From a Cornish Window Part 12

I was travelling some weeks ago by a railway line alongside of which ran a quickset hedge. It climbed to the summit of cuttings, plunged to the base of embankments, looped itself around stations, flickered on the skyline above us, raced us along the levels, dipped into pools, shot up again on their farther banks, chivvied us into tunnels, ran round and waited for us as we emerged. Its importunity drove me to the other side of the carriage, only to find another quickset hedge behaving similarly.

Now I can understand that a railway company has excellent reasons for planting quickset hedges alongside its permanent way. But their unspeakable monotony set me thinking. Why do we neglect the real parks of England?--parks enormous in extent, and yet uncultivated, save here and there and in the most timid fashion. And how better could our millionaires use their wealth (since they are always confiding to us their difficulties in getting rid of it) than by seeking out these gardens and endowing them, and so, without pauperising anyone, build for themselves monuments not only delightful, but perpetual?--for, as Victor Hugo said, the flowers last always. So, you may say, do books. I doubt it; and experts, who have discussed with me the modern products of the paper trade, share my gloomy views. Anyhow, the free public library has been sufficiently exploited, if not worked out. So, you may say again, have free public gardens and parks been worked out. I think not. Admit that a fair percentage of the public avails itself of these libraries and parks; still the ma.s.s does not, and they were intended for the ma.s.s.

Their attractiveness does not spread and go on spreading. The stream of public appreciation which pours through them is not fathomless; beyond a certain point it does not deepen, or deepens with heart-breaking slowness; and candid librarians and curators can sound its shallows accurately enough. What we want is not a garden into which folk will find their way if they have nothing better to do and can spare the time with an effort.

Or, to be accurate, we do want such gardens for deliberate enjoyment; but what we want more is to catch our busy man and build a garden about him in the brief leisure which, without seeking it, he is forced to take.

Where are these gardens? Why, beside and along our railway lines.

These are the great public parks of England; and through them travels daily a vast population held in enforced idleness, seeking distraction in its morning paper. Have you ever observed how a whole carriageful of travellers on the Great Western line will drop their papers to gaze out on Messrs. Sutton's trial-beds just outside Reading? A garish appeal, no doubt: a few raying spokes of colour, and the vision has gone. And I forestall the question, "Is that the sort of thing you wish to see extended?--a bed of yellow tulips, for instance, or of scarlet lobelias, or of bright-blue larkspurs, all the way from London to Liverpool?"

I suggest nothing of the sort. Our railway lines in England, when they follow the valleys--as railway lines must in hilly districts--are extraordinarily beautiful. The eye, for example, could desire nothing better, in swift flight, than the views along the Wye Valley or in the Derbyshire Peak country, and even the rich levels of Somerset have a beauty of their own (above all in May and June, when yellow with sheets of b.u.t.tercups) which artificial planting would spoil. But--cant about Nature apart--every line has its dreary cuttings and embankments, all of which might be made beautiful at no great cost. I need not labour this: here and there by a casual bunch of rhododendrons or of gorse, or by a sheet of primroses or wild hyacinths in springtime, the thing is proved, and has been proved again and again to me by the comments of fellow-pa.s.sengers.

Now I am honestly enamoured of this dream of mine, and must pause to dwell on some of its beauties. In the first place, we could start to realise it in the most modest fashion and test the appreciation of the public as we go along. Our flowers would be mainly wild flowers, and our trees, for the most part, native British plants, costing, say, from thirty shillings to three pounds the hundred. A few roods would do to begin with, if the spot were well chosen; indeed, it would be wiser in every way to begin modestly, for though England possesses several great artists in landscape gardening, their art has never to my knowledge been seriously applied to railway gardening, and the speed of the spectators introduces a new and highly-amusing condition, and one so singular and so important as to make this almost a separate art. At any rate, our gardeners would have to learn as they go, and if any man can be called enviable it is an artist learning to express art's eternal principles in a new medium, under new conditions.

Even if we miss our millionaire, we need not despond over ways and means.

The beauty-spots of Great Britain are engaged just now in a fierce rivalry of advertis.e.m.e.nt. Why should not this rivalry be pressed into the service of beautifying the railway lines along which the tourist must travel to reach them? Why should we neglect the porches (so to speak) of our temples? Would not the tourist arrive in a better temper if met on his way with silent evidence of our desire to please? And, again, is the advertising tradesman quite wise in offending so many eyes with his succession of ugly h.o.a.rdings standing impertinently in green fields?

Can it be that the sight of them sets up that disorder of the liver which he promises to cure? And if not, might he not call attention to his wares at least as effectively, if more summarily, by making them the excuse for a vision of delight which pa.s.sengers would drop their newspapers to gaze upon? Lastly, the railway companies themselves have discovered the commercial value of scenery. Years ago, and long before their discovery (and as if by a kind of instinct they were blundering towards it) they began to offer prizes for the best-kept station gardens--with what happy result all who have travelled in South Wales will remember. They should find it easy to learn that the 'development' of watering-places and holiday resorts may be profitably followed up by spending care upon their approaches.

But I come back to my imaginary millionaire--the benevolent man who only wants to be instructed how to spend his money--the 'magnificent man' of Aristotle's _Ethics_, nonplussed for the moment, and in despair of discovering an original way of scattering largesse for the public good.

For, while anxious to further my scheme by conciliating the commercial instinct, I must insist that its true beauty resides in the conception of our railways as vast public parks only hindered by our sad lack of inventiveness from ministering to the daily delight of scores of thousands and the occasional delight of almost everyone. The millionaire I want is one who can rise to this conception of it, and say with Blake--

"I will not cease from mental fight,"

(Nor from pecuniary contribution, for that matter)

"Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand Till we have built Jerusalem In England's green and pleasant land."

For these millionaires are bediamonded all over with good intentions.

The mischief with them is their lack of inventiveness. Most of my readers will agree that there is no easier game of solitaire than to suppose yourself suddenly endowed with a million of money, and to invent modes of dispensing it for the good of your kind. As a past master of that game I offer the above suggestion gratis to those poor brothers of mine who have more money than they know how to use.

The railway--not that of the quickset hedges, but the Great Western, on to which I changed after a tramp across Dartmoor--took me to pay a pious visit to my old school: a visit which I never pay without thinking-- especially in the chapel where we used to sing 'Lord, dismiss us with Thy blessing' on the evening before holidays--of a pa.s.sage in Izaak Walton's _Life of Sir Henry Wotton_:--

"He yearly went also to Oxford. But the summer before his death he changed that for a journey to Winchester College, to which school he was first removed from Bocton. And as he returned from Winchester towards Eton College, said to a friend, his companion in that journey, 'How useful was that advice of a holy monk who persuaded his friend to perform his customary devotions in a constant place, because in that place we usually meet with those very thoughts which possessed us at our last being there! And I find it thus far experimentally true that at my now being in that school, and seeing the very place where I sat when I was a boy, occasioned me to remember those very thoughts of my youth which then possessed me: sweet thoughts indeed, that promised my growing years numerous pleasures without mixtures of cares: and those to be enjoyed when time--which I therefore thought slow-paced--had changed my youth into manhood. But age and experience have taught me that those were but empty hopes: for I have always found it true, as my Saviour did foretell, 'Sufficient for the day is the evil thereof.'

Nevertheless, I saw there a succession of boys using the same recreations and, questionless, possessed with the same thoughts that then possessed me. Thus one generation succeeds another, both in their lives, recreations, hopes, fears, and death.'"

But my visit on this occasion was filled with thought less of myself than of a poet I had known in that chapel, those cloisters, that green close; not intimately enough to call him friend, yet so intimately that his lately-departed shade still haunted the place for me--a small boy whom he had once, for a day or two, treated with splendid kindness and thereafter (I dare say) had forgotten.

"T. E. B."

Thomas Edward Brown was born on May 5th, 1830, at Douglas, in the Isle of Man, where his father held the living of St. Matthew's. Sixty-five years later he wrote his last verses to aid a fund raised for a new St.

Matthew's Church, and characteristically had to excuse himself in a letter penetrated with affection for the old plain edifice and its memories.

"I was baptised there; almost all whom I loved and revered were a.s.sociated with its history . . . 'The only church in Douglas where the poor go'--I dare say that is literally true. But I believe it will continue to be so. . . . I postulate the continuity. . . ."

I quote these words (and so leave them for a while) with a purpose, aware how trivial they may seem to the reader. But to those who had the privilege of knowing Brown that cannot be trivial which they feel to be characteristic and in some degree explicative of the man; and with this 'I postulate the continuity' we touch accurately and simply for once a note which sang in many chords of the most vocal, not to say orchestral, nature it has ever been my lot to meet.

Let me record, and have done with, the few necessary incidents of what was by choice a _vita fallens_ and "curiously devoid of incident." The boy was but two years old when the family removed to Kirk Braddan Vicarage, near Douglas; the sixth of ten children of a witty and sensible Scots mother and a father whose n.o.bly humble idiosyncrasies continued in his son and are worthy to live longer in his description of them:--

"To think of a _Pazon_ respecting men's vices even; not as vices, G.o.d forbid! but as parts of _them_, very likely all but inseparable from them; at any rate, _theirs!_ Pitying with an eternal pity, but not exposing, not rebuking. My father would have considered he was 'taking a liberty' if he had confronted the sinner with his sin.

Doubtless he carried this too far. But don't suppose for a moment that the 'weak brethren' thought he was conniving at their weakness.

Not they: they saw the delicacy of his conduct. You don't think, do you, that these poor souls are incapable of appreciating delicacy?

G.o.d only knows how far down into their depths of misery the sweetness of that delicacy descends. . . . He loved sincerity, truth and modesty. It seemed as if he felt that, with these virtues, the others could not fail to be present."

Add to this that the Vicar of Kirk Braddan, though of no University, was a scholar in grain; was, for example, so fastidious about composition that he would make his son read some fragment of an English cla.s.sic to him before answering an invitation! "To my father style was like the instinct of personal cleanliness." Again we touch notes which echoed through the life of his son--who worshipped continuity.

From a course of tuition divided between his father and the parish schoolmaster, Brown went, at fifteen or over, to King William's College, and became its show scholar; thence, by the efforts of well-meaning friends (but at the cost of much subsequent pain), to Christ Church, Oxford, as a servitor. He won his double first; but he has left on record an account of a servitor's position at Christ Church in the early fifties, and to Brown the spiritual humiliation can have been little less than one long dragging anguish. He had, of course, his intervals of high spirits; but (says Mr. Irwin, his friend and biographer) "there is no doubt he did not exaggerate what the position was to him. I have heard him refer to it over and over again with a dispa.s.sionate bitterness there was no mistaking." Dean Gaisford absolutely refused to nominate him, after his two first cla.s.ses, to a fellowship, though all the resident dons wished it. "A servitor never has been elected student--_ergo_, he never shall be." Brown admired Gaisford, and always spoke kindly of him "in all his dealings with me." Yet the night after he won his double first was "one of the most intensely miserable I was ever called to endure." Relief, and of the right kind, came with his election as Fellow of Oriel in April, 1854. In those days an Oriel Fellowship still kept and conveyed its peculiar distinction, and the brilliant young scholar had at length the ball at his feet.

"This is none of your empty honours," he wrote to his mother; "it gives me an income of about 300 pounds per annum as long as I choose to reside at Oxford, and about 220 pounds in cash if I reside elsewhere. In addition to this it puts me in a highly commanding position for pupils, so that on the whole I have every reason to expect that (except perhaps the first year) I shall make between 500 and 600 pounds altogether per annum. So you see, my dear mother, that your prayers have not been unanswered, and that G.o.d will bless the generation of those who humbly strive to serve Him. . . I have not omitted to remark that the election took place on April 21st, the anniversary of your birth and marriage."

How did he use his opportunity? "He never took kindly to the life of an Oxford fellow," thought the late Dr. Fowler (an old schoolfellow of Brown's, afterwards President of Corpus and Vice-Chancellor of the University). Mr. Irwin quotes another old friend, Archdeacon Moore, to much the same effect. Their explanations lack something of definiteness.

After a few terms of private pupils Brown returned to the Island, and there accepted the office of Vice-princ.i.p.al of his old school. We can only be sure that his reasons were honourable, and sufficed for him; we may include among them, if we choose, that _nostalgia_ which haunted him all his days, until fate finally granted his wish and sent him back to his beloved Argos "for good."

In the following year (1857) he married his cousin, Miss Stowell, daughter of Dr. Stowell, of Ramsay; and soon after left King William's College to become 'by some strange mischance' Head Master of the Crypt School, Gloucester. Of this "Gloucester episode," as he called it, nothing needs to be recorded except that he hated the whole business and, incidentally, that one of his pupils was Mr. W. E. Henley--destined to gather into his _National Observer_, many years later, many blooms of Brown's last and not least memorable efflorescence in poesy.

From Gloucester he was summoned, on a fortunate day, by Mr. Percival (now Bishop of Hereford), who had recently been appointed to Clifton College, then a struggling new foundation, soon to be lifted by him into the ranks of the great Public Schools. Mr. Percival wanted a man to take the Modern Side; and, as fate orders these things, consulted the friend reserved by fate to be his own successor at Clifton--Mr. Wilson (now Canon of Worcester). Mr. Wilson was an old King William's boy; knew Brown, and named him.

"Mr. Wilson having told me about him," writes the bishop, "I made an appointment to see him in Oxford, and there, as chance would have it, I met him standing at the corner of St. Mary's Entry, in a somewhat Johnsonian att.i.tude, four-square, his hands deep in his pockets to keep himself still, and looking decidedly _volcanic_. We very soon came to terms, and I left him there under promise to come to Clifton as my colleague at the beginning of the following Term; and, needless to say, St. Mary's Entry has had an additional interest to me ever since. Sometimes I have wondered, and it would be worth a good deal to know, what thoughts were crossing through that richly-furnished, teeming brain as he stood there by St. Mary's Church, with Oriel College in front of him, thoughts of his own struggles and triumphs, and of all the great souls that had pa.s.sed to and fro over the pavement around him; and all set in the lurid background of the undergraduate life to which he had been condemned as a servitor at Christ Church."

Was he happy in his many years' work at Clifton? On the whole, and with some reservation, we may say 'yes'--'yes,' although in the end he escaped from it gladly and enjoyed his escape. One side of him, no doubt, loathed formality and routine; he was, as he often proclaimed himself, a nature-loving, somewhat intractable Celt; and if one may hint at a fault in him, it was that now and then he soon _tired_. A man so spendthrift of emotion is bound at times to knock on the bottom of his emotional coffers; and no doubt he was true _to a mood_ when he wrote--

"I'm here at Clifton, grinding at the mill My feet for thrice nine barren years have trod, But there are rocks and waves at Scarlett still, And gorse runs riot in Glen Cha.s.s--thank G.o.d!

"Alert, I seek exact.i.tude of rule, I step and square my shoulders with the squad, But there are blaeberries on old Barrule, And Langness has its heather still--thank G.o.d!"

--With the rest of the rebellious stanzas. We may go farther and allow that he played with the mood until he sometimes forgot on which side lay seriousness and on which side humour. Still it _was_ a mood; and it was Brown, after all, who wrote 'Planting':--

"Who would be planted chooseth not the soil Or here or there, Or loam or peat, Wherein he best may grow And bring forth guerdon of the planter's toil-- The lily is most fair, But says not' I will only blow Upon a southern land'; the cedar makes no coil What rock shall owe The springs that wash his feet; The crocus cannot arbitrate the foil That for his purple radiance is most meet-- Lord, even so I ask one prayer, The which if it be granted, It skills not where Thou plantest me, only I would be planted."

"You don't care for school-work," he writes to an Old Cliftonian.

. . . "I demur to your statement that when you take up schoolmastering your leisure for this kind of thing will be practically gone. Not at all. If you have the root of the matter in you the school-work will insist upon this kind of thing as a relief.

My plan always was to recognise two lives as necessary--the one the outer Kapelistic life of drudgery, the other the inner and cherished life of the spirit. It is true that the one has a tendency to kill the other, but it must not, and you must see that it does not. . . .

The pedagogic is needful for bread and b.u.t.ter, also for a certain form of joy; of the inner life you know what I think."

These are wise words, and I believe they represent Brown more truly than utterances which only seem more genuine because less deliberate. He was as a house master excellent, with an excellence not achievable by men whose hearts are removed from their work: he awoke and enjoyed fervent friendships and the enthusiastic admiration of many youngsters; he must have known of these enthusiasms, and was not the man to condemn them; he had the abiding a.s.surance of a.s.sisting in a kind of success which he certainly respected. He longed for the day of emanc.i.p.ation, to return to his Island; he was impatient; but I must decline to believe he was unhappy.

Indeed, his presence sufficiently denied it. How shall I describe him?

A st.u.r.dy, thick-set figure, inclining to rotundity, yet athletic; a face extraordinarily mobile; bushy, grey eyebrows; eyes at once deeply and radiantly human, yet holding the primitive faun in their coverts; a broad mouth made for broad, natural laughter, hearty without lewdness. "There are nice Rabelaisians, and there are nasty; but the latter are not Rabelaisians. I have an idea," he claimed, "that my judgment within this area is infallible." And it was. All honest laughter he welcomed as a G.o.dlike function.

"G.o.d sits upon His hill, And sees the shadows fly; And if He laughs at fools, why should He not?"

And for that matter, why should not we? Though at this point his fine manners intervened, correcting, counselling moderation. "I am certain G.o.d made fools for us to enjoy, but there must be _an economy of joy_ in the presence of a fool; you must not betray your enjoyment." Imagine all this overlaid with a certain portliness of bearing, suggestive of the high-and-dry Oxford scholar. Add something of the parsonic (he was ordained deacon before leaving Oxford, but did not proceed to priest's orders till near the end of his time at Clifton); add a simple natural piety which purged the parsonic of all "churchiness."

"This silence and solitude are to me absolute food," he writes from the Clifton College Library on the morning of Christmas Day, 1875, "especially after all the row and worry at the end of Term. . . .

Where are the men and women? Well, now look here, you'll not mention it again. They're all in church. See how good G.o.d is! See how He has placed these leitourgic traps in which people, especially disagreeable people, get caught--and lo! the universe for me!!! me-- me. . . ."

I have mentioned his fine manners, and with a certain right, since it once fell to me--a blundering innocent in the hands of fate--to put them to severest proof. A candidate for a scholarship at Clifton--awkward, and abominably conscious of it, and sensitive--I had been billeted on Brown's hospitality without his knowledge. The mistake (I cannot tell who was responsible) could not be covered out of sight; it was past all aid of kindly dissimulation by the time Brown returned to the house to find the unwelcome guest bathing in shame upon his doorstep. Can I say more than that he took me into the family circle--by no means an expansive one, or accustomed, as some are, to open gleefully to intruders--and for the inside of a week treated me with a consideration so quiet and pleasant, so easy yet attentive, that his dearest friend or most distinguished visitor could not have demanded more? A boy notes these things, and remembers.

. . . "If I lose my manners," Mr. Irwin quotes him as saying once over some trivial forgetfulness, "what is to become of me?" He was shy, too, like the most of his countrymen--"jus' the shy "--but with a proud reserve as far removed as possible from sham humility--being all too sensible and far too little of a fool to blink his own eminence of mind, though willing on all right occasions to forget it. "Once," records Mr. Irwin, "when I remarked on the omission of his name in an article on 'Minor Poets' in one of the magazines, he said, with a smile, 'Perhaps I am among the major!'"

That smile had just sufficient irony--no more.

To this we may add a pa.s.sion for music and a pa.s.sion for external nature-- external to the most of us, but so closely knit with his own that to be present at his ecstasies was like a.s.sisting a high priest of elemental mysteries reserved for him and beyond his power to impart. And yet we are beating about the bush and missing the essential man, for he was imprehensible--"Volcanic," the Bishop of Hereford calls him, and must go to the Bay of Naples to fetch home a simile: