CORRESPONDENCE.
A LAZY JOURNEY.—IV.
WE spent some days at Ville-aux-Abbayes, predetermined not to hurry, and drank our fill of the strange spirit of tranquillity and worship which still makes itself a home in the noble cathedral churches of the Ciderlands. There is a strong and enduring vitality in the oldest of the forms of Christian faith, which in the newer seems, at times, to have failed to take the same deep root. After all the storms of unbelief and denial that have swept over the old grey temples, converting them to strange uses, refusing to the vexed hearts of men the shelter of the sanctuary for their weaker hours, and barring the access to the Holy of Holies,—quietly, and with all the added power of reaction, they raise their unshaken fronts again, a living and overmastering testimony to the deathless force and inborn necessity of prayer. Ignorance could not kill it ; education will stifle it as little. It is at once a strange comment on the vanity of human wishes, and an unconscious tribute to the divinity of One who shapes our ends with a restful and ever- watchful love, that men should seem so perversely set upon the roughest form of hewing, even for the best of their blocks. When the poet-priest of Nature, from his quiet home among the northern lakes and hills, wrote his half-prophetic lines about the spread of popular teaching, what would the shock to him have been, if he could have foreseen that it was to enter in side by side with negation, and that the aim of a strong school of teachers—strong, at least, in appearance, and in their own complacent creed—who would identify light with darkness and themselves, would be to part education from all idea of God, which, in the seer's mind comprehended it all, and to play their Trconlet with the Prince's part left out ? How far is this new snare of Arimanes to succeed in catching men Even to the most advanced of thinkers, it must surely seem a strange logic to force a people to be instructed. at peril of the law, and yet deny them the very instruction which they have most at heart. Will they prosper in their plans I trow not. It was my fortune not long ago to join a large working-class excursion from one of the first and most independent of the northern towns ; and after a long day's harmless but keen pleasuring was over, the whole body beguiled the homeward way in the train by hymn-singing, the example being set entirely by them- selves, and the sitters in one carriage catching up the words and tunes passed on from the next. To some of them completely, and to all in a more or less degree, all the words and. all the tunes seemed alike house- hold and familiar. The reverence of it all was simple and general. I sat quietly noting the whole thing, and wishing that I could, suddenly and without warning, introduce my old college acquaintance Impey, of St. Nil's, to the scene. I can never quite grasp his views, for when Faith or Futurity is men- tioned he only shakes his head and smiles, as if "we could, an' if we would." If philosophy permitted of a sense of humour, Lord Burleigh'i3 head-shake in The Critic would have disposed of this line of argument, which lacks the courage of its opinions, after all. That ineffable but silent smile is so much easier than saying something, when you have nothing to say, and is the essence of the modern philosopher's stock-in-trade. Im- peyism, which is silence, must teach something more than silence, if it is to dethrone God in the hearts of the people, and must make up its mind that before long it will be definitely challenged to produce its credentials, and be good enough so far to condescend to the weaknesses of humanity as to say what it means, out of some dictionary which others as well as Impeyites may understand. Hard words neither break bones nor make faiths, and given the choice between Revelation and Impeyism, the majority does, so far, decidedly prefer Revelation. The new philes'Ophers have not yet learned how to express their meaning. When they have, it will be time enough to consider whether the meaning be worth expression.
This long digression, into which I have been led by incurable indolence of habit (and Mrs. Balbus aptly opines that it has nothing at all to do with my subject, and ought to be cut out), is the outcome of the reflections which the old cathedrals brought, and of a certain unwillingness to write about those places at all,—not so much because they are old ground, and have been chronicled so often, but because in me they always give rise to moods as changeful as the Sea's, and I do not know what mood to fix. They are all so much the same, those mighty palaces of the Cross, and yet each so different, that at one moment I am tempted to discourse of their variety, at another of their monotony. Once I declared to Mrs. Balbus that I had had too much of them, and we would not see any more. She acquiesced, and admitted that we had visited a good many. But she loves them with a very deep and real love, and when, soon afterwards, we halted at a town famous for its Lanes, over which I proposed to pass,—" I think, Tom," she said, "that we had better go and see the cathedral." I looked at her with a grow- ing sense of absolute impotence, and acquiesced in action as readily as she had done in word. Indeed, I sometimes think that there is a sort of tacit agreement between us about the due division of labour. I talk ; and she performs.
But I must have come to my "thirdly and lastly" by this time, and must not tempt the patience of my readers too far in this direction. We fell into some danger of a false start in the way of cathedrals—Mrs. Balbus and I—by being conducted over William the Conqueror's Abbey by a Terrefollese from the south, who professed a large enthusiasm on architecture and.
ritual, and volunteered to accompany us when Mrs. Balbus signified her desire of church-seeing. I have since had reason to believe that his professions were deceit, and that he was attracted solely by a preference for Mrs. Balbus's society. He would rather, perhaps, that it had not been incumbent on him to talk with her through an interpreter, and that interpreter her husband. But he did his best to fascinate under the conditions, and pressed his card on me at parting with much fervour. When I read upon it the name of "M. Ordinaire, of St. Estephe, merchant of wines," I thought that his motives might have been mixed ; but hoping that his liquors were not, I let the base thought pass by. His assumption on
the subject of cathedrals, however, was audacious. Under his informed instruction, we became historical, We lived
with the Conqueror again ; we traced. in the stately Norman arches the personal memories of his hand, and I fell my- self into the snare of wisdom, by giving Mrs. Balbus a good deal of off-hand information, at her enquiry, about the dates, and battles, and. circumstances of the time, as to the accuracy where- ,of I felt seriously uncertain. I glanced ever and anon furtively at the wine merchant, but detected in his face what I felt was either happy acquiescence or masterful fraud. I now know that it must have been the first, for when we had exhausted the Conqueror, and were for migrating to the Ladies' Abbey, we were struck by the dullness of the population, who, when we asked where that abbey lay, all insisted on pointing in the direction we were leaving, when we knew that the two cathedrals were at the opposite ends of the town. It eventu- ally proved that our friend had been showing us one abbey and -calling it the other, and had never been in Ville-aux-Abbayes .before,—in fact, I believe, had never heard a word of either church.
When we had rectified the errors of M. Ordinaire, and wished well to the Doctor, we parted with real regret from the Diaries, among the "last of the landlords," who in these Company-days grow, alas ! fewer and further between. Instead of the tra- veller's warm welcome in an inn, which meant to him a pleasant personal association, we have everywhere the imper- sonal manager, the- representative of the utilitarian "Co.," to whom, as Uriah Hoop to his gaoler, one is nothing but a number. I expressed this feeling with a sigh to Mrs. Balbus, but she only said that, much as she liked the Merles, she thought they were an exception, and that the beds of Company-hotels were usually the most com- fortable. "Life is not bed," I remonstrated. "A good deal of she answered. And I thought of an ancestor of mine who had once received a piece of high clerical preferment, and imme- diately, he said, was beset with letters from old friends in his new neighbourhood offering him beds. "As if," he said, "they thought that for the rest of my life I need do nothing but sleep !" And sleep brings me, by an easy transition, to our next halting-place, the town of Feuille-morte.
The travellers in the Ciderlande, whose name is legion, know well the fair, hill-crowning city of Feuille-morte, which, after an hour or two spent among the tapestried records of the Conquest—and even our laziness was unwilling to linger very long there—was our first halt after Ville-aux- Abbayes,—a city, built clearly by some generations in ad- vance of its time in the theory of bracing air, which seems to -disagree with all its inhabitants except the body of healthy young collegians, for whom learning has there found a seat. Mrs. Balbus took compassion on a stray, young Grumble- Islander, whose lot had fallen among them, whose fish-out-of- waterish feeling and appearance in the Lycea.n buttons, together with his fresh, shy manner, and curious incapacity for Terre- follese, betrayed his nationality to her quick eyes sooner than to mine. It was a very odd life, he said, and, as I think, his young expression ran, " rather one-horse." The spirit of emulation made him pine for some exercise besides gym- nastics; and I was sorry to see that on the fortnightly holiday, which he was allowed to pass in the care .of the landlord of our hotel—it was on one of these occasions that we happened to fall in with him,--he passed nearly all his time in playing billiards, with no taste for that unwhole- some sport, but from sheer lack of anything else to do. He played chiefly with a wonderful little waiter-marker, of some fifteen years, abnormally ugly and abnormally smiling, full of brightness and intelligence, and so bent on self-improvement, that he had already learned more of the lycean's language in these games than he had taught of his own. This youngster of a waiter pressed oigars on me with keen appreciation of the brands, confided to me that he had an exceptionally happy nature, only less so than that of his " jumeau," who was his living image, he said, and was a waiter at the neighbouring city of Eau-qui-dort, where wages were better than in Feuille-morte ; he discoursed of this jumeau with a brotherly delight that was very pleasant to see, and examined a Grumble-Island sovereign with a great curiosity, but with some disappointment that " louis de vingt-cinq francs" was not inscribed upon it, as he had been given to understand was the case. He did not see how it could be worth that sum, otherwise.
The little marker took great delight in a game of billiards which I played with the lycean, and instructed both of us in every stroke with a happy but self-reliant ignorance of angles. The poor scholar, I think, was thankful for the change, and I felt a real pity for him when, after dinner, the landlord came to convey him back to durance, with the penalty of the " black- hole " before him, if he should be late for the evening roll-call. He rebelled a great deal against the black-hole as au unworthy punishment, but still more against the necessity laid upon him of attending the classes in his own language, where, according to his account, the professor would insist on correcting his themes in vindication of his own position. "When I write I do,'" he said, "he insists on scratching it out, and putting it 'I does.'" The professor was himself one of our table d'hôte company, a truly wonderful-looking man, with a head of forest- hair, who smiled and gleamed through his spectacles as we dis- coursed in our native tongue, and kept nodding his head at us as if he were listening to a repetition, and pleased with the result. That his share in the dialogue went no further than that, I attribute to an unwillingness to introduce questions of grammar into the pleasures of the table, which he enjoyed with a healthy voracity. There were professors of all sorts to make up that table d'hôte, which was evidently their rendezvous,—thirsting for information only less than for cider ; and but that I had so exhausted the subject with the Doctor that T was not prepared for more discussion, I might have run through the whole theme of the Mfinchausen Ministry over again under new lights. But I was in one of those frames of mind when a man feels heartily weary of the whole thing, and craves other pastures. Mrs. Balbus and I were both more in the mood for the "last of the diligences," which conveyed us through one of the most smiling districts in the world from Feuille-morte to Eau- qui-dort, and was the first of those vehicles which Mrs. Balbus had ever experienced. Mindful, among others, of a drive of sixty-five continuous hours, some twenty years ago, I could not say the same. But I was in one of those rebellious moods
when the world's hurry and unrest irritate me into paradoxes ;
and as we drove, I discoursed much to Mrs. Balbus, who listened in a well-pleased silence, of the curse of railways and civilisation.
To BAL13US.
Previous page
