Prose Idylls, New and Old

‘All the fitter for a misanthrope.  But where are the trees?  I have not seen one for the last four miles.’

‘Nor will you for a few miles more.  Whatever will grow here (and most things will) they will not, except, at least, hereafter the sea-pine of the Biscay shore.  You would know why, if you had ever felt a south-westerly gale here, when the foam-flakes are flying miles inland, and you are fain to cling breathless to bank and bush, if you want to get one look at those black fields of shark’s-tooth tide-rocks, champing and churning the great green rollers into snow.  Wild folk are these here, gatherers of shell-fish and laver, and merciless to wrecked vessels, which they consider as their own by immemorial usage, or rather right divine.  Significant, how an agricultural people is generally as cruel to wrecked seamen, as a fishing one is merciful.  I could tell you twenty stories of the baysmen down there to the westward risking themselves like very heroes to save strangers’ lives, and beating off the labouring folk who swarmed down for plunder from the inland hills.’

‘Knowledge, you see, breeds sympathy and love.  But what a merciless coast!’

‘Hardly a winter passes without a wreck or two.  You see there lying about the timbers of more than one tall ship.  You see, too, that black rock a-wash far out at sea, apparently a submarine outlier of the north horn of this wide rock-amphitheatre below us.  That is the Morte stone, the “Death-rock,” as the Normans christened it of old; and it does not belie its name even now.  See how, even in this calm, it hurls up its column of spray at every wave; and then conceive being entrapped between it and the cliffs, on some blinding, whirling winter’s night, when the land is shrouded thick in clouds, and the roar of the breakers hardly precedes by a minute the crash of your bows against the rocks.’

‘I never think, on principle, of things so painful, and yet so irrelievable.  Yet why does not your much-admired Trinity House erect a light there?’

‘So ask the sailors; for it is indeed one of the gateway-jambs of the Channel, and the deep water and the line of coast tempt all craft to pass as close to it as possible.’

‘Look at that sheet of yellow sand below us now, banked to the inland with sand-hills and sunny downs, and ending abruptly at the foot of that sombre wall of slate-hill, which runs out like a huge pier into the sea some two miles off.’

‘That is Woollacombe: but here on our right is a sight worth seeing.  Every gully and creek there among the rocks is yellow, but not with sand.  Those are shells; the sweepings of the ocean bed for miles around, piled there, millions upon millions, yards deep, in every stage of destruction.  There they lie grinding to dust; and every gale brings in fresh myriads from the inexhaustible sea-world, as if Death could be never tired of devouring, or God of making.  The brain grows dizzy and tired, as one’s feet crunch over the endless variety of their forms.’

‘And then one recollects that every one of them has been a living thing—a whole history of birth, and growth, and propagation, and death.  Waste it cannot be, or cruelty on the part of the Maker: but why this infinite development of life, apparently only to furnish out of it now and then a cartload of shell-sand to these lazy farmers?  But after all, there is not so much life in all those shells put together as in one little child: and it may die the hour that it is born!  What we call life is but an appearance and a becoming; the true life of existence belongs only to spirits.  And whether or not we, or the sea-shell there, are at any given moment helping to make up part of some pretty little pattern in this great kaleidoscope called the material universe, yet, in the spirit all live to Him, and shall do so for ever.’

And thereon he rambled off into a long lecture on ‘species-spirits,’ and ‘individual-spirits,’ and ‘personal spirits,’ doubtless most important.  But I, what between the sun, the luncheon, and the metaphysic, sank into soft slumbers, from which I was only awakened by the carriage stopping, according to our order, on the top of Saunton hill.

We left the fly, and wandered down towards the old gabled court, nestling amid huge walnuts in its southward glen; while before us spread a panorama, half sea, half land, than which, perhaps, our England owns few lovelier.

At our feet was a sea of sand—for the half-mile to the right smooth as a floor, bounded by a broad band of curling waves, which crept slowly shorewards with the advancing tide.  Right underneath us the sand was drifted for miles into fantastic hills, which quivered in the heat, the glaring yellow of its lights chequered by delicate pink shadows and sheets of grey-green bent.  To the left were rich alluvial marshes, covered with red cattle sleeping in the sun, and laced with creeks and flowery dykes; and here and there a scarlet line, which gladdened Claude’s eye as being a ‘bit of positive colour in the foreground,’ and mine, because they were draining tiles.  Beyond again, two broad tide-rivers, spotted with white and red-brown sails, gleamed like avenues of silver, past knots of gay dwellings, and tall lighthouses, and church-towers, and wandered each on its own road, till they vanished among the wooded hills.  On the eastern horizon the dark range of Exmoor sank gradually into lower and more broken ridges, which rolled away, woodland beyond woodland, till all outlines were lost in purple haze; while, far beyond, the granite peaks of Dartmoor hung like a delicate blue cloud, and enticed the eye away into infinity.  From hence, as our eyes swept round the horizon, the broken hills above the river’s mouth gradually rose into the table-land of the ‘barren coal-measures’ some ten miles off,—a long straight wall of cliffs which hounded the broad bay, buried in deepest shadow, except where the opening of some glen revealed far depths of sunlit wood.  A faint perpendicular line of white houses, midway along the range, marked our destination; and far to the westward, the land ended sheer and suddenly at the cliffs of Hartland, the ‘Promontory of Hercules,’ as the old Romans called it, to reappear some ten miles out in the Atlantic, in the blue flat-topped island of Lundy, so exactly similar in height and form to the opposite cape, that it required no scientific imagination to supply the vast gap which the primeval currents had sawn out.  There it all lay beneath us like a map; its thousand hues toned down harmoniously into each other by the summer haze, and ‘the eye was not filled with seeing,’ nor the spirit with the intoxicating sight of infinitely various life and form in perfectest repose.

I was the first to break the silence.

‘Claude, well-beloved, will you not sketch a little?’

No answer.

‘Not even rhapsodize? call it “lovely, exquisite, grand, majestic”?  There are plenty of such words in worldlings’ mouths—not a Cockney but would burst out with some enthusiastic commonplace at such a sight—surely one or other of them must be appropriate.’

‘Silence, profane! and take me away from this.  Let us go down, and hide our stupidities among those sand-hills, and so forget the whole.  What use standing here to be maddened by this tantalizing earth-spirit, who shows us such glorious things, and will not tell us what they mean?’

So down we went upon the burrows, among the sands, which hid from us every object but their own chaotic curves and mounds.  Above, a hundred skylarks made the air ring with carollings; strange and gaudy plants flecked the waste round us; and insects without number whirred over our heads, or hung poised with their wings outspread on the tall stalks of marram grass.  All at once a cloud hid the sun, and a summer whirlwind, presage of the thunderstorm, swept past us, carrying up with it a column of dry sand, and rattling the dry bents over our heads.

‘What a chill, doleful sigh comes from those reeds!’ said Claude.  ‘I can conceive this desert, beneath a driving winter’s sky instead of this burning azure, one of the most desolate places on the earth.’

‘Ay, desolate enough,’ I said, as we walked down beyond the tide-mark, over the vast fields of ribbed and splashy sands, ‘when the dead shells are rolling and crawling up the beach in wreaths before the gale, with a ghastly rattle as of the dry bones in the “Valley of Vision,” and when not a flower shows on that sandcliff, which is now one broad bed of yellow, scarlet, and azure.’

‘That is the first spot in England,’ said Claude, ‘except, of course, “the meads of golden king-cups,” where I have seen wild flowers give a tone to the colouring of the whole landscape, as they are said to do in the prairies of Texas.  And look how flowers and cliff are both glowing in a warm green haze, like that of Cuyp’s wonderful sandcliff picture in the Dulwich Gallery,—wonderful, as I think, and true, let some critics revile it as much as they will.’

‘Strange, that you should have quoted that picture here; its curious resemblance to this very place first awoke in me, years ago, a living interest in landscape-painting.  But look there; even in these grand summer days there is a sight before us sad enough.  There are the ribs of some ill-fated ship, a man-of-war too, as the story goes, standing like black fangs, half-buried in the sand.  And off what are those two ravens rising, stirring up with their obscene wings a sickly, putrescent odour?  A corpse?’

No, it was not a corpse; but the token of many corpses.  A fragment of some ship; its gay green paint and half-effaced gilding contrasting mockingly with the long ugly feathered barnacle-shells, which clustered on it, rotting into slime beneath the sun, and torn and scattered by the greedy beaks of the ravens.

In what tropic tornado, or on what coral-key of the Bahamas, months ago, to judge by those barnacles, had that tall ship gone down?  How long had that scrap of wreck gone wandering down the Gulf Stream, from Newfoundland into the Mid-Atlantic, and hitherward on its homeless voyage toward the Spitzbergen shore?  And who were all those living men who “went down to Hades, even many stalwart souls of heroes,” to give no sign until the sea shall render up her dead?  And every one of them had a father and mother—a wife, perhaps, and children, waiting for him—at least a whole human life, childhood, boyhood, manhood, in him.  All those years of toil and education, to get him so far on his life-voyage; and here is the end thereof!’

‘Say rather, the beginning thereof,’ Claude answered, stepping into the boat.  ‘This wreck is but a torn scrap of the chrysalis-cocoon; we may meet the butterflies themselves hereafter.’

* * * * *

And now we are on board; and alas! some time before the breeze will be so.  Take care of that huge boom, landsman Claude, swaying and sweeping backwards and forwards across the deck, unless you wish to be knocked overboard.  Take care, too, of that loose rope’s end, unless you wish to have your eyes cut out.  Take my advice, lie down here across the deck, as others are doing.  Cover yourself with great-coats, like an Irishman, to keep yourself cool, and let us meditate little on this strange thing, and strange place, which holds us now.

Look at those spars, how they creak and groan with every heave of the long glassy swell.  How those sails flap, and thunder, and rage, with useless outcries and struggles—only because they are idle.  Let the wind take them, and they will be steady, silent in an instant—their deafening dissonant grumbling exchanged for the soft victorious song of the breeze through the rigging, musical, self-contented, as of bird on bough.  So it is through life; there is no true rest but labour.  “No true misery,” as Carlyle says, “but in that of not being able to work.”  Some may call it a pretty conceit.  I call it a great worldwide law, which reaches from earth to heaven.  Whatever the Preacher may have thought it in a moment of despondency, what is it but a blessing that “sun, and wind, and rivers, and ocean,” as he says, and “all things, are full of labour—man cannot utter it.”  This sea which bears us would rot and poison, did it not sweep in and out here twice a day in swift refreshing current; nay, more, in the very water which laps against our bows troops of negro girls may have hunted the purblind shark in West Indian harbours, beneath glaring white-walled towns, with their rows of green jalousies, and cocoa-nuts, and shaddock groves.  For on those white sands there to the left, year by year, are washed up foreign canes, cassia beans, and tropic seeds; and sometimes, too, the tropic ocean snails, with their fragile shells of amethystine blue, come floating in mysteriously in fleets from the far west out of the passing Gulf Stream, where they have been sailing out their little life, never touching shore or ground, but buoyed each by his cluster of air-bubbles, pumped in at will under the skin of his tiny foot, by some cunning machinery of valves—small creatures truly, but very wonderful to men who have learned to reverence not merely the size of things, but the wisdom of their idea, and raising strange longings and dreams about that submarine ocean-world which stretches, teeming with richer life than this terrestrial one, away, away there westward, down the path of the sun, toward the future centre of the world’s destiny.

Wonderful ocean-world! three-fifths of our planet!  Can it be true that no rational beings are denizens there?  Science is severely silent—having as yet seen no mermaids: our captain there forward is not silent—if he has not seen them, plenty of his friends have.  The young man here has been just telling me that it was only last month one followed a West Indiaman right across the Atlantic.  “For,” says he, “there must be mermaids, and such like.  Do you think Heaven would have made all that water there only for the herrings and mackerel?”

I do not know, Tom: but I, too, suspect not; and I do know that honest men’s guesses are sometimes found by science to have been prophecies, and that there is no smoke without fire, and few universal legends without their nucleus of fact.  After all, those sea-ladies are too lovely a dream to part with in a hurry, at the mere despotic fiat of stern old Dame Analysis, divine and reverend as she is.  Why, like Keats’s Lamia,

      ‘Must all charms flee,At the mere touch of cold Philosophy,’

who will not even condescend to be awe-struck at the new wonders which she herself reveals daily?  Perhaps, too, according to the Duke of Wellington’s great dictum, that each man must be the best judge in his own profession, sailors may know best whether mermaids exist or not.  Besides, was it not here on Croyde Sands abreast of us, this very last summer, that a maiden—by which beautiful old word West-country people still call young girls—was followed up the shore by a mermaid who issued from the breakers, green-haired, golden-combed, and all; and, fleeing home, took to her bed and died, poor thing, of sheer terror in the course of a few days, persisting in her account of the monster?  True, the mermaid may have been an overgrown Lundy Island seal, carried out of his usual haunts by spring-tides and a school of fish.  Be it so.  Lundy and its seals are wonderful enough in all reason to thinking men, as it looms up there out of the Atlantic, with its two great square headlands, not twenty miles from us, in the white summer haze.  We will go there some day, and pick up a wild tale or two about it.

But, lo! a black line creeps up the western horizon.  Tom, gesticulating, swears that he sees ‘a billow break.’  True: there they come; the great white horses, that ‘champ and chafe, and toss in the spray.’  That long-becalmed trawler to seaward fills, and heels over, and begins to tug and leap impatiently at the weight of her heavy trawl.  Five minutes more, and the breeze will be down upon us.  The young men whistle openly to woo it; the old father thinks such a superstition somewhat beneath both his years and his religion, but cannot help pursing up his lips into a sly ‘whe-eugh’ when he has got well forward out of sight.

* * * *

Five long minutes; there is a breath of air; a soft distant murmur; the white horses curve their necks, and dive and vanish; and rise again like snowy porpoises, nearer, and nearer, and nearer.  Father and sons are struggling with that raving, riotous, drunken squaresail forward; while we haul away upon the main-sheet.

When will it come?  It is dying back—sliding past us.  ‘Hope deferred maketh the heart sick.’  No, louder and nearer swells ‘the voice of many waters,’ ‘the countless laugh of ocean,’ like the mirth of ten thousand girls, before us, behind us, round us; and the oily swell darkens into crisp velvet-green, till the air strikes us, and heels us over; and leaping, plunging, thrashing our bows into the seas, we spring away close-hauled upon the ever-freshening breeze, while Claude is holding on by ropes and bulwarks, and some, whose sea-legs have not yet forgot their craft, are swinging like a pendulum as they pace the deck, enjoying, as the Norse vikings would have called it, ‘the gallop of the flying sea-horse, and the shiver of her tawny wings.’

Exquisite motion! more maddening than the smooth floating stride of the race-horse, or the crash of the thorn-hedges before the stalwart hunter, or the swaying of the fir-boughs in the gale, when we used to climb as schoolboys after the lofty hawk’s nest; but not so maddening as the new motion of our age—the rush of the express-train, when the live iron pants and leaps and roars through the long chalk cutting; and white mounds gleam cold a moment against the sky and vanish; and rocks, and grass, and bushes, fleet by in dim blended lines; and the long hedges revolve like the spokes of a gigantic wheel; and far below, meadows, and streams, and homesteads, with all their lazy old-world life, open for an instant, and then flee away; while awe-struck, silent, choked with the mingled sense of pride and helplessness, we are swept on by that great pulse of England’s life-blood, rushing down her iron veins; and dimly out of the future looms the fulfilment of our primæval mission, to conquer and subdue the earth, and space too, and time, and all things,—even, hardest of all tasks, yourselves, my cunning brothers ever learning some fresh lesson, except that hardest one of all, that it is the Spirit of God which giveth you understanding.

Yes, great railroads, and great railroad age, who would exchange you, with all your sins, for any other time?  For swiftly as rushes matter, more swiftly rushes mind; more swiftly still rushes the heavenly dawn up the eastern sky.  ‘The night is far spent, the day is at hand.’  ‘Blessed is that servant whom his Lord, when He cometh, shall find watching!’

But come, my poor Claude, I see you are too sick for such deep subjects; so let us while away the time by picking the brains of this tall handsome boy at the helm, who is humming a love-song to himself sotto voce, lest it should be overheard by the grey-headed father, who is forward, poring over his Wesleyan hymn-book.  He will have something to tell you; he has a soul in him looking out of those wild dark eyes, and delicate aquiline features of his.  He is no spade-drudge or bullet-headed Saxon clod: he has in his veins the blood of Danish rovers and passionate southern Milesians, who came hither from Teffrobani, the Isle of Summer, as the old Fenic myths inform us.  Come and chat with him.  You dare not stir?  Perhaps you are in the right.  I shall go and fraternize, and bring you reports.

* * * *

He has been, at all events, ‘up the Straits’ as the Mediterranean voyage is called here, and seen ‘Palermy’ and the Sicilians.  But, for his imagination, what seems to have struck it most was that it was a ‘fine place for Jack, for a man could get mools there for a matter of three-halfpence a-day.’

‘And was that all you got out of him?’ asked Claude, sickly and sulkily.

‘Oh, you must not forget the halo of glory and excitement which in a sailor’s eyes surrounds the delights of horseback.  But he gave me besides a long glowing account of the catechism which they had there, three-quarters of a mile long.’

‘Pope Pius’s catechism, I suppose?’

So thought I, at first; but it appeared that all the dead of the city were arranged therein, dried and dressed out in their finest clothes, ‘every sect and age,’ as Tom said, ‘by itself; as natural as life!’  We may hence opine that he means some catacombs or other.

Poor Claude could not even get up a smile: but his sorrows were coming swiftly to an end.  The rock clefts grew sharper and sharper before us.  The soft masses of the lofty bank of wooded cliff rose higher and higher.  The white houses of Clovelly, piled stair above stair up the rocks, gleamed more and more brightly out of the green round bosoms of the forest.  As we shut in headland after headland, one tall conical rock after another darkened with its black pyramid the bright orb of the setting sun.  Soon we began to hear the soft murmur of the snowy surf line; then the merry voices of the children along the shore; and running straight for the cliff-foot, we shipped into the little pier, from whence the red-sailed herring-boats were swarming forth like bees out of a hive, full of gay handsome faces, and all the busy blue-jacketed life of seaport towns, to their night’s fishing in the bay.

IV.—Clovelly

A couple of days had passed, and I was crawling up the paved stairs inaccessible to cart or carriage, which are flatteringly denominated ‘Clovelly-street,’ a landing-net full of shells in one hand, and a couple of mackerel lines in the other; behind me a sheer descent, roof below roof; at an angle of 45°, to the pier and bay, 200 feet below, and in front, another hundred feet above, a green amphitheatre of oak, and ash, and larch, shutting out all but a narrow slip of sky, across which the low, soft, formless mist was crawling, opening every instant to show some gap of intense dark rainy blue, and send down a hot vaporous gleam of sunshine upon the white cottages, with their grey steaming roofs, and bright green railings, packed one above another upon the ledges of the cliff; and on the tall tree-fuchsias and gaudy dahlias in the little scraps of court-yard, calling the rich faint odour out of the verbenas and jessamines, and, alas! out of the herring-heads and tails also, as they lay in the rivulet; and lighting up the wings of the gorgeous butterflies, almost unknown in our colder eastern climate, which fluttered from woodland down to garden, and from garden up to woodland, and seemed to form the connecting link between that swarming hive of human industry and the deep wild woods in which it was embosomed.  So up I was crawling, to dine off gurnards of my own catching,—excellent fish, despised by deluded Cockneys, who fancy that because its head is large and prickly, therefore its flesh is not as firm, and sweet, and white, as that of any cod who ever gobbled shell-fish,—when down the stair front of me, greasy as ice from the daily shower, came slipping and staggering, my friend Claude, armed with camp-stool and portfolio.

‘Where have you been wandering to-day?’ I asked.  ‘Have you yet been as far as the park, which, as I told you, would supply such endless subjects for your pencil?’

‘Not I.  I have been roaming up and down this same “New Road” above us; and find there materials for a good week’s more work, if I could afford it.  Indeed, it was only to-day, for the first time, that I got as far as the lodge at the end of it, and then was glad enough to turn back shuddering at the first glimpse of the flat, dreary moorland beyond,—as Adam may have turned back into Eden after a peep out of the gates of Paradise.’

He should have taken courage and gone a half-mile further,—to the furze-grown ruins of a great Roman camp, which gives its name to the place, ‘Clovelly,’—Vallum Clausum, or Vallis Clausa, as antiquarians derive it; perhaps, ‘the hidden camp,’ or glen,—perhaps something else.  Who cares?  The old Romans were there, at least 10,000 strong: and some sentimental tribune or other of them had taste enough to perch his summer-house out on a conical point of the Hartland Cliffs, now tumbling into the sea, tesselated pavement, baths and all.  And strange work, no doubt, went on in that lonely nook, looking out over the Atlantic swell,—nights and days fit for Petronius’s own pen, among a seraglio of dark Celtic beauties.  Perhaps it could not be otherwise.  An ugly state of things—as heathen conquests always must have been; yet even in it there was a use and meaning.  But they are past like a dream, those 10,000 stalwart men, who looked far and wide over the Damnonian moors from a station which would be, even in these days, a first-rate military position.  Gone, too, are the old Saxon Franklins who succeeded.  Old Wrengils, or some such name, whoever he was, at last found some one’s bill too hard for his brain-pan; and there he lies on the hill above, in his ‘barrow’ of Wrinklebury.  And gone, too, the gay Norman squire, who, as tradition says, kept his fair lady in the old watch-tower, on the highest point of the White Cliff—‘Gallantry Bower,’ as they call it to this day—now a mere ring of turf-covered stones, and a few low stunted oaks, shorn by the Atlantic blasts into the shape of two huge cannon, which form a favourite landmark for the fisherman of the bay.  Gone they all are, Cymry and Roman, Saxon and Norman; and upon the ruins of their accumulated labour we stand here.  Each of them had his use,—planted a few more trees or cleared a few more, tilled a fresh scrap of down, organized a scrap more of chaos.  Who dare wish the tide of improvement, which has been flowing for nineteen centuries, swifter and swifter still as it goes on, to stop, just because it is not convenient to us just now to move on?  It will not take another nineteen hundred years, be sure, to make even this lovely nook as superior to what it is now as it is now to the little knot of fishing huts where naked Britons peeped out, trembling at the iron tramp of each insolent legionary from the camp above.  It will not take another nineteen hundred years to develope the capabilities of this place,—to make it the finest fishery in England, next to Torbay,—the only safe harbour of refuge for West Indiamen, along sixty miles of ruthless coast,—and a commercial centre for a vast tract of half-tilled land within, which only requires means of conveyance to be as fertile and valuable as nine-tenths of England.  Meanwhile Claude ought to have seen the deer-park.  The panorama from that old ruined ‘bower’ of cliff and woodland, down and sea, is really unique in its way.