"When evening gray doth rise I fetch my round,Over the mount and all this hallowed ground,And early, ere the breath of odorous mornAwakes the slumbering leaves."
"When evening gray doth rise I fetch my round,Over the mount and all this hallowed ground,And early, ere the breath of odorous mornAwakes the slumbering leaves."
So I greet the blossoms of hill and upland and water-meadow, knowing them all by their country names, and sometimes fancying that they know me back: all that is lacking is the tutelary power to guard their growth and prolong their bright and fragrant lives. What fine old names theyhave, great with the blended dignities of literary and rural lore; archangel, tormentil, rosa solis or sun-dew, horehound, Saracen's wound-wort, melilot or king's clover, pellitory of Spain! I cannot coldly divide so fine a company into bare genera and species, but imagine for them high genealogies and alliances by an imaginative method of my own: to me the lily and the onion shall never be connections.
If I must read books on flowers, I take down such a one as Nicholas Culpeper'sComplete Herbal, written from "my house in Spitalfields next the Red Lion, September 5th, 1653." For here is a man who attempers science with the quaintest fancies after the manner of his generation, and delightfully misinterprets the real affinity of the flowers and the heavens. "He that would know the operation of the herbs must look up to the stars astrologically," says this master; and so to him briony is "a furious martial plant," and brank ursine "an excellent plant under the dominion of the moon." Of rosemary he says, "the sun claims privilege in it, and it is underthe celestial ram," and of viper's bugloss, "it is a most gallant herb of the sun." The bay-tree rouses him to real eloquence, though not for Apollo's sake. "It is a tree of the sun and under the celestial sign of Leo, and resists witchcraft very potently, as also all the evils that old Saturn can do to the body of man; for neither witch nor devil, thunder nor lightning will hurt a man in the place where a bay-tree is."
Reading in this old book of the ordinance and virtues of the familiar herbs, I escape from the severities of botanical science into a maze of queer fancies, well suited to those retrospective hours when we love best what we least believe. And by the pleasant suggestion of astrology I am led on to contemplate the starry heavens, which I do in the ancient pastoral way, peopling them with mythical forms and connecting them with the seasonable changes of rustic toil. I forget for the moment all the discoveries of Copernicus and Kepler, and see eye to eye with Cleostratus of Tenedos who nightly watched the stars from the sacred slopes of Ida.
Much as the companionships of nature have meant for me, I would not have any man content himself with these alone. It is not right to live the slave of Pales, or become the rhapsode of docks and nettles. To be all for the lower life, were it the fairest, is derogation; and Har and Heva before they may enter into their kingdom of the flowers must first be fallen spirits. But continually in the interludes of human endeavour to rebathe the mind at these clear wells does indeed exceedingly purify and strengthen against the returning and imminent encounter. Those long retreats at Walden may not often be repeated, for man is either risen too high or too far fallen to live well in the sole company of animals and flowers. What sociologists call the consciousness of kind is as vital to man as the consciousness of self; and to pine for adoption into an alien kind is vain on this side transmigration.
Not seldom my wanderings in town and country lead me to quiet churchyards, or to those vast cemeteries where the living have established the dead in avenues andstreets of tombs after their drear suburban fashion. Solitude has ever persuaded to the contemplation of death, and in these silent places I feel no shock of sadness but am rather possessed by a familiar spirit of peace. As I wander from path to path, my fancy is not lamed by mournful thoughts, but finds suggestion amid the poor laconic histories by which these headstones appeal to him that passes by.
It is with most men a natural desire to take their last rest in some green God's acre, far from the smoke and turmoil of towns, lying in a fair space amid a small company, where there is a wide prospect of tilled lands, and the reapers cut the swathes against the very churchyard wall. And this is my most usual aspiration; yet there are times when I would not shrink in thought from the Valley of Ezekiel, and would be content to be written a mere number in some city of the dead, where at last after all the loneliness of life I should no longer be kept apart, but be gathered to my fellows where they lie in their thousands, and be received a member oftheir society. And though I well know that it matters not a cummin-seed whether my bones are washed to and fro on the bed of the sea or my ashes cast to the winds of heaven, yet I humour this fancy, and find a quiet pleasure in the thought that death at least may end this isolation.
And what if the propinquity of these poor remains be gage and promise of a sympathy of souls unveiled and unhidden by false semblances of the body? Then should death indeed be the crown of a long desire and give me at the last the fellowship into which life denied initiation. Surely, as Coleridge dreamed, there is a sex in souls, which, disengaged from the coarse companionship of the flesh, shall see into each other's crystal deeps. Thence, in new life, when the last recondite secret is withholden no longer, there shall come forth those qualities and powers that ennobled man and woman in mortality; they shall come forth in all their several strength and beauty, divinely animate, and reflecting upon each other bright rays and softcolours invisible upon these misty oceans of our navigation.
It is not terrible to think, at times, on death, for thatdanse macabrewhich troubled the fancy of our forefathers is now danced out, and the silent figure that knocks at every door comes not as a grinning skeleton but as one of more gentle countenance than any art can express. The natural change, which to William Blake was but the passing out of one room into another, is well personified in the merciful figure with the kind eyes, coming at the sounded hour to lead away into quietness. My solitude has taught me to know well those noble efforts which art has made to lift from our bowed backs the burden of the fear of death: I like to look upon that youthful Thanatos carved upon a column from the temple of the Ephesian Diana, and every year the red leaves of autumn persuade my steps to that village rich in elms where lived one who also saw death so, and laboured to draw the frightened eyes of men from the hour-glass and the skull to the gracious vision of the deliverer and friend. There hands whichwere dear to him have raised a place of leave-taking upon a green slope, a house of farewell set upon the shore to receive the last pledges from the living to the absolved and unburdened dead.
When first I saw Compton it was a cloudless noon in August, the day of days in which to come alone into this silent place. Out of the fiery heat beaten from wall and path like a blinding spray of light, it is a passage into a dimness of cool space, an air glaucous as the shade of olives. There from the circuit of a dome look down kind faces of immortal youth, in form and habit too tranquil for our life, but made homely to us by the mercy in their eyes, and some quality of the white soft hands which draws all weariness and all pain towards them. To me it was as though some furious struggle in the waves were over, and swooning out of life I had awakened upon a floor of translucent ocean, where, in a gracious and tempered light, beings of a compassion too intense for earth, each with a gesture that was not yet a touch, were charming all the bruises of thelost battle away. Surely this is true vision of things to come, and to such mercy we shall awaken. It cannot be that when the eyes reopen they shall see the forms of dark apparitors, or that the ears shall hear Æacus and Rhadamanthys speaking in dim halls their cold, irrevocable dooms. No, but there shall be a pause and respite upon the way from one to another life, and none may be conceived more grateful than this rest, as it were a sojourn beneath waters of Eunoë, where a flood of dear memories foreboding good shall absolve us from the mortal sin of fear.
Turning back over these pages, I am conscious that I have failed to give real experiences their proper life. Describing solitude I have been dull; I have fixed the rushing flames of emotion in poor flamboyant lines. I have written far more than any reader but yourself will have cared to follow; but now at any rate the confession is over, and in the future I shall work, and use my sight for a worthier end than introspection. It has been said thatthe tale of any life is interesting if sincerely told; and it may be that the most ordinary lives have the advantage, because it is the common experience which touches most hearts. For the greater part mine has been a common life, unglorified by hazards in the field, or bright fulfilment of ambition; it had been better for its peace if it might wholly have kept the comfortable, usual way.
I sometimes wonder whether the printing of these pages will reveal to me any kinsmen in affliction, for such there must be going westward alone, and I wish that for a moment we might foregather as we pass, to compare the marvels of our isolation. Then perhaps I might be urged to higher effort, hearing stories more pitiful than mine, tales of silent courage under ban of excommunion to shame me from the very thought of despair. Poets have metaphorically given colours to souls; mine, I feel, is only grey, the common hue of shadows; but it was steeped in gloom by a veritable pain and evils really undergone. And as I reflect upon what I have written, andtry to imagine it read by some brisk person utterly content with life, I can well understand that the whole thing would appear to him incredible, too preposterously strange for belief, a rigmarole of sick fancies beyond the power of hellebore. So be it: I expect small comprehension and no mercy, for indeed I have written caring little for such consequence, yielding to that human thirst for utterance which only confession can slake; as one eases pain by a moan though there are none to hear it. It is not altogether a grateful task. For hardly, and then only in a fortunate hour, to one whose years and feelings have been interwoven with his own, will even a healthy man tell the tale of his hidden emotion; and mine is the deeper reticence of a habit which has ever held closely to the recipe of fernseed. To entrust a confidence to one of unproven sympathy, is to risk a profitless embarrassment. It has been most truly said that both parties to such impulsive avowals, whenever they afterwards meet, must feel a constraint as of confederacy in misdemeanour.
I have hope that though I came late to the steady labour of the vineyard, I may yet earn my wage and begin the new day with the rest. Like Joseph Poorgrass I can now almost regard my diffidence as an interesting study, and agree with the rustic man of calamities that destiny might have made things even worse. Certainly the pain grows less fierce; I can go more readily among my fellows for all but social ends. For those who live much apart learn at last to see men not as individuals but in groups: to them it is the type which counts, theforma specifica per formam individualem translucens, of which the scholastic jargon speaks. Those with whom I come in casual contact appear to me now in a vague, diffused light like the atmosphere of some other world. Dwelling upon none with the eyes of intimacy, and passing swiftly from this to that, I find each but the harmless variant of a species; if I lingered or came too near, doubtless old apprehensions would oppress me still. It is a disadvantage of this outlook that the fascination of detail is lost, and that I have less sensefor the personal in life. But if I grow old I shall regain the interest in particular things and persons with which age is consoled amid many miseries; for while youth grows earnest over some riddle of high art or the occultation of Aldebaran, age is happily absorbed in the arrangement of a room or discussing the destinies of a single household.
Meanwhile, though uncongenial to my kind as entering little into their pleasures, I like to be near them in their grief or happiness, standing unnoticed in the wind of their fortune's wheel. At least I am not soured or malevolent, and when there is dancing toward, I am in the crowd upon the margin of the green. I have abandoned social obligations because I am unfitted to perform them well, and society high and low exists by their cheerful fulfilment. But I no longer rail at social law or decline to see anything but evil in conventions devised by the wisdom and refinement of centuries. If I refuse invitations and leave calls unpaid, it is because I am socially bankrupt: were I solvent I should redeem all debts.
I decline therefore to denounce Chesterfield and deify Thoreau: there was exaggeration in both men, and though my sympathies are rather with the recluse of Walden pond, it is quite probable that Chesterfield was the more useful of the two. I am a bad player, I have not the high spirits or the conversational skill which each should contribute to the social game. And in almost any sport the incompetent confer a benefit by standing out: at least, that is the opinion which I hear the average player express. If I lived in the backwoods where any guest is welcome, it might be my duty to act differently. But my ways are cast in places where there is no need for social press-gangs, and the highways and hedges are left unsearched. If therefore by abstention I gain a qualified peace for myself, and confer positive benefit on others, I may go my way without serious reproach.
And I did wisely not to marry, for I should have clung too closely to my study for the happiness of any woman. I oncesaw an advertisement in the newspaper inserted by a discontented young wife whose husband was a recluse and would not take her out of evenings. She wanted to communicate with congenial people, and, like a desperate sailor marooned, was driven to wave her signal in the sight of the casual eye. This frank confession of abandonment made a profound impression upon me. I thought to myself, "Master recluse, you are a pilferer and have filched a life. I am yet more solitary in my estate, and if I followed your example, should be guilty of a greater wrong." There are, indeed, hours when I feel embittered at the thought that for one innocent defect a whole life should be amerced of joy; the finality of loss appals: all is so irrevocable;le vase est imbibé, l'étoffe a pris son pli. Avoided not without cause by those who were my natural associates, I grow impenetrable of access, and even in my own family unfamiliar. The resentment that welled up in the man who told the story of Henry Ryecroft obtains the mastery, and I feel one in spirit with that lonelyanalyst of disillusions. Sometimes a worse darkness gathers round, till I long for one of those intense and all-absorbing creeds which somehow seem to tend the brightest hearth-fires which earth knows: for philosophy, though it invented the void, never built a little Gidding.
It is then that I feel like the suppliant of the old Babylonian prayer, "one whose kin are afar off, whose city is distant," and all that appears before my sight is one scroll of wrongs which this evil heritage has inflicted upon me. It has made my best years rich in misery; it has cut me off from marriage; it has compelled me, one hating vain complaint, to live querulously in the optative mood. Neither poverty nor sickness could chastise more heavily; for poverty is strong in numbers and sickness rich in sympathy, but diffidence reaps laughter and is alone. When such thoughts win dominion over the mind I could envy what sufferer you will his most awful punishment. For in his agony be sure there is movement and action; his limbs are torn, yet he is dragged onward: by his very writhing in the bonds he confesses his life. But I lie in some dead waste where nothing moves and all is mist without horizon, lost in an abhorred blankness of dismay to which no positive suffering may be likened. Thither comes no fierce provocation to quicken into Promethean scorn; life lies whelmed in blackness unlit by flashes of defiance or the cold splendour of disdain.
Empedocles once described his dream of retribution for the last unutterable offence. For thrice ten thousand years the sinner roams estranged from bliss, taking all mortal shapes, wearing with tired feet all the sad ways of life. Æther sweeps him out to Ocean, Ocean casts him naked on the shores of Earth, Earth hurls him upward to the flames of Helios, and he, relentless, spurns the victim back to Æther, that the dread cycle may begin anew. But to be for ever driven in this majestic whirl of change, to receive the chastisement of all elements and survive unbroken for a new revolution of the wheel, this is but an assurance of the very pride of life, it isthe charter of an invincible manhood. The doom which in truth befits the unutterable sin is rather the blank pain without accident or period, without point or salience to draw from stunned nature her last energies of resentment. It is well for me that this misery is short-lived, and that either by thinking on that ideal love I know the miracle of the twenty-ninth sonnet, or, struggling with instant effort out of the toils, try to see myself as I appear to others, one who should scorn to sit in thirst when there are wells yet for the seeking.
It is a strange life to lead in this pleasureful world; and if when it is over I were condemned to live again, coming like Er the Armenian to that meadow where the lots are thrown down for each to choose his own, I am already decided what character I should elect to play. I should neither cast myself for a protagonist's part nor again for that of a dumb actor in those backgrounds I know too well; but just for a plain manly character, strong to face all fortunes and rich in troops of friends. There should be no more evasion or drearywrestling of mind with body; but life should move to a restrained harmony, and no elusive wind should carry half the music away.
As for what remains of this present dispensation, I shall know how to endure, trusting that the years may fade finely, like the figures in an old tapestry, and that the end may come to me as to the old gentleman in Hans Christian Andersen's story of the Old House. And I have this advantage over other men, that while they have the whole cornucopia to lose, I can but be deprived of the dregs in its pointed end. For in what can there be further punishment? On others, men of happy pasts, dismay may fall as the ways are darkened before them. But surely I shall be of good cheer as I come into the land of the fierce old robber Age; for, stripped long since by a more subtle and insatiate despoiler, I shall possess nothing of worth to draw his covetousness upon me. So many joys did my very youth renounce; so many pleasures the Harpies swept from my place at the spread board of life; suchgags and fetters held me while others danced and sang, that I was the sad familiar of evil fortune before my companions were acquainted with her name. That leaden weight which brings others low, by a nice adjustment of the scales shall raise me for the first time to their equality. And then, as one experienced in bereavements, of themselves they may seek my company; and I, so long the useless and estranged, may become at the close their helpful counsellor.
If only that might be; if only upon the verge of night I might redeem by usefulness my lost unserviceable day. Then this grey life, so long sole and intrinsical to itself, should glow at last with some reflection of the sunset; once more I should know young ardours imagined lost and devotions miraculously born again.
You will still encounter me now and then, moving absently through the crowd, or wandering in some green place, as in the garden of the Luxembourg Vauvenargues used to meet the wounded of the great battle, keeping apart in the narrowerwalks, and leaving the broad central ways for lighter feet than theirs. He often longed to have speech with them; but always they turned away, with the proud self-sufficiency of the disillusioned. Perhaps if he had succeeded he would have found that to some of them life had its consolations not unlike mine, and that they could still regard it as something more than a friendly process of detachment. But it is not our habit to expand; we are ever held back by the occult pride which the same soldier-philosopher has assigned to one of his imaginary characters, "cette fierté tendre d'une âme timide, qui ne veut avouer ni sa défaite, ni ses espérances, ni la vanité de ses vœux."