In these iron days of the dominance of steam, the crowning wrong that
is wrought us of furnace and piston-rod lies in their annihilation of
the steadfast mystery of the horizon, so that the imagination no longer
begins to work at the point where vision ceases. In happier times,
three hundred years ago, the seafarers from Bristol City looked out
from the prows of their vessels in the grey of the morning, and wot not
rightly whether the land they saw might be Jerusalem or Madagascar, or
if it were not North and South America. “And there be certaine flitting
islands,” says one, “which have been oftentimes seene, and when men
approached near them they vanished.” “It may be that the gulfs will
wash us down,” said Ulysses (thinking of what Americans call the
“getting-off place”); “it may be we shall touch the Happy Isles.” And
so on, and so on; each with his special hope or “wild surmise.” There
was always a chance of touching the Happy Isles. And in that first fair
world whose men and manners we knew through story-books, before
experience taught us far other, the Prince mounts his horse one fine
morning, and rides all day, and sleeps in a forest; and next morning,
lo! a new country: and he rides by fields and granges never visited
before, through faces strange to him, to where an unknown King steps
down to welcome the mysterious stranger. And he marries the Princess,
and dwells content for many a year; till one day he thinks “I will look
upon my father’s face again, though the leagues be long to my own
land.” And he rides all day, and sleeps in a forest; and next morning
he is made welcome at home, where his name has become a dim memory.
Which is all as it should be; for, annihilate time and space as you
may, a man’s stride remains the true standard of distance; an eternal
and unalterable scale. The severe horizon, too, repels the thoughts as
you gaze to the infinite considerations that lie about, within touch
and hail; and the night cometh, when no man can work.
To all these natural bounds and limitations it is good to get back now
and again, from a life assisted and smooth by artificialities. Where
iron has superseded muscle, the kindly life-blood is apt to throb dull
as the measured beat of the steam-engine. But the getting back to them
is now a matter of effort, of set purpose, a stepping aside out of our
ordinary course; they are no longer unsought influences towards the
making of character. So perhaps the time of them has gone by, here in
this second generation of steam. _Pereunt et imputantur;_ they pass
away, and are scored against not us but our guilty fathers. For
ourselves, our peculiar slate is probably filling fast. The romance of
the steam-engine is yet to be captured and expressed—not fully nor
worthily, perhaps, until it too is a vanished regret; though Emerson
for one will not have it so, and maintains and justifies its right to
immediate recognition as poetic material. “For as it is dislocation and
detachment from the life of God that makes things ugly, the poet, who
re-attaches things to Nature and the whole—re-attaching even artificial
things and violations of Nature to Nature by a deeper insight—disposes
very easily of the most disagreeable facts”; so that he looks upon “the
factory village and the railway” and “sees them fall within the great
Order not less than the bee-hive or the spider’s geometrical web.” The
poet, however, seems hard to convince hereof. Emerson will have it that
“Nature loves the gliding train of cars”; “instead of which” the poet
still goes about the country singing purling brooks. Painters have been
more flexible and liberal. Turner saw and did his best to seize the
spirit of the thing, its kinship with the elements, and to blend
furnace-glare and rush of iron with the storm-shower, the wind and the
thwart-flashing sun-rays, and to make the whole a single expression of
irresoluble force. And even in a certain work by another and a very
different painter—though I willingly acquit Mr Frith of any deliberate
romantic intention—you shall find the element of romance in the
vestiges of the old order still lingering in the first transition
period: the coach-shaped railway carriages with luggage piled and
corded on top, the red-coated guard, the little engine tethered well
ahead as if between traces. To those bred within sight of the sea,
steamers will always partake in somewhat of the “beauty and mystery of
the ships”; above all, if their happy childhood have lain among the
gleaming lochs and sinuous firths of the Western Highlands, where,
twice a week maybe, the strange visitant crept by headland and bay, a
piece of the busy, mysterious outer world. For myself, I probably stand
alone in owning to a sentimental weakness for the night-piercing
whistle—judiciously remote, as some men love the skirl of the pipes. In
the days when streets were less wearily familiar than now, or ever the
golden cord was quite loosed that led back to relinquished fields and
wider skies, I have lain awake on stifling summer nights, thinking of
luckier friends by moor and stream, and listening for the whistles from
certain railway stations, veritable “horns of Elf-land, faintly
blowing.” Then, a ghostly passenger, I have taken my seat in a phantom
train, and sped up, up, through the map, rehearsing the journey bit by
bit: through the furnace-lit Midlands, and on till the grey glimmer of
dawn showed stone walls in place of hedges, and masses looming up on
either side; till the bright sun shone upon brown leaping streams and
purple heather, and the clear, sharp northern air streamed in through
the windows. Return, indeed, was bitter; Endymion-like, “my first touch
of the earth went nigh to kill”: but it was only to hurry northwards
again on the wings of imagination, from dust and heat to the dear
mountain air. “We are only the children who might have been,” murmured
Lamb’s dream babes to him; and for the sake of those dream-journeys,
the journeys that might have been, I still hail with a certain
affection the call of the engine in the night: even as I love sometimes
to turn the enchanted pages of the railway a b c, and pass from one to
the other name reminiscent or suggestive of joy and freedom, Devonian
maybe, or savouring of Wessex, or bearing me away to some sequestered
reach of the quiet Thames.