Happiness is not to be pursued, though pleasure may be; but I have long thought that I should recognise happiness could I ever achieve it. It would be health, or at least unthwarted intensity of sensual and mental life, in the midst of beautiful or astonishing things which should give that life full play and banish expectation and recollection. I never achieved it, and am fated to be almost happy in many different circumstances, and on account of my forethought to be contemptuous or even disgusted at what the beneficent designs of chance have brought—refusing, for example, to abandon my nostrils frankly to the “musk and amber” of revenge; or polluting, by the notice of some trivial accident, the remembrance of past things, both bitter and sweet, in the company of an old friend. Wilfully and yet helplessly I coin mere pleasures out of happiness. And yet herein, perhaps, a just judge would declare me to be at least not more foolish than those men who are always pointing out the opportunities and just causes of happiness which others have. Also, the flaw in my happiness which wastes it to a pleasure is in the manner of my looking back at it when it is past. It is as if I had made a great joyous leap over a hedge, and then had looked back and seen that the hedge was but four feet high and not dangerous. Is it perhaps true that those are never happy who know what happiness is? The shadow of it I seem to see every day in entering a little idle field in a sternly luxuriant country.
It is but five grassy acres, and yet as the stile admitting you to it makes you pause—to taste the blackberries or to see how far the bryony has twined—you salute it in a little while as a thing of character. Many of the fields around are bounded by straight-ruled hedges, as if they had been cut up by a tyrant or a slave, with only a few of such irregularities as a stream or a pond may enforce. Not one of the five hedges of this field makes a straight line. The hedge up to your right from the stile is of a noble and fascinating unruliness. So winds a mountain stream down its ladders of crag in Cardigan; into some such form would the edge of a phalanx be worn by long swaying in the height of battle. The other hedges are equally fretted. Here, there is a deep indentation where the cattle lie and wear the blackthorn stems until they are polished for ever; and there the knitted stoles and roots of ash jut out and encroach, fierce and antique and stony, like a strange beast left there to lie in the sweet grass—like a worn effigy over a grave where knight and hound have become mingled in monstrous ambiguity. The surface of the field is of the same wildness. It does not rise and fall in a few sea-like heavings, or in many little waves, nor is it level or in one long, gradual slope, but rising sleepily from west to east it is broken by sudden hollows and mounds. In one place the furze on a mound makes a little world for two or three pairs of linnets and white-throats, and there are the largest and sweetest blackberries; there also a hundred young stems of brier spend spring and summer in perfecting the curves of their long leaps—curves that are like the gush of water over a dam, and yet crossing in multitudes without crowding, in all ways without discord, like the paths of the flight of swallows when they embroider the twilight air. In another place it is always marshy, the home of marigold and reed. One corner used to be dominated by a tall tented oak, of so majestic balance that when sawn through it stood long in the wind; there the pheasants are proud among bugle or centaury flowers. Here and there a smooth boulder protrudes, guarded by hundreds of blue scabious flowers which welcome butterflies of their own hue, and sometimes a peacock butterfly displays himself on the naked stone.
At the eastern and higher end the field becomes so narrow that it is like a lane, through which the hunt gloriously decants itself among the knolls. It is narrowed still more by a small pond, and round that a tall holly of solid shadow with glancing edges, an oak, an overhanging thicket of bramble and thorn and three old butts of ash, where the fairy gold of toadstools is scattered abundantly as if sown by one sweep of a generous hand. The pond is the home of one moorhen, which is always either swimming there or hastening to it from the field. It is but as large as a farmhouse kitchen, and yet the moorhen will not desert it, finding the eaves among the roots as pleasing as attics to a boy; content with her seeming security though the road passes just above, and rich in her share of sun and moon and stars. To see the moorhen swimming in the narrow pond on a silent and misty autumn morning is to think, now with joy, now with pain, of solitude, but always with a reverie at last that is entangled among the dim, late stars—she possessing the solitary pond, in the solitary autumn country on a planet that is but an element in the solitude of the infinite; and her liquid hoot dwells long in the brain.
It is worth while to watch the pool at dawn, because, though it might seem to be but one of the myriad waters that light candles of adoration and celebration to every dawn, it has then the air, as the mist drips and tingles at the edge, of being a grey priest who has not yet done serving other gods than the dawn, and, until it puts on its white robes and glimmers altogether, it makes with the oak tree a group of pathetic revolt against the day—the oak might be a Saturn or a Lear, the pool in its gradual surrender to the light a Druid sheltering dear and unprosperous mysteries yet a little longer from the proud sun. Then the thrush sings on the holly crest with such blitheness as cannot, nevertheless, excel the water’s glory in the fully risen light.
But whatever conversion the little pond undergoes on dawn after dawn, the field as a whole retains the same antiquity, which it announces so powerfully that I knew it on first crossing the stile. Perhaps the lawless shape of the field, its unusual undulations, its unkemptness in the midst of a land all rich with crops—perhaps these things suggested antiquity; but I think not—at least they do not explain it for it was then strange, and now with all its familiarity it has rather gained than lost its power. It is the same when its outlines are concealed by mist and all I can see is the clover rough with silver dew, white mushrooms, and perhaps one red yoke of maple in the hollow air, and when the snow covers all but the myriad thistles blossoming with blue tits. Enter it in spring—the linnets sprinkle a song like audible sunlight—and yet the field is old. But November is its notable month. Its trees are all oaks and they have hardly lost a leaf; the leaves are falling continually from those smouldering sunset clouds of foliage, which, kingly rich, look as if they would never be poor. One skylark sings high over the field in the rainy sky. The blue rooks unsheathe themselves heavily from the branches and shine silverly and caw with genial voices. A pheasant explodes from a grass tussock underfoot. The air smells like the musky white wild rose; coming from the west it blows gently, laden with all the brown and golden savours of Wales and Devon and Wiltshire and Surrey which I know, and the scent lifts the upper lip so that you snuff deeply as a dog snuffs. A stoat goes with uplifted tail across the field. But the field itself—was there a great house here once and is it dead and yet vocal? Are its undulations and rude edges all that remain of an old wood? Or was there a battle here, and is the turf alive with death? Certainly there is death somewhere speaking eloquently to mortal men. It is not alive, but it laments something, and where there is sorrow there is life.
For just one day in September the goldfinches come and twitter, and are happy among the thistles, and fly away.
CHAPTER XVII
THE BROOK
The brook rises in a clear, grey, trembling basin at the foot of a chalk hill, among flowers of lotus and thyme and eyebright and rest-harrow. Here the stone curlew drinks, and above is the gently rounded encampment, ancient, and yet still young compared with the dusky spring which has something gnomish and earthy about it, though it takes the sun. It drops in thin, bright links over the chalk, and then for a time loses its way in playing with cresses and marsh marigolds, spreading out so finely that hardly will the ladybird drown that falls therein—falling at length in a cascade from one dead leaf to another down a hedge bank. Below, it nourishes the first forget-me-nots, by a gateway where it slips across the lane, and is dew-fed by the vetches and clovers that swaddle the posts of the gate. Now it is unheard and unseen in the darkness underneath dog’s mercury leaves until it has gained its first treble voice as, pausing by an interrupting branch, it fills a hollow and pours over in icy fingers to the ditch beneath. Here it has cuckoo flowers and creeping jenny and butterbur to feed; thrushes drink of it; beetles dart across it like scullers that dream now and then upon their sculls. It learns now to sway the cress, to bow the brooklime, to brighten the sides of the minnows; the fledgling of the robin that falls into it dies. It floats the catkin down, and out of it rises the azure dragon fly. Sometimes it muffles its going in moss, but in a little while it gushes through drains and falls and falls with a now unceasing noise in a land where all the hollows are full of apple trees, rough grey with dewy clover, and through all the hollows winds the brook, dappled by blossom, leaned over by the bee-cradling, sleepy, meadow cranesbill flower; in its green bed the watervoles wear their submerged pathways. Now men have laid a slab of elm or of rude stone across it, and from those they lean to drink at haymaking or harvest; the children float on it pinnaces of bent reed, or set it to turn waterwheels of ash bark, or dip their cans in it for curving minnow or twisting tadpole or the little black circlers that meet and divide and pursue for a few April days. Already it has ranged along its margin rough, leaning willows garlanded by purple ivy; and their leaves that dip to the surface it will never allow to rest. The briers still overleap it in their long dreaming curves. The kingfisher sits over it and the small trout nestle in its bed. It enters many an ash copse and fills it with willow herb and meadowsweet and all juicy plants, figwort and iris and orchis and hyacinth and reed, with osiers and their mists of crimson and gold. Nymph-like the brook brightens and curves its crystal flesh and waves its emerald hair under the bridges at field corners, where the brambles dip their blossoms, and the nightingale sings and the sedgewarbler has its nest. For it the lonely willows in the flat fields shed their yellow leaves most pensively, like maidens casting their bridal garlands off. Three flowering apple trees in one islanded angle on a lawn of perfect grass, a most dream-worthy place, fit for the footprints of the beautiful,
“White Iope, blithe Helen, and the rest,”