The “new” road leads down to Hollington, a suburban village almost entirely swallowed up by expansion of the town. One of the old-established sights of Hastings is, or was, Old Roar, half a mile or so to the left-hand of it.
Old Roar was a waterfall, and the ravine through which it roared exists to this day, as those who seek it, after tracing several fields and pathways hemmed in between villas, shall find. Even so far back as 1827 it was described as “not so considerable as thirty years ago,” and sceptical writers of that time declared there never had been a period when it was not said of Old Roar that “he is not so good as last season.” In 1841 Mrs. Mozley, sister of Cardinal Newman, wrote a novel called “The Lost Brooch,” which no one has ever succeeded in reading, and in it she describes Old Roar as possessing “all the points necessary for a very good cataract, except one—water: rather a serious want in a waterfall.” Yet there was a time when its hoarse voice was to be distinctly heard a mile away. Pause to-day on the wooden bridge that spans the gorge, and only a dampness that discolours the stones is seen through the trees that spring from the sides.
This is typical of much else around Hastings or any other town that has equally expanded. To the right of the road lies Hollington church: the “Church in the Wood,” famous in all this country-side as a romantic solitude. There are woods here now, but not so extensive as before, and the church is no longer in them, but on the fringe of what remains. The church itself, restored and practically rebuilt, is utterly and absolutely without interest; and the churchyard is now nothing but a cemetery filled with costly and pretentious monuments. Yet, such is the force of habit and tradition, it will be found, on examining the huge, ledger-like visitors’ book kept in the porch, that an average of five hundred people make pilgrimage to the spot daily in the holiday season. They see nothing worth the trouble, and having seen it go away again not displeased, for to visit the “Church in the Wood” is a duty laid upon the holiday-maker, and will be, even when there is no wood remaining. The way to and from it is by “Old Church Road,” where you find houses named with even more than the usual want of propriety. Thus “Sea View” does not look upon the sea, “Fair View” is opposite a manure-heap, and from “Old Church View” you cannot view the church.
It is not worth the while exploring the New London Road. It is dispiriting, and those electric tramways that are the tyrants of the roads for miles around Hastings and St. Leonards render the way of the cyclist down Silverhill hazardous in the extreme. It is true the map shows the attractive name of “Bohemia” here, but it is only a mean—the meanest and miserablest—suburb. Henri Murger, Bohemian of that artistic and literary Bohemia that is not mapped, died, disillusioned, exclaiming against his wasted life in that land of rosy visions, “pas de Bohème,” and we may adopt his saying and, appropriating it to this drab purlieu, turn back and make for Hastings by the Old London Road, itself not particularly attractive in these times.
JUNCTION OF ROADS SPOILED BY TRAMWAYS, BALDSLOW.
You come along it, at the beginning of Baldslow, to a weird corner where a road comes up from Sedlescomb and, cutting under the Old London Road in an archway, makes for St. Leonards. Here the tramway poles and wires are insistently ugly, and the village or hamlet of Baldslow itself is scarce prepossessing. A roadside public-house, a gaunt windmill, a few ugly cottages, and a tin tabernacle church are its component parts. But immediately beyond that corrugated and galvanised ecclesiastical horror the road grows beautiful, overhung with trees. Here, at the entrance to a country house in the domestic-gothic sort, are two very fine clipped yew-trees. It is Holmhurst, and the trees are those christened by Mr. Hare “Huz and Buz.”
Holmhurst is not historic, in the larger way, but to those who are familiar with the literary work of Augustus J. C. Hare, it is a place to be regarded with interest and affection. Augustus Hare wrote many books. His “Walks in Rome” and “Walks in London” are the best known of them, but his “Story of my Life” is of course the most intimate, and it is the most endearing. His own half-humorous declaration that it is “a ponderous autobiography of a nobody” was heartily and unkindly endorsed by reviewers, but, at any rate, no one can read those six volumes without conceiving an affection for the author of them. He was a lovable man.
Augustus Hare, born 1834, died January 22nd, 1903, never married. He came of the family of Hares of Hurstmonceaux, a family at one time so numerous and so abundantly intermarried with the titled and landed classes that he could claim cousinship in different degrees with a very large circle in Society. But to call him a Society man would be as unjust as it would be to style him a dilettante in literature and the arts, for he had no vices, was no idler, and earned a very excellent literary repute. The “Story of my Life,” made up, as it is, largely from letters and journals, recounting his visits and the people he met, earned him with some sour critics of his work, the opprobrious title of “literary valet,” but it is so sincere and without artifice that the reproach is most undeserved, although his artistic, friendly, and family sympathies certainly often led him into praises which amusingly remind one of the famous epitaph on that Lady Jones who was “bland, passionate, and deeply religious. She was a niece of Horace Walpole and painted in water-colours, and of such is the Kingdom of Heaven.”
A welcome guest at country-house parties, he generally figured at them as a family connection, as a literary man and artist, and as an accomplished narrator of ghost stories. He indeed “called cousins” with so many people of note that the Crown Prince of Sweden, to whom he became bear-leader for a time, when asked what astonished him most in England, replied “the number of Mr. Hare’s cousins.” He was, in fact, the human exemplar of the fabled “hare with many friends.”