HOW difficult it is to say what one really feels about the landscapes and the countrysides and the subtle souls of Europe! I think that all men who are of European blood feel those countrysides and the soul of them very strongly; but I think that they feel as I feel now, as I write, a difficulty of expression. There is something in it like the difficulty of approaching a personality. One may admire, or reverence, or even love, but the personality is different from one’s own; it has a chastity of its own that must be respected, it has its boundaries and its honour, and one always fears that one will transgress such boundaries if one so much as speaks of the new thing one has come upon and desired to describe. With distant travel it is not so. One comes far over seas to a quite strange land and one treats it brutally. One’s appreciation is a sort of conquest; and you will note that those who speak of the Colonies, or of America, or of Africa, or of Asia speak of them with a hard intolerance as of something quite alien, or with a conventional set of phrases, as of something not worth the real expression of emotion. Now it is not so with our ancient provinces of Europe.
[168]A man coming out of the Cis-Alpine Gaul into old Italy across the Apennines feels something; indeed he feels it! What it is he feels very few men have written down; none has said it fully. You get out of one thing into something other when you climb up out of the Valley of the Parma and cross the High Apennines and look southward into the happy Garfagnana, and hear the noise of the little Serchio beginning in its meads. In the same way no one has described (to my knowledge at least) that shock of desolation and yet of mystery which comes upon a man when he crosses the River Couesnon and passes from Normandy into Brittany. Normandy is rich, Brittany is poor. Normandy loves ritual, Brittany religion. Normandy can make things, Brittany prayers. Normandy lives by Brittany in the matter of the soul, Brittany not by Normandy in the matter of the body. What Norman ever gave a Breton anything? You cross that river and everything changes. The men and women have dreamier eyes, the little children play more wonderfully, everybody is poor.
Or, again, the passage from the hard industry of the Lancashire Plain suddenly on to the moors, where the farming men and women are so quiet and silent and self-respectful and seem so careful rather to preserve what they own than to add to it. Or, again, the startling passage over Carter Fell from the Englishmen of Rede-Dale to the Scotchmen of Jedburgh; or the sharp passage from the violent,[169] active, sceptical, cruel, courageous, well-fed, ironical Burgundians into the gentle Germans of the Vosges: here is a boundary which is not marked in any political way, and yet how marked it is!
Now in England we have many such approaches and surprises. I will not speak of that good change which comes upon a man as he travels south from Victoria Station and hears, almost at the same time that he first smells earth, the South Country tongue; nor will I speak of that other change which perhaps some of my readers know very well, the change from the active and grasping Cockney into the quiet tenacity of East Anglia. It is not my province—but if I am not wrong one strikes it within half an hour in the fast expresses—these people push with quants, they sail in wherries, they inhabit flat tidal banks, they are at peace. Nor will I here speak of the Marches and how, between a village and a village, one changes from the common English parish with the Squire’s house and the church and the cottages and all, into the hard slate roofs and the inner flame of Wales. Rather I would speak of something the boundary of which has never yet been laid down, but which people call (I think) “The West Country.”
One never knows, when one is tackling a thing like this, where one should first begin to tackle it, or by what end one should take it. Every man[170] according to his own study, every man according to his own bent or accident of experience, takes it by his own handle, and the one man speaks of the language, the other of the hills, another of the architecture, another of the names. For my part I would desire to speak of all.
When one gets over a certain boundary one is in a peculiar district of this world, a special countryside of Europe, a happy land with a conviction and a tradition of its own which may not have a name, but which is in general the West Country, and which by its hills and by its men and women convinces any true traveller at once of its personality. More than one man after a dreary wandering southwa............