It is a pleasure to be at Selborne; nevertheless I find I always like Selborne best when I am out of it, especially when I am rambling about that bit of beautiful country on the border of which it lies. The memory of Gilbert White; the old church with its low, square tower and its famous yew tree; above all, the constant sight of the Hanger clothed in its beechen woods—green, or bronze and red-gold, or purple-brown in leafless winter—all these things do not prevent a sense of lassitude, of ill-being, which I experience in the village when I am too long in it, and which vanishes when I quit it, and seem to breathe a better air. This is no mere fancy, nor something peculiar to myself; the natives, too, are subject to this secret trouble, and are, some of them, conscious of it. Round about Selborne you will find those who were born and bred in the village, who say they were never well until they quitted it; and some of these declare that they would not return even if some generous person were to offer them a cottage rent free. The appearance of the people, too, may be considered in this connection. Mary Russell Mitford exclaims in one of her village sketches that there was not a pretty face in the country-side. The want of comeliness which is so noticeable in the southern parts of Berkshire is not confined to that county. The people of Berkshire and Hampshire, of the blonde type, are very much alike. But there are degrees; and if you want to see, I will not say a handsome, nor a pretty, but a passably fresh and pleasant face among the cottagers, you must go out of Selborne to some neighbouring village to look for it.
Selborne Common
But this question does not now concern us. The best of Selborne is the common on the hill—all the better for the steep hill which must be climbed to get to it, since that difficult way prevents the people from making too free use of it, and regarding it as a sort of back-yard or waste place to throw their rubbish on. It is a perpetual joy to the children. One morning in October I met there some youngsters gathering kindling-wood, and feasting at the same time on wild fruits—the sloes were just then at their best. They told me that they had only recently come to live in Selborne from Farringdon, their native village. "And which place do you like best?" I asked. "Selborne!" they shouted in a breath, and indeed appeared surprised that I had asked such a question. No wonder. This hill-top common is the most forest-like, the wildest in England, and the most beautiful as well, both in its trees and tangles of all kinds of wild plants that flourish in waste places, and in the prospects which one gets of the surrounding country. Here, seeing the happiness of the boys, I have wished to be a boy again. But one does not think so much of this spot when one comes to know the country round, and finds that Selborne Hill is but one of many hills of the same singular and beautiful type, sloping away gently on one side, and presenting a bold, almost precipitous front on the other, in most cases clothed on the steep side with dense beech woods. It is now eight years since I began to form an acquaintance with this east corner of Hampshire, but not until last October (1902) did I know how beautiful it was. From Selborne Hill one sees something of it; a better sight is obtained from Noire Hill, where one is able to get some idea of the peculiar character of the scenery. It is all wildly irregular, high and low grounds thrown together in a pretty confusion, and the soil everywhere fertile, so that the general effect is of extreme richness. One sees, too, that the human population is sparse, and that it has always been as it is now, and man's work—his old irregular fields, and the unkept hedges which, like the thickets on the waste places, are self-planted, and have been self-planted for centuries, and the old deep-winding lanes and by-roads—have come at last to seem one with nature's work. Out of this broken, variegated, richly green surface, here and there, in a sort of range, but irregular like all else, the hills, or hangers, lift their steep, bank-like fronts—splendid masses of red and russet gold against the soft grey-blue autumnal sky. It is delightful to walk through this bit of country from Nore Hill, and from hill to hill, across green fields, for the farms here are like wild lands that all are free to use, to Wheatham Hill, the highest point, which rises 800 feet above the sea-level. From this elevation one looks over a great part of that green variegated country of the Hangers, and sees on one hand where it fades close by into the sand and pine district beginning at Wolmer Forest, and on another side, beyond the little town of Petersfield, the region of great rolling downs stretching far away into Sussex.
Village churches
In my rambles about this corner of Hampshire, during which I visited all the villages nearest to Selborne—Empshott, Hawkley, Greatham, East and West Tisted, Worldham, Priors Dean, Colemore, Privett, Froxfield, Hartley Maudit, Blackmore, Oakhanger, Kingsley, Farringdon and Newton Valence—I could not help thinking a good deal about Hampshire village churches generally. It was a subject which had often enough been in my mind before in other parts of the county, but it now came back to me in connection with Gilbert White's strictures on these sacred buildings. Their "meanness" produced a feeling in him which is the nearest approach to indignation discoverable in his pages. He is speaking of jackdaws breeding in rabbit holes, and shrewdly conjectures that this habit has arisen on account of the absence of steeples and towers suitable as nesting-places. "Many Hampshire places of worship," he remarks, "make no better appearance than dovecotes." He envied Northamptonshire, Cambridgeshire, the Fens of Lincolnshire, and other districts, the number of spires which presented themselves in every point of view, and concludes: "As an admirer of prospects I have reason to lament this want in my own county, for such objects are very necessary ingredients in an elegant landscape."
The honoured historian of the parish of Selborne makes me shudder in this passage. But I am, perhaps, giving too much importance to his words, since one may judge, from his mention of Norfolk in this connection as being even worse off than his own county, that he was not well informed on the subject. Norfolk, like Somerset, abounds in grand old churches of the Perpendicular period. That smallness, or "meanness" as he expresses it, of the Hampshire churches, is, to my mind, one of their greatest merits. The Hampshire village would not possess that charm which we find in it—its sweet rusticity and homeliness, and its harmonious appearance in the midst of a nature green and soft and beautiful—but for that essential feature and part of it, the church which does not tower vast and conspicuous as a gigantic asylum or manufactory from among lowly cottages dwarfed by its proximity to the appearance of pigmy-built huts in the Aruwhimi forest. These immense churches which in recent years have lifted their tall spires and towers amidst lowly surroundings in many rural places, are, as a rule, the work of some zealot who has seared his sense of beauty with a hot iron, or else of a new over-rich lord of the manor, who must have all things new, including a big new church to worship a new God in—his own peculiar Stock Exchange God, who is a respecter of wealthy persons. Here in Hampshire we have seen the old but well preserved village church pulled down—doubtless with the consent of the ecclesiastical authorities—its ancient monuments broken up and carted away, its brasses made into fire ornaments by cottagers or sold as old metal, and the very gravestones used in paving the scullery and offices of the grand new parsonage built to match the grand new church.
Peasants' religious feeling
When coming upon one of these "necessary ingredients in an elegant landscape" in some rural spot I have sometimes wondered what the feeling of the people who have spent their lives there can be about it. What effect has the new vast building, with its highly decorated yet cold and vacant interior, on their dim minds—on their religion, let us say? It may be a poor unspiritual sort of religion, based on old traditions and associations, mostly local; but shall we scorn it on that account? If we look a little closely into the matter, we see that all men, even the most intellectual, the most spiritual, are subject to this feeling in some degree, that it is in all religions. That which from use, from association, becomes symbolic of faith is in itself sacred. At the present time the Church is torn with dissensions because of this very question. Certain bodily positions and signs and gestures, and woven fabrics and garments of many patterns and colours, and wood and stone and metal objects, and lighted candles and perfumes—mere hay and stubble to others who have different symbols—are things essential to worship in some. Touch these things and you hurt their souls; you deprive them of their means of communication with another world. So the poor peasant who was born and lives in a thatched cottage, with his limited intelligence, his animism, associates the idea of the unseen world with the sacred objects he has seen and known and handled—the small ancient building, the red-barked, dark-leafed yew, the green mounds and lichened gravestones among which he played as a child, and the dim, low-roofed interior of what was to him God's House. Whatever there is in his mind that is least earthly, whatever thoughts he may have of the unseen world and a life beyond this life, were inseparably bound up with these visible things.
We need not follow this line any farther; those who believe with me that the sense of the beautiful is God's best gift to the human soul will see that I have put the matter on other and higher grounds. The small village church with its low tower or grey-shingled spire among the shade trees, is beautiful chiefly because man and nature with its softening processes have combined to make it a fit part of the scene, a building which looks as natural and harmonious as an old hedge which man planted once and nature replanted many times, and as many an old thatched timbered cottage, and many an old grey ruin, ivy-grown, with red valerian blooming on its walls.
To pull down one of these churches to put in its place a gigantic Gothic structure in brick or stone, better suited in size (and ugliness) for a London or Liverpool church than for a small rustic village in Hampshire, is nothing less than a crime.