Reading Out of Doors

FEW can doubt that at least two persons are necessary to the real life of a book, –the author and the right, predestined reader. Without the latter a book is as a room barred from the outside, or as Tantalus forever athirst. But there is a third essential perhaps less commonly given its due. It is the situation of the reader; he must read the book in a fit season, in a fit place, with nicely adjusted circumstances of light and shade, of company or solitude. The right book in the right place is neither an easy nor an oft accomplished bliss. The principle is, I think, inexpugnable. Adonais is not to be read on the platform at Waterloo, and it is not unlikely that something would happen in a Morris-decorated room where Hall Caine was being devoured. On the other hand, it may fairly be maintained that there is always a place so extravagantly wrong as to be irresistible. Catullus has been read in a waiting-room on a wet, Sunday, suburban evening ; Izaak Walton, with one leaf always in the plate, at a restaurant in Soho ; and once, on looking over the shoulder of an opiumeating gambler who was unmoved by his losses, I saw one finger and one eye fixed upon the dialogue of Plædo. But these conjunctions must be discovered by each for himself, and a romantic eye may find out many a rare enjoyment, as an epicurean will take the choicest ices after a coffee warmed to the borders of indiscretion. This is, however, a rash happiness, balanced above the pit of grief, and by a sane mind not to be compared with that of listening to the voice of the book, saying,–

Such a star was the inn at Llangollen where Hazlitt read the Nouvelle HéIoïse, on his birthday, “ over a bottle of sherry and a cold chicken.” Such, too, is the forgotten library,–

with sounding and invisible trees below, where I read Sir Thomas Brown. Gilbert White is delightful anywhere. But I like best a Surrey farmhouse, worn by the delicate waste of ages, where even the poultry seem to crow and cluck in accents of a century ago. So, also, the true appreciator of a book is most often he to whom it has come in the right place as from the clouds. And those old authors are continually rediscovered– (I had almost said) remade.

I was shocked once to find myself reading Huysmans in a summer wood! Yet on returning to a fairly ample library it was hard to choose a book that would “ go with ” the woods more pleasantly. I had indeed hit upon perhaps the one moment in a lifetime when that author could be read in the open air. Reading out of doors is a fine and difficult art. I do not mean lounging with an opened novel or an unopened newspaper on the downs near our great shrimp resorts. Yet I know the pleasure of going miles through a various –solemn and delicate –country, lingering at every stile to look behind, and count the gold of what is past, and guess at what is to come, with a precious book fast-hidden in the pocket,–

The feeling of that book is something, though it remain untouched. The authoress of Elizabeth and her German Garden confesses that she always took a volume of Spenser or Wordsworth or Thoreau under the trees. That is one taste. For my part I have ever found that my own thoughts, or those which the landscape and the air thought for me, were far beyond the range of such as they. There is more wisdom in the amber maple leaf or the poise of a butterfly or the silence of a league of oaks than in all the poems of Wordsworth. The poet has indeed made a shrewd copy of some of this wisdom, but how little even he has remembered of what has been heard by those who perforce forget! Under an elm, or beside the sea, I have been many times a great poet of Nature or essayist. Yet have I found little inclination to open a book when I have been emulating the nettle or the grass in making much of the sun. The poets who are most happily read out of doors are the courtly writers, the men of wit and fashion, for whom no praise was loud enough in their own time, whom the nineteenth century tried to blow out with sentiment. Nature does on their behalf as she does sometimes for cheap architecture. She festoons them with ivy flowers; the birds sing and build close by ; the Moon will rest there in her pilgrimage. I have taken Mr. Prior’s verses out a dozen times into the fields, and found a place that was kind even to this, —

Friend Howard’s Genius fancied all the rest.” And so with Voltaire, and with all poets who have been born in ages that cared little for flowers except in hats, –who, not gathering flowers in their life, have, as it were, got moss and lichen after death. I have been disposed to conclude that there is a real need of Nature in all poetry : and if we search the greatest, who amongst them is not indebted to her abundance? Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, to name only those who need not be named –are supreme in no vein more than in this. Books that have grown old and have some of the pathos of old things are still more at their ease “ on the lap of earth.” Above all, the Morte Darthur. Hundreds of older books have not the same flavor of age. Virgil, for example, or Philostratus, or almost anything in Greek and Latin save Hesiod and Cato, never seems anything but fresh, separated from us by the space rather than by the haze of years. We cannot, I think, imagine them as old, any more than the friends of our childhood whom we have never seen since they were pink-faced and golden-haired. The books that grow old are oftenest such as reflect exclusively the contemporary taste; as a rule, they are unimportant. Cibber and Savage after all show us more than Gray what the eighteenth century thought. To take an extreme case, a quinquagenarian book of fashions will seem immensely old. Among famous books I could put down several; but the Morte Darthur is the perfect book to be read out of doors. Immediately it is on the grass, the wood sorcery catches it. The birds fill with their softest notes the pauses of his halting stories. The flowers and the trees are glad to find the place in these stories, which Malory rarely gave to them, fine though his gift be in that kind. Malory had the good fortune to be known to four centuries in black-letter, which –on that amber-colored page –harmonizes well with the branches and the leaves and their shadows,– much better than our spidery modern type. Perhaps for some good deed to a flower, I have been singularly happy in reading Malory out of doors. There the casual mention of a lord or lady, who never appears again, receives full justice from the imagination and its following. One day, I learned that there is really no hiatus in this: —

“ Sir Pelleas that loved the lady Ettard and he had died for her love had not been for a lady of the lake, her name was Dame Nimue ” ...

Cherry flowers threw a delicate gloom upon the grass. There were faint clouds in the sky, and I only knew they were there, because they sometimes disappeared and showed a deeper blue. And there may be other cherry orchards and other clouds that can weave the story of Nimuë and Pelleas.

Edward Thomas.