The Regret

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Title:     The Regret
Author: Hilaire Belloc [More Titles by Belloc]

Everybody knows, I suppose, that kind of landscape in which hills seem to lie in a regular manner, fold on fold, one range behind the other, until, at last, behind them all some higher and grander range dominates and frames the whole.

The infinite variety of light and air and accident of soil provide all men save those who live in the great plains with examples of this sort. The traveller in the dry air of California or of Spain, watching great distances from the heights, will recollect such landscapes all his life. They were the reward of his long ascents and the visions which attended his effort as he climbed up to the ridge of his horizon. Such a landscape does a man see from the Western edges of the Guadarrama, looking eastward and south toward the very distant hills that guard Toledo and the Gulf of the Tagus. Such a landscape does a man see at sunrise from the highest of the Cevennes looking right eastward to the dawn as it comes up in the pure and cold air beyond the Alps, and shows you the falling of the foothills to the Rhone. And by such a landscape is a man gladdened when upon the escarpments of the Tuolumne he turns back and looks westward over the plain towards the vast range.

The experience of such a sight is one peculiar in travel, or, for that matter, if a man is lucky enough to enjoy it at home, insistent and reiterated upon the mind of the home-dwelling man. Such a landscape, for instance, makes a man praise God if his house is upon the height of Mendip, and he can look over falling hills right over the Vale of Severn toward the ridge above ridge of the Welsh solemnities beyond, until the straight line and high of the Black Mountains ends his view.

It is the character of these landscapes to suggest at once a vastness, diversity, and seclusion. When a man comes upon them unexpectedly he can forget the perpetual toil of men and imagine that those who dwell below in the near side before him are exempt from the necessities of this world. When such a landscape is part of a man's dwelling-place, though he well knows that the painful life of men within those hills is the same hard business that it is throughout the world, yet his knowledge is modified and comforted by the permanent glory of the thing he sees.

The distant and high range that bounds his view makes a sort of veiling, cutting it off and guarding it from whatever may be beyond. The succession of lower ranges suggests secluded valleys, and the reiterated woods, distant and more distant, convey an impression of fertility more powerful than that of corn in harvest upon the lowlands.

Sometimes it is a whole province that is thus grasped by the eye, sometimes in the summer haze but a few miles; always this scenery inspires the onlooker with a sense of completion and of repose, and at the same time, I think, with worship and with awe.

Now one such group of valleys there was, hill above hill, forest above forest, and beyond it a great noble range, unwooded and high against heaven, guarding it, which I for my part knew when first I knew anything of this world. There is a high place under fir trees, a place of sand and bracken, in South England whence such a view was always present to eye in childhood and "There," said I to myself (even in childhood) "a man should make his habitation." In those valleys is the proper off-set for man.

And so there was.

It was a little place which had grown up as my county grows. The house throwing out arms and layers. One room was panelled in the oak of the seventeenth century--but that had been a novelty in its time, for the walls upon which the panels stood were of the late fifteenth, oak and brick intermingled. Another room was large and light built in the manner of one hundred and fifty years ago, which people call Georgian. It had been thrown out south (which is quite against our older custom, for our older houses looked east and west to take all the sun and to present a corner to the south-west and the storms. So they stand still). It had round it a solid cornice which the modern men of the towns would have called ugly, but there was ancestry in it. Then, further on this house had modern roominess stretching in one new wing after another; and it had a great steading and there was a copse and some six acres of land. Over a deep ravine looked the little town that was the mother of the place, and altogether it was enclosed, silent, and secure.

"The fish that misses the hook regrets the worm." If this is not a Chinese proverb it ought to be. That little farm and steading and those six acres, that ravine, those trees, that aspect of the little mothering town; the wooded hills fold above fold, the noble range beyond, will not be mine.

For all I know, some man quite unacquainted with that land took them grumbling for a debt; or again, for all I know, they may have been bought by a blind man who could not see the hills, or by some man who, seeing them, perpetually regretted the flat marshes of the fens. One day, up high on Egdean Side, not thinking of such things, through a gap in the trees I saw again after so many years, set one behind the other, the forests wave upon wave, the summer heat, the high, bare range guarding all, and in the midst of that landscape, set like a toy, the little Sabine Farm.

Then I said to it, "Continue. Go and serve whom you will, my little Sabine Farm. You were not mine because you would not be, and you are not mine at all to-day. You will regret it perhaps, and perhaps you will not. There was verse in you, perhaps, or prose, or--infinitely more!--contentment for a man (for all I know). But you refused. You lost your chance. Goodbye." And with that I went on into the wood and beyond the gap, and saw the sight no more.

It was ten years since I had seen it last. It may be ten years before I see it again, or it may be for ever. But as I went through the woods saying to myself:

"You lost your chance, my little Sabine Farm, you lost your chance!" another part of me at once replied:

"Ah! And so did _you_!"

Then, by way of riposte, I answered in my mind:

"Not at all, for the chance I never had, but what I lost was my desire."

"No, not your desire," said the voice to me within, "but the fulfilment of it, in which you would have lost your desire." And when that reply came I naturally turned as all men do on hearing such interior replies, to a general consideration of regret, and was prepared, if any honest publisher should have come whistling through that wood, with an offer proper to the occasion, namely, to produce no less than five volumes on the Nature of Regret, its mortal sting, its bitter-sweetness, its power to keep alive in man the pure passions of the soul, its hints at immortality, its memory of Heaven. But the wood was empty of publishers. The offer did not come. The moment was lost. The five volumes will hardly now be written. In place of them I offer poor this, which you may take or leave. But I beg leave before I end to cite certain words very nobly attached to that great inn "The Griffin," which has its foundation set far off in another place, in the town of March, in the Fen Land:

"England my desire, what have you not refused?"

[The end]
Hilaire Belloc's essay: The Regret

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