Yet even dull, and quite unfeathered bipeds have their glimmerings now
and then of sense, and of instinct. There are hours in which the great
Mother befriends them, as she does the rest of her two-legged,
four-legged, or many-legged offspring. That she should continue to do so
is I think amiable, and rather surprising on her part, when one
considers how they disobey and deride her; how they sit day after day in
stuffy rooms, eating dinners of many courses; hardly ever getting up to
see the sun rise, or doing any of the other things she directs, and
which her better-behaved scholars invariably do.
In spite of this, when the right winds blow, when the spring is afoot,
and the leaves are beginning to bud, she allows the old visions to
return to them. She brings back the old voices from the old haunts, to
whisper once more in their ears, so that for the moment they forget the
years that the locust has eaten, and their own incredible stupidities,
and all that has been, and time rolls itself up like a scroll, and they
are once again in very deed, though but for a little while, as they once
were.
There is a spot in a hill-wood barely a mile from this door, to which I
have been a good many times this spring, and which each time I go gives
me a curiously homely feeling. Ireland seems to breathe in it, even West
Ireland, though I can hardly say why, the only apparent reason being the
rather unpatriotic one that the fir trees, of which the wood consists,
have been sadly neglected. It covers an unusually steep bit of hillside,
and below expands into a tangle of brakes and brambles, circling about a
hollow place, which in my mind’s eye I conceive to be a boggy pool,
though, were I to clamber down to it, I should probably find it to be
dust-dry. Far and near not a roof is within sight, else were that
illusion for a certainty lost. Moreover, the only bit of distance
visible seems to be houseless also, and in these grey, rather
despondent-looking spring days wears just a touch of that wistful
indefiniteness, the lack of which, one is apt to assert, amongst many
beauties, to be England’s most conspicuous blemish.
Until the last great summons comes for us, we can never, happily,
entirely lose what has once formed a part of our little mental
patrimony. We may deliberately discard it, or, what oftener happens, it
may get unintentionally overlaid with other matters, so that it appears
to be gone, but a little search, or some happy accident, brings it
flying swiftly back, and the pleasure of that repossession is so great
that it seems almost worth while that the thing should have been
temporarily mislaid.
Of all such inalienable possessions the love of out-of-door life is
surely the most inalienable? And is it not profoundly natural that it
should be so? For this race, to which one belongs, was after all born
under an open sky, even though every individual of which it is composed
may have been born to-day under roofs. We do not any longer require the
comfort of sheltering boughs, nor yet to nestle at night in moss-lined
hollows, but the thought of such places still lurks in our blood, and
the life of out-of-doors remains as much a part of the natural
inheritance of a man, as it is a part of the inheritance of a fox, or of
a wood-pigeon, or of a tiger moth.
Back, back--like the touch of half-forgotten greetings--comes a flood of
remembrances to the heart. Back flows the old stream along its old
channels. No longer tearing along with a wild tumultuous rush, but still
sweeping by, full and clear, with a pleasant afternoon patter, and
showing many an unlooked-for nook, many a forgotten corner along its
banks, once we surrender ourselves frankly to its guidance. Back the
scenes return; ever back and back; now vividly; now with a dream-like
vagueness; scenes, some of them, that we have ourselves known, others to
which we have only as it were a communal right. Waking hours under the
flickering shade of leaves; life as it was lived in a larger, freer
world; a world without walls or hedgerows; without sign-posts, or
notice-boards; a world without towns, or smoke; without dust, or crowds.
It has been often debated, and not perhaps very profitably, which of two
types of men see deepest into that great arcanum of life which we
roughly call Nature. Is it the Man of Science, whose business it is to
chronicle what he sees and learns, but who must never travel half an
inch beyond his brief? who must cling to fact, as the samphire-picker
clings to his rope, and never for an instant relax his hold of it? Or is
it on the other hand the Singer, who is only too ready to toss all fact
to the winds, and to account it mere dust, and dregs and dross, so he
can awaken in himself, and pass on to others, some hint, some passing
impression, of what he would probably himself call the soul of things?
Time was when the barrier between these two types was held to be an
absolutely impassable one. We call ours a prosaic age, but it is
certainly one of its better points, and a mitigation of that prose, that
those barriers hardly appear to us so absolutely impregnable as they
once were. If we have never seen a great scientist combined with a
great poet it is at least not inconceivable that the world may some day
behold such a combination. Even within the generation just over, and in
utilitarian England, there have been one or two men who have given us at
all events an inkling of so desirable a possibility.
Given a mind that can feed on knowledge, without becoming surfeited by
it; a mind to which it has become so familiar that it has grown to be as
it were organic; a mind for which facts are no longer heavy, but light,
so that it can play with them, as an athlete plays with his iron balls,
and send them flying aloft, like birds through the air. Given such a
mind, so fed by knowledge, so constituted by nature, and it is not easy
to see limits to the realms of thought and of discovery, to the feats of
reconstruction, still more perhaps to the feats of reconciliation, which
may not, some day or other, be open to it.