IT was in the year 1888 (“O noctes coenasque deum!”—a tag) that, upon one of the southern hills of England, I came quite unexpectedly across a little old man who sat upon a bench that was there and looked out to sea. Now you will ask me why a bench was there, since benches are not commonly found upon the high slopes of our southern hills, of which the poet has well said, the writer has well written, and the singer has well sung:—
The Southern Hills and the South Sea
They blow such gladness into me
That when I get to Burton Sands
And smell the smell of the home lands,
My heart is all renewed, and fills
With the Southern Sea and the South Hills.
True, benches are not common there. I know of but one, all the way from the meeting place of England, which is upon Salisbury Plain, to that detestable suburb of Eastbourne by Beachy Head. Nay, even that one of which I speak has disappeared. For an honest man being weary of labour and yet desiring firewood one day took it away, and the stumps only now remain at the edge of a wood, a little to the south of No Man’s Land.
[23]Well, at any rate, upon this bench there sat in the year 1888 a little old man, and he was looking out to sea; for from this place the English Channel spreads out in a vast band 600 ft. below one, and the shore perhaps five miles away; it looks broader than any sea in the world, broader than the Mediterranean from the hills of Alba Longa, and broader than the Irish Sea from the summit of the Welsh Mountains: though why this is so I cannot tell. The little old man treated my coming as though it was an expected thing, and before I had spoken to him long assured me that this view gave him complete content.
“I could sit here,” he said, “and look at the Channel and consider the nature of this land for ever and for ever.” Now though words like this meant nothing in so early a year as the year 1888, yet I was willing to pursue them because there was, in the eyes of the little old man, a look of such wisdom, kindness, and cunning as seemed to me a marriage between those things native to the earth and those things which are divine. I mean, that he seemed to me to have all that the good animals have, which wander about in the brushwood and are happy all their lives, and also all that we have, of whom it has been well said that of every thing which runs or creeps upon earth, man is the fullest of sorrow. For this little old man seemed to have (at least such was my fantastic thought in that early year) a complete acquiescence in the soil and the air that had bred him, and[24] yet something common to mankind and a full foreknowledge of death.
His face was of the sort which you will only see in England, being quizzical and vivacious, a little pinched together, and the hair on his head was a close mass of grey curls. His eyes were as bright as are harbour lights when they are first lit towards the closing of our winter evenings: they shone upon the daylight. His mouth was firm, but even in repose it permanently, though very slightly, smiled.
I asked him why he took such pleasure in the view. He said it was because everything he saw was a part of his own country, and that just as some holy men said that to be united with God, our Author, was the end and summit of man’s effort, so to him who was not very holy, to mix, and have communion, with his own sky and earth was the one banquet that he knew: he also told me (which cheered me greatly) that alone of all the appetites this large affection for one’s own land does not grow less with age, but rather increases and occupies the soul. He then made me a discourse as old men will, which ran somewhat thus:—
“Each thing differs from all others, and the more you know, the more you desire or worship one thing, the more does that stand separate: and this is a mystery, for in spite of so much individuality all things are one.... How greatly out of all the world stands out this object of my adoration and of my content! you will not find the like of it in all[25] the world! It is England, and in the love of it I forget all enmities and all despairs.”
He then bade me look at a number of little things around, and see how particular they were: the way in which the homes of Englishmen hid themselves, and how, although a great town lay somewhat to our right not half a march away, there was all about us silence, self-possession, and repose. He bade me also note the wind-blown thorns, and the yew-trees, bent over from centuries of the south-west wind, and the short, sweet grass of the Downs, unfilled and unenclosed, and the long waves of woods which rich men had stolen and owned, and which yet in a way were property for us all.
“There is more than one,” said I in anger, “who so little understands his land that he will fence the woods about and prevent the people from coming and going: making a show of them, like some dirty town-bred fellow who thinks that the Downs and the woods are his villa-garden, bought with gold.”
The little old man wagged his crooked forefinger in front of his face and looked exceedingly knowing with his bright eyes, and said: “Time will tame all that! Not they can digest the county, but the county them. Their palings shall be burnt upon cottage hearths, and their sons shall go back to be lackeys as their fathers were. But this landscape shall always remain.”
Then he bade me note the tides and the many harbours; and how there was an inner and an outer[26] tide, and the great change between neaps and springs, and how there were no great rivers, but every harbour stood right upon the sea, and how for the knowledge of each of these harbours even the life of a man was too short. There was no other country, he said, which was thus held and embraced by the mastery of the Atlantic tide. For the patient Dutch have their towns inland upon broad rivers and ships sail up to quays between houses or between green fields; and the Spaniards and the French (he said) are, for half their nature and tradition, taught by a tideless sea, but we all around have the tide everywhere, and with the tide there comes to character salt and variety, adventure, peril, and change.
“But this,” I said, “is truer of the Irish.”
He answered: “Yes, but I am talking of my own soil.”
Then when he had been silent for a little while he began talking of the roads, which fitted into the folds of the hills, and of the low long window panes of men’s homes, of the deep thatch which covered them, and of that savour of fullness and inheritance which lay fruitfully over all the land. It gave him the pleasure to talk of these things which it gives men who know particular wines to talk of those wines, or men who have enjoyed some great risk together to talk together of their dangers overcome.
It gave him the same pleasure to talk of England and of his corner of England that it gives some venerable people sometimes to talk of those whom[27] they have loved in youth, or that it gives the true poets to mouth the lines of their immortal peers. It was a satisfaction to hear him say the things he said, because one knew that as he said them his soul was filled.
He spoke also of horses and of the birds native to our Downs, but not of pheasants, which he hated and would not speak to me about at all. He spoke of dogs, and told me how the dogs of one countryside were the fruits of it, just as its climate and its contours were; notably the spaniel, which was designed or bred by the mighty power of Amberley Wildbrook, which breeds all watery things. He showed me how the plover went with the waste flats of Arun and of Adur and of Ouse, and he showed me why the sheep were white and why they bunched together in a herd. “Because,” he said, “the chalk pits and the clouds behind the Down are wide patches of white; so must the sheep be also.” For a little he would have told me that the very names of places, nay, the religion itself, were grown right out of the sacred earth which was our Mother.
These truths and many more I should have learned from him, these extravagences and some few others I should have whimsically heard, had I not (since I was young) attempted argument and said to him: “But all these things change, and what we love so much is, after all, only what we have known in our[28] short time, and it is our souls within that lend divinity to any place, for, save within the soul, all is subject to time.”
He shook his head determinedly and like one who knows. He did assure me that in a subtle mastering manner the land that bore us made us ourselves, and was the major and the dominant power which moulded, as with firm hands, the clay of our being and which designed and gave us, and continued in us, all the form in which we are.
“You cannot tell this,” I said, “and neither can I; it is all guesswork to the brevity of man.”
“You are wrong,” he answered quietly. “I have watched these things for quite 3000 years.” And before I had time to gasp at that word he had disappeared.