cheerful obstinate tyrant of all that is. He lives, as Keats once said
of himself, "in a thousand worlds," withdrawing at will from one to
another, often curtailing his circumference to enlarge his liberty. His
universe is a universe of balls, like those which the cunning Oriental
carvers make out of ivory; each entire surface perforated with the same
delicate pattern, each moving prettily and inextricably within the
other, and all but the outer one impossible to handle. In some such
innermost asylum the right sort of dare-devil sits smiling, while men
rage or weep.
ON LYING AWAKE AT NIGHT
_By_ STEWART EDWARD WHITE
This is from _The Forest_--one of Stewart Edward White's many
delightful volumes. A very large public has enjoyed Mr. White's
writings--many of his readers, perhaps, without accurately
realizing how extraordinarily good they are.
Mr. White was born in Grand Rapids, Michigan, 1873; studied at the
University of Michigan; has hunted big game in Africa; served as
major of field artillery, 1917-18; and is a Fellow of the Royal
Geographical Society. His first book, _The Westerners_, was
published in 1901, since when they have followed regularly.
_"Who hath lain alone to hear the wild goose cry?"_
About once in so often you are due to lie awake at night. Why this is so
I have never been able to discover. It apparently comes from no
predisposing uneasiness of indigestion, no rashness in the matter of too
much tea or tobacco, no excitation of unusual incident or stimulating
conversation. In fact, you turn in with the expectation of rather a good
night's rest. Almost at once the little noises of the forest grow
larger, blend in the hollow bigness of the first drowse; your thoughts
drift idly back and forth between reality and dream; when--_snap!_--you
are broad awake!
Perhaps the reservoir of your vital forces is full to the overflow of a
little waste; or perhaps, more subtly, the great Mother insists thus
that you enter the temple of her larger mysteries.
For, unlike mere insomnia, lying awake at night in the woods is
pleasant. The eager, nervous straining for sleep gives way to a
delicious indifference. You do not care. Your mind is cradled in an
exquisite poppy-suspension of judgment and of thought. Impressions slip
vaguely into your consciousness and as vaguely out again. Sometimes they
stand stark and naked for your inspection; sometimes they lose
themselves in the mist of half-sleep. Always they lay soft velvet
fingers on the drowsy imagination, so that in their caressing you feel
the vaster spaces from which they have come. Peaceful-brooding your
faculties receive. Hearing, sight, smell--all are preternaturally keen
to whatever of sound and sight and woods perfume is abroad through the
night; and yet at the same time active appreciation dozes, so these
things lie on it sweet and cloying like fallen rose-leaves.
In such circumstance you will hear what the _voyageurs_ call the voices
of the rapids. Many people never hear them at all. They speak very soft
and low and distinct beneath the steady roar and dashing, beneath even
the lesser tinklings and gurglings whose quality superimposes them over
the louder sounds. They are like the tear-forms swimming across the
field of vision, which disappear so quickly when you concentrate your
sight to look at them, and which reappear so magically when again your
gaze turns vacant. In the stillness of your hazy half-consciousness they
speak; when you bend your attention to listen, they are gone, and only
the tumults and the tinklings remain.
But in the moments of their audibility they are very distinct. Just as
often an odor will wake all a vanished memory, so these voices, by the
force of a large impressionism, suggest whole scenes. Far off are the
cling-clang-cling of chimes and the swell-and-fall murmur of a multitude
_en fête_, so that subtly you feel the gray old town, with its walls,
the crowded market-place, the decent peasant crowd, the booths, the
mellow church building with its bells, the warm, dust-moted sun. Or, in
the pauses between the swish-dash-dashings of the waters, sound faint
and clear voices singing intermittently, calls, distant notes of
laughter, as though many canoes were working against the current--only
the flotilla never gets any nearer, nor the voices louder. The
_voyageurs_ call these mist people the Huntsmen; and look frightened. To
each is his vision, according to his experience. The nations of the
earth whisper to their exiled sons through the voices of the rapids.
Curiously enough, by all reports, they suggest always peaceful scenes--a
harvest-field, a street fair, a Sunday morning in a cathedral town,
careless travelers--never the turmoils and struggles. Perhaps this is
the great Mother's compensation in a harsh mode of life.
Nothing is more fantastically unreal to tell about, nothing more
concretely real to experience, than this undernote of the quick water.
And when you do lie awake at night, it is always making its unobtrusive
appeal. Gradually its hypnotic spell works. The distant chimes ring
louder and nearer as you cross the borderland of sleep. And then outside
the tent some little woods noise snaps the thread. An owl hoots, a
whippoorwill cries, a twig cracks beneath the cautious prowl of some
night creature--at once the yellow sunlit French meadows puff away--you
are staring at the blurred image of the moon spraying through the
texture of your tent.
The voices of the rapids have dropped into the background, as have the
dashing noises of the stream. Through the forest is a great silence, but
no stillness at all. The whippoorwill swings down and up the short curve
of his regular song; over and over an owl says his rapid _whoo, whoo,
whoo_. These, with the ceaseless dash of the rapids, are the web on
which the night traces her more delicate embroideries of the unexpected.
Distant crashes, single and impressive; stealthy footsteps near at hand;
the subdued scratching of claws; a faint _sniff! sniff! sniff!_ of
inquiry; the sudden clear tin-horn _ko-ko-ko-óh_ of the little owl; the
mournful, long-drawn-out cry of the loon, instinct with the spirit of
loneliness; the ethereal call-note of the birds of passage high in the
air; a _patter, patter, patter_, among the dead leaves, immediately
stilled; and then at the last, from the thicket close at hand, the
beautiful silver purity of the white-throated sparrow--the nightingale
of the North--trembling with the ecstasy of beauty, as though a
shimmering moonbeam had turned to sound; and all the while the blurred
figure of the moon mounting to the ridge-line of your tent--these things
combine subtly, until at last the great Silence of which they are a part
overarches the night and draws you forth to contemplation.
No beverage is more grateful than the cup of spring water you drink at
such a time; no moment more refreshing than that in which you look about
you at the darkened forest. You have cast from you with the warm blanket
the drowsiness of dreams. A coolness, physical and spiritual, bathes you
from head to foot. All your senses are keyed to the last vibrations. You
hear the littler night prowlers; you glimpse the greater. A faint,
searching woods perfume of dampness greets your nostrils. And somehow,
mysteriously, in a manner not to be understood, the forces of the world
seem in suspense, as though a touch might crystallize infinite
possibilities into infinite power and motion. But the touch lacks. The
forces hover on the edge of action, unheeding the little noises. In all
humbleness and awe, you are a dweller of the Silent Places.
At such a time you will meet with adventures. One night we put fourteen
inquisitive porcupines out of camp. Near McGregor's Bay I discovered in
the large grass park of my camp-site nine deer, cropping the herbage
like so many beautiful ghosts. A friend tells me of a fawn that every
night used to sleep outside his tent and within a foot of his head,
probably by way of protection against wolves. Its mother had in all
likelihood been killed. The instant my friend moved toward the tent
opening the little creature would disappear, and it was always gone by
earliest daylight. Nocturnal bears in search of pork are not uncommon.
But even though your interest meets nothing but the bats and the woods
shadows and the stars, that few moments of the sleeping world forces is
a psychical experience to be gained in no other way. You cannot know the
night by sitting up; she will sit up with you. Only by coming into her
presence from the borders of sleep can you meet her face to face in her
intimate mood.
The night wind from the river, or from the open spaces of the wilds,
chills you after a time. You begin to think of your blankets. In a few
moments you roll yourself in their soft wool. Instantly it is morning.
And, strange to say, you have not to pay by going through the day
unrefreshed. You may feel like turning in at eight instead of nine, and
you may fall asleep with unusual promptitude, but your journey will
begin clear-headedly, proceed springily, and end with much in reserve.
No languor, no dull headache, no exhaustion, follows your experience.
For this once your two hours of sleep have been as effective as nine.
A WOODLAND VALENTINE
_By_ MARIAN STORM
Marian Storm was born in Stormville, N. Y., and educated at Penn
Hall, Chambersburg, Pa., and at Smith College. She did editorial
and free-lance work in New York after graduation, and later went to
Washington to become private secretary to the Argentine Ambassador.
Since 1918 she has been connected with the New York _Evening Post_.
This essay comes from _Minstrel Weather_, a series of open-air
vignettes which circle the zodiac with the attentive eye of a
naturalist and the enchanted ardor of a poet.
Forces astir in the deepest roots grow restless beneath the lock of
frost. Bulbs try the door. February's stillness is charged with a faint
anxiety, as if the powers of light, pressing up from the earth's center
and streaming down from the stronger sun, had troubled the buried seeds,
who strive to answer their liberator, so that the guarding mother must
whisper over and over, "Not yet, not yet!" Better to stay behind the
frozen gate than to come too early up into realms where the wolves of
cold are still aprowl. Wisely the snow places a white hand over eager
life unseen, but perceived in February's woods as a swimmer feels the
changing moods of water in a lake fed by springs. Only the thick stars,
closer and more companionable than in months of foliage, burn alert and
serene. In February the Milky Way is revealed divinely lucent to lonely
peoples--herdsmen, mountaineers, fishermen, trappers--who are abroad in
the starlight hours of this grave and silent time of year. It is in the
long, frozen nights that the sky has most red flowers.
February knows the beat of twilight wings. Drifting north again come
birds who only pretended to forsake us--adventurers, not so fond of
safety but that they dare risk finding how snow bunting and pine finch
have plundered the cones of the evergreens, while chickadees, sparrows,
and crows are supervising from established stations all the more
domestic supplies available, a sparrow often making it possible to annoy
even a duck out of her share of cracked corn. Ranged along a
brown-draped oak branch in the waxing light, crows show a lordly
glistening of feathers. (Sun on a sweeping wing in flight has the
quality of sun on a ripple.) Where hemlocks gather, deep in somber
woods, the great horned owl has thus soon, perhaps working amid snows at
her task, built a nest wherein March will find sturdy balls of fluff.
The thunderous love song of her mate sounds through the timber. By the
time the wren has nested these winter babies will be solemn with the
wisdom of their famous race.
There is no season like the end of February for cleaning out brooks.
Hastening yellow waters toss a dreary wreckage of torn or ashen leaves,
twigs, acorn cups, stranded rafts of bark, and buttonballs from the
sycamore, never to come to seed. Standing on one bank or both, according
to the sundering flood's ambition, the knight with staff and bold
forefinger sets the water princess free. She goes then curtsying and
dimpling over the shining gravel, sliding from beneath the ice that
roofs her on the uplands down to the softer valleys, where her quickened
step will be heard by the frogs in their mansions of mud, and the fish,
recluses in rayless pools, will rise to the light she brings.
Down from the frozen mountains, in summer, birds and winds must bear the
seed of alpine flowers--lilies that lean against unmelting snows,
poppies, bright-colored herbs, and the palely gleaming, fringed beauties
that change names with countries. How just and reasonable it would seem
to be that flowers which edge the ice in July should consent to bloom in
lowlands no colder in February! The pageant of blue, magenta, and
scarlet on the austere upper slopes of the Rockies, where nights are
bitter to the summer wanderer--why should it not flourish to leeward of
a valley barn in months when icicles hang from the eaves in this tamer
setting? But no. Mountain tempests are endurable to the silken-petaled.
The treacherous lowland winter, with its coaxing suns followed by
roaring desolation, is for blooms bred in a different tradition.
The light is clear but hesitant, a delicate wine, by no means the mighty
vintage of April. February has no intoxication; the vague eagerness that
gives the air a pulse where fields lie voiceless comes from the secret
stirring of imprisoned life. Spring and sunrise are forever miracles,
but the early hour of the wonder hardly hints the exuberance of its
fulfilment. Even the forest dwellers move gravely, thankful for any
promise of kindness from the lord of day as he hangs above a sea-gray
landscape, but knowing well that their long duress is not yet to end.
Deer pathetically haunt the outskirts of farms, gazing upon cattle
feeding in winter pasture from the stack, and often, after dark,
clearing the fences and robbing the same disheveled storehouse. Not a
chipmunk winks from the top rail. The woodchuck, after his single
expeditionary effort on Candlemas, which he is obliged to make for
mankind's enlightenment, has retired without being seen, in sunshine or
shadow, and has not the slightest intention of disturbing himself just
yet. Though snowdrops may feel uneasy, he knows too much about the Ides
of March! Quietest of all Northern woods creatures, the otter slides
from one ice-hung waterfall to the next. The solitary scamperer left is
the cottontail, appealing because he is the most pursued and politest of
the furry; faithfully trying to give no offense, except when starvation
points to winter cabbage, he is none the less fey. So is the mink,
though he moves like a phantom.
Mosses, whereon March in coming treads first, show one hue brighter in
the swamps. Pussy willows have made a gray dawn in viny caverns where
the day's own dawn looks in but faintly, and the flushing of the red
willow betrays reveries of a not impossible cowslip upon the bank
beneath. The blue jay has mentioned it in the course of his voluble
recollections. He is unwilling to prophesy arbutus, but he will just
hint that when the leaves in the wood lot show through snow as early as
this.... Once he found a hepatica bud the last day of February....
Speaking with his old friend, the muskrat, last week.... And when you
can see red pebbles in the creek at five o'clock in the afternoon....
But it is no use to expect yellow orchids on the west knoll this spring,
for some people found them there last year, and after that you might as
well.... Of course cowslips beside red willows are remarkably pretty,
just as blue jays in a cedar with blue berries.... He is interminable,
but then he has seen a great deal of life. And February needs her blue
jays' unwearied and conquering faith.
THE ELEMENTS OF POETRY
_By_ GEORGE SANTAYANA
George Santayana was born in Madrid in 1863, of Spanish parentage.
He graduated from Harvard in 1886, and taught philosophy there,
1889-1911. He lives now, I think, in England. I must be frank:
except his poems, I only know his work in that enthralling volume,
_Little Essays Drawn from the Writings of George Santayana_, edited
by L. Pearsall Smith. Much of it is too esoteric for my grasp, but
Mr. Smith's redaction brings the fascination of Santayana's
philosophy within the compass of what Tennyson called "a
second-rate sensitive mind"; and, if mine is a criterion, such will
find it of the highest stimulus. This discourse on poetry seems to
me one of the most pregnant utterances on the subject. It is not
perfectly appreciated by merely one reading; but even if you have
to become a poet to enjoy it fully, that will do yourself least
harm.
If poetry in its higher reaches is more philosophical than history,
because it presents the memorable types of men and things apart from
unmeaning circumstances, so in its primary substance and texture poetry
is more philosophical than prose because it is nearer to our immediate
experience. Poetry breaks up the trite conceptions designated by current
words into the sensuous qualities out of which those conceptions were
originally put together. We name what we conceive and believe in, not
what we see; things, not images; souls, not voices and silhouettes. This
naming, with the whole education of the senses which it accompanies,
subserves the uses of life; in order to thread our way through the
labyrinth of objects which assault us, we must make a great selection in
our sensuous experience; half of what we see and hear we must pass over
as insignificant, while we piece out the other half with such an ideal
complement as is necessary to turn it into a fixed and well-ordered
conception of the world. This labor of perception and understanding,
this spelling of the material meaning of experience, is enshrined in our
workaday language and ideas; ideas which are literally poetic in the
sense that they are "made" (for every conception in an adult mind is a
fiction), but which are at the same time prosaic because they are made
economically, by abstraction, and for use.
When the child of poetic genius, who has learned this intellectual and
utilitarian language in the cradle, goes afield and gathers for himself
the aspects of nature, he begins to encumber his mind with the many
living impressions which the intellect rejected, and which the language
of the intellect can hardly convey; he labors with his nameless burden
of perception, and wastes himself in aimless impulses of emotion and
reverie, until finally the method of some art offers a vent to his
inspiration, or to such part of it as can survive the test of time and
the discipline of expression.
The poet retains by nature the innocence of the eye, or recovers it
easily; he disintegrates the fictions of common perception into their
sensuous elements, gathers these together again into chance groups as
the accidents of his environment or the affinities of his temperament
may conjoin them; and this wealth of sensation and this freedom of
fancy, which make an extraordinary ferment in his ignorant heart,
presently bubble over into some kind of utterance.
The fullness and sensuousness of such effusions bring them nearer to our
actual perceptions than common discourse could come; yet they may easily
seem remote, overloaded, and obscure to those accustomed to think
entirely in symbols, and never to be interrupted in the algebraic
rapidity of their thinking by a moment's pause and examination of heart,
nor ever to plunge for a moment into that torrent of sensation and
imagery over which the bridge of prosaic associations habitually carries
us safe and dry to some conventional act. How slight that bridge
commonly is, how much an affair of trestles and wire, we can hardly
conceive until we have trained ourselves to an extreme sharpness of
introspection. But psychologists have discovered, what laymen generally
will confess, that we hurry by the procession of our mental images as we
do by the traffic of the street, intent on business, gladly forgetting
the noise and movement of the scene, and looking only for the corner we
would turn or the door we would enter. Yet in our alertest moment the
depths of the soul are still dreaming; the real world stands drawn in
bare outline against a background of chaos and unrest. Our logical
thoughts dominate experience only as the parallels and meridians make a
checkerboard of the sea. They guide our voyage without controlling the
waves, which toss forever in spite of our ability to ride over them to
our chosen ends. Sanity is a madness put to good uses; waking life is a
dream controlled.
Out of the neglected riches of this dream the poet fetches his wares. He
dips into the chaos that underlies the rational shell of the world and
brings up some superfluous image, some emotion dropped by the way, and
reattaches it to the present object; he reinstates things unnecessary,
he emphasizes things ignored, he paints in again into the landscape the
tints which the intellect has allowed to fade from it. If he seems
sometimes to obscure a fact, it is only because he is restoring an
experience. The first element which the intellect rejects in forming its
ideas of things is the emotion which accompanies the perception; and
this emotion is the first thing the poet restores. He stops at the
image, because he stops to enjoy. He wanders into the bypaths of
association because the bypaths are delightful. The love of beauty which
made him give measure and cadence to his words, the love of harmony
which made him rhyme them, reappear in his imagination and make him
select there also the material that is itself beautiful, or capable of
assuming beautiful forms. The link that binds together the ideas,
sometimes so wide apart, which his wit assimilates, is most often the
link of emotion; they have in common some element of beauty or of
horror.
NOCTURNE
_By_ SIMEON STRUNSKY
Simeon Strunsky is one of the most brilliant and certainly the most
modest of American journalists. I regret that I cannot praise him,
for at present we both work in the same office, and kind words
uttered in public would cause him to avoid me forever. All that is
necessary is for my readers to examine his books and they will say
for themselves what I am restrained from hinting. There is a
spontaneous play of chaff in Mr. Strunsky's lighter vein which is
unsurpassed by any American humorist; his more inward musing is
well exemplified by this selection (from _Post-Impressions_, 1914).
If you read _Post-Impressions_, _The Patient Observer_, _Belshazzar
Court_, _Professor Latimer's Progress_ and _Sinbad and His
Friends_, you will have made a fair start.
Strunsky was born in Russia in 1879; studied at the Horace Mann
High School (New York) and graduated from Columbia University in
1900. He worked on the staff of the New International Encyclopædia
in 1900-06, and since then has been on the staff of the New York
_Evening Post_, of which he is now editor.
Once every three months, with fair regularity, she was brought into the
Night Court, found guilty, and fined. She came in between eleven o'clock
and midnight, when the traffic of the court is at its heaviest, and it
would be an hour, perhaps, before she was called to the bar. When her
turn came she would rise from her seat at one end of the prisoners'
bench and confront the magistrate.
Her eyes did not reach to the level of the magistrate's desk. A
policeman in citizen's clothes would mount the witness stand, take oath
with a seriousness of mien which was surprising, in view of the
frequency with which he was called upon to repeat the formula, and
testify in an illiterate drone to a definite infraction of the law of
the State, committed in his presence and with his encouragement. While
he spoke the magistrate would look at the ceiling. When she was called
upon to answer she defended herself with an obvious lie or two, while
the magistrate looked over her head. He would then condemn her to pay
the sum of ten dollars to the State and let her go.
She came to look forward to her visits at the Night Court.
* * * * *