I Cannot tell all the steps by which the young soul came forth from
its clouds and dreams, but must hurry over the years. This single
incident of his boyhood I have told to mark the character and
tendency of his development; spirituality made self-conscious
only in departing; life, a falling from ideals which grew greater,
more beautiful and luminous as the possibility of realizing them
died away. But this ebbtide of inner life was not regular and
incessant, but rather after the fashion of waves which retreat
surely indeed, but returning again and again, seem for moments to
regain almost more than their past altitude. His life was a series
of such falls and such awakenings. Every new experience which drew
his soul from its quietude brought with it a revelation of a spiritual
past, in which, as it now seemed, he had been living unconsciously.
Every new experience which enriched his mind seemed to leave his
soul more barren. The pathetic anguish of these moments had little
of the moral element, which was dormant and uncultivated rather
than perverted. He did not ponder over their moral aspect, for he
shared the superficial dislike to the ethical, which we often see
in purely artistic natures, who cannot endure the entrance of
restraint or pain upon their beauty. His greatest lack was the
companionship of fine men or noble women. He had shot up far beyond
the reach of those whom he knew, and wanting this companionship
he grew into a cynical or sensuous way of regarding them. He began
to write: he had acquired the faculty of vigourous expression by
means of such emotions as were tinged with a mystical voluptuousness
which was the other pole to his inner, secret and spiritual being.
The double strain upon his energies, which daily work and nightly
study with mental productiveness involved, acted injuriously upon
his health, and after a year he became so delicate that he could
carry on neither one nor other of his avocations without an interval
of complete rest. Obtaining leave from his employers, he went
back for a period of six weeks to the village where he had been born.
Here in the early summer and sunshine his health rapidly improved;
his mind even more than his body drank deep draughts of life; and
here, more than at any period in his life, did his imagination begin
to deal with mighty things, and probe into the secret mysteries of
life, and here passed into the long descended line by which the
human spirit passed from empire; he began to comprehend dimly by
what decadence from starry state the soul of man is ushered into
the great visible life. These things came to him not clearly as
ideas, but rather as shadowy and shining vision thrown across the
air of dawn of twilight as he moved about.
Not alone did this opulence of spiritual life make him happy, another
cause conspired with it to this end. He had met a nature somewhat
akin to his own: Olive Rayne, the woman of his life.
As the days passed over he grew eager not to lose any chance of
speech with her, and but two days before his departure he walked
to the village hoping to see her. Down the quiet English lane in
the evening he passed with the rapid feet that bear onward unquiet
or feverish thought. The clear fresh air communicated delight to him;
the fields grown dim, the voice of the cuckoo, the moon like a yellow
globe cut in the blue, the cattle like great red shadows driven
homeward with much unnecessary clamour by the children; all these
flashed in upon him and became part of him: ready made accessories
and backgrounds to his dreams, their quietness stilled and soothed
the troubled beauty of passion. His pace lessened as he came near
the village, half wondering what would serve as excuse for visits
following one so soon upon the other. Chance served as excuse.
He saw her grey dress, her firm upright figure coming out from among
the lilac brushes at the gate of her father's house. She saw Harvey
coming towards her and waited for him with a pleasant smile. Harvey,
accustomed to introspect and ideal imaginings, here encountered no
shock gazing upon the external. Some last light of day reflected
upward from the white gate-post, irradiated her face, and touched
with gold the delicate brown hair, the nosrtils, lips, chin, and
the lilac of her throat. Her features were clear-cut, flawless;
the expression exquisitely grave and pure; the large grey eyes
had that steady glow which shows a firm and undisturbed will. In
some undefinable way he found himself thinking of the vague objects
of his dreams, delicate and subtle things, dew, starlight, and
transparencies rose up by some affinity. He rejected them--not
those--then a strong warrior with a look of pity on his face appeared
and disappeared: all this quick as a flash before she spoke.
"I am going doctoring," she said. "Old nurse Winder is ill, and my
father will not be back until late." Mr. Rayne was the country doctor.
"May I go with you?" he asked.
"Oh, yes, why not? But I have first to call at two or three places
on the way."
He went with her. He was full of wonder at her. How could she
come out of her own world of aspiration and mystic religion and
show such perfect familiarity, ease and interest in dealing with
these sordid village complaints, moral and physical? Harvey was
a man who disliked things like these which did not touch his sense
of beauty. He could not speak to these people as she did: he could
not sympathize with them. The pain of the old woman made him shrink
into himself almost with more disgust than pity. While Olive was
bending over her tenderly and compassionately, he tried to imagine
what it was inspired such actions and such self-forgetfulness.
Almost it seemed for a moment to him as if some hidden will in the
universe would not let beauty rest in its own sphere, but bowed it
down among sorrows continually. He felt a feeling of relief as
they came out agin into the night.
It was a night of miracle and wonder. Withdrawn far aloft into
fairy altitudes, the stars danced with a gaiety which was more
tremendous and solemn than any repose. The night was wrought out
of a profusion of delicate fires. The grass, trees, and fields
glowed with the dusky colours of rich pottery. Everywhere silence;
everywhere the exultant breathing of life, subtle, universal,
penetrating. Into the charmed heart fell the enchantment we call
ancient, though the days have no fellows, nor will ever have any.
Harvey, filled up with this wonder, turned to his companion.
"See how the Magician of the Beautiful blows with his mystic breath
upon the world! How tremulous the lights are; what still ness!
How it banishes the memory of pain!"
"Can you forget pain so easily? I hardly noticed the night--it is
wonderful indeed. But the anguish it covers and enfolds everywhere
I cannot forget."
"I could not bear to think of pain at any time, still less while
these miracles are over and around us. You seem to me almost to
seek pain like a lover. I cannot understand you. How can you bear
the ugly, the mean, the sordid--the anguish which you meet. You--
so beautiful?"
"Can you not understand?" she said, almost impetuously. "Have you
never felt pity as universal as the light that floods the world?
To me a pity seems to come dropping, dropping, dropping from that
old sky, upon the earth and its anguish. God is not indifferent.
Love eternal encircles us. Its wishes are for our redemption.
Its movements are like the ripples starting from the rim of a pond
that overcome the outgoing ripples and restore all to peace.
"But what is pain if there is this love?" asked Harvey.
"Ah, how can I answer you? Yet I think it is the triumph of love
pushing back sin and rebellion. The cry of this old nature being
overcome is pain. And this is universal, and goes on everywhere,
through we cannot comprehend it; and so, when we yield to this
divine love, and accept the change, we find in pain a secret
sweetness. It is the first thrill that heralds an immense dawn."
"But why do you say it is universal? Is not that a frightful thought?"
"If God is the same yesterday, to-day, and to-morrow, then the life
of Christ on earth was a symbol--must be a symbol--of what endures
for ever: the Light and Darkness for ever in conflict: a crucifixion
in eternity."
This belief, so terrible, so pathetic, so strange, coming from this
young girl affected Harvey profoundly. He did not reject it. The
firmness and surety of her utterance, the moral purity of her
character, appealed to him who felt his own lack of clear belief
and heroic purpose. Like all spiritual people, he assimilated
easily the spiritual moods of those whom he came into contact with.
Coming from her, the moral, pathetic, and Christian doctrine had
that element of beauty which made it blend with his ideal paganism.
As he went homewards he pondered over her words, her life, her
thoughts. He began to find an inexpressible beauty in her pity,
as a feeling welling up from unknown depths, out of the ancient
heart of things. Filled with this pity he could overcome his dislike
of pain and go forth as the strong warrior of his momentary vision.
He found himself repeating again and again her words: "We find in
pain a secret sweetness--a secret sweetness--a secret sweetness."
If he could only find it, what might he not dare, to what might he
not attain? And revolving all these things upon his restless pillow,
there came over him one of those mystic moods I have spoken of:
wandering among dim originals, half in dream and half in trance,
there was unfolded within him this ancient legend of the soul:--
There was a great Gloom and a great Glory in nature, and the legions
of darkness and the glorious hosts were at war perpetually with one
another. Then the Ancient of Days, who holds all this within himself,
moved the Gloom and the Glory together: the Sons of the Bright Fire
he sent into the darkness, and the children of Darkness he brought
unto the gates of the day. And in the new life formed out of the
union of these two, pain, self-conscious, became touched with a
spiritual beauty, and those who were of the Hosts of Beauty wore
each one a Crown of Thorns upon the brow.