was a groan in outer darkness, the voice of all nameless dreads. The
nervous candle-flame shuddered by my bedside. The groaning rose to a
shriek, and the little flame jumped in a panic, and nearly left its
white column. Out of the corners of the room swarmed the released
shadows. Black specters danced in ecstasy over my bed. I love fresh air,
but I cannot allow it to slay the shining and delicate body of my little
friend the candle-flame, the comrade who ventures with me into the
solitudes beyond midnight. I shut the window.
They talk of the candle-power of an electric bulb. What do they mean? It
cannot have the faintest glimmer of the real power of my candle. It
would be as right to express, in the same inverted and foolish
comparison, the worth of "those delicate sisters, the Pleiades." That
pinch of star dust, the Pleiades, exquisitely remote in deepest night,
in the profound where light all but fails, has not the power of a
sulphur match; yet, still apprehensive to the mind though tremulous on
the limit of vision, and sometimes even vanishing, it brings into
distinction those distant and difficult hints--hidden far behind all our
verified thoughts--which we rarely properly view. I should like to know
of any great arc-lamp which could do that. So the star-like candle for
me. No other light follows so intimately an author's most ghostly
suggestion. We sit, the candle and I, in the midst of the shades we are
conquering, and sometimes look up from the lucent page to contemplate
the dark hosts of the enemy with a smile before they overwhelm us; as
they will, of course. Like me, the candle is mortal; it will burn out.
As the bed-book itself should be a sort of night-light, to assist its
illumination, coarse lamps are useless. They would douse the book. The
light for such a book must accord with it. It must be, like the book, a
limited, personal, mellow, and companionable glow; the solitary taper
beside the only worshiper in a sanctuary. That is why nothing can
compare with the intimacy of candle-light for a bed-book. It is a living
heart, bright and warm in central night, burning for us alone, holding
the gaunt and towering shadows at bay. There the monstrous specters
stand in our midnight room, the advance guard of the darkness of the
world, held off by our valiant little glim, but ready to flood instantly
and founder us in original gloom.
The wind moans without; ancient evils are at large and wandering in
torment. The rain shrieks across the window. For a moment, for just a
moment, the sentinel candle is shaken, and burns blue with terror. The
shadows leap out instantly. The little flame recovers, and merely looks
at its foe the darkness, and back to its own place goes the old enemy
of light and man. The candle for me, tiny, mortal, warm, and brave, a
golden lily on a silver stem!
"Almost any book does for a bed-book," a woman once said to me. I nearly
replied in a hurry that almost any woman would do for a wife; but that
is not the way to bring people to conviction of sin. Her idea was that
the bed-book is soporific, and for that reason she even advocated the
reading of political speeches. That would be a dissolute act. Certainly
you would go to sleep; but in what a frame of mind! You would enter into
sleep with your eyes shut. It would be like dying, not only unshriven,
but in the act of guilt.
What book shall it shine upon? Think of Plato, or Dante, or Tolstoy, or
a Blue Book for such an occasion! I cannot. They will not do--they are
no good to me. I am not writing about you. I know those men I have named
are transcendent, the greater lights. But I am bound to confess at times
they bore me. Though their feet are clay and on earth, just as ours,
their stellar brows are sometimes dim in remote clouds. For my part,
they are too big for bed-fellows. I cannot see myself, carrying my
feeble and restricted glim, following (in pajamas) the statuesque figure
of the Florentine where it stalks, aloof in its garb of austere pity,
the sonorous deeps of Hades. Hades! Not for me; not after midnight! Let
those go who like it.
As for the Russian, vast and disquieting, I refuse to leave all,
including the blankets and the pillow, to follow him into the gelid
tranquillity of the upper air, where even the colors are prismatic
spicules of ice, to brood upon the erratic orbit of the poor mud-ball
below called earth. I know it is my world also; but I cannot help that.
It is too late, after a busy day, and at that hour, to begin overtime on
fashioning a new and better planet out of cosmic dust. By
breakfast-time, nothing useful would have been accomplished. We should
all be where we were the night before. The job is far too long, once the
pillow is nicely set.
For the truth is, there are times when we are too weary to remain
attentive and thankful under the improving eye, kindly but severe, of
the seers. There are times when we do not wish to be any better than we
are. We do not wish to be elevated and improved. At midnight, away with
such books! As for the literary pundits, the high priests of the Temple
of Letters, it is interesting and helpful occasionally for an acolyte to
swinge them a good hard one with an incense-burner, and cut and run, for
a change, to something outside the rubrics. Midnight is the time when
one can recall, with ribald delight, the names of all the Great Works
which every gentleman ought to have read, but which some of us have
not. For there is almost as much clotted nonsense written about
literature as there is about theology.
There are few books which go with midnight, solitude, and a candle. It
is much easier to say what does not please us then than what is exactly
right. The book must be, anyhow, something benedictory by a sinning
fellow-man. Cleverness would be repellent at such an hour. Cleverness,
anyhow, is the level of mediocrity to-day; we are all too infernally
clever. The first witty and perverse paradox blows out the candle. Only
the sick in mind crave cleverness, as a morbid body turns to drink. The
late candle throws its beams a great distance; and its rays make
transparent much that seemed massy and important. The mind at rest
beside that light, when the house is asleep, and the consequential
affairs of the urgent world have diminished to their right proportions
because we see them distantly from another and a more tranquil place in
the heavens where duty, honor, witty arguments, controversial logic on
great questions, appear such as will leave hardly a trace of fossil in
the indurated mud which presently will cover them--the mind then
certainly smiles at cleverness.
For though at that hour the body may be dog-tired, the mind is white and
lucid, like that of a man from whom a fever has abated. It is bare of
illusions. It has a sharp focus, small and starlike, as a clear and
lonely flame left burning by the altar of a shrine from which all have
gone but one. A book which approaches that light in the privacy of that
place must come, as it were, with honest and open pages.
I like Heine then, though. His mockery of the grave and great, in those
sentences which are as brave as pennants in a breeze, is comfortable and
sedative. One's own secret and awkward convictions, never expressed
because not lawful and because it is hard to get words to bear them
lightly, seem then to be heard aloud in the mild, easy, and confident
diction of an immortal whose voice has the blitheness of one who has
watched, amused and irreverent, the high gods in eager and secret debate
on the best way to keep the gilt and trappings on the body of the evil
they have created.
That first-rate explorer, Gulliver, is also fine in the light of the
intimate candle. Have you read lately again his Voyage to the
Houyhnhnms? Try it alone again in quiet. Swift knew all about our
contemporary troubles. He has got it all down. Why was he called a
misanthrope? Reading that last voyage of Gulliver in the select intimacy
of midnight I am forced to wonder, not at Swift's hatred of mankind, not
at his satire of his fellows, not at the strange and terrible nature of
this genius who thought that much of us, but how it is that after such a
wise and sorrowful revealing of the things we insist on doing, and our
reasons for doing them, and what happens after we have done them, men do
not change. It does seem impossible that society could remain unaltered,
after the surprise its appearance should have caused it as it saw its
face in that ruthless mirror. We point instead to the fact that Swift
lost his mind in the end. Well, that is not a matter for surprise.
Such books, and France's "Isle of Penguins," are not disturbing as
bed-books. They resolve one's agitated and outraged soul, relieving it
with some free expression for the accusing and questioning thoughts
engendered by the day's affairs. But they do not rest immediately to
hand in the book-shelf by the bed. They depend on the kind of day one
has had. Sterne is closer. One would rather be transported as far as
possible from all the disturbances of earth's envelope of clouds, and
"Tristram Shandy" is sure to be found in the sun.
But best of all books for midnight are travel books. Once I was lost
every night for months with Doughty in the "Arabia Deserta." He is a
craggy author. A long course of the ordinary facile stuff, such as one
gets in the Press every day, thinking it is English, sends one
thoughtless and headlong among the bitter herbs and stark boulders of
Doughty's burning and spacious expanse; only to get bewildered, and the
shins broken, and a great fatigue at first, in a strange land of fierce
sun, hunger, glittering spar, ancient plutonic rock, and very Adam
himself. But once you are acclimatized, and know the language--it takes
time--there is no more London after dark, till, a wanderer returned from
a forgotten land, you emerge from the interior of Arabia on the Red Sea
coast again, feeling as though you had lost touch with the world you
used to know. And if that doesn't mean good writing I know of no other
test.
Because once there was a father whose habit it was to read with his boys
nightly some chapters of the Bible--and cordially they hated that habit
of his--I have that Book too; though I fear I have it for no reason that
he, the rigid old faithful, would be pleased to hear about. He thought
of the future when he read the Bible; I read it for the past. The
familiar names, the familiar rhythm of its words, its wonderful
well-remembered stories of things long past--like that of Esther, one of
the best in English--the eloquent anger of the prophets for the people
then who looked as though they were alive, but were really dead at
heart, all is solace and home to me. And now I think of it, it is our
home and solace that we want in a bed-book.
THE PRECEPT OF PEACE
_By_ LOUISE IMOGEN GUINEY
Louise Imogen Guiney (1861-1920), one of the rarest poets and most
delicately poised essayists this country has reared, has been
hitherto scantily appreciated by the omnipotent General Reader. Her
dainty spoor is perhaps too lightly trodden upon earth to be
followed by the throng. And yet one has faith in the
imperishability of such a star-dust track. This lovely and profound
"Precept of Peace" is peculiarly characteristic of her, and reminds
one of the humorous tranquillity with which she faced the complete
failure (financially speaking) of almost all her books. There was a
certain sadness in learning, when the news of her death came, that
many of our present-day critical Sanhedrim had never even become
aware of her name.
There is no space, in this brief note, to do justice to her. The
student will refer to the newly published memoir by her friend,
Alice Brown.
She was born in Boston in 1861, daughter of General Patrick Guiney
who fought in the Civil War. From 1894-97 she was postmistress in
Auburndale, Mass. Her later years were spent in England, mostly at
Oxford: the Bodleian Library was a candle and she the ecstatic
moth.
A certain sort of voluntary abstraction is the oldest and choicest of
social attitudes. In France, where all esthetic discoveries are made, it
was crowned long ago: la sainte indifférence is, or may be, a cult, and
le saint indifférent an articled practitioner. For the Gallic mind,
brought up at the knee of a consistent paradox, has found that not to
appear concerned about a desired good is the only method to possess it;
full happiness is given, in other words, to the very man who will never
sue for it. This is a secret neat as that of the Sphinx: to "go softly"
among events, yet domineer them. Without fear: not because we are brave,
but because we are exempt; we bear so charmed a life that not even
Baldur's mistletoe can touch us to harm us. Without solicitude: for the
essential thing is trained, falcon-like, to light from above upon our
wrists, and it has become with us an automatic motion to open the hand,
and drop what appertains to us no longer. Be it renown or a new hat, the
shorter stick of celery, or
"The friends to whom we had no natural right,
The homes that were not destined to be ours,"
it is all one: let it fall away! since only so, by depletions, can we
buy serenity and a blithe mien. It is diverting to study, at the feet of
Antisthenes and of Socrates his master, how many indispensables man can
live without; or how many he can gather together, make over into
luxuries, and so abrogate them. Thoreau somewhere expresses himself as
full of divine pity for the "mover," who on May-Day clouds city streets
with his melancholy household caravans: fatal impedimenta for an
immortal. No: furniture is clearly a superstition. "I have little, I
want nothing; all my treasure is in Minerva's tower." Not that the
novice may not accumulate. Rather, let him collect beetles and Venetian
interrogation-marks; if so be that he may distinguish what is truly
extrinsic to him, and bestow these toys, eventually, on the children of
Satan who clamor at the monastery gate. Of all his store, unconsciously
increased, he can always part with sixteen-seventeenths, by way of
concession to his individuality, and think the subtraction so much
concealing marble chipped from the heroic figure of himself. He would be
a donor from the beginning; before he can be seen to own, he will
disencumber, and divide. Strange and fearful is his discovery, amid the
bric-a-brac of the world, that this knowledge, or this material benefit,
is for him alone. He would fain beg off from the acquisition, and shake
the touch of the tangible from his imperious wings. It is not enough to
cease to strive for personal favor; your true indifférent is Early
Franciscan: caring not to have, he fears to hold. Things useful need
never become to him things desirable. Towards all commonly-accounted
sinecures, he bears the coldest front in Nature, like a magician walking
a maze, and scornful of its flower-bordered detentions. "I enjoy life,"
says Seneca, "because I am ready to leave it." Meanwhile, they who act
with too jealous respect for their morrow of civilized comfort, reap
only indigestion, and crow's-foot traceries for their deluded
eye-corners.
Now nothing is farther from le saint indifférent than cheap
indifferentism, so-called: the sickness of sophomores. His business is
to hide, not to display, his lack of interest in fripperies. It is not
he who looks languid, and twiddles his thumbs for sick misplacedness,
like Achilles among girls. On the contrary, he is a smiling industrious
elf, monstrous attentive to the canons of polite society. In relation to
others, he shows what passes for animation and enthusiasm; for at all
times his character is founded on control of these qualities, not on the
absence of them. It flatters his sense of superiority that he may thus
pull wool about the ears of joint and several. He has so strong a will
that it can be crossed and counter-crossed, as by himself, so by a dozen
outsiders, without a break in his apparent phlegm. He has gone through
volition, and come out at the other side of it; everything with him is a
specific act: he has no habits. Le saint indifférent is a dramatic
wight: he loves to refuse your proffered six per cent, when, by a little
haggling, he may obtain three-and-a-half. For so he gets away with his
own mental processes virgin: it is inconceivable to you that, being
sane, he should so comport himself. Amiable, perhaps, only by painful
propulsions and sore vigilance, let him appear the mere inheritor of
easy good-nature. Unselfish out of sheer pride, and ever eager to claim
the slippery side of the pavement, or the end cut of the roast (on the
secret ground, be it understood, that he is not as Capuan men, who
wince at trifles), let him have his ironic reward in passing for one
whose physical connoisseurship is yet in the raw. That sympathy which
his rule forbids his devoting to the usual objects, he expends, with
some bravado, upon their opposites; for he would fain seem a decent
partizan of some sort, not what he is, a bivalve intelligence, Tros
Tyriusque. He is known here and there, for instance, as valorous in
talk; yet he is by nature a solitary, and, for the most part, somewhat
less communicative than
"The wind that sings to himself as he makes stride,
Lonely and terrible, on the Andean height."
Imagining nothing idler than words in the face of grave events, he
condoles and congratulates with the genteelest air in the world. In
short, while there is anything expected of him, while there are
spectators to be fooled, the stratagems of the fellow prove
inexhaustible. It is only when he is quite alone that he drops his jaw,
and stretches his legs; then heigho! arises like a smoke, and envelopes
him becomingly, the beautiful native well-bred torpidity of the gods, of
poetic boredom, of "the Oxford manner."
"How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable!" sighed Hamlet of this mortal
outlook. As it came from him in the beginning, that plaint, in its
sincerity, can come only from the man of culture, who feels about him
vast mental spaces and depths, and to whom the face of creation is but
comparative and symbolic. Nor will he breathe it in the common ear,
where it may woo misapprehensions, and breed ignorant rebellion. The
unlettered must ever love or hate what is nearest him, and, for lack of
perspective, think his own fist the size of the sun. The social prizes,
which, with mellowed observers, rank as twelfth or thirteenth in order
of desirability, such as wealth and a foothold in affairs, seem to him
first and sole; and to them he clings like a barnacle. But to our
indifférent, nothing is so vulgar as close suction. He will never
tighten his fingers on loaned opportunity; he is a gentleman, the hero
of the habitually relaxed grasp. A light unprejudiced hold on his
profits strikes him as decent and comely, though his true artistic
pleasure is still in "fallings from us, vanishings." It costs him little
to loose and to forego, to unlace his tentacles, and from the many who
push hard behind, to retire, as it were, on a never-guessed-at
competency, "richer than untempted kings." He would not be a
life-prisoner, in ever so charming a bower. While the tranquil Sabine
Farm is his delight, well he knows that on the dark trail ahead of him,
even Sabine Farms are not sequacious. Thus he learns betimes to play the
guest under his own cedars, and, with disciplinary intent, goes often
from them; and, hearing his heart-strings snap the third night he is
away, rejoices that he is again a freedman. Where his foot is planted
(though it root not anywhere), he calls that spot home. No Unitarian in
locality, it follows that he is the best of travelers, tangential
merely, and pleased with each new vista of the human Past. He sometimes
wishes his understanding less, that he might itch deliciously with a
prejudice. With cosmic congruities, great and general forces, he keeps,
all along, a tacit understanding, such as one has with beloved relatives
at a distance; and his finger, airily inserted in his outer pocket, is
really upon the pulse of eternity. His vocation, however, is to bury
himself in the minor and immediate task; and from his intent manner, he
gets confounded, promptly and permanently, with the victims of
commercial ambition.
The true use of the much-praised Lucius Cary, Viscount Falkland, has
hardly been apprehended: he is simply the patron saint of indifférents.
From first to last, almost alone in that discordant time, he seems to
have heard far-off resolving harmonies, and to have been rapt away with
foreknowledge. Battle, to which all knights were bred, was penitential
to him. It was but a childish means: and to what end? He meanwhile--and
no man carried his will in better abeyance to the scheme of the
universe--wanted no diligence in camp or council. Cares sat handsomely
on him who cared not at all, who won small comfort from the cause which
his conscience finally espoused. He labored to be a doer, to stand well
with observers; and none save his intimate friends read his agitation
and profound weariness. "I am so much taken notice of," he writes, "for
an impatient desire for peace, that it is necessary I should likewise
make it appear how it is not out of fear for the utmost hazard of war."
And so, driven from the ardor he had to the simulation of the ardor he
lacked, loyally daring, a sacrifice to one of two transient opinions,
and inly impartial as a star, Lord Falkland fell: the young
never-to-be-forgotten martyr of Newburg field. The imminent deed he made
a work of art; and the station of the moment the only post of honor.
Life and death may be all one to such a man: but he will at least take
the noblest pains to discriminate between Tweedledum and Tweedledee, if
he has to write a book about the variations of their antennæ. And like
the Carolian exemplar is the disciple. The indifférent is a good
thinker, or a good fighter. He is no "immartial minion," as dear old
Chapman suffers Hector to call Tydides. Nevertheless, his sign-manual is
content with humble and stagnant conditions. Talk of scaling the
Himalayas of life affects him, very palpably, as "tall talk." He deals
not with things, but with the impressions and analogies of things. The
material counts for nothing with him: he has moulted it away. Not so
sure of the identity of the higher course of action as he is of his
consecrating dispositions, he feels that he may make heaven again, out
of sundries, as he goes. Shall not a beggarly duty, discharged with
perfect temper, land him in "the out-courts of Glory," quite as
successfully as a grand Sunday-school excursion to front the cruel
Paynim foe? He thinks so. Experts have thought so before him. Francis
Drake, with the national alarum instant in his ears, desired first to
win at bowls, on the Devon sward, "and afterwards to settle with the
Don." No one will claim a buccaneering hero for an indifférent, however.
The Jesuit novices were ball-playing almost at that very time, three
hundred years ago, when some too speculative companion, figuring the end
of the world in a few moments (with just leisure enough, between, to be
shriven in chapel, according to his own thrifty mind), asked Louis of
Gonzaga how he, on his part, should employ the precious interval. "I
should go on with the game," said the most innocent and most ascetic
youth among them. But to cite the behavior of any of the saints is to
step over the playful line allotted. Indifference of the mundane brand
is not to be confounded with their detachment, which is emancipation
wrought in the soul, and the ineffable efflorescence of the Christian
spirit. Like most supernatural virtues, it has a laic shadow; the
counsel to abstain, and to be unsolicitous, is one not only of
perfection, but also of polity. A very little nonadhesion to common
affairs, a little reserve of unconcern, and the gay spirit of sacrifice,
provide the moral immunity which is the only real estate. The
indifférent believes in storms: since tales of shipwreck encompass him.
But once among his own kind, he wonders that folk should be circumvented
by merely extraneous powers! His favorite catch, woven in among escaped
dangers, rises through the roughest weather, and daunts it:
"Now strike your sailes, ye jolly mariners,
For we be come into a quiet rode."