XIX Autumn in Canada Again

§ 32

Yet another country walk taken in England's North American dominions lives most pleasantly in my memory.

Two of the clock one autumn afternoon found me free. I had hoped to have lost no time in beginning to put enormous stretches of space between me and my desk. Not that this desk had not its pleasures, and many of them; but one craves a change of mental atmosphere, however salubrious that usually respired. The temptation, however, of calmly and in self-righteously indolent manner enjoying the sweets of freedom was too strong, so I lounged a whole afternoon, and not till daybreak on the following morning was I booted, knapsacked, and afoot.

The task of putting space between me and my desk was not one as easy as I had anticipated. It was hours before the dust of the city was shaken off, and the mud of the country allowed to take its place; the tedium of the streets at that unfrequented hour of the day made them seem interminable. For was I not craving and in search of country sights and sounds? And yet for miles not one met the eye or ear. Yes, I am forgetting: there was one which made up for much monotony. On a humble cottage wall facing the south, far out in the suburbs, was a wealth of flowering convolvulus such as I had rarely or only in India seen before. The sight was entrancing. The various-hued blossoms seemed blatantly to trumpet forth their beauty to the sun, to borrow the terms of sound and to apply them to colour. And what colour was there! That deep, soft, velvet purple, powdered with snowy pollen—what a profound, what an acute sense it produced of something altogether beyond the limitations of time and space, of something mysterious, beneficent, divine. Never before did I see so deep a meaning in those words: "Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin: and yet I say unto you, That even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these." How paltry, how tainted, seemed all human greatness beside those simple petals; how marred, how deformed! And why? Why should Nature alone be able to smile openly before her Maker's eyes, and man be ever hiding himself from the presence of the Lord God? Ah! there is more than one interpretation of the text, "All have sinned, and come short of the glory of God." ... Those brilliant blossoms aroused many a thought. How earnestly have all poets of Nature striven to find expression for the emotions that natural beauty evokes! And yet none has completely succeeded, and none will succeed till the hidden links are discovered between the beautiful thing, the mind that perceives it, and the Hand that fashions it. How is it that a sunset, a landscape, a green field even, or a growing fern, will sometimes in a moment of time cause to blaze up in a man a thrill, a joy, so intense that under its influence one feels dazed and dumb? A great power is, as it were, suddenly let loose; beauty incarnated momentarily reveals its divine presence, and one feels an all but overwhelming impulse to yield oneself to it and be rapt away whithersoever it leads. But—whither it leads we cannot go.

Of all poets who have given utterance to this deep and mystical emotion, Wordsworth perhaps has best succeeded. What can rival the following lines?—which will bear constant quotation:—

If only Wordsworth had written oftener in that strain of higher mood! To me this passage, even with just such narrow meaning as one not worthy to call himself a Wordsworthian can read into it, has been invaluable. In the mass of that hidden, cloudy, inner signification with which (I think it is Mr Ruskin who insists that) all poetry should be instinct, these lines are marvellous. They more nearly reach the goal of that "struggle to conceive the inconceivable, to utter the unutterable, that longing after the Infinite, that love of God," which Professor Max Müller describes as the basis of all religions, than all the creeds such religions have constructed.

Wordsworth saw, as perhaps no one before him ever quite so clearly saw, the Spiritual Unity underlying those two things:—the one called External Nature; the other, this spark of life called the Human Soul—the product of, and burning in, that External Nature, as a flame feeds upon the air which it illumines.—But to return to my walk.

§ 33

Curiously enough, I had hardly reached the confines of the town which I was leaving before I fell in with a youth apparently possessed of the same motive as myself—namely, to enjoy to the full the delights of the country after a year's inclusion in a thronged city; and, in order the better to do so, to use as means of locomotion his own two legs, and a stout stick. I say "apparently," for very short converse with him revealed the fact that he was utterly blind to the charms of Nature. He was nice-mannered and polite to a degree; but as a companion to aid in discovering rural beauty he was simply worse than none at all. His two negative or denominatorial eyes and ears completely cancelled, made useless, and altogether put out of existence my two positive or numeratorial senses. I was prepared to take infinite delight in the most trivial and insignificant of Nature's works, to extol her most commonplace manifestations, to find the longest sermons in the tiniest pebbles; but to do this by the side of the most antipathetic of, to all intents and purposes, blind and deaf of fellow-pedestrians—it was out of the question. I nothing extenuate nor set down aught in malice when I say that that utterance of his most pregnant with observation of the passing scene was contained in the words, "That's a potato-patch!" The early morning sun fought its way between dense grey clouds, and fell in cheering light on the tops of the trees, and in silver showers on the gleaming lake below; the rich green meadows caught the rays, the very air seemed laden with treasures of sunlight; young and graceful maples, in crimson autumn tints, like Mænads at vintage-time, flung flaming torches towards the sky, unmindful of the morn; the sumach and the gorgeous virginia-creeper were ablaze with beauty; yet of all this he saw nothing; a brown potato-patch by the highway rim a brown potato-patch was to him, and it was nothing more. Yes, by the by, it was something more: it was an appreciable piece of property, a prospective town lot at so much per foot frontage, one-third cash down and the balance in half-yearly instalments to suit the purchaser, all local improvements paid by.... At least some such jargon caught my inattentive ear. Real estate is, I gladly grant, a topic of (often too) absorbing interest; but one does not exactly wish to be confronted with intricate monetary calculations, connected with barter and commerce, when engaged in the not very kindred and decidedly delicate task of wooing Nature. Barter and commerce when Wordsworth is ringing in one's ears, incorporated companies and syndicates when bird and bush ask your attention—these things, in the language of the pharmacopœia, are incompatibles.

§ 34

I had thus two causes of complaint against my companion. So I left him: I took a bypath; he kept to the highway. Nor was I sorry. It is pleasant now and again for short periods to get away from one's fellow-men. Familiarity breeds contempt, it is said; perhaps it is as true of aggregations of men as of individuals. At all events, one comes back from a temporary seclusion with a sweeter temper, a more kindly and tolerant regard for those about one. Nor was I sorry. The main road contained too many curious starers. To walk for pleasure was a thing wholly outside the limits of their comprehension. "'Tisn't 'cause 'tis cheaper?" asked one irrepressible inquirer (always this matter of money!); and he was still more puzzled at the explanation that hotel bills largely exceeded railway fare....

§ 35

Yet one seeks entertainment when travelling long alone. The mind becomes overfull, it gathers from every sight and sound and scent, and craves another mind as depositary for the surplus, as sharer of the spoils. In time also it wearies of constant observation, and would give much for a companion. In lieu of a concrete one, I found myself quite unconsciously imitating Macaulay, and substituting an abstract one by quoting Milton; and never did his ponderous yet marvellously poised lines sound to me so grand as when rolled ore rotundo to the accompaniment of Ontario's rolling wave. M. Henri Cochin, Matthew Arnold tells us, speaks of "the majestic English iambic." It is to Milton surely that the English iambic owes the praise of majesty. To me, I confess, the exceeding beauty of much of Milton's verse is a snare—as is also much of Mr Ruskin's prose: the ear is so captivated by the sound that the mind strays from the sense.

§ 36

Toronto was my starting point, and my course lay eastwards on the northern shore of great Lake Ontario by what is always known as the Kingston Road, one of the oldest in the country, the precursor of the Grand Trunk Railway, the track of which, indeed, it closely follows. The country through which it runs varies but little in scenery, being a great undulating stretch of fertile land thickly settled with farms and orchards, and as thickly wooded with pine, maple, larch, elm, fir, beech, hickory, and other trees common in Canada. Here and there a small river runs to the lake, and here and there the shore rises into cliffs of eighty or a hundred feet. Cows and sheep, and pigs and poultry, meet one all along the road, showing us the occupations of the inhabitants; as do also the fields of barley and wheat, and the great orchards gay with the unrivalled Canadian apple, which gleams at us from the boughs with every hue and size. The Kingston Road is a king's highway with a vengeance; hard, well-travelled, and dotted, I should say, along its whole length, with comfortable, often elaborate, habitations standing in the midst of fields and trees. At every ten, fifteen, twenty, or thirty miles these habitations cluster into villages or towns; sometimes where road and railway intersect, when there spring up factories and warehouses; sometimes down by the shore, when there rise elevators and wharves. I cannot pretend to say that these are interesting. They consist for the most part each of one straggling main street, itself a part of the Kingston Road, and differentiated from it only by the unkempt habitations that line its length, and by the inevitable wooden pavements, broad in the central portions, but narrowing to a single plank in the outskirts—where, no doubt, it was in reality, if not in name, the "Lovers' Walk." They were not quaint, no ancient and few historical traditions clung to them, neither did they appear to me to possess any distinguishing characteristics.

§ 37

I have spoken of a quiet country town. A country town of a Sunday afternoon in Canada is the quietest of existing things. Everything in it seems lifeless. Not a sound is heard from any side. One's own cough startles one in the very streets. Two cows slowly wend their way homewards; an over-ripe apple falls heavily in an unkempt front garden—even these signs of semi-life are a relief. Rows of youths, all dressed in sombre black, and all smoking cigars fearfully if not wonderfully made, lean against the walls of the inn at the corner, or stand in silent knots about the horse-gnawed "hitching-post." The jaded afternoon sunlight falls slantingly and weariedly on untidy plots in which weeds strive for mastery successfully with flowers, on empty verandahs with blistered paint, on the dusty grass encroaching ever on the street. I enter the inn. It is chilly, and in the common room which serves many purposes a battered stove lacking two-thirds of its mica radiates a dry and suffocating heat. On deal chairs, mostly tipped up, sit the youths but just now lounging without. They say nothing; only they sit and smoke, and spit—how they spit! They themselves probably are all unconscious of the incessant salivary sharp-shooting; but I—I sit in terror, like a nervous woman dreading the pistol shots on the stage. Soon church bells begin to clang. None heeds them, nor are they over-inviting; one is cracked, they are not in harmony, and they seem to be ringing a race in which the hindmost is to win. In the space of about an hour, however, the youths begin to move, as if with the feeling that at last will come a small relief from the awful ennui which they cannot express. Church is coming out. They go out and draw up before the doors. A heavy yellow light streams across the street, and with it issues an odour, perhaps, of sanctity, but much disguised by kerosene. Greetings follow between the out-coming damsels and the waiting youths, and curious raucous laughs intended to be tender are heard disappearing into darkened ways. Soon all is again hushed, and but for here and there the slow and lugubrious sounds of hymn tunes played on old and middle-aged organs, the little town might be a buried city of the East.

§ 38

Yet no doubt it had its tragedies, this seemingly peaceful and sequestered spot: indeed signs of most pathetic tragedies came under my own eyes, few as were the hours which I spent in it. Hanging about the unpretentious hostelry about which those uncouth youths gathered, were two specimens of what was once humanity that made the heart ache to look on. One was a case, I think, hopeless: a gaunt and dirty figure, his last drink still dripping from his beard, clothed in the vilest of shirts, and in things that were once trousers, which last hung loose over large and faded carpet slippers, he moved disgust as well as pity. The other was of a different class. Drink had been his bane also, but there was not in his face that absence of all shame, that despair merging into careless defiance, which stamped his fellow-sufferer's case as beyond the cure of man. They called him "Doc," and there were still evidences of birth and education upon his bloated features. What had driven him thus far? I could not help but conjecture. Was there a woman at the bottom of it? If so, where and what was she now? Somebody else's.... But this was idle guesswork. There was yet another case, a woman herself this time, still more tragic. Her motto, stamped upon every feature, expressed in every gesture, was "The heart knoweth its own bitterness." A tall, dark, and once handsome spinster, a femme de trente ans, she waited upon us at table; but with such an air of utter indifference, with such complete abstraction from things material and ephemeral, that she awed the very persons to whose wants she ministered. Her face wore a settled and unaltering expression of something missed yet never to that day for one moment forgotten. A machine could not have carried plates and moved dishes with more unfailing stolidity. Her thoughts were remotely away in the past, and it seemed as if nothing, nothing upon all this earth, could fetch them back. Cato's statue would have smiled as soon as she. It was pathetic in the extreme. One longed to give her if but one moment's peace of mind. Did she never forget? What was it she brooded on? How long would the feminine heart and brain stand that strain? Tragedies! Yes, there were tragedies there, as everywhere else.

§ 39

Such is Sunday in a country town. But in truth, after the rush and hurry of city life, in the country it seems always Sunday. There is a leisure, a calm, a restfulness, and, away by the fields, a quiet sanctity which pervades its every part and unconsciously influences its every inhabitant. By degrees, too, on the traveller through the country this calming influence comes. The still green meadows, the gently swaying boughs, the sunshine sleeping pillowed on the clouds—all tend to meditative and restful peace, and one reaps the harvest of a quiet eye. And if one yields to this beneficent mood there is much, very much, to be gained. Alone with Nature, all around the spacious earth, above the immeasurable heavens, alone in a vast expanse, one finds oneself, in Amiel's fine phrase, tête-à-tête with the Infinite. At such times the great problem of Life flares upon us like a flash of lightning, so sudden, so intense, so vivid is its irruption on the mental vision. Time and space, like the darkness of night, are annihilated, earthly bounds are burst, and there is revealed a realm of Being beyond the confines of the relative, the limited, the finite. We recognise the infinity of unity, the brotherhood of all things. Terms of proportion and comparison lose their significance: there is no great or little, important or trivial, for the minutest object is an essential part of the All, without which this All would cease to be.

§ 40

Curious thoughts, or "half-embodyings of thoughts" as Coleridge called them, that lonely walk aroused. What was this All? And what portion of this All was I—I, this tiny biped crawling ant-like between earth and sky? I looked over the flat earth, and remembered that it was not flat but round, and but one of myriads like itself, and among them, perhaps, as paltry as, upon it, I. I looked up at the sky, filled with the radiance of the sun, and again remembered that, sown through space like seed, were countless other suns, and ours perhaps the least in all that host. And when night came, and the stars shone, I remembered that even then I saw only what came in at the pin-prick of the eye, and that to the mighty All that myriad-studded sky was perhaps as trivial as to it was earth or sun. Yet, trivial as we were, we were not naught—not quite nothing. That was the wonder of it. So far from naught, indeed, that to me, this tiny biped crawling, himself was very important; his little pains, his aches, even these his questionings were very real. If incommensurable suns swung high overhead, he at least was the centre of his own little world, and not the most astounding facts of science could alter or remove that egocentric view.—And, if not nothing, if something in all that vast inane, then what? How came it that, prompted by what entered at that pin-prick eye, something within him could fling itself, fling itself faster than light, far beyond the outermost boundary of vision, and put to the immensity of Being questions which, could Being hear, would surely put it to the blush? Those pains, those aches, were they nothing to the All? To the tiny mighty atom they were much.—But the world spun round, and the sun set, and darkness was upon the face of the deep.

§ 41

It is well now and again, I think, to withdraw into the holy of holies of one's own self, "where dwells the Nameless,"[22] in its shapeless and vague impenetrability, "as a cloud." The world is too much with us. The myriad trivial details of everyday life hide from us that of which they ought in reality perpetually to remind us. For, after all, what is all action, even as manifested in these trivial details, but a struggle to overcome space and time, the limitations of the finite; and what, again, is all thought but a struggle to conceive the infinite?

§ 42

Yet another thought this spacious prospect gave me. The endless green fields and the endless blue lake seemed a symbol of the unrealisability of the ideal. With both I was enamoured, and with the beauty of both I craved in some dim and unknown way to take my fill of delight: both were at my feet, but both stretched away and away until they met the eternal and unapproachable heavens at the horizon. Yes, the fields were green, but not the spot on which I stood; the water was blue, but not in the cup with which I tried to assuage my thirst.—But there is a limit to ontological and psychological speculations of sombre hue.