TRAVELS IN SUSSEX.*
Mn. JENNINGS has come within an ace of writing a classic, or some- thing very like it. Without putting it on the same level as White's Selborne, or Mr. Dudley Warner's Summer in Illy Garden, we can say that he has given us a delightful story of his walks and rambles through Sussex and Surrey, a story which some people will like to read twice. He has gone to familiar places, and seen them from unfamiliar spots. Ile " babbles of green fields," but not as the picturesque hunter does. We hear much of butterflies, and flowers, and birds, but there is no scientific tittle-tattle fit for the " Transactions of the Pickwick Club," and corresponding very much to the celebrated paper communicated by Samuel Pickwick, entitled " Speculations on the Sources of the Hampstead Ponds, with some Observations on the Theory of the Tittle-bats." He has walked about Winchelsea, and Rye, and Dorking, and Redhill, with no particular mission, but merely as a keen lover of nature, with a passion for English scenery, which he betrays, not in long-winded harangues, but in blithe and cheer- ful appreciation of the simple and unobtrusive charms of wild flowers and singing birds. The sight of the first primrose or of a few daisies that had struggled through the winter has been re- ward enough for a long trudge through muddy Sussex lanes, which almost suck the boots off a traveller's feet ; and he has * Field-Paths and Green Lanes. By Louie J. Jennings. Illustrated by J. W. Wbymper. London: John Murray.
been cheered, after spending a miserable night in the "White Horse " at Haalemere, over a tap-room filled with riotous drovers, quarrelling, swearing, and drinking over a game of dominoes, by seeing " the morn in russet mantle clad " walking " o'er the dew of yon high eastern hill," to wit, Hindhead, well known in old coaching days. We observe that he has managed to open the lips of the usually dumb folk of Sussex. Ho has picked up quaint sayings and odd scraps of information from people, "who are as shy of the tourists who hunt in couples as they are of the wild man who flies past them on a bicycle."
Very little real beauty has been passed over by Mr. Jennings in the lanes and paths along which he has musingly trudged. Still we have felt some touches of jealousy at finding lovely bits of country unmentioned and charming walks untraversed. Mr. Jennings must permit us to tell him that there are still "Yarrows unvisited " for him in Surrey and Sussex. He might have said less about the hackneyed and gingerbread beauties of Hastings ; and taking a journey of a few miles, he might have told us something of the woods and grassy slopes and undulating pastures—a pic- ture of sweetness, the fit and peaceful cemetery of the stormiest scene of English history—that lie round the old town of Battle. There is a walk for some three miles or more, winding along through meadow and coppice, by quiet-flowing stream-sides and silent pools, where the very pastoral silence seems to beget voices, and the air is full of misty shapes and sounds of " Haro l" and "Out, out !" for over these fields and rolling pastures the English were driven back inch .by inch by the Normans ; and the dark pools now/fringed with copse-wood, even as they were then, seem the remains of the Sanglac, " the Lake of Blood," near which Harold fell. Mr. Jennings's description of Winchelsea and Rye is abso- lutely accurate and full of lifelike touches, and he narrates the circumstances of his visit to the Mermaid Inn in the latter with a dash of humour of an American flavour. But we wonder much that he says so little of the curious and quite un-English expanse of country between the two old towns,—a wild stretch of treeless marsh-land, with one or two solitary farms, and the massive, gaunt form of Camber Castle rising from the plain ; an un- couth, half-formed offspring of the sea, over which still hang the fear of ague and fever, and legends of towns and villages suddenly submerged. We doubt, too, whether Mr. Jennings really explored old Winchelsea, where Thackeray picked up so much which he utilised in Denis Duval, and where any one with keen eyes will still find much to note. Had Mr. Jennings spent any time there, he would not have missed men- tioning the queer crypts or cellars in which the smugglers of Winchelsea stored their illicit brandy or lace. In fact, he has scampered much too fast through that part of the country. Had he lingered there, he would have heard from his wayside friends delightful stories of smuggling as carried on in quite modern times,—how men still living, or only recently dead, had shed the blood of several revenue officers in night encounters, and saved their necks by the leniency of interested Lewes juries ; how it was quite common to see a procession of men with kegs on their shoulders cross your lawn ; and how, if you looked the other way, as a neighbour ought, a keg of hollanda or a present of lace was sure to be left by some unknown donor.
We have been involuntarily tempted to compare Mr. Jennings's little volume with another, which it resembles in some respects. George Sand's Promenades Autour d'un Village is the story of ex- cursions in familiar places, of almost aimless walks in Berry, along the banks of the Indre—chere petite Indre froide et muette- or of the rocky Creuse, beloved of poets. A charm of both books is an unfeigned love of simple things, a certain chive'. rous affection for what lies neglected at one's door. Of course we do not find in Field-Paths the great touches which George Sand, even in her most trivial work, never fails to imprint. Mr. Jennings sees in the landscape little more than any one in robust health with a wholesome love of out-door things can observe. He does not make each day's journey a true idyll, each peasant whom he meets and talks with a figure of in- terest whom we quit with regret, each old house the subject of a sketch which brings before our eyes the life of its former- tenants as well as all its structural beauties. It is pleasant to hear Mr. Jennings protesting amid the beauties of Box Ilill against the profane presence of sandwich-papers and broken bottles, or hurling invectives against the restorers of Effingham or Pevensey churches. He has a good eye for the picturesque points of an old inn, like the " Star" at Alfriston, but we much prefer —it is no disrespect to Mr. Jennings to say so—to hear George sand discoursing of the graces and grandeurs of Berry and La Marche, and to watch her taking those short-cuts, known only to genius, which conduct from the meanest things of life to the highest.
Mr. Jennings got the country people to talk very freely with him, and not the least interesting passages are the reports of the conversations with his wayside acquaintances. He has a way of at once making for the churchyard as soon as he enters a place, and of gossiping with the sexton on funereal themes, One sexton explains to him, with ghastly coolness and much technical know- ledge, how you may determine whether a grave is an old grave or not. He talks with a wheezy clerk at Etchington, who propounds to him the following striking question :—" Can you tell me one thing, Sir? They do say as we all sprang from Adam and Eve, yet there be 95,000,000 of different names in the world. How do you account for that, Sir?" The clerk of Lodsworth, a philo- sopher, who thought this "a rum world," confided to him his sorrow that his seat in church had been moved by an improving, innovating rector back from the pulpit, and said that ho supposed it
was owing to " the march of intellect." He noted the odd ex- pressions used by the people, and he picked up from the lips of a
Sussex peasant some philological lore :-
" Two rough-looking mon were a little way ahead, and I was sur- prised to see them in such an out-of-the-way place, for they were evidently tramps, and very bad faces they had. Do you know these men?' I asked. ' Wait till wo nom up to 'em,' said ho, ' and I'll tell 'so.' Then when we had passed, and he had taken a sharp glance at them, he said, 'Ay, they bo runagates,'—i.e., ne'er-do-wells. I was de- lighted to get a present of this good old Biblical and Shakespearian word, and was almost equally pleased when my companion presently used the word mad in the sense of angry. This is what some people would call a genuine Americanism,—an Americanism' being in nine cases out of ten an old English word preserved in its ancient sense. My Etchington friend frequently made use of the expression, 'I reckon,' so that but for his misplaced &'s—and he dropped them all over the road, in a most reckless and amazing manner—ho might have been a Southern or Western American. He also used the word fall,' in speaking of the autumn. I am told that most hard-winged insects are commonly called bugs,' as in America,—thus wo bear of the lady-bug (lady-bird), tho May-bug (cockchafer), the June-bug (the green beetle), and so forth. I have heard the word axey' for ague in the Eastern States, just as it is used to this hour in many parts of Sussex."
Mr. Jennings visited all,the interesting old halls, and heard the usual number of blunders from the local cicerone. He questioned a man cleaning a clock in Lindfield Church as to some traces of painting on the walls, and received a vague description. " There used to be some one or other weighing out soles,' said the man, or so I understood him. A fishmonger ?' I asked. No; a hangel.'" He had interesting chats with strolling players, and he tells us of one roving Ophelia who " had drunk so much beer that her subsequent tumble into the stream did not surprise any of the audience." There are wayside arguments about the Labour question with people who complain that Canadian-made bags for
iced have driven English bags completely out of the field, and with reapers who ruefully murmur that " it be steam everywhere, a poor fellow don't get no chance." He discusses on a bridge at Wotton the land question with a man who believes that in 'America " the land is open to anybody,—to one as well as to another." He listens to Socialism talked in the inn at Caterham by a cross-
grained tramp who wishes to " emigrate to Canady and Horsetra,lia, where one man is as good as another ;" and he talks with tramps who have, of course, not tasted anything for a fortnight, and who indulge in a splutter of execrations because ho will not give them money. It is a pity that Mr. Jennings did not look a little more to the tombstone inscriptions, instead of giving up his attention so much to the old yews and churches, and almost equally old sextons. Sussex is peculiarly rich in the quaint literary efforts of the bucolic mind, and his book would have been brighter even than it is had ho noted down some of the epitaphs to be found in churchyards which we observe that he has visited. Such a book as this is the best proof that a true love of nature is abroad. here we find a gentleman scouring fields and lanes of Sussex and Surrey, peering into every hedge-row, noting every tree and wild flower, telling with delighted earnestness where the larks sang and the rooks cawed, and discovering at every turn, in every old homestead or churchyard, food for reflection and calm pleasure. " There aro," says he in his preface, " few things in life better worth living for than the pleasure of starting out on foot, in fair health and with no particular anxiety pressing upon the mind, for a long day amid all the beauties which nature spreads before her true lovers by every hedgerow and brook and hillside in England." Mr. Jenninga's book will convince many people of this for the first time.
Previous page
