Chapter IV: Part 4

There was an uncontrollable throb of emotion in the large congregation, and I confess that the tears filled my eyes. Mr. Woodward went on—

“Yes, it has pleased God to lead him through deep waters; but I do not think that he will altogether withhold from him something of his Christmas joy. He knows that they are safe with Christ—safe with Christ, and waiting for him there—and that will be more and more of a joy, and less and less of a sorrow as the years go on, till God restores him the dear children He has taken from him now. We must not forget him in our prayers.”

Then after a pause he resumed. There was no rhetoric or oratory about it; but I have never in my life heard anything so absolutely affecting and moving—any word which seemed to go so straight from heart to heart; it was the genius of humanity.

A few months after this Mr. Woodward died, as he always wished to die, quite suddenly, in his chair. He had often said to me that he did hope he wouldn’t die in bed, with bed-clothes tucked under his chin, and medicine bottles by him; he said he was sure he would not make an edifying end under the circumstances. His heart had long been weak; and he was found sitting with his head on his breast as though asleep, smiling to himself. In one hand his pen was still clasped. I have never seen such heartfelt grief as was shown at his funeral. His sister did not survive him a month. The week after her death I walked up to the rectory, and found the house being dismantled. Mr. Woodward’s books were being packed into deal cases; the study was already a dusty, awkward room. It was strange to think of the sudden break-up of that centre of beautiful life and high example. All over and done! Yet not all; there are many grateful hearts who do not forget Mr. Woodward; and what he would have thought and what he would have said are still the natural guide for conduct in a dozen simple households. If death must come, it was so that he would have wished it; and Mr. Woodward could be called happy in life and death perhaps more than any other man I have known.

20

[Sidenote: MR. CUTHBERT]

Who was to be Mr. Woodward’s successor? For some weeks we had lived in a state of agitated expectancy. One morning, soon after breakfast, a card was brought to me—The Rev. Cyril Cuthbert. I went down to the drawing-room and found my mother talking to a young clergyman, who rose at my entrance, and informed me that he had been offered the living, and that he had ventured to call and consult me, adding that he had been told I was all-powerful in the parish. I was distinctly prepossessed by his appearance, and perhaps by his appreciation, however exaggerated, of my influence; he was a small man with thin features, but bronzed and active; his hair was parted in the middle and lay in wiry waves on each side. He had small, almost feminine, hands and feet, and rather a delicate walk. He was entirely self-possessed, very genial in talk, with a pleasant laugh; at the same time he gave me an impression of strength. He was dressed in very old and shabby clothes, of decidedly clerical cut, but his hat and coat were almost green from exposure to weather. Yet he was obviously a gentleman. I gathered that he was the son of a country squire, that he had been at a public school and Oxford, and that he had been for some years a curate in a large manufacturing town. As we talked my impressions became more definite; the muscles of the jaw were strongly developed, and I began to fancy that the genial manner concealed a considerable amount of self-will. He had the eye which I have been led to associate with the fanatic, of a certain cold blue, shallow and impenetrable, which does not let you far into the soul, but meets you with a bright and unshrinking gaze.

At his request I accompanied him to church and vicarage. At the latter, he said to me frankly that he was a poor man, and that he would not be able to keep it up in the same style—“Indeed,” he said with a smile, “I don’t think it would be right to do so.” I said that I didn’t think it very material, but that as a matter of fact I thought that the perfection of Mr. Woodward’s arrangements had had a humanising influence in the place. At the church he was pleased at the neatness and general air of use that the building had; but he looked with disfavour at the simple arrangements of the chancel. I noticed that he bowed and murmured a few words of prayer when he entered the building. When we had examined the church he said to me, “To speak frankly, Mr. ——,—I don’t know what your views are,—but what is the church tone of this place like?” I said that I hardly knew how to describe it—the church certainly played a large part in the lives of the parishioners; but that I supposed that Mr. Woodward would perhaps be called old-fashioned. “Yes, indeed,” sighed Mr. Cuthbert, looking wearily round and shrugging his shoulders. “The altar indeed is distinctly dishonouring to the Blessed Sacrament—no attempt at Catholic practice or tradition. There is not, I see, even a second altar in the church; but, please God, if He sends me here we will change all that.”

Before we left the church he fell on his knees and prayed with absolute self-absorption.

When we got outside he said to me: “May I tell you something? I have just returned from a visit to a friend of mine, a priest at A——; he has got everything—simply everything; he is a noble fellow—if I could but hope to imitate him.”

A—— was, I knew, a great railway depôt, and thinking that Mr. Cuthbert did not fully understand how very rural a parish we were, I said, “I am afraid there is not very much scope here for great activity. We have a reading-room and a club, but it has never been a great success—the people won’t turn out in the evenings.”

“Reading-rooms and clubs,” said Mr. Cuthbert in high disdain; “I did not mean that kind of thing at all—I was thinking of things much nearer the heart of the people. Herries has incense and lights, the eucharistic vestments, he reserves the sacrament—you may see a dozen people kneeling before the tabernacle whenever you enter the church—he has often said to me that he doesn’t know how he could keep hope alive in his heart in the midst of such vice and sin, if it were not for the thought of the Blessed Presence, in the midst of it, in the quiet church. He has a sisterhood in his parish too under a very strict rule. They never leave the convent, and spend whole days in intercession. The sacrament has been reserved there for fifteen years. Then confession is urged plainly upon all, and it is a sight to make one thrill with joy to see the great rough navvies bending before Herries as he sits in his embroidered stole, they telling him the secrets of their hearts, and he bringing them nearer to the joy of their Lord. Some of the workmen in the parish are the most frequent at confession. Oh! he is a noble fellow; he tells me he has no time for visiting—positively no time at all. His whole day is spent in deepening the devotional life—the hours are recited in the church—he gives up ten hours every week to the direction of penitents, and he must spend, I should say, two hours a day at his _priedieu_. He says he could not have strength for his work if he did not. His sermons are beautiful; he speaks from the heart without preparation. He says he has learnt to trust the Spirit, and just says what is given him to say.

“Then he is devoted to his choristers, and they to him; it is a privilege to see him surrounded by them in their little cassocks while he leads them in a simple meditation. And he is a man of a deeply tender spirit—I have seen him, dining with his curates, burst into tears at the mere mention of the name of the dear Mother of Christ. I ought not to trouble you with all this—I am too enthusiastic! But the sight of him has put it into my heart more than anything else I have ever known to try and build up a really Catholic centre, which might do something to leaven the heavy Protestantism which is the curse of England. One more thing which especially struck me; it moved me to tears to hear one of his great rough fellows—a shunter, I believe, who is often overthrown by the demon of strong drink—talk so simply and faithfully of the Holy Mass: what rich associations that word has! Nothing but eternity will ever reveal the terrible loss which the disuse of that splendid word has inflicted on our unhappy England.”

I was too much bewildered by this statement to make any adequate reply, but said to console him that I thought the parish was wonderfully good, and prepared to look upon the clergyman as a friend. “Yes,” said Mr. Cuthbert, “that is all very well for a beginning, but it must be something more than that. They must revere him as steward of the mysteries of God—they must be ready to open their inmost heart to him; they must come to recognise that it is through him, as a consecrated priest of Christ, that the highest spiritual blessings can reach them: that he alone can confer upon them the absolution which can set them free from the guilt of sin.”

I felt that I ought not to let Mr. Cuthbert think that I was altogether of the same mind with him in these matters and so I said: “Well, you must remember that all this is unfamiliar here; Mr. Woodward did not approve of confession—he held that habitual confession was weakening to the moral nature, and encouraged the most hysterical kind of egotism—though no one was more ready to listen to any one’s troubles and to give the most loving advice in real difficulties. But as to the point about absolution, I think he felt, and I should agree with him, that God only can forgive sin, and that the clergy are merely the human interpreters of that forgiveness; it is so much more easy to apprehend a great moral principle like the forgiveness of sin from another human being than to arrive at it in the silence of one’s own troubled heart.”

Mr. Cuthbert smiled, not very pleasantly, and said, “I had hoped you would have shared my views more warmly—it is a disappointment! seriously, the power to bind and loose conferred on the Apostles by Christ Himself—does that mean nothing?”

“Yes, indeed,” I said, “the clergy are the accredited ministers in the matter, of course, and they have a sacred charge, but as to powers conferred upon the Apostles, it seems that other powers were conferred on His followers which they no longer possess—they were to drink poison with impunity, handle venomous snakes, and even to heal the sick.”

“Purely local and temporary provisions,” said Mr. Cuthbert, “which we have no doubt forfeited—if indeed we have forfeited them—by want of faith. The other was a gift for time and eternity.”

“I don’t remember,” I said, “that any such distinction was laid down in the Gospel—but in any case you would not maintain, would you, that they possessed the power _proprio motu_? To push it to extremes, that if a man was absolved by a priest, God’s forgiveness was bound to follow, even if the priest were deceived as to the reality of the penitence which claimed forgiveness.”

Mr. Cuthbert frowned and said, “To me it is not a question of theorising. It is a purely practical matter. I look upon it in this way—if a man is absolved by a priest, he is sure he is forgiven; if he is not, he cannot be sure of forgiveness.”

“I should hold,” I said, “that it was purely a matter of inner penitence. But I did not mean to entangle you in a theological argument—and I hope we are at one on essential matters.”

As we walked back I pointed out to him some of my favourite views—the long back of the distant downs; the dark forest tract that closed the northern horizon—but he looked with courteous indifference: his heart was full of Catholic tradition.

We heard a few days after that he had accepted the living, and we asked him to come and stay with us while he was getting into the vicarage, which he was furnishing with austere severity. Mr. Woodward’s pleasant dark study became a somewhat grim library, with books in deal shelves, carpeted with matting and with a large deal table to work at. Mr. Cuthbert dwelt much on the thought of sitting there in a cassock with a tippet, but I do not think he had any of the instincts of a student—it was rather the _mise-en-scène_ that pleased him. A bedroom became an oratory, with a large ivory crucifix. The dining-room he called his refectory, and he had a scheme at one time of having two young men to do the housework and cooking, which fortunately fell through, though they were to have had cassocks with cord-girdles, and to have been called lay brothers. On the other hand he was a very pleasant visitor, as long as theological discussions were avoided. He was bright, gay, outwardly sympathetic, full of a certain kind of humour, and with all the ways of a fine gentleman. The more I disagreed with him the more I liked him personally.

One evening after dinner, as we sat smoking—he was a great smoker—we had a rather serious discussion. I said to him that I really should like to understand what his theory of church work was.

[Sidenote: CATHOLIC TRADITION]

“It is all summed up in two phrases,” said Mr. Cuthbert. “Catholic practice—Catholic tradition. I hold that the Reformation inflicted a grievous blow upon this country. To break with Rome was almost inevitable, I admit, because of the corruption of doctrine that was beginning; but we need not have thrown over all manner of high and holy ways and traditions, solemn accessories of worship, tender assistances to devotion, any more than the Puritans were bound to break statues and damage stained glass windows.”

“Quite so,” I said; “but where does this Catholic tradition come from?”

“From the Primitive Church,” said Mr. Cuthbert. “As far back as we can trace the history of church practice we find these, or many of these, exquisite ceremonies, which I for one think it a solemn duty to try and restore.”

“But after all,” I said, “they are of human origin, are they not? You would not say that they have a divine sanction?”

“Well,” said Mr. Cuthbert, “their sanction is practically divine. We read that in the last days spent by our Lord in His glorified nature on the earth, He ‘spake to them of the things concerning the Kingdom of God.’ I myself think it is only reasonable to suppose that He was laying down the precise ceremonial that He wished should attend the worship of His Kingdom. I do not think that extravagant.”

“But,” I said, “was not the whole tenor of His teaching against such ceremonial precision? Did He not for His Sacraments choose the simplest and humblest actions of daily life—eating and drinking? Was He not always finding fault with the Pharisees for forgetting spiritual truth in their zeal for tradition and practice?”

“Yes,” said Mr. Cuthbert, “for _forgetting_ the weightier matters of the law; but He approved of their ceremonial. He said: ‘These ought ye to have done, and not to have left the other undone.’”

“I believe myself,” I said, “that He felt they should have obeyed their conscience in the matter; but surely the whole of the teaching of the Gospel is to loose human beings from tyranny of detail, and to teach them to live a simple life on great principles?”

“I cannot agree,” said Mr. Cuthbert. “The instinct for reverence, for the reverent and seemly expression of spiritual feeling, for the symbolic representation of spiritual feeling, for the symbolic representation of divine truths is a depreciated one, but a true one; and this instinct He graciously defined, fortified, and consecrated; and I believe that the Church was following the true guidance of the Spirit in the matter, when it slowly built up the grand and massive fabric of Catholic practice and tradition.”

“But,” I said, “who are the Church? There are a great many people who feel the exact opposite of what you maintain—and true Christians too.”

“They are grievously mistaken,” said Mr. Cuthbert, “and suffer an irreparable loss.”

“But who is to decide?” I said, a little nettled.

“A General Œcumenical Council would be competent to do so,” said Mr. Cuthbert.

“Do you mean of the Anglican Communion?” I said.

“Oh dear, no,” said Mr. Cuthbert. “The Anglican Communion indeed! No; such a Council must have representatives of all Churches who have received and maintain the Divine succession.”

“But,” said I, “you must know that the thing is impossible. Who could summon such a Council, and who would attend it?”

“That is not my business,” said Mr. Cuthbert; “I do not want any such Council. I am sure of my position; it is only you and others who wish to sacrifice the most exquisite part of Christian life who need such a solution. I am content with what I know; and humbly and faithfully I shall attempt as far as I can to follow the dictates of my conscience in the matter to endeavor to bring it home to the consciences of my flock.”

I felt I could not carry the argument further without loss of temper; but it was surprising to me how I continued to like, and even to respect, the man.

He has not, it must be confessed, obtained any great hold on the parish. Mr. Woodward’s quiet, delicate, fatherly work has gone; but Mr. Cuthbert has a few women who attend confession, and he is content. He has adorned the church according to his views, and the congregation think it rather pretty. They do not dislike his sermons, though they do not understand them; and as for his vestments, they regard them with a mild and somewhat bewildered interest. They like to see Mr. Cuthbert, he is so pleasant and good-humoured. He is assiduous in his visiting, and very assiduous in holding daily services, which are entirely unattended. He has no priestly influence; and I fear it would pain him deeply if he knew that his social influence is considerable. Personally, I find him a pleasant neighbour and highly congenial companion. We have many agreeable talks; and when I am in that irritable tense mood which is apt to develop in solitude, and which can only be cleared by an ebullition of spleen, I walk up to the vicarage and have a theological argument. It does neither myself nor Mr. Cuthbert any harm, and we are better friends than ever—indeed, he calls me quite the most agreeable Erastian he knows.

21

[Sidenote: THE RECLUSE]

Let me try to sketch the most Arcadian scholar I have ever seen or dreamed of; they are common enough in books; the gentleman of high family, with lustrous eyes and thin veined hands, who sits among musty folios—Heaven knows what he is supposed to be studying, or why they need be musty—who is in some very nebulous way believed to watch the movements of the heavens, who takes no notice of his prattling golden-haired daughter, except to print an absent kiss upon her brow—if there are such persons they are hard to encounter.

There is a little market-town a mile or two away, nestled among steep valleys; the cows that graze on the steep fields that surround it look down into the chimney-pots and back gardens. One of the converging valleys is rich in woods, and has a pleasant trout-stream, that flows among elders, bickers along by woodland corners, and runs brimming through rich water meadows, full of meadowsweet and willow-herb—the place in summer has a hot honied smell. You need not follow the road, but you may take an aimless footpath, which meanders from stile to stile in a leisurely way. After a mile or so a little stream bubbles in on the left; and close beside it an old deep farm-road, full of boulders and mud in winter, half road, half water-course, plunges down from the wood. All the hedges are full of gnarled roots fringed with luxuriant ferns. On a cloudy summer day it is like a hothouse here, and the flowers know it and revel in the warm growing air. Higher and higher the road goes; then it passes a farm-house, once an ancient manor: the walls green with lichen and moss, and a curious ancient cognizance, a bear with a ragged staff clasped in his paws, over the doorway. The farm is embowered in huge sprawling laurels and has a little garden, with box hedges and sharp savoury smells of herbs and sweet-william, and a row of humming hives. Push open the byre gate and go further yet; we are near the crest of the hill now: just below the top grows a thick wood of larches, set close together. You would not know there was a house in here. There is a little rustic gate at the corner of the plantation, and a path, just a track, rarely trodden, soft with a carpet of innumerable larch-needles.

Presently you come in sight of a small yellow stone house; not a venerable house, nor a beautiful one—if anything, a little pretentious, and looking as if the heart of the plantation had been cut out to build it as indeed it was; round-topped windows, high parapets, no roof visible, and only one rather makeshift chimney; the whole air of it rather sinister, and at the same time shamefaced—a little as though it set out to be castellated and had suddenly shrunk and collapsed, and been hastily finished. A gravel walk very full of weeds runs immediately round the house; there is no garden, but a small enclosure for cabbages grown very rank. In most of the windows hang dirty-looking blinds half pulled down; a general air of sordid neglect broods over the place. Here in this house had lived for many years—and, for all I know, lives there still—a retired gentleman, a public school and University man, who had taken high honours at the latter; not rich, but with a competence. What had caused his seclusion from the world I do not know, and I am not particular to inquire; whether a false step and the forced abandonment of a career, a disappointment of some kind, a hypochondriacal whim, or a settled and deliberate resolution. I know not, but always hoped the last.

From some slight indications I have thought that, for some reason or other, in youth, my recluse had cause to think that his life would not be a long one—his selection of a site was apparently fortuitous. He preferred a mild climate, and, it seems, took a fancy to the very remote and sequestered character of the valley; he bought a few acres of land, planted them with larches, and in the centre erected the unsightly house which I have described.

Inside the place was rather more attractive than you would have expected. There was a pinched little entry, rather bare, and a steep staircase leading to the upper regions; in front of you a door leading to some offices; on the left a door that opened into a large room to which all the rest of the house had been sacrificed. It had three windows, much overshadowed by the larches, which indeed at one corner actually touched the house and swept the windows as they swayed in the breeze. The room was barely furnished, with a carpet faded beyond recognition, and high presses, mostly containing books. An oak table stood near one of the windows, where our hermit took his meals; another table, covered with books, was set near the fireplace; at the far end a door led into an ugly slit of a room lighted by a skylight, where he slept. But I gathered that for days together he did not go to bed, but dozed in his chair. On the walls hung two or three portraits, black with age. One of an officer in a military uniform of the last century with a huge, adumbrating cocked-hat; a divine in bands and wig; and a pinched-looking lady in blue silk with two boys. His only servant was an elderly strong-looking woman of about fifty, with a look of intense mental suffering on her face, and weary eyes which she seldom lifted from the floor. I never heard her utter more than three consecutive words. She was afflicted I heard, not from herself, with a power of seeing apparitions, not, curiously, in the house, but in the wood all round; she told Mr. Woodward that “the dead used to look in at the window at noon and beckon her out.” In consequence of this she had not set foot outside the doors for twenty years, except once, when her master had been attacked by sudden illness. The only outside servant he had was a surly man who lived in a cottage a quarter of a mile away on the high-road, who marketed for them, drew water, and met the carrier’s cart which brought their necessaries.

The man himself was a student of history: he never wrote, except a few marginal notes in his books. He was totally ignorant of what was going on, took in no papers, and asked no questions as to current events. He received no letters, and the only parcels that came to him were boxes of books from a London library—memoirs, historical treatises, and biographies of the last century. I take it he had a minute knowledge of the social and political life of England up to the beginning of the present century; he received no one but Mr. Woodward who saw him two or three times a year, and it was with Mr. Woodward that I went, making the excuse (which was actually the case) that some literary work that I was doing was suspended for want of books.

We were shown in; he did not rise to receive us, but greeted us with extreme cordiality, and an old-fashioned kind of courtesy, absolutely without embarrassment. He was a tall, thin man, with a fair complexion, and straggling hair and beard. He seemed to be in excellent health; and I learnt that in the matter of food and drink he was singularly abstemious, which accounted for his clear complexion and brilliant eye. He smoked in moderation a very fragrant tobacco of which he gave me a small quantity, but refused to say where he obtained it. There was an air of infinite contentment about him. He seemed to me to hope for nothing and expect nothing from life; to live in the moment and for the moment. If ever I saw serene happiness written on a face in legible characters, it was there. He talked a little on theological points, with an air of gentle good-humour, to Mr. Woodward, somewhat as you might talk to a child, with amiable interest in the unexpected cleverness of its replies; he gave me the information I requested clearly and concisely but with no apparent zest, and seemed to have no wish to dwell on the subject or to part with his store of knowledge.

His one form of exercise was long vague walks; in the winter he rarely left the house except on moonlight nights; but in the summer he was accustomed to start as soon as it was light, and to ramble, never on the roads, but by unfrequented field-paths, for miles and miles, generally returning before the ordinary world was astir. On hot days he would sit by the stream in a very remote nook beneath a high bank where the water ran swiftly down a narrow channel, and swung into a deep black pool; here, I was told, he would stay for hours with his eyes fixed on the water, lost in some mysterious reverie. I take it he was a poet without power of expression, and his heart was as clean as a child’s.

[Sidenote: MODERN LIFE]

It is the fashion now to talk with much affected weariness of the hurry and bustle of modern life. No doubt such things are to be found if you go in search of them; and to have your life attended by a great quantity of either is generally held to be a sign of success. But the truth is, that this is what ordinary people like. The ordinary man has no precise idea what to do with his time. He needs to have it filled up by a good many conflicting and petty duties, and if it is filled he has a feeling that he is useful. But many of these duties are only necessary because of the existence of each other; it is a vicious circle. “What are those fields for?” said a squire who had lately succeeded to an estate, as he walked round with the bailiff. “To grow oats, sir.” “And what do you do with the oats?” “Feed the horses, sir.” “And what do you want the horses for?” “To plough the fields, sir.” That is what much of the bustle of modern life consists of.

Solitude and silence are a great strain; but if you enjoy them they are at least harmless, which is more than can be said of many activities. Such is not perhaps the temper in which continents are explored, battles won, empires extended, fortunes made. But whatever concrete gain we make for ourselves must be taken from others; and we ought to be very certain indeed of the meaning of this life, and the nature of the world to which we all migrate, before we immerse ourselves in self-contrived businesses. To be natural, to find our true life, to be independent of luxuries, not to be at the mercy of prejudices and false ideals—that is the secret of life: who can say that it is a secret that we most of us make our own? My recluse, I think, was nearer the Kingdom of Heaven, where places are not laid according to the table of precedence, than many men who have had biographies and statues, and who will be, I fear, sadly adrift in the world of silence into which they may be flung.

22

_Nov. 6, 1890._

To-day the gale had blown itself out; all yesterday it blustered round corners, shook casements, thundered in the chimneys, and roared in the pines. Now it is bright and fresh, and the steady wind is routing one by one the few clouds that hang in the sky. I came in yesterday at dusk, and the whole heaven was full of great ragged, lowering storm-wreaths, weeping wildly and sadly; now the rain is over, though in the morning a sudden dash of great drops mingled with hail made the windows patter; but the sun shone out very low and white from the clouds, even while the hail leapt on the window-sill.

I took the field-path that wanders aimlessly away below the house; the water lay in the grass, and the sodden leaves had a bitter smell. The copses were very bare, and the stream ran hoarse and turbid. The way wound by fallows and hedges—now threading a steep copse, now along the silent water-meadows, now through an open forest space, with faggots tied and piled, or by a cattle byre. Here and there I turned into a country lane, till at last the village of Spyfield lay before me, with the ancient church of dark sandstone and the little street of handsome Georgian houses, very neat and prim—a place, you would think, where every one went to bed at ten, and where no murmurs of wars ever penetrated.

Just beyond the village, my friend, Mr. Campden, the great artist, has built himself a palace. It is somewhat rococo, no doubt, with its marble terrace and its gilded cupolas. But it gleams in the dark hanging wood with an exotic beauty of its own, as if a Genie had uprooted it from a Tuscan slope, and planted it swiftly, in an unfamiliar world, in an hour of breathless labour between the twilight and the dawn. Still, fantastic as it is, it is an agreeable contrast to the brick-built mansions, with their slated turrets, that have lately, alas, begun to alight in our woodlands.

[Sidenote: MR. CAMPDEN]

Mr. Campden is a real prince, a Lorenzo the Magnificent; not only is he the painter of pictures which command a high price, though to me they are little more than harmonious wallpaper; but he binds books, makes furniture, weaves tapestry, and even bakes tiles and pottery; and the slender minaret that rises from a plain, windowless building on the right, is nothing but a concealed chimney. Moreover, he inherited through a relative’s death an immense fortune, so that he is a millionaire as well. To-day I followed the little steep lane that skirts his domain, and halted for a moment at a great grille of ironwork, which gives the passer-by a romantic and generous glimpse of a pleached alley, terminated by a mysterious leaden statue. I peeped in cautiously, and saw the great man in a blue suit, with a fur cloak thrown round his shoulders, a slouched hat set back from his forehead, and a loose red tie gleaming from his low-cut collar. I was near enough to see his wavy white hair and beard, his keen eyes, his thin hands, as he paced delicately about, breathing the air, and looking critically at the exquisite house beyond him. I am sure of a welcome from Mr. Campden—indeed, he has a princely welcome for all the world—but to-day I felt a certain simple schoolboy shyness, which ill accords with Mr. Campden’s Venetian manner. It is delightful after long rusticity to be with him, but it is like taking a part in some solemn and affected dance; to Mr. Campden I am the student-recluse, and to be gracefully bantered accordingly, and asked a series of questions on matters with which I am wholly unacquainted, but which are all part of the setting with which his pictorial mind has dowered me. On my first visit to him I spoke of the field-names of the neighbourhood, and so Mr. Campden speaks to me of Domesday Book, which I have never seen. I happened to express—in sheer wantonness—an interest in strange birds, and I have ever since to Mr. Campden been a man who, in the intervals of reading Domesday Book, stands in all weathers on hilltops, or by reedy stream-ends, watching for eagles and swans, like a Roman augur—indeed Augur is the name he gives me—our dear Augur—when I am introduced to his great friends.

Mr. Campden has an infinite contempt for the gentlemen of the neighbourhood, whom he treats with splendid courtesy, and the kind of patronising amusement with which one listens to the prattle of a rustic child. It is a matter of unceasing merriment to me to see him with a young squire of the neighbourhood, an intelligent young fellow who has travelled a good deal, and is a considerable reader. He has a certain superficial shyness, and consequently has never been able to secure enough of the talk for himself to show Mr. Campden what he is thinking of; and Mr. Campden at once boards him with questions about the price of eggs and the rotation of crops, calling him, “Will Honeycomb” from the _Spectator_; and when plied with nervous questions as to Perugino or Carlo Dolce, saying grandiloquently, “My dear young man, I know nothing whatever about it; I leave that to the critics. I am a republican in art, a red indeed, ha, ha! And you and I must not concern ourselves with such things. Here we are in the country, and we must talk of _bullocks_. Tell me now, in Lorton market last week, what price did a Tegg fetch?”

Mr. Campden is extraordinarily ignorant of all country matters, and has a small stock of ancient provincial words, not indigenous to the neighbourhood, but gathered from local histories, that he produces with complacent pride. Indeed, I do not know that I ever saw a more ludicrous scene than Mr. Campden talking agriculture to a distinguished scientific man, whom a neighbouring squire had brought over to tea with him, and whom he took for a landowner. To hear Mr. Campden explaining a subject with which he was not acquainted to a courteous scientist, who did not even know to what he was alluding, was a sight to make angels laugh.

But to-day I let Mr. Campden pace like a peacock up and down his pleasaunces, with his greyhound following him, and threaded the water-meadows homewards. I gave myself up to the luxurious influences of solitude and cool airs, and walked slowly, indifferent where I went, by sandstone pits, by brimming streams, through dripping coverts, till the day declined. What did I think of? I hardly dare confess. There are two or three ludicrous, pitiful ambitions that lurk in the corners of my mind, which, when I am alone and aimless, I take out and hold, as a child holds a doll, while fancy invests them with radiant hues. These and no other were my mental pabulum. I know they cannot be realised—indeed, I do not desire them—but these odd and dusty fancies remain with me from far-off boyish days; and many a time have I thus paraded them in all their silliness.

[Sidenote: HOME]

But the hedgerow grasses grew indistinguishably grey; the cattle splashed home along the road; the sharp smell of wood smoke from cottage fires, piled for the long evenings, stole down the woodways; pheasants muttered and crowed in the coverts, and sprang clanging to their roosts. The murmur of the stream became louder and more insistent; and as I turned the corner of the wood, it was with a glow of pleasure that I saw the sober gables of Golden End, and the hall window, like a red solemn eye, gaze cheerily upon the misty valley.

23

_July 7, 1891._

[Sidenote: IN THE WOODS]

I cannot tell why it is, but to be alone among woods, especially towards evening, is often attended with a vague unrest, an unsubstantial awe, which, though of the nature of pleasure, is perilously near the confines of horror. On certain days, when the nerves are very alert and the woods unusually still, I have known the sense become almost insupportable. There is a certain feeling of being haunted, followed, watched, almost dogged, which is bewildering and unmanning. Foolish as it may appear, I have found the carrying of a gun almost a relief on such occasions. But what heightens the sense in a strange degree is the presence of still water. A stream is lively—it encourages and consoles; but the sight of a long dark lake, with the woods coming down to the water’s edge, is a sight so solemn as to be positively oppressive. Each kind of natural scenery has its own awe—the _genius loci_, so to speak. On a grassy down there is the terror of the huge open-eyed gaze of the sky. In craggy mountains there is something wild and beastlike frowning from the rocks. Among ice and snow there is something mercilessly pure and averse to life; but neither of these is so intense or definite as the horror of still woods and silent waters. The feeling is admirably expressed by Mr. George Macdonald in _Phantastes_, a magical book. It is that sensation of haunting presences hiding behind trees, watching us timidly from the fern, peeping from dark copses, resting among fantastic and weather-worn rocks, that finds expression in the stories of Dryads and fairies, which seem so deeply implanted in the mind of man. Who, on coming out through dark woods into some green sequestered lawn, set deep in the fringing forest, has not had the sensation of an interrupted revel, as festivity suddenly abandoned by wild, ethereal natures, who have shrunk in silent alarm back into the sheltering shades? If only one had been more wary, and stolen a moment earlier upon the unsuspecting company!

But there is a darker and cloudier sensation, the _admonitus locorum_, which I have experienced upon fields of battle, and places where some huge tragedy of human suffering and excitement has been wrought. I have felt it upon the rustic ploughland of Jena, and on the grassy slopes of Flodden; it has crept over me under the mouldering walls and frowning gateways of old guarded towns; and not only there, where it may be nothing but the reflex of shadowy imaginations, but on wind-swept moors and tranquil valleys, I have felt, by some secret intuition, some overpowering tremor of spirit, that here some desperate strife has been waged, some primeval conflict enacted. There is a spot in the valley of Llanthony, a grassy tumulus among steep green hills, where the sense came over me with an uncontrollable throb of insight, that here some desperate stand was made, some barbarous Themopylæ lost or won.

[Sidenote: A DARK SECRET]

There is a place near Golden End where I encountered a singular experience. I own that I never pass it now without some obsession of feeling; indeed, I will confess that when I am alone I take a considerable circuit to avoid the place. An ancient footway, trodden deep in a sandy covert, winds up through a copse, and comes out into a quiet place far from the high-road, in the heart of the wood. Here stands a mouldering barn, and there are two or three shrubs, an escalonia and a cypress, that testify to some remote human occupation. There is a stretch of green sward, varied with bracken, and on the left a deep excavation, where sand has been dug: in winter, a pool; in summer, a marshy place full of stiff, lush water-plants. In this place, time after time as I passed it, there seemed to be a strange silence. No bird seemed to sing here, no woodland beast to frisk here; a secret shame or horror rested on the spot. It was with no sense of surprise, but rather of resolved doubt, that I found, one bright morning, two labouring men bent over some object that lay upon the ground. When they saw me, they seemed at first to hesitate, and then asked me to come and look. It was a spectacle of singular horror: they had drawn from the marshy edge of the pool the tiny skeleton of a child, wrapped in some oozy and ragged cloths; the slime dripping from the eyeless cavities of the little skull, and the weeds trailing over the unsightly cerements. It had caught the eye of one of them as they were passing. “The place has always had an evil name,” said one of them with a strange solemnity. There had been a house there, I gathered, inhabited by a mysterious evil family, a place of dark sin and hideous tradition. The stock had dwindled down to a wild solitary woman, who extracted a bare sustenance out of a tiny farm, and who alternated long periods of torpid gloom with disgusting orgies of drunkenness. Thirty years ago she had died, and the farm had remained so long unlet that it was at last pulled down, and the land planted with wood. Subsequent investigations revealed nothing; and the body had lain there, it was thought, for fully that time, preserved from decay by an iron-bound box in which it had been enclosed, and of which some traces still remained in reddish smears of rust and clotted nails. That picture—the sunlit morning, the troubled faces of the men, the silent spectatorial woods—has dwelt with me ineffaceably.

[Sidenote: OBSESSION]

Again, I have been constantly visited by the same inexplicable sensation in a certain room at Golden End. The room in question is a great bare chamber at the top of the house: the walls are plastered, and covered in all directions by solid warped beams; through the closed and dusty window the sunlight filters sordidly into the room. I do not know why it has never been furnished, but I gathered that my father took an unexplained dislike to the room from the first. The odd feature of it is, that in the wall at one end is a small door, as of a cupboard, some feet from the ground, which opens, not as you would expect into a cupboard, but into a loft, where you can see the tiles, the brickwork of the clustered chimney-stacks, and the plastered lathwork of the floor, in and below the joists of the timber. This strange opening can never have been a window, because the shutter is of the same date as the house; still less a door, for it is hardly possible to squeeze through it; but as the loft into which it looks is an accretion of later date than the room itself, it seems to me that the garret may have been once a granary up to which sacks were swung from the ground by a pulley; and this is made more possible by the existence of some iron staples on the outer side of it, that appear to have once controlled some simple mechanism.

[Sidenote: THE EVIL ROOM]

The room is now a mere receptacle for lumber, but it is strange that all who enter it, even the newest inmate of the house, take an unaccountable dislike to the place. I have myself struggled against the feeling; I once indeed shut myself up there on a sunny afternoon, and endeavoured to shame myself by pure reason out of the disagreeable, almost physical sensation that at once came over me, but all in vain; there was something about the bare room, with its dusty and worm-eaten floor, the hot stagnant air, the floating motes in the stained sunlight, and above all the sinister little door, that gave me a discomfort that it seems impossible to express in speech. My own room must have been the scene of many a serious human event. Sick men must have lain there; hopeless prayers must have echoed there; children must have been born there, and souls must have quitted their shattered tenement beneath its ancient panels. But these have after all been normal experiences; in the other room, I make no doubt, some altogether abnormal event must have happened, something of which the ethereal aroma, as of some evil, penetrating acid, must have bitten deep into wall and floor, and soaked the very beam of the roof with anxious and disturbed oppression. In feverish fancy I see strange things enact themselves; I see at the dead of night pale heads crane from the window, oppressive silence hold the room, as some dim and ugly burden jerks and dangles from the descending rope, while the rude gear creaks and rustles, and the vane upon the cupola sings its melancholy rusty song in the glimmering darkness. It is strange that the mind should be so tangibly impressed and yet should have no power given it to solve the sad enigma.

24

_Sep. 10, 1891._

[Sidenote: THE COUNTRY]

Very few consecutive days pass at Golden End without my contriving to get what I most enjoy in the form of exercise—a long, slow, solitary ride; severer activities are denied me. I have a strong, big-boned, amiable horse—strength is the one desideratum in a horse, in country where, to reach a point that appears to be a quarter of a mile away, it is often necessary to descend by a steep lane to a point two or three hundred feet below and to ascend a corresponding acclivity on the other side. Sometimes my ride has a definite object. I have to see a neighbouring farmer on business, or there is shopping to be done at Spyfield, or a distant call has to be paid—but it is best when there is no such scheme—and the result is that after a few years there is hardly a lane within a radius of five miles that I have not carefully explored and hardly a hamlet within ten miles that I have not visited.

The by-lanes are the most attractive feature. You turn out of the high-road down a steep sandy track, with high banks overhung by hazel and spindlewood and oak-copse; the ground falls rapidly. Through gaps at the side you can see the high, sloping forest glades opposite, or look along lonely green rides which lead straight into the heart of silent woods. There has been as a rule no parsimonious policy of enclosure, and the result is that there are often wide grassy spaces beside the road, thick-set with furze or forest undergrowth, with here and there a tiny pool, or a little dingle where sandstone has been dug. Down at the base of the hill you find a stream running deep below a rustic white-railed bridge, through sandy cuttings, all richly embowered with alders, and murmuring pleasantly through tall water-plants. Here and there is a weather-tiled cottage, with a boarded gable and a huge brick chimney-stack, flanked by a monstrous yew. Suddenly the road strikes into a piece of common, a true English forest, with a few huge beeches, and thick covert of ferns and saplings; still higher and you are on open ground, with the fragrant air blowing off the heather; a clump of pines marks the summit, and in an instant the rolling plain lies before you, rich in wood, rising in billowy ranges, with the smoke going up from a hundred hamlets, and the shadowy downs closing the horizon. Then you can ride a mile or two on soft white sand-paths winding in and out among the heather, while the sun goes slowly down among purple islands of cloud, with gilded promontories and fiords of rosy light, and the landscape grows more and more indistinct and romantic, suffused in a golden haze. At last it is time to turn homewards, and you wind down into a leafy dingle, where the air lies in cool strata across the sun-warmed path, and fragrant wood-smells, from the heart of winding ways and marshy streamlets, pour out of the green dusk. The whole day you have hardly seen a human being—an old labourer has looked out with a slow bovine stare from some field-corner, a group of cottage children have hailed you over a fence, or a carter walking beside a clinking team has given you a muttered greeting—the only sounds have been the voices of birds breaking from the thicket, the rustle of leaves, the murmuring of unseen streams, and the padding of your horse’s hoofs in the sandy lane.

[Sidenote: THE PEACEFUL MIND]

And what does the mind do in these tranquil hours? I hardly know. The thought runs in a little leisurely stream, glancing from point to point; the observation is, I notice, prematurely acute, and, though the intellectual faculties are in abeyance, drinks in impressions with greedy delight: the feathery, blue-green foliage of the ash-suckers, the grotesque, geometrical forms in the lonely sandstone quarry, the curving water-meadows with their tousled grasses, the stone-leek on the roof of mellowed barns, the flash of white chalk-quarries carved out of distant downs, the climbing, clustering roofs of the hamlet on the neighbouring ridge.

Some would say that the mind in such hours grows dull, narrow, rustical, and slow—“in the lonely vale of streams,” as Ossian sang, “abides the narrow soul.” I hardly know, but I think it is the opposite: it is true that one does not learn in such silent hours the deft trick of speech, the easy flow of humorous thoughts, the tinkling interchange of the mind; but there creeps over the spirit something of the coolness of the pasture, the tranquillity of green copses, and the contentment of the lazy stream. I think that, undiluted, such days might foster the elementary brutishness of the spirit, and that just as rhododendrons degenerate, if untended, to the primal magenta type, so one might revert by slow degrees to the animal which lies not far below the civilised surface. But there is no danger in my own life that I should have too much of such reverie; indeed, I have to scheme a little for it; and it is to me a bath of peace, a plunge into the quiet waters of nature, a refreshing return to the untroubled and gentle spirit of the earth.