Afoot in England

by W. H. Hudson

I am now going back to my first visit to this green retreat; it was in the course of one of those Easter walks I have spoken of, and the way was through Reading and by Three Mile Cross and Swallowfield. On this occasion I conceived a dislike to Reading which I have never quite got over, for it seemed an unconscionably big place for two slow pedestrians to leave behind. Worse still, when we did leave it we found that Reading would not leave us. It was like a stupendous octopus in red brick which threw out red tentacles, miles and miles long in various directions—little rows and single and double cottages and villas, all in red, red brick and its weary accompaniment, the everlasting hard slate roof. These square red brick boxes with sloping slate tops are built as close as possible to the public road, so that the passer-by looking in at the windows may see the whole interior—wall-papers, pictures, furniture, and oftentimes the dull expressionless face of the woman of the house, staring back at you out of her shallow blue eyes. The weather too was against us; a grey hard sky, like the slate roofs, and a cold strong east wind to make the road dusty all day long.

Arrived at Three Mile Cross, it was no surprise to find it no longer recognizable as the hamlet described in Our Village, but it was saddening to look at the cottage in which Mary Russell Mitford lived and was on the whole very happy with her flowers and work for thirty years of her life, in its present degraded state. It has a sign now and calls itself the "Mitford Arms" and a "Temperance Hotel," and we were told that you could get tea and bread and butter there but nothing else. The cottage has been much altered since Miss Mitford's time, and the open space once occupied by the beloved garden is now filled with buildings, including a corrugated-iron dissenting chapel.

From Three Mile Cross we walked on to Swallowfield, still by those never-ending roadside red-brick cottages and villas, for we were not yet properly out of the hated biscuit metropolis. It was a big village with the houses scattered far and wide over several square miles of country, but just where the church stands it is shady and pleasant. The pretty church yard too is very deeply shaded and occupies a small hill with the Loddon flowing partly round it, then taking its swift way through the village. Miss Mitford's monument is a plain, almost an ugly, granite cross, standing close to the wall, shaded by yew, elm, and beech trees, and one is grateful to think that if she never had her reward when living she has found at any rate a very peaceful resting-place.

The sexton was there and told us that he was but ten years old when Miss Mitford died, but that he remembered her well and she was a very pleasant little woman. Others in the place who remembered her said the same—that she was very pleasant and sweet. We know that she was sweet and charming, but unfortunately the portraits we have of her do not give that impression. They represent her as a fat common-place looking person, a little vulgar perhaps. I fancy the artists were bunglers. I possess a copy of a very small pencil sketch made of her face by a dear old lady friend of mine, now dead, about the year 1851 or 2. My friend had a gift for portraiture in a peculiar way. When she saw a face that greatly interested her, in a drawing-room, on a platform, in the street, anywhere, it remained very vividly in her mind and on going home she would sketch it, and some of these sketches of well known persons are wonderfully good. She was staying in the country with a friend who drove with her to Swallowfield to call on Miss Mitford, and on her return to her friend's house she made the little sketch, and in this tiny portrait I can see the refinement, the sweetness, the animation and charm which she undoubtedly possessed.

But let me now venture to step a little outside of my own province, my small plot—a poor pedestrian's unimportant impressions of places and faces; all these p's come by accident; and this I put in parenthetically just because an editor solemnly told me a while ago that he couldn't abide and wouldn't have alliteration's artful aid in his periodical. Let us leave the subject of what Miss Mitford was to those of her day who knew her; a thousand lovely personalities pass away every year and in a little while are no more remembered than the bright-plumaged bird that falls in the tropical forest, or the vanished orchid bloom of which some one has said that the angels in heaven can look on no more beautiful thing. Leaving all that, let us ask what remains to us of another generation of all she was and did?

She was a prolific writer, both prose and verse, and, as we know, had an extraordinary vogue in her own time. Anything that came from her pen had an immediate success; indeed, so highly was she regarded that nothing she chose to write, however poor, could fail. And she certainly did write a good deal of poor stuff: it was all in a sense poor, but books and books, poor soul, she had to write. It was in a sense poor because it was mostly ambitious stuff, and, as the proverb says, "You cannot fly like an eagle with the wings of a wren." She was driven to fly, and gave her little wings too much to do, and her flights were apt to be mere little weak flutterings over the surface of the ground. A wren, and she had not a cuckoo but a devouring cormorant to sustain—that dear, beautiful father of hers, who was more to her than any reprobate son to his devoted mother, and who day after day, year after year, gobbled up her earnings, and then would hungrily go on squawking for more until he stumbled into the grave. Alas! he was too long in dying; she was worn out by then, the little heart beating not so fast, and the bright little brain growing dim and very tired.

Now all the ambitious stuff she wrote to keep the cormorant and,
incidentally, to immortalize herself, has fallen deservedly into
oblivion. But we—some of us—do not forget and never want to forget
Mary Russell Mitford. Her letters remain—the little friendly letters
which came from her pen like balls of silvery down from a sun-ripened
plant, and were wafted far and wide over the land to those she loved.
There is a wonderful charm in them; they are so spontaneous, so natural,
so perfectly reflect her humour and vivacity, her overflowing sweetness,
her beautiful spirit. And one book too remains—the series of sketches
about the poor little hamlet, in which she lived so long and laboured
so hard to support herself and her parents, the turtledove mated with a
cormorant. Driven to produce work and hard up for a subject, in a happy
moment she took up this humble one lying at her own door and allowed her
self to write naturally even as in her most intimate letters. This is
the reason of the vitality of Our Tillage; it was simple, natural, and
reflected the author herself, her tender human heart, her impulsive
nature, her bright playful humorous spirit. There is no thought, no mind
stuff in it, and it is a classic! It is about the country, and she has
so little observation that it might have been written in a town, out of
a book, away from nature's sights and sounds. Her rustic characters
are not comparable to those of a score or perhaps two or three score of
other writers who treat of such subjects. The dialogue, when she makes
them talk, is unnatural, and her invention so poor that when she puts in
a little romance of her own making one regrets it. And so one might go
on picking it all to pieces like a dandelion blossom. Nevertheless it
endures, outliving scores of in a way better books on the same themes,
because her own delightful personality manifests itself and shines in
all these little pictures. This short passage describing how she took
Lizzie, the little village child she loved, to gather cowslips in the
meadows, will serve as an illustration.
They who know these feelings (and who is so happy as not to
have known some of them) will understand why Alfieri became powerless,
and Froissart dull; and why even needlework, the most effective
sedative, that grand soother and composer of women's distress, fails
to comfort me today. I will go out into the air this cool, pleasant
afternoon, and try what that will do.... I will go to the meadows, the
beautiful meadows and I will have my materials of happiness, Lizzie and
May, and a basket for flowers, and we will make a cowslip ball. "Did
you ever see a cowslip ball, Lizzie?" "No." "Come away then; make haste!
run, Lizzie!"
And on we go, fast, fast! down the road, across the lea,
past the workhouse, along by the great pond, till we slide into the deep
narrow lane, whose hedges seem to meet over the water, and win our way
to the little farmhouse at the end. "Through the farmyard, Lizzie; over
the gate; never mind the cows; they are quiet enough." "I don't mind
'em," said Miss Lizzie, boldly and' truly, and with a proud affronted
air, displeased at being thought to mind anything, and showing by her
attitude and manner some design of proving her courage by an attack on
the largest of the herd, in the shape of a pull by the tail. "I don't
mind 'em." "I know you don't, Lizzie; but let them, alone and don't
chase the turkey-cock. Come to me, my dear!" and, for wonder, Lizzie
came.

In the meantime my other pet, Mayflower, had also gotten into a scrape. She had driven about a huge unwieldy sow, till the animal's grunting had disturbed the repose of a still more enormous Newfoundland dog, the guardian of the yard.

The beautiful white greyhound's mocking treatment of the surly dog on the chain then follows, and other pretty scenes and adventures, until after some mishaps and much trouble the cowslip ball is at length completed.

What a concentration of fragrance and beauty it was! Golden and sweet to satiety! rich in sight, and touch, and smell! Lizzie was enchanted, and ran off with her prize, hiding amongst the trees in the very coyness of ecstasy, as if any human eye, even mine, would be a restraint on her innocent raptures.