss does not touch me like the sorrow
of the woman of the ballad, the phantom probably of a minstrel's brain.
The shoemaker will be forgotten—I shall be forgotten; and long after
visitors will sit here and look out on the landscape and murmur the
simple lines, But why do death and dying obtrude themselves at the
present moment? On the turret opposite, about the distance of a
gunshot, is as pretty a sight as eye could wish to see. Two young
people, strangers apparently, have come to visit the ruin. Neither
the ballad queen, nor the shoemaker down yonder, whose respirations are
getting shorter and shorter, touches them in the least. They are
merry and happy, and the graybeard turret has not the heart to thrust a
foolish moral upon them. They would not thank him if he did, I
daresay. Perhaps they could not understand him. Time enough!
Twenty years hence they will be able to sit down at his feet, and count
griefs with him, and tell him tale for tale. Human hearts get
ruinous in so much less time than stone walls and towers. See, the
young man has thrown himself down at the girl's feet on a little space
of grass. In her scarlet cloak she looks like a blossom springing
out of a crevice on the ruined steps. He gives her a flower, and
she bows her face down over it almost to her knees. What did the
flower say? Is it to hide a blush? He looks delighted; and I
almost fancy I see a proud colour on his brow. As I gaze, these
young people make for me a perfect idyl. The generous, ungrudging
sun, the melancholy ruin, decked, like mad Lear, with the flowers and
ivies of forgetfulness and grief, and between them, sweet and
evanescent, human truth and love!
Love!—does it yet walk the world, or is it imprisoned in poems and
romances? Has not the circulating library become the sole home of
the passion? Is love not become the exclusive property of
novelists and playwrights, to be used by them only for professional
purposes? Surely, if the men I see are lovers, or ever have been
lovers, they would be nobler than they are. The knowledge that he
is beloved should—must make a man tender, gentle, upright, pure.
While yet a youngster in a jacket, I can remember falling desperately in
love with a young lady several years my senior—after the fashion of
youngsters in jackets. Could I have fibbed in these days?
Could I have betrayed a comrade? Could I have stolen eggs or
callow young from the nest? Could I have stood quietly by and seen
the weak or the maimed bullied? Nay, verily! In these absurd
days she lighted up the whole world for me. To sit in the same
room with her was like the happiness of perpetual holiday; when she
asked me to run a message for her, or to do any, the slightest, service
for her, I felt as if a patent of nobility were conferred on me. I
kept my passion to myself, like a cake, and nibbled it in private.
Juliet was several years my senior, and had a lover—was, in point of
fact, actually engaged; and, in looking back, I can remember I was too
much in love to feel the slightest twinge of jealousy. I remember
also seeing Romeo for the first time, and thinking him a greater man
than Caesar or Napoleon. The worth I credited him with, the
cleverness, the goodness, the everything! He awed me by his manner
and bearing. He accepted that girl's love coolly and as a matter
of course; it put him no more about than a crown and sceptre puts about
a king. What I would have given my life to possess—being only
fourteen, it was not much to part with after all—he wore lightly, as he
wore his gloves or his cane. It did not seem a bit too good for
him. His self-possession appalled me. If I had seen him take
the sun out of the sky, and put it into his breeches' pocket, I don't
think I should have been in the least degree surprised. Well,
years after, when I had discarded my passion with my jacket, I have
assisted this middle-aged Romeo home from a roystering wine-party, and
heard him hiccup out his marital annoyances, with the strangest
remembrances of old times, and the strangest deductions therefrom.
Did that man with the idiotic laugh and the blurred utterance ever love?
Was he ever capable of loving? I protest I have my doubts.
But where are my young people? Gone! So it is always.
We begin to moralise and look wise, and Beauty, who is something of a
coquette, and of an exacting turn of mind, and likes attentions, gets
disgusted with our wisdom or our stupidity, and goes off in a huff.
Let the baggage go!
The ruined chapel adjoins the ruined castle on which I am now sitting, and
is evidently a building of much older date. It is a mere shell
now. It is quite roofless, ivy covers it in part; the stone
tracery of the great western window is yet intact, but the coloured
glass is gone with the splendid vestments of the abbot, the fuming
incense, the chanting choirs, and the patient, sad-eyed monks, who
muttered Aves, shrived guilt, and illuminated missals. Time
was when this place breathed actual benedictions, and was a home of
active peace. At present it is visited only by the stranger, and
delights but the antiquary. The village people have so little
respect for it, that they do not even consider it haunted. There
are several tombs in the interior bearing knights' escutcheons, which
time has sadly defaced. The dust you stand upon is noble.
Earls have been brought here in dinted mail from battle, and earls'
wives from the pangs of child-bearing. The last trumpet will break
the slumber of a right honourable company. One of the tombs—the
most perfect of all in point of preservation—I look at often, and try to
conjecture what it commemorates. With all my fancies, I can get no
further than the old story of love and death. There, on the slab,
the white figures sleep; marble hands, folded in prayer, on marble
breasts. And I like to think that he was brave, she beautiful;
that although the monument is worn by time, and sullied by the stains of
the weather, the qualities which it commemorates—husbandly and wifely
affection, courtesy, courage, knightly scorn of wrong and falsehood,
meekness, penitence, charity—are existing yet somewhere, recognisable by
each other. The man who in this world can keep the whiteness of
his soul, is not likely to lose it in any other.
In summer I spent a good deal of time floating about the lake. The
landing-place to which my boat is tethered is ruinous, like the chapel
and palace, and my embarkation causes quite a stir in the sleepy little
village. Small boys leave their games and mud-pies, and gather
round in silence; they have seen me get off a hundred times, but their
interest in the matter seems always new. Not unfrequently an idle
cobbler, in red nightcap and leathern apron, leans on a broken stile,
and honours my proceedings with his attention. I shoot, off, and
the human knot dissolves. The lake contains three islands, each
with a solitary tree, and on these islands the swans breed. I feed
the birds daily with bits of bread. See, one comes gliding towards
me, with superbly arched neck to receive its customary alms! How
wildly beautiful its motions! How haughtily it begs! The
green pasture lands run down to the edge of the water, and into it in
the afternoons the red kine wade and stand knee-deep in their shadows,
surrounded by troops of flies. Patiently the honest creatures
abide the attacks of their tormentors. Now one swishes itself with
its tail—now its neighbour flaps a huge ear. I draw my oars
alongside, and let my boat float at its own will. The soft blue
heavenly abysses, the wandering streams of vapour, the long beaches of
rippled cloud, are glassed and repeated in the lake. Dreamthorp is
silent as a picture, the voices of the children are mute; and the smoke
from the houses, the blue pillars all sloping in one angle, float upward
as if in sleep. Grave and stern the old castle rises from its
emerald banks, which long ago came down to the lake in terrace on
terrace, gay with fruits and flowers, and with stone nymph and satyrs
hid in every nook. Silent and empty enough to-day! A flock
of daws suddenly bursts out from a turret, and round and round they
wheel, as if in panic. Has some great scandal exploded? Has
a conspiracy been discovered? Has a revolution broken out?
The excitement has subsided, and one of them, perched on the old
banner-staff, chatters confidentially to himself as he, sideways, eyes
the world beneath him. Floating about thus, time passes swiftly,
for, before I know where I am, the kine have withdrawn from the lake to
couch on the herbage, while one on a little height is lowing for the
milkmaid and her pails. Along the road I see the labourers coming
home for supper, while the sun setting behind me makes the village
windows blaze; and so I take out my oars, and pull leisurely through
waters faintly flushed with evening colours.
I do not think that Mr. Buckle could have written his "History of
Civilisation" in Dreamthorp, because in it books, conversation, and the
other appurtenances of intellectual life, are not to be procured.
I am acquainted with birds, and the building of nests—with wild-flowers,
and the seasons in which they blow—but with the big world far away, with
what men and women are thinking, and doing, and saying, I am acquainted
only through the Times, and the occasional magazine or review,
sent by friends whom I have not looked upon for years, but by whom, it
seems, I am not yet forgotten. The village has but few
intellectual wants, and the intellectual supply is strictly measured by
the demand. Still there is something. Down in the village,
and opposite the curiously-carved fountain, is a schoolroom which can
accommodate a couple of hundred people on a pinch. There are our
public meetings held. Musical entertainments have been given there
by a single performer. In that schoolroom last winter an American
biologist terrified the villagers, and, to their simple understandings,
mingled up the next world with this. Now and again some rare bird
of an itinerant lecturer covers dead walls with posters, yellow and
blue, and to that schoolroom we flock to hear him. His rounded
periods the eloquent gentleman devolves amidst a respectful silence.
His audience do not understand him, but they see that the clergyman
does, and the doctor does; and so they are content, and look as
attentive and wise as possible. Then, in connexion with the
schoolroom, there is a public library, where books are exchanged once a
month. This library is a kind of Greenwich Hospital for disabled
novels and romances. Each of these books has been in the wars;
some are unquestionable antiques. The tears of three generations
have fallen upon their dusky pages. The heroes and the heroines
are of another age than ours. Sir Charles Grandison is standing
with his hat under his arm. Tom Jones plops from the tree into the
water, to the infinite distress of Sophia. Moses comes home from
market with his stock of shagreen spectacles. Lovers, warriors,
and villains—as dead to the present generation of readers as
Cambyses—are weeping, fighting, and intriguing. These books,
tattered and torn as they are, are read with delight to-day. The
viands are celestial if set forth on a dingy tablecloth. The gaps
and chasms which occur in pathetic or perilous chapters are felt to be
personal calamities. It is with a certain feeling of tenderness
that I look upon these books; I think of the dead fingers that have
turned over the leaves, of the dead eyes that have travelled along the
lines. An old novel has a history of its own. When fresh and
new, and before it had breathed its secret, it lay on my lady's table.
She killed the weary day with it, and when night came it was placed
beneath her pillow. At the sea-side a couple of foolish heads have
bent over it, hands have touched and tingled, and it has heard vows and
protestations as passionate as any its pages contained. Coming
down in the world, Cinderella in the kitchen has blubbered over it by
the light of a surreptitious candle, conceiving herself the while the
magnificent Georgiana, and Lord Mordaunt, Georgiana's lover, the pot-boy
round the corner. Tied up with many a dingy brother, the
auctioneer knocks the bundle down to the bidder of a few pence, and it
finds its way to the quiet cove of some village library, where with some
difficulty—as if from want of teeth, and with numerous interruptions—as
if from lack of memory, it tells its old stories, and wakes tears, and
blushes, and laughter as of yore. Thus it spends its age, and in a
few years it will become unintelligible, and then, in the dust-bin, like
poor human mortals in the grave, it will rest from all its labours.
It is impossible to estimate the benefit which such books have
conferred. How often have they loosed the chain of circumstance!
What unfamiliar tears—what unfamiliar laughter they have caused!
What chivalry and tenderness they have infused into rustic loves!
Of what weary hours they have cheated and beguiled their readers!
The big, solemn history-books are in excellent preservation; the
story-books are defaced and frayed, and their out-of-elbows condition is
their pride, and the best justification of their existence. They
are tashed, as roses are, by being eagerly handled and smelt. I
observe, too, that the most ancient romances are not in every case the
most severely worn. It is the pace that tells in horses, men, and
books. There are Nestors wonderfully hale; there are juveniles in
a state of dilapidation. One of the youngest books, "The Old
Curiosity Shop," is absolutely falling to pieces. That book, like
Italy, is possessor of the fatal gift; but happily, in its case,
everything can be rectified by a new edition. We have buried
warriors and poets, princes and queens, but no one of these was
followed, to the grave by sincerer mourners than was little Nell.
Besides the itinerant lecturer, and the permanent library, we have the
Sunday sermon.
These sum up the intellectual aids and furtherances of the whole place.
We have a church and a chapel, and I attend both. The Dreamthorp
people are Dissenters, for the most part; why, I never could understand;
because dissent implies a certain intellectual effort. But
Dissenters they are, and Dissenters they are likely to remain. In
an ungainly building, filled with hard gaunt pews, without an organ,
without a touch of colour in the windows, with nothing to stir the
imagination or the devotional sense, the simple people worship. On
Sunday, they are put upon a diet of spiritual bread-and-water.
Personally, I should desire more generous food. But the labouring
people listen attentively, till once they fall asleep, and they wake up
to receive the benediction with a feeling of having done their duty.
They know they ought to go to chapel, and they go. I go likewise,
from habit, although I have long ago lost the power of following a
discourse. In my pew, and whilst the clergyman is going on, I
think of the strangest things—of the tree at the window, of the
congregation of the dead outside, of the wheatfields and the corn-fields
beyond and all around. And the odd thing is, that it is during
sermon only that my mind flies off at a tangent and busies itself with
things removed from the place and the circumstances. Whenever it
is finished fancy returns from her wanderings, and I am alive to the
objects around me. The clergyman knows my humour, and is good
Christian enough to forgive me; and he smiles good-humouredly when I ask
him to let me have the chapel keys, that I may enter, when in the mood,
and preach a sermon to myself. To my mind, an empty chapel is
impressive; a crowded one, comparatively a commonplace affair.
Alone, I could choose my own text, and my silent discourse would not be
without its practical applications.
An idle life I live in this place, as the world counts it;
but then I have the satisfaction of differing from the world as to the
meaning of idleness. A windmill twirling its arms all day is
admirable only when there is corn to grind. Twirling its arms for
the mere barren pleasure of twirling them, or for the sake of looking
busy, does not deserve any rapturous paean of praise. I must be
made happy after my own fashion, not after the fashion of other people.
Here I can live as I please, here I can throw the reins on the neck of
my whim. Here I play with my own thoughts; here I ripen far the
grave.
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