It is an ancient notion that the earth never forgets any of our
thoughts and acts. When we leave home not to return, it bears us in
mind. Man has long entertained this strange and disturbing thought.
The old metaphysicians, who could always come to any conclusion they
desired, hinted the same opinion, that we leave an impress on the
air; or something as substantial as that. And why should we deny it?
It would be unreasonable to expect a seal upon the invisible to be
discernible, and just as unreasonable to deny its existence because it
could not be seen. We cannot declare our record is not there; but it
will never be apprehended by insensitive souls, we may safely assume,
any more than the Absolute, or the other unseen abstractions which seem
to shrink from the coarse contact of our senses. We may not expect a
memory haunting a place to reveal itself even when our mood is right,
and the hour. It may not be sought, we are told. Like Truth, it cannot
be proved. It comes when we are not looking for it. It is never more
precise than a sudden doubt, a wonder apparently unprovoked, a surmise
which abruptly checks our well-ordered activities.
Well, it is a novel kind of ghost story, and perhaps it has as much
in it as most ghost stories, for it was a sceptic who declared sadly
that the trouble with a ghost is that there is no ghost. We know there
are many people who do not rejoice in the thought that we leave no
lasting impression on our circumstances. They do not consider the
greater responsibility a certainty of this memory of earth for its
children would put upon us. How we should have to sublimate even our
emotions, if we would give an admirable impression! The nascent terror
at the bare suggestion of it reminds us that the experience is not
uncommon, on entering a strange room, or looking at an empty landscape,
to feel there the shadow of an abiding but inexplicable remembering.
We never know why. Mr. de la Mare, in his poem _The Listeners_, has
given this sense of the memory of an old and abandoned house; and
it would be as wrong to smile at the delicate intuitions of a poet
because they are too subtle as to deny the revolutionary reasoning of
Einstein because his argument moves on a plane beyond our attainment.
It is unfortunately natural for us to limit the possibilities of the
universe, the depth of its mystery, to what we are able to make of it;
for the things we do not know can exist for us only when we do know
them and so may admit they are there. When we declare we see clearly
all there is to be seen it seldom occurs to us that, even then, we may
be but confessing to a partial blindness.
It is true that the real mystery of the ghosts is not that they startle
us but that they do not. Not worth the trouble? Perhaps they are aware
we will maintain a vague belief in their presence only so long as
they do not show themselves. I myself find it easy to accept Mr. de
la Mare’s _Listeners_, but not the pair of evil souls who appear in
Henry James’ _Turn of the Screw_. I have always felt that we ought not
to have been allowed to see those maleficent spirits, and that it was
a defect in the story, a concession to our crudity, that they were
ever produced by their author as substance for his case. For we may
suppose that anything so imponderable as a memory the impassive earth
retains of the past will suggest itself only to the lucky, who may
make of their luck what they will. Most probably they will give their
good fortune a false interpretation. But what opportunities the notion
offers! What entertaining history could be made of it, if there were
anyone to write it! What poetry, if we were poets!
There is my own London suburb. After a walk round it, which would take
too much time, and would be very wearying, we might estimate that,
counting even its invisible shadows, it is not more than fifty years
old. The taxpayers there have some right to suppose that they know the
best and worst of it. It is an uproar of trams and motor-traffic in the
midst of hotels, restaurants, and ornate drapers’ shops. An alien might
suppose we devoted our whole lives to the buttoning and unbuttoning of
clothes and getting something to eat, until he saw the gilded stucco in
an Oriental style of architecture, the minarets and domes, of our many
picture palaces; for, after all, we have our intellectual excitements,
and the newsboys at the street-corners are anxious that we should never
grow listless.
It would be foolish to deny it. Our suburb seems raw and loud. Yet in
recent years it acquired an area where a shower of bombs fell from an
airship. History at last? No, we have some history which is earlier
than the airship, though less remarkable. We have some scholarly
local insistence on Clive, who went to school near, and on Ruskin,
whose grandmother kept a public-house near the High Street. We have a
Fellmongers’ Yard, and a Coldharbour Lane, a tavern which can claim
a Tudor reference, and a building, mainly of the fourteenth and
fifteenth centuries, and known to us as the Old Palace. Naturally,
Queen Elizabeth slept there. She did in most places. Here, however, she
really did sleep, and her most unqueenly ingratitude to her anxious
host, expressed when she departed, is on record. We delight in the
irregular mass of the Old Palace, with its little colony of rooks in
the trees beside it; yet our delight in it comes, I think, because its
memories of Tudor archbishops are associated, as we pass it, with the
singing and the play of our neighbours’ children, for the Palace to-day
is a school of theirs. We think more fondly of the children than of
the old ecclesiasts. They give us something more beautiful to think
about. Yet--the doubt is insistent--though we know well enough our
libraries are full of the solemn nonsense which historians have made
of their illusions and prejudices, is there a phantom more misleading
than the visible Fata Morgana of our own day, our own illusion, which
men of affairs call Things as They Are? For what are they? Dare we say
we know more about them than we know of the Pyramids, the Cretans, and
the wanderings of the Polynesians? Is the last comment on it all the
laughter of children?
Our suburb seems so raw. It has been reduced to figures on a chart,
which the Town Hall will supply. But I have long had a suspicion that
it has secrets which it is not sharing with such latecomers as we are.
This feeling has come over me, with chilling irrelevance, when I have
been passing our parish church late at night. Nobody knows when a
church first stood here, but it had a priest in 986. Late at night, our
own suburb suggests oddly that it is not ours, that its real existence
is in a dimension unknown to its sleeping citizens. I have wondered
then whether it was possible to write the history of any place, of any
time. Can we ever do more than make a few suggestive speculations?
Perhaps the most important happenings are always omitted; the words
with which we record an air-raid may not touch them. I know that the
history of my own little street, during the few years of the war, could
never be written, and if it were written it would be unbelievable. For
no man could so translate my street of those years for all to see its
significance, unless his imagination were like a morning sun which
rose to reveal the earth that night had obscured. Our street doors are
closed forever upon what happened behind them in those years. Unless
their history is written on the invisible air, then it is lost.
For this unreasonable certainty I can offer no evidence more
substantial than the last train home, and moonlight on the trees and
battlements of the church, and the silence, and a gargoyle leering down
at me from a porch. He might have been caught in the act of sardonic
comment on what was passing below, out of a fuller knowledge, and a
longer life. I can bring myself to believe that the gargoyle does not
grin at me at night without reason. He knows something. He always did.
But what is it? Why should he make me wonder whether I really know my
own street? One comes home at midnight, with the mind revolving round
London’s latest crisis; and for a wonder my suburb does not share the
excitement of the city. It is sunk in an immemorial quiet. The church
and the Old Palace might be the apparition of what was beyond us and
above the anxieties which make our time spin so fast. It is not their
time. Our contemporary bricks and mortar have assumed a startling
look of venerable and meditative dignity. Our familiar place is free
to compose itself in solitude, for we have withdrawn from it, noisy
children who have gone to bed. It looks superior to me, when I surprise
it at such a time, but it does not betray its knowledge. It spares no
more than the ironic comment of the gargoyle.
I think I can guess a little of what is behind that imp’s grimace.
Opposite to my house is a wall. It has no history. It is but a matured
wall, and its top is hoary with lichens and moss. This year’s leaves
are now littering the ground below. But I have seen our young men
assemble there, and march off for the Yser. This year’s leaves are
damp and sere on the path by the wall where the young men shuffled off
in the ominous quiet of that forgotten winter dawn. But what do the
new people in our street see when they gaze across to that old red
brickwork on a bright autumn morning? There the dead leaves are. What
is history? One may guess why the ancient imp by the church porch has
that grin when chance wayfarers late at night look up, and find he is
watching them pass. Does he know where they are going, and why, and is
he grinning over his secret?