Cecil Torr

“ The steamer had slowly hooted its way into the Piræus in the early morning; and I was driving up to Athens soon after sunrise. With the sun behind it, the Acropolis loomed up through the fog, as I came near; and this is the only time that I have seen it looking as I feel it ought to look. It seemed a vast and overwhelming mass; whereas in broad daylight it looks rather small, and quite puny, when one sees it from a distance. I have noticed that the Pyramids at Gizeh also look puny at a distance: yet the dome of St Peter’s looks its largest at fifteen or twenty miles from Rome. ”

“ Personally, I am always glad of the impressions of a mind that is brighter than my own, but I do not want the impressions of a mind that is still duller; and I get impatient, when the dull mind goes with a clumsy hand, so that the artist cannot even give me such impressions as he has. When honest critics praise such work, I fear their minds are very dull indeed.
As an executor I was concerned in putting a memorial window into a country church. A relative wished for copies of the figures by Sir Joshua Reynolds in the west window of New College chapel at Oxford. ”

“ My portrait was painted by Emily Holman Hunt in 1868. She was William’s sister, and had acquired all his mannerisms. My hair sticks out like wrought-iron railings round my head; and I have my old nurse’s authority for saying that I never wore such an ill-starched collar in my life.
There is also a water-colour of his here, which looks like the estuary of the Teign near Newton. I asked him if it was, 7 February 1909, and he told me that he remembered doing it while on a walking-tour in 1860, and it was somewhere between Falmouth and Exeter, but he was not certain where. ”

“ A steamboat was nicer than a diligence; and that really was the reason why people were always going up the Rhine. It was much the easiest way of getting to Switzerland and Italy. Going by the Rhine in 1855, my father notes that it was the seventeenth time that he had gone that way, either up or down the stream. That time he had his father with him, and chafed a little at the leisurely movements of the previous generation. But he never wished for anything more rapid than the steamboat on the Rhine, whereas I have found it tedious, and gone up by the train. ”

“ But the race itself is not as interesting as the procession that precedes it. The city and its seventeen wards are represented by about 180 men, all in costumes of the Fifteenth Century, and the chief in splendid armour: the horses go with the members of the wards for which they run: the Palio is carried on a wagon in the middle; and the procession ends with the standard of the city on the mast of the Carroccio, the great wagon round which the struggle centred at that Battle of the Standard fought at Montaperto on 4 September 1260. ”

“ The queerest table d’hôte I ever saw, was at the Singe d’Or at Tournai, 26 March 1875. That was Good Friday; and it was a first-rate fish-dinner, lasting close upon three hours. There were eighty people there, mostly from the town, as there were few travellers about, and we were the only English. The citizens went steadily through the fifteen courses, and drank dozens of champagne, and then went home with a good conscience, feeling they had carried out the precepts of the Church in having a meatless day. ”

“ The part we inhabit is in good condition, the rooms are very ancient, the walls and the ceilings are fresco, the dining-room is hung with tapestry, also the best bedrooms, the staircases are of stone, ropes passed thro’ iron rings in the walls supply the place of banisters, the walls are five feet thick; it will stand the cannon of the enemy, I have no fear in this good old place. The picture gallery is very interesting to visit, of course all family portraits, at the end of that is the old theatre ”

“ I noticed a group of people talking together and glancing at me now and then, and presently one of them came over and explained:—“What us be sayin’, zir, be this: whatever shall us do for our May-day, when you be dead.”
They were ringing a knell at North Bovey one afternoon when I was out beyond there; and it sounded very weird, when the gusts of wind carried the wail of the bells across the hills. I met one of the Lustleigh ringers as I was coming back, and I asked him why they never did it there. He answered:—“But us do. Sometime. Not for all folk like, though. But us’ll ring’n for thee.” ”

“ The high-altar at St Peter’s is scrubbed on Maundy Thursday; and, as I was in Rome, 14 April 1892, I went to see it done. This rite comes after Miserere, and therefore in the twilight. St Peter’s is not lighted up, and looks the vast size that it really is, as one cannot see the details that impair it. The dignitaries of the church come down in procession, each one carrying a candle and a mop; and they throw oil and wine upon the altar, and then begin to scrub. ”

“ The classic phrase is ‘her told she.’ A pious person told me that ‘us didn’t love He, ’twas Him loved we.’ They never say ‘we are,’ but ‘us be’ or else ‘we am,’ contracted into ‘we’m.’ They say ‘I be’ as well as ‘I’m,’ but never ‘me’m’ or ‘me be,’ though invariably ‘me and Jarge be,’ or ‘me and Urn,’ or whatever the name is, and never ‘Ernest and I’ or ‘George and I.’ They say ‘to’ for ‘at’—‘her liveth to Moreton’—and formerly said ‘at’ for ‘to’—‘I be goin’ at Bovey’—but now it is the fashion to say ‘as far as’ Bovey.—A complete Grammar might be compiled. ”

“ One of the old Wreyland houses looked out upon an orchard at the back; but the orchard was not let with the house, and at that time there was no back-door. Riding down the lane one day, the owner saw a piece of wood, as long as a fishing-rod, coming slowly out from one of the windows at the back, and going on until it reached an apple on a tree: it caught the apple in a sort of pocket at the end, and then went slowly back into the house again, taking the apple with it. ”

“ My grandfather writes to my brother, 16 January 1862:—“I enclose a piece of poetry, which was sent to me, on the old Cross Tree at Moreton. The stone cross erected there with a bason on the top to contain holy water, you are aware, is a relic of Popery. There was one at Chagford like it until some three years ago the lord of the manor, old Mr Southmead, destroyed it cross and all, for he had such dislike of Popery. I have known others in town-places, but this at Moreton is the last that I know of remaining; and the old tree is going to decay. ”

“ No wonder the fish are scarce in our brook, for they have embankments for irrigation, which destroys such numbers of fish in spawning time that truff and white fish [bull-trout and salmon-trout] are rarely seen now. One of the old poachers tells me that he does not know of one being taken for three years past—except those that do succeed in going up are sure to be seen on the grass returning. Since my remembrance they had a free course up to Bughead in Moreton, and the Moreton fellows used to take them with their hands, and plenty left after. ”

“ The children at Lustleigh school—boys and girls—elect one of the girls as Queen, and her name is carved upon a rock on the hill behind this house. Then on May-day the Queen walks in procession under a canopy of flowers carried by four of the boys, her crown and sceptre being carried by two others; then come her maids of honour; and then all the other children of the school, most of them carrying flowers in garlands or on staves. The procession winds along through Lustleigh and through Wreyland, halting at certain places to sing the customary songs, and at last ascends the hill behind here. ”

“ Agriculture has suffered from a cause that seems equally remote—“farm-house lodgings.” People say that farms are let at so much per acre, but all farms have a house, and the house will often pay the rent; and, when the house does that, the farmer is less careful of his land. The profit is not only from the letting of the rooms, but from selling butter, eggs, fowls, etc., without the trouble and expense of going to market, and often (I am told) at more than market prices. ”

“ With three men at work, it will turn 800 lbs. of apples into 60 gallons of cider in about two hours. The old press was not so quick or clean, but was more picturesque.
Cider-making is not a very pleasant sight; and I have known people say that they would never touch cider again, having once seen how it was made. A crushed apple is not a pretty thing at any time, and is none the prettier for being in company with several thousand others. However, cider-making is not quite as bad as wine-making in Southern Italy and Sicily. ”

“ Nantes impressed my father very much at that time:—“I have not seen a finer town. It is really finer than Brussels or Frankfort, and, as a whole, even finer than Paris.”
In his diary, Paris, 18 October 1839, my father writes:—“The streets here are worse, much worse, than in London, except just the Rivoli and one or two others, where there are arcades in front of the houses with flag stones. Not half or quarter of the other streets are flagged, and the common pavement is dreadfully uneven, besides not being level. ”

“ Coming through by railway, one misses some of the excitements of the older style of travelling. When we went over in 1869, the diligence had been attacked by brigands the night before in the narrow gorge below Airolo. It was twilight when we reached the gorge; and suddenly we heard men galloping towards us. My sister made up her mind at once that they were brigands; but they turned out to be an escort coming down to see us through, and they rode on with us, their carbines in their hands.
We came from Basle to London in 1869 in six-and-twenty hours, and in 1913 I came in fourteen hours. ”

“ So long as transport was difficult, each district had to grow nearly everything that it required. When transport was made easy, each district should have grown what it grew best. Here in the South Hams there was quite the best cream in England, and about the best cider, and also excellent mutton. Had people kept to things like these, and laid down all their arable land to grass, they would have saved far more on agricultural buildings, implements and horses, than they would have spent in getting arable products from a distance. ”

“ For many years he lived at Lustleigh Rectory, a venerable house that was transformed to something new and strange at the time of the Gothic Revival. But that was after his time; and he speaks of it as “nearly in ruins” in 1808. He quitted it in 1818, and went to live at Wilmead, which his son had lately bought. And the old man used always to come striding down across the fields, and take the path from Wreyland, when he went from Wilmead to the village or the church. ”

“ And now they never sow wheat early enough for the straw to gather strength. The result is that the thatch decays, and landlords and farmers both get tired of patching it, and put up slate or iron instead, thereby helping to destroy the market for one of their own products. I have known a field of wheat pay rent and rates and every outlay with the straw for thatching, and the grain was all clear profit.
Nobody who has lived under a thatched roof would willingly live under any other—the comfort is so great. The thatch keeps out the cold in winter, and keeps out the heat in summer. ”

“ There is nothing whatever inside it. The story is that queen Sheger ad-Durr made the pilgrimage in very splendid panniers about the year 1250; and such panniers have been sent each year since then, though nobody has ever ridden in them. The procession was too straggling to be impressive as a whole, but some things in it were striking—particularly the Sheikh of the Camel. That holy man kept wagging his head from side to side, as if he wished to shake it off; and he was said to go on wagging it all the way from Cairo to Mecca and back.
I went to Siena to see the Palio in August 1898. ”

“ At the inn at Manaton I once heard a group of old inhabitants talking over various buildings that had fallen down, and quarrelling as to which of them had made the greatest noise in falling. Here at Wreyland the end wall of the Tallet—some 40 tons—fell out into the orchard in the twilight of a Sunday evening as people were on their way to church. “And Miss Mary *****, her were a-passin’ at the time; and, when her come in afterward, her said in all her born days her never beheld such a noise.”
People talk as though there was no jerry-building in the olden times. ”

“ The managers of foreign lines have more imagination. I once met Lars Porsenna at Clusium—Chiusi—on the train for Rome.
A cousin of my father’s writes to him from Brighton, 28 April 1842:—“I was very glad to find from your note that you reached home safely, having escaped all the dangers of the railroad with its fearful tunnels. I think of returning [to London] by the good old stage coach, slow though it be: it is better to lose time than to run the risk of being crushed to pieces in those dark tunnels, where you have not even a chance of saving yourself by jumping out.” ”

“ Some friends of mine from Paris asked me quite angrily:—“Why do you call Portland Place a Place? It is not a Place.” They had gone to the Langham under the impression that it looked out on something like the Vendôme or the Concorde. At an hotel in Switzerland my father was objecting to rooms without a view. ”

“ He also liked scenery as well as fishing; and there is as good scenery on the Bovey under Lustleigh Cleave as on the Teign at Fingle Bridge.
He also fished in many of the trout-streams in the Alps and Pyrenees and Ardennes; and in 1858 and other years he went to Muggendorf for fishing in the Wiesent, and to Lambach and Ischl for the Traun. The people used to ask for flies, but very soon found that he owed less to flies than to his way of casting them. My mother fished with him, and got many good fish; but she never thought the sport was worth the journey and the discomfort in the smaller inns. ”

“ When people now-a-days go talking of the beauty of Greek Gods, they are thinking of the works of Pheidias and his successors. There is much charm in works of earlier date; but nobody can say quite honestly that the people in them are good-looking, much less that they are beautiful. Yet the nation cannot suddenly have changed its looks. ”

“ John Knight was paymaster of a battalion of the King’s German Legion from 1814 to 1816. He was with his battalion at the battle of Waterloo, and after the campaign he married the beautiful (and wealthy) daughter of the banker through whom he drew the pay at Brussels. The marriage brought him into contact with large financial interests on the Continent, and he settled at Antwerp as a banker; and there he made the acquaintance of Wappers. I remember Wappers very well. In his later years he lived in Paris, and I used to go to his house there. ”