But apart from the personal discomforts to which vague people subject themselves, and the absurdities of which they are guilty, one cannot help speculating on the spiritual state of folks to whom nothing is precise, nothing definite, and no question of faith clearly thought out. To be sure they may be great in the realm of conviction; but so is the African savage when he hears the ghosts of his ancestors pass howling in the woods; so is the Assassin of the Mountain, when he sees heaven open as he throws himself on the spears of his enemies in an ecstacy of faith, to be realized by slaughter and suicide. Convictions based on imagination, unsupported by facts or proofs, are as worthless in a moral as in a logical point of view; but the vague have nothing better; and whether as politicians or as pietists, though they are warm partizans they are but feeble advocates, fond of flourishing about large generalities, but impossible to be pinned to any point and unable to defend any position. To those who must have something absolute and precise, however limited—one inch of firmly-laid foundation on which to build up the superstructure—it is a matter of more wonder than envy how the vague are content to live for ever in a haze which has no clearness of outline, no definiteness of detail, and how they can make themselves happy in a name—calling their fog faith, and therewith counting themselves blessed.
ARCADIA.
Perhaps the largest amount of simple pleasure possible to adult life is to be found in the first weeks of the summer's holiday, when the hard-worked man of business leaves his office and all its anxieties behind him, and goes off to the sea-side or the hills for a couple of months' relaxation. Everything is so fresh to him, it is like the renewal of his boyhood; and if he happens to have chosen a picturesque place, where the houses stand well and make that ornate kind of landscape to be found in show-places, he wonders how it is that people who can stay here ever leave, or tire of the beauties that are so delightful to him. Yet he hears of this comfortable mansion, with its park and well-appointed grounds, waiting for an occupant; he is told of that fairyland cottage, embowered in roses and jessamine, with a garden gay and redolent with flowers, to be had for a mere song; and he finds to his surprise that the owners of these choice corners of Arcadia are only anxious to escape from what he would, if he could, be only anxious to retain.
In his first days this restlessness, this discontent, is simply inconceivable. What more do they want than what they have? Why, that field lying there in the sunshine, dotted about with dun-coloured cows which glow like glorified Cuyps in the evening red, and backed by rock and tree and tumbling cascade, would be enough to make him happy. He could never weary of such a lovely bit of home scenery; and if to this he adds a view of the sea, or the crags and purple shadows of a mountain, he has wherewith to make him blessed for the remainder of his life. So he thinks while the smoke of London and the sulphur of the Metropolitan still cling about his throat, and the roar of the streets has not quite died out of his ears.
The woods are full of flowers and the rarer kind of insects, and he is never sated with the sea. There is the trout stream as clear as crystal, where he is sure of a rise if he waits long enough; the moors, where he may shoot if he can put up a bird to shoot at, are handy; and there is no end to the picturesque bits just made for his sketch-book. Whatever his tastes may make him—naturalist, sailor, sportsman, artist—he has ample scope for their exercise; and ten or eleven months' disuse gives him a greater zest now that his playtime has come round again. At every turn he falls upon little scenes which give him an odd pleasure, as if they belonged to another life—things he has seen in old paintings, or read of in quaint books, long ago. Here go by two countrywomen, whose red and purple dresses are touched by the sun with startling effect, as they wind up the grey hillside road; there clatters past on horseback a group of market-girls with flapping straw hats, and carrying their baskets on their arms as if they were a set of Gainsborough's models come back to life, who turn their dark eyes and fresh comely faces to the London man with frank curiosity as they canter on and smother him with dust. Now he passes through the midst of a village fair, where youths are dancing in a barn to the sound of a cracked fiddle, and where, standing under an ivied porch, a pretty young woman unconsciously makes a picture as she bends down to fill a little child's held-up pinafore with sweets and cakes. The idyl here is so complete that the contemplation of pence given for the accommodation of the barn, or the calculation of shillings to be spent in beer afterwards, or the likelihood that the little one had brought a halfpenny in its chubby fist for the good things its small soul coveted, does not enter his mind.
The idea of base pelf in a scene so pure and innocent would be a kind of high treason to the poetic instinct; so the London man instinctively feels, glad to recognize the ideal he is mainly responsible for making. How can it be otherwise? A heron is fishing in the river; a kingfisher flashes past; swallows skim the ground or dart slanting above his head; white-sailed boats glide close inshore; a dragon-fly suns itself on a tall plumed thistle; young birds rustle in and out of the foliage; distant cattle low; cottage children laugh; everywhere he finds quiet, peace, absolute social repose, the absence of disturbing passions; and it seems to him that all who live here must feel the same delightful influences as those which he is feeling now, and be as innocent and virtuous as the place is beautiful and quiet.
But the charm does not last. Very few of us retain to the end of our holidays the same enthusiastic delight in our Arcadia that we had in the beginning. Constant change of Arcadias keeps up the illusion better; and with it the excitement; but a long spell in one place, however beautiful—unless indeed, it lasts so long that one becomes personally fond of the place and interested in the people—is almost sure to end in weariness. At first the modern pilgrim is savagely disinclined to society and his kind. All the signs and circumstances of the life he has left behind him are distasteful. He likes to watch the fishing-boats, but he abhors the steamers which put into his little harbour, and the excursionists who come by them he accounts as heathens and accursed. Trains, like steamers, are signs of a reprobate generation and made only for evildoers. He has no reverence for the post, and his soul is not rejoiced at the sight of letters. Even his daily paper is left unopened, and no change of Ministry counts as equal in importance with the picturesque bits he wishes to sketch, or the rare ferns and beetles to be found by long rambles and much diligence. By degrees the novelty wears off. His soul yearns after the life he has left, and he begins to look for the signs thereof with interest, not to say pleasure. He watches the arrival of the boat, or he strolls up to the railway station and speculates on the new comers with benevolence. If he sees a casual acquaintance, he hails him with enthusiastic cordiality; and in his extremity is reduced to fraternize with men 'not in his way.' He becomes peevish at the lateness of the mail, and he reads his Times from beginning to end, taking in even the agony column and the advertisements. He finds his idyllic pictures to be pictures, and nothing more. His Arcadians are no better than their neighbours; and, as for the absence of human passions—they are merely dwarfed to the dimensions of the life, and are as relatively strong here as elsewhere. The inhabitants of those flowery cottages quarrel among each other for trifles which he would have thought only children could have noticed; and they gossip to an extent of which he in his larger metropolitan life has no experience.
If he stays a few weeks longer than is the custom of visitors, he is as much an object of curiosity and surmise as if he were a man of another hemisphere; and he may think himself fortunate if vague reports do not get afloat touching his honesty, his morality, or his sanity. Nine times out of ten, if a personage at home, he is nobody here. He may be sure that, however great his name in art and literature, it will not be accounted to him for honour—it will only place him next to a well-conditioned mountebank; political fame, patent to all the world, rank which no one can mistake, and money which all may handle, alone going down in remote country places and carrying esteem along with them. If a wise man, he will forgive the uncharitable surmises and the contempt of which he is the object, knowing the ignorance of life as well as the purposeless vacuity from which they spring; but they are not the less unpleasant, and to understand a cause is not therefore to rejoice in the effect.