And it was meant to be a holiday. A week’s recreation which, given Matthew’s general cast of mind, would require an element of study — he would try his hand at this fossil business — but which might not exclude (Lyme Regis was well known not only for its fossils but for its summer crop of eligible daughters) a little amorous exploration.
The facts about Matthew Pearce as they stood in the year 1844. The facts infused with a good deal of theory, not to say imagination. The Notebooks do not begin till 1854, though they begin with a backward reference to that summer day in 1844, which, scrupulous as Matthew’s memory was, might have been subject to a degree of narrative licence. The facts, mixed with a good deal of not necessarily false invention. Pace Potter, I am not in the business of strict historiography. It is a prodigious, a presumptuous task: to take the skeletal remains of a single life and attempt to breathe into them their former actuality. Yet I owe Matthew nothing less. As Ruth would have said, the script is only a beginning: there is the whole life. Let Matthew be my creation. He would have appreciated the commitment — not to say the irony. And if I conjure out of the Notebooks a complete yet hybrid being, part truth, part fiction, is that so false? I only concur, surely, with the mind of the man himself, who must have asked, many a time: So what is real and what is not? And who am I? Am I this, or am I that?
He was born in Launceston, Cornwall, in March 1819, son of John Pearce, clockmaker, and Susan Pearce. And he began the Notebooks thirty-five years later, on the day of the death of his third-born, Felix. So much for plain, hard fact.
But I prefer, to get the measure of him, to picture him early one morning, in his twenty-second year, in an inn-yard in Oxford, about to leave that city, a fully educated young man, to take his modest and unsung place (he has no fond ideas) in the world. His journey home — for in the first place the world would have meant his father — would have been by stage-coach, a matter of some two-and-a-half days on the road. Thus at this point in his life Matthew would have belonged to the Old World. But only just. Within another five years he would have been able to have made the journey, at least as far as Exeter, by train. Within another ten years Matthew himself would have helped, in his small way, to guide the Great Western Railway — then nudging along the Thames valley — as far as Plymouth.
But there is no reason to suppose that on this summer’s morning he feels himself to belong to a vanishing age. Or that he looks upon the coach and team that will transport him westwards with the sort of wistful feeling that one day, indeed, people will apply to steam engines.
I see him (I have no proof of this; I have no idea what he looked like at all) as one of those robustly sober-looking young men in whom youth puts in only a tenuous appearance. He has the solid build and steady movements of a precocious maturity. He is unostentatiously dressed, for an Oxford man, and as he stands in the bustle of the inn-yard at this unseemly hour of the morning, he shows no sign either of aloofness or of discomfort. There is even a hint that he feels at home amidst such workaday surroundings and that he is not entirely sorry to be leaving this cloistered and rarefied city.
The arm that swings his portmanteau is strong and sure. The eyes of women, more easily turned by any number of sprightly young bucks, might, having first passed over Matthew, return to him with a sense of revised judgement. The face cracks readily enough into a generous smile or to offer some casual pleasantry — he has an appealing way of hovering between thoughtfulness and affability. The gaze is open and frank and meets yours forthrightly. You would say it was an observant gaze.
The very last quality he emanates — he climbs up, naturally, to take his seat on top behind the coachman — is lack of balance. Stability, rather, an intuitive sense that all things must have their basis, might be called his tacit watchword. He will become a surveyor. That is an unambitious, even lowly profession for a man with an Oxford education. But Matthew is shrewd enough not to leap ahead of his talents — three years at Oxford have taught him that he is neither an idler nor a genius — and both Matthew and Matthew’s father (though perhaps Matthew’s father rather more) are shrewd enough to foresee that there will be much call in the years ahead for versatile surveyors, and that a surveyor with the asset of an Oxford education might go far, even given the limited spheres in which surveyors operate.
And look at it another way. It is true that in the coming years, great engineers and designers would win for themselves immortal fame — it would be Matthew’s lot to know at least one of them (and feel a touch of pity mixed with his admiration) — but no surveyors. Yet what, in essence, was the surveyor’s task? It was to establish the true ground of things; to provide a basis, a sure foundation on which the works of others might be raised. Was it not, literally, fundamental? It was as essential as it was unspectacular. It had nothing to do with risk and hazard; everything to do with stability and trust.
And trust, merging imperceptibly with the deeper stuff of faith, might have been the other, silent watchword of this dependable-looking young man. In his portmanteau is his mother’s Bible. Matthew would have referred to it often in private and been able to quote large parts of it by heart. And now, in 1840, after three years’ exposure to scholarly scepticism and the rigours of science, he would not have relinquished the belief that every word it contained was the literal and immutable truth. The world, too, must have its basis, and the nature of this basis had been indelibly intimated to him long ago on his mother’s knee. The central fact of life was there. It was a wondrous thing, this central fact, a wonderful clarifier, encourager and liberator. It meant that the profounder questions of existence were settled and one was free to go out on to the surface of the world and do good, practical work. And the surface of the world only brought you back to the central fact: nature’s handiwork, and man’s too, since it exploited the unchanging laws that were part of nature’s design, was evidence of God’s.
The coachman cracks his whip. They leave the city. The sun fills the green bowl of the world.
A further reason Matthew might have given for choosing a career unlikely to be meteoric or all-consuming was simply that it allowed time for other things. If Oxford had shown him he was no scholar, he recognised in himself a naturally inquisitive mind. He liked to be out and about, to get the touch and tang of things (he looked forward to this stage-coach journey which others would have regarded as a three-day purgatory), to look, take note, assess, compare — all admirable habits for a surveyor. In this sense, Oxford had constrained him (the truth was, perhaps, that he had shielded his mind from some of Oxford’s more unsettling influences). He thought of his interests as being ranging and extra-curricular: natural history, geology, the ever-absorbing study of his fellow men.
Geology, of course, bore directly on his chosen profession. But Matthew had not yet begun to sound (it would come, before that holiday in Lyme) those intimate links between geology and palaeontology which were not essential to a surveyor’s broad understanding of rock and soil, that mysterious paradox by which this study of dead stones offered the clue to Life itself.
Geology drew him, in the first place, precisely because it was the science of solidity, the very key to that thing on which all human endeavours began and must surely come to rest. Ask Matthew, aged twenty-one, what he most loved about the world, and he might well have said: land. He couldn’t have said where the passion came from — from the rolling prospects from his native Launceston — but it is there. Matthew loved land as a surveyor and a believer in God should. “And the little hills rejoice on every side …” His palm sometimes tingled — he wouldn’t have known how to explain it — to reach out and stroke the contours of a particular landscape, as one might stroke the flanks of a horse or the head of a child.