Part 7 (1/2)

Alas, that the only sound from the little hill-platform, the embowered walks, should be the dull rolling of wheels--motors, coaches, omnibuses--in the road below! That is the shadow of his greatness. It is a pitiable thought that one of the fruits of his genius is that it has made his holy retreat fas.h.i.+onable. The villas rise in rows along the edges of the clear lakes, under the craggy fell-sides, where the feathery ashes root among the mimic precipices. A stream of chattering, vacuous, indifferent tourists pours listlessly along the road from _table-d'hote_ to _table-d'hote_. The turbid outflow of the vulgar world seems a profanation of these august haunts. One hopes despairingly that something of the spirit of lonely beauty speaks to these trivial heads and hearts. But is there consolation in this?

What would the poet himself have felt if he could have foreseen it all?

I descended the hill-road and crossed the valley highway; it was full of dust; the vehicles rolled along, crowded with men smoking cigars and reading newspapers, tired women, children whose idea of pleasure had been to fill their hands with ferns and flowers torn from cranny and covert. I climbed the little hill opposite the great Scar; its green towering head, with its feet buried in wood, the hardy trees straggling up the front wherever they could get a hold among the grey crags, rose in sweet grandeur opposite to me. I threaded tracks of s.h.i.+mmering fern, out of which the buzzing flies rose round me; I went by silent, solitary places where the springs soak out of the moorland, while I pondered over the bewildering ways of the world. The life, the ideals of the great poet, set in the splendid framework of the great hills, seemed so majestic and admirable a thing. But the visible results--the humming of silly strangers round his sacred solitudes, the contaminating influence of commercial exploitation--made one fruitlessly and hopelessly melancholy.

But even so the hills were silent; the sun went down in a great glory of golden haze among the shadowy ridges. The valleys lay out at my feet, the rolling woodland, the dark fells. There fell a mood of strange yearning upon me, a yearning for the peaceful secret that, as the orange sunset slowly waned, the great hills seemed to guard and hold. What was it that was going on there, what solemn pageant, what sweet mystery, that I could only desire to behold and apprehend? I know not! I only know that if I could discern it, if I could tell it, the world would stand to listen; its littleness, its meanness, would fade in that august light; the peace of G.o.d would go swiftly and secretly abroad.

XXV

Dorsets.h.i.+re

I am travelling just now, and am this week at _Dorchester_, in the company of my oldest and best friend. We like the same things; and I can be silent if I will, while I can also say anything, however whimsical, that comes into my mind; there are few things better than that in the world, and I count the precious hours very gratefully; _appono lucro_.

Dorsets.h.i.+re gives me the feeling of being a very old country. The big downs seem like the bases of great rocky hills which have through long ages been smoothed and worn away, softened and mellowed, the rocks, grain by grain, carried downwards into the flat alluvial meadowlands beneath. In these rich pastures, all intersected with clear streams, runnels and water-courses, full at this season of rich water-plants, the cattle graze peacefully. The downs have been ploughed and sown up to the sky-line. Then there are fine tracts of heather and pines in places. And then, too, there is a sense of old humanity, of ancient wars about the land. There are great camps and earthworks everywhere, with ramparts and ditches, both British and Roman. The wolds from which the sea is visible are thickly covered with barrows, each holding the mouldering bones of some forgotten chieftain, laid to rest, how many centuries ago, with the rude mourning of a savage clan. I stood on one of the highest of these the other day, on a great gorse-clad headland, and sent my spirit out in quest of the old warrior that lay below--”Audisne haec, Amphiarae, sub terram condite?” But there was no answer from the air; though in my sleep one night I saw a wild, red-bearded man, in a coat of skins, with rude gaiters, and a hat of foxes' fur on his head; he carried a long staff in his hand, pointed with iron, and looked mutely and sorrowfully upon me. Who knows if it was he?

And then of later date are many ruinous strongholds, with Cyclopean walls, like the huge shattered bulk of _Corfe_, upon its green hill, between the shoulders of great downs. There are broken abbeys, pinnacled church-towers in village after village. And then, too, in hamlet after hamlet, rise quaint stone manors, high-gabled, many-mullioned, in the midst of barns and byres. One of the sweetest places I have seen is _Cerne Abbas_. The road to it winds gently up among steep downs, a full stream gliding through flat pastures at the bottom. The hamlet has a forgotten, wistful air; there are many houses in ruins. Close to the street rises the church-tower, of rich and beautiful design, with gurgoyles and pinnacles, cut out of a soft orange stone and delicately weathered. At the end of the village stands a big farm-house, built out of the abbey ruins, with a fine oriel in one of the granaries. In a little wilderness of trees, the ground covered with primroses, stands the exquisite old gatehouse with mullioned windows. I have had for years a poor little engraving of the place, and it seemed to greet me like an old friend. Then, in the pasture above, you can see the old terraces and mounds of the monastic garden, where the busy Benedictines worked day by day; further still, on the side of the down itself, is cut a very strange and ancient monument. It is the rude and barbarous figure of a naked man, sixty yards long, as though moving northwards, and brandis.h.i.+ng a huge knotted club. It is carved deep into the turf, and is overgrown with rough gra.s.s. No one can even guess at the antiquity of the figure, but it is probably not less than three thousand years old. Some say that it records the death of a monstrous giant of the valley. The good monks Christianised it, and named it _Augustine_. But it seems to be certainly one of the frightful figures of which Caesar speaks, on which captives were bound with twisted osiers, and burnt to death for a Druidical sacrifice. The thing is grotesque, vile, horrible; the very stones of the place seemed soaked with terror, cruelty and death. Even recently foul and barbarous traditions were practised there, it is said, by villagers, who were Christian only in name. Yet it lay peacefully enough to-day, the shadows of the clouds racing over it, the wind rustling in the gra.s.s, with nothing to break the silence but the twitter of birds, the bleat of sheep on the down, and the crying of c.o.c.ks in the straw-thatched village below.

What a strange fabric of history, memory, and tradition is here unrolled, of old unhappy far-off things! How bewildering to think of the horrible agonies of fear, the helpless, stupefied creatures lying bound there, the smoke sweeping over them and the flames crackling nearer, while their victorious foes laughed and exulted round them, and the priests performed the last hideous rites. And all the while G.o.d watched the slow march of days from the silent heaven, and worked out his mysterious purposes! And yet, surveying the quiet valley to-day, it seems as though there were no memory of suffering or sorrow in it at all.

We climbed the down; and there at our feet the world lay like a map, with its fields, woods, hamlets and church-towers, the great rich plain rolling to the horizon, till it was lost in haze. How infinitely minute and unimportant seemed one's own life, one's own thoughts, the schemes of one tiny moving atom on the broad back of the hills. And yet my own small restless ident.i.ty is almost the only thing in the world of which I am a.s.sured!

There came to me at that moment a thrill of the spirit which comes but rarely; a deep hope, the sense of a secret lying very near, if one could only grasp it; an a.s.surance that we are safe and secure in the hand of G.o.d, and a certainty that there is a vast reality behind, veiled from us only by the shadows of fears, ambitions, and desires.

And the thought, too, came that all the tiny human beings that move about their tasks in the plain beneath--nay, the animals, the trees, the flowers, every blade of gra.s.s, every pebble--each has its place in the great and awful mystery. Then came the sense of the vast fellows.h.i.+p of created things, the tender Fatherhood of the G.o.d who made us all. I can hardly put the thought into words; but it was one of those sudden intuitions that seem to lie deeper even than the mind and the soul, a message from the heart of the world, bidding one wait and wonder, rest and be still.

XXVI

Portland

I will put another little sketch side by side with the last, for the sake of contrast; I think it is hardly possible within the compa.s.s of a few days to have seen two scenes of such minute and essential difference. At _Cerne_ I had the tranquil loneliness of the countryside, the silent valley, the long faintly-tinted lines of pasture, s.p.a.ce and stillness; the hamlets nestled among trees in the dingles of the down. To-day I went south along a dusty road; at first there were quiet ancient sights enough, such as the huge gra.s.s-grown encampment of _Maiden Castle_, now a s.p.a.ce of pasture, but still guarded by vast ramparts and ditches, dug in the chalk, and for a thousand years or more deserted. The downs, where they faced the sea, were dotted with gra.s.sy barrows, air-swept and silent. We topped the hill, and in a moment there was a change; through the haze we saw the roofs of _Weymouth_ laid out like a map before us, with the smoke drifting west from innumerable chimneys; in the harbour, guarded by the slender breakwaters, floated great ironclads, black and sinister bulks; and beyond them frowned the dark front of _Portland_. Very soon the houses began to close in upon the road,--brick-built, pretentious, bow-windowed villas; then we were in the streets, showing a wholesome antiquity in the broad-windowed mansions of mellow brick, which sprang into life when the honest king George III. made the quiet port fas.h.i.+onable by spending his simple summers there. There was the king's lodging itself, Gloucester House, now embedded in a hotel, with the big pilastered windows of its saloons giving it a faded courtly air. Soon we were by the quays, with black red-funnelled steamers unloading, and all the quaint and pretty bustle of a port. We went out to a promontory guarded by an old stone fort, and watched a red merchant steamer roll merrily in, blowing a loud sea-horn. Then over a low-shouldered ridge, and we were by the great inner roads, full of s.h.i.+pping; we sat for a while by the melancholy walls of an ancient Tudor castle, now crumbling into the sea; and then across the narrow causeway that leads on to _Portland_. On our right rose the _Chesil Bank_, that mysterious mole of orange s.h.i.+ngle, which the sea, for some strange purpose of its own, has piled up, century after century, for eighteen miles along the western coast. And then the grim front of _Portland Island_ itself loomed out above us. The road ran up steeply among the bluffs, through line upon line of grey-slated houses; to the left, at the top of the cliff, were the sunken lines of the huge fort, with the long slopes of its earthworks, the glacis overgrown with gra.s.s, and the guns peeping from their embrasures; to the left, dipping to the south, the steep grey crags, curve after curve. The streets were alive with an abundance of merry young sailors and soldiers, brisk, handsome boys, with the quiet air of discipline that converts a country lout into a self-respecting citizen. An old bronzed sergeant led a child with one hand, and with the other tried to obey her shrill directions about whirling a skipping-rope, so that she might skip beside him; he looked at us with a half-proud, half-shamefaced smile, calling down a rebuke for his inattention from the girl.

We wound slowly up the steep roads smothered in dust; landwards the view was all drowned in a pale haze, but the steep grey cliffs by _Lulworth_ gleamed with a tinge of gold across the sea.

At the top, one of the dreariest landscapes I have ever seen met the sight. The island lies, so to speak, like a stranded whale, the great head and shoulders northwards to the land. The moment you surmount the top, the huge, flat side of the monster is extended before you, shelving to the sea. Hardly a tree grows there; there is nothing but a long perspective of fields, divided here and there by stone walls, with scattered grey houses at intervals. There is not a feature of any kind on which the eye can rest. In the foreground the earth is all tunnelled and tumbled; quarries stretch in every direction, with huge, gaunt, straddling, gallows-like structures emerging, a wheel spinning at the top, and ropes travelling into the abyss; heaps of grey _debris_, interspersed with stunted gra.s.s, huge excavations, ugly ravines with a spout of grim stone at the seaward opening, like the burrowings of some huge mole. The placid green slopes of the fort give an impression of secret strength, even grandeur. Otherwise it is but a ragged, splashed aquarelle of grey and green. Over the _debris_ appear at a distance the blunt ominous chimneys of the convict prison, which seems to put the finis.h.i.+ng touch on the forbidding character of the scene.

To-day the landward view was all veiled in haze, which seemed to shut off the sad island from the world. On a clear day, no doubt, the view must be full of grandeur, the inland downs, edged everywhere with the tall scarped cliffs, headland after headland, with the long soft line of the _Chesil Bank_ below them. But on a day of sea mist, it must be, I felt, one of the saddest and most mournful regions in the world, with no sound but the wail of gulls, and the chafing of the surge below.

XXVII

Canterbury Tower

To-day I had a singular pleasure heightened by an intermingled strangeness and even terror--qualities which bring out the quality of pleasure in the same way that a bourdon in a pedal-point pa.s.sage brings out the quality of what a German would, I think, call the _over-work_.

I was at _Canterbury_, where the great central tower is wreathed with scaffolding, and has a dim, blurred outline from a distance, as though it were being rapidly shaken to and fro. I found a friendly and communicable man who offered to take me over it; we climbed a dizzy little winding stair, with bright glimpses at intervals, through loop-holes, of sunlight and wheeling birds; then we crept along the top of a vaulted s.p.a.ce with great pockets of darkness to right and left.

Soon we were in the gallery of the lantern, from which we could see the little people crawling on the floor beneath, like slow insects. And then we mounted a short ladder which took us out of one of the great belfry windows, on to the lowest of the planked galleries. What a frail and precarious structure it seemed: the planks bent beneath our feet. And here came the first exquisite delight--that of being close to the precipitous face of the tower, of seeing the carved work which had never been seen close at hand since its erection except by the jackdaws and pigeons. I was moved and touched by observing how fine and delicate all the sculpture was. There were rows and rows of little heraldic devices, which from below could appear only as tiny fretted points; yet every petal of rose or _fleur-de-lys_ was as scrupulously and cleanly cut as if it had been meant to be seen close at hand; a waste of power, I suppose; but what a pretty and delicate waste! and done, I felt, in faithful days, when the carving was done as much to delight, if possible, the eye of G.o.d, as to please the eye of man.

Higher and higher we went, till at last we reached the parapet. And then by a dizzy perpendicular ladder to which I committed myself in faith, we reached a little platform on the very top of one of the pinnacles. The vane had just been fixed, and the stone was splashed with the oozing solder. And now came the delight of the huge view all round: the wooden heights, the rolling hills; old church towers rose from flowering orchards; a mansion peeped through immemorial trees; and far to the north-east we could see the white cliff of _Pegwell Bay_; endeared to me through the beautiful picture by Dyce, where the pale crags rise from the reefs green with untorn weeds. There on the horizon I could see shadowy sails on the steely sea-line.