how difficult it is to say what one really feels about the landscapes and the countrysides and the subtle souls of europe! i think that all men who are of european blood feel those countrysides and the soul of them very strongly; but i think that they feel as i feel now, as i write, a difficulty of expression. there is something in it like the difficulty of approaching a personality. one may admire, or reverence, or even love, but the personality is different from one’s own; it has a chastity of its own that must be respected, it has its boundaries and its honour, and one always fears that one will transgress such boundaries if one so much as speaks of the new thing one has come upon and desired to describe.
with distant travel it is not so. one comes far over seas to a quite strange land and one treats it brutally. one’s appreciation is a sort of conquest; and you will note that those who speak of the colonies, or of america, or of africa, or of asia speak of them with a hard intolerance as of something quite alien, or with a conventional set of phrases, as of something not worth the real expression of emotion. now it is not so with our ancient provinces of europe.
[168]a man coming out of the cis-alpine gaul into old italy across the apennines feels something; indeed he feels it! what it is he feels very few men have written down; none has said it fully. you get out of one thing into something other when you climb up out of the valley of the parma and cross the high apennines and look southward into the happy garfagnana, and hear the noise of the little serchio beginning in its meads. in the same way no one has described (to my knowledge at least) that shock of desolation and yet of mystery which comes upon a man when he crosses the river couesnon and passes from normandy into brittany. normandy is rich, brittany is poor. normandy loves ritual, brittany religion. normandy can make things, brittany prayers. normandy lives by brittany in the matter of the soul, brittany not by normandy in the matter of the body. what norman ever gave a breton anything? you cross that river and everything changes. the men and women have dreamier eyes, the little children play more wonderfully, everybody is poor.
or, again, the passage from the hard industry of the lancashire plain suddenly on to the moors, where the farming men and women are so quiet and silent and self-respectful and seem so careful rather to preserve what they own than to add to it. or, again, the startling passage over carter fell from the englishmen of rede-dale to the scotchmen of jedburgh; or the sharp passage from the violent,[169] active, sceptical, cruel, courageous, well-fed, ironical burgundians into the gentle germans of the vosges: here is a boundary which is not marked in any political way, and yet how marked it is!
now in england we have many such approaches and surprises. i will not speak of that good change which comes upon a man as he travels south from victoria station and hears, almost at the same time that he first smells earth, the south country tongue; nor will i speak of that other change which perhaps some of my readers know very well, the change from the active and grasping cockney into the quiet tenacity of east anglia. it is not my province—but if i am not wrong one strikes it within half an hour in the fast expresses—these people push with quants, they sail in wherries, they inhabit flat tidal banks, they are at peace. nor will i here speak of the marches and how, between a village and a village, one changes from the common english parish with the squire’s house and the church and the cottages and all, into the hard slate roofs and the inner flame of wales. rather i would speak of something the boundary of which has never yet been laid down, but which people call (i think) “the west country.”
one never knows, when one is tackling a thing like this, where one should first begin to tackle it, or by what end one should take it. every man[170] according to his own study, every man according to his own bent or accident of experience, takes it by his own handle, and the one man speaks of the language, the other of the hills, another of the architecture, another of the names. for my part i would desire to speak of all.
when one gets over a certain boundary one is in a peculiar district of this world, a special countryside of europe, a happy land with a conviction and a tradition of its own which may not have a name, but which is in general the west country, and which by its hills and by its men and women convinces any true traveller at once of its personality. more than one man after a dreary wandering southwards through the midlands has walked by night up one of its fresh streets to an inn and cried: “what! have i come upon paradise?” and this feeling comes also when one has climbed up the cotswold through the little places of stone and suddenly sees the valley floor of the severn so full of orchards, or has come over the flat deserts of the upper thames and had revealed to him the golden valley; or, after plodding through wiltshire, has smelt an air which told him that not far off were the heavy tides of that haunted sea which runs between the welsh hills and the peninsula of cornwall and devon. men are lost in these seas and are saved in them perpetually as by miracles: i can appeal, in this print, to how many? they have been saved by the miracle of that water. here arthur was[171] cast up by the waves: on to that flat salt, in its calm, full of mists, looked out those who gave us our legend of his court.
the boundary into this particular land is not only fetched by men on foot; in no matter what kind of travel one pursues, one recognises that boundary in a flash as one traverses it. it is not only the orchards, nor the abrupt and pointed hills, nor those domestic towns, happy with memories, nor those clear waters, nor those meadows, bounded by careful walls of stone, but something much more which tells one that one has got into the enchanted land. that spirit in it which made the stuff of our early history, which gave us the landing of joseph of arimathea and the glorious bush of glastonbury and the cycle of the round table and those good verses with regard to passion unrestrained:
... well you wot that of such life
there comes but sore battaille and strife
and blood of men and hard travail....
and the prophecies of merlin, and the story of tristan and iseult and all the vision of immortality and of resurrection inhabits it still.
i never can believe (i speak for myself alone) that man can be dissociated from his earth any more than i can believe that the soul can be dissociated from the body. when men say to me that there is no soul, they can go on saying. but when men say that the soul can neglect the body then there is[172] matter for argument; and when the argument is finished one finds it is not so. now thus it is with the earth that breeds us and into which if we are content to die at home (and since we must die somewhere, better die there) we should at last return. the landscapes of europe make european men, and it is not for nothing that the climate and the shapes of the hills and the nature of the building stuff change just where man changes.
there is enchantment upon every high place of england, but the enchantment of the devonshire moors and of the tors to the north and upwards from them is different from the enchantment of the downs. there is a great delight in the proper fireplaces of the english people, but who, thoroughly alive, could mistake a fireplace in the west riding for a fireplace on the western rother or either of these for a fireplace a little before sherborne in the tumbles and the hollows where dorset and somerset meet? there is a richness of the speech and a contentment of the tongue which any man from the new countries might think common to all english agricultural men: yet there was a man from sussex who, hearing the sussex tongue in the choughs at yeovil, felt himself indeed come home. our provinces differ very much.
i have sometimes wondered whether in the process of time these little intimate differences of ours will survive. i wish they would! i wish they would, by the lord! the greeks were a little people, yet[173] their provinces have survived, and the contempt that aspasia felt for the peloponnesus is (or should be) yet recorded. the hill tribes behind the ph?nician coast were a little people, but the fame of their religion, of their civil wars, has survived that of the merchants of tyre. rome, veii, and the others were little places like arundel and pulborough, quite close together; but they were talked of, and men know much of them to-day.
i could wish the differences of this island were so known and that people coming from a long way off would be humble and learn those differences. surely a nation grows great in this way, by many provinces reacting one upon the other, recognised by the general will, sometimes in conflict with it. at any rate the west country is a province of europe; no one can get into it without touching his youth again and putting his fingers to earth, and getting sustenance from it, as a man does when he turns at the turning point of a race and touches earth with his fingers and is strong again to spring forward.
