Essays of Travel Tale 16 - Roads, 1873

Robert Louis Stevenson (0:00)

Section 16 of Essays of Travel by Robert Louis Stevenson. The Sliebervox recording is in the public domain. Chapter 13

Rhodes, 1873

No amateur will deny that he can find more pleasure in a single drawing over which he can sit a whole quiet forenoon and so gradually study himself into humor with the artist than he can ever extract from the dazzle and accumulation of incongruous impressions that send him weary and stupefied out of some famous picture gallery. But what is thus admitted with regard to art is not extended to the so-called natural beauties. No amount of excess in sublime mountain outline or the graces of cultivated lowland can do anything it is supposed to weaken or degrade the palette. We are not at all sure, however, that moderation and a regimen tolerably austere, even in scenery, are not helpful and strengthening to the taste, and that the best school for a lover of nature is not to the found in one of those countries where there is no stage effect, nothing salient or sudden, but a quiet spirit of orderly and harmonious beauty pervades all the details, so that we can patiently attend to each of the little touches that strike in us all of them together, the subdued note of the landscape. It is in scenery such as this that we find ourselves in the right temper to seek out small, sequestered loveliness. The constant recurrence of similar combinations of color and outline gradually forces upon us a sense of how the harmony has been built up, and we become familiar with something of nature's mannerism. This is the true pleasure of your rural voluptuary, not to remain ostracan before a Mount Chimborazo, not to sit deafened over the big drum in the orchestra, but day by day to teach himself some new beauty, to experience some new vague and tranquil sensation that has before evaded him. It is not the people who have pined and hungered after nature many a year, in the great city pent, as Coleridge said in the poem that made Charles Lamb so much ashamed of himself. It is not those who make the greatest progress in this intimacy with her, or who are most quick to see and have the greatest gusto to enjoy.

In this, as in everything else, it is minute knowledge and long-continued loving industry that make the two deletante. A man must have thought much over scenery before he begins fully to enjoy it. It is no youngling enthusiasm on hilltops that can possess itself of the last essence of beauty.

Probably most people's heads are growing bare before they can see all in a landscape that they have the capability of seeing. And even then, it will be only for one little moment of consummation before the faculties are again on the decline, and they that look out of the windows begin to be darkened and restrained in sight. Thus the study of nature should be carried forward thoroughly and with system. Every gratification should be rolled long under the tongue, and we should be always eager to analyze and compare, in order that we may be able to give some plausible reason for our admirations. True, it is difficult to put even approximately into words the kind of feelings thus called into play.

There is a dangerous vice inherent in any such intellectual refining upon vague sensation. The analysis of such satisfactions lends itself very readily to literary affectations, and we can all think of instances where it has shown itself apt to exercise a morbid influence, even upon an author's choice of language and the turn of his sentences. And yet, there is much that makes the attempt attractive. For any expression, however imperfect, once given to a cherished feeling, seems a sort of legitimation of the pleasure we take in it. A common sentiment is one of those great goods that make life palatable and ever new.

The knowledge that another has felt as we have felt and seen things, even if they are little things, not much otherwise than we have seen them, will continue to the end to be one of life's choicest pleasures.

Let the reader then butake himself in the spirit we have recommended to some of the quieter kinds of English landscape. In those homely and placid agricultural districts, familiarity will bring into relief many things worthy of notice, and urge them pleasantly home to him by a sort of loving repetition, such as the wonderful life-giving speed of windmill sails above the stationary country, the occurrence and recurrence of the same church tower at the end of one long vista after another, and conspicuous among these sources of quiet pleasure, the character and variety of the road itself, along which he takes his way, not only near at hand in the light contortions with which it adamps itself to the interchanges of level and slope, but far away also, when he sees a few hundred feet of it upheaved against a hill. In shining in the afternoon sun, he will find it an object so changeful and enlivening that he can always pleasurably busy his mind about it. He may leave the riverside or fall out of the way of villages, but the road he is always with him, and in the true humor of observation, will find in that sufficient company. From its subtle windings and changes of level, there arises a keen and continuous interest that keeps the attention ever alert and cheerful. Every sensitive adjustment to the contour of the ground, every little dip and swerve seems instinct with life, and an exquisite sense of balance and beauty. The road rolls upon the easy slopes of the country, like a long ship in the hollows of the sea.