Author Of Lorna Doone

( Originally Published 1912 )

THE next time you are in London go down to the royal borough of Richmond, which is but nine miles away, and having seen the famous view from the Terrace, continue by the footpath down the hill under the Star and Garter to the village of Petersham, where, within ten miles of the babble and bustle of Charing Cross, you will find relics and some of the atmosphere of the eighteenth and earlier centuries.

On one hand gently curves the placid, sylvan river; on the other Petersham Park slopes down through dense, glossy woods of oak, beech, elm, and chestnut, and clumps of spruce, pine, and cedar of Lebanon, with thickets of rhododendrons between, to hawthorn-hedged meadows, pastures, and paddocks, which spread out from the front and back of comfortable Georgian houses whose weathered brick glows in every shade of red and purple.

Another footpath across a field, leads you to the ancient church built of the same warm brick, mottled with ivy and golden lichens — a mere toy in size, but much the oldest edifice in the village: it was founded at the beginning of the fourteenth century on the site of a cell of the Abbey of Chertsey. There you will be tempted to linger in the little churchyard where you may hear the cuckoo calling like spirit to spirit, and the moss-grown graves are mantled by flowers and sheltered by sombre sentinels of cypress and yew.

You may linger, you will linger, until you fall under a spell of peace and beauty which reconciles you to the inevitable change the hillocked earth betokens. Roses sprinkle the low wall over which you can see all the surrounding loveliness: the slant of the park, the quiet fields and gardens, the silver surface of the stream, and the crimson, brown, and white sails tacking upon it; roses are everywhere, dropping their petals on the paths, netting headstones and monuments, springing where the hearts have been of those who lie below.

In all England you will not happen on anything more? characteristic of her rural charm than Petersham, which has been preserved like a piece of old lace or lengths of brocade bequeathed from grandmother to granddaughter for untold generations.

Some celebrities are buried here: Captain Vancouver, the discoverer of the island; Mary and Agnes Berry, the friends of Pope and Horace Walpole, and the Countess of Ailesbury and one monument testifies to the hold the place takes on others than natives:

Richard, Earl of Edgcumbe

Lies buried here who during a greater portion of his life chose this neighbourhood for a residence, and Dying at Richmond desired that his mortal remains should not be borne to the distant tomb of his ancestors, but be deposited in this church yard.

Mount Edgcumbe in Plymouth Sound has beauties of its own; its green hills dip into a peaceful bay; laurel, myrtle, orchids, magnolias, palmetto, and other tropical, and semi-tropical things thrive in its soft air, but the lord of it renounced it under the greater lure of this vale of peace on the fringe of London. If you have any sentiment you too will wish to live there when the time for retirement comes, and see in the signs of death among the graves, wreathed in flowers as they are, sung to by sky-larks and thrushes, and in the dark by nightingales, only the promise of repose.

Then, if you are good for another three miles, you can go by footpath up the wide, smooth river bank, over-hung by ancient trees and hawthorn, and on the opposite side, bordered by luxuriant gardens, with more and more roses in bushes, arcades, and screens, looking as though deluges of them must have fallen out of the blue sky and the slow-moving, billowy clouds — you can go past Ham House, which Charles the First's Earl of Lauder-dale built, and which his descendant, the Earl of Dysart, owns, to Twickenham Ferry and Teddington Lock without seeing in all your walk anything to mar the constant beauty, except here and there a tea house too reckless of colour, or an ill-advised villa, whose mistakes are nearly hidden by redeeming shrubbery and flowers.

That is a favourite walk of mine, and in the years that are gone it ended in Teddington at the door of R. D. Blackmore, the author of "Lorna Doone."

Away from the river Teddington is naught now but a raw, sprawling, untidy, hobbledehoy of a London suburb, but when Blackmore chose it for a home it was a country village, far from the noises and the smoke of town, and except for its tea gardens, as rural as anything between Hyde Park Corner and Bristol. He bought his land for its seclusion, and with no thought of what it would produce beyond fruits and vegetables. The only noise, and that infrequent, was from the occasional drags and char-ΰ-bancs on their way with vocal cockney holiday-makers to and from Hampton Court and Bushey Park.

He did not reckon on the reach of the dragon's claws or the size of its maw. The railway soon came and cut off a corner of the land. In a few years more the adjacent meadows were filled with the red and yellow shops and houses of Suburbia, and glades where the nightingale had sung were stripped and plotted to make room for the ever-increasing examples of the unlovely mushroom architecture, which pressed to his very gates.

He could have sold to advantage, but he had come to stay, and stay he did till the end of his days, sending his fruits to Covent Garden, and his novels to Fleet Street or thereabout to make good the losses on the fruit. He paid for his hobby, in part at least, with his books, and in doing so did not feel that he was making a sacrifice of them or of his dignity. It was exceptionally fine fruit that filled the round wicker baskets of the familiar pattern which, bearing his name in big black letters, were trundled down to market along the level highway, orchard-bound, between Teddington and Brentford to meet at Busch Corner, where the Isleworth Road connects with the Hounslow Road, the similar produce of another novelist, a friend of his, and a dear old friend of mine, George Manville Fenn, who for a quarter of a century or more divided himself between the loom of fiction and a walled, old-world garden within the bounds of the Duke of Northumberland's Syon Park.

If testimony is wanted I am willing to affirm that better fruit than that of R. D. Blackmore and George Manville Fenn was never sent to market: nor ever had the brotherhood of gardeners more honest or more enthusiastic followers than they. What pleasant memories spring from the alleys and coverts of Fenn's garden, with masses of glowing flowers, its lawn and the pavilion-like mulberry trees and weeping ashes that sheltered us in their cool and dappled shade at tea-time ! The two men were not unlike in their tastes and temperaments. Both were tall, genial, and mild; both charmed by a sort of radiant simplicity.

There could not be a simpler or plainer house than Blackmore's. I believe it is yet to be seen from the tops of the trams that have "cityfied " Teddington more than the trains did a house of dingy brick and slate without a dormer, or a gable, or a single ornament to relieve the austerity of its four wholly utilitarian walls, as improbable a domicile as one could think of for a man of roman-tic and poetical imagination. Within it was no more aesthetic than without, bare and cheerless, giving, how-ever, an impression of indifference to ornament or a con-tempt for it rather than of enforced frugality.

We talked in his study, and that was a bit of a room with a writing-table, a chair or two, and a few books against the walls, books in the plainest bindings —for use, and, like all the rest of the furniture, not for display. A pallet served as both bed and sofa, and a whimsical impulse decided that before the various articles had been assembled each had been asked: "What good are you? Are you necessary, something that we can't possibly do without? If you are a superfluity you shall not stay. If you are a luxury, out you go. You have mistaken your destination." Nevertheless everything was airy, sweet, and spotless, and confirmed Richard Whiteing's dictum that the absence of superfluity may be a negative beauty.

As for the man himself he was very like Horace Greeley in appearance. He must have been some inches more than six feet in height in his youth, and he towered above ordinary men even when his shoulders sagged, as they did in his closing years. His head was in proportion to his stature, and the sparse locks remaining had a sort of debonair friskiness that hinted at a vitality reduced a little, perhaps, but without a sign of the cloudy dregs of exhaustion, though he was well along in years. His beard, shaved away from his upper lip and chin, festooned a rosy face from ear to ear, a face of wholesome colour, pink and creamy as a girl's, and lighted by humorous, twinkling eyes of mingled shrewdness and kindness. Rusticity appeared in his loosely-fitting, ill-matched clothes, and an air of rusticity enveloped him: not the material rusticity of the farmyard, but that of the wind and the scents and the voices of the open spaces; that of one who, living afield, had become attuned to the quietude and solace of communion in noiseless and unprofaned places. He seemed to exhale the very essence of the moorlands and coombes he loved and interpreted so well. Low-voiced, mild, benign, and courteous, attached to old ways and conditions that are losing their hold, he was not passive or supine, but could take his stand solidly and inmovably enough when conduct or conversation antagonized his beliefs and principles. He was one of the sincerest of men, and if one had to sum him up in a word a fitter one than "wholesome" could not be chosen. You felt him as a piece of England and of England unmixed.

Is there ever a gardener, who, when you call on him, allows you to stay in his study, his drawing-room or elsewhere indoors for more than twenty minutes, if so long as that? You see him glancing at the sky through the windows : he may be wondering if it is too cold or damp for you, but if it is not tempestuous and the rain is not in drowning floods he is sure to say after a little hesitation, " Wouldn't you like to come into the garden? " and to show his pleasure the moment you consent. And then he leads you forth, and strolls with you up and down the paths, a more contented man, listening to you and answering, and throwing in his own comments in leisurely tones, while every now and then he steps from your side to rake a hand among the strawberries, which in Teddington and Twickenham are famous for their size and flavour, or shakes his head at his peaches and the fruits clinging to and slowly ripening against the green and purple, moss-stained southern walls. He is not inattentive to the subject of conversation, nor does he miss the thread of it, but through it all he interjects irrelevant parentheses as to blight, the weather and marauding birds, in which you, unless you are a gardener yourself, may only feign an interest. The expression of his eyes claims sympathy, and you are ashamed of yourself in becoming a renegade to him in letting your feelings run with the predatory enemies as you see a few of them caught alive by the neck in the meshes of the nets and paying the penalty of their appetites, like so many unfeathered and better endowed living things.

So it was with Blackmore. He took you into his garden, and picking up shears and pruning knife, used them as you followed him and talked for choice more of his fruits than of himself or of his books, about which he was always very shy. Only one thing seemed sufficient to ruffle his abiding serenity, and that was some mistaken paragraph in a horticultural paper. Then he would shake the offending sheet in the wind, and cry out "Blockheads ! Donkeys ! This is the thickest-headed of all the thick-headed papers. Why the fellow doesn't even know that the temperature of the soil has more to do with the start of life than the temperature of the air!" And he would cap his objurgation with a tip of Latin, for which he had a scholar's fondness.

With some reluctance on his part I got a few words in edgewise about "Lorna Doone," but he had grown tired of the predominance and preference given to that book by his admirers, many of them distant strangers in all parts of the world, from whom he was constantly hearing. Editors and publishers, I among them, besought him for variations of it or extensions of it, and under pressure and unwillingly he once revived the Doones in a brief narrative, which it is probable he afterward regretted. Beyond that he would not go.

I asked him about the origin of the story. "I could hardly tell " — with some attempts at memory — "whence and how I picked up the odds and ends, some of which came from my grandfather (rector of Oare), circa 1790, and later. I know not how early or how late, for he never lived there, but rode across the moors to give them a sermon every other Sunday. And when he became too old for that my uncle used to do it for him." He derided the frequent attempts to identify the scenes his imagination created with actual localities in the neighbourhood of Lynton.

I always thought there was a play in "Lorna Doone," and he authorized me, not without experience in such work, to dramatize it. I got as far as a scenario and consultations with actors and managers, but no farther. There was a difficulty which could not be overcome, and that was the size of John Ridd, the protagonist. Everything hung on that — on colossal height, girth, and muscle in the impersonator. Prize-fighters and exhibition giants were thought of, but bulk and weight could not suffice without some refinement, intelligence, and histrionic capacity. The combination was unattainable: padding might have served for circumference, as it does in the part of Falstaff, but stilts would have been requisite to lift the tallest actor to Ridd's splendid and surpassing elevation. It need not be said that the actors themselves did not see it in this way; Shakespeare had no "rude mechanical" in his eye when he created Bottom but a common specimen of his fellow players, who in their own conceit can, as we all know, play any part that is long enough and central enough, whether it be the lion or Pyramus. One of them was confident he could do John Ridd, and ready to stake money on it an effeminate little man with shrimpy figure, and a violin voice, which would have necessitated a megaphone in addition to the padding and the stilts. The play I contemplated was abandoned, and though unauthorized versions of the romance have been attempted they have not succeeded.