Chapter VI: The Saracen's Head143

[143] From _Tait's Magazine_ for December 1839.--M.

My first visit to the Wordsworths had been made in November, 1807; but, on that occasion, from the necessity of saving the Michaelmas Term at Oxford, for which I had barely left myself time, I stayed only one week. On the last day, I witnessed a scene, the first and the last of its kind that ever I _did_ witness, almost too trivial to mention, except for the sake of showing what things occur in the realities of experience which a novelist could not venture to imagine. Wordsworth and his sister were under an engagement of some standing to dine on that day with a literary lady about four miles distant; and, as the southern mail, which I was to catch at a distance of eighteen miles, would not pass that point until long after midnight, Miss Wordsworth proposed that, rather than pass my time at an inn, I should join the dinner party; a proposal rather more suitable to her own fervent and hospitable temper than to the habits of our hostess, who must (from what I came to know of her in after years) have looked upon me as an intruder. Something _had_ reached Miss Wordsworth of her penurious _ménage_, but nothing that approached the truth. I was presented to the lady, whom we found a perfect _bas bleu_ of a very commonplace order, but having some other accomplishments beyond her slender acquaintance with literature. Our party consisted of six--our hostess, who might be about fifty years of age; a pretty timid young woman, who was there in the character of a humble friend; some stranger or other; the Wordsworths, and myself. The dinner was the very humblest and simplest I had ever seen--in that there was nothing to offend--I did not then know that the lady was very rich--but also it was flagrantly insufficient in quantity. Dinner, however, proceeded; when, without any removals, in came a kind of second course, in the shape of a solitary pheasant. This, in a cold manner, she asked me to try; but we, in our humility, declined for the present; and also in mere good-nature, not wishing to expose too palpably the insufficiency of her dinner. May I die the death of a traitor, if she did not proceed, without further question to any one of us (and, as to the poor young companion, no form of even invitation was conceded to her), and, in the eyes of us all, eat up the whole bird, from alpha to omega. Upon my honour, I thought to myself, this is a scene I would not have missed. It is well to know the possibilities of human nature. Could she have a bet depending on the issue, and would she explain all to us as soon as she had won her wager? Alas! no explanation ever came, except, indeed, that afterwards her character, put _en evidence_ upon a score of occasions, too satisfactorily explained everything. No; it was, as Mr. Coleridge expresses it, a psychological curiosity--a hollow thing--and only once matched in all the course of my reading, in or out of romances; but that once, I grieve to say it, was by a king, and a sort of hero.

The Duchess of Marlborough it is who reports the shocking anecdote of William III, that actually Princess Anne, his future wife, durst not take any of the green peas brought to the dinner table, when that vegetable happened to be as yet scarce and premature. _There_ was a gentleman! And such a lady had we for our hostess. However, we all observed a suitable gravity; but afterwards, when we left the house, the remembrance affected us differently. Miss Wordsworth laughed with undissembled glee; but Wordsworth thought it too grave a matter for laughing--he was thoroughly disgusted, and said repeatedly, "A person cannot be honest, positively not honest, who is capable of such an act." The lady is dead, and I shall not mention her name: she lived only to gratify her selfish propensities; and two little anecdotes may show the outrageous character of her meanness. I was now on the debtor side of her dinner account, and, therefore, in a future year she readily accepted an invitation to come and dine with me at my cottage. But, on a subsequent occasion, when I was to have a few literary people at dinner, whom I knew that she greatly wished to meet, she positively replied thus:--"No; I have already come with my young lady to dine with you; that puts me on the wrong side by one; now, if I were to come again, as I cannot leave Miss ---- behind, I shall then be on the wrong side by three; and that is more than I could find opportunities to repay before I go up to London for the winter." "Very well," I said; "give me 3s. and _that_ will settle the account." She laughed, but positively persisted in not coming until after dinner, notwithstanding she had to drive a distance of ten miles.

The other anecdote is worse. She was exceedingly careful of her health; and not thinking it healthy to drive about in a close carriage,--which, besides, could not have suited the narrow mountain tracks, to which her sketching habits attracted her,--she shut up her town carriage for the summer, and jobbed some little open car. Being a very large woman, and, moreover, a masculine woman, with a bronzed complexion, and always choosing to wear, at night, a turban, round hair that was as black as that of the "Moors of Malabar," she presented an exact likeness of a Saracen's Head, as painted over inn-doors; whilst the timid and delicate young lady by her side looked like "dejected Pity" at the side of "Revenge" when assuming the war-denouncing trumpet. Some Oxonians and Cantabs, who, at different times, were in the habit of meeting this oddly assorted party in all nooks of the country, used to move the question, whether the poor horse or the young lady had the worst of it? At length the matter was decided: the horse was fast going off this sublunary stage; and the Saracen's Head was told as much, and with this little addition,--that his death was owing _inter alia_ to starvation. Her answer was remarkable:--"But, my dear madam, that is his master's fault; I pay so much a-day--he is to keep the horse." That might be, but still the horse was dying, and dying in the way stated. The Saracen's Head persisted in using him under those circumstances--such was her "bond"--and in a short time the horse actually died. Yes, the horse died--and died of starvation--or at least of an illness caused originally by starvation: for so said, not merely the whole population of the little neighbouring town, but also the surgeon. Not long after, however, the lady, the Saracen's Head, died herself; but I fear _not_ of starvation; for, though something like it did prevail at her table, she prudently reserved it all for her guests; in fact, I never heard of such vigilant care, and so much laudable exertion, applied to the promotion of health: yet all failed, and, in a degree which confounded people's speculations upon the subject--for she did not live much beyond sixty; whereas everybody supposed that the management of her physical system entitled her to outwear a century. Perhaps the prayers of horses might avail to order it otherwise.

But the singular thing about this lady's mixed and contradictory character was, that in London and Bath, where her peculiar habits of life were naturally less accurately known, she maintained the reputation of one who united the accomplishments of literature and art with a remarkable depth of sensibility, and a most amiable readiness to enter into the distresses of her friends by sympathy the most cordial and consolation the most delicate. More than once I have seen her name recorded in printed books, and attended with praises that tended to this effect. I have seen letters also from a lady in deep affliction which spoke of the Saracen's Head as having paid her the first visit from which she drew any effectual consolation. Such are the erroneous impressions conveyed by biographical memoirs; or, which is a more charitable construction of the case, such are the inconsistencies of the human heart! And certainly there was one fact, even in her Westmoreland life, that _did_ lend some countenance to the southern picture of her amiableness: and this lay in the cheerfulness with which she gave up her time (_time_, but not much of her redundant money) to the promotion of the charitable schemes set on foot by the neighbouring ladies; sometimes for the education of poor children, sometimes for the visiting of the sick, &c., &c. I have heard several of those ladies express their gratitude for her exertions, and declare that she was about their best member. But their horror was undisguised when the weekly committee came, by rotation, to hold its sittings at her little villa; for, as the business occupied them frequently from eleven o'clock in the forenoon to a late dinner hour, and as many of them had a fifteen or twenty miles' drive, they needed some refreshments: but these were, of course, a "great idea" at the Saracen's Head; since, according to the epigram which illustrates the maxim of Tacitus that _omne ignotum pro magnifico_, and, applying it to the case of a miser's horse, terminates by saying, "What vast ideas must he have of oats!"--upon the same principle these poor ladies, on those fatal committee days, never failed to form most exaggerated ideas of bread, butter, and wine. And at length some, more intrepid than the rest, began to carry biscuits in their muffs, and, with the conscious tremors of school girls (profiting by the absence of the mistress but momentarily expecting detection), they employed some casual absence of their unhostly hostess in distributing and eating their hidden "viaticum." However, it must be acknowledged, that time and exertion, and the sacrifice of more selfish pleasure during the penance at the school, were, after all, real indications of kindness to her fellow-creatures; and, as I wish to part in peace even with the Saracen's Head, I have reserved this anecdote to the last: for it is painful to have lived on terms of good nature, and exchanging civilities, with any human being of whom one can report absolutely _no_ good thing; and I sympathize heartily with that indulgent person of whom it is somewhere recorded that, upon an occasion when the death of a man happened to be mentioned who was unanimously pronounced a wretch without one good quality, "_monstrum nullâ virtute redemptum_," he ventured, however, at last, in a deprecatory tone to say--"Well, he did _whistle_ beautifully, at any rate."

Talking of "whistling" reminds me to return from my digression; for on that night, the 12th of November, 1807, and the last of my visits to the Wordsworths, I took leave of them in the inn at Ambleside about ten at night; and the post-chaise in which I crossed the country to catch the mail was driven by a postilion who whistled so delightfully that, for the first time in my life, I became aware of the prodigious powers which are lodged potentially in so despised a function of the vocal organs. For the whole of the long ascent up Orrest Head, which obliged him to walk his horses for a full half-mile, he made the woods of Windermere ring with the canorous sweetness of his half flute, half clarionet music; but, in fact, the subtle melody of the effect placed it in power far beyond either flute or clarionet. A year or two afterwards, I heard a fellow-servant of this same postilion's, a black, play with equal superiority of effect upon the jew's harp; making that, which in most hands is a mere monotonous jarring, a dull reverberating vibration, into a delightful lyre of no inconsiderable compass. We have since heard of, some of us have heard, the chinchopper. Within the last hundred years, we have had the Æolian harp (first mentioned and described in the "Castle of Indolence," which I think was first published entire about 1738[144]); then the musical glasses; then the _celestina_, to represent the music of the spheres, introduced by Mr. Walker, or some other lecturing astronomer; and many another fine effect obtained from trivial means. But, at this moment, I recollect a performance perhaps more astonishing than any of them. A Mr. Worgman, who had very good introductions, and very general ones (for he was to be met within a few months in every part of the island), used to accompany himself on the piano, weaving _extempore_ long tissues of impassioned music, that were called his own, but which, in fact, were all the better for not being such, or at least for continually embodying passages from Handel and Pergolesi. To this substratum of the instrumental music he contrived to adapt some unaccountable and indescribable choral accompaniment, a pomp of sound, a tempestuous blare of harmony ascending in clouds not from any one, but apparently from a band of Mr. Worgman's; for sometimes it was a trumpet, sometimes a kettle-drum, sometimes a cymbal, sometimes a bassoon, and sometimes it was all of these at once.

"And now 'twas like all instruments;
And now it was a flute;
And now it was an angel's voice,
That maketh the heavens be mute."

In this case I presume that ventriloquism must have had something to do with the effect; but, whatever it were, the power varied greatly with the state of his spirits, or with some other fluctuating causes in the animal economy. However, the result of all these experiences is, that I shall never more be surprised at any musical effects, the very greatest, drawn from whatever inconsiderable or apparently inadequate means; not even if the butcher's instrument, the marrow-bones and cleaver, or any of those culinary instruments so pleasantly treated by Addison in the "Spectator," such as the kitchen dresser and thumb, the tongs and shovel, the pepper and salt-box, should be exalted, by some immortal butcher or inspired scullion, into a sublime harp, dulcimer, or lute, capable of wooing St. Cecilia to listen, able even

"To raise a mortal to the skies,
Or draw an angel down."

That night, as I was passing under the grounds of Elleray, then belonging to a Westmoreland "statesman," a thought struck me, that I was now traversing a road with which, as yet, I was scarcely at all acquainted, but which, in years to come, might perhaps be as familiar to my eye as the rooms of my own house; and possibly that I might traverse them in company with faces as yet not even seen by me, but in those future years dearer than any which I had yet known. In this prophetic glimpse there was nothing very marvellous; for what could be more natural than that I should come to reside in the neighbourhood of the Wordsworths, and that this might lead to my forming connexions in a country which I should consequently come to know so well? I did not, however, anticipate so definitely and circumstantially as all this; but generally I had a dim presentiment that here, on this very road, I should often pass, and in company that, now not even conjecturally delineated or drawn out of the utter darkness in which they were as yet reposing, would hereafter plant memories in my heart, the last that will fade from it in the hour of death. Here, afterwards, at this very spot, or a little above it, but on this very estate, which from local peculiarities of ground, and of sudden angles, was peculiarly _kenspeck_, _i.e._ easy of recognition,[145] and could have been challenged and identified at any distance of years; here afterwards lived Professor Wilson, the only very intimate male friend I have had; here, too, it was, my M.,[146] that, in long years afterwards, through many a score of nights--nights often dark as Erebus, and amidst thunders and lightnings the most sublime--we descended at twelve, one, and two o'clock at night, speeding from Kendal to our distant home, twenty miles away. Thou wert at present a child not nine years old, nor had I seen thy face, nor heard thy name. But within nine years from that same night thou wert seated by my side;--and, thenceforwards, through a period of fourteen years, how often did we two descend, hand locked in hand, and thinking of things to come, at a pace of hurricane; whilst all the sleeping woods about us re-echoed the uproar of trampling hoofs and groaning wheels. Duly as we mounted the crest of Orrest Head, mechanically and of themselves almost, and spontaneously, without need of voice or spur, according to Westmoreland usage, the horses flew off into a gallop, like the pace of a swallow.[147] It was a railroad pace that we ever maintained; objects were descried far ahead in one moment, and in the next were crowding into the rear. Three miles and a half did this storm-flight continue, for so long the descent lasted. Then, for many a mile, over undulating ground, did we alternately creep and fly, until again a long precipitous movement, again a storm-gallop, that hardly suffered the feet to touch the ground, gave warning that we drew near to that beloved cottage; warning to us--warning to them:--

"The silence that is here
Is of the grave, and of austere
But happy feelings of the dead."

Sometimes the nights were bright with cloudless moonlight, and of that awful breathless quiet which often broods over vales that are peculiarly landlocked, and which is, or seems to be, so much more expressive of a solemn hush and a Sabbath-like rest from the labours of nature than I remember to have experienced in flat countries:--

"It is not quiet--is not peace--
But something deeper far than these."

And on such nights it was no sentimental refinement, but a sincere and hearty feeling, that, in wheeling past the village churchyard of Stavely, something like an outrage seemed offered to the sanctity of its graves by the uproar of our career. Sometimes the nights were of that pitchy darkness which is more palpable and unfathomable wherever hills intercept the gleaming of light which otherwise is usually seen to linger about the horizon in the northern quarter; and then arose in perfection that striking effect when the glare of lamps searches for one moment every dark recess of the thickets, forces them into sudden, almost daylight, revelation, only to leave them within the twinkling of the eye in darkness more profound; making them, like the snow-flakes falling upon a cataract, "one moment bright, then gone for ever." But, dark or moonlight alike, in every instance throughout so long a course of years, the road was entirely our own for the whole twenty miles. After nine o'clock not many people are abroad, after ten absolutely none, upon the roads of Westmoreland; a circumstance which gives a peculiar solemnity to a traveller's route amongst these quiet valleys upon a summer evening of latter May, of June, or early July; since, in a latitude so much higher than that of London, broad daylight prevails to an hour long after nine. Nowhere is the holiness of vesper hours more deeply felt.

[144] The _Castle of Indolence_ was first published in 1748, the
year of the poet's death. The following is the stanza of the poem
referred to by De Quincey:--

"A certain music, never known before,
Here lull'd the pensive, melancholy mind;
Full easily obtained. Behoves no more
But sidelong to the gently-waving wind
To lay the well-tuned instrument reclined,
From which, with airy flying fingers light,
Beyond each mortal touch the most refined;
The god of winds drew sounds of deep delight;
Whence, with just cause, the Harp of Æolus it hight."--M.

[145] The usual Scottish word is _kenspeckle_.--M.

[146] His future wife, Margaret Simpson.--M.

[147] It may be supposed, not literally, for the swallow (or at
least that species called the swift) has been known to fly at the
rate of 300 miles an hour. Very probably, however, this pace was
not deduced from an entire hour's performance, but estimated by
proportion from a flight of one or two minutes. An interesting
anecdote is told by the gentleman (I believe the Rev. E. Stanley)
who described in _Blackwood's_ _Magazine_ the opening of the
earliest English railway, viz. that a bird (snipe was it, or
field-fare, or plover?) ran, or rather flew, a race with the
engine for three or four miles, until, finding itself likely to be
beaten, it then suddenly wheeled away into the moors. And now, in
1839, from all these flying journeys and their stinging
remembrances, hardly a wreck survives of what composed their
living equipage: the men who chiefly drove in those days (for I
have ascertained it) are gone; the horses are gone; darkness rests
upon all, except myself. I, woe is me! am the solitary survivor
from scenes that now seem to me as fugitive as the flying lights
from our lamps as they shot into the forest recesses. God forbid
that on such a theme I should seem to affect sentimentalism! It is
from overmastering recollections that I look back on those distant
days; and chiefly I have suffered myself to give way before the
impulse that haunts me of reverting to those bitter, bitter
thoughts, in order to notice one singular waywardness or caprice
(as it might seem) incident to the situation, which, I doubt not,
besieges many more people than myself: it is, that I find a more
poignant suffering, a pang more searching, in going back, not to
those enjoyments themselves, and the days when they were within my
power, but to times anterior, when as yet they did not exist; nay,
when some who were chiefly concerned in them as parties had not
even been born. No night, I might almost say, of my whole life,
remains so profoundly, painfully, and pathetically imprinted on my
remembrance as this very one, on which I tried prelusively, as it
were, that same road in solitude, and lulled by the sweet
carollings of the postilion, which, _after_ an interval of ten
years, and _through_ a period of more than equal duration, it was
destined that I should so often traverse in circumstances of
happiness too radiant, that for me are burned out for ever.
Coleridge told me of a similar case that had fallen within his
knowledge, and the impassioned expression which the feelings
belonging to it drew from a servant woman at Keswick:--She had
nursed some boy, either of his or of Mr. Southey's; the boy had
lived apart from the rest of the family, secluded with his nurse
in her cottage; she was dotingly fond of him; lived, in short,
_by_ him, as well as for him; and nearly ten years of her life had
been exalted into one golden dream by his companionship. At length
came the day which severed the connexion; and she, in the anguish
of the separation, bewailing her future loneliness, and knowing
too well that education and the world, if it left him some kind
remembrances of her, never could restore him to her arms the same
fond loving boy that felt no shame in surrendering his whole heart
to caressing and being caressed, did not revert to any day or
season of her ten years' happiness, but went back to the very day
of his arrival, a particular Thursday, and to an hour when, as
yet, she had not seen him, exclaiming--"O that Thursday! O that it
could come back! that Thursday when the chaise-wheels were ringing
in the streets of Keswick; when yet I had not seen his bonny face;
but when _he_ was coming!"

Ay, reader, all this may sound foolishness to you, that perhaps never had a heartache, or that may have all your blessings to come. But now let me return to my narrative. After about twelve months' interval, and therefore again in November, but November of the year 1808, I repeated my visit to Wordsworth, and upon a longer scale. I found him removed from his cottage to a house of considerable size, about three-quarters of a mile distant, called Allan Bank. This house had been very recently erected, at an expense of about £1500, by a gentleman from Liverpool, a merchant, and also a lawyer in some department or other. It was not yet completely finished; and an odd accident was reported to me as having befallen it in its earliest stage. The walls had been finished, and this event was to be celebrated at the village inn with an _ovation_, previously to the _triumph_ that would follow on the roof-raising. The workmen had all housed themselves at the _Red Lion_, and were beginning their carouse, when up rode a traveller, who brought them the unseasonable news, that, whilst riding along the vale, he had beheld the downfall of the whole building. Out the men rushed, hoping that this might be a hoax; but too surely they found his report true, and their own festival premature. A little malice mingled unavoidably with the laughter of the Dalesmen; for it happened that the Liverpool gentleman had offered a sort of insult to the native artists, by bringing down both masons and carpenters from his own town; an unwise plan, for they were necessarily unacquainted with many points of local skill; and it was to some ignorance in their mode of laying the stones that the accident was due. The house had one or two capital defects--it was cold, damp, and, to all appearance, incurably smoky. Upon this latter defect, by the way, Wordsworth founded a claim, not for diminution of rent, but absolutely for entire immunity from any rent at all. It was truly comical to hear him argue the point with the Liverpool proprietor, Mr. C. He went on dilating on the hardship of living in such a house; of the injury, or suffering, at least, sustained by the eyes; until, at last, he had drawn a picture of himself as a very ill-used man; and I seriously expected to hear him sum up by demanding a round sum for damages. Mr. C. was a very good-natured man, calm, and gentlemanlike in his manners. He had also a considerable respect for Wordsworth, derived, it may be supposed, not from his writings, but from the authority (which many more besides him could not resist) of his conversation. However, he looked grave and perplexed. Nor do I know how the matter ended; but I mention it as an illustration of Wordsworth's keen spirit of business. Whilst foolish people supposed him a mere honeyed sentimentalist, speaking only in zephyrs and bucolics, he was in fact a somewhat hard pursuer of what he thought fair advantages.

In the February which followed, I left Allan Bank; but, upon Miss Wordsworth's happening to volunteer the task of furnishing for my use the cottage so recently occupied by her brother's family, I took it upon a seven years' lease. And thus it happened--this I mean was the mode of it (for, at any rate, I should have settled somewhere in the country)--that I became a resident in Grasmere.