Country Moods and Tenses

by Edith Olivier

  “My paper is done, talking about these dead and gone, whom you and I have only known in print; and yet as well so, as most we know in person. I really find my Society in such Books.’’

  That this is true is shown by a remark in a letter of 1876 addressed to Mrs. Kemble. He writes of Tennyson, one of his regular correspondents, and apparently one of his closest friends:

  “And now—Who should send in his card to me last week but the old poet himself. ‘Dear old Fitz’, ran the card in pencil, ‘We are passing thro’.’ I had not seen him for twenty years.’’

  So even his contemporaries seem to have existed for him most really on paper, and we are probably as close to “ old Fitz” as they were. He is to us what Madame de Sevigné, Dickens and Walter Scott were to him. He belongs to what de Vogue calls “La Société idéale que tout pays se compose arec sa literature classique”.

  We can, then, think of Fitzgerald as actually living, as he said, “a lonely life’’; and although I am told that he had a wife for a short time, I have never been able to find the letter in which he mentions her. I shall therefore continue to look upon him as the old bachelor that he always seemed to be.

  This timeless existence finds its perfect setting in Suffolk. Even when Fitzgerald writes (as he rarely does) of actual living people, they assume a dreamlike, remote character, passing like figures seen in a glass. He himself remarks on this when he is staying in his father’s house at Wherstead.

  “All our family, except my mother, are collected here: all my brothers and sisters, with their wives, husbands and children sitting at different occupations, or wandering about the grounds and gardens, discoursing each their separate concerns, but all united into one whole. When I see them passing to and fro, and hear their voices, it is like the scenes in a play.’’

  There was a time in his life when Fitzgerald was constantly acquiring, renting or buying fresh houses in the Woodbridge neighbourhood; but he seldom lived in these houses when once he possessed them. Instead, he handed them over to his nine nieces, while he himself roamed the sea in his yacht, or lived in lodgings at Aldeburgh or Lowestoft. So it is in the air round Woodbridge, rather than in any particular house that the pilgrim meets the spirit of old Fitz. Here he seems eternally to remain in the “green idleness” which so delighted him in his lifetime. “ Everything is fun in the country”, was a proverb which he quoted (or probably invented), and he says that he revelled in the “ dullness of country people”, which he infinitely preferred to “the impudence of Londoners”. He scoffed at the conducted lecture tours round the Mediterranean coasts that were only then beginning, and said that “ Suffolk turnips seem to me so classical compared to all that sort of thing”.

  When Fitzgerald writes of his Woodbridge world, his mind ranges far beyond the boundaries of his own estate. When he walked in the Seckhouse Almshouse garden “till 9 p.m. in a sharp frost”, he did not flatten his nose against the almsmen’s windows to watch their little doings inside: what he saw was “ Orion stalking over the south before me”. When he “ looked out at about ten o’clock at night before going to bed, it seemed perfectly still; frosty, and the stars shining bright. I heard a continuous moaning sound, which I knew to be, not that of an infant exposed, or female ravished, but of the sea more than ten miles off”. Dunwich is, perhaps, the place which speaks most of all of the man himself, and of the peculiar character of the country he loved and still haunts. Here, he says, “are the Village remains of a once large Town devoured by the sea: and, yet undevoured (except by Henry VIII), the grey walls of a Grey Friars’ Priory, beside which they used to walk, under such sunsets as illumine them still.… Robin Redbreast was piping in the Ivy along the Walls; and, under them, Blackberries ripening from stems which those old Grey Friars picked from”.

  Fitzgerald could humanise those wide empty spaces. He is never swallowed up by them, but comes into his own in this desolate, timeless world—a friendly spirit, who might be met any evening walking there on the wet sands, lovable, and very near at hand. And then, he would not be there at all.

  Fitzgerald made many a literary pilgrimage, and quite early in his life, he went “ to Salisbury to see the Cathedral, but more to walk to Bemerton, George Herbert’s village. It is about a mile and a half from Salisbury alongside a pleasant stream with old-fashioned water-mills beside: through fields very fertile. When I got to Bemerton, I scarcely knew what to do with myself. It is a very pretty Village with the Church and Parsonage much as Herbert must have left it.… The people in the cottages had heard of a pious man named Herbert, and had read his books—but they don’t know where he lies.… I thought I must have passed the spot in the road where he assisted the man with the fallen horse: and, to show the benefit of good examples, I was serviceable that very evening in the Town to some people coming in a cart: for the driver was drunk, and driving furiously home from the races, and I believe would have fallen out, but that some folks, of whom I was one, stopped the cart”.

  Since 1832, when this was written, the quiet meadows through which Herbert walked to hear evensong in the cathedral have been flanked by some particularly incongruous factory buildings, and by an engine-house attached to Salisbury station. Yet it is possible to turn one’s back upon these reminders of a century which preferred mechanics to meditation, and to find many a point from which one can see Herbert’s water meadows and his view of the cathedral exactly as they were in the seventeenth century. Perhaps the village people do not read his books so much as their great-grandfathers did, but they know his name; for did they not all take part, a few years back, in a pageant to commemorate the 300th anniversary of his death? Fitzgerald found no memorial at Bemerton to this village saint, and thought of asking permission to erect one himself; but since then, a fine parish church in the nineteenth century “Early English” style has been built in his memory, and in the tiny church which faces the parsonage there is now a good modern window which commemorates him. The medlar he planted grows on in the rectory garden, where the trout stream ripples towards Salisbury. The George Herbert pilgrim should not only visit Bemerton and Fugglestone to see the churches in which Herbert ministered: he should also stroll in the meadows to the south of the village, where the herons fly overhead, and the men call their cows home in the primitive language that George Herbert knew.

  Some years ago, an ardent American lady was travelling by train through Dorset. Her one fellow-passenger was an old gentleman of distinguished appearance and obviously of an autocratic disposition. The ardent lady gazed on the landscape which flashed past the firmly shut windows of the compartment. It hastened by, and she saw landmark after landmark pass out of sight. She could bear it no longer. She addressed her companion, regardless of his absorption in The Times.

  “Forgive me, sir”, she said. “This is the Hardy country, is it not?’’

  He dropped his newspaper.

  “The Hardy country?” he ejaculated, in the tone of a startled thunderclap. “No, indeed. It’s MY country. I have hunted it for the last thirty years.’’

  His voice tailed off into a cantankerous murmur:

  “Hardy, indeed! Who is the fellow?’’

  But it was the Hardy country, and there is no stretch of land in England which a writer has made so completely his own. He gave back to it the long-forgotten historic name which now trips off the tongues of library subscribers who never heard of the Heptarchy, and who probably imagine that Wessex is a “ portmanteau” word coined by Mr. Hardy to give the sound of some of the counties in which he set his books.

  It was an achievement, this re-creating of the old Kingdom of Wessex, “putting it back on the map”, as they say, and this not only for scholars (who presumably had heard of it before), but for the man-in-the-street. A literary pilgrimage to the Hardy country is memorable for more than one reason. Here Thomas Hardy was born, lived the greater part of his life, and here he died. He belonged to it. Then, all his writing is framed in it—his novels, his poems, and even his great European dram
a of “The Dynasts” keeps homing to the birthplace of its creator. And if Hardy had never lived, the county of Dorset would still possess a loveliness to steal the heart away. It is the perfect county to walk in, with its empty downlands, where the sea breaks in upon the landscape like a great “Amen” closing a vast chorus. It has its Roman roads, and its prehistoric ridgeways, following the contour of the hills, and leading the mind back to those primitive days when human settlements were determined by the lie of the land. There is a particularly lovely green road which runs from the Isle of Purbeck almost to Abbotsbury, with the sea a few miles distant during the whole of its length. That road is of the essence of Dorset.

  The part of Wessex which lies in Dorset is the district most connected with Hardy, but a map of the country covered by his books includes the whole of the old Kingdom, from Wantage to the Dorset coast, and from the Devon border to the New Forest. His whole being was impregnated with the world of Wessex—its bare downs, which curve like a horizon at sea; its village churches, with their unpretentious towers lifted towards the distant sky; its men and women who follow the old trades—farmers, millers, blacksmiths, soldiers and sailors. This country and these people are all within Hardy, and he in them. They are the substance of his bones and of his mind. They are the ink in which he dips his pen. There is for Hardy no such thing as “local colour”. Dorset has given its infinite tinge to his spirit.

  There is a stage direction in that scene in “The Dynasts” which depicts the lighting of the beacon on Egdon Heath at the time of Napoleon’s expected invasion:

  “Something in the feel of the darkness and in the personality of the spot imparts a sense of uninterrupted space around, the view by day extending from the cliffs of the Isle of Wight eastward, to Blackdon Hill by Deadman’s Bay westward, and south across the valley of the Froom to the ridge that screens the Channel.’’

  No dark night could blot out for Hardy the “personality” of any spot in his own county. He knew the “ feel” of it.

  One final passage will show that Hardy was the supreme guide to one of the most famous sites in Wessex. Here he gives the sense of Wessex by night in a very poignant setting. The chapter is one of the last ones in Tess of the d’Urberrilles, when, after the murder of Alex, Angel and Tess are escaping by night from the police.

  “All around was open loneliness and black solitude, over which a stiff breeze blew.

  “They had proceeded thus gropingly two or three miles further when on a sudden Clare became conscious of some vast erection close in his front, rising sheer from the grass. They had almost struck themselves against it.

  “‘What monstrous place is this’? said Angel.

  “‘It hums’, said she. ‘Hearken!’

  “He listened. The wind, playing upon the edifice, produced a booming tune, like the note of some gigantic one-stringed harp. No other sound came from it, and lifting his hand and advancing a step or two, Clare felt the vertical surface of the wall. It seemed to be of solid stone, without joint or moulding. Carrying his fingers onward he found that what he had come in contact with was a colossal rectangular pillar; by stretching out his left hand he could feel a similar one adjoining. At an indefinite height overhead something made the black sky blacker, which had the semblance of a vast architrave uniting the pillars horizontally. They carefully entered beneath and between; the surfaces echoed their soft rustle; but they seemed to be still out of doors. The place was roofless. Tess drew her breath fearfully, and Angel perplexed, said:

  “‘What can it be?’

  “Feeling sideways they encountered another tower-like pillar, square and uncompromising as the first; beyond it another and another. The place was all doors and pillars, some connected above by continuous architraves.

  “‘A very Temple of the Winds’, he said.… ‘It is Stonehenge’.’’

  THE FOURTH MOOD

  SUBJUNCTIVE

  1 Buying and Selling

  I MEAN TO CONSIDER THE SUBJUNCTIVE AS THE MOOD OF personal contacts, and, from very primitive days, barter seems to have been the first of these; while buying and selling have always been looked upon as an excuse for pleasure. Fairs and markets were for centuries the chief social functions, and though fairs have lost their position as practically the only occasions for general conviviality, market days have not yet been superseded by anything else. A market town is still a provincial metropolis, in every county it is there that local life is focused, and the whole countryside converges once a week upon its market town. The County Magistrates generally sit near the market place, so that men can freely pass from one kind of business to the other. Wives accompany their husbands to “town” for a good day’s shopping—not, as formerly, in the phæton, the gig or the tax-cart, but now in the motor-car. And working people from the villages, who used to fill the carriers’ carts, now ride by motor-bus. At about four o’clock in the afternoon of market day, one of the chief sights of a market town is the setting forth of those great fleets of buses. For an hour or so beforehand, the passengers have been assembling, laden with baskets and parcels and “ shopping bags”, bubbling with gossip and local jokes, and distracted by the loss of a child or two, or by the non-appearance of an expected parcel. At last everyone is aboard, and the great vehicle swings slowly out of its harbour, to feel its way through the traffic, which is organized by rule-of-thumb rather than by any of the better known traffic laws.

  There was a memorable scene in Salisbury one market day, a year or two ago, when a new bus station was to be opened. The ceremony began with a luncheon in the Council House, and then the Mayor of Salisbury, and I, as Mayor of Wilton, proceeded formally to declare the station open. We crossed the market place at the head of a small procession, which grew rapidly as the assembled people caught sight of our dignity and our chains, and eventually arrived on the scene at the head of a considerable crowd. Our first business was to cut two coloured ribbons which had been stretched across the entrance to the station, and then there immediately appeared the first bus which was to use it. In order to prevent delay, this had filled up at its old starting-point, and it was already crowded with passengers for Andover. They had no idea they were going to take part in any function. There they sat in their places, hugging their parcels, and staring out of the windows with astonishment at what must have looked to them like an unruly crowd of rioters waiting to spring upon them. Perhaps they were reassured by finding that this mob was headed by two Mayors in their robes, each holding aloft a pair of grape scissors. But their fears returned when these Mayors addressed them with loud and passionate prayers:

  “God bless this bus. May you have a safe journey. May this bus pass safely through all the dangers of the road”, and other slogans equally suggesting that this particular journey to Andover was likely to be a ticklish one.

  It was a typical market day festivity, for in a market town the chief dates are always made for market days, because then the buses arrive from everywhere, and the village people swell the population of the town. If you want to be certain of running up against any or all of your country neighbours, you are sure to meet them in the market place on market day.

  But these assignations and festivities are merely sideshows, distinct from the main business and interest of the day. People have come for buying and selling, and that is what they mean to do. All through the morning the sales of cattle and sheep, pigs and poultry, are in full swing. The auctioneers stand in their rostrums, roaring out their racy descriptions of the various lots. They all possess considerable knowledge of the points of livestock, and plenty of native wit to season this knowledge. The leading auctioneers have each a special standing in the world of agriculture. The value of their opinions has been tested by time, and their sales depend upon it. A good auctioneer is admitted to be an expert, and as such he compels attention. The reputation that he has built up determines the amount of his business, and also the prices he can command. Then it is essential that he should possess what sailors call “a gale o’ wind voice’
’; for it has got to prevail over a tempest of male conversation, which is loudly carried on all round him, and is interspersed with roars of laughter, sometimes at the jokes he has made himself, but equally often at private jokes circulating among his clientèle.

  These sales go on throughout the morning, and they are followed by what used to be called the “Farmers’ Ordinary”, which means the mid-day dinner in the chief hotels of the town. English cooking is often decried, but these masculine meals show it at its unbeatable best. Farmers know a good joint of meat when they see one, and they also know how it should be cooked and sent up. They demand, and they get, the best meat obtainable in the countryside; while, even for a mere woman, who is not admitted to the meal, there are few more exhilarating sounds than the roars of talk and laughter which burst out of the dining room whenever the door is opened, and which eventually surge to a climax when the party breaks up.

  As well as the important sales of stock, a good deal of other lively buying and selling takes place on market day. The market place is crowded with stalls, on which are displayed the smaller country products—fruit, vegetables, eggs, and (especially on stalls stocked by Women’s Institutes) jams and pickles, honey and cakes. There are glass and china stalls, upon which has been thrown a jumble of unrelated cups and saucers, jugs and plates. Old books can also be bought in markets; and many an old bookworm can be seen pawing and poring over a motley collection of tattered magazines, well-thumbed volumes of sermons and dirty school books, in the hope of discovering among them a choice and hitherto unidentified First Edition. A slowly moving crowd circulates with gloating eyes and disdainful tongues round and round the stalls. Prices are vigorously contested. The stallkeepers avow that theirs are the cheapest goods in the market. Housewives scoff at them, and loudly tell each other where better and even cheaper things of the same kind can be found over the way. Groups of people from far-off villages meet with animated gestures, of surprise and with loud delight, and then they block the way for a quarter-of-an-hour while they all in turn relate the history of their lives since they last met. No one complains of this holding up of the traffic. All the marketers are there for the day, and most of the pleasure of their visit to town lies in these unforeseen, but always anticipated, encounters with old friends. The largest crowd collects round the cheapjack, who not only produces watches from his pocket with the ease of a conjuror, but makes the welkin ring with startling and realistic descriptions of diseases and their cures. An extraordinary old fellow was for years a familiar sight in our town. He wore a ginger-coloured dressing gown and dark spectacles; and a short stiff grey beard added importance to his countenance. Holding up a bottle filled with a deep purple, murky, thick and mottled liquid, he roared out: