The Ingoldsby Country

The Ingoldsby Country By Charles G. Harper The Ingoldsby Country CHAPTER I INTRODUCTORY The present writer foregathered a little while since with a man who had been to the uttermost parts of the earth. He had just returned from Australia, and was casually met on what the vulgar call the "Tuppenny Tube," travelling from the Bank to Shepherd's Bush. It was a humorous anti-climax to all those other journeys, but that is not the point here to be made. He was full, as might have been expected, of tales strange and curious of those outposts of civilisation he had visited, and of legends of places—whose names generally ended with two gulps and a click—where civilisation was an unknown quantity. But to this man, who had been everywhere and elsewhere, who had crossed the Dark Continent when it was still dark, England, his native land, was largely a sealed book. Even as one spoke with him it could be perceived how perfect an exemplar he was of many globe-trotting Britons who roam the world and can talk to you at first hand of Bulawayo or the Australian bush, but are instantly nonplussed if the subject of rural England be broached. When he was done talking of places with savage and infinitely-repetitive names, composed of fantastically-arranged vowels, with never a consonant to consort with them, he was asked if he knew Kent. "Kent?" he repeated, in Jingle-like fashion, "why, yes. Canterbury Cathedral, hop-gardens, Charles Dickens, Rochester, Dover, and—and all that," he concluded, with a vague sweep of his arm. "Run through it on y'r way to Paris," he added, in an explanatory way. And that was all he knew of Kent: a place you run through, on the way to somewhere else! a country observed from fleeting and not very attentive glances obtained from a railway-carriage window! Such glances furnished him fully forth in all he had cared to know of the Garden of England! Not that one fully subscribes to that familiar epithet of praise, which must have originally been given by a Cockney who knew no better. Who that ever has sojourned in the west, and has known lovely Devon, would for a moment give Kent that pride of place? Now, if it were called the "Market Garden of England——!" What? But this is not to say that Kent is not very beautiful; only it is not Devon. I do not pillory Kent because it is not something else, and would by no means contemn its chalky soil because of any affection for the good red earth of that other shire. Kent has its lovable qualities, and when you have eliminated the thronging tramps, the paper and other factories, the objectionable hop-pickers, the beanfeasters, and the multitudinous yahoos who people its nearer Cockneyfied districts, there is a very considerable residuum of exquisite country. The elimination of all those items would be what the slangy term a "big order"; but the tourist who knows, and even the tourist who does not actually know, but can infer and deduce, need never lose himself in the Kent of commerce and blackguardism. He seeks out, and by instinct finds, the best; and, having found the best that Kent affords, is ready to declare that it is hard to beat. It is, for example, impossible to match, even in Devon, the beauty of that fertile fruit and hop- bearing belt of country which begins at Newington, a few miles below Chatham, and continues beside the Dover Road, past Teynham and Faversham, and on to Canterbury. It is a beauty that appeals alike and at once to the artist and the man with carnal appetites and fleshly longings; for, once off the dusty high-road, it is a constant succession of orchards and hop-gardens, wherein it is pleasant to lie on sunny afternoons in the dappled shade of the apple, pear, or cherry-trees, with the swede-eating sheep for sole companions, and the noise of the toilsome world coming restfully over the hedgerows. It is a noisy and a toilsome world. There goes the roar of the big guns down at the Medway forts; the clear note of the bugles sings up faintly—like an anthem from amid a naughty nest of vipers—out of Chatham and New Brompton (we are being duly taken care of!); the whistling and rushing of the railway trains are never still, and you can hear that holiday world which takes its vacation strenuously, "pip-pipping" on cycles, "poop- pooping" on motor-cars, and playing the yearnful concertina on the passing break like anything, t'other side of the merciful hedge. Even if you could not hear them, the signs of their passing would be evident in the cloud of chalk-dust which, like the pillar of cloud by day that guided the Children of Israel, marks their route. But the Land of Promise sought by those pilgrims, at such speed, is not ours. How should it be? Theirs is ever the Next Place; ours is Here. Theirs is the Promise without fruition; ours is granted to the full, and Now, wherever we be. That is if we be indeed wise in our generation, and content with the happy moment. One understands that same happy moment, here and now, to be passed in the consumption of ripe cherries out of a cool cabbage-leaf, in the shade of the boughs that bore them. This is one way in which beauteous Kent appeals, as we have said, to the carnal man, who perceives that if indeed Devonshire cream be good, equally good are the kindly fruits of Kent. If Kent be essentially the Market Garden of England, rather than pre- eminently the Garden in the picturesque sense, certainly this country yields to none other in historic or literary interest. That coast where Cæsar and Augustine, easily first among the great personages of history, landed; this fertile county which contains the Metropolitan Cathedral of the Church of England; the neighbourhood of Rochester and Maidstone, linked with the literary activities of Charles Dickens, must needs hold the affections of Englishmen, irrespective of the physical and æsthetic attractions of scenery. But there is another great literary figure connected with Kent, both by birth and by reason of his having exploited many of its rural legends in his merry verse. Richard Harris Barham was born at Canterbury, and in his Ingoldsby Legends created an Ingoldsby Country, which he had already peopled with many notable characters before death cut him off in his prime. The capital of the Ingoldsby Country is Canterbury; its very heart and core is comprised within the district to the east of a line drawn due south from Whitstable to Canterbury, Denton, and Hythe; and its frontiers make an indeterminate line to the west, beyond Romney Marsh and Ashford. The whole north coast of Kent, including Sheppey, the Swale, and the littoral of the Thames and Medway, is part and parcel of Ingoldsby Land, whose isolated and far-off dependencies are found at Shrewsbury, the scene of "Bloudie Jack"; or Salisbury Plain, where the "Dead Drummer" is located; at Wayland Wood, near Wymondham, in Norfolk, where the legend of the "Babes in the Wood" belongs; and at Netley Abbey, the scene of a fine poem. London, too, has its Ingoldsby associations, duly set forth in these pages. CHAPTER II BARHAM: THE AUTHOR OF THE INGOLDSBY LEGENDS There are coteries, circles inner and outer, in the world of letters, and there have always been. There are some in this time of ours whose members think they are of the giants whose memory the world will not willingly let die. There were other coterie when the nineteenth century was but newly come into its second quarter, when the period that is now known as Early Victorian was in the making, and when the Queen was young. The members of those literary brotherhoods are gone, each one to his place, and the memories of the most of them, of the books they wrote, the jokes they cracked, of their friendships and quarrels, are dim and dusty to-day. The taste in humour and pathos is not the taste of this time, which laughs at the pathos, and finds the humour, when not dull, merely spiteful and vindictive. When you rise from a perusal of Douglas Jerrold's wounding wit, you think him ungenerous and a cad, De Quincey's frolics merely elephantine, Hood's facilities dull, and Leigh Hunt's performances but journalism. All this is but the foil to show the brilliant humour, the fun, and the truly pathetic note of Richard Harris Barham's writings to better effect. Time has breathed upon the glass through which we see the lives and performances of Barham's contemporaries, and has obscured our view of them; but the author of the Ingoldsby Legends remains, almost alone among that Early Victorian band, as acceptable to-day (nay, perhaps even more acceptable) than he was fifty years ago. The Ingoldsby Legend will never be allowed to die. Indeed, we live in times when their admirable sanity might well be invoked as a counterblast to modern neurotic conditions, and a healthy revulsion from superstitious revivals. Written at that now historic time when the Ritualistic innovations and tendency towards Roman Catholicism of the new school of theology at Oxford were agitating English thought, they express the common-sense scorn of the healthy mind against the mystification and deceit of the religion that the Reformation pitched, neck and crop, out of England, close upon three hundred and seventy years ago, and for which the large- minded tolerance of to-day is not enough.

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