Country Life

Points of the compass

Peter Quince

To come back to England frOm the sunlit South, as so many of us do nowadays at this time of year, can be mildly unsettling. Things seem unaccountably different. The trees look greener, the air feels cooler, the light seems more veiled and more mysterious, than when one went away. After the

bright Mediterranean clarity, the spirit of soft and sensuous melancholy which inhabits the English landscape seems more noticea.ble.

When I chanced the other day to meet several people who had just returned to my village from various playgrounds in the sun, each remarked in turn that he had a sense of being only half in tune with the world 'about him. I came across one of them at the edge of a field of fresh stubble, in the evening. The low sun was dimmed to a glowing red disc in a sky of

shimmering haze, and the land scape rolled gently away into a misty distance. All the details were

blurred by the subtle light, so that the wood beyond the stubble was like a water-colourist's wash of dark green, and the hills behind that were scarcely more than hints of shape and colour.

My friend was faintly bemused by the contrast between such a scene and what was fresh in his

mind from earlier that same day — the clear pagan brilliance of

blue sea and brightly lit rock, of a landscape where olive and vine stand out in unfailing sharpness for as far as the eye can travel.

At such moments one is tempted to speculate about the part

played by landscape and climate in the shaping of human personality. It is an ancient and inexhaustible topic, of course. One need not be an out-and-out determinist to allow that its part must be consi derable. The cool luxuriance of the present English scene, for example; all those endlessly subtle gradations of tint and shade — it is impossible to believe that they do not impart some colouring to the mind and the emotions. But what?

Recently 1 came across, in the collected correspondence of Ald

ous Huxley, a letter in which he urged a friend in England to uproot himself and to settle as he had done under the blue sky of Tuscany. The North, he wrote, develops the soul, but the South is fruitful of beauty; and the mar fl age of northern soulfulness with southern beauty was his ideal. It is one which has cast a potent spell upon many generations of men bred in our cool, misty fringe of Europe.

But there are different views Which are as easy to accept. The northern landscape and climate can be seen as the nursemaid both of a particular kind of originality and also of a distinctive perceptiveness about the natural world. I mean the originality which shows itself in literature in, say, Tristram Shandy, and the perceptiveness Which is found in the poetry of Wordsworth. The quirkiness of the one, the obsessed concern with the natural order in the other — these are the products of the products of our infinitely-changing temperate latitudes, inconceivable in the hard Mediterranean glare. If Wordsworth had lived long abroad, instead of hastily retreating to his native mountains, he !night perhaps still have ripened Into a poet; but if so it would have been a poet of a profoundly different order. As it happens, the nearest thing to TrLstram Shandy which English literature has produced in this century is set in the bright Mediterranean world. I refer to Norman Douglas's novel South Wind, and

curiously enough this theme of the interaction between man's surroundings and his personality runs all through that splendid book. One of the characters, a Southerner it goes without saying, expatiates thus:

"The sun, which colours our complexion and orders our daily habits, influences at the same time our character and outlook. The almost hysteri al changes of light and darkness, summer and winter, which have impressed themselves on the literature of the North, are unknown here. Northern people . . . are prone to extremes."

This is not, perhaps, how many of us see it; it seems an unlikely charge to put upon the soft English landscape at this moment, when it is given over to mellowness and calm. It is probably not far from the truth, all the same.