forced my way through a gentleman's grounds, I came out on the high
road, and sat down to rest myself on a heap of stones at the top of a
long hill, with Cockermouth lying snugly at the bottom. An Irish
beggar-woman, with a beautiful little girl by her side, came up to ask
for alms, and gradually fell to telling me the little tragedy of her
life. Her own sister, she told me, had seduced her husband from her
after many years of married life, and the pair had fled, leaving her
destitute, with the little girl upon her hands. She seemed quite hopeful
and cheery, and, though she was unaffectedly sorry for the loss of her
husband's earnings, she made no pretence of despair at the loss of his
affection; some day she would meet the fugitives, and the law would see
her duly righted, and in the meantime the smallest contribution was
gratefully received. While she was telling all this in the most
matter-of-fact way, I had been noticing the approach of a tall man, with
a high white hat and darkish clothes. He came up the hill at a rapid
pace, and joined our little group with a sort of half salutation.
Turning at once to the woman, he asked her in a business-like way
whether she had anything to do, whether she were a Catholic or a
Protestant, whether she could read, and so forth; and then, after a few
kind words and some sweeties to the child, he despatched the mother with
some tracts about Biddy and the Priest, and the Orangeman's Bible. I was
a little amused at his abrupt manner, for he was still a young man, and
had somewhat the air of a navy officer; but he tackled me with great
solemnity. I could make fun of what he said, for I do not think it was
very wise; but the subject does not appear to me just now in a jesting
light, so I shall only say that he related to me his own conversion,
which had been effected (as is very often the case) through the agency
of a gig accident, and that, after having examined me and diagnosed my
case, he selected some suitable tracts from his repertory, gave them to
me, and, bidding me God-speed, went on his way.
LAST OF SMETHURST
That evening I got into a third-class carriage on my way for Keswick,
and was followed almost immediately by a burly man in brown clothes.
This fellow-passenger was seemingly ill at ease, and kept continually
putting his head out of the window, and asking the bystanders if they
saw _him_ coming. At last, when the train was already in motion, there
was a commotion on the platform, and a way was left clear to our
carriage door. _He_ had arrived. In the hurry I could just see
Smethurst, red and panting, thrust a couple of clay pipes into my
companion's outstretched hand, and hear him crying his farewells after
us as we slipped out of the station at an ever accelerating pace. I said
something about its being a close run, and the broad man, already
engaged in filling one of the pipes, assented, and went on to tell me of
his own stupidity in forgetting a necessary, and of how his friend had
good-naturedly gone down town at the last moment to supply the omission.
I mentioned that I had seen Mr. Smethurst already, and that he had been
very polite to me; and we fell into a discussion of the hatter's merits
that lasted some time and left us quite good friends at its conclusion.
The topic was productive of goodwill. We exchanged tobacco and talked
about the season, and agreed at last that we should go to the same hotel
at Keswick and sup in company. As he had some business in the town which
would occupy him some hour or so, on our arrival I was to improve the
time and go down to the lake, that I might see a glimpse of the promised
wonders.
The night had fallen already when I reached the water-side, at a place
where many pleasure-boats are moored and ready for hire; and as I went
along a stony path, between wood and water, a strong wind blew in gusts
from the far end of the lake. The sky was covered with flying scud; and,
as this was ragged, there was quite a wild chase of shadow and
moon-glimpse over the surface of the shuddering water. I had to hold my
hat on, and was growing rather tired, and inclined to go back in
disgust, when a little incident occurred to break the tedium. A sudden
and violent squall of wind sundered the low underwood, and at the same
time there came one of those brief discharges of moonlight, which leaped
into the opening thus made, and showed me three girls in the prettiest
flutter and disorder. It was as though they had sprung out of the
ground. I accosted them very politely in my capacity of stranger, and
requested to be told the names of all manner of hills and woods and
places that I did not wish to know, and we stood together for a while
and had an amusing little talk. The wind, too, made himself of the
party, brought the colour into their faces, and gave them enough to do
to repress their drapery; and one of them, amid much giggling, had to
pirouette round and round upon her toes (as girls do) when some
specially strong gust had got the advantage over her. They were just
high enough up in the social order not to be afraid to speak to a
gentleman; and just low enough to feel a little tremor, a nervous
consciousness of wrong-doing--of stolen waters, that gave a considerable
zest to our most innocent interview. They were as much discomposed and
fluttered, indeed, as if I had been a wicked baron proposing to elope
with the whole trio; but they showed no inclination to go away, and I
had managed to get them off hills and waterfalls and on to more
promising subjects, when a young man was descried coming along the path
from the direction of Keswick. Now whether he was the young man of one
of my friends, or the brother of one of them, or indeed the brother of
all, I do not know; but they incontinently said that they must be going,
and went away up the path with friendly salutations. I need not say that
I found the lake and the moonlight rather dull after their departure and
speedily found my way back to potted herrings and whisky-and-water in
the commercial room with my late fellow-traveller. In the smoking-room
there was a tall dark man with a moustache, in an ulster coat, who had
got the best place and was monopolising most of the talk; and, as I came
in, a whisper came round to me from both sides, that this was the
manager of a London theatre. The presence of such a man was a great
event for Keswick, and I must own that the manager showed himself equal
to his position. He had a large fat pocket-book, from which he produced
poem after poem, written on the backs of letters or hotel-bills; and
nothing could be more humorous than his recitation of these elegant
extracts, except perhaps the anecdotes with which he varied the
entertainment. Seeing, I suppose, something less countrified in my
appearance than in most of the company, he singled me out to
corroborate some statements as to the depravity and vice of the
aristocracy, and when he went on to describe some gilded saloon
experiences, I am proud to say that he honoured my sagacity with one
little covert wink before a second time appealing to me for
confirmation. The wink was not thrown away; I went in up to the elbows
with the manager, until I think that some of the glory of that great man
settled by reflection upon me, and that I was as noticeably the second
person in the smoking-room as he was the first. For a young man, this
was a position of some distinction, I think you will admit....
III
ROADS
(1873)
No amateur will deny that he can find more pleasure in a single drawing,
over which he can sit a whole quiet forenoon, and so gradually study
himself into humour with the artist, than he can ever extract from the
dazzle and accumulation of incongruous impressions that send him, weary
and stupefied, out of some famous picture-gallery. But what is thus
admitted with regard to art is not extended to the (so-called) natural
beauties: no amount of excess in sublime mountain outline or the graces
of cultivated lowland can do anything, it is supposed, to weaken or
degrade the palate. We are not at all sure, however, that moderation,
and a regimen tolerably austere, even in scenery, are not healthful and
strengthening to the taste; and that the best school for a lover of
nature is not to be found in one of those countries where there is no
stage effect--nothing salient or sudden,--but a quiet spirit of orderly
and harmonious beauty pervades all the details, so that we can
patiently attend to each of the little touches that strike in us, all of
them together, the subdued note of the landscape. It is in scenery such
as this that we find ourselves in the right temper to seek out small
sequestered loveliness. The constant recurrence of similar combinations
of colour and outline gradually forces upon us a sense of how the
harmony has been built up, and we become familiar with something of
nature's mannerism. This is the true pleasure of your "rural
voluptuary,"--not to remain awe-stricken before a Mount Chimborazo; not
to sit deafened over the big drum in the orchestra, but day by day to
teach himself some new beauty--to experience some new vague and tranquil
sensation that has before evaded him. It is not the people who "have
pined and hungered after nature many a year, in the great city pent," as
Coleridge said in the poem that made Charles Lamb so much ashamed of
himself; it is not those who make the greatest progress in this intimacy
with her, or who are most quick to see and have the greatest gusto to
enjoy. In this, as in everything else, it is minute knowledge and
long-continued loving industry that make the true dilettante. A man must
have thought much over scenery before he begins fully to enjoy it. It is
no youngling enthusiasm on hill-tops that can possess itself of the last
essence of beauty. Probably most people's heads are growing bare before
they can see all in a landscape that they have the capability of seeing;
and, even then, it will be only for one little moment of consummation
before the faculties are again on the decline, and they that look out of
the windows begin to be darkened and restrained in sight. Thus the study
of nature should be carried forward thoroughly and with system. Every
gratification should be rolled long under the tongue, and we should be
always eager to analyse and compare, in order that we may be able to
give some plausible reason for our admirations. True, it is difficult to
put even approximately into words the kind of feelings thus called into
play. There is a dangerous vice inherent in any such intellectual
refining upon vague sensation. The analysis of such satisfactions lends
itself very readily to literary affectations; and we can all think of
instances where it has shown itself apt to exercise a morbid influence,
even upon an author's choice of language and the turn of his sentences.
And yet there is much that makes the attempt attractive; for any
expression, however imperfect, once given to a cherished feeling, seems
a sort of legitimation of the pleasure we take in it. A common sentiment
is one of those great goods that make life palatable and ever new. The
knowledge that another has felt as we have felt, and seen things, even
if they are little things, not much otherwise than we have seen them,
will continue to the end to be one of life's choicest pleasures.
Let the reader, then, betake himself in the spirit we have recommended
to some of the quieter kinds of English landscape. In those homely and
placid agricultural districts, familiarity will bring into relief many
things worthy of notice, and urge them pleasantly home to him by a sort
of loving repetition; such as the wonderful life-giving speed of
windmill sails above the stationary country; the occurrence and
recurrence of the same church tower at the end of one long vista after
another; and, conspicuous among these sources of quiet pleasure, the
character and variety of the road itself, along which he takes his way.
Not only near at hand, in the lithe contortions with which it adapts
itself to the interchanges of level and slope, but far away also, when
he sees a few hundred feet of it upheaved against a hill and shining in
the afternoon sun, he will find it an object so changeful and enlivening
that he can always pleasurably busy his mind about it. He may leave the
river-side, or fall out of the way of villages, but the road he has
always with him; and, in the true humour of observation, will find in
that sufficient company. From its subtle windings and changes of level
there arises a keen and continuous interest, that keeps the attention
ever alert and cheerful. Every sensitive adjustment to the contour of
the ground, every little dip and swerve, seems instinct with life and
an exquisite sense of balance and beauty. The road rolls upon the easy
slopes of the country, like a long ship in the hollows of the sea. The
very margins of waste ground, as they trench a little farther on the
beaten way, or recede again to the shelter of the hedge, have something
of the same free delicacy of line--of the same swing and wilfulness. You
might think for a whole summer's day (and not have thought it any nearer
an end by evening) what concourse and succession of circumstances has
produced the least of these deflections; and it is, perhaps, just in
this that we should look for the secret of their interest. A footpath
across a meadow--in all its human waywardness and unaccountability, in
all the _grata protervitas_ of its varying direction--will always be
more to us than a railroad well engineered through a difficult
country.[39] No reasoned sequence is thrust upon our attention: we seem
to have slipped for one lawless little moment out of the iron rule of
cause and effect; and so we revert at once to some of the pleasant old
heresies of personification, always poetically orthodox, and attribute a
sort of free will, an active and spontaneous life, to the white riband
of road that lengthens out, and bends, and cunningly adapts itself to
the inequalities of the land before our eyes. We remember, as we write,
some miles of fine wide highway laid out with conscious aesthetic
artifice through a broken and richly cultivated tract of country. It is
said that the engineer had Hogarth's line of beauty in his mind as he
laid them down. And the result is striking. One splendid satisfying
sweep passes with easy transition into another, and there is nothing to
trouble or dislocate the strong continuousness of the main line of the
road. And yet there is something wanting. There is here no saving
imperfection, none of these secondary curves and little trepidations of
direction that carry, in natural roads, our curiosity actively along
with them. One feels at once that this road has not grown like a natural
road, but has been laboriously made to pattern; and that, while a model
may be academically correct in outline, it will always be inanimate and
cold. The traveller is also aware of a sympathy of mood between himself
and the road he travels. We have all seen ways that have wandered into
heavy sand near the sea-coast, and trail wearily over the dunes like a
trodden serpent: here we too must plod forward at a dull, laborious
pace; and so a sympathy is preserved between our frame of mind and the
expression of the relaxed, heavy curves of the roadway. Such a
phenomenon, indeed, our reason might perhaps resolve with a little
trouble. We might reflect that the present road had been developed out
of a track spontaneously followed by generations of primitive wayfarers;
and might see in its expression a testimony that those generations had
been affected at the same ground, one after another, in the same manner
as we are affected to-day. Or we might carry the reflection further, and
remind ourselves that where the air is invigorating and the ground firm
under the traveller's foot, his eye is quick to take advantage of small
undulations, and he will turn carelessly aside from the direct way
wherever there is anything beautiful to examine or some promise of a
wider view; so that even a bush of wild roses may permanently bias and
deform the straight path over the meadow; whereas, where the soil is
heavy, one is preoccupied with the labour of mere progression, and goes
with a bowed head heavily and unobservantly forward. Reason, however,
will not carry us the whole way; for the sentiment often recurs in
situations where it is very hard to imagine any possible explanation;
and indeed, if we drive briskly along a good, well-made road in an open
vehicle, we shall experience this sympathy almost at its fullest. We
feel the sharp settle of the springs at some curiously twisted corner;
after a steep ascent, the fresh air dances in our faces as we rattle
precipitately down the other side, and we find It difficult to avoid
attributing something headlong, a sort of _abandon_, to the road itself.
The mere winding of the path is enough to enliven a long day's walk in
even a commonplace or dreary country-side. Something that we have seen
from miles back, upon an eminence, is so long hid from us, as we wander
through folded valleys or among woods, that our expectation of seeing it
again is sharpened into a violent appetite, and as we draw nearer we
impatiently quicken our steps and turn every corner with a beating
heart. It is through these prolongations of expectancy, this succession
of one hope to another, that we live out long seasons of pleasure in a
few hours' walk. It is in following these capricious sinuosities that we
learn, only bit by bit and through one coquettish reticence after
another, much as we learn the heart of a friend, the whole loveliness of
the country. This disposition always preserves something new to be seen,
and takes us, like a careful cicerone, to many different points of
distant view before it allows us finally to approach the hoped-for
destination.
In its connection with the traffic, and whole friendly intercourse with
the country, there is something very pleasant in that succession of
saunterers and brisk and business-like passers-by, that peoples our ways
and helps to build up what Walt Whitman calls "the cheerful voice of the
public road, the gay, fresh sentiment of the road." But out of the great
network of ways that binds all life together from the hill-farm to the
city, there is something individual to most, and, on the whole, nearly
as much choice on the score of company as on the score of beauty or easy
travel. On some we are never long without the sound of wheels, and folk
pass us by so thickly that we lose the sense of their number. But on
others, about little-frequented districts, a meeting is an affair of
moment; we have the sight far off of some one coming towards us, the
growing definiteness of the person, and then the brief passage and
salutation, and the road left empty in front of us for perhaps a great
while to come. Such encounters have a wistful interest that can hardly
be understood by the dweller in places more populous. We remember
standing beside a countryman once, in the mouth of a quiet by-street in
a city that was more than ordinarily crowded and bustling; he seemed
stunned and bewildered by the continual passage of different faces; and
after a long pause, during which he appeared to search for some suitable
expression, he said timidly that there seemed to be a _great deal of
meeting thereabouts_. The phrase is significant. It is the expression of
town-life in the language of the long, solitary country highways. A
meeting of one with one was what this man had been used to in the
pastoral uplands from which he came; and the concourse of the streets
was in his eyes only an extraordinary multiplication of such "meetings."
And now we come to that last and most subtle quality of all, to that
sense of prospect, of outlook, that is brought so powerfully to our
minds by a road. In real nature as well as in old landscapes, beneath
that impartial daylight in which a whole variegated plain is plunged and
saturated, the line of the road leads the eye forth with the vague sense
of desire up to the green limit of the horizon. Travel is brought home
to us, and we visit in spirit every grove and hamlet that tempts us in
the distance. _Sehnsucht_--the passion for what is ever beyond--is
livingly expressed in that white riband of possible travel that severs
the uneven country; not a ploughman following his plough up the shining
furrow, not the blue smoke of any cottage in a hollow, but is brought to
us with a sense of nearness and attainability by this wavering line of
junction. There is a passionate paragraph in Werther that strikes the
very key. "When I came hither," he writes, "how the beautiful valley
invited me on every side, as I gazed down into it from the hill-top!
There the wood--ah, that I might mingle in its shadows! there the
mountain summits--ah, that I might look down from them over the broad
country! the interlinked hills! the secret valleys! O, to lose myself
among their mysteries! I hurried into the midst, and came back without
finding aught I hoped for. Alas! the distance is like the future. A vast
whole lies in the twilight before our spirit; sight and feeling alike
plunge and lose themselves in the prospect, and we yearn to surrender
our whole being, and let it be filled full with all the rapture of one
single glorious sensation; and alas! when we hasten to the fruition,
when _there_ is changed to _here_, all is afterwards as it was before,
and we stand in our indigent and cramped estate, and our soul thirsts
after a still ebbing elixir." It is to this wandering and uneasy spirit
of anticipation that roads minister. Every little vista, every little
glimpse that we have of what lies before us, gives the impatient
imagination rein, so that it can outstrip the body and already plunge
into the shadow of the woods, and overlook from the hilltop the plain
beyond it, and wander in the windings of the valleys that are still far
in front. The road is already there--we shall not be long behind. It is
as if we were marching with the rear of a great army, and, from far
before, heard the acclamation of the people as the vanguard entered some
friendly and jubilant city. Would not every man, through all the long
miles of march, feel as if he also were within the gates?
FOOTNOTE:
[39] Compare Blake, in the "Marriage of Heaven and Hell": "Improvement
makes straight roads; but the crooked roads, without improvement,
are roads of Genius."
IV
NOTES ON THE MOVEMENTS OF YOUNG CHILDREN
(1874)
I wish to direct the reader's attention to a certain quality in the
movements of children when young, which is somehow lovable in them,
although it would be even unpleasant in any grown person. Their
movements are not graceful, but they fall short of grace by something so
sweetly humorous that we only admire them the more. The imperfection is
so pretty and pathetic, and it gives so great a promise of something
different in the future, that it attracts us more than many forms of
beauty. They have something of the merit of a rough sketch by a master,
in which we pardon what is wanting or excessive for the sake of the very
bluntness and directness of the thing. It gives us pleasure to see the
beginning of gracious impulses and the springs of harmonious movement
laid bare to us with innocent simplicity.