Afoot in England: Chapter 7

Chapter 7

Roman Calleva

An afternoon in the late November of 1903. Frost, gales, and
abundant rains have more than half stripped the oaks of their
yellow leaves. But the rain is over now, the sky once more a
pure lucid blue above me--all around me, in fact, since I am
standing high on the top of the ancient stupendous earthwork,
grown over with oak wood and underwood of holly and thorn and
hazel with tangle of ivy and bramble and briar. It is
marvellously still; no sound from the village reaches me; I
only hear the faint rustle of the dead leaves as they fall,
and the robin, for one spied me here and has come to keep me
company. At intervals he spurts out his brilliant little
fountain of sound; and that sudden bright melody and the
bright colour of the sunlit translucent leaves seem like one
thing. Nature is still, and I am still, standing concealed
among trees, or moving cautiously through the dead russet
bracken. Not that I am expecting to get a glimpse of the
badger who has his hermitage in this solitary place, but I am
on forbidden ground, in the heart of a sacred pheasant
preserve, where one must do one's prowling warily. Hard by,
almost within a stone's-throw of the wood-grown earthwork on
which I stand, are the ruinous walls of Roman Calleva--the
Silchester which the antiquarians have been occupied in
uncovering these dozen years or longer. The stone walls, too,
like the more ancient earthwork, are overgrown with trees and
brambles and ivy. The trees have grown upon the wall, sending
roots deep down between the stones, through the crumbling
cement; and so fast are they anchored that never a tree falls
but it brings down huge masses of masonry with it. This slow
levelling process has been going on for centuries, and it was
doubtless in this way that the buildings within the walls were
pulled down long ages ago. Then the action of the earth-worms
began, and floors and foundations, with fallen stones and
tiles, were gradually buried in the soil, and what was once a
city was a dense thicket of oak and holly and thorn. Finally
the wood was cleared, and the city was a walled wheat field
--so far as we know, the ground has been cultivated since the
days of King John. But the entire history of this green
walled space before me--less than twenty centuries in
duration--does not seem so very long compared with that of
the huge earthen wall I am standing on, which dates back to
prehistoric times.

Standing here, knee-deep in the dead ruddy bracken, in the
"coloured shade" of the oaks, idly watching the leaves fall
fluttering to the ground, thinking in an aimless way of the
remains of the two ancient cities before me, the British and
the Roman, and of their comparative antiquity, I am struck
with the thought that the sweet sensations produced in me by
the scene differ in character from the feeling I have had in
other solitary places. The peculiar sense of satisfaction, of
restfulness, of peace, experienced here is very perfect; but
in the wilderness, where man has never been, or has at all
events left no trace of his former presence, there is ever a
mysterious sense of loneliness, of desolation, underlying our
pleasure in nature. Here it seems good to know, or to
imagine, that the men I occasionally meet in my solitary
rambles, and those I see in the scattered rustic village hard
by, are of the same race, and possibly the descendants, of the
people who occupied this spot in the remote past--Iberian and
Celt, and Roman and Saxon and Dane. If that hard-featured and
sour-visaged old gamekeeper, with the cold blue unfriendly
eyes, should come upon me here in my hiding-place, and scowl
as he is accustomed to do, standing silent before me, gun in
hand, to hear my excuses for trespassing in his preserves, I
should say (mentally): This man is distinctly English, and
his far-off progenitors, somewhere about sixteen hundred years
ago, probably assisted at the massacre of the inhabitants of
the pleasant little city at my feet. By and by, leaving the
ruins, I may meet with other villagers of different features
and different colour in hair, skin, and eyes, and of a
pleasanter expression; and in them I may see the remote
descendants of other older races of men, some who were lords
here before the Romans came, and of others before them, even
back to Neolithic times.

This, I take it, is a satisfaction, a sweetness and peace to
the soul in nature, because it carries with it a sense of the
continuity of the human race, its undying vigour, its
everlastingness. After all the tempests that have overcome
it, through all mutations in such immense stretches of time,
how stable it is!

I recall the time when I lived on a vast vacant level green
plain, an earth which to the eye, and to the mind which sees
with the eye, appeared illimitable, like the ocean; where the
house I was born in was the oldest in the district--a century
old, it was said; where the people were the children's
children of emigrants from Europe who had conquered and
colonized the country, and had enjoyed but half a century of
national life. But the people who had possessed the land
before these emigrants--what of them? They, were but a
memory, a tradition, a story told in books and hardly more
to us than a fable; perhaps they had dwelt there for long
centuries, or for thousands of years; perhaps they had come,
a wandering horde, to pass quickly away like a flight of
migrating locusts; for no memorial existed, no work of their
hands, not the faintest trace of their occupancy.

Walking one day at the side of a ditch, which had been newly
cut through a meadow at the end of our plantation, I caught
sight of a small black object protruding from the side of the
cutting, which turned out to be a fragment of Indian pottery
made of coarse clay, very black, and rudely ornamented on one
side. On searching further a few more pieces were found. I
took them home and preserved them carefully, experiencing a
novel and keen sense of pleasure in their possession; for
though worthless, they were man's handiwork, the only real
evidence I had come upon of that vanished people who had been
before us; and it was as if those bits of baked clay, with a
pattern incised on them by a man's finger-nail, had in them
some magical property which enabled me to realize the past,
and to see that vacant plain repeopled with long dead and
forgotten men.

Doubtless we all possess the feeling in some degree--the sense
of loneliness and desolation and dismay at the thought of an
uninhabited world, and of long periods when man was not. Is
it not the absence of human life or remains rather than the
illimitable wastes of thick-ribbed ice and snow which daunts
us at the thought of Arctic and Antarctic regions? Again, in
the story of the earth, as told by geology, do we not also
experience the same sense of dismay, and the soul shrinking
back on itself, when we come in imagination to those deserts
desolate in time when the continuity of the race was broken
and the world dispeopled? The doctrine of evolution has made
us tolerant of the thought of human animals,--our progenitors
as we must believe--who were of brutish aspect, and whose
period on this planet was so long that, compared with it, the
historic and prehistoric periods are but as the life of an
individual. A quarter of a million years has perhaps elapsed
since the beginning of that cold period which, at all events
in this part of the earth, killed Palaeolithic man; yet how
small a part of his racial life even that time would seem if,
as some believe, his remains may be traced as far back as the
Eocene! But after this rude man of the Quaternary and
Tertiary epochs had passed away there is a void, a period
which to the imagination seems measureless, when sun and moon
and stars looked on a waste and mindless world. When man once
more reappears he seems to have been re-created on somewhat
different lines.

It is this break in the history of the human race which amazes
and daunts us, which "shadows forth the heartless voids and
immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from behind
with the thought of annihilation."

Here, in these words of Hermann Melville, we are let all at
once into the true meaning of those disquieting and seemingly
indefinable emotions so often experienced, even by the most
ardent lovers of nature and of solitude, in uninhabited
deserts, on great mountains, and on the sea. We find here the
origin of that horror of mountains which was so common until
recent times. A friend once confessed to me that he was
always profoundly unhappy at sea during long voyages, and the
reason was that his sustaining belief in a superintending
Power and in immortality left him when he was on that waste of
waters, which have no human associations. The feeling, so
intense in his case, is known to most if not all of us; but we
feel it faintly as a disquieting element in nature of which we
may be but vaguely conscious.

Most travelled Englishmen who have seen much of the world and
resided for long or short periods in many widely separated
countries would probably agree that there is a vast difference
in the feeling of strangeness, or want of harmony with our
surroundings, experienced in old and in new countries. It is
a compound feeling and some of its elements are the same in
both cases; but in one there is a disquieting element which
the other is without. Thus, in Southern Europe, Egypt, Syria,
and in many countries of Asia, and some portions of Africa,
the wanderer from home might experience dissatisfaction and be
ill at ease and wish for old familiar sights and sounds; but
in a colony like Tasmania, and in any new country where there
were no remains of antiquity, no links with the past, the
feeling would be very much more poignant, and in some scenes
and moods would be like that sense of desolation which assails
us at the thought of the heartless voids and immensities of
the universe.

He recognizes that he is in a world on which we have but
recently entered, and in which our position is not yet
assured.

Here, standing on this mound, as on other occasions past
counting, I recognize and appreciate the enormous difference
which human associations make in the effect produced on us by
visible nature. In this silent solitary place, with the
walled field which was once Calleva Atrebatum at my feet, I
yet have a sense of satisfaction, of security, never felt in a
land that had no historic past. The knowledge that my
individual life is but a span, a breath; that in a little
while I too must wither and mingle like one of those fallen
yellow leaves with the mould, does not grieve me. I know it
and yet disbelieve it; for am I not here alive, where men have
inhabited for thousands of years, feeling what I now feel
--their oneness with everlasting nature and the undying human
family? The very soil and wet carpet of moss on which their
feet were set, the standing trees and leaves, green or yellow,
the rain-drops, the air they breathed, the sunshine in their
eyes and hearts, was part of them, not a garment, but of their
very substance and spirit. Feeling this, death becomes an
illusion; and the illusion that the continuous life of the
species (its immortality) and the individual life are one and
the same is the reality and truth. An illusion, but, as Mill
says, deprive us of our illusions and life would be
intolerable. Happily we are not easily deprived of them,
since they are of the nature of instincts and ineradicable.
And this very one which our reason can prove to be the most
childish, the absurdest of all, is yet the greatest, the most
fruitful of good for the race. To those who have discarded
supernatural religion, it may be a religion, or at all events
the foundation to build one on. For there is no comfort to
the healthy natural man in being told that the good he does
will not be interred with his bones, since he does not wish to
think, and in fact refuses to think, that his bones will ever
be interred. Joy in the "choir invisible" is to him a mere
poetic fancy, or at best a rarefied transcendentalism, which
fails to sustain him. If altruism, or the religion of
humanity, is a living vigorous plant, and as some believe
flourishes more with the progress of the centuries, it must,
like other "soul-growths," have a deeper, tougher woodier root
in our soil.

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