§ 53
May I here request the reader to accompany me in a short digression?—Few things are pleasanter than a walk in which one turns down any lane that invites.
One of the first delights of walking is the pleasure derived from the passing scene.—What is the secret of the pleasure derived from a beautiful landscape—or, as a matter of fact, from almost any landscape? For apparently a landscape need not be actually beautiful in order to give pleasure. "I wouldn't give a mile of the dear old Sierras," says Bret Harte, "with their honesty, sincerity, and magnificent uncouthness, for 100,000 kilomètres of the picturesque Vaud."[29] And even Mary MacLane, rail as she did at the barren sands of Butte, Montana, in her "Story,"[30] when she left them wrote, "I love those things the best of all."[31]—Bret Harte and Mary MacLane may give us a clue to the secret. It is not merely the contour or the colours of a landscape that delight; it is the associations that cling to it.—But what of a scene which is quite new to the eyes? Still, I think, association. "Scenery soon palls," says George Borrow, "unless it is associated with remarkable events, and the names of remarkable men."[32] And Ruskin, you will remember, when gazing at the broken masses of pine forest which skirt the course of the Ain above the village of Champignole, in the Jura, found that the impressiveness of the scene owed its source to the fact that "those ever-springing flowers and ever-flowing streams had been dyed by the deep colours of human endurance, valour, and virtue."[33]
Packed away in the brain and mind of man must be subtle and secret memories dating back through unknown ages of time.—A gaseous theory, perhaps, but one which Senancour has liquefied into the pellucid sentence:—"La nature sentie n'est que dans les rapports humains, et l'éloquence des choses n'est rien que l'éloquence de l'homme."[34] The great fight for life, the stern joys of life—the ferocious combat, the thrilling love match, the myriad sensations and emotions evoked by man's physical environment, and his struggle for existence therein—surely these live somehow somewhere packed away in his brain to-day—just as some migratory and nidificatory memories must be packed away in the brain of a bird. It is these dormant cosmic memories that a landscape revives. On how many a plain to-day does there not flow veritable human blood remuted into sap!—Terrene Nature was man's ancestral home and no man can gaze upon it unmoved.