literary Pilgrimages
By HAROLD NICOLSON FOR those who cherish the company of books, there are few more pleasurable enjoyments than to visit the places where great writers have lived and worked. Since no description, however detailed and coloured, can convey to us the surrounding mood of a house or garden, such visits increase our actual understanding of a poet's childhood or maturity. A visit to the rectory at Somersby enables us to visualise the congested conditions which. produced Poems by Two Brothers. or The Darling Room. Much of the Tennyson mysticism and melancholy is explained by that remote hamlet, by domestic wretchedness, by the feeling, of segregation and enclosure inspired by the circle of the hills. How can we accord the full depth of our sympathy to Keats's patient but torturing jealousy, unless we have stood by his window at Wentworth Place and shared his fevered agony as Fanny Brawne and her mother tripped, gay and inconsiderate, across the grass? Such visits, moreover, permit us to enter past centuries in the com- pany of some ghost whom we know most intimately. The dark drawing rooms of the Palazzo Lanfranchi, the frivolous balcony of the Villa Diodati, are rendered personal for us by the echo of Byron humming snatches of Rossini as he dawdles through the afternoon. We can hear the swish of his riding cane against the chestnut tree when he slouches towards the railing where the horses wait. ' Come up here, Shelley,' we hear him calling as he leans laughing with Polidori, propping his elbows on the very baluster which we stroke ourselves. The rooms, in which great men, whose thoughts and sufferings are familiar to us, lived for years, retain in our imagination a special identity. Is it so fantastic to suppose that their spirits, amused and flattered by our interest, conduct us gently round? ' In my day,' we hear them whisper., ' there was an outside staircase leading to that parapet. It was made of wood.' - * * * This summer, when on a holiday in France, I made three such pilgrimages, and have returned with knowledge widened and my sympathies peculiarly enhanced. I went first to Montaigne's little oast-house mild, off the great road that runs from Bergerac to Bordeaux. Often in his essays he has described for us this ivory tower, yet the reality is most different from what one had supposed. ' When at home,' he wrote, ' I retire to my library, where everything is under my own command. Below me, 1 can see my garden, my chicken run, the courtyard and most of the buildings of my home. Sometimes I ponder; sometimes, as I walk round the room, I record these my dreams. From my windows 1 have three different views, each opening upon a prospect that is free and rich. Here is my seat. Here I establish my own autocracy, untrammelled by wife, daughter, or other intruders. In the château itself, my authority is verbal only, and often confused. Miserable, in my opinion, is the man who does not possess such a room pf his own, where he can hide from others and pay private court to himself.' The tower is detached from the main buildings by three hundred yards; it rises from the corner of the garden wall, looking out upon vineyards and woods. Upon the rafters of the library one can still read the Greek and Latin mottoes which Montaigne had carved above him, to recall always the principles of his philosophy. Re- fjoice,' we read, in the things of the moment. All else is beyond thy comprehension." I determine nothing,' we read, I do not understand life; all I do is to examine and to suspend judgement.' And then, sharply incised, comes the lapidary motto of humanism. 'Homo sum: humanum nihil a and alienum puto.' We can see and hear the little dwarf, shuffling round his turret sanctuary, fiddling with the books on the encircling shelves, forgetting the world around him, ' excellent en l'oubliance,' and idly watching the village maidens gathering the vintage below his walls. The steps that wind up to the ivory tower are worn by his little feet. * * * Our third Visit was to the little village where Alain Fournier lived and which is the scene of the greatest romantic novel of this century, Le Grand Meaulnes. The turret of Montaigne had proved smaller, simpler than anything I had imagined: the home, of George Sand was grander and more elegant than I had supposed : but the setting of Le Grand Meaulnes was more rustic and tiny than I had ever pictured. For some reason I had seen a large secondary school of several.stories with a wide gravel courtyard surrounded by high railings and trees. Yet it was into a diminutive village school-room that the great Meaulnes burst, with little old-fashioned desks such as have disappeared from modern class-rooms, and a low pupitre at which Fournier's father taught the village boys. Above this seat there is a photograph of Alain gazing dreamily into space with a white hand raised to his chin. The courtyard in which I had pictured great battles between contending classes with shouts and ambuscades and sudden rushes, is but a tiny quadrangle no more than a few yards square. And beyond, some miles from the village where the country roads stride to meet each other, is an avenue of great trimmed trees, framing a pink dream-castle with a sense of shallow lakes around it and reeds and boats. How came it that this son of a village school-master should have evolved from such puny surround- ings so wide and vigorous a vision? The old men shuffling to the fields alOng the high-way must have known young Fournier in the days before the first war, in the days before he was killed. We climbed back into the car and drove on silently to Bourges.
* * * Such visits, as I have said, alter our comprehension. No longer shall I think of Montaigne as an aloof dilettante, a ruminating egoist, who never loved anybody except his father and his friend. 1 shall think of him as an irritable little stoic, muttering crossly to himself as he climbed his turret staircase and slammed the door. No longer shall I picture George Sand as an Amazon riding fiercely : she has become for me a calm mahresse de maison, arranging peaches in a porcelain bowl decorated with pink rosebuds and thinking the while how to design an enormous greatcoat for her puppet beadle to wear. And Alain Fournier, with his eyes still dreamy under his ugly lye& cap, becomes a village boy in that small class-room, longing for the class to finish when he can climb up again to the attic and be alone with his thoughts. What pleasurable emotions are evoked by such visits, what increase of under- standing is achieved! So let us all, when the autumn rains come, make another pilgrimage to Haworth : and stare from wet windows at all those graves. Then there is the house which George Sand loved so long and deeply, the Château de Nohant. A comfortable, rustic house, with rough pink tiles in the hall and upon the passage floors, and high windows now darkened by the overgrown cedars which she planted a hundred years ago. Her grand- daughter, with respectful piety, hps preserved- the main living rooms as they were when George Sand died. The table in the dining room is waiting for a party that will never come. The little decanters are filled with white and red wine and there are grapes and peaches in the dishes. In faded handwriting are the name cards beside the empty plates. M. de Balzac,' we read; M. Flaubert,' M. Turgenev,' Le Prince Jerome Bonaparte.' At a touch, it seems, the servant will enter with the soup tureen and the whole party come alive. We pass through a dark corridor to the puppet theatre so cleverly devised by George Sand's artistic son. Here are the puppets suspended in their cupboards, their dresses as fresh as if the ladies had all been sewing on spangles last Tuesday, their eyes goggling with appetite to live. And beyond, between the village graveyard and the garden, is Lelia's high black tomb, on which the rain dribbles from the yew tree that feeds upon her bones. George Sand lived at an ugly period and was herself devoid of all taste in dress. Yet in this charming house there is not a single object of ugliness, only faint walls, simple porcelain, and puppets grinning in dark cupboards at the memory of gaiety that has passed.
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