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!