LIII

I am sure that it is an inspiring as well as a pleasant thing to go on pilgrimage sometimes to the houses where interesting people and great people have lived and thought and written.  It helps one to realise, that “they were mortal, too, like us,” but it makes one realise it gratefully and joyfully; it is good to feel, as one comes to do by such visits, that such thoughts, such words, are not unattainable by humanity, that they can be thought in rooms and fields and gardens like our own, and written down in chairs and on tables much the same as others.  Tennyson went once to see Goethe’s house at Weimar, and was more transported by seeing a room full of his old boots and medicine-bottles than by anything else that he saw; and it is a wise care that keeps dear Sir Walter’s old hat and coat and clumsy laced shoes in a glass case at Abbotsford.  Of course one must not go in search of old boots and bottles, as many tourists do, without caring much about the hero to whom they belonged.  One must have grown familiar first with every detail of the great man’s life, have read his letters and his biography, and the letters written about him, and his Diary if possible, and all his books; one must have grown to admire him and desire his presence, and hate the thought of the grave that separates him from oneself; until one has come to feel that the place where he slept and ate and walked and talked and wrote is like the field full of stones at Luz, where the ladder was set up from heaven to earth, and where Jacob, shivering in his chilly slumbers, saw, in a moment of dreamful enlightenment, that the heavenly staircase may be let down in a moment at any place or hour, and that the angels may descend, carrying bright thoughts and secret consolations from its cloudy head.

And thus there can be for any one man but a few places to which he owes such a pilgrimage, because, in the first place, the thing must not be too ancient and remote; it is of little use to see the ruined shell of a great house in a forest, because such a scene does not in the least recall what the eyes of one’s hero saw and rested upon.  There must be some personal aroma about it; one must be able to see the garden-paths where he walked, the furniture which he used, and to realise the place in some degree as it appeared to him.

And then, too, there must be some sense of a personal link, an instinctive sympathy, between the soul of the writer and one’s own spirit.  It is not enough that he should have just written famous books; they must be books that have fed one’s own heart and mind, have whispered some delicious hope, have thrilled one with a responsive tenderness—­the writer must be one whom, unseen, we love.  It is not enough that one should recognise his genius, know him to be great; he must be near and dear as well; one must visit the scene as one would draw near to the grave of a father or a brother, with a sense of love and loss and spiritual contact It should be like visiting some familiar scene.  One must be able to say:  “Yes, this is the tree he loved and wrote about; there is the writing-table by the window that gave him the glimpse he speaks of, of lake and hill; these are the walls on which he liked to see the firelight darting on dark winter evenings.”