From Titsey you may climb a steep road and find Tatsfield church, separated from its scattered village, clean on the edge of the steep hill. Tatsfield church, which is old and small, stands nearly eight hundred feet above the weald, and its little churchyard, with a path in it leading to no gate, but only to a hedge, lends a curious sense of a garden. The stretch of Sussex and Kent to the south is freer and wider than any other Surrey church sees; but Tatsfield, like other places with a fine view, suffers continual loss in cloudy weather. When I was last there the church stood alone on the brow, over unguessable depths of grey mist.
CHAPTER XLI
DULWICH TO WIMBLEDON
Growing London.—Cigars by Dulwich Valley.—Edward Allen, Actor, Bear-baiter, Dog-fancier and Founder of a College.—Godd's Guift.—Dulwich buttercups.—Dr. Johnson.—A Prayer in a Library.—Merton.—Wimbledon Camp.—A Miser's grave.—An opportunity for a duel.—Groans for George Ranger.—Memories of the Windmill.
Nothing is more capricious than a vast town pushing out into the country. No law binds it; no power can resist it; it will not be tempted, or denied; only one future can certainly be prophesied for it, that where it comes it will remain. Looking at London and its surroundings on a new map and an old, it is an arresting thing to trace—almost to watch—the growth of the inexorable black ink on what a decade or two before was inviolate white. There is nothing orderly about it, nothing mathematical. London does not grow as the circles spread from a splash in a pond, nor regularly and certainly as geologists say stones grow in the soil—a fascinating and rather dreadful secret of growth. London grows suddenly by fits and starts. Once, perhaps, the town crept out quietly, a field at a time, a new road in a twelvemonth. Now it catches great parks and manors. But which way it will go out to catch them you cannot guess. It may walk threateningly, and it may leave alone, as it has left the deepest of hayfields alone in Kent much nearer London than in Surrey. One rule, perhaps, it keeps relentlessly; it will never leave country between London old and London new. The Londons join at once.
Ruskin, in Præterita, shows you London striding by Herne Hill to Croydon. Herne Hill should be a hill with a heronry on it, but the name is new; it was King's Hill when John Speed made his map in the days of James I. But Herne Hill was in the country when Ruskin knew it. Norwood was a hill; Dulwich was a valley. "Central in each amphitheatre, the crowning glory of Herne Hill was accordingly, that, after walking along its ridge southward from London through a mile of chestnut, lilac, and apple trees, hanging over the wooden palings on each side—suddenly the trees stopped on the left, and out one came on the top of the field sloping down to the south into Dulwich valley—open field animate with cow and buttercup, and below, the beautiful meadows and high avenues of Dulwich; and beyond, all that crescent of the Norwood hills; a footpath, entered by a turnstile, going down to the left, always so warm that invalids could be sheltered there in March, when to walk elsewhere would have been death to them; and so quiet, that whenever I had anything difficult to compose or think of, I used to do it rather there than in our own garden. The great field was separated from the path and road only by light wooden open palings, four feet high, needful to keep the cows in. Since I last composed, or meditated there, various improvements have taken place; first the neighbourhood wanted a new church, and built a meagre Gothic one with a useless spire, for the fashion of the thing, at the side of the field; then they built a parsonage behind it, the two stopping half the view in that direction. Then the Crystal Palace came, for ever spoiling the view through all its compass, and bringing every show-day from London a flood of pedestrians down the footpath who left it filthy with cigar ashes for the rest of the week: then the railroads came, and expatiating roughs by every excursion train, who knocked the palings about, roared at the cows, and tore down what branches of blossom they could reach over the palings on the enclosed side. Then the residents on the enclosed side built a brick wall to defend themselves. Then the path got to be insufferably hot as well as dirty; and was gradually abandoned to the roughs, with a policeman on watch at the bottom. Finally, this year, a six foot high close paling has been put down the other side of it, and the processional excursionist has the liberty of obtaining what notion of the country air and prospect he may, between the wall and that, with one bad cigar before him, another behind him, and another in his mouth."
Dulwich valley, and cows and buttercups—it has still an uneasy echo of the town. Somewhere, surely, there always broods over Dulwich the spirit of the founder of its college. He is the Londoner of Londoners, and the oddest combination of characters that ever left a name as pious benefactor of a school. Edward Allen, or Alleyn as his college spells him, was to begin with an Elizabethan actor. He was one of a company of strolling players before he was twenty; he was twenty-two when he had somehow made himself a "gentleman," to be so described on a deed of gift; and when he was twenty-six, he was such an actor that Ben Jonson compared him to Roscius and Cicero, and Thomas Nash wrote that "Not Roscius or Aesope, those tragedians admired before Christ was borne, could ever performe more in action than famous Ned Allen." Perhaps he made his money as an actor-manager; perhaps he married money, for his wife was the daughter of a pawnbroker (who was also a theatre-proprietor and one of the grooms of the Queen's chamber); perhaps he began lending money early in life himself. He and his father-in-law, when James succeeded Elizabeth, were made chief masters of "his Majesty's games of Beares, Bulls and doggs"; they had a menagerie in the Paris Gardens at Southwark where they kept wolves and lions; they worried bulls and had dog-fights, and showed "pleasant sport with the horse and ape and whipping of the blind beare." Money rolled in, with the apes and the bears and the loans, and in October, 1605, Allen, by this time full esquire, bought the manor and lands of Dulwich for £4,900. Eight years later he left Southwark for Dulwich, and set about founding his college.
Aubrey has a quaint legend of the foundation. How should an actor found a college? The devil was in it somewhere. Tradition told "that Mr. Alleyne, being a Tragedian, and one of the Original Actors in many of the celebrated Shakespear's Plays, in one of which he play'd a Daemon, with six others, and was in the midst of the Play surpriz'd by an Apparition of the Devil, which so worked on his Fancy, that he made a Vow which he perform'd at this Place." That was the beginning of Dulwich College, according to one story; according to another, it was only because Allen had begun so earnestly, and tied himself up by so many legal contracts that he did not repent of his vow and take back all he had given. That was when, a widower of fifty-seven, he wanted to marry a girl of twenty. She was John Donne's daughter Constance, and perhaps Donne felt bound to ask for liberal settlements. However, the settlements were arranged somehow, and the college was founded. The "colledge of God's gift" was his name for it, and as its founder he described himself as "chief master, ruler and overseer of all and singular over games of beares, bulls, mastive doggs and mastive bitches." His blood-relations were to be Master and Warden, if possible, and so, for many years, they were.
One of the statutes explains the name "God's gift." There were to be twelve poor scholars, chosen partly by merit and partly by chance. When a place became vacant three or four children were to be elected by the parish vestries, and of these two were to be chosen by the Master and Warden, and then the two were to draw lots:—