Chapter V: Part 5

Then for a distance the road traversed hedgeless arable levels that rose gently in their young green garments up to the Plain. I looked back, and saw the vast wall of the Plain making an elbow at West Lavington, and crooking round to a clump on a straw-coloured hill above Urchfont, the farthest point visible. Before me stretched the woods of Erlestoke Park, crossing the road and slanting narrow and irregular up and along the hillside, lining it with beech and fir for over a mile, under the name of Hill Wood. The road dipped steeply through the grounds of the park, and its high banks of gray sand, dressed in dog’s mercury and ivy, and overhung by pine trees, shut out everything on either hand. Several private bridges crossed the deep road, and a woman had stopped that her child might shout, “Cuckoo! Cuckoo!” under the arch of one of them. Emerging from these walls, the road cut through a chain of ponds. Erlestoke Park lay on both sides. On the right its deer fed by the new church under a steep rise of elms and sycamores; on the left rooks cawed among the elms and chestnuts scattered on lawn that sloped up to Hill Wood.

A timber-yard, a “George and Dragon,” and many neat thatched cottages compose the wayside village of Erlestoke. Water was flashing down the gutters. Quite a number of people were on the road, but no one could tell me the meaning of the statuary niched on the cottage walls. It must have come from “some old ancient place,” they said. An old man who had dwelt for eighteen years in one of the cottages thus adorned, and had worked as a boy with old men that knew the place, could tell me no more. Some of the figures were nudes--one a female, with the coy hands of Venus, rising from her bath--others classical, and symbolic or grotesque: all astonishing in that position, ten feet up on a cottage wall, and unlikely to have come from the old church in Erlestoke Park.

Not a mile of this road was without cottagers strolling with their children or walking out to see friends in the beautiful weather. But just outside Erlestoke I met two slightly dilapidated women, not cottage women, with a perambulator, and twenty yards behind them two weatherbeaten, able-bodied men in caps, better dressed than the women. As I went by, one of them gave a shout, which I did not take as meant for me. He continued to shout what I discovered to be “Sir” in a loud voice until I turned round and had to get down. They advanced to meet me. The shorter man, a stocky fellow of not much past thirty, with very little nose, thin lips, and a strong, shaven chin, hastened up to me and inquired, in an unnecessarily decided manner, the road to Devizes, and if there were many houses on the way. The taller man, slender and very upright, with bright blue eyes, had by this time come up, and the two began to beg, telling rapidly, loudly, emphatically, and complainingly, a combined story into which the _Titanic_ was introduced. One of them pointed out that he was wearing the button of the Seamen’s Guild. They wanted me to look at papers. The two women, who were still walking on, they claimed as their wives. The more they talked the less inclined did I feel to give them money. Though they began to call down a blessing on me, I still refused. They persisted. The shorter one was not silent while I mounted my bicycle. So I rode away out of reach of their blessings without giving them anything. I tried to explain to myself why. For sixpence I might have purchased two loaves or three pints for them, and for myself blessings and possibly some sort of glow. I did not know nearly enough of mankind to condemn them as mere beggars; besides, mere beggars must live, if any one must. But they were very glib and continuous. Also they were hearty men in good health--which should have been a reason for giving them what I could afford. The strongest reason against it was probably alarm at being given some responsibility at one blow for five bodies in some ways worse off than myself, and shame, too, at the act of handing money and receiving thanks for it. My conscience was uneasy. I could not appease it with sixpence, nor with half a sovereign, which might have been thought generous if I had told the story. If I was to do anything I ought to have seen the thing through, to have accompanied these people and seen that they slept dry and ate enough, and got work or a pension. To give them money was to take mean advantage of the fact that in half a mile or so I could stow them away among the mysteries and miseries of the world. Too late I concluded that I ought to have listened to their story to the end, to have read their papers and formed an opinion, and to have given what I could, because in any case I should be none the worse, and they might be the better, if only to the extent of three pints between them. I made a resolution--a sort of a resolution--to give sixpence in future to every beggar, and leave the question of right or wrong till--

“When the Archangel’s trump shall sound
And slumbering mortals bid to rise,”

and the schoolmaster’s expectation is answered. Nevertheless, I was uneasy--so uneasy that the next beggar got nothing from me. It was simpler to pass by with a helpless “_Que sais-je?_” shrug, than to stop and have a look at him and say something, while I felt in my pockets and made the choice between my coppers and my smallest silver.

Thus I rode up hill through more steep banks of gray sand draped in ivy, overhung with pine trees. Dipping again, I came to a park-like meadow, a pond, and a small house above rather stiff, ineffectual green terraces, on my right; while on the left the wall of the Plain was carved from top to bottom by three parallel even rolls like suet puddings, and these again carved across horizontally. A little farther on Coulston Hill was hollowed out into a great round steep bay which had once been a beech wood. Now all the beeches were lying anyhow, but mostly pointing downward, on the steep where they had fallen or slid, some singly, some in raft-like masses. Not a tree remained upright. The bared, blackish earth and the gray stems--of the colour of charred wood and ashes--suggested fire. The disorder of the strewn debris suggested earthquake. All was silent. A stiff man of fifty was endeavouring to loiter without stopping still in the road while his daughter of eighteen tried to keep her distance behind him by picking anemones without actually stopping.

Before Tinhead there were more vertical rolls and corresponding troughs on the hillside, and at the foot again three or four wide terraces, and below them a cornfield reaching to the road. To the low, dark-blue elm country away from the Plain--that is, northward--and to the far wooded ridge on its horizon, the westering light was beginning to add a sleeplike softness of pale haze. Over the low hedges I saw league after league of this lower land, and the drab buttresses of Beacon Hill near Devizes on its eastern edge. It had the appearance of a level, uninhabitable land of many trees. Several times a hollow cleft in the slope below the road--a cleft walled by trees, but grass-bottomed--guides the eye out towards it. All along good roads led down to the vale, and an equal number of rough roads climbed the hillside up to the Plain. I was to go down, not up, and I looked with regret at the clear ridge and the rampart of Bratton Castle carved on it against the sky, the high bare slopes, the green magnificent gulleys and horizontal terraces, the white roads, and especially a rough cartway mounting steeply from Edington between prodigious naked banks. For I had formerly gone up this cartway on a day so fine that for many nights afterwards I could send myself to sleep by thinking of how I climbed, seeing only these precipitous banks and the band of sky above them, until I emerged into the glory and the peace of the Plain, of the unbounded Plain and the unbounded sky, and the marriage of sun and wind that was being celebrated upon them. But it was no use going the same way, for I was tired and alone, and it was near the end of the afternoon, though still cloudily bright and warm. I had to go down, not up, to find a bed that I knew of seven or eight miles from Tinhead and Edington.

These two are typical downside villages of brick and thatch, built on the banks of the main road, a parallel lane or two, and some steep connecting lanes at right angles. When I first entered them from below I was surprised again and again how many steps yet higher up the downside they extended. From top to bottom the ledges and inclines on which they stand, and the intervening spaces of grass and orchard, cover about half a mile. Tinhead has an “Old George” inn of an L shape, with a yard in the angle. Edington, almost linked to Tinhead by cottages scattered along the road, has a “Plough” and “Old White Horse.” They were beginning to advertise the Tinhead and Bratton inns as suitable for teas and week-end parties. Hence, perhaps, the prefix “Old.” For hereby is the first station since Lavington on the line that goes parallel to the wall of the Plain and a mile or two below the road, all along the Pewsey vale to Westbury.

I turned away from the hills through Edington, which has a big towered church among its farmyards, cottage gardens, and elm slopes--big enough to seat all Edington, men and cattle. Like Salisbury Cathedral, this church looks as if it had been made in one piece. All over, it is a uniform rough gray without ivy or moss or any stain. On first entering the churchyard, what most struck my eye was the name of the Rev. Hussy Cave-Browne-Cave, for his name is on the fifth step of the cross erected during his vicarship; and next to that a prostrate cross within a stone kerb, six yards long by three yards wide, in memory of a member of the Long family. The church is the centre of a village of big box tombs, some ornamented by carving, one covered by a stone a foot thick, mossed, lichened, stained orange and black, pitted deep by rain, and retaining not a letter of its inscription. I saw the names Pike, Popler, Oram, and Fatt. Inside, out of the rain, lie the Longs, Carters, and Taylers, the days of their lives conspicuously recorded, and more than this in the case of George Tayler, since he died in 1852, and left money for a sixpenny cake to be given to each Sunday-school teacher, and a threepenny one to each scholar, once a year, “immediately after the sermon” (I think, at Easter). Mr. Tayler was either an enemy to sermons, or did not know as much as Sir Philip Sidney about schoolboys. One transept is the exclusive domain of an Augustinian canon, his head on a cushion, his feet against a barrel, while the coping-stone of his monument is capped by a barrel and a tree sprouting from it. The locked chancel is peopled by effigies of great or of rich men lying on their backs or kneeling and clasping their hands in prayer, as they have done for centuries; one of them a Welshman from Glamorgan, Sir Edward Lewys. Round about I read the names Lewis, Price, Roberts, Phillips, and Ellis. And speaking of names, I noticed that the landlord of the “Plough” was Pavy, a name which I had seen at Stapleford, and long before that in the epitaph Ben Jonson wrote on “a child of Queen Elizabeth’s Chapel,” a boy actor, Salathiel Pavy--

“Weep with me all you that read
This little story;
And know, for whom a tear you shed,
Death’s self is sorry.
’Twas a child, that so did thrive
In grace and feature,
As Heaven and nature seemed to strive
Which owned the creature.
Years he numbered scarce thirteen
When fates turned cruel;
Yet three filled zodiacs had he been
The stage’s jewel;
And did act, what now we moan,
Old men so duly,
As, sooth, the Parcæ thought him one,
He played so truly.
So, by error, to his fate
They all consented;
But viewing him since, alas, too late
They have repented;
And have sought, to give new birth,
In baths to steep him;
But, being so much too good for earth,
Heaven vows to keep him.”

The conceit and the babbling metre play most daintily with sadness; yet I think now it would touch us little had we not a name to attach to it, the name of a boy who acted in Jonson’s “Cynthia’s Revels” and “Poetaster” in 1600 and 1601.

A motor car overtook me in the village, scattering a group of boys. “Look out!” cried one, and as the thing passed by, turned to the next boy with, “There’s a fine motor; worth more than you are; cost a lot of money.” Is this not the awakening of England? At least, it is truth. One pink foxy boy laughed in my face as if there had been iron bars or a wall of plate glass dividing us; another waited till I had started, to hail me, “Long-legs.”

Rapidly I slid down, crossed the railway, and found myself in a land where oaks stood in the hedges and out in mid-meadow, and the banks were all primroses, and a brook gurgled slow among rush, marigold, and willow. High above me, on my left hand, eastward, was the grandest, cliffiest part of the Plain wall, the bastioned angle where it bends round southward by Westbury and Warminster, bare for the most part, carved with the White Horse and with double tiers of chalk pits, crowned with the gigantic camps of Bratton, Battlesbury, and Scratchbury, ploughed only on some of the lower slopes, and pierced by the road to Imber. The chimneys of Trowbridge made a clump on ahead to my right. In the west the dark ridge of the Mendips made the horizon.

I turned out of my way to see Steeple Ashton. It has no steeple, being in fact Staple Ashton, but a tower and a dial on a church, a very big church, bristling with coarse crockets all over, and knobby with coarse gargoyles, half lion and half dog, some spewing down, some out, some up. It is not a show village, like Lacock, where the houses are packed as in a town, and most of the gardens invisible; but a happy alternation of cottages of stone or brick (sometimes placed herring-bone fashion) or timber work, vegetable gardens, orchard plots, and the wagon-maker’s. On many a wagon for miles round the name of Steeple Ashton is painted. It is on level ground, but well up towards the Plain, over the wall of which rounded clouds, pure white and sunlit, were heaving up. Rain threatened again, but did no more. The late afternoon grew more and more quiet and still, and in the warmth I mistook a distant dog’s bark, and again a cock’s crowing, for the call of a cuckoo, mixed with the blackbird’s singing. I strained my ears, willing to be persuaded, but was not. I was sliding easily west, accompanied by rooks going homeward, and hailed by thrushes in elm trees beside the road--through West Ashton and downhill on the straight green-bordered road between Carter’s Wood and Flowery Wood. I crossed the little river Biss and went under the railway to North Bradley. This is a village built partly along the road from Westbury to Trowbridge, partly along two parallel turnings out of it. The most conspicuous houses on the main road are the red brick and stone villas with railings and small gardens, bearing the following names: The Laurels, East Lynn, Cremont, Lyndhurst, Hume Villa, Alcester Cottage, Rose Villa, and Frith House, all in one row. On a dusty, cold day, when sparrows are chattering irresolutely, this is not a cheerful spot; nor yet when an organ-grinder is singing and grinding at the same time, while his more beauteous and artistic-looking mate stands deceitfully by and makes all the motions but none of the music of a baritone in pain. To the outward eye, at least, the better part of North Bradley is the by-road which the old flat-fronted asylum of stone faces across a small green, the church tower standing behind, half hid by trees. I went down this road, past farms called Ireland and Scotland on the left, and on the right a green lane, where, among pots and pans, a gypsy caravan had anchored, belonging to a Loveridge of Bristol. Venus, spiky with beams, hung in the pale sky, and Orion stood up before me, above the blue woods of the horizon. All the thrushes of England sang at that hour, and against that background of myriads I heard two or three singing their frank, clear notes in a mad eagerness to have all done before dark; for already the blackbirds were chinking and shifting places along the hedgerows. And presently it was dark, but for a lamp at an open door, and silent, but for a chained dog barking, and a pine tree moaning over the house. When the dog ceased, an owl hooted, and when the owl ceased I could just hear the river Frome roaring steadily over a weir far off. Before I settled into a chair I asked them what the weather was going to be like to-morrow. “Who knows?” they said; “but we do want sun. The grass isn’t looking so well as it was a month ago: it’s looking browny.” Had any eggs been found? “Not one; but we’ve heard of them being found, and we’ve been looking out for plovers’ eggs.” I asked what they did with the song birds’ eggs, and if they were ever eaten. The idea of eating such little eggs disgusted every one over fifteen; but they were fond of moorhens’, and had once taken twenty-two from a single nest before the bird moved to a safe place. Yes, they had plenty of chicks, and some young ducks half grown. The turkeys were laying, but it was too early to let them sit.... Again I heard the weir, and I began to think of sleep.

V.

THREE WESSEX POETS.

Before I decided that sleep was better than any book, some bad poetry I was reading put me in mind of Stephen Duck. I had been thinking of him earlier in the day at Erlestoke, because it occurred to me that the sculpture was as inappropriate on the cottages there as were the frigid graces on the thresher’s mortal pages. This man, a labourer from Charlton, some way east of Erlestoke, was made a Yeoman of the Guard in 1733 for his services to literature, and rector of Byfleet in 1752. He drowned himself in 1755, when he was fifty. His great achievements were, first, to show that an agricultural labourer could write as well as ninety-nine out of a hundred clergymen, gentlemen, and noblemen, and extremely like them, for his verses rarely had more to do with rural life than the sculpture at Erlestoke; second, to show, conversely, that a poet could use a scythe, which he tells us he did--and made “the vanquished mowers soon confess his skill”--when revisiting his birthplace.

Instead of Stephen, George, and John, he sang of Colin, Cuddy, and Menalcas; of Chloe and Celia, instead of Ann and Maria. When he set himself to write of shepherds, whom he must often have met, it fell out thus,--

“From Bath, I travel thro’ the sultry vale,
Till Sal’sb’ry Plains afford a cooling Gale:
Arcadian Plains where Pan delights to dwell,
In verdant Beauties cannot these excel:
These too, like them, might gain immortal Fame,
Resound with Corydon and Thyrsis’ Flame;
If, to his Mouth, the Shepherd would apply
His mellow Pipe, or vocal Music try.”

But, alas, the poor shepherd has not heard of pastoral poetry, and does not know--oh, happy if his happiness he knew--that his country is Arcadia; for, as Duck laments,--

“Propt on his Staff, he indolently stands;
His Hands support his Head, his Staff his Hands;
Or, idly basking in the sunny Ray,
Supinely lazy, loiters Life away.”

This is a good deal more like a poet than a shepherd. The fellow might have retorted that even if he converted his sheep hook into a pen he might not be the one of whom the poet wrote,--

“Great Caroline her Royal Bounty show’d
To one, and raised him from the grov’ling Crowd”--

that Queen Caroline could not be expected to replenish the Yeomen with Arcadians only.

Duck was at least as much awed by the Queen as by Nature. Richmond Park and the Royal Gardens so disturbed his judgment that he believed it possible, if Pope’s Muse would visit him,--

“Then Richmond Hill renown’d in Verse should grow,
And Thames re-echo to the Song below;
A second Eden in my Page should shine,
And Milton’s Paradise submit to mine.”

The Queen’s Grotto in Richmond Gardens inspired him with the line,--

“The sweetest Grotto and the wisest Queen.”

And yet the poor man said, and in a preface published in his lifetime, “I have not myself been so fond of writing, as might be imagined from seeing so many things of mine as are got together in this Book. Several of them are on Subjects that were given me by Persons, to whom I have such great Obligations, that I always thought their desires commands.”

Leaving school about his fourteenth year for “the several lowest employments of a country life,” and marrying before he was twenty, he had to work at top pressure in order to make time to read the _Spectator_, which he did “all over sweat and heat, without regarding his own health.” He “got English just as we get Latin.” He studied “Paradise Lost” as others study the classics, with the help of a dictionary. When he wrote about the life best known to him, it was usually as any of those gentlemen who helped him would have done. He made very little advance on Sir Philip Sidney.

Nevertheless, some things he did write which were true and were unlikely to have been written by any one else, as when he described the thresher’s labour,--

“When sooty Pease we thresh, you scarce can know
Our native Colour as from Work we go:
The Sweat, the Dust, and suffocating Smoke,
Make us so much like Ethiopians look.
We scare our Wives, when Ev’ning brings us home,
And frighted Infants think the Bugbear come.
Week after Week, we this dull Task pursue,
Unless when winn’wing Days produce a new;
A new, indeed, but frequently a worse,
The Threshal yields but to the Master’s Curse.
He counts the Bushels, counts how much a Day;
Then swears we’ve idled half our Time away:
‘Why, look ye, Rogues, d’ye think that this will do?
Your neighbours thresh as much again as you.’
Now in our Hands we wish our noisy Tools,
To drown the hated Names of Rogues and Fools;
But, wanting these, we just like Schoolboys look,
When angry Masters view the blotted Book:
They cry, ‘Their Ink was faulty, and their Pen;’
We, ‘The Corn threshes bad, ’twas cut too green.’”

He might have equalled Bloomfield, he might have been a much lesser Crabbe, if he could have thrown Cuddy and Chloe on to the mixen and kept to the slighted homely style. Instead of merely writing as if he had been to Oxford, he might have reached men’s ears with his appeal,--

“Let those who feast at Ease on dainty Fare,
Pity the Reapers, who their Feasts prepare.”

As a rule his work--I mean his writing--is so remote from Wiltshire and Duck, or the sort of reality connected with them which we to-day look for, that even the grain or two about Salisbury Plain or the Pewsey Vale not quite dissolved in his floods of Alexanderpopery delight us, as when he calls the lambs bleating,--

“Too harsh, perhaps, to please politer Ears,
Yet much the sweetest Tune the Farmer hears:”

or when he compares the haymakers to sparrows at the approach of storm,--

“Thus have I seen, on a bright Summer’s Day,
On some green Brake, a Flock of Sparrows play;
From Twig to Twig, from Bush to Bush they fly;
And with continued Chirping fill the Sky:
But, on a sudden, if a Storm appears,
Their chirping Noise no longer dins our Ears.
They fly for Shelter to the thickest Bush,
There silent sit, and all at once is hush.”

He says little more than enough to make us feel how much he could have said if--well, if, for example, he had been the sort of man to wish to employ his flail, not to drown the master’s curses, but to break his head. But he was ineffectual, if not beautiful. The only known material effect of his verse was to draw charity from Lord Palmerston for providing an annual threshers’ dinner, which is still given at Charlton on June 30. This feast proves him greater as prophet than as poet in writing,--

“Oft as this Day returns, shall Temple cheer
The Threshers’ Hearts with Mutton, Beef, and Beer;
Hence, when their Children’s Children shall admire
This Holiday, and, whence deriv’d, inquire,
Some grateful Father, partial to my Fame,
Shall thus describe from whence, and how it came:
‘Here, Child, a Thresher liv’d in ancient Days;
Quaint Songs he sung, and pleasing Roundelays;
A gracious Queen his Sonnets did commend,
And some great Lord, one Temple, was his Friend.
That Lord was pleas’d this Holiday to make,
And feast the Threshers for that Thresher’s sake.’”

A hundred years were to pass before a countryman came to do something of what Duck left undone, but, however honestly, did it from the point of view of a spectator, a clergyman, a schoolmaster, an archæologist, a reader of Tennyson, and the refined contemplators of rural life. He lived and died in a country of which most of the conditions are to be paralleled on Salisbury Plain and the Pewsey Vale. I mean William Barnes.

Dorset is a county of chalk hills divided by broad valleys and, in particular, by the valleys of the Stour and the Frome. William Barnes is the poet of the valleys, the elm and not the beech being his favourite tree. In the first year of last century he was born in Blackmoor Vale, which is watered by a tributary of the Stour: at his death, only fourteen years from the century’s end, he was rector of Came, which is in the valley of the Frome. The son of a Dorset farmer, and for most of his life a schoolmaster or clergyman within the county, the Dorset dialect was his mother tongue, his “only true speech.” He wrote of Dorset, and for Dorset, and strangers, perhaps natives also, might say that the man was Dorset. His poems are full of the names and the aspects of its towns and villages, its rivers and brooks, and the hills that lie around its great central height of Bulbarrow, which is mid-way between the homes of his childhood and old age.

In his “Praise o’ Dorset” the poet is very modest, with a kind of humorous modesty, about the county. Though we may be homely, is the beginning, we are not ashamed to own our place; we have some women “not uncomely,” and so on. Homeliness, in fact, is characteristic of Barnes and of his Dorset. He became in some ways a learned man, but when he wrote in his mother tongue and from the heart, he was the Dorset farmer’s son and nothing else. From the humble homeliness of his work he might have been a labourer, and he did more or less deliberately make himself the mouth-piece of the Dorset carters, cowmen, mowers, and harvesters. These songs, narratives, and dialogues bring forward the men at their labours, walking with their club flags to church, singing the songs of Christmas or Harvest Home. Here they court, wed, grow old together, build a new house, or return with money saved to their “poor fore-fathers’ plot o’ land.” He celebrates the horses, Smiler, Violet, Whitefoot, Jack, and “the great old wagon uncle had.” Separate poems are given to notable trees--“the great oak tree that’s in the dell,” the cottage lilac tree, the solitary may tree by the pond, an aspen by the river at Pentridge, the great elm in the little home-field and its fall. “Trees be Company” is the title of one of his poems.

Many of his best passages are about old houses, with hearths “hallowed by times o’ zitten round,” and fires that made the heart gay in storm or winter, and some of them, like “the great old house of mossy stone,” with memories of stately ladies that once did use

“To walk wi’ hoops an’ high-heel shoes”

along its terraces. It makes me think of a man whose ancestors, at any rate, had often been cold, homeless, and tired, when I see how often he speaks of the hearth, the fire, the shelter of house walls, at evening, in hard weather, or in old age. Again and again he shows us the men forgetting their work for a little while, as they sit among children or friends, watching the flames in the window glass, or listening to the wind and rain. Give me, he says in one poem, even though I were the squire, “the settle and the great wood fire.” In another, he feels that he can endure all if only evening bring peace at home. A man with work, a family, and a store of wood for the winter, has everything: the evening meal and the wife smiling make bliss.

Barnes felt the pathos of the labourer’s rest, and one of his finest poems depicts a cottage under a swaying poplar, with the moonlight on its door,--

“An’ hands, a-tired by day, wer still,
Wi’ moonlight on the door.”

He uses the same effect a second time, adding the reflection that the children now sleeping in the moonlit house will rise again to fun, and their widowed mother to sorrow. These people are pathetic because in their “little worold” they want and have so little,--

“Drough longsome years a-wanderen,
Drough lwonesome rest a-ponderen.”

Anything may eclipse, though nought can extinguish, their little joy; yet they seem made rather for sorrow than joy. They have longings, but hardly passions. They want to rest after all, not to become discontented ghosts like “the weeping lady.” They are prepared for the worst in this life, but the worst is tempered. The dead, for example, are safe from all weathers, better off than the bereaved who grieve for them “with lonesome love.” The dead even seem beautiful in memory. There is a “glory round the old folk dead,” the old uncle and aunt who used to walk arm in arm on Sunday evenings about the farm, the grandmother who wore “a gown with great flowers like hollyhocks,” and told tales of ancient times, the old kindly squire who so enjoyed life,--

“But now I hope his kindly feäce
Is gone to vind a better pleäce.”

Many poems are given to another and not very different kind of memories, those of childhood, and the essence of them, with a hundred pretty variations, is,--

“How smoothly then did run my happy days,
When things to charm my mind and sight were nigh.”

Most are memories of the open air, of “lonesome woodlands, sunny woodlands,” the river and the harvest fields, to the accompaniment of the songs of birds and milkmaids. The children are always laughing, playing, dancing in their “tiny shoes,” but their heavy elders and the home under the elm or in the “lonesome” grove of oak remind us, if not them, of age and death.

The love-poems further illustrate Barnes’s Dorset homeliness and humbleness. Young maidens delight him much as children do; yet even while he is praising the Blackmoor maidens he says,--

“Why, if a man would wive
An’ thrive, ’ithout a dow’r,
Then let en look en out a wife
In Blackmwore by the Stour.”

The girls all have something wifely about them. The wooer never forgets that the sweetheart may be the wife; he wishes her less care than her mother had, and looks forward to old age in her company. He is not a wild wooer. He is content to sit in a gathering and hear his Jane “put in a good word now and then,” and have a smile and a blush from her at the door on parting: having carried her pail he is satisfied to know that she would have bowed when she took it back had it not been too heavy. He wants a maid who is “good and true,” “good and fair,” and healthy, and to have always beside him the “welcome face and homely name.” Once he may have been ruffled by a mere beauty in a scarlet cloak, but probably he soon sets his heart on one who may bring him happiness with children, contentment with age, and perhaps help him to a little fortune in the thatched cottage “below the elems by the bridge.” The lovers, like the poet himself, go with heads a little bowed, as if in readiness for blows. It is in contrast with these rather stiff, darkened men and women, who have winter and poverty on their horizon, that the children in Barnes’s poetry are so blithe, his Spring days so buoyant, and his flowers and birds among the brightest and freshest in any of the poets.

But there is a greater than Duck or Barnes still among us, a wide-ranging poet, who is always a countryman of a somewhat lonely heart, Mr. Thomas Hardy. For I do notice something in his poetry which I hope I may with respect call rustic, and, what is much the same thing, old-fashioned. It enables him to mingle elements unexpectedly, so that, thinking of 1967 in the year 1867, he spoke not only of the new century having “new minds, new modes, new fools, new wise,” but concluded,--

“For I would only ask thereof
That thy worm should be my worm, Love”--

which is as antique as Donne’s Flea that wedded the lovers by combining blood from both of them within its body. The same rusticity manifests itself elsewhere as Elizabethanism, and the poet is something of a “liberal shepherd” in his willingness to give things their grosser names or to hint at them. He has a real taste for such comparisons as that made by a French officer looking at the English fleet at Trafalgar,--

“Their overcrowded sails
Bulge like blown bladders in a tripeman’s shop
The market-morning after slaughter-day.”

Then, how his illustrations to his own poems--such as the pair of spectacles lying right across the landscape, following “In a Eweleaze near Weatherbury”--remind us of a seventeenth-century book of emblems!

Sometimes his excuse is that he is impersonating a man of an earlier age, as in the Sergeant’s song,--

“When Husbands with their Wives agree,
And Maids won’t wed from modesty,
Then little Boney he’ll pounce down,
And march his men on London town.
Rollicum-rorum, tol-lol-lorum,
Rollicum-rorum, tol-lol-lay.”

He has written songs and narratives which prove his descent from some ancient ballad-maker, perhaps the one who wrote “A pleasant ballad of the merry miller’s wooing of the baker’s daughter of Manchester,” or “A new ballade, showing the cruel robberies and lewd life of Philip Collins, _alias_ Osburne, commonly called Philip of the West, who was pressed to death at Newgate in London the third of December last past, 1597,” to be sung to the tune of “Pagginton’s round.” Some of the lyric stanzas to which he fits a narrative originated probably in some such tune.

And how often is he delighted to represent a peasant’s view, a peasant’s contribution to the irony of things, a capital instance being the Belgian who killed Grouchy to save his farm, and so lost Napoleon the battle of Waterloo.

With this rusticity, if that be the right name for it, I cannot help connecting that most tyrannous obsession of the blindness of Fate, the carelessness of Nature, and the insignificance of Man, crawling in multitudes like caterpillars, twitched by the Immanent Will hither and thither. Over and over again, from the earliest poems up to the “Dynasts,” he amplifies those words which he puts into the mouth of God,--

“My labours, logicless,
You may explain; not I:
Sense-sealed I have wrought, without a guess
That I evolved a Consciousness
To ask for reasons why.”

And, referring to the earth,--

“It lost my interest from the first,
My aims therefor succeeding ill;
Haply it died of doing as it durst.
Lord, it existeth still.”

“Sportsman Time” and “those purblind Doomsters” are characteristic phrases. The many things said by him of birth he sums up at the end of a death-bed poem,--

“We see by littles now the deft achievement
Whereby she has escaped the Wrongers all,
In view of which our momentary bereavement
Outshapes but small.”

As gravely he descends to the ludicrous extreme of making a country girl planting a pine-tree sing,--

“It will sigh in the morning,
Will sigh at noon,
At the winter’s warning,
In wafts of June;
Grieving that never
Kind Fate decreed
It could not ever
Remain a seed,
And shun the welter
Of things without,
Unneeding shelter
From storm and drought.”

He puts into the mouths of field, flock, and tree--because while he gazed at them at dawn they looked like chastened children sitting in school silent--the question,--

“Has some Vast Imbecility,
Mighty to build and blend,
But impotent to tend,
Framed us in jest, and left us now to hazardry?”

Napoleon, in the “Dynasts,” asks the question, “Why am I here?” and answers it,--

“By laws imposed on me inexorably.
History makes use of me to weave her web.”

Twentieth century superstition can no farther go than in that enormous poem, which is astonishing in many ways, not least in being readable. I call it superstition because truth, or a genuine attempt at truth, has been turned apparently by an isolated rustic imagination into an obsession so powerful that only a very great talent could have rescued anything uninjured from the weight of it. A hundred years ago, Mr. Hardy would have seen “real ghosts.” To-day he has to invent them, and call his Spirits of the Years and of the Pities, Spirits Sinister and Ironic, Rumours and Recording Angels, who have the best seats at the human comedy, “contrivances of the fancy merely.”

Even his use of irony verges on the superstitious. Artistically, at least in the shorter poems, it may be sound, and is certainly effective, as where the old man laments on learning that his wife is to be in the same wing of the workhouse, instead of setting him “free of his forty years’ chain.” But the frequent use and abuse of it change the reader’s smile into a laugh at the perversity.

Mr. Hardy must have discovered the blindness of Fate, the indifference of Nature, and the irony of Life, before he met them in books. They have been brooded over in solitude, until they afflict him as the wickedness of man afflicts a Puritan. The skull and crossbones, Death the scythed skeleton, and the symbolic hour-glass have been as real to him as to some of those carvers of tombstones in country churchyards, or to the painter of that window at St. Edmund’s in Salisbury who represented “God the Father ... in blue and red vests, like a little old man, the head, feet, and hands naked; in one place fixing a pair of compasses on the sun and moon.” If I were told that he had spent his days in a woodland hermitage, though I should not believe the story, I should suspect that it was founded on fact.

But the woodland, and the country in general, have given Mr. Hardy some of his principal consolations. And one, at least, of these is almost superstitious. I mean the idea that “the longlegs, the moth, and the dumbledore” know “earth-secrets” that he knows not. In the “Darkling Thrush” it is to be found in another stage, the bird’s song in Winter impelling him to think that “some blessed Hope” of which he was unaware was known to it. He compares town and country much as Meredith does. The country is paradise in the comparison; for he speaks of the Holiday Fund for City Children as temporarily “changing their urban murk to paradise.” Country life, paradise or not, he handles with a combination of power and exactness beyond that of any poet who could be compared to him, and for country women I should give the palm to his “Julie-Jane,”--

“Sing; how ’a would sing,
How ’a would raise the tune,
When we rode in the wagon from harvesting
By the light of the moon....
Bubbling and brightsome eyed,
But now--O never again!
She chose her bearers before she died
From her fancy-men.”

Such a woman has even made him merry like his fiddling ancestor, in the song of “The Dark-eyed Gentleman,”--

“And he came and he tied up my garter for me.”

And what with Nature and Beauty and Truth he is really farther from surrender than might appear in some poems. His “Let me enjoy”--

“Let me enjoy the earth no less
Because the all-enacting Might
That fashioned forth its loveliness
Had other aims than my delight”--

is in the minor key, but by no means repudiates or makes little of Joy, and is at least as likely as,

“Lord, with what care hast thou begirt us round,”

to make a marching song.

VI.

THE AVON, THE BISS, THE FROME.

Once in the night I awoke and heard the weir again, but the first sound in the morning was a thrush singing in a lilac next my window. For the main chorus of dawn was over. It was a still morning under a sky that was one low arch of cloud, a little whiter in places, but all gray. Big drops glistened on the undersides of horizontal rails. There had been a white frost, and, as they said, we seldom have many white frosts before it rains again. But not until I went out could I tell that it was softly and coldly raining. Everything more than two or three fields away was hidden.

Cycling is inferior to walking in this weather, because in cycling chiefly ample views are to be seen, and the mist conceals them. You travel too quickly to notice many small things; you see nothing save the troops of elms on the verge of invisibility. But walking I saw every small thing one by one; not only the handsome gateway chestnut just fully dressed, and the pale green larch plantation where another chiff-chaff was singing, and the tall elm tipped by a linnet pausing and musing a few notes, but every primrose and celandine and dandelion on the banks, every silvered green leaf of honeysuckle up in the hedge, every patch of brightest moss, every luminous drop on a thorn tip. The world seemed a small place: as I went between a row of elms and a row of beeches occupied by rooks, I had a feeling that the road, that the world itself, was private, all theirs; and the state of the road under their nests confirmed me. I was going hither and thither to-day in the neighbourhood of my stopping place, instead of continuing my journey.

At a quarter-past nine it drizzled slightly more, but by ten the sky whitened, the grass gleamed. Over the broad field where the fowls and turkeys feed, and a retriever guards them, the keeper was walking slow and heavy, carrying a mattock, and after him two men, one in gaiters. While they were disappearing from sight in the corner where the field runs up into the wood, the chained retriever stood and whined piteously after them. I understood him very well. And somehow the men setting out thus for a day’s work in the woods prophesied fine weather. Yet at half-past ten the gray thrust the white down again to the horizon, where the elms printed themselves against it.

The sun came out in earnest at eleven, and shone upon a field of tall yellow mustard and a man loading a cart with it, and I ceased to bend my back and crook my neck towards violet, primrose, anemone, and dog’s mercury in the blackthorn hedges, and I let the sun have a chance with me. I was trespassing, but, alas! no glory any longer attaches to trespassing, because every one is so civil unless you are a plain or ill-dressed woman, or a child, or obviously a poet. So I came well-warmed to Rudge, a hamlet collected about a meeting of roads and scattered up a steep hill, along one of these roads. The collection includes a small inn called the “Half Moon,” a plain Baptist chapel, several stone cottages, several ruins, solid but roofless, used solely to advertise sales, and a signpost pointing to Berkley and Frome past the ruined cottages, to Westbury and Bradley downhill from the inn, through the woods about the river Biss, and uphill to Road and Beckington. Southward I saw the single bare hump of Cley Hill five miles away, near Warminster: northward, the broad wooded vale rising up to hills on the horizon. I went uphill, between two bright trickles of water. The steep roadside bank, strengthened by a stone wall, was well-grown with pennywort and cranesbill, overhung by goose grass and ivy, and bathed at its foot by grass and nettles. The wall in one place is hollowed out into a cavernous, dark dip-well or water-cupboard. The rest of the village is built upon the banks. First comes a Wesleyan chapel, a neat, cold, demure little barn of the early nineteenth century, having a cypress on either side of its front door, and a few gravestones round about. One of these caught my eye with the verse--

“And am I born to die,
To lay this body down,
And must my trembling spirit fly
Into a world unknown?”--

and the name of Mary Willcox, who died in 1901 at the age of eighty-eight. A cottage or two stand not quite opposite, behind gardens of wallflowers, mezereon, periwinkle, and tall copper-coloured peony shoots, and a wall smothered in snow-on-the-mountains or alyssum. On the same side, beyond, a dark farm-house and its outbuildings project and cause the road and water to twist. The bank on that side, the left, covered with celandines and topped with elms, now carries a footpath of broad flagstones a yard or two above the road. Where this footpath ends, the road, still ascending, forks, and at once rejoins itself, thus making a small triangular island, occupied by a ruinous, ivy-mantled cottage and a cultivated vegetable garden. At the lower side a newish villa with a piano faces past the ruin uphill. At the upper side, facing past the ruin and the villa downhill, is a high-walled stone house of several gables, small enough, but possessing dignity and even a certain faint grimness: it is backed on the roadside by farm buildings. I saw and heard nobody from the “Half Moon” to this house, except a chicken. Here I turned off from the road along a lane which ended a mile away at a cottage and a farm-house, and in one of the ploughed fields I came upon a plain stone tower, consisting of two storeys, round-arched, roofless, in the company of a tall lime tree. It looks over the low land towards the White Horse at Westbury. Once, they told me, the upper storey held a water tank; but as the map shows an ancient beacon at about this spot, I thought of it as a beacon rather than as a water tower.

I returned and went some way along the road to Beckington. A few people were walking in towards Rudge, children were picking primroses from both sides of the hedges, watched silently and steadfastly by a baby in a perambulator, not less happy in the sun than they. For the sun shone radiant and warm out of a whitewashed sky on the red ploughlands and wet daisy meadows by Seymour’s Court Farm, on the teams pulling chain harrows and pewits plunging round them, and on the flag waving over Road Church as if for some natural festival. I found my first thrush’s egg of the year along this road, in which I was fortunate; for the bank below the nest had been trodden into steps by boys who had examined it before me.

I went downhill again through Rudge and took the road for North Bradley, keeping above the left bank of the river Biss and commanding the White Horse on the pale wall of the Plain beyond it. This took me past Cutteridge, a modest farm, all that remains of a great house, whose long avenues of limes, crooked and often as dense as a magpie’s nest, still radiate from it on three sides. This is a country of noble elms, spreading like oaks, above celandine banks.

Turning to the right down a steep-sided lane after passing Cutteridge I reached the flat, rushy, and willowy green valley of the Biss. The road forded the brook and brought me up into the sloping courtyard of Brook House Farm. On the right was a high wall and a pile of rough cordwood against it; on the left a buttressed, ecclesiastical-looking building with tiers of windows and three doorways, some four or five centuries old; and before me, at the top of the yard, between the upper end of the high wall and the ecclesiastical-looking building, was the back of the farm-house, its brass pans gleaming. This is the remnant of Brook House. What is now a cowshed below, a cheese room above, has been the chapel of Brook House, formerly the seat of Paveleys, Joneses, and Cheneys. The brook below was once called Baron’s brook on account of the barony conferred on the owner: the family of Willoughby de Broke are said to have taken their name from it. The cows made an excellent congregation, free from all the disadvantages of believing or wanting to believe in the immortality of the soul, in the lower half of the old chapel; the upper floor and its shelves of Cheddar cheeses of all sizes could not offend the most jealous deity or his most jealous worshippers. The high, intricate rafter-work of the tiled roof was open, and the timber, as pale as if newly scrubbed, was free from cobwebs--in fact, chestnut wood is said to forbid cobwebs. Against the wall leaned long boards bearing the round stains of bygone cheeses. Every one who could write had carved his name on the stone. Instead of windows there were three doors in the side away from the quadrangle, as if at one time they had been entered either from a contiguous building or by a staircase from beneath. Evidently both the upper and the lower chambers were formerly subdivided into cells of some kind.

The farmhouse is presumably the remnant of the old manor house, cool and still, looking out away from the quadrangle over a garden containing a broad, rough-hewn stone disinterred hereby, and a green field corrugated in parallelograms betokening old walls or an encampment. The field next to this is spoken of as a churchyard, but there seems to be no record of skeletons found there. Half a mile off in different directions are Cutteridge, Hawkeridge, and Storridge, but nothing nearer in that narrow, gentle valley....

The afternoon was as fine as Easter Monday could be, all that could be desired by chapel-goers for their Anniversary Tea. It was the very weather that Trowbridge people needed on Good Friday for a walk to Farleigh Castle, for beer or tea and watercress at the “Hungerford Arms.” As I bicycled into Trowbridge at four o’clock the inhabitants were streaming out along the dry road westward.