Prose Idylls, New and Old

Some people—most people—in these run-about railway days, would complain of such a life, in such a ‘narrow sphere,’ so they call it, as monotonous.  Very likely it is so.  But is it to be complained of on that account?  Is monotony in itself an evil?  Which is better, to know many places ill, or to know one place well?  Certainly—if a scientific habit of mind be a gain—it is only by exhausting as far as possible the significance of an individual phenomenon (is not that sentence a true scientific one in its magniloquence?) that you can discover any glimpse of the significance of the universal.  Even men of boundless knowledge, like Humboldt, must have had once their speciality, their pet subject, or they would have, strictly speaking, no knowledge at all.  The volcanoes of Mexico, patiently and laboriously investigated in his youth, were to Humboldt, possibly, the key of the whole Cosmos.  I learn more, studying over and over again the same Bagshot sand and gravel heaps, than I should by roaming all Europe in search of new geologic wonders.  Fifteen years have I been puzzling at the same questions and have only guessed at a few of the answers.  What sawed out the edges of the moors into long narrow banks of gravel?  What cut them off all flat atop?  What makes Erica Tetralix grow in one soil, and the bracken in another?  How did three species of Club-moss—one of them quite an Alpine one—get down here, all the way from Wales perhaps, upon this isolated patch of gravel?  Why did that one patch of Carex arenaria settle in the only square yard for miles and miles which bore sufficient resemblance to its native sandhill by the seashore, to make it comfortable?  Why did Myosurus minimus, which I had hunted for in vain for fourteen years, appear by dozens in the fifteenth, upon a new-made bank, which had been for at least two hundred years a farm-yard gateway?  Why does it generally rain here from the south-west, not when the barometer falls, but when it begins to rise again?  Why—why is everything, which lies under my feet all day long?  I don’t know; and you can’t tell me.  And till I have found out, I cannot complain of monotony, with still undiscovered puzzles waiting to be explained, and so to create novelty at every turn.

Besides, monotony is pleasant in itself; morally pleasant, and morally useful.  Marriage is monotonous: but there is much, I trust, to be said in favour of holy wedlock.  Living in the same house is monotonous: but three removes, say the wise, are as bad as a fire.  Locomotion is regarded as an evil by our Litany.  The Litany, as usual, is right.  ‘Those who travel by land or sea’ are to be objects of our pity and our prayers; and I do pity them.  I delight in that same monotony.  It saves curiosity, anxiety, excitement, disappointment, and a host of bad passions.  It gives a man the blessed, invigorating feeling that he is at home; that he has roots, deep and wide, struck down into all he sees; and that only The Being who will do nothing cruel or useless can tear them up.  It is pleasant to look down on the same parish day after day, and say, I know all that lies beneath, and all beneath know me.  If I want a friend, I know where to find him; if I want work done, I know who will do it.  It is pleasant and good to see the same trees year after year; the same birds coming back in spring to the same shrubs; the same banks covered with the same flowers, and broken (if they be stiff ones) by the same gaps.  Pleasant and good it is to ride the same horse, to sit in the same chair, to wear the same old coat.  That man who offered twenty pounds’ reward for a lost carpet-bag full of old boots was a sage, and I wish I knew him.  Why should one change one’s place, any more than one’s wife or one’s children?  Is a hermit-crab, slipping his tail out of one strange shell into another, in the hopes of its fitting him a little better, either a dignified, safe, or graceful animal?  No; George Riddler was a true philosopher.

‘Let vules go sarching vur and nigh,We bides at Whum, my dog and I;’

and become there, not only wiser, but more charitable; for the oftener one sees, the better one knows; and the better one knows, the more one loves.

It is an easy philosophy; especially in the case of the horse, where a man cannot afford more than one, as I cannot.  To own a stud of horses, after all, is not to own horses at all, but riding-machines.  Your rich man who rides Crimæa in the morning, Sir Guy in the afternoon, and Sultan to-morrow, and something else the next day, may be a very gallant rider: but it is a question whether he enjoys the pleasure which one horse gives to the poor man who rides him day after day; one horse, who is not a slave, but a friend; who has learnt all his tricks of voice, hand, heel, and knows what his master wants, even without being told; who will bear with his master’s infirmities, and feels secure that his master will bear with his in turn.

Possibly, after all, the grapes are sour; and were one rich, one would do even as the rich are wont to do: but still, I am a minute philosopher.  And therefore, this afternoon, after I have done the same work, visited the same people, and said the same words to them, which I have done for years past, and shall, I trust, for many a year to come, I shall go wandering out into the same winter-garden on the same old mare; and think the same thoughts, and see the same fir-trees, and meet perhaps the same good fellows hunting of their fox, as I have done with full content this many a year; and rejoice, as I said before, in my own boundless wealth, who have the whole universe to look at, without being charged one penny for the show.

As I have said, the grapes may be sour, and I enjoy the want of luxuries only because I cannot get them; but if my self-deception be useful to me, leave it alone.

No one is less inclined to depreciate that magnificent winter-garden at the Crystal Palace: yet let me, if I choose, prefer my own; I argue that, in the first place, it is far larger.  You may drive, I hear, through the grand one at Chatsworth for a quarter of a mile.  You may ride through mine for fifteen miles on end.  I prefer, too, to any glass roof which Sir Joseph Paxton ever planned, that dome above my head some three miles high, of soft dappled grey and yellow cloud, through the vast lattice-work whereof the blue sky peeps, and sheds down tender gleams on yellow bogs, and softly rounded heather knolls, and pale chalk ranges gleaming far away.  But, above all, I glory in my evergreens.  What winter-garden can compare for them with mine?  True, I have but four kinds—Scotch fir, holly, furze, and the heath; and by way of relief to them, only brows of brown fern, sheets of yellow bog-grass, and here and there a leafless birch, whose purple tresses are even more lovely to my eye than those fragrant green ones which she puts on in spring.  Well: in painting as in music, what effects are more grand than those produced by the scientific combination, in endless new variety, of a few simple elements?  Enough for me is the one purple birch; the bright hollies round its stem sparkling with scarlet beads; the furze-patch, rich with its lacework of interwoven light and shade, tipped here and there with a golden bud; the deep soft heather carpet, which invites you to lie down and dream for hours; and behind all, the wall of red fir-stems, and the dark fir-roof with its jagged edges a mile long, against the soft grey sky.

An ugly, straight-edged, monotonous fir-plantation?  Well, I like it, outside and inside.  I need no saw-edge of mountain peaks to stir up my imagination with the sense of the sublime, while I can watch the saw-edge of those fir peaks against the red sunset.  They are my Alps; little ones it may be: but after all, as I asked before, what is size?  A phantom of our brain; an optical delusion.  Grandeur, if you will consider wisely, consists in form, and not in size: and to the eye of the philosopher, the curve drawn on a paper two inches long, is just as magnificent, just as symbolic of divine mysteries and melodies, as when embodied in the span of some cathedral roof.  Have you eyes to see?  Then lie down on the grass, and look near enough to see something more of what is to be seen; and you will find tropic jungles in every square foot of turf; mountain cliffs and debacles at the mouth of every rabbit burrow: dark strids, tremendous cataracts, ‘deep glooms and sudden glories,’ in every foot-broad rill which wanders through the turf.  All is there for you to see, if you will but rid yourself of ‘that idol of space;’ and Nature, as everyone will tell you who has seen dissected an insect under the microscope, is as grand and graceful in her smallest as in her hugest forms.

The March breeze is chilly: but I can be always warm if I like in my winter-garden.  I turn my horse’s head to the red wall of fir-stems, and leap over the furze-grown bank into my cathedral, wherein if there be no saints, there are likewise no priestcraft and no idols; but endless vistas of smooth red green-veined shafts holding up the warm dark roof, lessening away into endless gloom, paved with rich brown fir-needle—a carpet at which Nature has been at work for forty years.  Red shafts, green roof, and here and there a pane of blue sky—neither Owen Jones nor Willement can improve upon that ecclesiastical ornamentation,—while for incense I have the fresh healthy turpentine fragrance, far sweeter to my nostrils than the stifling narcotic odour which fills a Roman Catholic cathedral.  There is not a breath of air within: but the breeze sighs over the roof above in a soft whisper.  I shut my eyes and listen.  Surely that is the murmur of the summer sea upon the summer sands in Devon far away.  I hear the innumerable wavelets spend themselves gently upon the shore, and die away to rise again.  And with the innumerable wave-sighs come innumerable memories, and faces which I shall never see again upon this earth.  I will not tell even you of that, old friend.

It has two notes, two keys rather, that Eolian-harp of fir-needles above my head; according as the wind is east or west, the needles dry or wet.  This easterly key of to-day is shriller, more cheerful, warmer in sound, though the day itself be colder: but grander still, as well as softer, is the sad soughing key in which the south-west wind roars on, rain-laden, over the forest, and calls me forth—being a minute philosopher—to catch trout in the nearest chalk-stream.

The breeze is gone a while; and I am in perfect silence—a silence which may be heard.  Not a sound; and not a moving object; absolutely none.  The absence of animal life is solemn, startling.  That ringdove, who was cooing half a mile away, has hushed his moan; that flock of long-tailed titmice, which were twinging and pecking about the fir-cones a few minutes since, are gone: and now there is not even a gnat to quiver in the slant sun-rays.  Did a spider run over these dead leaves, I almost fancy I could hear his footfall.  The creaking of the saddle, the soft step of the mare upon the fir-needles, jar my ears.  I seem alone in a dead world.  A dead world: and yet so full of life, if I had eyes to see!  Above my head every fir-needle is breathing—breathing for ever; currents unnumbered circulate in every bough, quickened by some undiscovered miracle; around me every fir-stem is distilling strange juices, which no laboratory of man can make; and where my dull eye sees only death, the eye of God sees boundless life and motion, health and use.

Slowly I wander on beneath the warm roof of the winter-garden, and meditate upon that one word—Life; and specially on all that Mr. Lewes has written so well thereon—for instance—

‘We may consider Life itself as an ever-increasing identification with Nature.  The simple cell, from which the plant or animal arises, must draw light and heat from the sun, nutriment from the surrounding world, or else it will remain quiescent, not alive, though latent with life; as the grains in the Egyptian tombs, which after lying thousands of years in those sepulchres, are placed in the earth, and smile forth as golden wheat.  What we call growth, is it not a perpetual absorption of Nature, the identification of the individual with the universal?  And may we not, in speculative moods, consider Death as the grand impatience of the soul to free itself from the circle of individual activity—the yearning of the creature to be united with the Creator?

‘As with Life, so with knowledge, which is intellectual life.  In the early days of man’s history, Nature and her marvellous ongoings were regarded with but a casual and careless eye, or else with the merest wonder.  It was late before profound and reverent study of her laws could wean man from impatient speculations; and now, what is our intellectual activity based on, except on the more thorough mental absorption of Nature?  When that absorption is completed, the mystic drama will be sunny clear, and all Nature’s processes be visible to man, as a Divine Effluence and Life.’

True: yet not all the truth.  But who knows all the truth?

Not I.  ‘We see through a glass darkly,’ said St. Paul of old; and what is more, dazzle and weary our eyes, like clumsy microscopists, by looking too long and earnestly through the imperfect and by no means achromatic lens.  Enough.  I will think of something else.  I will think of nothing at all—

Stay.  There was a sound at last; a light footfall.

A hare races towards us through the ferns, her great bright eyes full of terror, her ears aloft to catch some sound behind.  She sees us, turns short, and vanishes into the gloom.  The mare pricks up her ears too, listens, and looks: but not the way the hare has gone.  There is something more coming; I can trust the finer sense of the horse, to which (and no wonder) the Middle Age attributed the power of seeing ghosts and fairies impalpable to man’s gross eyes.  Beside, that hare was not travelling in search of food.  She was not loping along, looking around her right and left; but galloping steadily.  She has been frightened; she has been put up: but what has put her up?  And there, far away among the fir-stems, rings the shriek of a startled blackbird.  What has put him up?

That, old mare, at sight whereof your wise eyes widen till they are ready to burst, and your ears are first shot forward towards your nose, and then laid back with vicious intent.  Stand still, old woman!  Do you think still, after fifteen winters, that you can catch a fox?

A fox it is indeed; a great dog-fox, as red as the fir-stems between which he glides.  And yet his legs are black with fresh peat-stains.  He is a hunted fox: but he has not been up long.

The mare stands like a statue: but I can feel her trembling between my knees.  Positively he does not see us.  He sits down in the middle of a ride, turns his great ears right and left, and then scratches one of them with his hind foot, seemingly to make it hear the better.  Now he is up again and on.

Beneath yon firs, some hundred yards away, standeth, or rather lieth, for it is on dead flat ground, the famous castle of Malepartus, which beheld the base murder of Lampe the hare, and many a seely soul beside.  I know it well; a patch of sand-heaps, mingled with great holes, amid the twining fir-roots; ancient home of the last of the wild beasts.  And thither, unto Malepartus safe and strong, trots Reinecke, where he hopes to be snug among the labyrinthine windings, and innumerable starting-holes, as the old apologue has it, of his ballium, covert-way, and donjon keep.  Full blown in self-satisfaction he trots, lifting his toes delicately, and carrying his brush aloft, as full of cunning and conceit as that world-famous ancestor of his, whose deeds of unchivalry were the delight, if not the model, of knight and kaiser, lady and burgher, in the Middle Age.

Suddenly he halts at the great gate of Malepartus; examines it with his nose; goes on to a postern; examines that also, and then another, and another; while I perceive afar, projecting from every cave’s mouth, the red and green end of a new fir-faggot.  Ah, Reinecke! fallen is thy conceit, and fallen thy tail therewith.  Thou hast worse foes to deal with than Bruin the bear, or Isegrim the wolf, or any foolish brute whom thy great ancestor outwitted.  Man the many-counselled has been beforehand with thee; and the earths are stopped.

One moment he sits down to meditate, and scratches those trusty counsellors, his ears, as if he would tear them off, ‘revolving swift thoughts in a crafty mind.’

He has settled it now.  He is up and off—and at what a pace!  Out of the way, Fauns and Hamadryads, if any be left in the forest.  What a pace!  And with what a grace beside!

Oh Reinecke, beautiful thou art, of a surety, in spite of thy great naughtiness.  Art thou some fallen spirit, doomed to be hunted for thy sins in this life, and in some future life rewarded for thy swiftness, and grace, and cunning, by being made a very messenger of the immortals?  Who knows?  Not I.

I am rising fast to Pistol’s vein.  Shall I ejaculate?  Shall I notify?  Shall I waken the echoes?  Shall I break the grand silence by that scream which the vulgar view-halloo call?

It is needless; for louder and louder every moment swells up a sound which makes my heart leap into my mouth, and my mare into the air.

Music?  Well-beloved soul of Hullah, would that thou wert here this day, and not in St. Martin’s Hall, to hear that chorus, as it pours round the fir-stems, rings against the roof above, shatters up into a hundred echoes, till the air is live with sound!  You love madrigals, and whatever Weekes, or Wilbye, or Orlando Gibbons sang of old.  So do I.  Theirs is music fit for men: worthy of the age of heroes, of Drake and Raleigh, Spenser and Shakspeare: but oh that you could hear this madrigal!  If you must have ‘four parts,’ then there they are.  Deeped-mouthed bass, rolling along the ground; rich joyful tenor; wild wistful alto; and leaping up here and there above the throng of sounds, delicate treble shrieks and trills of trembling joy.  I know not whether you can fit it into your laws of music, any more than you can the song of that Ariel sprite who dwells in the Eolian harp, or the roar of the waves on the rock, or

‘Myriads of rivulets hurrying through the lawn,And murmur of innumerable bees.’

But music it is.  A madrigal?  Rather a whole opera of Der Freischutz—dæmoniac element and all—to judge by those red lips, fierce eyes, wild, hungry voices; and such as should make Reinecke, had he strong æsthetic sympathies, well content to be hunted from his cradle to his grave, that such sweet sounds might by him enrich the air.  Heroes of old were glad to die, if but some ‘vates sacer’ would sing their fame in worthy strains: and shalt not thou too be glad, Reinecke?  Content thyself with thy fate.  Music soothes care; let it soothe thine, as thou runnest for thy life; thou shalt have enough of it in the next hour.  For as the Etruscans (says Athenæus) were so luxurious that they used to flog their slaves to the sound of the flute, so shall luxurious Chanter and Challenger, Sweet-lips and Melody, eat thee to the sound of rich organ-pipes, that so thou mayest,

‘Like that old fabled swan, in music die.’

And now appear, dim at first and distant, but brightening and nearing fast, many a right good fellow and many a right good horse.  I know three out of four of them, their private histories, the private histories of their horses: and could tell you many a good story of them: but shall not, being an English gentleman, and not an American littérateur.  They may not all be very clever, or very learned, or very anything except gallant men; but they are all good enough company for me, or anyone; and each has his own specialité, for which I like him.  That huntsman I have known for fifteen years, and sat many an hour beside his father’s death-bed.  I am godfather to that whip’s child.  I have seen the servants of the hunt, as I have the hounds, grow up round me for two generations, and I feel for them as old friends; and like to look into their brave, honest, weather-beaten faces.  That red coat there, I knew him when he was a schoolboy; and now he is a captain in the Guards, and won his Victoria Cross at Inkermann: that bright green coat is the best farmer, as well as the hardest rider, for many a mile round; one who plays, as he works, with all his might, and might have been a beau sabreur and colonel of dragoons.  So might that black coat, who now brews good beer, and stands up for the poor at the Board of Guardians, and rides, like the green coat, as well as he works.  That other black coat is a county banker; but he knows more of the fox than the fox knows of himself, and where the hounds are, there will he be this day.  That red coat has hunted kangaroo in Australia: that one, as clever and good as he is brave and simple, has stood by Napier’s side in many an Indian fight: that one won his Victoria at Delhi, and was cut up at Lucknow, with more than twenty wounds: that one has—but what matter to you who each man is?  Enough that each can tell one a good story, welcome one cheerfully, and give one out here, in the wild forest, the wholesome feeling of being at home among friends.

There is music, again, if you will listen, in the soft tread of these hundred horse-hoofs upon the spongy vegetable soil.  They are trotting now in ‘common time.’  You may hear the whole Croats’ March (the finest trotting march in the world) played by those iron heels; the time, as it does in the Croats’ March, breaking now and then, plunging, jingling, struggling through heavy ground, bursting for a moment into a jubilant canter as it reaches a sound spot.

The hounds feather a moment round Malepartus, puzzled by the windings of Reinecke’s footsteps.  You can hear the flap and snort of the dogs’ nostrils as they canter round; and one likes it.  It is exciting: but why—who can tell?

What beautiful creatures they are, too!  Next to a Greek statue (I mean a real old Greek one; for I am a thoroughly anti-preraphaelite benighted pagan heathen in taste, and intend some day to get up a Cinque-Cento Club, for the total abolition of Gothic art)—next to a Greek statue, I say, I know few such combinations of grace and strength as in a fine foxhound.  It is the beauty of the Theseus—light and yet massive; and light not in spite of its masses, but on account of the perfect disposition of them.  I do not care for grace in man, woman, or animal, which is obtained (as in the old German painters) at the expense of honest flesh and blood.  It may be all very pure, and unearthly, and saintly, and what not; but it is not healthy; and, therefore, it is not really High Art, let it call itself such as much as it likes.  The highest art must be that in which the outward is the most perfect symbol of the muward; and, therefore, a healthy soul can be only exprest by a healthy body; and starved limbs and a hydrocephalous forehead must be either taken as incorrect symbols of spiritual excellence, or as—what they were really meant for—symbols of certain spiritual diseases which were in the Middle Age considered as ecclesiastical graces and virtues.  Wherefore I like pagan and naturalist art; consider Titian and Correggio as unappreciated geniuses, whose excellences the world will in some saner mood rediscover; hold, in direct opposition to Rio, that Rafaelle improved steadily all his life through, and that his noblest works are not his somewhat simpering Madonnas and somewhat impish Bambinos (very lovely though they are), but his great, coarse, naturalist, Protestant cartoons, which (with Andrea Mantegna’s Heathen Triumph) Cromwell saved for the British nation.  Probably no one will agree with all this for the next quarter of a century: but after that I have hopes.  The world will grow tired of pretending to admire Manichæan pictures in an age of natural science; and Art will let the dead bury their dead, and beginning again where Michael Angelo and Rafaelle left off work forward into a nobler, truer, freer, and more divine school than the world has yet seen—at least, so I hope.

And all this has grown out of those foxhounds.  Why not?  Theirs is the sort of form which expresses to me what I want Art to express—Nature not limited, but developed, by high civilization.  The old savage ideal of beauty was the lion, type of mere massive force.  That was succeeded by an over-civilized ideal, say the fawn, type of delicate grace.  By cunning breeding and choosing, through long centuries, man has combined both, and has created the foxhound, lion and fawn in one; just as he might create noble human beings; did he take half as much trouble about politics (in the true old sense of the word) as he does about fowls.  Look at that old hound, who stands doubtful, looking up at his master for advice.  Look at the severity, delicacy, lightness of every curve.  His head is finer than a deer’s; his hind legs tense as steel springs; his fore-legs straight as arrows: and yet see the depth of chest, the sweep of loin, the breadth of paw, the mass of arm and thigh; and if you have an eye for form, look at the absolute majesty of his attitude at this moment.  Majesty is the only word for it.  If he were six feet high, instead of twenty-three inches, with what animal on earth could you compare him?  Is it not a joy to see such a thing alive?  It is to me, at least.  I should like to have one in my study all day long, as I would have a statue or a picture; and when Mr. Morrell gave (as they say) two hundred guineas for Hercules alone, I believe the dog was well worth the money, only to look at.  But I am a minute philosopher.