Essays of Travel Tale 5 - Cockermouth and Keswick

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Section 5 of Essays of Travel, by Robert Louis Stevenson. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Chapter 2, Cogrimoth and Keswick, a fragment, 1871

Very much as a painter half closes his eyes, so that some salient unity may disengage itself from among the crowd of details, and what he sees may thus form itself into a whole, very much on the same principle, I may say, I allow a considerable lapse of time to intervene between any of my little journey-eens and the attempt to chronicle them. I cannot describe a thing that is before me at the moment, or that has been before me only a very little while before. I must allow my recollections to get thoroughly strained, free from all shaft, till nothing be except a pure gold. Allow my memory to choose out what is truly memorable by a process of natural selection. And I piously believe that in this way, I ensure the survival of the fittest. If I make notes for future use, or if I am obliged to write letters during the course of my little excursion, I so interfere with the process that I can never again find out what is worthy of being preserved, or what should be given in full length, what in torso, or what merely in profile. This process of incubation may be unreasonably prolonged, and I am somewhat afraid that I've made this mistake with the present journey. Like a bad daguerreotype, great part of it has been entirely lost. I can tell you nothing about the beginning and nothing about the end, but the doings of some 50 or 60 hours about the middle remain quite distinct and definite, like a little patch of sunshine on a long shadowy plain, or the one spot on an old picture that has been restored by the dexterous hand of the cleaner.

I remember a tale of an old Scots minister called upon suddenly to preach, who had hastily snatched an old sermon out of his study and found himself in the pulpit before he noticed that the rats had been making free with his manuscript and eaten the first two or three pages away. He gravely explained to the congregation how he found himself situated. And now, said he, let us just begin where the rats have left off. I must follow the Divine's example and take up the thread of my discourse where it first distinctly issues from the limbo of forgetfulness.

Cockermouth. I was lighting my pipe as I stepped out of the inn at Cockermouth and did not raise my head until I was fairly in the street. When I did so, it plashed upon me that I was in England. The evening sunlight lit up English houses, English faces, and English confirmation of street. As it were, an English atmosphere blew against my face. There is nothing perhaps more puzzling, if one thing in sociology can ever really be more unaccountable than another, than the great gulf that is set between England and Scotland. A gulf so easy in appearance, in reality so difficult to traverse. Here are two people, almost identical in blood, pent up together on one small island, so that their intercourse, one would have thought, must be as close as that of prisoners, who shared one cell of the Bastille.

The same in language and religion, and yet a few years of quarrelsome isolation. A mere forenoon's whiff, as one may call it, in comparison with the great historical cycles, has so separated their thoughts and ways, that not unions, not mutual dangers, nor steamers, nor railways, nor all the king's horses and all the king's men seem able to obliterate the broad distinction. In the trituration of another century, or so the corners may disappear, but in the meantime, in the year of grace, 1871, I was as much in a new country as if I had been walking out of the hotel cent and tuan at Antwerp.

I felt a little thrill of pleasure at my heart as I realized the change and strolled away up the street with my hands behind my back, noting in a dull, sensual way how foreign and yet how friendly were the slopes of the gables and the color of the tiles, and even the demeanor and voices of the gossips round about me.

Wandering in this aimless humor, I turned up a lane and found myself following the course of the bright little river. I passed first one and then another, then a third, several couples out bluff making in the spring evening, and a consequent feeling of loneliness was beginning to grow upon me when I came to a dam across the river and a mill, a great gaunt promontory of building, half on dry ground and half arched over the stream. The road here drew in its shoulders and crept through between the landward extremity of the mill and the little garden enclosure with a small house and a large signboard within its privet hedge. I was pleased to fancy this an inn, and drew little etchings and fancy of a sanded parlor and three-cornered spittoons and a society of parochial gossips seated within over their church wardens. But as I drew near, the board displayed its superscription, and I could read the name of Smedhurst and the designation of Canadian felt hat manufacturers. There was no more hope of evening fellowship, and I could only stroll on by the riverside under the trees. The water was dappled with slanting sunshine and dusted all over with a little mist of flying insects. There were some amorous ducks also, whose lovemaking reminded me of what I had seen a little farther down. But the road grew sad, and I grew weary. And as I was perpetually haunted with the terror of a return of the tie that had been playing such ruin in my head a week ago, I turned and went back to the inn and supper and my bed. The next morning at breakfast, I communicated to the smart waitress my intention of continuing down the coast and through Whitehaven to Furness. And as I might have expected, I was instantly confronted by that last and most worrying form of interference that chooses to introduce tradition and authority into the choice of a man's own pleasures. I can excuse a person combatting my religious or philosophical heresies, because of them I have deliberately accepted, and am ready to justify by present argument. But I do not seek to justify my pleasures. If I prefer tame scenery to grand, a little hot sunshine over lowland parks and woodlands, to the war of the elements around the summit of Mont Blanc. Or if I prefer a pipe of mild tobacco, and the company of one or two chosen companions, to a ball where I feel myself very hot, awkward, and weary, I merely state these preferences as facts, and do not seek to establish them as principles. This is not the general rule, however. And accordingly, the waitress was shocked, as one might be at a heresy, to hear the root that I had sketched out for myself. Everybody who came to Cockermouth for pleasure, it appeared, went on to Keswick. It was in vain that I put up a little plea for the liberty of the subject. It was in vain that I said I should prefer to go to Whitehaven. I was told that there was nothing to see there, that weary, hackneyed old falsehood. And at last, as the handmaiden began to look really concerned, I gave way, as men always do in such circumstances, and agreed that I was to leave for Keswick by a train in the early evening.