No, it is the alien remote appearance of the house and land serene in the May evening light which creates this reverence in the mind. It is not feudalism, or the old nobility and gentility, that we are bowing down to, but only to Nature without us and the dream within us. It is certainly not pure envy. Nor yet is it for the same reason as made Borrow reflect when he saw the good house at the end of an avenue of noble oaks near Llandovery—
“... A plain but comfortable gentleman’s seat with wings. It looked south down the dale. ‘With what satisfaction I could live in that house,’ said I to myself, ‘if backed by a couple of thousand a year. With what gravity could I sign a warrant in its library, and with what dreamy comfort translate an ode of Lewis Glyn Cothi, my tankard of rich ale beside me. I wonder whether the proprietor is fond of the old bard and keeps good ale. Were I an Irishman instead of a Norfolk man I would go in and ask him.’”
Not if he were a Welshman, either. For I at least know that in no other man’s house should I be better off than I am, and I lack the confidence to think I could make any use of his income. I would as soon envy a tramp because he has no possessions, or a navvy because he walks like a hero as he pushes a heavy trolley before him, his loose jacket fitting him as a mane fits a lion. To envy a man is to misunderstand him or yourself.
Nor yet is it pure admiration. That is what I feel for something external that can be described as right, as having absolute individuality and inevitableness of form. For example, I admire certain groups that are the result of what we call chance—an arrangement of fishing boats going out to sea, first one, then at a long interval two close together, a fourth a little behind, and then by ones and pairs and clusters at different intervals; or the four or five oaks left in a meadow that was once a copse; or the fruit fallen on autumn rime; or sunset clouds that pause darkly along the north-west in a way that will never be seen again; or of tragic figures at such a moment as when Polyxena, among the Grecian youths, gave her throat to the dagger of Neoptolemus, and fell beautiful in death.
No. Those houses are castles in Spain. They are fantastic architecture. We have made them out of our spirit stuff and have set our souls to roam their corridors and look out of their casements upon the sea or the mountains or the clouds. It is because they are accessible only to the everywhere wandering irresistible and immortal part of us that they are beautiful. There is no need for them to be large or costly or antique. The poorest house can do us a like service. In a town, for example, and in a suburb, I have had the same yearning when, on a fine still morning of May or June, in streets away from the traffic, I have seen through the open windows a cool white-curtained shadowy room, and in it a table with white cloths and gleaming metal and glass laid thereon, and nobody has yet come down to open the letters. It all seems to be the work of spirit hands. It is beautiful and calm and celestial, and is a profound pleasure—tinged by melancholy—to see. It gives a sense of fitness—for what? For something undivined, imperfectly known, guessed at, or hoped for, in ourselves; for a wider and less tainted beauty, for a greater grace. Or it may not be a house at all, but a hill-top five miles off, up which winds a white road in two long loops between a wood and the turf. The grass is smooth and warm and bright at the summit in the blue noon; or in the horizontal sunbeams each stem is lit so that the hill is transmuted into a glowing and insubstantial thing; and then, at noon or evening, something in me flies at the sight and desires to tread that holy ground. It is an odd world where everything is fleeting yet the soul desires permanence even for fancies so unprofitable as this.
And so these thoughts at the sight of the great houses mingle with the thoughts that grow at twilight and fade gradually away in the windless night when the sky is soft-ridged all over with white clouds and in the dark vales between them are the stars. Then, for it is Saturday, follows another pleasure of the umbrageous white country roads at night—the high contented voices of children talking to father and mother as they go home from the market town. The parents move dark-clothed, silent, laden; the children flit about them with white hats or pinafores. Their voices travel far and long after they are invisible in the mist that washes over the fields in long white firths, but die away as the misty night blots out the hills, the clouds, the stars, the trees, and everything but the branches overhead and the white parsley flowers floating along the hedge. There is no breath of wind. The owls are quiet. The air is full of the scent of holly flower and may and nettles and of the sound of a little stream among the leaves.
CHAPTER VIII
JUNE—HAMPSHIRE—THE GOLDEN AGE—TRAHERNE
HAMPSHIRE.
Now day by day, indoors and out of doors, the conquest of spring proceeds to the music of the conquerors. One evening the first chafer comes to the lamp, and his booming makes the ears tremble with dim apprehension. He climbs, six-legged and slow, up the curtain, supporting himself now and then by unfurling his wings, or if not he falls with a drunken moan, then begins to climb again, and at last blunders about the room like a ball that must strike something, the white ceiling, the white paper, the lamp, and when he falls he rests. In his painful climbing he looks human, as perhaps a man looks angelic to an angel; but there is nothing lovelier and more surprising than the unfurling of his pinions like a magic wind-blown cloak out of that hard mail.