From the right-hand side of the road, as one went down from the village, the ground sloped rapidly towards the valley below. The little stream running under the road had worn a deep narrow ravine, which expanded lower down, and over this rose a gaunt stone bridge supporting the road. The sides of this glen were lined with mountain ash, silver beeches, splay alders, gigantic ferns, and tangles of broad-bladed grasses, and masses of mingled bush and bramble and shrub, down to the golden mosses that slept upon the dark cold rocks above the sparkling curves of falling water. And below each tiny cascade lay a level miniature swamp, with a few huge flags standing up in each green, rush-fringed, open space.
On the slope of this glen, and on the slope of the great valley, stood Anerly Church, a couple of hundred yards from the bridge. Past the church the glen opened, and the dwarf vegetation near the bridge gave way to lofty pines, whose tops made a long sombre arch over the stream. Beyond this dark arch lay a blaze of green light, and a scarf of flaming white satin, where the valley and the stream caught the full sunlight.
"This will be jolly!" said Edward Graham, as he scaled the low parapet to the approach of the bridge, and threw himself down on the slope of the glen. "That archway is partly dry; I'll walk up in it until I get the picture focussed, and then I'll paint it. The bridge is so high there is sure to be plenty of light."
But when he got under the arch, and had picked his way to the rear of it, he altered his mind slightly. "By Jove!" he cried, for a moment looking at the startling effect of light and shade. "I don't know whether Salvator Rosa or Rembrandt would have admired this the more, but I am going to paint it; and instead of using the arch merely as a means of focussing the scene, I will paint the whole blessed lot, archway and stalactites, water under the archway and all."
The picture was striking.
By the sober light of the vault it was possible to make out with dim distinctness the outline of every object in it. This dimness did not arise from want of light, but from the fact that the floor and the sides of the vault were damp, and the outlines of damp objects in such a light are always uncertain to the eye. The archway looked north and south, and now a small portion of the western inner wall had caught a beam of the early sun, and the water in a pool at the eastern side, struck by the rays refracted by the wall, threw a blue and brown patch of trembling light on the middle of the roof. This light in return fell into another pool at the eastern side, where it made a trembling veil of orange-brown and golden-green; while all round, on the grey walls, the white roof, and the ashen stalactites, were scattered wandering hints of prismatic fire, which seemed rather to come through the stone than to be reflected from the water below.
Thus the huge barrel formed by the bridge, with its wavering, dull, dappled, transparent lights, was connected by one patch of brightness on the western pier and vault with the foreground of blue-and-white water, and rich green and yellow stripes of the rushes and grasses and underwood in the flat light of the glen. Beyond the flat light was the gloomy tunnel formed by the pines, where the yellows turned to browns, and the greens to sad blues; and the water flowed furtively from dull olive pool to dull olive pool, until at last it sprang out, a white blaze, into the full sunlight beyond, and fell headlong in foam to join the silver scarf of stream lying across the golden meadows below.
For a long while Edward Graham paused in reverence. He was not in his essence an artist, and the impulse which would have come first to an artist, came second to him.
His first distinct thought was: "What a picture it will make!" His second, "How beautiful it is!" Then he looked for a long time without thinking. He was gazing at the simple whole without reflection, as one may listen to a note prolonged, and be yet content, although there is no succession of anything produced in the mind, no idea suggested by the sound.
Then his mind came back suddenly, and he thought: "By Jove! it requires no painting at all. It paints itself." He had not been able to say "By Jove!" as long as his form of thought was abstract. But the moment he thought of the concrete, of brushes and canvas, and tubes and palette, he fell to the level of his own mind in his studio, where came no intoxicating visions of delight, no visitings of poetry, no fine frenzy to cause the eye to roll. Of his own nature he was not capable of evolving a thought or idea worthy of any more powerful or enthusiastic form of expression than "By Jove!" But here something new had been set before him. He felt there was poetry in the scene. He knew at a glance it would make a good picture. A second glance showed him there was poetry in it, but where he could not tell. He had no originality. He was a reflector, not a prism.