The Spirit of Place

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The Spirit of Place and Other Essays


Contents:

The Spirit of Place
Mrs. Dingley
Solitude
The Lady of the Lyrics
July
Wells
The Foot
Have Patience, Little Saint
The Ladies of the Idyll
A Derivation
A Counterchange
Rain
Letters of Marceline Valmore
The Hours of Sleep
The Horizon
Habits and Consciousness
Shadows




THE SPIRIT OF PLACE


With mimicry, with praises, with echoes, or with answers, the poets have
all but outsung the bells. The inarticulate bell has found too much
interpretation, too many rhymes professing to close with her inaccessible
utterance, and to agree with her remote tongue. The bell, like the bird,
is a musician pestered with literature.

To the bell, moreover, men do actual violence. You cannot shake together
a nightingale's notes, or strike or drive them into haste, nor can you
make a lark toll for you with intervals to suit your turn, whereas
wedding-bells are compelled to seem gay by mere movement and hustling. I
have known some grim bells, with not a single joyous note in the whole
peal, so forced to hurry for a human festival, with their harshness made
light of, as though the Bishop of Hereford had again been forced to dance
in his boots by a merry highwayman.

The clock is an inexorable but less arbitrary player than the bellringer,
and the chimes await their appointed time to fly--wild prisoners--by twos
or threes, or in greater companies. Fugitives--one or twelve taking
wing--they are sudden, they are brief, they are gone; they are delivered
from the close hands of this actual present. Not in vain is the sudden
upper door opened against the sky; they are away, hours of the past.

Of all unfamiliar bells, those which seem to hold the memory most surely
after but one hearing are bells of an unseen cathedral of France when one
has arrived by night; they are no more to be forgotten than the bells in
"Parsifal." They mingle with the sound of feet in unknown streets, they
are the voices of an unknown tower; they are loud in their own language.
The spirit of place, which is to be seen in the shapes of the fields and
the manner of the crops, to be felt in a prevalent wind, breathed in the
breath of the earth, overheard in a far street-cry or in the tinkle of
some black-smith, calls out and peals in the cathedral bells. It speaks
its local tongue remotely, steadfastly, largely, clamorously, loudly, and
greatly by these voices; you hear the sound in its dignity, and you know
how familiar, how childlike, how life-long it is in the ears of the
people. The bells are strange, and you know how homely they must be.
Their utterances are, as it were, the classics of a dialect.

Spirit of place! It is for this we travel, to surprise its subtlety; and
where it is a strong and dominant angel, that place, seen once, abides
entire in the memory with all its own accidents, its habits, its breath,
its name. It is recalled all a lifetime, having been perceived a week,
and is not scattered but abides, one living body of remembrance. The
untravelled spirit of place--not to be pursued, for it never flies, but
always to be discovered, never absent, without variation--lurks in the by-
ways and rules over the towers, indestructible, an indescribable unity.
It awaits us always in its ancient and eager freshness. It is sweet and
nimble within its immemorial boundaries, but it never crosses them. Long
white roads outside have mere suggestions of it and prophecies; they give
promise not of its coming, for it abides, but of a new and singular and
unforeseen goal for our present pilgrimage, and of an intimacy to be
made. Was ever journey too hard or too long that had to pay such a
visit? And if by good fortune it is a child who is the pilgrim, the
spirit of place gives him a peculiar welcome, for antiquity and the
conceiver of antiquity (who is only a child) know one another; nor is
there a more delicate perceiver of locality than a child. He is well
used to words and voices that he does not understand, and this is a
condition of his simplicity; and when those unknown words are bells, loud
in the night, they are to him as homely and as old as lullabies.

If, especially in England, we make rough and reluctant bells go in gay
measures, when we whip them to run down the scale to ring in a
wedding--bells that would step to quite another and a less agile march
with a better grace--there are belfries that hold far sweeter companies.
If there is no music within Italian churches, there is a most curious
local immemorial music in many a campanile on the heights. Their way is
for the ringers to play a tune on the festivals, and the tunes are not
hymn tunes or popular melodies, but proper bell-tunes, made for bells.
Doubtless they were made in times better versed than ours in the
sub-divisions of the arts, and better able to understand the strength
that lies ready in the mere little submission to the means of a little
art, and to the limits--nay, the very embarrassments--of those means. If
it were but possible to give here a real bell-tune--which cannot be, for
those melodies are rather long--the reader would understand how some
village musician of the past used his narrow means as a composer for the
bells, with what freshness, completeness, significance, fancy, and what
effect of liberty.

These hamlet-bells are the sweetest, as to their own voices, in the
world. Then I speak of their antiquity I use the word relatively. The
belfries are no older than the sixteenth or seventeenth century, the time
when Italy seems to have been generally rebuilt. But, needless to say,
this is antiquity for music, especially in Italy. At that time they must
have had foundries for bells of tender voices, and pure, warm, light, and
golden throats, precisely tuned. The hounds of Theseus had not a more
just scale, tuned in a peal, than a North Italian belfry holds in leash.
But it does not send them out in a mere scale, it touches them in the
order of the game of a charming melody. Of all cheerful sounds made by
man this is by far the most light-hearted. You do not hear it from the
great churches. Giotto's coloured tower in Florence, that carries the
bells for Santa Maria del Fiore and Brunelleschi's silent dome, does not
ring more than four contralto notes, tuned with sweetness, depth, and
dignity, and swinging one musical phrase which softly fills the country.

The village belfry it is that grows so fantastic and has such nimble
bells. Obviously it stands alone with its own village, and can therefore
hear its own tune from beginning to end. There are no other bells in
earshot. Other such dovecote-doors are suddenly set open to the cloud,
on a _festa_ morning, to let fly those soft-voiced flocks, but the
nearest is behind one of many mountains, and our local tune is
uninterrupted. Doubtless this is why the little, secluded, sequestered
art of composing melodies for bells--charming division of an art, having
its own ends and means, and keeping its own wings for unfolding by
law--dwells in these solitary places. No tunes in a town would get this
hearing, or would be made clear to the end of their frolic amid such a
wide and lofty silence.

Nor does every inner village of Italy hold a bell-tune of its own; the
custom is Ligurian. Nowhere so much as in Genoa does the nervous tourist
complain of church bells in the morning, and in fact he is made to hear
an honest rout of them betimes. But the nervous tourist has not,
perhaps, the sense of place, and the genius of place does not signal to
him to go and find it among innumerable hills, where one by one, one by
one, the belfries stand and play their tunes. Variable are those lonely
melodies, having a differing gaiety for the festivals; and a pitiful air
is played for the burial of a villager.

As for the poets, there is but one among so many of their bells that
seems to toll with a spiritual music so loud as to be unforgotten when
the mind goes up a little higher than the earth, to listen in thought to
earth's untethered sounds. This is Milton's curfew, that sways across
one of the greatest of all the seashores of poetry--"the wide-watered."




MRS. DINGLEY


We cannot do her honour by her Christian name. {1} All we have to call
her by more tenderly is the mere D, the D that ties her to Stella, with
whom she made the two-in-one whom Swift loved "better a thousand times
than life, as hope saved." MD, without full stops, Swift writes it eight
times in a line for the pleasure of writing it. "MD sometimes means
Stella alone," says one of many editors. "The letters were written
nominally to Stella and Mrs. Dingley," says another, "but it does not
require to be said that it was really for Stella's sake alone that they
were penned." Not so. "MD" never stands for Stella alone. And the
editor does not yet live who shall persuade one honest reader, against
the word of Swift, that Swift loved Stella only, with an ordinary love,
and not, by a most delicate exception, Stella and Dingley, so joined that
they make the "she" and "her" of every letter. And this shall be a paper
of reparation to Mrs. Dingley.

No one else in literary history has been so defrauded of her honours. In
love "to divide is not to take away," as Shelley says; and Dingley's half
of the tender things said to MD is equal to any whole, and takes nothing
from the whole of Stella's half. But the sentimentalist has fought
against Mrs. Dingley from the outset. He has disliked her, shirked her,
misconceived her, and effaced her. Sly sentimentalist--he finds her
irksome. Through one of his most modern representatives he has but
lately called her a "chaperon." A chaperon!

MD was not a sentimentalist. Stella was not so, though she has been
pressed into that character; D certainly was not, and has in this respect
been spared by the chronicler; and MD together were "saucy charming MD,"
"saucy little, pretty, dear rogues," "little monkeys mine," "little
mischievous girls," "nautinautinautidear girls," "brats," "huzzies both,"
"impudence and saucy-face," "saucy noses," "my dearest lives and
delights," "dear little young women," "good dallars, not crying dallars"
(which means "girls"), "ten thousand times dearest MD," and so forth in a
hundred repetitions. They are, every now and then, "poor MD," but
obviously not because of their own complaining. Swift called them so
because they were mortal; and he, like all great souls, lived and loved,
conscious every day of the price, which is death.

The two were joined by love, not without solemnity, though man, with his
summary and wholesale ready-made sentiment, has thus obstinately put them
asunder. No wholesale sentiment can do otherwise than foolishly play
havoc with such a relation. To Swift it was the most secluded thing in
the world. "I am weary of friends, and friendships are all monsters,
except MD's;" "I ought to read these letters I write after I have done.
But I hope it does not puzzle little Dingley to read, for I think I mend:
but methinks," he adds, "when I write plain, I do not know how, but we
are not alone, all the world can see us. A bad scrawl is so snug; it
looks like PMD." Again: "I do not like women so much as I did. MD, you
must know, are not women." "God Almighty preserve you both and make us
happy together." "I say Amen with all my heart and vitals, that we may
never be asunder ten days together while poor Presto lives." "Farewell,
dearest beloved MD, and love poor, poor Presto, who has not had one happy
day since he left you, as hope saved."

With them--with her--he hid himself in the world, at Court, at the bar of
St. James's coffee-house, whither he went on the Irish mail-day, and was
"in pain except he saw MD's little handwriting." He hid with them in the
long labours of these exquisite letters every night and morning. If no
letter came, he comforted himself with thinking that "he had it yet to be
happy with." And the world has agreed to hide under its own manifold and
lachrymose blunders the grace and singularity--the distinction--of this
sweet romance. "Little, sequestered pleasure-house"--it seemed as though
"the many could not miss it," but not even the few have found it.

It is part of the scheme of the sympathetic historian that Stella should
be the victim of hope deferred, watching for letters from Swift. But day
and night Presto complains of the scantiness of MD's little letters; he
waits upon "her" will: "I shall make a sort of journal, and when it is
full I will send it whether MD writes or not; and so that will be
pretty." "Naughty girls that will not write to a body!" "I wish you
were whipped for forgetting to send. Go, be far enough, negligent
baggages." "You, Mistress Stella, shall write your share, and then comes
Dingley altogether, and then Stella a little crumb at the end; and then
conclude with something handsome and genteel, as 'your most humble
cumdumble.'" But Scott and Macaulay and Thackeray are all exceedingly
sorry for Stella.

Swift is most charming when he is feigning to complain of his task: "Here
is such a stir and bustle with this little MD of ours; I must be writing
every night; O Lord, O Lord!" "I must go write idle things, and twittle
twattle." "These saucy jades take up so much of my time with writing to
them in the morning." Is it not a stealthy wrong done upon Mrs. Dingley
that she should be stripped of all these ornaments to her name and
memory? When Swift tells a woman in a letter that there he is "writing
in bed, like a tiger," she should go gay in the eyes of all generations.

They will not let Stella go gay, because of sentiment; and they will not
let Mrs. Dingley go gay, because of sentiment for Stella. Marry come up!
Why did not the historians assign all the tender passages (taken very
seriously) to Stella, and let Dingley have the jokes, then? That would
have been no ill share for Dingley. But no, forsooth, Dingley is allowed
nothing.

There are passages, nevertheless, which can hardly be taken from her. For
now and then Swift parts his dear MD. When he does so he invariably
drops those initials and writes "Stella" or "Ppt" for the one, and "D" or
"Dingley" for the other. There is no exception to this anywhere. He is
anxious about Stella's "little eyes," and about her health generally;
whereas Dingley is strong. Poor Ppt, he thinks, will not catch the "new
fever," because she is not well; "but why should D escape it, pray?" And
Mrs. Dingley is rebuked for her tale of a journey from Dublin to Wexford.
"I doubt, Madam Dingley, you are apt to lie in your travels, though not
so bad as Stella; she tells thumpers." Stella is often reproved for her
spelling, and Mrs. Dingley writes much the better hand. But she is a
puzzle-headed woman, like another. "What do you mean by my fourth
letter, Madam Dinglibus? Does not Stella say you had my fifth, goody
Blunder?" "Now, Mistress Dingley, are you not an impudent slut to except
a letter next packet? Unreasonable baggage! No, little Dingley, I am
always in bed by twelve, and I take great care of myself." "You are a
pretending slut, indeed, with your 'fourth' and 'fifth' in the margin,
and your 'journal' and everything. O Lord, never saw the like, we shall
never have done." "I never saw such a letter, so saucy, so journalish,
so everything." Swift is insistently grateful for their inquiries for
his health. He pauses seriously to thank them in the midst of his
prattle. Both women--MD--are rallied on their politics: "I have a fancy
that Ppt is a Tory, I fancy she looks like one, and D a sort of trimmer."

But it is for Dingley separately that Swift endured a wild bird in his
lodgings. His man Patrick had got one to take over to her in Ireland.
"He keeps it in a closet, where it makes a terrible litter; but I say
nothing; I am as tame as a clout."

Forgotten Dingley, happy in this, has not had to endure the ignominy, in
a hundred essays, to be retrospectively offered to Swift as an unclaimed
wife; so far so good. But two hundred years is long for her to have gone
stripped of so radiant a glory as is hers by right. "Better, thanks to
MD's prayers," wrote the immortal man who loved her, in a private
fragment of a journal, never meant for Dingley's eyes, nor for Ppt's, nor
for any human eyes; and the rogue Stella has for two centuries stolen all
the credit of those prayers, and all the thanks of that pious
benediction.




SOLITUDE


The wild man is alone at will, and so is the man for whom civilization
has been kind. But there are the multitudes to whom civilization has
given little but its reaction, its rebound, its chips, its refuse, its
shavings, sawdust and waste, its failures; to them solitude is a right
foregone or a luxury unattained; a right foregone, we may name it, in the
case of the nearly savage, and a luxury unattained in the case of the
nearly refined. These has the movement of the world thronged together
into some blind by-way.

Their share in the enormous solitude which is the common, unbounded, and
virtually illimitable possession of all mankind has lapsed, unclaimed.
They do not know it is theirs. Of many of their kingdoms they are
ignorant, but of this most ignorant. They have not guessed that they own
for every man a space inviolate, a place of unhidden liberty and of no
obscure enfranchisement. They do not claim even the solitude of closed
corners, the narrow privacy of the lock and key; nor could they command
so much. For the solitude that has a sky and a horizon they know not how
to wish.

It lies in a perpetual distance. England has leagues thereof,
landscapes, verge beyond verge, a thousand thousand places in the woods,
and on uplifted hills. Or rather, solitudes are not to be measured by
miles; they are to be numbered by days. They are freshly and freely the
dominion of every man for the day of his possession. There is loneliness
for innumerable solitaries. As many days as there are in all the ages,
so many solitudes are there for men. This is the open house of the
earth; no one is refused. Nor is the space shortened or the silence
marred because, one by one, men in multitudes have been alone there
before. Solitude is separate experience. Nay, solitudes are not to be
numbered by days, but by men themselves. Every man of the living and
every man of the dead might have had his "privacy of light."

It needs no park. It is to be found in the merest working country; and a
thicket may be as secret as a forest. It is not so difficult to get for
a time out of sight and earshot. Even if your solitude be enclosed, it
is still an open solitude, so there be "no cloister for the eyes," and a
space of far country or a cloud in the sky be privy to your hiding-place.
But the best solitude does not hide at all.

This the people who have drifted together into the streets live whole
lives and never know. Do they suffer from their deprivation of even the
solitude of the hiding-place? There are many who never have a whole hour
alone. They live in reluctant or indifferent companionship, as people
may in a boarding-house, by paradoxical choice, familiar with one another
and not intimate. They live under careless observation and subject to a
vagabond curiosity. Theirs is the involuntary and perhaps the
unconscious loss which is futile and barren.

One knows the men, and the many women, who have sacrificed all their
solitude to the perpetual society of the school, the cloister, or the
hospital ward. They walk without secrecy, candid, simple, visible,
without moods, unchangeable, in a constant communication and practice of
action and speech. Theirs assuredly is no barren or futile loss, and
they have a conviction, and they bestow the conviction, of solitude
deferred.

Who has painted solitude so that the solitary seemed to stand alone and
inaccessible? There is the loneliness of the shepherdess in many a
drawing of J.F. Millet. The little figure is away, aloof. The girl
stands so when the painter is gone. She waits so on the sun for the
closing of the hours of pasture. Millet has her as she looks, out of
sight.

Now, although solitude is a prepared, secured, defended, elaborate
possession of the rich, they too deny themselves the natural solitude of
a woman with a child. A newly-born child is so nursed and talked about,
handled and jolted and carried about by aliens, and there is so much
importunate service going forward, that a woman is hardly alone long
enough to become aware, in recollection, how her own blood moves
separately, beside her, with another rhythm and different pulses. All is
commonplace until the doors are closed upon the two. This unique
intimacy is a profound retreat, an absolute seclusion. It is more than
single solitude; it is a redoubled isolation more remote than mountains,
safer than valleys, deeper than forests, and further than mid-sea.

That solitude partaken--the only partaken solitude in the world--is the
Point of Honour of ethics. Treachery to that obligation and a betrayal
of that confidence might well be held to be the least pardonable of all
crimes. There is no innocent sleep so innocent as sleep shared between a
woman and a child, the little breath hurrying beside the longer, as a
child's foot runs. But the favourite crime of the sentimentalist is that
of a woman against her child. Her power, her intimacy, her opportunity,
that should be her accusers, are held to excuse her. She gains the most
slovenly of indulgences and the grossest compassion, on the vulgar
grounds that her crime was easy.

Lawless and vain art of a certain kind is apt to claim to-day, by the
way, some such fondling as a heroine of the dock receives from common
opinion. The vain artist had all the opportunities of the situation. He
was master of his own purpose, such as it was; it was his secret, and the
public was not privy to his artistic conscience. He does violence to the
obligations of which he is aware, and which the world does not know very
explicitly. Nothing is easier. Or he is lawless in a more literal
sense, but only hopes the world will believe that he has a whole code of
his own making. It would, nevertheless, be less unworthy to break
obvious rules obviously in the obvious face of the public, and to abide
the common rebuke.

It has just been said that a park is by no means necessary for the
preparation of a country solitude. Indeed, to make those far and wide
and long approaches and avenues to peace seems to be a denial of the
accessibility of what should be so simple. A step, a pace or so aside,
is enough to lead thither.

A park insists too much, and, besides, does not insist very sincerely. In
order to fulfil the apparent professions and to keep the published
promise of a park, the owner thereof should be a lover of long seclusion
or of a very life of loneliness. He should have gained the state of
solitariness which is a condition of life quite unlike any other. The
traveller who may have gone astray in countries where an almost life-long
solitude is possible knows how invincibly apart are the lonely figures he
has seen in desert places there. Their loneliness is broken by his
passage, it is true, but hardly so to them. They look at him, but they
are not aware that he looks at them. Nay, they look at him as though
they were invisible. Their un-self-consciousness is absolute; it is in
the wild degree. They are solitaries, body and soul; even when they are
curious, and turn to watch the passer-by, they are essentially alone.
Now, no one ever found that attitude in a squire's figure, or that look
in any country gentleman's eyes. The squire is not a life-long solitary.
He never bore himself as though he were invisible. He never had the
impersonal ways of a herdsman in the remoter Apennines, with a blind,
blank hut in the rocks for his dwelling. Millet would not even have
taken him as a model for a solitary in the briefer and milder sylvan
solitudes of France. And yet nothing but a life-long, habitual, and wild
solitariness would be quite proportionate to a park of any magnitude.

If there is a look of human eyes that tells of perpetual loneliness, so
there is also the familiar look that is the sign of perpetual crowds. It
is the London expression, and, in its way, the Paris expression. It is
the quickly caught, though not interested, look, the dull but ready
glance of those who do not know of their forfeited place apart; who have
neither the open secret nor the close; no reserve, no need of refuge, no
flight nor impulse of flight; no moods but what they may brave out in the
street, no hope of news from solitary counsels.




THE LADY OF THE LYRICS


She is eclipsed, or gone, or in hiding. But the sixteenth century took
her for granted as the object of song; she was a class, a state, a sex.
It was scarcely necessary to waste the lyrist's time--time that went so
gaily to metre as not to brook delays--in making her out too clearly. She
had no more of what later times call individuality than has the rose, her
rival, her foil when she was kinder, her superior when she was cruel, her
ever fresh and ever conventional paragon. She needed not to be devised
or divined; she was ready. A merry heart goes all the day; the lyrist's
never grew weary. Honest men never grow tired of bread or of any other
daily things whereof the sweetness is in their own simplicity.