EGLISTON AND BRIGNAL.
BESIDES asking for traditions at Rokeby, Scott Aid he must have "an old church of the right sort," and "a robbers' cave." Both were found for him. Egliston Abbey was the church, and as it is the nearer of the two, being about half-way between Rokeby and Barnard Castle, we will visit it first. Just before we come to it from Rokeby, we pass the bridge which connects Yorkshire with what used to be called the " Bishoprick,"—i.e., the Palatinate of Durham. The view from it is fine, but we liked the view which we got on it, of the Yorkshire character, better. We had walked from Rokeby, when the sight of the bridge, which we had no need to cross, made us wish to look over the parapet ; only we knew that we had forgotten our purse, and the bridge appeared to be guarded by something like a toll-gate. This checked Us in a moment. Out came the keeper,—" It's a halfpenny, Sir." We had not even a farthing, said so, and began to return to our road again. On this, a man sitting inside the keeper's den strode forward in an ungainly way, and without saying a word, placed a halfpenny in our hand, and retreated. The keeper seized the money, took it back to his friend or companion, and said indignantly, "Who said I was going to be so hard as to turn the gentleman back for want of a halfpenny P Cross the bridge, Sir." The bridge spans the Tees at a great height, and the sudden disclosure of the chasm, with the river foaming over slabs of limestone far below, and a glimpse of the abbey among the tree-tops, is certainly striking. Few English abbeys stand on a height, and when they do so, it is no wide stretch of woodland and pasture which they overlook, but rather the waste grey fields of the sea. The whole character of Egliston is pastoral. Little is known of its founder or of its history, nothing great or tragic is associated with it, and we hardly thank Scott for having used it as a background to the melodramatic scene with which he winds up Rokeby. The barely prevented execution of the Knight, the dying of Wilfrid, the shooting of Oswald, and the general clearing-away of the puppets of the poem,—we utterly refuse to let this wild, confused picture bear any part in our conception of ancient Egliston. We would rather think of the Premonstratensians who once dwelt hero, and of them as having been among the most peaceful of their peace-loving order ; pursuing their studies and obeying their golden rule with fewer interruptions and tempta- tions than befell brethren of grander houses, and that the thrum of their own mill-wheel and the murmur of the Tees were always as grateful to them as they are to us now. Certainly,
we know no ruin which wears a happier look. It is bright, with close-cropped, brilliantly green grass on all sides, with elms and with ash-trees and abundant wild-flowers ; and there are sights and sounds of rural labour all about it,—clothes laid out among the roses and honeysuckles of the hedges, parliaments and pro- cessions of dazzling white geese, the miller's cart coming and going, but there is no sound too much, or at variance with a scene which is crowned by the mullioned window and relics of broken tracery of the ruin above ; and no dell can be love- lier than that of Thorsgill, into which the green bank de- scends, with the steepest of curves, almost directly from the abbey-walls. The abbey buildings are not as yet in total ruin, and are very picturesque ; but they were, perhaps, more so when they were used, as we recollect them some years ago, for a farm- house. An old man of eighty is now their sole occupant, as self-constituted guardian. He, too, like the bridge-keeper, refused to allow our complete impecuniosity to stand in our way. "Never mind about the money. Ye's' see everything, all the same." There is something large-hearted about Yorkshire folks. "Do you think I'm tied up with a thread P" said an old woman to us, on another occasion, as she pushed back five- pennyworth of coppers, to which she was justly entitled. We are aware of the reputation which belongs to the county in the matter of bargains, but when once the stress of the money- battle is over, Yorkshire is just, we venture to think, with a justice unknown in the South, and anxious that you should have the full benefit of your side of the arrangement. At least, we can speak for this being the case to a large extant in the northern and north-eastern parts of the county, and we limit our assertions carefully, lest any of our readers should be led to imagine that such traces of a golden age are more widely spread than they really are. But to return to the old man, and his tumble-down dwelling. He remembered the partial burning of the mill just below, in the first quarter of the century. We thought at once of the rebuilding of the miller's house, which is going on in the Turner drawing of Egliston. This drawing was exhibited lately, with the rest of Mr. Ruskin's Turners, at the Fine-Art Gallery in Bond Street, and we may, therefore, presume that some of our readers are acquainted with it, or with the engraving in the Yorkshire series. He told us it was a paper-mill then, and that both mill and contents having suffered from the fire, the work was re- moved to the abbey buildings above, the partitions of the top- most floor taken down, and the whole story used as a paper manufactory. The mill which appears in the drawing is a most unassuming one, with red tiles and latticed window, and does not look capable of producing any more sheets of paper at one time than the few which a single female figure is carefully lay- ing out on the river-bank. Local testimony is so strong on the point of its having been a paper-mill at the time of Turner's visit, that we are forced to regard the two mill-stones which he has put leaning against the wall as introduced to make the fact of its being a mill of some kind plain at all costs ; but if our reading of this part of the picture is correct, on what a modest, Lilliputian scale, and how entirely consistent with the scheme of nature, must paper-making then have been I We learnt from this old man that the descendants of the mill-owner of that day are now settled in a pretty town not very far off. We have seen their works with horror. We heard also that Mr. Morritt, Scott's friend, refused to allow a steam-engine to be set up here, and so caused the departure of his thriving tenant, while he saved the beauty of Egliston. We cannot leave so good a deed unrecorded and unpraised.
The" robbers' cave " that Scott wanted was found in the ancient slate quarries of ]3rignal. It is in connection with this cave that we obtain from him a valuable glimpse of his method of work, which seems to have been very realistic indeed. Mr. Monitt, his companion at Brignal, thus records an afternoon's study : —" I observed him noting down even the peculiar little wild- flowers and herbs that accidentally grew around, and on the side of a bold crag, near his intended cave of Guy Denzil, and could not help saying that as he was not upon oath in his work, daisies, violets, and primroses would be as poetical as any of the humble plants he was examining. I laughed, in short, at his scrupulousness ; but I understood him when he replied "that in nature herself no two scenes are exactly alike, and that whoever copied truly what was before his eyes would possess the same variety in his descriptions, and exhibit apparently an imagination as boundless as the range of nature in the scenes he recorded; whereas whoever trusted to the imagination would soon find his own mind circumscribed and contracted to a few favourite images, and repetition of these would sooner or later produce that monotony and barrenness which had always haunted descriptive poetry in the hands of any but the patient worshippers of truth. Besides which,' he said, 'local names and peculiarities make a story look so much better in the face.'" How unaffectedly Scott discloses one of his favourite means of effect in the last sentence ! What a strong ally he shows himself throughout to those who hold, in op- position to Sir Joshua, that particular and not general truths are the truths which an artist especially desires to get hold of ! How calmly he exposes the folly of trusting to the imagination, or if that is too noble a word, to the inner consciousness, and the vague picturing which that implies, instead of to direct portraiture, whenever it can be got ! It is true that he is speaking with reference to descriptive poetry only, which was the business he had then in hand; but we look to his masterpieces, we cannot doubt that he would if
have said much the same thing with reference to every other subject of his art, and in character-painting also would have admitted that the best way to awed monotony and barrenness was to be a patient worshipper of truth. Indeed, to one born with so healthy and spontaneous a creative faculty as Scott, "worship of truth—patient and loving worship—and the eudeav- 'our to reproduce the truth with the utmost vividness, would probably slim up the whole duty of a literary artist, as such__ a certain amount of attention to the matter of rhymes and metres, or other mechanism of his craft, being thrown in. Given clearness and strength of intellectual eight and fullness of sym- pathy on the artist's part, whatever was good and beautiful in the world from which he drew would tell in his work with due proportion and perspective. How far the truth which he was to follow might be coloured by tradition, or association, or a thousand influences which acted on personal feeling, was a -matter he had nothing to do with ; least of all was he to trouble himself with "ideals," or attempts to 'improve upon Nature, — which last, by the way, according to high-art theories then strongly prevalent, was the very chief thing he had to do. We cannot but feel that Scott, if he had lived now, would have aided with those among us who object to any use of the word s, imagination " which obscures, or is inconsistent with, the claim of that faculty to be regarded as an essentially truth-loving and truth-telling one,—in its grandest manifestations the most truth-telling which poor human nature possesses.
But we are on Greta side all this time, and are able to vouch for Scott's accuracy of detail. More than one rock answers to his description, and "rears it, pale, grey breast," with its pro- fuse growth of hazel about t, and its darkening yew, mysteri- ously rooted, and sweeping downward almost to the shadowy pool 'beneath. You splash through the Pebbly shallows at the outlet of the pool, or clamber over the the ruinous heap fallen from the cliff, and perhaps a path succeeds, and a wilderness of 4' verdurous glooms and mossy, winding ways," and in one of the meadows left at frequent intervals by the curves of the river, you come upon a broken gable and a disused
graveyard. This is Brignal old church—as small In its best days as churches .among north-country mountains and moors are wont to be—and if you go to the top of the bank above, and if it is a fair twilight in summer, you have the subject of one of Turner's noblest poems before you. The prettiest lines in Scott's " Rokeby " i always seemed to us to be those n which he moralises, in a most openly common-Place manner, on the foam-bubbles of Greta, and their likeness in frothiness, frailty, and vanity to " the schemes of human pride." Turner's picture conveys much the same lesson, but with a wide-reaching grandeur, and he has used a splendid passage of landscape as his means of expression. The drawing unhappily no longer exists, but the engraving preserves the design for us. It is a very simple one. The Greta flows nearly in the middle of it, in a hollow with steep wooded banks on each side, the one above the church on the right being entirely lost in shadow and convex in curvature, the other still reflecting light from the western sky, and showing a bit of sheer precipice among the coppice-wood. A wavy line of distance unites the two aides of the composition. In the base of the picture—we can hardly say foreground—there is a network of tree-tops (the characteristic yew not being forgotten), through which we can see the abyss gleaming below; and amongst these perilous boughs a boy is climbing after his kite, which has dragged in its career, and been caught there, evidently with no chance of recovery. Mists are rising stealthily in the ravine, and beginning to lie in bands on the far-away, desolate moors. We should say, from having seen the exact counterpart of such an evening on the very spot, that there had been a thunderstorm in the after- noon, certainly that the day had not been an absolutely un- troubled or windless one ; but now the few clouds are breathing themselves away in flecks and films of soft grey shade ; there are more and more breaks in that slanting line of them which stretches towards the sunset, where, against the clear field of the sky, the swell of the moorland, subtly linked with that of the nearer hill, tells with the most exquisite precision and feeling of perfect calm. If the sky here is the large light of the design, the darkness gathers strongly on this hill which descends to the church and its sheltered meadow, and lies deepest of all on the pool Which hems in the little churchyard. There is not a line or touch in this engraved poem which does not fulfil its part in the poet's design, namely, to make us feel through and along with the beauty of that scene, the mystery of human life. The worship of truth is there, as we could abundantly prove, but it is worship rendered all the more patient, for the weight and full- ness of the thoughts which the truth of that quiet landscape brought to a master-mind.
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