ONE GREEN FIELD
Happiness is not to be pursued, though pleasure may be; but I have
long thought that I should recognise happiness could I ever achieve
it. It would be health, or at least unthwarted intensity of sensual
and mental life, in the midst of beautiful or astonishing things
which should give that life full play and banish expectation and
recollection. I never achieved it, and am fated to be almost happy in
many different circumstances, and on account of my forethought to be
contemptuous or even disgusted at what the beneficent designs of chance
have brought--refusing, for example, to abandon my nostrils frankly
to the “musk and amber” of revenge; or polluting, by the notice of
some trivial accident, the remembrance of past things, both bitter and
sweet, in the company of an old friend. Wilfully and yet helplessly
I coin mere pleasures out of happiness. And yet herein, perhaps, a
just judge would declare me to be at least not more foolish than those
men who are always pointing out the opportunities and just causes of
happiness which others have. Also, the flaw in my happiness which
wastes it to a pleasure is in the manner of my looking back at it when
it is past. It is as if I had made a great joyous leap over a hedge,
and then had looked back and seen that the hedge was but four feet
high and not dangerous. Is it perhaps true that those are never happy
who know what happiness is? The shadow of it I seem to see every day in
entering a little idle field in a sternly luxuriant country.
It is but five grassy acres, and yet as the stile admitting you to it
makes you pause--to taste the blackberries or to see how far the bryony
has twined--you salute it in a little while as a thing of character.
Many of the fields around are bounded by straight-ruled hedges, as if
they had been cut up by a tyrant or a slave, with only a few of such
irregularities as a stream or a pond may enforce. Not one of the five
hedges of this field makes a straight line. The hedge up to your right
from the stile is of a noble and fascinating unruliness. So winds a
mountain stream down its ladders of crag in Cardigan; into some such
form would the edge of a phalanx be worn by long swaying in the height
of battle. The other hedges are equally fretted. Here, there is a deep
indentation where the cattle lie and wear the blackthorn stems until
they are polished for ever; and there the knitted stoles and roots
of ash jut out and encroach, fierce and antique and stony, like a
strange beast left there to lie in the sweet grass--like a worn effigy
over a grave where knight and hound have become mingled in monstrous
ambiguity. The surface of the field is of the same wildness. It does
not rise and fall in a few sea-like heavings, or in many little waves,
nor is it level or in one long, gradual slope, but rising sleepily
from west to east it is broken by sudden hollows and mounds. In one
place the furze on a mound makes a little world for two or three pairs
of linnets and white-throats, and there are the largest and sweetest
blackberries; there also a hundred young stems of brier spend spring
and summer in perfecting the curves of their long leaps--curves that
are like the gush of water over a dam, and yet crossing in multitudes
without crowding, in all ways without discord, like the paths of the
flight of swallows when they embroider the twilight air. In another
place it is always marshy, the home of marigold and reed. One corner
used to be dominated by a tall tented oak, of so majestic balance
that when sawn through it stood long in the wind; there the pheasants
are proud among bugle or centaury flowers. Here and there a smooth
boulder protrudes, guarded by hundreds of blue scabious flowers which
welcome butterflies of their own hue, and sometimes a peacock butterfly
displays himself on the naked stone.
At the eastern and higher end the field becomes so narrow that it is
like a lane, through which the hunt gloriously decants itself among the
knolls. It is narrowed still more by a small pond, and round that a
tall holly of solid shadow with glancing edges, an oak, an overhanging
thicket of bramble and thorn and three old butts of ash, where the
fairy gold of toadstools is scattered abundantly as if sown by one
sweep of a generous hand. The pond is the home of one moorhen, which
is always either swimming there or hastening to it from the field. It
is but as large as a farmhouse kitchen, and yet the moorhen will not
desert it, finding the eaves among the roots as pleasing as attics
to a boy; content with her seeming security though the road passes
just above, and rich in her share of sun and moon and stars. To see
the moorhen swimming in the narrow pond on a silent and misty autumn
morning is to think, now with joy, now with pain, of solitude, but
always with a reverie at last that is entangled among the dim, late
stars--she possessing the solitary pond, in the solitary autumn country
on a planet that is but an element in the solitude of the infinite; and
her liquid hoot dwells long in the brain.
It is worth while to watch the pool at dawn, because, though it might
seem to be but one of the myriad waters that light candles of adoration
and celebration to every dawn, it has then the air, as the mist drips
and tingles at the edge, of being a grey priest who has not yet done
serving other gods than the dawn, and, until it puts on its white
robes and glimmers altogether, it makes with the oak tree a group of
pathetic revolt against the day--the oak might be a Saturn or a Lear,
the pool in its gradual surrender to the light a Druid sheltering dear
and unprosperous mysteries yet a little longer from the proud sun. Then
the thrush sings on the holly crest with such blitheness as cannot,
nevertheless, excel the water’s glory in the fully risen light.
But whatever conversion the little pond undergoes on dawn after dawn,
the field as a whole retains the same antiquity, which it announces
so powerfully that I knew it on first crossing the stile. Perhaps the
lawless shape of the field, its unusual undulations, its unkemptness in
the midst of a land all rich with crops--perhaps these things suggested
antiquity; but I think not--at least they do not explain it for it was
then strange, and now with all its familiarity it has rather gained
than lost its power. It is the same when its outlines are concealed
by mist and all I can see is the clover rough with silver dew, white
mushrooms, and perhaps one red yoke of maple in the hollow air, and
when the snow covers all but the myriad thistles blossoming with blue
tits. Enter it in spring--the linnets sprinkle a song like audible
sunlight--and yet the field is old. But November is its notable month.
Its trees are all oaks and they have hardly lost a leaf; the leaves are
falling continually from those smouldering sunset clouds of foliage,
which, kingly rich, look as if they would never be poor. One skylark
sings high over the field in the rainy sky. The blue rooks unsheathe
themselves heavily from the branches and shine silverly and caw with
genial voices. A pheasant explodes from a grass tussock underfoot. The
air smells like the musky white wild rose; coming from the west it
blows gently, laden with all the brown and golden savours of Wales and
Devon and Wiltshire and Surrey which I know, and the scent lifts the
upper lip so that you snuff deeply as a dog snuffs. A stoat goes with
uplifted tail across the field. But the field itself--was there a great
house here once and is it dead and yet vocal? Are its undulations and
rude edges all that remain of an old wood? Or was there a battle here,
and is the turf alive with death? Certainly there is death somewhere
speaking eloquently to mortal men. It is not alive, but it laments
something, and where there is sorrow there is life.
For just one day in September the goldfinches come and twitter, and are
happy among the thistles, and fly away.