Seeing Europe with Famous Authors Volume II Part 1

Seeing Europe with Famous Authors.

by Francis W. Halsey.

Vol. II

Great Britain And Ireland, Part Two

IV

ENGLISH LITERARY SHRINES

(_Continued_)

STOKE POGIS [Footnote: From "Reminiscences of a Journalist." By special arrangement with, and by permission of, the publishers, Houghton, Mifflin Co. Copyright, 1884. Mr. Congdon was, for many years, under Horace Greeley, a leading editorial writer for the New York "Tribune."]

BY CHARLES T. CONGDON

It was a comfort as I came out of the Albert Memorial Chapel, and rejoined nature upon the Terrace, to mutter to myself those fine lines which not a hundred years ago everybody knew by heart: "The boast of heraldry, the pomp of power, And all that beauty, all that wealth ere gave, Await alike th' inevitable hour. The paths of glory lead but to the grave,"--a verse which I found it not bad to remember as in the Chapel Royal I gazed upon the helmets, and banners, and insignia of many a defunct Knight of the Garter. I wondered if posterity would care much for George the Fourth, or Third, or Second, or First, whose portraits I had just been gazing at; I was sure that a good many would remember the recluse scholar of Pembroke Hall, the Cambridge Professor of Modern History, who cared for nothing but ancient history; who projected twenty great poems, and finished only one or two; who spent his life in commenting upon Plato and studying botany, and in writing letters to his friend Mason; and who with a real touch of Pindar in his nature, was content to fiddle-faddle away his life. He died at last of a most unpoetical gout in the stomach, leaving behind him a cartload of memoranda, and fifty fragments of fine things; and yet I, a stranger from a far distant sh.o.r.e, was about to make a little pilgrimage to his tomb, and all for the sake of that "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard," which has so held its own while a hundred bulkier things have been forgotten.

The church itself is an interesting but not remarkable edifice, old, small, and solidly built in a style common enough in England. Nothing, however, could be more in keeping with the a.s.sociations of the scene.

The very humility of the edifice has a property of its own, for anything more magnificent would jar upon the feelings, as the monument in the Park does most decidedly. It was Gray's wish that he might be buried here, near the mother whom he loved so well; otherwise he could hardly have escaped the posthumous misfortune of a tomb in Westminster Abbey or St. Paul's. In such case the world would have missed one of the most charming of a.s.sociations, and the great poem the most poetical of its features. For surely it was fit that he who sang so touchingly of the dead here sleeping, should find near them his last resting-place; that when the pleasant toil in libraries was over, the last folio closed by those industrious hands, the last ma.n.u.script collated, and the last flower picked for the herbarium, he who here so tenderly sang of the emptiness of earthly honors and the nothingness of worldly success should be buried humbly near those whom he best loved, and where all the moral of his teaching might be perpetually ill.u.s.trated. I wondered, as I stood there, whether Horace Walpole ever thought it worth his while, for the sake of that early friendship which was so rudely broken, to come there, away from the haunts of fashion, or from his plaything villa at Strawberry Hill, to muse for a moment over the grave of one who rated pedigrees and peerages at their just value. Probably my Lord Orford was never guilty of such a piece of sentimentality. He was thinking too much of his pictures and coins and eternal bric-a-brac for that.

A stone set in the outside of the church indicates the spot near which the poet is buried. I was very anxious to see the interior of the edifice, and, fortunately I found the s.e.xton busy in the neighborhood.

There was nothing, however, remarkable to be seen, after sixpence had opened the door, except perhaps the very largest pew which these eyes ever beheld. It belonged to the Penn family, descendants of drab-coated and sweet-voiced William Penn, whose seat is in the neighborhood. I do not know what that primitive Quaker would have said to such an enormous reservation of s.p.a.ce in the house of G.o.d for the sole use and behoof of two or three aristocratic worshipers. Probably few of my readers have ever seen such a pew as that. It was not so much a pew as a room. It was literally walled off, and quite set apart from the plebeian portion of the sanctuary, was carpeted, and finished with comfortable arm-chairs, and in the middle of it was a stove. The occupants could look out and over at the altar, but the rustics could not look in and at them. The Squire might have smoked or read novels, or my lady might have worked worsted or petted her poodle through the service, without much scandal.

The pew monopolized so much room that there was little left for the remainder of the "miserable offenders," but I suspect that there was quite enough for all who came to pray. For it was, as I have said, literally a country church; and those who sleep near it were peasants.

It is difficult to comprehend the whole physiognomy of the poem, if I may use the expression, without seeing the spot which it commemorates. I take it for granted that the reader is familiar with it. There are "those rugged elms," and there is "that yew tree's shade." There are "the frail memorials," "with uncouth rhymes and shapeless sculpture decked;" there "the name, the years, spelt by the unlettered muse;" and the holy texts strewn round "that teach the rustic moralist to die."

There is still "the ivy-mantled tower," tho the "moping owl" that evening did not "to the moon complain," partly because there was no moon to complain to, and possibly because there was no moping owl in the tower. But there was one little circ.u.mstance which I may be pardoned for mentioning. Gray, somehow, has the reputation of being an artificial poet, yet for one who wrote so little poetry he makes a good many allusions to childhood and children. As I pa.s.sed through the Park on my way to the churchyard, I encountered a group of merry boys and girls playing about the base of the monument; and I recalled that verse which Gray wrote for the Elegy, and afterward discarded, under the impression that it made the parenthesis too long.

There scatter'd oft, the earliest of the year, By hands unseen are showers of violets found; The redbreast loves to build and warble there, And little footsteps lightly print the ground.

I have often wondered how Gray could bear to give up these sweet, tender and most natural lines. I have sometimes surmised that he thought them a little too much like Ambrose Philips's verses about children--Namby Pamby Philips, as the Pope set nicknamed that unfortunate writer.

I lingered about the churchyard until that long twilight, of which we know nothing in America, began to grow dimmer and dimmer. If it was still before, it seemed all the stiller now. I was glad that I had waited so long, because by doing so I understood all the better how true the Elegy is to nature. The neighborhood, with its agreeable variety of meadow and wood, has all the hundred charms of the gentle and winning English scenery. The hush, hardly broken even by the songs of the birds, brought forcibly to my mind that beautiful line of the Elegy: "And all the air a solemn stillness holds;" while that other line: "Now fades the glimmering landscape on the sight," is exactly true. The landscape did glimmer, and as I watched the sun go down, I pleased myself with the fancy that I was sitting just where the poet sat, as he revolved those lines which the world has got by heart. Just then came the cry of the cattle, and I knew why Gray wrote: "The lowing herd winds slowly o'er the lea," nor did I fail to encounter a plowman homeward plodding his weary way.

As I strolled listlessly back to the station, there was such a serenity on the earth about me, and in the sky above me, that I could easily give myself to gentle memories and poetic dreams. I recalled the springtime of life, when I learned this famous Elegy by heart as a pleasant task, and, as yet unsophisticated by critical notions, accepted it as perfect.

I thought of innumerable things which I had read about it; of the long and patient revision which its author gave it, year after year, keeping it in his desk, and then sending it, a mere pamphlet, with no flourish of trumpets, into the world. Many an ancient figure came to lend animation to the scene. Horace Walpole in his lace coat and spruce wig went mincing by; the mother of Gray, with her sister, measured lace for the customers who came to her little shop in London; the wags of Pembroke College, graceless varlets, raise an alarm of fire that they may see the frightened poet drop from the window, half dead with alarm; old Foulis, the Glasgow printer, volunteers to send from his press such, a luxurious edition of Gray's poems as the London printers can not match; Dr. Johnson, holding the page to his eyes, growls over this stanza, and half-grudgingly praises that. I had spent perhaps the pleasantest day which the fates vouchsafed me during my sojourn in England; and here I was back again in Slough Station, ready to return to the noisy haunts of men. The train came rattling up, and the day with Gray was over.

HAWORTH [Footnote: From "A Literary Pilgrimage." By arrangement with, and by permission of, the publishers, J. B. Lippincott Co.

Copyright, 1895.]

BY THEODORE F. WOLFE

Other Bronte shrines have engaged us,--Guiseley, where Patrick Bronte was married and Neilson worked as a mill-girl; the lowly Thornton home, where Charlotte was born; the cottage where she visited Harriet Martineau; the school where she found Caroline Helstone and Rose and Jessy Yorke; the Fieldhead, Lowood, and Thornfield of her tales; the Villette where she knew her hero; but it is the bleak Haworth hilltop where the Brontes wrote the wonderful books and lived the pathetic lives that most attracts and longest holds our steps. Our way is along Airedale, now a highway of toil and trade, desolated by the need of hungry poverty and greed of hungrier wealth; meads are replaced by blocks of grimy huts, groves are supplanted by factory chimneys that a.s.soil earth and heaven, the one "shining" stream is filthy with the refuse of many mills.

At Keighley our walk begins, and altho we have no peas in our "Pilgrim shoon," the way is heavy with memories of the sad sisters Bronte who so often trod the dreary miles which bring us to Haworth. The village street, steep as a roof, has a pavement of rude stones, upon which the wooden shoes of the villagers clank with an unfamiliar sound. The dingy houses of gray stone, barren and ugly in architecture, are huddled along the incline and encroach upon the narrow street. The place and its situation are a proverb of ugliness in all the countryside; one dweller in Airedale told us that late in the evening of the last day of creation it was found that a little rubbish was left, and out of that Haworth was made. But, grim and rough as it is, the genius of a little woman has made the place ill.u.s.trious and draws to it visitors from every quarter of the world. We are come in the "glory season" of the moors, and as we climb through the village we behold above and beyond it vast undulating sweeps of amethyst-tinted hills rising circle beyond circle,--all now one great expanse of purple bloom stirred by zephyrs which waft to us the perfume of the heather.

At the hilltop we come to the Black Bull Inn, where one Bronte drowned his genius in drink, and from our apartment here we look upon all the shrines we seek. The inn stands at the churchyard gates, and is one of the landmarks of the place. Long ago preacher Grimshaw flogged the loungers from its taproom into chapel; here Wesley and Whitefield lodged when holding meetings on the hilltop; here Bronte's predecessor took refuge from his riotous parishioners, finally escaping through the low eas.e.m.e.nt at the back,--out of which poor Branwell Bronte used to vault when his sisters asked for him at the door. This inn is a quaint structure, low-eaved and cosy; its furniture is dark with age. We sleep in a bed once occupied by Henry J. Raymond, [Footnote: In the editorial sense, the founder of the New York "Times." Mr. Raymond died in 1869, eighteen years after the paper was started.] and so lofty that steps are provided to ascend its heights. Our meals are served in the old-fashioned parlor to which Branwell came. In a nook between the fireplace and the before-mentioned eas.e.m.e.nt stood the tall arm-chair, with square seat and quaintly carved back, which was reserved for him.

The landlady denied that he was summoned to entertain travelers here; "he never needed to be sent for, he came fast enough of himself." His wit and conviviality were usually the life of the circle, but at times he was mute and abstracted and for hours together "would just sit and sit in his corner there." She described him as a "little, red-haired, light-complexioned chap, cleverer than all his sisters put together.

What they put in their books they got from him," quoth she, reminding us of the statement in Grundy's Reminiscences that Branwell declared he invented the plot and wrote the major part of "Wuthering Heights."

Certain it is he possest transcending genius and that in this room that genius was slain. Here he received the message of renunciation from his depraved mistress which finally wrecked his life; the landlady, entering after the messenger had gone, found him in a fit on the floor. Emily Bronte's rescue of her dog, an incident recorded in "Shirley," occurred at the inn door.

The graveyard is so thickly sown with blackened tombstones that there is scant s.p.a.ce for blade or foliage to relieve its dreariness, and the villagers, for whom the yard is a thoroughfare, step from tomb to tomb; in the time of the Brontes the village women dried their linen on these graves. Close to the wall which divides the churchyard from the vicarage is a plain stone set by Charlotte Bronte to mark the grave of Tabby, the faithful servant who served the Brontes from their childhood till all but Charlotte were dead. The very ancient church-tower still "rises dark from the stony enclosure of its yard;" the church itself has been remodeled and much of its romantic interest destroyed. No interments have been made in the vaults beneath the aisles since Mr. Bronte was laid there. The site of the Bronte pew is by the chancel; here Emily sat in the farther corner, Anne next and Charlotte by the door, within a foot of the spot where her ashes now lie.

A former sacristan remembered to have seen Thackeray and Miss Martineau sitting with Charlotte in the pew. And here, almost directly above her sepulcher, she stood one summer morning and gave herself in marriage to the man who served for her as "faithfully and long as did Jacob for Rachel." The Bronte tablet in the wall bears a uniquely pathetic record, its twelve lines registering eight deaths, of which Mr. Bronte's at the age of eighty-five, is the last. On a side aisle is a beautiful stained window inscribed "To the Glory of G.o.d, in Memory of Charlotte Bronte, by an American citizen." The list shows that most of the visitors come from America, and it was left for a dweller in that far land to set up here almost the only voluntary memento of England's great novelist. A worn page of the register displays the tremulous autograph of Charlotte as she signs her maiden name for the last time, and the signatures of the witnesses to her marriage,--Miss Wooler, of "Roe Head," Ellen Nussy, who is the E of Charlotte's letters and the Caroline of "Shirley."

The vicarage and its garden are out of a corner of the churchyard and separated from it by a low wall. A lane lies along one side of the churchyard and leads from the street to the vicarage gates. The garden, which was Emily's care, where she tended stunted shrubs and borders of unresponsive flowers and where Charlotte planted the currant-bushes, is beautiful with foliage and flowers, and its boundary wall is overtopped by a screen of trees which shuts out the depressing prospect of the graves from the vicarage windows and makes the place seem less "a churchyard home" than when the Brontes inhabited it. The dwelling is of gray stone, two stories high, of plain and somber aspect. A wing is added, the little window-panes are replaced by larger squares, the stone floors are removed or concealed, curtains--forbidden by Mr. Bronte's dread of fire--shade the window, and the once bare interior is furbished and furnished in modern style; but the arrangement of the apartments is unchanged.

Most interesting of these is the Bronte parlor, at the left of the entrance; here the three curates of "Shirley" used to take tea with Mr.

Bronte and were upbraided by Charlotte for their intolerance; here the sisters discuss their plots and read each other's MSS.; here they trans.m.u.ted the sorrows of their lives into the stories which make the name of Bronte immortal; here Emily, "her imagination occupied with Wuthering Heights," watched in the darkness to admit Branwell coming late and drunken from the Black Bull; here Charlotte, the survivor of all, paced the night-watches in solitary anguish, haunted by the vanished faces, the voices forever stilled, the echoing footsteps that came no more. Here, too, she lay in her coffin. The room behind the parlor was fitted by Charlotte for Nichols's study. On the right was Bronte's study, and behind it the kitchen, where the sisters read with their books propt on the table before them while they worked, and where Emily (prototype of "Shirley"), bitten by a dog at the gate of the lane, took one of Tabby's glowing irons from the fire and cauterized the wound, telling no one till danger was past.

Above the parlor is the chamber in which Charlotte and Emily died, the scene of Nichols's loving ministrations to his suffering wife. Above Bronte's study was his chamber; the adjoining children's study was later Branwell's apartment and the theater of the most terrible tragedies of the stricken family; here that ill-fated youth writhed in the horrors of mania-a-potu; here Emily rescued him--stricken with drunken stupor--from his burning couch, as "Jane Eyre" saved Rochester; here he breathed out his blighted life erect upon his feet, his pockets filled with love-letters from the perfidious woman who brought his ruin. Even now the isolated site of the parsonage, its environment of graves and wild-moors, its exposure to the fierce winds of the long winters, make it unspeakably dreary; in the Brontes' time it must have been cheerless indeed. Its influence darkened the lives of the inmates and left its fateful impression upon the books here produced. Visitors are rarely admitted to the vicarage; among those against whom its doors have been closed is the gifted daughter of Charlotte's literary idol, to whom "Jane Eyre" was dedicated, Thackeray.

By the vicarage lane were the cottage of Tabby's sister, the school the Brontes daily visited, and the s.e.xton's dwelling where the curates lodged. Behind the vicarage a savage expanse of gorse and heather rises to the horizon and stretches many miles away; a path oft-trodden by the Brontes leads between low walls from their home to this open moor, their habitual resort in childhood and womanhood. The higher plateaus afford a wide prospect, but, despite the August bloom and fragrance and the delightful play of light and shadow along the sinuous sweeps, the aspect of the bleak, treeless, houseless waste of uplands is even now dispiriting; when frosts have destroyed its verdure, and wintry skies frown above, its gloom and desolation must be terrible beyond description. Remembering that the sisters found even these usually dismal moors a welcome relief from their tomb of a dwelling, we may appreciate the utter dreariness of their situation and the pathos of Charlotte's declaration, "I always dislike to leave Haworth, it takes so long to be content again after I return."

GAD'S HILL [Footnote: From "A Literary Pilgrimage." By arrangement with, and by permission of, the publishers, J. B. Lippincott Co.

Copyright, 1895.]

BY THEODORE F. WOLFE

"To go to Gad's Hill," said d.i.c.kens, in a note of invitation, "you leave Charing Cross at nine o'clock by North Kent Railway for Higham." Guided by these directions and equipped with a letter from d.i.c.kens's son, we find ourselves gliding eastward among the chimneys of London and, a little later, emerging into the fields of Kent,--Jingle's region of "apples, cherries, hops, and women." The Thames is on our left; we pa.s.s many river-towns,--Dartford where Wat Tyler lived, Gravesend where Pocahontas died,--but most of our way is through the open country, where we have glimpses of "fields," "parks," and leafy lanes, with here and there picturesque camps of gypsies or of peripatetic rascals "goin'

a-hoppin.'" From wretched Higham a walk of half an hour among orchards and between hedges of wild-rose and honeysuckle brings us to the hill which Shakespeare and d.i.c.kens have made cla.s.sic ground, and soon we see, above the tree tops, the glittering vane which surmounted the home of the world's greatest novelist.

The name Gad's (Vagabond's) Hill is a survival of the time when the depredations of highwaymen upon "pilgrims going to Canterbury with rich offerings and traders riding to London with fat purses" gave to this spot the ill repute it had in Shakespeare's day; it was here he located Falstaff's great exploit. The tuft of evergreens which crowns the hill about d.i.c.kens' retreat is the remnant of thick woods once closely bordering the highway, in which the "men in buckram" lay concealed, and the robbery of the Franklin was committed in front of the spot where the d.i.c.kens house stands. By this road pa.s.sed Chaucer, who had property near by, gathering from the pilgrims his "Canterbury Tales." In all time to come the great master of romance who came here to live and die will be worthily a.s.sociated with Shakespeare and Chaucer in the renown of Gad's Hill.

In becoming possessor of this place d.i.c.kens realized a dream of his boyhood and ambition of his life. In one of his travelers' sketches he introduces a "queer small boy" (himself) gazing at Gad's Hill House and predicting his future ownership, which the author finds annoying "because it happens to be my house and I believe what he said was true."

When at last the place was for sale, d.i.c.kens did not wait to examine it; he never was inside the house until he went to direct its repair.

Eighteen hundred pounds was the price; a thousand more were expended for enlargement of the grounds and alterations of the house, which, despite his declaration that he had "stuck bits upon it in all manner of ways,"

did not greatly change it from what it was when it became the goal of his childish aspirations. At first it was his summer residence merely,--his wife came with him the first summer,--but three years later he sold Tavistock House, and Gad's Hill was thenceforth his home. From the bustle and din of the city he returned to the haunts of his boyhood to find restful quiet and time for leisurely work among these "blessed woods and fields" which had ever held his heart. For nine years after the death of d.i.c.kens Gad's Hill was occupied by his oldest son; its ownership has since twice or thrice changed.

Its elevated site and commanding view render it one of the most conspicuous, as it is one of the most lovely, spots in Kent. The mansion is an unpretentious, old-fashioned, two-storied structure of fourteen rooms. Its brick walls are surmounted by Mansard roofs above which rises a bell-turret; a pillared portico, where d.i.c.kens sat with his family on summer evenings, shades the front entrance; wide bay-windows project upon either side; flowers and vines clamber upon the walls, and a delightfully home-like air pervades the place. It seems withal a modest seat for one who left half a million dollars at his death. At the right of the entrance-hall we see d.i.c.kens's library and study, a cosy room shown in the picture of "The Empty Chair;" here are shelves which held his books; the panels he decorated with counterfeit bookbacks; the nook where perched, the mounted remains of his raven, the "Grip" of "Barnaby Rudge." By this bay-window, whence he could look across the lawn to the cedars beyond the highway, stood his chair and the desk where he wrote many of the works by which the world will know him always. Behind the study was his billiard-room, and upon the opposite side of the hall the parlor, with the dining-room adjoining it at the back, both bedecked with the many mirrors which delighted the master.

Opening out of these rooms is a conservatory, paid for out of "the golden shower from America" and completed but a few days before d.i.c.kens'

death, holding yet the ferns he tended. The dining-room was the scene of much of that emphatic hospitality which it pleased the novelist to dispense, his exuberant spirits making him the leader in all the jollity and conviviality of the board. Here he compounded for bibulous guests his famous "cider-cup of Gad's Hill," and at the same table he was stricken with death; on a couch beneath yonder window, the one nearest the hall, he died on the anniversary of the railway accident which so frightfully imperiled his life. From this window we look out upon a lawn decked with shrubbery and see across undulating cornfields his beloved Cobham. From the parqueted hall, stairs lead to the modest chambers--that of d.i.c.kens being above the drawing-room. He lined the stairway with prints of Hogarth's works, and declared he never came down the stairs without pausing to wonder at the sagacity and skill which had produced these masterful pictures of human life.

The house is invested with roses, and parterres of the red geraniums which the master loved are ranged upon every side. It was some fresh manifestation of his pa.s.sion for these flowers that elicited from his daughter the averment, "Papa, I think when you are an angel your wings will be made of looking-gla.s.ses and your crown of scarlet geraniums."

Beneath a rose-tree not far from the window where d.i.c.kens died, a bed blooming with blue lobelia holds the tiny grave of "d.i.c.k" and the tender memorial of the novelist to that "Best of Birds." The row of gleaming limes which shadow the porch was planted by d.i.c.kens's own hands. The pedestal of the sundial upon the lawn is a ma.s.sive bal.u.s.trade of the old stone bridge at nearby Rochester, which little David Copperfield crossed "footsore and weary" on his way to his aunt, and from which Pickwick contemplated the castle-ruin, the cathedral, the peaceful Medway. At the left of the mansion are the carriage-house and the school-room of d.i.c.kens' sons. In another portion of the grounds are his tennis-court and the bowling-green which he prepared, where he became a skilful and tireless player. The broad meadow beyond the lawn was a later purchase, and the many limes which beautify it were rooted by d.i.c.kens. Here numerous cricket-matches were played, and he would watch the players or keep the score "The whole day long."

It was in this meadow that he rehea.r.s.ed his readings, and his talking, laughing, weeping, and gesticulating here "all to himself" excited among his neighbors suspicion of his insanity. From the front lawn a tunnel constructed by d.i.c.kens pa.s.ses beneath the highway to "The Wilderness," a thickly-wooded shrubbery, where magnificent cedars up-rear their venerable forms and many somber firs, survivors of the forest which erst covered the countryside, cl.u.s.ter upon the hill top. Here d.i.c.kens's favorite dog, the "Linda" of his letters, lies buried. Amid the leafy seclusion of this retreat, and upon the very spot where Falstaff was routed by Hal and Poins ("the eleven men in buckram"), d.i.c.kens erected the chalet sent to him in pieces by Fechter, the upper room of which--up among the quivering boughs, where "birds and b.u.t.terflies fly in and out, and green branches shoot in at the windows"--d.i.c.kens lined with mirrors and used as his study in summer. Of the work produced at Gad's Hill--"A Tale of Two Cities," "The Uncommercial Traveler," "Our Mutual Friend,"

"The Mystery of Edwin Drood," and many tales and sketches of "All the Year Round"--much was written in this leaf-environed nook; here the master wrought through the golden hours of his last day of conscious life, here he wrote his last paragraph and at the close of that June day let fall his pen, never to take it up again. From the place of the chalet we behold the view which delighted the heart of d.i.c.kens--his desk was so placed that his eyes would rest upon this view whenever he raised them from his work--the fields of waving corn, the green expanse of meadows, the sail-dotted river.