To travel eastwards and breast the sun, to sail towards the watershed and
breast the floods, to go north and breast the winter--fresh and warm are
the energies of such bracing action; but more animating still is it to
live so as to breast the stress of time.
Man and woman may, like the child, or almost like him, fill the time and
enlarge the capacity of the day--our poor day that so easily shrinks and
dwindles in the careless possession of idle minds. The date, every first
of March, for example, may sweep upon a large curve and come home
annually after a swinging flight. To the infinite variety of natural
days may be entrusted half the work of strengthening the flight against
time, but the other half must be the task of the vehement heart. Nature
assuredly does not fail. Days, seasons, and years are as wide asunder as
the unforeseen can set them, and a crowd of children is not more various.
But the resisting heart seems of late to be somewhat lacking. We are
inclined to turn our heel upon the East, upon the watershed, upon the
gates of the wind, and to go the smooth road.
We are even precipitate, and whip our way faster on the time-killing
course than the natural event would take us. It is not enough that we
should run helplessly, we outstrip the breeze and outsail the current
with the ease of our untimely luxuries. Our daffodils are no longer to
have the praise of their daring, for we no longer relate them to the
lagging swallow. By the time the barely budding woods give a poor man's
lodging to the cold daffodil--a scanty kind taking the wind with a short
stalk and giving it but small petals to buffet--we have already said
farewell to the tall and splendid green-house daffodil that never braved
the cold. We gave to this our untimely welcome long before the snowdrop
came, and the golden name of daffodil has lost its vernal sound. And
when we part with the improved creature, lofty and enlarged, we hardly
know or care whether the starveling is yet mustering in hollows of
woodlands, or whether it is over or to come. We are attending to a
yellower tulip, no doubt, when the only daffodil that Shakespeare knew is
opening in the chilly wood.
The reproach is a commonplace, but perhaps we have generally accused
ourselves of the impatience rather than of the listlessness, and have not
noted how we shorten the disarranged seasons and lay up for ourselves
memories confused and undefined. Late springs and early, gentle and
hard, are compelled to yield the same colours; haste has its way and its
revenges. If we are resolved to live quickly, why, nothing is easier.
There are no such brief days as those that are indistinct; and the
sliding on the way of time is, of all habits, the most tyrannously
careless. It is first a laxity, then a habit, and next a folly; and when
we keep neither Ash Wednesday nor the birthday of daffodils, and have
hardly felt the cold, and do not know where the sun rises, we are already
on the way of least resistance, the friction of life is gone; and in our
last old age the past will seem to dwindle even like the dwindled present
of our decline.
There has been one unconscious operation of the love of life, one single
grasp after variety, intended to save the year, to face it, to meet it,
to compel it to show a unique face and bear a name of its own; and this
is travel. It is the finest and most effectual flight against time of
all. What elastic days are those wherein I make head against a
travelling landscape, meet histories and boundaries, hail frontiers, face
a new manner of building, cross the regions of silver roofs and of heavy
Alpine stone, and bring with me the late light upon billowy gables and
red eaves! And how buoyant the week in which I anticipate the sun upon
the roofless east! How serried are the days with forests, how enlarged
by plains, how thronged by cities, how singled by the pine, how newly
audible by a new sea! Far was the sunrise from the sunset, and noon is
one memorable midday with shortened shadows upon some solitary road.
Our fathers had friction of another kind: hardship at home, winters and
nights that were dark with a darkness we have abolished; springs that
brought an infinite releasing, illumination, and recolouring. None of us
has seen the sight, or breathed the air, or heard those emancipated
voices. The bloom, the birds, the ifted sky! Bright nights and glowing
houses have surely robbed us of that variety, and all these untimely
fruits and flowers have suppressed even the small privations of a winter
in disguise.
In those days Englishmen had to breast the times as they were. They had
the privilege of their latitude--vigorous and rigorous seasons. They had
a year full of change--their time was stretched whether with impatience
or with patience, with conflict or with felicity. Their salt meats were
not the worst of it; there was the siege of darkness, the captivity of
cold, the threat of storm, and the labour to close with the closing
enemy, to break ways and save animals alive, and keep the laws in force
in the street in the long and secret nights. From such a season of
winter at home, winter well known, men broke free to hail their
daffodils. They found them, short, strong, and shivering, in the still
open and undefended woods. In the springs before Chaucer, and earlier
than the day of the first spring lyric, in the same places grew the keen
wild flowers as now; but they assuredly were marked with another welcome;
they made memories; this year's wild harvest was not confused with that
of last year, or of half-a-score of years gone by. Distance of vital
time set the springs far apart, and made the daffodils strangers.
They were greeted with the courtesy due to strangers, so fresh must have
been the senses of the villager, and of the citizen of the village town.
Suburbs divide a city from the fields as walls did never. He of old went
from a little town, close and serried as a new box of toys, with one step
into the unsmirched country, carrying an unsated heart. Refreshed with
the animating compulsion of changeful life were man and woman, and much
like their child in a constant capacity for unique experiences, unique
days, years that are separate, known, and distinguishable, and not only
separate but long.
Indeed, some of us who travel hardly know how to remedy our fugitive,
resembling, hastening, and collapsing seasons, even by means of this
sovereign remedy of travel. It is to be feared that a modern journey is
not always to us so bracing a manner of living as was the untravelled
journey of hard days at home to the ancient islander. To journey as he
did, keeping his feet, with a moving heart against the moving seasons, to
resist, to withstand, widened the hours; but his posterity are taking all
means to narrow their own, even on the railway. To go the same way every
year, for instance, is to lose, when a few such years are gone, nearly
all the gain to life. To take no heed at all of the way, but merely to
be by any means at the end of the travelling, to sleep or go by night,
and to calculate Europe by hours, half-hours, junctions, and dining-cars,
is but to close up the time as though you closed a telescope. A long
railway journey and a long motor journey may be taken with the flight of
time as well as against it, and the habit of summaries can use these too
to its own end. Precipitate, unresisting, are the day in the train and
the heedless night. We love to reproach ourselves with living at too
great a speed, having, perhaps, no sense of the second meaning of the
phrase. Medicine may, perhaps, fulfil her promise of giving us a few
more years, but habit derides her by making each year a scanty gift.
Much, too, of the spirit of time is lost to us because we will not let
the sun rule the day. He would see to it that our hours were various;
but we have preferred to his various face the plain face of a clock, and
the lights without vicissitudes of our nights without seasons.