If we walk more than ten or twelve miles, it breaks up the day too much; leaving no time for stopping at the stream sides or shady banks, or for any work at the end of the day; besides that the last few miles are apt to be done in a hurry, and may then be considered as lost ground. But if, advancing thus slowly, after some days we approach any more interesting scenery, every yard of the changeful ground becomes precious and piquant; and the continual increase of hope, and of surrounding beauty, affords one of the most exquisite enjoyments possible to the healthy mind; besides that real knowledge is acquired of whatever it is the object of travelling to learn, and a certain sublimity given to all places, so attained, by the true sense of the spaces of earth that separate them. A man who really loves travelling would as soon consent to pack a day of such happiness into an hour of railroad, as one who loved eating would agree, if it were possible, to concentrate his dinner into a pill.
§ 25. And, secondly, I say that it is wisdom to preserve as much as possible the innocent sources of novelty;—not definite inferiorities of one place to another, if such can be done away; but differences of manners and customs, of language and architecture. The greatest effort ought especially to be made by all wise and far-sighted persons, in the present crisis of civilization, to enforce the distinction between wholesome reform, and heartless abandonment of ancestral custom; between kindly fellowship of nation with nation, and ape-like adoption, by one, of the habits of another. It is ludicrously awful to see the luxurious inhabitants of London and Paris rushing over the Continent (as they say, to see it), and transposing every place, as far as lies in their power, instantly into a likeness of Regent Street and the Rue de la Paix, which they need not certainly have come so far to see. Of this evil I shall have more to say hereafter; meantime I return to our main subject.
§ 26. The next character we have to note in the landscape-instinct (and on this much stress is to be laid), is its total inconsistency with all evil passion; its absolute contrariety (whether in the contest it were crushed or not) to all care, hatred, envy, anxiety, and moroseness. A feeling of this kind is assuredly not one to be lightly repressed, or treated with contempt.
But how, if it be so, the reader asks, can it be characteristic of passionate and unprincipled men, like Byron, Shelley, and such others, and not characteristic of the noblest and most highly principled men?
First, because it is itself a passion, and therefore likely to be characteristic of passionate men. Secondly, because it is (§ 18) wholly a separate thing from moral principle, and may or may not be joined to strength of will, or rectitude of purpose[92]; only, this much is always observable in the men whom it characterizes, that, whatever their faults or failings, they always understand and love noble qualities of character; they can conceive (if not certain phases of piety), at all events, self-devotion of the highest kind; they delight in all that is good, gracious, and noble; and though warped often to take delight also in what is dark or degraded, that delight is mixed with bitter self-reproach; or else is wanton, careless, or affected, while their delight in noble things is constant and sincere.
§ 27. Look back to the two lists given above, § 7. I have not lately read anything by Mrs. Radclyffe or George Sand, and cannot, therefore, take instances from them; Keats hardly introduced human character into his work; but glance over the others, and note the general tone of their conceptions. Take St. Pierre's Virginia, Byron's Myrrha, Angiolina, and Marina, and Eugene Sue's Fleur de Marie; and out of the other lists you will only be able to find Pamela, Clementina, and, I suppose, Clarissa,[93] to put beside them; and these will not more than match Myrrha and Marina; leaving Fleur de Marie and Virginia rivalless. Then meditate a little, with all justice and mercy, over the two groups of names; and I think you will, at last, feel that there is a pathos and tenderness of heart among the lovers of nature in the second list, of which it is nearly impossible to estimate either the value or the danger; that the sterner consistency of the men in the first may, in great part, have arisen only from the, to them, most merciful, appointment of having had religious teaching or disciplined education in their youth; while their want of love for nature, whether that love be originally absent, or artificially repressed, is to none of them an advantage. Johnson's indolence, Goldsmith's improvidence, Young's worldliness, Milton's severity, and Bacon's servility, might all have been less, if they could in any wise have sympathized with Byron's lonely joy in a Jura storm,[94] or with Shelley's interest in floating paper boats down the Serchio.
§ 28. And then observe, farther, as I kept the names of Wordsworth and Scott out of the second list, I withdrew, also, certain names from the first; and for this reason, that in all the men who are named in that list, there is evidently some degree of love for nature, which may have been originally of more power than we suppose, and may have had an infinitely hallowing and protective influence upon them. But there also lived certain men of high intellect in that age who had no love of nature whatever. They do not appear ever to have received the smallest sensation of ocular delight from any natural scene, but would have lived happily all their lives in drawingrooms or studies. And, therefore, in these men we shall be able to determine, with the greatest chance of accuracy, what the real influence of natural beauty is, and what the character of a mind destitute of its love. Take, as conspicuous instances, Le Sage and Smollett, and you will find, in meditating over their works, that they are utterly incapable of conceiving a human soul as endowed with any nobleness whatever; their heroes are simply beasts endowed with some degree of human intellect;— cunning, false, passionate, reckless, ungrateful, and abominable, incapable of noble joy, of noble sorrow, of any spiritual perception or hope. I said, "beasts with human intellect;" but neither Gil Blas nor Roderick Random reach, morally, anything near the level of dogs; while the delight which the writers themselves feel in mere filth and pain, with an unmitigated foulness and cruelty of heart, is just as manifest in every sentence as the distress and indignation which with pain and injustice are seen by Shelley and Byron.
§ 29. Distinguished from these men by some evidence of love for nature, yet an evidence much less clear than that for any of those named even in the first list, stand Cervantes, Pope, and Molière. It is not easy to say how much the character of these last depended on their epoch and education; but it is noticeable that the first two agree thus far in temper with Le Sage and Smollett,—that they delight in dwelling upon vice, misfortune, or folly, as subjects of amusement; while yet they are distinguished from Le Sage and Smollett by capacity of conceiving nobleness of character, only in a humiliating and hopeless way; the one representing all chivalry as insanity, the other placing the wisdom of man in a serene and sneering reconciliation of good with evil. Of Molière I think very differently. Living in the blindest period of the world's history, in the most luxurious city, and the most corrupted court, of the time, he yet manifests through all his writings an exquisite natural wisdom; a capacity for the most simple enjoyment; a high sense of all nobleness, honor, and purity, variously marked throughout his slighter work, but distinctly made the theme of his two perfect plays—the Tartuffe and Misanthrope; and in all that he says of art or science he has an unerring instinct for what is useful and sincere, and uses his whole power to defend it, with as keen a hatred of everything affected and vain. And, singular as it may seem, the first definite lesson read to Europe, in that school of simplicity of which Wordsworth was the supposed originator among the mountains of Cumberland, was, in fact, given in the midst of the court of Louis XIV., and by Molière. The little canzonet "J'aime mieux ma mie," is, I believe, the first Wordsworthian poem brought forward on philosophical principles to oppose the schools of art and affectation.
§ 30. I do not know if, by a careful analysis, I could point out any evidences of a capacity for the love of natural scenery in Molière stealing forth through the slightness of his pastorals; but, if not, we must simply set him aside as exceptional, as a man uniting Wordsworth's philosophy with Le Sage's wit, turned by circumstances from the observance of natural beauty to that of human frailty. And thus putting him aside for the moment, I think we cannot doubt of our main conclusion, that, though the absence of the love of nature is not an assured condemnation, its presence is an invariable sign of goodness of heart and justness of moral perception, though by no means of moral practice; that in proportion to the degree in which it is felt, will probably be the degree in which all nobleness and beauty of character will also be felt; that when it is originally absent from any mind, that mind is in many other respects hard, worldly, and degraded; that where, having been originally present, it is repressed by art or education, that repression appears to have been detrimental to the person suffering it; and that wherever the feeling exists, it acts for good on the character to which it belongs, though, as it may often belong to characters weak in other respects, it may carelessly be mistaken for a source of evil in them.
§ 31. And having arrived at this conclusion by a review of facts, which I hope it will be admitted, whether accurate or not, has at least been candid, these farther considerations may confirm our belief in its truth. Observe: the whole force of education, until very lately, has been directed in every possible way to the destruction of the love of nature. The only knowledge which has been considered essential among us is that of words, and, next after it, of the abstract sciences; while every liking shown by children for simple natural history has been either violently checked, (if it took an inconvenient form for the housemaids,) or else scrupulously limited to hours of play: so that it has really been impossible for any child earnestly to study the works of God but against its conscience; and the love of nature has become inherently the characteristic of truants and idlers. While also the art of drawing, which is of more real importance to the human race than that of writing (because people can hardly draw anything without being of some use both to themselves and others, and can hardly write anything without wasting their own time and that of others),—this art of drawing, I say, which on plain and stern system should be taught to every child, just as writing is,—has been so neglected and abused, that there is not one man in a thousand, even of its professed teachers, who knows its first principles: and thus it needs much ill-fortune or obstinacy—much neglect on the part of his teachers, or rebellion on his own—before a boy can get leave to use his eyes or his fingers; so that those who can use them are for the most part neglected or rebellious lads—runaways and bad scholars—passionate, erratic, self-willed, and restive against all forms of education; while your well-behaved and amiable scholars are disciplined into blindness and palsy of half their faculties. Wherein there is at once a notable ground for what difference we have observed between the lovers of nature and its despisers; between the somewhat immoral and unrespectable watchfulness of the one, and the moral and respectable blindness of the other.