Edward Thomas

“ Her brave warriors, best of patriots, poured out their blood for freedom. Ancient and mountainous Wales, Paradise of the bard, every valley and cliff is lovely in my sight; through the feeling of patriotism, how alluring is the ripple on her rivers and brooks. If the enemy treads my country under foot, the old language of the Welsh lives as it used to live; the Muse suffers not, in spite of the horrid hand of the traitor, nor yet the melodious harp of my country. ”

“ There was a chimney-stack clearly visible ten miles away, and I wished that I could hear the factory hiss and groan. No wind stirred among the trees. Once a kite flew over among the clouds of the colour of young swan's plumage, but silently, silently. I passed the remains of twelve ancient oaks, like the litter of some uncouth, vast monster pasturing, but without a sound.
The ruins of a farm lay at the edge of one valley: snow choked the chimney and protected the hearth, which was black with flames long dead, and as cold as a cinerary urn of the bronze age. ”

“ Fowler's landscapes show that he is not one of those who fly to dreams to satisfy the craving for beauty that exists in every human breast. The reality, he feels, is infinitely more wonderful than anything we could imagine. But the full significance of reality is not displayed on the highway so that even the most careless and indifferent cannot fail to see it: it is only to the lover that the beauty of reality is revealed. ”

“ I had entered that golden age that is always with us, where there are no wars except in the Iliad and Paradise Lost. At one stile, I saw Aeneas,—in mediæval mail,—revealing a blue-eyed, confident face, with a slippery mouth set firm by his destiny.
The country was without obvious character. An artist could have made nothing of it. Nothing in the arrangement of meadow and corn-land, wood and reedy water, made a clear impression on the mind: they might, perhaps, have been rearranged without attracting attention. So the landscape occupied the eyes little and the mind not at all. ”

“ ENTERING WALES The best way into Wales is the way you choose, provided that you care. Some may like the sudden modern way of going to sleep at London in a train and remaining asleep on a mountain-side, which has the advantage of being the most expensive and the least surprising way. Some may like to go softly into the land along the Severn, on foot, and going through sheath after sheath of the country, to reach at last the heart of it at peaty Tregaron, or the soul of it on Plynlimmon itself. ”

“ Squirrels glowed in the road; the heavy rooks let fall the acorns among the leaves continually. The last beams of the sun reached now a circle of high bracken on a far-off hill, and reached it alone and transfigured it with strong, quiet light; and then made one brown hill seem to be consumed in a golden glow, while the next hill was sombre; and again devoted themselves to a group of beeches that shone ruddy, branch and leaf and bole, and divine and majestic and unrelated to the cattle passing underneath. ”

“ It was impossible to think of the inn to which I was going, and hardly of the one which I had left. How could their fires have survived the all-pervading silent snow? When one is comfortable, near a fire or within reach of one, and in company, winter is thought of as a time of activity, of glowing faces, of elements despised, and even a poetry book brings back the spring: one will run, or eat chestnuts, or read a book, or look at a picture to-morrow, and so the winter flies. ”

“ There is one reward nature gives to those who love her with Mr. Fowler's self-abandonment, which the illustrations of this volume prove that the artist has gathered abundantly. He never seems to repeat himself. His work has something of nature's infinity, her prodigality and inexhaustible resources. We not only pass from scene to scene, but we share the myriad adventures of the days and hear the tramp of the seasons resounding through his pictures.
Mr. Fowler once adorned the walls of his studio with this motto: "The world has been enough invented: let us discover it." ”

“ December Twenty miles from the sea, a little river leaves an underground lake, flows through a cave, and falls radiant from the darkness among steep rocks, and takes a course like a man's thoughts when they have the joy of an unknown impulse and no certain aim. There, the river always talks of Spring. It winds and studies all the country round,—castle and farm and inn and old graves,—with many sharp digressions, which I suppose it could not have done without, any more than I in a similar case. ”

“ Just beyond this dragon and its house, an important road crossed the lane, which then narrowed and allowed the hedgerow hazels to arch over it and let in only the wannest light to the steep, stony hedge-bank of whin and grass and fern and violets. Little streams ran this way and that, under and over and alongside the lane, and at length a larger one was honoured by a bridge, the parapet covered with flat, dense, even turf. The bridge made way for a wide view, and to invite the eye a magpie flew away from the grassy parapet with wavy flight to a mountain side. ”

“ Fowler is particularly liable to be misjudged by an ignorant or hasty glance. It is easy for those who do not consider what art is to call it artless, and for those who do not see deeply into the infinite beauty of nature to sneer at it as "a mere transcript of nature." "As painting is an art," says Reynolds—and he knew what he was talking about—"they" (the ignorant) "think they ought to be pleased in proportion as they see that art ostentatiously displayed; they will from this supposition prefer neatness, high finishing, and gaudy colouring to the truth, simplicity, and unity of nature." ”

“ BARMOUTH BRIDGE
152 July I For three days I walked and drove towards Llyn-y-Fan Fach. On the first day I passed through a country of furnaces and mines, and the country had been exquisitely made. The gently swirling lines of hill and valley spoke of the mountains far off, as the little waves and the foam coming up the shore like chain-mail speak of the breakers out in the bay. Every large field that was left unburdened by house or factory had a fair curve in it, and even the odd pieces of land were something more than building sites and suggested their context. ”

“ Come, lasses, come, ere our rose world falls grey. 131We had talked long into the night, and then as sleep came, out of this darkness peered the early timorous warble of a blackbird, and gradually all the birds in orchard, hedge, and wood made a thick mist or curtain of innumerable and indistinguishable notes through which still crept the bolder note of that same nearest blackbird. As the night lost its heaviness, though not its stillness, the continuous mist of songs grew thicker and seemed to produce or to be one with the faint darkness which so soon was to be light. ”

“ How sweet and grave were the young larches! The brooks were not running as I had heard them up among the hills, but as brooks would run if I read of them at home and at ease in the verses of some tender poet, or as they will when I remember them many years hence. The sound of the world was heard only as the laughter of youthful voices 135by the trout pools, or again as the pealing of bells that presently grew and swelled and bubbled until the valley in which they pealed overflowed with the sound, and the moment of their ceasing was not marked. ”

“ For a little while, indeed, we asked, What would other children do who lived in that suburb, and had no "Quebec" to provide a home for all their fancies,—to lend its lawns for bright ladies and brave knights to walk upon,—its borders and bowers to complete the scenery of Hans Andersen,—its grey walls to hide beauty and cruelty, misers and witches, and children crying because of wicked stepmothers? We had set out, as children, to live as if for eternity. Now we would live as if for annihilation to-morrow. We would no longer set our hearts upon anything which the world can destroy. ”

“ But it was to a meal of wheaten bread and oat cake, and cheese and onions and cucumber, that we came in, while the trembling splendours of the first stars shone, as if they also were dewy like the furze. Nothing is to be compared with the pleasure of seeing the stars thus in the east, when most eyes are watching the west, except perhaps to read a fresh modern poet, straight from the press, before any one has praised it, and to know that it is good. ”

“ There were about fifty well-used books near the fire, and two or three men smoking, and one man reading some serious book aloud, by the only lamp; and a white girl was carrying out the week's baking, of large loaves, flat fruit tarts of blackberry, apple, and whinberry, plain golden cakes, large soft currant biscuits, and curled oat cakes. And outside, the noises of a west wind and a flooded stream, the whimper of an otter, and the long, slow laugh of an owl; and always silent, but never forgotten, the restless, towering outline of a mountain. ”

“ What I loved is but vexation; what I loved is no more. 40And I thought that perhaps it is even true, as Taliesin sang, that "A man is wont to be oldest when born, and younger all the time," and that the apple flowers did but remind me of old capacities laid waste.
These little things are the opening cadences of a great music which I have heard, and which is Wales. But I have forgotten the whole, and have echoes of it only, when I hear an old Welsh song, when I am trying to catch a trout, or am eating bread and butter and white cheese, and drinking pale tea, in a mountain farm.... ”

“ Just within reach of the sunset light, on one side of the valley lay a farm, with ricks, outhouses, and two cottages, all thatched. In the corner of the field nearest to the house, the long-horned craggy cattle were beginning to lie down. Those cattle, always vast and fierce, seemed to have sprung from the earth—into which the lines of their recumbent bodies flowed—out of which their horns rose coldly and angrily. ”

“ The street songs were but a week or two behind those of London, and they were not mixed with anything but an occasional Welsh hymn tune or "Sospan bach." But there used to be an old house there that spoke of old Wales, and I went to see it.
When I came to the edge of its garden I heard a blackbird sing, and in the busy street how old and far away it sounded! as if it were true that "thrice the age of a man is that of a stag, and thrice that of a stag is that of the melodious blackbird." ”

“ Reynolds was therefore consistent when he blamed the Dutch painters—not for imitating nature, but for copying nature in a one-sided and vulgar way, and for missing the beauties that intelligent insight and loving sympathy can always discover.
Mr. Fowler is right in refusing to admit that beauty is unnatural or that nature is unbeautiful. He is right in maintaining that it is not by listening to the "fond illusion of his heart" that the poet or the artist should create for us, but that he should see more clearly into the nature of reality than the majority of men. ”

“ He seems to have said to himself, "Nature is greater than all our artifices," and to have abandoned himself to the might and splendour and incommensurability of the great mother. The tricks of the trade are all forgotten or abandoned. Here is no cunning artifice of line, no obvious formula of design. The scene itself speaks to us from the canvas: the art and the artist are forgotten. ”

“ NEAR COLWYN BAY
39When I came again and saw the apple trees in flower, the island was very far away, and the unseen cuckoo sang behind a veil and not so suitably as the curlew. There was something of the dawn in the light over it, though it was mid-day; and I could hardly understand, and was inclined to melancholy, until chance brought into my head the poem of the old princely warrior poet Llywarch Hên, and out of his melancholy and mine was born a mild and lasting joy. He sang:
Sitting high upon a hill, to battle is inclined
My mind, but it does not impel me onward. ”

“ He is mainly English and partly Spanish; he was born in England, but having a Welsh name, he boasts much of his country, as he has elected to call Wales. But in truth he belongs to no time or place. He cares nothing for the house he lives in, for the village, or for any place he ever saw. Yet are we never tired of hearing his rich sentiments about them all. If only he be far away from it, there is no place known to him which he will not magnify with words which others do not easily use even for their true loves. ”

“ And the magic of Wales, or of Spring, or of childhood made the island of apple trees more than an orchard in flower. For as some women seem at first to be but rich eyes in a mist of 38complexion and sweet voice, so the orchard was but an invisible soul playing with scent and colour as symbols. ”

“ Yet here there was no rich high-hedged lane, no poplar, no noise of rooks, but only a desolate brown moorland crossed by deep swift brooks through which the one footpath ran, and this white house, like a flower on a grave, recalling these memories of other valleys; so that I forgot that near by the birches stood each in a basin of foam from the dripping of mist and rain, and that I had not yet seen a thrush's nest in any hawthorn on those hills. ”

“ Fowler is a painter who loves nature more than pictures—a much rarer thing than many people would suppose. Most painters learn to be original by imitating other artists. Mr. Fowler never seems to give us echoes of other men and of other men's works. His paintings are the immediate outcome of an overpowering desire to embody his own feelings and sensations. To many artists nature is interesting only in so far as she furthers their business of making pretty pictures. But the man who painted "The Stacks, Tenby," regarded nature as something more than the mere raw material of art. ”