Highways and Byways in Surrey Part 23

"_Thursday_, MICKLEHAM.

"Madame de Stael has written me two English notes, quite beautiful in ideas, and not very reprehensible in idiom. But English has nothing to do with elegance such as theirs--at least, little and rarely. I am always exposing myself to the wrath of John Bull, when this coterie come into compet.i.tion. It is inconceivable what a convert M. de Talleyrand has made of me; I think him now one of the first members, and one of the most charming, of this exquisite set."

DR. BURNEY TO MISS BURNEY.

"CHELSEA COLLEGE, _Tuesday Morning_, _February 19, 1793_.

"Why, f.a.n.n.y, what are you about, and where are you? I shall write _at_ you, not knowing how to write _to_ you, as Swift did to the flying and romantic Lord Peterborough."

MISS BURNEY TO MRS. PHILLIPS.

"_Friday, May 31_, CHESSINGTON.

"My dearest Fredy, in the beginning of her knowledge of this transaction, told me that Mr. Lock was of opinion that the 100 per annum might do, as it does for many a curate. M. d'A. also most solemnly and affectingly declares that _le simple necessaire_ is all he requires, and here, in your vicinity, would unhesitatingly be preferred by him to the most brilliant fortune in another _sejour_.

"If _he_ can say that, what must _I_ be not to echo it? I, who in the bosom of my most chosen, most darling friends----"

DR. BURNEY TO MISS BURNEY.

"_May 1793._

"Dear f.a.n.n.y,--I have for some time seen very plainly that you are _eprise_, and have been extremely uneasy at the discovery. You must have observed my silent gravity, surpa.s.sing that of mere illness and its consequent low spirits. I had some thoughts of writing to Susan about it, and intended begging her to do what I must now do for myself--that is, beg, warn, and admonish you not to entangle yourself in a wild and romantic attachment which offers nothing in prospect but poverty and distress, with future inconvenience and unhappiness...."

FROM MADAME D'ARBLAY TO MRS. ----.

"_August 2, 1793._

"Last Sunday (July 28) M^r and M^rs Lock, my sister and Captain Phillips, and my brother Captain Burney, accompanied us to the altar in Mickleham Church; since which the ceremony has been repeated in the chapel of the Sardinian Amba.s.sador, that if, by a counter-revolution in France, M. d'Arblay recovers any of his rights, his wife may not be excluded from their partic.i.p.ation.

"You may be amazed not to see the name of my dear father upon this solemn occasion; but his apprehensions from the smallness of our income have made him cold and averse: and though he granted his consent, I could not even solicit his presence."

FROM MADAME D'ARBLAY TO DR. BURNEY AFTER HIS FIRST VISIT TO HER AT BOOKHAM.

"BOOKHAM, _August '94_.

It is just a week since I had the greatest gratification of its kind I ever, I think, experienced:--so kind a thought, so sweet a surprise as was my dearest father's visit! How softly and soothingly it has rested upon my mind ever since!...

"How thankfully did I look back, the 28^th of last month, upon a year that has not been blemished with one regretful moment!"

It was at Bookham that Madame d'Arblay wrote _Camilla_, and out of the sale of the novel she built her cottage, Camilla Lacey, on a plot of ground at West Humble leased to her by her friend Mr. Lock. _Camilla_, which Horace Walpole thought deplorable, infinitely worse than _Cecilia_, which was not so good as _Evelina_, was an instant success.

Within a month Madame d'Arblay had made 2,000, and Macaulay's estimate of her whole profits was over three thousand guineas. There was never a stranger climb down a ladder to fortune than f.a.n.n.y Burney's. _Evelina_, her first and incomparably her best novel, brought her 30; _Cecilia_, her next, 250; then came _Camilla_; and her last novel, _The Wanderer_, which she wrote after ten years' absence with her husband in France, actually sold 3,600 copies in six months at two guineas a copy, and was an absolute and hopeless failure.

Camilla Lacey, invisible from the road, has been enlarged and altered to look like nothing the d'Arblays knew. Juniper Hall has also changed, but the splendid cedars which stand round its lawns must have been familiar to Talleyrand and Madame de Stael. They have grown curiously slowly; they do not strike one as larger than many trees which are known to be not more than a hundred and twenty years old--those, for instance, at Farnham Castle; but John Timbs, in his _Promenade Round Dorking_, written in 1823, speaks of them as "immense," and as "said to be of the finest growth in England."

[Ill.u.s.tration: _Cedars at Juniper Hall._]

Norbury Park also has its famous trees. The Druids' Walk, a path running under enormous yews, is no longer open to the public. But Louis Jennings, thirty years ago, saw the trees and preserved a memory of them in _Field Paths and Green Lanes_:--

"As the path descends the shadows deepen, and you arrive at a spot where a ma.s.s of yews of great size and vast age stretch up the hill, and beyond to the left as far as the eye can penetrate through the obscurity. The trees in their long and slow growth have a.s.sumed many wild forms, and the visitor who stands there towards evening, and peers into that sombre grove, will sometimes yield to the spell which the scene is sure to exercise on imaginative natures; he will half fancy that these ghostly trees are conscious creatures, and that they have marked with mingled pity and scorn the long processions of mankind come and go like the insects of a day, through the centuries during which they have been stretching out their distorted limbs nearer and nearer to each other. Thick fibrous shoots spring out from their trunks, awakening in the memory long-forgotten stories of huge hairy giants, enemies of mankind even as the "double-fatal" yew itself was supposed to be in other days.

The bark stands in distinct layers, the outer ridges mouldering away, like the fragments of a wall of some ruined castle. The tops are fresh and green, but all below in that sunless recess seems dead."

In another respect Norbury Park has changed--in the opportunities the Mole running through the park offers to anglers wishing to catch large trout. Mr. C.J. Swete, writing in his _Handbook of Epsom_, not longer ago than 1853, is pleased to take his reader with him by the banks of the Mole, in which he has obtained "permission from the proprietor to gather some of the finny treasures of its liquid mines." Quite unwarrantably, he a.s.sumes that his reader is no fisherman:--

"Well, now, cast out your line, you have a respectable cast, for here the river is broad, you can scarce cast your line across it.

Well, you must be a little patient,--You cannot expect to catch a fish the moment you throw in.... I see you are not a great proficient at the piscatory science. Cast out very little line at first, perhaps about the length of your rod, and then increasing by degrees, you will soon be able to throw full across and with precision. Ah! now you have a fine fish; let him down the stream a little. Now bring him close to the sh.o.r.e. Stay! It is safer to land him with the net. For this stream it is a very excellent fish, exactly three pounds weight, I find. How do I know it is just three pounds? I will tell you."

He proceeds to do so. He knows because he has measured the fish and finds him nineteen inches long by ten in girth, and if you do the sum his way, it works out at three pounds. "This is in accordance, as you suppose, with the mathematical law that similar solids are to each other in the triplicate ratio of one of their dimensions." That is the way to measure trout in Norbury Park.

Two quaintly spelt epitaphs can be read on the black marble tombstones in Mickleham Church. Under one lies the body of Peter de la Hay, "Eldest Yeoman of his Majesties Confectionary Office, who Departed this Liee" in 1684, and under the other Thomas Tooth, "Yeaman of his Ma^ties Sculery, who deceased this Life" a year later.

Almost opposite Juniper Hall is Fredley Farm, once the home of "Conversation" Sharp, hat-maker, poet and member of Parliament. Fredley Farm, in the years between 1797 and 1835, when Sharp lived there, must have been visited by more distinguished poets, authors, politicians, wits, scholars and artists than any other house in Surrey. Wordsworth came there, and Scott, Coleridge, Campbell, Southey and Moore; he talked painting with Lawrence, and sculpture with Chantrey; Macaulay talked with him "about everything and everybody," and so did Grote and Mill and Lockhart and Jeffrey; Porson was there, and perhaps had his favourite porter for breakfast; and the politicians were without number--Brougham, Sheridan, Grattan, Talleyrand, Huskisson, and almost a link with to-day, Lord John Russell. Macaulay has left a few sentences which greater men than Sharp might not deserve as an epitaph: "One thing I have observed in Sharp, which is quite peculiar to him among town-wits and diners-out.

He never talks scandal. If he can say nothing good of a man, he holds his tongue." Yet with all his virtues and all his conversation, Sharp lacks his Boswell.

A little further towards Dorking the road crosses the Mole at Burford Bridge. The inn at Burford Bridge, a sort of Swindon of the Dorking Road, where everybody stops to have lunch or dinner, perhaps will again welcome a great admiral and finish a great poem. Nelson stayed there before leaving to command at Trafalgar; Keats came there to finish _Endymion_. His visit, he writes to his friend Benjamin Bailey, is "to change the scene--change the air, and give me a spur to wind up my poem, of which there are wanting about 500 lines." Night on the hill inspired him; in another letter he shows the way for other poets: "I went up Box Hill this evening after the moon--'you a' seen the moon'--came down and wrote some lines." And it is of the inn at Burford Bridge that the story is told, by Mortimer Collins, in his "Walk through Surrey," of Keats and the waiter. Keats was reciting _Endymion_:--

"For wine, for wine we left our kernel tree; For wine we left our heath and yellow brooms, And cold mushrooms;"

The waiter heard, and obeyed, bringing mushrooms uncooked on a plate and a decanter of sherry. But that story is a little too artificial.

Still, _Endymion_ owes a good deal to the trees and the solitude of the hill above Burford Bridge. It was with the woods in his memory that Keats wrote something very like a description of Box Hill, with the Mole below it:--

"Where shall our dwelling be? Under the brow Of some steep mossy hill, where ivy dun Would hide us up, although spring leaves were none; And where dark yew trees as we rustle through, Will drop their scarlet berry cups of dew?

O thou wouldst joy to live in such a place; Dusk for our loves, yet light enough to grace Those gentle limbs on mossy bed reclin'd: For by one step the blue sky should'st thou find, And by another in deep dell below, See, through the trees, a little river go All in its midday gold and glimmering."

But the great poet and novelist of Box Hill came later. Mr. George Meredith lived his long life and died at last, on May 18, 1909, at his house, Flint Cottage, near Burford Bridge. It was by Box Hill that he imagined the gayest and wisest of novels and some of the most glorious of all English poetry. Here, in his chalet looking out over the Surrey hills, he wrote _The Thrush in February_:--

"I know him, February's thrush, And loud at eve he valentines On sprays that paw the naked bush Where soon will sprout the thorns and bines.

Now ere the foreign singer thrills Our vale his plain-song pipe he pours A herald of the million bills; And heed him not, the loss is yours.

My study, flanked with ivied fir And budded beech with dry leaves curled, Perched over yew and juniper, He neighbours, piping to the world:--

The wooded pathways dank on brown, The branches on grey cloud a web, The long green roller of the down, An image of the deluge-ebb:"--

The lines ring with the bird's song; the light of all February evenings is on the hill. But if you are to take the heart of the poem, you must choose the last eight lines:--

"For love we Earth, then serve we all; Her mystic secret then is ours: We fall, or view our treasures fall, Unclouded, as beholds her flowers.

Earth, from a night of frosty wreck, Enrobed in morning's mounted fire, When lowly, with a broken neck, The crocus lays her cheek to mire."

The n.o.blest philosophy of poetry belongs to this Surrey hill, and so does the most wonderful love-song of its century, the long, enchanted cadences of _Love in the Valley_:--

"Lovely are the curves of the white owl sweeping Wavy in the dusk lit by one large star.

Lone on the fir-branch, his rattle-note unvaried, Brooding o'er the gloom, spins the brown evejar.

Darker grows the valley, more and more forgetting: So were it with me if forgetting could be willed.

Tell the gra.s.sy hollow that holds the bubbling well-spring, Tell it to forget the source that keeps it filled."

Box Hill must be pretty nearly the best-known hill in the world. It has all the advantages. It is within easy reach of London for school treats, excursions, choir outings, week-ends, and all other journeys in open air; it has a railway station at its foot, and several inns, and a tea-garden at the top, and a hundred Bank holidays have left it unspoiled. The box-trees that name the hill are the finest in England.