Part 2 (1/2)
He went bathing in Rapparee Cove, and when his tutors were out of sight began blazing at the numbers on the boxes, though warned by ”young Alfie Price” not to; and after a wordy altercation the Kaiser knocked down Alfie, who got up and went for him ”just like a Devon bull.”
”He knacked the Kaiser on the nose, And tapped the ry'al blid. . . .”
The tutors came up and intervened, and Alf was given thirty s.h.i.+llings to keep the matter quiet; but Kaiser Bill swore implacable hate of the English, because of the affront, built his Dreadnoughts and drilled his army to avenge the insult of Rapparee Cove upon the English nation.
Local publications are always, I think, of some interest, even when they are as rough and simple a doggerel as the above; and there are two magazines, printed and published at Barnstaple in the early years of the nineteenth century, and which may be seen in the Athenaeum Library of the town. They are the _Lundy Review_ and _The Cave_, and they contain stories, poetry, puns, epigrams, acrostics, all with the mild, faint flavour of a curate's tea-party in a cathedral town, and yet invested with a kind of charm by the old-fas.h.i.+oned type, the yellowing paper, and a small, dim picture--like the images of ourselves and our furniture which we see in those old, round, diminis.h.i.+ng mirrors--of the life of a century ago. There is poetry of the Lake School fas.h.i.+on, exhortations to Bideford and Woody Bay, to Lynton or ”The Beauties of Devon”; there is more poetry of the Byronic fas.h.i.+on, fierce and satiric invective (yet never, be it understood, transgressing the bounds of decency or good manners!) against the lady of the poet's affection; there are stories, in which love and virtue triumph over temptation and evil-doing; there is, of course, at least one story of a blind girl, and one of a consumptive; there is much harmless punning, and in the acrostics which the ladies of 1820 so much loved are fantastically woven the names of the handsome young women of Barnstaple whose only other record is now upon a tombstone.
There is a strong tone of ”patriotism,” if by that we mean a dignified contempt for foreign manners and customs, foreign thought and foreign speech. I call to mind one article, where the writer is good-humouredly but supremely contemptuous of the French, because of their manner of p.r.o.nouncing cla.s.sical names. What can you expect of a nation, says he, for whom t.i.tus Livy is no better than a ”tom-t.i.t-liv-ing” in a hedge, and Marcus Aurelius, the Emperor philosopher, becomes ”Mark O'Rail,” a mere beggerly, abusive Irishman?
This insularity of ours, which appears in a comic aspect in this article in _The Cave_, continued throughout the nineteenth century, and withstood the shock of the Crimea and the Indian Mutiny without apparently being in any way shaken; it is breaking now, indeed, under the humiliations of the South African War, when we were made to feel our isolation in Europe, and under the stress of this greatest war of all, when at last we feel and say that we are proud to stand with the nations of the Continent in a common cause.
But, in the nineteenth century, not only was our insular prejudice extreme, but there was a pride in our very prejudice, which made it seem hopelessly fixed and stultified. There is a trail of it through all but the greatest writings of that time, Tennyson was not without it, Charles Kingsley, Froude. . . . To the novel it became actually a stock-in-trade, and as such it was used by Henry Kingsley in his novel of ”Ravenshoe.” He was a younger brother of Charles, and his life was as restless and adventurous as a novel. He was, besides being an author, an explorer to the Australian goldfields--from which he came back rich in observation of men and manners, but without having made a pecuniary fortune--the editor of a paper, the _Edinburgh Daily Review_, and a correspondent in the Franco-Prussian War. He was a prolific and too hasty writer, but his novel of ”Ravenshoe,” whose scene is princ.i.p.ally laid on the northern strip of Somerset coast, bordering the Bristol Channel, and which was his own favourite among his works, is considered by many critics to reach a high level, and to stand comparison with the work of his more famous brother. In the _Academy_ of 1901 the following tribute to the book appeared under the initials C.K.B.: ”I first read 'Ravenshoe' at that period when absolute romance and absolute fact have to live together; and very turbulent partners they make. The appeal of the book was instant and permanent. Even now, after a dozen years I cannot read the story unmoved. . . . Each point holds me of old, by sheer force of its human presentation, its resourceful dialogue, its unwearied vitality.”
I first read ”Ravenshoe” in this year of 1917, and to me the world seems to have travelled so far since its publication in 1862, that its aims, its ideals, and its point of view, are hardly credible. Through it all runs that facile spirit of optimism which seems to me to have distinguished much of the thought of the mid-Victorian era, that air of ”All is for the best in this best of all possible worlds,” that insular pride of which I have been speaking, but which to us now appears the narrowest and worst form of parochialism, a certainty that English beef, English beer, English morals, and English standards, were the ultimate excellence towards which a world of misguided foreigners might ultimately aspire, that self-satisfaction, different from pride, that glorying in prejudice, and wilful blindness to all features of national life which do not bear out the theory of an earthly paradise. ”Tell me one thing, Lord Saltire; you have travelled in many countries. Is there any land, east or west, that can give us what this dear old England does--settled order, in which each man knows his place and his duties? It is so easy to be good in England.”
”Well, no. It is the first country in the world. A few bad harvests would make a h.e.l.l of it, though.”
This was written at a time, remember, when the invention of machinery, the rapid growth of industrialism, and the increasing mobility of the population of the world, had broken down the old order of things, had created large fortunes and reduced thousands to dest.i.tution; when men poured into cities and lived crowded and unhealthy in slums, when the opening phase of the grim battle between employer and employed was fought, when trade-unionism was wrested from an unwilling Government, when housing regulations, health regulations, and poor-laws, were incapable of dealing with the wars of misery, poverty, and sickness, they were designed to meet, when little by little vested interests and cla.s.s prejudices were brought before the judgment of reason and found wanting--it was in such a period of our national history that Harry Kingsley could write of ”settled order, in which each one knows his place and his duties.”
This att.i.tude of mind is characteristic of a whole school of mid-Victorian novelists, and George Meredith--whose earliest novel, ”Richard Feverel,” was published about this date--broke many a lance against it, and scolded us and laughed at us, and upset our dignified conception of ourselves, and sometimes, in his irritable affection for his countrymen, took a bludgeon to us, and broke our heads.
I find it also in another and much greater novel, to attack which in a book dealing with this corner of Devon and Somerset is indeed a sort of _lese-majeste_--for, to most people, who says ”Exmoor” says ”Lorna Doone.”
Yet rereading the book in these present days--and even amid the scenes whose beauty and whose character Blackmore has so firmly reproduced--I find the parochialism, the self-satisfaction, and the prejudice, which lumps the whole un-English world, with its revolutions, and ideals, and racial problems, under one heading, as ”dam-furriners.” John Ridd is English, therefore he despises what is not English; he is rather stupid, therefore he despises intellect. ”She was born next day with more mind than body--the worst thing that can befall a man,” he says of his sister Eliza. He is a man, so, at the last stage of self-satisfaction, he despises what is not man--woman. ”Now I spoke gently to Lorna, seeing how much she had been tried; and I praised her for her courage, in not having run away, when she was so unable; and my darling was pleased with this. . . . But you may take this as a general rule, that a woman likes praise from the man she loves, and cannot stop always to balance it.” ”But he led me aside in the course of the evening, and told me all about it; saying that I knew, as well as he did, that it was not women's business. . . . Herein I quite agreed with him, because I always think that women, of whatever mind, are best when least they meddle with things that appertain to men.” As the matter under discussion was a question of their all having their throats cut by the Doones, and the farm being burnt over their heads, it seems to us to have been, at least in some slight degree, the women's business.
The hero of ”Ravenshoe,” Charles, is of the same type, though not drawn with the firmness of touch with which Blackmore depicts John Ridd, and which makes him indeed a living personality to us, even if one to quarrel with.
Charles Ravenshoe is of the type which for many years we have striven to present to the contemplation of the outside world as the perfect Englishman. He is a bluff, hearty fellow, without serious vices, without, also, serious virtues; he has, of course, a perfect self-satisfaction, and a deep and unconscious selfishness, tempered by an easy good-nature and a superficial benevolence, of wis.h.i.+ng to get on well with everybody, and to see everybody round him comfortable. He is without ideals or spiritual aims, and has a contemptuous tolerance for them, as in the case of his brother Cuthbert, who is deeply religious and desirous of entering a monastery, and yet is held by the temptations of the world, so that his mind is a continual striving and renunciation. Charles's relations.h.i.+p with the lady of his choice may be gauged by the following: ”How is Adelaide?” asks his adopted sister.
”Adelaide is all that the fondest lover could desire,” he answers. Did the Englishmen of the nineteenth century really talk like that about their dearest and most intimate affairs?
And yet here is John Ridd, the accepted lover of Lorna, an honest, clumsy, self-satisfied couple of yards of a man, for whom she has to be properly grateful in a world of villains, and yet, for my part, I can never look upon her marriage with him as other than a _mesalliance_.
Of course, it must be understood, even by those who most violently disagree with me, that these strictures are pa.s.sed, not upon Blackmore's novel, but upon the spirit of the age which made John Ridd the hero of such a novel, the spirit which in the dress of ”John Bull”
has insistently presented our less attractive qualities to the outside world as the true Englishman, and which has been, by the outside world, adopted and disliked; while such admirable traits as sincerity, disinterestedness, and self-criticism, have been neglected by us and ignored by them.
For the novel itself it is difficult to have anything but praise. The admirable sense of locality, and the art with which Blackmore has so identified his persons of fiction with actual places till we no longer disa.s.sociate them, but in the church of Oare, or the Doone Valley, or Porlock, or Badgeworthy Water, think and speak of Lorna and John Kidd as if they had had an actual existence; the firm and lively drawing of the lesser characters, the charming pastoral scenes of the life on the Ridds' farm, the really magnificent descriptions of the scenery of Exmoor, and a particular gift of narrative, all place this novel of Blackmore's on a high level in the literature of the nineteenth century. His other novel, of which the scene is laid on this coast, is ”The Maid of Sker,” less well known and of less artistic weight, but of interest to anyone visiting the country between Barnstaple and Lynton, and containing a particularly vivid account of old Barnstaple Fair.
[Ill.u.s.tration: The Doone Valley]
I have spoken of Henry Kingsley's novel ”Ravenshoe,” and it is impossible to write of the literary a.s.sociations of this district without mention of his elder and more famous brother; for though ”Westward Ho!” deals with Bideford and its adjacent villages of Appledore and Northam--it was at the latter village that Amyas Leigh lived with his mother---and this book elects to deal only with the country from Barnstaple northwards and westwards, yet Charles Kingsley is the presiding local deity and guardian spirit, who has loved and lived in and written in praise of the many beautiful spots, cliff and cove, or valley and orchard, from the boundaries of Cornwall to Somerset.
The family of Kingsley, also, is intimately connected with many of the families of these villages. The Rev. J. R. Chanter, Vicar of Parracombe, married a Miss Kingsley. He himself is the author of a short monograph on Lundy, a book which is now very scarce, but which can be seen at the London Library, at the Bideford Public Library, and at the Athenaeum at Barnstaple. The Kingsleys and the Chanters are closely connected through two generations, and the strain of authors.h.i.+p seems to persist in them, one member after another displaying an exceptional talent. Miss Vallings, the young author of a quickly celebrated novel, ”Bindweed,” is a granddaughter of Mr. Chanter, and a grandniece of Kingsley's; and the bold and original writer ”Lucas Mallet” is Canon Kingsley's daughter, and a niece of Henry Kingsley.
CHAPTER III
BARNSTAPLE
Barnstaple is a pleasant English country town, with that air of cleanliness and quiet prosperity, of excellent sanitation and odd historic corners, side by side with big new modern buildings and exquisite green gardens where the old gnarled apple-trees are afroth with blossom in the spring, which is the peculiar flavour of an English country town. The incongruity is the charm; you step from a modern drapery store, with a respectable display of plate-gla.s.s, on to the clean narrow pavement, and find yourself looking down a small dark pa.s.sage opposite, into a sunny paved court, where the houses are cream-washed, and the roofs are atilt in odd delicious angles, and the cas.e.m.e.nt windows have still the old diamond panes of Elizabeth's day, and the sun lies slanting across the pots of wallflower, and the small boys play marbles as they played marbles there when the Armada sailed. Barnstaple is a thriving little modern town, but it has many such charming scenes to the visitor with an observant eye--a narrow cobbled street, with an irregular sag of gabled houses either side, the cream and rose-coloured walls mellow and sunny in the late afternoon, or a cl.u.s.ter of really beautiful half-timbered houses of the sixteenth century, with carved oak doorposts and beam-ends, such as those which are known as Church Row, and stand back from the road, between Boutport Street, and the High Street, by St.
Peter's Church and St. Anne's Chapel. St. Peter's Church, which stands between these two main streets in the very centre of the town, is of the fourteenth century, and has a fine leaded spire, considered to be one of the finest in Europe, which the nineteenth century was anxious to abolish, and replace by a western tower of the more ordinary type.
Fortunately Sir Gilbert Scott was called in to restore the church, and refused to have a hand in destroying the spire, so the old parish church stands as it was built, but with its spire drawn curiously out of the perpendicular by the action of the sun's rays on the lead.