Juliana Horatia Ewing And Her Books Part 27

Mrs. O'M. is delighted with "Daddy Darwin." I had a most curious letter about it from Mrs. S., a very clever one and very flattering!

F.S. too wrote to D., and said things almost exactly similar. It seems odd that people should express such a sense of "purity" with the "wit and wisdom" of one's writing! It seems such an odd reflection on the tone of other people's writings!!! But the minor writers of the "Fleshly school" are perhaps producing a reaction! Though it's _marvellous_ what people will read, and think "so clever!" Some novels lately--_Sophy_ and _Mehalah_, deeply recommended to me, have made me aghast. I'm not very young, nor I think very priggish; but I do decline to look at life and its complexities solely and entirely from a point of view that (bar Christian names and the English language) would do equally well for a pig or a monkey. If I _am_ no more than a Pig, I'm a fairly "learned" pig, and will back myself to get some small piggish pleasures out of this mortal stye, before I go to the Butcher!! But--IF--I am something very different, and very much higher, I won't ignore my birthright, or sell it for Hog'swash, because it involves the endurance of some pain, and the exercise of some faith and hope and charity! _Mehalah_ is a well-written book, with a delicious sense of local colour in nature. And it is (pardon the sacrilege!) a LOVE _story_! The focus point of the hero's (!) desire would at quarter sessions, or a.s.sizes, go by the plain names of outrage and murder, and he succeeds in drowning himself with the girl who hates him lashed to him by a chain. In not one other character of the book is there an indication that life has an aim beyond the l.u.s.ts of the flesh, and the most respectable characters are the tenants whose desires are summed up in the desire of more suet pudding and gravy!! To any one who KNOWS the poor! who knows what faiths and hopes (true or untrue) support them in consumption and cancer, in hard lives and dreary deaths, the picture is as untrue as it is (to me!) disgusting.

March 22, 1882.

On Sat.u.r.day night I went down with A. and L. to Battersea, to one of the People's Concerts. I enclose the programme. It is years since I have enjoyed anything so much as _Thomas's_ Harp-playing. (He is not Ap-Thomas, but he _is_ the Queen's Harper.) His hands on those strings were the hands of a _Wizard_, and form and features nearly as quaint as those of Mawns seemed to dilate into those of a poet. It was very marvellous.

Did I tell you that Lady L. has sent _me_ a ticket this year for her Sunday afternoons at the Grosvenor? We went on Sunday. The paintings there just now are Watts's. Our old blind friend at Manchester has sent a lot. It is a very fine collection. I think few paintings do beat Watts's 'Love and Death'--Death, great and irresistible, wrapped in shrowd-like drapery, is pushing relentlessly over the threshold of a home, where the portal is climbed over by roses and a dove plays about the lintel. You only see his back. But, facing you, Love, as a young boy, torn and flushed with pa.s.sion and grief, is madly striving to keep Death back, his arms strained, his wings crushed and broken in the unequal struggle.

Beside the paintings it was great fun seeing the company! Princess Louise was there, and lots of minor stars. And--my Welsh Harper was there! I had a long chat with him. He talks like a true artist, and WE must know him hereafter. When I said that when I heard him play the 'Men of Harlech,' I understood how Welshmen fought in the valleys if their harpers played upon the hills (_most true!_), he seized my hand in both his, and thanked me so excitedly I was quite alarmed for fear Mrs. Grundy had an eye round the corner!!!

_Amesbury_, May 28, 1182.

... 'Tis a sweet, sweet spot! Not one jot or one t.i.ttle of the old charm has forsaken it. Clean, clean shining streets and little houses, pure, pure air!--a changeful and lovely sky--the green watermeads and silvery willows--the old patriarch in his smock--the rushing of the white weir among the meadows, the grey bridge, the big, peaceful, shading trees, the rust-coloured lichen on the graves where the forefathers of the hamlet sleep (oh what a place for sleep!), the sublime serenity of that incomparable church tower, about which the starlings wheel, some of them speaking words outside, and others replying from the inside (where they have no business to be!) through the belfry windows in a strange chirruping antiphon, as if outside they sang:

"Have you found a house, and a nest where you may lay your young?

(and from within):

Even Thy altars, O Lord of Hosts! my King and my G.o.d!"

D. and I wandered (how one _wanders_ here) a long time there yesterday evening. Then we went up to the cemetery on the hill, with that beautiful lych-gate you were so fond of. I picked you a forget-me-not from the old Rector's grave, for he has gone home, after fifty-nine years' pastorship of Amesbury. His wife died the year before. Their graves are beautifully kept with flowers.

_Whit-Monday_, 9.30 p.m. We are in the upper sitting-room to-day, the lower one having been reserved for "trippers." It is a glorious night--beyond the open window one of several Union Jacks waves in the evening breeze, and one of several bra.s.s bands has just played its way up the street. How these admirable musicians have found the lungs to keep it up as they have done since an early hour this morning they best know! Oh, how we have laughed! How _you_ would have laughed!! It has been the most good-humoured, civil crowd you can imagine! Such banners! such a "gitting of them" up and down the street by ardent "Foresters" and other clubs in huge green sashes and flowers everywhere! Before we were up this morning they were hanging flags across the street, and seriously threatening the stability of that fine old window!

When I was dressed enough to pull up the blind and open the window some green leaves fluttered in in the delicious breeze. I went off into raptures, thinking it was a big _Vine_ I had not noticed before, creeping outside!!

It was a maypole of sycamore branches, placed there by the Foresters!!!

Frances Peard laughed at me much for something like to this I said at Torquay! She said, "You are just like my old mother. Whenever we pa.s.s a man who has used a fusee, she always becomes knowing about tobacco, and says, _There_, Frances, my dear--there IS a fine cigar.'"

... We came here last Thursday. When I got to Porton D. had sent an air-cushion in the fly, and though I had a five miles drive it was through this exquisite air on a calm, lovely evening, and by the time we got to a spot on the Downs where a little Pinewood breaks the expanse of the plains, the good-humoured driver and I were both on our knees on the gra.s.s digging up plots of the exquisite Shepherd's Thyme, which carpets the place with blue!

Yesterday we drove by Stonehenge to Winterbourne Stoke. It was glaring, and I could not do much sketching, but the drive over the downs was like drinking in life at some primeval spring. (And this though the wind did give me acute neuralgia in my right eye, but yet the air was so exquisitely refreshing that I could cover my eye with a handkerchief and still enjoy!) The charm of these unhedged, unbounded, un-"cabined, cribbed, confined" _prairies_ is all their own, and very perfect! And _such_ flowers _enamel_ (it _is_ a good simile in spite of Alphonse Karr!) the close fine gra.s.s! The pale-yellow rock cistus in clumps, the blue "shepherd's thyme" in tracts of colour, sweet little purple-capped orchids, spireas and burnets, and everywhere "the golden b.u.t.tercup" in sheets of gleaming yellow, and the soft wind blows and blows, and the black-nosed sheep come up the leas, and I drink in the breeze! Oh, those flocks of black-faced lambs and sheep are TOO-TOO! and I must tell you that the old Wiltshire "ship-dog" is nearly extinct. I regret to say that he is not found equal to "the Scotch" in business habits, and one see Collies everywhere now....

_London._ June 29, 1882.

I had a great treat last Sunday. One you and I will share when you come home. D., U., and I took Jack to church at the Chelsea Hospital, and we went round the Pensioners' Rooms, kitchen, sick-wards, etc.

afterwards, with old Sir Patrick Grant and Col. Wadeson, V.C. (Govr.

and Lieut.-Govr.), and a lot of other people.

It is an odd, perhaps a savage, mixture of emotions, to kneel at one's prayers with some _pride_ under fourteen French flags--_captured_ (including one of Napoleon's while he was still Consul, with a red cap of Liberty as big as your hat!), and hard by the FIVE bare staves from which the FIVE standards taken at Blenheim have rotted to dust!--and then to pa.s.s under the great Russian standard (twenty feet square, I should say!) that is festooned above the door of the big hall. If Rule Britannia IS humbug--and we are mere Philistine Braggarts--why doesn't Cook organize a tour to some German or other city, where we can sit under fourteen captured British Colours, and be disillusioned once for all!!! Where is the Hospital whose walls are simply decorated like some Lord Mayor's show with trophies taken from us and from every corner of the world? (You know Lady Grant was in the action at Chillianwallah and has the medal?) We saw two Waterloo men, and Jack was handed about from one old veteran to another like a toy. "Grow up a brave man," they said, over and over again. But "The Officer," as he called Colonel Wadeson, was his chief pride, he being in full uniform and c.o.c.ked hat!!

And I must tell you--in the sick ward I saw a young man, fair-curled, broad-chested, whose face seemed familiar. He was with Captain Cleather at the Aldershot Gym., fell, and is "going home"--slowly, and with every comfort and kindness about him, but of spinal paralysis.

It _did_ seem hard lines! He was at the Amesbury March Past, and we had a long chat about it.

July 21, 1882.

I cannot tell you how it pleases me that you liked the bit about Aldershot in "Laetus." I hope that it must have _grated_ very much if I had done it badly or out of taste, on any one who knows it as well as you do; and that its moving your sympathies does mean that I have done it pretty well. I cannot tell you the pains I expended on it! All those sentences about the Camp were written in sc.r.a.ps and corrected for sense and euphony, etc., etc., bit by bit, like "Jackanapes"!!!

Did I tell you about "Tuck of Drum"? Several people who saw the proof, pitched into me, "Never heard of such an expression." I was convinced I knew it, and as I said, as a _poetical_ phrase; but I could not charge my memory with the quotation: and people exasperated me by regarding it as "camp slang." I got Miss S. to look in her _Shakespeare's Concordance_, but in vain, and she wrote severely, "My Major lifts his eyebrows at the term." I was in despair, but I sent the proof back, trusting to my instincts, and sent a postcard to Dr.

Littledale, and got a post-card back by return--"Scott"--"Rokeby."

"With burnished brand and musketoon, So gallantly you come, I rede you for a bold dragoon, That lists the tuck of drum."-- "I list no more the tuck of drum, No more the trumpet hear; But when the beetle sounds his hum, My comrades take the spear."

And I copied this on to another postcard and added, _Tell your Major!_ and despatched it to Miss S.! She said, "You _did_ c.o.c.kadoodle!"--

But isn't it _exquisite_? _What_ a creature Scott was! Could words, could a long romance, give one a finer picture of the ex-soldier turned "Gentleman of the Road"? The touch of regret--"I list no more the tuck of drum," and the soldierly necessity for a "call"--and then _such_ a call!

When the Beetle _sounds his hum_--

The Dor Beetle!--

I hope you will like the tale as a whole. It has been long in my head.

Oh! how funny Grossmith was! Yesterday I was at the Matinee for the Dramatic School, and he did a "Humorous Sketch" about Music, when he said with care-carked brows that there was only one man's music that _thoroughly_ satisfied him (after touching on the various schools!)--and added--"my own." It was inexpressibly funny. His "Amateur Composer" would have made you die!

Ah, but THE treat, such a treat as I have not heard for years--was that old Ristori RECITED the 5th Canto of the _Inferno_. I did not remember which it was, and feared I should not be able to follow, but it proved to be "Francesca." Never could I have believed it possible that reciting could be like that. I could have gone into a corner and cried my heart out afterwards, the tension was so extreme. And oh what power and WHAT refinement!

July 28, 1882.