Billeder på siden
PDF
ePub

CHAPTER XIV.

A Walk from Dulwich to Brockham.

IN A LETTER TO A FRIEND.

With an Original Circumstance or two respecting Dr. Johnson.

DEAR SIR,

As other calls upon my pilgrimage in this world have interrupted those weekly voyages of discovery into green lanes and rustic houses of entertainment which you and I had so agreeably commenced, I thought I could not do better than make you partaker of my new journey, as far as pen and paper could do it. You are therefore to look upon yourself as having resolved to take a walk of twenty or thirty miles into Surrey without knowing anything of the matter. You will have set out with us a fortnight ago, and will be kind enough to take your busts for chambermaids, and your music (which is not so easy) for the voices of stage-coachmen.

Illness, you know, does not hinder me from walking; neither does anxiety. On the contrary, the more I walk, the better and stouter I become; and I believe if everybody were to regard the restlessness which anxiety creates, as a signal from nature to get up and contend with it in that manner, people would find the benefit of it. This is more particularly the case if they are lovers of Nature, as well as pupils of her, and have an eye for the beauties in which her visible world abounds; and as I may claim the merit of loving her heartily, and even of tracing my sufferings (when I have them) to her cause, the latter are never so great but she repays me with some sense of sweetness, and leaves me a certain property in the delight of others, when I have little of my own.

"O that I had the wings of a dove!" said the royal poet;

"then would I fly away and be at rest." I believe there are few persons, who having felt sorrow, and anticipating a journey not exactly towards it, have not partaken of this sense of the desirability of remoteness. A great deal of what we love in poetry is founded upon it; nor do any feel it with more passion, than those whose sense of duty to their fellow-creatures will not allow them to regard retirement as anything but a refreshment between their tasks, and as a wealth of which all ought to partake.

But David sighed for remoteness, and not for solitude. At least, if he did, the cares of the moment must have greatly overbalanced the habits of the poet. Neither doves nor poets can very well do without a companion. Be that as it may, the writer of this epistle, who is a still greater lover of companionship than poetry (and he cannot express his liking more strongly), had not the misfortune, on the present occasion, of being compelled to do without it; and as to remoteness, though his pilgrimage was to extend little beyond twenty miles, he had not the less sense of it on that account. Remoteness is not how far you go in point of ground, but how far you feel yourself from your common-places. Literal distance is indeed necessary in some degree; but the quantity of it depends on imagination and the nature of circumstances. The poet who can take to his wings like a dove, and plunge into the wood nearest him, is farther off, millions of miles, in the retreat of his thoughts, than the literalist, who must get to Johnny Groat's in order to convince himself that he is not in Edinburgh.

Almost any companion would do, if we could not make our choice, provided it loved us and was sincere. A horse is good company, if you have no other; a dog still better. I have often thought, that I could take a child by the hand, and walk with it day after day towards the north or the east, a straight road, feeling as if it would lead into another world,

"And think 'twould lead to some bright isle of rest.” But I should have to go back, to fetch some grown friends. There were three of us on the present occasion, grown and young. We began by taking the Dulwich stage from a house in Fleet-street, where a drunken man came into the tap, and

was very pious. He recited hymns; asked the landlady to shake hands with him; was for making a sofa of the counter, which she prevented by thrusting his leg off with some indignation; and being hindered in this piece of jollity, he sank on his knees to pray. He was too good-natured for a Methodist; so had taken to stiff glasses of brandy-and-water,

"To help him to support uneasy steps

Over the burning marle."

He said he had been "twice through the gates of hell ;" and by his drinking, poor fellow, he seemed to be setting out on his third adventure. We called him Sin-bad. By the way, when you were a boy, did you not think that the name of Sindbad was allegorical, and meant a man who had sinned very badly? Does not every little boy think so? One does not indeed, at that time of life, know very well what to make of the porter Hindbad, who rhymes to him; and I remember I was not pleased when I came to find out that Hind and Sind were component words, and meant Eastern and Western.

The stage took us to the Greyhound at Dulwich, where, though we had come from another village almost as far off from London on the northern side, we felt as if we had newly got into the country, and ate a hearty supper accordingly. This was a thing not usual with us; but then everybody eats “in the country;"—there is "the air;" and besides, we had eaten little dinner, and were merrier, and "remote." On looking out of our chamber window in the morning, we remarked that the situation of the inn was beautiful, even towards the road, the place is so rich with trees; and returning to the room in which we had supped, we found with pleasure that we had a window there, presenting us with a peep into rich meadows, where the haymakers were at work in their white shirts. A sunny room, quiet, our remote five miles, and a pleasant subject (the Poetry of British Ladies), enabled the editorial part of us to go comfortably to our morning's task; after which we left the inn to proceed on our journey. We had not seen Dulwich for many years, and were surprised to find it still so full of trees. It continues, at least in the quarter through which we passed, to deserve the recommendation given it by Armstrong, of

-"Dulwich, yet unspoil'd by art."

He would have added, had he lived, now that art had come, even to make it better. It was with real pain, that two lovers of painting were obliged to coast the walls of the college without seeing the gallery; but we have vowed a pilgrimage very shortly to those remoter places, there to be found; to wit, the landscapes of Claude and Cuyp, and the houses of Rembrandt; and we shall make report of it, to save our character. We know not whether it was the sultriness of the day, with occasional heavy clouds, but we thought the air of Dulwich too warm, and pronounced it a place of sleepy luxuriance. So it appeared to us that morning; beautiful, however, and "remote ;" and the thought of old Allen, Shakspeare's playmate, made it still

more so.

I remember, in my boyhood, seeing Sir Francis Bourgeois (the bequeather of the Dulwich pictures) in company with Mr. West, in the latter's gallery in Newman-street. He was in buckskins and boots, dandy dress of that time, and appeared a lively, good-natured man, with a pleasing countenance, probably because he said something pleasant of myself; he confirmed it with an oath, which startled, but did not alter this opinion. Ever afterwards I had an inclination to like his pictures, which I believe were not very good; and unfortunately, with whatever gravity he might paint, his oath and his buckskins would never allow me to consider him a serious person; so that it somewhat surprised me to hear that M. Desenfans had bequeathed him his gallery out of pure regard; and still more that Sir Francis, when he died, had ordered his own remains to be gathered to those of his benefactor and Madame Desenfans, and all three buried in the society of the pictures they loved. For the first time, I began to think that his pictures must have contained more than was found in them, and that I had done wrong (as it is customary to do) to the gaiety of his manners. If there was vanity in the bequest, as some have thought, it was at least a vanity accompanied with touching circumstances and an appearance of a very social taste; and as most people have their vanities, it might be as well for them to think what sort of accom

paniments exalt or degrade theirs, or render them purely dull and selfish. As to the Gallery's being "out of the way," especially for students, I am of a different opinion, and for two reasons: first, that no gallery, whether in or out of the way, can ever produce great artists, nature, and perhaps the very want of a gallery, always settling that matter before galleries are thought of; and, second, because in going to see the pictures in a beautiful country village, people get out of their town common-places, and are better prepared for the perception of other beauties, and of the nature that makes them all. Besides, there

is probably something to pay on a jaunt of this kind, and yet of a different sort from payments at a door. There is no illiberal demand at Dulwich for a liberal pleasure; but then “the inn" is inviting; people eat and drink, and get social; and the warmth which dinner and a glass diffuses, helps them to rejoice doubly in the warmth of the sunshine and the pictures, and in the fame of the great and generous.

Leaving Dulwich for Norwood (where we rejoiced to hear that some of our old friends the Gipsies were still extant), we found the air very refreshing as we ascended towards the church of the latter village. It is one of the dandy modern churches (for they deserve no better name) standing on an open hill, as if to be admired. It is pleasant to see churches instead of Methodist chapels, because any moderate religion has more of real Christianity in it, than contumelious opinions of God and the next world; but there is a want of taste, of every sort, in these new churches. They are not picturesque, like the old ones; they are not humble; they are not, what they are so often miscalled, classical. A barn is a more classical building than a church with a fantastic steeple to it. In fact, a barn is of the genuine classical shape, and only wants a stone covering, and pillars about it, to become a temple of Theseus. The classical shape is the shape of simple utility and beauty. Sometimes we see it in the body of the modern church; but then a steeple must be put on it: the artist must have something of his own; and having, in fact, nothing of his own, he first puts a bit of a steeple, which he thinks will not be enough, then another bit, and then another; adds another fantastic ornament here and there to his

« ForrigeFortsæt »