Ulverton (19 page)

You may wonder why it is I have no human interest in this picture – no weary pilgrim leaning against the tree, or plodding his hedge-shadowed way. It is imperative to remember that a
human
interposition immediately subsumes any sublime feeling in a work; there is a kind of sublime melancholia, I suggest, here present, that arises out of the suggestiveness of a presence just around the corner, or about to come into view – for no road is made for anything other than human passage. If that passage be absent, as here, how pure and clean becomes the metaphor! The spectator is drawn towards his own destiny, in which no one truly shares but our watchful Creator. Only the passing of past generations resounds in all its invisible ghostliness – the tramp of legions, the earls on their palfreys, the peasants bent under their faggots – while those generations to come, the snorting of traction engines and the whip-cracking chaises, lurk in the shadows of Destiny.

Here, under the great and cooling shade of the chestnut, Frederic Moon plies his ancient trade. In the long-ago past of pagan mystery, the Evil One passed near Ulverton, and demanded of the smith his service: the smith declined to shoe those terrible hooves, and was turned to stone. The Devil thereupon limped away, leaving his mark in a curious depression on Louzy Down, that the less imaginative say was the quarry for our White Horse (see Plate XV,
ibid
.), that canters (albeit somewhat grey and brambled) upon the same slope. The stone rests, rain-worn, but still (from a north-easterly angle) shaped like a man bent over an anvil, on the brow of a nearby hill, and rare is the villager that dares approach it at full moon, when the forlorn striking of iron on iron is said to echo across the vale.

Happily, in these Christian times, Mr Moon (coincident name!) is asked to cradle nothing more terrible than a nag’s leg, as here he is doing. Alas, no amount of cajoling can persuade a horse to keep its head from moving, or tail from swishing, however firm the hand upon the bridle – and Mr Moon’s strapping assistant, Master Harry Dimmick, did all in his powers to still the beast. The trestle, grindstone, and other sundry items were
purposefully
arranged, as in a painter’s canvas, to please the eye – much to the amusement of the fellows, who were more used to tossing their tools onto the most convenient spot at hand! Indeed, I requested that the rain-barrel against the wall could be shifted more firmly to the right of the picture, thus counter-weighting the window on the left, but they claimed (in great consternation) that it instantly, and without hesitation, would fall apart, and its precious liquid (this was late summer) be given to the dust.

The older folk, on viewing this operation, were heard to remark how the village was without a smithy for a full year, some thirty-odd years ago. On requesting the reason for this improbable occurrence, I got little satisfaction beyond a few murmurings of ‘that trouble’, or ‘that gurt black day’, until one old dame of great spirit informed me that, ‘old Dick Bowsher was transported for seven year, an’ passed away out yonder, poor soul’ – to a silent applause of slow nods and grim faces. Mr Bowsher being the village blacksmith, and accompanied on his sad voyage by several other fine bodies from the locality (their leader, a Mr Oadam, having been dealt with capitally), no replacement was to be had (or, I venture to suggest, desired) and the smithy fell almost into ruins. The crime of said persons? A desire for living wages, and a fear of machinery, that sprang forth in those riots of some thirty years ago, that caused the nation such alarm, but were snuffed out with a ferocity one can only feel belongs to less civilised nations (see Plate XXXIV,
ibid
.), and that has not brought any marked improvement in the lot of our poor John Hodges.

Again, I draw the reader’s attention to the minute particulars in our surroundings – whether they be rustic or urban – that serve the photographer so efficaciously. This is, indeed, an Example whose title exercises that faculty in the viewer, and once exercised, I venture to hope that the said viewer will depart into the world with a surer eye. For where, you might ask, is the subject? Here is another road (I am partial to roads) and there is a
part
of a field, and hedgerows, and a clear sky (those sooty black specks are not the outcome of mishandling, but are passing birds – many the image marred by those spirited creatures!) with a farm of picturesque quality in the near distance, sunk under its four great elms (it is known, in the appealing way of country nomenclature, as Five Elms Farm) – but where is the rustling, creaking haywain? Where the dust of the bringing home? Where the rosy-cheeked children riding the stack?

But look more carefully: something has, indeed, passed this way. It is early morning, and the low sun before us lights the track: the track is dry, and absorbs the light. But there is something other, some strewn matter, that does not absorb – that appears to rejoice in the sun; as if its gleam is a welcome, a memory of happier, golden times – before the fall upon dull ruts, or the hook of the eager hawthorn bough! The textural properties of this matter make of it something like precious metal, gathered by passing wheels into the middle part of the road, where it resembles (in actuality) a golden spine, or a long lock of Rapunzel’s hair, with its sheen woven into the distance – but likewise immediately puts one in mind of the mental track, with its golden thread of higher effort, that can so easily be blown into disarray by the gusts of fate and bitterness.

This, then, is the only evidence, dear reader, of all the bustling and moisture and thirst and singing that is harvest-time – but how poignant, how much more poignant, this evidence! And for how long will this precious spill – for precious it is indeed, in the thrifty world of the countryside – be allowed to lie in the dust, to be trampled into oblivion by hooves and cart-wheels?

Banish from your imagination that Biblical scene when Christ approached the woman at the well, in which the young girl no doubt sports a fair complexion, and pretty hands, and a lithe figure – and replace it, I dare suggest, with this image now before you. No pump or well, in this end of the Village (named,
appropriate
baptising! Back Lane) but a muddy brook beside a rotting gate-post, which surfaces sullenly from its subterranean passage at this point, and several others, along with its cargo of excrement, and drowned rats, and other choice items off the muck-hills, that are regularly heaped up against the cotter’s walls.

Replace, then, the young beauty of your illustration with this actual villager (a Mrs Eliza Pyke): for those sturdy buckets on that sturdy yoke are filled to the brim, and may not be transported by pretty hands, and a lithe figure – but by the form you see before you. It is not a want of fellow-feeling has made her taciturn of expression, but the chafing rub of the wood upon her shoulders. It is not indulgence has puffed out her features, but an eternal died of white bread and weak tea. She has no need of refinement of posture, or of gesture. Lest she stand fair-square and broad – her back would break.

Where is the water bound? It is washing day. The tub will soon be out, the soil-caked garments soaked and scrubbed – but there is no mangle in Back Lane; no mangle but the arms and hands you see before you, soon to be slapping and twisting and pummelling – for do not pretend to yourself, in your mobile imagination, that those heavy garments will steam merrily before a blazing hearth, when it is wet without (as it was that day). In Back Lane, in Ulverton – in the downland heart of our great and glorious Empire – there are no blazing hearths, but only smoke. Alas, that the necessary minute of exposure has blurred those foul billows to a vague, smudged whiteness across the roofs! For this is smoke which would (if the doors were shut fast) choke the occupants to an untimely death, surpassing far the vile air of Manchester or London – and causing one’s attention, on passing these miserable hovels, to be caught by the litany of coughing within: the heartbreak treble of the children, or the bass clatter of a father scouring his lungs. For firewood, dear reader – the kind stacked brittle and dry, perhaps, in your orchard (if you are not partial to coal) – firewood does not grow on trees. It must be gathered, or paid for: and few are the places left for gathering, in this Kingdom of the partridge and the hare!

So do not forget, when you next peruse that holy passage, or don your clean silk stocks – do not forget this image, lest vanity take you by the hand, and lead you from heavy-shouldered Truth to the whirling drapery of Illusion.

A forest of beech in the summer, seen from without, presents a blank wall of leaf, until (if the wood be viewed from the correct compass-point) the ebbing sunlight, from one flank or the other, shafts through the midst, the front wall of trees grows dark in silhouette, and Nature reveals, as in a suddenly pellucid pool, the secret heart of the wood. This effect is more pronounced, perhaps, in winter, when the natural shadows of the wood still render it opaque from the outside, but the absence of leafage allows a startling brilliance of bronze, or copper, or a bloody red, to strike the boles and trunks of the interior, and as it were illuminate the hidden soul, on a fine dying afternoon. Beech woods, of which there are an abundance around our village, favouring as they do the chalk soil, are the true friends of the photographer: their sinuous lengths, unencumbered by ground shrubbery, rise as the pillars of a cathedral to their exultant heights of transpicuous, gauze-thin leafage.

Until the impossible is gained – and the myriad colours of the universe are arrestable likewise on our silvered plates – we must be content with the play of light and shade, the infinitesimal tremble of texture and tone in a moment’s grace, the unencumbered beauty of Nature’s pen that brings through our lens, as a richly-laden camel through the eye of the needle, her unsurpassable artistry. So this straddling copse, called Bayleaze Wood, of a spring evening, with the breath of night on the air, and the sweet breath of day folding itself onto the forest floor, becomes the entranced glimpse of a better world, where mystery is gilded, and a thousand paths open up where only a screen stood before.

But wait – there is a human figure: poised beside the broad tree on the extreme left, his pale hat chiming with the creamy stroke of the lopped bole on the far right, he stands proudly in his domain – for this is the woodcutter, sharp axe in hand; though he be but a dwarf, but a dab of dark leather, in this gargantuan realm.

The portrait study, with its long ancestry, and its popularity with those who wish their features, at a certain moment in life, to be recalled without the smoothing generosity of the painter’s brush, remains the most illustrious, but also the most easily facile, of all photographic subjects. I confess that, for my living, and to keep in servants, I crowd my studio with the good and the great of our fustian county – magistrates, doctors, barristers, professors, divines, and so forth. But now and again I cajole one who would otherwise never set foot in my room, clamp the head of one who would otherwise remain in a fog of others’ memories (until the passage of time had eroded even that brief retainment of uniqueness) and etch each wrinkle, each pockmark, each hair, upon a tablet that dares eternity – for there are no flawed elements to the eye of the camera, but only the God-given grace of living appearance, that holds in every line the years endured, and the spirit borne.

This portrait is my most-loved, but not for beauty: Miss Hannah Heddin (now lately deceased) was sixty years of age when this portrait was taken: her mouth shows a severity – she was never known to smile; but her eyes – see how their hooded lids conceal beneath them a natural gaiety, that is not quite quenched! See how the hands, resting upon the hem of her simple (and threadbare) shawl, for all their chapped sturdiness, and arthritic curves, speak of younger days still – in that brass ring about which the skin has folded up, as a field folds up about a boulder. Only the Gainsboroughs amongst the painters can hope to emulate this poignant entrapment of the years – in which the face itself is, as it were, its own artist; and the photographer the humble recorder with his tricks of glass and light.

And do you see, in this grim-faced, wind-ravaged visage, these fingers that have grappled with unyielding flints, and frost-clung roots – do you see something deeper, more unyielding still, than simple endurance of poverty and air? For I have captured for posterity a portrait of the Outcast, an example of Fortitude in the face of scorn and isolation. Owing to some hidden sin effected long ago, involving (as far as I can gather) the deposition of fatal
evidence,
in the aftermath of ‘that trouble’ (see Plate XXX,
ibid
.), she has been cast into a realm, as terrible and solitary as if she, too, had been sent to the Antipodes, and suffered its blazing heat and deep loneliness. If I could have recorded the silence she endures, and the spittle of children, whenever she ventures from her outlying cot – how shallowly you would see the spirit of Forgiveness entered into our communities, and how grand the tragedies played on this our tiny stage!

With his brass spectacles, his starched collar, and his general demeanour of youthful authority, Mr Irvine Leslie, B.A., was an unmistakable pillar of our small but robust community, loudly maintaining that those in his charge were as important to him as any Oxford college. Alas! a back room of the rectory is not conducive to learning, and neither is the absence of books (other than tattered exiles from the vestry cupboard), or paper, or slates, or blackboards; or anything more sophisticated for the inculcation of the very rudiments of the intellectual life, than a ruler with which to crack the three Rs, as it were, into the knuckles of the unfortunates under his care – knuckles more used to the gritty chill of stone and earth, than the warmth of a pencil.