That is really all, I think. And what is there to love in all that?
Well, it is a little space of earth in which life has been going on for I daresay a thousand years. The whole place has grown slowly up out of the love and care and work of man. Perhaps there were nothing but little huts and hovels at first, with a tiny rubble church; then the houses grew a little bigger and better. Perhaps it was emptied again by the Black Death, which took a long toll of victims hereabouts. Shepherds, ploughmen, hedgers, ditchers, farmers, an ale-house-keeper, a shopkeeper or two, and a priest— that has been the village for a thousand years. Patient, stupid, toilsome, unimaginative, kindly little lives, I daresay. Not much interested in one another, ill educated, gossipy, brutish, superstitious, but surprised perhaps into sudden passions of love, and still more surprised perhaps by the joys of fatherhood and motherhood; with children of all ages growing up, pretty and engaging and dirty and amusing and naughty, fading one by one into dull and sober age, and into decrepitude, and the churchyard at the end of all!
Well, I think all that pathetic and mysterious, and beautiful with the beauty that reality has. I want to know who all the folks were, what they looked like, what they cared about or thought about, how they made terms with pain and death, what they hoped, expected, feared, and what has become of them. Everyone as urgently and vehemently and interestedly alive as I myself, and yet none of them with the slightest idea of how they got there or whither they were going—the great, helpless, good-natured, passive army of men and women, pouring like a stream through the world, and borne away on the wings of the wind. They were glad to be alive, no doubt, when the sun fell on the apple-orchard, and the scent of the fruit was in the air, and the bees hummed round the blossoms, when people smile at each other and say kind and meaningless things; they were afraid, no doubt, as they lay in pain in the stuffy attics, with the night wind blustering round the chimney-stack, and hoped to be well again. Then there were occasions and treats, the Sunday dinner, the wedding, the ride in the farm-cart to Cambridge, the visit of the married sister from her home close by. I do not suppose they knew or cared what was happening in the world. War and politics made little difference to them. They knew about the weather, they cared perhaps about their work, they liked the Sunday holiday—all very dim and simple, thoughts not expressed, feelings not uttered, experience summed up in little bits of phrases. Yet I like to think that they were pleased with the look of the place without knowing why. I don't deceive myself about all this, or make it out as idyllic. I don't exactly wish to have lived thus, and I expect it was coarse, greedy, dull, ugly, a great deal of it; but though I can think fine thoughts about it, and put my thoughts into musical words, I do not honestly believe that my life, my hopes, my feelings differ very much from the experience of these old people.
Of course I have books and pictures and intellectual fancies and ideas; but that is only an elaborate game that I play, the things I notice and recognise: but I expect the old hearts and minds were at work, too, noticing and observing and recording; and all my flourish of talk and thought is only a superficial affair.
And what consecrates and lights up the little place for me, touches it with golden hues, makes it moving, touching, beautiful, is the thought of all that strange, unconscious life, the love and hate, the fear and the content, the joy and sorrow, that has surged to and fro among the thatched roofs and apple-orchards so many centuries before I came into being, and will continue when I am trodden into the dust.
When I came here first thirty years ago, exploring with a friend long dead the country-side, it was, I am sure, the same thought that made the place beautiful. I could not then put it into words; I have learned to do that since, and word-painting is a very pleasant pastime. It was a hot, bright summer day—I recall the scent of the clover in the air—and there came on me that curious uplifting of the heart, that wonder as to what all the warmth and scent, the green-piled tree, the grazing cows, the children trotting to and fro, could possibly mean, or why it was all so utterly delightful. It was not a religious feeling, but there was a sense of a great, good-natured, beauty-loving mind behind it all—a mind very like our own, and yet even then with a shadow striking across it—the shadow of pain and grief and hollow farewells.
I was not a very contented boy in those days, in some bewilderment of both mind and heart, having had my first experience that life could be hard and intricate. The world was sweeter to me, though not so interesting as it now is; but I had just the same deep desire as I have now, though it has not been satisfied, to find something strong and secure and permanent, some heart to trust utterly and entirely, something that could understand and comfort and explain and reassure, a power which one could clasp hands with, as a child lays its delicate finger in a strong, enfolding palm, and never be in any doubt again. It is one's weakness which is so tiring, so disappointing; and yet I do not want a careless, indifferent, brutal, healthy strength at all. It is the strength of love and peace that I want, not to be afraid, not to be troubled. It is all somewhere, I do not doubt:
Yet, oh, the place could I but find!
I have been through my village this very day. The sun was just beginning to slope to the west; the sun poured out his rays of gold from underneath the shadow of a great, dark, up-piled cloud—the long rays which my nurse used to tell me were sucking up water, but which I believed to be the eye of God. The trees were bare, but the elm-buds were red, and the willow-rods were crimson with spring; the little stream bubbled clearly off the hill; and the cottage gardens were full of up-thrusting blades; while the mezereons were all aflame with bloom. Life moving, pausing, rushing past! I wonder. When I pass the gate, if I see the dawn of that other morning, I cannot help feeling that I shall want to see my little village again, to loiter down the lane among the white-gabled houses. Shall I be much wiser then than I am now? Shall I have seen or heard something which will set my anxious mind at rest? Who can tell me? And yet the old, gnarled apple-boughs, with the blue sky behind them, and the new-springing grass all seem to hold the secret, which I want as much to interpret and make my own as when I wandered through the hamlet under the wold more than thirty years ago.