Bradley Arthur Granville
The English Lakes
Rydal Mount, standing embowered in foliage above the road which afterwards skirts both lakes, is not accessible, but Dove Cottage on Grasmere, where the poet, with his gifted sister and for a time with S. T. Coleridge, spent the years preceding his long married life at Rydal Mount, is open to the pilgrim, be he a devout or an indifferent one. It will be hardly less interesting as the residence for twenty years of that strange genius, stylist, and laudanum drinker, De Quincey. Apart from the great literary obligations under which he has laid posterity, the autobiographical volume which deals with this Lake country, and the brilliant circle of which he was a member, is a book of extraordinary interest. He married a local yeoman's daughter, and the domestic side of his life, including a devoted and successful family, infinitely alleviates the tragedy of his own long and indifferently successful struggle with the fatal drug. The weak-willed but lovable and brilliant Hartley Coleridge, too, who would dash off a sonnet in ten minutes, lived at Nab Cottage, on Rydal Water, till he was laid in Grasmere Churchyard, to be followed there by Wordsworth in the succeeding year of 1850. Wordsworth himself was never really in touch with his humbler neighbours. He had not the temperament for that kind of thing, and remained a continual mystery to most of them.
"Well, John, what's the news?" said the rather too sociable Hartley Coleridge one morning to an old stone-breaker.
"Why, nowte varry particlar, only ald Wudsworth's brocken lowce ageean." This had reference to the poet's habit of spouting his productions as he walked along the roads, which was taken by the country folk as a sign of mental aberration. On another occasion a stranger resting at a cottage in Rydal enquired of the housewife as to Wordsworth's neighbourly qualities.
"Well," said she, "he sometimes goes booin' his pottery about t' rooads an' t' fields an' takes na nooatish o' neabody; but at udder times he'll say 'Good morning, Dolly,' as sensible as oyder you or me."
THIRLMERE AND HELVELLYN
Lying beside the familiar and continuously beautiful road from Grasmere to Keswick, Thirlmere has happily lost nothing of its pristine beauty in becoming the source of Manchester's water supply. An engine house at one point and the big dam, only visible at the far end, are more than counterbalanced in the raising for many feet of a lake that is three miles long and only a quarter of a mile wide. That first delicious view of it which greets the pilgrim on the downward winding road from the pass of Dunmaile Raise, deep channelled between the rugged wall of Armboth Crags and the northern shoulders of Helvellyn, with the pale cone of Skiddaw rising over the hidden interval beyond, will be among the most familiar memories of the lake tourist. These grey Armboth steeps, falling from the wild moorish table-land above so abruptly to the water's edge, and planting everywhere their knotted pine-feathered toes in the deep clear water, with the little promontories and islands wooded in the like fashion, give a character all its own to the narrow but beautiful lake. As a road now skirts both shores, those denied the physical joy of walking this country can get all that the banks, at any rate, of Thirlmere have to offer. The best of this, no doubt, is the prospect here depicted from the lower end, with Old Helvellyn looming so near and filling up the vista to the southward.
The little inn at Wythburn on the highway near the lake-head where the coaches halt, unpretending tavern in outward appearance though it is, might yet be almost accounted as classic ground for the number of men of note, from Scott and the lake poets onward, its modest walls have sheltered. For it has not only been for all time a halfway resting-place between Ambleside and Keswick, but for many either a starting, or a finishing, point in the ascent of Helvellyn. It was in the little parlour of this inn a century ago that Professor Wilson, the athletic and breezy Scottish Intellectual, played an almost brutal practical joke on his hyper-sensitive friends – the two Coleridges and De Quincey – as they all sat resting here by the fire after a long walk one winter night. Seeing a loaded gun in the corner, the Professor introduced it stealthily into the group, and, pointing it up the chimney, pulled the trigger. In the then diminutive bar parlour, hung about with glass and crockery, the unexpected explosion on the drug-weakened nerves of two, at any rate, of the brilliant trio must have been almost more than the most hardened practical joker could have wished for.
This is, of course, the smooth side of Helvellyn, and you may ascend it from virtually any point. Roughly speaking, it represents a huge mound cloven half down the middle and the refuse carted away. After climbing the steep smooth slope from the Thirlmere side to the top, you find yourself suddenly standing on the edge of a precipice, almost of a crater, with the farther side of course wanting, and in its stead beautiful sweeps of glen and crag dipping gradually to the vale where the blue coils of Ullswater lie sleeping. Needless to add, this is but a fraction of the prospect from Helvellyn, and to relate what can be seen from it on a reasonably clear day would merely be to compile a chart of the entire mountain system of Lakeland, and for an exceptionally clear one it would be necessary to make many and remoter additions.
To anyone in touch with these things, the summit of Helvellyn is an inspiring spot, commanding in a single glance the entire dominion of a race not merely homogeneous in breed, but till recently unique in situation. Here were a people, ranging as individuals from peasant to yeomen, to put it roughly; four hundred square miles, say, of freehold farmers, who had never known a landlord since the Crown in the sixteenth century held them as tenants on Border service; a complete democracy among themselves, into whose lives the influence of an aristocracy, as exerted everywhere else without exception in Great Britain, never entered. For there was no such thing within all these wide bounds. These primitive conditions passed away by degrees during the last century. But it was such that bred the Lakelander much as you see him now, though inevitably modified by the influx of large landlords who have bought him out, of villa residents and countless tourists. But here he is still, a type who till recently had virtually no experience of what social grades and distinctions meant in his own daily life, though he dispatched from his rugged stone homestead a steady stream of raw lads who rose to power, wealth, and influence in the world. The Lakelander, too, like his immediate neighbours, is of more definitely Scandinavian origin than any other community in England. His country bristles with Norse place-names; his genuine tongue is so full of it, that an expert in old Cumbrian, it is said, can almost read the Norse Bible. His traditions give him an easy and independent bearing. For two or three generations of more or less contact with the outer world and its complications can only modify, not efface, such things. He still remains a cheery, independent soul, but absolutely one of Nature's gentlemen.
Now from Helvellyn you can see the Pennines, and across the Pennines lies Northumberland. We have nothing to do here with the Northumbrian, but as an immediate neighbour of these others it is interesting to note that he has less Norse blood in him, and together with his Lothian and Berwickshire neighbours is accounted the purest Saxon of any Englishman. His place-names have the Saxon flavour. Here in Lakeland we have fells and becks and garths and ghylls; beyond the Pennines and the Cheviots they are all burns and laws and tons. The Lakelanders proper were not Border fighters as the word applies to their low country neighbours and the Northumbrians. They were liable to service, and frequently took a hand against the Scots, but their savage country was not tempting to the Scottish freebooter nor worth the risk. Nor when the tide set the other way were they accounted as actually of the following of the great Border houses. When James I. ascended the throne of a United Kingdom, and fondly fancied Border troubles were at an end, that canny monarch thought to make some money by commuting the feudal service nature of the Lakeland statesmen's holding to a money rent. These military tenants of the Crown met to the number of two thousand between Windermere and Kendal and swore that they would yield up their lives rather than their title-deeds, which settled the matter. It remained for the growth of national wealth, luxury, and what we call the march of civilization to destroy by individual land purchase, assisted by local conditions too complex to mention, the greater number of the Lakeland freeholders or "statesmen".
There are still some few left in possession, but otherwise the man himself, though now a tenant, has by no means parted with his qualities because his father or his grandfather parted with his freehold.
