We see the bright unnumbered throng of stars as so many specks of dust
on the dark mantle of old Chaos, most ancient of devils. And even they
appear remote and unfriendly. The fixed stars know nothing of us: the
old homely constellations have an alien look. In the scarred white face
of the moon we can read the destiny of our own beautiful planet, soon to
be a cold cinder. Good and evil alike are as nothing in the face of the
illimitable darkness that awaits us. Our most heroic endeavour cannot
lighten the gloom. The greatest of our prophets and poets cannot break
the silence for long; it has swallowed the shouts and songs of countless
generations. Man, with all his pleasant green places, is only the
tiniest accident, a slight tremor of a wheel, something that the next
stroke of the machine will put to rights, obliterating him and all his
works. But these shuddering negations, to which we have been led by a
few scientific data, do not disturb us long. A few hours’ sleep or a
brisk walk destroys the whole mournful fabric, and we step out lively as
before. A few misguided men, having much to do with these things, make
some sort of a creed of such folly, and angrily deny that man has an
immortal soul. In this they are wise according to their lights, for
believing themselves to be caged in such a universe their only hope lies
in a speedy extinction. The soul has no better place in their dreary
cosmos than a skylark would have in a Birmingham factory.
Blake was once at a friend’s house when the talk turned on the vastness
of Space. At last Blake, who was always irritated by this sort of talk,
broke in with, ‘It is false. I walked the other evening to the end of
the heath, and touched the sky with my finger.’ Those who are familiar
with Blake’s habit of mind, his way of using daring figures of speech as
if they were literal statements of fact, will not dismiss this remark as
the raving of a genial madman. To Blake, the artist, this perpetual
raising of scientific bogeys, this emphasising of the emptiness of the
universe, to the distress of our imagination, was nothing short of
criminal. He believed in the ‘determinate and bounding form’ of all
things, in ‘the bounding line and its infinite inflections and
movements.’ ‘Leave out this line,’ he wrote, ‘and you leave out life
itself; all is chaos again....’ And chaos is the arch-enemy of the
artist, who strives to fashion from the corrupt materials at hand the
enduring forms of his imagination. To Blake the sky appeared a most
excellent canopy, a majestical roof fretted with golden fire, as it did
to Hamlet or any other man. So, too, our earth appears a lovely,
fruitful dwelling-place. But, according to science, one is a nightmare
of space, the other a putrescent cinder. This may be the truth for
science, in which there are no nightmares, but it is not the truth for
us. Science, with all its data and phenomena, appeals only to one small
part of a man, but the ultimate truth must appeal to the whole man, to
the emotional, reasoning, moral, imaginative creature with an immortal
soul. It is poetry, in the widest sense of the term, that makes this
appeal, and poetry alone. The sky and the earth that we find in poetry
and that we have seen for ourselves, the blue canopy stretched over the
beautiful dwelling-place, are nearer the ultimate truth than anything
that science can tell us.
When we go to science for an account of the cosmos and recoil in horror
from the nightmarish thing that we find there, it does not mean that
science is necessarily wrong (though, for the most part, it is only
guessing), but that we have gone to it for something that it cannot
give, and does not pretend to give--an ultimate truth that will satisfy
every demand of our highly complex nature. We cannot take science out of
its own limited sphere of activity without being horror-struck at the
result. Thus, if we went to science, in one or other of its various
branches, for a minute description of a red rose, a glass of wine, a
wonderful sunset, or a lovely child, the result, in every instance,
would seem to be an outlandish thing of horror. So it is with the
universe; when we can apprehend it as we can a rose or a sunset, not
through science but through the poetry that saturates our being, we
shall see the universe in all its majesty and splendour, with all its
blazing multi-coloured suns, strange planets and wild moons, moving in
the endless dance.
Men like Hearn suffered because they would not keep science within its
natural limits. They allowed the bogey talk of the astronomers to
frighten them. Hearn never seemed to see that the old Japanese legend
which made the heavens seem very near and warm and human was probably
nearer the ultimate truth of things than the monstrous facts that he was
always trying to forget. He needed large doses of Blake as an antidote
to Herbert Spencer. As for the notion of infinite space and ‘that
everlasting night,’ of which the astronomical dabblers have made so
much, it is nothing but a bleak fiction. For my part, I have ceased to
be troubled by any horror of that space in which star-systems move like
specks of dust, for I have long held that the whole affair is in reality
an illusion, an elaborate jest of the gods. Even the scientists are less
confident than they were, for the new Einstein theory (which
mathematical friends have vainly tried to explain to me) seems to
emphasise the illusory aspect of space, making our old theories and
elaborate calculations look rather foolish. Meanwhile, the cosmos now
appears to be more of a joke than ever, but whatever conclusions the
scientists may arrive at, of one thing I am certain--it is a good joke.
Probably it is the ultimate, universal, everlasting joke, of which the
greatest of our jests are but distorted reflections and fleeting
shadows.
A ROAD TO ONESELF
Sometimes, on one of these sunny autumn mornings, when I turn my back on
the town and take to the highway, I seem to have the world to myself. I
walk forward, as it were, into a great sunlit emptiness. Once I am a
little way out of the town it is as if the world had been swept clean of
men. I pass a few young mothers, who are proudly ushering their
round-eyed solemn babes into the presence of the morning sun, a
lumbering cart or two, and maybe a knot of labourers, who look up from
their task with humorous resignation in their faces; these and others I
overtake and pass by, and then there is often an end of my fellows. I
alone keep a lounging tryst with the sun, himself, I fancy, a mighty,
genial idler and the father of all dreamers and idlers among men.
A light mist covers the neighbouring hills, which are almost
imperceptible, their shapes and colours showing but faintly, so that
they seem to stand aloof--things of dream. As I go further along the
shining road I seem to be lounging into a vast, empty room. There are
sights and sounds in plenty; cows looking over the walls with their
great, mournful eyes; here and there a thin blue column of smoke; the
cawing of rooks about the decaying woods; and, distantly sounding, the
creak of a cart, a casual shout or two, a vague hammering, and, more
distant still, the noise of the town, now the faint murmur of a hive.
Yet to me, coming from the crowded, tumultuous streets, it seems empty
because I meet no one by the way. The road, for all its thick drift of
leaves, deep gold and brown, at either side, seems to lie naked in the
sunshine, and I drink in this unexpected solitude as eagerly as a dusty
traveller takes his ale. For a time, it comes as a delectable and
quickening draught, and though outwardly a sober, meditative, almost
melancholy pedestrian, I hold high festival in the spirit, drink deep,
and revel with the younger gods.
One of the greatest dangers of living in large towns is that we have too
many neighbours and human fellowship is too cheap. We are apt to become
wearied of humanity; a solitary green tree sometimes seems dearer to us
than an odd thousand of our fellow-citizens. Unless we are hardened, the
millions of eyes begin to madden us; and for ever pushed and jostled by
crowds we begin to take more kindly to Malthus, and are even willing to
think better of Herod and other wholesale depopulators. We begin to hate
the sight of men who would appear as gods to us if we met them in
Turkestan or Patagonia. When we have become thoroughly crowd-sick, we
feel that the continued presence of these thousands of other men and
women will soon crush, stamp, or press our unique, miraculous
individuality into some vile pattern of the streets; we feel that the
spirit will perish for want of room to expand in: and we gasp for an air
untainted by crowded humanity.
Some such thoughts as these come to me, at first, in my curious little
glimpse of solitude. I am possessed by an ampler mood than men commonly
know, and feel that I can fashion the world about me to my changing
whims; my spirit overflows, and seems to fill the quiet drooping
countryside with sudden light and laughter; the empty road and vacant
fields, the golden atmosphere and blue spaces are my kingdoms, and I
can people them at will with my fancies. Beautiful snatches of poetry
come into my head, and I repeat a few words, or even only one word,
aloud and with passionate emphasis, as if to impress their significance
and beauty upon a listening host. Sometimes I break into violent little
gusts of laughter, for my own good pleasure. At other times I sing,
loudly and with abandon: to a petrified audience of one cow and three
trees I protest melodiously that Phyllis has such charming graces that I
could love her till I die, and I believe it, too, at the time. I brag to
myself, and applaud and flatter myself. I even indulge in one or two of
those swaggering day-dreams of boyhood in which one finds oneself
suddenly raised to some extraordinary eminence, the idol of millions, a
demi-god among men, from which height one looks down with kindly scorn
on those myopic persons who did not know true greatness when they saw
it, sarcastic schoolmasters and jeering relatives for the most part.
Only by such heightened images, seemingly more applicable to centuries
of riotous life than half an hour’s sauntering, can I suggest in
stubborn words the swelling mood that first comes to me with this
sudden, unexpected seclusion.
But as the morning wears away, the jubilation arising from this new
expansion of oneself dwindles and perishes; the spirit wearies of its
play. The road stretches out its vacant length, a few last leaves come
fluttering down, and the sun grows stronger, sharpening the outline of
the hills. The day is lovelier than ever. But I meet no one by the way,
and even the distant sounds of men’s travail and sport have died down.
After a time the empty road and silent valley become vaguely
disquieting, like a great room spread for a feast, blazing with lights,
opulent in crimson and gold, and yet all deserted and quiet as the
grave. I ask myself if all men have been mewed up in offices and
underground warehouses, by some ghastly edict, unknown to me, which has
come into force this very morning. Have I alone escaped? Or I wonder if
the Last Day has dawned, and been made plain to men not by sound of
trump, but by some sign in the sky that I have overlooked; a vast hand
may have beckoned to all men or the heavens may have opened while I was
busy lighting my pipe. Have all but one of the weary children of earth
been gathered to their long rest? I walk in loneliness.
Suddenly, I see a tiny moving figure on the road before me, and
immediately it focuses my attention. What are walls, fields, trees, and
cows compared with this miraculous thing, a fellow human being, played
upon by the same desires and passions, his head stuffed with the same
dreams and fluttering thoughts? In one of the world’s greatest romances
is not the most breathless moment concerned with the discovery of a
human footprint in the sand? Does not the world’s story begin with one
human being meeting another? As I keep my eyes fixed on the nearing
figure the last of my vague fancies and egotistical imaginings are blown
away; my mind is engrossed by the solidly romantic possibilities of the
encounter. Just as I was glad to escape from the sight and sound of men,
so I am eager now to break my solitude: the circle is complete. And as
we come up together, the stranger and I, I give him a loud greeting, and
he, a little startled, returns the salute; and so we pass on,
fellow-travellers and nameless companions in a great adventure, knowing
no more of each other than the brief sight of a face, the sound of a
voice can tell us. We only cry out a Hail and Farewell through the mist,
yet I think we go on our way a little heartened.
THE EDITOR
I have just learned from a little paragraph in a newspaper that another
old acquaintance of mine has gone--old Wimpenny-Brown, ‘for many years
editor of the _Wallerdale Herald_’--as the paragraph is careful to
inform me. But there is little need, for it was in his editorial days
that I met Wimpenny-Brown, and I can only think of him as an editor.
Apart from a few early years spent as a reporter on a lesser London
paper, all his time had been given to the _Wallerdale Herald_. It was an
obscure provincial sheet, Liberal-cum-Radical in tone, strongly
upholding Free Trade and much given to enunciating those few leading
principles ‘upon which the prosperity and happiness of this country must
inevitably depend.’ But in the days when I knew its editor, the _Herald_
was nothing more to me than a frame, the necessary boundaries of gilt
and moulding, that set off his personality. Thus framed, my old
acquaintance was a man to be sought out and gathered to oneself. To a
youngster in quest of the absurd, as I was at that time, he was meat and
drink. Even so long ago, he was considered one of the old school, and so
true to type that he seemed to have been specially created to verify the
comic novelists. He seemed to dwell in the great shadow of Mr. Potts, of
the _Eatanswill Gazette_, and to be closely related to that solemn
editorial host of Colonels and Majors dear to the American humorist.
A pipe and an occasional glass served Wimpenny-Brown as a tribute to the
bohemianism of his profession; as hostages to respectability he had a
pair of gold-rimmed eyeglasses at the end of a black ribbon, trim
whiskers, and a large umbrella; with his staff he was--I
believe--majestically paternal, but to his opponents he was a very
Jupiter; and for the rest--he had a manner. In his presence, it seemed
as if the _Essay on Liberty_ had just been published, as if dusty men of
letters were still delightedly wondering where Macaulay’s style came
from, as if radical masterpieces were still being issued in fortnightly
parts. Many men had his respect, even his homage, but as an editor--and
I never knew him as anything else--he would allow no man to dictate to
him; he served only the Public and ‘those few great principles.’ ‘An
editor,’ he would say, tapping a sheet of paper with his glasses, ‘is
the servant of the Public although his duty is to educate it.’ And his
innocent vanity would swell out into such monstrous proportions, would
bud and blossom into such foolish phrases, that his hearer would wonder
if he had suddenly strayed into the rigid world of the third-rate comic
novel. But all was sincerely spoken. Wimpenny-Brown meant all that he
said, and he strove hard to educate his public. He would not pander to
low tastes (he has said so many a time in my hearing); nor was he
prepared to tickle rather higher tastes with the bright confectionery of
fiction and verse and such things. No, it was by enunciating and
applying those great principles, giving solid bread, so to speak, that
he meant to educate his readers. ‘You must remember, sir’--he would
point the glasses--‘that this is a News-Paper, and not a magazine’--the
last with magnificent scorn. At ordinary times, his hand was hardly to
be traced in the paper; he remained hidden afar-off, brooding over the
great principles. But at a crisis, Wallerdale knew what it meant to have
a _Herald_ and a Wimpenny-Brown as its editor. On the eve of an
election, at the outbreak or at the conclusion of a war, at all times
like these, he could be counted upon; leaders would flow from his pen,
and the _Herald_ would look Monarch, Lords, Commons, in the face, would
address all Europe, and the two Americas if need be, re-assuring friends
and denouncing enemies here, there, and everywhere. Opinion would
perhaps differ as to when he was at his best, but I, for one, found most
to admire in his leaders on the death--say--of a political opponent: the
decent respect for the dead man’s private virtues, tempered by regret at
the waste of brilliant qualities in a bad cause, at the ‘late lamented
minister’s fatal inability to comprehend those great principles which
have ...’ and so forth. One saw the gold-rimmed glasses and the trim
whiskers poised over the foolscap; he was no longer a fellow-citizen but
the supreme arbiter, measuring out praise and blame while the organ
wails and the strange dust is borne away.
Well, he is gone now, long after he quitted the editorial chair and
declined from a servant of the public (and its educator) to an old
fellow mumbling in a corner of a club-room. And in thinking of what he
was, I may have done him little justice; probably the soft delicate
lights of character have faded out of my memory and left the crude lines
of a caricature. But still the little round figure (for he was little
and round) rises from the past; I see the unfathomably profound look, I
hear the solemn accents, and again his unconscious absurdity swells
monstrously, and again the farce is played out. He seems now as extinct
as the mastodon. Even his foolish dull little paper has disappeared;
Wallerdale has no _Herald_ now, but listens to the brazen voices from
London. Even those few great principles have sadly declined, and we hear
little of them now. He would, I suppose, be as helpless as a babe in the
office of a great modern newspaper. His solemn gestures, worn rhetorical
finery and great principles would not carry him in that tense
atmosphere. More sense of organisation, quick decisions, lightning
judgments, would be demanded from him--and, I think, in vain. A greater
knowledge of what can be done in a newspaper, of what catches the public
eye, in short, of the tricks of the trade, would certainly be necessary.
Yes, he would have to know more.
And yet, in a way, he would have to know less. Looking back at him, the
obscure editor of an obscure sheet, amazingly rigid with
self-importance, a little figure of fun, I realise that he was a better
man than most of his successors of to-day, those undeniably clever,
industrious journalists who put the great newspapers into the hands of
the million. He could not have done what they do, day by day, but would
he have tried? He, at least, would never have consented to become the
mouthpiece of the rich, no better--nay, worse--than their lackeys. His
talents were slender enough and monstrously exaggerated in his own mind,
but such as they were, they were genuinely at the service of his
readers. To him the public was not that million-eyed monster waiting to
be cajoled and tricked which it has since become. And though his
successors may be infinitely more clever, the worst of them can only run
their dubious course to-day because yesterday my old editor and his like
ran another and better course; the trickster of to-day is nothing but a
huge parasite battening on the good name that some honest men in his
trade left behind them. That lying sheet, the What’s-its-Name from
London, has, I believe, taken the place of the _Wallerdale Herald_, and
when a reader from those parts goes trustfully through its smudgy
columns of falsehood, perhaps he does it because he still imagines that
someone like Wimpenny-Brown is responsible for its utterance. Alas!--he
does not know that the Wimpenny-Browns, those Servants of the Public
with their few great principles, are dead and gone, and that something
more than innocent folly perished with them.
ON AN OLD BOOK OF NATURAL HISTORY
The observation that ‘Truth is stranger than fiction’ is looked upon, in
these days, rather as a platitude than a paradox; yet it does not
necessarily follow that we, in our heart of hearts, really accept this
smart saying. But everyone who has read in our old literature must admit
that it is true of our forefathers; their idea of truth and their
so-called facts are a thousand times stranger to us than their fiction.
The mediaeval romances are full of the marvellous, but they pale before
the grave books of instruction written by quite serious, learned old
gentlemen. Some of the latter merely set out to edify the young mind,
but the result of their labours often seems to us a very riot of the
imagination, and our schoolboys would consider themselves lucky if they
could meet with matter one-half so entertaining. The quaint, unconscious
humour of these solemn, old authors over-shadows even their historical
and antiquarian interest.
Some such thoughts as these were going through my head the other night
when I was gleefully devouring, in one of the Early English Text
Society’s wonderful reprints, some extracts from a very quaint old book:
‘The noble lyfe and natures of man, Of bestes, serpentys, fowles and
fisshes,’ by one Laurens Andrewe. The date of this volume is unknown,
but it was probably written and published early in the sixteenth
century. The Third Part of the book is particularly occupied with the
noble life and natures of fishes, and begins: ‘Here after followeth of
the natures of the fisshes of the See, whiche be right profitable to be
understande.’ Now I care little for Natural History at any time, and
fishes do not make a very lively subject for study, but in the hands of
Master Andrewe, Natural History becomes ‘all a wonder,’ and the sea, to
him, is certainly filled with creatures that are ‘rich and strange.’
When he is dealing with the commonest fishes, like the herring, our
author is fairly sure of his facts, and we get nothing very exciting,
but once he leaves the familiar types, there is no end to his
phantasies. The Ahuna, when in danger, withdraws his head into his
belly, and, as Laurens wisely notes: ‘He dothe ete (eat) a parte of
himselfe rather than the other fisshes sholde ete him whole.’ The most
interesting fact about the Balena, a creature resembling a whale, is
that in rough weather she puts her young ones in her mouth for safety.
But, according to our author, the Cetus ‘is the greatest whale fisshe of
all,’ and the manner of his capture is most extraordinary. Such is the
perfidious and cruel nature of mankind that the most gentle, lovable
trait of this great creature becomes his undoing. For, you must know,
the Cetus is very fond of music, and, in order to ensnare the
unsuspecting leviathan, men assemble a number of ships, and then, with
‘divers instruments of musike, they play with grete armonye.’ The
hapless creature, innocent of the nature of man, comes to the surface
and draws nearer and nearer, being ‘very gladde of this armonye,’ only
to find a terrible death awaiting him.
All of which our author shamelessly chronicles in great detail. For
accuracy combined with brevity, what could be better than his
description of the Conger, which is fashioned like an eel, but much
‘greter (greater) in quantyte?’ On being questioned as to the piscatory
view of bad weather, most of us would say offhand that all fishes would
be either indifferent to rain or glad of it, but this only shows the
danger of ignorance; it seems that the Coretz ‘hideth him in the deep of
the water when it raineth, for if he received any rain, he should waxe
blynde, and dye of it.’
In his account of the Dolphin, our author nearly achieves pathos. ‘It
hath no voice,’ he says, ‘yet it singeth like a man’; then he adds a
cautious, indirect statement, ‘Some say whan they be taken that they
wepe.’ Like the unfortunate Cetus, the Dolphin is musical, and ‘will
gladly listen to the playing of lutes, harpes and pypes.’ There was once
a king, who, after having captured a dolphin, was so moved by its
piteous weeping and lamenting, that he let it go again.