SUSSEX.*
No form of book is so easy to write, and so hard to write well,. as the topographical For generations it bas been the favoured preserve of the amateur, often titled, rarely talented. When your " person of quality " condescended upon letters, his work generally took the form of the history of this or that parish, or notes of an itinerary in Wales or Scotland. The reason of the choice is clear. In topography you have the raw material waiting to your hand. Geography provides a ready- made order, and all one need do is to combine the mass of facts, antiquarian, scientific, and topographical, in one narra- tive, adding as flavour a few trite moralisings. But if the thing is simple, success is difficult and infrequent. Now that the limits of ordinary knowledge have been extended, and • Highways and Byways in Sussex. By E. V. Lucas. With Illustrations 15y Frederick L Griggs. London: hiamnill.n and Co. [6r..]
travel has taken a wider sweep, topography has become a miniature art, requiring more delicate hands than for common travel or history, just as writing which will pass muster in a folio deserves a closer scrutiny in an essay. There must be a real enthusiasm for the country treated of, a feeling for the delicacies of landscape and association, a power of realising an elder life, a love of the road and the vagrom characters of the roadside, and, above all, a true urbanity of style. The reader must be interested and informed, as if by the best conversation. It is not too much to say that Mr. Lucas lacks none of the gifts of the topographer, and some he possesses in a notable degree. In a strain of easy gossip he conducts us by very crooked ways over Sussex, and so infectious is his zeal that the present writer, who has no love of the South Country, is almost persuaded to be a convert. From his stores of local history he produces many pleasant stories, and, as becomes so genuine a book-lover, he has a keen scent for all literary associations. Perhaps there is too much about churches, for it is hard to be interested in architecture we have not seen, even though Mr. Griggs is at hand with his admirable sketches. Famous as Sussex cricketing history is, there is a little too much cricket, for no sporting records are so evanescent in interest as cricketing feats. Sometimes, too, Mr. Lucas is apt to be morbidly literary, and to drag in allusions which are scarcely called for. The quotation on p. 328, for example, from Mr. Kipling is so artificially intro- duced as to jar upon the reader's sense of the relevant. But on the whole, we can congratulate Mr. Lucas on a remarkable success. He has produced a true country book, full of colour and life, which will no doubt long prove a delight to the lover of Sussex and a refutation to the sceptic. The bookish flavour, which would have offended in connection with some landscapes, is not out of place in the long-settled shire of down and weald. It is a book the reviewer can do little with, for in the embarrassment of riches selection is futile ; but no reader with any love of leisurely travel in an historic country will regret accepting Mr. Lucas's guidance.
To the ordinary man the fault of Sussex is its dryness. There are streams, to be sure, but they do not affect the view.
And since, as Novalis said quaintly, " water is the eye of landscape," there is a blindness and deadness in the ordinary Downs scenery. But to their lovers they have a charm of their own :--
"They are the smoothest things in England, gigantic, rotund, easy ; the eye rests upon their gentle contour and is at peace. They have no sublimity, no grandeur, only the most spacious
repose The Downs change their complexion, but are never otherwise than soothing and still ; no stress of weather produces in them any of that sense of fatality that one is conscious of in Westmoreland. Thunder-clouds empurple the turf and blacken the hangers, but they cannot break the imperturbable equanimity of the line ; rain throws over the range a gauze veil of added softness ; a mist makes them more wonderful, unreal, romantic; snow brings them to one's doors. At sunrise they are magical, a background for Malory ; at sunset they are the lovely homes of the serenest thoughts, a spectacle for Marcus Aurelius."
Sometimes the descriptions of landscape are full of imagina-
tive subtlety, as in the sketches of Rye and Winchelsea, and the short note on Petworth Park (why, by the way, does Mr. Lucas on p. 100 bestow an earldom on Lord Leconfield ?) But as a rule the sketches are not elaborated. They are the flying records of the traveller, done with the speed and detachment of travel, but admirably fulfilling their task of giving the reader a broad picturesque conception of
the land. It is the exact antithesis of the method of Richard Jefferies, whom Mr. Lucas quotes frequently with apprecia- tion, and we nowhere find that slow subjective construction of a scene which exists in books like Wild Life in a Southern County. For an itinerary Mr. Lucas's method is perfect, and his ever-present humour is in keeping with the spirit of the road, as when he says happily that the staple industry of a certain district seems to be the prosecuting of trespassers. We could wish that there had been a little more natural
history, but as the author is conscious of the omission we forbear to complain.
Amid such wealth of old stories and customs it is hard to select. Local history is treated with an ironical gravity which is perhaps the best way for a writer whose intention is not antiquarian. On the Downs less than a century ago the great bustard used to be hunted with greyhounds, and the birds fought fiercely and often injured the dogs. It is pleasant in that
ill-watered land to read of the catching of a trout of ten and a half pounds in the Albourne brook in 1715, and of a monster twenty-nine inches long in 1692. We presume these were yellow trout, for the salmon-trout is mentioned specially elsewhere in the same narrative. From the numerous epitaphs which Mr. Lucas has chronicled we may select a pretty one on a certain Dorothy Shurley, of whose children it is written that " some were called into Heaven and others into several marriages of good quality " ; while she herself "had a merite beyond most of her time her pitty was the clothing of the poore and all her minutes were but steppes to Heaven."
Some of the associations which Mr. Lucas has discovered are amazingly recondite, as when he announces that Chichester, among its other glories, was the birthplace of the snuff-maker to Sir Joshua Reynolds. Of Sussex worthies the majority seem to have been men of letters, Shelley being perhaps the most considerable. The county has also the distinction of producing the first English maker of cannon, Ralph Rogge, of Hog House, a Sussex ironmaster who flourished about 1543. At Wiston, below Chanctonbury, lived the family of Shirley,— Antony, who in the ' Bevis of Southampton' sailed to the south coast of Africa, America, and the West Indies ; Robert, who became a great lord in Persia, and married a kinswoman of the Sophy ; and Thomas, who being ashamed to see his brothers " worne like Flowers in the Breasts and Bosomes of forreign Princes, whilst he himself withered upon the stalk he grew on," undertook sea voyages, " to the great honour of his Nation, but small inriching of himself." Landscape, after all, is no final determinant of the character of a people, for this soft tranquil South county has the honour to claim one of the most famous families of English adventurers.
Mr. Lucas's pleasant narrative is illustrated with numerous drawings by Mr. Frederick Griggs. Nothing could be better than these little sketches, which, whether they portray a corner of a village or a wide landscape, are always clear, simple, and faithful.
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