The woods by night, in all their uncanny effect, are not rightly to be
understood until you can compare them with the woods by day. The
stillness of the medium, the floor of glittering sand, these trees that
go streaming up like monstrous sea-weeds and waver in the moving winds
like the weeds in submarine currents, all these set the mind working on
the thought of what you may have seen off a foreland or over the side of
a boat, and make you feel like a diver, down in the quiet water, fathoms
below the tumbling, transitory surface of the sea. And yet in itself, as
I say, the strangeness of these nocturnal solitudes is not to be felt
fully without the sense of contrast. You must have risen in the morning
and seen the woods as they are by day, kindled and coloured in the sun’s
light; you must have felt the odour of innumerable trees at even, the
unsparing heat along the forest roads, and the coolness of the groves.
And on the first morning you will doubtless rise betimes. If you have
not been wakened before by the visit of some adventurous pigeon, you will
be wakened as soon as the sun can reach your window—for there are no
blind or shutters to keep him out—and the room, with its bare wood floor
and bare whitewashed walls, shines all round you in a sort of glory of
reflected lights. You may doze a while longer by snatches, or lie awake
to study the charcoal men and dogs and horses with which former occupants
have defiled the partitions: Thiers, with wily profile; local
celebrities, pipe in hand; or, maybe, a romantic landscape splashed in
oil. Meanwhile artist after artist drops into the salle-à-manger for
coffee, and then shoulders easel, sunshade, stool, and paint-box, bound
into a fagot, and sets of for what he calls his ‘motive.’ And artist
after artist, as he goes out of the village, carries with him a little
following of dogs. For the dogs, who belong only nominally to any
special master, hang about the gate of the forest all day long, and
whenever any one goes by who hits their fancy, profit by his escort, and
go forth with him to play an hour or two at hunting. They would like to
be under the trees all day. But they cannot go alone. They require a
pretext. And so they take the passing artist as an excuse to go into the
woods, as they might take a walking-stick as an excuse to bathe. With
quick ears, long spines, and bandy legs, or perhaps as tall as a
greyhound and with a bulldog’s head, this company of mongrels will trot
by your side all day and come home with you at night, still showing white
teeth and wagging stunted tail. Their good humour is not to be
exhausted. You may pelt them with stones if you please, and all they
will do is to give you a wider berth. If once they come out with you, to
you they will remain faithful, and with you return; although if you meet
them next morning in the street, it is as like as not they will cut you
with a countenance of brass.
The forest—a strange thing for an Englishman—is very destitute of birds.
This is no country where every patch of wood among the meadows gibes up
an increase of song, and every valley wandered through by a streamlet
rings and reverberates from side to with a profusion of clear notes. And
this rarity of birds is not to be regretted on its own account only. For
the insects prosper in their absence, and become as one of the plagues of
Egypt. Ants swarm in the hot sand; mosquitos drone their nasal drone;
wherever the sun finds a hole in the roof of the forest, you see a myriad
transparent creatures coming and going in the shaft of light; and even
between-whiles, even where there is no incursion of sun-rays into the
dark arcade of the wood, you are conscious of a continual drift of
insects, an ebb and flow of infinitesimal living things between the
trees. Nor are insects the only evil creatures that haunt the forest.
For you may plump into a cave among the rocks, and find yourself face to
face with a wild boar, or see a crooked viper slither across the road.
Perhaps you may set yourself down in the bay between two spreading
beech-roots with a book on your lap, and be awakened all of a sudden by a
friend: ‘I say, just keep where you are, will you? You make the jolliest
motive.’ And you reply: ‘Well, I don’t mind, if I may smoke.’ And
thereafter the hours go idly by. Your friend at the easel labours
doggedly a little way off, in the wide shadow of the tree; and yet
farther, across a strait of glaring sunshine, you see another painter,
encamped in the shadow of another tree, and up to his waist in the fern.
You cannot watch your own effigy growing out of the white trunk, and the
trunk beginning to stand forth from the rest of the wood, and the whole
picture getting dappled over with the flecks of sun that slip through the
leaves overhead, and, as a wind goes by and sets the trees a-talking,
flicker hither and thither like butterflies of light. But you know it is
going forward; and, out of emulation with the painter, get ready your own
palette, and lay out the colour for a woodland scene in words.
Your tree stands in a hollow paved with fern and heather, set in a basin
of low hills, and scattered over with rocks and junipers. All the open
is steeped in pitiless sunlight. Everything stands out as though it were
cut in cardboard, every colour is strained into its highest key. The
boulders are some of them upright and dead like monolithic castles, some
of them prone like sleeping cattle. The junipers—looking, in their
soiled and ragged mourning, like some funeral procession that has gone
seeking the place of sepulchre three hundred years and more in wind and
rain—are daubed in forcibly against the glowing ferns and heather. Every
tassel of their rusty foliage is defined with pre-Raphaelite minuteness.
And a sorry figure they make out there in the sun, like misbegotten
yew-trees! The scene is all pitched in a key of colour so peculiar, and
lit up with such a discharge of violent sunlight, as a man might live
fifty years in England and not see.
Meanwhile at your elbow some one tunes up a song, words of Ronsard to a
pathetic tremulous air, of how the poet loved his mistress long ago, and
pressed on her the flight of time, and told her how white and quiet the
dead lay under the stones, and how the boat dipped and pitched as the
shades embarked for the passionless land. Yet a little while, sang the
poet, and there shall be no more love; only to sit and remember loves
that might have been. There is a falling flourish in the air that
remains in the memory and comes back in incongruous places, on the seat
of hansoms or in the warm bed at night, with something of a forest
savour.
‘You can get up now,’ says the painter; ‘I’m at the background.’
And so up you get, stretching yourself, and go your way into the wood,
the daylight becoming richer and more golden, and the shadows stretching
farther into the open. A cool air comes along the highways, and the
scents awaken. The fir-trees breathe abroad their ozone. Out of unknown
thickets comes forth the soft, secret, aromatic odour of the woods, not
like a smell of the free heaven, but as though court ladies, who had
known these paths in ages long gone by, still walked in the summer
evenings, and shed from their brocades a breath of musk or bergamot upon
the woodland winds. One side of the long avenues is still kindled with
the sun, the other is plunged in transparent shadow. Over the trees the
west begins to burn like a furnace; and the painters gather up their
chattels, and go down, by avenue or footpath, to the plain.