My own plan, which may be recommended only to those who go out
for pleasure - who value happiness above
Useless (otherwise
useful) knowledge, and the pictures that live and glow in
memory above albums and collections of photographs - is not to
look at a guide-book until the place it treats of has been
explored and left behind.
The practical person, to whom this may come as a new idea
and who wishes not to waste any time in experiments, would
doubtless like to hear how the plan works. He will say that
he certainly wants all the happiness to be got out of his
rambles, but it is clear that without the book in his pocket
he would miss many interesting things: Would the greater
degree of pleasure experienced in the others be a sufficient
compensation? I should say that he would gain more than he
would lose; that vivid interest and pleasure in a few things
is preferable to that fainter, more diffused feeling
experienced in the other case. Again, we have to take into
account the value to us of the mental pictures gathered in our
wanderings. For we know that only when a scene is viewed
emotionally, when it produces in us a shock of pleasure, does
it become a permanent possession of the mind; in other words,
it registers an image which, when called up before the inner
eye, is capable of reproducing a measure of the original
delight.
In recalling those scenes which have given me the greatest
happiness, the images of which are most vivid and lasting, I
find that most of them are of scenes or objects which were
discovered, as it were, by chance, which I had not heard
of, or else had heard of and forgotten, or which I had not
expected to see. They came as a surprise, and in the following
instance one may see that it makes a vast difference whether
we do or do not experience such a sensation.
In the course of a ramble on foot in a remote district I came
to a small ancient town, set in a cuplike depression amidst
high wood-grown hills. The woods were of oak in spring
foliage, and against that vivid green I saw the many-gabled
tiled roofs and tall chimneys of the old timbered houses,
glowing red and warm brown in the brilliant sunshine - a scene
of rare beauty, and yet it produced no shock of pleasure;
never, in fact, had I looked on a lovely scene for the first
time so unemotionally. It seemed to be no new scene, but
an old familiar one; and that it had certain degrading
associations which took away all delight.
The reason of this was that a great railway company had
long been "booming" this romantic spot, and large photographs,
plain and coloured, of the town and its quaint buildings had
for years been staring at me in every station and every
railway carriage which I had entered on that line. Photography
degrades most things, especially open-air things; and in this
case, not only had its poor presentments made the scene too
familiar, but something of the degradation in the advertising
pictures seemed to attach itself to the very scene. Yet even
here, after some pleasureless days spent in vain endeavours to
shake off these vulgar associations, I was to experience one
of the sweetest surprises and delights of my life.
The church of this village-like town is one of its chief
attractions; it is a very old and stately building, and its
perpendicular tower, nearly a hundred feet high, is one of the
noblest in England. It has a magnificent peal of bells, and
on a Sunday afternoon they were ringing, filling and flooding
that hollow in the hills, seeming to make the houses and trees
and the very earth to tremble with the glorious storm of
sound. Walking past the church, I followed the streamlet that
runs through the town and out by a cleft between the hills to
a narrow marshy valley, on the other side of which are
precipitous hills, clothed from base to summit in oak woods.
As I walked through the cleft the musical roar of the bells
followed, and was like a mighty current flowing through and
over me; but as I came out the sound from behind ceased
suddenly and was now in front, coming back from the hills
before me. A sound, but not the same - not a mere echo; and
yet an echo it was, the most wonderful I had ever heard.
For now that great tempest of musical noise, composed of a
multitude of clanging notes with long vibrations, overlapping
and mingling and clashing together, seemed at the same time
one and many - that tempest from the tower which had
mysteriously ceased to be audible came back in strokes or
notes distinct and separate and multiplied many times. The
sound, the echo, was distributed over the whole face of the
steep hill before me, and was changed in character, and it was
as if every one of those thousands of oak trees had a peal of
bells in it, and that they were raining that far-up bright
spiritual tree music down into the valley below. As I stood
listening it seemed to me that I had never heard anything so
beautiful, nor had any man - not the monk of Eynsham in that
vision when he heard the Easter bells on the holy Saturday
evening, and described the sound as "a ringing of a marvellous
sweetness, as if all the bells in the world, or whatsoever is
of sounding, had been rung together at once."
Here, then, I had found and had become the possessor of
something priceless, since in that moment of surprise and
delight the mysterious beautiful sound, with the whole scene,
had registered an impression which would outlast all others
received at that place, where I had viewed all things with but
languid interest.
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