who enter it, even the newest inmate of the house, take an unaccountable
dislike to the place. I have myself struggled against the feeling; I
once indeed shut myself up there on a sunny afternoon, and endeavoured
to shame myself by pure reason out of the disagreeable, almost physical
sensation that at once came over me, but all in vain; there was something
about the bare room, with its dusty and worm-eaten floor, the hot
stagnant air, the floating motes in the stained sunlight, and above
all the sinister little door, that gave me a discomfort that it seems
impossible to express in speech. My own room must have been the scene
of many a serious human event. Sick men must have lain there; hopeless
prayers must have echoed there; children must have been born there, and
souls must have quitted their shattered tenement beneath its ancient
panels. But these have after all been normal experiences; in the other
room, I make no doubt, some altogether abnormal event must have happened,
something of which the ethereal aroma, as of some evil, penetrating acid,
must have bitten deep into wall and floor, and soaked the very beam of
the roof with anxious and disturbed oppression. In feverish fancy I see
strange things enact themselves; I see at the dead of night pale heads
crane from the window, oppressive silence hold the room, as some dim
and ugly burden jerks and dangles from the descending rope, while the
rude gear creaks and rustles, and the vane upon the cupola sings its
melancholy rusty song in the glimmering darkness. It is strange that the
mind should be so tangibly impressed and yet should have no power given
it to solve the sad enigma.
24
_Sep. 10, 1891._
[Sidenote: THE COUNTRY]
Very few consecutive days pass at Golden End without my contriving to get
what I most enjoy in the form of exercise—a long, slow, solitary ride;
severer activities are denied me. I have a strong, big-boned, amiable
horse—strength is the one desideratum in a horse, in country where, to
reach a point that appears to be a quarter of a mile away, it is often
necessary to descend by a steep lane to a point two or three hundred
feet below and to ascend a corresponding acclivity on the other side.
Sometimes my ride has a definite object. I have to see a neighbouring
farmer on business, or there is shopping to be done at Spyfield, or
a distant call has to be paid—but it is best when there is no such
scheme—and the result is that after a few years there is hardly a lane
within a radius of five miles that I have not carefully explored and
hardly a hamlet within ten miles that I have not visited.
The by-lanes are the most attractive feature. You turn out of the
high-road down a steep sandy track, with high banks overhung by hazel
and spindlewood and oak-copse; the ground falls rapidly. Through gaps at
the side you can see the high, sloping forest glades opposite, or look
along lonely green rides which lead straight into the heart of silent
woods. There has been as a rule no parsimonious policy of enclosure,
and the result is that there are often wide grassy spaces beside the
road, thick-set with furze or forest undergrowth, with here and there
a tiny pool, or a little dingle where sandstone has been dug. Down at
the base of the hill you find a stream running deep below a rustic
white-railed bridge, through sandy cuttings, all richly embowered with
alders, and murmuring pleasantly through tall water-plants. Here and
there is a weather-tiled cottage, with a boarded gable and a huge brick
chimney-stack, flanked by a monstrous yew. Suddenly the road strikes
into a piece of common, a true English forest, with a few huge beeches,
and thick covert of ferns and saplings; still higher and you are on open
ground, with the fragrant air blowing off the heather; a clump of pines
marks the summit, and in an instant the rolling plain lies before you,
rich in wood, rising in billowy ranges, with the smoke going up from a
hundred hamlets, and the shadowy downs closing the horizon. Then you can
ride a mile or two on soft white sand-paths winding in and out among the
heather, while the sun goes slowly down among purple islands of cloud,
with gilded promontories and fiords of rosy light, and the landscape
grows more and more indistinct and romantic, suffused in a golden haze.
At last it is time to turn homewards, and you wind down into a leafy
dingle, where the air lies in cool strata across the sun-warmed path,
and fragrant wood-smells, from the heart of winding ways and marshy
streamlets, pour out of the green dusk. The whole day you have hardly
seen a human being—an old labourer has looked out with a slow bovine
stare from some field-corner, a group of cottage children have hailed you
over a fence, or a carter walking beside a clinking team has given you a
muttered greeting—the only sounds have been the voices of birds breaking
from the thicket, the rustle of leaves, the murmuring of unseen streams,
and the padding of your horse’s hoofs in the sandy lane.
[Sidenote: THE PEACEFUL MIND]
And what does the mind do in these tranquil hours? I hardly know.
The thought runs in a little leisurely stream, glancing from point to
point; the observation is, I notice, prematurely acute, and, though
the intellectual faculties are in abeyance, drinks in impressions with
greedy delight: the feathery, blue-green foliage of the ash-suckers, the
grotesque, geometrical forms in the lonely sandstone quarry, the curving
water-meadows with their tousled grasses, the stone-leek on the roof of
mellowed barns, the flash of white chalk-quarries carved out of distant
downs, the climbing, clustering roofs of the hamlet on the neighbouring
ridge.
Some would say that the mind in such hours grows dull, narrow, rustical,
and slow—“in the lonely vale of streams,” as Ossian sang, “abides the
narrow soul.” I hardly know, but I think it is the opposite: it is true
that one does not learn in such silent hours the deft trick of speech,
the easy flow of humorous thoughts, the tinkling interchange of the
mind; but there creeps over the spirit something of the coolness of
the pasture, the tranquillity of green copses, and the contentment of
the lazy stream. I think that, undiluted, such days might foster the
elementary brutishness of the spirit, and that just as rhododendrons
degenerate, if untended, to the primal magenta type, so one might revert
by slow degrees to the animal which lies not far below the civilised
surface. But there is no danger in my own life that I should have too
much of such reverie; indeed, I have to scheme a little for it; and it
is to me a bath of peace, a plunge into the quiet waters of nature, a
refreshing return to the untroubled and gentle spirit of the earth.
The only thing to fear in such rides as these, is if some ugly or sordid
thought, some muddy difficulty, some tangled dilemma is stuck like a
burr on the mind; then indeed such hours are of little use, if they
be not positively harmful. The mind (at least my mind) has a way of
arranging matters in solitude so as to be as little hopeful, as little
kindly as possible; the fretted spirit brews its venom, practises for
odious repartees, plans devilish questions, and rehearses the mean drama
over and over. At such hours I feel indeed like Sinbad, with the lithe
legs and skinny arms of the Old Man of the Sea twined round his neck.
But the mood changes—an interesting letter, a sunshiny day, a pleasant
visitor—any of these raises the spirit out of the mire, and restores
me to myself; and I resume my accustomed tranquillity all the more
sedulously for having had a dip in the tonic tide of depression.
25
_June 6, 1892._
I have often thought what a lightening of the load of life it would be
if we could arrive at greater simplicity and directness in our social
dealings with others. Of course the first difficulty to triumph over is
the physical difficulty of simple shyness, which so often paralyses men
and women in the presence of a stranger. But how instantly and perfectly
a natural person evokes naturalness in others. This naturalness is hardly
to be achieved without a certain healthy egotism. It by no means produces
naturalness in others to begin operations by questioning people about
themselves. But if one person begins to talk easily and frankly about
his own interests, others insensibly follow suit by a kind of simple
imitativeness. And if the inspirer of this naturalness is not a profound
egotist, if he is really interested in other people, if he can waive his
own claims to attention, the difficulty is overcome.
[Sidenote: THE CONVEYANCER]
The other day I was bicycling, and on turning out of Spyfield, where I
had been doing some business, I observed another bicyclist a little ahead
of me. He was a tall thin man, with a loose white hat, and he rode with
a certain fantastic childish zest which attracted my attention. If there
was a little upward slope in the road, he tacked extravagantly from side
to side, and seemed to be encouraging himself by murmured exhortations.
He had a word for every one he passed. I rode for about half a mile
behind him, and he at last dismounted at the foot of a steep slope that
leads up to a place called Gallows Hill. He stopped half-way up the
hill to study a map, and as I passed him wheeling my bicycle, he called
cheerily to me to ask how far it was to a neighbouring village. I told
him to the best of my ability, whereupon he said, “Oh no, I am sure you
are wrong; it must be twice that distance!” I was for an instant somewhat
nettled, feeling that if he knew the distance, his question had a certain
wantonness. So I said, “Well, I have lived here for twenty years and know
all the roads very well.” The stranger touched his hat and said, “I am
sure I apologise with all my heart; I ought not to have spoken as I did.”
Examining him at my leisure I saw him to be a tall, lean man, with rather
exaggerated features. He had a big, thin head, a long, pointed nose, a
mobile and smiling mouth, large dark eyes, and full side-whiskers. I took
him at once for a professional man of some kind, solicitor, schoolmaster,
or even a clergyman, though his attire was not clerical. “Here,” he said,
“just take the end of this map and let us consult together.” I did as
I was desired, and he pointed out the way he meant to take. “Now,” he
said, “there is a train there in an hour, and I want to arrive there
_easily_—mind you, not _hot_; that is so uncomfortable.” I told him that
if he knew the road, which was a complicated one, he could probably just
do it in the time; but I added that I was myself going to pass a station
on the line, where he might catch the same train nearer town. He looked
at me with a certain slyness. “Are you certain of that?” he cried; “I
have all the trains at my fingers’ ends.” I assured him it was so, while
he consulted a time-table. “Right!” he said, “you are right, but _all_
the trains do not stop there; it is not a deduction that you can draw
from the fact of _one_ stopping at the _other_ station.” We walked up
to the top of the hill together, and I proposed that we should ride in
company. He accepted with alacrity. “Nothing I should like better!” As
we got on to our bicycles his foot slipped. “You will notice,” he said,
“that these are new boots—of a good pattern—but somewhat smooth on the
sole; in fact they slip.” I replied that it was a good thing to scratch
new boots on the sole, so as to roughen them before riding. “A capital
idea!” he said delightedly; “I shall do it the moment I return, with a
pair of nail-scissors, _closed_, mind you, to prevent my straining either
blade.” We then rode off, and after a few yards he said, “Now, this is
not my usual pace—rather faster than I can go with comfort.” I begged him
to take his own pace, and he then began to talk of the country. “Pent up
in my chambers,” he said—“I am a conveyancer, you must know—I long for a
green lane and a row of elms. I have lived for years in town, in a most
convenient street, I must tell you, but I sicken for the country; and now
that I am in easier circumstances—I have lived a _hard_ life, mind you—I
am going to make the great change, and live in the country. Now, what is
your opinion of the relative merits of town and country as a place of
residence?” I told him that the only disadvantage of the country to my
mind was the difficulty of servants. “Right again!” he said, as if I had
answered a riddle. “But I have overcome that; I have been educating a
pair of good maids for years—they are paragons, and they will go anywhere
with me; indeed, they prefer the country themselves.”
In such light talk we beguiled the way; too soon we came to where our
roads divided; I pointed out to him the turn he was to take. “Well,” he
said cheerily, “all pleasant things come to an end. I confess that I
have enjoyed your company, and am grateful for your kind communications;
perhaps we may have another encounter, and if not, we will be glad to
have met, and think sometimes of this pleasant hour!” He put his foot
upon the step of his bicycle cautiously, then mounted gleefully, and
saying “Good-bye, good-bye!” he waved his hand, and in a moment was out
of sight.
The thought of this brave and merry spirit planning schemes of life,
making the most of simple pleasures, has always dwelt with me. The
gods, as we know from Homer, assumed the forms of men, and were at the
pains to relate long and wholly unreliable stories to account for their
presence at particular times and places; and I have sometimes wondered
whether in the lean conveyancer, with his childlike zest for experience,
his brisk enjoyment of the smallest details of daily life, I did not
entertain some genial, masquerading angel unawares.
26
_June 8, 1893._
Is it not the experience of every one that at rare intervals, by some
happy accident, life presents one with a sudden and delicious thrill of
beauty? I have often tried to analyse the constituent elements of these
moments, but the essence is subtle and defies detection. They cannot
be calculated upon, or produced by any amount of volition or previous
preparation. One thing about these tiny ecstasies I have noticed—they
do not come as a rule when one is tranquil, healthy, serene—they rather
come as a compensation for weariness and discontent; and yet they are the
purest gold of life, and a good deal of sand is well worth washing for a
pellet or two of the real metal.
To-day I was more than usually impatient; over me all the week had hung
the shadow of some trying, difficult business—the sort of business which,
whatever you do, will be done to nobody’s satisfaction. After a vain
attempt to wrestle with it, I gave it up, and went out on a bicycle;
the wind blew gently and steadily this soft June day; all the blue sky
was filled with large white clouds, blackening to rain. I made for the
one piece of flat ground in our neighbourhood. It is tranquillising, I
have often found, to the dweller in a hilly land, to cool and sober the
eye occasionally with the pure breadths of a level plain. The grass was
thick and heavy-headed in the fields, but of mere wantonness I turned
down a lane which I know has no ending,—a mere relief-road for carts to
have access to a farm,—and soon came to the end of it in a small grassy
circle, with a cottage or two, where a footpath strikes off across the
fields.
[Sidenote: HERETOFORE UNVISITED]
Why did I never come here before, I thought. Through a gap in the
hedge I saw a large broad pasture, fringed in the far distance with
full-foliaged, rotund elms in thick leaf; a row of willows on the horizon
marked the track of a stream. In the pasture in front of me was a broad
oblong pool of water with water-lilies; down one side ran a row of huge
horse-chestnuts, and the end was rich in elders full of flat white cakes
of blossom. In the field grazed an old horse; while a pigeon sailed
lazily down from the trees and ran to the pool to drink. That was all
there was to see. But it brought me with a deep and inexplicable thrill
close to the heart of the old, kindly, patient Earth, the mother and the
mistress and the servant of all—she who allows us to tear and rend her
for our own paltry ends, and then sets, how sweetly and tranquilly, to
work, with what a sense of inexhaustible leisure, to paint and mellow
and adorn the rude and bleeding gaps. We tear up a copse, and she fills
the ugly scars in the spring with a crop of fresh flowers—of flowers,
perhaps, which are not seen in the neighbourhood, but whose seeds have
lain vital and moist in the ground, but too deep to know the impulse
born of the spring sun. Yet now they burst their armoured mail, and send
a thin, white, worm-like arm to the top, which, as soon as it passes
into the light, drinks from the rays the green flush that it chooses to
hide its nakedness. We dig a pool in the crumbling marl. At the time the
wound seems irreparable; the ugly, slobbered banks grin at us like death;
the ground is full of footprints and slime, broken roots and bedabbled
leaves,—and next year it is all a paradise of green and luscious
water-plants, with a hundred quiet lives being lived there, of snail and
worm and beetle, as though the place had never been disturbed. We build
a raw red house with an insupportably geometrical outline, the hue of
the vicious fire still in the bricks; pass fifty years, and the bricks
are mellow and soft, plastered with orange rosettes or grey filaments of
lichen; the ugly window frames are blistered and warped; the roof has
taken a soft and yielding outline—all is in peace and harmony with the
green world in which it sits.
[Sidenote: THE REPAIRER OF THE BREACH]
I never saw this more beautifully illustrated than once, when a great
house in Whitehall was destroyed, and heaped up in a hideous rockery of
bricks. All through the winter these raw ruins, partly concealed by a
rough hoarding, tainted the view; but as soon as spring returned, from
every inch of grit rose a forest of green stalks of willow-herb, each in
summer to be crowned with a spire of fantastic crimson flowers, and to
pass a little later into those graceful, ghostly husks that shiver in
the wind. Centuries must have passed since willow-herb had grown on that
spot. Had they laid dormant, these hopeful seeds, or had they been wafted
along dusty streets and high in air over sun-scorched spaces? Nature at
all events had seen her chance, and done her work patiently and wisely
as ever.
But to return to my lane-end. How strange and deep are the impressions
of a deep and inviolate peace that some quiet corner like this gives to
the restless spirit! It can never be so with the scenes that have grown
familiar, where we have carried about with us the burden of private
cares—the symptoms of the disease of life. In any house where we have
lived, every corner, however peaceful and beautiful in itself, is bound
to be gradually soaked, as it were, in the miseries of life, to conceal
its beauties under the accretion of sordid associations.
This room we connect with some sad misunderstanding. There we gave way to
some petty passion of resentment, of jealousy, of irritation, or vainly
tried to pacify some similar outbreak from one we loved. This is the
torture of imagination; to feel the beauty of sight and sound, we must be
sensitive; and if we are sensitive, we carry about the shadow with us—the
capacity for self-torment, the struggle of the ideal with the passing
mood.
[Sidenote: SAD ASSOCIATIONS]
I have sometimes climbed to the top of a hill and looked into some
unknown and placid valley, with field and wood and rivulet and the homes
of men. I have seen the figures of men and oxen move sedately about
those quiet fields. Often, too, gliding at evening in a train through a
pastoral country when the setting sun bathes all things in genial light
and contented shade, I have felt the same thought. “How peaceful, how
simple life would be, nay, must be, here.” Only very gradually, as life
goes on, does it dawn upon the soul that the trouble lies deeper, and
that though surrounded by the most unimagined peace, the same fret, the
same beating of restless wings, the same delays attend. That dreamt-of
peace can hardly be attained. The most we can do is to enjoy it to the
utmost when it is with us; and when it takes its flight, and leaves us
dumb, discontented, peevish, to quench the sordid thought in resolute
_silence_, to curb the grating mood, to battle mutely with the cowering
fear; and so to escape investing the house and the garden that we love
with the poisonous and bitter associations that strike the beauty out of
the fairest scene.
27
_September 20, 1894._
I had to-day a strange little instance of the patient, immutable habit of
nature. Some years ago there was a particular walk of which I was fond;
it led through pastures, by shady wood-ends, and came out eventually on a
bridge that spanned the line. Here I often went to see a certain express
pass; there was something thrilling in the silent cutting, the beckoning,
ghostly arm of the high signal, the faint far-off murmur, and then the
roar of the great train forging past. It was a breath from the world.
[Sidenote: THE RED SPIDER]
On the parapet of the bridge, grey with close-grained lichen, there
lived a numerous colony of little crimson spiders. What they did I
never could discern; they wandered aimlessly about hither and thither,
in a sort of feeble, blind haste; if they ever encountered each other
on their rambles, they stopped, twiddled horns, and fled in a sudden
horror; they never seemed to eat or sleep, and even continued their
endless peregrinations in the middle of heavy showers, which flicked them
quivering to death.
I used to amuse myself with thinking how one had but to alter the scale,
so to speak, and what appalling, intolerable monsters these would become.
Think of it! huge crimson shapeless masses, with strong wiry legs, and
waving mandibles, tramping silently over the grey veldt, and perhaps
preying on minute luckless insects, which would flee before them in vain.
One day I walked on ahead, leaving a companion to follow. He did follow,
and joined me on the bridge—bringing heavy tidings which had just arrived
after I left home.
The place grew to me so inseparably connected with the horror of the news
that I instinctively abandoned it; but to-day, finding myself close to
the place—nearly ten years had passed without my visiting it—I turned
aside, musing on the old sadness, with something in my heart of the soft
regret that a sorrow wears when seen through the haze of years.
There was the place, just the same; I bent to see a passing train and (I
had forgotten all about them) there were my red spiders still pursuing
their aimless perambulations. But who can tell the dynasties, the
genealogies that had bridged the interval?
The red spider has no great use in the world, as far as I know. But he
has every right to be there, and to enjoy the sun falling so warm on the
stone. I wonder what he thinks about it all? For me, he has become the
type of the patient, pretty fancies of nature, so persistently pursued,
so void of moral, so deliciously fantastic and useless—but after all,
what am I to talk of usefulness?
Spider and man, man and spider—and to the pitying, tender mind of God,
the brisk spider on his ledge, and the dull, wistful, middle-aged man who
loiters looking about him, wondering and waiting, are much the same. He
has a careful thought of each, I know:—
To both alike the darkness and the day,
The sunshine and the flowers,
We draw sad comfort, thinking we obey
A deeper will than ours.
28
_August 4, 1895._
[Sidenote: THE DAWN]
Just another picture lingers with me, for no very defined reason. It was
an August night; I had gone to rest with the wind sighing and buffeting
against my windows, but when I awoke with a start, deep in the night,
roused, it seemed, as by footsteps in the air and a sudden hollow
calling of airy voices, it was utterly still outside. I drew aside my
heavy tapestry curtain, and lo! it was the dawn. A faint upward gush of
lemon-coloured light edged the eastern hills. The air as I threw the
casement wide was unutterably sweet and cool. In the faint light, over
the roof of the great barn, I saw what I had seen a hundred times before,
a quiet wood-end, upon which the climbing hedges converge. But now it
seemed to lie there in a pure and silent dream, sleeping a light sleep,
waiting contentedly for the dawn and smiling softly to itself. Over the
fields lay little wreaths of mist, and beyond the wood, hills of faintest
blue, the hills of dreamland, where it seems as if no harsh wind could
blow or cold rain fall. I felt as though I stood to watch the stainless
slumber of one I loved, and was permitted by some happy and holy chance
to see for once the unuttered peace that earth enjoys in her lonely and
unwatched hours. Too often, alas! one carries into the fairest scenes a
turmoil of spirit, a clouded mind that breaks and mars the spell. But
here it was not so; I gazed upon the hushed eyes of the earth, and heard
her sleeping breath; and, as the height of blessing, I seemed myself
to have left for a moment the past behind, to have no overshadowing
from the future, but to live only in the inviolate moment, clear-eyed
and clean-hearted, to see the earth in her holiest and most secluded
sanctuary, unsuspicious and untroubled, bathed in the light and careless
slumber of eternal youth, in that delicious oblivion that fences day from
weary day.