There is a place in front of the Royal Exchange where the wide pavement
reaches out like a promontory. It is in the shape of a triangle with a
rounded apex. A stream of traffic runs on either side, and other
streets send their currents down into the open space before it. Like
the spokes of a wheel converging streams of human life flow into this
agitated pool. Horses and carriages, carts, vans, omnibuses, cabs,
every kind of conveyance cross each other’s course in every possible
direction. Twisting in and out by the wheels and under the horses’
heads, working a devious way, men and women of all conditions wind a
path over. They fill the interstices between the carriages and blacken
the surface, till the vans almost float on human beings. Now the
streams slacken, and now they rush amain, but never cease; dark waves
are always rolling down the incline opposite, waves swell out from the
side rivers, all London converges into this focus. There is an
indistinguishable noise—it is not clatter, hum, or roar, it is not
resolvable; made up of a thousand thousand footsteps, from a thousand
hoofs, a thousand wheels—of haste, and shuffle, and quick movements,
and ponderous loads; no attention can resolve it into a fixed sound.
Blue carts and yellow omnibuses, varnished carriages and brown vans,
green omnibuses and red cabs, pale loads of yellow straw, rusty-red
iron clanking on paintless carts, high white wool-packs, grey horses,
bay horses, black teams; sunlight sparkling on brass harness, gleaming
from carriage panels; jingle, jingle, jingle! An intermixed and
intertangled, ceaselessly changing jingle, too, of colour; flecks of
colour champed, as it were, like bits in the horses’ teeth, frothed and
strewn about, and a surface always of dark-dressed people winding like
the curves on fast-flowing water. This is the vortex and whirlpool, the
centre of human life today on the earth. Now the tide rises and now it
sinks, but the flow of these rivers always continues. Here it seethes
and whirls, not for an hour only, but for all present time, hour by
hour, day by day, year by year.
Here it rushes and pushes, the atoms triturate and grind, and, eagerly
thrusting by, pursue their separate ends. Here it appears in its
unconcealed personality, indifferent to all else but itself, absorbed
and rapt in eager self, devoid and stripped of conventional gloss and
politeness, yielding only to get its own way; driving, pushing, carried
on in a stress of feverish force like a bullet, dynamic force apart
from reason or will, like the force that lifts the tides and sends the
clouds onwards. The friction of a thousand interests evolves a
condition of electricity in which men are moved to and fro without
considering their steps. Yet the agitated pool of life is stonily
indifferent, the thought is absent or preoccupied, for it is evident
that the mass are unconscious of the scene in which they act.
But it is more sternly real than the very stones, for all these men and
women that pass through are driven on by the push of accumulated
circumstances; they cannot stay, they must go, their necks are in the
slave’s ring, they are beaten like seaweed against the solid walls of
fact. In ancient times, Xerxes, the king of kings, looking down upon
his myriads, wept to think that in a hundred years not one of them
would be left. Where will be these millions of to-day in a hundred
years? But, further than that, let us ask, Where then will be the sum
and outcome of their labour? If they wither away like summer grass,
will not at least a result be left which those of a hundred years hence
may be the better for? No, not one jot! There will not be any sum or
outcome or result of this ceaseless labour and movement; it vanishes in
the moment that it is done, and in a hundred years nothing will be
there, for nothing is there now. There will be no more sum or result
than accumulates from the motion of a revolving cowl on a housetop. Nor
do they receive any more sunshine during their lives, for they are
unconscious of the sun.
I used to come and stand near the apex of the promontory of pavement
which juts out towards the pool of life; I still go there to ponder.
Burning in the sky, the sun shone on me as when I rested in the narrow
valley carved in prehistoric time. Burning in the sky, I can never
forget the sun. The heat of summer is dry there as if the light carried
an impalpable dust; dry, breathless heat that will not let the skin
respire, but swathes up the dry fire in the blood. But beyond the heat
and light, I felt the presence of the sun as I felt it in the solitary
valley, the presence of the resistless forces of the universe; the sun
burned in the sky as I stood and pondered. Is there any theory,
philosophy, or creed, is there any system or culture, any formulated
method able to meet and satisfy each separate item of this agitated
pool of human life? By which they may be guided, by which hope, by
which look forward? Not a mere illusion of the craven heart—something
real, as real as the solid walls of fact against which, like drifted
sea-weed, they are dashed; something to give each separate personality
sunshine and a flower in its own existence now; something to shape this
million-handed labour to an end and outcome that will leave more
sunshine and more flowers to those who must succeed? Something real
now, and not in the spirit-land; in this hour now, as I stand and the
sun burns. Can any creed, philosophy, system, or culture endure the
test and remain unmolten in this fierce focus of human life?
Consider, is there anything slowly painted on the once mystic and now
commonplace papyri of ancient, ancient Egypt, held on the mummy’s
withered breast? In that elaborate ritual, in the procession of the
symbols, in the winged circle, in the laborious sarcophagus? Nothing;
absolutely nothing! Before the fierce heat of the human furnace, the
papyri smoulder away as paper smoulders under a lens in the sun.
Remember Nineveh and the cult of the fir-cone, the turbaned and bearded
bulls of stone, the lion hunt, the painted chambers loaded with tile
books, the lore of the arrow-headed writing. What is in Assyria? There
are sand, and failing rivers, and in Assyria’s writings an utter
nothing. The aged caves of India, who shall tell when they were
sculptured? Far back when the sun was burning, burning in the sky as
now in untold precedent time. Is there any meaning in those ancient
caves? The indistinguishable noise not to be resolved, born of the
human struggle, mocks in answer.
In the strange characters of the Zend, in the Sanscrit, in the
effortless creed of Confucius, in the Aztec coloured-string writings
and rayed stones, in the uncertain marks left of the sunken Polynesian
continent, hieroglyphs as useless as those of Memphis, nothing.
Nothing! They have been tried, and were found an illusion. Think then,
to-day, now looking from this apex of the pavement promontory outwards
from our own land to the utmost bounds of the farthest sail, is there
any faith or culture at this hour which can stand in this fierce heat?
From the various forms of Semitic, Aryan, or Turanian creed now
existing, from the printing-press to the palm-leaf volume on to those
who call on the jewel in the lotus, can aught be gathered which can
face this, the Reality? The indistinguishable noise, non-resolvable,
roars a loud contempt.
Turn, then, to the calm reasoning of Aristotle; is there anything in
that? Can the half-divine thought of Plato, rising in storeys of
sequential ideas, following each other to the conclusion, endure here?
No! All the philosophers in Diogenes Laertius fade away: the theories
of mediæval days; the organon of experiment; down to this hour—they are
useless alike. The science of this hour, drawn from the printing-press
in an endless web of paper, is powerless here; the indistinguishable
noise echoed from the smoke-shadowed walls despises the whole. A
thousand footsteps, a thousand hoofs, a thousand wheels roll over and
utterly contemn them in complete annihilation. Mere illusions of heart
or mind, they are tested and thrust aside by the irresistible push of a
million converging feet.
Burning in the sky, the sun shines as it shone on me in the solitary
valley, as it burned on when the earliest cave of India was carved.
Above the indistinguishable roar of the many feet I feel the presence
of the sun, of the immense forces of the universe, and beyond these the
sense of the eternal now, of the immortal. Full well aware that all has
failed, yet, side by side with the sadness of that knowledge, there
lives on in me an unquenchable belief, thought burning like the sun,
that there is yet something to be found, something real, something to
give each separate personality sunshine and flowers in its own
existence now. Something to shape this million-handed labour to an end
and outcome, leaving accumulated sunshine and flowers to those who
shall succeed. It must be dragged forth by might of thought from the
immense forces of the universe.
To prepare for such an effort, first the mind must be cleared of the
conceit that, because we live to-day, we are wiser than the ages gone.
The mind must acknowledge its ignorance; all the learning and lore of
so many eras must be erased from it as an encumbrance. It is not from
past or present knowledge, science or faith, that it is to be drawn.
Erase these altogether as they are erased under the fierce heat of the
focus before me. Begin wholly afresh. Go straight to the sun, the
immense forces of the universe, to the Entity unknown; go higher than a
god; deeper than prayer; and open a new day. That I might but have a
fragment of Cæsar’s intellect to find a fragment of this desire!
From my home near London I made a pilgrimage almost daily to an aspen
by a brook. It was a mile and a quarter along the road, far enough for
me to walk off the concentration of mind necessary for work. The idea
of the pilgrimage was to get away from the endless and nameless
circumstances of everyday existence, which by degrees build a wall
about the mind so that it travels in a constantly narrowing circle.
This tether of the faculties tends to make them accept present
knowledge, and present things, as all that can be attained to. This is
all—there is nothing more—is the iterated preaching of house-life.
Remain; be content; go round and round in one barren path, a little
money, a little food and sleep, some ancient fables, old age and death.
Of all the inventions of casuistry with man for ages has in various
ways which manacled himself, and stayed his own advance, there is none
equally potent with the supposition that nothing more is possible. Once
well impress on the mind that it has already all, that advance is
impossible because there is nothing further, and it is chained like a
horse to an iron pin in the ground. It is the most deadly—the most
fatal poison of the mind. No such casuistry has ever for a moment held
me, but still, if permitted, the constant routine of house-life, the
same work, the same thought in the work, the little circumstances
regularly recurring, will dull the keenest edge of thought. By my daily
pilgrimage, I escaped from it back to the sun.
In summer the leaves of the aspen rustled pleasantly, there was the
tinkle of falling water over a hatch, thrushes sang and blackbirds
whistled, greenfinches laughed in their talk to each other. The
commonplace dusty road was commonplace no longer. In the dust was the
mark of the chaffinches’ little feet; the white light rendered even the
dust brighter to look on. The air came from the south-west—there were
distant hills in that direction—over fields of grass and corn. As I
visited the spot from day to day the wheat grew from green to yellow,
the wild roses flowered, the scarlet poppies appeared, and again the
beeches reddened in autumn. In the march of time there fell away from
my mind, as the leaves from the trees in autumn, the last traces and
relics of superstitions and traditions acquired compulsorily in
childhood. Always feebly adhering, they finally disappeared.
There fell away, too, personal bias and prejudices, enabling me to see
clearer and with wider sympathies. The glamour of modern science and
discoveries faded away, for I found them no more than the first
potter’s wheel. Erasure and reception proceeded together; the past
accumulations of casuistry were erased, and my thought widened to
receive the idea of something beyond all previous ideas. With
disbelief, belief increased. The aspiration and hope, the prayer, was
the same as that which I felt years before on the hills, only it now
broadened.
Experience of life, instead of curtailing and checking my prayer, led
me to reject experience altogether. As well might the horse believe
that the road the bridle forces it to traverse every day encircles the
earth as I believe in experience. All the experience of the greatest
city in the world could not withhold me. I rejected it wholly. I stood
bare-headed before the sun, in the presence of the earth and air, in
the presence of the immense forces of the universe. I demand that which
will make me more perfect now, this hour. London convinced me of my own
thought. That thought has always been with me, and always grows wider.
One midsummer I went out of the road into the fields, and sat down on
the grass between the yellowing wheat and the green hawthorn bushes.
The sun burned in the sky, the wheat was full of a luxuriant sense of
growth, the grass high, the earth giving its vigour to tree and leaf,
the heaven blue. The vigour and growth, the warmth and light, the
beauty and richness of it entered into me; an ecstasy of soul
accompanied the delicate excitement of the senses: the soul rose with
the body. Rapt in the fulness of the moment, I prayed there with all
that expansion of mind and frame; no words, no definition,
inexpressible desire of physical life, of soul-life, equal to and
beyond the highest imagining of my heart.
These memories cannot be placed in exact chronological order. There was
a time when a weary restlessness came upon me, perhaps from
too-long-continued labour. It was like a drought—a moral drought—as if
I had been absent for many years from the sources of life and hope. The
inner nature was faint, all was dry and tasteless; I was weary for the
pure, fresh springs of thought. Some instinctive feeling uncontrollable
drove me to the sea; I was so under its influence that I could not
arrange the journey so as to get the longest day. I merely started, and
of course had to wait and endure much inconvenience. To get to the sea
at some quiet spot was my one thought; to do so I had to travel
farther, and from want of prearrangement it was between two and three
in the afternoon before I reached the end of my journey. Even then,
being too much preoccupied to inquire the way, I missed the road and
had to walk a long distance before coming to the shore. But I found the
sea at last; I walked beside it in a trance away from the houses out
into the wheat. The ripe corn stood up to the beach, the waves on one
side of the shingle, and the yellow wheat on the other.
There, alone, I went down to the sea. I stood where the foam came to my
feet, and looked out over the sunlit waters. The great earth bearing
the richness of the harvest, and its hills golden with corn, was at my
back; its strength and firmness under me. The great sun shone above,
the wide sea was before me, the wind came sweet and strong from the
waves. The life of the earth and the sea, the glow of the sun filled
me; I touched the surge with my hand, I lifted my face to the sun, I
opened my lips to the wind. I prayed aloud in the roar of the waves—my
soul was strong as the sea and prayed with the sea’s might. Give me
fulness of life like to the sea and the sun, to the earth and the air;
give me fulness of physical life, mind equal and beyond their fulness;
give me a greatness and perfection of soul higher than all things; give
me my inexpressible desire which swells in me like a tide—give it to me
with all the force of the sea.
Then I rested, sitting by the wheat; the bank of beach was between me
and the sea, but the waves beat against it; the sea was there, the sea
was present and at hand. By the dry wheat I rested, I did not think, I
was inhaling the richness of the sea, all the strength and depth of
meaning of the sea and earth came to me again. I rubbed out some of the
wheat in my hands, I took up a piece of clod and crumbled it in my
fingers—it was a joy to touch it—I held my hand so that I could see the
sunlight gleam on the slightly moist surface of the skin. The earth and
sun were to me like my flesh and blood, and the air of the sea life.
With all the greater existence I drew from them I prayed for a bodily
life equal to it, for a soul-life beyond my thought, for my
inexpressible desire of more than I could shape even into idea. There
was something higher than idea, invisible to thought as air to the eye;
give me bodily life equal in fulness to the strength of earth, and sun,
and sea; give me the soul-life of my desire. Once more I went down to
the sea, touched it, and said farewell. So deep was the inhalation of
this life that day, that it seemed to remain in me for years. This was
a real pilgrimage.
Time passed away, with more labour, pleasure, and again at last, after
much pain and wearinesss of mind, I came down again to the sea. The
circumstances were changed—it was not a hurried glance—there were
opportunities for longer thought. It mattered scarcely anything to me
now whether I was alone, or whether houses and other people were near.
Nothing could disturb my inner vision. By the sea, aware of the sun
overhead, and the blue heaven, I feel that there is nothing between me
and space. This is the verge of a gulf, and a tangent from my feet goes
straight unchecked into the unknown. It is the edge of the abyss as
much as if the earth were cut away in a sheer fall of eight thousand
miles to the sky beneath, thence a hollow to the stars. Looking
straight out is looking straight down; the eye-glance gradually departs
from the sea-level, and, rising as that falls, enters the hollow of
heaven. It is gazing along the face of a vast precipice into the hollow
space which is nameless.
There mystery has been placed, but realising the vast hollow yonder
makes me feel that the mystery is here. I, who am here on the verge,
standing on the margin of the sky, am in the mystery itself. If I let
my eye look back upon me from the extreme opposite of heaven, then this
spot where I stand is in the centre of the hollow. Alone with the sea
and sky, I presently feel all the depth and wonder of the unknown come
back surging up around, and touching me as the foam runs to my feet. I
am in it now, not to-morrow, this moment; I cannot escape from it.
Though I may deceive myself with labour, yet still I am in it; in sleep
too. There is no escape from this immensity.
Feeling this by the sea, under the sun, my life enlarges and quickens,
striving to take to itself the largeness of the heaven. The frame
cannot expand, but the soul is able to stand before it. No giant’s body
could be in proportion to the earth, but a little spirit is equal to
the entire cosmos, to earth and ocean, sun and star-hollow. These are
but a few acres to it. Were the cosmos twice as wide, the soul could
run over it, and return to itself in a time so small, no measure exists
to mete it. Therefore, I think the soul may sometimes find out an
existence as superior as my mind is to the dead chalk cliff.
With the great sun burning over the foam-flaked sea, roofed with
heaven—aware of myself, a consciousness forced on me by these things—I
feel that thought must yet grow larger and correspond in magnitude of
conception to these. But these cannot content me, these Titanic things
of sea, and sun, and profundity; I feel that my thought is stronger
than they are. I burn life like a torch. The hot light shot back from
the sea scorches my cheek—my life is burning in me. The soul throbs
like the sea for a larger life. No thought which I have ever had has
satisfied my soul.