“O my soul, she beats her wings,
And pants to fly away
In the heavenly day:
xviYet she flags and almost faints;
Can such be meant for me?—
Come and see, say the Saints.
Saith Jesus: Come and see.
Say the saints: His pleasures please us
Before God and the Lamb.
Come and taste My sweets, saith Jesus:
Be with Me where I am.”
The voice is that of Christina Rossetti, but it is the thought too of her who wrote “Cherry and Violet.”
Miss Manning, as we read her life in her books, walks through the world with an unbounded charity and a hope ever refreshed. “Preach peace to all,” said S. Francis of Assisi, “for often those whom you think to be the children of the devil are those whom you will know some day to be the sons of God.” Miss Manning loved to think of, and to look upon, whatsoever10 things are lovely and of good report, and so thinking and looking she found flowers xviieverywhere to spring up beneath her feet.
“Tread softly! all the earth is holy ground.
It may be, could we look with seeing eyes,
This spot we stand on is a Paradise
Where dead have come to life and lost been found,
Where faith has triumphed, martyrdom been crowned,
Where fools have foiled the wisdom of the wise;
From this same spot the dust of saints may rise,
And the King’s prisoners come to light unbound.”
So when she turns to the sixteenth century, with its sordid11 materialism12 and its coarse handling of things most sacred, not merely does she recognise, as an Englishwoman, the grandeur13 of its struggles, but she sees its best embodiment in the tragedy of an almost perfect life. As she seeks refuge in that time of stress with the Household of Sir Thomas More, so in the next century she turns aside from the pettiness of Pepys or the realism of Defoe to the life of a simple girl born xviiiand nurtured14 on the great bridge that spans the Thames.
“Quali colombe dal disio chiamante
Volan per l’aer dal voler portate.”
With “The Household of Sir Thomas More” we walked in the dangerous days when the Lion found his strength. With “Cherry and Violet” we are in the still more alarming atmosphere of the Commonwealth15 and the Restoration. Year by year, as old houses open their chests, and scholars hunt among their yellow papers, we learn more of the reign16 of terror which marked the closing years of the Protectorate. We see one Verney living a “lude life” with “my lord Claypoll” and other “my lords” the kindred of the Protector; while another, the honest Sir Ralph, stoutest17 of Parliamentarians, is clapped in prison, no man xixknows why; and at the same time John Howe, pious18 Puritan preacher (whom Mistress Cherry herself knew of), is confessing how impossible it is to win the family which reigns19 at Whitehall to think of the welfare of their souls. Yet all the while there hangs over the land the outer gloom of an enforced conformity20, which Miss Manning so happily describes. When we find ourselves in the heyday21 of the Restoration, or when we watch the splendours and the scandals of the Court of Charles II., we learn from the scandalous Pepys—now so much more than ever since Mr. H. B. Wheatley has given us all that it was possible to print of the wonderful Diary as Pepys really wrote it—how utterly22 rotten was the social life of the age, even among those, too often, who might seem to sit sedately23 above its more flagrant iniquities24.
And then there comes in Defoe with xxhis marvellous photographic realism of fiction, and tells us of the horrors of the Plague with a fidelity25 which those who had lived among them could, we fancy, hardly have approached.
From sources such as these—from Pepys and Defoe, as well as from the more sober pages of the stately Evelyn, it is that Miss Manning takes much of the mise-en-scène of her “Tale of the Great Plague”; and we find, as historic evidence accumulates around us, how true her imaginary picture is.
It was a happy thought which made the story begin on old London Bridge—happier still, readers will now think when they see Mr. Herbert Railton’s beautiful drawings. Something we learn of the stress of the time as we recall, with Mistress Cherry, the strange pageants26 which the bridge-dwellers watched from their windows. They saw the double xxitide, portent27 of unknown woes28. They saw how the mighty29 Strafford went serenely30 to his death, and the old Archbishop passed up and down under guard on the long days of his weary trial. They saw the King come to his own again—and some of them may have looked out of windows that wet Sunday night in 1662 when Mr. Pepys had left his singing of “some holy things” and went back by water, shooting the rapids under “the bridge (which did trouble me) home, and so to bed.” The life on the bridge must have been something which an Englishman’s experience of to-day can hardly help to picture. Something of it we may fancy as we enter an old shop on the Ponte Vecchio at Florence, or look out upon it and the Arno from the long corridor that connects the Uffizi with the Pitti. But on that narrow space is no such crowded life as on old London xxiiBridge—no such dangers for foot-passengers, drivers, and horsemen. To picture this in seventeenth-century England we must cross near mid-day from Stamboul towards Pera by the far-famed Galata Bridge. Scarce anywhere but in Florence and in Constantinople can we now recall what sights old London Bridge must have witnessed. Mr. Railton sees them, though, very clearly, and we are more than content to see with his eyes. Something idealised they are, perhaps. Old London Bridge was hardly so beautiful, surely, as he pictures it; and his drawings, perhaps, are more like what the houses ought to have been than ever they were. “More Nurembergy than Nuremberg,” says Mr. Ruskin of some of Prout’s famous work. We may say it of Mr. Railton’s old London; and high praise it is. And as Mr. Railton brings back to us the scenes, so Mr. Jellicoe xxiiigives us the persons of old time in their habits as they lived.
Among such surroundings we picture Cherry doing her simple duties, tending her mother, thinking somewhat primly31 of her vivacious33 neighbour Violet, fancying she has lost her heart for ever to poor Mark, and then waking to a heroine’s work in the horrors of the Plague, and finding through that her own bright reward.
“The Plague growing on us,” says Pepys, and of remedies “some saying one thing, and some another.” So it begins in May, and by the first week of June, “much against my will, I did in Drury Lane see two or three houses marked with a red cross upon the doors, and ‘Lord have mercy upon us’ writ3 there; which was a sad sight to me, being the first of the kind that to my remembrance I ever saw.” Ten days later, and as he xxivgoes in a hackney coach from the Lord Treasurer’s, his coachman is struck of a sudden “very sick and almost blind”—and journey by coach becomes “a very dangerous passage nowadays.” So it comes till there are seven hundred dying in a week, and “it was a sad noise to hear our bell to toll34 and ring so often either for death or burials.”
And soon, “But, Lord! how sad a sight it is to see the streets empty of people and very few upon the ’Change. Jealous of every door that one sees shut up, lest it should be the Plague; and about us two shops in three, if not more, generally shut up.”
Reports are terrible of the thousands who every week are carried to their graves in the long pits; and with an even closer terror speaks the record of the veracious35 diarist. “I went forth36 and walked towards Moorfields (August 30th) xxvto see (God forgive me my presumption37!) whether I could see any dead corpse38 going to the grave; but, as God would have it, did not. But, Lord! how everybody looks, and discourse39 on the streets is of death, and nothing else, and few people going up and down, that the town is like a place distressed40 and forsaken41.” “What a sad time it is,” he writes on 20th September, “to see no boats upon the river; and grass grows up and down White Hall Court, and nobody but poor wretches42 in the streets.”
To these records the genius of Defoe adds an immortal picture. “As this puts me upon mentioning my walking the Streets and Fields”—he has been speaking of the numbers that fled to the outskirts43 of the town, “into the Fields and Woods, and into secret uncouth44 Places, almost anywhere to creep into a Bush, or Hedge, and die,” and how it “was a general xxviMethod to walk away” if any one was seen coming—“I cannot omit taking notice what a desolate45 place the City was at that time. The great street I lived in, which is known to be one of the broadest of all the streets of London, I mean of the Suburbs as well as the Liberties; all the side where the Butchers lived, especially without the Bars, was more like a green Field than a paved Street, and the People generally went in the middle with the Horses and Carts. It is true that the farthest End, towards White-Chappel Church, was not all pav’d, but even the part that was pav’d was full of Grass also; but this need not seem strange, since the great Streets within the City, such as Leaden-Hall Street, Bishopgate-Street, Cornhill, and even the Exchange itself, had Grass growing in them, in several Places; neither Cart nor Coach were seen in the Streets from Morning to xxviiEvening, except some Country Carts to bring Roots and Beans, or Pease, Hay and Straw, to the Market, and those but very few, compared to what was usual: as for Coaches, they were scarce used, but to carry sick People to the Pest-House, and to other Hospitals; and some few to carry Physicians to such Places as they thought fit to venture to visit; for really coaches were dangerous things, and People did not Care to venture into them because they did not know who might have been carried in them last; and sick infected People were, as I have said, ordinarily carried in them to the Pest-Houses, and some times People expired in them as they went along.
“It is true, when the Infection came to such a Height as I have now mentioned, there were very few Physicians which car’d to stir abroad to sick Houses, and very many of the most eminent46 of xxviiithe Faculty47 were dead as well as the Surgeons also; for now it was indeed a dismal48 time, and for about a month together, not taking any Notice of the Bills of Mortality, I believe there did not die less than 1500 or 1700 a-Day, one Day with another.
“One of the worst Days we had in the whole Time, as I thought, was in the Beginning of September, when indeed good People began to think that God was resolved to make a full End of the People in this miserable49 City. This was at that Time when the Plague was fully50 come into the Eastern Parishes: the Parish of Algate, if I may give my Opinion, buried above a thousand a Week for two Weeks, though the Bills did not say so many; but it surrounded me at so dismal a rate, that there was not a House in twenty uninfected; in the Minories, in Houndsditch, and in those Parts of xxixAlgate about the Butcher-Row, and the Alleys51 over against me, I say in those places Death reigned52 in every Corner. White-Chappel Parish was in the same Condition, and tho’ much less than the Parish I liv’d in; yet buried near 600 a Week by the Bills; and in my Opinion near twice as many; whole Families, and indeed whole Streets of Families were swept away together; insomuch that it was frequent for Neighbours to call to the Bellman, to go to such and such Houses, and fetch out the People, for that they were all dead.”
There is little, if anything, in the description which is exaggerated. How much in tone as well as detail Miss Manning learnt from this great master of fiction is clear. But it was altogether foreign to her nature to paint long in such gloomy colours, and she turned, with a true art, from the horrors of the xxxPlague to the peace of country life “in good King Charles’s golden days.”
So she brings her heroine down into Berkshire. A very short journey we take it to have been, or the old horse must have been more swift of foot than we should gather from Mistress Cherry’s description, for Buckland in Berks lies not far from Faringdon, and over seventy miles from London town. One of those quiet little villages it is that nestle among the low hills that overlook the peaceful valley of the upper Thames. A fine old church may have had Master Blower for its vicar. It has four bells and a register that date from his day. There are memorials of two families, the Yates and the Southbys, who have passed away with the good old times. The house is not such as Mistress Cherry stayed in, but speaks all of the eighteenth century, of George the Second and Mr. Wood of Bath.
xxxiIt is tempting53 to wonder whether this part of the country was one Miss Manning ever saw—whether she watched the deer speeding by her—whether she felt the fascination54 of
“This little stream whose hamlets scarce have names,
This far-off, lonely mother of the Thames.”
One may like to fancy her rejoicing in it, as Dante Gabriel Rossetti rejoiced, who lived in a quaint55 old house such as she had pictured Master Blower welcoming Cherry into, only a few miles away from Buckland, at Kelmscott. But the place refuses to be identified, and we must be content to conclude that Mistress Cherry’s geography was at fault.
Having chosen a striking setting for her characters, Miss Manning knew well how to give them life. She had a quiet humour, and a kindly56 knowledge of human nature, which made her draw xxxiitrue portraits. Different readers will have their favourites, but I think few will fail to be drawn57 to honest Nathaniel Blower, priest and scholar, who, after days of poverty such as we may read many a true history of in Walker’s “Sufferings of the Clergy,” and a sore struggle with the Plague, lived to be Rector of Whitechapel, and better still, after the crowning misfortune of the Fire, to end his days quietly among the country folk at Bucklands with his good wife by his side. Master Blower is indeed drawn with Miss Manning’s happiest touches: we do not readily forget the figure he presents in bed, or how he “in his Deliration went through the whole Book of Job in his head.”
Whether most lads would not fall in love with Violet we cannot tell, but certainly quiet Cherry is a good woman, worthy of the hand of Mary Wilkins. xxxiiiWe may sometimes feel that she is a damsel of the nineteenth century at masquerade in the dress of two centuries before; but we like her none the less if we fancy she is good Miss Manning in disguise.
And so we leave her and Master Blower happy in their home at Bucklands. Good man, we doubt not he tilled his garden and tended his parish well, like the Berkshire priest and poet of to-day, and, it may be, with the same thought.
“In all my borders I my true love seek
By flowery signs to set:
Her hair the violet;
Flowers that with sweet returns each season bloom,
As each its impulse wakes,
Be pledges of a beauty still more fair
When hair and cheek are white.”
All’s well that ends well. After prim32 Puritanism and roystering Restoration revels64, after Plague and Fire, comes the quiet ending in the country’s peace.
W. H. HUTTON.
The Great House, Burford,
June 26, 1896.
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1
reticent
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| adj.沉默寡言的；言不如意的 | |
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con
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| n.反对的观点，反对者，反对票，肺病；vt.精读，学习，默记；adv.反对地，从反面；adj.欺诈的 | |
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writ
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| n.命令状，书面命令 | |
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exquisite
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| adj.精美的；敏锐的；剧烈的，感觉强烈的 | |
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worthy
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| adj.(of)值得的，配得上的；有价值的 | |
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immortal
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| adj.不朽的；永生的，不死的；神的 | |
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immortality
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| n.不死，不朽 | |
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aspirations
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| 强烈的愿望( aspiration的名词复数 )； 志向； 发送气音； 发 h 音 | |
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akin
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| adj.同族的，类似的 | |
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whatsoever
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| adv.（用于否定句中以加强语气）任何；pron.无论什么 | |
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11
sordid
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| adj.肮脏的，不干净的，卑鄙的，暗淡的 | |
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12
materialism
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| n.［哲］唯物主义，唯物论；物质至上 | |
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13
grandeur
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| n.伟大，崇高，宏伟，庄严，豪华 | |
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14
nurtured
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| 养育( nurture的过去式和过去分词 )； 培育； 滋长； 助长 | |
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commonwealth
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| n.共和国，联邦，共同体 | |
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16
reign
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| n.统治时期，统治，支配，盛行；v.占优势 | |
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stoutest
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| 粗壮的( stout的最高级 )； 结实的； 坚固的； 坚定的 | |
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18
pious
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| adj.虔诚的；道貌岸然的 | |
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reigns
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| n.君主的统治( reign的名词复数 )；君主统治时期；任期；当政期 | |
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conformity
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| n.一致，遵从，顺从 | |
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heyday
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| n.全盛时期，青春期 | |
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utterly
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| adv.完全地，绝对地 | |
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sedately
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| adv.镇静地，安详地 | |
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24
iniquities
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| n.邪恶( iniquity的名词复数 )；极不公正 | |
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fidelity
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| n.忠诚，忠实；精确 | |
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pageants
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| n.盛装的游行( pageant的名词复数 )；穿古代服装的游行；再现历史场景的娱乐活动；盛会 | |
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portent
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| n.预兆；恶兆；怪事 | |
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28
woes
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| 困境( woe的名词复数 )； 悲伤； 我好苦哇； 某人就要倒霉 | |
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mighty
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| adj.强有力的；巨大的 | |
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serenely
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| adv.安详地，宁静地，平静地 | |
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31
primly
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| adv.循规蹈矩地，整洁地 | |
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prim
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| adj.拘泥形式的，一本正经的；n.循规蹈矩，整洁；adv.循规蹈矩地，整洁地 | |
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vivacious
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| adj.活泼的，快活的 | |
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toll
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| n.过路(桥)费；损失，伤亡人数；v.敲(钟) | |
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veracious
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| adj.诚实可靠的 | |
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forth
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| adv.向前；向外，往外 | |
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presumption
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| n.推测，可能性，冒昧，放肆，[法律]推定 | |
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corpse
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| n.尸体，死尸 | |
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discourse
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| n.论文，演说；谈话；话语；vi.讲述，著述 | |
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distressed
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| 痛苦的 | |
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41
Forsaken
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| adj. 被遗忘的, 被抛弃的 动词forsake的过去分词 | |
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wretches
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| n.不幸的人( wretch的名词复数 )；可怜的人；恶棍；坏蛋 | |
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43
outskirts
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| n.郊外，郊区 | |
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uncouth
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| adj.无教养的，粗鲁的 | |
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45
desolate
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| adj.荒凉的，荒芜的；孤独的，凄凉的；v.使荒芜，使孤寂 | |
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46
eminent
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| adj.显赫的，杰出的，有名的，优良的 | |
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faculty
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| n.才能；学院，系；(学院或系的)全体教学人员 | |
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dismal
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| adj.阴沉的，凄凉的，令人忧郁的，差劲的 | |
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miserable
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| adj.悲惨的，痛苦的；可怜的，糟糕的 | |
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50
fully
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| adv.完全地，全部地，彻底地；充分地 | |
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51
alleys
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| 胡同，小巷( alley的名词复数 )； 小径 | |
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52
reigned
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| vi.当政，统治（reign的过去式形式） | |
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53
tempting
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| a.诱人的, 吸引人的 | |
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54
fascination
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| n.令人着迷的事物，魅力，迷恋 | |
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55
quaint
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| adj.古雅的，离奇有趣的，奇怪的 | |
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56
kindly
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| adj.和蔼的，温和的，爽快的；adv.温和地，亲切地 | |
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57
drawn
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| v.拖，拉，拔出；adj.憔悴的，紧张的 | |
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carnation
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| n.康乃馨（一种花） | |
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59
fragrant
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| adj.芬香的，馥郁的，愉快的 | |
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60
crimson
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| n./adj.深(绯)红色(的)；vi.脸变绯红色 | |
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61
flakes
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| 小薄片( flake的名词复数 )； （尤指）碎片； 雪花； 古怪的人 | |
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62
blanch
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| v.漂白；使变白；使(植物)不见日光而变白 | |
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63
foam
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| v./n.泡沫，起泡沫 | |
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64
revels
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| n.作乐( revel的名词复数 )；狂欢；着迷；陶醉v.作乐( revel的第三人称单数 )；狂欢；着迷；陶醉 | |
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