Prose Idylls, New and Old

The other chaperone was a lady of God’s making, too; one who might have been a St. Theresa, had she been born there and then; but as it was, had been fated to become only the Wesleyan abbess of the town, and, like Deborah, ‘a mother in Israel.’  With her tall, slim, queenly figure, massive forehead, glittering eyes, features beaming with tenderness and enthusiasm, and yet overcast with a peculiar expression of self-consciousness and restraint, well known to those who have studied the physiognomies of ‘saints,’ she seemed to want only the dress of some monastic order to make her the ideal of a mediæval abbess, watching with a half-pitying, half-complacent smile, the gambols of a group of innocent young worldlings.  I saw Claude gazing at her full of admiration and surprise, which latter was certainly not decreased when, as soon as all had settled themselves comfortably on board, and the cutter was slipping quietly away under the magnificent deer-park cliffs, the Lady Abbess, pulling out her Wesleyan hymn-book, gave out the Morning Hymn, apparently as a matter of course.

With hardly a demur one sweet voice after another arose; then a man gained courage, and chimed in with a full harmonious bass; then a rich sad alto made itself heard, as it wandered in and out between the voices of the men and women; and at last a wild mellow tenor, which we discovered after much searching to proceed from the most unlikely-looking lips of an old dry, weather-bleared, mummified chrysalis of a man, who stood aft, steering with his legs, and showing no sign of life except when he slowly and solemnly filled his nose with snuff.

‘What strange people have you brought me among?’ asked Claude.  ‘I have been wondering ever since I came here at the splendid faces and figures of men, women, and children, which popped out upon me from every door in that human rabbit-burrow above.  I have been in raptures at the gracefulness, the courtesy, the intelligence of almost everyone I meet; and now, to crown all, everyone among them seems to be a musician.’

‘Really you are not far wrong, and you will find them as remarkable morally as they are physically and intellectually.  The simplicity and purity of the women here put one more in mind of the valleys of the Tyrol than of an English village.’

‘And in proportion to their purity, I suppose,’ said Claude, ‘is their freedom and affectionateness?’

‘Exactly.  It would do your “naturalist” heart good, Claude, to see a young fellow just lauded from a foreign voyage rolling up the street which we have just descended, and availing himself of the immemorial right belonging to such cases of kissing and being kissed by every woman whom he meets, young and old.  You will find yourself here among those who are too simple-minded, and too full of self-respect, to be either servile or uncourteous.’

‘I have found out already that Liberty, Fraternity, and Equality, in such company as this, are infinitely pleasanter, as well as cheaper, than the aristocratic seclusion of a cutter hired for our own behoof.’

‘True; and now you will not go home and, as most tourists do, say that you know a place, without knowing the people who live in it—as if the human inhabitants of a range of scenery were not among its integral and most important parts—’

‘What! are Copley Fielding’s South Down landscapes incomplete without a half-starved seven shillings a-week labourer in the foreground?’

‘Honestly, are they not a text without a sermon? a premise without a conclusion?  Is it not partly because the land is down, and not well-tilled arable, that the labourer is what he is?  And yet, perhaps, the very absence of human beings in his vast sheets of landscape, when one considers that they are scraps of great, overcrowded, scientific England in the nineteenth century, is in itself the bitterest of satires.  But, hush! there is another hymn commencing—not to be the last by many.’

* * * * *

We had landed, and laughed, and scrambled, eaten and drunk, seen all the sights of Lundy, and heard all the traditions.  Are they not written in Mr. Bamfield’s Ilfracombe Guide?  Why has not some one already written a fire-and-brimstone romance about them?  ‘Moresco Castle; or, the Pirate Knight of the Atlantic Wave.’  What a title!  Or again—‘The Seal Fiend; or, the Nemesis of the Scuttled West Indiaman.’—If I had paper and lubricité enough, and that delightful carelessness of any moral or purpose, except that of fine writing and money-making, which possesses some modern scribblers—I could tales unfold—But neither pirate legends, nor tales of cheated insurance offices, nor wrecks and murders, will make us understand Lundy—what it is ‘considered in its idea,’ as the new argot is.  It may be defined as a lighthouse-bearing island.  The whole three miles of granite table-land, seals, sea-birds, and human beings, are mere accidents and appendages—the pedestal and the ornaments of that great white tower in the centre, whose sleepless fiery eye blinks all night long over the night-mists of the Atlantic.  If, as a wise man has said, the days will come when our degenerate posterity will fall down and worship rusty locomotives and fossil electric-telegraphs, the relics of their ancestors’ science, grown to them mythic and impossible, as the Easter-islanders bow before the colossal statues left by a nobler and extinct race, then surely there will be pilgrimages to Lundy, and prayers to that white granite tower, with its unglazed lantern and rusting machinery, to light itself up again, and help poor human beings!  Really, my dear brothers, I am not in jest: you seem but too likely now-a-days to arrive at some such catastrophe—sentimental philosophy for the ‘enlightened’ few, and fetish-worship (of which nominally Christian forms are as possible as heathen ones) for the masses.—At that you may only too probably arrive—unless you repent, and ‘get back your souls.’

* * * * *

We had shot along the cliffs a red-legged chough or two, and one of the real black English rat, exterminated on the mainland by the grey Hanoverian newcomer; and weary with sight-seeing and scrambling, we sat down to meditate on a slab of granite, which hung three hundred feet in air above the western main.

‘This is even more strange and new to me,’ said Claude, at length, ‘than anything I have yet seen in this lovely West.  I now appreciate Ruskin’s advice to oil-painters to go and study the coasts of Devon and Cornwall, instead of lingering about the muddy seas and tame cliffs of the Channel and the German Ocean.’

‘How clear and brilliant,’ said I, ‘everything shows through this Atlantic atmosphere.  The intensity of colouring may vie with that of the shores of the Mediterranean.  The very raininess of the climate, by condensing the moisture into an ever-changing phantasmagoria of clouds, leaves the clear air and sunshine, when we do get a glimpse of them, all the more pure and transparent.’

‘The distinctive feature of the scene is, in my eyes, the daring juxtaposition of large simple masses of positive colour.  There are none of the misty enamelled tones of Lynmouth, or the luscious richness of Clovelly.  The forms are so simple and severe, that they would be absolutely meagre, were it not for the rich colouring with which Nature has so lovingly made up for the absence of all softness, all picturesque outline.  One does not regret or even feel the want of trees here, while the eye ranges down from that dappled cloud-world above, over that sheet of purple heather, those dells bedded with dark green fern, of a depth and richness of hue which I never saw before—over those bright grey granite rocks, spangled with black glittering mica and golden lichens, to rest at last on that sea below, which streams past the island in a swift roaring torrent of tide.’

‘Sea, Claude? say, ocean.  This is real Atlantic blue here beneath us.  No more Severn mud, no more grass-green bay-water, but real ocean sapphire—dark, deep, intense, Homeric purple, it spreads away, away, there before us, without a break or islet, to the shores of America.  You are sitting on one of the last points of Europe; and therefore all things round you are stern and strange with a barbaric pomp, such as befits the boundary of a world.’

‘Ay, the very form of the cliffs shows them to be the breakwaters of a continent.  No more fantastic curves and bands of slate, such as harmonize so well with the fairyland which we left this morning; the cliffs, with their horizontal rows of cubical blocks, seem built up by Cyclopean hands.’

‘Yet how symbolic is the difference between them and that equally Cyclopic masonry of the Exmoor coast.  There every fracture is fresh, sharp-edged, crystalline; the worn-out useless hills are dropping to pieces with their own weight.  Here each cube is delicately rounded off at the edges, every crack worn out into a sinuous furrow, like the scars of an everlasting warfare with the winds and waves.’

‘Does it not raise strange longings in you,’ said Claude, ‘to gaze out yonder over the infinite calm, and then to remember that beyond it lies America!—the new world; the future world; the great Titan-baby, who will be teeming with new Athens and Londons, with new Bacons and Shakspeares, Newtons and Goethes, when this old worn-out island will be—what?  Oh! when I look out here, like a bird from its cage, a captive from his dungeon, and remember what lies behind me, to what I must return to-morrow—the over-peopled Babylon of misery and misrule, puffery and covetousness—and there before me great countries untilled, uncivilized, unchristianized, crying aloud for man to come and be man indeed, and replenish the earth and subdue it.  “Oh that I had wings as a dove, then would I flee away and be at rest!”  Here, lead me away; my body is growing as dizzy as my mind.  I feel coming over me that horrible longing of which I have heard, to leap out into empty space.  How the blank air whispers, “Be free!”  How the broad sea smiles, and calls, with its ten thousand waves, “Be free!”—As I live, if you do not take me away I shall throw myself over the cliff.’

I did take him away, for I knew the sensation and its danger well.  It has nothing to do with physical giddiness.  Those who are cliff-bred, and who never were giddy for an instant in their lives, have often felt themselves impelled to leap from masts, and tree-tops, and cliffs; and nothing but the most violent effort of will could break the fascination.  I cannot but think, by the bye, that many a puzzling suicide might be traced to this same emotion acting on a weak and morbid brain.

We returned to the little landing cove.  The red-sailed cutter lay sleeping below us—‘floating double, ship and shadow.’  Shoals of innumerable mackerel broke up, making acres of water foam and sparkle round their silvery sides, with a soft roar (call it ‘a bull’ if you like, it is the only expression for that mysterious sound), while among them the black head of a huge seal was slowly and silently appearing and vanishing, as he got his dinner, in a quiet business-like way, among the unhappy wanderers.

We put off in the boat, and just halfway from the cutter Claude gave a start, and the women a scream, as the enormous brute quietly raised his head and shoulders out of the water ten yards off, with a fish kicking in his mouth, and the water running off his nose, to take a deliberate stare at us, after the fashion of seals, whose ruling passion is curiosity.  The sound of a musical instrument, the sight of a man bathing—anything, in short, which their small wits cannot explain at first sight, is enough to make them forget all their cunning, and thrust their heads suicidally into any danger; and even so it fared with the ‘black man,’ as the girls, in their first terror, declared him to be.  Some fellow’s gun went off—of itself I should like to believe—but the whole charge disappeared into his sleek round visage, knocking the mackerel from between his teeth; and he turned over, a seven-foot lump of lifeless blubber.

‘Wretch!’ cried Claude, as we dragged the seal into the boat, where he lay with his head and arms hanging helplessly over the bows, like a sea-sick alderman on board a Margate steamer.  ‘What excuse can he give for such a piece of wanton cruelty?’

‘I assure you his skin and oil are very valuable.’

‘Pish!—Was he thinking of skin and oil when he pulled the trigger? or merely obeying the fleshly lust of destructiveness—the puppet of two bumps on the back of his head?’

‘My dear Claude, man is the microcosm; and as the highest animal, the ideal type of the mammalia, he, like all true types, comprises in himself the attributes of all lower species.  Therefore he must have a tiger-vein in him, my dear Claude, as well as a beaver-vein and a spider-vein; and no more shame to him.  You are a butterfly; that good fellow a beast of prey; both may have their own work to do in this age just as they had in the old ones; and if you do not like that explanation, all I can say is, I can sympathise with you and with him too.  Homo sum—humani nihil a me alienum puto.  Trim the boat, lads, or the seal will swamp us, and, like Samson, slay more in his death than ever he slew in his life.’

We slipped on homeward.  The cliff-wall of Lundy stood out blacker and blacker every moment against the gay western sky; greens, greys, and purples, dyeing together into one deep rich monotone, for which our narrow colour-vocabulary has no word; and threw a long cold shadow towards us across the golden sea; suddenly above its dark ridge a wild wreath of low rack caught the rays of the setting sun, and flamed up like a volcano towards the dun and purple canopy of upper clouds.  Before us the blue sea and the blue land-line were fading into mournful grey, on which one huge West Indiaman blazed out, orange and scarlet, her crowded canvas all a-flame from the truck to the water’s edge.—A few moments and she, too, had vanished into the grey twilight, and a chill night-wind crisped the sea.  It was a relief to hear the Evening Hymn rise rich and full from one voice, and then another and another, till the men chimed in one by one, and the whole cutter, from stem to stern, breathed up its melody into the silent night.

But the hymn soon flagged—there was more mirth on board than could vent itself in old Charles Wesley’s words; and one began to hum a song tune, and then another, with a side glance at the expression of the Lady Abbess’s face, till at last, when a fair wife took courage, and burst out with full pipe into ‘The sea, the sea,’ the ice was fairly broken; and among jests and laughter one merry harmless song after another rang out, many of them, to Claude’s surprise, fashionable London ones, which sounded strangely enough out there on the wild western sea.  At last—‘Claude, friend,’ I whispered, ‘you must sing your share too—and mine also, for that matter.’

‘What shall I sing?’

‘Anything you will, from the sublime to the ridiculous.  They will understand and appreciate it as well as yourself.  Recollect, you are not among bullet-headed South Saxon clods, but among wits as keen and imaginations as rich as those of any Scotch shepherd or Manchester operative.’

And up rose his exquisite tenor.

This was his first song, but it was not allowed to be his last.  German ballads, Italian Opera airs, were all just as warmly, and perhaps far more sincerely appreciated, as they would have been by any London evening-party; and the singing went on, hour after hour, as we slipped slowly on upon the tide, till it grew late, and the sweet voices died away one by one; and then the Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity which had reigned so pleasantly throughout the day took a new form, as the women huddled together to sleep in each other’s arms; and the men and we clustered forwards, while from every mouth fragrant incense steamed upwards into the air.  ‘Man a cooking animal?’ my dear Doctor Johnson—pooh! man is a smoking animal.  There is his ergon, his ‘differential energy,’ as the Aristotelians say—his true distinction from the ourang-outang.  Ponder it well.

The men were leaning on the trawl capstan, while our old landlord, with half-a-dozen pipes within a foot of his face, droned out some long sea-yarn about Ostend, and muds, and snow-storms, and revenue-cruisers going down stern foremost, kegs of brandy and French prisons, which I shall not repeat; for indeed the public has been surfeited with sea-stories of late, from many sufficiently dull ones up to the genial wisdom of ‘Peter Simple,’ and the gorgeous word-painting of ‘Tom Cringle’s Log.’  And now the subject is stale—the old war and the wonders thereof have died away into the past, like the men who fought in it; and Trafalgar and the Bellerophon are replaced by Manchester and ‘Mary Barton.’  We have solved the old sea-going problems pretty well—thanks to wise English-hearted Captain Marryat, now gone to his rest, just when his work was done; and we must turn round and face a few land-going problems not quite so easy of solution.  So Claude and I thought, as we leant over the sloop’s bows, listening neither to the Ostend story forwards nor the forty-stanza ballad aft, which the old steersman was moaning on, careless of listeners, to keep himself awake at the helm.  Forty stanzas or so we did count from curiosity; the first line of each of which ended infallibly with

‘Says the commodo—ore;

and the third with

‘Says the female smuggler;’

and then gave up in despair; and watched in a dreamy, tired, half-sad mood, the everlasting sparkle of the water as our bows threw it gently off in sheets of flame and ‘tender curving lines of creamy’ fire, that ran along the glassy surface, and seemed to awaken the sea for yards round into glittering life, as countless diamonds, and emeralds, and topazes, leaped and ran and dived round us, while we slipped slowly by; and then a speck of light would show far off in the blank darkness, and another, and another, and slide slowly up to us—shoals of medusæ, every one of them a heaving globe of flame; and some unseen guillemot would give a startled squeak, or a shearwater close above our heads suddenly stopped the yarn, and raised a titter among the men, by his ridiculously articulate, and not over-complimentary, cry; and then a fox’s bark from the cliffs came wild and shrill, although so faint and distant; or the lazy gaff gave a sad uneasy creak; and then a soft warm air, laden with heather honey, and fragrant odours of sedge, and birch, and oak, came sighing from the land; while all around us was the dense blank of the night, except where now and then some lonely gleam through the southern clouds showed the cliff-tops on our right.—It was all most unearthly, dreamlike, a strange phantasmagoria, like some scene from ‘The Ancient Mariner’—all the world shut out, silent, invisible, and we floating along there alone, like a fairy ship creeping through Chaos and the unknown Limbo.  Was it an evil thought that rose within me as I said to Claude—‘Is not this too like life?  Our only light the sparkles that rise up round us at every step, and die behind us; and all around, and all before, the great black unfathomable eternities?  A few souls brought together as it were by chance, for a short friendship and mutual dependence in this little ship of earth, so soon to land her passengers and break up the company for ever?’

He smiled.

‘There is a devil’s meaning to everything in nature, and a God’s meaning, too.  Your friends, the zoologists, have surely taught you better than that.  As I read Nature’s parable to-night, I find nothing in it but hope.  What if there be darkness, the sun will rise to-morrow.  What if there seem a chaos: the great organic world is still living, and growing, and feeding, unseen by us, all the black night through; and every phosphoric atom there below is a sign that even in the darkest night there is still the power of light, ready to flash out, wherever and however it is stirred.  Does the age seem to you dark?  Do you, too, feel as I do at times, the awful sadness of that text,—“The time shall come when ye shall desire to see one of the days of the Lord, and shall not see it”?  Then remember that

“The night is never so longBut at last it ringeth for matin song.”

And even as it is around us here, so it is in the world of men.  The night is peopled not merely with phantoms and wizards, superstitions and spirits of evil, but under its shadow all sciences, methods, social energies, are taking rest, and growing, and feeding, unknown to themselves, that they may awake into a new life, and intermarry, and beget children nobler than themselves, when “the day-spring from on high comes down.”  Even now, see! the dawn is gilding the highest souls, as it is those Exmoor peaks afar; and we are in the night only because we crawl below.  What if we be unconscious of all the living energies which are fermenting round us now?  Have you not shown me in this last week every moorland pool, every drop of the summer sea, alive with beautiful organizations, multiplying as fast as the thoughts of man?  Is not every leaf breathing still, every sap vein drinking still, though we may not see them?  “Even so is the kingdom of God; like seed sown in the ground; and men rise, and lie down and sleep; and it groweth up they know not how.”’

We both fell into a reverie.  The story and the ballad were finished, and not a sound broke the silence except the screaming of the sea-fowl, which led my thoughts wandering back to nights long past, when we dragged the seine up to our chins in water through the short midsummer night, and scrambled and rolled over on the beach in boyish glee, after the skate and mullet, with those now gone; and as I thought and thought, old voices seemed to call me, old faces looked at me, of playmates, and those nearer than playmates, now sleeping in the deep deep sea, amid far coral islands; and old figures seemed to glide out of the mysterious dark along the still sea floor, as if the ocean were indeed giving up her dead.  I shook myself, turned away, and tried to persuade myself that I was dreaming.  Perhaps I had been doing so.  At least, I remember very little more, till I was roused by the rattling of the chain-cable through the hawse-hole, opposite the pier-head.

And now, gentle readers, farewell; and farewell, Clovelly, and all the loving hearts it holds; and farewell, too, the soft still summer weather.  Claude and I are taking our last walk together along the deer-park cliffs.  Lundy is shrouded in the great grey fan of dappled haze which streams up from the westward, dimming the sickly sun.  ‘There is not a breath the blue wave to curl.’  Yet lo! round Chapman’s Head creeps a huge bank of polished swell, and bursts in thunder on the cliffs.—Another follows, and another.—The Atlantic gales are sending in their avant-courriers of ground-swell: six hours more, and the storm which has been sweeping over ‘the still-vexed Bermoöthes,’ and bending the tall palms on West Indian isles, will be roaring through the oak woods of Devon.  The old black buck is calling his does with ominous croakings, and leading the way slowly into the deepest coverts of the glens.  The stormy petrels, driven in from the Atlantic, are skimming like black swallows over the bay beneath us.  Long strings of sea-fowl are flagging on steadily at railroad pace, towards the sands and salt-marshes of Braunton.  The herring-boats are hastily hauling their nets—you may see the fish sparkling like flakes of silver as they come up over the gunwale; all craft, large and small, are making for the shelter of the pier.  Claude starts this afternoon to sit for six months in Babylonic smoke, working up his sketches into certain unspeakable pictures, with which the world will be astonished, or otherwise, at the next Royal Academy Exhibition; while I, for whom another fortnight of pure western air remains, am off to well-known streams, to be in time for the autumn floods, and the shoals of fresh-run salmon trout.

1

Fraser’s Magazine, June 1867.

2

Fraser’s Magazine, September 1858.

3

The Ripon list of natural flies contains several other species of small Nemouridæ unknown to me, save one brown one, which is seen in the South, though rarely, in June.

4

For these details I am indebted to a paper in the ‘Annals of Natural History,’ for September 1862, by my friend, Professor Alfred Newton, of Cambridge.

5

Fraser’s Magazine, January 1858.

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