A New Medley of Memories

by Sir David Oswald Hunter Blair

From Campden I went on to Leamington to visit another brother, who had invited me to witness the Warwick Pageant, I think the first, and certainly the most effective and successful, of these spectacles, for which the craze was just beginning to spread through England. The dramatic episodes at Warwick were not always dramatic, and the dialogue and acting were perhaps not quite worthy of the superb surroundings; but the setting of the spectacle was absolutely perfect. Behind us the towers and battlements of the feudal castle rose above the woods: on our right the giant oaks of the park, in their glorious midsummer foliage: to our left the Avon glistening like a ribbon of burnished silver; and in front, beyond a great expanse of verdant lawn (the "stage" of the pageant), a prospect of enchanting wooded glades and long-drawn sylvan avenues, down which came the long processions of players, mounted and afoot, with singular and striking effect. Lord and Lady Willoughby de Broke, who appeared (with the splendidly mounted members of their hunt) as Louis XI. and Margaret of Scotland, were conspicuous, if only because the former acted his part and spoke his lines best of the whole company. The concerted singing was quite charming; and charming, too, the spectacle of the hundred boys of the famous old Warwick Grammar-school, in their pretty dresses of russet and gold, and their masters costumed as old-world pedagogues. Altogether a delightful and notable entertainment, which I was very glad to have seen; and in other respects I enjoyed my visit, my brother taking me to Kenilworth, Stoneleigh, Charlecote, and other interesting places in that most interesting country. The August Bank-holiday found me at Scarborough, of all places in the world, spending the day there with the two schoolboy sons of my host at a country house in the East Riding. I recall, at the aquarium there, my interest on discovering a "fact not generally known"—namely that fishes can, and do, yawn. We saw a turbot yawn twice, and a cod once. The cod's yawn was remarkable chiefly for its width, but the turbot's was much more noteworthy. It begins at the lips, which open as if to suck in water;[[18]] then the jaws distend themselves and so the yawn goes on, works through the back of the head, stretching the plates of the skull almost to cracking point, and finally comes out at the gills, which open showing their red lining, and are inflated for a moment; and then, with a gasping kind of shiver, the fish flattens out again, until, if unusually bored, as it appeared to be by our presence, it relieves its feelings by another yawn. I left my young friends to enjoy the varied humours of the front; and climbing up (as I had done at Nice) "far from the madding crowd," discovered many quaint and charming bits of old Scarborough. A policeman told me that they reckoned that at least 120,000 visitors were in the town that day; and they all seemed collected together to view the evening firework display above the Spa. The biggest crowds I had ever seen were at Epsom on Derby Day, between Mortlake and Putney on Boat-race Day, and in St. Peter's Square at Rome on the election-day of Leo XIII.: but this great congeries at Scarborough surpassed them all in impressiveness. I turned my back on the "set pieces" and Roman candles, gazed almost awestruck at the vast sea of upturned white faces on the beach below, lit up from time to time by the lurid glow of coloured fires, and listened to the cry "Ah-h-h!" of the great multitude as the rockets shrilled up into the starlit sky. Mirabile visu et auditu! it somehow made me think (at Scarborough on Bank Holiday evening!) of the Last Day and the Valley of Jehoshaphat. From Scarborough, before going north to Scotland, I went for a few days to Longridge Towers, Sir Hubert Jerningham's beautiful place near Berwick, with views on every side over the rolling Border country. "Norham's castle steep," built nine centuries before by Flambard, the "Magnificent" Bishop of Durham, was on the Longridge property; and I spent some delightful hours there with my accomplished host, who was a charming companion, and (as became a bachelier-ès-lettres of Paris University) could tell a good story as well in French as he could in English. He showed me among many curiosities a letter from an early Quaker which I thought worth copying:—

FRIEND JOHN,—

I desire thee to be so kind as to go to one of those sinful men in the flesh called an attorney, and let him take out an instrument, with a seal fixed thereto, by means whereof we may seize the outward tabernacle of George Green, and bring him before the lambskin men at Westminster, and teach him to do as he would be done by; and so I rest thy friend in the light,

M.D.

Mountstuart claimed me for a short visit when I had got across the Border; and I found the big house very cheerful under the new and youthful régime, and my hostess, now a happy mother, driving the baby Lady Mary about the island and exhibiting her to the admiring farmers' wives. I made my way up the West coast to Fort Augustus to spend the rest of the Oxford "Long," travelling thence in September to Aberdeen to read a paper at the annual conference of the Catholic Truth Society. There was a large attendance, Lady Lovat doing hostess at a big reception one evening; and it was pleasant to find oneself in a genuinely Scottish, as well as Catholic, gathering, presided over by a Highland bishop (Æneas Chisholm of beloved memory), as patriotic and popular as he was pious and pleasant. My paper, on "The Holy See and the Scottish Universities," was very well received, and the local newspapers did me the honour of reprinting it verbatim next morning, while the Scotsman devoted a leading article to it. Our principal meeting, in the largest hall of the city, wound up not only with "Faith of our Fathers" but "God save the King." "Is this necessary?" whispered a prelate of Nationalist leanings to the presiding bishop, in the middle of the loyal anthem. "It may not be necessary," replied Bishop Chisholm, in a very audible "aside," "but it is very right and extremely proper." O si sic omnes!"[[19]]

[[1]] Such seeming exceptions as the noble churches of St. John at Norwich and St. Philip at Arundel, the Duke of Newcastle's sumptuous chapel at Clumber, the impressive church of the Irvingites in Gordon Square, are only satisfactory in so far as they are more or less exact imitations of mediæval Gothic. The cloisters of Fort Augustus Abbey are beautiful because they are reproductions, from A. W. Pugin's note-books, of real live fifteenth-century tracery. The more the modern Gothic architect strives to be original (a hard saying, but a true one), the more certainly he fails. And to see how feebly ineffective even his imitations can be, one need only look at the entrance tower of St. Swithun's Quad at Magdalen, and compare it with the incomparable Founder's Tower immediately opposite.

Let me add that I have no animus against Downside in particular: it is merely an instance taken at random to illustrate my thesis. I had felt just the same, years before, about the first grandiose plans for our own church at Fort Augustus. "Go to Westminster Abbey—you can see it from your windows," I wrote to the architect, "and get an inspiration from that glorious temple of living Gothic. Your elaborate designs have no life, no reality. If they were ever realized among our Highland hills, I should expect some genie of the Arabian Nights to swoop down one day and whisk the whole impossible structure back to Victoria Street!" I still recall the pleasure and approval with which Dom Gilbert Dolan of Downside, one of the most distinguished of modern Benedictine architects, read this letter.

[[2]] Who was the reporter who once announced (I believe it was really a printer's error and not a little bit of malice) that "the Conservatives among the audience received the candidate with welcoming snouts"?

[[3]] Arthur Balfour had resigned the premiership in the previous week, and Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman had succeeded him.

[[4]] Not an easy task! for Lovat wanted the Scouts to have all the honour, which they wished assigned to him. My inscription (I believe generally approved) ran: Erected by the Lovat Tenantry and Feuars of the Aird and Fort Augustus Districts to Commemorate the Raising of the Lovat Scouts for Service in South Africa by Simon Joseph, 16th Lord Lovat, C.V.O., C.B., D.S.O., who Desired to Show that the Martial Spirit of their Ancestors still Animates the Highlanders of To-Day, and Whose Confidence was Justified by the Success in the Field of the Gallant Corps Whose Existence was Due to His Loyalty and Patriotism. A.D. 1905.