Prose Idylls, New and Old Part 8

'Ein lang und breites Volkegewicht, Der erate wusste vom letzen nicht.

Der erste fiel, der zweite stand, Des dritten Lanze war zur Hand, Ein jeder hundertfach gestarkt; Erschlagene Tausend unbemerkt -

- till, as you stand upon some eminence, you see, stretching to the eastward of each tract of older trees, a long cloud of younger ones, like a green comet's tail--I wish their substance was as yielding this day. Truly beautiful--grand indeed to me it is--to see young live Nature thus carrying on a great savage process in the heart of this old and seemingly all-artificial English land; and reproducing here, as surely as in the Australian bush, a native forest, careless of mankind. Still, I wish it were easier to ride through. Stiff are those Scotchmen, and close and stout they stand by each other, and claw at you as you twist through them, the biggest aiming at your head, or even worse, at your knees; while the middle-sized slip their brushes between your thigh and the saddle, and the little babies tickle your horse's stomach, or twine about his fore-feet. Whish-- whish; we are enveloped in what seems an atmosphere of scrubbing- brushes. Fain would I shut my eyes: but dare not, or I shall ride against a tree. Whish--whish; alas for the horse which cannot wind and turn like a hare! Plunge--stagger. What is this? A broad line of ruts; perhaps some Celtic track-way, two thousand years old, now matted over with firs; dangerous enough out on the open moor, when only masked by a line of higher and darker heath: but doubly dangerous now when masked by dark undergrowth. You must find your own way here, mare. I will positively have nothing to do with it. I disclaim all responsibility. There are the reins on your neck; do what you will, only do something--and if you can, get forward, and not back.

There is daylight at last, and fresh air. I trot contemptuously through the advanced skirmishers of the Scotch invading army; and watch my friends some mile and a half off, who have threaded a practicable track-way through a long dreary yellow bog, too wet for firs to root in, and are away in 'a streamer.' Now a streamer is produced in this wise. There is but one possible gap in a bank, one possible ford in a brook; one possible path in a cover; and as each man has to wait till the man before him gets through, and them gallops on, each man loses twenty yards or more on the man before him: wherefore, by all laws of known arithmetic, if ten men tail through a gap, then will the last of the ten find himself two hundred yards behind the foremost, which process several times repeated, produces the phenomenon called a streamer, viz. twenty men galloping absurdly as hard as they can, in a line half a mile long, and in humours which are celestial in the few foremost, contented in the central, and gradually becoming darker in the hindmost; till in the last man they a.s.sume a hue altogether Tartarean. Farewell, brave gentlemen! I watch, half sadly, half self-contented, the red coats scattered like sparks of fire over hill and dale, and turn slowly homeward, to visit my old women.

I pa.s.s through a gateway, out upon a village green, planted with rows of oaks, surrounded by trim sunny cottages, a pleasant oasis in the middle of the wilderness. Across the village cricket-ground--we are great cricketers in these parts, and long may the good old game live among us; and then up another hollow lane, which leads between damp shaughs and copses toward the further moor.

Curious things to a minute philosopher are these same hollow lanes.

They set him on archaeological questions, more than he can solve; and I meditate as I go, how many centuries it took to saw through the warm sandbanks this d.y.k.e ten feet deep, up which he trots, with the oak boughs meeting over his head. Was it ever worth men's while to dig out the soil? Surely not. The old method must have been, to remove the softer upper spit, till they got to tolerably hard ground; and then, Macadam's metal being as yet unknown, the rains and the wheels of generations sawed it gradually deeper and deeper, till this road-ditch was formed. But it must have taken centuries to do it.

Many of these hollow lanes, especially those on flat ground, must be as old or older than the Conquest. In Devons.h.i.+re I am sure that they are. But there many of them, one suspects, were made not of malice, but of cowardice prepense. Your indigenous Celt was, one fears, a sneaking animal, and liked to keep when he could under cover of banks and hill-sides; while your bold Roman made his raised roads straight over hill and dale, as 'ridge-ways' from which, as from an eagle's eyrie, he could survey the conquered lowlands far and wide. It marks strongly the difference between the two races, that difference between the Roman paved road with its established common way for all pa.s.sengers, its regular stations and milestones, and the Celtic track-way winding irresolutely along in innumerable ruts, parting to meet again, as if each savage (for they were little better) had taken his own fresh path when he found the next line of ruts too heavy for his cattle. Around the spurs of Dartmoor I have seen many ancient roads, some of them long disused, which could have been hollowed out for no other purpose but that of concealment.

So I go slowly up the hill, till the valley lies beneath me like a long green garden between its two banks of brown moor; and on through a cheerful little green, with red brick cottages scattered all round, each with its large neat garden, and beehives, and pigs and geese, and turf-stack, and clipt yews and hollies before the door, and rosy dark-eyed children, and all the simple healthy comforts of a wild 'heth-cropper's' home. When he can, the good man of the house works at farm labour, or cuts his own turf; and when work is scarce, he cuts copses and makes heath-brooms, and does a little poaching.

True, he seldom goes to church, save to be christened, married, or buried: but he equally seldom gets drunk. For church and public stand together two miles off; so that social wants sometimes bring their own compensations with them, and there are two sides to every question.

Hark! A faint, dreary hollo off the moor above. And then another, and another. My friends may trust it; for the clod of these parts delights in the chase like any bare-legged Paddy, and casts away flail and fork wildly, to run, shout, a.s.sist, and interfere in all possible ways, out of pure love. The descendant of many generations of broom-squires and deer-stealers, the instinct of sport is strong within him still, though no more of the king's deer are to be shot in the winter turnip-fields, or worse, caught by an apple-baited hook hung from an orchard bough. He now limits his aspirations to hares and pheasants, and too probably once in his life, 'hits the keeper into the river,' and reconsiders himself for a while after over a crank in Winchester gaol. Well, he has his faults; and I have mine.

But he is a thorough good fellow nevertheless; quite as good as I: civil, contented, industrious, and often very handsome; and a far shrewder fellow too--owing to his dash of wild forest blood, from gipsy, highwayman; and what not--than his bullet-headed and flaxen- polled cousin, the pure South-Saxon of the Chalk-downs. Dark-haired he is, ruddy, and tall of bone; swaggering in his youth; but when he grows old, a thorough gentleman, reserved, stately, and courteous as a prince. Sixteen years have I lived with him hail fellow well met, and never yet had a rude word or action from him.

With him I have cast in my lot, to live and die, and be buried by his side; and to him I go home contented, to look after his petty interests, cares, sorrows--Petty, truly--seeing that they include the whole primal mysteries of life--Food, raiment, and work to earn them withal; love and marriage, birth and death, right doing and wrong doing, 'Schicksal und eigene Schuld;' and all those commonplaces of humanity which in the eyes of a minute philosopher are most divine, because they are most commonplace--catholic as the suns.h.i.+ne and the rain which come down from the Heavenly Father, alike upon the evil and the good. As for doing fine things, my friend, with you, I have learnt to believe that I am not set to do fine things, simply because I am not able to do them; and as for seeing fine things, with you, I have learnt to see the sight--as well as to try to do the duty--which lies nearest me; and to comfort myself with the fancy that if I make good use of my eyes and brain in this life, I shall see--if it be of any use to me--all the fine things, or perhaps finer still, in the life to come. But if not--what matter? In any life, in any state, however simple or humble, there will be always sufficient to occupy a Minute Philosopher; and if a man be busy, and busy about his duty, what more does he require, for time or for eternity?

V. FROM OCEAN TO SEA.

The point from which to start, in order best to appreciate the change from ocean to sea, is perhaps Biarritz. The point at which to stop is Cette. And the change is important. Between the two points races are changed, climates are changed, scenery is changed, the very plants under your feet are changed, from a Western to an Eastern type. You pa.s.s from the wild Atlantic into the heart of the Roman Empire--from the influences which formed the discoverers of the New World, to those which formed the civilizers of the Old. Gascony, not only in its scenery, but in its very legends, reminds you of Devon and Cornwall; Languedoc of Greece and Palestine.

In the sea, as was to be expected, the change is even more complete.

From Biarritz to Cette, you pa.s.s from poor Edward Forbes's Atlantic to his Mediterranean centre of creation. In plain English and fact, whether you agree with his theory or not, you pa.s.s from the region of respectable whales, herrings, and salmon, to that of tunnies, sciaenas, dorados, and all the gorgons, hydras, and chimaeras dire, which are said to grace the fish-markets of Barcelona or Ma.r.s.eilles.

But to this a.s.sertion, as to most concerning nature, there are exceptions. Mediterranean fishes slip out of the Straits of Gibraltar, and up the coast of Portugal, and, once in the Bay of Biscay, find the feeding good and the wind against them, and stay there.

So it befalls, that at worthy M. Gardere's hotel at Biarritz (he has seen service in England, and knows our English ways), you may have at dinner, day after day, salmon, louvine, shad, sardine, dorado, tunny.

The first is unknown to the Mediterranean; for Fluellen mistook when he said that there were salmons in Macedon, as well as Monmouth; the louvine is none other than the nasty ba.s.s, or sea-perch of the Atlantic; the shad (extinct in these islands, save in the Severn) is a gigantic herring which comes up rivers to sp.a.w.n; a fish common (with slight differences) to both sides of the North Atlantic; while the sardine, the dorado, and the tunny (whether he be the true tunny or the Alalonga) are Mediterranean fish.

The whale fishery of these sh.o.r.es is long extinct. The Biscayan whale was supposed to be extinct likewise. But like the ibex, and some other animals which man has ceased to hunt, because he fancies that he has killed them all, they seem inclined to reappear. For in 1854 one was washed ash.o.r.e near St. Jean de Luz, at news whereof Eschricht, the great Danish naturalist, travelled night and day from Copenhagen, and secured the skeleton of the new-old monster.

But during the latter part of the Middle Ages, and on--if I recollect aright--into the seventeenth century, Bayonne, Biarritz, Guettary, and St. Jean de Luz, sent forth their hardy whale-fishers, who slew all the whales of the Biscayan seas, and then crossed the Atlantic, to attack those of the frozen North.

British and American enterprise drove them from the West coast of the Atlantic; and now their descendants are content to stay at home and take the sardine-shoals, and send them in to Bayonne on their daughters' heads.

Pretty enough it was, at least in outward seeming, to meet a party of those fisher-girls, bare-legged, high-kilted, lithe as deer, trotting, at a long loping pace, up the high road toward Bayonne, each with her basket on her head, as she laughed and sang, and tossed her black hair, and flashed her brown eyes, full of life and the enjoyment of life. Pretty enough. And yet who will blame the rail, which now sends her quickly into Bayonne--or even her fish without her; and relieves the fair young maiden from being degraded into a beast of burden?

Handsome folk are these brown Basques. A mysterious people, who dwell alone, and are not counted among the nations; speaking an unique language, and keeping up unique customs, for which the curious must consult M. Michel's interesting book. There may be a cross of English blood among them, too, about Biarritz and Bayonne; English features there are, plainly to be seen. And whether or not, one accepts the story of the country, that Anglets, near by, is an old English colony left by our Black Prince, it is certain that Bayonne Cathedral was built in part by English architects, and carries the royal arms of England; and every school history will tell us how this corner of France was long in our hands, and was indeed English long before it was properly French. Moorish blood there may be, too, here and there, left behind by those who built the little 'atalaya' or fire-beacon, over the old harbour, to correspond, by its smoke column, with a long line of similar beacons down the Spanish coast.

The Basques resemble in look the Southern Welsh--quick-eyed, neat in feature, neat in dress, often, both men and women, beautiful. The men wear a flat Scotch cap of some bright colour, and call it 'berretta.' The women tie a gaudy handkerchief round their heads, and compel one corner to stand forward from behind the ear in a triangle, in proportion to the size and stiffness whereof the lady seems to think herself well dressed. But the pretty Basque handkerchief will soon give place to the Parisian bonnet. For every cove among the rocks is now filled with smart bathing-houses, from which, in summer, the gay folk of Paris issue in 'costume de bain,'

to float about all day on calabashes--having literally no room for the soles of their feet on land. Then are opened casinos, theatre, shops, which lie closed all the winter. Then do the Basque house- owners flee into the moors, and camp out (it is said) on the hills all night, letting their rooms for ten francs a night as mere bed- chambers--for all eating and living is performed in public; while the dove-coloured oxen, with brown holland pinafores over their backs, who dawdle in pairs up and down the long street with their light carts, have to make way for wondrous equipages from the Bois de Boulogne.

Not then, for the wise man, is Biarritz a place to see and to love: but in the winter, when a little knot of quiet pleasant English hold the place against all comers, and wander, undisturbed by fas.h.i.+on, about the quaint little rocks and caves and natural bridges--and watch tumbling into the sea, before the Biscayan surges, the trim walks and summer-houses, which were erected by the munic.i.p.ality in honour of the Empress and her suite. Yearly they tumble in, and yearly are renewed, as the soft greensand strata are graven away, and what must have been once a long promontory becomes a group of fantastic pierced rocks, exactly like those which are immortalized upon the willow-pattern plates.

Owing to this rapid destruction, the rocks of Biarritz are very barren in sea-beasts and sea-weeds. But there is one remarkable exception, where the pools worn in a hard limestone are filled with what seem at first sight beds of china-asters, of all loveliest colours--primrose, sea-green, dove, purple, crimson, pink, ash-grey.

They are all p.r.i.c.kly sea-eggs (presumably the Echinus lividus, which is found in similar places in the west of Ireland), each buried for life in a cup-shaped hole which he has excavated in the rock, and shut in by an overhanging lip of living lime--seemingly a Nullipore coralline. What they do there, what they think of, or what food is brought into their curious grinding-mills by the Atlantic surges which thunder over them twice a day, who can tell? However they form, without doubt, the most beautiful object which I have ever seen in pool or cove.

But the glory of Biarritz, after all, is the moors above, and the view to be seen therefrom. Under blazing blue skies, tempered by soft dappled cloud, for ever sliding from the Atlantic and the Asturias mountains, in a climate soft as milk, and exhilarating withal as wine, one sees far and wide a panorama which, from its variety as well as its beauty, can never weary.

To the north, the long sand-line of the Biscayan sh.o.r.e--the bar of the Adour marked by a cloud of grey spray. Then the dark pine-flats of the Landes, and the towers of Bayonne rising through rich woods.

To the eastward lies a high country, furred with woods, broken with glens; a country exactly like Devon, through the heart of which, hidden in such a gorge as that of Dart or Taw, runs the swift stream of the Nive, draining the western Pyrenees. And beyond, to the south-east, in early spring, the Pyrenean snows gleam bright, white clouds above the clouds. As one turns southward, the mountains break down into brown heather-hills, like Scottish grouse moors. The two nearest, and seemingly highest, are the famous Rhune and Bayonette, where lie, to this day, amid the heath and crags, hundreds of unburied bones. For those great hills, skilfully fortified by Soult before the pa.s.sage of the Bida.s.soa, were stormed, yard by yard, by Wellington's army in October 1813. That mighty deed must be read in the pages of one who saw it with his own eyes, and fought there with his own n.o.ble body, and even n.o.bler spirit. It is not for me to tell of victories, of which Sir William Napier has already told.

Towards that hill, and the Nivelle at its foot, the land slopes down, still wooded and broken, bounded by a long sweep of clayey crumbling cliff. The eye catches the fort of Secoa, at the mouth of the Nivelle--once Wellington's sea-base for his great French campaign.

Then Fontarabia, at the Bida.s.soa mouth; and far off, the cove within which lies the fatal citadel of St. Sebastian; all backed up by the fantastic mountains of Spain; the four-horned "Quatre Couronnes," the pyramidal Jaysquivel, and beyond them again, sloping headlong into the sea, peak after peak, each one more blue and tender than the one before, leading the eye on and on for seemingly countless leagues, till they die away into the ocean horizon and the boundless west.

Not a sail, often for days together, pa.s.ses between those mountains and the sh.o.r.e on which we stand, to break the solitude, and peace, and vast expanse; and we linger, looking and looking at we know not what, and find repose in gazing purposeless into the utter void.

Very unlike France are these Basque uplands; very like the seaward parts of Devon and Cornwall. Large oak-copses and boggy meadows fill the glens; while above, the small fields, with their five-barred gates (relics of the English occupation) and high furze and heath- grown banks, make you fancy yourself for a moment in England. And the illusion is strengthened, as you see that the heath of the banks is the Goonhilly heath of the Lizard Point, and that of the bogs the orange-belled Erica ciliaris, which lingers (though rare) both in Cornwall and in the south of Ireland. But another glance undeceives you. The wild flowers are new, saving those cosmopolitan seeds (like nettles and poppies) which the Romans have carried all over Europe, and the British are now carrying over the world. Every sandy bank near the sea is covered with the creeping stems of a huge reed, which grows in summer tall enough to make not only high fences, but fis.h.i.+ng-rods. Poverty (though there is none of what we call poverty in Britain) fills the little walled court before its cottage with bay trees and standard figs; while wealth (though there is nothing here of what we call wealth in Britain) a.s.serts itself uniformly by great standard magnolias, and rich trailing roses, in full bloom here in April instead of--as with us--in July. Both on bank and in bog grow Scorzoneras (dandelions with sword-shaped leaves) of which there are none in these isles; and every common is ablaze with strange and lovely flowers. Each dry spot is brilliant with the azure flowers of a prostrate Lithospermum, so exquisite a plant, that it is a marvel why we do not see it, as 'spring-bedding,' in every British garden.

The heath is almost hidden, in places, by the large white flowers and trailing stems of the sage-leaved Cistus. Delicate purple Ixias, and yet more delicate Hoop-petticoat Narcissus, spring from the turf.

And here and there among furze and heath, crop out great pink bunches of the Daphne Cneorum of our gardens, perfuming all the air. Yes, we are indeed in foreign parts, in the very home of that Atlantic flora, of which only a few species have reached the south-west of these isles; and on the limit of another flora also--of that of Italy and Greece. For as we descend into the glen, every lane-bank and low tree is entwined, not with ivy, but with a still more beautiful evergreen, the Smilax of South-eastern Europe, with its zigzag stems, and curving heart-shaped leaves, and hooked thorns; the very oak- scrub is of species unknown to Britain. And what are these tall lilies, which fill every glade breast-high with their sword-like leaves, and spires of white flowers, lilac-pencilled? They are the cla.s.sic flower, the Asphodel of Greece and Grecian song; the Asphodel through which the ghosts of Homer's heroes strode: as heroes' ghosts might stride even here.

For here we are on sacred ground. The vegetation is rank with the blood of gallant invaders, and of no less gallant patriots. In the words of Campbell's 'Hohenlinden' -

'Every turf beneath our feet May be a hero's sepulchre.'

That little tarn below has 'bubbled with crimson foam' when the kings of Europe arose to bring home the Bourbons, as did the Lake Regillus of old, in the day when 'the Thirty Cities swore to bring the Tarquins home.'

Turn to the left, above the tarn, and into the great Spanish road from Bayonne to the frontier at what was lately 'La Negresse,' but is now a gay railway station. Where that station is, was another tarn, now drained. The road ran between the two. And that narrow s.p.a.ce of two hundred yards, on which we stand, was for three fearful days the gate of France.

For on the 10th of December, 1813, Soult, driven into Bayonne by Wellington's advance, rushed out again in the early morn, and poured a torrent of living men down this road, and upwards again towards the British army which crested that long ridge in front.

The ridge slopes rapidly away at the back, toward the lowlands of the Bida.s.soa; and once thrust from it, the English army would have been cut in two--one half driven back upon their sea-base at St. Jean de Luz: the other half left on the further side of the Adour.

And this was the gate, which had to be defended during a three days'

battle. That long copse which overhangs the road is the famous wood, which was taken and retaken many times. You house above it, embowered in trees, is the 'Mayor's house,' in which Sir John Hope was so nearly captured by the French. Somewhere behind the lane where we came down was the battery which blasted off our troops as they ran up from the lowlands behind, to support their fellows.

Of the details of the fight you must read in Napier's 'Peninsular War,' and in Mr. Gleig's 'Subaltern.' They are not to be described by one who never saw a battle, great or small.

And now, if you choose to start upon your journey from the ocean to the sea, you will take the railroad here, and run five miles through the battle-fields into Bayonne, the quaint old fortress city, girdled with a labyrinth of walls, and turf-d.y.k.es, and outside them meadows as rich, and trees as stately, as if war had never swept across the land. You may stop, if you will, to look at the tall Spanish houses, with their piazzas and jalousies, and the motley populace, French, Basques, Spaniards, Jews; and, most worth seeing of all, the lovely ladies of Bayonne, who swarm out when the sun goes down, for air and military music. You may try to find (in which you will probably fail) the arms of England in the roof of the ugly old cathedral; you may wander the bridges over which join the three quarters of the city (for the Adour and the Nive meet within the walls), and probably lose your way--a slight matter among folk who, if you will but take off your hat, call them Monsieur, apologize for the trouble you are giving, begin the laugh at your own stupidity, and compliment them on their city and their fair ladies, will be delighted to walk a mile out of their own way to show you yours. You will gaze up at the rock-rooted citadel from whence, in the small hours of April 14, 1813, after peace was agreed on, but unhappily not declared (for Napier has fully exculpated the French Generals), three thousand of Thouvenot's men burst forth against Sir John Hope's unsuspecting besiegers, with a furious valour which cost the English more than 800 men.

There, in the pine woods on the opposite side, is the Boucault, where our besieging army lay. Across the reach below stretched Sir John Hope's famous bridge; and as you leave Bayonne by rail, you run beneath the English cemetery, where lie the soldiers (officers of the Coldstream Guards among them) who fell in the Frenchman's last struggle to defend his native land.

But enough of this. I should not have recalled to mind one of these battles, had they not, one and all, been as glorious for the French and their great captain--wearied with long marches, disheartened by the apathy of their own countrymen, and, as they went on, overpowered by mere numbers--as they were for our veterans, and Wellington himself.

And now, once through Bayonne, we are in the Pignadas and the Landes.

To form a conception of these famous Landes, it is only necessary to run down by the South-Western Railway, through the moors of Woking or Ascot; spread them out flat, and multiply them to seeming infinity.

The same sea of brown heather, broken only by the same dark pignadas, or fir plantations, extends for nigh a hundred miles; and when the traveller northward has lost sight, first of the Spanish mountains, and then of the Pyrenean snows, he seems to be rus.h.i.+ng along a brown ocean, without wave or sh.o.r.e. Only, instead of the three heaths of Surrey and Hants (the same species as those of Scotland), larger and richer southern heaths cover the grey sands; and notably the delicate upright spires of the bruyere, or Erica scoparia, which grows full six feet high, and furnishes from its roots those 'bruyere' pipes, which British shopkeepers have rechristened 'briar-roots.' Instead, again, of the Scotch firs of Ascot, the pines are all pinasters (miscalled P. maritima). Each has the same bent stem, carrying at top, long, ragged, scanty, leaf-tufts, instead of the straight stem and dense short foliage of the st.u.r.dier Scotchman; and down each stem runs a long, fresh scar, and at the bottom (in spring at least), hangs a lip of tin, and a neat earthen pipkin, into which distils turpentine as clear as gla.s.s. The trees have mostly been planted within the last fifty years, to keep the drifting sands from being blown away. As timber they are about as valuable as those Jersey cow-cabbage stalks, of which the curious will at times make walking- sticks: but as producers of turpentine they have their use, and give employment to the sad, stunted, ill-fed folk, unhealthy for want of water, and barbarous from utter loneliness, whose only employment, in old times, was the keeping ragged flocks about the moors. Few and far between the natives may be seen from the railway, seemingly hung high in air, till on nearer approach you find them to be stalking along on stilts, or standing knitting on the same, a sheepskin over their shoulders, an umbrella strapped to their side, and, stuck into the small of the back, a long crutch, which serves, when resting, as a third wooden leg.