The Spirit of Place

A >> Alice Meynell >> The Spirit of Place


A horizon dark with storm is another thing. The weather darkens the line
and defines it, or mingles it with the raining cloud; or softly dims it,
or blackens it against a gleam of narrow sunshine in the sky. The stormy
horizon will take wing, and the sunny. Go high enough, and you can raise
the light from beyond the shower, and the shadow from behind the ray.
Only the shapeless and lifeless smoke disobeys and defeats the summer of
the eyes.

Up at the top of the seaward hill your first thought is one of some
compassion for sailors, inasmuch as they see but little of their sea. A
child on a mere Channel cliff looks upon spaces and sizes that they
cannot see in the Pacific, on the ocean side of the world. Never in the
solitude of the blue water, never between the Cape of Good Hope and Cape
Horn, never between the Islands and the West, has the seaman seen
anything but a little circle of sea. The Ancient Mariner, when he was
alone, did but drift through a thousand narrow solitudes. The sailor has
nothing but his mast, indeed. And but for his mast he would be isolated
in as small a world as that of a traveller through the plains.

Round the plains the horizon lies with folded wings. It keeps them so
perpetually for man, and opens them only for the bird, replying to flight
with flight.

A close circlet of waves is the sailor's famous offing. His offing
hardly deserves the name of horizon. To hear him you might think
something of his offing, but you do not so when you sit down in the
centre of it.

As the upspringing of all things at your going up the heights, so steady,
so swift, is the subsidence at your descent. The further sea lies away,
hill folds down behind hill. The whole upstanding world, with its looks
serene and alert, its distant replies, its signals of many miles, its
signs and communications of light, gathers down and pauses. This flock
of birds which is the mobile landscape wheels and goes to earth. The
Cardinal weighs down the audience with his downward hands. Farewell to
the most delicate horizon.




HABITS AND CONSCIOUSNESS


Education might do somewhat to control the personal habits for which
ungenerous observant men are inclined to dislike one another. It has
done little. As to literature, this has had the most curiously diverse
influence upon the human sensitiveness to habit. Tolstoi's perception of
habits is keener than a child's, and he takes them uneasily, as a child
does not. He holds them to be the occasion, if not the cause, of hatred.
Anna Karenina, as she drank her coffee, knew that her sometime lover was
dreading to hear her swallow it, and was hating the crooking of her
little finger as she held her cup. It is impossible to live in a world
of habits with such an apprehension of habits as this.

It is no wonder that Tolstoi denies to other men unconsciousness, and
even preoccupation. With him perception never lapses, and he will not
describe a murderer as rapt away by passion from the details of the room
and the observation of himself; nor will he represent a theologian as
failing--even while he thinks out and decides the question of his
faith--to note the things that arrest his present and unclouded eyes. No
habits would dare to live under those glances. They must die of dismay.

Tolstoi sees everything that is within sight. That he sees this
multitude of things with invincible simplicity is what proves him an
artist; nevertheless, for such perception as his there is no peace. For
when it is not the trivialities of other men's habits but the actualities
of his own mind that he follows without rest, for him there is no
possible peace but sleep. To him, more than to all others, it has been
said, "Watch!" There is no relapse, there is no respite but sleep or
death.

To such a mind every night must come with an overwhelming change, a
release too great for gratitude. What a falling to sleep! What a
manumission, what an absolution! Consciousness and conscience set free
from the exacted instant replies of the unrelapsing day. And at the
awakening all is ready yet once more, and apprehension begins again: a
perpetual presence of mind.

Dr. Johnson was "absent." No man of "absent" mind is without some hourly
deliverance. It is on the present mind that presses the burden of the
present world.




SHADOWS


Another good reason that we ought to leave blank, unvexed, and
unencumbered with paper patterns the ceiling and walls of a simple house
is that the plain surface may be visited by the unique designs of
shadows. The opportunity is so fine a thing that it ought oftener to be
offered to the light and to yonder handful of long sedges and rushes in a
vase. Their slender grey design of shadows upon white walls is better
than a tedious, trivial, or anxious device from the shop.

The shadow has all intricacies of perspective simply translated into line
and intersecting curve, and pictorially presented to the eyes, not to the
mind. The shadow knows nothing except its flat designs. It is single;
it draws a decoration that was never seen before, and will never be seen
again, and that, untouched, varies with the journey of the sun, shifts
the interrelation of a score of delicate lines at the mere passing of
time, though all the room be motionless. Why will design insist upon its
importunate immortality? Wiser is the drama, and wiser the dance, that
do not pause upon an attitude. But these walk with passion or pleasure,
while the shadow walks with the earth. It alters as the hours wheel.

Moreover, while the habit of your sunward thoughts is still flowing
southward, after the winter and the spring, it surprises you in the
sudden gleam of a north-westering sun. It decks a new wall; it is shed
by a late sunset through a window unvisited for a year past; it betrays
the flitting of the sun into unwonted skies--a sun that takes the
midsummer world in the rear, and shows his head at a sally-porte, and is
about to alight on an unused horizon. So does the grey drawing, with
which you have allowed the sun and your pot of rushes to adorn your room,
play the stealthy game of the year.

You need not stint yourself of shadows, for an occasion. It needs but
four candles to make a hanging Oriental bell play the most buoyant
jugglery overhead. Two lamps make of one palm-branch a symmetrical
countercharge of shadows, and here two palm-branches close with one
another in shadow, their arches flowing together, and their paler greys
darkening. It is hard to believe that there are many to prefer a
"repeating pattern."

It must be granted to them that a grey day robs of their decoration the
walls that should be sprinkled with shadows. Let, then, a plaque or a
picture be kept for hanging on shadowless clays. To dress a room once
for all, and to give it no more heed, is to neglect the units of the
days.

Shadows within doors are yet only messages from that world of shadows
which is the landscape of sunshine. Facing a May sun you see little
except an infinite number of shadows. Atoms of shadow--be the day bright
enough--compose the very air through which you see the light. The trees
show you a shadow for every leaf, and the poplars are sprinkled upon the
shining sky with little shadows that look translucent. The liveliness of
every shadow is that some light is reflected into it; shade and shine
have been entangled as though by some wild wind through their million
molecules.

The coolness and the dark of night are interlocked with the unclouded
sun. Turn sunward from the north, and shadows come to life, and are
themselves the life, the action, and the transparence of their day.

To eyes tired and retired all day within lowered blinds, the light looks
still and changeless. So many squares of sunshine abide for so many
hours, and when the sun has circled away they pass and are extinguished.
Him who lies alone there the outer world touches less by this long
sunshine than by the haste and passage of a shadow. Although there may
be no tree to stand between his window and the south, and although no
noonday wind may blow a branch of roses across the blind, shadows and
their life will be carried across by a brilliant bird.

To the sick man a cloud-shadow is nothing but an eclipse; he cannot see
its shape, its color, its approach, or its flight. It does but darken
his window as it darkens the day, and is gone again; he does not see it
pluck and snatch the sun. But the flying bird shows him wings. What
flash of light could be more bright for him than such a flash of
darkness?

It is the pulse of life, where all change had seemed to be charmed. If
he had seen the bird itself he would have seen less--the bird's shadow
was a message from the sun.

There are two separated flights for the fancy to follow, the flight of
the bird in the air, and the flight of its shadow on earth. This goes
across the window blind, across the wood, where it is astray for a while
in the shades; it dips into the valley, growing vaguer and larger, runs,
quicker than the wind, uphill, smaller and darker on the soft and dry
grass, and rushes to meet its bird when the bird swoops to a branch and
clings.

In the great bird country of the north-eastern littoral of England, about
Holy Island and the basaltic rocks, the shadows of the high birds are the
movement and the pulse of the solitude. Where there are no woods to make
a shade, the sun suffers the brilliant eclipse of flocks of pearl-white
sea birds, or of the solitary creature driving on the wind. Theirs is
always a surprise of flight. The clouds go one way, but the birds go all
ways: in from the sea or out, across the sands, inland to high northern
fields, where the crops are late by a month. They fly so high that
though they have the shadow of the sun under their wings, they have the
light of the earth there also. The waves and the coast shine up to them,
and they fly between lights.

Black flocks and white they gather their delicate shadows up, "swift as
dreams," at the end of their flight into the clefts, platforms, and
ledges of harbourless rocks dominating the North Sea. They subside by
degrees, with lessening and shortening volleys of wings and cries until
there comes the general shadow of night wherewith the little shadows
close, complete.

The evening is the shadow of another flight. All the birds have traced
wild and innumerable paths across the mid-May earth; their shadows have
fled all day faster than her streams, and have overtaken all the movement
of her wingless creatures. But now it is the flight of the very earth
that carries her clasped shadow from the sun.




Footnotes:


{1} I found it afterwards: it was Rebecca.