Things near & far
lawns; fountains in the midst of them, flowering shrubs and flowery
creepers blossoming and trailing everywhere; kitchen gardens where
the peaches glowed and burned dark against the hot white walls, where
the pears on the dwarf trees were as shapes of golden honey: at
last the old _clôture_ of the Abbey of Marmoutiers with pepper-pot
turrets at intervals, close to the road, and inside the enclosure,
the modern buildings of a convent school: and the mellow, river cliff
behind all. It was delightful; but it was not a bit like Doré. I
confess, my heart sank. And then going on by the river road, I got
to Rochecorbon. Still the warm cliff overhung the road, underneath
it a small hamlet with a tavern, “A la Lanterne de Rochecorbon,” and
perched on the edge of the cliff the Lantern, an odd structure which
looked something like an ancient factory chimney, and was, I suppose,
the sole relic of the ancient castle celebrated by Balzac. It took me
some time before I could get Dora’s Touraine out of my mind and enjoy
the Touraine of actuality on its own merits. And these are many.
There were great moments on this first visit to the garden of France.
I was staying at the Faisan in the Rue Royale--that street which
Balzac, who was born in it, praises as being “always royal, always
imperial,” which in these later days has taken to calling itself the
Rue Nationale--a delicious inn indeed. I got the recommendation from
Thackeray. Philip stayed there once. He calls it the “Faisan d’Or.”
It had three courtyards, or rather a courtyard and two gardens,
both closed in by the hotel walls. You entered the courtyard under
the archway in the Rue Royale; to the left was the dining-room hung
with tapestries depicting in an ancient mode the famous castles of
Touraine; on the right was the kitchen, all bright with glowing
copper pots, and the big round cook standing at the open door or
bending over his furnace, occasionally shaking one of his pots
knowingly and beaming on you as you sat at your little table in the
courtyard as much as to say: “You will find it good.” Around this
great man were four or five boys, all in white like their chief, who
seemed to be busy all day long in washing vegetables, in chopping
meat and herbs fine for _farses_, in manifold culinary employments,
running out now and again and shaking showers from bags full of
wet lettuce or endive leaves. At the back were the stables, and on
market days the yard of the Faisan was full, like an English inn
yard, of all manner of queer traps and shandridans from the country.
And beyond this courtyard, at the back of the house, were the two
gardens, secret, retired and delicious. Such green turf was there in
these chosen places, so pleasant a music in one of them of a singing
fountain, so glowing the flowers about it with the water drops
glittering on them, so sweet the shade of overhanging boughs--there
are here and there gardens that address the heart and spirit and not
the florist, as Poe knew well.
And thinking of the Faisan at Tours and of its curious delights,
how is it that much money--one may say the wealth of the whole
world--cannot buy anything like this in London? Money will get you a
set of rooms thirty feet or so in height from floor to ceiling, it
will buy you the use of suites of furniture that make you wonder when
you wake up in the morning whether by any chance you can have turned
into Louis XV in your sleep; it will buy you bathrooms all marble and
tessellated pavement, dining-rooms as marblous and Louisquinzious as
your private suites; but delights such as are afforded by the Faisan
at Tours it will by no means buy. It is a pity; at least I think so.
But then I can never fancy that I am Louis XV even for a moment, and
that, I suppose, is the reason why I don’t like living in the style
of that monarch, why I don’t even like lunching or dining in palatial
halls built and furnished in his favourite manner. And I doubt
whether the grandest of all grand hotels in our London could furnish
you with a bottle of Vouvray Nature of a named _clos_, for any money
that your millionaire’s purse could proffer.
And the mention of that admirable amber wine of Vouvray, the wine
wherein an argent bead rises at intervals through the mellow gold,
reminds me of my first night at the Faisan. All down the tables were
portly decanters of wine, red and white. I chose red, and found it
a new sensation in wine vastly to my taste. It was, of course, an
ordinary wine, and a little wine, I think of the kind called Joué
Noble, from the place of its growth, a parish by the Cher river. It
was scented like flowers in June; it was in its entirely unpretending
way quite exquisite. I drank it with relish, and towards the end of
dinner I had accounted for about three-parts of the decanter. Swiftly
came the head waiter and bore it away and as swiftly put another and
a full decanter in its place. It was almost too much; “temperance”
enthusiasts would say a great deal too much. I thought solemnly to
myself as I smoked a grateful pipe after dinner in the courtyard:
“This night I have had as much good red wine as ever I could drink.”
And this was one of the great moments of my visit to Touraine.
And then there was Chinon. The train passes through the deep darkness
of Chinon Forest, and you leave the station and come out into the
sunlight. Here is a narrow river valley: the clear Vienne in the
middle of it; to the left a gently rising land, rich with vines;
to the right a long, golden, precipitous cliff, golden in such a
sunlight as we never see in England. As in the backgrounds of the old
Italian masters, the trees stand out clearly, vividly, distinctly
against the sky; so was it at Chinon. That long, mouldering and
golden cliff was surmounted by the walls of the old castle, golden
and mouldering also, irradiated; and from the river to the cliff the
town climbed up; narrow ways, winding ways, steep ways, and every
here and there the grey-blue _tourelles_ of the fifteenth-century
houses piercing upwards; and the dark mass of the forest stretching
far and far away beyond. And then the thought that the man who had
received one of the great visions of reality once walked these ways,
and looked on a scene that had not much changed since his time; that
the golden and rich sunlight had shone on him also, in the hour when
the amazing, terrible, tremendous figures and symbols of the vision
of Pantagruel, Panurge, Friar John, the three who are yet one came to
him, we must conjecture, in clouds and darkness and uncertainties,
as he listened to the new song of the vineyards, and the vine and
the outpoured wine: all this was made a great moment also. I sat
on a sort of bridge--if I remember--joining the two parts of the
ruined castle, sat on golden stones, and looked down on the Chinon
of the grey-blue _tourelles_, on the shining Vienne, and the gentle
vine-covered slope, and I thought of the cloudy young man stumbling
over that hard French of Rabelais far into the night, in obscure
Clarendon Road, long ago. It was not long ago; this was of ’90 and
that was of ’85, but hard pains make long years. I went down the hill
again, past the fountain, and drank the red wine of Chinon solemnly,
reverently in a dark tavern in one of the dark, narrow streets. It
was called “Le Caveau de Rabelais.”
* * * * *
I came back to London in the autumn and took rooms in Guilford Street
till that cottage on the Chilterns should be ready for occupation.
Then from 1891 I lived in the country, and found it nothing, and
came back to London in the autumn of 1893, to an “upper part” in
Great Russell Street, a little westward of the British Museum. It was
then that I began to explore London, and to realise its vastness,
its immensities. Things are relative; I began now to appreciate
the fact that if you set out, without a map, from your house at 36
Great Russell Street and walk for an hour eastward or northward
you are in fact in an unknown region, a new world. Continually you
stand on a peak in Darien, and look out on undiscovered territories,
inhabited by peoples of whom you know nothing. I would go along
Great Russell Street, and turn up into Russell Square, and then go
by Guilford Street, crossing Gray’s Inn Road, and so find myself,
like the knight in the song, “ten leagues beyond the wide world’s
end.” I would go northward, up the Gray’s Inn Road, and then turn
to the right, descend into a valley and climb a height and so come
to a region which was to me as the ultimate parts of Libya, and the
lands of the Mountains of the Moon. I shall never forget the awe with
which I first came upon the other Baker Street, the Baker Street
which would enter no taxi-driver’s mind; those houses climbing up the
hill into Lloyd Square, stucco houses with classic pediments, but
all tottering, askew, and falling into decay; the jerry building of
1820–30. And, I remember, seeing on one of the leaning and doubtful
doors here the brass plate of someone who said that he was a “Buhl
Maker.” I wonder. Did someone really labour in this forsaken,
climbing street in that rich eighteenth-century art of brass and
tortoiseshell, fashioning curious cabinets and escritoires! How
unlikely it seemed; more unlikely than another announcement on a
modest door in the recesses of Camden Town, to the effect that here
were made Shell Boxes.
Often I went up Baker Street and stood in Lloyd’s Square and looked
down on London, on Gilbert Scott’s horrible, villainous sham-Gothic
St. Pancras Station and on all the vague, smoky, weary streets
about it. Here, one evening, the sun flamed suddenly and struck the
windows of a school below and lit fires in them: hence the lines--in
“A Fragment of Life”--entitled: “Lines written on looking down from a
Height in London on a Board School suddenly lit up by the sun.”
And here I would say that the matter of Wonder--that is the matter of
the arts--is everywhere offered to us. It is, I am sure, true, as the
feeble though pious Keble wrote, that:
The daily round, the common task
Will furnish all we need to ask.
And it is utterly true that he who cannot find wonder, mystery, awe,
the sense of a new world and an undiscovered realm in the places by
the Gray’s Inn Road will never find those secrets elsewhere, not in
the heart of Africa, not in the fabled hidden cities of Tibet. “The
matter of our work is everywhere present,” wrote the old alchemists,
and that is the truth. All the wonders lie within a stone’s-throw of
King’s Cross Station.
I remember that when, later on, I wrote a book on the principles
of literary criticism called “Hieroglyphics,” a good many of the
reviewers found grave fault with my dictum that all fine literature
is the work of ecstasy and the inspirer of ecstasy. “In other
words,” said these clever fellows, “a good book is a book that you
happen to like. But other people may have very different tastes
and likings; no doubt many people experience ecstasy in reading a
newspaper feuilleton. Is the feuilleton therefore fine literature?”
The objection, I hasten to say, is perfectly legitimate. Tens of
thousands, or hundreds of thousands of people, I have no doubt, read
the newspaper feuilleton in an ecstasy of delight. I once found
myself, to my dumb, almost awestruck horror, in a drawing-room where
a number of tolerably well-educated people were engaged in taking
the works of ... well, Miss Thingumbob, seriously. Doubtless, then,
there are many people who find rarities and wonders in matter that
you and I pronounce to be contemptible or detestable or just nothing
at all: my reviewers were perfectly right. But if you accept their
ruling you put an end to criticism of all sorts. I could form a large
company of coalheavers, financiers, sporting noblemen, gardeners,