CHAPTER XXVIII.
1856.
My first encampment in Lancashire.—Value of encamping as a part of educational discipline.—Happy days in camp.—The natural and the artificial in landscape.—Sir James Kay Shuttleworth's Exhibition project.—I decline to take an active part in it.—His energetic and laborious disposition.—Charlotte Brontë.—General Scarlett.
The Loire expedition having been abandoned for the year 1856, and the Nile voyage put off indefinitely, I remained working in the north of England, discouraged, as to literature, by the failure of the book of verse, and without much encouragement for painting either; so the summer of 1856 was not very fruitful in work of any kind.
Towards autumn, however, I took courage again, and determined to paint from nature on the moors. This led to the first attempt at encamping.
It is wonderful what an influence the things we do in early life may have on our future occupations. In 1886, exactly thirty years later, I made the Saône expedition, for which two absolutely essential qualifications were an intimate knowledge of the French language and a practical acquaintance with encamping. The Roman who said that fifteen years made a long space in human life would have appreciated the importance of thirty, yet across all that space of time what I did in 1856 told just as effectually as if it had been done the year before. Moral (for any young man who may read this book): it is impossible to say how important the deeds of twenty-one may turn out to have been when we look back upon them in complete maturity. All we know about them is that they are likely to be recognized in the future as far more important than they seemed when they were in the present.
Encamping is now quite familiar to young Englishmen in connection with boating excursions, and it has even been adopted in American pine forests for the sake of health; but in 1856 only military men and a few travellers knew anything about encampments. I was led into this art, or amusement (for it is both), by a very natural transition. Here are the three stages of it.
1. You want to paint from nature in uncertain weather, and you build a hut for shelter.
2. The hut is at some distance from a house, and you do not like to leave it, so you sleep in it.
3. The accommodation is found to be narrow, and it is unpleasant to have one little room for everything, so you add a tent or two outside and keep a man. Hence a complete little encampment.