Winter in a solitary house in the country, without society, is tolerable, nay, even enjoyable and delightful, given certain conditions; but these are not the conditions which attach to the life of a professional man who drops down into such a place by mere accident.... They are old association--an almost exhaustive biographical or historical acquaintance with every object, animate and inanimate, within the observer's horizon. He must know all about those invisible ones of the days gone by, whose feet have traversed the fields which look so grey from his windows; recall whose creaking plough has turned those sods from time to time; whose hands planted the trees that form a crest to the opposite hill; whose horses and hounds have torn through that underwood; what birds affect that particular brake; what bygone domestic dramas of love, jealousy, revenge, or disappointment have been enacted in the cottages, the mansions, the street, or on the green. The spot may have beauty, grandeur, salubrity, convenience; but if it lack memories it will ultimately pall upon him who settles there without opportunity of intercourse with his kind.
No, that was not discreet reading for a dyspeptic man of letters, alone in a two-roomed gunyah in the midst of virgin bush, in a land where the respectably old dates back a score of years, the historic, say, fifty years, and 'the mists of antiquity' a bare century. One recollection inevitably aroused by such a passage brought to mind words comparatively recent, spoken by Mrs. Oldcastle:
'In the Old World, even for a man who lives alone on a mountain-top, there is more of intellectuality--in the very atmosphere, in the buildings and roads, the hedges and the ditches--than the best cities of the New World have to offer.'
Quite apart from its grimly ironic philosophy, the topography, the earthy quality--'take of English earth as much as either hand may rightly clutch'--of the Wessex master's work makes it indigestible reading for an exile of more than thirty or forty; unless, of course, he is of the fine and robust type, whose minds and constitutions function with the steadiness of a good chronometer, warranted for all climes and circumstances.
But this mention of Hardy reminds me of a curious literary coincidence which I stumbled upon a few months ago. For me, at all events, it was a discovery. I was reading, quite idly, the story which should long since have been dramatised for the stage, The Trumpet Major, written, if I mistake not, in the early 'nineties. I came to chapter xxiii., which opens in this wise:
Christmas had passed. Dreary winter with dark evenings had given place to more dreary winter with light evenings. Rapid thaws had ended in rain, rain in wind, wind in dust. Showery days had come--the season of pink dawns and white sunsets....
This reading was part of my Hardy debauch. A week or two earlier I had been reading what I think was his first book, written a quarter of a century before The Trumpet Major. I refer to Desperate Remedies; with all its faults, an extraordinarily full and finished production for a first book. Now, with curiosity in my very finger-tips, I turned over the pages of this volume, reread no more than a week previously. I came presently upon chapter xii., and, following upon its first sentence, read these words:
Christmas had passed; dreary winter with dark evenings had given place to more dreary winter with light evenings. Thaws had ended in rain, rain in wind, wind in dust. Showery days had come--the period of pink dawns and white sunsets....
That (with a quarter of a century, the writing of many books, and the building up of a justly great and world-wide reputation between the two writings) strikes me as a singular, and, in a way, pleasing literary coincidence; singular, as a freak of subconscious memory for words, pleasing, as a verification in mature life of the writer's comparatively youthful observations of natural phenomena. I wonder if the author, or any others among his almost innumerable readers, have chanced to light upon this particular coincidence!
Another writer of fiction, whose bent of mind, if sombre, was far from devoid of ironical humour, has occupied a deal of my leisure here--George Gissing. I rank him very high among the Victorian novelists. His work deserves a higher place than it is usually accorded by the critics. He was a fine story-teller, and for me (though their topographical appeal is not, perhaps, very obvious) his books are very closely packed with living human interest. But again, for such an one as myself, so situated, I would not say that a course of Gissing formed particularly wholesome or digestible reading. Here, for example, is a passage associated in my recollection with a night which was among the worst I have spent in this place: