What particularly attracted me, this autumn morning, was a blade of
grass under the tamarisk hedge. There are not many such mornings,
even in the best of years. It was as though the earth were trying to
restore one’s faith completely for the winter, so that the soul should
hibernate in security and repose--live through hard times, as it were,
on the bounty of this gift of fat. The branches of the tamarisk,
usually troubled, for they face the Atlantic, were in complete repose.
Their green feathers were on young stems of shining coral. The sea was
as placid as a lower sky. On some days here, even a modern destroyer,
making for shelter, looks a poor little thing, utterly insignificant,
an item of pathetic flotsam in a world which treats it with violent
derision; indeed, the treatment is greatly worse than that, for it
comes obviously of magnificent indifference to man the disturber and
destroyer. It is as much as you can do to keep your glasses fixed in
concern on that warship, which now and then is cruelly effaced. For our
English seas are as fickle as is faith in the winds of doctrine.
But on this morning a sheldrake, diving about in five fathoms just off
shore, was more noticeable than a fleet of ships would be on other
days. When he dived he sent rings over the blue glass. The sea was
like that. The distant cliffs were only something about which you were
quite sure, yet but faintly remembered. It was easy to believe news
had arrived that morning which we should all be glad to hear, and that
somehow the sheldrake had heard the word already. And there was that
blade of grass under the tamarisk. There were many blades of grass
there, of course, but this one stood out. It topped the rest. It was
arched above its fellows. Its blade, of bluish green, was set with
minute beads of dew, and the angle of the sunlight was lucky. The blade
was iridescent. It glittered from many minute suns. It flashed at times
in a way to which grass has no right, and the flashes were of ruby and
emerald. You may search up and down Bond Street with the ready money in
your pocket, and you will not find anything so good. Yet I could not
collect my treasure. I had to leave it where I found it. Is treasure
always like that?
I abandoned it, feeling much more confident and refreshed than ever I
do when a book of philosophy confirms, with irrefragable arguments,
some of my private prejudices, and sat on a hummock of thyme to watch
the sheldrake. Then a man of letters came and sat beside me. I did
not tell him about my feast of grass. What would have been the good?
I did not recall that that kind of refreshment is down in any book;
for Nebuchadnezzar’s attempt on grass, we may recall, was somewhat
different. We began, instead, to talk of Bond Street, or rather, of
literary criticism, about which I know nothing but my prejudices; and
they, possibly, were found somewhere in the neighbourhood of that
street, and therefore have no relationship to the morning dew. I
noticed that the critic himself seemed unsettled that morning, though
whether the blue of the sky had got into his head to change the Oxford
blue, or whether he, too, had been feeding on honeydew, it is not for
me to say. One should never, except with a full sense of the awful
implication, call another person mad; for the improvident beauty of the
world, placed where we either miss it, or destroy it, might serve as
evidence of the madness of God. It is possible that we may even lightly
blaspheme when we call a strange fellow a little mad. Nevertheless,
the critic’s words at least startled me. He was tying a knot in a stalk
of thrift, and he remarked casually: “It seems to me you can bring
all art down to one test.” He gave me that test, which is a passage
beginning “Consider the lilies of the field.”
Perhaps we had better not. Perhaps a consideration which began with a
lily might tarnish, if it were allowed, more than the glory of wise
kings. To begin with such a challenge to one’s opinions is unwise,
because it would not allow the consequent argument a chance to find
approval for the things we most admire. But evidently those lilies of
the field were of importance to the commentator who once begged his
fellow-men to consider them, or objects so common by the wayside could
not have been marked by him in favour. He so exalted those common weeds
that they diminished, though that was not their aim, the cherished
national tradition of a great monarch. Is that an approach to a just
criticism of art? It may be so. After that accidental discovery of
the wasted treasure behind me it was impossible to reject at once so
disastrous a theory. I am almost prepared to believe there may be
something in it. It is possible that scientific critics, who judge by
fixed criteria of analysis and comparison, and who are startled as
much by a show of life in a book as an anatomist would be if the corpse
moved under his knife, had better regard it; unless, like the girl
in melodrama, they would prefer to take the wrong turning. I heard a
farmer the other day calling this a bad year. But what did he want?
If he had climbed out of his fields to where the young green and gold
of the furze was among the purple heather he would have seen that the
fount of life was just as full as ever.
Seaward there is only light, and the smoke of a distant steamer low
down. The westerly gales have ceased at last, as if there were no more
reason to bring ships home to a land that not long ago was populous,
but now is not. The smoke of that steamer in the southwest remains as a
dark blur, the slowly fading memory of a busy past, long after she must
have lifted another landmark. In all the wide world, from the beach as
it is to-day, that distant trace of smoke is the only sign of human
activity.
In the frail shine of this autumn morning, reminiscent and tranquil,
the broad ridge of shingle, miles long, the product of centuries of
storms, appears unsubstantial. There are, on its summit and terraces,
mirages of blue pools and lakes where no water can be. No breakers
explode on it to-day. The sea is a rigid mirror. The high downs behind
the shingle, that have been dark with an antiquity of heather, tumuli,
and frowning weather, are happily released to the sky, and are buoyant
as though raised by an inner glow.
Not many days in the year are like this. Two, or three? And the
resemblance of our own coast to a southern shore is now remarkable. The
old wall of the steading behind the beach is not merely whitewashed.
That wall’s brightness this morning might be, like moonshine, the
assurance of what once stood there. Only the dark feathers of tamarisk
above it pretend to substance, and they are drowsy after the buffeting
of a wild summer, and bend asleep over the wall. That secluded place
has grown familiar to me, but on a day like this, with the strong
smell of decaying sea litter--long cables of pulse have been laid
along the shingle by continual hard weather--and my footsteps the only
sound, I approach that wall as if it were an undiscovered secret on
an unfrequented strand of the Tortugas. No need to go out of England
for adventure. Adventure is never anywhere unless we make it. Chance
releases it; some unexpected incidence of little things. The trouble is
to know it in time, when we see it. If we are not ready for it, then it
is not there.
This morning I had the feeling that I was much nearer that fellow in
the round barrow above the steading, whoever he used to be, than ever
I felt on a glum day. Such autumn light as this is mocking. When the
weather is overcast the tumulus is deeply sundered by time, but a
September sun makes yesterday of it. Almost hidden in the fig-wort and
hemp-agrimony of a dry ditch behind the shingle is a rusty globe, a
dead mine of the war, and from an embankment above it I picked out a
flint arrowhead; or rather, to-day’s odd and revealing shine betrayed
it to me there. But in the gay and mocking light of such a morning both
weapons belong to the same time in man’s short history. They were used
in the same war. They will be separate from us, and both will become
equally ancient, when we are of another mind and temper. When will that
be? We may have to maintain ourselves in such light as this, regardless
of the weather.
For what this oblique light makes clear is that there is a life and a
tendency which goes on outside our own, and is indifferent to our most
important crises. It is not affected by them. No doubt it affects us;
but we do not often surmise that. It is lusty and valid, and we may
suppose that it knows exactly what it is about. We may be too proud in
our assurance that this other life has a less authentic word about its
destiny than has been given to us. At sunrise to-day, on the high ridge
of the shingle which rose between me and the sea, six herons stood
motionless in a row, like immense figures of bronze. They were gigantic
and ominous in that light. They stood in another world. They were like
a warning of what once was, and could be again, huge and threatening,
magnified out of all resemblance to birds, legendary figures which
closed vast gulfs of time at a glance and put the familiar shingle in
another geological epoch. When they rose and slowly beat the air with
concave pinions I thought the very Heaven was undulating. With those
grotesque black monsters shaking the sky, it looked as though man had
not yet arrived. Anyhow, he was a mere circumstance--he could come
and go--but a life not his persisted, and was in closer accord with
whatever power it is that has no need to reckon time and space, but
alters seas and continents at leisure.