The Dim Sea Is
Always So Beautiful A View Because It Is Not Disfigured By These
Buildings.
In the ships men live; in the houses among the trees they
live; these steeples and towers are empty, and no spirit can dwell in
that which is out of proportion.
Scarcely any one can paint a picture of
the country without sticking in one of these repellent structures. The
oast-houses, whose red cones are so plentiful in Kent and Sussex, have
quite a different effect; they have some colour, and by a curious
felicity the builders have hit upon a good proportion, so that the shape
is pleasant; these, too, have some use in the world.
Westward the sun was going down over the sea, and a wild west wind, which
the glow of the sun as it touched the waves seemed to heat into fury,
brought up the distant sound of the billows from the beach. A line of
dark Spanish oaks from which the sharp pointed acorns were dropping,
darkest green oaks, shut out the shore. A thousand starlings were flung
up into the air out of these oaks, as if an impatient hand had cast them
into the sky; then down they fell again, with a ceaseless whistling and
clucking; up they went and down they came, lost in the deep green foliage
as if they had dropped in the sea. The long level of the wheat-field
plain stretched out from my feet towards the far-away Downs, so level
that the first hedge shut off the fields beyond; and every now and then
over these hedges there rose up the white forms of sea-gulls drifting to
and fro among the elms. White sea-gulls - birds of divination, you might
say - a good symbol of the times, for now we plough the ocean. The barren
sea! In the Greek poets you may find constant reference to it as that
which could not be reaped or sowed. Ulysses, to betoken his madness, took
his plough down to the shore and drew furrows in the sand - the sea that
even Demeter, great goddess, could not sow nor bring to any fruition. Yet
now the ocean is our wheat-field and ships are our barns. The sea-gull
should be painted on the village tavern sign instead of the golden
wheatsheaf.
There could be no more flat and uninteresting surface than this field, a
damp wet brown, water slowly draining out of the furrows, not a bird that
I can see. No hare certainly, or partridge, or even a rabbit - nothing to
sit or crouch - on that cold surface, tame and level as the brown cover of
a book. They like something more human and comfortable; just as we creep
into nooks and corners of rooms and into cosy arm-chairs, so they like
tufts or some growth of shelter, or mounds that are dry, between hedges
where there is a bite for them. I can trace nothing on this surface, so
heavily washed by late rain. Let now the harriers come, and instantly the
hounds' second sense of smell picks up the invisible sign of the hare
that has crossed it in the night or early dawn, and runs it as swiftly as
if he were lifting a clue of thread. The dull surface is all written over
with hieroglyphics to the hound, he can read and translate to us in
joyous tongue. Or the foxhounds carry a bee-line straight from hedge to
hedge, and after them come the hoofs, prospecting deeply into the earth,
dashing down fibre and blade, crunching up the tender wheat and battering
it to pieces. It will rise again all the fresher and stronger, for there
is something human in wheat, and the more it is trampled on the better it
grows. Despots grind half the human race, and despots stronger than
man - plague, pestilence, and famine - grind the whole; and yet the world
increases, and the green wheat of the human heart is not to be trampled
out.
The starlings grew busier and busier in the dark green Spanish oaks,
thrown up as if a shell had burst among them; suddenly their clucking and
whistling ceased, the speeches of contention were over, a vote of
confidence had been passed in their Government, and the House was silent.
The pheasants in the park shook their wings and crowed 'kuck, kuck - kow,'
and went to roost; the water in the furrows ceased to reflect; the dark
earth grew darker and damper; the elms lost their reddish brown; the sky
became leaden behind the ridge of the Downs; and the shadow of night fell
over the field.
Twenty-five years ago I went into a camera obscura, where you see
miniature men and women, coloured photographs alive and moving, trees
waving, now and then dogs crossing the bright sun picture. I was only
there a few moments, and I have never been in one since, and yet so
inexplicable a thing is memory, the picture stands before me now clear as
if it were painted and tangible. So many millions of pictures have come
and gone upon the retina, and yet I can single out this one in an
instant, and take it down as you would a book from a shelf. The millions
of coloured etchings that have fixed themselves there in the course of
those years are all in due order in the portfolio of the mind, and yet
they cannot occupy the space of a pin's point. They have neither length,
breadth, nor thickness, none of the qualifications of mathematical
substance, and yet they must in some way be a species of matter. The fact
indicates the possibility of still more subtle existences. Now I wish I
could put before you a coloured, living, moving picture, like that of the
camera obscura, of some other wheat-fields at a sunnier time. They were
painted on the surface of a plain, set round about with a margin of green
downs.
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