Primitive and essential things have great power to touch the heart of
the beholder. I mean such things as a man ploughing a field, or sowing
or reaping; a girl filling a pitcher from a spring; a young mother with
her child; a fisherman mending his nets; a light from a lonely hut on a
dark night.
Things such as these are the best themes for poets and painters, and
appeal to aught that there may be of painter or poet in any one of
us. Strictly, they are not so old as the hills, but they are more
significant and eloquent than hills. Hills will outlast them; but hills
glacially surviving the life of man on this planet are of as little
account as hills tremulous and hot in ages before the life of man had
its beginning. Nature is interesting only because of us. And the
best symbols of us are such sights as I have just mentioned--sights
unalterable by fashion of time or place, sights that in all countries
always were and never will not be.
It is true that in many districts nowadays there are elaborate new kinds
of machinery for ploughing the fields and reaping the corn. In the most
progressive districts of all, I daresay, the very sowing of the grain is
done by means of some engine, with better results than could be got by
hand. For aught I know, there is a patented invention for catching fish
by electricity. It is natural that we should, in some degree, pride
ourselves on such triumphs. It is well that we should have poems about
them, and pictures of them. But such poems and pictures cannot touch our
hearts very deeply. They cannot stir in us the sense of our kinship with
the whole dim past and the whole dim future. The ancient Egyptians were
great at scientific dodges--very great indeed, nearly as great as we,
the archaeologists tell us. Sand buried the memory of those dodges for
a rather long time. How are we to know that the glories of our present
civilisation will never be lost? The world’s coal-mines and oil-fields
are exhaustible; and it is not, I am told, by any means certain that
scientists will discover any good substitutes for the materials which
are necessary to mankind’s present pitch of glory. Mankind may, I infer,
have to sink back into slow and simple ways, continent be once more
separated from continent, nation from nation, village from village. And,
even supposing that the present rate of traction and communication and
all the rest of it can forever be maintained, is our modern way of life
so great a success that mankind will surely never be willing to let it
lapse? Doubtless, that present rate can be not only maintained, but also
accelerated immensely, in the near future. Will these greater glories
be voted, even by the biggest fools, an improvement? We smile already at
the people of the early nineteenth century who thought that the vistas
opened by applied science were very heavenly. We have travelled far
along those vistas. Light is not abundant in them, is it? We are proud
of having gone such a long way, but...peradventure, those who come
after us will turn back, sooner or later, of their own accord. This is
a humbling thought. If the wonders of our civilisation are doomed, we
should prefer them to cease through lack of the minerals and mineral
products that keep them going. Possibly they are not doomed at all. But
this chance counts for little as against the certainty that, whatever
happens, the primitive and essential things will never, anywhere, wholly
cease, while mankind lasts. And thus it is that Brown’s Ode to the Steam
Plough, Jones’ Sonnet Sequence on the Automatic Reaping Machine, and
Robinson’s Epic of the Piscicidal Dynamo, leave unstirred the deeper
depths of emotion in us. The subjects chosen by these three great poets
do not much impress us when we regard them sub specie aeternitatis.
Smith has painted nothing more masterly than his picture of a girl
turning a hot-water tap. But has he never seen a girl fill a pitcher
from a spring? Smithers’ picture of a young mother seconding a
resolution at a meeting of a Board of Guardians is magnificent, as
brushwork. But why not have cut out the Board and put in the baby? I
yield to no one in admiration of Smithkins’ ‘Facade of the Waldorf Hotel
by Night, in Peace Time.’ But a single light from a lonely hut would
have been a finer theme.
I should like to show Smithkins the thing that I call The Golden
Drugget. Or rather, as this thing is greatly romantic to me, and that
painter is so unfortunate in his surname, I should like Smithkins to
find it for himself.
These words are written in war time and in England. There are, I hear,
‘lighting restrictions’ even on the far Riviera di Levante. I take it
that the Golden Drugget is not outspread now-anights across the high
dark coast-road between Rapallo and Zoagli. But the lonely wayside inn
is still there, doubtless; and its narrow door will again stand open,
giving out for wayfarers its old span of brightness into darkness, when
peace comes.
It is nothing by daylight, that inn. If anything, it is rather an
offence. Steep behind it rise mountains that are grey all over with
olive trees, and beneath it, on the other side of the road, the cliff
falls sheer to the sea. The road is white, the sea and sky are usually
of a deep bright blue, there are many single cypresses among the olives.
It is a scene of good colour and noble form. It is a gay and a grand
scene, in which the inn, though unassuming, is unpleasing, if you pay
attention to it. An ugly little box-like inn. A stuffy-looking and
uninviting inn. Salt and tobacco, it announces in faint letters above
the door, may be bought there. But one would prefer to buy these things
elsewhere. There is a bench outside, and a rickety table with a zinc top
to it, and sometimes a peasant or two drinking a glass or two of wine.
The proprietress is very unkempt. To Don Quixote she would have seemed a
princess, and the inn a castle, and the peasants notable magicians. Don
Quixote would have paused here and done something. Not so do I.
By daylight, on the way down from my little home to Rapallo, or up from
Rapallo home, I am indeed hardly conscious that this inn exists. By
moonlight, too, it is negligible. Stars are rather unbecoming to it. But
on a thoroughly dark night, when it is manifest as nothing but a strip
of yellow light cast across the road from an ever-open door, great
always is its magic for me. Is? I mean was. But then, I mean also will
be. And so I cleave to the present tense--the nostalgic present, as
grammarians might call it.
Likewise, when I say that thoroughly dark nights are rare here, I mean
that they are rare in the Gulf of Genoa. Clouds do not seem to like
our landscape. But it has often struck me that Italian nights, whenever
clouds do congregate, are somehow as much darker than English nights as
Italian days are brighter than days in England. They have a heavier and
thicker nigritude. They shut things out from you more impenetrably. They
enclose you as in a small pavilion of black velvet. This tenement is not
very comfortable in a strong gale. It makes you feel rather helpless.
And gales can be strong enough, in the late autumn, on the Riviera di
Levante.
It is on nights when the wind blows its hardest, but makes no rift
anywhere for a star to peep through, that the Golden Drugget, as I
approach it, gladdens my heart the most. The distance between Rapallo
and my home up yonder is rather more than two miles. The road curves and
zigzags sharply, for the most part; but at the end of the first mile it
runs straight for three or four hundred yards; and, as the inn stands at
a point midway on this straight course, the Golden Drugget is visible to
me long before I come to it. Even by starlight, it is good to see. How
much better, if I happen to be out on a black rough night when nothing
is disclosed but this one calm bright thing. Nothing? Well, there has
been descriable, all the way, a certain grey glimmer immediately in
front of my feet. This, in point of fact, is the road, and by following
it carefully I have managed to escape collision with trees, bushes,
stone walls. The continuous shrill wailing of trees’ branches writhing
unseen but near, and the great hoarse roar of the sea against the rocks
far down below, are no cheerful accompaniment for the buffeted pilgrim.
He feels that he is engaged in single combat with Nature at her
unfriendliest. He isn’t sure that she hasn’t supernatural allies working
with her--witches on broomsticks circling closely round him, demons in
pursuit of him or waiting to leap out on him. And how about mere robbers
and cutthroats? Suppose--but look! that streak, yonder, look!--the
Golden Drugget.
There it is, familiar, serene, festal. That the pilgrim knew he would
see it in due time does not diminish for him the queer joy of seeing
it; nay, this emotion would be far less without that foreknowledge. Some
things are best at first sight. Others--and here is one of them--do
ever improve by recognition. I remember that when first I beheld this
steady strip of light, shed forth over a threshold level with the road,
it seemed to me conceivably sinister. It brought Stevenson to my
mind: the chink of doubloons and the clash of cutlasses; and I think I
quickened pace as I passed it. But now!--now it inspires in me a sense
of deep trust and gratitude; and such awe as I have for it is altogether
a loving awe, as for holy ground that should he trod lightly. A drugget
of crimson cloth across a London pavement is rather resented by the
casual passer-by, as saying to him ‘Step across me, stranger, but not
along me, not in!’ and for answer he spurns it with his heel. ‘Stranger,
come in!’ is the clear message of the Golden Drugget. ‘This is but a
humble and earthly hostel, yet you will find here a radiant company of
angels and archangels.’ And always I cherish the belief that if I
obeyed the summons I should receive fulfilment of the promise. Well, the
beliefs that one most cherishes one is least willing to test. I do not
go in at that open door. But lingering, but reluctant, is my tread as I
pass by it; and I pause to bathe in the light that is as the span of our
human life, granted between one great darkness and another.