A Common Sentiment Is One Of Those Great Goods That
Make Life Palatable And Ever New.
The knowledge that another has
felt as we have felt, and seen things, even if they are little
things, not much otherwise than we have seen them, will continue to
the end to be one of life's choicest pleasures.
Let the reader, then, betake himself in the spirit we have
recommended to some of the quieter kinds of English landscape. In
those homely and placid agricultural districts, familiarity will
bring into relief many things worthy of notice, and urge them
pleasantly home to him by a sort of loving repetition; such as the
wonderful life-giving speed of windmill sails above the stationary
country; the occurrence and recurrence of the same church tower at
the end of one long vista after another: and, conspicuous among
these sources of quiet pleasure, the character and variety of the
road itself, along which he takes his way. Not only near at hand,
in the lithe contortions with which it adapts itself to the
interchanges of level and slope, but far away also, when he sees a
few hundred feet of it upheaved against a hill and shining in the
afternoon sun, he will find it an object so changeful and
enlivening that he can always pleasurably busy his mind about it.
He may leave the river-side, or fall out of the way of villages,
but the road he has always with him; and, in the true humour of
observation, will find in that sufficient company. From its subtle
windings and changes of level there arises a keen and continuous
interest, that keeps the attention ever alert and cheerful. Every
sensitive adjustment to the contour of the ground, every little dip
and swerve, seems instinct with life and an exquisite sense of
balance and beauty. The road rolls upon the easy slopes of the
country, like a long ship in the hollows of the sea. The very
margins of waste ground, as they trench a little farther on the
beaten way, or recede again to the shelter of the hedge, have
something of the same free delicacy of line - of the same swing and
wilfulness. You might think for a whole summer's day (and not have
thought it any nearer an end by evening) what concourse and
succession of circumstances has produced the least of these
deflections; and it is, perhaps, just in this that we should look
for the secret of their interest. A foot-path across a meadow - in
all its human waywardness and unaccountability, in all the grata
protervitas of its varying direction - will always be more to us
than a railroad well engineered through a difficult country. {7}
No reasoned sequence is thrust upon our attention: we seem to have
slipped for one lawless little moment out of the iron rule of cause
and effect; and so we revert at once to some of the pleasant old
heresies of personification, always poetically orthodox, and
attribute a sort of free-will, an active and spontaneous life, to
the white riband of road that lengthens out, and bends, and
cunningly adapts itself to the inequalities of the land before our
eyes. We remember, as we write, some miles of fine wide highway
laid out with conscious aesthetic artifice through a broken and
richly cultivated tract of country. It is said that the engineer
had Hogarth's line of beauty in his mind as he laid them down. And
the result is striking. One splendid satisfying sweep passes with
easy transition into another, and there is nothing to trouble or
dislocate the strong continuousness of the main line of the road.
And yet there is something wanting. There is here no saving
imperfection, none of those secondary curves and little
trepidations of direction that carry, in natural roads, our
curiosity actively along with them. One feels at once that this
road has not has been laboriously grown like a natural road, but
made to pattern; and that, while a model may be academically
correct in outline, it will always be inanimate and cold. The
traveller is also aware of a sympathy of mood between himself and
the road he travels. We have all seen ways that have wandered into
heavy sand near the sea-coast, and trail wearily over the dunes
like a trodden serpent. Here we too must plod forward at a dull,
laborious pace; and so a sympathy is preserved between our frame of
mind and the expression of the relaxed, heavy curves of the
roadway. Such a phenomenon, indeed, our reason might perhaps
resolve with a little trouble. We might reflect that the present
road had been developed out of a tract spontaneously followed by
generations of primitive wayfarers; and might see in its expression
a testimony that those generations had been affected at the same
ground, one after another, in the same manner as we are affected
to-day. Or we might carry the reflection further, and remind
ourselves that where the air is invigorating and the ground firm
under the traveller's foot, his eye is quick to take advantage of
small undulations, and he will turn carelessly aside from the
direct way wherever there is anything beautiful to examine or some
promise of a wider view; so that even a bush of wild roses may
permanently bias and deform the straight path over the meadow;
whereas, where the soil is heavy, one is preoccupied with the
labour of mere progression, and goes with a bowed head heavily and
unobservantly forward. Reason, however, will not carry us the
whole way; for the sentiment often recurs in situations where it is
very hard to imagine any possible explanation; and indeed, if we
drive briskly along a good, well-made road in an open vehicle, we
shall experience this sympathy almost at its fullest. We feel the
sharp settle of the springs at some curiously twisted corner; after
a steep ascent, the fresh air dances in our faces as we rattle
precipitately down the other side, and we find it difficult to
avoid attributing something headlong, a sort of ABANDON, to the
road itself.
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