june 8, 1893.
is it not the experience of every one that at rare intervals, by some happy accident, life presents one with a sudden and delicious thrill of beauty? i have often tried to analyse the constituent elements of these moments, but the essence is subtle and defies detection. they cannot be calculated upon, or produced by any amount of volition or previous preparation. one thing about these tiny ecstasies i have noticed—they do not come as a rule when one is tranquil, healthy, serene—they rather come as a compensation for weariness and discontent; and yet they are the purest gold of life, and a good deal of sand is well worth washing for a pellet or two of the real metal.
to-day i was more than usually impatient; over me all the week had hung the shadow of some trying, difficult business—the sort of business which, whatever you do, will be done to nobody’s satisfaction. after a vain attempt to wrestle with it, i gave it up, and went[189] out on a bicycle; the wind blew gently and steadily this soft june day; all the blue sky was filled with large white clouds, blackening to rain. i made for the one piece of flat ground in our neighbourhood. it is tranquillising, i have often found, to the dweller in a hilly land, to cool and sober the eye occasionally with the pure breadths of a level plain. the grass was thick and heavy-headed in the fields, but of mere wantonness i turned down a lane which i know has no ending,—a mere relief-road for carts to have access to a farm,—and soon came to the end of it in a small grassy circle, with a cottage or two, where a footpath strikes off across the fields.
heretofore unvisited
why did i never come here before, i thought. through a gap in the hedge i saw a large broad pasture, fringed in the far distance with full-foliaged, rotund elms in thick leaf; a row of willows on the horizon marked the track of a stream. in the pasture in front of me was a broad oblong pool of water with water-lilies; down one side ran a row of huge horse-chestnuts, and the end was rich in elders full of flat white cakes of blossom. in the field grazed an old horse; while a pigeon sailed lazily down from the trees and ran to the pool[190] to drink. that was all there was to see. but it brought me with a deep and inexplicable thrill close to the heart of the old, kindly, patient earth, the mother and the mistress and the servant of all—she who allows us to tear and rend her for our own paltry ends, and then sets, how sweetly and tranquilly, to work, with what a sense of inexhaustible leisure, to paint and mellow and adorn the rude and bleeding gaps. we tear up a copse, and she fills the ugly scars in the spring with a crop of fresh flowers—of flowers, perhaps, which are not seen in the neighbourhood, but whose seeds have lain vital and moist in the ground, but too deep to know the impulse born of the spring sun. yet now they burst their armoured mail, and send a thin, white, worm-like arm to the top, which, as soon as it passes into the light, drinks from the rays the green flush that it chooses to hide its nakedness. we dig a pool in the crumbling marl. at the time the wound seems irreparable; the ugly, slobbered banks grin at us like death; the ground is full of footprints and slime, broken roots and bedabbled leaves,—and next year it is all a paradise of green and luscious water-plants, with a hundred quiet lives being lived[191] there, of snail and worm and beetle, as though the place had never been disturbed. we build a raw red house with an insupportably geometrical outline, the hue of the vicious fire still in the bricks; pass fifty years, and the bricks are mellow and soft, plastered with orange rosettes or grey filaments of lichen; the ugly window frames are blistered and warped; the roof has taken a soft and yielding outline—all is in peace and harmony with the green world in which it sits.
the repairer of the breach
i never saw this more beautifully illustrated than once, when a great house in whitehall was destroyed, and heaped up in a hideous rockery of bricks. all through the winter these raw ruins, partly concealed by a rough hoarding, tainted the view; but as soon as spring returned, from every inch of grit rose a forest of green stalks of willow-herb, each in summer to be crowned with a spire of fantastic crimson flowers, and to pass a little later into those graceful, ghostly husks that shiver in the wind. centuries must have passed since willow-herb had grown on that spot. had they laid dormant, these hopeful seeds, or had they been wafted along dusty streets and high in air over sun-scorched spaces? nature at all[192] events had seen her chance, and done her work patiently and wisely as ever.
but to return to my lane-end. how strange and deep are the impressions of a deep and inviolate peace that some quiet corner like this gives to the restless spirit! it can never be so with the scenes that have grown familiar, where we have carried about with us the burden of private cares—the symptoms of the disease of life. in any house where we have lived, every corner, however peaceful and beautiful in itself, is bound to be gradually soaked, as it were, in the miseries of life, to conceal its beauties under the accretion of sordid associations.
this room we connect with some sad misunderstanding. there we gave way to some petty passion of resentment, of jealousy, of irritation, or vainly tried to pacify some similar outbreak from one we loved. this is the torture of imagination; to feel the beauty of sight and sound, we must be sensitive; and if we are sensitive, we carry about the shadow with us—the capacity for self-torment, the struggle of the ideal with the passing mood.
sad associations
i have sometimes climbed to the top of a hill and looked into some unknown and placid[193] valley, with field and wood and rivulet and the homes of men. i have seen the figures of men and oxen move sedately about those quiet fields. often, too, gliding at evening in a train through a pastoral country when the setting sun bathes all things in genial light and contented shade, i have felt the same thought. “how peaceful, how simple life would be, nay, must be, here.” only very gradually, as life goes on, does it dawn upon the soul that the trouble lies deeper, and that though surrounded by the most unimagined peace, the same fret, the same beating of restless wings, the same delays attend. that dreamt-of peace can hardly be attained. the most we can do is to enjoy it to the utmost when it is with us; and when it takes its flight, and leaves us dumb, discontented, peevish, to quench the sordid thought in resolute silence, to curb the grating mood, to battle mutely with the cowering fear; and so to escape investing the house and the garden that we love with the poisonous and bitter associations that strike the beauty out of the fairest scene.
