MR STODHAM SPEAKS FOR ENGLAND--FOG SUPERVENES
Some time after the story of the Castle of Leaves, Mr Morgan took
occasion to point out the difference between Ann speaking of the
“beautiful long white beards” that men grew in those “unhappy old
days,” and Mr Torrance praising the “merry” or “good old” England of
his imagination. He said that from what he could gather they were merry
in the old days with little cause, while to-day, whatever cause there
might be, few persons possessed the ability. He concluded, I think,
that after all there was probably nothing to be merry about at any time
if you looked round carefully: that, in fact, what was really important
was to be capable of more merriment and less ado about nothing. Someone
with a precocious sneer, asked if England was now anything more than
a geographical expression, and Mr Stodham preached a sermon straight
away:
“A great poet said once upon a time that this earth is ‘where we have
our happiness or not at all.’ For most of those who speak his language
he might have said that this England is where we have our happiness or
not at all. He meant to say that we are limited creatures, not angels,
and that our immediate surroundings are enough to exercise all our
faculties of mind and body: there is no need to flatter ourselves with
the belief that we could do better in a bigger or another world. Only
the bad workman complains of his tools.
“There was another poet who hailed England, his native land, and asked
how could it but be dear and holy to him, because he declared himself
one who (here Mr Stodham grew very red and his voice rose, and Lewis
thought he was going to sing as he recited):
“‘From thy lakes and mountain-hills,
Thy clouds, thy quiet dales, thy rocks and seas,
Have drunk in all my intellectual life,
All sweet sensations, all ennobling thoughts,
All adoration of the God in nature,
All lovely and all honourable things,
Whatever makes this mortal spirit feel
The joy and greatness of its future being?
There lives nor form nor feeling in my soul
Unborrowed from my country. O divine
And beauteous island! thou hast been my sole
And most magnificent temple, in the which
I walk with awe, and sing my stately songs,
Loving the God that made me!’
“Of course, I do not know what it _all_ means,” he muttered, but went
on: “and that other poet who was his friend called the lark:”
“‘Type of the wise who soar but never roam,
True to the kindred points of heaven and home.’
Well, England is home and heaven too. England made you, and of you
is England made. Deny England--wise men have done so--and you may
find yourself some day denying your father and mother--and this also
wise men have done. Having denied England and your father and mother,
you may have to deny your own self, and treat it as nothing, a mere
conventional boundary, an artifice, by which you are separated from
the universe and its creator. To unite yourself with the universe and
the creator, you may be tempted to destroy that boundary of your own
body and brain, and die. He is a bold man who hopes to do without
earth, England, family, and self. Many a man dies, having made little
of these things, and if he says at the end of a long life that he has
had enough, he means only that he has no capacity for more--_he_ is
exhausted, not the earth, not England.
“I do not think that a man who knows many languages, many histories,
many lands, would ask if England was more than a geographical
expression. Nor would he be the first to attempt an answer to one that
did ask.
“I do not want you to praise England. She can do without receiving
better than you can without giving. I do not want to shout that our
great soldiers and poets are greater than those of other nations, but
they are ours, they are great, and in proportion as we are good and
intelligent, we can respond to them and understand them as those who
are not Englishmen cannot. They cannot long do without us or we without
them. Think of it. We have each of us some of the blood and spirit of
Sir Thomas More, and Sir Philip Sidney, and the man who wrote ‘Tom
Jones,’ and Horatio Nelson, and the man who wrote ‘Love in the Valley.’
Think what we owe to them of joy, courage, and mere security. Try to
think what they owe to us, since they depend on us for keeping alive
their spirits, and a spirit that can value them. They are England: we
are England. Deny England, and we deny them and ourselves. Do you
love the Wilderness? Do you love Wales? If you do, you love what I
understand by ‘England.’ The more you love and know England, the more
deeply you can love the Wilderness and Wales. I am sure of it....”
At this point Mr Stodham ran away. Nobody thought how like a _very
good_ rat he was during this speech, or, rather, this series of short
speeches interrupted by moments of excitement when all that he could
do was to light a pipe and let it out. Higgs, perhaps, came nearest to
laughing; for he struck up “Rule Britannia” with evident pride that he
was the first to think of it. This raised my gorge; I could not help
shouting “Home Rule for Ireland.” Whereupon Higgs swore abominably, and
I do not know what would have happened if Ann had not said: “Jessie, my
love, sing _Land of my Fathers_,” which is the Welsh national anthem;
but when Jessie sang it--in English, for our sakes--everyone but Higgs
joined in the chorus and felt that it breathed the spirit of patriotism
which Mr Stodham had been trying to express. It was exulting without
self-glorification or any other form of brutality. It might well be
the national anthem of any nation that knows, and would not rashly
destroy, the bonds distinguishing it from the rest of the world without
isolating it.
Aurelius, who had been brooding for some time, said:
“I should never have thought it. Mr Stodham has made me a present of a
country. I really did not know before that England was not a shocking
fiction of the journalists and politicians. I am the richer, and,
according to Mr Stodham, so is England. But what about London fog?
what is the correct attitude of a patriot towards London fog and the
manufacturers who make it what it is?”
Aurelius got up to look out at the fog, the many dim trees, the single
gas lamp in the lane beyond the yard. Pointing to the trees, he asked--
“‘What are these,
So withered and so wild in their attire,
That look not like th’ inhabitants o’ the earth
And yet are on’t?’
Even so must Mr Stodham’s patriotism, or that of _Land of our Fathers_,
appear to Higgs. His patriotism is more like the ‘Elephant and Castle’
on a Saturday night than those trees. Both are good, as they say at
Cambridge.” And he went out, muttering towards the trees in the fog:
“‘Live you? or are you aught
That man may question? You seem to understand me,
By each at once her choppy fingers laying
Upon her skinny lips: you should be women,
And yet your beards forbid me to interpret
That you are so.’”
For some time we were all silent, until Ann said: “Hark.” “What is it?
another Ripper murder?” said Higgs. “Oh, shut up, Higgs,” said Philip
looking at Ann. “Hark,” said Ann again. It was horrible. Somewhere far
off I could hear an angry murmur broken by frantic metallic clashings.
No one sound out of the devilish babble could I disentangle, still
less, explain. A myriad noises were violently mixed in one muddy,
struggling mass of rumbling and jangling. The worst gramophones are
infinitely nearer to the cooing of doves than this, but it had in it
something strained, reckless, drunken-mad, horror-stricken, like the
voice of the gramophone. Above all, the babble was angry and it was
inhuman. I had never heard it before, and my first thought was that it
was an armed and furious multitude, perhaps a foreign invader, a mile
or so distant.
“Didn’t you know it was Saturday night?” said Higgs. “It is always
worse on Saturdays.”
“What is?” said I.
“That noise,” said Higgs.
“Hark,” said Philip anxiously, and we all held our breath to catch it
again. There.... It was no nearer. It was not advancing. It was always
the same. As I realised that it was the mutter of London, I sighed,
being a child, with relief, but could not help listening still for
every moment of that roar as of interlaced immortal dragons fighting
eternally in a pit. It was surprising that such a tone could endure.
The sea sounds everlastingly, but this was more appropriate to a dying
curse, and should have lasted no more than a few minutes. As I listened
it seemed rather to be a brutish yell of agony during the infliction
of some unspeakable pain, and though pain of that degree would kill or
stupefy in a few minutes, this did not.
“If you like the ‘Elephant and Castle,’” said Mr Morgan, “you like
that. But if you live in London all your lives, perhaps you may never
hear it again.
“For the sound does not cease. We help to make it as we do to make
England. Even those weird sisters of Aurelius out in the Wilderness
help to make it by rattling branches and dropping leaves in the fog.
You will hear the leaves falling, the clock ticking, the fog-signals
exploding, but not London.”
I was, in fact, twenty-one before I heard the roar again. Never since
have I noticed it. But Ann, it seems, used to hear it continually,
perhaps because she went out so seldom and could not become one of
the mob of unquestionable “inhabitants o’ the earth.” But when the
window had been shut, we, at any rate, forgot all about London in
that warm room in Abercorran House, amidst the gleam of china and the
glitter of brass and silver. Lewis and Harry sat on the floor, in a
corner, playing with lead soldiers. The English army--that is to say,
Lewis--was beaten, and refused to accept its fate. On being told,
“But it is all over now,” he burst out crying. Harry looked on in
sympathetic awe. But before his tears had quite come to their natural
end, a brilliant idea caused him to uncover his face suddenly and say:
“I know what I shall do. I shall build a tower like David--a real
one--in the Wilderness.”
“Oh, yes, let’s,” exclaimed Harry.
“Us,” said Lewis, “I like that. It is I that shall build a tower. But I
will _employ_ you.”
“That,” mused Harry slowly, “means that I build a tower and let you
live in it. That isn’t right. Mr Gladstone would never allow it.”
“What has Mr Gladstone got to do with the Wilderness, I should like
to know? We _employ_ him. I should like to see him getting over the
fence into the Wilderness. He does not know where it is. Besides,
if he did, he could _never_, _never_, get into my tower. If he did
I would immediately fling myself down from the top. Then I should
be safe,” shrieked Lewis, before entering another of those vales or
abysses of tears which were so black for him, and so brief. It was not
so agreeable as silence would have been, or as Ann’s sewing was, or
the continuous bagpipe music of a kettle always just on the boil. But
Philip had gone upstairs, and the book on my knee held me more than
Lewis’s tears. This book placed me in a mountain solitude such as that
where David Morgan had built his tower, and, like that, haunted by
curlews:
“The rugged mountain’s scanty cloak
Was dwarfish shrubs of birch and oak,
With shingles bare, and cliffs between,
And patches bright of bracken green,
And heather black that waved so high
It held the copse in rivalry.”
Out of the ambush of copse and heather and bracken had started up at
a chieftain’s whistle--“wild as the scream of the curlew”--a host of
mountaineers, while the Chieftain revealed himself to the enemy who had
imagined him alone:
“And, Saxon, I am Roderick Dhu.”
“What is the matter, Arthur?” asked Harry when I came to this line.
I answered him with a look of trembling contempt. The whole scene so
fascinated me--I so thrilled with admiration at everything done by
the Highland chieftain--that his magic whistle at last pierced me to
the marrow with exquisite joy. In my excitement I said the words,
“And, Saxon, I am Roderick Dhu,” aloud, yet not loud enough to make
anything but a husky muttering audible. I was choking and blushing with
pleasant pains and with a desire to pass them on to another, myself not
lacking glory as the discoverer. Hence my muttering those words aloud:
hence the contempt of my answer to Harry, upon not being instantly
and enthusiastically understood. The contempt, however, was not
satisfying.... I, too, wished that I possessed a tower upon a mountain
where I could live for ever in a state of poetic pain. Therefore I went
out silently, saying no good night, not seeing Philip again.
Fog and cold cured me rapidly. On that wretched night I could no more
go on thinking of a tower on a mountain than I could jump into a pond.
I had to run to get warm. Then I thought of the book once more: I
recovered my pleasure and my pride. The fog, pierced by some feeble
sparkles of lamps, and dim glows of windows from invisible houses, the
silence, broken by the dead leaf that rustled after me, made the world
a shadowy vast stage on which I was the one real thing. The solitary
grandeur was better than any tower, and at the end of my run, on
entering again among people and bright lights, I could flit out of it
as easily as possible, which was more than Morgan could do, since to
escape from his tower he had to die.