‘Amid the smoke of cities did you pass
The time of early youth; and there you learned,
From years of quiet industry, to love
The living beings by your own fireside
With such a strong devotion, that your heart
Is slow towards the sympathies of them
Who look upon the hills with tenderness,
And make dear friendships with the streams and groves.’
They are the extremes: Joanna cannot understand the frame of mind at all; Wordsworth is, in this mood, the perfect example of the life lived in the fellowship of inanimate things.
But to few is the fellowship thus whole-heartedly given. For this it is necessary to be a true æsthete (using the word in an unprejudiced sense), so that in the one indivisible act of seeing, the one great moment, a whole message is revealed. But life refuses to divide itself into such moments; we cannot isolate ourselves either from the continuity of the past or the community of the present. Most men move on a plain of less concentration and greater self-consciousness, where the act of seeing inevitably includes and leads up to reflection and analysis. We still have the animal and the primitive man within us, linking us to the past and the flow of time; and reason, the common gift of all men, keeps always lurking in the background. Yet we still strive after this immediacy of fellowship, but there come times when the snow-peaks and the rocks have fed our appreciation on too strong a draught, when our senses, relying on themselves alone, are over-sated, and there seems a film before our eyes, so that we are no longer ‘alive and drinking up our wonder,’ but the draught stagnates without us and turns to bitterness.
Then we must be humble, and resign our pretensions to an ‘æsthetic geography’ for one on a lower scale; we shall return to the passes, which will remain to us the emblem of a new ‘geography of the spirit’ which, instead of trying to gain all in one tremendous moment, will be content to browse upon the myriad things which intelligence sees displayed. Even as a picture, an arrangement of lines and colours, the pass has much that the higher peaks cannot give us: the deep curve of the summit, slung between its supporting peaks, appeals to us by its grace and weakness; there is a discontinuity of colour and clearness as each bastion of the valley comes out from the curve its forerunner had hidden. But these effects are heightened and brought together by our geography; we imagine the glaciers that separated those bastions from one another; that cup at the end is perhaps the work of some other mighty glacier of the far side, piled up so high that it fell across the watershed and cut its way down; maybe there is a giant moraine, bigger than most of our English mountains, still to bear witness of it.
But it is the stream and the road which hold our imagination; the water tells us of all the powers which we know to be at work, but which our senses are too slow to perceive. Each stream is itself part of the great cycle of water, each is an agent in the mountain cycle, perpetually hurrying the actual fabric of the mountains down to the sea; their voice is never silent even on the summits; they are the lords of the peaks, moulding them slowly to new shapes, and their murmur seems to call the clouds, ‘chased by the hounding winds from distant seas,’ to come and renew their springs for a new course of the never-ending circle.
But the road takes our geography farther afield and peoples our imaginings. We have softened the immediacy of our ‘æsthetic geography’ by the aid of intelligence; the road softens it by bringing in humankind to stand with us facing the gulf between the living and the inanimate. As the water alters our view of the mountains by bringing to light the importance of time, so does the road alter our view of ourselves. As we look up a pass from below, the view of the road appearing and vanishing round the folds of the valley brings to us two pictures of men. Winding away from us up to the skyline goes the pilgrim’s progress, the slow toiling advance upwards to gain the view of things not seen. Many there are, but few together; some on side-tracks; some on the old steep road with its rough stones now overgrown, more on the new smooth driving road which turns about so that they can take their eyes from the goal; some even making a path for themselves, either above on the hillside, steering for some nearer gap on the skyline, which does not cross the main watershed; others below the road, toiling painfully along the stream-bed. And each in turn we see reach the summit and disappear; we cannot see what they see, nor even the expression of their faces as they confront the other side.
But the same valley can be the setting for another picture: down from the top there seem to come great processions, gay like Benozzo Gozzoli’s ‘Procession of the Magi,’ many leagues long and all ordered and together, though part is hidden in the green woods, part in the valley’s folds. We seem to take our place in the upward journey, and soon it will be our turn to wonder what new thing we shall see beyond the barrier. Perhaps encompassing mists will give place suddenly at the summit to a sunny prospect of some great cathedral range, to take our place in one of those processions and descend to the richness of an Italian land. Or, if it is on the far side that the mists have gathered, and the gateway of the pass is barred by a deep grey veil of nothingness, at least the mists will lift high enough to show the two gentle arms of our mother earth descending to where we are, strong and lit by a strange internal light, ready to hold us up as we take the last step into the grey, where we shall see no more.