Yet At The End I Found That
Exford Had Left The Most Vivid And Lasting Impression, And Was
Remembered With Most Pleasure.
It was more to me than
Winsford, that fragrant, cool, grey and green village, the
home of immemorial peace, second to no English village in
beauty; with its hoary church tower, its great trees, its old
stone, thatched cottages draped in ivy and vine, its soothing
sound of running waters.
Exeter itself did not impress me so
strongly, in spite of its cathedral. The village of Exford
printed itself thus sharply on my mind because I had there
been filled with wonder and delight at the sight of a face
exceeding in loveliness all the faces seen in that West
Country - a rarest human gem, which had the power of imparting
to its setting something of its own wonderful lustre. The
type was a common Somerset one, but with marked differences in
some respects, else it could not have been so perfect.
The type I speak of is a very distinct one: in a crowd in a
London street you can easily spot a Somerset man who has this
mark on his countenance, but it shows more clearly in the
woman. There are more types than one, but the variety is less
than in other places; the women are more like each other, and
differ more from those that are outside their borders than is
the case in other English counties. A woman of this prevalent
type, to be met with anywhere from Bath and Bedminster to the
wilds of Exmoor, is of a good height, and has a pleasant,
often a pretty face; regular features, the nose straight,
rather long, with thin nostrils; eyes grey-blue; hair brown,
neither dark nor light, in many cases with a sandy or sunburnt
tint. Black, golden, reds, chestnuts are rarely seen. There
is always colour in the skin, but not deep; as a rule it is a
light tender brown with a rosy or reddish tinge. Altogether
it is a winning face, with smiling eyes; there is more in it
of that something we can call "refinement" than is seen in
women of the same class in other counties. The expression is
somewhat infantile; a young woman, even a middle-aged woman,
will frequently remind you of a little girl of seven or eight
summers. The innocent eyes and mobile mouth are singularly
childlike. This peculiarity is the more striking when we
consider the figure. This is not fully developed according to
the accepted standards the hips are too small, the chest too
narrow and flat, the arms too thin. True or false, the idea
is formed of a woman of a childlike, affectionate nature, but
lacking in passion, one to be chosen for a sister rather than
a wife. Something in us - instinct or tradition - will have it
that the well-developed woman is richest in the purely womanly
qualities - the wifely and maternal feelings. The luxuriant
types that abound most in Devonshire are not common here.
It will be understood that the women described are those that
live in cottages. Here, as elsewhere, as you go higher in the
social scale - further from the soil as it were - the type
becomes less and less distinct. Those of the "higher class,"
or "better class," are few, and always in a sense foreigners.
Chapter Twenty-Four: Troston
I doubt if the name of this small Suffolk village, remote from
towns and railroads, will have any literary associations for
the reader, unless he be a person of exceptionally good
memory, who has taken a special interest in the minor poets of
the last century; or that it would help him if I add the names
of Honington and Sapiston, two other small villages a couple
of miles from Troston, with the slow sedgy Little Ouse, or a
branch of it, flowing between them. Yet Honington was the
birthplace of Robert Bloomfield, known as "the Suffolk poet"
in the early part of the last century (although Crabbe was
living then and was great, as he is becoming again after many
years); while at Sapiston, the rustic village on the other
side of the old stone bridge, he acquired that love of nature
and intimate knowledge of farm life and work which came out
later in his Farmer's Boy. Finally, Troston, the little
village in which I write, was the home of Capel Lofft, a
person of importance in his day, who discovered Bloomfield,
found a publisher for his poems, and boomed it with amazing
success.
I dare say it will only provoke a smile of amusement in
readers of literary taste when I confess that Bloomfield's
memory is dear to me; that only because of this feeling for
the forgotten rustic who wrote rhymes I am now here, strolling
about in the shade of the venerable trees in Troston Park-the
selfsame trees which the somewhat fantastic Capel knew in his
day as "Homer," "Sophocles," "Virgil," "Milton," and by other
names, calling each old oak, elm, ash, and chestnut after one
of the immortals.
I can even imagine that the literary man, if he chanced to be
a personal friend, would try to save me from myself by begging
me not to put anything of this sort into print. He would warn
me that it matters nothing that Bloomfield's verse was
exceedingly popular for a time, that twenty-five or thirty
editions of his Farmer's Boy were issued within three years of
its publication in 1800 that it continued to be read for half
a century afterwards. There are other better tests. Is it
alive to-day? What do judges of literature say of it now?
Nothing! They smile and that's all. The absurdity of his
popularity was felt in his own day. Byron laughed at it;
Crabbe growled and Charles Lamb said he had looked at the
Farmer's Boy and it made him sick. Well, nobody wants to look
at it now.
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