Prose Idylls, New and Old

I cap them on to the spot at which Reinecke disappeared.  Old Virginal’s stern flourishes; instantly her pace quickens.  One whimper, and she is away full-mouthed through the wood, and the pack after her: but not I.

I am not going with them.  My hunting days are over.  Let it suffice that I have, in the days of my vanity, ‘drank delight of battle with my peers, far on the ringing plains’ of many a county, grass and forest, down and vale.  No, my gallant friends.  You know that I could ride, if I chose; and I am vain enough to be glad that you know it.  But useless are your coaxings, solicitations, wavings of honest right hands.  ‘Life,’ as my friend Tom Brown says, ‘is not all beer and skittles;’ it is past two now, and I have four old women to read to at three, and an old man to bury at four; and I think, on the whole, that you will respect me the more for going home and doing my duty.  That I should like to see this fox fairly killed, or even fairly lost, I deny not.  That I should like it as much as I can like any earthly and outward thing, I deny not.  But sugar to one’s bread and butter is not good; and if my winter-garden represent the bread and butter, then will fox-hunting stand to it in the relation of superfluous and unwholesome sugar: so farewell; and long may your noble sport prosper—‘the image of war with only half its danger,’ to train you and your sons after, into gallant soldiers—full of

‘The reason firm, the temperate will,Endurance, foresight, strength and skill.’

So homeward I go through a labyrinth of fir-stems and, what is worse, fir-stumps, which need both my eyes and my horse’s at every moment; and woe to the ‘anchorite,’ as old Bunbury names him, who carries his nose in the air, and his fore feet well under him.  Woe to the self-willed or hard-hided horse who cannot take the slightest hint of the heel, and wince hind legs or fore out of the way of those jagged points which lie in wait for him.  Woe, in fact, to all who are clumsy or cowardly, or in anywise not ‘masters of the situation.’

Pleasant riding it is, though, if you dare look anywhere but over your horse’s nose, under the dark roof between the red fir-pillars, in that rich subdued light.  Now I plunge into a gloomy dell, wherein is no tinkling rivulet, ever pure; but instead a bog, hewn out into a chess-board of squares, parted by deep narrow ditches some twenty feet apart.  Blundering among the stems I go, fetlock-deep in peat, and jumping at every third stride one of the said uncanny gripes, half hidden in long hassock grass.  Oh Aira cæspitosa, most stately and most variable of British grasses, why will you always grow where you are not wanted?  Through you the mare all but left her hind legs in that last gripe.  Through you a red-coat ahead of me, avoiding one of your hassocks, jumped with his horse’s nose full butt against a fir-stem, and stopped,

‘As one that is struck deadBy lightning, ere he falls,’

as we shall soon, in spite of the mare’s cleverness.  Would we were out of this!

Out of it we shall be soon.  I see daylight ahead at last, bright between the dark stems.  Up a steep slope, and over a bank which is not very big, but being composed of loose gravel and peat mould, gives down with me, nearly sending me head over heels in the heather, and leaving me a sheer gap to scramble through, and out on the open moor.

Grand old moor! stretching your brown flats right away toward Windsor for many a mile.—Far to our right is the new Wellington College, looking stately enough here all alone in the wilderness, in spite of its two ugly towers and pinched waist.  Close over me is the long fir-fringed ride of Easthampstead, ending suddenly in Cæsar’s camp; and hounds and huntsmen are already far ahead, and racing up the Roman road, which the clods of these parts, unable to give a better account of it, call the Devil’s Highway.

Racing indeed; for as Reinecke gallops up the narrow heather-fringed pathway, he brushes off his scent upon the twigs at every stride; and the hounds race after him, showing no head indeed, and keeping, for convenience, in one long line upon the track: but going heads up, sterns down, at a pace which no horse can follow.—I only hope they may not overrun the scent.

They have overrun it; halt, and put their heads down a moment.  But with one swift cast in fall gallop they have hit it off again, fifty yards away in the heather, long ere the horsemen are up to them; for those hounds can hunt a fox because they are not hunted themselves, and so have learnt to trust themselves, and act for themselves; as boys should learn at school, even at the risk of a mistake or two.  Now they are showing head indeed, down a half-cleared valley, and over a few ineffectual turnips withering in the peat, a patch of growing civilization in the heart of the wilderness; and then over the brook, while I turn slowly away, through a green wilderness of self-sown firs.

There they stand in thousands, the sturdy Scots, colonizing the desert in spite of frost, and gales, and barrenness; and clustering together, too, as Scotsmen always do abroad, little and big, every one under his neighbour’s lee, according to the good old proverb of their native land, ‘Caw me, and I’ll caw thee.’

I respect them, those Scotch firs.  I delight in their forms, from James the First’s gnarled giants up in Bramshill Park—the only place in England where a painter can learn what Scotch firs are—down to the little green pyramids which stand up out of the heather, triumphant over tyranny, and the strange woes of an untoward youth.  Seven years on an average have most of them spent in ineffectual efforts to become a foot high.  Nibbled off by hares, trodden down by cattle, cut down by turf-parers, seeing hundreds of their brethren cut up and carried off in the turf-fuel, they are as gnarled and stubbed near the ground as an old thorn-bush in a pasture.  But they have conquered at last, and are growing away, eighteen inches a year, with fair green brushes silvertipt, reclothing the wilderness with a vegetation which it has not seen for—how many thousand years?

No man can tell.  For when last the Scotch fir was indigenous to England, and, mixed with the larch, stretched in one vast forest from Norfolk into Wales, England was not as it is now.  Snowdon was, it may be, fifteen thousand feet in height, and from the edges of its glaciers the marmot and the musk ox, the elk and the bear, wandered down into the Lowlands, and the hyena and the lion dwelt in those caves where fox and badger only now abide.  And how did the Scotch fir die out?  Did the whole land sink slowly from its sub-Alpine elevation into a warmer climate below?  Or was it never raised at all?  Did some change of the Atlantic sea-floor turn for the first time the warm Gulf Stream to these shores; and with its soft sea-breezes melt away the ‘Age of Ice,’ till glaciers and pines, marmots and musk oxen, perspired to death, and vanished for an æon?  Who knows?  Not I.  But of the fact there can be no doubt.  Whether, as we hold traditionally here, the Scotch fir was re-introduced by James the First when he built Bramshill for Raleigh’s hapless pet, Henry the Prince, or whatever may have been the date of their re-introduction, here they are, and no one can turn them out.  In countless thousands the winged seeds float down the south-west gales from the older trees; and every seed which falls takes root in ground which, however unable to bear broad-leaved trees, is ready by long rest for the seeds of the needle-leaved ones.  Thousands perish yearly; but the eastward march of the whole, up hill and down dale, is sure and steady as that of Lynceus’ Goths in Goethe’s Helena:—

‘Ein lang und breites Volkegewicht,Der erate wusste vom letzen nicht.Der erste fiel, der zweite stand,Des dritten Lanze war zur Hand,Ein jeder hundertfach gestärkt;Erschlagene Tausend unbemerkt—

—till, as you stand upon some eminence, you see, stretching to the eastward of each tract of older trees, a long cloud of younger ones, like a green comet’s tail—I wish their substance was as yielding this day.  Truly beautiful—grand indeed to me it is—to see young live Nature thus carrying on a great savage process in the heart of this old and seemingly all-artificial English land; and reproducing here, as surely as in the Australian bush, a native forest, careless of mankind.  Still, I wish it were easier to ride through.  Stiff are those Scotchmen, and close and stout they stand by each other, and claw at you as you twist through them, the biggest aiming at your head, or even worse, at your knees; while the middle-sized slip their brushes between your thigh and the saddle, and the little babies tickle your horse’s stomach, or twine about his fore-feet.  Whish—whish; we are enveloped in what seems an atmosphere of scrubbing-brushes.  Fain would I shut my eyes: but dare not, or I shall ride against a tree.  Whish—whish; alas for the horse which cannot wind and turn like a hare!  Plunge—stagger.  What is this?  A broad line of ruts; perhaps some Celtic track-way, two thousand years old, now matted over with firs; dangerous enough out on the open moor, when only masked by a line of higher and darker heath: but doubly dangerous now when masked by dark undergrowth.  You must find your own way here, mare.  I will positively have nothing to do with it.  I disclaim all responsibility.  There are the reins on your neck; do what you will, only do something—and if you can, get forward, and not back.

There is daylight at last, and fresh air.  I trot contemptuously through the advanced skirmishers of the Scotch invading army; and watch my friends some mile and a half off, who have threaded a practicable track-way through a long dreary yellow bog, too wet for firs to root in, and are away in ‘a streamer.’  Now a streamer is produced in this wise.  There is but one possible gap in a bank, one possible ford in a brook; one possible path in a cover; and as each man has to wait till the man before him gets through, and them gallops on, each man loses twenty yards or more on the man before him: wherefore, by all laws of known arithmetic, if ten men tail through a gap, then will the last of the ten find himself two hundred yards behind the foremost, which process several times repeated, produces the phenomenon called a streamer, viz. twenty men galloping absurdly as hard as they can, in a line half a mile long, and in humours which are celestial in the few foremost, contented in the central, and gradually becoming darker in the hindmost; till in the last man they assume a hue altogether Tartarean.  Farewell, brave gentlemen!  I watch, half sadly, half self-contented, the red coats scattered like sparks of fire over hill and dale, and turn slowly homeward, to visit my old women.

I pass through a gateway, out upon a village green, planted with rows of oaks, surrounded by trim sunny cottages, a pleasant oasis in the middle of the wilderness.  Across the village cricket-ground—we are great cricketers in these parts, and long may the good old game live among us; and then up another hollow lane, which leads between damp shaughs and copses toward the further moor.

Curious things to a minute philosopher are these same hollow lanes.  They set him on archæological questions, more than he can solve; and I meditate as I go, how many centuries it took to saw through the warm sandbanks this dyke ten feet deep, up which he trots, with the oak boughs meeting over his head.  Was it ever worth men’s while to dig out the soil?  Surely not.  The old method must have been, to remove the softer upper spit, till they got to tolerably hard ground; and then, Macadam’s metal being as yet unknown, the rains and the wheels of generations sawed it gradually deeper and deeper, till this road-ditch was formed.  But it must have taken centuries to do it.  Many of these hollow lanes, especially those on flat ground, must be as old or older than the Conquest.  In Devonshire I am sure that they are.  But there many of them, one suspects, were made not of malice, but of cowardice prepense.  Your indigenous Celt was, one fears, a sneaking animal, and liked to keep when he could under cover of banks and hill-sides; while your bold Roman made his raised roads straight over hill and dale, as ‘ridge-ways’ from which, as from an eagle’s eyrie, he could survey the conquered lowlands far and wide.  It marks strongly the difference between the two races, that difference between the Roman paved road with its established common way for all passengers, its regular stations and milestones, and the Celtic track-way winding irresolutely along in innumerable ruts, parting to meet again, as if each savage (for they were little better) had taken his own fresh path when he found the next line of ruts too heavy for his cattle.  Around the spurs of Dartmoor I have seen many ancient roads, some of them long disused, which could have been hollowed out for no other purpose but that of concealment.

So I go slowly up the hill, till the valley lies beneath me like a long green garden between its two banks of brown moor; and on through a cheerful little green, with red brick cottages scattered all round, each with its large neat garden, and beehives, and pigs and geese, and turf-stack, and clipt yews and hollies before the door, and rosy dark-eyed children, and all the simple healthy comforts of a wild ‘heth-cropper’s’ home.  When he can, the good man of the house works at farm labour, or cuts his own turf; and when work is scarce, he cuts copses and makes heath-brooms, and does a little poaching.  True, he seldom goes to church, save to be christened, married, or buried: but he equally seldom gets drunk.  For church and public stand together two miles off; so that social wants sometimes bring their own compensations with them, and there are two sides to every question.

Hark!  A faint, dreary hollo off the moor above.  And then another, and another.  My friends may trust it; for the clod of these parts delights in the chase like any bare-legged Paddy, and casts away flail and fork wildly, to run, shout, assist, and interfere in all possible ways, out of pure love.  The descendant of many generations of broom-squires and deer-stealers, the instinct of sport is strong within him still, though no more of the king’s deer are to be shot in the winter turnip-fields, or worse, caught by an apple-baited hook hung from an orchard bough.  He now limits his aspirations to hares and pheasants, and too probably once in his life, ‘hits the keeper into the river,’ and reconsiders himself for a while after over a crank in Winchester gaol.  Well, he has his faults; and I have mine.  But he is a thorough good fellow nevertheless; quite as good as I: civil, contented, industrious, and often very handsome; and a far shrewder fellow too—owing to his dash of wild forest blood, from gipsy, highwayman; and what not—than his bullet-headed and flaxen-polled cousin, the pure South-Saxon of the Chalk-downs.  Dark-haired he is, ruddy, and tall of bone; swaggering in his youth; but when he grows old, a thorough gentleman, reserved, stately, and courteous as a prince.  Sixteen years have I lived with him hail fellow well met, and never yet had a rude word or action from him.

With him I have cast in my lot, to live and die, and be buried by his side; and to him I go home contented, to look after his petty interests, cares, sorrows—Petty, truly—seeing that they include the whole primal mysteries of life—Food, raiment, and work to earn them withal; love and marriage, birth and death, right doing and wrong doing, ‘Schicksal und eigene Schuld;’ and all those commonplaces of humanity which in the eyes of a minute philosopher are most divine, because they are most commonplace—catholic as the sunshine and the rain which come down from the Heavenly Father, alike upon the evil and the good.  As for doing fine things, my friend, with you, I have learnt to believe that I am not set to do fine things, simply because I am not able to do them; and as for seeing fine things, with you, I have learnt to see the sight—as well as to try to do the duty—which lies nearest me; and to comfort myself with the fancy that if I make good use of my eyes and brain in this life, I shall see—if it be of any use to me—all the fine things, or perhaps finer still, in the life to come.  But if not—what matter?  In any life, in any state, however simple or humble, there will be always sufficient to occupy a Minute Philosopher; and if a man be busy, and busy about his duty, what more does he require, for time or for eternity?

V

FROM OCEAN TO SEA

The point from which to start, in order best to appreciate the change from ocean to sea, is perhaps Biarritz.  The point at which to stop is Cette.  And the change is important.  Between the two points races are changed, climates are changed, scenery is changed, the very plants under your feet are changed, from a Western to an Eastern type.  You pass from the wild Atlantic into the heart of the Roman Empire—from the influences which formed the discoverers of the New World, to those which formed the civilizers of the Old.  Gascony, not only in its scenery, but in its very legends, reminds you of Devon and Cornwall; Languedoc of Greece and Palestine.

In the sea, as was to be expected, the change is even more complete.  From Biarritz to Cette, you pass from poor Edward Forbes’s Atlantic to his Mediterranean centre of creation.  In plain English and fact, whether you agree with his theory or not, you pass from the region of respectable whales, herrings, and salmon, to that of tunnies, sciænas, dorados, and all the gorgons, hydras, and chimæras dire, which are said to grace the fish-markets of Barcelona or Marseilles.

But to this assertion, as to most concerning nature, there are exceptions.  Mediterranean fishes slip out of the Straits of Gibraltar, and up the coast of Portugal, and, once in the Bay of Biscay, find the feeding good and the wind against them, and stay there.

So it befalls, that at worthy M. Gardère’s hotel at Biarritz (he has seen service in England, and knows our English ways), you may have at dinner, day after day, salmon, louvine, shad, sardine, dorado, tunny.  The first is unknown to the Mediterranean; for Fluellen mistook when he said that there were salmons in Macedon, as well as Monmouth; the louvine is none other than the nasty bass, or sea-perch of the Atlantic; the shad (extinct in these islands, save in the Severn) is a gigantic herring which comes up rivers to spawn; a fish common (with slight differences) to both sides of the North Atlantic; while the sardine, the dorado, and the tunny (whether he be the true tunny or the Alalonga) are Mediterranean fish.

The whale fishery of these shores is long extinct.  The Biscayan whale was supposed to be extinct likewise.  But like the ibex, and some other animals which man has ceased to hunt, because he fancies that he has killed them all, they seem inclined to reappear.  For in 1854 one was washed ashore near St. Jean de Luz, at news whereof Eschricht, the great Danish naturalist, travelled night and day from Copenhagen, and secured the skeleton of the new-old monster.

But during the latter part of the Middle Ages, and on—if I recollect aright—into the seventeenth century, Bayonne, Biarritz, Guettary, and St. Jean de Luz, sent forth their hardy whale-fishers, who slew all the whales of the Biscayan seas, and then crossed the Atlantic, to attack those of the frozen North.

British and American enterprise drove them from the West coast of the Atlantic; and now their descendants are content to stay at home and take the sardine-shoals, and send them in to Bayonne on their daughters’ heads.

Pretty enough it was, at least in outward seeming, to meet a party of those fisher-girls, bare-legged, high-kilted, lithe as deer, trotting, at a long loping pace, up the high road toward Bayonne, each with her basket on her head, as she laughed and sang, and tossed her black hair, and flashed her brown eyes, full of life and the enjoyment of life.  Pretty enough.  And yet who will blame the rail, which now sends her quickly into Bayonne—or even her fish without her; and relieves the fair young maiden from being degraded into a beast of burden?

Handsome folk are these brown Basques.  A mysterious people, who dwell alone, and are not counted among the nations; speaking an unique language, and keeping up unique customs, for which the curious must consult M. Michel’s interesting book.  There may be a cross of English blood among them, too, about Biarritz and Bayonne; English features there are, plainly to be seen.  And whether or not, one accepts the story of the country, that Anglets, near by, is an old English colony left by our Black Prince, it is certain that Bayonne Cathedral was built in part by English architects, and carries the royal arms of England; and every school history will tell us how this corner of France was long in our hands, and was indeed English long before it was properly French.  Moorish blood there may be, too, here and there, left behind by those who built the little ‘atalaya’ or fire-beacon, over the old harbour, to correspond, by its smoke column, with a long line of similar beacons down the Spanish coast.  The Basques resemble in look the Southern Welsh—quick-eyed, neat in feature, neat in dress, often, both men and women, beautiful.  The men wear a flat Scotch cap of some bright colour, and call it ‘berretta.’  The women tie a gaudy handkerchief round their heads, and compel one corner to stand forward from behind the ear in a triangle, in proportion to the size and stiffness whereof the lady seems to think herself well dressed.  But the pretty Basque handkerchief will soon give place to the Parisian bonnet.  For every cove among the rocks is now filled with smart bathing-houses, from which, in summer, the gay folk of Paris issue in ‘costume de bain,’ to float about all day on calabashes—having literally no room for the soles of their feet on land.  Then are opened casinos, theatre, shops, which lie closed all the winter.  Then do the Basque house-owners flee into the moors, and camp out (it is said) on the hills all night, letting their rooms for ten francs a night as mere bed-chambers—for all eating and living is performed in public; while the dove-coloured oxen, with brown holland pinafores over their backs, who dawdle in pairs up and down the long street with their light carts, have to make way for wondrous equipages from the Bois de Boulogne.

Not then, for the wise man, is Biarritz a place to see and to love: but in the winter, when a little knot of quiet pleasant English hold the place against all comers, and wander, undisturbed by fashion, about the quaint little rocks and caves and natural bridges—and watch tumbling into the sea, before the Biscayan surges, the trim walks and summer-houses, which were erected by the municipality in honour of the Empress and her suite.  Yearly they tumble in, and yearly are renewed, as the soft greensand strata are graven away, and what must have been once a long promontory becomes a group of fantastic pierced rocks, exactly like those which are immortalized upon the willow-pattern plates.

Owing to this rapid destruction, the rocks of Biarritz are very barren in sea-beasts and sea-weeds.  But there is one remarkable exception, where the pools worn in a hard limestone are filled with what seem at first sight beds of china-asters, of all loveliest colours—primrose, sea-green, dove, purple, crimson, pink, ash-grey.  They are all prickly sea-eggs (presumably the Echinus lividus, which is found in similar places in the west of Ireland), each buried for life in a cup-shaped hole which he has excavated in the rock, and shut in by an overhanging lip of living lime—seemingly a Nullipore coralline.  What they do there, what they think of, or what food is brought into their curious grinding-mills by the Atlantic surges which thunder over them twice a day, who can tell?  However they form, without doubt, the most beautiful object which I have ever seen in pool or cove.

But the glory of Biarritz, after all, is the moors above, and the view to be seen therefrom.  Under blazing blue skies, tempered by soft dappled cloud, for ever sliding from the Atlantic and the Asturias mountains, in a climate soft as milk, and exhilarating withal as wine, one sees far and wide a panorama which, from its variety as well as its beauty, can never weary.

To the north, the long sand-line of the Biscayan shore—the bar of the Adour marked by a cloud of grey spray.  Then the dark pine-flats of the Landes, and the towers of Bayonne rising through rich woods.  To the eastward lies a high country, furred with woods, broken with glens; a country exactly like Devon, through the heart of which, hidden in such a gorge as that of Dart or Taw, runs the swift stream of the Nive, draining the western Pyrenees.  And beyond, to the south-east, in early spring, the Pyrenean snows gleam bright, white clouds above the clouds.  As one turns southward, the mountains break down into brown heather-hills, like Scottish grouse moors.  The two nearest, and seemingly highest, are the famous Rhune and Bayonette, where lie, to this day, amid the heath and crags, hundreds of unburied bones.  For those great hills, skilfully fortified by Soult before the passage of the Bidassoa, were stormed, yard by yard, by Wellington’s army in October 1813.  That mighty deed must be read in the pages of one who saw it with his own eyes, and fought there with his own noble body, and even nobler spirit.  It is not for me to tell of victories, of which Sir William Napier has already told.