The Recluse
Let me try to sketch the most Arcadian scholar I have ever seen or dreamed of; they are common enough in books; the gentleman of high family, with lustrous eyes and thin veined hands, who sits among musty folios—Heaven knows what he is supposed to be studying, or why they need be musty—who is in some very nebulous way believed to watch the movements of the heavens, who takes no notice of his prattling golden-haired daughter, except to print an absent kiss upon her brow—if there are such persons they are hard to encounter.
There is a little market-town a mile or two away, nestled among steep valleys; the cows that graze on the steep fields that surround it look down into the chimney-pots and back gardens. One of the converging valleys is rich in woods, and has a pleasant trout-stream, that flows among elders, bickers along by woodland corners, and runs brimmingthrough rich water meadows, full of meadowsweet and willow-herb—the place in summer has a hot honied smell. You need not follow the road, but you may take an aimless footpath, which meanders from stile to stile in a leisurely way. After a mile or so a little stream bubbles in on the left; and close beside it an old deep farm-road, full of boulders and mud in winter, half road, half water-course, plunges down from the wood. All the hedges are full of gnarled roots fringed with luxuriant ferns. On a cloudy summer day it is like a hothouse here, and the flowers know it and revel in the warm growing air. Higher and higher the road goes; then it passes a farm-house, once an ancient manor: the walls green with lichen and moss, and a curious ancient cognizance, a bear with a ragged staff clasped in his paws, over the doorway. The farm is embowered in huge sprawling laurels and has a little garden, with box hedges and sharp savoury smells of herbs and sweet-william, and a row of humming hives. Push open the byre gate and go further yet; we are near the crest of the hill now: just below the top grows a thick wood of larches, set close together. You would not know there was ahouse in here. There is a little rustic gate at the corner of the plantation, and a path, just a track, rarely trodden, soft with a carpet of innumerable larch-needles.
Presently you come in sight of a small yellow stone house; not a venerable house, nor a beautiful one—if anything, a little pretentious, and looking as if the heart of the plantation had been cut out to build it as indeed it was; round-topped windows, high parapets, no roof visible, and only one rather makeshift chimney; the whole air of it rather sinister, and at the same time shamefaced—a little as though it set out to be castellated and had suddenly shrunk and collapsed, and been hastily finished. A gravel walk very full of weeds runs immediately round the house; there is no garden, but a small enclosure for cabbages grown very rank. In most of the windows hang dirty-looking blinds half pulled down; a general air of sordid neglect broods over the place. Here in this house had lived for many years—and, for all I know, lives there still—a retired gentleman, a public school and University man, who had taken high honours at the latter; not rich, but with a competence. What had caused his seclusionfrom the world I do not know, and I am not particular to inquire; whether a false step and the forced abandonment of a career, a disappointment of some kind, a hypochondriacal whim, or a settled and deliberate resolution. I know not, but always hoped the last.
From some slight indications I have thought that, for some reason or other, in youth, my recluse had cause to think that his life would not be a long one—his selection of a site was apparently fortuitous. He preferred a mild climate, and, it seems, took a fancy to the very remote and sequestered character of the valley; he bought a few acres of land, planted them with larches, and in the centre erected the unsightly house which I have described.
Inside the place was rather more attractive than you would have expected. There was a pinched little entry, rather bare, and a steep staircase leading to the upper regions; in front of you a door leading to some offices; on the left a door that opened into a large room to which all the rest of the house had been sacrificed. It had three windows, much overshadowed by the larches, which indeed at one corner actually touched the house and sweptthe windows as they swayed in the breeze. The room was barely furnished, with a carpet faded beyond recognition, and high presses, mostly containing books. An oak table stood near one of the windows, where our hermit took his meals; another table, covered with books, was set near the fireplace; at the far end a door led into an ugly slit of a room lighted by a skylight, where he slept. But I gathered that for days together he did not go to bed, but dozed in his chair. On the walls hung two or three portraits, black with age. One of an officer in a military uniform of the last century with a huge, adumbrating cocked-hat; a divine in bands and wig; and a pinched-looking lady in blue silk with two boys. His only servant was an elderly strong-looking woman of about fifty, with a look of intense mental suffering on her face, and weary eyes which she seldom lifted from the floor. I never heard her utter more than three consecutive words. She was afflicted I heard, not from herself, with a power of seeing apparitions, not, curiously, in the house, but in the wood all round; she told Mr. Woodward that “the dead used to look in at the window at noon and beckon her out.” In consequenceof this she had not set foot outside the doors for twenty years, except once, when her master had been attacked by sudden illness. The only outside servant he had was a surly man who lived in a cottage a quarter of a mile away on the high-road, who marketed for them, drew water, and met the carrier’s cart which brought their necessaries.
The man himself was a student of history: he never wrote, except a few marginal notes in his books. He was totally ignorant of what was going on, took in no papers, and asked no questions as to current events. He received no letters, and the only parcels that came to him were boxes of books from a London library—memoirs, historical treatises, and biographies of the last century. I take it he had a minute knowledge of the social and political life of England up to the beginning of the present century; he received no one but Mr. Woodward who saw him two or three times a year, and it was with Mr. Woodward that I went, making the excuse (which was actually the case) that some literary work that I was doing was suspended for want of books.
We were shown in; he did not rise to receive us, but greeted us with extreme cordiality,and an old-fashioned kind of courtesy, absolutely without embarrassment. He was a tall, thin man, with a fair complexion, and straggling hair and beard. He seemed to be in excellent health; and I learnt that in the matter of food and drink he was singularly abstemious, which accounted for his clear complexion and brilliant eye. He smoked in moderation a very fragrant tobacco of which he gave me a small quantity, but refused to say where he obtained it. There was an air of infinite contentment about him. He seemed to me to hope for nothing and expect nothing from life; to live in the moment and for the moment. If ever I saw serene happiness written on a face in legible characters, it was there. He talked a little on theological points, with an air of gentle good-humour, to Mr. Woodward, somewhat as you might talk to a child, with amiable interest in the unexpected cleverness of its replies; he gave me the information I requested clearly and concisely but with no apparent zest, and seemed to have no wish to dwell on the subject or to part with his store of knowledge.
His one form of exercise was long vague walks; in the winter he rarely left the houseexcept on moonlight nights; but in the summer he was accustomed to start as soon as it was light, and to ramble, never on the roads, but by unfrequented field-paths, for miles and miles, generally returning before the ordinary world was astir. On hot days he would sit by the stream in a very remote nook beneath a high bank where the water ran swiftly down a narrow channel, and swung into a deep black pool; here, I was told, he would stay for hours with his eyes fixed on the water, lost in some mysterious reverie. I take it he was a poet without power of expression, and his heart was as clean as a child’s.
Modern Life
It is the fashion now to talk with much affected weariness of the hurry and bustle of modern life. No doubt such things are to be found if you go in search of them; and to have your life attended by a great quantity of either is generally held to be a sign of success. But the truth is, that this is what ordinary people like. The ordinary man has no precise idea what to do with his time. He needs to have it filled up by a good many conflicting and petty duties, and if it is filled he has a feeling that he is useful. But many of these duties are only necessary because of the existence of eachother; it is a vicious circle. “What are those fields for?” said a squire who had lately succeeded to an estate, as he walked round with the bailiff. “To grow oats, sir.” “And what do you do with the oats?” “Feed the horses, sir.” “And what do you want the horses for?” “To plough the fields, sir.” That is what much of the bustle of modern life consists of.
Solitude and silence are a great strain; but if you enjoy them they are at least harmless, which is more than can be said of many activities. Such is not perhaps the temper in which continents are explored, battles won, empires extended, fortunes made. But whatever concrete gain we make for ourselves must be taken from others; and we ought to be very certain indeed of the meaning of this life, and the nature of the world to which we all migrate, before we immerse ourselves in self-contrived businesses. To be natural, to find our true life, to be independent of luxuries, not to be at the mercy of prejudices and false ideals—that is the secret of life: who can say that it is a secret that we most of us make our own? My recluse, I think, was nearer the Kingdom of Heaven, where places are not laid according to the table of precedence, thanmany men who have had biographies and statues, and who will be, I fear, sadly adrift in the world of silence into which they may be flung.
Nov. 6, 1890.
To-day the gale had blown itself out; all yesterday it blustered round corners, shook casements, thundered in the chimneys, and roared in the pines. Now it is bright and fresh, and the steady wind is routing one by one the few clouds that hang in the sky. I came in yesterday at dusk, and the whole heaven was full of great ragged, lowering storm-wreaths, weeping wildly and sadly; now the rain is over, though in the morning a sudden dash of great drops mingled with hail made the windows patter; but the sun shone out very low and white from the clouds, even while the hail leapt on the window-sill.
I took the field-path that wanders aimlessly away below the house; the water lay in the grass, and the sodden leaves had a bitter smell. The copses were very bare, and the stream ran hoarse and turbid. The way wound by fallows and hedges—now threading a steep copse, now along the silent water-meadows, nowthrough an open forest space, with faggots tied and piled, or by a cattle byre. Here and there I turned into a country lane, till at last the village of Spyfield lay before me, with the ancient church of dark sandstone and the little street of handsome Georgian houses, very neat and prim—a place, you would think, where every one went to bed at ten, and where no murmurs of wars ever penetrated.
Just beyond the village, my friend, Mr. Campden, the great artist, has built himself a palace. It is somewhat rococo, no doubt, with its marble terrace and its gilded cupolas. But it gleams in the dark hanging wood with an exotic beauty of its own, as if a Genie had uprooted it from a Tuscan slope, and planted it swiftly, in an unfamiliar world, in an hour of breathless labour between the twilight and the dawn. Still, fantastic as it is, it is an agreeable contrast to the brick-built mansions, with their slated turrets, that have lately, alas, begun to alight in our woodlands.
Mr. Campden
Mr. Campden is a real prince, a Lorenzo the Magnificent; not only is he the painter of pictures which command a high price, though to me they are little more than harmonious wallpaper; but he binds books, makes furniture,weaves tapestry, and even bakes tiles and pottery; and the slender minaret that rises from a plain, windowless building on the right, is nothing but a concealed chimney. Moreover, he inherited through a relative’s death an immense fortune, so that he is a millionaire as well. To-day I followed the little steep lane that skirts his domain, and halted for a moment at a great grille of ironwork, which gives the passer-by a romantic and generous glimpse of a pleached alley, terminated by a mysterious leaden statue. I peeped in cautiously, and saw the great man in a blue suit, with a fur cloak thrown round his shoulders, a slouched hat set back from his forehead, and a loose red tie gleaming from his low-cut collar. I was near enough to see his wavy white hair and beard, his keen eyes, his thin hands, as he paced delicately about, breathing the air, and looking critically at the exquisite house beyond him. I am sure of a welcome from Mr. Campden—indeed, he has a princely welcome for all the world—but to-day I felt a certain simple schoolboy shyness, which ill accords with Mr. Campden’s Venetian manner. It is delightful after long rusticity to be with him, but it is like taking a part in some solemn and affecteddance; to Mr. Campden I am the student-recluse, and to be gracefully bantered accordingly, and asked a series of questions on matters with which I am wholly unacquainted, but which are all part of the setting with which his pictorial mind has dowered me. On my first visit to him I spoke of the field-names of the neighbourhood, and so Mr. Campden speaks to me of Domesday Book, which I have never seen. I happened to express—in sheer wantonness—an interest in strange birds, and I have ever since to Mr. Campden been a man who, in the intervals of reading Domesday Book, stands in all weathers on hilltops, or by reedy stream-ends, watching for eagles and swans, like a Roman augur—indeed Augur is the name he gives me—our dear Augur—when I am introduced to his great friends.
Mr. Campden has an infinite contempt for the gentlemen of the neighbourhood, whom he treats with splendid courtesy, and the kind of patronising amusement with which one listens to the prattle of a rustic child. It is a matter of unceasing merriment to me to see him with a young squire of the neighbourhood, an intelligent young fellow who has travelled a good deal, and is a considerable reader. Hehas a certain superficial shyness, and consequently has never been able to secure enough of the talk for himself to show Mr. Campden what he is thinking of; and Mr. Campden at once boards him with questions about the price of eggs and the rotation of crops, calling him, “Will Honeycomb” from theSpectator; and when plied with nervous questions as to Perugino or Carlo Dolce, saying grandiloquently, “My dear young man, I know nothing whatever about it; I leave that to the critics. I am a republican in art, a red indeed, ha, ha! And you and I must not concern ourselves with such things. Here we are in the country, and we must talk ofbullocks. Tell me now, in Lorton market last week, what price did a Tegg fetch?”
Mr. Campden is extraordinarily ignorant of all country matters, and has a small stock of ancient provincial words, not indigenous to the neighbourhood, but gathered from local histories, that he produces with complacent pride. Indeed, I do not know that I ever saw a more ludicrous scene than Mr. Campden talking agriculture to a distinguished scientific man, whom a neighbouring squire had brought over to tea with him, and whom he took for a landowner.To hear Mr. Campden explaining a subject with which he was not acquainted to a courteous scientist, who did not even know to what he was alluding, was a sight to make angels laugh.
But to-day I let Mr. Campden pace like a peacock up and down his pleasaunces, with his greyhound following him, and threaded the water-meadows homewards. I gave myself up to the luxurious influences of solitude and cool airs, and walked slowly, indifferent where I went, by sandstone pits, by brimming streams, through dripping coverts, till the day declined. What did I think of? I hardly dare confess. There are two or three ludicrous, pitiful ambitions that lurk in the corners of my mind, which, when I am alone and aimless, I take out and hold, as a child holds a doll, while fancy invests them with radiant hues. These and no other were my mental pabulum. I know they cannot be realised—indeed, I do not desire them—but these odd and dusty fancies remain with me from far-off boyish days; and many a time have I thus paraded them in all their silliness.
Home
But the hedgerow grasses grew indistinguishably grey; the cattle splashed home alongthe road; the sharp smell of wood smoke from cottage fires, piled for the long evenings, stole down the woodways; pheasants muttered and crowed in the coverts, and sprang clanging to their roosts. The murmur of the stream became louder and more insistent; and as I turned the corner of the wood, it was with a glow of pleasure that I saw the sober gables of Golden End, and the hall window, like a red solemn eye, gaze cheerily upon the misty valley.
July 7, 1891.
In the Woods
I cannot tell why it is, but to be alone among woods, especially towards evening, is often attended with a vague unrest, an unsubstantial awe, which, though of the nature of pleasure, is perilously near the confines of horror. On certain days, when the nerves are very alert and the woods unusually still, I have known the sense become almost insupportable. There is a certain feeling of being haunted, followed, watched, almost dogged, which is bewildering and unmanning. Foolish as it may appear, I have found the carrying of a gun almost a relief on such occasions. But what heightens the sense in a strange degree is the presence of still water. A stream is lively—it encourages and consoles; but the sight of a long dark lake, with the woods coming down to the water’s edge, is a sight so solemn as to be positively oppressive. Each kind of natural scenery has its own awe—thegenius loci, so to speak. On a grassy down there is the terror of the hugeopen-eyed gaze of the sky. In craggy mountains there is something wild and beastlike frowning from the rocks. Among ice and snow there is something mercilessly pure and averse to life; but neither of these is so intense or definite as the horror of still woods and silent waters. The feeling is admirably expressed by Mr. George Macdonald inPhantastes, a magical book. It is that sensation of haunting presences hiding behind trees, watching us timidly from the fern, peeping from dark copses, resting among fantastic and weather-worn rocks, that finds expression in the stories of Dryads and fairies, which seem so deeply implanted in the mind of man. Who, on coming out through dark woods into some green sequestered lawn, set deep in the fringing forest, has not had the sensation of an interrupted revel, as festivity suddenly abandoned by wild, ethereal natures, who have shrunk in silent alarm back into the sheltering shades? If only one had been more wary, and stolen a moment earlier upon the unsuspecting company!
But there is a darker and cloudier sensation, theadmonitus locorum, which I have experienced upon fields of battle, and places wheresome huge tragedy of human suffering and excitement has been wrought. I have felt it upon the rustic ploughland of Jena, and on the grassy slopes of Flodden; it has crept over me under the mouldering walls and frowning gateways of old guarded towns; and not only there, where it may be nothing but the reflex of shadowy imaginations, but on wind-swept moors and tranquil valleys, I have felt, by some secret intuition, some overpowering tremor of spirit, that here some desperate strife has been waged, some primeval conflict enacted. There is a spot in the valley of Llanthony, a grassy tumulus among steep green hills, where the sense came over me with an uncontrollable throb of insight, that here some desperate stand was made, some barbarous Themopylæ lost or won.
A Dark Secret
There is a place near Golden End where I encountered a singular experience. I own that I never pass it now without some obsession of feeling; indeed, I will confess that when I am alone I take a considerable circuit to avoid the place. An ancient footway, trodden deep in a sandy covert, winds up through a copse, and comes out into a quiet place far from the high-road, in the heart of the wood.Here stands a mouldering barn, and there are two or three shrubs, an escalonia and a cypress, that testify to some remote human occupation. There is a stretch of green sward, varied with bracken, and on the left a deep excavation, where sand has been dug: in winter, a pool; in summer, a marshy place full of stiff, lush water-plants. In this place, time after time as I passed it, there seemed to be a strange silence. No bird seemed to sing here, no woodland beast to frisk here; a secret shame or horror rested on the spot. It was with no sense of surprise, but rather of resolved doubt, that I found, one bright morning, two labouring men bent over some object that lay upon the ground. When they saw me, they seemed at first to hesitate, and then asked me to come and look. It was a spectacle of singular horror: they had drawn from the marshy edge of the pool the tiny skeleton of a child, wrapped in some oozy and ragged cloths; the slime dripping from the eyeless cavities of the little skull, and the weeds trailing over the unsightly cerements. It had caught the eye of one of them as they were passing. “The place has always had an evil name,” said one of them with a strange solemnity. There hadbeen a house there, I gathered, inhabited by a mysterious evil family, a place of dark sin and hideous tradition. The stock had dwindled down to a wild solitary woman, who extracted a bare sustenance out of a tiny farm, and who alternated long periods of torpid gloom with disgusting orgies of drunkenness. Thirty years ago she had died, and the farm had remained so long unlet that it was at last pulled down, and the land planted with wood. Subsequent investigations revealed nothing; and the body had lain there, it was thought, for fully that time, preserved from decay by an iron-bound box in which it had been enclosed, and of which some traces still remained in reddish smears of rust and clotted nails. That picture—the sunlit morning, the troubled faces of the men, the silent spectatorial woods—has dwelt with me ineffaceably.
Obsession
Again, I have been constantly visited by the same inexplicable sensation in a certain room at Golden End. The room in question is a great bare chamber at the top of the house: the walls are plastered, and covered in all directions by solid warped beams; through the closed and dusty window the sunlight filters sordidly into the room. I do not know why it has neverbeen furnished, but I gathered that my father took an unexplained dislike to the room from the first. The odd feature of it is, that in the wall at one end is a small door, as of a cupboard, some feet from the ground, which opens, not as you would expect into a cupboard, but into a loft, where you can see the tiles, the brickwork of the clustered chimney-stacks, and the plastered lathwork of the floor, in and below the joists of the timber. This strange opening can never have been a window, because the shutter is of the same date as the house; still less a door, for it is hardly possible to squeeze through it; but as the loft into which it looks is an accretion of later date than the room itself, it seems to me that the garret may have been once a granary up to which sacks were swung from the ground by a pulley; and this is made more possible by the existence of some iron staples on the outer side of it, that appear to have once controlled some simple mechanism.
The Evil Room
The room is now a mere receptacle for lumber, but it is strange that all who enter it, even the newest inmate of the house, take an unaccountable dislike to the place. I have myself struggled against the feeling; I once indeedshut myself up there on a sunny afternoon, and endeavoured to shame myself by pure reason out of the disagreeable, almost physical sensation that at once came over me, but all in vain; there was something about the bare room, with its dusty and worm-eaten floor, the hot stagnant air, the floating motes in the stained sunlight, and above all the sinister little door, that gave me a discomfort that it seems impossible to express in speech. My own room must have been the scene of many a serious human event. Sick men must have lain there; hopeless prayers must have echoed there; children must have been born there, and souls must have quitted their shattered tenement beneath its ancient panels. But these have after all been normal experiences; in the other room, I make no doubt, some altogether abnormal event must have happened, something of which the ethereal aroma, as of some evil, penetrating acid, must have bitten deep into wall and floor, and soaked the very beam of the roof with anxious and disturbed oppression. In feverish fancy I see strange things enact themselves; I see at the dead of night pale heads crane from the window, oppressive silence hold the room, as some dim andugly burden jerks and dangles from the descending rope, while the rude gear creaks and rustles, and the vane upon the cupola sings its melancholy rusty song in the glimmering darkness. It is strange that the mind should be so tangibly impressed and yet should have no power given it to solve the sad enigma.
Sep. 10, 1891.
The Country
Very few consecutive days pass at Golden End without my contriving to get what I most enjoy in the form of exercise—a long, slow, solitary ride; severer activities are denied me. I have a strong, big-boned, amiable horse—strength is the one desideratum in a horse, in country where, to reach a point that appears to be a quarter of a mile away, it is often necessary to descend by a steep lane to a point two or three hundred feet below and to ascend a corresponding acclivity on the other side. Sometimes my ride has a definite object. I have to see a neighbouring farmer on business, or there is shopping to be done at Spyfield, or a distant call has to be paid—but it is best when there is no such scheme—and the result is that after a few years there is hardly a lane within a radius of five miles that I have not carefully explored and hardly a hamlet within ten miles that I have not visited.
The by-lanes are the most attractive feature.You turn out of the high-road down a steep sandy track, with high banks overhung by hazel and spindlewood and oak-copse; the ground falls rapidly. Through gaps at the side you can see the high, sloping forest glades opposite, or look along lonely green rides which lead straight into the heart of silent woods. There has been as a rule no parsimonious policy of enclosure, and the result is that there are often wide grassy spaces beside the road, thick-set with furze or forest undergrowth, with here and there a tiny pool, or a little dingle where sandstone has been dug. Down at the base of the hill you find a stream running deep below a rustic white-railed bridge, through sandy cuttings, all richly embowered with alders, and murmuring pleasantly through tall water-plants. Here and there is a weather-tiled cottage, with a boarded gable and a huge brick chimney-stack, flanked by a monstrous yew. Suddenly the road strikes into a piece of common, a true English forest, with a few huge beeches, and thick covert of ferns and saplings; still higher and you are on open ground, with the fragrant air blowing off the heather; a clump of pines marks the summit, and in an instant the rollingplain lies before you, rich in wood, rising in billowy ranges, with the smoke going up from a hundred hamlets, and the shadowy downs closing the horizon. Then you can ride a mile or two on soft white sand-paths winding in and out among the heather, while the sun goes slowly down among purple islands of cloud, with gilded promontories and fiords of rosy light, and the landscape grows more and more indistinct and romantic, suffused in a golden haze. At last it is time to turn homewards, and you wind down into a leafy dingle, where the air lies in cool strata across the sun-warmed path, and fragrant wood-smells, from the heart of winding ways and marshy streamlets, pour out of the green dusk. The whole day you have hardly seen a human being—an old labourer has looked out with a slow bovine stare from some field-corner, a group of cottage children have hailed you over a fence, or a carter walking beside a clinking team has given you a muttered greeting—the only sounds have been the voices of birds breaking from the thicket, the rustle of leaves, the murmuring of unseen streams, and the padding of your horse’s hoofs in the sandy lane.
The Peaceful Mind
And what does the mind do in these tranquilhours? I hardly know. The thought runs in a little leisurely stream, glancing from point to point; the observation is, I notice, prematurely acute, and, though the intellectual faculties are in abeyance, drinks in impressions with greedy delight: the feathery, blue-green foliage of the ash-suckers, the grotesque, geometrical forms in the lonely sandstone quarry, the curving water-meadows with their tousled grasses, the stone-leek on the roof of mellowed barns, the flash of white chalk-quarries carved out of distant downs, the climbing, clustering roofs of the hamlet on the neighbouring ridge.
Some would say that the mind in such hours grows dull, narrow, rustical, and slow—“in the lonely vale of streams,” as Ossian sang, “abides the narrow soul.” I hardly know, but I think it is the opposite: it is true that one does not learn in such silent hours the deft trick of speech, the easy flow of humorous thoughts, the tinkling interchange of the mind; but there creeps over the spirit something of the coolness of the pasture, the tranquillity of green copses, and the contentment of the lazy stream. I think that, undiluted, such days might foster the elementary brutishness of thespirit, and that just as rhododendrons degenerate, if untended, to the primal magenta type, so one might revert by slow degrees to the animal which lies not far below the civilised surface. But there is no danger in my own life that I should have too much of such reverie; indeed, I have to scheme a little for it; and it is to me a bath of peace, a plunge into the quiet waters of nature, a refreshing return to the untroubled and gentle spirit of the earth.
The only thing to fear in such rides as these, is if some ugly or sordid thought, some muddy difficulty, some tangled dilemma is stuck like a burr on the mind; then indeed such hours are of little use, if they be not positively harmful. The mind (at least my mind) has a way of arranging matters in solitude so as to be as little hopeful, as little kindly as possible; the fretted spirit brews its venom, practises for odious repartees, plans devilish questions, and rehearses the mean drama over and over. At such hours I feel indeed like Sinbad, with the lithe legs and skinny arms of the Old Man of the Sea twined round his neck. But the mood changes—an interesting letter, a sunshiny day, a pleasant visitor—any of these raises the spirit out of the mire, and restoresme to myself; and I resume my accustomed tranquillity all the more sedulously for having had a dip in the tonic tide of depression.
June 6, 1892.
I have often thought what a lightening of the load of life it would be if we could arrive at greater simplicity and directness in our social dealings with others. Of course the first difficulty to triumph over is the physical difficulty of simple shyness, which so often paralyses men and women in the presence of a stranger. But how instantly and perfectly a natural person evokes naturalness in others. This naturalness is hardly to be achieved without a certain healthy egotism. It by no means produces naturalness in others to begin operations by questioning people about themselves. But if one person begins to talk easily and frankly about his own interests, others insensibly follow suit by a kind of simple imitativeness. And if the inspirer of this naturalness is not a profound egotist, if he is really interested in other people, if he can waive his own claims to attention, the difficulty is overcome.
The Conveyancer
The other day I was bicycling, and on turningout of Spyfield, where I had been doing some business, I observed another bicyclist a little ahead of me. He was a tall thin man, with a loose white hat, and he rode with a certain fantastic childish zest which attracted my attention. If there was a little upward slope in the road, he tacked extravagantly from side to side, and seemed to be encouraging himself by murmured exhortations. He had a word for every one he passed. I rode for about half a mile behind him, and he at last dismounted at the foot of a steep slope that leads up to a place called Gallows Hill. He stopped half-way up the hill to study a map, and as I passed him wheeling my bicycle, he called cheerily to me to ask how far it was to a neighbouring village. I told him to the best of my ability, whereupon he said, “Oh no, I am sure you are wrong; it must be twice that distance!” I was for an instant somewhat nettled, feeling that if he knew the distance, his question had a certain wantonness. So I said, “Well, I have lived here for twenty years and know all the roads very well.” The stranger touched his hat and said, “I am sure I apologise with all my heart; I ought not to have spoken as I did.”
Examining him at my leisure I saw him to be a tall, lean man, with rather exaggerated features. He had a big, thin head, a long, pointed nose, a mobile and smiling mouth, large dark eyes, and full side-whiskers. I took him at once for a professional man of some kind, solicitor, schoolmaster, or even a clergyman, though his attire was not clerical. “Here,” he said, “just take the end of this map and let us consult together.” I did as I was desired, and he pointed out the way he meant to take. “Now,” he said, “there is a train there in an hour, and I want to arrive thereeasily—mind you, nothot; that is so uncomfortable.” I told him that if he knew the road, which was a complicated one, he could probably just do it in the time; but I added that I was myself going to pass a station on the line, where he might catch the same train nearer town. He looked at me with a certain slyness. “Are you certain of that?” he cried; “I have all the trains at my fingers’ ends.” I assured him it was so, while he consulted a time-table. “Right!” he said, “you are right, butallthe trains do not stop there; it is not a deduction that you can draw from the fact ofonestopping at theotherstation.” Wewalked up to the top of the hill together, and I proposed that we should ride in company. He accepted with alacrity. “Nothing I should like better!” As we got on to our bicycles his foot slipped. “You will notice,” he said, “that these are new boots—of a good pattern—but somewhat smooth on the sole; in fact they slip.” I replied that it was a good thing to scratch new boots on the sole, so as to roughen them before riding. “A capital idea!” he said delightedly; “I shall do it the moment I return, with a pair of nail-scissors,closed, mind you, to prevent my straining either blade.” We then rode off, and after a few yards he said, “Now, this is not my usual pace—rather faster than I can go with comfort.” I begged him to take his own pace, and he then began to talk of the country. “Pent up in my chambers,” he said—“I am a conveyancer, you must know—I long for a green lane and a row of elms. I have lived for years in town, in a most convenient street, I must tell you, but I sicken for the country; and now that I am in easier circumstances—I have lived ahardlife, mind you—I am going to make the great change, and live in the country. Now, what is your opinion ofthe relative merits of town and country as a place of residence?” I told him that the only disadvantage of the country to my mind was the difficulty of servants. “Right again!” he said, as if I had answered a riddle. “But I have overcome that; I have been educating a pair of good maids for years—they are paragons, and they will go anywhere with me; indeed, they prefer the country themselves.”
In such light talk we beguiled the way; too soon we came to where our roads divided; I pointed out to him the turn he was to take. “Well,” he said cheerily, “all pleasant things come to an end. I confess that I have enjoyed your company, and am grateful for your kind communications; perhaps we may have another encounter, and if not, we will be glad to have met, and think sometimes of this pleasant hour!” He put his foot upon the step of his bicycle cautiously, then mounted gleefully, and saying “Good-bye, good-bye!” he waved his hand, and in a moment was out of sight.
The thought of this brave and merry spirit planning schemes of life, making the most of simple pleasures, has always dwelt with me. The gods, as we know from Homer, assumedthe forms of men, and were at the pains to relate long and wholly unreliable stories to account for their presence at particular times and places; and I have sometimes wondered whether in the lean conveyancer, with his childlike zest for experience, his brisk enjoyment of the smallest details of daily life, I did not entertain some genial, masquerading angel unawares.
June 8, 1893.
Is it not the experience of every one that at rare intervals, by some happy accident, life presents one with a sudden and delicious thrill of beauty? I have often tried to analyse the constituent elements of these moments, but the essence is subtle and defies detection. They cannot be calculated upon, or produced by any amount of volition or previous preparation. One thing about these tiny ecstasies I have noticed—they do not come as a rule when one is tranquil, healthy, serene—they rather come as a compensation for weariness and discontent; and yet they are the purest gold of life, and a good deal of sand is well worth washing for a pellet or two of the real metal.
To-day I was more than usually impatient; over me all the week had hung the shadow of some trying, difficult business—the sort of business which, whatever you do, will be done to nobody’s satisfaction. After a vain attempt to wrestle with it, I gave it up, and wentout on a bicycle; the wind blew gently and steadily this soft June day; all the blue sky was filled with large white clouds, blackening to rain. I made for the one piece of flat ground in our neighbourhood. It is tranquillising, I have often found, to the dweller in a hilly land, to cool and sober the eye occasionally with the pure breadths of a level plain. The grass was thick and heavy-headed in the fields, but of mere wantonness I turned down a lane which I know has no ending,—a mere relief-road for carts to have access to a farm,—and soon came to the end of it in a small grassy circle, with a cottage or two, where a footpath strikes off across the fields.
Heretofore Unvisited
Why did I never come here before, I thought. Through a gap in the hedge I saw a large broad pasture, fringed in the far distance with full-foliaged, rotund elms in thick leaf; a row of willows on the horizon marked the track of a stream. In the pasture in front of me was a broad oblong pool of water with water-lilies; down one side ran a row of huge horse-chestnuts, and the end was rich in elders full of flat white cakes of blossom. In the field grazed an old horse; while a pigeon sailed lazily down from the trees and ran to the poolto drink. That was all there was to see. But it brought me with a deep and inexplicable thrill close to the heart of the old, kindly, patient Earth, the mother and the mistress and the servant of all—she who allows us to tear and rend her for our own paltry ends, and then sets, how sweetly and tranquilly, to work, with what a sense of inexhaustible leisure, to paint and mellow and adorn the rude and bleeding gaps. We tear up a copse, and she fills the ugly scars in the spring with a crop of fresh flowers—of flowers, perhaps, which are not seen in the neighbourhood, but whose seeds have lain vital and moist in the ground, but too deep to know the impulse born of the spring sun. Yet now they burst their armoured mail, and send a thin, white, worm-like arm to the top, which, as soon as it passes into the light, drinks from the rays the green flush that it chooses to hide its nakedness. We dig a pool in the crumbling marl. At the time the wound seems irreparable; the ugly, slobbered banks grin at us like death; the ground is full of footprints and slime, broken roots and bedabbled leaves,—and next year it is all a paradise of green and luscious water-plants, with a hundred quiet lives being livedthere, of snail and worm and beetle, as though the place had never been disturbed. We build a raw red house with an insupportably geometrical outline, the hue of the vicious fire still in the bricks; pass fifty years, and the bricks are mellow and soft, plastered with orange rosettes or grey filaments of lichen; the ugly window frames are blistered and warped; the roof has taken a soft and yielding outline—all is in peace and harmony with the green world in which it sits.
The Repairer of the Breach
I never saw this more beautifully illustrated than once, when a great house in Whitehall was destroyed, and heaped up in a hideous rockery of bricks. All through the winter these raw ruins, partly concealed by a rough hoarding, tainted the view; but as soon as spring returned, from every inch of grit rose a forest of green stalks of willow-herb, each in summer to be crowned with a spire of fantastic crimson flowers, and to pass a little later into those graceful, ghostly husks that shiver in the wind. Centuries must have passed since willow-herb had grown on that spot. Had they laid dormant, these hopeful seeds, or had they been wafted along dusty streets and high in air over sun-scorched spaces? Nature at allevents had seen her chance, and done her work patiently and wisely as ever.
But to return to my lane-end. How strange and deep are the impressions of a deep and inviolate peace that some quiet corner like this gives to the restless spirit! It can never be so with the scenes that have grown familiar, where we have carried about with us the burden of private cares—the symptoms of the disease of life. In any house where we have lived, every corner, however peaceful and beautiful in itself, is bound to be gradually soaked, as it were, in the miseries of life, to conceal its beauties under the accretion of sordid associations.
This room we connect with some sad misunderstanding. There we gave way to some petty passion of resentment, of jealousy, of irritation, or vainly tried to pacify some similar outbreak from one we loved. This is the torture of imagination; to feel the beauty of sight and sound, we must be sensitive; and if we are sensitive, we carry about the shadow with us—the capacity for self-torment, the struggle of the ideal with the passing mood.