“ANYTUS and Meletus can kill me, but they cannot hurt me,” said Socrates;
and Governor Sancho, with all the itch of newly-acquired authority, could
not make the young weaver of steel-heads for lances sleep in prison. In
the Vision of Er the souls passed straight forward under the throne of
necessity, and out into the plains of forgetfulness, where they must
severally drink of the river of unmindfulness whose waters cannot be held
in any vessel. The throne, the plain, and the river are still here, but
in the distance rise the great lone heavenward hills, and the wise among
us no longer ask of the gods Lethe, but rather remembrance. Necessity
can set me helpless on my back, but she cannot keep me there; nor can
four walls limit my vision. I pass out from under her throne into the
garden of God a free man, to my ultimate beatitude or my exceeding shame.
All day long this world lies open to me; ay, and other worlds also, if I
will but have it so; and when night comes I pass into the kingdom and
power of the dark.
I lie through the long hours and watch my bridge, which is set with
lights across the gloom; watch the traffic which is for me but so many
passing lamps telling their tale by varying height and brightness. I
hear under my window the sprint of over-tired horses, the rattle of
uncertain wheels as the street-sellers hasten south; the jangle of cab
bells as the theatre-goers take their homeward way; the gruff altercation
of weary men, the unmelodious song and clamorous laugh of women whose
merriment is wearier still. Then comes a time of stillness when the
light in the sky waxes and wanes, when the cloud-drifts obscure the
stars, and I gaze out into blackness set with watching eyes. No sound
comes from without but the voice of the night-wind and the cry of the
hour. The clock on the mantelpiece ticks imperatively, for a check has
fallen on the familiarity which breeds a disregard of common things, and
a reason has to be sought for each sound which claims a hearing. The
pause is wonderful while it lasts, but it is not for long. The working
world awakes, the poorer brethren take up the burden of service; the dawn
lights the sky; remembrance cries an end to forgetting.
Sometimes in the country on a night in early summer you may shut the
cottage door to step out into an immense darkness which palls heaven and
earth. Going forward into the embrace of the great gloom, you are as a
babe swaddled by the hands of night into helpless quiescence. Your feet
tread an unseen path, your hands grasp at a void, or shrink from the
contact they cannot realise; your eyes are holden; your voice would die
in your throat did you seek to rend the veil of that impenetrable
silence.
Shut in by the intangible dark, we are brought up against those worlds
within worlds blotted out by our concrete daily life. The working of the
great microcosm at which we peer dimly through the little window of
science; the wonderful, breathing earth; the pulsing, throbbing sap; the
growing fragrance shut in the calyx of to-morrow’s flower; the heart-beat
of a sleeping world that we dream that we know; and around, above, and
interpenetrating all, the world of dreams, of angels and of spirits.
It was this world which Jacob saw on the first night of his exile, and
again when he wrestled in Peniel until the break of day. It was this
world which Elisha saw with open eyes; which Job knew when darkness fell
on him; which Ezekiel gazed into from his place among the captives; which
Daniel beheld as he stood alone by the great river, the river Hiddekel.
For the moment we have left behind the realm of question and explanation,
of power over matter and the exercise of bodily faculties; and passed
into darkness alight with visions we cannot see, into silence alive with
voices we cannot hear. Like helpless men we set our all on the one thing
left us, and lift up our hearts, knowing that we are but a mere speck
among a myriad worlds, yet greater than the sum of them; having our roots
in the dark places of the earth, but our branches in the sweet airs of
heaven.
It is the material counterpart of the ‘Night of the Soul.’ We have left
our house and set forth in the darkness which paralyses those faculties
that make us men in the world of men. But surely the great mystics, with
all their insight and heavenly love, fell short when they sought freedom
in complete separateness from creation instead of in perfect unity with
it. The Greeks knew better when they flung Ariadne’s crown among the
stars, and wrote Demeter’s grief on a barren earth, and Persephone’s joy
in the fruitful field. For the earth is gathered up in man; he is the
whole which is greater than the sum of its parts. Standing in the image
of God, and clothed in the garment of God, he lifts up priestly hands and
presents the sacrifice of redeemed earth before the throne of the
All-Father. “Dust and ashes and a house of devils,” he cries; and there
comes back for answer, “_Rex concupiscet decorem tuam_.”
The Angel of Death has broad wings of silence and mystery with which he
shadows the valley where we need fear no evil, and where the voice which
speaks to us is as the “voice of doves, tabering upon their breasts.” It
is a place of healing and preparation, of peace and refreshing after the
sharply-defined outlines of a garish day. Walking there we learn to use
those natural faculties of the soul which are hampered by the familiarity
of bodily progress, to apprehend the truths which we have intellectually
accepted. It is the place of secrets where the humility which embraces
all attainable knowledge cries “I know not”; and while we proclaim from
the house-tops that which we have learnt, the manner of our learning lies
hid for each one of us in the sanctuary of our souls.
The Egyptians, in their ancient wisdom, act in the desert a great
androsphinx, image of mystery and silence, staring from under level brows
across the arid sands of the sea-way. The Greeks borrowed and debased
the image, turning the inscrutable into a semi-woman who asked a foolish
riddle, and hurled herself down in petulant pride when Œdipus answered
aright. So we, marring the office of silence, question its mystery;
thwart ourselves with riddles of our own suggesting; and turn away,
leaving our offering but half consumed on the altar of the unknown god.
It was not the theft of fire that brought the vengeance of heaven upon
Prometheus, but the mocking sacrifice. Orpheus lost Eurydice because he
must see her face before the appointed time. Persephone ate of the
pomegranate and hungered in gloom for the day of light which should have
been endless.
The universe is full of miracle and mystery; the darkness and silence are
set for a sign we dare not despise. The pall of night lifts, leaving us
engulphed in the light of immensity under a tossing heaven of stars. The
dawn breaks, but it does not surprise us, for we have watched from the
valley and seen the pale twilight. Through the wondrous Sabbath of
faithful souls, the long day of rosemary and rue, the light brightens in
the East; and we pass on towards it with quiet feet and opening eyes,
bearing with us all of the redeemed earth that we have made our own,
until we are fulfilled in the sunrise of the great Easter Day, and the
peoples come from north and south and east and west to the City which
lieth foursquare—the Beatific Vision of God.
Vere Ierusalem est illa civitas
Cuius pax iugis et summa iucunditas;
Ubi non prævenit rem desiderium,
Nec desiderio minus est præmium.
AT THE WHITE GATE
CHAPTER I
A GREAT joy has come to me; one of those unexpected gifts which life
loves to bestow after we have learnt to loose our grip of her. I am back
in my own place very near my road—the white gate lies within my distant
vision; near the lean grey Downs which keep watch and ward between the
country and the sea; very near, nay, in the lap of Mother Earth, for as I
write I am lying on a green carpet, powdered yellow and white with the
sun’s own flowers; overhead a great sycamore where the bees toil and
sing; and sighing shimmering poplars golden grey against the blue. The
day of Persephone has dawned for me, and I, set free like Demeter’s
child, gladden my eyes with this foretaste of coming radiance, and rest
my tired sense with the scent and sound of home. Away down the meadow I
hear the early scythe song, and the warm air is fragrant with the fallen
grass. It has its own message for me as I lie here, I who have obtained
yet one more mercy, and the burden of it is life, not death.
I remember when, taking a grace from my road, I helped to mow Farmer
Marler’s ten-acre field, rich in ripe upstanding grass. The mechanism of
the ancient reaper had given way under the strain of the home meadows,
and if this crop was to be saved it must be by hand. I have kept the
record of those days of joyous labour under a June sky. Men were hard to
get in our village; old Dodden, who was over seventy, volunteered his
services—he had done yeoman work with the scythe in his youth—and two of
the farm hands with their master completed our strength.
We took our places under a five o’clock morning sky, and the larks cried
down to us as we stood knee-deep in the fragrant dew-steeped grass, each
man with his gleaming scythe poised ready for its sweeping swing. Old
Dodden led by right of age and ripe experience; bent like a sickle, brown
and dry as a nut, his face a tracery of innumerable wrinkles, he has
never ailed a day, and the cunning of his craft was still with him. At
first we worked stiffly, unreadily, but soon the monotonous motion
possessed us with its insistent rhythm, and the grass bowed to each
sibilant swish and fell in sweet-smelling swathes at our feet. Now and
then a startled rabbit scurried through the miniature forest to vanish
with white flick of tail in the tangled hedge; here and there a mother
lark was discovered sitting motionless, immovable upon her little brood;
but save for these infrequent incidents we paced steadily on with no
speech save the cry of the hone on the steel and the swish of the falling
swathes. The sun rose high in the heaven and burnt on bent neck and bare
and aching arms, the blood beat and drummed in my veins with the unwonted
posture and exercise; I worked as a man who sees and hears in a mist.
Once, as I paused to whet my scythe, my eye caught the line of the
untroubled hills strong and still in the broad sunshine; then to work
again in the labouring, fertile valley.
Rest time came, and wiping the sweat from brow and blade we sought the
welcome shadow of the hedge and the cool sweet oatmeal water with which
the wise reaper quenches his thirst. Farmer Marler hastened off to see
with master-eye that all went well elsewhere; the farm men slept
tranquilly, stretched at full length, clasped hands for pillow; and old
Dodden, sitting with crooked fingers interlaced to check their trembling
betrayal of old age, told how in his youth he had “swep” a four-acre
field single-handed in three days—an almost impossible feat—and of the
first reaping machine in these parts, and how it brought, to his
thinking, the ruin of agricultural morals with it. “’Tis again nature,”
he said, “the Lard gave us the land an’ the seed, but ’Ee said that a man
should sweat. Where’s the sweat drivin’ round wi’ two horses cuttin’ the
straw down an’ gatherin’ it again, wi’ scarce a hand’s turn i’ the day’s
work?”
Old Dodden’s high-pitched quavering voice rose and fell, mournful as he
surveyed the present, vehement as he recorded the heroic past. He spoke
of the rural exodus and shook his head mournfully. “We old ’uns were
content wi’ earth and the open sky like our feythers before us, but wi’
the children ’tis first machines to save doin’ a hand’s turn o’ honest
work, an’ then land an’ sky ain’t big enough seemin’ly, nor grand enough;
it must be town an’ a paved street, an’ they sweat their lives out atwixt
four walls an’ call it seein’ life—’tis death an’ worse comes to the most
of ’em. Ay, ’tis better to stay by the land, as the Lard said, till time
comes to lie under it.” I looked away across the field where the hot air
throbbed and quivered, and the fallen grass, robbed already of its
freshness, lay prone at the feet of its upstanding fellows. It is quite
useless to argue with old Dodden; he only shakes his head and says
firmly, “An old man, seventy-five come Martinmass knows more o’ life than
a young chap, stands ter reason”; besides, his epitome of the town life
he knows nothing of was a just one as far as it went; and his own son is
the sweeper of a Holborn crossing, and many other things that he should
not be; but that is the parson’s secret and mine.
We took rank again and swept steadily on through the hot still hours into
the evening shadows, until the sinking sun set a _Gloria_ to the psalm of
another working day. Only a third of the field lay mown, for we were not
skilled labourers to cut our acre a day; I saw it again that night under
the moonlight and the starlight, wrapped in a shroud of summer’s mist.
The women joined us on the third day to begin haymaking, and the air was
fragrant of tossed and sun-dried grass. One of them walked apart from
the rest, without interest or freedom of movement; her face, sealed and
impassive, was aged beyond the vigour of her years. I knew the woman by
sight, and her history by hearsay. We have a code of morals here—not
indeed peculiar to this place or people—that a wedding is ‘respectable’
if it precedes child-birth by a bare month, tolerable, and to be
recognised, should it succeed the same by less than a year (provided the
pair are not living in the same village); but the child that has never
been ‘fathered’ and the wife without a ring are ‘anathema,’ and such in
one was Elizabeth Banks. She went away a maid and came back a year ago
with a child and without a name. Her mother was dead, her father and the
village would have none of her: the homing instinct is very strong, or
she would scarcely have returned, knowing the traditions of the place.
Old Dodden, seeing her, grumbled to me in the rest-time.—“Can’t think
what the farmer wants wi’ Lizzie Banks in ’is field.” “She must live,” I
said, “and by all showing her life is a hard one.” “She ’ad the makin’
of ’er bed,” he went on, obstinately. “What for do she bring her
disgrace home, wi’ a fatherless brat for all folks to see? We don’t want
them sort in our village. The Lord’s hand is heavy, an’ a brat’s a curse
that cannot be hid.”
When tea-time came I crossed the field to look for a missing hone, and
saw Elizabeth Banks far from the other women, busied with a bundle under
the hedge. I passed close on my search, and lo! the bundle was a little
boy. He lay smiling and stretching, fighting the air with his small pink
fists, while the wind played with his curls. “A curse that cannot be
hid,” old Dodden had said. The mother knelt a moment, devouring him with
her eyes, then snatched him to her with aching greed and covered him with
kisses. I saw the poor, plain face illumined, transfigured, alive with a
mother’s love, and remembered how the word came once to a Hebrew
prophet:—
Say unto your brethren Ammi, and to your sisters Ruhamah.
The evening sky was clouding fast, the sound of rain was in the air;
Farmer Marler shook his head as he looked at the grass lying in ordered
rows. I was the last to leave, and as I lingered at the gate drinking in
the scent of the field and the cool of the coming rain, the first drops
fell on my upturned face and kissed the poor dry swathes at my feet, and
I was glad.
David, child of the fields and the sheepfolds, his kingship laid aside,
sees through the parted curtain of the years the advent of his greater
Son, and cries in his psalm of the hilltops, his last prophetic prayer:—
He shall come down like rain upon the mown grass.
Even so He came, and shall still come. Three days ago the field, in its
pageant of fresh beauty, with shimmering blades and tossing banners,
greeted sun and shower alike with joy for the furtherance of its life and
purpose; now, laid low, it hears the young grass whisper the splendour of
its coming green; and the poor swathes are glad at the telling, but full
of grief for their own apparent failure. Then in great pity comes the
rain, the rain of summer, gentle, refreshing, penetrating, and the
swathes are comforted, for they know that standing to greet or prostrate
to suffer, the consolations of the former and the latter rain are still
their own, with tender touch and cool caress. Then, once more parched by
the sun, they are borne away to the new service their apparent failure
has fitted them for; and perhaps as they wait in the dark for the unknown
that is still to come they hear sometimes the call of the distant rain,
and at the sound the dry sap stirs afresh—they are not forgotten and can
wait.
“_Say unto your sisters Ruhamah_,” cries the prophet.
“_He shall come down like rain on the mown grass_,” sang the poet of the
sheepfolds.
“_My ways are not your ways_, _saith the Lord_.”
* * * * *
I remember how I went home along the damp sweet-scented lanes through the
grey mist of the rain, thinking of the mown field and Elizabeth Banks and
many, many more; and that night, when the sky had cleared and the
nightingale sang, I looked out at the moon riding at anchor, a silver
boat in a still blue sea ablaze with the headlights of the stars, and the
saying of the herdsman of Tekoa came to me—as it has come oftentimes
since:—
Seek Him that maketh the seven stars and Orion, and turneth the
shadow of death into the morning, and maketh the day dark with night;
that calleth for the waters of the sea and poureth them out upon the
face of earth; the Lord is His name.
CHAPTER II
THIS garden is an epitome of peace; sun and wind, rain, flowers, and
birds gather me into the blessedness of their active harmony. The world
holds no wish for me, now that I have come home to die with my own
people, for verify I think that the sap of grass and trees must run in my
veins, so steady is their pull upon my heart-strings. London claimed all
my philosophy, but the country gives all, and asks of me only the warm
receptivity of a child in its mother’s arms.
When I lie in my cool light room on the garden level, I look across the
bright grass—_il verde smalto_—to a great red rose bush in lavish
disarray against the dark cypress. Near by, amid a tangle of many-hued
corn-flowers I see the promise of coming lilies, the sudden crimson of a
solitary pæony; and in lowlier state against the poor parched earth glow
the golden cups of the eschseholtzias. Beyond the low hedge lies pasture
bright with buttercups, where the cattle feed. Farther off, where the
scythe has been busy, are sheep, clean and shorn, with merry, well-grown
lambs; and in the farthest field I can see the great horses moving in
slow steady pace as the farmer turns his furrow.
The birds are noisy comrades and old friends, from the lark which chants
the dew-steeped morning, to the nightingale that breaks the silence of
the most wonderful nights. I hear the wisdom of the rooks in the great
elms; the lifting lilt of the linnet, and the robin’s quaint little
summer song. The starlings chatter ceaselessly, their queer strident
voices harsh against the melodious gossip of the other birds; the martins
shrill softly as they swoop to and fro busied with their nesting under
the caves; thrush and blackbird vie in friendly rivalry like the
Meister-singer of old; sometimes I hear the drawling cry of a peacock
strayed from the great house, or the laugh of the woodpecker; and at
night the hunting note of the owl reaches me as he sweeps by in search of
prey.
To-day I am out again; and the great sycamore showers honey and flowers
on me as I lie beneath it. Sometimes a bee falls like an over-ripe
fruit, and waits awhile to clean his pollen-coated legs ere he flies home
to discharge his burden. He is too busy to be friendly, but his great
velvety cousin is much more sociable, and stays for a gentle rub between
his noisy shimmering wings, and a nap in the hollow of my hand, for he is
an idle friendly soul with plenty of time at his own disposal and no
responsibilities. Looking across I can watch the martins at work; they
have a starling and a sparrow for near neighbours in the wooden gutter.
One nest is already complete all but the coping, the other two are
a-building: I wonder whether I or they will be first to go south through
the mist.
This great tree is a world in itself, and the denizens appear full of
curiosity as to the Gulliver who has taken up his abode beneath it. Pale
green caterpillars and spiders of all sizes come spinning down to visit
me, and have to be persuaded with infinite difficulty to ascend their
threads again. There are flies with beautiful iridescent wings, beetles
of all shapes, some of them like tiny jewels in the sunlight. Their
nomenclature is a sealed book to me; of their life and habits I know
nothing; yet this is but a little corner of the cosmos I am leaving, and
I feel not so much desire for the beauty to come, as a great longing to
open my eyes a little wider during the time which remains to me in this
beautiful world of God’s making, where each moment tells its own tale of
active, progressive life in which there is no undoing. Nature knows
naught of the web of Penelope, that acme of anxious pathetic waiting, but
goes steadily on in ever widening circle towards the fulfilment of the
mystery of God.
There are, I take it, two master-keys to the secrets of the universe,
viewed _sub specie æternitatis_, the Incarnation of God, and the
Personality of Man; with these it is true for us as for the pantheistic
little man of contemptible speech, that “all things are ours,” yea, even
unto the third heaven.
I have lost my voracious appetite for books; their language is less plain
than scent and song and the wind in the trees; and for me the clue to the
next world lies in the wisdom of earth rather than in the learning of
men. “_Libera me ab fuscina Hophni_,” prayed the good Bishop fearful of
religious greed. I know too much, not too little; it is realisation that
I lack, wherefore I desire these last days to confirm in myself the
sustaining goodness of God, the love which is our continuing city, the
New Jerusalem whose length, breadth, and height are all one. It is a
time of exceeding peace. There is a place waiting for me under the firs
in the quiet churchyard; thanks to my poverty I have no worldly anxieties
or personal dispositions; and I am rich in friends, many of them unknown
to me, who lavishly supply my needs and make it ideal to live on the
charity of one’s fellow-men. I am most gladly in debt to all the world;
and to Earth, my mother, for her great beauty.
I can never remember the time when I did not love her, this mother of
mine with her wonderful garments and ordered loveliness, her tender care
and patient bearing of man’s burden. In the earliest days of my lonely
childhood I used to lie chin on hand amid the milkmaids, red sorrel, and
heavy spear-grass listening to her many voices, and above all to the
voice of the little brook which ran through the meadows where I used to
play: I think it has run through my whole life also, to lose itself at
last, not in the great sea but in the river that maketh glad the City of
God. Valley and plain, mountain and fruitful field; the lark’s song and
the speedwell in the grass; surely a man need not sigh for greater
loveliness until he has read something more of this living letter, and
knelt before that earth of which he is the only confusion.
It is a grave matter that the word religion holds such away among us,
making the very gap seem to yawn again which the Incarnation once and for
ever filled full. We have banished the protecting gods that ruled in
river and mountain, tree and grove; we have gainsayed for the most part
folk-lore and myth, superstition and fairy-tale, evil only in their
abuse. We have done away with mystery, or named it deceit. All this we
have done in an enlightened age, but despite this policy of destruction
we have left ourselves a belief, the grandest and most simple the world
has ever known, which sanctifies the water that is shed by every passing
cloud; and gathers up in its great central act vineyard and cornfield,
proclaiming them to be that Life of the world without which a man is dead
while he liveth. Further, it is a belief whose foundations are the most
heavenly mystery of the Trinity, but whose centre is a little Child: it
sets a price upon the head of the sparrow, and reckons the riches of this
world at their true value; it points to a way of holiness where the fool
shall not err, and the sage may find the realisation of his far-seeking;
and yet, despite its inclusiveness, it is a belief which cannot save the
birds from destruction, the silent mountains from advertisement, or the
stream from pollution, in an avowedly Christian land. John Ruskin
scolded and fought and did yeoman service, somewhat hindered by his
over-good conceit of himself; but it is not the worship of beauty we need
so much as the beauty of holiness. Little by little the barrier grows
and ‘religion’ becomes a _rule_ of life, not life itself, although the
Bride stands ready to interpret, likened in her loveliness to the chief
treasures of her handmaid-Earth. There is more truth in the believing
cry, “Come from thy white cliffs, O Pan!” than in the religion that
measures a man’s life by the letter of the Ten Commandments, and erects
itself as judge and ruler over him, instead of throwing open the gate of
the garden where God walks with man from morning until morning.
As I write the sun is setting; in the pale radiance of the sky above his
glory there dawns the evening star; and earth like a tired child turns
her face to the bosom of the night.
CHAPTER III
ONCE again I have paid a rare visit to my tree to find many things
changed since my last sojourn there. The bees are silent, for the
honey-laden flowers of the sycamore are gone and in their place hang
dainty two-fold keys. The poplar has lost its metallic shimmer, the
chestnut its tall white candles; and the sound of the wind in the
fully-leaved branches is like the sighing of the sea. The martins’ nests
are finished, and one is occupied by a shrill-voiced brood; but for the
most part the birds’ parental cares are over, and the nestlings in bold
flight no longer flutter on inefficient wings across the lawn with
clamorous, open bill. The robins show promise of their ruddy vests, the
slim young thrush is diligently practising maturer notes, and soon Maid
June will have fled.
It is such a wonderful world that I cannot find it in my heart to sigh
for fresh beauty amid these glories of the Lord on which I look, seeing
men as trees walking, in my material impotence which awaits the final
anointing. The marigolds with their orange suns, the lilies’ white
flame, the corncockle’s blue crown of many flowers, the honeysuckle’s
horn of fragrance—I can paraphrase them, name, class, dissect them; and
then, save for the purposes of human intercourse, I stand where I stood
before, my world bounded by my capacity, the secret of colour and
fragrance still kept. It is difficult to believe that the second lesson
will not be the sequence of the first, and death prove a “feast of
opening eyes” to all these wonders, instead of the heavy-lidded slumber
to which we so often liken it. “Earth to earth?” Yes, “dust thou art,
and unto dust thou shalt return,” but what of the rest? What of the
folded grave clothes, and the Forty Days? If the next state be, as it
well might, space of four dimensions, and the first veil which will lift
for me be the material one, then the “other” world which is hidden from
our grosser material organism will lie open, and declare still further to
my widening eyes and unstopped ears the glory and purpose of the manifold
garment of God. Knowledge will give place to understanding in that
second chamber of the House of Wisdom and Love. Revelation is always
measured by capacity: “Open thy mouth wide,” and it shall be filled with
a satisfaction that in itself is desire.
There is a child here, a happy quiet little creature holding gently to
its two months of life. Sometimes they lay it beside me, I the more
helpless of the two—perhaps the more ignorant—and equally dependent for
the supply of my smallest need. I feel indecently large as I survey its
minute perfections and the tiny balled fist lying in my great palm. The
little creature fixes me with the wise wide stare of a soul in advance of
its medium of expression; and I, gazing back at the mystery in those
eyes, feel the thrill of contact between my worn and sustained self and
the innocence of a little white child. It is wonderful to watch a
woman’s rapturous familiarity with these newcomers. A man’s love has far
more awe in it, and the passionate animal instinct of defence is wanting
in him. “A woman shall be saved through the child-bearing,” said St
Paul; not necessarily her own, but by participation in the great act of
motherhood which is the crown and glory of her sex. She is the “prisoner
of love,” caught in a net of her own weaving; held fast by little hands
which rule by impotence, pursued by feet the swifter for their faltering.
It seems incredible that this is what a woman will barter for the right
to “live her own life”—surely the most empty of desires. Man—_vir_,
woman—_femina_, go to make up _the_ man—_homo_. There can be no
comparison, no rivalry between them; they are the complement of each
other, and a little child shall lead them. It is easy to understand that
desire to shelter under the dear mantle of motherhood which has led to
one of the abuses of modern Romanism. I met an old peasant couple at
Bornhofen who had tramped many weary miles to the famous shrine of Our
Lady to plead for their only son. They had a few pence saved for a
candle, and afterwards when they told me their tale the old woman heaved
a sigh of relief, “Es wird bald gut gehen: Die da, Sie versteht,” and I
saw her later paying a farewell visit to the great understanding Mother
whom she could trust. Superstitious misapprehension if you will, but
also the recognition of a divine principle.
It was Behmen, I believe, who cried with the breath of inspiration, “Only
when I know God shall I know myself”; and so man remains the last of all
the riddles, to be solved it may be only in Heaven’s perfection and the
light of the Beatific Vision. “Know thyself” is a vain legend, the more
so when emphasised by a skull; and so I company with a friend and a
stranger, and looking across at the white gate I wonder concerning the
quiet pastures and still waters that lie beyond, even as Brother Ambrose
wondered long years ago in the monastery by the forest.
The Brother Ambrose was ever a saintly man approved of God and
beloved by the Brethren. To him one night, as he lay abed in the
dormitory, came the word of the Lord, saying, “Come, and I will show
thee the Bride, the Lamb’s wife.” And Brother Ambrose arose and was
carried to a great and high mountain, even as in the Vision of
Blessed John. ’Twas a still night of many stars, and Brother
Ambrose, looking up, saw a radiant path in the heavens; and lo! the
stars gathered themselves together on either side until they stood as
walls of light, and the four winds lapped him about as in a mantle
and bore him towards the wondrous gleaming roadway. Then between the
stars came the Holy City with roof and pinnacle aflame, and walls
aglow with such colours as no earthly limner dreams of, and much
gold. Brother Ambrose beheld the Gates of Pearl, and by every gate
an angel with wings of snow and fire, and a face no man dare look on
because of its exceeding radiance.
Then as Brother Ambrose stretched out his arms because of his great
longing, a little grey cloud came out of the north and hung between
the walls of light, so that he no longer beheld the Vision, but only
heard a sound as of a great multitude crying ‘Alleluia’; and suddenly
the winds came about him again, and lo! he found himself in his bed
in the dormitory, and it was midnight, for the bell was ringing to
Matins; and he rose and went down with the rest. But when the
Brethren left the choir Brother Ambrose stayed fast in his place,
hearing and seeing nothing because of the Vision of God; and at Lauds
they found him and told the Prior.
He questioned Brother Ambrose of the matter, and when he heard the
Vision bade him limn the Holy City even as he had seen it; and the
Precentor gave him uterine vellum and much fine gold and what colours
he asked for the work. Then Brother Ambrose limned a wondrous fair
city of gold with turrets and spires; and he inlaid blue for the
sapphire, and green for the emerald, and vermilion where the city
seemed aflame with the glory of God; but the angels he could not
limn, nor could he set the rest of the colours as he saw them, nor
the wall of stars on either hand; and Brother Ambrose fell sick
because of the exceeding great longing he had to limn the Holy City,
and was very sad; but the Prior bade him thank God, and remember the
infirmity of the flesh, which, like the little grey cloud, veiled
Jerusalem to his sight.
As I write the monastery bell hard by rings out across the lark’s song.
They still have time for visions behind those guarding walls, but for
most of us it is not so. We let slip the ideal for what we call the
real, and the golden dreams vanish while we clutch at phantoms: we speed
along life’s pathway, counting to the full the sixty minutes of every
hour, yet the race is not to the swift nor the battle to the strong.
Lying here in this quiet backwater it is hard to believe that the world
without is turbulent with storm and stress and the ebb and flow of
uncertain tides. The little yellow cat rolling on its back among the
daisies, the staid tortoise making a stately meal off the buttercups near
me, these are great events in this haven of peace. And yet, looking back
to the working days, I know how much goodness and loving kindness there
is under the froth and foam. If we do not know ourselves we most
certainly do not know our brethren: that revelation awaits us, it may be,
first in Heaven. To have faith is to create; to have hope is to call
down blessing; to have love is to work miracles. Above all let us see
visions, visions of colour and light, of green fields and broad rivers,
of palaces laid with fair colours, and gardens where a place is found for
rosemary and rue.
It is our prerogative to be dreamers, but there will always be men ready
to offer us death for our dreams. And if it must be so let us choose
death; it is gain, not loss, and the gloomy portal when we reach it is
but a white gate, the white gate maybe we have known all our lives barred
by the tendrils of the woodbine.
CHAPTER IV
RAIN, rain, rain: the little flagged path outside my window is a
streaming way, where the coming raindrops meet again the grey clouds
whose storehouse they have but just now left. The grass grows greener as
I watch it, the burnt patches fade, a thousand thirsty beads are uplifted
for the cooling draught.
The great thrush that robs the raspberry canes is busy; yesterday he had
little but dust for his guerdon, but now fresh, juicy fruit repays him as
he swings to and fro on the pliant branches. The blackbirds and
starlings find the worms an easy prey—poor brother worm ever ready for
sacrifice. I can hear the soft expectant chatter of the family of
martins under the roof; there will be good hunting, and they know it, for
the flies are out when the rain is over, and there are clamorous mouths
awaiting. My little brown brothers, the sparrows, remain my chief
delight. Of all the birds these nestle closest to my heart, be they
grimy little cockneys or their trim and dainty country cousins. They
come day by day for their meed of crumbs spread for them outside my
window, and at this season they eat leisurely and with good appetite, for
there are no hungry babies pestering to be fed. Very early in the
morning I hear the whirr and rustle of eager wings, and the tap, tap, of
little beaks upon the stone. The sound carries me back, for it was the
first to greet me when I rose to draw water and gather kindling in my
roadmender days; and if I slip back another decade they survey me,
reproving my laziness, from the foot of the narrow bed in my little attic
overseas.
Looking along the roadway that we have travelled we see the landmarks,
great and small, which have determined the direction of our feet. For
some those of childhood stand out above all the rest; but I remember few
notable ones, and those few the emphatic chord of the universe, rather
than any commerce with my fellows. There was the night of my great
disappointment, when I was borne from my comfortable bed to see the
wonders of the moon’s eclipse. Disappointment was so great that it
sealed my lips; but, once back on my pillow, I sobbed for grief that I
had seen a wonder so far below my expectation. Then there was a night at
Whitby, when the wind made speech impossible, and the seas rushed up and
over the great lighthouse like the hungry spirits of the deep. I like
better to remember the scent of the first cowslip field under the warm
side of the hedge, when I sang to myself for pure joy of their colour and
fragrance. Again, there were the bluebells in the deserted quarry like
the backwash of a southern sea, and below them the miniature forest of
sheltering bracken with its quaint conceits; and, crowned above all, the
day I stood on Watcombe Down, and looked across a stretch of golden gorse
and new-turned blood-red field, the green of the headland, and beyond,
the sapphire sea.
Time sped, and there came a day when I first set foot on German soil and
felt the throb of its paternity, the beat of our common Life. England is
my mother, and most dearly do I love her swelling breasts and wind-swept,
salt-strewn hair. Scotland gave me my name, with its haunting derivation
handed down by brave men; but Germany has always been to me the
Fatherland _par excellence_. True, my love is limited to the southern
provinces, with their medieval memories; for the progressive guttural
north I have little sympathy, but the Rhine claimed me from the first,
calling, calling, with that wonderful voice which speaks of death and
life, of chivalry and greed of gold. If you would have the river’s
company you should wander, a happy solitary, along its banks, watching
its gleaming current in the early morning, its golden glory as it answers
the farewell of parting day. Then, in the silence of the night, you can
hear the wash and eddy calling one to another, count the heart-beats of
the great bearer of burdens, and watch in the moonlight the sisters of
the mist as they lament with wringing hands the days that are gone.
The forests, too, are ready with story hid in the fastness of their
solitude, and it is a joy to think that those great pines, pointing ever
upwards, go for the most part to carry the sails of great ships seeking
afar under open sky. The forest holds other wonders still. It seems but
last night that I wandered down the road which led to the little unheeded
village where I had made my temporary home. The warm-scented breath of
the pines and the stillness of the night wrapped me in great content; the
summer lightning leapt in a lambent arch across the east, and the stars,
seen dimly through the sombre tree crests, were outrivalled by the
glow-worms which shone in countless points of light from bank and hedge;
even two charcoal-burners, who passed with friendly greeting, had
wreathed their hats with the living flame. The tiny shifting lamps were
everywhere; pale yellow, purely white, or green as the underside of a
northern wave. By day but an ugly, repellent worm; but darkness comes,
and lo, a star alight. Nature is full for us of seeming inconsistencies
and glad surprises. The world’s asleep, say you; on your ear falls the
nightingale’s song and the stir of living creatures in bush and brake.
The mantle of night falls, and all unattended the wind leaps up and
scatters the clouds which veil the constant stars; or in the hour of the
great dark, dawn parts the curtain with the long foregleam of the coming
day. It is hard to turn one’s back on night with her kiss of peace for
tired eye-lids, the kiss which is not sleep but its neglected forerunner.
I made my way at last down to the vine-girt bridge asleep under the stars
and up the winding stairs of the old grey tower; and a stone’s-throw away
the Rhine slipped quietly past in the midsummer moonlight. Switzerland
came in its turn, unearthly in its white loveliness and glory of lake and
sky. But perhaps the landmark which stands out most clearly is the
solitary blue gentian which I found in the short slippery grass of the
Rigi, gazing up at the sky whose blue could not hope to excel it. It was
my first; and what need of another, for finding one I had gazed into the
mystery of all. This side the Pass, snow and the blue of heaven; later I
entered Italy through fields of many-hued lilies, her past glories
blazoned in the flowers of the field.
Now it is a strangely uneventful road that leads to my White Gate. Each
day questions me as it passes; each day makes answer for me “not yet.”
There is no material preparation to be made for this journey of mine into
a far country—a simple fact which adds to the ‘unknowableness’ of the
other side. Do I travel alone, or am I one of a great company, swift yet
unhurried in their passage? The voices of Penelope’s suitors shrilled on
the ears of Ulysses, as they journeyed to the nether-world, like
nocturnal birds and bats in the inarticulateness of their speech. They
had abused the gift, and fled self-condemned. Maybe silence commends
itself as most suitable for the wayfarers towards the sunrise—silence
because they seek the Word—but for those hastening towards the confusion
they have wrought there falls already the sharp oncoming of the curse.
While we are still here the language of worship seems far, and yet lies
very nigh; for what better note can our frail tongues lisp than the voice
of wind and sea, river and stream, those grateful servants giving all and
asking nothing, the soft whisper of snow and rain eager to replenish, or
the thunder proclaiming a majesty too great for utterance? Here, too,
stands the angel with the censer gathering up the fragrance of teeming
earth and forest-tree, of flower and fruit, and sweetly pungent herb
distilled by sun and rain for joyful use. Here, too, come acolytes
lighting the dark with tapers—sun, moon, and stars—gifts of the Lord that
His sanctuary may stand ever served.
It lies here ready to our hand, this life of adoration which we needs
must live hand in hand with earth, for has she not borne the curse with
us? But beyond the white gate and the trail of woodbine falls the
silence greater than speech, darkness greater than light, a pause of “a
little while”; and then the touch of that healing garment as we pass to
the King in His beauty, in a land from which there is no return.
At the gateway then I cry you farewell.