Then I thought of a new one, which is really
excellent, and which I recommend to the whole world.
It is to vary the
road, suddenly taking now the fields, now the river, but only
occasionally the turnpike. This last lap was very well suited for such
a method. The valley had become more like a wide and shallow trench
than ever. The hills on either side were low and exactly even. Up the
middle of it went the river, the canal and the road, and these two
last had only a field between them; now broad, now narrow.
First on the tow-path, then on the road, then on the grass, then back
on the tow-path, I pieced out the last baking mile into Charmes, that
lies at the foot of a rather higher hill, and at last was dragging
myself up the street just as the bell was ringing the noon Angelus;
nor, however tedious you may have found it to read this final effort
of mine, can you have found it a quarter as wearisome as I did to walk
it; and surely between writer and reader there should be give and
take, now the one furnishing the entertainment and now the other.
The delightful thing in Charmes is its name. Of this name I had indeed
been thinking as I went along the last miles of that dusty and
deplorable road - that a town should be called 'Charms'.
Not but that towns, if they are left to themselves and not hurried,
have a way of settling into right names suited to the hills about them
and recalling their own fields. I remember Sussex, and as I remember
it I must, if only for example, set down my roll-call of such names,
as - Fittleworth, where the Inn has painted panels; Amberley in the
marshes; delicate Fernhurst, and Ditchling under its hill; Arundel,
that is well known to every one; and Climping, that no one knows, set
on a lonely beach and lost at the vague end of an impassable road; and
Barlton, and Burton, and Duncton, and Coldwatham, that stand under in
the shadow and look up at the great downs; and Petworth, where the
spire leans sideways; and Timberley, that the floods make into an
island; and No Man's Land, where first there breaks on you the distant
sea. I never knew a Sussex man yet but, if you noted him such a list,
would answer: 'There I was on such and such a day; this I came to
after such and such a run; and that other is my home.' But it is not
his recollection alone which moves him, it is sound of the names. He
feels the accent of them, and all the men who live between Hind-head
and the Channel know these names stand for Eden; the noise is enough
to prove it. So it is also with the hidden valleys of the lie de
France; and when you say Jouy or Chevreuse to a man that was born in
those shadows he grows dreamy - yet they are within a walk of Paris.
But the wonderful thing about a name like Charmes is that it hands
down the dead. For some dead man gave it a keen name proceeding from
his own immediate delight, and made general what had been a private
pleasure, and, so to speak, bequeathed a poem to his town. They say
the Arabs do this; calling one place 'the rest of the warriors', and
another 'the end', and another 'the surprise of the horses': let those
who know them speak for it. I at least know that in the west of the
Cotentin (a sea-garden) old Danes married to Gaulish women discovered
the just epithet, and that you have 'St Mary on the Hill' and 'High
Town under the Wind' and 'The Borough over the Heath', which are
to-day exactly what their name describes them. If you doubt that
England has such descriptive names, consider the great Truth that at
one junction on a railway where a mournful desolation of stagnant
waters and treeless, stonewalled fields threatens you with experience
and awe, a melancholy porter is told off to put his head into your
carriage and to chant like Charon, 'Change here for Ashton under the
Wood, Moreton on the Marsh, Bourton on the Water, and Stow in the
Wold.'
Charmes does not fulfil its name nor preserve what its forgotten son
found so wonderful in it. For at luncheon there a great commercial
traveller told me fiercely that it was chiefly known for its
breweries, and that he thought it of little account. Still even in
Charmes I found one marvellous corner of a renaissance house, which I
drew; but as I have lost the drawing, let it go.
When I came out from the inn of Charmes the heat was more terrible
than ever, and the prospect of a march in it more intolerable. My head
hung, I went very slowly, and I played with cowardly thoughts, which
were really (had I known it) good angels. I began to look out
anxiously for woods, but saw only long whitened wall glaring in the
sun, or, if ever there were trees, they were surrounded by wooden
palisades which the owners had put there. But in a little time (now I
had definitely yielded to temptation) I found a thicket.
You must know that if you yield to entertaining a temptation, there is
the opportunity presented to you like lightning. A theologian told me
this, and it is partly true: but not of Mammon or Belphegor, or
whatever Devil it is that overlooks the Currency (I can see his face
from here): for how many have yielded to the Desire of Riches and
professed themselves very willing to revel in them, yet did not get an
opportunity worth a farthing till they died? Like those two beggars
that Rabelais tells of, one of whom wished for all the gold that would
pay for all the merchandise that had ever been sold in Paris since its
first foundation, and the other for as much gold as would go into all
the sacks that could be sewn by all the needles (and those of the
smallest size) that could be crammed into Notre-Dame from the floor to
the ceiling, filling the smallest crannies.
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