And here, again, by the way, appears a marked difference between the Dalesmen and the intrusive gentry — not creditable to the latter. The native Dalesman, well aware of the fury with which the wind often gathers and eddies about any eminence, however trifling its elevation, never thinks of planting his house there: whereas the stranger, singly solicitous about the prospect or the range of lake which his gilt saloons are to command, chooses his site too often upon points better fitted for a temple of Eolus than a human dwelling-place; and he belts his house with balconies and verandas that a mountain gale often tears away in mockery. The Dalesman, wherever his choice is not circumscribed, selects a sheltered spot (a wray, for instance), which protects him from the wind altogether, upon one or two quarters, and on all quarters from its tornado violence: he takes good care, at the same time, to be within a few feet of a mountain beck: a caution so little heeded by some of the villa founders that absolutely, in a country surcharged with water, they have sometimes found themselves driven, by sheer necessity, to the after-thought of sinking a well. The very best situation, however, in other respects, may be bad in one, and sometimes find its very advantages, and the beetling crags which protect its rear, obstructions the most permanent to the ascent of smoke; and it is in the contest with these natural baffling repellents of the smoke, and in the variety of artifices for modifying its vertical, or for accomplishing its lateral escape, that have arisen the large and graceful variety of chimney models. My cottage, wanting this primary feature of elegance in the constituents of Westmoreland cottage architecture, and wanting also another very interesting feature of the elder architecture, annually becoming more and more rare, — viz. the outside gallery (which is sometimes merely of wood, but is much more striking when provided for in the original construction of the house, and completely enfoncé in the masonry), — could not rank high amongst the picturesque houses of the country; those, at least, which are such by virtue of their architectural form. It was, however, very irregular in its outline to the rear, by the aid of one little projecting room, and also of a stable and little barn, in immediate contact with the dwelling-house. It had, besides, the great advantage of a varying height: two sides being about fifteen or sixteen feet high from the exposure of both storeys; whereas the other two, being swathed about by a little orchard that rose rapidly and unequally towards the vast mountain range in the rear, exposed only the upper storey; and, consequently, on those sides the elevation rarely rose beyond seven or eight feet. All these accidents of irregular form and outline gave to the house some little pretensions to a picturesque character; whilst its “separable accidents” (as the logicians say), its bowery roses and jessamine, clothed it in loveliness — its associations with Wordsworth crowned it, to my mind, with historical dignity, — and, finally, my own twenty-seven years’ off-and-on connexion with it have, by ties personal and indestructible, endeared it to my heart so unspeakably beyond all other houses, that even now I rarely dream through four nights running that I do not find myself (and others besides) in some one of those rooms, and, most probably, the last cloudy delirium of approaching death will re-install me in some chamber of that same humble cottage. “What a tale,” says Foster, the eloquent essayist—”what a tale could be told by many a room, were the walls endowed with memory and speech!” or, in the more impassioned expressions of Wordsworth —
“Ah! what a lesson to a thoughtless man —— —— —— — if any gladsome field of earth Could render back the sighs to which it hath responded, Or echo the sad steps by which it hath been trod!”
And equally affecting it would be, if such a field or such a house could render up the echoes of joy, of festal music, of jubilant laughter — the innocent mirth of infants, or the gaiety, not less innocent, of youthful mothers — equally affecting would be such a reverberation of forgotten household happiness with the re-echoing records of sighs and groans. And few indeed are the houses that, within a period no longer than from the beginning of the century to 1835 (so long was it either mine or Wordsworth’s) have crowded such ample materials for those echoes, whether sorrowful or joyous.
Society of the Lakes
My cottage was ready in the summer; but I was playing truant amongst the valleys of Somersetshire; and, meantime, different families, throughout the summer, borrowed the cottage of the Wordsworths as my friends. They consisted chiefly of ladies; and some, by the delicacy of their attentions to the flowers, &c., gave me reason to consider their visit during my absence as a real honour; others — such is the difference of people in this world — left the rudest memorials of their careless habits impressed upon house, furniture, garden, &c. In November, at last, I, the long-expected, made my appearance. Some little sensation did really and naturally attend my coming, for most of the draperies belonging to beds, curtains, &c., had been sewed by the young women of that or the adjoining vales. This had caused me to be talked of. Many had seen me on my visit to the Wordsworths. Miss Wordsworth had introduced the curious to a knowledge of my age, name, prospects, and all the rest of what can be interesting to know. Even the old people of the vale were a little excited by the accounts (somewhat exaggerated, perhaps) of the never ending books that continued to arrive in packing-cases for several months in succession. Nothing in these vales so much fixes the attention and respect of the people as the reputation of being a “far learn’d” man. So far, therefore, I had already bespoke the favourable opinion of the Dalesmen. And a separate kind of interest arose amongst mothers and daughters, in the knowledge that I should necessarily want what — in a sense somewhat different from the general one — is called a “housekeeper”; that is, not an upper servant to superintend others, but one who could undertake, in her own person, all the duties of the house. It is not discreditable to these worthy people that several of the richest and most respectable families were anxious to secure the place for a daughter. Had I been a dissipated young man, I have good reason to know that there would have been no canvassing at all for the situation. But partly my books spoke for the character of my pursuits with these simple-minded people — partly the introduction of the Wordsworths guaranteed the safety of such a service. Even then, had I persisted in my original intention of bringing a man-servant, no respectable young woman would have accepted the place. As it was, and it being understood that I had renounced this intention, many, in a gentle, diffident way, applied for the place, or their parents on their behalf. And I mention the fact, because it illustrates one feature in the manners of this primitive and peculiar people, the Dalesmen of Westmoreland. However wealthy, they do not think it degrading to permit even the eldest daughter to go out a few years to service. The object is not to gain a sum of money in wages, but that sort of household experience which is supposed to be unattainable upon a suitable scale out of a gentleman’s family. So far was this carried, that, amongst the offers made to myself, was one from a young woman whose family was amongst the very oldest in the country, and who was at that time under an engagement of marriage to the very richest young man in the vale. She and her future husband had a reasonable prospect of possessing ten thousand pounds in land; and yet neither her own family nor her husband’s objected to her seeking such a place as I could offer. Her character and manners, I ought to add, were so truly excellent, and won respect so inevitably from everybody, that nobody could wonder at the honourable confidence reposed in her by her manly and spirited young lover. The issue of the matter, as respected my service, was, why I do not know, that Miss Wordsworth did not accept of her: and she fulfilled her purpose in another family, a very grave and respectable one, in Kendal. She stayed about a couple of years, returned, and married the young man to whom she had engaged herself, and is now the prosperous mother of a fine handsome family; and she together with her mother-in-law are the two leading matrons of the vale.
It was on a November night, about ten o’clock, that I first found myself installed in a house of my own — this cottage, so memorable from its past tenant to all men, so memorable to my
self from all which has since passed in connexion with it. A writer in The Quarterly Review, in noticing the autobiography of Dr. Watson, the Bishop of Llandaff, has thought fit to say that the Lakes, of course, afforded no society capable of appreciating this commonplace, coarse-minded man of talents. The person who said this I understand to have been Dr. Whitaker, the respectable antiquary. Now, that the reader may judge of the propriety with which this was asserted, I shall slightly rehearse the muster-roll of our Lake society, as it existed at the time when I seated myself in my Grasmere cottage. I will undertake to say that the meanest person in the whole scattered community was more extensively accomplished than the good bishop, was more conscientiously true to his duties, and had more varied powers of conversation. Wordsworth and Coleridge, then living at Allan Bank, in Grasmere, I will not notice in such a question. Southey, living thirteen miles off, at Keswick, I have already noticed; and he needs no proneur. I will begin with Windermere.
At Clappersgate, a little hamlet of perhaps six houses, on its north-west angle, and about five miles from my cottage, resided two Scottish ladies, daughters of Dr. Cullen, the famous physician and nosologist. They were universally beloved for their truly kind dispositions and the firm independence of their conduct They had been reduced from great affluence to a condition of rigorous poverty. Their father had made what should have been a fortune by his practice. The good doctor, however, was careless of his money in proportion to the facility with which he made it. All was put into a box, open to the whole family. Breach of confidence, in the most thoughtless use of this money, there could be none; because no restraint in that point, beyond what honour and good sense imposed, was laid upon any of the elder children. Under such regulations, it may be imagined that Dr. Cullen would not accumulate any very large capital; and, at his death, the family, for the first time, found themselves in embarrassed circumstances. Of the two daughters who belonged to our Lake population, one had married a Mr. Millar, son to the celebrated Professor Millar of Glasgow. This gentleman had died in America; and Mrs. Millar was now a childless widow. The other still remained unmarried. Both were equally independent; and independent even with regard to their nearest relatives; for, even from their brother — who had risen to rank and affluence as a Scottish judge, under the title of Lord Cullen — they declined to receive assistance; and except for some small addition made to their income by a novel called “Home” (in as many as seven volumes, I really believe) by Miss Cullen, their expenditure was rigorously shaped to meet that very slender income which they drew from their shares of the patrimonial wrecks. More honourable and modest independence, or poverty more gracefully supported, I have rarely known.
Meantime, these ladies, though literary and very agreeable in conversation, could not be classed with what now began to be known as the lake community of literati; for they took no interest in any one of the lake poets; did not affect to take any; and I am sure they were not aware of so much value in any one thing these poets had written as could make it worth while even to look into their books; and accordingly, as well-bred women, they took the same course as was pursued for several years by Mrs. Hannah More, viz. cautiously to avoid mentioning their names in my presence. This was natural enough in women who had probably built their early admiration upon French models (for Mrs. Millar used to tell me that she regarded the “Mahomet” of Voltaire as the most perfect of human compositions), and still more so at a period when almost all the world had surrendered their opinions and their literary consciences (so to speak) into the keeping of The Edinburgh Review; in whose favour, besides, those ladies had the pardonable prepossessions of national pride, as a collateral guarantee of that implicit faith which, in those days, stronger-minded people than they took a pride in professing. Still, in defiance of prejudices mustering so strongly to support their blindness, and the still stronger support which this blindness drew from their total ignorance of everything either done or attempted by the lake poets, these amiable women persisted in one uniform tone of courteous forbearance, as often as any question arose to implicate the names either of Wordsworth or Coleridge, — any question about them, their books, their families, or anything that was theirs. They thought it strange, indeed (for so much I heard by a circuitous course), that promising and intellectual young men — men educated at great Universities, such as Mr. Wilson of Elleray, or myself, or a few others who had paid us visits, — should possess so deep a veneration for these writers; but evidently this was an infatuation — a craze, originating, perhaps, in personal connexions, and, as the craze of valued friends, to be treated with tenderness. For us therefore — for our sakes — they took a religious care to suppress all allusion to these disreputable names; and it is pretty plain how sincere their indifference must have been with regard to these neighbouring authors, from the evidence of one fact, viz. that when, in 1810, Mr. Coleridge began to issue, in weekly numbers, his Friend, which, by the prospectus, held forth a promise of meeting all possible tastes — literary, philosophic, political — even this comprehensive field of interest, combined with the adventitious attraction (so very unusual, and so little to have been looked for in that thinly-peopled region) of a local origin, from the bosom of those very hills at the foot of which (though on a different side) they were themselves living, failed altogether to stimulate their torpid curiosity; so perfect was their persuasion beforehand that no good thing could by possibility come out of a community that had fallen under the ban of the Edinburgh critics.
At the same time, it is melancholy to confess that, partly from the dejection of Coleridge, his constant immersion in opium at that period, his hatred of the duties he had assumed, or at least of their too frequent and periodical recurrence, and partly also from the bad selection of topics for a miscellaneous audience, from the heaviness and obscurity with which they were treated, and from the total want of variety, in consequence of defective arrangements on his part for ensuring the co-operation of his friends, no conceivable act of authorship that Coleridge could have perpetrated, no possible overt act of dulness and somnolent darkness that he could have authorized, was so well fitted to sustain the impression, with regard to him and his friends, that had pre-occupied these ladies’ minds. Habes confitentem reum! I am sure they would exclaim; not perhaps confessing to that form of delinquency which they had been taught to expect — trivial or extravagant sentimentalism, Germanity alternating with tumid inanity; not this, but something quite as bad or worse, viz. palpable dulness — dulness that could be felt and handled — rayless obscurity as to the thoughts — and communicated in language that, according to the Bishop of Llandaff’s complaint, was not always English. For, though the particular words cited for blame were certainly known to the vocabulary of metaphysics, and had even been employed by a writer of Queen Anne’s reign (Leibnitz), who, if any, had the gift of translating dark thoughts into plain ones — still it was intolerable, in point of good sense, that one who had to win his way into the public ear should begin by bringing before a popular and miscellaneous audience themes that could require such startling and revolting words. The Delphic Oracle was the kindest of the nicknames which the literary taste of Windermere conferred upon the new journal. This was the laughing suggestion of a clever young lady, a daughter of the Bishop of Llandaff, who stood in a neutral position with regard to Coleridge. But others there were amongst his supposed friends who felt even more keenly than this young lady the shocking want of adaptation to his audience in the choice of matter, and, even to an audience better qualified to meet such matter, the want of adaptation in the mode of publication, — viz. periodically, and by weekly recurrence; a mode of soliciting the public attention which even authorizes the expectation of current topics — topics arising each with its own week or day. One in particular I remember of these disapproving friends: a Mr. Blair, an accomplished scholar, and a frequent visitor at Elleray, who started the playful scheme of a satirical rejoinder to Coleridge’s Friend, under the name of The Enemy, which was to follow always in the
wake of its leader, and to stimulate Coleridge (at the same time that it amused the public) by attic banter, or by downright opposition and showing fight in good earnest. It was a plan that might have done good service to the world, and chiefly through a seasonable irritation (never so much wanted as then) applied to Coleridge’s too lethargic state: in fact, throughout life, it is most deeply to be regretted that Coleridge’s powers and peculiar learning were never forced out into a large display by intense and almost persecuting opposition. However, this scheme, like thousands of other day-dreams and bubbles that rose upon the breath of morning spirits and buoyant youth, fell to the ground; and, in the meantime, no enemy to The Friend appeared that was capable of matching The Friend when left to itself and its own careless or vagrant guidance. The Friend ploughed heavily along for nine-and-twenty numbers; and our fair recusants and non-conformists in all that regarded the lake poetry or authorship, the two Scottish ladies of Clappersgate, found no reasons for changing their opinions; but continued, for the rest of my acquaintance with them, to practise the same courteous and indulgent silence, whenever the names of Coleridge or Wordsworth happened to be mentioned.
In taking leave of these Scottish ladies, it may be interesting to mention that, previously to their final farewell to our Lake society, upon taking up their permanent residence in York (which step they adopted partly, I believe, to enjoy the more diversified society which that great city yields, and, at any rate, the more accessible society than amongst mountain districts — partly with a view to the cheapness of that rich district in comparison with our sterile soil, poor towns, and poor agriculture) somewhere about the May or June of 1810, I think — they were able, by a long preparatory course of economy, to invite to the English lakes a family of foreigners — what shall I call them? — a family of Anglo-Gallo-Americans, from the Carolinas. The invitation had been of old standing, and offered, as an expression of gratitude, from these ladies, for many hospitalities and friendly services rendered by the two heads of that family to Mrs. Millar, in former years, and under circumstances of peculiar trial. Mrs. Millar had been hastily summoned from Scotland to attend her husband at Charleston; him, on her arrival, she found dying; and, whilst overwhelmed by this sudden blow, it may be imagined that the young widow would find trials enough for her fortitude, without needing any addition to the load from friendlessness amongst a nation of strangers and from total solitude. These evils were spared to Mrs. Millar, through the kind offices and disinterested exertions of an American gentleman (French by birth, but American by adoption), M. Simond, who took upon himself the cares of superintending Mr. Millar’s funeral through all its details, and, by this most seasonable service, secured to the heart-stricken widow that most welcome of privileges in all situations, the privilege of unmolested privacy; for assuredly the heaviest aggravation of such bereavements lies in the necessity, — too often imposed by circumstances upon him or upon her who may happen to be the sole responsible representative, and, at the same time, the dearest friend of the deceased, — of superintending the funeral arrangements. In the very agonies of a new-born grief, whilst the heart is yet raw and bleeding, the mind not yet able to comprehend its loss, the very light of day hateful to the eyes, the necessity even at such a moment arises, and without a day’s delay, of facing strangers, talking with strangers, discussing the most empty details with a view to the most sordid of considerations — cheapness, convenience, custom, and local prejudice — and, finally, talking about whom? why, the very child, husband, wife, who has just been torn away; and this, too, under a consciousness that the being so hallowed is, as to these strangers, an object equally indifferent with any one person whatsoever that died a thousand years ago. Fortunate, indeed, is that person who has a natural friend, or, in default of such a friend, who finds a volunteer stepping forward to relieve him from a conflict of feeling so peculiarly unseasonable. Mrs. Millar never forgot the service which had been rendered to her; and she was happy when M. Simond, who had become a wealthy citizen of America, at length held out the prospect of coming to profit by her hospitable attentions amongst that circle of friends with whom she and her sister had surrounded themselves in so interesting a part of England.
Complete Poetical Works of Robert Southey Page 304