And yet if we
make it for the hundredth time to-morrow: it will have the same
charm as ever; our heart will beat and our eyes will be bright, as
we leave the town behind us, and we shall feel once again (as we
have felt so often before) that we are cutting ourselves loose for
ever from our whole past life, with all its sins and follies and
circumscriptions, and go forward as a new creature into a new
world.
It was well, perhaps, that I had this first enthusiasm to encourage
me up the long hill above High Wycombe; for the day was a bad day
for walking at best, and now began to draw towards afternoon, dull,
heavy, and lifeless. A pall of grey cloud covered the sky, and its
colour reacted on the colour of the landscape. Near at hand,
indeed, the hedgerow trees were still fairly green, shot through
with bright autumnal yellows, bright as sunshine. But a little way
off, the solid bricks of woodland that lay squarely on slope and
hill-top were not green, but russet and grey, and ever less russet
and more grey as they drew off into the distance. As they drew off
into the distance, also, the woods seemed to mass themselves
together, and lie thin and straight, like clouds, upon the limit of
one's view. Not that this massing was complete, or gave the idea
of any extent of forest, for every here and there the trees would
break up and go down into a valley in open order, or stand in long
Indian file along the horizon, tree after tree relieved, foolishly
enough, against the sky. I say foolishly enough, although I have
seen the effect employed cleverly in art, and such long line of
single trees thrown out against the customary sunset of a Japanese
picture with a certain fantastic effect that was not to be
despised; but this was over water and level land, where it did not
jar, as here, with the soft contour of hills and valleys. The
whole scene had an indefinable look of being painted, the colour
was so abstract and correct, and there was something so sketchy and
merely impressional about these distant single trees on the horizon
that one was forced to think of it all as of a clever French
landscape. For it is rather in nature that we see resemblance to
art, than in art to nature; and we say a hundred times, 'How like a
picture!' for once that we say, 'How like the truth!' The forms in
which we learn to think of landscape are forms that we have got
from painted canvas. Any man can see and understand a picture; it
is reserved for the few to separate anything out of the confusion
of nature, and see that distinctly and with intelligence.
The sun came out before I had been long on my way; and as I had got
by that time to the top of the ascent, and was now treading a
labyrinth of confined by-roads, my whole view brightened
considerably in colour, for it was the distance only that was grey
and cold, and the distance I could see no longer.
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