Prose Idylls, New and Old Part 11

'What think you?'

'That you are far worthier in such matters than I, friend. But do not forget that it may be your intellect, and your profession--in one word, Heaven's mercy--which have steered you clear of shoals upon which you will find the ma.s.s of our cla.s.s founder. Woe to the cla.s.s or the nation which has no manly physical training! Look at the manners, the morals, the faces of the young men of the shopkeeping cla.s.ses, if you wish to see the effects of utterly neglecting the physical development of man; {235} of fancying that all the muscular activity he requires under the sun is to be able to stand behind a counter, or sit on a desk-stool without tumbling off. Be sure, be sure, that ever since the days of the Persians of old, effeminacy, if not twin-sister of cowardice and dishonesty, has always gone hand in hand with them. To that utter neglect of any exercises which call out fort.i.tude, patience, self-dependence, and daring, I attribute a great deal of the low sensuality, the conceited vulgarity, the want of a high sense of honour, which is increasing just now among the middle cla.s.ses; and from which the navigator, the engineer, the miner, and the sailor are comparatively free.'

'And perhaps, too, that similar want of a high sense of honour, which seems, from the religious periodicals, to pervade a large proportion of a certain more venerable profession?'

'Seriously, Claude, I believe you are not far wrong. But we are getting on delicate ground there: however I have always found, that of whatever profession he may be--to travestie Shakspeare's words, -

"The man that hath not sporting in his soul, Is fit for treason's direst stratagems" -

and so forth.'

'Civil to me!'

'Oh, you have a sporting soul in you, like hundreds of other Englishmen who never handled rod or gun; or you would not be steering for Exmoor to-day. If a lad be a genius, you may trust him to find some original means for developing his manly energies, whether in art, agriculture, science, or travels, discovery, and commerce. But if he be not, as there are a thousand chances to one he will not be, then whatever you teach him, let the two first things be, as they were with the old Persians, "To speak the truth, and to draw the bow."'

By this time we had reached the stream, just clearing from the last night's showers. A long transparent amber shallow, dimpled with fleeting silver rings by rising trout; a low cascade of green-veined snow; a deep dark pool of swirling orange-brown, walled in with heathery rocks, and paved with sandstone slabs and boulders, distorted by the changing refractions of the eddies,--sight delicious to the angler.

I commenced my sport at once, while Claude wandered up the glen to sketch a knoll of crags, on which a half-wild moorland pony, the only living thing in sight, stood staring and snuffing at the intruder, his long mane and tail streaming out wildly against the sky.

I had fished on for some hour or two; Claude had long since disappeared among the hills; I fancied myself miles from any human being, when a voice at my elbow startled me

'A bleak place for fishing this, sir!'

I turned; it was an old grey-whiskered labouring man, with pick and spade on shoulder, who had crept on me unawares beneath the wall of the neighbouring deer-cover. Keen honest eyes gleamed out from his brown, scarred, weather-beaten face; and as he settled himself against a rock with the deliberate intention of a chat, I commenced by asking after the landlord of those parts, well known and honoured both by sportsman and by farmer.

'He was gone to Malta--a warmer place that than Exmoor.'

'What! have you been in Malta?'

Yes, he had been in Malta, and in stranger places yet. He had been a sailor: he had seen the landing in Egypt, and heard the French cannon thundering vainly from the sand-hills on the English boats.

He had himself helped to lift Abercrombie up the ship's side to the death-bed of the brave. He had seen Caraccioli hanging at his own yard-arm, and heard (so he said, I know not how correctly) Lady Hamilton order out the barge herself, and row round the frigate of the murdered man, to glut her eyes with her revenge. He had seen, too, the ghastly corpse floating upright, when Nelson and the enchantress met their victim, returned from the sea-depths to stare at them, as Banquo's ghost upon Macbeth. But she was 'a mortal fine woman, was Lady Hamilton, though she was a queer one, and cruel kind to the sailors; and many a man she saved from flogging; and one from hanging, too; that was a marine that got a-stealing; for Nelson, though he was kind enough, yet it was a word and a blow with him; and quite right he, sir; for there be such rascals on board ship, that if you ain't as sharp with them as with wild beastesses, no man's life, nor the ship's neither, would be worth a day's purchase.'

So he, with his simple straightforward notions of right and wrong worth, much maudlin unmerciful indulgence which we hear in these days: and yet not going to the bottom of the matter either, as we shall see in the next war. But, rambling on, he told me how he had come home, war-worn and crippled, to marry a wife and get tall sons, and lay his bones in his native village; till which time (for death to the aged poor man is a Sabbath, of which he talks freely, calmly, even joyously) 'he just got his bread, by the squire's kindness, patching and mending at the stone deer-fences.'

I gave him something to buy tobacco, and watched him as he crawled away, with a sort of stunned surprise. And he had actually seen Nelson sit by Lady Hamilton! It was so strange, to have that gay Italian bay, with all its memories,--the orgies of Baiae, and the unburied wrecks of ancient towns, with the smoking crater far above; and the world-famous Nile-mouths and those great old wars, big with the destinies of the world; and those great old heroes, with their awful deeds for good and evil, all brought so suddenly and livingly before me, up there in the desolate moorland, where the deer, and birds, and heath, and rushes were even as they had been from the beginning. Like Wordsworth with his Leech-Gatherer (a poem which I, in spite of laughter, must rank among his very highest), -

'While he was talking thus, the lonely place, The old man's shape, and speech--all troubled me; In my mind's eye I seemed to see him pace About the weary moors continually, Wandering about alone and silently.

. . . and when he ended, I could have laughed myself to scorn to find In that decrepit man so firm a mind.'

Just then I heard a rustle, and turning, saw Claude toiling down to me over the hill-side. He joined me, footsore and weary, but in great excitement; for the first minute or two he could not speak, and at last, -

'Oh, I have seen such a sight!--but I will tell you how it all was.

After I left you I met a keeper. He spoke civilly to me--you know my antipathy to game and those who live thereby: but there was a wild, bold, self-helping look about him and his gun alone there in the waste--and after all he was a man and a brother. Well, we fell into talk, and fraternized; and at last he offered to take me to a neighbouring hill and show me "sixty head of red-deer all together;"

and as he spoke he looked quite proud of his words. "I was lucky,"

he said, "to come just then, for the stags had all just got their heads again." At which speech I wondered; but was silent, and followed him, I, Claude the c.o.c.kney, such a walk as I shall never take again. Behold these trousers--behold these hands! scratched to pieces by crawling on all-fours through the heather. But I saw them.'

'A sight worth many pairs of plaid trousers?'

'Worth Saint Chrysostom's seven years' nakedness on all-fours! And so I told the fellow, who by some cunning calculations about wind, and sun, and so forth, which he imparted to my uncomprehending ears, brought me suddenly to the top of a little crag, below which, some hundred yards off, the whole herd stood, stags, hinds--but I can't describe them. I have not brought away a sc.r.a.p of sketch, though we watched them full ten minutes undiscovered; and then the stare, and the toss of those antlers, and the rush! That broke the spell with me; for I had been staring stupidly at them, trying in vain to take in the sight, with the strangest new excitement heaving and boiling up in my throat; and at the sound of their hoofs on the turf I woke, and found the keeper staring, not at them, but at me, who, I verily believe, had something very like a tear in these excitable eyes of mine.'

'"Ain't you well, sir?" said he. "You needn't be afeard; it's only at the fall of the year the stags is wicked."

'I don't know what I answered at first; but the fellow understood me when I shook his hand frantically, and told him that I should thank him to the last day of my life, and that I would not have missed it for a thousand pounds. In part-proof whereof I gave him a sovereign on the spot, which seemed to clear my character in his eyes as much as the crying at the sight of a herd of deer had mystified it.'

'Claude, well-beloved,' said I, 'will you ever speak contemptuously of sportsmen any more?'

'"Do ma.n.u.s," I have been vilifying them, as one does most things in the world, only for want of understanding them. How shall I do penance? Go and take service with Edwin Landseer, as pupil, colour- grinder, footboy?'

'You will then be very near to a very great poet,' quoth I, 'and one whose works will become, as centuries roll on, more and more valuable to art and to science, and, possibly, to something higher than either.'

'I begin to guess your meaning,' answered Claude.

'So we lounged, and dreamt, and fished, in heathery Highland,' as Mr.

Clough would say, while the summer snipes flitted whistling up the shallow before us, and the soft, south-eastern clouds slid lazily across the sun, and the little trout snapped and dimpled at a tiny partridge hackle, with a twist of orange silk, whose elegance for shape and colour reconciled Claude's heart somewhat to my everlasting whipping of the water. When as last:-

'You seem to have given up catching anything. You have not stirred a fish in this last two pools, except that little saucy yellow shrimp, who jumped over your fly, and gave a spiteful slap at it with his tail.'

Too true; and what could be the cause? Had that impudent sand-piper frightened all the fish on his way up? Had an otter paralysed them with terror for the morning? Or had a stag been down to drink? We saw the fresh slot of his broad claws, by the bye, in the mud a few yards back.

'We must have seen the stag himself, if he had been here lately,'

said Claude.

'Mr. Landseer knows too well by this time that that is a non sequitur.'

'"I am no more a non sequitur than you are," answered the Cornish magistrate to the barrister.'

'Fish and deer, friend, see us purblind sons of men somewhat more quickly than we see them, fear sharpening the senses. Perhaps, after all, the fault is in your staring white-straw hat, a garment which has spoilt many a good day's fishing. Ah, no! there is the cause; the hat of a mightier than you--the thunder-spirit himself. Thor is at hand, while the breeze, awe-stricken, falls dead calm before his march. Behold, climbing above that eastern ridge, his huge powdered cauliflower-wig, barred with a grey horizontal handkerchief of mist.'

'Oh, profane and uncomely simile!--which will next, I presume, liken the coming hailstorm to hair-powder shaken from the said wig.'

'To shot rather than to powder. Flee, oh, flee to yonder pile of crags, and thank your stars that there is one at hand; for these mountain tornadoes are at once Tropic in their ferocity and Siberian in their cutting cold.'

Down it came. The brown hills vanished in white sheets of hail, first falling perpendicularly, then slanting and driving furiously before the cold blast which issued from the storm. The rock above us rang with the thunder-peals; and the lightning, which might have fallen miles away, seemed to our dazzled eyes to dive into the glittering river at our feet. We sat silent some half-hour, listening to the voice of One more mighty than ourselves; and it was long after the uproar had rolled away among the hills, and a steady, sighing sheet of warmer rains, from banks of low grey fog, had succeeded the rattling of the hail upon the crisp heather, that I turned to Claude.

'And now, since your heart is softened towards these wild, stag- hunting, trout fishing, jovial west-countrymen, consider whether it should not be softened likewise toward those old outlaw ballads which I have never yet been able to make you admire. They express feelings not yet extinct in the minds of a large portion of the lower orders, as you would know had you lived, like me, all your life in poaching counties, and on the edges of one forest after another,--feelings which must be satisfied, even in the highest development of the civilization of the future, for they are innate in every thoughtful and energetic race,--feelings which, though they have often led to crime, have far oftener delivered from swinish sensuality; the feelings which drove into the merry greenwood "Robin Hood, Scarlet, and John;" "Adam Bell, and Clym of the Cleugh, and William of Cloudislee;" the feelings which prompted one half of his inspiration to the nameless immortal who wrote the "Nutbrown Maid;"--feelings which could not then, and cannot now, be satisfied by the drudgery of a barbaric agriculture, which, without science, economy, or enterprise, offers no food for the highest instincts of the human mind, its yearnings after Nature, after freedom, and the n.o.ble excitement of self-dependent energy.'

Our talk ended: but the rain did not: and we were at last fain to leave our shelter, and let ourselves be blown by the gale (the difficulty being not to progress forward, but to keep our feet) back to the shed where our ponies were tied, and to canter home to Lynmouth, with the rain cutting our faces like showers of pebbles, and our little mountain ponies staggering against the wind, and more than once, if Londoners will believe me, blown sheer up against the bank by some mad gust, which rushed perpendicularly, not down, but up, the chasms of the glens below.

II.--THE COAST LINE.

It is four o'clock on a May morning, and Claude and I are just embarking on board a Clovelly trawling skiff, which, having disposed of her fish at various ports along the Channel, is about to run leisurely homewards with an ebb tide, and a soft north-easterly breeze.