dozen villages round about it which have sprung from the same needs, the same history; and yet these have missed the unconsidered charm of Haslingfield, which man did not devise, nor does nature inevitably bring, but which is instantly recognisable and strangely affecting.
Such charm seems to arise partly out of a subtle orderliness and a simple appropriateness, and partly from a blending of delicate and pathetic elements in a certain unascertained proportion. It seems to touch unknown memories into life, and to give a hint of the working of some half-whimsical, half-tenderly concerned spirit, brooding over its work, adding a touch of form here and a dash of colour there, and pleased to see, when all is done, that it is good.
If one looks closely at life, one sees the same quality in humanity, in men and women, in books and pictures, and yet one cannot tell what goes to the making of it. It seems to be a thing which no energy or design can capture, but which alights here and there, blowing like the wind at will. It is not force or originality or inventiveness; very often it is strangely lacking in any masterful quality at all; but it has always just the same wistful appeal, which makes one desire to understand it, to take possession of it, to serve it, to win its favour. It is as when the child in Francis Thompson’s poem seems to say, “I hire you for nothing.” That is exactly it: there is nothing offered or bestowed, but one is at once magically bound to serve it for love and delight. There is nothing that one can expect to get from it, and yet it goes very far down into the soul; it is behind the maddening desire which certain faces, hands, voices, smiles excite–the desire to possess, to claim, to know even that no one else can possess or claim them, which lies at the root of half the jealous tragedies of life.
Some personalities have charm in a marvellous degree, and if, as one looks into the old records of life, one discovers figures that seem to have laid an inexplicable hold on their circles, and to have passed through life in a tempest of applause and admiration, one may be sure that charm has been the secret.
Take the case of Arthur Hallam, the inspirer of “In Memoriam.” I remember hearing Mr. Gladstone say, with kindled eye and emphatic gesture, that Arthur Hallam was the most perfect being physically, morally, and intellectually that he had ever seen or hoped to see. He said, I remember, with a smile: “The story of Milnes Gaskell’s friendship with Hallam was curious. You must know that people fell in love very easily in those days; there was a Miss E– of whom Hallam was enamoured, and Milnes Gaskell abandoned his own addresses to her in favour of Hallam, in order to gain his friendship.”
Yet the portrait of Hallam which hangs in the provost’s house at Eton represents a rosy, solid, rather heavy-featured young man, with a flushed face,–Mr. Gladstone said that this was caused by overwork,–who looks more like a young country bumpkin on the opera-bouffe stage than an intellectual archangel.
Odder still, the letters, poems, and remains of Hallam throw no light on the hypnotic effect he produced; they are turgid, elaborate, and wholly uninteresting; nor does he seem to have been entirely amiable. Lord Dudley told Francis Hare that he had dined with Henry Hallam, the historian, who was Arthur Hallam’s father, in the company of the son, in Italy, adding, “It did my heart good to sit by and hear how the son snubbed the father, remembering how often the father had unmercifully snubbed me.”
There is a hint of beauty in the dark eyes and the down-dropped curve of the mobile lip in the portrait, and one need not quote “In Memoriam” to prove how utterly the charm of Hallam subjugated the Tennyson circle. Wit, swiftness of insight, beauty, lovableness– all seem to have been there; and it remains that Arthur Hallam was worshipped and adored by his contemporaries with a fierce jealousy of devotion. Nothing but the presence of an overmastering charm can explain this conspiracy of praise; and perhaps there is no better proof of it than that his friends could detect genius in letters and poems which seem alike destitute of promise and performance.
There is another figure of earlier date who seems to have had the same magnetic gift in an even more pre-eminent degree. There is a portrait by Lawrence of Lord Melbourne that certainly gives a hint, and more than a hint, of the extraordinary charm which enveloped him; the thick, wavy hair, the fine nose, the full, but firmly moulded, lips, are attractive enough. But the large, dark eyes under strongly marked eyebrows, which are at once pathetic, passionate, ironical, and mournful, evoke a singular emotion. Every gift that men hold to be advantageous was showered upon Melbourne. He was well born, wealthy, able; he was full of humour, quick to grasp a subject, an omnivorous reader and student, a famous sportsman. He won the devotion of both men and women. His marriage with the lovely and brilliant Lady Caroline Ponsonby, whose heart was broken and mind shattered by her hopeless passion for Byron, showed how he could win hearts. There is no figure of all that period of whom one would rather possess a personal memoir. Yet despite all his fame and political prestige, he was an unhappy, dissatisfied man, who tasted every experience and joy of life, and found that there was nothing in it.
The dicta of his that are preserved vibrate between cynicism, shrewdness, wisdom, and tenderness. “Stop a bit,” he said, as the cabinet went downstairs after a dinner to discuss the corn laws. “Is it to lower the price of bread or isn’t it? It doesn’t much matter which, but we must all say the same thing.” Yet, after all, it is the letters and diaries of Queen Victoria that reveal the true secret of Melbourne’s charm. His relation to his girl- sovereign is one of the most beautiful things in latter-day history. Melbourne loved her half paternally, half chivalrously, while it is evident that the Queen’s affection for her gallant and attractive premier was of a quality which escaped her own perception. He humoured her, advised her, watched over her; in return, she idolised him, noted down his smallest sayings, permitted him to behave and talk just as he would. She lovingly records his little ways and fancies–how he fell asleep after dinner, how he always took two apples, and hid one in his lap while he ate the other.
“I asked him if he meant to cat it. He thought not, and said, ‘But I like to have the power of doing so.’ I observed, hadn’t he just as well the power of doing so when the apples were in the dish on the table? He laughed and said, ‘Not the FULL power.'”
Melbourne was full of prejudices and whims and hatreds, but his charity was boundless, and he always had a good word for an enemy. He excused the career of Henry VIII to the Queen by saying, “You see, those women bothered him so.” And when he was superseded by Peel, he combated the Queen’s dislike of her new premier, and did his best to put Peel in a favourable light. When Peel made his first appearance at Windsor, shy and awkward, and holding himself like a dancing-master, it was Melbourne who broke the awkward pause by going up to Peel, and saying in an undertone, “For God’s sake, go and talk to the Queen!” When I was privileged to work through all Melbourne’s letters to the Queen, so carefully preserved and magnificently bound, I was greatly touched by the sweetness and tenderness of them, the gentle ironical flavour, the delicate freedom, and the little presents and remembrances they exchanged up to the end.
Melbourne can hardly be called a very great man,–he had not the purpose or tenacity for that, and he thought both too contemptuously and too indulgently of human nature,–but I know of no historical figure who is more wholly transfused and penetrated by the aroma of charm. Everything that he did and said had some distinction and unusualness: perceptive observation, ripe wisdom, and, with it all, the petulant attractiveness of the spoiled and engaging child. And yet even so, one is baffled, because it is not the profundity or the gravity of what he said that impresses; it is rather the delicate and fantastic turn he gave to a thought or a phrase that makes his simplest deductions from life, his most sensible bits of counsel, appear to have something fresh and interesting about them, though prudent men have said much the same before, and said it heavily and solemnly.
Not that charm need be whimsical and freakish, though it is perhaps most beautiful when there is something of the child about it, something naive and unconventional. There are men, of whom I think that Cardinal Newman was pre-eminently one, who seem to have had the appeal of a pathetic sort of beauty and even helplessness. Newman seems to have always been surprised to find himself so interesting to others, and perhaps rather over-shadowed by the responsibility of it. He was romantically affectionate, and the tears came very easily at the call of emotion. Such incidents as that when Newman said good-bye to his bare room at Littlemore, and kissed the door-posts and the bed in a passion of grief, show what his intensity of feeling might be.
It is not as a rule the calm and controlled people who have this attractiveness for others; it is rather those who unite with an enchanting kind of playfulness an instinct to confide in and to depend upon protective affection. Very probably there is some deep- seated sexual impulse involved, however remotely and unconsciously, in this species of charm. It is the appeal of the child that exults in happiness, claims it as a right, uses it with a pretty petulance,–like the feigned enmity of the kitten and the puppy,– and when it is clouded over, requires tearfully that it shall be restored. That may seem an undignified comparison for a prince of the church. But Newman was artist first, and theologian a long way afterward; he needed comfort and approval and even applause; and he evoked, together with love and admiration, the compassion and protective chivalry of his friends. His writings have little logical or intellectual force; their strength is in their ineffable and fragrant charm, their ordered grace, their infinite pathos.
The Greek word for this subtle kind of beauty is charis, and the Greeks are worth hearing on the subject, because they, of all the nations that ever lived, were penetrated by it, valued it, looked out for it, worshipped it. The word itself has suffered, as all large words are apt to suffer, when they are transferred to another language, because the big, ultimate words of every tongue connote a number of ideas which cannot be exactly rendered by a single word in another language. Let us be mildly philological for a moment, and realise that the word charis in Greek is the substantive of which the verb is chairo, to rejoice. We translate the word charis by the English word “grace,” which means, apart from its theological sense, a rich endowment of charm and beauty, a thing which is essentially a gift, and which cannot be captured by taking thought. When we say that a thing is done with a perfect grace, we mean that it seems entirely delightful, appropriate, seemly, and beautiful. It pleases every sense; it is done just as it should be done, easily, courteously, gently, pleasantly, with a confidence which is yet modest, and with a rightness that has nothing rigid or unamiable about it. To see a thing so done, whatever it may be, leaves us with an envious desire that we might do the thing in the same way. It seems easy and effortless, and the one thing worth doing; and this is where the moral appeal of beauty lies, in the contagious sort of example that it sets. But when we clumsily translate the word by “grace,” we lose the root idea of the word, which has a certain joyfulness about it. A thing done with charis is done as a pleasure, naturally, eagerly, out of the heart’s abundance; and that is the appeal of things so done to the ordinary mind, that they seem to well up out of a beautiful and happy nature, as the clear spring rises from the sandy floor of the pool. The act is done, or the word spoken, out of a tranquil fund of joy, not as a matter of duty, or in reluctant obedience to a principle, but because the thing, whatever it is, is the joyful and beautiful thing to do.
And so the word became the fundamental idea of the Christian life: the grace of God was the power that floods the whole of the earlier teaching of the gospel, before the conflict with the ungracious and suspicious world began–the serene, uncalculating life, lived simply and purely, not from any grim principle of asceticism, but because it was beautiful to live so. It stood for the joy of life, as opposed to its cares and anxieties and ambitions; it was beautiful to share happiness, to give things away, to live in love, to find joy in the fresh mintage of the earth, the flowers, the creatures, the children, before they were clouded and stained by the strife and greed and enmity of the world. The exquisite quality of the first soft touches of the gospel story comes from the fact that it all rose out of a heart of joy, an overflowing certainty of the true values of life, a determination to fight the uglier side of life by opposing to it a simplicity and a sweetness that claimed nothing, and exacted nothing but a right to the purest sort of happiness–the happiness of a loving circle of friends, where the sacrifice of personal desires is the easiest and most natural thing in the world, because such sacrifice is both the best reward and the highest delight of love. It was here that the strength of primitive Christianity lay, that it seemed the possession of a joyful secret that turned all common things, and even sorrow and suffering, to gold. If a man could rejoice in tribulation, he was on his way to be invulnerable.
It is not a very happy business to trace the decay of a great and noble idea; but one can catch a glimpse of the perversion of “grace” in the hands of our Puritan ancestors, when it became a combative thing, which instead of winning the enemies of the Lord by its patient sweetness, put an edge on the sword of holiness, and enabled the staunch Christian to hew the Amalekites hip and thigh; so that the word, which had stood for a perfectly peaceful and attractive charm, became the symbol of righteous persecution, and flowered in cries of anguish and spilled blood.
We shall take a long time before we can crawl out of the shadow of that dark inheritance; but there are signs in the world of an awakening brotherliness; and perhaps we may some day come back to the old truth, so long mishandled, that the essence of all religion is a spirit of beauty and of joy, bent on giving rather than receiving; and so at last we may reach the perception that the fruitful strength of morality lies not in its terror, its prohibitions, its coercions, but in its good-will, its tolerance, its dislike of rebuke and censure, its rapturous acceptance of all generous and chivalrous and noble ways of living.
And thus, then, I mean by charm not a mere superficial gracefulness which can be learned, as good manners are learned, through a certain code of behaviour, but a thing which is the flower and outward sign of a beautiful attitude to life; an eagerness to welcome everything which is fine and fresh and unstained; that turns away the glance from things unlovely and violent and greedy not in a disapproving or a self-righteous spirit, because it is respectable to be shocked, but in a sense of shame and disgrace that such cruel and covetous and unclean things should be. If one takes a figure like that of St. Francis of Assisi, who for all the superstition and fanaticism with which the record is intermingled, showed a real reflection and restoration of the old Christian joy of life, we shall see that he had firm hold of the secret. St. Francis’s love of nature, of animals, of flowers, of children, his way of breaking into song about the pleasant things of earth, his praise of “our sister the Water, because she is very serviceable to us and humble and clean,” show the outrush of an overpowering joy. He had the courage to do what very few men and women ever dare to do, and that is to make a clean sweep of property and its complications; but even so, the old legend distorts some of this into a priggish desire to set a good example, to warn and rebuke and improve the occasion. But St. Francis’s asceticism is the only kind of asceticism that has any charm, the self-denial, namely, that springs from a sense of enjoyment, and is practised from a feeling of its beauty, and not as a matter of timid and anxious calculation. It is true that St. Francis was haunted by the medieval nightmare of the essential vileness of the body, and spurred it too hard. But apart from this, one recognises in him a poet, and a man of ineffable charm, who found the company of sinners at least as attractive as the company of saints, for the simple reason that the sinner is often enough well meaning and humble, and is spared at least the ugliness of respectable self- righteousness, which is of all things most destructive of the sense of proportion, and most divorced from natural joy. St. Francis took human nature as he found it, and recognised that failure has a beauty which is denied to success, for the simple reason that conscious failure makes a man both grateful and affectionate, while success too often makes him cold and hard.
And there is thus a wonderful fragrance about all that St. Francis did and said, though he must have been sorely tried by his stupid and pompous followers, who constantly misunderstood and misrepresented him, and dragged into the light what was meant to be the inner secret of his soul. There are few figures in the roll of saints so profoundly beautiful and touching as that of St. Francis, because he had in a pre-eminent degree that childlike freshness and trustfulness which is the secret of all charm.
Charm is of course not the same thing as beauty, but only a subdivision of it. There are many things in nature and in art, from the Matterhorn to “Samson Agonistes,” that have no charm, but that appeal to a different range of emotions, the sublime, the majestic, the awe-inspiring, things in the presence of which we are hardly at ease; but charm is essentially a comfortable quality, something that one gathers to one’s heart, and if there is a mystery about it, as there is about all beautiful things, it is not a mystery of which one would be afraid to know the secret. Charm is the quality which makes one desire to linger upon one’s pilgrimage, that cries to the soul to halt, to rest, to be content. It is intimate, reassuring, and appealing; and the shadow of it is the gentle pathos, which is in itself half a luxury of sadness, in the thought that sweet things must have an end. As Herrick wrote to the daffodils:
Stay, stay
Until the hasting day
Has run
But to the evensong:
And, having prayed together, we
Will go with you along.
We have short time to stay, as you, We have as short a spring;
As quick a growth to meet decay
As you, or anything.
In such a mood as that there is no sense of terror or despair at the quick-coming onset of death; no more dread of what may be than there is when the hamlet, with its little roofs and tall trees, is folded in the arms of the night, as the sunset dies behind the hill. Beauty may be a terrible thing, as in the sheeted cataract, with all its boiling eddies, or in the falling of the lightning from the womb of the cloud. There is desolation behind that, gigantic movement, ruthless force; but charm comes like a signal of security and good-will, and even its inevitable end is lit with something of mercy and quietness. The danger of charm is that it is the mother of sentiment; and the danger of sentiment is not that it is untrue, but that it takes from us the sense of proportion; we begin to be unable to do without our little scenes and sunsets; and the eye gets so used to dwelling upon the flower-strewn pleasaunce, with its screening trees, that it cannot bear to face the far horizon, with its menace of darkness and storm.
Yet we are very grateful to those who can teach us to turn our eyes to the charm which surrounds us, and a life which is lived without such perception is apt to be a rough and hurrying thing, even though it may also be both high and austere. Like most of life, the true success lies in not choosing one force and neglecting another, but in an expectant kind of compromise. The great affairs and facts of life flash upon us, whether we will or no; and even the man whose mind is bent upon the greatest hopes and aims may find strength and consolation in the lesser and simpler delights. Mighty spirits like, let us say, Carlyle and Ruskin, were not hampered or distracted from their further quest by the microscopic eye, the infinite zest for detail, which characterised both. No one ever spoke so finely as Carlyle of the salient features of moorland and hill, and the silence so deep that it was possible to hear the far- off sheep cropping the grass; no one ever noted so instantaneously the vivid gesture or the picturesque turn of speech, or dwelt more intently upon the pathetic sculpture of experience seen in the old humble workaday faces of country-folk. No one ever delighted more ecstatically than Ruskin in the colour of the amber cataract, with its soft, translucent rims, its flying spray, or in the dim splendours of some half-faded fresco, or in the intricate facade of the crumbling, crag-like church front. But they did not stay there; indeed, Carlyle, in his passionate career among verities and forces, hardly took enough account of the beauty so patiently entwined with mortal things; while Ruskin’s sharpest agonies were endured when he found, to his dismay, that men and women could not be induced by any appeal or invective to heed the message of beauty.
It is true that, however we linger, however passionately we love the small, sweet, encircling joys and delights of life, the tragic experience comes to us, whether we will or no. None escapes. And thus our care must be not to turn our eyes away from what in sterner moments we are apt to think mere shows and vanities, but to use them serenely and temperately. St. Augustine, in a magnificent apologue upon the glories and subtleties of light, can only end by the prayer that his heart may not thereby be seduced from heavenly things; but that is the false kind of asceticism, and it is nothing more than a fear of life, if our only concern with it is to shun and abhor the joy it would fain give us. But we may be sure that life has a meaning for us in its charm and loveliness; not the whole meaning, but still an immense significance. To make life into a continuous flight, a sad expectancy, a perpetual awe, is wilfully to select one range of experiences and to neglect its kindness and its good-will. We may grow weak in our sentiment if we make a tragedy out of life, if we cannot bear to have our comfortable arrangements disordered, our little circle of pleasures broken through. The triumph is to be ready for the change, and to know that if the perfect summer day comes to an end, the power that shaped it so, and made the heart swift to love it, has yet larger surprises and glories in store. If we do that, then the charm of life takes its place in our spirits as the evidence of something joyful, wistful, pleasant, bound up with the essence of things; if it disappears, like the gold or azure thread of the tapestry, it is only to emerge in the pattern farther on; and the victory is not to attach ourselves to the particular touches of beauty and fineness which we see in the familiar scene and the well-loved circle, but to recognise beauty as a spirit, a quality which is for ever making itself felt, for ever beckoning and whispering to us, and which will not fail us even if for a time the urgent wind drives us far into the night and the storm, among the crash of the breakers, and the scream of loud winds over the sea.
VI
SUNSET
The liquid kindling of the twilight, the western glow of clear- burning fires, bringing no weariness of heat but the exquisite coolness of darkling airs, is of all the ceremonial of the day the most solemn and sacred moment. The dawn has its own splendours, but it brightens out of secret mists and folded clouds into the common light of day, when the burden must be resumed and the common business of the world renewed again. But the sunset wanes from glory and majesty into the stillness of the star-hung night, when tired eyes may close in sleep, and rehearse the mystery of death; and so the dying down of light, with the suspension of daily activities, is of the nature of a benediction. Dawn brings the consecration of beauty to a new episode of life, bidding the soul to remember throughout the toil and eagerness of the day that the beginning was made in the innocent onrush of dewy light; but when the evening comes, the deeds and words of the daylight are irrevocable facts, and the mood is not one of forward-looking hope and adventure, but of unalterable memory, and of things dealt with so and not otherwise, which nothing can henceforward change or modify. If in the morning we feel that we have power over life, in the evening we know that, whether we have done ill or well, life’s power over ourselves has been asserted, and that thus and thus the record must stand.
And so the mood of evening is the larger and the wiser mood, because we must think less of ourselves and more of God. In the dawn it seems to us that we have our part to play, and that nothing, not even God, can prevent us from exercising our will upon the life about us; but in the evening we begin to wonder how much, after all, we have the strength to effect; we see that even our desires and impulses have their roots far back in a past which no restlessness of design or energy can touch; till we end by thankfulness that we have been allowed to feel and to experience the current of life at all. I sat the other day by the bedside of an old and gracious lady, the widow of a great artist, whose works with all their shapely form and dusky flashes of rich colour hung on the walls of her room. She had lived for many years in the forefront of a great fellowship of art and endeavour; she had seen and known intimately all the greatest figures in the art and literature of the last generation; and she was awaiting with perfect serenity and dignity the close. She said to me with a deep emotion, “Ah, the only thing that I desire is that I may continue to FEEL–that brings suffering in abundance with it, but while we suffer we are at least alive. Once or twice in my life I have felt the numbness of anguish, when a blow had fallen, and I could not even suffer. That is the only thing which I dread–not death, nor silence, but only the obliteration of feeling and love.” That was a wonderful saying, full of life and energy. She did not wish to recall the old days, nor hanker after them with an unsatisfied pain; and I saw that an immortal spirit dwelt in that frail body, like a bird in an outworn cage.
However much one may enjoy the onrush and vividness of life–I for one find that, though vitality runs now in more definite and habitual channels, though one has done with making vague impulsive experiments, though one wastes less time in undertaking doubtful enterprises, yet there is a great gain in the concentration of energy, and in the certain knowledge of what one’s definite work really is.
Far from finding the spring and motion of life diminished, I feel that the current of it runs with a sharper and clearer intensity, because I have learned my limitations, and expend no energy in useless enterprises. I have learned what the achievements are which come joyfully bearing their sheaves with them, and what are the trivial and fruitless aims. When I was younger I desired to be known and recognised and deferred to. I wanted to push my way discreetly into many companies, to produce an impression, to create a sense of admiration. Now as the sunset draws nearer, and the enriched light, withdrawn from the farther horizon, begins to pulsate more intensely in the quarter whence it must soon altogether fade, I begin to see that vague and widely ranging effects have a thinness and shallowness about them. It is a poor thing just to see oneself transiently reflected in a hundred little mirrors. There is no touch of reality about that. Little greetings, casual flashes of courteous talk, petty compliments–these are things that fade as soon as they are born. The only thing worth doing is a little bit of faithful and solid work, something given away which costs one real pain, a few ideas and thoughts worked patiently out, a few hearts really enlivened and inspirited. And then, too, comes the consciousness that much of one’s cherished labour is of no use at all except to oneself; that work is not a magnificent gift presented to others, but a wholesome privilege conceded to oneself, that the love which brought with it but a momentary flash of self-regarding pleasure is not love at all, and that only love which means suffering–not delicate regrets and luxurious reveries, but hard and hopeless pain–is worth the name of love at all. Those are some of the lights of sunset, the enfolding gleams that are on their way to death, and which yet testify that the light which wanes and lapses here, drawn reluctantly away from dark valley and sombre woodland, is yet striding ahead over dewy uplands and breaking seas, past the upheaving shoulder of the world.
But best of all the gifts of sunset to the spirit is the knowledge that behind all the whirling web of daylight, beyond all the noise and laughter and appetite and drudgery of life, lies the spirit of beauty that cannot be always revealed or traced in the louder and more urgent pageantry of the day. The sunset has the power of weaving a subtle and remote mystery over a scene that by day has nothing to show but a homely and obvious animation. I was travelling the other day and passed, just as the day began to decline, through the outskirts of a bustling, seaport town. It had all the interest and curiosity of life. Crowded warehouses, swinging up straw-packed crates into projecting penthouses; steamers with red-stained funnels, open-mouthed tubes, gangways, staircase heads, dangling boats, were moored by bustling wharves. One could not divine the use of half the strangely shaped objects with which the scene was furnished, or what the business could be of all the swarming and hurrying figures. Deep sea-horns blew and whistles shrilled, orders were given, hands waved. It was life at its fullest and busiest, but it was life demanding and enforcing its claim and concealing its further purposes. It was just a glimpse of something full of urgent haste, but pleasanter to watch than to mix with; then we passed through a wilderness of little houses, street after street, yard after yard. Presently we were rushing away from it all past a lonely sea-creek that ran far up into the low-lying land. That had a more silent life of its own; old dusky hulks lay at anchor in the channel; the tide ebbed away from mudflats and oozy inlets, the skeletons of worn-out boats stood up out of the weltering clay. Gradually, as the sun went down among orange stains and twisted cloud-wreaths, the creek narrowed and beyond lay a mysterious promontory with shadowy woods and low bare pasture-lands, with here and there a tower standing up or a solitary sea-mark, or a hamlet of clustered houses by the water’s edge, while the water between grew paler and stiller, reflecting the wan green of the sky. It is not easy to describe the effect of this scene, thus magically transfigured, upon the mind; but it is a very real and distinct emotion, though its charm depends upon the fact that it shifts the reality of the world to a further point, away from the definite shapes and colours, the tangible and visible relations of things, which become for an instant like a translucent curtain through which one catches a glimpse of a larger and more beautiful reality. The specific hopes, fears, schemes, designs, purposes of life, suddenly become an interlude and not an end. They do not become phantasmal and unreal, but they are known for a brief moment as only temporary conditions, which by their hardness and sharpness obscure a further and larger life, existing before they existed, and extending itself beyond their momentary pact and influence. All that one is engaged in busily saying and doing and enacting is seen in that instant to be only as a ripple on a deep pool. It does not make the activities of life either futile or avoidable; it only gives the mystical sense, that however urgent and important they may seem, there is something further, larger, greater, beyond them, of which they are a real part, but only a part.
Moreover, in my own experience, the further secret, whatever it is, is by no means wholly joyful and not at all light-hearted. It seems to me at such times that it is rather solemn, profound, serious, difficult, and sad. But it is not a heavy or depressing sadness– indeed, the thought is at once hopeful and above everything beautiful. It has nothing that is called sentimental about it. It is not full of rest and content and peace; it is rather strong and stern, though it is gentle too; but it is the kind of gentle strength which faces labour and hardness, not troubled by them, and indeed knowing that only thus can the secret be attained. There is no hint of easy, childlike happiness about the mood; there is a happiness in it, but it is an old and a wise happiness that has learned how to wait and is fully prepared for endurance. There is no fretfulness in it, no chafing over dreams unrealised, no impatience or disappointment. But it does not speak of an untroubled bliss–rather of a deep, sad and loving patience, which expects no fulfilment, no easy satisfaction of desire.
It always seems to me that the quality which most differentiates men is the power of recognising the Unknown. Some natures acquiesce buoyantly or wretchedly in present conditions, and cannot in any circumstances look beyond them; some again have a deep distaste for present conditions whatever they are; and again there are some who throw themselves eagerly and freely into present conditions, use experience, taste life, enjoy, grieve, dislike, but yet preserve a consciousness of something above and beyond. The idealist is one who has a need in his soul to worship, to admire, to love. The mistake made too often by religious idealists is to believe that this sense of worship can only be satisfied by religious and, even more narrowly, by ecclesiastical observance. For there are many idealists to whom religion with its scientific creeds and definite dogmas seems only a dreary sort of metaphysic, an attempt to define what is beyond definition. But there are some idealists who find the sense of worship and the consciousness of an immortal power in the high passions and affections of life. To these the human form, the spirit that looks out from human eyes, are the symbols of their mystery. Others find it in art and music, others again in the endless loveliness of nature, her seas and streams, her hills and woods. Others again find it in visions of helping and raising mankind out of base conditions, or in scientific investigation of the miraculous constitution of nature. It has a hundred forms and energies; but the one feature of it is the sense of some vast and mysterious Power, which holds the world in its grasp–a Power which can be dimly apprehended and even communicated with. Prayer is one manifestation of this sense, though prayer is but a formulation of one’s desires for oneself and for the world.
But the essential and vital part of the mystery is not what the soul asks of it, but the signals which it makes to the soul. And here I am but recording my own experience when I say that the lights and gleams of sunset, its golden inlets and cloud-ripples, the dusky veil it weaves about the world, is for my own spirit the solemnity which effects for me what I believe that the mass effects for a devoted Catholic–the unfolding in hints and symbols of the mysteries of God. An unbeliever may look on at a mass and see nothing but the vesture and the rite, a drama of woven paces and waving hands, when a believer may become aware of the very presence of the divine. And the sunset has for me that same unveiling of the beauty of God; it illumines and transfigures life; it shows me visibly and sacredly that beauty pure and stainless runs from end to end of the universe, and calls upon me to adore it, to prostrate myself before its divine essence. The fact that another may see it carelessly and indifferently makes no difference. It only means that not thus does he perceive God. But, for myself, I know no experience more wholly and deeply religious than when I pass in solitude among deep stream-fed valleys, or over the wide fenland, or through the familiar hamlet, and see the dying day flame and smoulder far down in the west among cloudy pavilions or in tranquil spaces of clear sky. Then the well-known land whose homely, day- long energies I know seems to gather itself together into a far and silent adoration, to commit itself trustfully and quietly to God, to receive His endless benediction, and in that moment to become itself eternal in a soft harmony of voiceless praise and passionate desire.
VII
THE HOUSE OF PENGERSICK
There are days–perhaps it is well that they are not more common– when by some singular harmony of body and spirit, every little sound and sight strikes on the senses with a peculiar sharpness and distinctness of quality, has a keen and racy savour, and comes as delightfully home to the mind as cool well-water to thirsty lips. Everything seems in place, in some well-designed combination or symphony of the senses; and more than that–the sound, the sight, whatever it be, sets free a whole train of far-reaching and mysterious thoughts, that seem to flash the secret of life on the spirit–or rather hint it in a tender, smiling way, as a mother nods a delighted acquiescence to the eager questions of a child face to face with some happy surprise. That day of January was just such a day to me, as we drove along the dreary road from Marazion to Helston, by ruined mine-towers with their heaps of scoriae, looking out to the sea on the one hand, and on the other to the low, monotonous slopes of tilth and pasture, rising and falling like broad-backed waves, with here and there a wild and broken wood of firs, like the forest of Broceliande, or a holt of wind-brushed, fawn-coloured ash-trees, half empurpled by the coming of spring, in some rushy dingle by the stream side.
It was a cool grey day, with a haze over the sea, the gusty sky of yesterday having hardened into delicate flakes of pearly cloud, like the sand on some wave-beaten beach. It was all infinitely soft and refreshing to the eye, that outspread pastoral landscape, seen in a low dusk, like the dusk of a winter dawn.
It was then that in a little hollow to our right we saw the old House of Pengersick–what a grim, lean, hungry sort of name! We made our way down along a little road, the big worn flints standing up out of the gravel, by brakes of bramble, turf-walls where the ferns grew thick, by bits of wild upland covered with gorse and rusty bracken, and down at last to the tiny hamlet–four or five low white houses, in little gardens where the escallonia grew thick and glossy, the purple veronica bloomed richly, and the green fleshy mesembryanthemum tumbled and dripped over the fences. The tower itself rose straight out of a farmyard, where calves stared through the gate, pigs and hens routed and picked in the mire. I have seldom seen so beautiful a bit of building: it was a great square battlemented tower, with a turret, the mullioned windows stopped up with sea-worn boulders. The whole built of very peculiar stone, of a dark grey tinge, weathered on the seaward side to a most delicate silvery grey, with ivy sprawling over it in places, like water shot out from a pail over a stone floor. There were just a few traces of other buildings in the sheds and walls, and bits of carved stonework piled up in a rockery. No doubt the little farm itself and the cottages were all built out of the ruins.
From the tower itself–it has a few bare rooms filled with farm lumber–one can see down the valley to the long grey line of the Prah sands, and the low dusky cliffs of Hove point, where the waves were breaking white.
I suppose it needed to be a strong place. The Algiers and Sallee pirates used to make descents upon this coast till a comparatively recent date. As late as 1636 they kidnapped seven boats and forty- two fishermen off the Manacles, none of whom were ever heard of again. Eighty fishermen from Looe were captured in one day, and there is a complaint extant from the justices of Cornwall to the lord lieutenant that in one year Cornwall had lost above a thousand mariners thus!
But there was also another side to the picture; the natives all along this coast were dreadful wreckers and plunderers themselves, and made little account of burning a ship and knocking the survivors on the head. The very parish, Germoe, in which Pengersick stands, had as bad a name as any in Cornwall:
God keep us from rocks and shelving sands, And save us from Breage and Germoe men’s hands,
runs the old rhyme. And there is an evil old story of how a treasure ship, the St. Andrew of Portugal, went ashore at Gunwalloe in January 1526. There were thousands of cakes of copper and silver on board, plate, pearls, jewels, chains, brooches, arras, satins, velvets, sets of armour for the King of Portugal, and a huge chest of coined gold.
The wretched crew got most of the treasure to land and stacked it on the cliffs, when John Milliton of Pengersick, with a St. Aubyn and a Godolphin, came down with sixty armed men, and took all the treasure away. Complaints were made, and the three gentlemen protested that they had but ridden down to save the crew, had found them destitute, and had even given them money. But I daresay the big guest-chamber of Pengersick was hung with Portuguese arras for many a long year afterwards.
The Millitons died out, and their land passed by purchase or marriage to the descendants of another of the three pious squires, Godolphin of Godolphin–and belongs to-day to his descendant, the Duke of Leeds.
One would have thought that men could not have borne to live so, in such deadly insecurity. But probably they troubled their heads little about the pirates, kept the women and children at home, and set a retainer on the cliff in open weather, to scan the offing for the light-rigged barques, while poorer folk took their chance. We live among a different set of risks now, and think little of them, as the days pass.
The life of the tower was simple and hardy enough–some fishing and hunting, some setting of springes on the moor for woodcock and rabbits, much farmwork, solid eating and drinking, and an occasional carouse–a rude, plentiful, healthy life, perhaps not as far removed from our own as we like to believe.
But the old tower spoke to me to-day of different things, of the buried life of the past, of the strange drift of human souls through the world for their little span of life, love, and sorrow, and all so pathetically ignorant of what goes before and follows after, why it so comes about, and what is the final aim of the will we blindly serve. Here was a house of men, I said to myself, with the same hopes and fears and fancies as myself, and yet none of them, could I recall them, could give me any reason for the life we thus hurriedly live, so much of it entirely joyful and delightful, so much of it distasteful and afflicting. On a sunny day of summer, with the sea a sapphire blue, set with great purple patches, the scent of the gorse in the air, the sound of the clear stream in one’s ears, what could be sweeter than to live? and even on dark days, when the wind volleys up from the sea, and the rain dashes on the windows, and the gulls veer and sail overhead, the great guest- room with its fire of wreckage, the women working, the children playing about, must have been a pleasant place enough. But even to the strongest and boldest of the old squires the end came, as the waggon with the coffin jolted along the stony lane, and the bell of Germoe came faintly over the hill.
But I could not think of that to-day, with a secret joy in my heart; I thought rather of the splendid mystery of life, that seems to screen from us something more gracious still–the steep velvet sky full of star-dust, the flush of spring in sunlit orchards, the soft, thunderous echoes of great ocean billows, the orange glow of sunset behind dark woods: all that background of life; and then the converse of friend with friend, the intercepted glance of wondering eyes, the whispered message of the heart. All this, and a crowd of other sweet images and fancies came upon me in a rush to-day, like scents from a twilight garden, as I watched the old silvery tower stand up bluff and square, with the dark moorland behind it, and the little houses clustering about its feet.
VIII
VILLAGES
I wonder if any human being has ever expended as much sincere and unrequited love upon the little pastoral villages about Cambridge as I have. No one ever seems to me to take the smallest interest in them or to know them apart or to remember where they are. It is true that it takes a very faithful lover to distinguish instantly and impeccably between Histon, Hinxton, Hauxton, Harston, and Harlton; but to me they have all of them a perfectly distinct quality, and make a series of charming little pastoral pictures in the mind. Who shall justly and perfectly assess the beautiful claims of Great and Little Eversden? I doubt if any inhabitant of Cambridge but myself and one friend of mine, a good man and true, could do it. Yet it is as pleasant to have a connoisseurship in villages as to have a connoisseurship in wines or cigars, though it is not so regarded.
What is the charm of them? That I cannot say. It is a mystery, like the charm of all sweet things; and further, what is the meaning of love for an inanimate thing, with no individuality, no personality, no power of returning love? The charm of love is that one discerns some spirit making signals back. “I like you to be here, I trust you, I am glad to be with you, I wish to give you something, to increase your joy, as mine is increased.” That, or something like that, is what one reads in the eyes and faces and gestures of those whom one dares to love. One would otherwise be sadly and mournfully alone if one could not come across the traces of something, some one whose heart leaps up and whose pulse quickens at the proximity of comrade and friend and lover. But even so there is always the thought of the parting ahead, when, after the sharing of joy, each has to go on his way alone.
Then, one may love animals; but that is a very strange love, for the man and the animal cannot understand each other. The dog may be a true and faithful comrade, and there really is nothing in the world more wonderful than the trustful love of a dog for a man. One may love a horse, I suppose, though the horse is a foolish creature at best; one may have a sober friendship with a cat, though a cat does little more than tolerate one; and a bird can be a merry little playfellow: but the terror of wild animals for men has something rather dreadful about it, because it stands for many centuries of cruel wrong-doing.
And one may love, too, with a wistful sort of love the works of men, pictures, music, statues; but that, I think, is because one discerns a human figure at the end of a vista–a figure hurrying away through the ages, but whom one feels one could have loved had time and place only allowed.
But when it comes to loving trees and flowers, streams and hills, buildings and fields, what is it that happens? I have a perfectly distinct feeling about these little villages hereabouts. Some are to me like courteous strangers, some like dull and indifferent people, some like pleasant, genial folk whom I am mildly pleased to see; but with some I have a real and devoted friendship. I like visiting them, and if I cannot visit them, I think of them; when I am far away the thought of them comes across me, and I am glad to think of them waiting there for me, nestling under their hill, the smoke going up above the apple-orchards.
One or two of them are particularly beloved because I visited them first thirty years ago, when I was an undergraduate, and the thought of the old days and the old friendships springs up again like a sweet and far-off fragrance when I enter them. Yet I do not know any of the people who live in these villages, though by dint of going there often there are a few people by whom I am recognised and saluted.
But let me take one village in particular, and I will not name it, because one ought not to publish the names of those whom one loves. What does it consist of? It straggles along a rough and ill-laid lane, under a little wold, once a sheep-walk, now long ploughed up. The soil of the wold is pale, so that in the new-ploughed fields there rest soft, creamlike shadows when the evening sun falls aslant. There are two or three substantial farmhouses of red brick, comfortable old places, with sheds and ricks and cattle-byres and barns close about them. And I think it is strange that the scent of a cattle-byre, with its rich manure and its oozing pools, is not ungrateful to the human sense. It ought to be, but it is not. It gives one, by long inheritance, no doubt, a homelike feeling.
Then there are many plastered, white-walled, irregular cottages, very quaint and pretty, perhaps a couple of centuries old, very ill built, no doubt, but enchanting to look at; there is a new schoolhouse, very ugly at present, with its smart red brick and its stone facings–ugly because it does not seem to have grown up out of the place, but to have been brought there by rail; and there are a few new yellow-brick cottages, probably much pleasanter to live in than the old ones, but with no sort of interest or charm. The whole is surrounded by little fields, orchards, closes, paddocks, and a good many great elms stand up above the house-roofs. There is one quaint old farm, with a moat and a dove-cote and a fine, old mellow brick wall surrounded by little pollarded elms, very quiet and characteristic; and then there is a big, ancient church, by whom built one cannot divine, because there is no squire in the village, and the farmers and labourers could no more build such a church now than they could build a stellar observatory. It would cost nowadays not less than ten thousand pounds, and there is no record of who gave the money or who the architect was. It has a fine tower and a couple of solid bells; it has a few bits of good brass-work, a chandelier and some candlesticks, and it has a fine eighteenth-century tomb in a corner, with a huge slab of black basalt on the top, and a heraldic shield and a very obsequious inscription, which might apply to anyone, and yet could be true of nobody. Why the particular old gentleman should want to sleep there, or who was willing to spend so much on his lying in state, no one knows, and I fear that no one cares except myself.
There are a few little bits of old glass in the church, in the traceries of the windows, just enough to show that some one liked making pretty things, and that some one else cared enough to pay for them. And then there is a solid rectory by the church, inhabited for centuries by fellows of a certain Cambridge college. I do not expect that they lived there very much. Probably they rode over on Sundays, read two services, and had a cold luncheon in between; perhaps they visited a sick parishioner, and even came over on a week-day for a marriage or a funeral; and I daresay that in the summer, when the college was deserted, they came and lived there for a few weeks, rather bored, and longing for the warm combination room and the college port and the gossip and stir of the place.
That is really all, I think. And what is there to love in all that?
Well, it is a little space of earth in which life has been going on for I daresay a thousand years. The whole place has grown slowly up out of the love and care and work of man. Perhaps there were nothing but little huts and hovels at first, with a tiny rubble church; then the houses grew a little bigger and better. Perhaps it was emptied again by the Black Death, which took a long toll of victims hereabouts. Shepherds, ploughmen, hedgers, ditchers, farmers, an ale-house-keeper, a shopkeeper or two, and a priest– that has been the village for a thousand years. Patient, stupid, toilsome, unimaginative, kindly little lives, I daresay. Not much interested in one another, ill educated, gossipy, brutish, superstitious, but surprised perhaps into sudden passions of love, and still more surprised perhaps by the joys of fatherhood and motherhood; with children of all ages growing up, pretty and engaging and dirty and amusing and naughty, fading one by one into dull and sober age, and into decrepitude, and the churchyard at the end of all!
Well, I think all that pathetic and mysterious, and beautiful with the beauty that reality has. I want to know who all the folks were, what they looked like, what they cared about or thought about, how they made terms with pain and death, what they hoped, expected, feared, and what has become of them. Everyone as urgently and vehemently and interestedly alive as I myself, and yet none of them with the slightest idea of how they got there or whither they were going–the great, helpless, good-natured, passive army of men and women, pouring like a stream through the world, and borne away on the wings of the wind. They were glad to be alive, no doubt, when the sun fell on the apple-orchard, and the scent of the fruit was in the air, and the bees hummed round the blossoms, when people smile at each other and say kind and meaningless things; they were afraid, no doubt, as they lay in pain in the stuffy attics, with the night wind blustering round the chimney-stack, and hoped to be well again. Then there were occasions and treats, the Sunday dinner, the wedding, the ride in the farm-cart to Cambridge, the visit of the married sister from her home close by. I do not suppose they knew or cared what was happening in the world. War and politics made little difference to them. They knew about the weather, they cared perhaps about their work, they liked the Sunday holiday–all very dim and simple, thoughts not expressed, feelings not uttered, experience summed up in little bits of phrases. Yet I like to think that they were pleased with the look of the place without knowing why. I don’t deceive myself about all this, or make it out as idyllic. I don’t exactly wish to have lived thus, and I expect it was coarse, greedy, dull, ugly, a great deal of it; but though I can think fine thoughts about it, and put my thoughts into musical words, I do not honestly believe that my life, my hopes, my feelings differ very much from the experience of these old people.
Of course I have books and pictures and intellectual fancies and ideas; but that is only an elaborate game that I play, the things I notice and recognise: but I expect the old hearts and minds were at work, too, noticing and observing and recording; and all my flourish of talk and thought is only a superficial affair.
And what consecrates and lights up the little place for me, touches it with golden hues, makes it moving, touching, beautiful, is the thought of all that strange, unconscious life, the love and hate, the fear and the content, the joy and sorrow, that has surged to and fro among the thatched roofs and apple-orchards so many centuries before I came into being, and will continue when I am trodden into the dust.
When I came here first thirty years ago, exploring with a friend long dead the country-side, it was, I am sure, the same thought that made the place beautiful. I could not then put it into words; I have learned to do that since, and word-painting is a very pleasant pastime. It was a hot, bright summer day–I recall the scent of the clover in the air–and there came on me that curious uplifting of the heart, that wonder as to what all the warmth and scent, the green-piled tree, the grazing cows, the children trotting to and fro, could possibly mean, or why it was all so utterly delightful. It was not a religious feeling, but there was a sense of a great, good-natured, beauty-loving mind behind it all–a mind very like our own, and yet even then with a shadow striking across it–the shadow of pain and grief and hollow farewells.
I was not a very contented boy in those days, in some bewilderment of both mind and heart, having had my first experience that life could be hard and intricate. The world was sweeter to me, though not so interesting as it now is; but I had just the same deep desire as I have now, though it has not been satisfied, to find something strong and secure and permanent, some heart to trust utterly and entirely, something that could understand and comfort and explain and reassure, a power which one could clasp hands with, as a child lays its delicate finger in a strong, enfolding palm, and never be in any doubt again. It is one’s weakness which is so tiring, so disappointing; and yet I do not want a careless, indifferent, brutal, healthy strength at all. It is the strength of love and peace that I want, not to be afraid, not to be troubled. It is all somewhere, I do not doubt:
Yet, oh, the place could I but find!
I have been through my village this very day. The sun was just beginning to slope to the west; the sun poured out his rays of gold from underneath the shadow of a great, dark, up-piled cloud–the long rays which my nurse used to tell me were sucking up water, but which I believed to be the eye of God. The trees were bare, but the elm-buds were red, and the willow-rods were crimson with spring; the little stream bubbled clearly off the hill; and the cottage gardens were full of up-thrusting blades; while the mezereons were all aflame with bloom. Life moving, pausing, rushing past! I wonder. When I pass the gate, if I see the dawn of that other morning, I cannot help feeling that I shall want to see my little village again, to loiter down the lane among the white-gabled houses. Shall I be much wiser then than I am now? Shall I have seen or heard something which will set my anxious mind at rest? Who can tell me? And yet the old, gnarled apple-boughs, with the blue sky behind them, and the new-springing grass all seem to hold the secret, which I want as much to interpret and make my own as when I wandered through the hamlet under the wold more than thirty years ago.
IX
DREAMS
There is a movement nowadays among the philosophers who study the laws of thought, to lay a strong emphasis upon the phenomena of dreams; what part of us is it that enacts with such strange zest and vividness, and yet with so mysterious a disregard of ordinary motives and conventions, the pageant of dreams? Like many other things which befall us in daily life, dreams are so familiar a fact, that we often forget to wonder at the marvellousness of it all. The two points about dreams which seem to me entirely inexplicable are: firstly, that they are so much occupied with visual impressions, and secondly, that though they are all self- invented and self-produced, they yet contrive to strike upon the mind with a marvellous freshness of emotion and surprise. Let us take these two points a little more in detail.
When one awakes from a vivid dream one generally has the impression of a scene of some kind, which has been mainly received through the medium of the eye. I suppose that this varies with different people, but my own dreams are rather sharply divided into certain classes. I am oftenest a silent spectator of landscapes of ineffable beauty, such as a great river, as blue as sapphire, rolling majestically down between vast sandstone cliffs, or among wooded hills, piled thick with trees rich in blossom; or I see stately buildings crowded together among woodlands, with long carved fronts of stone and airy towers. These dreams are peculiarly uplifting and stimulating, and I wake from them with an extraordinary sense of beauty and wonder; or else I see from some window or balcony a great ceremony of some quite unintelligible kind proceeding, a procession with richly dressed persons walking or riding, or a religious pomp taking place in a dim pillared interior. All such dreams pass by in absolute silence. I have no idea where I am, nor what is happening, nor am I curious to know. No voice is upraised, and there is no one at hand to converse with.
Then again there are dreams of which the substance is animated and vivid conversation. I have long and confidential talks with people like the Pope or the Tsar of Russia. They ask my advice, they quote my books, and I am surprised to find them so familiar and accessible. Or I am in a strange house with an unknown party of guests, and person after person comes up to tell me all kinds of interesting facts and details. Or else, as often happens to me, I meet people long since dead; I dream constantly, for instance, about my father. I see him by chance at a railway station, we congratulate ourselves upon the happy accident of meeting; he takes my arm, he talks smilingly and indulgently; and the only way in which the knowledge that he is dead affects the dream is that I feel bewildered at having seen so little of him of late, and even ask him where he has been for so long that we have not met oftener.
Very occasionally I hear music in a dream. I well remember hearing four musicians with little instruments like silver flutes play a quartet of infinite sweetness; but most of my adventures take place either among fine landscapes or in familiar conversation.
At one time, as a child, I had an often repeated dream. We were then living in an old house at Lincoln, called the Chancery. It was a large rambling place, with some interesting medieval features, such as a stone winding staircase, a wooden Tudor screen, built into a wall, and formerly belonging to the chapel of the house, There were, moreover, certain quite unaccountable spaces, where the external measurements of passages did not correspond with the measurement of rooms within. This fact excited our childish imagination, and probably was the origin of the dream.
It always began in the same way. I would appear to be descending a staircase which led up into a lobby, and would find that a certain step rattled as I trod upon it. Upon examination the step proved to be hinged, and on opening it, the head of a staircase appeared, leading downwards. Though, as I say, the dream was often repeated, it was always with the same shock of surprise that I made the discovery. I used to squeeze in through the opening, close the step behind me, and go down the stairs; the place was dimly lighted with some artificial light, the source of which I could never discover. At the bottom a large vaulted room was visible, of great extent, fitted with iron-barred stalls as in a stable. These stalls were tenanted by animals; there were dogs, tigers, and lions. They were all very tame, and delighted to see me. I used to go into the stalls one by one, feed and play with the animals, and enjoy myself very much. There was never any custodian to be seen, and it never occurred to me to wonder how the animals had got there, nor to whom they belonged. After spending a long time with my menagerie, I used to return; and the only thing that seemed of importance to me was that I should not be seen leaving the place. I used to raise the step cautiously and listen, so as to be sure that there was no one about; generally in the dream some one came down the stairs over my head; and I then waited, crouched below, with a sense of delightful adventure, until the person had passed by, when I cautiously extricated myself. This dream became quite familiar to me, so that I used to hope in my mind, on going to bed, that I might be about to see the animals. but I was often disappointed, and dreamed of other things. This dream visited me at irregular intervals for I should say about two or three years, and then I had it no more; but the singular fact about it was that it always came with the same sense of wonder and delight, and while actually dreaming it, I never realised that I had seen it before.
The only other tendency to a recurring dream that I have ever noticed was in the course of the long illness of which I have written elsewhere; my dreams were invariably pleasant and agreeable at that time; but I constantly had the experience in the course of them of seeing something of a profound blackness. Sometimes it was a man in a cloak, sometimes an open door with an intensely black space within, sometimes a bird, like a raven or a crow; oftenest of all it took the shape of a small black cubical box, which lay on a table, without any apparent lid or means of opening it. This I used to take up in my hands, and find very heavy; but the predominance of some intensely black object, which I have never experienced before or since, was too marked to be a mere coincidence; and I have little doubt that it was some obscure symptom of my condition, and had some definite physical cause. Indeed, at the same time, I was occasionally aware of the presence of something black in waking hours, not a thing definitely seen, but existing dimly in a visual cell. After I recovered, this left me, and I have never seen it since.
These are the more coherent kind of dreams; but there is another kind of a vaguely anxious character, which consist of endless attempts to catch trains, or to fulfil social engagements, and are full of hurry and dismay. Or one dreams that one has been condemned to death for some unknown offence, and the time draws near; some little while ago I spent the night under these circumstances interviewing different members of the Government in a vain attempt to discover the reasons for my condemnation; they could none of them give me a specific account of the affair, and could only politely deplore that it was necessary to make an example. “Depend upon it,” said Mr. Lloyd-George to me, “SUBSTANTIAL justice will be done!” “But that is no consolation to me,” I said. “No,” he replied kindly, “it would hardly amount to that!”
But out of all this there emerges the fact that after a vivid dream, one’s memory is full of pictures of things seen quite as distinctly, indeed often more distinctly, than in real life. I have a clearer recollection of certain dream-landscapes than I have of many scenes actually beheld with the eye; and this sets me wondering how the effect is brought about, and how the memory is enabled to store what appears to be a visual impression, by some reflex action of the nerves of sight.
Then there is the second point, that of the lively emotions stirred by dreams. It would really appear that there must be two distinct personalities at work, without any connection between them, one unconsciously inventing and the other consciously observing. I dreamed not long ago that I was walking beside the lake at Riseholme, the former palace of the bishops of Lincoln, where I often went as a child. I saw that the level of the lake had sunk, and that there was a great bank of shingle between the water and the shore, on which I proceeded to pace. I was attracted by something sticking out of the bank, and on going up to it, I saw that it was the base of a curious metal cup. I pulled it out and saw that I had found a great golden chalice, much dimmed with age and weather. Then I saw that farther in the bank there were a number of cups, patens, candlesticks, flagons, of great antiquity and beauty. I then recollected that I had heard as a child (this was wholly imaginary, of course) that there had once been a great robbery of cathedral plate at Lincoln, and that one of the bishops had been vaguely suspected of being concerned in it; and I saw at once that I had stumbled on the hoard, stowed there no doubt by guilty episcopal hands–I even recollected the name of the bishop concerned.
Now as a matter of fact one part of my mind must have been ahead inventing this story, while the other part of the mind was apprehending it with astonishment and excitement. Yet the observant part of the mind was utterly unaware of the fact that I was myself originating it all. And the only natural inference would seem to be that there is a real duality of mind at work.
For when one is composing a story, in ordinary waking moments, one has the sense that one is inventing and controlling the incidents. In dreams this sense of proprietorship is utterly lost; one seems to have no power over the inventive part of the mind; one can only helplessly follow its lead, and be amazed at its creations. And yet, sometimes, in a dream of tragic intensity, as one begins to awake, a third person seems to intervene, and says reassuringly that it is only a dream. This intervention seems to disconcert the inventor, who then promptly retires, while it brings sudden relief to the timid and frightened observer. It would seem then that the rational self reasserts itself, and that the two personalities, one of which has been creating and the other observing, come in like dogs to heel.
Another very curious part of dreams is that they concern themselves so very little with the current thoughts of life. My dreams are mostly composed, as I have said, of landscapes, ceremonies, conversations, sensational adventures, muddling engagements. When I was a schoolmaster, I seldom dreamed of school; now that I am no longer a schoolmaster, I do sometimes dream of school, of trying to keep order in immense classrooms, or hurrying about in search of my form. When I had my long and dreary illness, lasting for two years, I invariably had happy dreams. Now that I am well again, I often have dreams of causeless and poignant melancholy. It is the rarest thing in the world for me to be able to connect my dreams with anything which has recently happened; I cannot say that marvellous landscapes, ceremonies, conversations with exalted personages, sensational incidents, play any considerable part in my life; and yet these are the constituent elements in my dreams. The scientific students of psychology say that the principal stuff of dreams seems to be furnished by the early experience of life; and when they are dealing with mental ailments, they say that delusions and obsessions are often explained by the study of the dreams of diseased brains, which point as a rule either to some unfulfilled desire, or to some severe nervous shock sustained in childhood. But I cannot discern any predominant cause of my own elaborate visions; the only physical cause which seems to me to be very active in producing dreams is if I am either too hot or too cold in bed. A sudden change of temperature in the night is the one thing which seems to me quite certain to produce a great crop of dreams.
Another very curious fact about my dreams is that I am wholly deserted by any moral sense. I have stolen interesting objects, I have even killed people in dreams, without adequate cause; but I am then entirely devoid of remorse, and only anxious to escape detection. I have never felt anything of the nature of shame or regret in a dream. I find myself anxious indeed, but fertile in expedients for escaping unscathed. On the other hand, certain emotions are very active in dreams. I sometimes appear to go with a brother or sister through the rooms or gardens of a house, which on awaking proves to be wholly imaginary, and recall with my companion all sorts of pathetic and delightful incidents of childhood which seem to have taken place there.
Again, though much of my life is given to writing, I hardly ever find myself composing anything in a dream. Once I wrote a poem in my sleep, a curious Elizabethan lyric, which may be found in the Oxford Book of Verse, called “The Phoenix.” It is not the sort of thing that I have ever written before or since. It came to me on the night before my birthday, in 1891, I think, when I was staying with a friend at the Dun Bull Hotel, by Hawes Water in Westmorland. I scribbled the lyric down on awaking. I afterwards added a verse, thinking the poem incomplete. I published it in a book of poems, and showed the proof to a friend, who said to me, pointing to the added stanza: “Ah, you must omit that stanza–it is quite out of keeping with the rest of the poem!”
But this is a quite unique experience, except that I once dreamed I was present at a confirmation service, at which a very singular hymn was sung, which I recollected on waking, and which is far too grotesque to write down, being addressed, as it was, to the bishop who was to perform the rite. At the time, however, it seemed to me both moving and appropriate.
It is often said that dreams only take place either when one is just going to sleep or beginning to awake. But that is not my experience. I have occasionally been awakened suddenly by some loud sound, and on those occasions I have come out of dreams of an intensity and vividness that I have never known equalled. Neither is it true in my experience that dreamful sleep is unrefreshing. I should say it was rather the other way. Profound and heavy sleep is generally to me a sign that I am not very well; but a sleep full of happy and interesting dreams is generally succeeded by a feeling of freshness and gaiety, as if one had been both rested and well entertained.
These are only a few scattered personal experiences, and I have no philosophy of dreams to suggest. It is in my case an inherited power. My father was the most vivid and persistent dreamer I have ever met, and his dreams had a quality of unexpectedness and interest of which I have never known the like. The dream of his, which I have told in his biography, of the finding of the grave of the horse of Titus Oates, seems to me one of the most extraordinary pieces of invention I have ever heard, because of the conversation which took place before he realised what the slab actually was.
He dreamed that he was standing in Westminster Abbey with Dean Stanley, looking at a small cracked slab of slate with letters on it. “We’ve found it,” said Stanley. “Yes,” said my father, “and how do you account for it?” “Why,” said Stanley, “I suppose it is intended to commemorate the fact that the animal innocence was not affected by the villainies of the master.” “Of course!” said my father, who was still quite unaware what the inscription referred to. He then saw on the slab the letters ITI CAPITANI, and knew that the stone was one that had marked the grave of Titus Oates’ horse, and that the whole inscription must have been EQUUS TITI CAPITANI,- -“The horse of Titus the Captain”–the “Captain” referring to the fact that my father then recollected that Titus Oates had been a Train-band Captain.
My only really remarkable dream containing a presentiment or rather a clairvoyance of a singular kind, hardly explicable as a mere coincidence, has occurred to me since I began this paper.
On the night of December 8, 1914, I dreamed that I was walking along a country road, between hedges. To the left was a little country house, in a park. I was proposing to call there, to see, I thought, an old friend of mine, Miss Adie Browne, who has been dead for some years, though in my dream I thought of her as alive.
I came up with four people, walking along the road in the same direction as myself. There was an elderly man, a younger man, red- haired, walking very lightly, in knickerbockers, and two boys whom I took to be the sons of the younger man. I recognised the elder man as a friend, though I cannot now remember who he appeared to be. He nodded and smiled to me, and I joined the party. Just as I did so, the younger man said, “I am going to call on a lady, an elderly cousin of mine, who lives here!” He said this to his companions, not to me, and I became aware that he was speaking of Miss Adie Browne. The older man said to me, “You have not been introduced,” and then, presenting the younger man, he said, “This is Lord Radstock!” We shook hands and I said, “Do you know, I am very much surprised; I understood Lord Radstock to be a much older man!”
I do not remember any more of the dream; but it had been very vivid, and when I was called, I went over it in my mind. A few minutes later, the Times of December 9 was brought to my bedroom, and opening it, I saw the sudden death of Lord Radstock announced. I had not known that he was ill, and indeed had never thought of him for years; but the strange thing is this, that he was a cousin of Miss Adie Browne’s, and she used to tell me interesting stories about him. I do not suppose that since her death I have ever heard his name mentioned, and I had never met him. So that, as a matter of fact, when I dreamed my dream, the old Lord Radstock was dead, and his son, who is a man of fifty-four, was the new Lord Radstock. The man I saw in my dream was not, I should say, more than about forty-five; but I remember little of him, except that he had red hair.
I do not take in an evening paper, but I do not think there was any announcement of Lord Radstock’s illness, on the previous day; in fact his death seems to have been quite sudden and unexpected. Apart from coincidence, the rational explanation might be that my mind was in some sort of telepathic communication with that of my old and dear friend Miss Adie Browne, who is indeed often in my mind, and one would also have to presuppose that her spirit was likewise aware of her cousin Lord Radstock’s death. I do not advance this as the only explanation, but it seems to me a not impossible one of a mysterious affair.
My conclusion, such as it is, would be that the rational and moral faculties are in suspense in dreams, and that it is a wholly primitive part of one’s essence that is at work. The creative power seems to be very strong, and to have a vigorous faculty of combining and exaggerating the materials of memory; but it deals mainly with rather childish emotions, with shapes and colours, with impressive and distinguished people, with things marvellous and sensational, with troublesome and perplexed adventures. It does not go far in search of motives; in the train-catching dreams, for instance, I never know exactly where I am going, or what is the object of my journey; in the ceremonial dreams, I seldom have any notion of what is being celebrated.
But what I cannot in the least understand is the complete withdrawal of consciousness from the inventive part of the mind, especially when the observant part is so eagerly and alertly aware of all that is happening. Moreover, I can never understand the curious way in which dream-experiences, so vivid at the time, melt away upon awakening. If one rehearses a dream in memory the moment one awakes, it becomes a very distinct affair. If one does not do this, it fades swiftly, and though one has a vague sense of rich adventures, half an hour later there seems to be no power whatever of recovering them.
Strangest of all, the inventive power in dreams seems to have a range and an intensity which does not exist when one is awake. I have not the slightest power, in waking life, of conceiving and visualising the astonishing landscapes which I see in dreams. I can recall actual scenes with great distinctness, but the glowing colour and the prodigious forms of my landscape visions are wholly beyond my power of thought.
Lastly, I have never had any dream of any real or vital significance, any warning or presentiment, anything which bore in the least degree upon the issues of life.
There is a beautiful passage in the “Purgatorio” of Dante about the dawn: he writes
In that hour
When near the dawn the swallow her sad song, Haply remembering ancient grief, renews; And when our minds, more wanderers from the flesh And less by thought restrained, are, as ‘t were, full Of holy divination in their dreams.
I suppose that it would be possible to interpret one’s dreams symbolically; but in my own case my dream-experiences all seem to belong to a wholly different person from myself, a light-hearted, childish, careless creature, full of animation and inquisitiveness, buoyant and thoughtless, content to look neither forwards nor backwards, wholly without responsibility or intelligence, just borne along by the pleasure of the moment, perfectly harmless and friendly as a rule, a sort of cheerful butterfly. That is not in the least my waking temperament; but it fills me sometimes with an uneasy suspicion that it is more like myself than I know.
X
THE VISITANT
I am going to try to put into words a very singular and very elusive experience which visits me not infrequently. I cannot say when it began, but I first became aware of it about four years ago.
It takes the form of an instantaneous mental vision, not very distinct but still not to be mistaken for anything else, of two people, a husband and wife, who are living somewhere in a large newly built house. The husband is a man of, I suppose, about forty– the wife is a trifle younger, and they are childless. The husband is an active, well-built man with light, almost golden hair, rather coarse in texture, and with a pointed beard of the same hue. He has fine, clean-cut, muscular hands, and he wears, as I see him, a rough, rather shabby suit of light, homespun cloth. The wife is of fair complexion, a beautiful woman, with brown hair, and dressed, I think, in a very simple and rather peculiar dress. They are people of high principle, wealthy, and with cultivated tastes. They care for music and books and art. The husband has no profession. They live in a wide, well-wooded landscape, I am inclined to think in Sussex, in a newly built house, as I have said, of white plaster and timber, tiled, with many gables and with two large, bow- windowed rooms, rather low, the big mullioned oriels of which, with leaded roofs, are a rather conspicuous feature of the house. The house stands on a slightly rising ground, in a park-like demesne of a few acres, well timbered, and with open paddocks of grass. The house is approached by a drive from the main road, with two big gateposts of brick, and a white gate between. To the right of the house among the trees is the louvre of a stable. There is a terrace just in front of the house, full of flowers, with a low brick wall in front of it separating it from the field. I see the house and its surroundings more clearly than I see the figures themselves.
I cannot see the interior of the house at all clearly, with the exception of one room. I do not know where the front door is, nor have I ever seen any of the upper rooms. The one exception is a big room on the right of the house as one looks at it from the main road. This room I see with great distinctness. It is large and low, papered with a white paper and with a parquetry floor, designed for a music room. There is a grand piano, but what I see most clearly are a good many books, rather inconveniently placed in low white bookcases which run round most of the room, under the windows, with three shelves in each. It seems to me to be a bad arrangement, because it would be necessary to stoop down so much for the books, but I do not think that there is much reading done in the room. There are several low armchairs draped in a highly coloured chintz with a white ground; there are pictures on the walls, but I cannot see them distinctly. I think they are water-colours. The curtains are of a very peculiar and bright blue. A low window-seat runs round the oriel, with cushions of the same blue. It is in this room only that I see the two people, always together; and I have never seen anyone else in the house. They are seen in certain definite positions, oftenest standing together looking out of the window, which must face the west, because I see the sunset out of it. As a rule, the woman’s hand is passed through the man’s arm.
The vision simply flashes across my mind like a picture, whatever I am doing at the time. Sometimes I see it several times in a week, sometimes not for weeks together. I should recognise the house in a moment if I saw it; I do not think I should recognise the people. I cannot see the shapes of their features or their expressions, but I can see the bloom on the wife’s cheek and its pure outline.
To the best of my knowledge I have never seen either the people or the house in real life; and yet I have strongly the sense that it is a real house and that the people are real. it does not seem to me like a mere imagination, because it comes too distinctly and too accurately for that. Nor does it seem to me to be a mere combination of things which I have seen. The curious part of it is that some parts of the vision are absolutely clear–thus I can see the very texture of the smooth plaster of the house, and the oak beams inset; and I can also see the fabric of the man’s clothes and the colour of his hair; but, however much I interrogate my memory or my fancy about other details, they are all involved in a sort of mist which I cannot pierce. It is this which convinces me of the reality of the house, and makes me believe that it is not imagination; because, if it were, I think I should have enlarged my vision of the whole; but this I cannot do. There is a door, for instance, in the music-room, which is sometimes open, but even so I cannot see anything outside in the hall or passage to which it leads. Moreover, though I can recollect the visions with absolute distinctness, I cannot evoke them. I may be reading or writing, and I suddenly see in my mind the house across the meadows; or I am in the music-room, and the two figures are standing together in the window.
So strongly do I feel the actuality of it all, that if this book should fall into the hands of the people to whom the vision refers, I will ask them to communicate with me. I have no idea what their past has been, but I know their characters well. The fact that they have no children is a sorrow to them, but has served to centre their affections strongly on each other. The husband is a very tranquil and unaffected man. There is no sort of pose about his life. He just lives as he likes best. He is unambitious, and he has no sense of a duty owed to others. But this is not coupled with any sense of contempt or aloofness–he is invariably kind and gentle. He is an intellectual man, highly trained and clear-minded. The wife has less knowledge of the technique of artistic things, but a very fine, natural, critical taste. She cares, however, less for the things themselves than because her husband cares for them; but I do not think that she knows this. They have always enjoyed good health, and I cannot discern that they have had troubles of any kind. And I have the strongest sense of a perfectly natural high- mindedness about both, a healthy instinct for what is right and fine. They are absolutely without meanness; and they are entirely free from any sort of morbidity or dreariness. They have travelled a good deal, but they now seldom leave home; they designed and built their own house. One curious thing is that I have never heard music in the house, nor have I ever seen them reading, and yet I feel that they are much occupied with music and books.
What is the possible explanation of this curious vision? I have sometimes wondered if they have been brought into some unconscious rapport with me through one of my books. It seems to me just possible that when I have seen them standing together there may be some phrase in one of my books which has struck them and which they are accustomed to remember; and I think it may be some phrase about the sunset, because it is at sunset that I generally see them. But this does not explain my vision of the house, because I have never seen either of them outside of the house, and I have several times seen the music-room with no one in it; how does the vision of the house, which is so strangely distinct, come to me?
They inspire me with a great feeling of respect and friendship; the vision is very beautiful, and is always attended by a great sense of pleasure. I feel that it does me good in some obscure way to be brought into touch with them. Yet I can never retain my hold on the scene for more than an instant; it is just there and then it is gone.
It is a very strange thing to be conscious of two quite distinct personalities, and yet without any power of winding myself any further into their thoughts. There seems to be no vital contact. I am admitted, as it were, at certain times to a sight of the place, but I am sure that there is no sort of volition on their part about it; I do not feel that their thoughts are ever bent actually upon me, as I exist, but perhaps upon something connected with me.
I must add that, though I am a great dreamer at night and have always at all times a strong power of mental visualisations, I am not accustomed to be controlled by it, but rather to control it; and I have never at any time had any sort of similar vision, of a thing apart from memory or fancy.
I do believe very firmly in the telepathic faculty. I think that our thoughts are much affected both consciously and unconsciously by the thoughts of others. I believe thought takes place in a spiritual medium and that there is much interlacing and transference of thought. I have never tried any definite experiments in it, but I have had frequent evidence of my thoughts being affected by the thoughts of my friends. It seems to me that this may be a case of some open channel of communication, as if two wires had become in some way entangled. The whole method of thought is so obscure that it is hard to say under what conditions this takes place. But I allow myself the happiness of believing that the place and the people of whom I have been so often aware are real and tangible existences, and that impressions of things unseen and unrecognised by me have passed into my brain, so that some secret fellowship has been established. It would be a great joy to me if this could be definitely established; and I am not without hopes that this piece of writing may by some happy chance be the bearer of definite tidings to two people whom unseen I love, and whose thought may have been bent aimlessly perhaps and indistinctly upon mine, but never without some touch of kinship and goodwill.
XI
THAT OTHER ONE
I am going to try, in these few pages, to draw water out of a deep well–the well of which William Morris wrote as the “Well at the World’s End.” I shall try to describe a very strange and secret experience, which visits me rarely and at unequal intervals; sometimes for weeks together not at all, sometimes several times in a day. When it happens it is not strange at all, nor wonderful; the only wonder about it is that it does not happen more often, because it seems at the moment to be the one true thing in a world of vain shadows; everything else falls away, becomes accidental and remote, like the lights, let me say, of some unknown town, which one sees as one travels by night and as one twitches aside the curtain from the window of a railway-carriage, in a sudden interval between two profound slumbers. The train has relaxed its speed; one looks out; the red and green signal lamps hang high in the air; and one glides past a sleeping town, the lamps burning quietly in deserted streets; there are house-fronts below, in a long thoroughfare suddenly visible from end to end; above, there are indeterminate shadows, the glimmering faces of high towers; it is all ghost-like and mysterious; one only knows that men live and work there; and then the tides of slumber flow in upon the brain, and one dives thirstily to the depths of sleep.
Before I say more about it, I will just relate my last taste of the mood. I was walking alone in the autumn landscape; bare fields about me; the trees of a village to my right touched sharply with gold and russet red; some white-gabled cottages clustered together, and there was a tower among the trees; it was near sunset, and the sun seemed dragging behind him to the west long wisps of purple and rusty clouds touched with fire; below me to the left a stream passing slowly among rushes and willow-beds, all beautiful and silent and remote. I had an anxious matter in my mind, a thing that required, so it seemed to me, careful deliberation to steer a right course among many motives and contingencies. I had gone out alone to think it over. I weighed this against that, and it seemed to me that I was headed off by some obstacle whichever way I turned. Whatever I desired to do appeared to be disadvantageous and even hurtful. “Yes,” I said to myself, “this is one of those cases where whatever I do, I shall wish I had done differently! I see no way out.” It was then that a deeper voice still seemed to speak in me, the voice of something strong and quiet and even indolent, which seemed half-amused, half-vexed, by my perturbation. It said, “When you have done reasoning and pondering, I will decide.” Then I thought that a sort of vague, half-spoken, half-dumb dialogue followed.
“What are you?” I said. “What right have you to interfere?”
The other voice did not trouble to answer; it only seemed to laugh a lazy laugh.
“I am trying to think this all out,” I said, half-ashamed, half- vexed. “You may help me if you will; I am perplexed–I see no way out of it!”
“Oh, you may think as much as you like,” said the other voice. “I am in no hurry, I can wait.”
“But I AM in a hurry,” I said, “and I cannot wait. This has got to be settled somehow, and without delay.”
“I shall decide when the time comes,” said the voice to me.
“Yes, but you do not understand,” I said, feeling partly irritated and partly helpless. “There is this and that, there is so-and-so to be considered, there is the effect on these other persons to be weighed; there is my own position too–I must think of my health– there are a dozen things to be taken into account.”
“I know,” said the voice; “I do not mind your balancing all these things if you wish. I shall take no heed of that! I repeat that, when you have finished thinking it out, I shall decide.”
“Then you know what you mean to do?” said I, a little angered.
“No, I do not know just yet,” said the voice; “but I shall know when the time comes; there will be no doubt at all.”
“Then I suppose I shall have to do what you decide?” I said, angry but impressed.
“Yes, you will do what I decide,” said the voice; “you know that perfectly well.”
“Then what is the use of my taking all this trouble?” I said.
“Oh, you may just as well look into it,” said the voice; “that is your part! You are only my servant, after all. You have got to work the figures and the details out, and then I shall settle. Of course you must do your part–it is not all wasted. What is wasted is your fretting and fussing!”
“I am anxious,” I said. “I cannot help being anxious!”
“That is a pity!” said the voice. “It hurts you and it hurts me too, in a way. You disturb me, you know; but I cannot interfere with you; I must wait.”
“But are you sure you will do right?” I said.
“I shall do what must be done,” said the voice. “If you mean, shall I regret my choice, that is possible; at least you may regret it. But it will not have been a mistake.”
I was puzzled at this, and for a time the voice was silent, so that I had leisure to look about me. I had walked some way while the dialogue went on, and I was now by the stream, which ran full and cold into a pool beside the bridge, a pool like a clouded jewel. How beautiful it was! . . . The old thoughts began again, the old perplexities. “If he says THAT,” I said to myself, thinking of an opponent of my plan, “then I must be prepared with an answer–it is a weak point in my case; perhaps it would be better to write; one says what one thinks; not what one means to say. . . .”
“Still at work?” said the voice. “You are having a very uncomfortable time over there. I am sorry for that! Yet I cannot think why you do not understand!”
“What ARE you?” I said impatiently.
There was no answer to that.
“You seem very strong and patient!” I said at last. “I think I rather like you, and I am sure that I trust you; but you irritate me, and you will not explain. Cannot you help me a little? You seem to me to be out of sight–the other side of a wall. Cannot you break it down or look over?”
“You would not like that,” said the voice; “it would be inconvenient, even painful; it would upset your plans very much. Tell me–you like life, do you not?”
“Yes,” I said, “I like life–at least I am very much interested in it. I do not feel sure if I like it; I think you know that better than I do. Tell me, do I like it?”
“Yes,” said the voice; “at least I do. You have guessed right for once; it matters more what I like than what you like. You see, I believe in God, for one thing.”
“So do I,” I said eagerly. “I have reached that point! I am sure He is there. It is largely a question of argument, and I have really no doubt, no doubt at all. There are difficulties of course– difficulties about personality and intention; and then there is the origin of evil–I have thought much about that, and I have arrived at a solution; it is this. I can explain it best by an analogy. . . .”
There came a laugh from the other side of the wall, not a scornful laugh or an idle laugh, but a laugh kind and compassionate, like a father with a child on his knee; and the voice said, “I have seen Him–I see Him! He is here all about us, and He is yonder. He is not coming to meet us, as you think. . . . Dear me, how young you must be. . . . I had forgotten.”
This struck me dumb for an instant; then I said, “You frighten me! Who are you, what are you, . . . WHERE are you?”
And then the voice said, in a tone of the deepest and sweetest love, as if surprised and a little pained, “My child!”
And then I heard it no more; and I went back to my cares and anxieties. But it was as the voice had said, and when the time came to decide, I had no doubt at all what to do.
Now I have told all this in the nearest and simplest words that I can find. I have had to use similitudes of voices and laughter and partition-walls, because one can only use the language which one knows. But it is all quite true and real, more real than a hundred talks which one holds with men and women whose face and dress one sees in rooms and streets, and with whom one bandies words about things for which one does not care. There was indeed some one present with me, whom I knew perfectly well though I could not discern him, whom I had known all my life, who had gone about with me and shared all my experiences, in so far as he chose. But before I go on to speak further, I will tell one more experience, which came at a time when I was very unhappy, longing to escape from life, looking forward mournfully to death.
It had been under similar circumstances–a dreadful argument proceeding in my mind as to what I could do to get back to happiness again, whom to consult, where to go, whether to give up my work, whether to add to it, what diet to use, how to get sleep which would not visit me.
“Can’t you help me?” I said over and over again to the other person. At last the answer came, very faint and far away.
“I am sick,” said the voice, “and I cannot come forth!”
That frightened me exceedingly, because I felt alone and weak. So I said, “Is it my fault? Is it anything that I have done?”
“I have had a blow,” said the other voice. “You dealt it me–but it is not your fault–you did not know.”
“What can I do?” I said.
“Ah, nothing,” said the voice. “You must not disturb me! I am trying to recover, and I shall recover. Go on with your play, if you can, and do not heed me.”
“My play!” I said scornfully. “Do you not know I am miserable?”
The voice gave a sigh. “You hurt me,” it said. “I am weak and faint; but you can help me; be as brave as you can. Try not to think or grieve. I shall be able to help you again soon, but not now. . . . Ah, leave me to myself,” it added. “I must sleep, a long sleep; it is your turn to help!”
And then I heard no more; till a day long after, when the voice came to me on a bright morning by the sea, with the clear waves breaking and hissing on the shingle; the voice came blithe and strong, “I am well again; you have done your part, dear one! Give me your burden, and I will carry it; it is your time of joy!”
And then for a long time after that I did not hear the voice, and I was full of delight, hour by hour, grudging even the time I must spend in sleep, because it kept me from the life I loved.
These then are some of the talks we have held together, that Other One and I. But I must say this, that he will not always come for being called. I sometimes call to him and get no answer; sometimes he cries out beside me suddenly in the air. He seems to have a life of his own, quite distinct from mine. Sometimes when I am fretted and vexed, he is quietly joyful and elate, and then my troubles die away, like the footsteps of the wind upon water; and sometimes when I would be happy and contented, he is heavy and displeased, and takes no heed of me; and then I too fall into sorrow and gloom. He is much the stronger, and it matters far more to me what he feels than what I feel. I do not know how he is occupied–very little, I think, and what is strangest of all, he changes somewhat; very slowly and imperceptibly; but he has changed more than I have in the course of my life. I do not change at all, I think. I can say better what I think, I am more accomplished and skilful; but the thought and motive is unaltered from what it was when I was a child. But he is different in some ways. I have only gone on perceiving and remembering, and sometimes forgetting. But he does not forget; and here I feel that I have helped him a little, as a servant can help his master to remember the little things he has to do.
I think that many people must have similar experiences to this. Tennyson had, when he wrote “The Two Voices,” and I have seen hints of the same thing in a dozen books. The strange thing is that it does not help one more to be strong and brave, because I know this, if I know anything, that when the anxious and careful part of me lies down at last to rest, I shall slip past the wall which now divides us, and be clasped close in the arms of that Other One; nay, it will be more than that! I shall be merged with him, as the quivering water-drop is merged with the fountain; that will be a blessed peace; and I shall know, I think, without any questioning or wondering, many things that are obscure to me now, under these low-hung skies, which after all I love so well. . . .
XII
SCHOOLDAYS
1
It certainly seems, looking back to the early years, that I have altered very little–hardly at all, in fact! The little thing, whatever it is, that sits at the heart of the machine, the speck of soul-stuff that is really ME, is very much the same creature, neither old nor young; confident, imperturbable, with a strange insouciance of its own, knowing what it has to do. I have done many things, gathered many impressions, ransacked experience, enjoyed, suffered; but whatever I have argued, expressed, tried to believe, aimed at, hoped, feared, has hardly affected that central core of life at all. And I feel as though that strange, dumb, cheerful self–it is always cheerful, I think–had played the part all along of a silent and not very critical spectator of all I have tried to be. The mind, the reason, the emotion, have each of them expanded, acquired knowledge, learned skill, but that innermost cell has lain there, sleepless, perceptive, dreaming head on hand, watching, seldom making a sign of either approval or disapproval.
In childhood it was more dominant than it is now, perhaps. It went its way more securely, because, in my case at least, the mind was, in those far-off days, strangely inactive. The whole nature was bent upon observation. Ruskin is the only writer who has described what was precisely my own experience, when he says that as a child he lived almost entirely in the region of SIGHT. It was the only part of me, the eye, that was then furiously and untiringly awake. Taste, smell, touch, had each of them at moments a sharp consciousness; but it was the shape, the form, the appearance of things, that interested me, took up most of my time and energy, occupied me unceasingly. Even now my memory ranges, with lively precision, over the home, the garden, the heathery moorland, the firwoods, the neighbouring houses of the scene where I lived. I can see the winding walks, the larch shrubberies, the flower-borders, the very grain of the brickwork; while in the house itself, the wall papers, the furniture, the patterns of carpets and chintzes, are all absolutely clear to the memory.
Thus I lived, from day to day and from year to year, in the moment as it passed; but I remember no touch of speculation or curiosity as to how or why things existed as they did. The house, the arrangements, the servants, the meal-times, the occupations were all simply accepted as they were, just the will of my parents taking shape. I never thought of interrogating or altering anything. Life came to me just so. I remember no sharp emotions, no dominant affections. My parents seemed to me kind and powerful; but it did not occur to me that, if I had died, they would feel any particular grief. I was just a part of their arrangements; and my idea of life was simply to manage so that I should be as little interfered with as possible, and go my way, annexing such little property as I could, and learning the appearance of the things that were too large to be annexed.
Then my elder brother went off to school. I do not remember being sorry, or missing his company; in fact, I rather welcomed the additional independence it gave me. I was glad in a mild way when he came back for the holidays; but I do not recollect the faintest curiosity about what he did at school, or what it was all like. He told us some stories about boys and masters; but it was all quite remote, like a fairy-tale; and then the time gradually drew near when I too was to go to school; but I remember neither interest or curiosity or excitement or anxiety. I think I rather enjoyed a few extra presents, and the packing of my school-box with a consciousness of proprietorship. And then the day came, and I drifted off like thistledown into the big world.
2
My father and mother took us down to school. It was a fine place at Mortlake, called Temple Grove, near Richmond Park. Mortlake was hardly more than an old-fashioned village then, in the country, not joined to London as it is now by streets and rows of villas. It was a place of big suburban mansions, with high walls everywhere, cedars looking over, towering chestnuts, big classical gate-posts. Temple Grove, so called from the statesman, the patron of Swift, was a large, solid, handsome house with fine rooms, and large grounds well timbered. Schoolrooms and dormitories had been tacked on to the house, but all built in a solid, spacious way. It was dignified, but bare and austere. We arrived, and went in to see the headmaster, Mr. Waterfield, a tall, handsome, extremely alarming man, with curled hair and beard and flashing eyes. He was a fine gentleman, a brilliant talker, and an excellent teacher, though unnecessarily severe. I had been used to see my father, who was then himself headmaster of Wellington College, treated with obvious deference; but Waterfield, who was an old family friend, met him