文档介绍:The Spirit of Place and Other Essays
The Spirit of Place and
Other Essays
by Alice Meynell
1
The Spirit of Place and Other Essays
THE SPIRIT OF PLACE
With mimicry, with praises, with echoes, or with answers, the poets
have all but outsung the bells. The inarticulate bell has found too much
interpretation, too many rhymes professing to close with her essible
utterance, and to agree with her remote tongue. The bell, like the bird, is
a musician pestered with literature.
To the bell, moreover, men do actual violence. You cannot shake
together a nightingale's notes, or strike or drive them into haste, nor can
you make a lark toll for you with intervals to suit your turn, whereas
wedding-bells pelled to seem gay by mere movement and hustling.
I have known some grim bells, with not a single joyous note in the whole
peal, so forced to hurry for a human festival, with their harshness made
light of, as though the Bishop of Hereford had again been forced to dance
in his boots by a merry highwayman.
The clock is an inexorable but less arbitrary player than the bellringer,
and the chimes await their appointed time to fly--wild prisoners--by twos
or threes, or in panies. Fugitives-- one or twelve taking
wing--they are sudden, they are brief, they are gone; they are delivered
from the close hands of this actual present. Not in vain is the sudden
upper door opened against the sky; they are away, hours of the past.
Of all unfamiliar bells, those which seem to hold the memory most
surely after but one hearing are bells of an unseen cathedral of France
when one has arrived by night; they are no more to be forgotten than the
bells in "Parsifal." They mingle with the sound of feet in unknown
streets, they are the voices of an unknown tower; they are loud in their
own language. The spirit of place, which is to be seen in the shapes of
the fields and the manner of the crops, to be felt in a prevalent wind,
breathed in the breath of the earth, over