now--we are all recovering fast, and are drinking hypophosphates, and
beginning to be greedy again--that the solemnity of it ought to have
been discounted long ago, if it is going to be solemn at all. Everyone,
of course, is at liberty to take life solemnly from the time he begins
to think at all. But whatever our attitude towards life is, the same
ought to be our attitude towards death, whether we believe that there is
a continuance of life afterwards, or whether we are so unfortunate as to
believe that there is the quenched candle. For in the one case death is
but the opening of a door into a fuller light, a thing, it is true, that
may affect one for the moment, since from the weakness of the flesh we
cling to what we know, while in the other death is just extinction, a
consummation which no pessimist should fear, since while he lived he
had held so poor an opinion of life. So whether we regard life as a
pleasant interlude in something else, or whether we regard death--a
thing unthinkable to me--as the extinction of consciousness, I cannot
believe that he is not a guest who is welcome when he comes. Personally
I do not want him to come for a long time, since I am delighted with the
world, and it would be most annoying to die now when one is just
recovering from influenza, and hopes to go to the Richter concert
to-morrow. But whatever one’s belief about the future is, I cannot see
that there is an essential horror about death. I can conjure up horror
of some kind about going to the dentist, about looking up trains in a
Bradshaw, since the print is so execrable and the connections so unruly,
but I go my journey, or I go to the dentist, and get to my destination,
or am relieved of a troublesome tooth. Life does not seem to me the
least troublesome, it is true, but let us take it that by death I get to
my destination, or in any case get nearer it.
Besides, how frightfully interesting!
I did not die, but went to the Richter concert instead. Legs wished to
go, too, but that was clearly idiotic, and so Helen and I tossed up as
to which of us should go, and which remain at home. I won, and went.
There was Isolde in his high chair. (Probably an intelligent critic will
say that Isolde was a woman, and I mean Tristan. But I don’t.) He waved
a little wand, and the spirit of the Meistersingers filled the hall. It
was not, so it struck me, a remembrance only of their harmonious
joviality, a mere picture of them; it was they who rollicked and made
processions in the great thumping triads of their march. There they sat,
each with his business, town clerk, and vintner burgomaster, and lawyer,
and, best of all, the old tender-hearted shoemaker, on whose kindly face
upturned to the sky one feather of the bird of love had fallen, though
it had never come and nestled in his bosom. But it was not with
bitterness that so great a loss had filled him; it had but refined him
to a mellow kindliness that made all young things love him. There they
all sat, so the band told me, over their songs and their sober
carousing, till the others went home, and Sachs was left alone with
music yet unsung echoing in his kind old head, and throbbing in his
youthful heart. But he knew that such Divine melody was not to be
realized by him; some master of music had yet to come and put into notes
and audible harmony that which existed but in the temple of his dreams,
in the garden of things a man may conceive, but may not realize. Then
came there the gracious young knight, and Sachs heard that of which he
had dreamed, the song taught by the birds and the choirs of Nature to
the ardent heart of youth.
The triumph took wings and soared, lifting Sachs with it, him and his
yearnings, and that fine old music, too, which was his. Inextricably
mingled, they were knit one into each other, soaring into the sunrise.
* * * * *
Thereafter we were taken to the bleak mountain, where should gather the
maidens of storm, who did the will of Wotan. It was high and exposed
above the region of the trees, and shrill blew the winds over it, and
the heavens streamed above it. Fast and thick rode the army of menacing
clouds, for the tempest in which the Valkyries rejoice, riding their
untamed steeds down the swift roadway of the winds, was broken out in
mad fury. Yelling and screaming, it drove in mad circles of wrath round
the place where the nine maidens should foregather that evening, each
with the fruit of her day’s quest slung across her saddle, each with a
hero who should drink that night of the wine of the gods, which should
pour into his veins the fire of eternal life in place of the faint
mortal blood that had beaten there before. Yet it was not love the
maidens sought. It was danger and death and heroic enterprise that bore
them so swiftly on their errands, and lit in them a fire brighter than
love has ever kindled. Their wine was the buffet of the tempest, their
meat the strong winds of God.
Then there was heard, faint at first, the beating of the immortal hoofs
in the rush of flying steeds; from east and west there shone out remote
fires in the bedlam of the clouds, increasing, getting nearer and more
blinding, till through the darkness of the tempest could be seen the
figures of the maidens gathering to their trysting-place, some at the
gallop, some flying, and all drunk with adventure and swift deeds. Each
that day had prospered, each had a hero at her saddle, swooning now in
death, but soon to be restored to the fuller life.
So gathered they, but as yet one was still missing--Brünnhilde, the
swiftest and best of them all, the dearest to the heart of Wotan, for,
indeed, she was none other than his heart and his inviolable will. And
while yet the others wondered at her tarrying, she came. But no hero had
she. She but led a woman into the midst of her sisters, for pity had
touched her fierce heart with so keen and intimate a pang that she had
disobeyed the behest of Wotan, and saved her of the race which he had
doomed to destruction.... The sorrow and the pain of the world had
entered into her. Henceforth no more there would be for her the starry
splendour of Valhalla, throned on the thunder and rosy with the light of
eternal dawn. Soon for this her deed should another light shine on
tower and palace wall--the light of the flames that consumed it.
* * * * *
Tempest, and love, and sorrow, and the doom of the immortal gods all
made audible in the eternal kingdom of the air! How is it that, when
once one has heard a miracle like this, one can ever so far forget it as
to go back to the meanness of little miry ways? There are so many big
things in the world, and though one knows that, and has, according to
one’s scale, seen and understood their size, yet we can still be so
gross of perception that one can sit down, blear-eyed of vision, to
write two-penny-halfpenny reflections about sorrow and mutability! (And
be rather pleased with them, too, until Legs and Helen laughed
themselves all out of shape.)
How large a place, too, in that which makes for size and the breeziness
of living, does Art in some form or other occupy for most of us! Music
and painting, literature and drama, are great doors flung wide to admit
one to the sunshine of God. Often, even to the spiritually-minded, the
avenues of prayer and directer communion seem somehow blocked; to
others, the majority, they are never wholly open. But to any who have an
appreciation at all of what is beautiful, it must be a dark hour indeed
when that approach is altogether shrouded and black, when neither
Angelo, nor Velasquez, nor Shelley, nor Wagner, has a candle to give one
to light the way. Millions of beautiful minds have their approach here.
To millions all idea of a personal God, to be approached directly, seems
inconceivable, but it seems to me to be one of the perfectly certain
things in this very uncertain world that the passionate worship of
beauty, in whatever sort manifested, is no less a direct invocation than
prayer and the bent knee. The study and the love for ‘whatsoever things
are lovely’ is as royal a road, perhaps, as the other, for the passion
for what is beautiful is no less than the passion for the only
Beautiful, and by such as feel that, all that is filthy is as unerringly
condemned as it is by those who call ‘filthy’ by another name--‘sinful.’
For the perception of anything beautiful has to the perceiver a force of
purging, while to the gross sense it is a sealed thing.
‘O world as God has made it, all is beauty;
And knowing this is love, and love is duty,
What further can be sought for or declared?’
And to that I say ‘Amen.’
* * * * *
The ‘kennel,’ as that same magician of words said, is ‘a-yelp’ at this.
Artists, of whatever sort, are supposed to be loose of life. Where that
extraordinary delusion arose I have no idea, unless it had its origin in
some superficial observer of the manners and ways in the Latin quarter
of Paris. That things not technically parochial may have occurred there,
who would deny? But for my part I think it just as un-Christian to nag,
and to vex, and to be unkind as to be anything else under the sun. In
fact, to put it broadly, I would as soon be a drunken and kind man as be
a sour and total abstainer. Sour and total abstainers will turn on me
their eyes of smiling pity and horror, but perhaps it is only a matter
of taste.
But to be ‘nice’ to people seems so immensely important. You may lecture
on the Lamentations of Jeremiah for hours together, with a battery of
historical facts to help you, and yet do no particular good; but if you
help a lame dog, canine or human, over a stile, you have been a far
better Christian. I dare say that word offends some people, so I will
cancel it, and say that you have been of far greater service in a world
that has fortuitously come into being, and will as fortuitously go out
of being. Whatever may be the truth about things seen and unseen,
happiness is quite certainly better than misery, and laughter is better
than the most edifying tears.
The finger of the gloomy moralist is pointed at me. I knew it was going
to be pointed--and in a sepulchral voice he says: ‘What about death?’
The fact is that I don’t know (nor does he), and it is not my affair.
While I am alive I prefer to drink deep of the joy of life than to
speculate about what may come next. I can conjure up my death-bed as
often as I choose, and make it a scene of moving pathos and dim vexed
doubts. There is nothing so easy. I can without the slightest effort
advance really profound problems as to ‘what it all means,’ since there
is nothing so easy as asking unanswerable questions. What of the death
of the wasp which I killed gleefully last August with a tennis-racquet?
I haven’t the slightest idea. All I know is that if next August another
ventures to buzz round my head when I am having tea on the lawn after a
perspiring set, I shall, if possible, kill it again.
If only the gloomy moralist could give me a reasonable theory to show
why I could not exterminate wasps, I would accept it. But he can’t. He
only says it puzzles him. It puzzles me, too, but in the interval I kill
the wasp.
The fact is (degrading though it may sound) that I do not really believe
that we are any of us capable of understanding the mind of the Infinite
God. Philosophers try to explain little bits of it, and in their
explanation of the little bit of it bang their heads together like
children playing hide-and-seek in the dark. _Hinc illæ lacrimæ_. The
poor children have terrible headaches. I am extremely sorry, but it is,
after all, their fault. Instead of playing hide-and-seek in the dark,
they should go out and play in the light; then no heads would be hit
together.
It is quite maddening to think of the energy expended over this
hide-and-seek, when all the time the garden of the world’s beauty is
ready waiting outside the door. If you have the instincts of a beast,
perhaps it is better to grope in the dark; but if you have the rudiments
of any other condition, go and play. All the beauty that the world holds
is at your command. All that really matters in this world is to be
enjoyed very cheaply. Most things worth reading can be bought for a
shilling or two, and if that is not ‘handy,’ look at a tree instead, and
absorb the life that shines in each growing twig of it. Or if you are
musically minded, hear, as I have just heard, the glories of the maidens
of the storm.
Of course, no one thing is the least more wonderful than any other. All
that happens, if we look at it at all closely, is a marvellous
conjuring-trick. Why don’t ducks come out of hen’s eggs? Is it not
marvellous that chickens invariably issue? If you go a step farther
back, and learn something about the continuance of type, it becomes even
more wonderful. ‘How’ can be told us, but never ‘why.’ And so I am
confident in the unanswerableness of my riddle. Why do sounds like those
of the violin and the brass in the ‘Ride of the Valkyries’ convey the
essence of storm and tempest?
* * * * *
Another conjuring-trick of the most delightful kind occurred next
morning. At twelve o’clock last night the streets of London had, without
asking (thereby reversing the sad tale of Oliver Twist), been given a
second helping of brown porridge. It was ankle-deep on the roadway of
Sloane Street, thick brown porridge of mud; then during the night the
temperature went down, and it froze. The result is that for the copious
soup we are given a clean, dry roadway. There is no mud of any kind, not
even frozen mud. The street is clear and dry, as if Oliver Twist had
licked it. But where has gone that two inches of obfusc lather? Has the
wood-pavement drunk it in? Has it gone into the air? Has some celestial
housemaid, like the Awful Thing, been set to sweep the streets, even as
she has swept the sky, and given us the invigoration of frost in
exchange for the wet blanket of chilly cloud? Coming back from Richter
last night, the streets were swimming; eight hours later (or it may be
nine) one might walk barefoot across the road, or spread one’s dinner
there, and get no taint. How it will be sparkling on the grasses and
brave evergreens at home, turned to diamond spray by the red sun of
frosty mornings!
* * * * *
‘O world as God has made it!’... How often involuntarily, as if coming
from without, that line rings in my head! And how very little we, with
all our jealousies, and depressions, and bickerings, and follies, are
able to spoil or dim the beauty that is cast so broadly there. Puny as
are our efforts for good, it really seems to me that our attempts at
being evil are even more impotent and microscopic. We are often as
tiresome and unpleasant as we know how to be, yet all the time we are
swimming against that huge quiet tide of the beauty of the world as God
made it, the knowledge of which is love, and beyond which there is no
further declaration possible. Sometimes, if we are very active indeed,
and exert ourselves very much, we can stand still or even move a little
way in opposition to the great tide, but soon our efforts must relax,
and we are swept down again with the current that eternally flows from
the heart of the Infinite, and returns there again in those pulsations
that are the life and the light of the world.
It is impossible, indeed, unless we say that evil is the vital principle
of the world, to think otherwise. War there is between the two huge
forces, but it is just Satanism, and nothing else whatever, that makes
people say that the world is going from bad to worse. If you are so
unfortunate as to be a Satanist, there is nothing more to be said, and I
hope the devil will give you your due; but if otherwise, there can be no
other conclusion than that good, all that is lovely and fine, is
steadily gaining ground. For it does not seem reasonable to suppose that
God contemplates some swift heady manœuvre which shall suddenly take
evil in the rear, and in a moment rout the antagonism. At any rate, as
far as we can possibly judge, it is by quiet processes that He deals
with the sum of the world, even as He deals with the units that make
it. For just as nobody has any right to expect that the evil in his
nature will be suddenly expunged, even though the moment should be one
of blinding revelation, so we should acquiesce in the slow progress of
the sum-total. For there are only three possible alternatives--the first
(namely, that the progress is from bad to worse), which is Satanism; the
second, that there is now in the world (and will be) exactly the same
amount of evil and good as there has always been, in which case you are
confronted with the absurd proposition of two absolutely equal forces
having made this scheme of things, which will war to all eternity; and
the third, that good is stronger than evil, and is quietly gaining
ground.
The objection to the first alternative is that it is Satanism--a very
fatal objection. The objection to the second is that it is so
stupendously dull. There cannot possibly be any point in anything if the
two forces are equal. There can be no struggle in the mind as to whether
one ought or ought not to do certain things, if whatever you do or don’t
does not make any difference. There remains the third alternative. The
objection to that is ... well, I can’t see there is any.
* * * * *
Hours ago this house has been asleep, the house in which I write on this
early morning of the New Year, the house which is home to me, even as my
own is; for it is the house--you will have guessed--where lives she who
is neither dearer nor less dear than Helen, and where we always spend
the week and a little more that begins before Christmas and finishes a
little after the New Year has been swung from the voices of mellow
bells. Before midnight we sat in the oak-panelled room and played the
most heavenly games, charades, and insane gymnastic exercises, and
table-turning, with terror when the dreadful table turned in a really
unaccountable manner, all consecrated by love and laughter; and then,
when the Old Year was to be numbered by minutes that the fingers could
reckon, we drew nearer to the log fire and wished each other that which
we all wanted for each. Legs’ triumphant entry into the Foreign Office
was no longer capable of a wish, since it was already accomplished, so
he was wished a wife; and--you will understand that we were all very
intimate--my mother was wished freedom from all anxiety of whatever
kind; and the old nurse of ninety years who had acted charades with us
with astonishing power was wished her century; and I was wished the
holding of the frost, so that I might skate--they were flippant
again--and two cousins were respectively wished a microscope--one is of
tender years--and a motor-car; and then, just as the clock jarred,
telling us there was but a minute more to the New Year, it was Helen’s
turn to be wished, and somebody said, ‘Your heart’s desire’; and she
understood.
Immediately afterwards the clock struck, and everybody kissed everybody
else, and said ‘Happy New Year,’ and no more. For you must not say
anything more than that: you _must not_ even say ‘Good-night,’ else the
charm is broken. So in dead silence we lighted bedroom candles, for the
ritual was well known, and separated. And who knows but that all about
the house, as in the ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream,’ the dances of the
fairies circled up and down by the light of drowsy fires?
JANUARY
A hundred pounds have suddenly and unexpectedly appeared on the horizon.
People who are very rich have not the slightest idea what that means to
us. People who are very poor have not the slightest idea either, because
they would probably buy a public-house, or goodwill, or something of
that nature, and never have any fun out of it at all. But to people who
‘jog along’ a hundred pounds is a treat which neither rich people nor
poor can form any conception of. To those who just pay their way, as we
do, it means several weeks somewhere. The only question is ‘Where?’ At
this point in our argument it was impossible to proceed. Helen and I
were both being so unselfish that we couldn’t go on. She said she longed
to have two or three weeks in Switzerland; I said that what I really
wanted was to go to the Riviera for a fortnight. Then, as always
happens, these subterfuges broke down, and we both confessed that we
neither of us really wanted to go where we said we did. She wanted to go
to Nice; I wanted to go to the high altitudes. So, with the
understanding that we were to go where the coin said we should, and not
otherwise, we tossed up. It was high altitudes.
His country put in a claim for Legs at the Foreign Office,
unfortunately, and he should not come with us; but we felt, when we
observed the urbanity of the French customs-house officials, who
obligingly shut their eyes to the presence of large quantities of
tobacco, and the politeness of the railway officials, that Legs had
probably made himself felt in our foreign relations already, and that he
was responsible for all this very civil behaviour. At Bâle, however,
where we had to change at the awful hour in the morning which is neither
night nor day, we found that Legs’ diplomacy had not yet had time to
make itself felt, for we were subjected to a searching scrutiny. Luckily
I had had experience of the manners and customs-house officials of Bâle
before, and had transferred my tobacco into my coat pockets, thus
frustrating the baffled Teuton. But I am afraid it gave certain secret
glee to observe that my travelling companion of the night before--a
stout white man, with a name on his labels so long that I could not read
it, who had snored all the time--was caught, and his rich stores of
cigarettes taken from him, to be sent, I suppose, to Berne, for the
delectation of the President of the Republic.
Switzerland is a land that always arouses curiosity as to how it came
about that a country in which the people are so small, so ‘toy,’ should
in itself be on so gigantic and marvellous a scale. Is it that the
living among these stupendous surroundings has somehow dwarfed the
people, or has Nature, by one of her inimitable contrasts, made the
human part of Switzerland so insignificant in order to set off the
vastness of peak and snowfield? Certainly the glib commonplace that
national character is influenced and formed by national surroundings is
here gloriously contradicted, since, as far as I am aware, no Swiss has
ever attained to eminence in anything. They are a little toy people,
who live in little toy towns, and make excellent chocolate, and run
innumerable hotels on the most economical principles. But even then they
do not (as one would expect) get very rich. They are never ‘very’
anything. ‘But the chocolate is excellent,’ said Helen to these
speculations.
It requires faith this morning to believe that in a few hours we shall
be crunching the dry, powdery snow beneath our feet, and before sunset
be skating or gliding down the white frozen road, with puffs of snow
coming from the bows of the toboggan, for here all down the shore of the
Lake of Thun the country is brown and grey, with scarce a streak of
white to show that it is winter. Low overhead are fat masses of
dirty-looking cloud, but between them (and this is the door where faith
enters) are glimpses of the perfect azure which we expect up above. Now
and then the sun strikes some distant hillside, or, like a flashlight,
is turned on to the waters of the lake, making of them a sudden
aquamarine of luminous green. But the weather is undoubtedly mild; the
eaves of the wooden toy-stations drip with discouraging moisture, and
Interlaken, when we reach it, wears a dreadful spring-like aspect, and
people are sitting out of doors at the cafés, and appear to find it
relaxing.
Then the first of these wonderful winter miracles happened. There was
the flat alluvial land at the end of the lake, across which ran the
fussy little light railway which should take us above (so we hoped) the
region of cloudland. Grey and puddle-strewn was it, with here and there
a patch of dirty snow stained through with the earthy moistness beneath.
A low-lying mist was spread over the nearer distance, which melted into
the thicker clouds of the sky itself. It was just such a view as you
shall see anywhere in the English fen-land during February.