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THE SPIRIT OF PLACE AND OTHER ESSAYS
THE SPIRIT OF PLACE AND OTHER ESSAYS ALICE MEYNELL Contents:
The Spirit of Place
Mrs. Dingley
Solitude
The Lady of the Lyrics
July
Wells
The Foot
Have Patience Little Saint
The Ladies of the Idyll
A Derivation
A Counterchange
Rain
Letters of Marceline Valmore
The Hours of Sleep
The Horizon
Habits and Consciousness
Shadows
THE SPIRIT OF PLACE
With mimicry with praises with echoes or with answers the poets
have all but outsung the bells. The inarticulate bell has found too
much interpretation too many rhymes professing to close with her
inaccessible utterance and to agree with her remote tongue. The
bell like the bird is a musician pestered with literature.
To the bell moreover men do actual violence. You cannot shake
together a nightingale's notes or strike or drive them into haste
nor can you make a lark toll for you with intervals to suit your
turn whereas wedding-bells are compelled to seem gay by mere
movement and hustling. I have known some grim bells with not a
single joyous note in the whole peal so forced to hurry for a human
festival with their harshness made light of as though the Bishop
of Hereford had again been forced to dance in his boots by a merry
highwayman.
The clock is an inexorable but less arbitrary player than the
bellringer and the chimes await their appointed time to fly--wild
prisoners--by twos or threes or in greater companies. Fugitives--
one or twelve taking wing--they are sudden they are brief they are
gone; they are delivered from the close hands of this actual
present. Not in vain is the sudden upper door opened against the
sky; they are away hours of the past.
Of all unfamiliar bells those which seem to hold the memory most
surely after but one hearing are bells of an unseen cathedral of
France when one has arrived by night; they are no more to be
forgotten than the bells in "Parsifal." They mingle with the sound
of feet in unknown streets they are the voices of an unknown tower;
they are loud in their own language. The spirit of place which is
to be seen in the shapes of the fields and the manner of the crops
to be felt in a prevalent wind breathed in the breath of the earth
overheard in a far street-cry or in the tinkle of some black-smith
calls out and peals in the cathedral bells. It speaks its local
tongue remotely steadfastly largely clamorously loudly and
greatly by these voices; you hear the sound in its dignity and you
know how familiar how childlike how lifelong it is in the ears of
the people. The bells are strange and you know how homely they
must be. Their utterances are as it were the classics of a
dialect.
Spirit of place! It is for this we travel to surprise its
subtlety; and where it is a strong and dominant angel that place
seen once abides entire in the memory with all its own accidents
its habits its breath its name. It is recalled all a lifetime
having been perceived a week and is not scattered but abides one
living body of remembrance. The untravelled spirit of place--not to
be pursued for it never flies but always to be discovered never
absent without variation--lurks in the by-ways and rules over the
towers indestructible an indescribable unity. It awaits us always
in its ancient and eager freshness. It is sweet and nimble within
its immemorial boundaries but it never crosses them. Long white
roads outside have mere suggestions of it and prophecies; they give
promise not of its coming for it abides but of a new and singular
and unforeseen goal for our present pilgrimage and of an intimacy
to be made. Was ever journey too hard or too long that had to pay
such a visit? And if by good fortune it is a child who is the
pilgrim the spirit of place gives him a peculiar welcome for
antiquity and the conceiver of antiquity (who is only a child) know
one another; nor is there a more delicate perceiver of locality than
a child. He is well used to words and voices that he does not
understand and this is a condition of his simplicity; and when
those unknown words are bells loud in the night they are to him as
homely and as old as lullabies.
If especially in England we make rough and reluctant bells go in
gay measures when we whip them to run down the scale to ring in a
wedding--bells that would step to quite another and a less agile
march with a better grace--there are belfries that hold far sweeter
companies. If there is no music within Italian churches there is a
most curious local immemorial music in many a campanile on the
heights. Their way is for the ringers to play a tune on the
festivals and the tunes are not hymn tunes or popular melodies but
proper bell-tunes made for bells. Doubtless they were made in
times better versed than ours in the sub-divisions of the arts and
better able to understand the strength that lies ready in the mere
little submission to the means of a little art and to the limits--
nay the very embarrassments--of those means. If it were but
possible to give here a real bell-tune--which cannot be for those
melodies are rather long--the reader would understand how some
village musician of the past used his narrow means as a composer for
the bells with what freshness completeness significance fancy
and what effect of liberty.
These hamlet-bells are the sweetest as to their own voices in the
world. Then I speak of their antiquity I use the word relatively.
The belfries are no older than the sixteenth or seventeenth century
the time when Italy seems to have been generally rebuilt. But
needless to say this is antiquity for music especially in Italy.
At that time they must have had foundries for bells of tender
voices and pure warm light and golden throats precisely tuned.
The hounds of Theseus had not a more just scale tuned in a peal
than a North Italian belfry holds in leash. But it does not send
them out in a mere scale it touches them in the order of the game
of a charming melody. Of all cheerful sounds made by man this is by
far the most light-hearted. You do not hear it from the great
churches. Giotto's coloured tower in Florence that carries the
bells for Santa Maria del Fiore and Brunelleschi's silent dome does
not ring more than four contralto notes tuned with sweetness
depth and dignity and swinging one musical phrase which softly
fills the country.
The village belfry it is that grows so fantastic and has such nimble
bells. Obviously it stands alone with its own village and can
therefore hear its own tune from beginning to end. There are no
other bells in earshot. Other such dovecote-doors are suddenly set
open to the cloud on a festa morning to let fly those soft-voiced
flocks but the nearest is behind one of many mountains and our
local tune is uninterrupted. Doubtless this is why the little
secluded sequestered art of composing melodies for bells--charming
division of an art having its own ends and means and keeping its
own wings for unfolding by law--dwells in these solitary places. No
tunes in a town would get this hearing or would be made clear to
the end of their frolic amid such a wide and lofty silence.
Nor does every inner village of Italy hold a bell-tune of its own;
the custom is Ligurian. Nowhere so much as in Genoa does the
nervous tourist complain of church bells in the morning and in fact
he is made to hear an honest rout of them betimes. But the nervous
tourist has not perhaps the sense of place and the genius of
place does not signal to him to go and find it among innumerable
hills where one by one one by one the belfries stand and play
their tunes. Variable are those lonely melodies having a differing
gaiety for the festivals; and a pitiful air is played for the burial
of a villager.
As for the poets there is but one among so many of their bells that
seems to toll with a spiritual music so loud as to be unforgotten
when the mind goes up a little higher than the earth to listen in
thought to earth's untethered sounds. This is Milton's curfew that
sways across one of the greatest of all the seashores of poetry--
"the wide-watered."
MRS. DINGLEY
We cannot do her honour by her Christian name. {1} All we have to
call her by more tenderly is the mere D the D that ties her to
Stella with whom she made the two-in-one whom Swift loved "better a
thousand times than life as hope saved." MD without full stops
Swift writes it eight times in a line for the pleasure of writing
it. "MD sometimes means Stella alone" says one of many editors.
"The letters were written nominally to Stella and Mrs. Dingley"
says another "but it does not require to be said that it was really
for Stella's sake alone that they were penned." Not so. "MD" never
stands for Stella alone. And the editor does not yet live who shall
persuade one honest reader against the word of Swift that Swift
loved Stella only with an ordinary love and not by a most
delicate exception Stella and Dingley so joined that they make the
"she" and "her" of every letter. And this shall be a paper of
reparation to Mrs. Dingley.
No one else in literary history has been so defrauded of her
honours. In love "to divide is not to take away" as Shelley says;
and Dingley's half of the tender things said to MD is equal to any
whole and takes nothing from the whole of Stella's half. But the
sentimentalist has fought against Mrs. Dingley from the outset. He
has disliked her shirked her misconceived her and effaced her.
Sly sentimentalist--he finds her irksome. Through one of his most
modern representatives he has but lately called her a "chaperon." A
chaperon!
MD was not a sentimentalist. Stella was not so though she has been
pressed into that character; D certainly was not and has in this
respect been spared by the chronicler; and MD together were "saucy
charming MD" "saucy little pretty dear rogues" "little monkeys
mine" "little mischievous girls" "nautinautinautidear girls"
"brats" "huzzies both" "impudence and saucy-face" "saucy noses"
"my dearest lives and delights" "dear little young women" "good
dallars not crying dallars" (which means "girls") "ten thousand
times dearest MD" and so forth in a hundred repetitions. They are
every now and then "poor MD" but obviously not because of their
own complaining. Swift called them so because they were mortal; and
he like all great souls lived and loved conscious every day of
the price which is death.
The two were joined by love not without solemnity though man with
his summary and wholesale ready-made sentiment has thus obstinately
put them asunder. No wholesale sentiment can do otherwise than
foolishly play havoc with such a relation. To Swift it was the most
secluded thing in the world. "I am weary of friends and
friendships are all monsters except MD's;" "I ought to read these
letters I write after I have done. But I hope it does not puzzle
little Dingley to read for I think I mend: but methinks" he adds
"when I write plain I do not know how but we are not alone all
the world can see us. A bad scrawl is so snug; it looks like PMD."
Again: "I do not like women so much as I did. MD you must know
are not women." "God Almighty preserve you both and make us happy
together." "I say Amen with all my heart and vitals that we may
never be asunder ten days together while poor Presto lives."
"Farewell dearest beloved MD and love poor poor Presto who has
not had one happy day since he left you as hope saved."
With them--with her--he hid himself in the world at Court at the
bar of St. James's coffee-house whither he went on the Irish mail-
day and was "in pain except he saw MD's little handwriting." He
hid with them in the long labours of these exquisite letters every
night and morning. If no letter came he comforted himself with
thinking that "he had it yet to be happy with." And the world has
agreed to hide under its own manifold and lachrymose blunders the
grace and singularity--the distinction--of this sweet romance.
"Little sequestered pleasure-house"--it seemed as though "the many
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