Part 8 (2/2)

must have owed much to Dr. Young-a debt which the poet acknowledged, as we have already seen, in no n.i.g.g.ardly way. Amongst Milton's Latin letters is the following, which has been translated by Professor Ma.s.son thus: 'Although I had resolved with myself, most excellent preceptor, to send you a certain small epistle composed in metrical numbers, yet I did not consider that I had done enough unless I also wrote something in prose: for, truly, the singular and boundless grat.i.tude of my mind which your deserts justly claim from me was not to be expressed in that cramped mode of speech, straitened by fixed feet and syllables, but in a free oration-nay, rather, if it were possible, in an Asiatic exuberance of words. To express sufficiently how much I owe you, were a work far greater than my strength, even if I should call into play all those commonplaces of argument which Aristotle or that dialectician of Paris (Ramus) has collected, or even if I should exhaust all the fountains of oratory. You complain as justly that my letters have been to you very few and very short; but I, on the other hand, do not so much grieve that I have been remiss in a duty so pleasant and so enviable, as I rejoice, and all but exult, at having such a place in your friends.h.i.+p, as that you should care to ask for frequent letters from me. That I should never have written to you for over more than three years, I pray you will not misconceive, but, in accordance with your wonderful indulgence and candour, put the more charitable construction on it; for I call G.o.d to witness how much, as a father, I regard you, with what singular devotion I have always followed you in thought, and how I feared to trouble you with my writings. In sooth, I make it my first care, that since there is nothing else to commend my letters, that their rarity may commend them.

Next, as out of that most vehement desire after you which I feel, I always fancy you with me, and speak to you, and beheld you as if you were present, and so, as always happens in love, soothe my grief by a certain vain imagination of your presence, it is, in truth, my fear, as soon as I meditate sending you a letter, that it should suddenly come into my mind by what an interval of earth you are distant from me, and so the grief of your absence, already nearly lulled, should grow fresh and break up my sweet dream. The Hebrew Bible, your truly most acceptable gift, I have already received. These lines I have written in London, in the midst of town distractions, not, as usual, surrounded by books; if, therefore, anything in this epistle should please you less than might be, and disappoint your expectations, it will be made up for by another more elaborate one as soon as I have returned to the haunts of the Muses.'

When the above letter was written, Milton had become a Cambridge student, where he was to experience a new kind of tutor. Milton could not get on with Chappell as he did with Young. The tie between the Stowmarket Vicar and the poet was of a much more cordial character.

Again the poet appears to have forwarded the following letter to the Stowmarket Vicarage. It is to be feared that few such precious epistles find their way there now. Milton writes to the Doctor: 'On looking at your letter, most excellent preceptor, this alone struck me as superfluous, that you excused your slowness in writing; for though nothing could come to me more desirable than your letters, how could I or ought I to hope that you should have so much leisure from serious and more sacred affairs, especially as that is a matter entirely of kindness, and not at all of duty? That, however, I should suspect that you had forgotten me, your so many recent kindnesses to me would by no means allow. I do not see how you could dismiss out of your memory one laden with so great benefits by you. Having been invited by you to your part of the country, as soon as spring has a little advanced I will gladly come to enjoy the delights of the year, and not less of your conversation, and will then withdraw myself from the din of town to your Stoa of the Iceni, as to that most celebrated porch of Zeno or the Tusculan Villa of Cicero, where you with moderate means, but regal spirit, like some Serra.n.u.s or Curius, placidly reign in your little farm, and contemning fortune, hold as it were a triumph over riches, ambition, pomp, luxury, and whatever the herd of man admire and are amazed by. But as you have deprecated the blame of slowness, you will also, I hope, pardon me the fault of haste; for having put off this letter, I preferred writing little, and that rather in a slovenly manner, to not writing at all. Farewell, much-to-be respected Sir.'

The question is, Did Milton carry out this intention, and pay Stowmarket a visit? Professor Ma.s.son thinks he may have been there in the memorable summer and autumn of 1630. The Rev. Mr. Hollingsworth, the Stowmarket historian argues that it is not unlikely that several, if not many, visits, extending over a period of thirty years, while the tutor held the living, were made by the poet to the place. Tradition has constantly a.s.sociated his name with the mulberry-trees of the Vicarage, which he planted, but of these only one remains. 'This venerable relic of the past,' continues the Vicar, 'is much decayed, and is still in vigorous bearing. Its girth, before it breaks into branches, is ten feet, and I have had in one season as much as ten gallons from the pure juices of its fruits, which yields a highly flavoured and brilliant-coloured wine.' It stands a few yards distant from the oldest part of the house, and opposite the windows of an upstair double room, which was formerly the sitting-parlour of the Vicar, and where, it is to be believed, the poet and his friend had many a talk of the way to advance religion and liberty in the land, to remove hirelings out of the Church, and to abolish the Bishops. There too, perhaps, might have come to the guest visions of 'Paradise Lost.' In his first work Milton throws out something like a hint of the great poem which he was in time to write. 'Then, amidst,' to quote his own sonorous language, 'the hymns and hallelujahs of saints, _someone_ may, perhaps, be heard offering in high strains, in new and lofty measures, to sing and celebrate Thy Divine mercies and marvellous judgments in this land throughout all ages.' We can easily believe how, in the Stowmarket Vicarage, the plan of the poet may have been talked over, and the heart of the poet encouraged to the work. Regarding Young as Milton did, we may be sure that he would have been only too glad to listen to his suggestions and adopt his advice. There must have been a good deal of plain living and high thinking at the Stowmarket Vicarage when Milton came there as an occasional guest. This is the more probable as Milton's earliest publications were in support of the views of Smectymnian divines. His friends.h.i.+p for Young probably led him into the field of controversy, for he owns that he was not disposed to this manner of writing 'wherein, knowing myself inferior to myself, led by the genial power of nature to another task, I have the use, as I may account, but of my left hand.' It is a fact that Milton was thus drawn into the controversy, and what more natural than that he should have been induced to do so by the Stowmarket Vicar in the Stowmarket Vicarage? The poet's family were familiar with that part of Suffolk, and his brother, Sir Christopher, who was a stanch Royalist and barrister, lived at Ipswich, but twelve miles off. He went to see Milton, and Milton might have visited Ipswich and Stowmarket at the same time. Be that as it may, tradition and probability alike justify the belief that Milton came to Stowmarket, and that he went away all the wiser and better, all the stronger to do good work for man and G.o.d, for his age and all succeeding ages. Young, as it may be inferred, was held in high honour by his friends. He was spoken of by two neighbouring ejected Rectors as the reverend, learned, orthodox, prudent, and holy Dr. Young. When he died, an epitaph was inscribed with some care by a friendly hand, and an unwilling admission is made of the opposition he had encountered. It is now illegible, and some of its lines appear to have been carefully erased-by some High Church chisel, probably. But the following copy was made when the epitaph was fresh and legible:

'Here is committed to earth's trust Wise, pious, spotlesse, learned dust, Who living more adorned the place Than the place him. Such was G.o.d's grace.'

Is the verse of this epitaph from Milton's pen or not? Mr. Hollingsworth writes: 'The probability is quite in favour that the pupil should write the last memorial of one whom he so highly honoured and loved as his old master. Nor is the verse itself, with the exception of the last line, unlike the character of Milton's poetry, and this last may have been mutilated and rendered inharmonious by the action of the stone-cutter, who also confused the death of the father and son.' It is pleasant to think, not only that Milton now and then came to the Stowmarket Vicarage, but that in the church itself there is a slight record of his poetical fame. Let me add, as a further ill.u.s.tration of the connection of the great poet with the county of Suffolk, that I am informed one of the family of the Meadowses, of Witnesham, was for a time one of his secretaries.

Young died, aged sixty-eight, in the year 1655, when Milton was fully embarked in public life, when he could spare but little time; but we may be sure that he would be the last at that time of life to forget all that he owed to his tutor Young. Wife and son had predeceased the Vicar. It seems as if there was no one left but the poet to record on the marble in the middle aisle, in front of the present reading-desk, the virtues of a character which had long exercised so beneficial an influence on his own, and which he had loved so well. Milton's regret for the loss of such a guide, philosopher, and friend must have been lasting and sincere.

CHAPTER XI.

IN CONSTABLE'S COUNTY.

East Bergholt-The Valley of the Stour-Painting from nature-East Anglian girls.

Charles Kingsley was wont to glorify the teaching of the hills, and to maintain that the man of the mountain is more imaginative and poetical than the man of the plain. There are many Scotch people, mostly those born in the Highlands, who tell us much the same. If the theory be true-and I am not aware that it is-the exceptions are striking and many.

Lincolns.h.i.+re is rather a flat country, but it gave us (I can never bring myself to call him Lord) Alfred Tennyson. Many of our greatest poets and artists were c.o.c.kneys; and Constable, that sweet painter of cornfields and shady lanes and quiet rivers, used to say that the scenes of his boyhood made him a painter. I was one autumn in Constable's county, and I do not wonder at it. It is a wonderful district. I trod all the while, it seemed to me, on enchanted ground: in the gilded mist of autumn, with its river and its marsh lands, where the cows lazily fed-or got under the pollards to be out of the way of the flies-where laughing children swarmed along the hedges in pursuit of the ripe blackberry, where every cottage front was a thing of beauty, with its ivy creeping up the roof or over the wall; while the little garden was a ma.s.s of flowers.

We expected to see the old G.o.ds and G.o.ddesses again to partic.i.p.ate in the joyousness of an ancient mirth.

Nor was it altogether a flat land, sacred to fat cattle and wheat and turnips. All round me were the elements of romance. At one end of the Vale of Dedham is a hill whence you may look all along the valley (Constable has made it the subject of one of his pictures) as far as Harwich; and as I lingered by the Stour-the river which divides Ess.e.x and Suffolk-East Bergholt, clothed with woods and crowned with a church, in which there is a stained-gla.s.s window put up in honour of Constable, and a baptismal font, the gift of Constable's brother, unfolded to my wondering eye all her rural charms. There are people who love to climb hills; I hate to do so. It is all vanity and vexation of spirit; when you get to the top of one hill the chances are all you see is another hill, to the top of which you will have to climb. Give me a country lane, with its luxuriant hedges, its shady trees, its flowers, its richness of greensward, its pigs and poultry and farmyard; there is poetry in such nooks and corners of the earth, as Burns and Bloomfield and Gerald Ma.s.sey found. No wonder the place made Constable an artist, and an artist whose name will not speedily pa.s.s away. My dear sir or madam, the next time you are on your way from London to Ipswich, don't rush along at express speed; get out at Ardleigh, make your way to the Vale of Dedham, then walk along the Stour, and cross it by a couple of rustic bridges, and you are at East Bergholt, in Suffolk, where Constable was born, and if you do so you will bless me evermore. Then, if you like, rejoin the train at Manningtree, and resume your journey. Few East Anglians even are aware of the wealth of beauty in that quiet corner.

'The beauty of the surrounding scenery,' writes Constable's biographer, 'its gentle declivities, its luxuriant meadows, flats sprinkled with flocks and herds, its well-cultivated Uplands, its woods and rivers, with mansions scattered, and churches, farms, and picturesque cottages-all impart to this spot an amenity and elegance hardly anywhere else to be found.'

The Constables have been long in the district. The grandfather was a farmer at a village close by. The father, who was well-to-do, purchased a water-mill at Dedham and two windmills at East Bergholt, where he lived. The great artist, his son John, was born in the last century, and was educated at Lavenham and the Dedham Grammar School, and when the lad had reached sixteen or seventeen became addicted to painting, his studio being in the house of a Mr. John Dunthorne, a painter and glazier, with whom he remained on terms of the greatest intimacy for many years. The father would fain have made the son a farmer. He preferred to be a miller, and in his young days was known in the district as the handsome miller. His windmills, when he took to painting, were wonderful, and well deserved the criticism of his brother, who used to say, 'When I look at a windmill painted by John, I see that it will go round, which is not always the case with those of other artists,' for the simple reason that John knew what he was about, which the others did not. Again, his industrial career helped him in another way. A miller learns to study the clouds, and Constable's clouds were exceptionally life-like and real.

The handsome young miller soon acquired artistic friends, one of them being Sir George Beaumont, the guide, philosopher, and friend of most of the geniuses of that time. Said another to him, 'Do not trouble yourself about inventing figures for a landscape; you cannot remain an hour in a spot without the appearance of some living thing, that will in all probability better accord with the scene and the time of day than any invention of your own.' After a visit to his artist friends in London, he resumed his mill life, and in 1779 he finally commenced his artistic career, and painted all the country round. His studies were chiefly Dedham, East Bergholt, the Valley of the Stour, and the neighbouring village of Stratford. At Stoke Nayland he painted an altar-piece for the church. There is also another altar-piece in a neighbouring church, but his altar-pieces are not known or treasured like his other works.

Cooper tells a good story of Constable. One day Stodart, the sculptor, met Fuseli starting forth with an old umbrella. 'Why do you carry the umbrella?' asked the sculptor. 'I am going to see Constable,' was the reply, 'and he is always painting rain.' One can only remark that, if Constable was always painting rain, he always did it well.

Another good story was told Redgrave by Lee. 'I hear you sell all your pictures,' said Constable to the younger landscape-painter. 'Why, yes,'

said Lee; 'I'm pretty fortunate. Don't you sell yours?' 'No,' said Constable, 'I don't sell any of my pictures, and I'll tell you why: when I paint a _bad_ picture I don't like to part with it, and when I paint a _good_ one I like to keep it.' It is well known that one year when Constable was on the Council of the Royal Academy, one of his own pictures was pa.s.sed by mistake before the judges. 'Cross it,' said one.

'It won't do,' said another. 'Pa.s.s on,' said a third. And the carpenter was just about to chalk it with a cross, when he read the name of 'John Constable.' Of course there were lame apologies, and the picture was taken from the condemned heap and placed with the works of his brother Academicians. But after work was over Constable took the picture under his arm, and, despite the remonstrance of his brother colleagues, marched off with it, saving: 'I can't think of its being hung after it has been fairly turned out. The work so condemned was the 'Stream bordered in with Willows,' now in the South Kensington Museum. Leslie once remarked to Redgrave that he would give any work he had painted for it, so warmly did he admire it.

'Constable is the best landscape-painter we have,' wrote Frith to his mother in 1835. 'He is a very merry fellow, and very rich. He told us an anecdote of a man who came to look at his pictures; he was a gardener.

One day he called him into his painting-room to look at his pictures, when the man made the usual vulgar remarks, such as, ”Did you do all this, sir?” ”Yes.” ”What, all this?” ”Yes.” ”What, frame and all?”

At last he came to an empty frame that was hung against the wall without any picture in it, when he said to Constable, ”But you don't call this picture quite finished, do you, sir?” Constable said that quite sickened him, and he never let any ignoramuses ever see his pictures again, or frames either.'

Constable's great merits, writes Mr. Frith, were first recognised in France, with the result upon French landscape art that is felt at the present time. His advice to Frith was: 'Never do anything without nature before you if it be possible to have it. See those weeds and the dock leaves? They are to come into the foreground of this picture. I know dock leaves pretty well, but I should not attempt to introduce them into a picture without having them before me.'

Constable died very suddenly in 1837. His fame, now that he is dead, is greater than when he was alive. His work abides in all its strength.

There is little in East Bergholt to remind one of Constable, where his reputation remains as that of a genial and kindly-hearted man; but the landscape in all its essential features remains the same. The house in which he was born was pulled down in 1841, which is a great pity, as it is described as a large and handsome mansion. But I never saw a small village with so many attractive residences, though why anybody should live in any of them I could not, for the life of me, understand. Yet there they were, quite a street of them, all in beautiful order, as if they were the residences of wealthy citizens in the suburbs of a busy town. They ought to have been filled with handsome girls, as Charles Kingsley tells us East Anglia is famed for the beauty of its women; all I can say, however, is that I saw none of them, or any sign of life anywhere, beyond the inevitable tradesmen's carts. Independently of Constable, East Bergholt claims to be worth a pilgrimage for its rustic beauty, which, however, becomes tame and common as you get away from it.

The church is old, and has a history-of little consequence, however, to anyone now. One of its rectors was burned at Ipswich in Queen Mary's reign. His name, Samuel, ought to be preserved by a Church which, till lately, had few martyrs of its own. East Bergholt has also a Congregational and Primitive Methodist chapel, and a colony of Benedictine nuns, driven away from France by the great Revolution. We are a hospitable people, and we are proud to be so, but have we not just at this time too many refugee nuns and monks in our midst?

<script>