The west wind this morning had a rolling sonorousness which sent my
thoughts flying, swift as light, across all the little intervening
ridges, over the plains, over the villages, across endless housetops,
through multitudinous suburbs, over the big, ugly, stately town; out
again, over fresh sweeps of more or less encumbered green fields,
hedgerows, lanes, roads; past meadows and orchards, redolent of
centuries of care; past brickfields and coalfields, redolent only of
defiling greed; over a fretful space of sea; across more fields, less
enclosed, less cultivated, but certainly not less green. On and on
breathlessly, until I stood--free of all encumbrances, free of any
thought of luggage, conveyance, or the need of a roof to shelter
under--upon a very familiar spot, close to the tumbling breast of the
Atlantic.
The clearness, or lack of clearness, with which certain familiar spots
rise before the eye is one of the minor mysteries of life; mysteries
which like many larger ones we are never likely to clear up entirely to
our satisfaction. There are moments in my experience when such a spot as
this that I am thinking of, is in a sense _more_ vivid to me away from
it than if I were standing there in person; when every tuft of bog
myrtle becomes clearly visible; every yard of “drift” or of “boulder
clay” shows in its entirety; the very stones fallen from them, and lying
like small cannon-balls upon the beach, being all able to be counted.
The waves toss; the clouds roll wearily; the seaweed rises and falls, as
it naturally would. No scene in a cinematograph could by any possibility
be clearer.
This is the vivid condition. An hour later one tries to conjure up the
same familiar scene, and not a detail will rise to one’s bidding. Not a
leaf, not a stone, not a wave will become manifest. Clearness is gone. A
dull, blurred impression is all that remains. The landscape as a whole
may be there, but its details are lost. That living,
multitudinous-tinted foreground has vanished as though it had never
existed.
It must have been the scent of the bog plants which conferred that
momentary impression upon me this morning. That scents “open the wards
of memory with a key” we all know. They do more, for they sweep away for
the moment those films which ordinarily cover the mental eye, so that
during that moment we really do see. Of all scents commend me for this
awakening quality to the boggy ones. They alone in my experience are
really transformatory. For the brief time that their aroma is in one’s
nostrils one actually _is_ in the place that they recall.
It is a proof of the demoralising effect of ownership that one of my
first impulses nowadays is a desire to transfer the plants that I see,
sometimes that I merely remember, from where they are to where I happen
to want them. Yet, when one thinks of it, what an outrage! Why should
one desire to do anything of the sort? Conceive the contrast, the
downfall; the roominess, the elemental breadth, the cool, rain-saturated
comfort of the one setting; the cramped limitation, the unpalatable
dryness of the other. Not that I would for worlds disparage our own
faithful coppice; to do so would be to show myself the merest of
ingrates. Was I not an alien, and did it not befriend me? Was I not
roofless, and did it not offer its soil for us to lift a roof over?
Still, when one tries to place the one scene beside the other the
contrast becomes farcical. The very wind--the cold, unsentimental
wind--must be sensible of such a difference. How much more then a
root-extending, acutely sensitive, living thing!
I have a profound affection for bog plants, which I hope some of them
respond to, for they thrive fairly. Others are exceedingly difficult to
establish, and rarely look anything but starved and homesick. Amongst
these are the butterworts. Why the translation should so particularly
affect them I have yet to learn, but the fact is unmistakable. Not all
the water of all our taps, not all the peat of all our hillsides will
persuade them to be contented. In vain I have wooed them with the
wettest spots I could find; in vain erected poor semblances of tussocks
for their benefit; have puddled the peat till it seemed impossible that
any creature unprovided with eyes could distinguish it from a bit of
real bog. No, die they will, and die they hitherto always have.
The sundews, on the other hand, are much less hard to please. Indeed,
considering that at least one species grows wild within a few miles of
us, it would be the height of affectation were they to refuse to
tolerate us. I find myself falling into the habit of thinking that I am
inhabiting here a region of eternal thirstiness, devoid of the materials
of sustaining any vegetable more requiring in the matter of water than a
gaillardia. Yet, when one considers the matter seriously, England is not
precisely the Great Sahara! There are brown streams, purling brooks,
dripping wells, rushy meadows, even puddles and bog-holes, to be found a
good deal nearer to this spot than the Atlantic. We are purblind
citizens all of us; apt to dogmatise largely upon an uncommonly small
substratum of knowledge. Like the moles and the blindworms we know
remarkably well the few inches that we can actually feel and touch; but
with regard to what John Locke calls “the rest of the vast expansum,”
that we give up to fog and practical non-existence, thereby saving
ourselves from the trouble of knowing anything about it.