tramping
tramping
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
THE ARTIST’S NOTEBOOK
Holding but lightly to material things,Happy to stay, yet eager to begone,He is the poet, though he never writA line of metre; he is God’s free manAnd has the franchise of Eternity.Into his soul through every sense there stealImmortal melodies. This song of praise,This verdant life, this fragrance, the blue sky,Those mighty mountains and the distant seaAre symbols of the everlasting songSwelling from age to age among the stars.
Holding but lightly to material things,Happy to stay, yet eager to begone,He is the poet, though he never writA line of metre; he is God’s free manAnd has the franchise of Eternity.Into his soul through every sense there stealImmortal melodies. This song of praise,This verdant life, this fragrance, the blue sky,Those mighty mountains and the distant seaAre symbols of the everlasting songSwelling from age to age among the stars.
Holding but lightly to material things,Happy to stay, yet eager to begone,He is the poet, though he never writA line of metre; he is God’s free manAnd has the franchise of Eternity.Into his soul through every sense there stealImmortal melodies. This song of praise,This verdant life, this fragrance, the blue sky,Those mighty mountains and the distant seaAre symbols of the everlasting songSwelling from age to age among the stars.
Holding but lightly to material things,
Happy to stay, yet eager to begone,
He is the poet, though he never writ
A line of metre; he is God’s free man
And has the franchise of Eternity.
Into his soul through every sense there steal
Immortal melodies. This song of praise,
This verdant life, this fragrance, the blue sky,
Those mighty mountains and the distant sea
Are symbols of the everlasting song
Swelling from age to age among the stars.
SELF-EXPRESSION is life, What gives more satisfaction to one’s being than to have expressed oneself. One builds a houseand expresses himself, another writes a poem and expresses himself, another begets a large family and expresses himself—and looking back, they can say “Vixi”: “I have lived.”
Some years ago they used to sell on the streets little blue revolving spheres for a penny; spheres with the continents and seas painted on them. They were toys. For a penny you could give your baby the world to play with.
That is what he needs, and what the world was made for. We were given the world to play with, as blocks with letters on are given to children, for play and—for expression. The whole object of the world is to help us to say a few words about ourselves. I think it is Novalis says: “The world—all nature—is an encyclopædical index of our own souls.” If you would read the cypher of your soul you must use the cypher key of Nature. If you would learn and read the language of the heart, the world, the visible universe, shall be your dictionary.
When Richard Jeffries wroteThe Story of My Heartit proved to be all birds, flowers,bees, grasses, skies and trees and airs. It was no cinema story, no Tarzan romance. Nor was it booklore. He did not go to the British Museum to obtain materials for the story of his heart, did not “mug it up” with the help of great authorities. But in the wild woods and on the Wiltshire hills he spelt it out with his fingers letter by letter, like a blind man fingering Braille.
I sometimes think that the gold of all literature and art is self-expression of this kind, and that after all, the best passages and the best pictures are “impressions de voyage.” After we die we may be set to write an essay on our life story. It will be “impressions de voyage.” Fifty years in an office will be found shriveled up to a dot, and a few days in the wilds will expand into the whole essay.
Why do we stare at beautiful things? We see them—is that not enough, can we not merely glance and pass on? We stop and we stare, at that mountain side, at that flower, at that dreaming lake. We cannot pass at once. We seem to be looking intently, stargazing at something further off and yet more kindredthan the stars, but we are not using our physical eyes. Perhaps we are not using our eyes at all. We are listening. Nature is trying to tell us something; she is speaking to us on a long-distance wave.
Your mind is haunted. You have forgotten something, and the flower is trying to tell you. It is reminding you of a forgotten air. Something you cannot quite hear, cannot quite make out. Once you belonged to a kingdom where ... once you knew some one young and fair ... once you were lost, still lost, always lost.... But you could join us yet, did you dare ... what is the flower trying to say? What does the mountain say, and the lone bird on the branch? The heart aches. You lie on the downs; heaven is alive with birds. The bosom of the sky heaves with their song. And you, down below on the cropped grass of the hills, lying on the chalk, shading the eyes with a hand, look up—and the heart aches. It aches with homesickness, with love for that some one of whom the flowers speak and the lark sings.
You are camped by the side of a stream,and a boatman goes past in his boat in the dusk; you are dreaming by your fire in the morning, and a wild bird comes unbidden to your wrist; you are yourself mirrored in the water below a rock just before you are about to plunge; you watch an eagle bridge a chasm with its flight; you see cliffs shaped like giants and trees like dwarfs. The snake serpentines through the dust across your path, drawing a line—thus far and no further—which, however, you overstep. You find yourself treading in primeval forest, where no step of man has ever been heard before. The trees change into great armies marching upward in platoons, in serried battalions. You come to great walls—termini. You overclimb them: death, new life. You are out of touch with below. It is the great plateau: you can yearn upward with your hands, you cannot yearn downward to those you have left below. Lark’s song comes up to you from other people’s heaven. You are in upper mountain country among glaciers and scarred rocks, amid frogs, amid storms. You dance in the air with the snowflakes. The soul plumbs the depth of theworld with a sad thought dropped from the height. Listen—the little avalanches—a crack, a rumble, a thudding, a whispering. You reach and stand astride the pass between two countries. God divided up the world, and you are a pair of compasses in His hand.
The first tramp left Eden many years ago. They say he died. But to my mind he is still wandering. God made him wander. He has wandered so far his wits are wandering too. He doesn’t remember much about the garden now. It was a pleasant place. It had a snake in it, however. Very pleasant: a place in which one could lie down and rest for an eternity at a time, if it were not for the snakes in the grass. The devil got loose in it. Still, it was the only place in which one could feel at home for ever and ever. And outside of it one must wander. Life is a wandering and a seeking where it was once a sitting still and an adoring.
So the tramp’s life is a type of existence. I like the symbolism of the Jewish Passover, the standing dressed for departure into the wilderness. Man is not man sitting down; he is man on the move.Le tramp c’est l’homme.
Even if in small measure the tramp is a pilgrim. His adventure is a spiritual adventure or it is nothing. The clouds part and Orion is disclosed. The rude pencilings are erased and the main curve remains, and the curve of your adventure is a broken arc. “On earth the broken arc; in heaven the perfect round,” says Browning. But given the arc the center can be found. We revolve about the sun, but there are planets revolving around a sun invisible to us. Our souls, I suppose, revolve about some invisible spiritual sun which we are always thinking about—a center called God.
So with all our hilarity, our joyous meetings, our madcap doings, with all the fun of the tramping expedition there is the deeper interest underlying all. Most people will make the tramp without one conscious deeper thought. It does not matter. Their nature is getting something intuitively, although the mind has no knowledge of it. The gay undergraduate, all vim and no soul, shies at religion and has no thought except about climbs, leaps, jumps, food, sporting chances, pedestrianachievement! He may not see this glorious jaunt in a poetic light until years afterwards. Cunninghame Graham remarks in one of his clever prefaces that nothing in the present ever seems so good as what is past. Some years pass, and your present, which is silver to-day, becomes gold in recollection. You lie in a matter-of-fact mood under the stars in the midst of the mountains. Your mind is at rest, you ask for nothing beyond perhaps good sleep, and belike you thank neither God nor yourself for having got there. But ten years later you look back with a sigh and say “How wonderful it was, ah, I was happy then!”
The intuitive understanding rises slowly to the mind, like light traveling from a distant planet to this earth. But you get it at last and see.
So the experience is kindred for all manner of minds. The poet may exult too feverishly at first, and grow tired of his own rhapsodies; the reflective intellectual may become bored by his own meditations. But neither the poetic rhapsodies nor the intellectual notes record the measure of the tramp. For it is a measureof hidden honey that is being stored, and you are seldom allowed by Nature to eat of your own store day by day. We are bees rather than wasps.
The true beehive of inner experience is in you, and yet, of course, there are what may be called auxiliary beehives. I believe the conscious experience of a tramp can be greatly increased in a pleasurable way by the use of notebooks. It is worth while keeping a record if only to remind yourself in other years. The details of your spiritual adventures fade out unless you have a good memory or anaide-mémoire. The whole work of some writers is no more than a tramp’s notebook, Blake, for instance, a series of marvelously scrawled hieroglyphics—the story of his journey from one world to another. But one does not need to be a “writer” as it is called, or an “artist.” It is a spurious classification. We are all writers and artists from the day when we scrawl with our toy spades in the wet sand to the day when we put the seal of death to our wills. Man as such is an artist. Being public, being printed, being exhibited, are matters connectedwith the minor function of being professionally artistic. Giotto drew a perfect circle to show what he could do. We shall draw imperfect ones and be more true to Art.
The fact is he has lost a great deal who has not kept a daybook of the soul. Something very sweet happened to Leigh Hunt one day and he wrote.
Time you thief who love to getSweets into your list, put that in.
Time you thief who love to getSweets into your list, put that in.
Time you thief who love to getSweets into your list, put that in.
Time you thief who love to get
Sweets into your list, put that in.
It was entered in his daybook. Certain happenings make a day worth while and perhaps forever memorable to you. “To-day I knew that I had conquered all my doubtings,” wrote Carlyle once in his diary, recording his transit from scepticism to positive belief. It was an entry in his daybook.
As a practical detail, I love page-a-day diaries, the new sort used mostly in America and France. It is a nicely bound thin-paper book with a whole page for each day in the year and no postal information or cash columns. Unfortunately in England such books are generally bound to look like Bibles andhave appropriate Scripture references at the head of each page. One is reminded of the Lessons and the Collects. That is very well, but we require a minimum of printed matter on our daily page. It is ours, like our life when we wake up in the morning, free and open, and we may write there only what is given to us personally to write. Such a notebook should be free from conventions. If we wish to draw sketches in it mixed with written notes, we will. If we need to overstep the limits of a page we will find a less-covered page among our yesterdays and let to-day spill over to fill out the measure of time past. If you have had a tramping expedition in the midst of an otherwise sedentary year how the empty pages will fill up from the more glorious days!
The artist’s notebook is free for sketches, notes, impressions of moments,bon mots, poems, things overheard, maps and plans, names of friends and records of their idiosyncrasies, paradoxes, musical notations, records of folksongs and other songs which you copy in order that you may sing for yearsafterwards. But it should not contain too much banal detail, such as petty accounts, addresses, druggists’ prescriptions, number of season ticket and fire-insurance policy, memos to send rent. These things are apt to clutter up your book, and when you come to Old Year’s Night, and sit waiting for the chime of bells which rings in another year—and you have your daybook before you, and you go over its pages, you do not want to pause on a scrawled laundry list or some Falstaffian account of wine and bread consumed at such and such an inn.
The artist’s daybook is his own living gospel—something coming after Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John—and should be sacred to him, if he is not merely a flippant and cynical fellow seeing life in large part as a buffonade.
A thought recorded, one that is your own, written down the day when it occurred, is a mental snapshot, and is at least as valuable as the photographs you may take on your journey. Yesterday’s thought is worth considering again, if only as the stepping stone of your dead self.
The thoughts of some people are constant, but of others varying and contradictory. It is like landscape. Some live their lives in the sight of a great range of mountains—they live in the presence of certain ever-abiding thoughts; others change their mental scenery from day to day, in the shallows and flats of the low country. But we all have our epochal days, our epochal thoughts. We turn to a page in our notebook and say: “On this day the thought occurred to me in the light of which I have lived ever since.” You draw two candles there, with light rays, to show the thought of the year.
It is much the same if the expression of the thought has been given you by another. Your thought of the year may take the form of a quotation. Those who search while they read naturally find in the expression of others what their souls need. I remember long periods of living with certain thoughts derived from books—Browning’s:
He placed thee midst this danceOf plastic circumstanceThis present thou forsooth would’st fain arrest.
He placed thee midst this danceOf plastic circumstanceThis present thou forsooth would’st fain arrest.
He placed thee midst this danceOf plastic circumstanceThis present thou forsooth would’st fain arrest.
He placed thee midst this dance
Of plastic circumstance
This present thou forsooth would’st fain arrest.
and then at another time Richter’s:
“We are near awakening when we dream that we dream.”
“We are near awakening when we dream that we dream.”
“We are near awakening when we dream that we dream.”
“We are near awakening when we dream that we dream.”
Persistent thoughts on a path of life’s pilgrimage! Morning after morning one awakens and the thought awakens with one and goes through the day in company, in communion with one.
Each day Nature puts her magic mirror in our hands. “Oh child, do you see yourself to-day?”
We look, we look, and answer wistfully, “Not to-day, not to-day.”
Is it that the reflection is dim and vague, or that our eyes have not yet cleared? Shortsighted people see curious distortions of themselves in the glass.
But it may even be true that no one has yet seen his own face. You can never be sure that what you see in a glass is what other people see in your face. So also in the spiritual mirror of Nature, one seeks to identify oneself and yet never is satisfied. Cheek and nose are wandering with the ripples of the lake.Every pool in the marsh has its star reflections, and as you bend o’er one of them your visage is broken by the starlight.
On the desolate North Cape, amid ice floes and leaping seals, with the bleak homeless winds of the Arctic about your ears, you are as near to your own image as in the warmth of Gibraltar’s opening gates. In the center of the Great Pyramid your heart turns to dust, but coming forth it vivifies again and is young as the year of your age. Pharaoh’s uncovered face is a faded hieroglyphic, but still it asks thousands of years after death—who am I; whither do I go?
So life’s scroll is full of question marks, pointers, index fingers, records of bearings, soundings, answers and partial answers to the question: Where am I? Drake climbs a goodlie and high tree in Darien and descries afar the Southern Sea. It is a picture in his artist’s notebook. Such an artistic thing to do, and life made him do it! It was no pose, his going forth to singe the King of Spain’s beard. It was more of a pose, I think, when he refused to allow his game of bowlsto be interrupted by the approach of the Armada.
Pose is, unfortunately, a prevalent disease of the quest. Some natures are betrayed to striking attitudes on the top of molehills. To-day I conquered the Mendips; henceforth there are no Mendips. But good hard, earnest living—tramping and seeking, will cure most people of the false theatrical. Beware of going to Jerusalem in order that you may come back and tell the world you have been. It spoils all you found on the way. I do not like the palmers; those who have been and have come back. Admitted that it is a vice of ourselves, we professionallittéraires, we go and then partially spill over when we return, selling the wine of experience for so much. When it is genuine experience you well may:
Wonder what the vintners buyOne half so precious as the goods they sell.
Wonder what the vintners buyOne half so precious as the goods they sell.
Wonder what the vintners buyOne half so precious as the goods they sell.
Wonder what the vintners buy
One half so precious as the goods they sell.
But, of course, one can tell one’s story and yet escape pose. “Make thyself small,” saith Buddha. Make thyself unobtrusive, lest some one may think that a very ornate and luxuriousloud speaker is responsible for the music itself. In an old-fashioned phrase so difficult to stomach nowadays—“Give God the glory.”
The personal diary, however, that daybook of the soul, is not meant for other gaze. I should imagine oneself shy even of the eyes of one’s most intimate friend, wife, sweetheart,alter ego. There is a delicacy, a secrecy about the functions of mind and soul. You do not wish others to see what you have written and blush at the thought of half a line being read over your shoulder. And the better the diary is kept the more private and personal it becomes.
I do not consider Pepys’ Diary to be the type of a good daybook, though it is extremely valuable as a record of the life of the age in which Pepys lived. It is one of the great curiosities of literature. As after a lifelong imprisonment one might find the diary of a prisoner, written to kill time, so after Pepys’ life one finds this astonishing document, wherein as it were,allis written down. But that all of Pepys’ Diary is not all. It is all that is immaterial. There is much that escapedPepys because he was not on the lookout for it. The chief omissions are the answers or attempted answers to the questions: “Who was Pepys? Whom did Pepys think he was?” The answers to these questions covering the whole of Pepys’ life could well occupy as much space as the famous diary we have.
But Pepys, perhaps without intention, described his England very well. He set down so much detail that he provided something resembling cinema films of daily life. As you read his pages you drop away from your own century and walk in his. His work is not a selection of phenomena; you make your selection from it. You can, in fact, make a diary from his diary. His many pages become one page, or half a page, in your diary.
There was in Russia, up to the Revolution, in which he perished a Pepysian writer, more selective, it is true, but determined to write downall, everything that occurred to him from day to day through life. He became naturally voluminous, and put down all manner of things, discreet and indiscreet, some very shocking to decent minds. But in one of hislater volumes of fragments and thoughts he wrote, “It may be asked what possible interest is there is these things I am recording, but that is my affair. For a long while now I have been writing without reader. If some one reads, that is his lookout; I do not invite him. One resolution I have made, and will carry out, and that is to printall.” So many of his daybook entries have curious tags after them, such as “Written on my cuff at Mme. So-and-So’s reception”; “Written while waiting for the tram on Nevski.”
It is fair to him to say that he only recorded thoughts and observations. If he was making love to a Captain’s wife at any time he did not tell of it—but only gave current reflections on love and what women really are. His whole literary output makes one spiritual notebook.
Few people however have much persistence. The January mood is familiar; this year I will keep a diary. The February pages of most diaries look pale and consumptive. March may pass without a single entry, as if throughout that glorious month nothing of moment had passed before one’s eyes or occurredto one’s being. That is not, however, such a default as may appear. One drops the diary; one resumes it. To-day I take stock of life and thought and all good things that are mine; to-morrow I will swing all day on the garden gate singing a nursery rhyme; the day after I shall put on my silk hat and go to the city and a company meeting; I shall promenade at night. Something will occur sooner or later and I shall say, “Hah, my diary, my tablets, my ink fountain, that I may write down something special and wonderful and curious that has occurred to me this day.”
Some are so fortunate that their professional and intellectual life blend—the writer, the artist, the social worker, the barrister, sometimes the lawyer, the politician, often the doctor. Matters of deep interest professionally have also a personal spiritual interest. But whatever the profession or calling all interests become one on an occasion of travel, on a tramping expedition or visit to a strange country. Then the daybook rests in the inner pocket, the ready helpmeet of one’s thoughts.
In visiting foreign countries and studyingother peoples, I always look out for what may be called key phenomena. I like to be able to record a fact which means so much more than its bare utterance seems to imply. Such a fact, bursting with brilliant significance is like a luminary on the page. It may be light on your way for the whole of the year. A nation reveals its secret in a sentence. Or it may be, an animal tells its nature by one trait observed. There is a curious satisfaction of the soul in knowing about the ways of men and of beasts.
Of course, I do not mean that there is any particular satisfaction in recording trivialities and prejudices. A man once wrote in his diary, “The Frenchmen eat frogs: I do not like them.” It was not worth his writing down. But one day, tramping with a hungry American, I was astonished to hear him exclaim, “I wish I could see a frog; I would soon have him in the pot.” That rid me of a prejudice, and I sat down complacently afterwards to a dish of frogs’ legs. It was worth a line in the diary.
A pilgrim once said to me: “I do not know you; to know a man one must eat forty poundsof salt.” It was worth a line in my diary. “Nitchevo,” said a Russian peasant servant to Bismarck, when out hunting they were lost in the snow in the forest. “Nitchevo,” and it lasted Bismarck all his life. He never forgotNitchevoand was always fond of saying it. “He is a gentleman; he keeps a gig,” Carlyle overheard, and it became one of the brevities of his spiritual life—“gigmanity.” “I am a workingman; I have carried my dinner pail,” some one else said, defining himself and a workingman at the same time. Such definitions and explanations, pointers, and street lamps, are worth keeping.
The diary of this kind is sometimes called a Commonplace book, which, however, seems to me too modest a title, as one does not inscribe in it one’s commonplaces. The Dean of St. Paul’s published recently large extracts from a wonderful series of “Commonplace books,” which he had kept during most of his life, but I would rather call them uncommonplace books. Truly, in the Dean’s case these scrapbooks garnered the fruits of reading rather than of life, and my especial plea is not for thefruits of reading as for the fruits of life. The digest of books is the habit of the good student, who sets down in brevity the content of whatever he reads and so preserves knowledge for future guidance. But the keeping of the daybook represents a different habit of mind.
With many it begins in happy school days or school holidays when natural history diaries were started. The enthusiastic collector of birds’ eggs, butterflies, or beetles, makes constant expeditions and delights in chronicling the results. He may do it at length, or briefly; may describe habits of species and adventures in tracking them, or merely set down the names of captures and of the localities. In boyhood one records the marvelous doings of the oak-egger female; later on one records what man, the insect, is doing.
It is just as much worth while, though so much more difficult, to describe what people look like as to set down what they say. And then most people and things are silent to our ears; they speak more to our eyes. Certain shapes, certain groups, speak at times enormouslyto our eyes. But how record them if we do not describe?
It is in description that the keeper of a diary becomes artist. All description is art, and in describing an event, an action or a being, you enter to some extent into the joy of art. You are more than the mere secretary of life, patiently taking down from dictation, more than life’s mere scribe; you become its singer, the expresser of the glory of it. With a verbal description goes also sketching, the thumb-nail sketch, the vague impression, the pictorial pointer. There is no reason for being afraid of bad drawing in one’s own personal travel diary; the main thing is that it be ours and have some relationship to our eyes and the thing seen.
I have seldom gone on a tramp, or a long vagabondage, without seeing things that made the heart ache with their beauty or pathos, and other things that set the mind a-tingle with intellectual curiosity. I do not refer to great episodes, glimpses of important shows and functions, but to little things, unexpected visions of life! Some were unforgettable inthemselves and seemingly needed no tablets other than those of memory, and yet it was a great addition to inner content and happiness to describe them as they occurred in my daybook of travel.
It is good also, after describing something that has specially affected one, to add one’s observations, the one line perhaps that records one’s mind at the time.
For these, and for other reasons, the artist’s notebook, the diary, the common- and uncommonplace book, the daybook of the soul are to be placed as part of the equipment of life, when faring forth, be it on pilgrimage, be it on tramp, or be it merely on the common round of daily life. Every entry is a shade of self-confession, and the whole when duly entered is a passage of self-knowledge.