When Richard Jeffries wrote The Story of My Heart it proved to be all birds, flowers, bees, grasses, skies and trees and airs. It was no cinema story, no Tarzan romance. Nor was it booklore. He did not go to the British Museum to obtain materials for the story of his heart, did not “mug it up” with the help of great authorities. But in the wild woods and on the Wiltshire hills he spelt it out with his fingers letter by letter, like a blind man fingering Braille.
I sometimes think that the gold of all literature and art is self-expression of this kind, and that after all, the best passages and the best pictures are “impressions de voyage.” After we die we may be set to write an essay on our life story. It will be “impressions de voyage.” Fifty years in an office will be found shriveled up to a dot, and a few days in the wilds will expand into the whole essay.
Why do we stare at beautiful things? We see them—is that not enough, can we not merely glance and pass on? We stop and we stare, at that mountain side, at that flower, at that dreaming lake. We cannot pass at once. We seem to be looking intently, stargazing at something further off and yet more kindred than the stars, but we are not using our physical eyes. Perhaps we are not using our eyes at all. We are listening. Nature is trying to tell us something; she is speaking to us on a long-distance wave.
Your mind is haunted. You have forgotten something, and the flower is trying to tell you. It is reminding you of a forgotten air. Something you cannot quite hear, cannot quite make out. Once you belonged to a kingdom where ... once you knew some one young and fair ... once you were lost, still lost, always lost.... But you could join us yet, did you dare ... what is the flower trying to say? What does the mountain say, and the lone bird on the branch? The heart aches. You lie on the downs; heaven is alive with birds. The bosom of the sky heaves with their song. And you, down below on the cropped grass of the hills, lying on the chalk, shading the eyes with a hand, look up—and the heart aches. It aches with homesickness, with love for that some one of whom the flowers speak and the lark sings.
You are camped by the side of a stream, and a boatman goes past in his boat in the dusk; you are dreaming by your fire in the morning, and a wild bird comes unbidden to your wrist; you are yourself mirrored in the water below a rock just before you are about to plunge; you watch an eagle bridge a chasm with its flight; you see cliffs shaped like giants and trees like dwarfs. The snake serpentines through the dust across your path, drawing a line—thus far and no further—which, however, you overstep. You find yourself treading in primeval forest, where no step of man has ever been heard before. The trees change into great armies marching upward in platoons, in serried battalions. You come to great walls—termini. You overclimb them: death, new life. You are out of touch with below. It is the great plateau: you can yearn upward with your hands, you cannot yearn downward to those you have left below. Lark’s song comes up to you from other people’s heaven. You are in upper mountain country among glaciers and scarred rocks, amid frogs, amid storms. You dance in the air with the snowflakes. The soul plumbs the depth of the world with a sad thought dropped from the height. Listen—the little avalanches—a crack, a rumble, a thudding, a whispering. You reach and stand astride the pass between two countries. God divided up the world, and you are a pair of compasses in His hand.
The first tramp left Eden many years ago. They say he died. But to my mind he is still wandering. God made him wander. He has wandered so far his wits are wandering too. He doesn’t remember much about the garden now. It was a pleasant place. It had a snake in it, however. Very pleasant: a place in which one could lie down and rest for an eternity at a time, if it were not for the snakes in the grass. The devil got loose in it. Still, it was the only place in which one could feel at home for ever and ever. And outside of it one must wander. Life is a wandering and a seeking where it was once a sitting still and an adoring.
So the tramp’s life is a type of existence. I like the symbolism of the Jewish Passover, the standing dressed for departure into the wilderness. Man is not man sitting down; he is man on the move. Le tramp c’est l’homme.
Even if in small measure the tramp is a pilgrim. His adventure is a spiritual adventure or it is nothing. The clouds part and Orion is disclosed. The rude pencilings are erased and the main curve remains, and the curve of your adventure is a broken arc. “On earth the broken arc; in heaven the perfect round,” says Browning. But given the arc the center can be found. We revolve about the sun, but there are planets revolving around a sun invisible to us. Our souls, I suppose, revolve about some invisible spiritual sun which we are always thinking about—a center called God.
So with all our hilarity, our joyous meetings, our madcap doings, with all the fun of the tramping expedition there is the deeper interest underlying all. Most people will make the tramp without one conscious deeper thought. It does not matter. Their nature is getting something intuitively, although the mind has no knowledge of it. The gay undergraduate, all vim and no soul, shies at religion and has no thought except about climbs, leaps, jumps, food, sporting chances, pedestrian achievement! He may not see this glorious jaunt in a poetic light until years afterwards. Cunninghame Graham remarks in one of his clever prefaces that nothing in the present ever seems so good as what is past. Some years pass, and your present, which is silver to-day, becomes gold in recollection. You lie in a matter-of-fact mood under the stars in the midst of the mountains. Your mind is at rest, you ask for nothing beyond perhaps good sleep, and belike you thank neither God nor yourself for having got there. But ten years later you look back with a sigh and say “How wonderful it was, ah, I was happy then!”
The intuitive understanding rises slowly to the mind, like light traveling from a distant planet to this earth. But you get it at last and see.