to dispel the natural sense of coming and going: one's bed re-made,
one's self replaced, new boxes brought and unpacked, metaphorically as
well as literally; fresh adjustments, new subjects of discourse, new
sympathies: and the poor previous occupant meanwhile _rolling_, as the
French put it. Rolling! how well the word expresses that sense of smooth
and empty nowhere, with nothing to catch on or keep, which plays so
large a part in all our earthly experience; as, for the rest, is
natural, seeing that the earth is only a ball, at least the astronomers
say so.
But let us turn from this painful side of _going away_; and insist
rather on certain charming impressions sometimes connected with it. For
there is something charming and almost romantic, when, as in the case I
mentioned, the friend leaves friends late in the evening. There is the
whole pleasant day intact, with leisurely afternoon stroll when all is
packed and ready: watching the sunset up the estuary, picking some
flowers in the garden; sometimes even seeing the first stars prick
themselves upon the sky, and mild sheet-lightnings, auguring good, play
round the house, disclosing distant hills and villages. And the orderly
dinner, seeming more swept and garnished for the anticipation of bustle,
the light on the cloth, the sheen on the silver, the grace and fragrance
of fruit and flowers, and the gracious faces above it, remains a wide
and steady luminous vision on the black background of midnight travel,
of the train rushing through nothingness. Most charming of all, when
after the early evening on the balcony, the traveller leaves the south,
to hurtle by night, conscious only of the last impression of supper with
kind friends at Milan or the lakes, and the glimpse, in the station
light, of heads covered with veils, and flowers in the hands, and
southern evening dresses. These are the occasional gracious
compensations for that bad thing called going away.
COMING BACK
Most people tell you that to return to places where one has been
exceptionally happy is an unwise proceeding. But this, I venture to
conceive, is what poor Alfred de Musset called "une insulte au bonheur."
It shows, at all events, a lack of appreciation of the particular
nature, permanent, and, in a manner, radiating, of happy experiences. Of
course, I am not speaking of the cases where the happy past has been
severed from indifferent present and future by some dreadful calamity;
poetry alone is consolatory and also aloof enough to deal decorously
with such tragic things, and they are no concern of the essayist. There
is, besides, a very individual and variable character about great
misfortunes, no two natures being affected by them quite alike, so that
discussion and generalization are not merely intrusive, but also mostly
fruitless. Therefore the question is not whether people are wise or
unwise in avoiding places where they have been happy, after events which
have shattered their happiness. And the only loss I have to deal with is
the loss--if it really is one, as we shall examine--of the actual
circumstances which accompanied a happy experience; the loss of the
_then_ as opposed to the _now_, and, in a measure of the irrecoverable
time, years or months, and of the small luggage of expectations and
illusions which has got inevitably mislaid or scattered in the interval.
And the question arises whether 'tis wiser, in a sense whether it is
more delicately epicurean, to avoid the places which bring all that,
together with the sense of the happy gone-by days, vividly home to one;
or whether, as I contend, past happiness ought not to be used as an
essential element in the happiness of the present.
I have had, lately, the experience of returning to a part of the world
which I had not seen for many, many years, and where I had spent the
drowsy long days of a long illness, and the dreamy sweet days of a
longer convalescence. It made a day's journey, without any especial
resting-place for the soles of my feet, and undertaken, I can scarcely
tell why, with a little shyness and fear. I did not go to the house
where I had lived, but to one in the neighbourhood, whither I had often
been taken all those years ago; and I did not even take the
precaution--or perhaps took the contrary one--of securing the presence
of the owners. The ladies were out; gone to one of the little fishing
towns which are strung all around the Forth, and they would not be back
till teatime. But the benevolent Scottish housemaid, noticing perhaps a
shadow of disappointment, suggested my going in and waiting.
The little old castle, which had got a little blurred in my
recollection, seemed suddenly remembered and familiar, even as had been
the case with the country I had driven along from the station; the
undulating turnip-fields and fields of pale stooked corn, the
reaping-machines and the women tying up the bean-straw, the white line
of the Forth, and the whole pale, delicate country under the low,
tender, _intimate_ northern sky. Even the smell, sweet and pungent, of
the withered potatoes, bringing the sense of knowing it all, turnings
of roads and of the land, so well. And similarly inside the castle,
where I lingered on the pretext of writing a note to those ladies. It
was all unchanged; the escutcheons in relief on the ceiling, the view of
cornfield and thin beech belts, and distant sea from the windows, the
lavender and _pot-pourri_ in the bowls, and almost the titles of the
books, seemed quietly, at the touch of reality, to open out in
remembrance. I did not stay till the return of the ladies, but went back
to the station, and waited on the bridge for my train, which was a good
half-hour late. I looked down from that bridge on the kind and gentle
country in the veiled sunshine. The hill to the back of the house where
I had lived, in the distance, the red roofs of the fishing villages, the
little spire of the smallest of them barely projecting, as it always
did, above the freshly reaped fields. And I felt, as I leaned against
the parapet watching for my train's smoke coming towards me, not the
loss, but rather the inestimable gain which a kindly past represents.
Years gone by? Nay, rather years which make endurable, which furnish and
warm the present, giving it sweetness and significance. How very poor
we must be in our early youth, with no possessions like these; and how
rich in our later life, with many years distilled into the essence of a
single to-day!
As I stood on the railway bridge thinking or feeling in this manner, I
heard wheels, and saw a pony-cart, with an elderly lady, and a younger
one driving her, coming towards me. It was the ladies who had been so
kind to me all those years back, returning to the little castle. I
turned my back, leaned on the parapet, and let them pass me, unnoticing.
I wanted to keep them also in that dim and dear kind past.
For we must be discreet as well as grateful-hearted if we would enjoy
the Past's full gifts....
The Past's gifts; and to these I would add, or among them rather I would
include, an item which I find a difficulty in naming properly, and
which, of course, I hesitate a little to speak about. I mean the gifts,
odd as it sounds, of Death. For Death, while in his main function the
cruel taker-away, the violent or stealthy robber, has also a less
important side to his character, and is a giver of gifts, if only we
know how to receive them. And he is this even apart from his power (for
which one might imagine that the Greeks gave him, in certain terra
cottas and reliefs, so very gentle and beautiful an aspect) of bringing
light and loving-kindness into poor human creatures' judgments, and
teaching them to understand and pardon; apart also from that mystic
relationship, felt by Dante and all the poets, which he bears to the
genius of imaginative love. What I allude to is a more humble, but quite
as gracious function, of leading those he takes away (with the
infinitely tender gesture of the antique funereal Hermes), not into
vacuity and the horrid blackness of oblivion, but into a place of safe
and serene memory. In this capacity Death can be, even like his master,
Time, a giver of gifts to us. For those _are_ gifts to us, those friends
he gathers together under hazier, tenderer skies into our thoughts which
have the autumn warmth and stillness of late-reaped fields. Nay, the
gift is greater, for there are added certain half-strangers, towards
whom we lose all shyness, and who turn to real friends when introduced
by death and worked into our past; dear such-an-one, whom we scarcely
knew, barely more than face and name _then_, but know and have the right
to care for now. So that I think that we might extract and take with
happy interpretation those two last lines of the old, old Goethe's
heartbreaking dedication to the generations whom he had outlived:--
"Was ich besitze, seh' ich wie im Weiten,
Und was verschwand, wird mir zu Wirklichkeiten."
For all which reasons let us never be afraid of going back to places
where we have been exceptionally happy; not even in the cases where we
recognize that such former happiness was due, in part, to some dispelled
illusion. For if we can but learn to be glad of the Past and receive its
gift with gratitude, may not the remembrance of a dear illusion, brought
home with the sight of the places which we filled with it, be merely
another blessing; a possession which nothing can rob us of, and by which
our spirit is the richer?
LOSING ONE'S TRAIN
The clocks up at the villa must have been all wrong, or else my watch
did not go with them, or else I had not looked often enough at it while
rambling about the town on my way to the station. Certain it is that
when I got there, at the gallop of my cab-horse, the express was gone.
There is something hatefully inexorable about expresses: it is useless
to run after them, even in Italy. The next train took an hour and a
quarter instead of forty minutes to cover the nineteen miles between
Pistoia and Florence. Moreover, that next train was not till eight in
the evening, and it was now half-past five.
I felt all it was proper to feel on the occasion, and said, if anything,
rather more. Missing a train is a terrible business, even if you miss
nothing else in consequence; and the inner disarray, the blow and wrench
to thoughts and feelings, is most often far worse than any mere
upsetting of arrangements. A chasm suddenly gapes between present and
future, and the river of life flows backwards, if but for a second. It
is most fit and natural to lose one's temper; but the throwing out of so
much moral ballast does not help one to overtake that train. I mention
this, lest I should pass for heartless; and now proceed to say that,
after a few minutes given to wrath and lamentation, I called the cab
back and went in search of a certain very ancient church, containing a
very ancient pulpit, which I had never succeeded in seeing before.
Exactly as on previous occasions, when I got to the farm where the key
of that church was kept, the key had gone to town in the pocket of the
peasant. He would be back, no doubt, at nightfall. But I had not very
much expected the church to be open, so I felt perfectly indifferent at
not seeing the pulpit--nay, if anything, a little relieved, as one does
sometimes when friends prove _not at home_.
I walked up a long steep track to the little battered, black,
fast-locked church, which stands all alone under some oak trees. The
track was through thin hillside woods. Such divine woods! young oak and
acacia, and an undergrowth of grass and ferns, of full-blown roses
thrown across the grass; and here and there, dark in that pale young
green, a cypress. The freshness of evening came all of a sudden, and
with it a scent of every kind of leaf and herb and fern, and the
sweetness of the ripening corn all round. And when I got to the ridge,
slippery with dry cut grass, what should I see in front of me, over the
olive-yards and the wooded slopes, but the walls and towers of
Serravalle, which have beckoned to my fancy almost ever since my
childhood. I sat there a long while in the June sunset and very nearly
missed the second train, which it had seemed intolerable to wait for.
This is an allegory, and I commend its application to the wise and
gentle reader. There are more of such symbolical trains lost than real
ones, even by the most travelled mortals, Odysseus or a bag-man. And
such losing of trains is not inevitably a blessing. I have often written
about life with optimistic heartlessness, because life, on the whole,
has been uncommonly kind to me, and because one is nearer the truth
when cheerful than when depressed. But this is the place for a brief
interlude of pessimism. For it is all very well to make the best of
losing trains when we have time, cabs, and a fine view at hand; and when
in losing the train we lose nothing else, except our temper. But surely
'tis no ingratitude towards life's great mercies and blessings to
discriminate them from life's buffets and bruisings. And methinks that
the teaching of courage or resignation might fitly begin by the
recognition of the many cases where only courage or resignation avails,
because they are thoroughly bad. There is something stupid and underbred
at times in the attitude of saints and stoics--at least in their books.
When Rachel weepeth for her children, we have no business to come round
hawking our consolation; we should stand aside, unless we can cradle her
to sleep in our arms. And if we refuse to weep, 'tis not because there
is not matter enough for weeping, but because we require our strength
and serenity to carry her through her trouble. Pain, dear cheerful
friends, is pain; and grief, grief; and if our own complete human
efficiency requires the acquaintance thereof, 'tis because the
knowledge of their violence and of their wiles is needed for our own
protection and the helping of other folk. Evil comes from the gods, no
doubt; but so do all things; and to extract good from it--the great
Prometheus-feat of man--is not to evil's credit, but to the credit of
good. The contrary doctrine is a poison to the spirit, though a poison
of medicinal use in moments of anguish, a bromide or an opiate.
I am speaking, therefore, only of such contingencies as will bear
comparison, without silly stoicism, to the missing of a train. Much of
the good such disappointments may contain is of the nature of education,
and most of it a matter of mere novelty. Without suspecting it, we are
all suffering from lack of new departures; and life would no doubt be
better if we tried a few more things, and gave the hidden, neglected
possibilities a greater chance. Change as such is often fruitful of
improvement, exposing to renovating air and rains the hard, exhausted
soil of our souls, turning up new layers and helping on life's
chemistry. The thwarting of our cherished plans is beneficial, because
our plans are often mere routine, born not of wisdom, but of inertness.
In our endless treadmill of activity, in our ceaseless rumination, we
are, as a fact, neither acting nor thinking; and life, secretly at a
standstill, ceases to produce any good. There was no reason for taking
that express and getting back two or three hours sooner to my house: no
one required me, nothing needed doing. Yet, unless I had lost that train
I should not have dreamed of taking that walk, of making that little
journey of discovery, in a delightful unknown place.
There is another source of good hidden in disappointment. For it is
disappointment rather than age (age getting the credit for what it
merely witnesses) which teaches us to work into life's scheme certain
facts, frequently difficult of acceptance; trying to make them, as all
reality should be, causes of strength rather than of weakness. Painful
facts? Or rather, perhaps, only painful contradictions to certain
pleasant delusions, founded on nothing save their pleasantness, and
taken for granted--who knows how long?--without proof and without
questioning. Facts concerning not merely success, love, personal
contact, but also one's own powers and possibilities for good, what the
world is able to receive at one's hands, as much as of what the world
can give to one.
But the knowledge which disappointment gives, to those wishing to learn
from it, has a higher usefulness than practical application. It
constitutes a view of life, a certain contemplative attitude which, in
its active resignation, in its domination of reality by intelligent
acquiescence, gives continuity, peace, and dignity. And here my allegory
finds its completion. For what compensated me after my lost train and
all my worry and vexation of spirit? Nothing to put in my pocket or
swell my luggage, not even a kingdom, such as made up for the loss of
poor Saul's asses; but an impression of sunset freshness and sweetness
among ripening corn and delicate leaves, and a view, unexpected, solemn,
and charming, with those long-forgotten distant walls and towers which I
shall never reach, and which have beckoned to me from my childhood.
Such is the allegory, or morality, of the Lost Train.
THE HANGING GARDENS
VALEDICTORY
I am not alluding to those of Semiramis. Though, now I come to think of
it, this is the moment for protesting against one of those unnecessary
deceptions from which the candid mind of children is allowed to suffer.
For the verb _to hang_ invariably implies that the hanging object (or,
according to our jurisprudence, person) is supported by a rope, nail, or
other device, from above, while remaining unsupported from below. And it
was in such relations to the forces of gravitation that my infancy
conceived those gardens of the Babylonish Queen. So that I quite
remember my bitter disappointment (the first germ, doubtless, of a
general scepticism about Gods and Men) when a cut in an indiscreet
_Handbook of Antiquities_ displayed these flowery places as resting
flatly on a housetop, and no more hanging, in any intelligible sense,
than I hung myself.
Having lodged this complaint, I will, however, admit that this
misleading adjective comes as a boon in the discourse I am now
meditating. Since, returning to my old theme of the _Garden of Life_, I
find that the misapplication of that word _Hanging_, and its original
literal suggestion, lends added significance to this allegoric dictum:
Of all the _Gardens of Life_ the best worth cultivating are often the
Hanging Ones. Yes! Hanging between the town pavement, a hundred feet
below, and the open sky, with gales ready to sweep down every flower-pot
into smithereens, the kind or wicked sky, immediately above. Moreover,
as regards legal claim to soil, leasehold, freehold, or copyhold, why,
simply none, the earth having been carried up to that precarious place
in arduous basketfuls.
One of the wisest of women (I say it with pride, for she is my godchild)
put this skyey allegory of mine into plain words, which I often repeat
to myself, and never without profit. The circumstances and character of
her husband had involved her in wanderings from her very wedding-day;
and each of her six children had been born in a different place, and
each in a more unlikely one. "It must have been very difficult to settle
down at last like this," I said, looking in admiration from the dainty
white walls and white carpets to the delicately laid table, with the
flowers upon it and around it--I mean the garland of pink little faces
and pink little pinafores. "I wonder you could do it after so long."
"But I have always been what you call _settled_," she answered, and
added very simply--"As soon as I took in that we should always be
eternally uprooting, I made up my mind that the only way was to live as
if we should never move at all. You see, everything would have gone to
bits if I had let myself realise the contrary, and I think I should have
gone crazy into the bargain."
There has been a good deal of _going to bits_ and of craziness of sorts
owing to the centuries and the universe not always having been as wise
as this lady. And--with all deference to higher illuminations--I am
tempted to ask myself whether all creeds, which have insisted on life's
fleetingness and vanity, have not played considerable havoc with the
fruitfulness, let alone the pleasantness, of existence. Certainly the
holy persons who awaited the end of the world in caves, and on platforms
fastened to columns, had not well-furbished knives and forks, nor
carefully folded linen, nor, as a rule, nicely behaved nice little boys
and girls, waiting with eager patience for a second helping of pudding.
There is a distressing sneer at soap ("scented soap" it is always
called), even in the great Tolstoi's writings, ever since he has allowed
himself to be hag-ridden by the thought of death. And one speculates
whether the care true saints have bestowed upon their souls, if not
their bodies, the swept and garnished character of the best monasticism,
has not been due to the fact that all this tidiness was in preparation
for an eternity of beatitude?
Fortunately for the world, the case of my dear goddaughter is an
extreme one; and although our existence is quite as full of uprootings
as hers, they come in such a stealthy or such a tragic manner as to
beget no expectation of recurrence. Moreover, the very essence of life
is to make us believe in itself; we fashion the future out of our
feelings of the present, and go on living as if we should live for
ever, simply because, by the nature of things, we have no experience
of ceasing to live. Life is for ever murmuring to us the secret of its
unendingness; and it is to our honour, and for our happiness, that we,
poor flashes of a second, identify ourselves with the great unceasing,
steady light which we and millions of myriads besides go to make up.
Are we much surer of being alive to-morrow than of being dead in fifty
years? "Is there any moment which can certify to its successor?" That
is the answer to La Fontaine's octogenarian, planting his trees,
despite the gibes of the little beardless boys whom, as is inevitable
in such cases, he survived.
Défendez-vous au sage
De se donner des soins pour le plaisir d'autrui?
Cela même est un fruit qui je goûte aujourd'hui;
J'en puis jouir demain, et quelques jours encore.
And all I would add is that, although it was very nice of the old man
to enjoy his planting because of the unborn generations who would eat
the fruits, he might have been less nice and quite as pleased if, as
is probable, he liked gardening for its own sake.
But people seem--on account of that horrid philosophical and
moralising twist--to cast about for an excuse whenever they are doing
what is, after all, neither wicked nor silly--to wit, making the best
of such days and such powers as a merciful Providence or an
indifferent trio of Fates has allowed them. But I should like to turn
the tables on these persons, and suggest that all this worrying about
whether life is or is not worth living, and hunting for answers for
and against, may itself be an excuse, unconscious like all the most
mischievous excuses, and hide not finer demands and highbred
discontents, but rather a certain feebleness, lack of grip and
adaptation, and an indolent acquiescence in what my godchild stoutly
refused, a greater or lesser going to bits.
This much is certain, that we all of us have to make a stand against
such demoralisation whenever our plans are upset, or we are impatient to
do something else, or we are feeling worried and ill. We most of us have
to struggle against leaving our portmanteau gaping on a sofa or throwing
our boot-trees into corners when we are in a place only for a few hours;
and struggle against allowing the flowers on the table to wither, and
the fire to go out, when we are setting out on a journey next day, or a
dear one is about to say goodbye. "See to that fire being kept up, and
bring fresh roses," said a certain friend of mine on a similar occasion.
That was laying out a little hanging garden on the narrow ledge of two
or three poor hours; and, behold! the garden has continued to be sweet
and bright in the wide safe places of memory.