Blackmore

“ Sir Richard Blackmore is one of those men whose writings have attracted much notice, but of whose life and manners very little has been communicated, and whose lot it has been to be much oftener mentioned by enemies than by friends. ”

“ He was a keen judge of fruit, and often gave his friends delightful and quite unpremeditated lessons in its culture. Blackmore was a tall, square-shouldered, powerfully built, dignified-looking man, and was the picture of health with fair complexion and high colour. ”

“ His residence was in Cheapside, [1] and his friends were chiefly in the city. In the early part of Blackmore's time, a citizen was a term of reproach; and his place of abode was another topick to which his adversaries had recourse, in the penury of scandal.
Blackmore, therefore, was made a poet not by necessity but inclination, and wrote not for a livelihood but for fame; or, if he may tell his own motives, for a nobler purpose, to engage poetry in the cause of Virtue.
I believe it is peculiar to him, that his first publick work was an heroick poem. ”

“ Do not turn here, but continue ahead until a post is observed indicating the road to Blackmore to be down a turning to the left. In about two miles from here, when you have been wheeling along a country lane until Blackmore appears to be unattainable, and you have almost given up all hopes of finding it, the spire of the village church is glimpsed across the meadows to the right, and a pretty and easy run leads into the street of this exceedingly beautiful and old-world place. ”

“ When{108} the panting and perspiring traveller reaches a turn of the road he may hap to espy a hollow in a field on the left. That is Granny’s Pit, where an old woman with dishevelled tresses has been viewed, bewailing her daughter. A few more paces bring us to the grove of firs, whence the sinuous Barle may be surveyed far below in all his sylvan glory. This may be Blackmore’s “corner of trees,” if Ridd followed this route, and not Hollam Lane, which runs parallel with it. ”

“ Where is Blackmore's?"
"You don't mean to say that he has made you go to Blackmore's?" exclaimed my brother.
"He has. Why shouldn't he?"
"Only that Blackmore will take ten per cent of your miserable salary for ten weeks, that is all."
"The devil he will," cried I.
"It's a sort of authorized custom of the profession," explained my brother. "You'll have to submit until you are strong enough to tell the agents all to go to the Devil." ”

“ Thus the limits of the Blackmore country are definitely staked out by family tradition, as well as by literary interest, running from Culmstock to Ashford, and from Oare to Combe Martin, with the commons appurtenant. ”

“ Be that as it may, the fact cannot be gainsaid that at Culmstock, and not at Culmstock alone, the advent of the railway and the newspaper, and the general opening-up of communications with the outer world, have made a difference. So great indeed is the revolution that one is constrained to admit that here, though one is in Blackmore’s village, one is yet not properly in the village that Blackmore knew. ”

“ Sheep-stealing was not the only excitement.{23} In Blackmore’s youth—and Perlycross is built on the circumstance—smuggling was carried on with spirit (in both senses) over the Blackdowns, and queer stories are told of fortunes made by “fair trade,” in the conduct of which a mysterious tower, out on the hills, is said to have played an important part. An octogenarian of my acquaintance admits that, as a boy, he shared in these illegal adventures, which did not receive that amount of social reprobation they may have deserved. ”

“ They were freeholders settled at East Bodley and Barton in the parish of Parracombe, and leaseholders of the neighbouring farm of Killington, or Kinwelton, in the parish of Martinhoe. Over the porch of the old farmstead at Parracombe may still be read the inscription, “R.B., J.B., 1638”; and as the Subsidy Rolls of 16 Charles I. for Parracombe and Martinhoe contain the names of Richard and John Blackmore, we may conjecture without difficulty to whom the initials belonged. The first of the yeomen on whom we can fasten as a certain ancestor of the novelist was a John Blackmore who died in 1689. ”

“ A romance—this romance in particular—may be regarded as a fairy-tale raised to a higher plane of evolution, and Blackmore seems to have possessed the godlike faculty of reflecting in his pages the shining images of his boyish fantasy, when, to copy Kingsley, every goose was a swan and every lass a queen. ”

“ BLACKMORE, RICHARD DODDRIDGE (1825–1900) , novelist and barrister, was born on 7 June 1825, at Longworth, Berkshire, of which parish his father, John Blackmore (d. 1858) , was vicar. His father, at one time fellow of Exeter College, Oxford, was a scholar of high classical attainments and exceptional force of character. The novelist's mother, a woman of charm and refinement, was Anne Basset, eldest daughter of the Rev. Robert Knight, vicar of Tewkesbury, a descendant of Sir John Knight 'the elder' (1612-1683) [q. v.] ”

“ Say ’twas the Doones of Bagworthy,”
is located by Blackmore in the parish of Martinhoe, and he subjoins the following note: “The story is strictly true; and true it is that the country-people rose, to a man, at this dastard cruelty, and did what the Government failed to do.” ”

“ A sincerely religious man, Blackmore was offended with the gross licentiousness of the drama, and all those productions of the poets which constituted the light literature of the eighteenth century. To his eternal honour, Blackmore was the first man who had the courage to raise his voice against the evil, and give utterance to a manly indignation at the insults offered nightly in every theatre to public decency. ”

“ This John Blackmore, born in 1764, betrayed a taste for learning, and through Tiverton School found his way to Exeter College, Oxford, where he won the degree of B.A. He was soon after ordained, and entered on his duties as curate of High Bray, on the outskirts of Exmoor, and in his own country and county. An antiquary and a person of general cultivation, he was at the pains of copying the parish register, and in the new edition did what every parson should do, set down items of current interest, together with an informal history of the parish, so far as it could be learned. ”

“ But from Exmoor to Barnstaple, and from Lynton to Tiverton, he reigns supreme—and naturally, for this was his homeland, which, through all its length and breadth, he knew with an intimacy,{xii} and loved with a devotion, and portrayed with a skill, that will surely never again be the portion of any child of Devon.
Richard Doddridge Blackmore was born on June 7, 1825, at Longworth, in Berkshire—a circumstance which raises the delicate and important question whether, after all, he can be justly claimed as a Devonshire man. ”

“ An illustration, pointed and germane, is not far to seek. I always understood from my late kind friend, the Rev. C. St Barbe, Sydenham, rector of Brushford, who, to the deep regret of a wide circle of acquaintance, passed away in the spring of 1904 at the age of 81, that R. D. Blackmore, as a boy, spent many of his vacations at the moorland village of Charles, to the rectory of which his uncle Richard had, as we have seen, been presented by his grandfather. ”

“ On the strength of these resources he kept a pack of hounds. He was naturally very intimate with the Temples, and I have been told by a descendant that it was thanks to his generosity that the late Archbishop Temple was enabled to proceed to Oxford. Mutatis mutandis, it seems not improbable that by Frank Gilham, Blackmore may have intended his schoolmate. Think of it. Major Temple was not only an officer of the army, but a practical farmer, and the late primate could plough and thresh with the best. ”

“ Through a broken arch beyond the barricade pale moonbeams crossed the darkness, like the bars of some soft melody; in the middle the serpent coil was hissing with the deadly nitre; at the foot of the steps was her false lover—husband he had called himself—with his hat off, and his white face turned in the last supplication towards her, as hers had been turned towards him just now. Should a woman be as pitiless as a man?
“Come down, for God's sake, and climb that cursed wood, and pull back the fuse, pull it back from the powder. Oh, Polly! and then we will go away together.” ”

“ Contempt is a kind of gangrene, which, if it seizes one part of a character, corrupts all the rest by degrees. Blackmore, being despised as a poet, was in time neglected as a physician; his practice, which was once invidiously great, forsook him in the latter part of his life; but being by nature, or by principle, averse from idleness, he employed his unwelcome leisure in writing books on physick, and teaching others to cure those whom he could himself cure no longer. ”

“ The recollections of old inhabitants are always interesting, and it may be laid down that, next to our own, no age attracts like that immediately preceding it, out of which we are sprung, and in which Blackmore flourished. Therefore I account it a fortunate accident that made me for a short time an inmate in the house of Mr Parminter, one of the makers of modern Barnstaple, who drew my attention to a remarkable fact—that in the old days the town was provided with iron gates, which were closed at night, to keep out tramps and travellers. ”

“ His father recovered ; but his mother, her sister, two of his father's six pupils, the family doctor, and all the servants died. The place became unbearable to the elder Blackmore, and he quitted it for a living at Culmstock, near Barnstaple. He finally settled in that of Ashford in the same county. Meanwhile Blackmore came to live with his maternal grandmother, Mrs, Knight, at Newton House, Newton, and after some years his father married again. ”

“ For Blackmore always just failed to convince, and never quite dispelled an unreal kind of atmosphere that took his novels 275quite out of the experiences of actual life, and made his characters so many jumping-jacks, obviously actuated by strings. ”

“ PROLOGUE The “Blackmore Country” is an expression requiring some amount of definition, as it clearly will not do to make it embrace the whole of the territory which he annexed, from time to time, in his various works of fiction, nor even every part of Devon in which he has laid the scenes of a romance. ”

“ A Whig, but the friend of Tories, Garth cordially disliked Sir Richard Blackmore, a member of his own profession and political party. Blackmore was an anti-dispensarian, a bad poet, and a pure and rigid moralist. ”

“ This excerpt represents the legend of the Doones which Blackmore inherited, and which it is absurd to designate as his invention. What he did was to add colour and definition to an already existing, though faded, tradition. How much of the substructure of Lorna Doone is due to his imaginative genius, is a fascinating problem, which, it is to be feared, it is beyond the wit of man to solve satisfactorily. ”

“ True, there is the old church tower, the stone-screen (Mr Penniloe’s glorious “find”) , and even the old yew-tree springing from the ledge below the battlements. The bridge, too, is much the same, save for a tasteless, if necessary, addition. The vicarage also stands, its back turned discourteously on the wayfarer; and I certify that it is the{14} identical structure which sheltered Blackmore as a boy, though his father was never the vicar, only curate-in-charge.
All this may be granted, but the man of feeling still mourns the loss—for loss he knows there has been—of local life and colour. ”

“ Half the pleasure of the mouth is in the nose beforehand. But stay, almost I forgot my business, in the hurry which thy tongue hath spread through my lately despairing belly. Hungry I am, and sore of body, from my heels right upward, and sorest in front of my doublet, yet may I not rest nor bite barley-bread, until I have seen and touched John Ridd. God grant that he be not far away; I must eat my saddle, if it be so.'
'Have no fear, good sir,' I answered; 'you have seen and touched John Ridd. ”

“ However, I can hold out a good bit, Major, for any work that requires no strength.”
“Do you know where to find any of our own fellows? They would be quite ready to fight these blackguards; they are very sore about the way those scoundrels stole into the town. We have always been the foremost hitherto. Your legs are all right, I suppose, my boy.”
“All right, except that I am a trifle light-headed, and that always flies to the legs—or at least we used to say so at Oxford.”
“Never mind what you said at Oxford. Only mind what you say in Badajos. Collect every man you can find of ours. ”

“ What more natural than that he should communicate it freely to his neighbours, with all the pride of a fond uncle with no children of his own? Would he not have related also, as the harvest of imparted wisdom, that in the rectory parlour, the scene of former instruction, great part of Lorna Doone was{xxii} written? Nor must we forget the old Blackmore property at Bodley, where the novelist’s grandfather, in order to adapt it to his requirements as an occasional residence, had added to the venerable homestead a new wing ”

“ Moreover, I had a letter from Mr R. D. Blackmore, soon after his immortal work was issued, wherein he acknowledged that it was the accidental glancing at the poor stuff in the Leisure Hour that gave him the clue for the weaving of the romance, and caused him to study the details on the spot. I have never been across Exmoor{151} since Lorna Doone was published, but I am sure that I could at once find my way either on foot or horseback to the very place that I knew so well as the stronghold of the Doones, either from the Porlock or the Lynton side. ”

“ Moreover, it is beyond question an important hub of Blackmore associations, and the faithful votary of the novelist must betake himself thither. Whether or not the fact be due to this circumstance, it seems certain that more visitors patronise the neighbourhood than formerly, and Mr Brown, the obliging chemist, informs me that he has developed negatives for Americans, from whom he has received flattering testimonials. Well done, Mr Brown! The following entry in the visitors’ book at the “George” has an independent interest. ”