But even if I suffered not at all from excess of light and could perform without winking the feats of the eagle and the oxy-acetylene welder, I should still take coloured glasses with me on my southward travels. For they have an aesthetic as well as a merely practical use. They improve the landscape as well as soothe the eyes.
As one approaches the great desert belt which bands the earth with some thousand miles of aridity to this side of the tropic of Cancer, the landscape suffers a change which to us northerners at least seems a change for the worse. It loses its luxuriant greenness. South of Lyons (except among the mountains and in the marshes) there is no grass worthy of the name. The deciduous trees grow with reluctance, yielding place to the black cypress and pine, the dark green laurel and juniper, the pale grey olive. The greens in an Italian landscape are either pale and dusty or glossily dark. Only when you climb to two thousand feet—and by no means invariably then—does anything like the brilliant, the seemingly self-luminous verdure of the English scene appear.
The typical north Italian landscape is one of hills, the lower slopes grey with olives, the summits, when they are above the level of cultivation, bare and brown. It is a landscape that makes a not entirely satisfactory compromise between the northern type and the fully southern. The English scene is made rich and comfortable by the bosomy forms and the damply glowing colours of its luxuriant foliage. And its rather rotund earthiness is tempered and made romantic by the bloom of mist that half veils it from sight. The southern, Mediterranean landscape, which makes its first Italian appearance at Terracina, is bare, sharp-outlined and austerely brilliant. The air is clear, and the far-seen earth seems itself to be made of coloured air. The landscape of Northern Italy is neither northern nor southern—neither aerially bright and light nor, on the other hand, rounded, or softly, luxuriously green.
It is here, in this half-parched landscape that is not yet refined to a bright asceticism, that the judicious traveller will don his green spectacles. The effect is magical. Every blade of dusty grass becomes on the instant rich with juicy life. Whatever greenness lurks in the grey of the olive trees shines out, intensified. The dried-up woods reburgeon. The vines and the growing corn seem to have drunk of a refreshing rain. All that the scene lacked to make it perfectly beautiful is instantaneously added. Through green spectacles, it becomes the northern landscape, but transformed and glorified—brighter, more nobly dramatic and romantic.
Green spectacles make excellent wearing, too, on the shores of the northern Mediterranean. In the south the blue of the sea is beautifully dark, like lapis-lazuli. It is the wine-dark sea of antiquity in contrast with which the sunlit land seems more than ever light, clear-coloured and aerial. But north of Rome the blue is insufficiently intense; it is a china not a lazuline blue. The sea at Monaco and Genoa, at Spezia and Civitavecchia has the blue, glassy stare of a doll’s eye—a stare that becomes very soon enraging in its enormous blankness and brightness. Put on green spectacles and this blank stare becomes at once the darkly glaucous, enigmatic gaze that shines up, between the cypresses, from the pools in the Villa d’Este gardens at Tivoli. From imbecile, the sea turns siren, and the arid hills that overhang it break into verdure as though beneath the feet of the spring.
Or if you like, you may put on black spectacles and so deepen the colour till it approaches that of the wine-dark Mediterranean of Greece and Magna Graecia and the isles. Black spectacles do nothing, however, to make the land more southern in aspect. By the side of their dark sea, the southern coasts seem built of bright air. Black spectacles may darken the northern sea; but they also give weight and an added solidity to the land. The glass which shall make the world seem brighter, clearer and lighter, put sunlight into the grey landscape and turn north into south still, alas, remains to be invented.
THE COUNTRY
It is a curious fact, of which I can think of no satisfactory explanation, that enthusiasm for country life and love of natural scenery are strongest and most widely diffused precisely in those European countries which have the worst climate and where the search for the picturesque involves the greatest discomfort. Nature worship increases in an exact ratio with distance from the Mediterranean. The Italians and the Spanish have next to no interest in nature for its own sake. The French feel a certain affection for the country, but not enough to make them desire to live in it if they can possibly inhabit the town. The south Germans and Swiss form an apparent exception to the rule.
They live nearer to the Mediterranean than the Parisians, and yet they are fonder of the country. But the exception, as I have said, is only apparent; for owing to their remoteness from the ocean and the mountainous conformation of the land, these people enjoy for a large part of each year a climate that is, to all intents, arctic. In England, where the climate is detestable, we love the country so much that we are prepared, for the privilege of living in it, to get up at seven, summer and winter, bicycle, wet or fine, to a distant station and make an hour’s journey to our place of labour. In our spare moments we go for walking tours, and we regard caravanning as a pleasure.
In Holland the climate is far more unpleasant than in England and we should consequently expect the Dutch to be even keener country-fanciers than ourselves. The ubiquitous water makes it difficult, however, for season-ticket holders to settle down casually in the Dutch countryside. But if unsuitable as building land, the soggy meadows of the Low Countries are firm enough to carry tents. Unable to live permanently in the country, the Dutch are the greatest campers in the world. Poor Uncle Toby, when he was campaigning in those parts, found the damp so penetrating, that he was forced to burn good brandy in his tent to dry the air. But then my Uncle Toby was a mere Englishman, brought up in a climate which, compared with that of Holland, is balmy. The hardier Dutch camp out for pleasure.
Of Northern Germany it is enough to say that it is the home of the wander-birds. And as for Scandinavia—it is well known that there is no part of the world, excluding the tropics, where people so freely divest themselves of their clothing. The Swedish passion for nature is so strong that it can only be adequately expressed when in a state of nature. ‘As souls unbodied,’ says Donne, ‘bodies unclothed must be to taste whole joys.’ Noble, nude and far more modern than any other people in Europe, they sport in the icy waters of the Baltic, they roam naked in the primeval forest. The cautious Italian, meanwhile, bathes in his tepid sea during only two months out of the twelve; always wears a vest under his shirt and never leaves the town, if he can possibly help it, except when the summer is at its most hellish, and again, for a little while, in the autumn, to superintend the making of his wine.
Strange and inexplicable state of affairs! Is it that the dwellers under inclement skies are trying to bluff themselves into a belief that they inhabit Eden? Do they deliberately love nature in the hope of persuading themselves that she is as beautiful in the damp and darkness as in the sunlight? Do they brave the discomforts of northern country life in order to be able to say to those who live in more favoured lands: You see, our countryside is just as delightful as yours; and the proof is that we live in it!
But whatever the reason, the fact remains that nature worship does increase with distance from the sun. To search for causes is hopeless; but it is easy and at the same time not uninteresting to catalogue effects. Thus, our Anglo-Saxon passion for the country has had the result of turning the country into one vast town; but a town without the urban conveniences which makes tolerable life in a city. For we all love the country so much, that we desire to live in it, if only during the night, when we are not at work. We build cottages, buy season tickets and bicycles to take us to the station. And meanwhile the country perishes.
The Surrey I knew as a boy was full of wildernesses. To-day Hindhead is hardly distinguishable from the Elephant and Castle. Mr. Lloyd George has built a week-end cottage (not, one feels, without a certain appositeness) at the foot of the Devil’s Jumps; and several thousand people are busily following his example. Every lane is now a street. Harrod’s and Selfridge’s call daily. There is no more country, at any rate within fifty miles of London. Our love has killed it.
Except in summer, when it
