He
didn't know because he never got outside the hypnotism of self.
I have sometimes felt angry with that phrase, "What do they know of
England, who only England know?" It is the watchword of a shallow
Imperialism. But I felt a certain truth in it once. I was alone in the
Alps, in an immense solitude of peak and glacier, and as I waited for the
return of my guide, who had gone on ahead to prospect, I looked, like
Richard, "towards England." In that moment I seemed to see it
imaginatively, comprehensively, as I had never, never seen it in all the
years of my life in it. I saw its green pastures and moorlands, its
mountains and its lakes, its cities and its people, its splendours and its
squalors as if it was all a vision projected beyond the verge of the
horizon. I saw it with a fresh eye and a new mind, seemed to understand it
as I had never understood it before, certainly loved it as I had never
loved it before. I found that I had left England to discover it.
That is what we need to do with ourselves occasionally.
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