Book: Dreamthorp

A >> Alexander Smith >> Dreamthorp




My trees are young enough, and if they do not take me away into the
past, they project me into the future. When I planted them, I knew I
was performing an act, the issues of which would outlast me long. My
oaks are but saplings; but what undreamed-of English kings will they
not outlive! I pluck my apples, my pears, my plums; and I know that
from the same branches other hands will pluck apples, pears, and plums
when this body of mine will have shrunk into a pinch of dust. I cannot
dream with what year these hands will date their letters. A man does
not plant a tree for himself, he plants it for posterity. And, sitting
idly in the sunshine, I think at times of the unborn people who will,
to some small extent, be indebted to me. Remember me kindly, ye future
men and women! When I am dead, the juice of my apples will foam and
spurt in your cider-presses, my plums will gather for you their misty
bloom; and that any of your youngsters should be choked by one of my
cherry-stones, merciful Heaven forfend!

In this pleasant summer weather I hold my audience in my garden rather
than in my house. In all my interviews the sun is a third party.
Every village has its Fool, and, of course, Dreamthorp is not without
one. Him I get to run my messages for me, and he occasionally turns my
garden borders with a neat hand enough. He and I hold frequent
converse, and people here, I have been told, think we have certain
points of sympathy. Although this is not meant for a compliment, I
take it for one. The poor faithful creature's brain has strange
visitors; now 't is fun, now wisdom, and now something which seems in
the queerest way a compound of both. He lives in a kind of twilight
which obscures objects, and his remarks seem to come from another world
than that in which ordinary people live. He is the only original
person of my acquaintance; his views of life are his own, and form a
singular commentary on those generally accepted. He is dull enough at
times, poor fellow; but anon he startles you with something, and you
think he must have wandered out of Shakspeare's plays into this
out-of-the-way place. Up from the village now and then comes to visit
me the tall, gaunt, atrabilious confectioner, who has a hankering after
Red-republicanism, and the destruction of Queen, Lords, and Commons.
Guy Fawkes is, I believe, the only martyr in his calendar. The
sourest-tempered man, I think, that ever engaged in the manufacture of
sweetmeats. I wonder that the oddity of the thing never strikes
himself. To be at all consistent, he should put poison in his
lozenges, and become the Herod of the village innocents. One of his
many eccentricities is a love for flowers, and he visits me often to
have a look at my greenhouse and my borders. I listen to his truculent
and revolutionary speeches, and take my revenge by sending the gloomy
egotist away with a nosegay in his hand, and a gay-coloured flower
stuck in a button-hole. He goes quite unconscious of my floral satire.

The village clergyman and the village doctor are great friends of mine;
they come to visit me often, and smoke a pipe with me in my garden.
The twain love and respect each other, but they regard the world from
different points of view, and I am now and again made witness of a
good-humoured passage of arms. The clergyman is old, unmarried, and a
humourist. His sallies and his gentle eccentricities seldom provoke
laughter, but they are continually awakening the pleasantest smiles.
Perhaps what he has seen of the world, its sins, its sorrows, its
death-beds, its widows and orphans, has tamed his spirit and put a
tenderness into his wit. I do not think I have ever encountered a man
who so adorns his sacred profession. His pious, devout nature produces
sermons just as naturally as my apple-trees produce apples. He is a
tree that flowers every Sunday. Very beautiful in his reverence for
the Book, his trust in it; through long acquaintance, its ideas have
come to colour his entire thought, and you come upon its phrases in his
ordinary speech. He is more himself in the pulpit than anywhere else,
and you get nearer him in his sermons than you do sitting with him at
his tea-table, or walking with him on the country roads. He does not
feel confined in his orthodoxy; in it he is free as a bird in the air.
The doctor is, I conceive, as good a Christian as the clergyman, but he
is impatient of pale or limit; he never comes to a fence without
feeling a desire to get over it. He is a great hunter of insects, and
he thinks that the wings of his butterflies might yield very excellent
texts; he is fond of geology, and cannot, especially when he is in the
company of the clergyman, resist the temptation of hurling a fossil at
Moses. He wears his scepticism as a coquette wears her ribbons,--to
annoy if he cannot subdue; and when his purpose is served, he puts his
scepticism aside,--as the coquette puts her ribbons. Great arguments
arise between them, and the doctor loses his field through his loss of
temper,--which, however, he regains before any harm is done; for the
worthy man is irascible withal, and opposition draws fire from him.

After an outburst, there is a truce between the friends for a while,
till it is broken by theological battle over the age of the world, or
some other the like remote matter, which seems important to me only in
so far as it affords ground for disputation. These truces are broken
sometimes by the doctor, sometimes by the clergyman. T'other evening
the doctor and myself were sitting in the garden, smoking each a
meditative pipe. Dreamthorp lay below, with its old castle and its
lake, and its hundred wreaths of smoke floating upward into the sunset.
Where we sat, the voices of children playing in the street could hardly
reach us. Suddenly a step was heard on the gravel, and the next moment
the clergyman appeared, as it seemed to me, with a peculiar airiness of
aspect, and the light of a humourous satisfaction in his eye. After
the usual salutations, he took his seat beside us, lifted a pipe of the
kind called "churchwarden" from the box on the ground, filled and
lighted it, and for a little while we were silent all three. The
clergyman then drew an old magazine from his side pocket, opened it at
a place where the leaf had been carefully turned down, and drew my
attention to a short poem which had for its title, "Vanity Fair,"
imprinted in German text. This poem he desired me to read aloud.
Laying down my pipe carefully beside me, I complied with his request.
It ran thus; for as after my friends went it was left behind, I have
written it down word for word:--

"The world-old Fair of Vanity
Since Bunyan's day has grown discreeter
No more it flocks in crowds to see
A blazing Paul or Peter.

"Not that a single inch it swerves
From hate of saint or love of sinner,
But martyrs shock aesthetic nerves,
And spoil the _gout_ of dinner.

"Raise but a shout, or flaunt a scarf,--
Its mobs are all agog and flying;
They 'll cram the levee of a dwarf,
And leave a Haydon dying.

"They live upon each newest thing,
They fill their idle days with seeing;
Fresh news of courtier and of king
Sustains their empty being.

"The statelier, from year to year,
Maintain their comfortable stations
At the wide windows that o'erpeer
The public square of nations;

"While through it heaves, with cheers and groans,
Harsh drums of battle in the distance,
Frightful with gallows, ropes, and thrones,
The medley of existence;

"Amongst them tongues are wagging much:
Hark to the philosophic sisters!
To his, whose keen satiric touch,
Like the Medusa, blisters!

"All things are made for talk,--St. Paul;
The pattern of an altar cushion;
A Paris wild with carnival,
Or red with revolution.

"And much they knew, that sneering crew,
Of things above the world and under:
They search'd the hoary deep; they knew
The secret of the thunder;

"The pure white arrow of the light
They split into its colours seven;
They weighed the sun; they dwelt, like night,
Among the stars of heaven;

"They 've found out life and death,--the first
Is known but to the upper classes;
The second, pooh! 't is at the worst
A dissolution into gases.

"And vice and virtue are akin,
As black and white from Adam issue,--
One flesh, one blood, though sheeted in
A different coloured tissue.

"Their science groped from star to star;--
But then herself found nothing greater.
What wonder?--in a Leyden jar
They bottled the Creator.

"Fires fluttered on their lightning-rod;
They cleared the human mind from error;
They emptied heaven of its God,
And Tophet of its terror.

"Better the savage in his dance
Than these acute and syllogistic!
Better a reverent ignorance
Than knowledge atheistic!

"Have they dispelled one cloud that lowers
So darkly on the human creature?
They with their irreligious powers
Have subjugated nature.

"But, as a satyr wins the charms
Of maiden in a forest hearted,
He finds, when clasped within his arms,
The outraged soul departed."


When I had done reading these verses,
he clergyman glanced slyly along to see the effect of his shot. The
doctor drew two or three hurried whiffs, gave a huge grunt of scorn,
then, turning sharply, asked, "What is 'a reverent ignorance'? What is
'a knowledge atheistic'?" The clergyman, skewered by the sudden
question, wriggled a little, and then began to explain,--with no great
heart, however, for he had had his little joke out, and did not care to
carry it further. The doctor listened for a little, and then, laying
down his pipe, said, with some heat, "It won't do. 'Reverent
ignorance' and such trash is a mere jingle of words; _that_ you know as
well as I. You stumbled on these verses, and brought them up here to
throw them at me. They don't harm me in the least, I can assure you.
There is no use," continued the doctor, mollifying at the sight of his
friend's countenance, and seeing how the land lay,--"there is no use
speaking to our incurious, solitary friend here, who could bask
comfortably in sunshine for a century, without once inquiring whence
came the light and heat. But let me tell you," lifting his pipe and
shaking it across me at the clergyman, "that science has done services
to your cloth which have not always received the most grateful
acknowledgments. Why, man," here he began to fill his pipe slowly,
"the theologian and the man of science, although they seem to diverge
and lose sight of each other, are all the while working to one end.
Two exploring parties in Australia set out from one point; the one goes
east, and the other west. They lose sight of each other, they know
nothing of one another's whereabouts; but they are all steering to one
point,"--the sharp spirt of a fusee on the garden-seat came in here,
followed by an aromatic flavour in the air,--"and when they do meet,
which they are certain to do in the long run,"--here the doctor put the
pipe in his mouth, and finished his speech with it there,--"the figure
of the continent has become known, and may be set down in maps. The
exploring parties have started long ago. What folly in the one to
pooh-pooh or be suspicious of the exertions of the other. That party
deserves the greatest credit which meets the other more than half
way."--"Bravo!" cried the clergyman, when the doctor had finished his
oration; "I don't know that I could fill your place at the bedside, but
I am quite sure that you could fill mine in the pulpit."--"I am not
sure that the congregation would approve of the change,--I might
disturb their slumbers;" and, pleased with his retort, his cheery laugh
rose through a cloud of smoke into the sunset.

Heigho! mine is a dull life, I fear, when this little affair of the
doctor and the clergyman takes the dignity of an incident, and seems
worthy of being recorded.

The doctor was anxious that, during the following winter, a short
course of lectures should be delivered in the village schoolroom, and
in my garden he held several conferences on the matter with the
clergyman and myself. It was arranged finally that the lectures should
be delivered, and that one of them should be delivered by me. I need
not say how pleasant was the writing out of my discourse, and how the
pleasure was heightened by the slightest thrill of alarm at my own
temerity. My lecture I copied out in my most careful hand, and, as I
had it by heart, I used to declaim passages of it ensconced in my
moss-house, or concealed behind my shrubbery trees. In these places I
tried it all over, sentence by sentence. The evening came at last
which had been looked forward to for a couple of months or more. The
small schoolroom was filled by forms on which the people sat, and a
small reading-desk, with a tumbler of water on it, at the further end,
waited for me. When I took my seat, the couple of hundred eyes struck
into me a certain awe. I discovered in a moment why the orator of the
hustings is so deferential to the mob. You may despise every
individual member of your audience, but these despised individuals, in
their capacity of a collective body, overpower you. I addressed the
people with the most unfeigned respect. When I began, too, I found
what a dreadful thing it is to hear your own voice inhabiting the
silence. You are related to your voice, and yet divorced from it. It
is you, and yet a thing apart. All the time it is going on, you can be
critical as to its tone, volume, cadence, and other qualities, as if it
was the voice of a stranger. Gradually, however, I got accustomed to
my voice, and the respect which I entertained for my hearers so far
relaxed that I was at last able to look them in the face. I saw the
doctor and the clergyman smile encouragingly, and my half-witted
gardener looking up at me with open mouth, and the atrabilious
confectioner clap his hands, which made me take refuge in my paper
again. I got to the end of my task without any remarkable incident, if
I except the doctor's once calling out "hear" loudly, which brought the
heart into my mouth, and blurred half a sentence. When I sat down,
there were the usual sounds of approbation, and the confectioner
returned thanks, in the name of the audience.




ON VAGABONDS

Call it oddity, eccentricity, humour, or what you please, it is evident
that the special flavour of mind or manner which, independently of
fortune, station, or profession, sets a man apart and makes him
distinguishable from his fellows, and which gives the charm of
picturesqueness to society, is fast disappearing from amongst us. A
man may count the odd people of his acquaintance on his fingers; and it
is observable that these odd people are generally well stricken in
years. They belong more to the past generation than to the present.
Our young men are terribly alike. For these many years back, the young
gentlemen I have had the fortune to encounter are clever, knowing,
selfish, disagreeable; the young ladies are of one pattern, like minted
sovereigns of the same reign,--excellent gold, I have no doubt, but
each bearing the same awfully proper image and superscription. There
are no blanks in the matrimonial lottery nowadays, but the prizes are
all of a value, and there is but one kind of article given for the
ticket. Courtship is an absurdity and a sheer waste of time. If a man
could but close his eyes in a ball-room, dash into a bevy of muslin
beauties, carry off the fair one that accident gives to his arms, his
raid would be as reasonable and as likely to produce happiness as the
more ordinary methods of procuring a spouse. If a man has to choose
one guinea out of a bag containing one hundred and fifty, what can he
do? What wonderful wisdom can he display in his choice? There is no
appreciable difference of value in the golden pieces. The latest
coined are a little fresher, that's all. An act of uniformity, with
heavy penalties for recusants, seems to have been passed upon the
English race. That we can quite well account for this state of things,
does not make the matter better, does not make it the less our duty to
fight against it. We are apt to be told that men are too busy and
women too accomplished for humour of speech or originality of character
or manner. In the truth of this lies the pity of it. If, with the
exceptions of hedges that divide fields, and streams that run as
marches between farms, every inch of soil were drained, ploughed,
manured, and under that improved cultivation rushing up into
astonishing wheaten and oaten crops, enriching tenant and proprietor,
the aspect of the country would be decidedly uninteresting, and would
present scant attraction to the man riding or walking through it. In
such a world the tourists would be few. Personally, I should detest a
world all red and ruled with the ploughshare in spring, all covered
with harvest in autumn. I wish a little variety. I desiderate moors
and barren places: the copse where you can flush the woodcock; the
warren where, when you approach, you can see the twinkle of innumerable
rabbit tails; and, to tell the truth, would not feel sorry although
Reynard himself had a hole beneath the wooded bank, even if the demands
of his rising family cost Farmer Yellowleas a fat capon or two in the
season. The fresh, rough, heathery parts of human nature, where the
air is freshest, and where the linnets sing, is getting encroached upon
by cultivated fields. Every one is making himself and herself useful.
Every one is producing something. Everybody is clever. Everybody is a
philanthropist. I don't like it. I love a little eccentricity. I
respect honest prejudices. I admire foolish enthusiasm in a young head
better than a wise scepticism. It is high time, it seems to me, that a
moral game-law were passed for the preservation of the wild and vagrant
feelings of human nature.

I have advertised myself to speak of _vagabonds_, and I must explain
what I mean by the term. We all know what was the doom of the first
child born of man, and it is needless for me to say that I do not wish
the spirit of Cain more widely diffused amongst my fellow-creatures.
By vagabonds, I do not mean a tramp or a gipsy, or a thimble-rigger, or
a brawler who is brought up with a black eye before a magistrate in the
morning. The vagabond as I have him in my mind's eye, and whom I
dearly love, comes out of quite a different mould. The man I speak of,
seldom, it is true, attains to the dignity of a churchwarden; he is
never found sitting at a reformed town-council board; he has a horror
of public platforms; he never by any chance heads a subscription list
with a donation of fifty pounds. On the other hand, he is very far
from being a "ne'er-do-weel," as the Scotch phrase it, or an imprudent
person. He does not play at "Aunt Sally" on a public race-course, he
does not wrench knockers from the doors of slumbering citizens; he has
never seen the interior of a police-cell. It is quite true, he has a
peculiar way of looking at many things. If, for instance, he is
brought up with cousin Milly, and loves her dearly, and the childish
affection grows up and strengthens in the woman's heart, and there is a
fair chance for them fighting the world side by side, he marries her
without too curiously considering whether his income will permit him to
give dinner-parties, and otherwise fashionably see his friends. Very
imprudent, no doubt. But you cannot convince my vagabond. With the
strangest logical twist, which seems natural to him, he conceives that
he marries for his own sake, and not for the sake of his acquaintances,
and that the possession of a loving heart and a conscience void of
reproach is worth, at any time an odd sovereign in his pocket. The
vagabond is not a favourite with the respectable classes. He is
particularly feared by mammas who have daughters to dispose of,--not
that he is a bad son, or likely to prove a bad husband or a treacherous
friend; but somehow gold does not stick to his fingers as it does to
the fingers of some men. He is regardless of appearances. He chooses
his friends neither for their fine houses nor their rare wines, but for
their humours, their goodness of heart, their capacities of making a
joke and of seeing one, and for their abilities, unknown often as the
woodland violet, but not the less sweet for obscurity. As a
consequence, his acquaintance is miscellaneous, and he is often seen at
other places than rich men's feasts. I do believe he is a gainer by
reason of his vagrant ways. He comes in contact with the queer corners
and the out-of-the-way places of human life. He knows more of our
common nature, just as the man who walks through a country, and who
strikes off the main road now and then to visit a ruin, or a legendary
cairn of stones, who drops into village inns, and talks with the people
he meets on the road, becomes better acquainted with it than the man
who rolls haughtily along the turnpike in a carriage and four. We lose
a great deal by foolish hauteur. No man is worth much who has not a
touch of the vagabond in him. Could I have visited London thirty years
ago, I would rather have spent an hour with Charles Lamb than with any
other of its residents. He was a fine specimen of the vagabond, as I
conceive him. His mind was as full of queer nooks and tortuous
passages as any mansion-house of Elizabeth's day or earlier, where the
rooms are cosey, albeit a little low in the roof; where dusty stained
lights are falling on old oaken panellings; where every bit of
furniture has a reverent flavour of ancientness; where portraits of
noble men and women, all dead long ago, are hanging on the walls; and
where a black-letter Chaucer with silver clasps is lying open on a seat
in the window. There was nothing modern about him. The garden of his
mind did not flaunt in gay parterres; it resembled those that Cowley
and Evelyn delighted in, with clipped trees, and shaven lawns, and
stone satyrs, and dark, shadowing yews, and a sun-dial, with a Latin
motto sculptured on it, standing at the farther end. Lamb was the
slave of quip and whimsey; he stuttered out puns to the detriment of
all serious and improving conversation, and twice or so in the year he
was overtaken in liquor. Well, in spite of these things, perhaps on
account of these things, I love his memory. For love and charity
ripened in that nature as peaches ripen on the wall that fronts the
sun. Although he did not blow his trumpet in the corners of the
streets, he was tried as few men are, and fell not. He jested, that he
might not weep. He wore a martyr's heart beneath his suit of motley.
And only years after his death, when to admiration or censure he was
alike insensible, did the world know his story and that of his sister
Mary.

Ah, me! what a world this was to live in two or three centuries ago,
when it was getting itself discovered--when the sunset gave up America,
when a steel hand had the spoiling of Mexico and Peru! Then were the
"Arabian Nights" commonplace, enchantments a matter of course, and
romance the most ordinary thing in the world. Then man was courting
Nature; now he has married her. Every mystery is dissipated. The
planet is familiar as the trodden pathway running between towns. We no
longer gaze wistfully to the west, dreaming of the Fortunate Isles. We
seek our wonders now on the ebbed sea-shore; we discover our new worlds
with the microscope. Yet, for all that time has brought and taken
away, I am glad to know that the vagabond sleeps in our blood, and
awakes now and then. Overlay human nature as you please, here and
there some bit of rock, or mound of aboriginal soil, will crop out with
the wild-flowers growing upon it, sweetening the air. When the boy
throws his Delectus or his Euclid aside, and takes passionately to the
reading of "Robinson Crusoe" or Bruce's "African Travels," do not shake
your head despondingly over him and prophesy evil issues. Let the wild
hawk try its wings. It will be hooded, and will sit quietly enough on
the falconer's perch ere long. Let the wild horse career over its
boundless pampas; the jerk of the lasso will bring it down soon enough.
Soon enough will the snaffle in the mouth and the spur of the tamer
subdue the high spirit to the bridle, or the carriage-trace. Perhaps
not; and, if so, the better for all parties. Once more there will be a
new man and new deeds in the world. For Genius is a vagabond, Art is a
vagabond, Enterprise is a vagabond. Vagabonds have moulded the world
into its present shape; they have made the houses in which we dwell,
the roads on which we ride and drive, the very laws that govern us.
Respectable people swarm in the track of the vagabond as rooks in the
track of the ploughshare. Respectable people do little in the world
except storing wine-cellars and amassing fortunes for the benefit of
spendthrift heirs. Respectable well-to-do Grecians shook their heads
over Leonidas and his three hundred when they went down to Thermopylae.
Respectable Spanish churchmen with shaven crowns scouted the dream of
Columbus. Respectable German folks attempted to dissuade Luther from
appearing before Charles and the princes and electors of the Empire,
and were scandalised when he declared that "Were there as many devils
in Worms as there were tiles on the house-tops, still would he on."
Nature makes us vagabonds, the world makes us respectable.

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