Lynton and Lynmouth: A Pageant of Cliff & Moorland. John Presland
the spirit of Tracy, or looking for seaweed and anemones in the clear rock-pools at low-tide. Ilfracombe then, in the middle of the last century, kept much of its original character as a seaport of importance, which in its day had sent representatives to a shipping council in the fourteenth century, had contributed six ships towards the Siege of Calais—at a time when Liverpool was only of sufficient size to send one—and had had enough strategical value to be the scene of a projected French invasion under Napoleon. Already Ilfracombe was beginning to be, however, what it now is pre-eminently, a "holiday resort." It was patronized by royalty, and, following royalty, by "the aristocracy and military," who came to enjoy the "overwhelming charms" Nature poured forth here "with a tremendous and prolific grandeur which we shall not pretend to describe," as Mr. Cornish mellifluously exclaims in his "Rise and Progress of the Towns in North Devon." In the seventies the present German Emperor, then Prince William of Prussia, was sent here with his tutors; and there is a story, preserved with great pride, of a fight on the beach between him and a bathing-machine boy, at whose father's property the Prince was throwing stones. An account of this historic battle is preserved in a doggerel ballad, printed and sold locally, and composed Heaven knows where, which is called "Tapping the War-Lord's Claret: Why Kaiser Bill hates England."
"When Kaiser Will'um was a y'uth
He com'd t' Combe one day,
And at the big hotel out there
He stopped on holiday. … "
He went bathing in Rapparee Cove, and when his tutors were out of sight began blazing at the numbers on the boxes, though warned by "young Alfie Price" not to; and after a wordy altercation the Kaiser knocked down Alfie, who got up and went for him "just like a Devon bull."
"He knacked the Kaiser on the nose,
And tapped the ry'al blid. … "
The tutors came up and intervened, and Alf was given thirty shillings to keep the matter quiet; but Kaiser Bill swore implacable hate of the English, because of the affront, built his Dreadnoughts and drilled his army to avenge the insult of Rapparee Cove upon the English nation.
Local publications are always, I think, of some interest, even when they are as rough and simple a doggerel as the above; and there are two magazines, printed and published at Barnstaple in the early years of the nineteenth century, and which may be seen in the Athenaeum Library of the town. They are the Lundy Review and The Cave, and they contain stories, poetry, puns, epigrams, acrostics, all with the mild, faint flavour of a curate's tea-party in a cathedral town, and yet invested with a kind of charm by the old-fashioned type, the yellowing paper, and a small, dim picture—like the images of ourselves and our furniture which we see in those old, round, diminishing mirrors—of the life of a century ago. There is poetry of the Lake School fashion, exhortations to Bideford and Woody Bay, to Lynton or "The Beauties of Devon"; there is more poetry of the Byronic fashion, fierce and satiric invective (yet never, be it understood, transgressing the bounds of decency or good manners!) against the lady of the poet's affection; there are stories, in which love and virtue triumph over temptation and evil-doing; there is, of course, at least one story of a blind girl, and one of a consumptive; there is much harmless punning, and in the acrostics which the ladies of 1820 so much loved are fantastically woven the names of the handsome young women of Barnstaple whose only other record is now upon a tombstone.
There is a strong tone of "patriotism," if by that we mean a dignified contempt for foreign manners and customs, foreign thought and foreign speech. I call to mind one article, where the writer is good-humouredly but supremely contemptuous of the French, because of their manner of pronouncing classical names. What can you expect of a nation, says he, for whom Titus Livy is no better than a "tom-tit-liv-ing" in a hedge, and Marcus Aurelius, the Emperor philosopher, becomes "Mark O'Rail," a mere beggerly, abusive Irishman?
This insularity of ours, which appears in a comic aspect in this article in The Cave, continued throughout the nineteenth century, and withstood the shock of the Crimea and the Indian Mutiny without apparently being in any way shaken; it is breaking now, indeed, under the humiliations of the South African War, when we were made to feel our isolation in Europe, and under the stress of this greatest war of all, when at last we feel and say that we are proud to stand with the nations of the Continent in a common cause.
But, in the nineteenth century, not only was our insular prejudice extreme, but there was a pride in our very prejudice, which made it seem hopelessly fixed and stultified. There is a trail of it through all but the greatest writings of that time, Tennyson was not without it, Charles Kingsley, Froude. … To the novel it became actually a stock-in-trade, and as such it was used by Henry Kingsley in his novel of "Ravenshoe." He was a younger brother of Charles, and his life was as restless and adventurous as a novel. He was, besides being an author, an explorer to the Australian goldfields—from which he came back rich in observation of men and manners, but without having made a pecuniary fortune—the editor of a paper, the Edinburgh Daily Review, and a correspondent in the Franco-Prussian War. He was a prolific and too hasty writer, but his novel of "Ravenshoe," whose scene is principally laid on the northern strip of Somerset coast, bordering the Bristol Channel, and which was his own favourite among his works, is considered by many critics to reach a high level, and to stand comparison with the work of his more famous brother. In the Academy of 1901 the following tribute to the book appeared under the initials C.K.B.: "I first read 'Ravenshoe' at that period when absolute romance and absolute fact have to live together; and very turbulent partners they make. The appeal of the book was instant and permanent. Even now, after a dozen years I cannot read the story unmoved. … Each point holds me of old, by sheer force of its human presentation, its resourceful dialogue, its unwearied vitality."
I first read "Ravenshoe" in this year of 1917, and to me the world seems to have travelled so far since its publication in 1862, that its aims, its ideals, and its point of view, are hardly credible. Through it all runs that facile spirit of optimism which seems to me to have distinguished much of the thought of the mid-Victorian era, that air of "All is for the best in this best of all possible worlds," that insular pride of which I have been speaking, but which to us now appears the narrowest and worst form of parochialism, a certainty that English beef, English beer, English morals, and English standards, were the ultimate excellence towards which a world of misguided foreigners might ultimately aspire, that self-satisfaction, different from pride, that glorying in prejudice, and wilful blindness to all features of national life which do not bear out the theory of an earthly paradise. "Tell me one thing, Lord Saltire; you have travelled in many countries. Is there any land, east or west, that can give us what this dear old England does—settled order, in which each man knows his place and his duties? It is so easy to be good in England."
"Well, no. It is the first country in the world. A few bad harvests would make a hell of it, though."
This was written at a time, remember, when the invention of machinery, the rapid growth of industrialism, and the increasing mobility of the population of the world, had broken down the old order of things, had created large fortunes and reduced thousands to destitution; when men poured into cities and lived crowded and unhealthy in slums, when the opening phase of the grim battle between employer and employed was fought, when trade-unionism was wrested from an unwilling Government, when housing regulations, health regulations, and poor-laws, were incapable of dealing with the wars of misery, poverty, and sickness, they were designed to meet, when little by little vested interests and class prejudices were brought before the judgment of reason and found wanting—it was in such a period of our national history that Harry Kingsley could write of "settled order, in which each one knows his place and his duties."
This attitude of mind is characteristic of a whole school of mid-Victorian novelists, and George Meredith—whose earliest novel, "Richard Feverel," was published about this date—broke many a lance against it, and scolded us and laughed at us, and upset our dignified conception of ourselves, and sometimes, in his irritable affection for his countrymen, took a bludgeon to us, and broke our heads.
I find it also in another and much greater novel, to attack which in a book dealing with this corner of Devon and Somerset is indeed a sort of lèse-majesté—for, to most people, who says "Exmoor" says "Lorna Doone."
Yet