The Spirit of Place and Other Essays(地方的精神等)

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The Spirit of Place and Other Essays

The Spirit of Place and

Other Essays

by Alice Meynell

The Spirit of Place and Other Essays

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

The Spirit of Place and Other Essays

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

The Spirit of Place and Other Essays

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

The Spirit of Place and Other Essays

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."

The Spirit of Place and Other Essays

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

The Spirit of Place and Other Essays

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 could not miss it," but not even the few have found it.

It is part of the scheme of the sympathetic historian that Stella should

be the victim of hope deferred, watching for letters from Swift. But day

and night Presto complains of the scantiness of MD's little letters; he waits

upon "her" will: "I shall make a sort of journal, and when it is full I will

send it whether MD writes or not; and so that will be pretty." "Naughty

girls that will not write to a body!" "I wish you were whipped for

forgetting to send. Go, be far enough, negligent baggages." "You,

The Spirit of Place and Other Essays

Mistress Stella, shall write your share, and then comes Dingley altogether,

and then Stella a little crumb at the end; and then conclude with something

handsome and genteel, as `your most humble cumdumble.'" But Scott

and Macaulay and Thackeray are all exceedingly sorry for Stella.

Swift is most charming when he is feigning to complain of his task:

"Here is such a stir and bustle with this little MD of ours; I must be

writing every night; O Lord, O Lord!" "I must go write idle things, and

twittle twattle." "These saucy jades take up so much of my time with

writing to them in the morning." Is it not a stealthy wrong done upon

Mrs. Dingley that she should be stripped of all these ornaments to her

name and memory? When Swift tells a woman in a letter that there he is

"writing in bed, like a tiger," she should go gay in the eyes of all

generations.

They will not let Stella go gay, because of sentiment; and they will not

let Mrs. Dingley go gay, because of sentiment for Stella. Marry come up!

Why did not the historians assign all the tender passages (taken very

seriously) to Stella, and let Dingley have the jokes, then? That would

have been no ill share for Dingley. But no, forsooth, Dingley is allowed

nothing.

There are passages, nevertheless, which can hardly be taken from her.

For now and then Swift parts his dear MD. When he does so he

invariably drops those initials and writes "Stella" or "Ppt" for the one, and

"D" or "Dingley" for the other. There is no exception to this anywhere.

He is anxious about Stella's "little eyes," and about her health generally;

whereas Dingley is strong. Poor Ppt, he thinks, will not catch the "new

fever," because she is not well; "but why should D escape it, pray?" And

Mrs. Dingley is rebuked for her tale of a journey from Dublin to Wexford.

"I doubt, Madam Dingley, you are apt to lie in your travels, though not so

bad as Stella; she tells thumpers." Stella is often reproved for her

spelling, and Mrs. Dingley writes much the better hand. But she is a

puzzle-headed woman, like another. "What do you mean by my fourth

letter, Madam Dinglibus? Does not Stella say you had my fifth, goody

Blunder?" "Now, Mistress Dingley, are you not an impudent slut to

except a letter next packet? Unreasonable baggage! No, little Dingley,

The Spirit of Place and Other Essays

I am always in bed by twelve, and I take great care of myself." "You are

a pretending slut, indeed, with your `fourth' and `fifth' in the margin, and

your `journal' and everything. O Lord, never saw the like, we shall never

have done." "I never saw such a letter, so saucy, so journalish, so

everything." Swift is insistently grateful for their inquiries for his health.

He pauses seriously to thank them in the midst of his prattle. Both

women-- MD--are rallied on their politics: "I have a fancy that Ppt is a

Tory, I fancy she looks like one, and D a sort of trimmer."

But it is for Dingley separately that Swift endured a wild bird in his

lodgings. His man Patrick had got one to take over to her in Ireland.

"He keeps it in a closet, where it makes a terrible litter; but I say nothing; I

am as tame as a clout."

Forgotten Dingley, happy in this, has not had to endure the ignominy,

in a hundred essays, to be retrospectively offered to Swift as an unclaimed

wife; so far so good. But two hundred years is long for her to have gone

stripped of so radiant a glory as is hers by right. "Better, thanks to MD's

prayers," wrote the immortal man who loved her, in a private fragment of

a journal, never meant for Dingley's eyes, nor for Ppt's, nor for any human

eyes; and the rogue Stella has for two centuries stolen all the credit of

those prayers, and all the thanks of that pious benediction.

The Spirit of Place and Other Essays

SOLITUDE

The wild man is alone at will, and so is the man for whom civilization

has been kind. But there are the multitudes to whom civilization has

given little but its reaction, its rebound, its chips, its refuse, its shavings,

sawdust and waste, its failures; to them solitude is a right foregone or a

luxury unattained; a right foregone, we may name it, in the case of the

nearly savage, and a luxury unattained in the case of the nearly refined.

These has the movement of the world thronged together into some blind

by-way.

Their share in the enormous solitude which is the common, unbounded,

and virtually illimitable possession of all mankind has lapsed, unclaimed.

They do not know it is theirs. Of many of their kingdoms they are

ignorant, but of this most ignorant. They have not guessed that they own

for every man a space inviolate, a place of unhidden liberty and of no

obscure enfranchisement. They do not claim even the solitude of closed

corners, the narrow privacy of the lock and key; nor could they command

so much. For the solitude that has a sky and a horizon they know not

how to wish.

It lies in a perpetual distance. England has leagues thereof,

landscapes, verge beyond verge, a thousand thousand places in the woods,

and on uplifted hills. Or rather, solitudes are not to be measured by miles;

they are to be numbered by days. They are freshly and freely the

dominion of every man for the day of his possession. There is loneliness

for innumerable solitaries. As many days as there are in all the ages, so

many solitudes are there for men. This is the open house of the earth; no

one is refused. Nor is the space shortened or the silence marred because,

one by one, men in multitudes have been alone there before. Solitude is

separate experience. Nay, solitudes are not to be numbered by days, but

by men themselves. Every man of the living and every man of the dead

might have had his "privacy of light."

It needs no park. It is to be found in the merest working country; and

a thicket may be as secret as a forest. It is not so difficult to get for a

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TheSpiritofPlaceandOtherEssays1TheSpiritofPlaceandOtherEssaysbyAliceMeynellTheSpiritofPlaceandOtherEssays2THESPIRITOFPLACEWithmimicry,withpraises,withechoes,orwithanswers,thepoetshaveallbutoutsungthebells.Theinarticulatebellhasfoundtoomuchinterpretation,toomanyrhymesprofessingtoclosewithherinaccessi...

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