Essays of Travel Tale 6 - An Autumn Effect. 1875

Robert Louis Stevenson (0:00)

Section 6 of Essays of Travel by Robert Louis Stevenson. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Chapter 3, An Autumn Effect, 1875

Nous ne décrivons jamais mieux la nature qui lorsque nous nous efforçons d'exprimer soberment et simplement l'impression que nous en avons reçu.

Monsieur André Thierry, La Tombe dans les Bois, Revue des Deux Mondes. 1st October 1874, page 562

A country rapidly passed through under favorable auspices may leave upon us a unity of impression that would only be disturbed and dissipated if we stayed longer. Clear vision goes with a quick foot. Things fall for us into a sort of natural perspective when we see them for a moment in going by.

We generalize boldly and simply and are gone before the sun is overcast, before the rain falls, before the season can steal like a dial hand from his figure, before the lights and shadows, shifting round towards nightfall, can show us the other side of things and belie what they showed us in the morning. We expose our mind to the landscape as we would expose the prepared plate in the camera for the moment only during which the effect endures, and we are away before the effect can change. Hence, we shall have in our memories a long scroll of continuous wayside pictures, all imbued already with the prevailing sentiment of the season, the weather and the landscape, and certain to be unified more and more as time goes on by the unconscious processes of thought, so that we who have only looked at a country over our shoulders, so to speak, as we went by, will have a conception of it far more memorable and articulate than a man who has lived there all his life from a child upwards, and had his impression of today modified by that of tomorrow, and belied by that of the day after, till at length the stable characteristics of the country are all blotted out from him behind the confusion, a variable effect. I begin my little pilgrimage in the most enviable of all humours, that in which a person, with a sufficiency of money and an absack, turns his back on a town, and walks forward into a country of which he knows only by the vague report of others.

Such an one has not surrendered his will, and contracted for the next hundred miles like a man on a railway. He may change his mind at every finger post, and where ways meet, follow vague preferences freely, and go the low road or the high, choose the shadow or the sunshine, suffer himself to be tempted by the lane that turns immediately into the woods, or the broad road that lies open before him into the distance, and shows him the far-off spires of some city, or a range of mountain tops, or a rim of sea perhaps, along a low horizon. In short, he may gratify his every whim and fancy, without a pang of reproving conscience, or the least jostle to his self-respect.

It is true, however, that most men do not possess the faculty of free action, the priceless gift of being able to live for the moment only. And as they begin to go forward on their journey, they will find that they have made for themselves new fetters.

Slight projects they may have entertained for a moment, having just become iron laws to them. They know not why. They will be led by the nose, by these vague reports of which I spoke above. And the mere fact that their informant mentioned one village and not another will compel their footsteps with inexplicable power. And yet a little while, yet a few days of this fictitious liberty, and they will begin to hear imperious voices calling on them to return. And some passion, some duty, some worthy or unworthy expectation will set its hand upon their shoulder and lead them back into the old paths. Once and again, we have all made the experiment. We know the end of it right well. And yet if we make it for the 100th time tomorrow, it will have the same charm as ever. Our heart will beat and our eyes will be bright. As we leave the town behind us, and we shall feel once again, as we have felt so often before, that we are cutting ourselves loose forever from our whole past life, with all its sins and follies and circumscriptions, and go forward as a new creature into a new world.

It was well, perhaps, that I had this first enthusiasm to encourage me up the long hill above High Wycombe, for the day was a bad day for walking at best, and now began to draw towards afternoon, dull, heavy, and lifeless. A pall of gray cloud covered the sky, and its color reacted on the color of the landscape. Near at hand, indeed, the hedgerow trees were still fairly green, shot through with bright autumnal yellows, bright as sunshine, but a little way off, the solid bricks of woodland that lay squarely on slope and hilltop were not green but russet and gray, and ever less russet and more gray as they drew off into the distance. As they drew off into the distance also, the woods seemed to mass themselves together and lie thin and straight, like clouds upon the limit of one's view. Not that this massing was complete or gave the idea of any extent of forest, for every here and there the trees would break up, and go down into a valley in open order, or stand in long Indian file along the horizon, tree after tree relieved foolishly enough against the sky.