THE COUNTRY 
 
 EDWARD THOMAS
 
 THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 LOS ANGELES
 
 FELLOWSHIP BOOKS 
 
 tratton 
 
 THE COUNTRY
 
 THE COUNTRY 
 
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 ONE evening I heard a man who had 
 served twenty years' imprisonment 
 in a London office and was not yet 
 done with it, trying to prove by autobiography 
 that all was over for him and the world because 
 of this servitude. He was a country-bred man 
 with a distinct London accent. Once upon 
 a time, it seems, he had charmed a snake, 
 caught a tench of five pounds and lost a bigger 
 one, and, like Jefferies, heard the song of the 
 redwing in England ; now he kept some- 
 body's accounts and wore the everlasting 
 mourning of clerks : hence these tears. 
 " Science," he said, in dreary anger, " Science 
 is wearing out its eyes with staring, and soon 
 
 SSthe 
 
 862065
 
 the best spe<5tacles in the world will avail her 
 nothing. Science is not final, or absolute. 
 It is only a recent method of looking at 
 things, and it will pass away like the method 
 which made it not only possible but necessary 
 to believe in witches. And what will have 
 been its effecl: ? 
 
 S " Take, for example, a matter in which 
 Science is supposed to have wrought a great 
 and beneficial or at any rate ennobling 
 change the sense of time and space, the 
 feeling for eternity and infinity. I believe 
 that the average educated or partly educated 
 man, as well as the uneducated man, now 
 holds the story of Adam and Eve untrue, 
 and thinks that man was only made in the 
 image of God a little before the Reform Bill. 
 Myths have been destroyed which helped to 
 maintain a true and vivid acknowledgment 
 of the mystery of the past. Science has not 
 left us without a substitute. It has given us 
 figures and innumerable statements, and the 
 newspapers cannot overpraise the substitute. 
 2
 
 And so with space. Formerly no one had 
 any idea that the stars were a certain number 
 of million miles away. They entered into 
 human life : they were beautiful and useful, 
 and mythology made them more human but 
 not less god-like. Now they are inferior to 
 gas and electric light. Our way of human- 
 izing them is to say that the railway metals 
 of Great Britain, if placed on end, would 
 reach to the moon, or would do so if they 
 were a little longer. We gape and gasp, and 
 the railway is not any more divine or the 
 moon any more human. The sky is now 
 a very large dome pricked through by a 
 number of lights so small as to be practically 
 useless, and if we catch ourselves sighing at 
 them the sigh is deepened by the thought 
 that we are still suffering from a discredited 
 but not extinct superstition. That the uni- 
 verse has been enlarged is somehow supposed 
 to be not incompatible with the fact that 
 the telegraph, etc., have annihilated space. 
 Sg " The peasant who saw his lord ride home 
 3 %2 with
 
 with apes and ivory and peacocks had the 
 means for as sublime a view of the glories of 
 the world as the schoolboy who could tell you 
 the diameter of the earth. How long will it 
 take the truths of Science to pass out of the 
 stage of fa<5ts and figures into realities or living 
 falsehoods ? The poet Francis Thompson is 
 one of the few who have even pretended to 
 possess such realities. He speaks of the Earth, 
 ' a joyous David,' dancing before God, and of 
 a mighty Spirit unknown ' that swingeth the 
 slow earth before the embannered Throne.' 
 But this is not the living reality or falsehood of 
 imagination : it is the shadowy half-truth of 
 fancy. Poets who believed the earth and man 
 to be two or three thousand years old had not 
 less regard for c the dark backward and abysm 
 of time ' than poets who are geologists. 
 %& " But let me speak for myself. I am a man 
 of the English middle class, as my people have 
 been for several generations. We have moved 
 among our kind. We have travelled and read. 
 We have not been altogether dull and 
 
 4
 
 blind. Yet, though we accept the state- 
 ment that the earth is round, and have 
 watched the apparent motion of the firma- 
 ment and seen Capella rise and set in a summer 
 night, though we have seen ships sink out of 
 sight over the rim of the world we treat the 
 earth as flat, we point with a horizontal arm 
 towards America, and if with a vertical arm 
 to New Zealand, then with no more under- 
 standing than if we pointed upwards to 
 heaven. To me who have not travelled, India 
 is a small coloured place on a map ; if I think 
 of its mighty rivers that place fades out of 
 sight and I see floods larger than the land itself. 
 The lesser stars are white sparks to me, the 
 great are cups of fire spilt but never emptied: 
 I distinguish them from dew-drops or glow- 
 worms by their position overhead. The moon 
 is something which resembles a hundred differ- 
 ent things, from a shaving of silver or a dried 
 Honesty seed to a dinted golden shield. The 
 sublimest thing I know is the sea, and after 
 that London, vast, complex, ancient, restless, 
 5 <
 
 and incalculable : I pass through it at night 
 and hear its noises like the wrath and sorrow 
 of lions raving in bondage, and when I look 
 up the starry sky is like a well in the forest of 
 the city. ... I wonder how many others feel 
 the same, that we have been robbed all but 
 Mr. Charles M. Doughty of the small intel- 
 ligible England of Elizabeth and given the 
 word Imperialism instead. Apollo, Woden, 
 Jehovah, have been put away for the sake ot 
 unsectarian education. No wonder we are 
 languid, fretful, and aimless. 
 " There is nothing left for us to rest upon, 
 nothing great, venerable, or mysterious,which 
 can take us out of ourselves, and give us that 
 more than human tranquillity now to be seen 
 in a few old faces of a disappearing generation. 
 To be a citizen of infinity is no compensation 
 for the loss of that tranquillity. When we 
 grow old what will grant any of us that look ? 
 Certainly not statistics and the knowledge 
 that we have lived through a time of progress 
 unparalleled in history. 
 6
 
 S2 " As for myself, I can only hope that when 
 I am old, c in this our pinching cave,' I shall 
 remember chiefly the valley of the river Uther 
 where I was born, and the small old house 
 half encircled and half shadowed by an enor- 
 mous crescent of beech-covered hills. That is 
 my world in spite of everything. Those fifteen 
 or twenty square miles make the one real 
 thing that I know and cannot forget, in spite 
 of a hundred English scenes wantonly visited 
 and forgotten, in spite of London unforgotten 
 and unintelligible." 
 
 < And much he had to say of that old house 
 shadowed and smothered in leaves, and of 
 himself doing as he liked in it and in the 
 woods, and of the farmers, the labourers, the 
 inn-keeper, the squire, and other well-pre- 
 served fragments of old England, and in parti- 
 cular of the only man he had ever met in 
 those huge woods on the hills above his home. 
 9$ "Once only," he said, "I met a man in 
 the woods. I was reaching the top of the hill, 
 and the hounds had just streamed past me, 
 7 SS when
 
 when a shrill voice like a bull's filled the air. 
 A cough close by soon afterwards told me that 
 it was a man. I looked round, and there, 
 sitting on a beech-stump in the sun, was an 
 old, old man, and he was leaning on a stick. 
 His face was like a wrinkled red apple, and 
 yet I have seen boys of twelve with older 
 faces. It told you the boy he had been eighty 
 years before the dullest of boys at his books, 
 one who was not good either at leading or 
 obeying other boys a mischievous, too 
 daring, indiscreet boy, who would do any- 
 thing and submit to any punishment, but 
 was likely all of a sudden to lower his head 
 and run at a bully, knock him down, and fall 
 over him in a heap. All the mischief had 
 not yet gone out of his face, though his eyes 
 were a rheumy blue and resembled shell-fish. 
 It was a merry face. I know now that he 
 was probably made by hard work, beer, and 
 women, but I should like to live another 
 seventy years to see if this generation pro- 
 duces anything as fit for living on the earth. 
 8
 
 c I work for all,' says the labourer on the 
 inn-sign of the Five Alls ; and yet, I think, 
 looking back at that old man, he often had 
 the laugh of all the others. You may be sure 
 there were hundreds like him in Shake- 
 speare's time and in Wordsworth's, and if 
 there aren't a good sprinkling of them, 
 generation after generation, I do not know 
 what we shall come to, but I have my fears. 
 I warrant, every man who was ever any good 
 had a little apple-faced man or woman like 
 this somewhere not very far back in his 
 pedigree. Where else will he get his endur- 
 ance, his knowledge of the earth, his feeling 
 for life and for what that old man called 
 God ? When a poet writes, I believe he is 
 often only putting into words what such 
 another old man puzzled out among the sheep 
 in a long lifetime. You cannot persuade me 
 that the peak-faced poets think of all those 
 things about earth and men by themselves." 
 S He concluded by saying that he had had 
 ten years in that house and those woods, that 
 9 9S then
 
 then his father died, he went away to school 
 and afterwards into an office. Those ten 
 years were the only reality in his life. Every- 
 thing since had been heavy illusion without 
 rest. " There is nothing to rest on," he said, 
 " nothing to make a man last like the old 
 man I met in the woods." 
 S This man's story could probably be paral- 
 leled thousands of times to-day. I have given 
 it because unintentionally it refutes his state- 
 ment that nothing is left for us to rest on. 
 There was something firm and very mighty 
 left even for him, though his melancholy, per- 
 verse temper could reach it only through 
 memory. He had Nature to rest upon. He 
 had those hills which were not himself, 
 which he had not made, which were not 
 made for man and yet were good to him as 
 well as to myriads of other races, visible and 
 invisible, that have been upon the earth and 
 in the air, or will be in some other moment 
 of eternity. 
 
 < To put it less equivocally, he had the 
 10
 
 country to rest on. For Nature includes Fleet 
 Street as well as the Milky Way, White- 
 chapel as well as the valley of the Towy or the 
 valley of the Wylye. There are eyes, and 
 at least one pair of human eyes, that look 
 with as much satisfaction on a lamp-post as 
 on a poplar-tree, and see towns as beautiful 
 birds' nests. For most of us this visionary 
 or God-like view is impossible except in a 
 few particular and irrecoverable moments. 
 We cannot make harmony out of cities : 
 often we think it a great triumph to become 
 blind and deaf to them and without sense of 
 smell ; or we are proud that the rain on the 
 windy 'bus-top has kissed us exactly as on 
 Old Winchester Hill or Sir John's Hill at 
 Laugharne and has brought them to mind. 
 Roughly speaking, we still accept Cowper's 
 hard-and-fast distinction between God-made 
 country and man-made town. We may feel 
 the painful splendour of our humanity in the 
 town, but it is in the country more often 
 that we become aware, in a sort of majestic 
 1 1 B8 quiet,
 
 quiet, of the destiny which binds us to 
 infinity and eternity. Old as the towns are so 
 plainly often stiff and rotten with age 
 we know and deeply feel that the oldest of 
 them are as grass in the sight of the wind, the 
 moon, even the hills. We know that it was 
 all once " country " : we know without the 
 help of " After London " that it will all once 
 again be "country." I like to see grass and 
 flowers come down softly to take possession 
 of any London soil that is, for a month or 
 two, allowed to feel the sun, wind, and rain. 
 With all their inhuman grace, lightness, and 
 silence, the flowers and grass are related to me 
 as the bricks, mortar, and iron are not, and I 
 have a kind of far-off share in their victories. 
 On the other hand I am not dismayed at a 
 house building in a field. It can do no harm ; 
 moreover it is adventuring, it is going to 
 mix with high, strange company, and to learn 
 something from clouds and stars, from the 
 long bays of corn and grass among the woods 
 at the bases of the hills, which it will look 
 
 12
 
 down on perhaps for many generations. 
 But all towns have committed something of 
 the sin of Babel. They are complicated and 
 divided ; they end in confusion. Before super- 
 human eyes, no doubt, they are not confused in 
 themselves, nor out of harmony with what 
 is about and above them : yet for most of us 
 Cowper's distinction is true. It was Varro's 
 also : eighteen hundred years before Cowper 
 he remarked that the country life was more 
 ancient than the town life, that the country 
 was made by divine Nature, the towns by 
 human art. 
 
 S Thus it came about that the gods were 
 born before the towns. The towns accepted 
 the country-bred gods, and listened to the 
 psalms of men whose speech was full of seas 
 and mountains, lions and dragons, who said : 
 " Surely as Tabor is among the mountains, 
 and as Carmel by the sea, so shall he come." 
 Away from the woods Joan of Arc could not 
 hear her voices. 
 
 SS For a time the towns were but large 
 1 3 B8 collections
 
 collections of country people ; perhaps it was 
 only after the use of steam-driven machinery 
 that other English towns than London were 
 cut off by a wall, " with dreadful faces 
 thronged and fiery arms," from the country. 
 In blood the townsmen have been children or 
 grandchildren of countrymen ; but the town 
 became more than the man and at last seemed 
 to have made him and to be well pleased with 
 him. Statesmen who had always one foot in 
 the country judged this to be ill, and in 
 Rome as in England they tried to get men 
 back back through twenty centuries to 
 the land, to the country, to Nature, to the 
 whole, where they might be healed of the 
 town. 
 
 S8 To the townsman living where Pan could 
 not enter, the poets sang how in the green 
 Spring, in the smiling weather, men lie on 
 the soft shadowed grass under the trees beside 
 the water, and "at small cost" refresh them- 
 selves. One of them, Virgil, painted an old 
 countryman cultivating a few rough acres,
 
 but a king of content, having year after year 
 the first blossom, the first honey, the first 
 fruit. The life of the ox, said the poet, was 
 better than the townsman's, because his food 
 was simple, his drink water, his sleep un- 
 troubled ; as, long afterwards, Walt Whitman 
 said: "I think I could turn and live with 
 animals, they are so placid and self-con- 
 tained. . . ." 
 
 < To the poets themselves the fields and 
 rivers gave health and flowing thought : they 
 hunted, and they found "Minerva as well as 
 Diana" upon the hills. In death, said one 
 poet, he would fain be buried, not alongside 
 the highway, but under a tree or among the 
 sand-hills. So much had this country charm 
 been lauded that Quintilian warned the orator 
 against it. It seemed to him that retirement 
 to beautiful groves was a pleasant end in 
 itself rather than a stimulus to literary work, 
 and that the trees, the rivers, the wind in 
 the leaves, the freedom of the long-drawn 
 views, were a distraclion. 
 
 15 B f B As
 
 S As to our own poets, a century ago a sober 
 Christian among them said: 
 
 One Impulse from a vernal wood 
 May teach you more of man, 
 
 Of moral evil and of good, 
 Than all the sages can. 
 
 Quite recently Mr. Le Gallienne advanced 
 beyond Wordsworth so far as to sing : 
 
 Peace of this world you shall not take, 
 
 Nay, no provision heed ; 
 A wild rose gathered in the wood 
 
 Will bring you all your need. 
 
 Since Wordsworth most of the poets have 
 written of the country as if it were their home 
 and the sky their tent, and yet seldom do they 
 recall to my mind what Emerson, in his 
 Journal, says of the Penobscot Indian, after 
 he has been away some weeks a-hunting, 
 that he returns a different person, with an 
 eagle eye, a wild look, a commanding carriage 
 and gesture. Many have dwelt in streets, but 
 16
 
 the few that write of them have in mind 
 a " bald street " whereon breaks the " blank 
 day," or a " city of dreadful night " : the 
 " Fleet Street Eclogues " smelt of hay more 
 than of smoke. 
 
 %& The city becomes our scapegoat; and we 
 begin to see a kind of allegory in the ballad of 
 Bessie Bell and Mary Gray, how those bonny 
 lasses built a house on the brookside and 
 thatched it with rushes, but the plague stole 
 upon them out of the town and killed them, 
 and they were buried, not with their kindred 
 in the churchyard, but on a hill-side facing 
 the sun. The century of Pope and Johnson 
 is looked down on for nothing so much as for 
 being townish and for thinking one green 
 field like another. We forget that, neverthe- 
 less, their fields were greener than ours, and 
 that they did not neglect them save in poetry. 
 In their poetry the critic finds little magic, 
 but could find, if he would, something like 
 the pleasure given by an old building which 
 all the architects condemn except Time. 
 17 "The
 
 " The Deserted Village " itself owes some- 
 thing to our surprise that it should have 
 occurred at all at such a time. Far more in 
 Shenstone, the few readable things, especially 
 when met unexpectedly after the " Ode to a 
 young lady somewhat too solicitous about 
 her manner of expression," please us unrea- 
 sonably. Perhaps the fa6l that Shenstone 
 died long ago, after a foolish pathetic life, is 
 not without influence on our impressions ; but 
 I like him chiefly because he shows an easy 
 content with natural things which is nowhere 
 to be had to-day. And Smollett I fancy the 
 critic's ears twitching at the name has a few 
 lines that taste of the country purely. If they 
 stood alone, or in the work of a professed 
 encomiast of Nature, they would be vain ; 
 but where they are, in his " Ode to Leven 
 Water," the lines are full of life and enjoy- 
 ment : 
 
 Pure stream in 'whose transparent wave 
 My youthful limbs I wont to lave. . . . 
 
 18
 
 Or, I should have said that to atone for the 
 poverty of the verses I am forced to imagine 
 a real, simple love of swimming and fishing. 
 What is certain is that for this man the 
 country was neither a bore nor a religion, but 
 an unexa<5ting neighbour. For these poets in 
 wigs have a verily rustic sentiment. They 
 are townsmen, preferring the town ; of the 
 modern sad passion for Nature they have 
 nothing ; but they love the fields in their 
 season. Now and then they go out into the 
 country which is at their doors, not several 
 hours off by rail and their fetes-champetres 
 have something gay and foreign to us which 
 calls up a vision of fields more virginal than 
 ours. There were elves in those days ; country 
 people saw them, if poets failed : and when 
 you were returning after nightfall from 
 shooting, you might see torches lighting the 
 King of the Cats to his grave. The country 
 had always been there, and was to be there 
 for ever. It had not yet assumed " the pale 
 cast of thought." They greeted it and smiled, 
 19 S2 as
 
 as men once greeted Helen, not thinking of 
 her immortality. Thus their words in de- 
 scription or praise of Nature were less profuse 
 and less precise than ours. When Dr. Thomas 
 Parnell talks of early shepherds "printing 
 long footsteps in the glittering grass" we 
 have to supply what he carelessly omitted: 
 when he says " a grove " he means about as 
 
 much as Mr. when he writes a score of 
 
 sonnets : he suggests that being out in the 
 country was a source of what Gay calls 
 "amusing thoughts and peaceful hours," but 
 not of literature. As for their prose there 
 are passages in Fielding, for example, which 
 have a country sentiment not to be challenged 
 by anything in our more elaborate style: they 
 are of a genuine rusticity, while in the finest 
 things of a later day the landscape is pensive 
 with a by no means rustic colouring. That 
 was a time when literature seems to have been 
 diffident of using what was not suitable for 
 general conversation ; the literature of Nature 
 represents rather the unsocial and unspoken 
 20
 
 thoughts of men. But it would be rash to 
 assume that, because men did not express 
 many unsocial thoughts, they had them not. 
 Men did not often write love-lyrics in Chau- 
 cer's day, yet I suppose they loved. The 
 frugal lines of those eighteenth-century poets 
 need and deserve eking out. They had their 
 conventions, their personifications, their 
 nymphs, for which we can spare some 
 mockery ; but at least it should be tender, 
 since it is hard to foretell of what conven- 
 tions we are to be accused by an enlightened 
 posterity. 
 
 For those men the town was not yet a 
 symbol of bondage, a scapegoat of civiliza- 
 tion. In their day the countryman came up 
 to London and had his Arabian Nights' enter- 
 tainment, like Borrow, on Cornhill. This 
 will happen less and less, because the country- 
 man is dying out, and when we hear his voice, 
 as in George Bourne's " Bettesworth Book," 
 it is more foreign than French. He had long 
 been in a decline, and now he sinks before 
 21 g the
 
 the Daily Mail like a savage before pox or 
 whisky. Before it is too late, I hope that the 
 Zoological Society will receive a few pairs at 
 their Gardens. With them, or in neighbour- 
 ing paddocks (or whatever, for the sake or 
 human dignity, they are called), should be 
 some Gypsies. They are at least as interest- 
 ing, though often not as beautiful, as anything 
 at the Zoo. At the price of a first-rate cigar 
 one of them could be fed for a week, or a 
 family for a bottle of wine ; they will eat 
 almost anything. They give endless quiet 
 amusement to civilized men who behold what 
 they have risen from, and what some would 
 like to return to again. 
 
 9$ Countrymen, as best they can, still admire 
 London, and would probably be willing to 
 change places with the citizens for a week 
 or two. The citizens would stand their 
 new quarters longer, with the aid of ele<5tric 
 theatre, gramophone, and the world's adulte- 
 rated news. For the truth is that to enjoy 
 the country, pure and simple, is not the 
 22
 
 easiest thing in the world : perhaps an art is 
 necessary to-day to give scope even to our 
 deep ancient instincts. At present, men use 
 town and country to set off one another, 
 taking smaller and smaller doses of each. 
 The mind is, however, still its own place 
 when there is enough of it. Men read with 
 delight how Gunnar the Icelander was riding 
 away into exile when his horse tripped and 
 threw him, so that perforce he turned and 
 beheld his home, and the sight caused him 
 to say : " Fair is the Lithe ; so fair that it 
 has never seemed to me so fair; the corn- 
 fields are white to harvest, and the home 
 mead is mown ; and now I will ride back 
 home, and not fare abroad at all " ; and he 
 returned an outlaw, and soon afterwards met 
 his death. Men read this and thrill, but on 
 the morrow take the same train to Waterloo, 
 coming faithfully home at night to the dwell- 
 ing which never seemed to them fair at all. 
 That is the merit of the town life, to produce 
 myriads of sympathies, few impulses. 
 
 23 %& The
 
 S< The preacher is loud in the land. Richard 
 Jefferies plainly says : " If you wish your 
 children to think deep things to know the 
 holiest emotions take them to the woods 
 and hills, and give them the freedom of the 
 meadows. . . . Put away their books, and 
 give them the freedom of the meadows. Do 
 it at any cost or trouble to yourselves, if you 
 wish them to become great men and noble 
 women." Whitman says : " Away then to 
 loosen, to unstring the divine bow, so tense, 
 so long. Away, from curtain, carpet, sofa, 
 book. . . . Away, thou soul, . . . for one 
 day and night at least, returning to the naked 
 source-life of us all to the breast of the 
 great silent savage all-acceptive Mother. 
 Alas, how many of us are so sodden how 
 many have wandered so far away, that return 
 is almost impossible." Sir Leslie Stephen 
 thought mere walking a kind of panacea for 
 literary men : still more so must it be for 
 ordinary men. The common voice repeats : 
 " Back to the country, back to the mother 
 
 24
 
 God gave man," or ventures so far as to say : 
 " Those who live in cities all the year round 
 . . . often seem to me to be inclined to argue 
 from a too narrow point of view." Men re- 
 peat the ballad of " The Gypsy Laddie " : 
 
 The gypsies came to our good lord's gate, 
 And wow but they sang sweetly. 
 
 They sang sae sweet and sae very compleat 
 That down came the fair lady . . . 
 
 and see it as another allegory, the Gypsies 
 standing for the country, " the call of the 
 wild," or that call of the North Sea which 
 the Great Eastern Railway speaks of in its 
 advertisements : another sings the folk-song 
 of the lady who went " off with the Raggle- 
 taggle Gypsies O " in the same sense. 
 < William James quoted from " The Story 
 of My Heart," in one of his " Talks to 
 Students on Some of Life's Ideals " quoted 
 a passage where Jefferies describes his rap- 
 turous communion on the Downs " with the 
 earth, the sun and sky, the stars hidden by 
 2$ & the
 
 the light, with the ocean. . . ." His com- 
 ment was : " Surely a worthless hour of life, 
 when measured by the usual standards of 
 commercial value. Yet in what other kind of 
 value can the preciousness of any hour, made 
 precious by any standard, consist, if it consist 
 not in feelings of excited significance like 
 these, engendered in some one, by what the 
 hour contains ? " In the same paper a long 
 passage is quoted from Mr. W. H. Hudson's 
 " Idle Days in Patagonia," describing days 
 spent in a remote solitude among trees with- 
 out sound or motion, when thought was 
 impossible: "To think was like setting in 
 motion a noisy engine in my brain ; and there 
 was something there which bade me be still, 
 and I was forced to obey. My state was one 
 of suspense and 'watchfulness : yet I had no 
 expectation of meeting with an adventure, 
 and felt as free from apprehension as I feel 
 now when sitting in a room in London. The 
 change in me was just as great and wonder- 
 ful as if I had changed my identity for that 
 26
 
 of another man or animal ; but at the time I 
 was powerless to wonder at or speculate about 
 it ; the state seemed familiar rather than 
 strange, and although accompanied by a 
 strong feeling of elation, I did not know 
 it did not know that something had come 
 between me and my intellect until I lost it 
 and returned to my former self to thinking 
 and the old insipid existence." Mr. Hudson 
 says that he had gone back to a state repre- 
 senting the mental state of the pure savage. 
 Mr. James was sorry for the person who has 
 never been under the spell of " this mys- 
 terious sensorial life, with its irrationality 
 if so you like to call it but its vigilance and 
 its supreme felicity. The holidays of life are 
 its most vitally significant portions, because 
 they are, or at least should be, covered with 
 just this kind of magically irresponsible 
 spell." He recommends this mental state, 
 the freedom from those affairs which pro- 
 duce American tension and fatigue, as a 
 remedy. 
 
 27 ' cgl
 
 g I dare say that many a man has found in 
 something like Mr. Hudson's noon-day pause 
 the herb " in which his heart-cure lies." 
 Little do we know of what those who are not 
 writers have felt about the country, but they 
 too have loved it, those husbandmen whom 
 Hesiod advised to plough " when first the 
 cuckoo uttereth his note amid the leaves of 
 the oak and rejoiceth men over the limitless 
 earth," and not to cross a river before pray- 
 ing with faces turned towards the source and 
 washing their hands in the sweet water. They 
 had no need of Cato's book, telling them that 
 the farmer's life came nearest to being that 
 of a wise man. Maybe a farmer begot the 
 poet Alcman, who loved pea-soup, who 
 knew all the songs of the birds, who learnt 
 from the partridge and longed, when he was 
 in love, to be the halcyon, the sea-blue bird 
 of Spring flying over the waves with un- 
 troubled heart ; who sang of the Maenad on 
 the mountains milking a lioness into her 
 golden pail to make a gleaming white cheese, 
 28
 
 and of mad Love wantoning like a boy on 
 the topmost flowers of the sweet gale. Not 
 Sappho alone saw the sweet apple reddening 
 at the crest of the tree which the pickers 
 could not reach and so left it to furnish her 
 with a comparison for the bride. If Heliodora 
 was by chance a country girl and never read 
 Meleager's verses to her or never liked them, 
 and if she certainly could not have written 
 them, it was not because her love of flowers 
 was not as deep as his own. 
 < He sang : I will twine the white violet and 
 I will twine the delicate narcissus with myrtle 
 buds, and I will twine laughing lilies, and I will 
 twine the sweet crocus, and I will twine 
 therewithal the crimson hyacinth, and I will 
 twine lovers' roses, that on balsam-curled 
 Heliodora's temples my garland may shed 
 its petals over the lovelocks of her hair. 
 Certain it is that for Heliodora and for her 
 brethren forest, mountain, and river were 
 not simply material things, useful, indifferent, 
 or dangerous, and that they had many times 
 29 gg felt
 
 felt what the unknown poet said of the 
 grassy meadow, when he bade the traveller 
 rest there ; " Since here also, as thou listen- 
 est to the cicala's tune, the stone-pine trem- 
 bling in the wafts of west wind will lull thee, 
 and the shepherd on the mountains piping at 
 noon nigh the spring under a copse of leafy 
 plane : so escaping the ardours of the au- 
 tumnal dogstar thou wilt cross the height 
 to-morrow ; trust this good counsel that Pan 
 gives thee." Men and women of the plough- 
 lands and the pastures would not have been 
 surprised at hearing that the wise king, 
 Numa Pompilius, had his laws approved 
 and blessed by the nymph Egeria at Diana's 
 shrine of Aricia. The hills and waters were 
 alive with an unknown life, not so much 
 body and spirit as half body, half spirit, 
 indivisibly : whether they saw as well as 
 heard " old Triton blow his wreathed horn " 
 is now uncertain. It has been said (by Sir 
 Archibald Geikie in " The Love of Nature 
 among the Romans") that beyond their regard 
 
 3
 
 for what was useful or agreeable to them in 
 daily life it might perhaps be seldom possible 
 for them to rise. But it is inaccurate to sup- 
 pose that we must be detached from a thing 
 in order to care for it : only a rarefied con- 
 scious appreciation is made possible by de- 
 tachment and the severing of all bonds of 
 necessity. 
 
 S Sea, mountains, " bad weather," incon- 
 venient solitude, are unlikely to be much 
 admired until the man who is to admire 
 them is free from fear and in every way 
 practically safe from them. The first will 
 naturally be comfortable men, Roman poets, 
 for example, not attempting to live by poetry, 
 free to live in town or country, and therefore 
 making a habit of variety, according to public 
 fashion or private taste. Many of them have 
 been born in the country and spent their 
 most impressionable years there, so that the 
 favourable eyes of retrospection would be 
 turned upon childhood and country together. 
 In later years they went into the country by 
 31 c B2 their
 
 their own choice. Sea and mountains they 
 encountered only under compulsion and dis- 
 liked them. Fresh air, hot springs, freedom 
 from enforced society, sport, desire of change, 
 invited them to the country. The growth of 
 cities, when they became definitely opposed 
 to the country, would alone have sufficed to 
 impel all who were movable out into the 
 country. If the country had not lain ready 
 at their gates they would have had to invent 
 it as an antidote. 
 
 %& With civilization, with increased safety of 
 travel, and the multiplication of the arts and 
 sciences of peace, the region of recreation 
 expands, and the more various become its 
 attractions of scenery, sport, natural history, 
 and travel orvagabondage for their own sakes. 
 When the under classes obtain leisure by 
 momentary relief from the direcl: struggle for 
 life they also are free to admire and enjoy 
 what had often seemed part of the vast in- 
 humanity of the universe. This stage is being 
 reached in England, but probably never was 
 
 3 2
 
 in Rome, though the Romans eloquently 
 envied the peasants and even the bailiffs and 
 porters at their country-houses. Apparently 
 they had almost all our variety of country 
 pleasures, from the extreme of luxury to the 
 liberty of solitude. They had exhausted their 
 religion, but not the effects of it, and the holy 
 grove had in store a silence which seemed the 
 voice of a god, they knew not what, as for us 
 it is the voice of welcome to a world more 
 spacious, of which this one is but a parish. 
 %& Men had not to wait for shilling reprints 
 before they could feel deeply about the 
 country, apart from religion. In spite of the 
 full cares and equally full relaxations of life 
 when " Beowulf " was composed, men did not 
 fail to respond to the poet speaking of an un- 
 known land, of wolf-slopes, wind-swept head- 
 lands, perilous marsh-paths, where the moun- 
 tain stream goes down under the mists of the 
 cliffs ; or the steep rocky slopes, the narrow 
 ways, the thin, lone paths, the beetling crags, 
 the many homes of water-sprites and the 
 33 S2 monster's
 
 monster's dwelling, the turbid, blood-stained 
 water overhung by a dismal wooded preci- 
 pice. In a later age, Robert Burns and John 
 Clare, as well as Stephen Duck, were among 
 the poets. 
 
 S3 " The oftener one comes back to the 
 forest," says Mr. Stewart Edward White in 
 " The Cabin," a series of cheerful and lively 
 impressions of men and Nature seventy miles 
 from a railway, " the more deeply one is im- 
 pressed by the fact that these calm green people 
 have entered fully into the over-philosophy 
 we attain to only in snatches." Here be con- 
 solations for a wet August. But I should like 
 to have a farmer's opinion of the sentence. 
 Mr. White is not a farmer : he is one of the 
 less than half wild providers of wildness for a 
 very tame public. Real countrymen have still 
 much to learn from him as well as from 
 Virgil. 
 
 SS In Cxsar's time and in Victoria's the plain 
 men of Italy and Britain were far poorer in 
 words than the townsmen who began to pitch 
 
 34
 
 their villas over the Surrey hills and along the 
 bay of Naples, planting the rhododendron, 
 the monkey-puzzle, and the plane-tree, tem- 
 perately imitating the countrymen with the 
 help of tailors. These villa men have caused 
 a delicate kind of scenery, semi-rural, semi- 
 urban, where the protected wilderness, bur- 
 rowed under by a railway, lies between trim 
 exotic gardens and ploughland or pasture, and 
 the trees on the upper slopes frame a little 
 church of Chaucer's time and a stockbroker's 
 stately home, nor quite conceal the more dis- 
 tant tower of a lunatic asylum ; or in an old 
 wood, at the crossing of two ancient track- 
 ways, marked by a tumulus, a small legacy has 
 placed the prettiest of gardens and the dain- 
 tiest of cottagettes, to be the home of a canary 
 bird, a Newfoundland dog, and several slender 
 Celtic ladies. 
 
 $& The villa men and ladies were the first 
 " lovers of Nature," the first to talk and write 
 of the country. The first painters of pure 
 landscape were Dutch, not Russian. Far 
 35 %& different
 
 different were those urban rustics, far different 
 is Mr. White, from a man like Swift, sitting 
 in London on March the nineteenth, 1711, 
 writing to Stella : 
 
 " O that we were at Laracor this fine day ! 
 the willows begin to peep and the quicks to 
 bud. My dream's out : I was dreaming last 
 night that I eat ripe cherries. And now they 
 begin to catch the pikes, and will shortly the 
 trouts, (pox on these ministers,) and I would 
 fain know whether the floods were ever so 
 high as to get over the holly bank or the river 
 walk ; if so, then all my pikes are gone ; but 
 I hope not." 
 
 $& For the villa residents and the more nume- 
 rous others living " in London and on Lon- 
 don " who would be or will be villa residents, 
 all our country literature is written ; for them 
 Mr. White has disturbed the untrodden soli- 
 tudes of the mountains. Many are the varieties 
 of this literature and its degrees of merit. It 
 includes books of natural history and of topo- 
 
 36
 
 graphy, minute or general, some dry, some 
 decorated, some alive ; of sports treated in an 
 instru6Ung or an enjoying manner ; histories, 
 descriptions innumerable ; books about houses 
 and gardens ; several thousand volumes an- 
 nually of verse up to the neck in the country, 
 used as a subject or as a source of imagery. 
 They broaden our horizon by introducing 
 us to trees, animals, gypsies, peasants, and 
 romantic vagabonds. 
 
 S8 A few of these books are the result of a 
 genuine impulse towards literary expression ; 
 crowds are written to order by men, women, 
 and others, in flats, villas, farmhouses, cot- 
 tages, and tents. They reveal many kinds of 
 satisfaction in the country, which the writers 
 regard as a source of rest, relief, stimulation, 
 a kind of religion, poetry, cash : as a refuge for 
 thinkers, poets, lovers, children, tired workers 
 or players. For some the country is hardly 
 more than an alternative to theatres, exhibi- 
 tions, clubs, or pills. A large number find in 
 a country mixture of sport, natural history, 
 37 SS archaeology,
 
 archaeology, and vagabondage, in the society 
 of the lonely sea, what most calls out and con- 
 tents their deeper genial instincts: on the 
 hills or in forests they do not feel themselves 
 to be mere spirits fettered to restless but heavy 
 bodies, or mere bodies with starving spirits, 
 but can, for " moments big as years " and even 
 for some weeks, feel only a little lower than 
 the animals as well as the angels. The country 
 gives them more encouragement to moods of 
 ease and a sense of unity with life, more 
 obvious opportunities than the town for self- 
 reliance and freedom from the confounding 
 paraphernalia of civilization. Other men, like 
 that Italian of the Renaissance, have shed tears 
 at the sight of noble trees and waving corn- 
 fields, and a long landscape has cured their 
 sickness. To these and some others the coun- 
 try is the principal reality outside themselves : 
 there only are they at home, and the city 
 seems to them an accident, perhaps an un- 
 necessary one. They do not care the less for 
 individual men, they are not indifferent to 
 
 38
 
 movements affecting multitudes, they may 
 even have become entangled in one or another 
 kind of social net, but they recognize only two 
 great things, Nature and the heart of man. 
 The extinction of a bird may rouse them, as 
 it has done the poet, Mr. Ralph Hodgson, to 
 sorrow both for the loss of beauty and for the 
 wound given to an ancient order which passes 
 man's understanding. In others the freedom 
 and simplicity connected by them with some 
 forms of country life foster that cultivation 
 of the instinctive and primitive which is the 
 fine flower of a self-conscious civilization, 
 turning in disgust upon itself. 
 SS A smaller class, probably, is the one which 
 Mr. W. H. Hudson was led to speak of by 
 the barrows of Beaulieu heath on a cold June 
 evening : 
 
 " There are times and moods in which it is 
 revealed to us, or to a few among us, that we 
 are a survival of the past, a dying remnant of 
 a vanished people, and are like strangers and 
 captives among those who do not understand 
 39 BE us,
 
 us, and have no wish to do so ; whose lan- 
 guage and customs and thoughts are not ours. 
 That ' world-strangeness ' which William 
 Watson and his fellow-poets prattle in rhyme 
 about, those, at all events, who have what 
 they call c the note of modernity ' in their 
 pipings, is not in me as in them. The blue 
 sky, the brown soil beneath, the grass, the 
 trees, the animals, the wind, and rain, and 
 sun, and stars, are never strange to me ; for I 
 am in and of and am one with them ; and my 
 flesh and the soil are one, and the heat in my 
 blood and in the sunshine are one, and the 
 winds and tempests and my passions are one. 
 I feel the ' strangeness ' only with regard to 
 my fellow-men, especially in towns where 
 they exist in conditions unnatural to me, 
 but congenial to them ; where they are 
 seen in numbers and in crowds, in streets 
 and houses, and in all places where they 
 gather together ; when I look at them, their 
 pale civilized faces, their clothes, and hear 
 them eagerly talking about things that do 
 40
 
 not concern me. They are out of my 
 world the real world." 
 < Such a man would understand the hermit 
 in the old Irish poem, a king's brother, whom 
 nothing could persuade to leave his hut in 
 the forest, and his berries and honey and 
 spring water, and the company of stag and 
 badger and fox, and the song of cuckoo and 
 thrush and wren, and the cry of heron and 
 gull and swan, and " the voice of the wind 
 against the branchy wood upon the deep-blue 
 sky." Such a man would not be astonished 
 to hear that a wise king, giving an account 
 of his early training, began with : " I was a 
 listener in woods, I was a gazer at stars." 
 
 %& When Mr. Hudson writes of the country 
 he reveals with a reality that has yet a 
 visionary character the spaciousness of the 
 great globe itself ; the music of his birds and 
 the colour of his flowers are the richer and 
 the more grave on account of it. Very differ- 
 ent is the country of a contemporary poet, 
 41 2 Mr.
 
 Mr. Walter de la Mare. The scene of one 
 poem is a stone house, in a forest by a lake, 
 " named only Alas" At the moonlit door 
 of another lone house a traveller knocks : 
 
 But only a host of phantom listeners 
 That dwelt in the lone house then, 
 
 Stood listening in the quiet of the moonlight 
 To that 'voice from the world of men. 
 
 Or the scene is the palace of the King or 
 Never-to-be, or a grave-yard, or " the shades 
 of Arabia." Arabia is the name of one of the 
 provinces of his country, and it is a proof of 
 his mastery that he can use this name and 
 make it so distinctly his own, while retaining 
 all that it means to those who are neither 
 travellers nor geographers. It would be de- 
 lightful and valuable to study the soil, the 
 air, the history, and the architecture of this 
 country. It has palaces, chateaux, cottages, 
 forests, orchards, grave -yards, all having 
 some of the partly conventional, partly fan- 
 
 42
 
 tastic qualities of those things to a child or 
 to a solitary of few books and fewer travels: 
 the grave-yard in particular is perfectly what 
 a child might construct out of a tale and 
 many night thoughts ; and yet I do not 
 know where to find a more vivid sense of 
 the grave than in this first verse of " The 
 Bindweed " : 
 
 The bindweed roots pierce down 
 
 Deeper than men do lie, 
 Laid in their dark-shut graves 
 
 Their slumbering kinsmen by. 
 
 Mr. de la Mare's birds and flowers are most 
 beautiful, but his book is not natural history. 
 The " Owl and Newt and Nightjar, Leveret, 
 Bat, and Mole " of his tomb-land are seen 
 through a great gulf of time. The asphodel 
 and the amaranth are among his flowers ; 
 Lethe is among his rivers. Dreams come to 
 him from " gloomy Hades and the whisper- 
 ing shore." His hawthorn " hath a deathly 
 43 3$ smell."
 
 smell." His snow frightens the starlings by 
 its pale glare. Witches inhabit the land, 
 carrying " charms and spells and sorceries " 
 in their packs. Cupid has once been met 
 there, certainly alive. The ladies of that 
 country are very beautiful. And after all, I 
 scarcely hesitate to say that all have been 
 found by the poet in these islands, and that 
 he has embellished our Flora and Fauna more 
 than many naturalists. He is singular but 
 not alone, but I have no room to mention a 
 score that would enrich these pages, and only 
 just bare room to mention Dermot O'Byrne, 
 who hears the voice of the Gaelic divine 
 mother singing 
 
 Among the tumbled rocks and the far cry 
 Of hidden wondrous folk that never die ; 
 
 and Mr. William H.Davies,whohasaperfe6tly 
 Franciscan familiarity with natural things, 
 and really means it when he says to the robin 
 who is singing " half-way up his legs in 
 snow " : 
 
 44
 
 If these crumbs of bread were pearls^ 
 And I had no bread at home^ 
 
 He should have them for that song ; 
 Pretty Robin Redbreast, come. 
 
 B The varieties of uninspired preachers are 
 as many. While Mr. Stewart Edward White 
 talks of the trees as calm green people who 
 have entered fully into an " over-philosophy " 
 attained by men only in snatches, Mr. Alger- 
 non Blackwood, on the other hand, quotes 
 these words from a scientist : 
 BS " It is impossible to know whether or not 
 plants are conscious ; but it is consistent with 
 the docTrine of continuity that in all living 
 things there is something psychic, and if we 
 accept this point of view we must believe 
 that in plants there exists a faint copy of what 
 we know as consciousness in ourselves " 
 and then goes on to plead, with all the re- 
 sources of art except conviction and the 
 power of enchantment, for the idea that 
 certain trees were aware of a man and loved 
 45 SS him
 
 him and in the end won him over " across the 
 border into themselves into their world 
 of living." 
 
 S These various writers find or make equal 
 varieties among readers, naturalists, sports- 
 men, ramblers, of all degrees, and all combi- 
 nations thereof. In every class there will be 
 some who might say like the Roman, with a 
 difference, that the gold and ivory images of 
 the gods do not move them more to worship 
 than the groves and their silences; that there 
 is some god among them. But never again, 
 I suppose, at least in this present civilization, 
 will a man, save in far-off imagination, know 
 the feeling of the ancient poet who wrote 
 Deirdre's " Farewell to Alba" : there she had 
 ranged and lived wild with her hero-lover in 
 the sun and by the sea, feasting on venison 
 and badger's fat and fish, sleeping among 
 mountains and at river-mouths, loving the 
 cuckoo's voice in the high country and the 
 brightness of the pure water over the sand ;
 
 never would she have left these glens and 
 their strong places without her lover and the 
 command of fate. As little will a man in this 
 island to-day understand the Welsh poet's ode 
 to David ap Jenkin, the outlawed Lancas- 
 trian, the tall Kay of the greenwood, hunts- 
 man and harper, good with his hands at all 
 things, beloved of the stags and a very steward 
 to the cuckoo : " eight woods and God shall 
 keep thee safe " are the last words in the trans- 
 lation of Mr. H. Idris Bell. Not so few will 
 yet echo that other Welsh poet's praise of the 
 labourer : " When he pays his debt to God, 
 a good soul and a righteous will he render 
 up. It will be easy to the labourer of the 
 smiling meads to put his trust in the Lord 
 God; he passes no judgment save on the 
 plough-beam, brawling goes not in his com- 
 pany, he wages no war nor follows it, he 
 destroys no man for his goods, he does not 
 lord it overweeningly over us, he cloaks no 
 wrongful claim under a fair seeming. He is 
 made but to suffer ; there is no life, there is 
 47 D f %& no
 
 no world without him. Surely it is sweeter 
 far to him, unstained by guilt, to follow with 
 patient long-suffering mien the plough and 
 the ox-goad than to wear the shape of Arthur, 
 waster of cities. Who speaks against him ? 
 . . ." Men will echo this without believing 
 that the countryman is 01 necessity more 
 virtuous, but only that his vices, like his 
 virtues, are in the old style. 
 
 %& All these different classes of writers and 
 readers have behind them a thousand genera- 
 tions of ancestors who were shepherds, far- 
 mers, sailors, men who looked rather silently 
 on hill, meadow, and sea, save when cursing 
 them for inclemency or barrenness. As the 
 man said who lived in the house under the 
 hill: "When a poet writes he is often only put- 
 ting into words what some little old country- 
 man puzzled out among the sheep and the 
 corn in a long lifetime." If those men had 
 not learned to know a good pasture ground, 
 a good cornfield or olive garden, a good morn- 
 
 4 8
 
 ing sky and the smell of the land at sea, the 
 modern lovers of Nature would have been 
 vacant before a beautiful stretch of earth, 
 sky, or sea. Each one is the hundredth part of 
 a hunter or a husbandman. He who has more 
 than a hundredth part pure aesthete he per- 
 haps has his joys, but I wish his descendants 
 better fortune. Haggard and chilly must be 
 his pleasures in the English land or the Eng- 
 lish speech. He also may be adding to the 
 accumulated significance of the country, see- 
 ing it as the site for a house or a picnic, or 
 the subject of a picture ; and doubtless there 
 goes some religion to a house or even a picnic. 
 But what will such a man make of a book 
 like Professor Skeat's "Early English Pro- 
 verbs," a list of proverbs current when towns 
 were small and England merry ? Those sur- 
 viving to-day have a vigorous and rustic form 
 like "Sound as a trout," or "Men cut a broad 
 thong from unbought leather," or "There are 
 more stars than two," with its later variant, 
 " There are more maids than Malkin." 
 49 SS Some
 
 Some have so purely rustic a form that they 
 can hardly survive, such as "They talk, but 
 they never bent his bow," and its later form, 
 " Many talk of Robin Hood that never 
 shot with his bow." Another such is " The 
 harm is done and farewell fieldfare," from 
 " Troilus and Cressida," Proressor Skeat in- 
 terpreting the last words as "Good riddance " 
 because the fieldfare is a visitor who departs 
 with Winter. We have little use now for 
 the words, if we have for the sentiment, 
 of " It is hard to have the wolf full and the 
 sheep whole at the same time," or for " With 
 an empty hand a man cannot lure hawks." 
 There are some that could hardly be used now 
 in the King's English, though country speech 
 ought to preserve them ; for example, "Three 
 things drive a man from his house : smoke, 
 dripping rain, and wicked wives," and " The 
 man who builds his house all of sallow, whips 
 his blind horse over the fallow, and lets his 
 wife go on pilgrimages, is fit to be hanged." 
 Many a proverb has reached a duller or less 
 
 5
 
 rustic form. " Set a thief to catch a thief" is 
 descended from " The best man to keep a 
 forest is he who was once a thief of venison." 
 There is a country difference between "Every 
 Jack will find a Jill " and Chaucer's " There 
 is no goose so grey at the lake but he will 
 have a mate " ; between " First come first 
 served " and "He who comes first to the mill 
 grinds first." We seem to see the beginning 
 of a proverb in the mediaeval form of 
 "Nothing so bold as a blind mare" "As 
 bold as Bayard the blind," Bayard being a 
 common horse's name in the old England 
 of these proverbs. 
 
 S But the very assthete finds rusticity pala- 
 table in pilules, and the complete fatherless 
 and motherless aesthete is really an impolite 
 fiction. No man can see hill and valley as 
 but a pictorial arrangement of forms and 
 colours : no man sees only with his eyes. 
 He sees with the aid of hunter and sailor 
 and husbandman, and also of poets of perhaps 
 5 1 8 alien
 
 alien blood, Callimachus, Virgil, Shelley, 
 Emily Bronte. 
 
 $& Take for example Emily Bronte, the dark 
 Oread of Yorkshire moorland whose life was 
 all "secret pleasure, secret tears." In that 
 gaunt solitude, the " lone home of wind and 
 tree," she cried : 
 
 Give we the hills our equal prayer^ 
 
 Earth's breezy hills and heaven s blue sea ; 
 
 I ask for nothing further here 
 But my own heart and liberty. 
 
 She, the only poet who seems to call earth 
 " mother " with no inaccuracy, said to the 
 earth : 
 
 We would not leave our nature home 
 For any world beyond the tomb. 
 j!VO, mother, on thy kindly breast 
 Let us be laid in lasting resf, 
 Or waken but to share with thee 
 A mutual immortality. 
 
 That the trees were truly her half-sisters, 
 52
 
 cannot be doubtful to any reader of the 
 verse : 
 
 Woods ^ you need not frown on me ; 
 Spettral trees , that so dolefully 
 Shake your heads in the dreary sky, 
 Ton need not mock so bitterly. 
 
 %& For they were not always friendly sisters. 
 Her poems are full of a disturbing sense of the 
 vicissitudes of that intimacy which forced her 
 pen seventy years ago. The poems are her- 
 self, not her quiet ghost ; they live with beat- 
 ing pulses, quick breaths, dishevelled hair, 
 bright hair, upon the mountains. Hers was 
 a passionate intimacy, never a friendship, with 
 the earth, so that she knew all moods of happi- 
 ness except content. Her awful love of the 
 wild country bordered on religion, and in her 
 heart often supplanted conventional religion. 
 It seems to belong to an earlier age, to demand 
 a stronger body, a mind knowing less of books 
 or having fewer obligations to indoor life. 
 Her spirit might fittingly have possessed the 
 53 BS body
 
 body of that fifteenth-century Welsh outlaw 
 in his " pleasant fastness," and it is hard not to 
 believe that it had come down to her tinged 
 by such a one, nor to her alone, though to 
 few other poets. Even for those without this 
 same inheritance her " quick sympathies " 
 have added a power to the winds of the moor, 
 as Keats added one to its quiet when he 
 wrote : 
 
 Like a cirque 
 
 Of Druid stones upon a Jorlorn moor 
 When the chill rain begins at shut of eve. 
 
 Blake did an equal service when he perceived 
 the flowers putting forth their precious 
 odours, 
 
 And none can tell how from so small a centre 
 
 comes such sweet, 
 Forgetting that from within that centre ILternity 
 
 expands 
 Its ever during doors, that Og and Anak fiercely 
 
 guard. 
 
 54
 
 cg Blake relates the flower to Eternity. 
 Calming us with its space and patience, the 
 country relates us all to Eternity. We go to it 
 as would-be poets, or as solitaries, vagabonds, 
 lovers, to escape foul air, noise, hard hats, 
 black uniforms, multitudes, confusion, incom-^ 
 pleteness, elaborate means without clear ends, 
 to escape ourselves ; and we do more than 
 escape them. So vastly do we increase the 
 circle of which we are the centre that we 
 become as nothing. The larger the circle the 
 less seems our distance from other men each 
 at his separate centre ; and at last that dis- 
 tance is nothing at all in the mighty circle, 
 and all have but one circumference. And 
 thus we truly find ourselves. Many cannot 
 bear this expanding circle, this devouring 
 silence, and they seek another kind of near- 
 ness by crowding to Eastbourne or the Bay of 
 Naples, but do not succeed entirely in evading 
 the greatness of sun, wind, and sea. 
 B Riding or afoot, for sport, fresh society, or 
 whatever it may be, they go spreading far 
 55 <and
 
 and wide, as when children pour out of the 
 narrow school-door. They call it play be- 
 cause it seems only a respite from the "serious 
 business of life," and because it is so short. 
 They dare not take more of it : they must 
 return to involve themselves in grimmest 
 trifles, lest they should unmask the trifles and 
 never return, and so break up the fabric of a 
 few thousand years and enter that of eternity. 
 A small number stay behind to construe! 
 some kind of simple and natural life, and their 
 gains are great, but those of their followers less, 
 except in so far as they can allow themselves 
 to be absorbed in the machinery of a new 
 order, pleasantly blinded and distracled. 
 Hence also a gain to commerce : a fellow 
 names a new cereal after himself, and adver- 
 tises it by saying that something of the kind 
 was once the chief food of the American 
 Indians, " one of the most stalwart races of 
 men the world has ever produced " ; their 
 women, he says, " ground it laboriously in 
 hollowed stones and cooked it in a rude 
 
 56
 
 manner," and yet, notwithstanding this labo- 
 rious grinding and rude cooking, the corn, 
 " together with meat taken in the chase, 
 sustained a race of muscular giants." Some 
 will return to the laborious grinding and the 
 rude cooking, but not to the meat or the 
 chase, and hope to breed a new race of 
 muscular giants ranging benevolently over a 
 painless planet. 
 
 The country does not resent these gentle 
 adventurers and their cloistered wildness. It 
 is meek in its strength. It uses neither haste 
 nor violence, and men carve and colour the 
 face of the land. In some moods it is even 
 comfortable to remember how much of the 
 pleasantness of English country men made 
 by chance or design. The sowing of various 
 crops, the planting of hedges and building 
 of walls, the ordering of forests, and so on, 
 are conscious attempts to collaborate with 
 Nature. But as great effects are produced 
 when men have seemed at first to ignore her. 
 A new house, for example, however well pro- 
 57 portioned
 
 portioned, however wisely chosen the material 
 is always harsh to the eye and to the mind. 
 In a hundred years it matters little what the 
 form or the material ; if the house survives 
 and is inhabited for a century, it has probably 
 taken its place. If it is deserted a place is 
 made for it yet more rapidly. Any building 
 can be comfortably digested by the country, 
 if left to itself, in twenty years. Palace, 
 factory, or cottage cannot resist the wiles of 
 frost, wind, rain, and ivy, and the building 
 which has given itself up to them is always 
 attractive unless the beholder happens to 
 know why it was deserted. London deserted 
 would become a much pleasanter place than 
 Jefferies pictured it in " After London." 
 The mere thought of the jackdaws who 
 would dwell there is a cheerful one, and they 
 would not be alone. I like to think what 
 mysteries the shafts, the tubes, the tunnels, 
 and the vaults would make, and what a land to 
 discover and explore. The railway-cuttings, 
 unless very steep-sided, soon become gracious 
 
 58
 
 and impenetrable sanctuaries for plants and 
 inserts. 
 
 SS The country has already absorbed things 
 as huge as London. Therefore you may fancy 
 in her smile some unkind subtlety as in La 
 Gioconda's, but that is too flattering not to 
 her wisdom, but to the dignity of ages and 
 civilizations. She is eternal, or represents 
 eternal things : she smiles not at time, but 
 with eternity. She gives every man what he has 
 it in his power to see, seek, and enjoy, whether 
 he desires green homes, grey wilds, or but a 
 grave to be forgotten ; whether he would 
 find a solitude or create a desert, but not a 
 solitude, by playing golf. Men help to main- 
 tain the country as they think it should be. 
 According to their tastes they destroy or they 
 work to preserve rights of way : while some 
 blotch and blight the hills, others will have 
 this hollow or that summit made a possession 
 of the people for ever, or they save old houses 
 or build new ones worthy to please the eyes 
 of 1912 and 20 1 2. The process is not always 
 59 <2 an
 
 an agreeable one. Horace complained that 
 the villas would not leave room for the 
 plough, and no man likes suddenly to see 
 Deodara Villa standing at the edge of the 
 Pilgrims' Way. But even in southern Eng- 
 land an angle of country is always to be found 
 purer than what had long been thought purest, 
 to take the place of the desecrated,and greener 
 pastures, villages deeper hid than Imber, 
 denser copses, deserts more idle, longer 
 emancipating views, deeper silences of that 
 unknown god.
 
 Printed at The Ballantyne Press 
 London 1913
 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY 
 
 Los Angeles 
 This book is DUE on the last date stamped below. 
 
 DEC 8 
 
 JAN 3 1962 
 
 REID BOOK BOX 
 ..DEC 16 
 
 Form L9-50m-7,'54 (5990) 444
 
 PR Thomas 
 
 6039 The country 
 
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