drawing-room of an hotel in France. One of the ladies led the ring, and
I can recall her as a model of accomplished, cultured movement. Two
little girls, about eight years old, were the pupils; that is an age of
great interest in girls, when natural grace comes to its consummation of
justice and purity, with little admixture of that other grace of
forethought and discipline that will shortly supersede it altogether. In
these two, particularly, the rhythm was sometimes broken by an excess of
energy, as though the pleasure of the music in their light bodies could
endure no longer the restraint of regulated dance. So that, between
these and the lady, there was not only some beginning of the very
contrast I wish to insist upon, but matter enough to set one thinking a
long while on the beauty of motion. I do not know that, here in England,
we have any good opportunity of seeing what that is; the generation of
British dancing men and women are certainly more remarkable for other
qualities than for grace: they are, many of them, very conscientious
artists, and give quite a serious regard to the technical parts of their
performance; but the spectacle, somehow, is not often beautiful, and
strikes no note of pleasure. If I had seen no more, therefore, this
evening might have remained in my memory as a rare experience. But the
best part of it was yet to come. For after the others had desisted, the
musician still continued to play, and a little button between two and
three years old came out into the cleared space and began to figure
before us as the music prompted. I had an opportunity of seeing her, not
on this night only, but on many subsequent nights; and the wonder and
comical admiration she inspired was only deepened as time went on. She
had an admirable musical ear; and each new melody, as it struck in her a
new humour, suggested wonderful combinations and variations of movement.
Now it would be a dance with which she would suit the music, now rather
an appropriate pantomime, and now a mere string of disconnected
attitudes. But whatever she did, she did it with the same verve and
gusto. The spirit of the air seemed to have entered into her, and to
possess her like a passion; and you could see her struggling to find
expression for the beauty that was in her against the inefficacy of the
dull, half-informed body. Though her footing was uneven, and her
gestures often ludicrously helpless, still the spectacle was not merely
amusing; and though subtle inspirations of movement miscarried in
tottering travesty, you could still see that they had been inspirations;
you could still see that she had set her heart on realising something
just and beautiful, and that, by the discipline of these abortive
efforts, she was making for herself in the future a quick, supple, and
obedient body. It was grace in the making. She was not to be daunted by
any merriment of people looking on critically; the music said something
to her, and her whole spirit was intent on what the music said: she must
carry out its suggestions, she must do her best to translate its
language into that other dialect of the modulated body into which it can
be translated most easily and fully.
Just the other day I was witness to a second scene, in which the motive
was something similar; only this time with quite common children, and in
the familiar neighbourhood of Hampstead. A little congregation had
formed itself in the lane underneath my window, and was busy over a
skipping-rope. There were two sisters, from seven to nine perhaps, with
dark faces and dark hair, and slim, lithe, little figures clad in lilac
frocks. The elder of these two was mistress of the art of skipping. She
was just and adroit in every movement; the rope passed over her black
head and under her scarlet-stockinged legs with a precision and
regularity that was like machinery; but there was nothing mechanical in
the infinite variety and sweetness of her inclinations, and the
spontaneous agile flexure of her lean waist and hips. There was one
variation favourite with her, in which she crossed her hands before her
with a motion not unlike that of weaving, which was admirably intricate
and complete. And when the two took the rope together and whirled in and
out with occasional interruptions, there was something Italian in the
type of both--in the length of nose, in the slimness and accuracy of the
shapes--and something gay and harmonious in the double movement, that
added to the whole scene a southern element, and took me over sea and
land into distant and beautiful places. Nor was this impression lessened
when the elder girl took in her arms a fair-headed baby, while the
others held the rope for her, turned and gyrated, and went in and out
over it lightly, with a quiet regularity that seemed as if it might go
on for ever. Somehow, incongruous as was the occupation, she reminded me
of Italian Madonnas. And now, as before in the hotel drawing-room, the
humorous element was to be introduced; only this time it was in broad
farce. The funniest little girl, with a mottled complexion and a big,
damaged nose, and looking for all the world like any dirty, broken-nosed
doll in a nursery lumber-room, came forward to take her turn. While the
others swung the rope for her as gently as it could be done--a mere
mockery of movement--and playfully taunted her timidity, she passaged
backwards and forwards in a pretty flutter of indecision, putting up her
shoulders and laughing with the embarrassed laughter of children by the
water's edge, eager to bathe and yet fearful. There never was anything
at once so droll and so pathetic. One did not know whether to laugh or
to cry. And when at last she had made an end of all her deprecations and
drawings back, and summoned up heart enough to straddle over the rope,
one leg at a time, it was a sight to see her ruffle herself up like a
peacock and go away down the lane with her damaged nose, seeming to
think discretion the better part of valour, and rather uneasy lest they
should ask her to repeat the exploit. Much as I had enjoyed the grace of
the older girls, it was now just as it had been before in France, and
the clumsiness of the child seemed to have a significance and a sort of
beauty of its own, quite above this grace of the others in power to
affect the heart. I had looked on with a certain sense of balance and
completion at the silent, rapid, masterly evolutions of the eldest; I
had been pleased by these in the way of satisfaction. But when little
broken-nose began her pantomime of indecision I grew excited. There was
something quite fresh and poignant in the delight I took in her
imperfect movements. I remember, for instance, that I moved my own
shoulders, as if to imitate her; really, I suppose, with an inarticulate
wish to help her out.
Now, there are many reasons why this gracelessness of young children
should be pretty and sympathetic to us. And, first, there is an interest
as of battle. It is in travail and laughable _fiasco_ that the young
school their bodies to beautiful expression, as they school their minds.
We seem, in watching them, to divine antagonists pitted one against the
other; and, as in other wars, so in this war of the intelligence against
the unwilling body, we do not wish to see even the cause of progress
triumph without some honourable toil; and we are so sure of the ultimate
result, that it pleases us to linger in pathetic sympathy over these
reverses of the early campaign, just as we do over the troubles that
environ the heroine of a novel on her way to the happy ending. Again,
people are very ready to disown the pleasure they take in a thing
merely because it is big, as an Alp, or merely because it is little, as
a little child; and yet this pleasure is surely as legitimate as
another. There is much of it here; we have an irrational indulgence for
small folk; we ask but little where there is so little to ask it of; we
cannot overcome our astonishment that they should be able to move at
all, and are interested in their movements somewhat as we are interested
in the movements of a puppet. And again, there is a prolongation of
expectancy when, as in these movements of children, we are kept
continually on the very point of attainment and ever turned away and
tantalised by some humorous imperfection. This is altogether absent in
the secure and accomplished movements of persons more fully grown. The
tight-rope walker does not walk so freely or so well as any one else can
walk upon a good road; and yet we like to watch him for the mere sake of
the difficulty; we like to see his vacillations; we like this last so
much even, that I am told a really artistic tight-rope walker must feign
to be troubled in his balance, even if he is not so really. And again,
we have in these baby efforts an assurance of spontaneity that we do not
have often. We know this at least certainly, that the child tries to
dance for its own pleasure, and not for any by-end of ostentation and
conformity. If we did not know it we should see it. There is a
sincerity, a directness, an impulsive truth, about their free gestures
that shows throughout all imperfection, and it is to us as a
reminiscence of primitive festivals and the Golden Age. Lastly, there is
in the sentiment much of a simple human compassion for creatures more
helpless than ourselves. One nearly ready to die is pathetic; and so is
one scarcely ready to live. In view of their future, our heart is
softened to these clumsy little ones. They will be more adroit when they
are not so happy.
Unfortunately, then, this character that so much delights us is not one
that can be preserved by any plastic art. It turns, as we have seen,
upon consideration not really aesthetic. Art may deal with the slim
freedom of a few years later; but with this fettered impulse, with these
stammering motions, she is powerless to do more than stereotype what is
ungraceful, and, in the doing of it, lose all pathos and humanity. So
these humorous little ones must go away into the limbo of beautiful
things that are not beautiful for art, there to wait a more perfect age
before they sit for their portraits.
V
ON THE ENJOYMENT OF UNPLEASANT PLACES
(1874)
It is a difficult matter to make the most of any given place, and we
have much in our own power. Things looked at patiently from one side
after another generally end by showing a side that is beautiful. A few
months ago some words were said in the _Portfolio_ as to an "austere
regimen in scenery"; and such a discipline was then recommended as
"healthful and strengthening to the taste." That is the test, so to
speak, of the present essay. This discipline in scenery, it must be
understood, is something more than a mere walk before breakfast to whet
the appetite. For when we are put down in some unsightly neighbourhood,
and especially if we have come to be more or less dependent on what we
see, we must set ourselves to hunt out beautiful things with all the
ardour and patience of a botanist after a rare plant. Day by day we
perfect ourselves in the art of seeing nature more favourably. We learn
to live with her, as people learn to live with fretful or violent
spouses: to dwell lovingly on what is good, and shut our eyes against
all that is bleak or inharmonious. We learn, also, to come to each
place in the right spirit. The traveller, as Brantome quaintly tells us,
"_fait des discours en soi pour se soutenir en chemin_"; and into these
discourses he weaves something out of all that he sees and suffers by
the way; they take their tone greatly from the varying character of the
scene; a sharp ascent brings different thoughts from a level road; and
the man's fancies grow lighter as he comes out of the wood into a
clearing. Nor does the scenery any more affect the thoughts than the
thoughts affect the scenery. We see places through our humours as
through differently-coloured glasses. We are ourselves a term in the
equation, a note of the chord, and make discord or harmony almost at
will. There is no fear for the result, if we can but surrender ourselves
sufficiently to the country that surrounds and follows us, so that we
are ever thinking suitable thoughts or telling ourselves some suitable
sort of story as we go. We become thus, in some sense, a centre of
beauty; we are provocative of beauty, much as a gentle and sincere
character is provocative of sincerity and gentleness in others. And even
where there is no harmony to be elicited by the quickest and most
obedient of spirits, we may still embellish a place with some attraction
of romance. We may learn to go far afield for associations, and handle
them lightly when we have found them. Sometimes an old print comes to
our aid; I have seen many a spot lit up at once with picturesque
imaginations, by a reminiscence of Callot, or Sadeler, or Paul Brill.
Dick Turpin has been my lay figure for many an English lane. And I
suppose the Trossachs would hardly be the Trossachs for most tourists if
a man of admirable romantic instinct had not peopled it for them with
harmonious figures, and brought them thither with minds rightly prepared
for the impression. There is half the battle in this preparation. For
instance: I have rarely been able to visit, in the proper spirit, the
wild and inhospitable places of our own Highlands. I am happier where it
is tame and fertile, and not readily pleased without trees. I
understand that there are some phases of mental trouble that harmonise
well with such surroundings, and that some persons, by the dispensing
power of the imagination, can go back several centuries in spirit, and
put themselves into sympathy with the hunted, houseless, unsociable way
of life that was in its place upon these savage hills. Now, when I am
sad, I like nature to charm me out of my sadness, like David before
Saul; and the thought of these past ages strikes nothing in me but an
unpleasant pity; so that I can never hit on the right humour for this
sort of landscape, and lose much pleasure in consequence. Still, even
here, if I were only let alone, and time enough were given, I should
have all manner of pleasures, and take many clear and beautiful images
away with me when I left. When we cannot think ourselves into sympathy
with the great features of a country, we learn to ignore them, and put
our head among the grass for flowers, or pore, for long times together,
over the changeful current of a stream. We come down to the sermon in
stones, when we are shut out from any poem in the spread landscape. We
begin to peep and botanise, we take an interest in birds and insects, we
find many things beautiful in miniature. The reader will recollect the
little summer scene in "Wuthering Heights"--the one warm scene, perhaps,
in all that powerful, miserable novel--and the great feature that is
made therein by grasses and flowers and a little sunshine: this is in
the spirit of which I now speak. And, lastly, we can go indoors;
interiors are sometimes as beautiful, often more picturesque, than the
shows of the open air, and they have that quality of shelter of which I
shall presently have more to say.
With all this in mind, I have often been tempted to put forth the
paradox that any place is good enough to live a life in, while it is
only in a few, and those highly favoured, that we can pass a few hours
agreeably. For, if we only stay long enough, we become at home in the
neighbourhood. Reminiscences spring up, like flowers, about
uninteresting corners. We forget to some degree the superior loveliness
of other places, and fall into a tolerant and sympathetic spirit which
is its own reward and justification. Looking back the other day on some
recollections of my own, I was astonished to find how much I owed to
such a residence; six weeks in one unpleasant country-side had done
more, it seemed, to quicken and educate my sensibilities than many years
in places that jumped more nearly with my inclination.
The country to which I refer was a level and treeless plateau over which
the winds cut like a whip. For miles on miles it was the same. A river,
indeed, fell into the sea near the town where I resided; but the valley
of the river was shallow and bald, for as far up as ever I had the heart
to follow it. There were roads, certainly, but roads that had no beauty
or interest; for, as there was no timber, and but little irregularity of
surface, you saw your whole walk exposed to you from the beginning:
there was nothing left to fancy, nothing to expect, nothing to see by
the wayside, save here and there an unhomely-looking homestead, and here
and there a solitary, spectacled stone-breaker; and you were only
accompanied, as you went doggedly forward, by the gaunt telegraph-posts
and the hum of the resonant wires in the keen sea-wind. To one who had
learned to know their song in warm pleasant places by the Mediterranean,
it seemed to taunt the country, and make it still bleaker by suggested
contrast. Even the waste places by the side of the road were not, as
Hawthorne liked to put it, "taken back to Nature" by any decent covering
of vegetation. Wherever the land had the chance, it seemed to lie
fallow. There is a certain tawny nudity of the South, bare sun-burnt
plains, coloured like a lion, and hills clothed only in the blue
transparent air; but this was of another description--this was the
nakedness of the North; the earth seemed to know that it was naked, and
was ashamed and cold.
It seemed to be always blowing on that coast. Indeed, this had passed
into the speech of the inhabitants, and they saluted each other when
they met with "Breezy, breezy," instead of the customary "Fine day" of
farther south. These continual winds were not like the harvest breeze,
that just keeps an equable pressure against your face as you walk, and
serves to set all the trees talking over your head, or bring round you
the smell of the wet surface of the country after a shower. They were of
the bitter, hard, persistent sort, that interferes with sight and
respiration, and makes the eyes sore. Even such winds as these have
their own merit in proper time and place. It is pleasant to see them
brandish great masses of shadow. And what a power they have over the
colour of the world! How they ruffle the solid woodlands in their
passage, and make them shudder and whiten like a single willow! There is
nothing more vertiginous than a wind like this among the woods, with all
its sights and noises; and the effect gets between some painters and
their sober eyesight, so that, even when the rest of their picture is
calm, the foliage is coloured like foliage in a gale. There was nothing,
however, of this sort to be noticed in a country where there were no
trees and hardly any shadows, save the passive shadows of clouds or
those of rigid houses and walls. But the wind was nevertheless an
occasion of pleasure; for nowhere could you taste more fully the
pleasure of a sudden lull, or a place of opportune shelter. The reader
knows what I mean; he must remember how, when he has sat himself down
behind a dyke on a hill-side, he delighted to hear the wind hiss vainly
through the crannies at his back; how his body tingled all over with
warmth, and it began to dawn upon him, with a sort of slow surprise,
that the country was beautiful, the heather purple, and the far-away
hills all marbled with sun and shadow. Wordsworth, in a beautiful
passage of the "Prelude," has used this as a figure for the feeling
struck in us by the quiet by-streets of London after the uproar of the
great thoroughfares; and the comparison may be turned the other way with
as good effect:
"Meanwhile the roar continues, till at length,
Escaped as from an enemy, we turn
Abruptly into some sequester'd nook,
Still as a shelter'd place when winds blow loud!"
I remember meeting a man once, in a train, who told me of what must have
been quite the most perfect instance of this pleasure of escape. He had
gone up, one sunny, windy morning, to the top of a great cathedral
somewhere abroad; I think it was Cologne Cathedral, the great unfinished
marvel by the Rhine; and after a long while in dark stairways, he issued
at last into the sunshine, on a platform high above the town. At that
elevation it was quite still and warm; the gale was only in the lower
strata of the air, and he had forgotten it in the quiet interior of the
church and during his long ascent; and so you may judge of his surprise
when, resting his arms on the sunlit balustrade and looking over into
the "Place" far below him, he saw the good people holding on their hats
and leaning hard against the wind as they walked. There is something, to
my fancy, quite perfect in this little experience of my
fellow-traveller's. The ways of men seem always very trivial to us when
we find ourselves alone on a church top, with the blue sky and a few
tall pinnacles, and see far below us the steep roofs and foreshortened
buttresses, and the silent activity of the city streets; but how much
more must they not have seemed so to him as he stood, not only above
other men's business, but above other men's climate, in a golden zone
like Apollo's!
This was the sort of pleasure I found in the country of which I write.
The pleasure was to be out of the wind, and to keep it in memory all the
time, and hug oneself upon the shelter. And it was only by the sea that
any such sheltered places were to be found. Between the black worm-eaten
headlands there are little bights and havens, well screened from the
wind and the commotion of the external sea, where the sand and weeds
look up into the gazer's face from a depth of tranquil water, and the
sea-birds, screaming and flickering from the ruined crags, alone disturb
the silence and the sunshine. One such place has impressed itself on my
memory beyond all others. On a rock by the water's edge, old fighting
men of the Norse breed had planted a double castle; the two stood wall
to wall like semi-detached villas; and yet feud had run so high between
their owners, that one, from out of a window, shot the other as he stood
in his own doorway. There is something in the juxtaposition of these two
enemies full of tragic irony. It is grim to think of bearded men and
bitter women taking hateful counsel together about the two hall-fires at
night, when the sea boomed against the foundations and the wild winter
wind was loose over the battlements. And in the study we may reconstruct
for ourselves some pale figure of what life then was. Not so when we are
there; when we are there such thoughts come to us only to intensify a
contrary impression, and association is turned against itself. I
remember walking thither three afternoons in succession, my eyes weary
with being set against the wind, and how, dropping suddenly over the
edge of the down, I found myself in a new world of warmth and shelter.
The wind, from which I had escaped, "as from an enemy," was seemingly
quite local. It carried no clouds with it, and came from such a quarter
that it did not trouble the sea within view. The two castles, black and
ruinous as the rocks about them, were still distinguishable from these
by something more insecure and fantastic in the outline, something that
the last storm had left imminent and the next would demolish entirely.
It would be difficult to render in words the sense of peace that took
possession of me on these three afternoons. It was helped out, as I
have said, by the contrast. The shore was battered and bemauled by
previous tempests; I had the memory at heart of the insane strife of the
pigmies who had erected these two castles and lived in them in mutual
distrust and enmity, and knew I had only to put my head out of this
little cup of shelter to find the hard wind blowing in my eyes; and yet
there were the two great tracts of motionless blue air and peaceful sea
looking on, unconcerned and apart, at the turmoil of the present moment
and the memorials of the precarious past. There is ever something
transitory and fretful in the impression of a high wind under a
cloudless sky; it seems to have no root in the constitution of things;
it must speedily begin to faint and wither away like a cut flower. And
on those days the thought of the wind and the thought of human life came
very near together in my mind. Our noisy years did indeed seem moments
in the being of the eternal silence: and the wind, in the face of that
great field of stationary blue, was as the wind of a butterfly's wing.
The placidity of the sea was a thing likewise to be remembered. Shelley
speaks of the sea as "hungering for calm," and in this place one learned
to understand the phrase. Looking down into these green waters from the
broken edge of the rock, or swimming leisurely in the sunshine, it
seemed to me that they were enjoying their own tranquillity; and when
now and again it was disturbed by a wind ripple on the surface, or the
quick black passage of a fish far below, they settled back again (one
could fancy) with relief.
On shore too, in the little nook of shelter, everything was so subdued
and still that the least particular struck in me a pleasurable surprise.
The desultory crackling of the whin-pods in the afternoon sun usurped
the ear. The hot, sweet breath of the bank, that had been saturated all
day long with sunshine, and now exhaled it into my face, was like the
breath of a fellow-creature. I remember that I was haunted by two lines
of French verse; in some dumb way they seemed to fit my surroundings and
give expression to the contentment that was in me, and I kept repeating
to myself--
"Mon coeur est un luth suspendu;
Sitot qu'on le touche, il resonne."
I can give no reason why these lines came to me at this time; and for
that very cause I repeat them here. For all I know, they may serve to
complete the impression in the mind of the reader, as they were
certainly a part of it for me.
And this happened to me in the place of all others where I liked least
to stay. When I think of it I grow ashamed of my own ingratitude. "Out
of the strong came forth sweetness." There, in the bleak and gusty
North, I received, perhaps, my strongest impression of peace. I saw the
sea to be great and calm; and the earth, in that little corner, was all
alive and friendly to me. So, wherever a man is, he will find something
to please and pacify him: in the town he will meet pleasant faces of men
and women, and see beautiful flowers at a window, or hear a cage-bird
singing at the corner of the gloomiest street; and for the country,
there is no country without some amenity--let him only look for it in
the right spirit, and he will surely find.
VI
AN AUTUMN EFFECT
(1875)
"Nous ne decrivons jamais mieux la nature que lorsque nous nous
efforcons d'exprimer sobrement et simplement l'impression que nous en
avons recue."--M. ANDRE THEURIET, "L'Automne dans les Bois," _Revue
des Deux Mondes_, 1st Oct. 1874, p. 562.[40]