Prose Idylls, New and Old

II.—The Coast Line

It is four o’clock on a May morning, and Claude and I are just embarking on board a Clovelly trawling skiff, which, having disposed of her fish at various ports along the Channel, is about to run leisurely homewards with an ebb tide, and a soft north-easterly breeze.

So farewell, fair Lynmouth; and ye storm-spirits, send us a propitious day; and dismiss those fantastic clouds which are coquetting with your thrones, crawling down one hill-side, and whirling and leaping up another, in wreaths of snow, and dun, and amber, pierced every minute by some long glittering upward arrow from the rising sun, which gilds grey crags and downs a thousand feet above, while underneath the gorges still sleep black and cold in shade.

There, they have heard us!  The cap rises off the ‘Summer-house hill,’ that eight hundred feet of upright wall, which seems ready to topple down into the nest of be-myrtled cottages at its foot; and as we sweep out into the deeper water the last mist-flake streams up from the Foreland, and vanishes in white threads into the stainless blue.

‘Look at the colours of that Foreland!’ cried Claude.  ‘The simple monotone of pearly green, broken only at intervals by blood-red stains, where the turf has slipped and left the fresh rock bare, and all glimmering softly through a delicate blue haze, like the bloom on a half-ripened plum!’

‘And look, too, how the grey pebble beach is already dancing and quivering in the mirage which steams up, like the hot breath of a limekiln, from the drying stones.  Talk of “glazings and scumblings,” ye artists! and bungle at them as you will, what are they to Nature’s own glazings, deepening every instant there behind us?’

‘Mock me not.  I have walked up and down here with a humbled and broken spirit, and had nearly forsworn the audacity of painting anything beyond a beech stem, or a frond of fern.’

‘The little infinite in them would have baffled you as much as the only somewhat bigger infinite of just the hills on which they grow.’

‘Confest: and so farewell to unpaintable Lynmouth!  Farewell to the charming contrast of civilized English landscape-gardening, with its villas, and its exotics, and its evergreens, thus strangely and yet harmoniously confronted with the chaos of the rocks and mountain-streams.  Those grounds of Sir William H—’s are a double paradise, the wild Eden of the Past side by side with the cultivated Eden of the Future.  How its alternations of Art and Savagery at once startle and relieve the sense, as you pass suddenly out of wildernesses of piled boulders, and torrent-shattered trees, and the roar of fern-fringed waterfalls, into “trim walks, and fragrant alleys green;” and the door of a summer-house transports you at a step from Richmond to the Alps.  Happy he who “possesses,” as the world calls it, and happier still he whose taste could organize, that fairy bower.’

So he, magniloquently, as was his wont; and yet his declamations always flowed with such a graceful ease,—a simple, smiling earnestness,—an unpractised melody of voice, that what would have been rant from other lips, from his showed only as the healthy enthusiasm of the passionate, all-seeing, all-loving artist.

‘Look yonder, again,’ said he, gazing up at the huge boulder-strewn hill-side above us.  ‘One wonders at that sight, whether the fable of the giants be not true after all,—and that “Vale of Rocks,” hanging five hundred feet in air, with all its crag-castles, and tottering battlements, and colossal crumbling idols, and great blocks, which hang sloping, caught in act to fall, be not some enormous Cyclopean temple left half-disinterred: or is it a fragment of old Chaos, left unorganized?—or, perhaps, the waste heap of the world, where, after the rest of England had been made, some angel put up a notice for his fellows, “Dry rubbish shot here”?’

‘Not so, unscientific!  It is the grandfather of hills,—a fossil bone of some old continent, which stood here ages before England was.  And the great earth-angel, who grinds up mountains into paint, as you do bits of ochre, for his “Continental Sketches,” found in it the materials for a whole dark ground-tone of coal-measures, and a few hundred miles of warm high-lights, which we call New Red Sandstone.’

What a sea-wall they are, those Exmoor hills!  Sheer upward from the sea a thousand feet rise the downs; and as we slide and stagger lazily along before the dying breeze, through the deep water which never leaves the cliff, the eye ranges, almost dizzy, up some five hundred feet of rock, dappled with every hue; from the intense dark of the tide-line, through the warm green and brown rock-shadows, out of which the horizontal cracks of the strata loom black, and the breeding gulls show like lingering snow-flakes; up to the middle cliff, where delicate grey fades into pink, pink into red, red into glowing purple; up to where the purple is streaked with glossy ivy wreaths, and black-green yews; up to where all the choir of colours vanishes abruptly on the mid-hill, to give place to one yellowish-grey sheet of upward down, sweeping aloft smooth and unbroken, except by a lonely stone, or knot of clambering sheep, and stopped by one great rounded waving line, sharp-cut against the brilliant blue.  The sheep hang like white daisies upon the steep; and a solitary falcon rides, a speck in air, yet far below the crest of that tall hill.  Now he sinks to the cliff edge, and hangs quivering, supported, like a kite, by the pressure of his breast and long curved wings, against the breeze.

There he hangs, the peregrine—a true ‘falcon gentle,’ ‘sharp-notched, long-taloned, crooked-winged,’ whose uncles and cousins, ages since, have struck at duck and pheasant, and sat upon the wrists of kings.  And now he is full proud of any mouse or cliff-lark; like an old Chingachgook, last of the Mohicans, he lingers round ‘the hunting-field of his fathers.’  So all things end.

‘Ay, and the day may come,’ said Claude, ‘when the brows of that huge High Vere shall be crowned with golden wheat, and every rock-ledge on Trentishoe, like those of Petra and the Rhine, support its garden-bed of artificial soil.’

‘And when,’ I answered, ‘the shingly sides of that great chasm of Headon’s Mouth may be clothed with the white mulberry, and the summer limestone-skiffs shall go back freighted with fabrics which vie with the finest woof of Italy and Lyons.’

‘You believe, then, in the late Mrs. Whitby of Lymington?’

‘Seeing is believing, Claude: through laughter, and failures, and the stupidity of half-barbarous clods, she persevered in her silk-growing, and succeeded; and I should like to put her book into the hands of every squire in Devon, Cornwall, and the South of Ireland.’

‘Or require them to pass an examination in it, as one more among the many books which I intend, in my ideal kingdom, all landlords to read and digest, before they are allowed to take possession of their estates.  In the meantime, what is that noble conical hill, which has increased my wonder at the infinite variety of beauty which The Spirit can produce by combinations so simple as a few grey stones and a sheet of turf?’

‘The Hangman.’

‘An ominous name.  What is its history?’

‘Some sheep-stealer, they say, clambering over a wall with his booty slung round his neck, was literally hung by the poor brute’s struggles, and found days after on the mountain-side, a blackened corpse on one side of the wall, with the sheep on the other, and the ravens—You may fill up the picture for yourself.’

But, see, as we round the Hangman, what a change of scene—the square-blocked sandstone cliffs dip suddenly under dark slate-beds, fantastically bent and broken by primeval earthquakes.  Wooded combes, and craggy ridges of rich pasture-land, wander and slope towards a labyrinth of bush-fringed coves, black isolated tide-rocks, and land-locked harbours.  There shines among the woods the Castle of Watermouth, on its lovely little salt-water loch, the safest harbour on the coast; and there is Combe-Martin, mile-long man-stye, which seven centuries of fruitless silver-mining, and of the right (now deservedly lost) of ‘sending a talker to the national palaver,’ have neither cleansed nor civilized.  Turn, turn thy head away, dear Claude, lest even at this distance some foul odour taint the summer airs, and complete the misfortune already presaged by that pale, sad face, sickening in the burning calm!  For this great sun-roasted fire-brick of the Exmoor range is fairly burning up the breeze, and we have nothing but the tide to drift us slowly down to Ilfracombe.

Now we open Rillage, and now Hillsborough, two of the most picturesque of headlands; see how their round foreheads of glistening grey shale sink down into two dark, jagged moles, running far out to seaward, and tapering off, each into a long black horizontal line, vanishing at last beneath its lace-fringe of restless hissing foam.  How grand the contrast of the lightness of those sea-lines, with the solid mass which rests upon them!  Look, too, at the glaring lights and Tartarean shadows of those chasms and caves, which the tide never leaves, or the foot of man explores; and listen how, at every rush of the long ground-swell, mysterious mutterings, solemn sighs, sudden thunders, as of a pent-up earthquake, boom out of them across the glassy swell.  Look at those blasts of delicate vapour that shoot up from hidden rifts, and hang a moment, and vanish; and those green columns of wave which rush mast-high up the perpendicular walls, and then fall back and outward in a waterfall of foam, lacing the black rocks with a thousand snowy streams.  There they fall, and leap, and fall again.  And so they did yesterday, and the day before; and so they did centuries ago, when the Danes swept past them, battleworn, and sad of heart for the loss of the magic raven flag, from the fight at Appledore, to sit down and starve on ‘the island of Bradanrelice, which men call Flat Holms.’  Ay, and even so they leapt and fell, before a sail gleamed on the Severn sea, when the shark and the ichthyosaur paddled beneath the shade of tropic forests—now scanty turf and golden gorse.  And so they will leap and fall on, on, through the centuries and the ages.  O dim abyss of Time, into which we peer shuddering, what will be the end of thee, and of this ceaseless coil and moan of waters?  It is true, that when thou shalt be no more, then, too, ‘there shall be no more sea;’ and this ocean bed, this great grave of fertility, into which all earth’s wasted riches stream, day and night, from hill and town, shall rise and become fruitful soil, corn-field and meadow-land; and earth shall teem as thick with living men as bean-fields with the summer bees?  What a consummation!  At least there is One greater than sea, or time: and the Judge of all the earth will do right.

But there is Ilfracombe, with its rock-walled harbour, its little wood of masts within, its white terraces, rambling up the hills, and its capstone sea-walk, the finest ‘marine parade,’ as Cockneydom terms it, in all England, except that splendid Hoe at Plymouth, ‘Lam Goemagot,’ Gog-magog’s leap, as the old Britains called it, over which Corineus threw that mighty giant.  And there is the little isolated rock-chapel, where seven hundred years ago, our west-country forefathers used to go to pray St. Nicholas for deliverance from shipwreck,—a method lovingly regretted by some, as a ‘pious idea of the Ages of faith.’  We, however, shall prefer the method of lighthouses and the worthy Trinity Board, as actually more godly and ‘faithful,’ as well as more useful; and, probably, so do the sailors themselves.

But Claude is by this time nearly sick of the roasting calm, and the rolling ground-swell, and the smell of fish, and is somewhat sleepy also, between early rising and incoherent sermons; wherefore, if he takes good advice, he will stay and recruit himself at Ilfracombe, before he proceeds further with his self-elected cicerone on the grand tour of North Devon.  Believe me, Claude, you will not stir from the place for a month at least.  For be sure, if you are sea-sick, or heart-sick, or pocket-sick either, there is no pleasanter or cheaper place of cure (to indulge in a puff of a species now well nigh obsolete, the puff honest and true) than this same Ilfracombe, with its quiet nature and its quiet luxury, its rock fairyland and its sea-walks, its downs and combes, its kind people, and, if possible, its still kinder climate, which combines the soft warmth of South Devon with the bracing freshness of the Welsh mountains; where winter has slipped out of the list of the seasons, and mother Earth makes up for her summer’s luxury by fasting, ‘not in sackcloth and ashes, but in new silk and old sack;’ and instead of standing three months chin-deep in ice, and christening great snowballs her ‘friends and family,’ as St. Francis of Assisi did of old, knows no severer asceticism than tepid shower-baths, and a parasol of soft grey mist.

III.—Morte

I had been wandering over the centre of Exmoor, killing trout as I went, through a country which owes its civilization and tillage to the spirit of one man, who has found stag-preserving by no means incompatible with large agricultural improvements; among a population who still evince an unpleasant partiality for cutting and carrying farmers’ crops by night, without leave or licence, and for housebreaking after the true classic method of Athens, by fairly digging holes through the house walls; a little nook of primeval savagery fast reorganizing itself under the influences of these better days.  I had been on Dartmoor, too; but of that noble moorland range so much has been said and sung of late, that I really am afraid it is becoming somewhat cockney and trite.  Far and wide I had wandered, rod in hand, becoming a boy again in the land of my boyhood, till, once more at Ilfracombe, opposite me sat Claude Mellot, just beginning to bloom again into cheerfulness.

We were on the point of starting for Morte, and so round to Saunton Court, and the sands beyond it; where a Clovelly trawler, which we had chartered for the occasion, had promised to send a boat on shore and take us off, provided the wind lay off the land.

But, indeed, the sea was calm as glass, the sky cloudless azure; and the doubt was not whether we should be able to get on board through the surf, but whether, having got on board, we should not lie till nightfall, as idle

And now behold us on our way up lovely combes, with their green copses, ridges of rock, golden furze, fruit-laden orchards, and slopes of emerald pasture, pitched as steep as house-roofs, where the red longhorns are feeding, with their tails a yard above their heads; and under us, seen in bird’s-eye view, the ground-plans of the little snug farms and homesteads of the Damnonii, ‘dwellers in the valley,’ as we West-countrymen were called of old.  Now we are leaving them far below us; the blue hazy sea is showing far above the serrated ridge of the Tors, and their huge bank of sunny green: and before us is a desolate table-land of rushy pastures and mouldering banks, festooned with the delicate network of the little ivy-leaved campanula, loveliest of British wild-flowers, fit with its hair-like stems and tiny bells of blue to wreathe the temples of Titania.  Alas! we have passed out of the world into limbum patrum, and the region of ineffectuality and incompleteness.  The only cultivators here, and through thousands of acres in the North of Devon, are the rook and mole: and yet the land is rich enough—the fat deep crumbling of the shale and ironstone returning year by year into the mud, from whence it hardened ages since.  There are scores of farms of far worse land in mid-England, under ‘a four-course shift,’ yielding their load of wheat an acre.  When will that land do as much?  When will the spirit of Smith of Deanston and Grey of Dilston descend on North Devon?  When will some true captain of industry, and Theseus of the nineteenth century, like the late Mr. Warnes of Trimmingham, teach the people here to annihilate poor-rates by growing flax upon some of the finest flax land, and in the finest flax climate, that we have in England?  The shrewd Cornishmen of Launceston and Bodmin have awakened long ago to ‘the new gospel of fertility.’  When will North Devon awake?

‘When landlords and farmers,’ said Claude, ‘at last acknowledge their divine vocation, and feel it a noble and heaven-ordained duty to produce food for the people of England; when they learn that to grow rushes where they might grow corn, ay, to grow four quarters of wheat where they might grow five, is to sin against God’s blessings and against the English nation.  No wonder that sluggards like these cry out for protection—that those who cannot take care of the land feel that they themselves need artificial care.’

‘We will not talk politics, Claude.  Our modern expediency mongers have made them pro tempore an extinct science.  “Let the dead bury their dead.”  The social questions are now-a-days becoming far more important than the mere House of Commons ones.’

‘There does seem here and there,’ he said, ‘some sign of improvement.  I see the paring plough at work on one field and another.’

‘Swiftly goes the age, and slowly crawls improvement.  The greater part of that land will be only broken up to be exhausted by corn-crop after corn-crop, till it can bear no more, and the very manure which is drawn home from it in the shape of a few turnips will be wasted by every rain of heaven, and the straw probably used to mend bad places in the road with; while the land returns to twenty years of worse sterility than ever; on the ground that—

‘“Veather did zo, and gramfer did zo, and why shouldn’t Jan do the zame?”’ * * * *

‘But here is Morte below us.  “The little grey church on the windy shore,” which once belonged to William de Tracy, one of your friend Thomas à Becket’s murderers.  If you wish to vent your wrath against those who cut off your favourite Saxon hero, there is a tomb in the church which bears De Tracy’s name; over which rival Dryasdusts contend fiercely with paper-arrows: the one party asserting that he became a priest, and died here in the wilderness; the others that the tomb is of later date, that he fled hence to Italy, under favour of a certain easy-going Bishop of Exeter, and died penitent and duly shriven, according to the attestations of a certain or uncertain Bishop of Cosenza.’

‘Peace be with him and with the Bishop!  The flight to Italy seems a very needless precaution to a man who owned this corner of the world.  A bailiff would have had even less chance here then than in Connemara a hundred years ago.’

‘He certainly would have fed the crabs and rock-cod in two hours after his arrival.  Nevertheless, I believe the Cosenza story is the safer one.’

‘What a chaos of rock-ridges!—Old starved mother Earth’s bare-worn ribs and joints peeping out through every field and down; and on three sides of us, the sullen thunder of the unseen surge.  What a place for some “gloom-pampered man” to sit and misanthropize!’

‘“Morte,” says the Devonshire proverb, “is the place on earth which heaven made last, and the devil will take first.”’