CHAPTER III
ALTON TO COMPTON
A FEW miles to the right of the road is a place which no pilgrim of modern times can leave unvisited—Selborne, White’s Selborne, the home of the gentle naturalist whose memory haunts these rural scenes. Here he lived in the picturesque house overgrown with creepers, with the sunny garden and dial at the back, and the great spreading oak where he loved to study the ways of the owls, and the juniper tree, which, to his joy, survived the Siberian winter of 1776. And here{45} he died, and lies buried in the quiet churchyard in the shade of the old yew tree where he so often stood to watch his favourite birds. Not a stone but what speaks of him, not a turn in the village street but has its tale to tell. The play-stow, or village green, which Adam de Gurdon granted to the Augustinian Canons of Selborne in the thirteenth century, where the prior held his market of old, and where young and old met on summer evenings under the big oak, and “sat in quiet debate” or “frolicked and danced” before him; the farmhouse which now marks the site of the ancient Priory itself, founded by Peter de Rupibus, Bishop of Winchester, in 1232—he has described them all. How the good Canons grew lazy and secular in their ways after a time, how William of Wykeham found certain of them professed hunters and sportsmen, and tried in vain to reform them, and how the estates were finally handed over to the new college of St. Mary Magdalene at Oxford, by its founder, William of Waynflete—Gilbert White has already told us. The Hanger, with its wooded slopes, rising from the back of his garden, and that “noble chalk{46} promontory” of Nore Hill, planted with the beeches which he called the most lovely of all forest trees, how familiar they seem to us! Still the swifts wheel to and fro round the low church-tower, and the crickets chirp in the long grass, and the white owl is heard at night, just as when he used to linger under the old walls and watch their manners with infinite care and love.
One of the “rocky hollow lanes” which lead towards Alton will take us back into the road, and bring us to Chawton, a village about a mile from that town. The fine Elizabethan manor-house at the foot of the green knoll, and the grey church peeping out of the trees close by, have been for centuries the home and burial-place of the Knights. On the south side of the chancel a black and white marble monument records the memory of that gallant cavalier, Sir Richard Knight, who risked life and fortune in the Royal cause, and was invested with the Order of the Royal Oak by Charles II. after the Restoration. But it is as the place where Jane Austen, in George Eliot’s opinion, “the greatest artist that has ever written,” composed her novels, that Chawton is memorable.{47} The cottage where she lived is still standing a few hundred yards from the “great house,” which was the home of the brother and nieces to whom she was so fondly attached. She and her sister, Cassandra, settled there in 1809, and remained there until May, 1817, when they moved to the corner house of College Street, Winchester, where three months afterwards she died. During the eight years spent in this quiet home, Jane Austen attained the height of her powers and wrote her most famous novels, those works which she herself said cost her so little, and which in Tennyson’s words have given her a place in English literature “next to Shakespeare.” “Sense and Sensibility,” her first novel, was published two years after the move to Chawton. “Persuasion,” the last and most finished of the immortal series, was only written in 1816, a year before her death. Seldom, indeed, has so great a novelist led so retired an existence. The life at Chawton, so smooth in its even flow, with the daily round of small excitements and quiet pleasures, the visits to the “great house,” and walks with her nieces in the woods, the shopping expeditions{49} to Alton, the talk about new bonnets and gowns, and the latest news as to the births, deaths, and marriages of the numerous relatives in Kent and Hampshire, are faithfully reflected in those pleasant letters of Jane Austen, which her great-nephew, Lord Brabourne, gave to the world. There is a good deal about her flowers, her chickens, her niece’s love affairs, the fancy work on which she is engaged, the improvements in the house and garden—“You cannot imagine,” she writes on one occasion, “it is not in human nature to imagine, what a nice walk we have round the orchard!”—but very little indeed about her books. Almost the only allusion we find to one of her characters is in 1816, when she writes to Fanny Knight of Anne Elliot in “Persuasion.” “You may perhaps like the heroine, as she is almost too good for me!” Anything like fame or publicity was positively distasteful to her. She owns to feeling absolutely terrified when a lady in town asked to be introduced to her, and then adds laughingly, “If I am a wild beast I cannot help it, it is not my fault!”
Curiously enough, the Pilgrims’ Way, in the{50} later course of its path, brings us to Godmersham, that other and finer home of the Knights on the Kentish Downs, a place also associated with Jane Austen’s life and letters, where she spent many pleasant hours in the midst of her family, enjoying the beauty of the spot and its cheerful surroundings. But Chawton retains the supremacy as her own home, and as the scene of those literary labours that were cut short, alas! too soon. “What a pity,” Sir Walter Scott exclaimed, after reading a book of hers, “what a pity such a gifted creature died so early!”