Widecombe Fair

Front matter

FRONTISPIECE BY CECIL HUNT, R.W.S.

“The steep hill to Kingshead aloft on the shoulder of Hameldon.”

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II

The twenty volumes of the present definitive edition form what the novelist rightly calls a “Dartmoor Cycle.” They all deal with the Moor, and their composition covers a period of exactly a quarter of a century. The first novel, Children of the Mist, was written in 1898; the last, Children of Men, was written in 1923. But, although they constitute the most important part of Eden Phillpotts’ output, these novels by no means constitute the whole of it. I point this out in order to destroy the quite false legend that he is a writer of one idea and one field. On the contrary, the work of few living authors is as various and as wide-embracing as his. A Devon man, born in India, and educated at Plymouth, he lived first in London, indulging in business, journalism, and fiction; and then he returned to Devonshire, where, barring a few brief excursions afield, he has faithfully remained, either on his moor or on the further outskirts of it, and producing with immense and sustained industry a continuous succession of works in almost all branches of literature—novels, short stories, travel, philosophy, poetry, essays, studies of horticulture and of wild nature, plays, and pure fantasias based on classical themes.

His earliest novels, The End of a Life and A Tiger’s Cub, gave no indication beyond their sincerity and their elaborateness that their author ix was to become a realistic novelist with a scientifically conceived philosophy and system of technique. ‘They will divert and hold the reader who yields to them, for they contain scenes of marked emotional power; but they are not the efforts of a creative artist who knows exactly what he would be at. Later came Some Everyday. Folks, and in the very title of the book we discern the first stirrings of the writer in the direction of realism. Evidently he had begun to suspect that in the unexaggerated dailiness of life the novelist may find material worthy of his most serious energies. Some Everyday Folks suffers from timidity; the author had not yet cultivated the courage of his convictions—convictions then indeed still rather undeveloped.

Three years later (1897) he published Lying Prophets, a Cornish story of the coast, and a most notable advance on its forerunner. Lying Prophets, if immature, is essentially a fine work, imagined and constructed with genuine distinction, and moving easily, throughout the greater portion of its course, on a high plane. The realist was fully disclosed in it, the man who would not deign to arrange life cunningly in a pattern of optimism, and the man also who had his own personal and disturbing vision of beauty. Its pictures of the sea, and the terrific description of the flood, are memorable, and nothing that Eden Phillpotts has since done or may hereafter do will render them second-rate. Good judges xX were as much struck by its promise as by its actual performance. But it has no connection’ whatever with Dartmoor; nor had the author, up to this date, handled the Moor at all, save in a few short stories. The truth probably is that he was awakening but slowly to the marvellous possibilities of the unique morsel of material which lay waiting for him in the shape of Dartmoor. No doubt he had been cautiously attending the moment of full inspiration.

The next year and the next book, Children of the Mist, brought the first large vision of the Moor. After that Eden Phillpotts prosecuted with regularity his great geographical scheme for covering all the Moor (omitting the high central wastes where men dwell not), until he had finished Widecombe Fair, the fourteenth novel. At this point he interrupted the series to write five extraneous novels displaying some of the minor industries of southern and south-western England : the Cornish slate quarries (Old Delabole), Essex horticulture and oyster fisheries (The Nursery), the Kentish hop industry (Green Alleys), spinning at Bridport (The Spinners), and Brixham trawl-fishing (The Haven). Then he went back to the Dartmoor Cycle and brought it to a magnificent close with Children of Men. Incidentally, I ought to mention, he had written no less than five volumes of fiction about “ the human boy.”

Xi

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Like nearly all its successors, Children of the Mist deals exclusively with the peasantry and the farming class. The burden of the plot is upon what are generally called ‘simple minds ’, though I have never been able to see that such minds are simpler (or, shall I say less complex?) than our patronising own. Eden Phillpotts certainly has no illusion as to their simplicity. The hero is a water-bailiff, Will Blanchard. One of the heroines is his sister; the other is the miller’s daughter. The most intellectual character is a sign-painter in a tiny Dartmoor town, and the most imposing are two brothers of low birth who have re-settled on the Moor after acquiring a fortune in the Colonies. The minor people are labourers and their women-folk. Not a soul in the story is either sophisticated or well-educated, or speaks correctly, or would be at ease in a drawing-room.

Here is to be noted a difference between Eden Phillpotts and his senior, Thomas Hardy. Thomas Hardy succeeds best when he centralises the interest on a sophisticated character. Tess is highly sophisticated. She is, within, a fine lady. And of the leading women in that masterpiece, The Woodlanders, Grace and Felice are far more alive than Marty South. Whereas Eden Phillpotts succeeds best when he centralises the interest on characters quite without any exotic or adventitious attractiveness.

xii

Children of the Mist is first and chiefly a study of the character of Will Blanchard. ‘ You’re dealing with a curious temperament,”’ says someone to Will’s father-in-law, the miller. The miller replies: “ I’m dealing with a damned fule. But there are fules and fules... 2” And Will Blanchard is a fool. He is a headstrong, conceited, ignorant, irritable, rude, good-natured, warm-hearted, and generous fool. Meet such a peasant as Will in a Dartmoor village and you would not think twice about him. And he does not conquer either. He fails. He is a proved fool. Nevertheless, he is the hero of the tale, and a right hero, because the strength, the weakness, and the beauty of human nature are intensely made manifest in him. Simple—no! And the slowly unrolled psychological panorama of the development of his faulty and fine soul is more impressive than any of the exceedingly impressive situations which arise out of it.

You can perceive in this book, as in all the Dartmoor novels, that the author thinks first, and unshrinkingly, of character and the development of character, and only afterwards of situations. But he is fond of terrific situations— situations which bear their own weight without strain solely by virtue of the truth of the characterdrawing that has preceded them.

Take the minor final situation of Clem Hicks the sign-painter and his seduced sweetheart, Chris Blanchard. Clem has put an end to his

Xiil ceaseless arraignment of the eternal powers by suicide. His mother and Chris meet at night over his corpse. Chris means to kill herself, and she tells Mrs. Hicks that she is pregnant. “ Wummon!” the little, insignificant, faded, sturdy creature bursts out in protest. ‘‘ You’m a holy thing tome. . . . Gotoun! Goto Clem and tell un, in his ear, that I know. It'll reach him if ye whisper it. His soul bain’t so very far away yet. ... An’ ax God for a bwoy.... But for Christ’s sake, ax like wan who has a right to, not fawning an’ humble.” The situation is lifted up to the heroic with tremendous emotional power.

And then Mrs. Hicks sinks back again. A hundred pages further on we have a last glimpse of the old woman. “She never talks of nothing but snuff. ”Tis the awnly bright spot in her life. She’s forgot everythin’ ’bout the past, an’ if you went to see her she’d hold out her hand and say, ‘ Got a little bit o’ snuff for a’ auld body, dearie? ’ And that’s all.” An uncompromising touch, which retrospectively enhances in the memory the convincingness of the greatest moment in Mrs. Hicks’s life.

Children of the Mist is a long and intricate book. One leaves it with the sensation of having lived a long while with a whole community. Nobody and nothing is omitted. We have assisted at the operations of agriculture and the superstitious rites thereto pertaining. We have

Xiv heard the peasants, and especially the ancient Billy Blee, discussing God. We have seen winter change to summer and summer to winter. We have seen deaths and births. We are closely acquainted with certain sheep-dogs, and with a Muscovy duck of solitary habits. We know all the reaches of the river from the lofty castle down to the mill-wheel. We have learnt to sympathise with the moor-men against the caprices of their mysterious over-lord, the ‘Duchy.’ And, above all, we have seen the Moor in every kind of weather—the terrible, magnificent moor, which is at once the subsistence and the ruin of the men that toil like ants on its vast curving flanks. The recollection of the central wastes in winter, as rendered at length in the third part of the novel, freezes up the heart. It is appalling. And, let us admit, the quality of obduracy which human nature has caught from the Moor is equally appalling.

Ly.

After Children of the Mist came Sons of the Morning (in which the principal characters stand higher than peasants and small tradesmen in the social scale) and another remarkable novel, The River—the titular stream being the Dart—as to which much might be said. But the book that followed The River showed an advance so considerable as to mark another definite stage in the author’s development. Children of the Mist was

XV a structure of genuine imaginative realism built on a foundation into whose composition had entered a certain amount of mere cleverness. In The Secret Woman the craftsman offers no display of youth openly exulting in the exercise of a virtuosity which it knows to be rare. The virtuosity is there all right, but it hides itself. The Secret Woman is mature—a tragedy scientifically conceived.

Children of the Mist opens with a description of a girl’s face. The Secret Woman opens with a large description of that part of the Moor on which the story is to move. ‘This very significant detail shows the direction of the author’s progress. He was thinking scientifically—or, to use a more proper word, philosophically; that is to say, he was making an effort towards synthesis. The habit of novelists had been to place characters against a background. And in some novels we even have the singular sight of a set of figures realistically like life, but scarcely attached to the planet, existing, as it were, in the void.

Nothing of this method of approach in The Secret Woman! Here Eden Phillpotts has kept steadily before him, during the process of creation, the dominant truth that the most important factors in human life are the sun and the earth itself; he has remembered that human life is only a portion of a larger life. The Secret Woman is not a tragedy which happens to occur on Dartmoor. It is a part of Dartmoor on which a

XVi tragedy happens to occur. This distinction is of high importance to the understanding of the author’s position. We used to divide the substance of a novel into ‘ character and event’ and “scenery.” But Eden Phillpotts has demonstrated in his work that such a division is unphilosophical and inept. His characters are henceforward part of his scenery and the scenery is part of the characters. He has put humanity into its right place in the universal scheme.

This book is primarily mundane. It deals with every form of vital energy on a particular portion of the earth’s crust. Not with an air of apology does it describe the clouds over a man’s head, or the shape of a larch by which stands a young girl. It is a novel chiefly about humanity, of course; but only because humanity is the leading theme in the great concerted movement of evolution, and not because humanity is the expression of a separate kind of force which by chance finds itself on the earth’s surface. The unity, the correlation of all forms of vital energy—this is what Eden Phillpotts feels and what is the original and final source of his inspiration.

The plot of The Secret Woman is simple; it is austere. Ann Redvers, a woman of the highest respectability with two grown-up sons, catches her husband in adultery. In an impulsive moment of overmastering resentment she kills him, and then learns that her sons have witnessed the deed. Jesse is his father’s son, Michael his

XVii b mother’s. Jesse urges her to confess. Michael savagely forbids her to confess. She is suspected by none. Then the tragedy begins slowly to work itself out, up there in the solitary farm on the Moor. Stage of it succeeds stage: the tension increases until it breaks suddenly, as it must break. While it lasts it achieves just that degree of ‘ intolerableness ’ which is the mark of firstclass tragedy. The agony of the mother who is longing to confess and have peace, but does not confess because of her favourite son, finds vent in cries which stick in the memory like sharp swords,

Meanwhile, the identity of the adulteress (the ‘secret woman’) remains hidden, and she actually becomes affianced to Jesse. Here is a situation which, even though the girl had no intention of marriage, we of the Anglo-Saxon public would not have accepted at the beginning of the century. The doings of the sleepy-eyed Salome, very close to earth as she is, would have shocked and angered us then. And the perfect naturalness with which episode follows episode, the impossibility of putting our finger on any spot and saying, “That is not true and not beautiful,” would not have prevented the mass of readers from labelling its author as ‘ unhealthy.’ Indeed, there is scarcely an aspect of this masterly and daring novel which is not a proof that the large public acclaiming it was a changed and enlightened public. Eden Phillpotts was

XVili continuing the great work of educating the public.

Everywhere, in its opening and its close, in its emotion and its humour, in its varying episodic moods and in its fundamental attitude towards the eternal mystery, The Secret Woman is plainly the creation of a philosophic mind that was fettered by nothing but a consideration for truth. The sentimentalist in search of facile comfort will not find it here, but he who is never afraid of beauty will be rewarded.

V

After The Secret Woman came The Portreeve, a novel in which, as in Sons of the Morning, the author departed from his custom of confining the main interest to the peasantry. And then The Whirlwind, which is one of the four or five major books of the Dartmoor Cycle. I would not assert that the psychological scheme of The Whirlwind is finer than that of The Secret Woman; but it is simpler; it is handled with an even nobler austerity; and, perhaps still more important, it has the advantage of stating and summing up with a sort of stark completeness the elements of the moral struggle which is the basis of all the author’s principal works, namely, the conflict between traditional, dogmatic, religious faith and the profounder paganism of instinct. Wherever he may take us, in successive novels, in his ‘ perx1X ambulation ’ of the Moor, he always introduces us to characters who are preoccupied by problems of eternal import. An anthology might well be compiled from the sayings of his peasants, in the public-houses and elsewhere, about that which is the enigma of the universe, though they would call it by another name.

Now in the figures of Daniel Brendon, the gigantic farm-hand, who slowly develops religious mania, and his wife Sarah Jane, the unspoilt creature of earth, the two tendencies of human thought are personified in their most naive and elemental form. Never, surely, was a more superb pagan than Sarah Jane, who first appears to us wearing a sack for an apron. Her beauty, her startling candour, her naturalness, her fierce pride, her innocence, her passionate belief in the righteousness of her own desires, render her easily the most enchanting among her author’s creations; and of the originality and truth of the observation which must have gone to the conception of her, there can be no doubt. When Dan began to bring religion into his kisses she bluntly reproved him; “Leave God till after. Go on burning now. Love me. Hug me. There’ll be black and blue bruises on my arms to-morrow.” And again, when he suggests to her that she is fond of her kind because they are made in God’s image, she corrects him with vehemence: ‘ Not that! Not that! Because they are made in mine!” And yet she says once to a man whose love she had xX refused: ‘I’m a very modest woman, really, though you don’t seem to think so.” She was. She had the modesty of nature.

As for Daniel Brendon, he had every good quality except intelligence. He was industrious, upright, constant; but a fatal stupidity of prejudice marred his happiness from start to finish. And when his prejudice was engaged he could not see straight—even when he could see at all. And his prejudice was made homicidally dangerous by a jealousy which drives him to mad, to Greek excesses. The scene in which he strikes the corpse of the man who had dishonoured him is among the most terrible in fiction. And the other scene, in which the sinning woman dies by her own hand in order to spare the justly infuriated Daniel from killing her, is among the most sublime. Certainly it surpasses anything in the author’s previous novels. The motive of jealousy complicates the central situation ; but one may argue that Daniel’s jealousy was one of the consequences of his religious prejudice.

The Whirlwind has been called a cruel book. It is neither cruel nor merciful. An author has no business with cruelty or with mercy. In his attitude he must try to follow, so far as a man may, the example of nature. But no author can hope to equal nature in the matter of this majestic indifference to the fate of the individual. And Eden Phillpotts has not done so. Just before the moment of Sarah’s suicide he writes: “‘ Her heart

Xx1 throbbed farewell to the only world she had known; and she was glad that the sky shone blue over her death. She turned her lovely eyes up to it. A million unclouded firmaments would not redeem the loss to earth when those eyes shut.” The last sentiment shows that, in the emotional excitement of composing that tremendous page, his affection for the preferred creature of his imagination moved him actually to compassionate nature upon the woman’s dissolution! Yet the artist in him was well aware, and must have told him so afterwards, that the shutting of those eyes was no loss whatever to earth.

VI

The Whirlwind was followed by eight novels: The Mother, The Virgin in Fudgment, The Three Brothers, The Thief of Virtue (perhaps the most interesting of the eight), Demeter’s Daughter, The Beacon, The Forest, and Widecombe Fair, which on account of considerations of space cannot here be discussed. It must suffice to point out that Widecombe Fair is significant in that it presents a comprehensive and complete picture of all the activities of a village. Here the community itself is, in a curious and original way, the protagonist of the story. Also the book is especially remarkable for the spoken wisdom and wit of the characters.

Then came Brunel’s Tower, which might be classed equally in the Dartmoor Cycle and in the

XXil series of novels dealing with small industries. Brunel’s Tower describes earthenware manufacture, as practised on the confines of the Moor, with extraordinary fullness and exactitude of detail; and the discerning reader will note the narrative virtuosity with which the processes of potting are throughout employed to subserve the purposes of the plot.

The hero, Harvey Porter, is very imperfect, like all the Dartmoor heroes—and like human nature, and the story is the story of his reclamation from a vicious origin. Harvey Porter (whose real name is something else) escapes as a boy from a reformatory and, by dint of effective lying, gets a situation in George Easterbrook’s pottery, and soon makes a god of his master. But the god is as savage as a Hebrew deity. He judges and condemns the youth for a fault whose excuse was that it was committed for the glory of the god. Harvey Porter is cast out.

Mr. Easterbrook is startled and pained when his friends tell him that he was wrong to expect perfection from the partially reclaimed sinner; that he has impulsively abandoned his humane work before it was, or could have been, finished; and that therefore he ought to relent and to resume it. Mr. Easterbrook does relent, but before he brings himself to take back his worshipper the youth is killed in a successful attempt to save the life of the savage god.

Such are the bones of the tale, which is simple

XXili and comparatively quiet. Its interest, richly and variously maintained, is purely psychological, until the tragedy of the close. Pity is the note of this restrained and very moving book. The moral significance is well stated by the characters. Says one Mr. Pitts: ‘‘ When a man goes through the door of death, Samuel, it may mean something far worse than death to those left behind him.” And says Samuel Punchard: “ A very good-natured boy—though queer—was Porter, and gone off in a blaze of glory, I’m sure, for it’s the last thing he did that will be remembered about him, and that’s the best. So, through his wrong-doing, he was put into the way of a bit of right-doing; and after being a rascal he swells up into a hero. And all inside six months. Now that’s a bit out of the usual—eh? ” “ Why, no, Samuel,” Mr. Pitts decides the matter. ‘“‘An everyday thing, I reckon, and well inside the pattern of human nature.”

VII

Miser’s Money and Orphan Dinah succeeded Brunel’s Tower, and then came Children of Men, the eighteenth and the last novel of the Dartmoor Cycle. For the most part these novels are tragedies, and terrible tragedies; and Children of Men is perhaps the most terrible of them all. Like The Whirlwind, Children of Men is a story of jealousy complicated by religious fervour; but

XXIV with this difference, that the two passions are in two different persons, not mingled in a single individual; there is a further difference, that the woman is patently and utterly guiltless.

Jacob Bullstone, a professional breeder of terriers, married Margery Huxam, many years his junior. Jacob’s tendency towards jealousy is early displayed. Margery’s mother is an extreme example of the Dartmoor dogmatic diehard, and her antipathy to her son-in-law is aroused by Jacob’s carelessness and his freedom of speech in the matter of -religion. Margery says to her mother that Jacob is “great on reason.”’ Judith Huxam replies: ‘“ I’m sorry to hear it. Reason is well known for a faulty shift and the playground of the devil. Reason don’t save no souls, but it damns a parlous number, and I wish I could feel a lot surer than I do where Jacob will spend his eternity.” Mrs. Huxam is incapable of any compromise. She is one of those women who are born, who live, and who die without a doubt concerning the rightness of their convictions and the wrongness of all other convictions whatsoever.

Jacob also is incapable of compromise in the marital field. His wife is admired by, and is sympathetic to, Adam Winter, but there is absolutely nothing in the relations of these two to justify the least criticism. Jacob, however, is possessed by all the seven devils of jealousy. In this particular he is mentally sick. After

XXV seventeen years of placid married life, when four children in the house are approaching adolescence, he practically accuses his wife of infidelity. Her defence of herself makes a magnificent scene. Jacob is convinced of her innocence—or he would be convinced if reason directed his thoughts about marriage as it directs his critical thoughts about religious dogma.

On his own special preoccupation Jacob in fact is just as irrational as his mother-in-law on hers. His jealousy smoulders and then burns scorchingly up once more; and he leaves his house to begin an action for divorce. ‘The sole defect in the whole formidable narration lies, to my mind, in the fact that the author fails to explain how Jacob found a solicitor, and how the solicitor found a barrister, to take the case into court on such a preposterous bit of evidence. ‘The husband’s behaviour is rendered admirably convincing. ‘The lawyer’s behaviour is not. Inevitably Jacob loses his case. But habit forces him to return to the Moor and to his own community.

Margery, ill, has gone to live with her mother. Time does its work. Repentant Jacob wants tremendously to get his wife back, and Margery would go back. But Margery’s ruthless mother will not hear of a reconciliation. For her a reconciliation would mean Margery’s eternal damnation. Mrs. Huxam cannot trust her daughter’s strength of mind; and to save Mar-

XXVi gery’s soul Mrs. Huxam flies with Margery’s sick body to the house of a relative at Plymouth. Jacob follows. Mrs. Huxam defends her daughter to the last. She locks herself in the bedroom of the dying Margery. Jacob, aided by Mrs. Huxam’s brother, breaks into the bedroom. Margery is dead, and the sheet drawn up over her face. Behold indeed a situation to which the adjective Greek may properly be applied, as it may be applied to so many other situations in the Dartmoor novels.

But the story does not end at this point, where it would have ended in a Greek tragedy. The four children of the Bullstones begin to play major réles in the development of the plot—and particularly Auna, her father’s favourite child, whose changeless affection is Jacob’s salvation. At the close of the book sadness still obtains, but a calm and restrained content is about to prevail over it. The older generation, wounded and permanently scarred, recedes very slowly into the background, and the younger generation, to whom the past is and must be after all only a tale, happily pushes forward nature’s endless plan.

Here is mellowness. Here is the author grandly completing, with sternness, but a tempered and even tender sternness, the task of twenty-five years. It is a superb climax to an effort as large and as finely sustained as any in fiction. Children of Men may or may not be -

XXVil superior to all its forerunners. I cannot say. But it is most positively inferior to none.

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In fiction, as in all literature, what most matters is the author’s attitude towards the mystery of the universe. The attitude of Eden Phillpotts is scientific so far as science can go. Beyond that it is strictly agnostic. If he has any ruling dogma —and nearly all of us have—the dogma is not apparent in his books. He sees the workings of the primal cause as chiefly tragic in their results. The character of his mind is certainly grim. He thinks straight, and is always ready to face uncompromisingly the logical consequences of his thought. He puts humanity down to its proper place in the whole scheme of things. And that scheme is an orderly scheme. In other words, for him there zs a scheme, and he takes it seriously; he takes it emotionally. He is anironist; but his irony is subdued, often hidden. He seems to say to his readers: ‘“ Now I admit I feel this strongly, and I want you to feel it strongly.” He stands or falls by his emotional quality. He has not the ironist’s shame at being caught in an utterly serious mood.

In all this he differs from Thomas Hardy, with whom—for reasons which I do not comprehend—he is often compared. Thomas Hardy carries irony as far as the fantastic. He does not,

XXVIl1 artistically, regard the earth as an ordered, reasonable unit in the immense march of evolution. He regards it as a wondrous, lovely, disconcerting jocularity on the part of an Unknowable with sardonic leanings towards the absurd. In the invention of incident he shows again and again that this is the real posture of his mind. One never knows what is coming next in a novel by Thomas Hardy. The creator in him revels in sheer fantasy.

In that enchanting and unsurpassed novel, The Woodlanders, there is scarcely an episode which is not whimsical, capricious, bizarre. The obsession of old South about the tree; the result of Giles’s effort to render the tree innocuous; Giles’s singular interview from the height of the tree with Grace on the ground: these things reflected upon afterwards are amazingly curious. And they are followed by matters still more so. Who but Thomas Hardy would have drawn the first meeting of his hero and heroine out of a contract made by an old woman to sell her corpse to a doctor for dissection? Who but he would have made the heroine surprise her lover seemingly but not really asleep, and allowed her apparition to cause the hero to imagine that he in fact was asleep?