|When I awoke this morning and saw the sunlight streaming over the
valley and the beech woods glowing with the rich fires of autumn, and
heard the ducks clamouring for their breakfast, and felt all the kindly
intimacies of life coming back in a flood for the new day, I felt,
as the Americans say, “good.” Waking up is always--given a clear
conscience, a good digestion, and a healthy faculty of sleep--a joyous
experience. It has the pleasing excitement with which the tuning up of
the fiddles of the orchestra prior to the symphony affects you. It is
like starting out for a new adventure, or coming into an unexpected
inheritance, or falling in love, or stumbling suddenly upon some author
whom you have unaccountably missed and who goes to your heart like a
brother. In short, it is like anything that is sudden and beautiful and
full of promise.
But waking up can never have been quite so intoxicating a joy as it is
now that peace has come back to the earth. It is in the first burst of
consciousness that you feel the full measure of the great thing that has
happened in the world. It is like waking from an agonising nightmare and
realising with a glorious surge of happiness that it was not true. The
fact that the nightmare from which we have awakened now was true does
not diminish our happiness. It deepens it, extends it, projects it into
the future. We see a long, long vista of days before us, and on awaking
to each one of them we shall know afresh that the nightmare is over,
that the years of the Great Killing are passed, that the sun is shining
and the birds are singing in a friendly world, and that men are going
forth to their labour until the evening without fear and without hate.
As the day advances and you get submerged in its petty affairs and find
it is very much like other days the emotion passes. But in that moment
when you step over the threshold of sleep into the living world the
revelation is simple, immediate, overwhelming. The shadow has passed.
The devil is dead. The delirium is over and sanity is coming back to the
earth. You recall the far different emotions of a few brief months ago
when the morning sun woke you with a sinister smile, and the carolling
of the birds seemed pregnant with sardonic irony, and the news in the
paper spoiled your breakfast. You thank heaven that you are not the
Kaiser. Poor wretch, he is waking, too, probably about this time and
wondering what will happen to him before nightfall, wondering where
he will spend the miserable remnant of his days, wondering whether his
great ancestor's habit of carrying a dose of poison was not after all a
practice worth thinking about. He wanted the whole, earth, and now he is
discovering that he is entitled to just six feet of it--the same as the
lowliest peasant in his land. “The foxes have holes and the birds of
the air have nests,” but there is neither hole nor nest where he will be
welcome. There is not much joy for him in waking to a new day.
But perhaps he doesn't wake. Perhaps, like Macbeth, he has “murdered
Sleep,” and is suffering the final bankruptcy of life. A man may lose
a crown and be all the better, but to lose the faculty of sleep is to
enter the kingdom of the damned. If you or I were offered a new lease
of life after our present lease had run out and were told that we could
nominate our gifts what would be our first choice? Not a kingdom, nor
an earldom, nor even succession to an O.B.E. There was a period of my
childhood when I thought I should have liked to have been born a muffin
man, eternally perambulating the streets ringing a bell, carrying a
basket on my head and shouting “Muffins,” in the ears of a delighted
populace. I loved muffins and I loved bells, and here was a man who had
those joys about him all day long and every day. But now my ambitions
are more restrained. I would no more wish to be born a muffin man than
a poet or an Archbishop. The first gift I should ask would be something
modest. It would be the faculty of sleeping eight solid hours every
night, and waking each morning with the sense of unfathomable and
illimitable content with which I opened my eyes to the world to-day.
All the functions of nature are agreeable, though views may differ as to
their relative pleasure. A distinguished man, whose name I forget, put
eating first, “for,” said he, “there is no other pleasure that comes
three times a day and lasts an hour each time.” But sleep lasts eight
hours. It fills up a good third of the time we spend here and it
fills it up with the divinest of all balms. It is the very kingdom
of democracy. “All equal are within the church's gate,” said George
Herbert. It may have been so in George Herbert's parish; but it is
hardly so in most parishes. It is true of the Kingdom of Sleep. When you
enter its portals all discriminations vanish, and Hodge and his master,
the prince and the pauper, are alike clothed in the royal purple and
inherit the same golden realm. There is more harmony and equality in
life than wre are apt to admit. For a good twenty-five years of our
seventy we sleep (and even snore) with an agreement that is simply
wonderful.
And the joy of waking up is not less generously distributed. What
delight is there like throwing off the enchantment of sleep and seeing
the sunlight streaming in at the window and hearing the happy jangle of
the birds, or looking out on the snow-covered landscape in winter, or
the cherry blossom in spring, or the golden fields of harvest time, or
(as now) upon the smouldering fires of the autumn woodlands? Perhaps the
day will be as thorny and full of disappointments and disillusions as
any that have gone before. But no matter. In this wonder of waking there
is eternal renewal of the spirit, the inexhaustible promise of the best
that is still to come, the joy of the new birth that experience cannot
stale nor familiarity make tame.
That singer of our time, who has caught most perfectly the artless note
of the birds themselves, has uttered the spirit of joyous waking that
all must feel on this exultant morning--