Chapter II

If I spoke just now of Winchelsea as haunted, let this somewhat overworked word stand as an ineffectual tribute to the small, sad, civic history that the place appeals to us to reconstruct as we gaze vaguely about. I have a little ancient and most decorative map of Sussex—testifying remarkably to the changes of relation between sea and land in this corner of the coast—in which “Old Winchelsey Drowned” figures as the melancholy indication of a small circular spot quite out at sea. If new Winchelsea is old, the earlier town is to-day but the dim ghost of a tradition, with its very site—distant several miles from that of its successor—rendered uncertain by the endless mutation of the shore. After suffering, all through the thirteenth century, much stress of wind and weather, it was practically destroyed in 1287 by a great storm which cast up masses of beach, altered the course of a river, and roughly handled the face of many things. The reconstruction of the town in another place was thereupon decreed by a great English king, and we need but a little fuller chronicle to help us to assist at one of those migrations of a whole city of which antiquity so often gives us the picture. The survivors of Winchelsea were colonised, and colonised in much state. The “new” community, whose life was also to be so brief, sits on the pleasant table of a great cliff-like hill which, in the days of the Plantagenets, was an admirable promontory washed by the waves. The sea surrounded its base, came up past it to the east and north in a long inlet, and stretched away, across the level where the sheep now graze, to stout little neighbouring Rye, perched—in doubtless not quite equal pride—on an eminence more humble, but which must have counted then even for more than to-day in the pretty figure made, as you stand off, by the small, compact, pyramidal port. The “Antient Towns” looked at each other then across the water, which made almost an island of the rock of huddled, church-crowned Rye—which had too much to say to them alike, on evil days, at their best time, but which was too soon to begin to have too little. If the early Winchelsea was to suffer by “drowning,” its successor was to bear the stroke of remaining high and dry. The haven on the hill-top—a bold and extraordinary conception—had hardly had time to get, as we should now say, “started,” before it began to see its days numbered. The sea and the shore were never at peace together, and it was, most remarkably, not the sea that got the best of it. Winchelsea had only time to dream a great dream—the dream of a scant pair of centuries—before its hopes were turned to bitterness and its boasts to lamentation. It had literally, during its short career, put in a claim to rivalship with the port of London. The irony of fate now sits in its empty lap; but the port of London has never suggested even a frustrate “Denis Duval.”

While Winchelsea dreamed, at any rate, she worked, and the noble fragment of her great church, rising solid from the abortive symmetry of her great square, helps us to put our hand on her deep good faith. She built at least as she believed—she planned as she fondly imagined. The huge ivy-covered choir and transepts of St. Thomas of Canterbury—to whom the structure was addressed—represent to us a great intention. They are not so mighty, but they are almost as brave, as the wondrous fragment of Beauvais. Walled and closed on their unfinished side, they form at present all the church, and, with its grand lines of arch and window, its beautiful gothic tombs and general hugeness and height, the church—mercifully exempt as yet from restoration—is wonderful for the place. You may at this hour—if you are given to such emotions—feel a mild thrill, not be unaware even of the approach of tears, as you measure the scale on which the building had been planned and the ground that the nave and aisles would have covered. You murmur, in the summer twilight, a soft “Bravo!” across the ages—to the ears of heaven knows what poor nameless ghosts. The square—apparently one of many—was to have been worthy of New York or of Turin; for the queerest, quaintest, most touching thing of all is that the reinstated city was to have been laid out on the most approved modern lines. Nothing is more interesting—to the mooning, sketching spectator—than this evidence that the great Edward had anticipated us all in the convenient chessboard pattern. It is true—attention has been called to the fact—that Pompeii had anticipated _him_; but I doubt if he knew much about Pompeii. His abstract avenues and cross-streets straggle away, through the summer twilight, into mere legend and mystery. In speaking awhile since of the gates of these shattered strongholds as “stiff,” I also spoke of their walls as “tight;” but the scheme of Winchelsea must have involved, after all, a certain looseness of cincture. The old vague girdle is lost to-day in the fields where the sheep browse, in the parkish acres where the great trees cluster. The Sussex oak is mighty—it was of the Sussex oak that, in the old time, the king’s ships were built; it was, in particular, to her command of this material that Rye owed the burdensome honour of supplying vessels, on constant call, to the royal navy. Strange is this record, in Holloway’s History of that town, and in presence of the small things of to-day; so perpetual, under stress, appears to have been the demand and so free the supply and the service.

Rye continued indeed, under her old brown south cliff, to build big boats till this industry was smitten by the adoption of iron. That was the last stroke; though even now you may see things as you stand on the edge of the cliff: best of all on the open, sunny terrace of a dear little old garden—a garden brown-walled, red-walled, rose-covered on its other sides, divided by the width of a quiet street of grass-grown cobbles from the house of its master, and possessed of a little old glass-fronted, panelled pavilion which I hold to be the special spot in the world where Thackeray might most fitly have figured out his story. There is not much room in the pavilion, but there is room for the hard-pressed table and the tilted chair—there is room for a novelist and his friends. The panels have a queer paint and a venerable slant; the small chimney-place is at your back; the south window is perfect, the privacy bright and open. How can I tell what old—what young—visions of visions and memories of images come back to me under the influence of this quaint receptacle, into which, by kind permission, I occasionally peep, and still more under the charm of the air and the view that, as I just said, you may enjoy, close at hand, from the small terrace? How can I tell why I always keep remembering and losing there the particular passages of some far-away foolish fiction, absorbed in extreme youth, which haunt me, yet escape me, like the echo of an old premonition? I seem to myself to have lain on the grass somewhere, as a boy, poring over an English novel of the period, presumably quite bad,—for they were pretty bad then too,—and losing myself in the idea of just such another scene as this. But even could I rediscover the novel, I wouldn’t go back to it. It couldn’t have been so good as this; for this—all concrete and doomed and minimised as it is—is the real thing. The other little gardens, other little odds and ends of crooked brown wall and supported terrace and glazed winter sun-trap, lean over the cliff that still, after centuries, keeps its rude drop; they have beneath them the river, a tide that comes and goes, and the mile or more of grudging desert level, beyond it, which now throws the sea to the near horizon, where, on summer days, with a depth of blue and a scattered gleam of sails, it looks forgiving and resigned. The little old shipyards at the base of the rock are for the most part quite empty, with only vague piles of brown timber and the deposit of generations of chips; yet a fishing-boat or two are still on the stocks—an “output” of three or four a year!—and the ring of the hammer on the wood, a sound, in such places, rare to the contemporary ear, comes up, through the sunny stillness, to your meditative perch.

The tidal river, on the left, wanders away to Rye Harbour and its bar, where the black fishing-boats, half the time at lop-sided rest in the mud, make a cluster of slanting spears against the sky. When the river is full we are proud of its wide light and many curves; when it is empty we call it, for vague reasons, “rather Dutch;” and empty or full we sketch it in the fine weather as hard as ever we can. When I say “we” I mean _they_ do—it is to speak with hospitality. They mostly wear, as I have hinted, large sunbonnets, and they crouch on low camp-stools; they put in, as they would say, a bit of white, in places often the least likely. Rye is in truth a rudimentary drawing-lesson, and you quite embrace the question when you have fairly seized the formula. Nothing so “quaint” was ever so easy—nothing so easy was ever so quaint. Much more to be loved than feared, she has not, alas, a scrap of “style,” and she may be effectively rendered without the obligation of subtlety. At favoured seasons there appear within her precinct sundry slouch-hatted gentlemen who study her humble charms through a small telescope formed by their curved fingers and thumb, and who are not unliable to define themselves as French artists leading a train of English and American lady pupils. They distribute their disciples over the place, at selected points, where the master, going his round from hour to hour, reminds you of nothing so much as a busy _chef_ with many saucepans on the stove and periodically lifting their covers for a sniff and a stir. There are ancient doorsteps that are fairly haunted, for their convenience of view, by the “class,” and where the fond proprietor, going and coming, has to pick his way among paraphernalia or to take flying leaps over genius and industry. If Winchelsea is, as I gather, less beset, it is simply that Winchelsea enjoys the immunity of her greater distinction. She is full of that and must be even more difficult than she at first appears. But I forsook her and her distinction, just now, and I must return to them; though the right moment would quite have been as we stood, at Rye, on the terrace of the little old south-garden, to which she presents herself, beyond two or three miles of flat Dutch-looking interval, from the extreme right, her few red roofs almost lost on her wooded hill and her general presence masking, for this view, the headland of Hastings, ten miles, by the coast, westward.

It was about her spacious solitude that we had already begun to stroll; for the purpose, however, mainly, of measuring the stretch, south and north, to the two more crumbled of her three old gates. They are very far gone, each but the ruin of a ruin; but it is their actual countrified state that speaks of the circuit—one hundred and fifty acres—they were supposed to defend. Under one of them you may pass, much round about, by high-seated villages and in constant sight of the sea, toward Hastings; from the other, slightly the less dilapidated, you may gather, if much so minded, the suggestion of some illustration or tail-piece in a volume of Italian travel. The steep white road plunges crookedly down to where the poor arches that once were massive straddle across it, while a spreading chestnut, beside them, plays exactly the part desired—prepares you, that is, for the crack of the whip of the _vetturino_ trudging up beside his travelling-carriage. With a bare-legged urchin and a browsing goat the whole thing would be there. But we turn, at that point, to mount again and cross the idle square and come back to the east gate, which is the aspect of Winchelsea that presents itself most—and in fact quite admirably—as the front. Yet by what is it that, at the end of summer afternoons, my sense of an obliterated history is fed? There is little but the church really to testify, for the extraordinary groined vaults and crypts that are part of the actual pride of the place—treasure-houses of old merchants, foundations of upper solidities that now are dust—count for nothing, naturally, in the immediate effect. The early houses passed away long ago, and the present ones speak, in broken accents and scant and shabby signs, but of the last hundred, the last couple of hundred, years. Everything that ever happened is gone, and, for that matter, nothing very eminent, only a dim mediocrity of life, ever did happen. Rye has Fletcher the dramatist, the Fletcher of Beaumont, whom it brought to birth; but Winchelsea has only the last preachment, under a tree still shown, of John Wesley. The third Edward and the Black Prince, in 1350, overcame the Spaniards in a stout sea-fight within sight of the walls; but I am bound to confess that I do not at all focus that performance, am unable, in the changed conditions, to “place” anything so pompous. In the same way I fail to “visualise,” thank goodness, either of the several French inroads that left their mark of massacre and ruin. What I do see, on the other hand, very comfortably, is the little undistinguished picture of a nearer antiquity, the antiquity for a glimpse of which I reopened “Denis Duval.” Where, please, was the barber’s shop of the family of that hero, and where the apartments, where the preferred resorts, the particular scenes of occupation and diversion, of the dark Chevalier de la Motte? Where did this subtle son of another civilisation, with whom Madame de Saverne had eloped from France, _en plein ancien régime_, without the occurrence between them of the least impropriety, spend his time for so long a period; where had he his little habits and his numerous indispensable conveniences? What was the general geography, to express it synthetically, of the state of life of the orphaned Clarisse, quartered with a family of which one of the sons, furiously desirous of the girl, was, at his lost moments, a highwayman stopping coaches in the dead of night? Over nothing in the whole fragment does such vagueness hover as over the domestic situation, in her tender years, of the future Madame Denis. Yet these are just the things I should have liked to know—the things, above all, I should have liked most to tell. Into a vision of _them_, at least, we can work ourselves; it is exactly the sort of vision into which Rye and Winchelsea, and all the land about, full of lurking hints and modest memories, most throws us back. I should, in truth, have liked to lock up our novelist in our little pavilion of inspiration, the gazebo at Rye, not letting him out till he should quite have satisfied us.

Close beside the east gate, so close that one of its battered towers leans heavily on the little garden, is a wonderfully perched cottage, of which the mistress is a very celebrated lady who resorts to the place in the intervals of an exacting profession—the scene of her renown, I may go so far as to mention, is the theatre—for refreshment and rest. The small grounds of this refuge, supported by the old town-wall and the steep plunge of the great hill, have a rare position and view. The narrow garden stretches away in the manner of a terrace to which the top of the wall forms a low parapet; and here it is that, when the summer days are long, the sweet old soul of all the land seems most to hang in the air. It is almost a question indeed whether this fine Winchelsea front, all silver-grey and ivy-green, is not even better when making a picture itself from below than when giving you one, with much immensity, from its brow. This picture is always your great effect, artfully prepared by an absence of prediction, when you take a friend over from Rye; and it would appear quite to settle the small discussion—that may be said to come up among us so often—of which is the happier abode. The great thing is that if you live at Rye you have Winchelsea to show; whereas if you live at Winchelsea you have nothing but Rye. This latter privilege I should be sorry to cry down; but nothing can alter the fact that, to begin with, the pedestal of Winchelsea has twice the height, by a rough measure, of that of its neighbour; and we all know the value of an inch at the end of a nose. Almost directly under the Winchelsea hill, crossing the little bridge of the Brede, you pass beyond a screen of trees and take in, at the top of the ascent, the two round towers and arch, ivied and mutilated, but still erect, of the old main gate. The road either way is long and abrupt, so that people kind to their beasts alight at the foot, and cyclists careful of their necks alight at the head. The brooding spectator, moreover, who forms a class by himself, pauses, infallibly, as he goes, to admire the way the great trees cluster and compose on the high slope, always striking, for him, as day gathers in and the whole thing melts together, a classic, academic note, the note of Turner and Claude. From the garden of the distinguished cottage, at any rate, it is a large, melancholy view—a view that an occasional perverse person whom it fails to touch finds easy, I admit, to speak of as dreary; so that those who love it and are well advised will ever, at the outset, carry the war into the enemy’s country by announcing it, with glee, as sad. Just this it must be that nourishes the sense of obliterated history as to which I a moment ago wondered. The air is like that of a room through which something has been carried that you are aware of without having seen it. There is a vast deal of level in the prospect, but, though much depends on the day and still more on the hour, it is, at the worst, all too delicate to be ugly. The best hour is that at which the compact little pyramid of Rye, crowned with its big but stunted church and quite covered by the westering sun, gives out the full measure of its old browns that turn to red and its old reds that turn to purple. These tones of evening are now pretty much all that Rye has left to give, but there are truly, sometimes, conditions of atmosphere in which I have seen the effect as fantastic. I sigh when I think, however, what it might have been if, perfectly placed as it is, the church tower—which in its more perverse moods only resembles a big central button, a knob on a pincushion—had had the grace of a few more feet of stature. But that way depression lies, and the humiliation of those moments at which the brooding spectator says to himself that both tower and hill _would_ have been higher if the place had only been French or Italian. Its whole pleasant little pathos, in point of fact, is just that it is homely English. And even with this, after all, the imagination can play. The wide, ambiguous flat that stretches eastward from Winchelsea hill, and on the monotone of whose bosom, seen at sunset from a friendly eminence that stands nearer, Rye takes the form of a huge floating boat, its water-line sharp and its bulk defined from stem to stern—this dim expanse is the great Romney Marsh, no longer a marsh to-day, but, at the end of long years, drained and ordered, a wide pastoral of grazing, with “new” Romney town, a Port no more,—not the least of the shrunken Five,—mellowed to mere russet at the far end, and other obscure charms, revealed best to the slow cyclist, scattered over its breast: little old “bits” that are not to be described, yet are known, with a small thrill, when seen; little lonely farms, red and grey; little mouse-coloured churches; little villages that seem made only for long shadows and summer afternoons. Brookland, Old Romney, Ivychurch, Dymchurch, Lydd—they have positively the prettiest names. But the point to be made is that, comparing small things with great,—which may always be done when the small things are amiable,—if Rye and its rock and its church are a miniature Mont-Saint-Michel, so, when the summer deepens, the shadows fall, and the mounted shepherds and their dogs pass before you in the grassy desert, you find in the mild English “marsh” a recall of the Roman Campagna.

OLD SUFFOLK

I am not sure that before entering the county of Suffolk in the early part of August, I had been conscious of any personal relation to it save my share in what we all inevitably feel for a province enshrining the birthplace of a Copperfield. The opening lines in David’s history offered in this particular an easy perch to my young imagination; and to recall them to-day, though with a memory long unrefreshed, is to wonder once more at the depth to which early impressions strike down. This one in especial indeed has been the privilege of those millions of readers who owe to Dickens the glow of the prime response to the romantic, that first bite of the apple of knowledge which leaves a taste for ever on the tongue. The great initiators give such a colour to mere names that the things they represent have often, before contact, been a lively part of experience. It is hard therefore for an undefended victim of this kind of emotion to measure, when contact arrives, the quantity of picture already stored up, to point to the nucleus of the gallery or trace the history of the acquaintance. It is true that for the divine plant of sensibility in youth the watering need never have been lavish. It flowered, at all events, at the right moment, in a certain case, into the branching image of Blunderstone—which, by the way, I am sorry to see figure as “Blunderston” in gazetteers of recent date and more than questionable tact. Dickens took his Rookery exactly where he found it, and simply fixed it for ever; he left the cradle of the Copperfields the benefit of its delightful name; or I should say better, perhaps, left the delightful name and the obscure nook the benefit of an association ineffaceable: all of which makes me the more ashamed not as yet to have found the right afternoon—it would have in truth to be abnormally long—for a pious pilgrimage to the distracting little church where, on David’s sleepy Sundays, one used to lose one’s self with the sketchy Phiz. One of the reasons of this omission, so profane on a prior view, is doubtless that everything, in England, in old-time corners, has the connecting touch and the quality of illustration, and that, in a particularly golden August, with an impression in every bush, the immediate vision, wherever one meets it, easily attaches and suffices. Another must have been, I confess, the somewhat depressed memory of a visit paid a few years since to the ancient home of the Peggottys, supposedly so “sympathetic,” but with little left, to-day, as the event then proved, of the glamour it had worn to the fancy. Great Yarmouth, it will be remembered, was a convenient drive from Blunderstone; but Great Yarmouth, with its mile of cockneyfied sea-front and its overflow of nigger minstrelsy, now strikes the wrong note so continuously that I, for my part, became conscious, on the spot, of a chill to the spirit of research.

This time, therefore, I have allowed that spirit its ease; and I may perhaps intelligibly make the point I desire if I contrive to express somehow that I have found myself, most of the month, none the less abundantly occupied in reading a fuller sense into the lingering sound given out, for a candid mind, by my superscription and watching whatever it may stand for gradually flush with a stronger infusion. It takes, in England, for that matter, no wonderful corner of the land to make the fiddle-string vibrate. The old usual rural things do this enough, and a part of the charm of one’s exposure to them is that they ask one to rise to no heroics. What is the charm, after all, but just the abyss of the familiar? The peopled fancy, the haunted memory are themselves what pay the bill. The game can accordingly be played with delightful economy, a thrift involving the cost of little more than a good bicycle. The bicycle indeed, since I fall back on that admission, may perhaps, without difficulty, be too good for the roads. Those of the more devious kind often engender hereabouts, like the Aristotelian tragedy, pity and terror; but almost equally with others they lead, on many a chance, to the ruddiest, greenest hamlets. What this comes to is saying that I have had, for many a day, the sweet sense of living, æsthetically, at really high pressure without, as it were, drawing on the great fund. By the great fund I mean the public show, the show for admission to which you are charged and overcharged, made to taste of the tree of possible disappointment. The beauty of old Suffolk in general, and above all of the desperate depth of it from which I write, is that these things whisk you straight out of conceivable relation to that last danger.

I defy any one, at desolate, exquisite Dunwich, to be disappointed in anything. The minor key is struck here with a felicity that leaves no sigh to be breathed, no loss to be suffered; a month of the place is a real education to the patient, the inner vision. The explanation of this is, appreciably, that the conditions give you to deal with not, in the manner of some quiet countries, what is meagre and thin, but what has literally, in a large degree, ceased to be at all. Dunwich is not even the ghost of its dead self; almost all you can say of it is that it consists of the mere letters of its old name. The coast, up and down, for miles, has been, for more centuries than I presume to count, gnawed away by the sea. All the grossness of its positive life is now at the bottom of the German Ocean, which moves for ever, like a ruminating beast, an insatiable, indefatigable lip. Few things are so melancholy—and so redeemed from mere ugliness by sadness—as this long, artificial straightness that the monster has impartially maintained. If at low tide you walk on the shore, the cliffs, of little height, show you a defence picked as bare as a bone; and you can say nothing kinder of the general humility and general sweetness of the land than that this sawlike action gives it, for the fancy, an interest, a sort of mystery, that more than makes up for what it may have surrendered. It stretched, within historic times, out into towns and promontories for which there is now no more to show than the empty eye-holes of a skull; and half the effect of the whole thing, half the secret of the impression, and what I may really call, I think, the source of the distinction, is this very visibility of the mutilation. Such at any rate is the case for a mind that can properly brood. There is a presence in what is missing—there is history in there being so little. It is so little, to-day, that every item of the handful counts.

The biggest items are of course the two ruins, the great church and its tall tower, now quite on the verge of the cliff, and the crumbled, ivied wall of the immense cincture of the Priory. These things have parted with almost every grace, but they still keep up the work that they have been engaged in for centuries and that cannot better be described than as the adding of mystery to mystery. This accumulation, at present prodigious, is, to the brooding mind, unconscious as the shrunken little Dunwich of to-day may be of it, the beginning and the end of the matter. I hasten to add that it is to the brooding mind only, and from it, that I speak. The mystery sounds for ever in the hard, straight tide, and hangs, through the long, still summer days and over the low, diked fields, in the soft, thick light. We play with it as with the answerless question, the question of the spirit and attitude, never again to be recovered, of the little city submerged. For it _was_ a city, the main port of Suffolk, as even its poor relics show; with a fleet of its own on the North Sea, and a big religious house on the hill. We wonder what were then the apparent conditions of security, and on what rough calculation a community could so build itself out to meet its fate. It keeps one easy company here to-day to think of the whole business as a magnificent mistake. But Mr. Swinburne, in verses of an extraordinary poetic eloquence, quite brave enough for whatever there may have been, glances in the right direction much further than I can do. Read moreover, for other glances, the “Letters of Edward FitzGerald,” Suffolk worthy and whimsical subject, who, living hard by at Woodbridge, haunted these regions during most of his life, and has left, in delightful pages, at the service of the emulous visitor, the echo of every odd, quaint air they could draw from his cracked, sweet instrument. He has paid his tribute, I seem to remember, to the particular delicate flower—the pale Dunwich rose—that blooms on the walls of the Priory. The emulous visitor, only yesterday, on the most vulgar of vehicles—which, however, he is quite aware he must choose between using and abusing—followed, in the mellow afternoon, one of these faint hints across the land and as far as the old, old town of Aldeburgh, the birthplace and the commemorated “Borough” of the poet Crabbe.

FitzGerald, devoted to Crabbe, was apparently not less so to this small break in the wide, low, heathery bareness that brings the sweet Suffolk commons—rare purple and gold when I arrived—nearly to the edge of the sea. We don’t, none the less, always gather the particular impression we bravely go forth to seek. We doubtless gather another indeed that will serve as well any such turn as here may wait for it; so that if it was somehow not easy to work FitzGerald into the small gentility of the sea-front, the little “marina,” as of a fourth-rate watering-place, that has elbowed away, evidently in recent years, the old handful of character, one could at least, to make up for that, fall back either on the general sense of the happy trickery of genius or on the special beauty of the mixture, in the singer of Omar Khayyam, that, giving him such a place for a setting, could yet feed his fancy so full. Crabbe, at Aldeburgh, for that matter, is perhaps even more wonderful—in the light, I mean, of what is left of the place by one’s conjuring away the little modern vulgar accumulation. What is left is just the stony beach and the big gales and the cluster of fishermen’s huts and the small, wide, short street of decent, homely, shoppy houses. These are the private emotions of the historic sense—glimpses in which we recover for an hour, or rather perhaps, with an intensity, but for the glimmer of a minute, the conditions that, grimly enough, could engender masterpieces, or at all events classics. What a mere pinch of manners and customs in the midst of winds and waves! Yet if it was a feature of these to return a member to Parliament, what wonder that, up to the Reform Bill, dead Dunwich should have returned two?

The glimpses I speak of are, in all directions, the constant company of the afternoon “spin.” Beginning, modestly enough, at Dunwich itself, they end, for intensity, as far inland as you have time to go; far enough—this is the great point—to have shown you, in their quiet vividness of type, a placid series of the things into which you may most read the old story of what is softest in the English complexity. I scarce know what murmur has been for weeks in my ears if it be not that of the constant word that, as a recall of the story, may serve to be put under the vignette. And yet this word is in its last form nothing more eloquent than the mere admonition to be pleased. Well, so you are, even as I was yesterday at Wesselton with the characteristic “value” that expressed itself, however shyly, in the dear old red inn at which I halted for the queer restorative—I thus discharge my debt to it—of a bottle of lemonade with a “dash.” The dash was only of beer, but the refreshment was immense. So even was that of the sight of a dim, draped, sphinx-like figure that loomed, at the end of a polished passage, out of a little dusky back parlour which had a windowful of the choked light of a small green garden—a figure proving to be an old woman desirous to dilate on all the years she had sat there with rheumatism “most cruel.” So, inveterately—and in these cases without the after-taste—is that of the pretty little park gates you pass to skirt the walls and hedges beyond which the great affair, the greatest of all, the deep, still home, sits in the midst of its acres and strikes you all the more for being, precisely, so unrenowned. It is the charming repeated lesson that the amenity of the famous seats in this country is nothing to that of the lost and buried ones. This impression in particular may bring you round again harmoniously to Dunwich and above all perhaps to where the Priory, laid, as I may say, flat on its back, rests its large outline on what was once the high ground, with the inevitable “big” house, beyond and a little above, folded, for privacy, in a neat, impenetrable wood. Here as elsewhere the cluster offers without complication just the signs of the type. At the base of the hill are the dozen cottages to which the village has been reduced, and one of which contains, to my hearing, though by no means, alas, to his own, a very ancient man who will count for you on his fingers, till they fail, the grand acres that, in his day, he has seen go the way of the rest. He likes to figure that he ploughed of old where only the sea ploughs now. Dunwich, however, will still last his time; and that of as many others as—to repeat my hint—may yet be drawn here (though not, I hope, on the instance of these prudent lines) to judge for themselves into how many meanings a few elements can compose. One never need be bored, after all, when “composition” really rules. It rules in the way the brown hamlet really disposes itself, and the grey square tower of the church, in just the right relation, peeps out of trees that remind me exactly of those which, in the frontispieces of Birket Foster, offered to my childish credulity the very essence of England. Let me put it directly for old Suffolk that this credulity finds itself here, at the end of time, more than ever justified. Let me put it perhaps also that the very essence of England has a way of presenting itself with completeness in almost any fortuitous combination of rural objects at all, so that, wherever you may be, you get, reduced and simplified, the whole of the scale. The big house and its woods are always at hand; with a “party” always, in the intervals of shooting, to bring down to the rustic sports that keep up the tradition of the village green. The russet, low-browed inn, the “ale-house” of Shakespeare, the immemorial fountain of beer, looking over that expanse, swings, with an old-time story-telling creak, the sign of the Marquis of Carabas. The pretty girls, within sight of it, alight from the Marquis’s wagonette; the young men with the one eye-glass and the new hat sit beside them on the benches supplied for their sole accommodation, and thanks to which the meditator on manners has, a little, the image, gathered from faded fictions by female hands, of the company brought over, for the triumph of the heroine, to the hunt or the county ball. And it is always Hodge and Gaffer that, at bottom, _font les frais_—always the mild children of the glebe on whom, in the last resort, the complex superstructure rests.

The discovery, in the twilight of time, of the merits, as a building-site, of Hodge’s broad bent back remains surely one of the most sagacious strokes of the race from which the squire and the parson were to be evolved. He is there in force—at the rustic sports—in force or in feebleness, with Mrs. Hodge and the Miss Hodges, who participate with a silent glee in the chase, over fields where their shadows are long, of a pig with a greased tail. He pulls his forelock in the tent in which, after the pig is caught, the rewards of valour are dispensed by the squire’s lady, and if he be in favour for respectability and not behind with rent, he penetrates later to the lawn within the wood, where he is awaited by a band of music and a collation of beer, buns, and tobacco.

I mention these things as some of the light notes, but the picture is never too empty for a stronger one not to sound. The strongest, at Dunwich, is indeed one that, without in the least falsifying the scale, counts immensely for filling in. The palm in the rustic sports is for the bluejackets; as, in England, of course, nothing is easier than for the village green to alternate with the element that Britannia still more admirably rules. I had often dreamed that the ideal refuge for a man of letters was a cottage so placed on the coast as to be circled, as it were, by the protecting arm of the Admiralty. I remember to have heard it said in the old country—in New York and Boston—that the best place to live in is next to an engine-house, and it is on this analogy that, at Dunwich, I have looked for ministering peace in near neighbourhood to one of those stations of the coast-guard that, round all the edge of England, at short intervals, on rock and sand and heath, make, with shining whitewash and tar, clean as a great state is at least theoretically clean, each its own little image of the reach of the empire. It is in each case an image that, for one reason and another, you respond to with a sort of thrill; and the thing becomes as concrete as you can wish on your discovering in the three or four individual members of the simple staff of the establishment all sorts of educated decency and many sorts of beguilement to intercourse. Prime among the latter, in truth, is the great yarn-spinning gift. It differs from man to man, but here and there it glows like a cut ruby. May the last darkness close before I cease to care for sea-folk!—though this, I hasten to add, is not the private predilection at which, in these incoherent notes, I proposed most to glance. Let me have mentioned it merely as a sign that the fault is all my own if, this summer, the arm of the Admiralty has not, in the full measure of my theory, represented the protection under which the long literary morning may know—abyss of delusion!—nothing but itself.

DUNWICH, August 31, 1879.

INDEX

Abergavenny, 247.

“Adam Bede,” locality of, 216, 217.

Aldeburgh, birthplace of Crabbe, 323, 324.

Apsley House, 20, 21.

Arnold, Matthew, 24;
“The Sick King in Bokhara,” quoted, 29.

Avon River, 90.

Baillie, Joanna, 44.

Banbury, 218.

Becket, Thomas A’, his assassination at Canterbury, 149, 150;
his shrine, 150, 151.

Belgravia, 15, 16; in dog-days, 154.

Blackheath, the Common, 168.

Black Prince, the (_see_ Edward Plantagenet).

Blunderstone, 318, 319.

Bonchurch, 253, 254.

Brighton, 278;
gaiety of, 279.

Broughton Castle, 219, 220.

Browning, Robert, 51-59.

Buckingham Palace, 21, 23.

Bury St. Edmunds, 266;
ruined abbey at, 267.

Cambridge University, famous chapel of King’s College, 264, 265.

Cambridgeshire, Newmarket Heath, 265, 266;
shooting-boxes in, 266;
Bury St. Edmunds, 266, 267.

Canterbury, 142;
the cathedral, 147-152;
King’s School, 148, 149;
where Becket was killed, 149, 150;
tomb of the Black Prince, 150;
Lady Chapel, 151;
the pilgrimage to, 151.

Charing Cross, 7;
railway station, 42.

Chatsworth, 87.

Chaucer, his story-telling cavalcade, 151.

Chelsea, 42, 43.

Chester, ancient wall, 62-67;
cathedral, 66, 72-76;
the Rows, 67-72;
Anglican service, 73, 74;
Canon Kingsley, 73-75.

Chichester, the cathedral, 257, 260;
an old market cross, 259.

Clapham, a classic community, 178, 179.

Climate, richness of London, 17.

Compton Wyniates, 220.

Coventry, charity foundations, 210, 212, 213.

Crabbe, George, birthplace of, 323, 324.

“Daniel Deronda,” recalled in Warwickshire, 202, 203.

“David Copperfield,” 290;
retrospective pictures in, 65;
sleeps under a cannon at Chatham, 145;
his birthplace visited, 317, 318;
home of the Peggottys, 319.

“Denis Duval,” locality of, 288-315.

Devonshire, beauties of, 93, 94.

Dickens, Charles, retrospective pictures in “David Copperfield,”
65;
his Gadshill house, 143;
recalled by talkative shopkeeper, 144;
background of “Oliver Twist” identified, 274;
birthplace of David visited, 317, 318.

Doré, Gustave, his drawing suggested by Devon seacoast, 104.

Dover, 142.

Du Maurier, George, 19.

Dunwich, a desolate seaport, 320-322;
ruins of, 322, 323;
FitzGerald’s tribute to quaintness of, 323;
the Priory, 326;
inroads of the sea, 326, 327;
rural merry-making, 327, 328.

Edward Plantagenet, his tomb, 150;
“Fleur-de-Lis” inn named in honour of, 151;
in the sea-fight off Winchelsea, 310.

Edward III, fights Spaniards off Winchelsea, 310, 311.

Eliot, George, characters in “Daniel Deronda” suggested, 202, 203;
locality of “Adam Bede” and “Middlemarch,” 216, 217.

England, its social discipline, 121, 122;
universal church-going, 123-125;
social usages, 125, 126;
Easter exodus from London, 126;
holiday spirit, 128, 129;
Passion Week, 130-138;
its people handsome, 136-138;
its poverty depressing, 137;
proletariat funeral, 138-141;
no public entertainments, 157-159;
prestige of, 170-173;
the Egyptian occupation, 172, 173;
Derby Day, 175-188;
the country the basis of society, 176;
a rural Sunday, 204, 205;
types of English beauty, 206-208;
rural scenery, 225-230;
an English New Year, 269-275;
watering-places in winter, 277-286.

Epsom, Derby Day, 175-188.

Exeter, the cathedral, 95-97.

FitzGerald, Edward, tribute to Suffolk in his “Letters,” 323;
fond of Crabbe’s birthplace, 323, 324.

Fletcher, John, born at Rye, 309.

Fog, London, 32, 33, 35, 131, 272.

Foster, Birket, 327.

Gladstone, William Ewart, speech on Egyptian occupation, 173.

Glastonbury, 115, 116;
ruined abbey of, 115-117.

Green Park, 21-23.

Greenwich, 43;
dining at, 161-163;
river excursion to, 164, 165;
observatory and park, 166.

Grosvenor Place, 21.

Haddon Hall, 83-87.

Hampstead, 43, 44.

Hastings, 277;
a little London, 278, 279;
inns and hotels, 280-284;
a quiet retreat, 285, 286.

“Henry Esmond,” lines from, recalled, 5, 6;
its Kensington setting, 44.

Hyde Park, 18;
the Row, 19, 20;
the Corner, 20-23, 46;
in dog-days, 153.

Ilfracombe, 97-101.

“Ingoldsby Legends,” an incident suggests, 5.

Isle of Wight, detestable railways of, 251;
Ryde, 251;
Ventnor, 251-253;
Bonchurch, 253, 254;
Shanklin, 254.

Johnson, Samuel, first glimpse of Temple Bar, 79;
birthplace, 78-83.

Jones, Inigo, 167.

Kenilworth, 198-201.

Kensington Gardens, enchanting vista in, 18.

Kingsley, Charles, discourse at Chester, 74, 75.

Lichfield, Dr. Johnson’s birth-house, 78;
cathedral, 79-83;
Haddon Hall, 83-87;
Chatsworth, 87.

Liverpool, first impression of, 2, 3, 5;
journey from, to London, 3-5.

London, first impressions of, 1, 4, 7, 8;
St. Paul’s, 4;
Morley’s Hotel, 4, 5;
Temple Bar, 5;
Ludgate Hill, 6;
Strand, 6, 7;
Charing Cross, 7;
Piccadilly, 7, 8;
its immensity an advantage, 8-13;
creeds and coteries, 11;
home of human race, 13;
headquarters of English speech, 14;
absence of style, 15;
accident of style replaces intention, 16, 17;
parks, 16-25;
rural impressions, 18, 19;
rustic walk from Notting Hill to Whitehall, 18-25;
Hyde Park, 19-22;
Hyde Park Corner, 20;
Grosvenor Place 21;
Apsley House, 20, 21;
Green Park, 21-23;
Buckingham Palace, 21-23;
levelling tendencies of London life, 25-28;
beautiful women the great admiration, 28;
liberal hospitality, 29;
cultivation of the abrupt, 29, 30;
lights and shades, 31-36, 134;
holidays, 34;
railway stations, 37, 38;
bookstalls, 38, 39;
Thames River, 40-43;
Hampstead, 43, 44;
Kensington, 44;
the Season, 45-51;
Easter exodus, 126-128;
Passion Week, 130-138;
architectural ugliness, 133, 134;
people of the slums, 137;
proletariat funeral, 138-141;
the Tower, 142, 143;
dog-days in, 153-161;
no “public fund” of amusement, 157-159;
tramps, 160, 161;
convivial gatherings, 162-164.

Ludgate Hill, 6.

Ludlow, a charming old town, 240;
provincial society at, 241-243.

Lynton, 102-104.

Mayfair, mind of, residences of, 15, 16.

“Middlemarch,” locality of, 216, 217.

“Mill on the Floss,” retrospective pictures in, 65.

Milton, John, 14.

Monmouthshire, April in, 245, 246;
the Skirrid, 246, 247;
Abergavenny, 247;
a mediæval church, 247-249;
feudal manors, 249, 250.

Newmarket Heath, 265, 266.

Notting Hill, rustic walk to Whitehall, 18-25.

North Devon, 93-105;
Exeter Cathedral, 95-97;
beauties of Ilfracombe, 97-101;
Lynton, 102-104;
Somerset, 104, 105.

Odger, George, radical agitator, his funeral, 138-141.

“Oliver Twist,” visit to a workhouse recalls, 274.

Oxford, 41;
at Commemoration, 189-196;
typifies union of science and sense, 261;
Trinity College, 261-264.

“Pall Mall Gazette,” 176.

Pall Mall, 32, 33.

Piccadilly, 7, 8, 14, 21;
funeral procession on, 130, 140;
the “White House,” 177.

Portsmouth, untidy and prosaic, 255, 256;
Nelson’s “Victory,” 256, 257.

“Punch,” 7.

Queen Anne, statue of, 6.

Rembrandt, pictures at Warwick Castle, 90.

Rochester, the Dickens country, 143-145;
Watts’s shelter, 144;
the cathedral, 145-147.

Ryde, 251.

Rye, locality of “Denis Duval,” 288-315;
old shipyards, 304, 306;
old gardens, 304-306;
haunt of artists, 306-308;
birthplace of Fletcher, 309;
landscape beauties, 313-315;
Romney Marsh, 314.

St. Leonards, 278, 285.

St. Paul’s, cathedral of, 4.

Salisbury, the cathedral, 117, 118;
Stonehenge, 118, 119;
Wilton House, 119, 120.

Scott, Sir Walter, 290;
locality of “Woodstock,” 221, 222.

Serpentine, bridge over, 17, 18.

Shakespeare, William, 14;
Warwickshire his country, 88, 213, 214;
his clowns, 201;
Dame Quickly’s ale-house identified, 201;
a garden setting for his comedies, 216.

Shanklin, 254.

“Sir Roger de Coverley,” visualized at Porlock, 105.

Skirrid, the, 246, 247.

Somerset, 104, 105.

Stokesay, 236;
the castle, 237-240.

Stonehenge, 118, 119.

Strand, first walk in, 6;
Exeter Hall, 6, 7.

Stratford, 201;
ideal home for a scholar, 214;
a modern house in, 215.

Suffolk, locality of “David Copperfield,” 317-319;
Dunwich, 320-330;
Aldeburgh, 323, 324;
Wesselton, 325, 326.

Swinburne, Algernon Charles, 323.

Temple Bar, 5;
Dr. Johnson’s first glimpse, 79.

Thackeray, William Makepeace, locality of “Denis Duval,” 288-315;
“Lovel the Widower,” 288;
Adventures of Philip, 288;
“Henry Esmond,” 289;
“The Roundabout Papers,” 295, 296.

Thames River, 15;
beauties of, 40-42;
penny steamboats on, 142, 164, 165.

Vandyck, Anthony, pictures at Warwick Castle, 90, 91;
portraits at Wilton House, 119, 120.

Ventnor, 251-253.

Warwick, 89;
the castle, 89-91;
Leicester’s Hospital, 210-212.

Warwickshire, 87, 88;
centre of English life, 197;
Kenilworth, 198-201;
an old rectory, 201-207;
a Sunday in, 204, 205;
pretty girls of, 207, 208;
conservatism of, 208-210;
charitable institutions, 210-213;
Stratford, 214, 215;
Broughton Castle, 219, 220;
Compton Wyniates, 220;
Wroxton Abbey, 222, 223.

Wells, the cathedral, 107-112;
the close, 112;
Bishop’s Palace, 113, 114;
beautiful church of St. Cuthbert, 114;
Glastonbury Abbey, 115-117.

Wesley, John, his last sermon at Winchelsea, 309.

Wesselton, 325, 326.

Westminster, impressive towers of, 18, 23.

Westminster Abbey, Browning in, 51-59;
Easter service at, 135.

Winchelsea, locality of “Denis Duval,” 288-315;
inroads of the sea, 302;
her great church, 302, 303;
plans for expansion, 303, 304;
Wesley’s last sermon preached at, 309;
sea-fight with Spaniards in, 310;
atmospheric and colour effects at, 312, 313.

“Woodstock,” its locality, 221, 222.

Woolwich, walk from Blackheath to, 168;
the common, 169;
military college and arsenal, 169;
feelings inspired by, 170-173.

Wroxton Abbey, 222, 223.

Wye River, 83.

FOOTNOTE

[1] The monument in the middle of the square, with Sir Edgar
Boehm’s four fine soldiers, had not been set up when these words
were written.