Everybody knows, I suppose, that kind of landscape in which hills seem
to lie in a regular manner, fold on fold, one range behind the other,
until, at last, behind them all some higher and grander range dominates
and frames the whole.
The infinite variety of light and air and accident of soil provide all
men save those who live in the great plains with examples of this sort.
The traveller in the dry air of California or of Spain, watching great
distances from the heights, will recollect such landscapes all his
life. They were the reward of his long ascents and the visions which
attended his effort as he climbed up to the ridge of his horizon. Such
a landscape does a man see from the Western edges of the Guadarrama,
looking eastward and south toward the very distant hills that guard
Toledo and the Gulf of the Tagus. Such a landscape does a man see at
sunrise from the highest of the Cevennes looking right eastward to the
dawn as it comes up in the pure and cold air beyond the Alps, and shows
you the falling of the foothills to the Rhone. And by such a landscape
is a man gladdened when upon the escarpments of the Tuolumne he turns
back and looks westward over the plain towards the vast range.
The experience of such a sight is one peculiar in travel, or, for that
matter, if a man is lucky enough to enjoy it at home, insistent and
reiterated upon the mind of the home-dwelling man. Such a landscape,
for instance, makes a man praise God if his house is upon the height of
Mendip, and he can look over falling hills right over the Vale of
Severn toward the ridge above ridge of the Welsh solemnities beyond,
until the straight line and high of the Black Mountains ends his view.
It is the character of these landscapes to suggest at once a vastness,
diversity, and seclusion. When a man comes upon them unexpectedly he
can forget the perpetual toil of men and imagine that those who dwell
below in the near side before him are exempt from the necessities of
this world. When such a landscape is part of a man’s dwelling-place,
though he well knows that the painful life of men within those hills is
the same hard business that it is throughout the world, yet his
knowledge is modified and comforted by the permanent glory of the thing
he sees.
The distant and high range that bounds his view makes a sort of
veiling, cutting it off and guarding it from whatever may be beyond.
The succession of lower ranges suggests secluded valleys, and the
reiterated woods, distant and more distant, convey an impression of
fertility more powerful than that of corn in harvest upon the lowlands.
Sometimes it is a whole province that is thus grasped by the eye,
sometimes in the summer haze but a few miles; always this scenery
inspires the onlooker with a sense of completion and of repose, and at
the same time, I think, with worship and with awe.
Now one such group of valleys there was, hill above hill, forest above
forest, and beyond it a great noble range, unwooded and high against
heaven, guarding it, which I for my part knew when first I knew
anything of this world. There is a high place under fir trees, a place
of sand and bracken, in South England whence such a view was always
present to eye in childhood and “There,” said I to myself (even in
childhood) “a man should make his habitation.” In those valleys is the
proper off-set for man.
And so there was.
It was a little place which had grown up as my county grows. The house
throwing out arms and layers. One room was panelled in the oak of the
seventeenth century—but that had been a novelty in its time, for the
walls upon which the panels stood were of the late fifteenth, oak and
brick intermingled. Another room was large and light built in the
manner of one hundred and fifty years ago, which people call Georgian.
It had been thrown out south (which is quite against our older custom,
for our older houses looked east and west to take all the sun and to
present a corner to the south-west and the storms. So they stand
still). It had round it a solid cornice which the modern men of the
towns would have called ugly, but there was ancestry in it. Then,
further on this house had modern roominess stretching in one new wing
after another; and it had a great steading and there was a copse and
some six acres of land. Over a deep ravine looked the little town that
was the mother of the place, and altogether it was enclosed, silent,
and secure.
“The fish that misses the hook regrets the worm.” If this is not a
Chinese proverb it ought to be. That little farm and steading and those
six acres, that ravine, those trees, that aspect of the little
mothering town; the wooded hills fold above fold, the noble range
beyond, will not be mine.
For all I know, some man quite unacquainted with that land took them
grumbling for a debt; or again, for all I know, they may have been
bought by a blind man who could not see the hills, or by some man who,
seeing them, perpetually regretted the flat marshes of the fens. One
day, up high on Egdean Side, not thinking of such things, through a gap
in the trees I saw again after so many years, set one behind the other,
the forests wave upon wave, the summer heat, the high, bare range
guarding all, and in the midst of that landscape, set like a toy, the
little Sabine Farm.
Then I said to it, “Continue. Go and serve whom you will, my little
Sabine Farm. You were not mine because you would not be, and you are
not mine at all to-day. You will regret it perhaps, and perhaps you
will not. There was verse in you, perhaps, or prose, or—infinitely
more!—contentment for a man (for all I know). But you refused. You lost
your chance. Goodbye.” And with that I went on into the wood and beyond
the gap, and saw the sight no more.
It was ten years since I had seen it last. It may be ten years before I
see it again, or it may be for ever. But as I went through the woods
saying to myself:
“You lost your chance, my little Sabine Farm, you lost your chance!”
another part of me at once replied:
“Ah! And so did _you_!”
Then, by way of riposte, I answered in my mind:
“Not at all, for the chance I never had, but what I lost was my
desire.”
“No, not your desire,” said the voice to me within, “but the fulfilment
of it, in which you would have lost your desire.” And when that reply
came I naturally turned as all men do on hearing such interior replies,
to a general consideration of regret, and was prepared, if any honest
publisher should have come whistling through that wood, with an offer
proper to the occasion, namely, to produce no less than five volumes on
the Nature of Regret, its mortal sting, its bitter-sweetness, its power
to keep alive in man the pure passions of the soul, its hints at
immortality, its memory of Heaven. But the wood was empty of
publishers. The offer did not come. The moment was lost. The five
volumes will hardly now be written. In place of them I offer poor this,
which you may take or leave. But I beg leave before I end to cite
certain words very nobly attached to that great inn “The Griffin,”
which has its foundation set far off in another place, in the town of
March, in the Fen Land:
“England my desire, what have you not refused?”