A Brass-Bound Holiday
I
THE charm of brasses, so far as I can discover, has not been said or sung in America. Bowls and candlesticks and brazen odds and ends we have; but with us ‘no witness lives in brass.’ and no poet would be likely to sing in Shakespearean wise of ‘brass eternal,’unless he were moved by wistful impecuniosity. We have none of those Monumental Brasses which, to the mind of the devotee, are the only real brasses at all. They are known, of course, to scholars errant, and an occasional tourist abroad gets a glimpse of them; but here, for the most part, a brass suggests some small, mildly decorative product of Arts and Crafts work, and a brass-rubber, a person with a polishing cloth.
All this is of more importance than at first appears. Brass-rubbing is one of the most delightful adventures in the world. Not only is it a craft that quickens the eye and enthralls the hand, but it has a power of magic that works amazing transformations. It must be pursued in England, where the real brasses in largest number are to be found; but since a goodly part of America, from June to September, embarks nowadays for England, that is no obstacle. What matters is, that for those who go, if they have willing spirits, the lost romance of travel, despite the clouds of tourist dust, can be restored, and even England can seem again an unfamiliar, almost an untrodden, land.
An English brass-rubber would not, in all probability, acknowledge such romantic possibilities in his craft. That would be partly because he is English, but also because he has been long enough a type to surprise neither himself nor his neighbors. It took a fairly long time to make him one; for brasses were laid down in England in the thirteenth century, and they were not really observed until the nineteenth. Then the English antiquary began to move cautiously among them; but it was long years before that elderly person, with his penchant for writing about his choicest finds in the obscurest little local papers, quickened anything like an awareness of brasses among even his academic or ecclesiastical countrymen. When young university men began to share his interest, they hunted brasses as he did, chiefly as a mine of historical information about costume, armor, heraldry, and a good many other things. Not even William Morris, who went a-brassing so eagerly in his youth, ever set forth, in print at least, the full measure of their possibilities.
But it is time, at last, to insist that, in the quest for brasses, any happy vagrant can find more romance than history. They will lead him almost invariably to the loveliest of lovely places; they will reward his inexpert hand with the creation of lovely things; and they will give him such glimpses of bygone personality, such whimsical contacts, not to say conflicts, with living ‘Characters,’ as will be to him forever memorable.
For all this it needs no learning, no grave preparation. The more unexpectedly the vagrant becomes a lover of brasses, the better. Let him read as I did, in a dull guide-book, that ‘the finest brass in England’ is but a few miles away, and let him feel no more inkling of his fate than the uneasy promptings of a tourist conscience, and the desire, perhaps, to escape from a noisy crowded town to the possible quiet of a village. Let him fare forth then, and so find the way ‘to al good aventure.’ It was in such fashion that I set out to find my first brass, and the reward still seems beyond all deserving.
Spring was in the air, and ‘the bursting boughs of May ’ overhung the green hedgerows of Shropshire. Beyond the towering shadows of some great cedars of Lebanon lay the little churchyard of Acton Burnell, where hosts of golden daffodils were breaking in sunlit waves against the low green mounds. By a stile stood an Ancient, who murmured the thought of one’s heart: ‘A sweet place, a pretty place to lie.’ Within the gray walls of the little church — walls that went back to Saxon times — was a cool and holy quiet.
The old man led the way to a stonecanopied tomb set at one side of the altar. On its flat top lay the effigy in brass of Sir Nicholas Burnell, warrior and gentleman, of the fourteenth century. The Ancient beheld him lovingly, but there was a plaintive note in his voice as he ran his finger over the clear, deeply incised lines: ‘Ees a good ’un to do, ee is. Rubbers used to come frequent. They be forgetting ee now.’
In an instant like that, desire is born, and eager curiosity. Who would not want to know about the rubbers, and how they rub? Who would not seek to find another place as enchanting, and another knight of such brazen charm? Who would not hunt shy antiquaries, or those books in which they tell where the best brasses can be found? Thus inspired, the merest novice learns to make for himself a new kind of map, a map of the principal brass counties — Kent, Surrey, Essex. Norfolk; but rarely does he put down on it a name of which any tourist has ever heard. It becomes a map of little towns and noble parish churches, of places often within an hour’s ride from London, but too small, sometimes, for even a railway station. Only the ubiquitous motor-road, or pleasant footpaths, winding through azure ‘sheets of hyacinths’ or pale banks of primroses, lead to such destinations. They belong to that ancient rural England of which the poets make us dream, but of which no ‘Cook’s man’ ever speaks.
The brass-books tell nothing, of course, of environment: that is altogether a matter of adventuring chance. But when it happens repeatedly that the brasses are found in places to make one henceforth ‘babble o’ green fields,’ one comes to look for such exterior beauty as an expected thing. Within the churches, too, are treasures without number—old glass, old carvings, old saints and devils fading amiably away together on ancient walls; but they are not, as they often are in the cathedrals, too numerous, too notable, too crowded about for comfort. And of all such things, best, to the rubber, as he walks delicately before the altar, are the brasses which lie before it in dim, gold-colored splendor.
II
It is time, perhaps, to expound the rubber’s craft. At best, it is not long to learn, though it is always sufficiently arduous. In really serious efforts it calls for the muscular activity of a charwoman, combined with the delicacy of touch that a well-trained student of Braille is supposed to acquire. But even the worst of amateurs can learn, after he has acquired the magic heel-ball or cobbler’s wax, and long rolls of paper, to use them with effect. Like the child making the perennial discovery that pictures come through when paper is laid over a patterned surface and rubbed with crayon, he spreads out his white yards and begins, timidly at first, but with growing boldness, to rub at the brass beneath. He must not rub too hard, or he will tear the paper; he must not rub too lightly, or his impression will be vague and weak. He must not move the paper until the rubbing is completed; and since he must work in churches, he must remember the hours of church services, for he is persona non grata once t hey begin. Indeed, it is no wonder that ecclesiastical authority does not bend too favorable an eye on the enthusiast who must at need curl up on an altar tomb, or recline full-length on a church floor, his sheets of paper about him, and his hands, and in all likelihood his face, assuming the hue of the black heel-ball with which he works. But of the rubber and the church, more anon.
The difficulties of the gentle craft are, obviously, of minor sort, and are more than offset by the fact that it needs no long apprenticeship. When anyone has found his brass, all he has to do is to rub. No matter how untrained is his hand, he will find that it will make him possessed of these noble shapes and patterns of antiquity.
The older the brasses, the nobler they are, and the easier to do. They lack the frills and furbelows, the futile attempts at shading, of a later time. They are often heroic in size, and they have a kind of heroic simplicity about them, like figures in ancient epic poetry. Great lords and ladies, prelates and civilians, they lie in characteristic costume and state, august and venerable. Sometimes the brass-maker has placed their figures, as mediæval sculptors placed their saints, in what seems a niche, with shafts at the side and a canopy above. In such case, as the rubber sees its perfect, geometric curves growing on his paper, he may look up at the traceried window above his own head, or his inward architectural eye may recall another elsewhere, which might well have served for model. At any rate, he murmurs ‘Early Decorated’ to himself, in a glow of happy recognition.
The figures themselves, wholly apart from all antiquarian considerations, are even more satisfying. They come slowly into view—the features stern or lovely or humorously quaint, the headgear of armor or veils, the costume rich in broideries of clear and beautiful design. However conventionalized the faces, they yet convey some real sense of personality. The warriors, with eyes as fierce as their tight-shut lips, bear the look of an age of Blood and Iron. Yet among them can be found a Sir Robert de Setvans (Chartham, Kent), gloriously young and debonair, his head unhelmeted, and his hair as curly as if, like that of Chaucer’s Squire, it had been ’leyd in presse.’ The women’s faces have a rather too consistent piety; but in their long slim figures, in their slender clasped hands, there is grace incarnate. One must, however, keep to the ladies antedating 1500, for stoutness seems to have been one of the admired minor gifts of the Early Renaissance.
At the foot of each figure there is usually a kind of tail-piece. The lords and ladies rest their quiet feet against some faithful dog or lion. The rubber learns to take a lively interest in these friendly beasts and their individual characteristics: in the genial waggishness of the Cambridge dog of Sir Roger de Trumpington, or in the zeal with which at Stoke d’Abernon (Surrey), the lion of Sir John d’Abernon seizes in his teeth his master’s lance. If the brass is large, the rubber may, indeed, be weary when he comes to these last bits; but in them, even more than in the stately figures above, he is likely to find that blessed touch of Nature which links some clever old craftsman to any beholder of his work. The old graver was not always in romantic or courtly mood: he could, at, will, be literal and realistic to a degree. To folk in trade, he gave the signs of that trade. Rich wool merchants, to whose trade with Flanders the introduction of Flemish brasses into fourteenth-century England was due, have their feet disposed on woolsacks, or, less comfortably, on a woolpack and on a sheep. A wealthy tailor has beneath him his faithful shears, and a notary his bottle of ink. With true Gothic liveliness little scenes are introduced — fights of wodehouses (savage men) with monsters, scenes at the windmill, and other bits of rural life. On a famous brass at King’s Lynn, a Peacock Feast bears witness to the sumptuous luxury of the great days when an Edward Rex came to Norfolk.
III
The ‘dear delights’ of brass-rubbing, I hope, grow apparent . But lest anyone think they are chiefly of an æsthetic nature, let me hasten on to their dramatic possibilities. These arise from the fact that though brasses in general rest in the august keeping of the Church of England, brasses in particular are in the care of vicars of small country parishes. True, there are some brasses in the great cathedrals; but in such places comparatively few have escaped intact from the religious fanatic, the commercial looter, the devastating restorer; and it is, therefore, chiefly with the country vicar, whose parish church has suffered less from such vandalism, that the rubber has to deal.
Unless an American is familiar with a certain type of English novel, the country vicar is apt to seem a strange and sometimes a difficult species. In his own setting, remote, secure, the vicar is not quite like anything else in this hustling world. It is he from whom permission to rub the brasses must be secured; it is his wholly unpredicable disposition on which the fate of the whole expedition depends. He maybe avaricious for his church and exact a pious but extortionate tax; he may be as gentle as a dove and brood tenderly, not to say chattily, over one’s labors; he may be as odd a mixture of diverse things as he whom I encountered on a last, most memorable quest .
I found myself in a village too small to have more than one short street. A nobly built church towered high above tiny cottages, and over the long low almshouses that had once been part of a monastery. With difficulty, in a town so unused to strangers, I found the promise of ‘bed and breakfast.’ But the promise was fulfilled in excellence, and it was with happy spirit that I sought the Vicar. His house lay at the end of the street; his gates were forbidding, and his bell had a sepulchral sound. A deaf and ancient maiden gave way to a Mrs. Vicar, whose function was clearly Cerberean. She made it plain that her reverend husband was not to be disturbed thus early in the morning.
Chagrined, but not disheartened, I returned to the village and besought the caretaker of the church to open its heavily barred portals. She was as gentle as she was old, and the great key trembled in her frail hands. She was one for whom the little ritual of her office would never be outworn. The thin faint trickle of her talk flowed on over a lesson well learned, and freer than most from fallacy.
My eyes feasted, meanwhile, on the treasures of the church, and most of all on the wonderful brasses lying just as they had been placed some six centuries before. Each one was known to the old woman, and was the object of her humble veneration. She had a special feeling, I remember, for one noble lady whose husband’s brass had been removed in the sixteenth century.
‘She’s been looking at the vacant place ever since,’ said the old voice sympathetically.
When I began to question of herself, she answered with timid pride.
‘Yes, forty-two year I’ve been here, come next Michaelmas. Vicar’s been here forty-two.'
‘That is a long time,’ I said, ‘for people to have one vicar. They must all be very fond of him now?’
‘Well, no,’ came the quiet answer, ‘hardly I’d say fond. We all knows each other, but there’s few understands Vicar. I manage because he and me has been here so long; but Vicar’s not an easy man. He’s old, Vicar is, and he ’s notions, lots of notions.’
She told me of his anxious care of the church, and of how it had come to pass that it had to be kept closed save for the Sunday services.
‘There’s lots of folk to bother Vicar,’ she said. ‘There’s the bad boys, and there’s the trippers that mess up the churchyard, and there’s the brassrubbers too. They ’re real naughty sometimes, the rubbers are.’
With a certain embarrassment, I asked what they did.
‘Well, some’s good, of course, but some’s bad. Vicar don’t like them noways. They ’ll come, and one will go secret-like, not telling of the others, and he ’ll get permission from Vicar. Then, when I let him into the church, unless I take my key away, he ’ll let in the others. They ’ll all rub and track around careless-like, and won’t take no pains about their boots nor their heelballs nor anything. And they ’re not polite sometimes. One man he opened the Good Book and laughed; and I had to get real angry to make him behave.’
The picture of this small wren of a woman opposed to the rude practitioner of the gentle craft was singularly touching. I tried to lead her to happier reminiscences, until it was time to make a second call on the Vicar.
This time it was he himself who opened the door. He looked tremendously old, but far from feeble. His Adam’s apple rose and fell far above an ill-fitting collar, and in his watery blue eye was the gleam of battle. Without a word of wasted greeting he led me within and thrust into my hands a typewritten card. It took the form of a solemn covenant: ‘I, So and so, do promise: (1) to take off my boots; (2) to pay five shillings; (3) to use paper forty-five inches wide.’
Consternation overwhelmed me. In all the summer’s experience as a brassrubber never had I seen or heard of paper that size. For a moment, temptation was acute to evade the preposterous requirements. Rolls of paper turned sidewise might be held to be of any width, but the memory of other faithless rubbers prevented even that pretense. I confessed my lack, and an inexorable finger pointed to the door.
Again I walked down the village street. Disappointment grew more vexed and more obstinate. Though I knew how hopeless it would be to find any kind of brass-rubbing paper in so small a place, I hastened into the one general shop the village boasted. Its owner was one-eyed, but that one gleamed with sudden frenzy as I made my request.
‘Vicar won’t let ye rub the brasses,’he fairly shouted. ‘He’s a pup, Vicar is. Thinks he owns the whole church; thinks the brasses is his; thinks the whole place is his —’
His wife rushed round the counter to calm her irate spouse. But his loud tones had already attracted others, and in a thrice a little crowd had grown around me. Not often does one get so swiftly to the heart of a community; not often does the phlegmatic English villager so rouse himself to the expression of his woes. Vicar scared the children; he scolded, the grown folk, and irked them by an ever-growing number of small restrictions.
‘He’s too old, is Vicar,’ said one stout woman; ‘he’s all wore out come every Sunday. He means well, but he’s hard. And there’s never getting anything out of him, especially on a Monday. I could have tolled ye that.'
As the talk went on, — and there was an hour or so of it, — the pathos of this little rural drama grew more plain. Its centre was a shepherd grown too old and bitter and wise for his flock, a keeper of treasures who had somehow lost the best. But suddenly the voices stopped. Without, in the village street, the Vicar himself, pedaling an ancient tricycle with slow carefulness, was just, coming to a stop. The village folk shrank back in somewhat shamefaced confusion. The stout woman pushed me to the door, whispering loudly, ‘Vicar’s after ye, I bet.’
The Vicar met me with dignity, though there was the trace of a faint flush on his withered cheek. He intimated that, if he could see my paper, he might be able to allow me to do a detail at least from the brasses. With his own key he unlocked the doors of the church, and in a short time we were conversing with perfect amity on the subject dear to our hearts. In this guise, wrought by I know not what genial magic of afternoon, the Vicar was revealed as a charming old scholar and gentleman, willing to let me do whatsoever I would. From one pocket he drew his own little manuscript volume of notes on the brasses; in a dusty corner, he found the necessary weights for my paper; from a hidden recess he brought forth a great roll. The paper was more than forty-five inches wide; it was mounted on linen; and on it was a superb rubbing of one of the most famous of the brasses. Together we unrolled its great length; humbly I marveled at it; together we rolled it up. Into the Vicar’s eyes came the ghost of a twinkle.
‘I keep it,’ he remarked confidentially, ‘to scare brass-rubbers with. They are apt to go off quickly when I show them that, or ask for paper of that size.’
I, who had lingered so wrathfully, made bold to ask why he wished to scare them. Among those who cared enough to come, surely there would be few who would ever do harm.
The thin lips of the man of God clicked together.
‘Everyone does harm,’ he said, as he turned and stalked out among the silent villagers.