BACK' TO LONDON
IHAVE lately returned to London after two or three -1-• years in the wilderness. - The wilderness was not very far away, only in the Chilterns. An hour and a half in the train from Paddington, then two miles up a long hill, usually negotiated by a tattered vehicle that echoed the very groans of Mr. Ford himself- over a warlike world, and you were there. Once a week your locusts and wild honey were delivered from London. It was, on the whole, a very pleasant wilderness, with miles and miles of beech trees that transformed them- selves, in early spring, into the grave delicate forest of a fairy-tale, and turned bacchanal in autumn, staining the whole countryside with enchanting red and gold dyes. It was, indeed, now that I come to think about it, even a beautiful wilderness. In spring my orchard snowed down cherry and apple blossom, and the south wall was starry with the pluni. Summer brought -its own enchantments, those evenings when, racquets flung aside, we -lounged late in the garden, the darkening air sweet with honeysuckle, enormous moons climbing the sky, and from somewhere behind the house the voice, like some obscure fate motif; of the throbbing nightjar. 'Even winter, when its days of wind and rain would suddenly cease and there would come a touch Of. frost; -had its beauty. .With the after-breakfast pipe in your mouth, you would look out of the window at the exquisite _.. • grey stillness and then there would come into your vision, as if they • were morning callers • from Yueatin, great -green and Scarlet. woodpecker bdecaneers busY on your lawn: And here, it would seem, is yet another 'man whO has returned • from the wilderneSs not to speak.. the truth but to make fine phrases, with number of unnecessary but picturesque 'adjeCtiires- his wallet.
But no—having rid myself of the fine phrases, I can now venture to .speak the truth. It was a beautiful wilderness, but it was still a wilderness, and I am glad to be out of "it. There are a hundred and one reasons why I should , be glad, but I will content - myself with putting forWard• only one of them, 'and that p.ethaps the 'strangest, as it is'. a- moral reason. There I spent my -days and nights surrounded by thousands of rustling beech trees, whereas here I spend them surrounded by thousands of sighing ratepayers ; and, to put the matter shortly, the ratepayers are much better for me than the beech trees. Whatever I lose by the change in physical health, I gain in mental health. The truth is that this living apart from one's fellow-creatures, this nestling in the lap of Nature, listening to the heart-beats of our great Mother; and so forth, is a sad and unwholesome business. It transforms a man. from a kindly social being into a dreary egotist. The Only persons whO can be trusted to live with Nature are the people, farmers and the like, who do not rhapsodize over her but try to get something out of her, scratching her bosom and killing her creatures, so that they may take their leave of her fields and birds and sit for ever in the bar-parlour of the ." Doi. and Duck." They only. turn away from people in order that they may return, as soon as they can, with more money in their pockets. It is not these genuine country folks who are transformed into dreary egotists (though even they are apt to be harder and more self-centred than townspeople), but the authors and artists and educated idlers- who quit the town to commune in peace with Nature.
Thus, authors and artists are, under any circumstances, vain and fussy creatures, and their only hope of salvation is to mingle with crowds of other human beings; indifferent to them 'and all with' hopes and fears and important concerns of their own, and to encounter very frequently creatures of their own kind with whom they have at least to pretend modesty, and a sense of humour about themselves. Faced with nothing but a wide vacant countryside, their ego swells. enormously, and all, idea of proportion is lost. I have known more than one author who took to the _wilderness and pretended he had not a care so long as he might watch the starlings and not see another human being, when all the time. he was aching for the next post, to clutch a fat bundle of press cuttings. So situated, an adverse criticism in the Rutland Times would ruin a whole day for him, no matter how the starlings twittered and all Nature 'smiled, whereas if he had read the thing in a Fleet Street tavern he would have roared with laughter. Vanity, which seeks applause, may blossom when we are surrounded by our friends and cronies, but if we take leave of them, our vanity cools and hardens into real egotism. In theory a long con_ templation of Nature's gigantic ever-recurring processes, her endless pageant of birth, dissolution, decay and re- birth, her prodigal waste of life, should teach a man humility. In practice, it does nothing of the kind. His pride mounts with the absence of his fellow-creatures. The beech trees do not tell him he is an ass ; the .birds do not ask him what has lecome.Of his sense of hinuour le is the most important thing in the landscape and before long even the distant horizons are brightened and darkened by his moods. Nature can do many things ; she can soften the edges of our grief, fill us with an exquisite wonder, blow • away our sickneSS but never yet has she helped- to reduce a man's sense of his own importance. That needs the presence of her highest and most wayward children. .The -most eiviliied of them, let us say a Wise tuid -hurnoiou Old lady, might undo- the mischief -in' an hour's - brisk talk. It may be that Nature herself is really a: wise and humorous Old lady, but by not giving us that hour's talk, by allowing our sick fancies to assume monstrous proportions -in her presence, she is a maker and not an un-maker of egotists.
There is a bright -fire in my room, a much better fire than I had in the Chilterns ; outside it is cold and misty, and there no doubt it is even colder and mistier ; and very shortly I shall dine with some old friends win would -have been miles away had I still been in the wilderness ; so-that I am more convinced than ever that my reasoning is sound and that I did well to come back to London: I think of my authors, and see that the mast genial and kindly of them were fellows like Johnson and Lamb, who would not set foot out of town if they could help it. Consider your great nature poets, your Wordsworths and. Merediths, all self-centred to a fault, who were for ever saying what Nature had taught them ; but it is clear she never taught them not to take themselves over- seriously. Your Thoreau living with his Milky Way was there ever such an egotistical prig ? Did ever men write so dismally of the worst streets in Bootle or Shore- ditch as our rural novelists write of their countryside and its people ? I could go on piling instance upon instance, and probably shall do all through the winter. But by next spring there will come a wind from the South-West, promising primroses and leaving me suddenly sick of the streets, and then a desire to return to the wilderness will come upon me and I shall be able to produce a hundred and. one reasons why I should go. . One of these reasons will be a moral reason, and though I do not yet know what it will be, I do know that it will be just as good as the one that brought me back to London. -What a piece of work is man !
J. B. PRIESTLEY. -
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