"Hurrah for positive science,Long live exact demonstration!"
"Hurrah for positive science,Long live exact demonstration!"
cried Walt Whitman, exulting over the filed fetters of mankind; and let us all echo the cry, nor ever forget the razed Bastilles of superstition. But there glimmers a wealth of truth in the penumbra beyond our lanterns to which science will creep too slowly without the aid of imagination. Yet this truth may be seized by swift sallies into the darkness, and assured to us as it were by some dim apperception of the soul, when the whole personality is made tense, and subtly anticipates the cosmic argument. Life is too short to renounce this daring: the sense of kinship with the All-Consciousness sanctions if not commands the right adventure.
It was this feeling which led William Blake to exclaim in his impulsive way, that to generalize is to be an idiot, that direct perception is all, and the slow process of the inductive reason a devil's machination.This method of intuition is to the more sober method of science as the romantic to the classical spirit in literature, permitting to the individual mind a licence of noble vagrancy. But it must be a law for the ordinary intelligence to exercise the two apart, else it will fall into sick fancies of excitement, and by abuse of wild analogies lose the vital art of balance and sane comparison. Only the greatest minds, endowed as it were with some divine genius of extrication, may dare to practise the two together. So Leonardo da Vinci drove inference and intuition abreast without disaster, and gathered from purple distances of thought their wildest and most splendid flowers. To him, as has been well said, philosophy was something giving strange swiftness and double sight, clairvoyant of occult gifts in common or uncommon things. The doom of Phæton awaits those who now would follow that marvellous course; but the poetic observation of resemblances in things remote, which lent so rich a colour to the science of the Renaissance, may yet be trained in all our minds;and the philosophy which trusts in the slow suffusion of the worlds with intellectual light will bless and encourage its reasonable growth.
Such a philosophy brings also a living sympathy with art. For the artist ever sees a perfection of truth beyond his rendering, yet always calling for expression; there is something eternally missed by his highest effort, and he can never know complacency. The philosophy which conceives the gradual growth of form through consciousness towards a perfection infinitely removed, yet in its remoteness drawing up our life as the moon sways the tides—this surely is the artist's wisdom. Idealism is like love,ἄπορα πόριμος, holding us as it were in touch with the intangible: it will have us conceive the Absolute without that helpless absorption in thought which changed Amiel's life from a fountain to a vapour: it would keep us near the surf and confluence of things. Its function is not to give any mysterious transcendental knowledge, but to serve culture "by suggesting questions which help to detect the passion,and strangeness and dramatic contrasts of life." And not only to bring suggestions, but repose, by granting to eyes wearied with minute concerns the contrasts of vast times and spaces, the majestic idea of the Whole; to change the focus and variously dispose the perspectives of familiar things.
An old watchmaker, whose window overlooked a wide meadow, used ever and again to lay down his instruments to gaze out upon the expanse of green, pasturing upon it a wandering vague regard, and absorbing from it an assuagement of his wearied senses which, he said, served him more effectually after these bright interludes. The province of Metaphysics should be to us as to this wise workman his field; not a place to dream our days away in, but for occasional resort; in which we may forget the infinitesimal in healing visions of broad space and colour. I counsel every lonely man to satisfy what has been described as the common metaphysical instinct, and according to his powers to become a metaphysician. There is no discipline which so well consists with solitude, none which so instantlyenfranchises the mind from the tyranny of mean self-interest or vain and envious polemics. Men do not grow sour and quarrelsome about the Absolute: everything that is polemical is inspired, as Michelet once said, by some temporal and momentary interest. The man who has climbed to the Idalian spring comes down benevolent. He does not grudge this toiling ant his grain, that snarling dog his bone, but is content to live serene, in the certainty that his soul has great provision, and that though all human things are small, each is worth its while. Into his hand there is given a scale by which life is known in its fair proportions; a tranquil joy, disturbed neither by dirges nor Epinician odes, is poured into his heart and exalts him above distraction. He respects himself as akin to that great Self whose perfection shall one day be known; he understands the passion for the ideal through which men die young; he wonders at envy and in the happiness of enfranchisement would have all men free.
The pages of this Almagest are for theexceptional hour; but daily, as one bookish from the nursery, I read much in many directions. For if books are called the best friends of happy men, to the sad they are saviours also. And when I remember too clearly what I am, I turn perhaps most often to Lucretius. For of all those who have taken up the pen to assuage the miseries of men, it is he who sings most bravely of the great endurance. This austere enthusiast, whose soul was never fused in the fire of friendship; who went apart, as it were, amid thunders upon the lonely heights; who, without any lover, yet loved his kind so well that all the years of his maturity, how short and splendid a period, were poured forth in one song of human consolation,—this man for all the madness of his creed, was yet aflame with a wisdom to be called divine. That calm face, lit with one desire—to drive the furies from the way and soothe the frightened children of men, is ever among the nobler countenances which fancy summons about my bed. Over the anxious heart they flow, those slow cadences, so vibrant yetso magnificently passionless, until the nerves of pain cease to throb, and fear shrinks as a taint impossible to the patient of such a physician. It is not his to intimidate or denounce, to evoke visions of lurid hell, to linger over dire vaticinations, or apportion to each his grade of torment, but with cool fingers to smooth the hair back from the forehead, and in grave, tender accents to say: Sleep now, for it was a dream.
Landor, in a fine passage, compared the merciful tolerance of the Roman poet with the pitiless ire of Dante, contrasting in respect of the quality of mercy these two poets, one in their austere perfection, but so different in their vision of death, and judgment, and ultimate reward. The seer of lost worlds has written his own defence, and was indeed but attacked to point the sharp antithesis; but Lucretius, though he owes it to a literary feint, is very finely praised. And to me it seems that his compassionate mood increased upon him just because he was not emulous of the world's gifts or earnest for its pleasures, but withdrew from the press, and livedout his few great years contemplating apart the vicissitudes of orbs and men. He did not wait in ante-chambers or sit at wedding feasts; but severing all entangling and intricate threads of observance, followed the voice which called him to solitary places of illimitable prospect. It was not through disillusion or injustice, or wounded pride, that he walked aloof; but loneliness was his birthright, and from the hills and headlands to which solitude allured his steps he saw the dust of mad encounters rise to heaven, and the rent sails of foundering galleys. He saw, and could not but be wrung with pity for man deafened to wise counsel by the noise of vanities, and fiercely conspiring to precipitate his doom. As he went by shore and upland, there gathered in his mind those resonant hexameters of warning or consolation, those similes from the life of husbandry and dumb things, which, set like diamonds in clay, lend to the most arid arguments their own incomparable splendour, or that homelier beauty which instantly pierces the defences of the heart. Not diffident as we, but ofa nature so infinitely absent and reserved that in the legend his wife must concoct a philter to remind him of his love, he is of all the pagans the best companion for our angrier moods. An archaic and elemental serenity is upon his language and thought, rebuking our unprofitable petulance; if emotion gains him he finds utterance in those tremendous periods "where single words seem to gather out of the deep and to reverberate like thunder." As the reverberation dies away and the clouds are pierced by the sun, the world is seen in new lights through an air clear as upon rain-swept mountains.
As my reading is incessant, so also is my writing. For the happiness of man is in his fertility, and of barrenness comes the worst despair. To be happy is to have issue—children, or books written, or things beautifully wrought, or monuments of goodness to live after you, if only in the memory of some tiny hamlet of the folded hills. This is the law of life that Diotima knew, by which flower and tree, animal and man, fulfil the end of their creation; and man innothing more surely proves his lordship than by his many-handed hold upon posterity. For the lower creation is procreant in one way, but man in many; who may have offspring not of body alone but of mind and heart, and be so redeemed from the grim dismay of childlessness. The greatest human happiness is to be fertile in every way, a thing granted rarely in the world we know; the next, perhaps, is that of the parent who gives all of himself to his family, not tilling any field beyond the charmed walls confining his desire. The author sure of his fame, the born artist, the benefactor of his kind, are also happy, seeing their offspring grow in years and in the power of making a brighter world.
But he is miserable who, aspiring to follow these, feels his force wane within him while he remains yet fatherless; or who has sons stillborn, or weakly, or dishonoured. I question whether sheer degradation into evil brings more pain to man than such sense of sterility or frustrate parentage. But it is no small part of human redemption that none need know the interminable misery.A man may have neither sons nor genius, but in the dark hour he can go out and give, if it be only a penny or a kind word, and on that foundation build a temple to receive his thanksgiving. To give of yourself is good. This is that grand agreement and œcumenical consent to which those wordsquod ab omnibus quod ubiquein deed and truth may be applied. For this reason meanness is of the deeps, and avarice groans in the lowest zone of hell. And if there are faces of blank and permanent despair upon your path, be sure that these are not masks of whole men, but of those who wilfully abstained from joy and have received the greater damnation. My children are mostly writings, poor weakly creatures dying inarticulate and unchristened, tenderly remembered by myself only, but at least no nuisance to the world. I loved them at their birth, I hold them in remembrance, though they were ever of a hectic and uncertain beauty.
The comparison of children with branches of the olive is not the mere ornament of a Bible verse, but the wisdom of one who knewboth tree and child. For as children are bright creatures of swiftly changing moods, so are the olive leaves in the blue southern air. I once read of an artist who essayed to paint a group of olives and a cypress growing before them. Against their silvery leaves its dark burnished form stood finely mysterious, the contrasting grey lending it a depth of almost sable colour; all was propitious for his work. Then suddenly, the air being to all seeming quite still, the grey-green leaves began to shake and quiver, until each olive tree was like a silver bonfire, tremulous with a thousand waves of white flame flowing and following along the branches. It was a revelation and swift effluence of life, perplexing and full of charm. The brush was laid down, the moment of inspiration gone, before the capricious leaves ceased their quivering to be robed once more in grey, casting on the ground that translucent shadow which tempers the sunlight only, and does not spoil it of its gold. In the end the canvas was covered, but with a sketch far less true and beautiful than the painter'sfirst happy vision. Even so of all our children few attain the perfection of our dreams. While we look, some influence comes upon them and they are changed, some breeze, born we know not where, stirs them to their heart of joy while we stand perplexed; innumerable laughter of leaves, a rushing and a shivering in quick answer to a mere breath, silence as swift when unperceived it dies away—these are their replies to our silent invocations. We cannot follow the swift course, but are quickened with a glad rejuvenescence, the true prize and guerdon of parentage. They may grow old or die, or bring us sorrow; it is enough that once they so lived and stirred a pride within us. Let Hedonist and idealist dispute, let one worship pleasure and another wait on the intangible joy, but in the fathering and mothering and the bringing up of young children, of the flesh, the mind, or the spirit, lies the natural happiness of men and women. It is a joy which outlasts disillusions; it rests surely upon achievement and deserts which lie ponderable inthe archangel's scales. For it is certain that he who creates as best he knows best serves God, the world and himself, and what system of Ethics has conceived a more perfect rule?
All young life is instinct with such a beauty and trustfulness, that though he himself may have no part or lot in its creation, and be dumb or awkward in its presence, a man will be the brighter for having passed, if but for a moment, out of the darkness of his own course into the radiance within its orbit. To the diffident this is an especial grace. For children by some deeper intuition understand us as their parents cannot do; and when all the world is cold will often smile upon us with happy upturned faces. It is one of my consolations that the little players in the parks come running to me rather than to others with their eternal question after the exact hour of day. For I reflect that though my face grows wrinkled and drawn with years, there must yet hover something about its ugly surface which tells of a good will within. There was a time when Ifound the children's question importunate, and drew out my watch ungraciously; but now I feel disappointment if during their hours of play I can walk my mile without answering one of these high-pitched inquiries.
To have the confidence of children is indeed a thing of which a poor wanderer may be proud, a credential confirming his self-respect, and worthy one day to be presented at the gate of heaven. Once during one of my worst hours of desolation, when I was tramping across the fields, I found a little maid of seven picking primroses on the edge of an old orchard. For some time I stood watching, so charmed with the grace of her movements and the beauty of the spring sunlight on her golden mane, that I lost all consciousness of present trouble, and beyond her fairy form began to see vague visions of lost happiness returning. As I stood thus forgetful and looking absently before me, I suddenly felt a touch which recalled my scattered thoughts: she had come to me and put her hand in mine. I think in all my lonely life I never feltso swift a thankfulness as that which suffused me then: the memory of it is always with me, and now I never see a happy child engrossed in its little task of duty or pleasure without thinking to myself there is one of those who truly have power to remit sins. I will not repeat the fond things often written about children. Not all of them are like the infant angels of Bellini or Filippino Lippi or Carpaccio; some indeed are strident, pert, without charm or candour, not doves but little jays; but for the loveliness of those who have smiled upon me, whether rich or poor, whether wild or tended flowers, I shall ever hold the whole company dear.
Whether I read or write, or go painfully upon difficult paths of thought, like many other men whom the world dismays, I win a larger tranquillity and a clearer vision from an increased simplicity of life. I know that to use the word asceticism of one's daily practice is to incur the judgment of all those whom the world calls good fellows, whose motto is live and let live, or any other aphorism of convenient and universal remission. To them asceticism is the deterrent saintliness which renounces all joy, and with a hard thin voice condemns the leanings of mankind to reasonable indulgence. The ill-favour drawn down by ecclesiastical exaggeration upon the good Greek wordἄσκησις, which means nothing more than the practice of fitness, has prejudiced men against all system of conduct bold enough to include it in their terminology.
Kant's chapter on the Ascetic Exercise of Ethics is a fine defence of that training of the heart and mind which has no affinity with the morbid discipline of hair shirt and scourge. "The ascetic exercise of the monasteries," he says, "inspired by superstitious fear and the hypocritical disesteem of a man's own self, sets to work with self-reproaches, whimpering compunction and a torturing of the body. It is intended not to result in virtue but to make expiation for sins, and by self-imposed punishment the sinners expect to do penance, instead of ethically repenting." And again—"All ethical gymnastics consist therefore singlyin subjugating the instincts and appetites of our physical system ... a gymnastic exercise rendering the will hardy and robust, which by the consciousness of regained freedom makes the heart glad."
This is sound doctrine, neither ungodly nor inhuman, the word of a man in whose veins the warm blood yet flowed. Few pictures of venerable age please more than that of the old philosopher of Königsberg drawn for us by de Quincey in one of his miscellaneous Essays. There we see Immanuel Kant, leading his tranquil sane existence, giving his friends sober entertainment, talking brightly of mundane things, practising "the hilarity which goes hand in hand with virtue." For me the very eccentricities of his daily routine have a fascination, and I read them as a devout Catholic reads many a quaint passage in theActa Sanctorum. How wise was his nightly habit, as he settled himself in bed before falling asleep, to asseverate with a sigh of thankfulness that no man living was more contented and healthier than he! Here is the true asceticism, the child's glad abandonment to nature maintained and grown articulate in philosophic age.
To this beauty of plain life I cannot attain. But my own life is as far removed as may be from brilliant or luxurious pleasures, and I divide my time between the country and the town. This I do from obedience to reason rather than fashion; for while the country has my love, the city is more remedial to my peculiar pain. There the shy man may have what Lamb called the perfect and sympathetic solitude, as opposed to the "inhuman and cavern-haunting solitariness," to which his infirmity inclines. There he and those who rub shoulders with him on the pavement can "enjoy each other's want of conversation." No creature with a heart can jostle daily with his kind, but he wins some consciousness of kindly feeling. The very annoyances and constraints of propinquity are in their own way disciplinary, and insistent, uncongenial persons, like glaring red buoys with clanging bells, serve at least to keep us in the fairway of navigation. And in a city there are voices ofcheerful exhortation always echoing in the higher air above the roar and the trampling, which in the interludes of coarser sound, or by our removal into some quiet court or garden, may be heard repeating their stirring watchwords of endeavour. We are told that no word spoken ever dies, but goes reverberating through space for ever. It is my fancy that only evil words escape into the outer void, which eternally engulfs their profitless message, while words of hope and helpfulness are not thus lightly sundered from the world that needs them, but hover still near above us, descending with every lull of the tumult into those ears which are strained towards them. The laden air of towns carries not the rumour of the battle only, but by the presence of these fair echoes held within it, gives back to the soul more health than ever it drew from the body. With this thought I am often consoled as I go my way through gloom and clamour and unloveliness, finding a Providence in places which else seem abandoned in the outer desolation.
Nor is the vast city to be valued only for what it gives, but for its own wonderful self, an obvious point which need not be expanded into a tedious circle. The shy will naturally draw more advantage from so rich a field of contemplation than those who seldom walk alone. In London I often map out a course of wandering which in its varied stages shall remind me of the change in progress or decay of particular arts or industries or different quarters of the town. Reading their meaning in the light of history, I make bare walls speak to me with a personal voice. Let any one but acquaint himself with the styles of ecclesiastical or domestic architecture, or of monuments of the dead, or with the history of the thoroughfares he frequents, and he will be pleasantly constrained to reflection upon those who have gone before him. As he stands in the shadow of an ancient church he will think to himself: "By this very wall Chaucer may have stood." As he walks amid the reverberating ravines which are city streets he will say: "Here along green and silent paths the Roman legionarymarched when Hadrian ruled the world." When once the faculty of observation has been awakened to a permanent alertness, the desire to be widely read in history of men and their arts will become irresistible; and through the knowledge gradually amassed it will be thought a sorry chance if any ramble of wider compass yield no vision which in comeliness or deformity tells its tale of changing fortune. To appreciate human work, and the conditions under which it is born, is to exult in abounding sympathy with this man's conquest over things poor in promise, or to condole with that man's failure to do the best that in him lay.
As I walk by the strand of Thames, my fancy sees upon one flood the gay barge gliding upward to green fields, and the black hull bearing down the prisoner to the Traitors' Gate. If I go up Holborn, I remember that where this traffic now thunders John Gerard tended his Physic Garden when Elizabeth was queen. I know where Sarah Siddons lived; and where William Blake died; and my curious wanderings are now so far extended, that when I turn to the great book of London I seldom find a tedious page. The places where people strove and suffered evoke before me the forms of men and women dead but unforgotten, and if I am alone I am not aware of loneliness.
London is the central wonder, but wonderful also in spirit and suggestion are those old places which ring it round: these I often frequent at every season, and carry their portraits over my heart. Let a man once learn to know them, and his memory shall never starve; he will never forget the hour when first they yielded him up their secret. Many moments of intimate delight do I treasure in remembrance, moments when I was suddenly aware that all previous impressions were the poor gatherings of purblind eyes; but I will only tell you of one, which may suffice to show what riches lie ever open to those who roam in solitude.
It was mid-April and the close of a cloudless day. I had been to the Observatory hill at Greenwich to see the sun setover London, looking for such a transfiguration of the grey city as should reveal its line of warehouses lying along the horizon in a mist of splendour like the walls of the New Jerusalem. So I had seen it before, marvellous and refined in unearthly fire: but to-day, in a sadder mood, and hungering more deeply for the vision, I looked out to the west in vain. For the wind had set in from the east, and driven back upon the town a zone of iron-grey smoke, ragged along its upper edge like a great water blown to spray, but merging below with those gloomy and innumerable buildings. Upon this the sun, which all day had ridden in a clear air, was slowly falling, losing radiance with every minute, until as it approached that gloomy spray it was luminous no more, but a dull red orb whose light, like a flame withdrawn into the consumed heart of coals, glows for awhile beneath a gathering film of grey. In a few minutes it descended, as if sadly and of resolution, into the murky sea, where for a moment its red curves seemed to refine the smoke into translucency;but at last the dun waves gathered upon it dark and voluminous, drowning it so deeply that the clearer sky above was instantly robbed of the wonted after-glow. Some pale reflection there was in the upper heaven, ensuring a time of twilight, but no glory; and smitten with a congruous sadness, I went down to the river. But there, pacing to and fro as if upon a quarter-deck, with the water lapping upon the wall beneath, I lived one of the happy hours of life, redeemed from disappointment, and carried far into a magical world.
The flood tide, which had turned for more than an hour, was now racing down wilful for the sea, though the breeze ruffling its surface seemed to thwart and stay its eager course. And on the surface, indeed, chafed and broken into innumerable ripples, the wind triumphed; but as one looked westwards towards the city, it was clear that the sullen strength of stream and tide had the mastery. For over the broad curving reach, lit like white unburnished silver with the reflection of the pallid sky, there glided forward a line of barges eachwith every red sail set, and as silent as if they sallied from a besieged city. One by one they hung out their lights, the lamps swaying and casting yellow bars over the quivering water, until in perfect silence all passed down before me. Each in turn attaining the lower bend where the river sweeps northward, went about and stood for the Middlesex shore; and then for a moment the wind seemed to overcome the tide, for before the boat could win new way, lying almost broadside across the stream, the breeze held her motionless, like a tired bird on a windy day when it flies out from the shelter of the wood. It was but for a moment, and then the blunt bows glided forward towards the north bank, and another barge succeeded in the gathering gloom.
And so it was until all were passed. The departing light drew the colours from the red sails and the silvery brightness from the river; all forms became outlined in black upon what uncertain light remained. Two men put off in a boat from an anchored ship; the mingled sound of their oars andvoices came with subdued tone as if out of an infinite distance. Then the whole reach lay bare and silent for a while, and only the little waves lapping upon the stone steps played an accompaniment to my dream.
The hour and the place compelled to reverie, and memory consenting to their evocative charm, I peopled the still scene with the forms of those who had swayed or shared the fortunes of this land; imperious Elizabeth and gentler Mary, the slight heroic figure with one sleeve pinned empty on the breast, and all those who, going down to their business in deep waters or returning therefrom, have saluted with melancholy or with joy these towers and this wooded hill. I thought of the lads playing beneath these trees, and so inbreathing the spirit of this place that for them there was no career but to follow the river down to ocean, and ocean himself in his circuit of the world. I thought of the veterans returned from that quest, old Argonauts of a later day, now clustering round the Hospital fires and perhaps recalling amid tales of havens and high seas the verymorning when they first dropped round the bend and passed into the new world beyond. For this Thames is such an avenue and entry into marvellous life that earth can show no greater rival, none more rich in dignity or in the multitude of its merchandise. And if the flood of that merchandise shall cease, and the stream once more go lonely to the sea or carry coracles, it cannot be again as if it had never borne great ships, or swung the Admiral's galley on its tide.
It is good for an Englishman to stand here and listen to the brown waters lapping on the old walls and caulked timbers; to hear, as an under murmur, voices of Lechlade and Bablockhythe, for all intervening leagues of wood and meadow not altogether lost: before this persistence and continuity of youth to feel high thoughts stir within him and solemnize the nativity of new resolve. You cannot feel beneath your feet these old stones trodden by the great generations of your own blood and kindred, and not be moved to walk uprightly, to be approved by their shades as one not unworthy of such descent. For whethersuch worn stones be in the aisle of some great minster, or here, paving this narrow way for hurrying feet, the inspiration is as strong and the thankfulness not other. For this is a place of meridian, the navel of our land and empire; the wind searching its alleys has no usual voice, but as it were a deep and oceanic sound, according with old ballads and stories of the sea.
I lingered leaning upon the rail until the tide had fallen from the wall, tracing along the narrow pebbled foreshore a clear marginal line of irregular contour, now sinuous, now straight, but palely luminous like a silver tone on some enamel of old Italy, a line drawn by a master draughtsman, in its inevitable and sure perfection wholly satisfying the eye. With the dark bank it vanished towards the great city, now marked in the upper sky by a hovering brightness of light escaped beyond the smoky rampart to tell the effort of innumerable lamps beneath, all pouring their blurred and vain effulgence to the disdainful stars.
Moreover, the city will give the shy man all the consolations of art, philosophy andliterature of which his education or experience may have made him worthy. He can see great pictures or read great books at little cost, and find in them the truest of friends in need. It is so obvious that a solitary of any culture will find relief with such companions, that here I take for granted his resort to their aid, and will only mention two resources from which the real recluse often draws less advantage than he might, I mean orchestral music and the drama. Any man of feeling who hears a great symphony ceases to be self-centred with the first movement; he goes out of himself, and rides upon waves of sound, exalted by this majesty of collective effort. No other music thrills his whole being like this, which sweeps him with all around into the very course of changing fates. In the confluence of dim hopes and passions which rise above the harmonies like smoke-wreaths riding the red flame, the soul glows interfluous with other souls and is elated with the inspiration of their presence. He bears arms exulting who never had comrades till now; his will isabsorbed in confederate joy and human force unanimous. In this abandonment of the whole being, the diffident know their fellows near, and in the ecstasy of shared emotion learn the full measure of their humanity. Philosophers in all ages have known and taught the power of music in compelling ten thousand to the love of one, and so ennobling an infinite multitude in the glow of a common emotion. Sound was the first instinctive language, one for man and winds and waters; and music, which is the development of this primeval converse, leaving to grammars the expression of cold and abstract thought, has gathered about her in her mountain caverns the echoes of all sighs sad or passionate, of all inarticulate cries born of aspiration or desire, and there blended them into eternal harmonies which at her word flow forth and join the hearts of men.
Indeed, that swift responsiveness of feeling which music thus awakes is a gift beyond gems of Golconda; not youth's swift effusion cheaply given and soon forgotten, but the vibration of a heart stirred in sympathy withsome profound note of life, as the dyed pane stirs and quivers when the organ gives forth its deepest tones. Sentiment is a draught of old wine passing into the veins and enriching the blood, until in the generous glow all the privations and the stints of loneliness are forgotten. Pure emotion is like righteous anger, which may be lawfully indulged if the sun go not down upon it; and as he who shrinks from all fire of wrath lives but a vaporous life, so he who will never be moved is proud of a poor crustacean strength, like the limpet, winning darkness in exchange for dull stability. As for me, in the propitious hour when the heart longs for expansion, I give it honourable licence, and quicken its unfolding by spells of magical words. At such times I invoke the aid of passionate souls, not shrinking even from the vain, provided that they loved greatly and give great expression to their humanity. Such is that wild lover of George Sand whoseSouvenir, for all its rhetoric, charms like an incantation. The ancients quenched the ashes of the pyre with red wine, as if theblood of the god-given vine could hearten the spirit that yet hovered near. Over my ashes let no wine be poured, but read me such verses high and valiant, that if my soul yet lingers undelivered from the earth's attraction it may be regenerated and set free into a braver life.
And let the lonely man be an assiduous frequenter of the playhouse, for the drama will also open the world's heart to him, and that by a plainer and less elusive speech. Seated in the theatre among his kind, he knows a deeper pleasure than other men; for while to these the changing scene brings remembrance or anticipation of familiar things, to him it reveals whole vistas of life which, except in dreams, his feet may never tread. When the curtain is rung down, and he goes out into the street, for a while at least his existence is transformed. All those front doors aligned in their innumerable sequence, which in daylight or darkness he passes when he wanders alone, are now no longer barred against him; they open at the touch of his fancy, and he sees within the light of homeliness,where father, mother, and child weave round warm firesides their close conspiracies of affection. At last he knows what is passing behind those bars; like an old family friend he takes his place by the fire and receives as of right the confidences which in his real lonely life never find their way to his ears. He helps the lovers to build their cloudy castles, he reasons away the parents' care, he goes up-stairs with a shaded candle to look in upon the children sleeping. Good women unlock the jewel-caskets which are their souls; happy maidens are sisterly with him; strong men grapple him to their hearts and call him friend. He that was vagabond has now innumerable homes, and of the faces that fleet by him out of doors there are always some which seem to give him greeting.
These secret and unavowed alliances transfigure the unlovely streets, and light in the cavernous blank houses many a glowing and familiar hearth. As he goes on, careless of distance or direction, he is now inwardly busy with fresh and delightful dreams. He plights his troth and earth isEden; he imagines brilliant hours for the dream-children who go by his side, holding each of his hands. And if the visions change, and sorrow or sin pass in over a familiar threshold, what generous abnegation, what pity, what righteous wrath does he not know, until the plastic power of fancy moulds out of this poor recluse a man like other men. Amid these visionary sympathies time goes quickly by, and returning to his voiceless dwelling he has stored up such wealth of dreams that he can even endure the supreme test when the lonely man finds himself sitting in the wan light with no one near him to whom he is dear. Of the strength and peacefulness which bring him safely through that hour of desolation he owes much to the players, who have shot the drab texture of life with an infinity of bright and tender hues, so that he can bear to turn it in his hands and look upon it with a wistful pleasure. I say, then, let the shy man frequent the playhouse, and there facet and burnish his dulled mind until it reflects, if it may not touch, the many-sided world.
For the discipline of sympathy, for the quickened sense of comradeship in work, for the very presence of that unloveliness which compels sympathy, I dwell more months in the town than in the country-side. But remembering what Nature did to save me, and owing her an endless debt of filial duty, I return to her in the summer days, and to make up for the long months of separation cling nearer to her than most of her truant sons. For communion with Nature, the ideal joy of country life, is not attained by the sportsman or the mere player of games, who think of their bodies chiefly, and use as a means to rude physical vigour the end ordained for the fine contentience of body, mind, and spirit. Again I will pass by the obvious and familiar resources of outdoor life, and speak only of such as men are unaccountably prone to neglect.
There is a way of learning nature which in this wet land is mostly followed by tramps and vagrants; the way of sleeping beneath the stars. So far is this joy from the thoughts of most men, that even GeorgeBorrow felt a strange uneasiness when for the first time the darkness descended upon him in the open country. I think we carry with us all our lives that fear of night with which nursery tales inspired our childhood; it reinforces the later more reasoned fear of boisterous weather, or of the men who walk in darkness because their works are evil. We shrink from night as a chill privation of daylight, as a gloom which we must traverse, but not inhabit; the distrust becomes with years instinctive and universal, and the nearest approach to friendly relation with night attained by most of us is a timid liking for the twilight hours. Yet as the sun rises alike upon the just and upon the unjust even so does he descend, and we put a slight upon Providence if we abandon to rogues and rakes that wonderful kingdom of the darkness of which by natural prerogative we are enfranchised. By never using our proper freedom, we give them prescriptive licence of usurpation, so that the hours in which the heavens are nearest to us are become the peculiar inheritance of thieves.
I confess that on the night when first I set out to do without a bedroom I too felt all the force of the traditional mistrust. I heard human whispers in the wind, and saw the shadows of walls and trees as forms of men lurking to spring out against me. The movements of roosting birds startled me as I passed; the sudden silences startled me more. And when I had spread my gear on the ground and settled down to rest, the sense of exposure on every side made sleep impossible; time after time I seemed to hear footsteps stealthily approaching; and there was a strangeness pervading everything which to my nervous fancy was simply provocative of apparitions. This lasted many nights; and whether I established myself on the edge of a copse, or in the open grass, or in a hammock beneath two trees, I continued a prey to the same uneasy wakefulness. But then, as if satisfied of good faith by such perseverance, the night began to wear a friendly aspect, the shadows gave up their ghosts, and the breezes became the expected messengers of slumber.
When the lonely sleeper-out has grown familiar with the moonlight and the darkness, he is admitted into the number of earth's favoured sons; for lying like a child upon her bosom, he hears her heart beating in the silence, and wakes to see her smiling in her beauty like a queen apparelled. To no man slumber comes more gently than to him; and his uprising is as that of a child exulting in the cloudless day. Health and innocence return to him, and his one sorrow is that he has lived into maturity without continually partaking of these sane and natural delights. Remorse is his that for all these years he has feared the dews and shrunk from the bland night airs; and remembering the needless imprisonment of a hundred chambers, he mourns over the irrecoverable hours which would have rooted his life more deeply in tranquillity and strength. But the June sun is up, and the birds are singing: he strides with light step over the grass, watching the rabbits play in the glades, and in unison with a host of fellow-creatures singing a welcome to the dawn. When itis time for him to think of home and he comes once more beneath a doorway, he has a mind refreshed by the quietude of dim space, and a heart replenished with innocence and good-will. He who so sleeps hates no man, and will go upon the dullest way free from petulance or despair. The scent of the rich earth is in his nostrils, and the clearness of morning air has passed into his eyes.
I have made my lair in many places since I first kept house with Nature. I have couched in heather by the pines of hills far above the Sussex Weald; I have lain in dry furrows or on the margin of a copse, or in the parks of the children of fortune, for whose welfare, in gratitude for their unconscious hospitality, I shall ever pray. But of all wild resting-places I have known, the openest are the most delightful. To see the whole sweep of the stars; to lie on the shorn ground free of all that overshadows or encompasses or confines; to breathe in the great gulf of air; to stretch unhindered limbs—this is an initiation into a new life, a pleasant memory in the longglooms of winter. Let nothing come between you and the stars, that they may look well upon your face, and haply repenting of some ancient unkindliness, draw you at this rebirth a new horoscope of blessing and fair fortune. And if slumber tarries when you lie in an open spot, you may consciously ride the great globe through space, and like the shepherd watching by his flock in the clear night while star rises after star, grow aware of the great earth rolling to the east beneath you.
In these still hours of night or early dawn there steals upon the charmed mind an Orphic sense of worship and inexplicable joy. For here on bare uplands and wooded hills, where the starlight rains down through the silence, or the day, welling up over the rim of the downs, glides fresh from the lips of ocean, a calm river of light, here is the place of Dionysus, of him born from fire and dew, Zagreus the soul of clean souls and wild lives, his heart a-quiver with vague sadness drawn from all the worlds, Eleutherios, loosener of heart and lip, the regenerator, the absolver, the eternally misunderstood, whose true followers are priests of impassioned pure life, whose wine is not juice of grapes but the clear air ambient upon the hills. Here when sleep is shamed away by expectant awe, the whole being grows one with all-environing life; personality glides into the stream of cosmic existence, lost and found a thousand times in the trance and ecstasy of dim divine feelings beyond the power of words inexpressible. It is miracle; it is religion; it is a feast of purification above pomps or mysteries, a cleansing ritual without victims and undefiled. In such hours, and in such hours alone, man and things are joined in a supreme utterance of life high and humble, transient and immortal, by which the fellowship of all existences within the universe is made real and significant to the initiate mind. For in the day fences are about us, roofs and towers impend above our heads, we are cribbed in streets and markets, the din of rhetoric or sordid bargaining fills our ears. Or if we withdraw into some still chamber, yet the walls built by hired hands offend, and the doorposts of sapless timber; no high influence can penetrate to us save through the close court of memory, and compared with the breezy starlit meadows, how poor an avenue to the soul is that!
And the exuberant sun of noon distracts, and the multitude of his beams is troublous, for what does sight avail if the things of the heart's desire are lost in immeasurable perplexities of light? For in the high day the quivering bright air is more opaque than the dim spaces of night, so tranquil and severe, or the glowing kingdoms of the morning. At the springing of the day the eyes open upon awakening flowers, giving filial heed to the marvellous earth which waits in patience for a human greeting. I like the passage in which Chaucer tells how in May-time his couch was spread in an arbour upon the margin of the grass, that he might wake to see the daisies unfold their petals. Sleeping thus, he also must have known those intervals of slumber when a sense of some impending wonder grows too strong for sleep, and all nature seems calling to high vision. Often Ihave been thus awakened, not by noise or movement, but as it were by some strange prescience of beauty constraining me to rise and look. Once I was drawn some distance round the corner of a copse, and there, low in the sable-blue of the sky, in a rivalry of intense but dazzling light, the crescent moon hung splendid over against a great constellation which glittered like a carcanet of diamonds. They seemed to speak together as if in some scene or passage of celestial drama, nor did I know which was the diviner speech, the moon's unwavering effulgence or that leaping coruscation of the stars. Nothing stirred on the right hand or the left, but earth and air were hushed, as if before that colloquy all sound and motion were miraculously holden. Tall trees brown with densest shadows were massed upon one side, obscuring half the heaven, and lending by their contrasted gloom that sense of wizardry in natural things which enchants the clear summer nights when the air is still.
This is but one among many visions of which the remembrance makes life worshipful; and it is pity that at the hour of their coming well-nigh all whom they should delight lie chambered within brick walls, lost in sleep or in the mazes of unprofitable thoughts. For these things in their rare appearances are more precious than an hour's slumber, were it dreamless as a child's, or all the watches of luxurious unrest. If another summer is given me I hope to take the road when July has come with balmy nights, and wander days at a stretch with all I need upon my shoulders. Then I shall know the real joy of vagrancy, caring little where night finds me, and quickening my steps for nothing and for no man. I shall linger in every glade or on every hill-top which calls to me to stay; I shall tell all the hedgerow flowers, and lean over the gates to watch the foals playing. The brooks shall be my washing-basins, and I shall quench hunger and thirst in the tiled kitchens of lonely farmsteads. If I hear the shriek of a train I shall smile when I think of its cooped and harried passengers, and plunge devious into some pathless wood,in whose depths the only sounds are the tap of the woodpecker's bill or the measured axe-strokes of the woodman. I shall fling myself down to rest under what tree I will, and pulling from my pocket the book of my choice, I shall summon a wise and cheerful companion to my side as easily as ever oriental magician called a jinn to do him service. I shall once more be commensal with wild creatures, and wonder that solitude was ever a pain; I shall be healthily disdainful of the valetudinarian who lives to spoil either his body or his soul.
These are the wanderings which henceforward will chiefly suffice to my need. For since I roamed my fill in other continents the gadfly may no longer sting me out of my tranquil haunts. In their youth lonely people suffer more than others from that restlessness which fills the mind with sudden distaste for the present scene, and a fierce longing to be somewhere far away. Others are preserved from it by the love of home; but we, in our poverty of attachment, listen more readily to the depreciating voice.
I remember how deep had always been my longing to look out upon the sea from some Greek island, and how one day, when this desire was granted, and I walked along hills set high above the blue Ægean, I was seized with an instant yearning to be instead upon Ranmore Common in Surrey. Yet at that moment a life's ambition was being fulfilled; I stood in a scene of incomparable beauty, gazing down on those deep azure waters whose voice is always to me as a lament for wandering Odysseus; the lower slopes were rich with olive trees, powdering with silver the tilled lands round a beautiful monastery lying there in its enchanted rest. Dark cypresses rose amid white walls of villages, by the contrast of their gloom making all bright colours glorious; away to the left, where the shore verged westward tracing inimitable curves between field and sea, lay slumbering a little white town with minarets and walled gardens and tiny haven—a very place for Argonauts; and yet my thoughts turned to the chalk downs of England and honeysuckle crowning the unfruitful hollies.Sed quia semper abest quod aves praesentia temnis;—Such desire has distracted Roman minds; the perversity is very old; and perhaps only children find no disillusion in the accomplishment of a dream.
For our feet have one country and our dreams another, and there is no constancy in us. It is not alone in the bartering of one earthly scene for its fellow that we suffer the sick thirst of change; but into the rarest hour of achieved ideal to which hope promised her supreme satisfaction, the same wayward longing will often find a way; as in a sacred place amid the purest and most exquisite meditations of the soul, there will suddenly flit inexplicable shadows of irreverence, with echoes of incongruous voices from the abandoned world.
But now as the years pass and the penury of human love has made the home woods and fields more dear, I feel that this unrest is drawing to its end. For as the seasons pass over the uplands and the meadows, clothing them with new splendours between the seed-time and the harvest, no visionrises upon the memory dearer and more beneficent than theirs. As the lover's fancy dwells upon the image of his beloved in this or that environment, and thus or thus arrayed, so I see the woods and fields in the various glories of the year and know not in which garb I love them best. They have heard my laments, my confidences, all my broken resolves: they are bound to me by so pure and intimate an affection that all those grander wonders of the world should never draw me again from this allegiance. Not for the vision of Himalaya piercing the heaven, or the sunsets of Sienna, or the moonlight on the Taj Mahal, or for any other beauty or any wonder shall I weary of the cornfields framed in elms or the great horses turning in the furrow against the evening sky.
For with the growth of years our desires wander less, and are mercifully contracted to the scope of our wearying powers. We haunt the same old places and want the same old things, dwelling amongst them with an increasing constancy of devotion. For we find that year by year the oldplaces and things are not really the same; something has touched them in our absence; strange still agencies have intervened, long silences of dissolution and the ineluctable fate of change. And so that perfect sameness which we find unattainable takes on the quality of ideal and demands the grown man's devotion, as the change that is forbidden casts its resistless spell over the guarded and tethered child. The eyes of youth are on the far end of the vista, those of age upon the near; the old horse that has drawn the coulter through the clay is glad for the four hedges of the paddock which irk the growing colt's desire. When Richard Jefferies was asked why he walked the same lane day after day, at first he was at a loss for a reply; but gradually the reason became clear to him. It was because he had become aware of the iron law:Nothing twice: he wanted the same old and loved things not twice but endlessly; he was yearly more eager to be with them, and paint indelibly upon his memory their delicate quiet beauty, their soft and perishable charm.
That is how I also feel, as with the return of summer I wander out into the old meadows and climb the familiar hills; I find myself hoping that nothing is changed, and am stirred with sweet anxieties of reminiscence. And surely within the enchanted boundaries of the counties where I ramble, there is variety which not the hundred eyes of Argus could exhaust. These fields and woodlands in high summer feast all the senses with a surfeit of delights. How good it is to exercise in all its range the fine mechanism of the body, suffering each part of it to indulge its own hunger after beauty; to feel the texture of petals, and draw the long grasses through the fingers; to breathe an air laden with the scent of blossoms, passing from uplands fragrant with bean-flowers into untilled regions odorous with pines; to hear the birds' chorus at sunrise and the distant sound of reaping; to see innumerable marvels; the belts of clover mantling wine-dark in the wind; the poppies in the standing corn, the carmine yew-stems on the downs; above you the soft grey cloudsdelicately floating; below you, as the day declines, some distant lonely water emerging in its glory to be the mirror and refuge of all heaven's light; to remember the gorse and broom and look forward to the royal purple of the heather—all this is a consummation of pure life, a high, sensuous pleasure penetrating to the inmost soul, and of such exceeding price that to disdain its offerings or to pass incurious before them, is to live in the blindness of the tribe of Genseric.
In such wanderings the mind is filled with slow and seasonable thoughts, lasting as the trees and buildings of the country-side. Old deliberate contemplations, perceptions after long regard ingathered from abundant nature, theories leisurely compacted in sunshine or storm, to stand in the fields of memory, crowned with beauty by the indulgent years. So in the visible meadows stand the ancient barns, with roofs of umber tiles parcel-gilded with old gold of lichen, and crowning their seasoned timbers "as naturally as leaves"; restful structures of a quiet age, capacious of dimspace, unvexed by the glare of a hundred summers.
And if you ask what profit is here for one who must do battle in the loud world, study for a while the artifice and industrious policy of plants by which they attract to themselves the visitants they need or with most masterful defence repel the importunate advance, and you will return to the societies of men, even to their parliaments, enriched with arts of prudence beyond the practice of Machiavel. Examine the dog-rose upon the hedge, how by putting forth thorns it raises itself to the light and ranges irresistible along the leafy parapets; see how the flowers adapt their form and colour to the convenience of the bee or the predilections of the bird; consider the furze armed with spines against browsing muzzles, and be near when it casts its seed wide upon the earth; and then say if among states or governments there is a wiser economy or an intelligence more provident of its end. I myself have the conceit that if time, revoking my sentence of superannuation, should restore my lostyears and add youth to the wisdom learned along the hedges, even I, a very profitless weed, should not again so uncivilly decay, but flower to another June and see my seed multiply around me.
Perhaps, if that might be, I should strive to learn thoroughly, and bring science to bear upon experience. But, as I am, classifications and dissections are repellent to my fancy. I cannot get to the hearts of flowers by any Linnæan approach, but go rather by the old animistic way, still honoured by Milton through his Genius of the Woods: