CORRESPONDENCE.
HAUNTS OF ANCIENT PEACE.—III.
"And one, an English home. Grey twilight poured On dewy pastures, dewy trees, Softer than sleep ; all things in order stored, A haunt of ancient peace."
TENNYBON--" The Palace of Art."
To see one familiar with the leafy solitudes, the casual runnels, and the entangled boughs of St. Leonard's Forest, so ac- cessible from Field Place, it will, I think, at once seem true that, as so often occurred to me in days when I knew them well, they inspired Shelley, whether he was aware of it or not, with much of the descriptive poetry in "Alastor," and " Prome- theus Unbound." St. Leonard's Forest is very different, no doubt, from "the lone Chorasmian shore" or the "Etherial cliffs of Caucasus." But it is " a paradise of wildernesses ; " and we all know how the eye of genius enlarges and expands what it beholds into a wonder-world, large and luminous enough to satisfy its own transfiguring imagination. As a boy, Shelley must have often wandered under what would seem to him a boundless canopy of leaves, and through bracken that suggested to him the growth of tropical jungles. He was never in the East, and his descriptions of semi- tropical scenery are descriptions, for the most part, of English forests, made more grandiose and colossal to suit the assumed locality. But even here, how un-English Shelley was, and how much more accurately he afterwards described Italian landscape, sea, and sky, than he did those of the land of his own race ! He seemed at birth to be impreg- nated with the spirit of that year, 1792, in which he was born, and to be a true cosmopolitan son of the French Revo- lution. One cannot help thinking of him once again, when in the county of his origin, and driving through the scenes amid which his childhood was passed. Has it ever been remarked that Sussex gave birth to no less than four of our English poets,—Otway, Fletcher, Collins, and Shelley ? That, I suppose, should be set down to its honour. But in none of them perhaps were " blood and judgment so commingled " as they might have been. Pawn summa tenent. Serenity sits upon the heights; and the loftiest minds are haunts of ancient peace. The indulgent Chaucer, his strong, healthy English imagination lit by a luminous smile ; the high-bred Spenser, an English gentleman, if ever there was one, and the author of the memorable line,— " The noblest mind the best contentment has ;" the catholic Shakespeare, so catholic that, in an age of furious theological controversy, you cannot say whether he was a Catholic or a Protestant; the austere Milton, a trifle too austere perhaps, yet making amends for his austerity by the sublime uses to which he put it ; Wordsworth, the proud and blameless recluse, who loved England with almost too narrow and insular a passion; and finally, he whom we lost but yesterday, and who, when a great politician was once announced, observed : " I suppose I must see him ; but I dislike these fellows, they do not love their country ; "—are not these the names we think of, when we want to recall those who have the most accurately expressed the mind and heart of England, have the most fondly, yet faithfully, described its scenery, and have the most strikingly reflected in their lives its weighty and unwayward character. For there is a poetic as well as an apostolic succession; and contrasted with the long line of those Supreme Pontiffs of English Poetry, will not Shelley figure, notwithstanding his unsurpassed lyrical genius, almost as a brilliant heresiaroh ?
Such, at least, was the question which, without presuming to answer it, one perhaps not unnaturally propounds when driving through scenes where a great Sussex poet learned in suffering, if of a somewhat imaginary kind, what he taught in song. I thought, too—for one cannot well help moralising as, one leisurely traverses one's native land in genial August• weather—what a fortunate circumstance it has been for the- English people, that they can respect as well as admire their greatest writers ; whose names are not Rabelais, La Fontaine, Voltaire, Rousseau, who, by reason of so much that is un- pleasing in them, must be held to wear their laurel with a difference ; but Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton,. Wordsworth, Tennyson, all good reputable citizens, all pillars, of the Commonwealth, strengthening England by their conduct as much as by their genius. Sussex, it must be owned, produced none of these,—meet nurse though indeed it is for a poetic child, with its pastoral downs, as little changed since the time of Egbert as the sea itself on which they look, with its undulating stretches of- silent woodland, and, perhaps, most of all, with its deep-rutted miry lanes, where hedgerow and wild-flower have it all their own way, and in late summer or early autumn, call it which you will, have a special and surprising: charm for the loiterer. Never have I seen such bramble- flowers, whether of the blackberry or of the dewberry, as in the lanes round Storrington, where I passed a couple of' reposeful days. The pink-flowered bramble was everywhere. entangled and intertwined with the wild jessamine, doubly. christened Maiden's Bower and Traveller's Joy,—Maiden's• Bower, if you halt to rest ; Traveller's Joy, if you resume- your pack and trudge on again. The days were yet fairly' remote when it will be known by neither designation, and children with no dread of winter will playfully call it " Old' Man's Beard." Children were already about, for hopping-. time was soon to be here, and the elementary schools had already set them free from their tasks ; and everywhere there- were signs that they had passed, by hazel-nuts gathered before• they were ripe, and by wild-flowers plucked but to be flung; away. That, perhaps, seems peculiarly childish in its boot- less wantonness. But is it not better than gathering artificial weeds, as too many grown-up children do, only likewise to throw them away P I was startled by seeing approach a monk. in long white habit, bareheaded and tonsured, and for a moment I thought I must have been dreaming, and that I, was not in Sussex, but in Tuscany. The lane was so narrow,. we could not well have passed each other without a greeting, even had either desired to do so. But he had the fine manners, as well as the saintly look, of the raonasti.o, recluse, and we were soon in intimate discourse. His Order, he told me, wan- the Premonstratontian—from Pia Montr6, in France, where their founder, St. Norbert, though not a Frenchman, lb think, centuries ago established their head house—and his. own little abbey or convent was close by. Would I not see it ? His name was Brother Gabriel, for he was as yet not ordained priest, and he rather thought, but was not quite- sure, he should start that night for America. He named this as simply as I should have named my next driving stage, and it seemed no more important to him. Such, I conclude, is the result of holy obedience. He took me in,_ showed me the little chapel, the little refectory, the little library, and then said he must notify to the Prior what he- had done, who would himself bid me welcome. The Prior,. and the remaining members of the community, a mere- handful, are of French nationality, and have all the courtesy of their race. I know that Kent and Sussex have always. been homes of anti-Papal Puritanism, and I doubt if they have abated their repugnance to Rome. But here, in a Sussex village, were these foreign monks walking about in, their habit at every hour of the day, while at the same time I saw a group of young Englishmen, who are being "coached" for the Army, for the Indian Civil Service, and what nob, andr who were, for the moment, sitting on the village doorsteps, smoking cigarettes, previously to setting off to a cricket- match. How large, how hospitable, how magnanimous, in the literal sense, is this England of ours I I do the Premonstra- tentians at Storrington no wrong when I say they regard proselytism as a duty; and Brother Gabriel himself told me- that even a bribe of five shillings a night could not induce a. good, stout Puritan peasant-woman there to sit up with one of their " converts." But they themselves wander about,. unmolested and unrebuked, exiled by law from " Catholics France," but placidly tolerated in this happier land, and with their monastic inclosure, their belfry, their garb, their active charity, making Storrington, still more than it naturally is, a haunt of ancient peace.
This aspect of ancientness, which perforce is associated with the feeling of peace, and which greets you almost -everywhere in the counties through which we drove, is most noticeable, I think, just when summer is passing into autumn, The year then is beginning, like the scene, to wear the touch of age, and the two conspire without effort to deepen the sense of quietude. In a place like Midhurst, which seems to have admitted a new dwelling or two under ,protest, the beautiful ruin of Cowdray deepens the spell of long-transmitted tranquillity. How is it that when country-houses of some pretension have to be built or rebuilt, the architect is not bidden humbly to copy some fair original such as Cowdray must have been, or as Shaw House and Bramshill, for, instance, still are P It grieves one to see fair opportunities of completing the grace of stately park or -antique chase thrown away by a too liberal toleration of pseudo- originality. When an art has once reached perfection, novelty, save within very narrow limits, must be necessarily a deviation rather than an advance ; and new forms of English domestic architecture, like new English metres, are samples rather of the ingenuity of the individual than of the adequacy of the work. The character and confines of English prosody were tong ago, I imagine, settled by the nature of the English aanguage; and the true artist is well content to work within these limits, and does not feel hampered by them ; and I -cannot but think that, where an Englishman is forced by circumstance to build himself a lordly pleasure.house, he would do well to walk more or less meekly in the foot- steps of his Tudor, Elizabethan, or Queen Anne ancestors. 6o deferentially treading, he avoids striking a false note in the harmony of the English landscape, and gives bene- ficent evidence of the true historic sense. For the form- less fields and meandering lanes do not tell us more significantly of our ancestry, than do rough herring-bone ;Saxon masonry, Norman tower, Early English chancel, Per- pendicular aisle, Tudor manor-house, and Jacobean mansion. Analytical experts may go to Syria or Byzantium for the -origin of our architecture. To the plain unlettered eye it is of native growth, bone of our bone, almost flesh of our flesh, as 'expressive of us as our literature or our farming. This it was which made almost every village through which we passed, and certainly every village where we halted, like East Meon, for instance, with its solid, stern Norman tower, its font -brought from afar, and its silvery runnel sweetening the Tillage street, so insinuatingly attractive. They all seemed, if not as if they were one's home, at least as if they might have been, with their English characteristics of domesticity .and undemonstrativeness. The only town through which I ,passed in my circle of three hundred miles was equally, by the accident of the season, a haunt of ancient peace ; for it -was Winchester, but Winchester empty of its vigorous striplings, who, when there, must rob it somewhat of its ancientness. As it was, its principal denizens seemed to be Alfred the Great, William of Wykeham, or, at latest, .Jane Austen, who ended here her quiet days. Is it fanciful zto feel that all the best specimens of our race have close kinship with that Perpendicular architecture of which I suppose Winchester Cathedral is a supreme example, and which attests by its downright character, while Gothic was elsewhere wandering into the Flamboyant, the country of its origin and exclusive prevalence ? It used to be said, Nemo 4oteat exuere patriam. But I fear that is not quite true, for ,could one not name some well-meaning citizens who seem to have got rid of everything peculiarly distinctive of England -except its language P If they would but quit for a time their controversies, and wander with quiet eye and receptive heart through haunts of ancient peace, surely a due under- standing and a deeper love of their native land would return to them. ALFRED AUSTIN.
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