The House and the Hill

IT is an old New England hillside. I say ‘old’ because it usually feels old to me. Its patches of low huckleberry bushes, to be sure, bear every year new and shiny berries, the wild roses straying over its rocks bloom as fresh and sweet as if the whole hillside had been late-created, as though God had only thought of it last May. But those same berry patches have been here for generations, and the gnarled little rosebushes which bear the tender blossoming shoots are, perhaps, as old as the giant chestnuts near them. The chestnuts themselves are more obviously old, though they toss their creamy plumes of blossom each July afresh, and the rocks — the hillside, being truly of New England, is almost all rock —are older still.

Now and then, walking slowly up one of the faint cow-paths that wind among huckleberry and sumach, I have picked up an Indian arrow-head lying under a ledge as though dropped there but yesterday. It is as if a wave of the retreating past had swept up and licked about my feet, and I am set wondering about the past yet more remote — so remote that its waves can never stir me with even the tiniest left-over wave of reminiscence.

I have always loved the hill. I felt that I knew it well, and through knowledge and affection had, in a sense, earned the right to call it mine. One day, I set up a little canvas house upon it —one room only, with windows on all sides. And when I entered it and looked out upon my hill I found that something had happened. The hillside had become ’outdoors.’ It had become this in a new way because I had created, in its midst, ‘indoors.’ Hitherto, as I wandered here, or sat on its rocks, or lay on its thinly grassed sides, I had thought little about its aspects, I had never really held it from me to think about it at all; I had been a part of it, like the wasps among the berries or the bees among the roses. But now suddenly I found that I was holding it away from me.

Perhaps I had lost something; certainly I had gained something. For, as I looked out through the wide, low windows, I found it more beautiful than it had ever been before — more vivid, more thrilling. There was the Western outlook,—the hillside falling steeply away toward the gay green of the swamp meadow below, the lane winding at its foot up the opposite hill toward the huddle of gray roofs under dark maples. I had never noticed how the lane ' composed ’ with roofs and maples and swamp. There was the Southern, — sloping in a tenderer curve, past wood-edges pushing in on both sides, toward the distance where a deep green hill rose into the sky. There was the Eastern, — a level pasture full of rocks and huckleberries and bounded by woods whose shadows baffled the eye. There was the Northern, — the rock ledges of silver-gray, rising rough against the blue, with deep-green cedars set stiffly about, and clumped thorn-bushes which in the autumn would be gay with berries. It seemed as if I had never really seen cedars until I saw them framed by the window of my house — delightful New England trees that they are, prim and uncompromising, rough and yet conventional, a little scratchy even to the eye, yet full of a real distinction in the completeness of their individuality. And sensitive! Responsive in their color to every change of the sky or season, responsive in their delicate sea-weed-like tips to each breath of wind, and swaying to the bigger gusts with their whole stiff, spiring height.

Yet it is not the first time I have had this experience. Often, as I have walked along a country road, idly pleased with the world about me, I have passed an old barn, with great doors flung wide, front and back, so that one could look through them to the meadows behind. It is the same country I have been passing, — fields, bushes, fence-lines, a bit of hill and sky, —but the great doorways framing it in timbers and shadow create thereby a certain enhancement of its values, so that invariably, looking through, one gets one’s impression with something added, — a heightening of perception that is strangely arresting.

What is it that the big barn doors do? They limit, of course, they cut a little piece out from the wholeness of things, they say to us, ‘Never mind the rest, take just this, look at it in just this way — and now see how beautiful it is!’ They play the artist to us for a moment, forcing upon us our point of view, selecting our subject, adjusting the lights, and — perhaps greatest service of all — suggesting to us, or rather, imposing upon us, that sense of distance that is so necessary a part of the æsthetic experience.

This, too, is done for me by the broad, low windows of my little hillside house — this and something more. For the house gives zest to the hillside, as the hillside to the house, by its contrast of within and without. Outdoors means more to me by reason of having indoors too.

These things have set me pondering — pondering upon the virtues of limitation and the powers that inhere in bonds. Parallels are dangerous things to play with, yet I am tempted to play with one now. We are in a generation that jeers at dogma and is impatient of creeds, yet may it not be that these have done for races what the open barn door does for the passer-by ? Engulfed in the cosmos, infinitesimal part of the great whole, we have no real awareness of it. But frame it in dogma, confine it in a creed, and it becomes ours in a certain vividness of apprehension born of the artificial limits we have set up. True, the race pays a price; it gives up all but the small moiety that can be viewed through that special creed. But the traveler, also, would not linger forever before the same barn door. He passes on, enriched. And so the races have passed on from creed to creed, and in each have found, in some sort, both riches and poverty, enlightenment and ignorance.

It is true with all thought, all feeling, the entire circle of experience. As soon as we define, as soon as we express, we gain something, though we perhaps also give up something. In order to achieve, we must forego. No one, I fancy, ever wrote a poem or painted a picture without being aware, at least dimly, of a vast something that he was giving up. When artists feel this very keenly, struggling against it, striving for the gain without the loss, we sometimes perceive it and call them symbolists. But for us there is no loss, only great gain. For us, all great poems, all pictures, all works of art, are as great doors flung wide, as windows looking North or East or South or West, framing some part of the beauty of the world which without them we should never so deeply perceive.

But there is a furt her parallel which I would fain play with. My little house, giving me my centre of indoors from which, or even because of which, to enjoy the widening circles of outdoors — it is a symbol to me of my own individuality. The supreme joy, some say, is to lose one’s self in the infinite. Perhaps, but let us not forget, that there would be no point to this if we had not first a self to lose. It is a joy to me to gaze out of my windows, to go out of my door and enter into the great sea of outdoors that surges up even to the canvas walls of my little house. But these walls are what give its own color to my joy. So it is, too, with the barriers of myself. I should be loath to let them down, slight though they seem, and poor though that within may prove when scanned for its own static values. For how can we appreciate anything save through difference? And what can the infinite be to me unless I can approach it from something that is not infinite?

It is idle to reason about such things, yet still I play with my childish symbols. I even picture myself, a tiny house, flying through the Cosmos — so small, so unimportant, yet so persistently and joyously finite, so inalienably and joyously possessed of its own indoorness, in the midst of that wide outdoors. It is a presumptuous fancy, yet when I frown upon it, it only smiles back at me — the fancy that without this element even the hillsides of Nirvana might lack piquancy, — that even upon their limitless reaches I must needs maintain the walls, frail but valiant, of my own self.