Читать книгу The South Country онлайн

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So amiable, fair, so pure, so delicate,

So plump, so full, so fresh, her eyes so wondrous clear:

And first unto her lord, at Wandsworth doth appear,

That in the goodly court, of their great sovereign Tames,

There might no other speech be had amongst the streams,

But only of this Nymph, sweet Wandel, what she wore;

Of her complexion, grace, and how herself she bore.

Nor can I omit the Wiltshire and Berkshire canal, as it was fifteen years ago, between Swindon and Dauntsey, an unfrequented by-way through a quiet dairy country, and full of pike and tench among the weeds and under the tall water docks and willow herbs which even then threatened to subdue it as they now have done.

The chief roads make south, south-east, south-west and west from London; almost the only road going east and west and not touching London is the old road known between Winchester and Canterbury as the Pilgrims’ Way.

Most of the towns are small market towns, manufacturing chiefly beer; or they are swollen, especially in the neighbourhood of London, as residential quarters on lines of railway or as health and pleasure resorts on the sea. But any man used to maps will be wiser on these matters in an hour than I am. For what I have sought is quiet and as complete a remoteness as possible from towns, whether of manufactures, of markets or of cathedrals. I have used a good many maps in my time, largely to avoid the towns; but I confess that I prefer to do without them and to go, if I have some days before me, guided by the hills or the sun or a stream—or, if I have one day only, in a rough circle, trusting, by taking a series of turnings to the left or a series to the right, to take much beauty by surprise and to return at last to my starting-point. On a dull day or cloudy night I have often no knowledge of the points of the compass. I never go out to see anything. The signboards thus often astonish me. I wish, by the way, that I had noted down more of the names on the signboards at the cross-roads. There is a wealth of poetry in them, as in that which points—by a ford, too—first, to Poulner and Ringwood; second, to Gorley and Fordingbridge; third, to Linwood and Broomy: and another pointing to Fordingbridge, to Ringwood, and to Cuckoo Hill and Furze Hill: and another in the parish of Pentlow, pointing to Foxearth and Sudbury, to Cavendish and Clare, and to Belchamps and Yeldham. Castles, churches, old houses, of extraordinary beauty or interest, have never worn out any of my shoe leather except by accident. I like to come upon them—usually without knowing their names and legends—but do not lament when chance takes me a hundred times out of their way. Nor have I ever been to Marlow to think about Shelley, or to Winterslow for Hazlitt’s sake; and I enter Buriton many times without remembering Gibbon. They would move me no more than the statue of a man and a fat horse (with beribboned tail), which a grateful countryside erected to William III in the market square at Petersfield. I prefer any country church or chapel to Winchester or Chichester or Canterbury Cathedral, just as I prefer “All round my hat,” or “Somer is icumen in,” to Beethoven. Not that I dislike the cathedrals, or that I do not find many pleasures amongst them. But they are incomprehensible and not restful. I feel when I am within them that I know why a dog bays at the moon. They are much more difficult or, rather, I am more conscious in them of my lack of comprehension, than the hills or the sea; and I do not like the showmen, the smell and look of the museum, the feeling that it is admiration or nothing, and all the well-dressed and flyblown people round about. I sometimes think that religious architecture is a dead language, majestic but dead, that it never was a popular language. Have some of these buildings lived too long, been too well preserved, so as to oppress our little days with too permanent an expression of the passing things? The truth is that, though the past allures me, and to discover a cathedral for myself would be an immense pleasure, I have no historic sense and no curiosity. I mention these trivial things because they may be important to those who read what I am paid for writing. I have read a great deal of history—in fact, a university gave me a degree out of respect for my apparent knowledge of history—but I have forgotten it all, or it has got into my blood and is present in me in a form which defies evocation or analysis. But as far as I can tell I am pure of history. Consequently I prefer the old brick houses round the cathedral, and that avenue of archaic bossy limes to the cathedral itself with all its turbulent quiet and vague antiquity. The old school also close at hand! I was there after the end of the term once, and two boys were kicking a football in a half-walled court; it was a bright, cold, windy April afternoon; and the ancient brick was penetrated with their voices and the sound of the ball, and I thought there could be nothing lovelier than that court, the pleasant walls, and the broad playing fields in sight of a smooth noble hill and a temple of dark firs on top. I was not thinking of Winchester or of any one older than the fondest son of that “mother, more than mother,” and little of him; but was merely caught up by and with the harmony of man and his work, of two children playing, and of the green downs and windy sky.