Theodore Watts-Dunton: Poet, Novelist, Critic. Douglas James

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СКАЧАТЬ of the ‘Children of the Open Air.’ But in regard to Darwin, besides the strength of his family ties, the pedantic inquisitiveness, the methodizing pedantry of the man of science; in Emily Brontë, the sensitivity to human contact; and in Sinn Lovell, subjection to the love passion – disturbed, and indeed partially stifled, the native instinct with which they were undoubtedly endowed. I was perfectly conscious that I belonged to the third case of Nature-worshippers – that is, I was one of those who, howsoever strongly drawn to Nature and to a free and unconventional life, felt the strength of the love passion to such a degree that it prevented my claiming to be a genuine Child of the Open Air.

      Between the true ‘Children of the Open Air’ and their fellows there are barriers of idiosyncrasy, barriers of convention, or other barriers quite indefinable, which they find most difficult to overpass, and, even when they succeed in overpassing them, the attempt is not found to be worth the making. For, what this kind of Nature-worshipper finds in intercourse with his fellow-men is, not the unegoistic frankness of Nature, his first love, inviting him to touch her close, soul to soul – but another ego enisled like his own – sensitive, shrinking, like his own – a soul which, love him as it may, is, nevertheless, and for all its love, the central ego of the universe to itself, the very Alcyone round whom all other Nature-worshippers revolve like the rest of the human constellations. But between these and Nature there is no such barrier, and upon Nature they lavish their love, ‘a most equal love’ that varies no more with her change of mood than does the love of a man for a beautiful woman, whether she smiles, or weeps, or frowns. To them a Highland glen is most beautiful; so is a green meadow; so is a mountain gorge or a barren peak; so is a South American savannah. A balmy summer is beautiful, but not more beautiful than a winter’s sleet beating about the face, and stinging every nerve into delicious life.

      To the ‘Child of the Open Air’ life has but few ills; poverty cannot touch him. Let the Stock Exchange rob him of his bonds, and he will go and tend sheep in Sacramento Valley, perfectly content to see a dozen faces in a year; so far from being lonely, he has got the sky, the wind, the brown grass, and the sheep. And as life goes on, love of Nature grows, both as a cultus and a passion, and in time Nature seems ‘to know him and love him’ in her turn.

      Dereham entered, and, suddenly coming upon me, there was no retreating, and we were introduced.

      He tried to be as civil as possible, but evidently he was much annoyed. Yet there was something in the very tone of his voice that drew my heart to him, for to me he was the hero of my boyhood still. My own shyness was being rapidly fingered off by the rough handling of the world, but his retained all the bloom of youth, and a terrible barrier it was; yet I attacked it manfully. I knew from his books that Dereham had read but little except in his own out-of-the-way directions; but then, unfortunately, like all specialists, he considered that in these his own special directions lay all the knowledge that was of any value. Accordingly, what appeared to Dereham as the most striking characteristic of the present age was its ignorance. Unfortunately, too, I knew that for strangers to talk of his own published books, or of gypsies, appeared to him to be ‘prying,’ though there I should have been quite at home. I knew, however, from his books that in the obscure English pamphlet literature of the last century, recording the sayings and doings of eccentric people and strange adventures, Dereham was very learned, and I too chanced to be far from ignorant in that direction. I touched on Bamfylde Moore Carew, but without effect. Dereham evidently considered that every properly educated man was familiar with the story of Bamfylde Moore Carew in its every detail. Then I touched upon beer, the British bruiser, ‘gentility nonsense,’ and other ‘nonsense’; then upon etymology – traced hoity-toityism to ‘toit,’ a roof – but only to have my shallow philology dismissed with a withering smile. I tried other subjects in the same direction, but with small success, till in a lucky moment I bethought myself of Ambrose Gwinett. There is a very scarce eighteenth century pamphlet narrating the story of Ambrose Gwinett, the man who, after having been hanged and gibbeted for murdering a traveller with whom he had shared a double-bedded room at a seaside inn, revived in the night, escaped from the gibbet-irons, went to sea as a common sailor, and afterwards met on a British man-of-war the very man he had been hanged for murdering. The truth was that Gwinett’s supposed victim, having been seized on the night in question with a violent bleeding at the nose, had risen and left the house for a few minutes’ walk in the sea-breeze, when the press-gang captured him and bore him off to sea, where he had been in service ever since. I introduced the subject of Ambrose Gwinett, and Douglas Jerrold’s play upon it, and at once the ice between us thawed and we became friends.

      We all went out of the house and looked over the common. It chanced that at that very moment there were a few gypsies encamped on the sunken road opposite to Gordon’s house. These same gypsies, by the by, form the subject of a charming sketch by Herkomer which appeared in the ‘Graphic.’ Borrow took the trouble to assure us that they were not of the better class of gypsies, the gryengroes, but basket-makers. After passing this group we went on the common. We did not at first talk much, but it delighted me to see the mighty figure, strengthened by the years rather than stricken by them, striding along between the whin bushes or through the quags, now stooping over the water to pluck the wild mint he loved, whose lilac-coloured blossoms perfumed the air as he crushed them, now stopping to watch the water wagtails by the ponds.

      After the stroll we turned back and went, at Dereham’s suggestion, for a ramble through Richmond Park, calling on the way at the ‘Bald-Faced Stag’ in Kingston Vale, in order that Dereham should introduce me to Jerry Abershaw’s sword, which was one of the special glories of that once famous hostelry. A divine summer day it was I remember – a day whose heat would have been oppressive had it not been tempered every now and then by a playful silvery shower falling from an occasional wandering cloud, whose slate-coloured body thinned at the edges to a fringe of lace brighter than any silver.

      These showers, however, seemed, as Dereham remarked, merely to give a rich colour to the sunshine, and to make the wild flowers in the meadows on the left breathe more freely. In a word, it was one of those uncertain summer days whose peculiarly English charm was Dereham’s special delight. He liked rain, but he liked it falling on the green umbrella (enormous, shaggy, like a gypsy-tent after a summer storm) he generally carried. As we entered the Robin Hood Gate we were confronted by a sudden weird yellow radiance, magical and mysterious, which showed clearly enough that in the sky behind us there was gleaming over the fields and over Wimbledon Common a rainbow of exceptional brilliance, while the raindrops sparkling on the ferns seemed answering every hue in the magic arch far away. Dereham told us some interesting stories of Romany superstition in connection with the rainbow – how, by making a ‘trus’hul’ (cross) of two sticks, the Romany chi who ‘pens the dukkerin can wipe the rainbow out of the sky,’ etc. Whereupon Gordon, quite as original a man as Dereham, and a humourist of a rarer temper, launched out into a strain of wit and whim, which it is not my business here to record, upon the subject of the ‘Spirit of the Rainbow’ which I, as a child, went out to find.

      Dereham loved Richmond Park, and he seemed to know every tree. I found also that he was extremely learned in deer, and seemed familiar with every dappled coat which, washed and burnished by the showers, seemed to shine in the sun like metal. Of course, I observed him closely, and I began to wonder whether I had encountered, in the silvery-haired giant striding by my side, with a vast umbrella under his arm, a true ‘Child of the Open Air.’

      ‘Did a true Child of the Open Air ever carry a gigantic green umbrella that would have satisfied Sarah Gamp herself?’ I murmured to Gordon, while Dereham lingered under a tree and, looking round the Park, said in a dreamy way, ‘Old England! Old England!’

      It was the umbrella, green, manifold and bulging, under Dereham’s arm, that made me ask Gordon, as Dereham walked along beneath the trees, ‘Is he a genuine Child of the Open Air?’ And then, calling to mind the books he had written, I said: ‘He went into the Dingle, and lived alone – went there, not as an experiment in self-education, as Thoreau went and lived by Walden Pond. He could enjoy living alone, for the ‘horrors’ to which he was occasionally subject did not spring from solitary living. He was never СКАЧАТЬ