impressions of reality. You have the great advantage of facing society
from the outside of its classes. You are at the bottom of the social
system and have the freedom from pride which such a position implies.
_’Tis pride that pulls the country down
Then take thy auld cloak about thee._
You do not need to put on airs, put on side, ape pompous acquaintances,
simper, trim, bowdlerize, change clothes according to time of day,
polish finger nails and balance cake, give the expected smile after
futile remark, avoid contradiction, or read up the secrets of bon ton
at night.
As you come along the road at any time of day everything about you
says, “Here I am, the tramp; take me as I am or not at all.” The Church
covers the friar so that he is immune from pride and taunt, fashion and
convention. He cannot be reproached; for his garments are a token that
he is bearing the reproach of Christ. And Nature covers the tramp in a
similar way. He has the chance to feel and be at home in any place in
the world, under any circumstances and with any people. You are never
ill-dressed in the King’s uniform; you are never ill-dressed in the
tramp’s.
Such stability is great gain, and frees the mind from care and fear
of appearances. You can with a gay heart plunge into converse with
the heir to the kingdom if he comes your way, and he will almost
infallibly say after his long revealing talk with you: “Ah, I wish I
were you!” You cause kings to envy you, but even peasants, who can
be prouder and stiffer than kings, will feel at home with you. You
must also be at home with them. You learn their accent, their special
peasant version of life, their stories, their songs. Quite by accident
you seem to get inside the real life of a nation and you belong to
it for the time. “It is always worth while talking to a clever man,”
says a character in Dostoyevsky. It is always worth while talking to a
stranger.
[Illustration]
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
THE ARTIST’S NOTEBOOK
_Holding but lightly to material things,
Happy to stay, yet eager to begone,
He is the poet, though he never writ
A line of metre; he is God’s free man
And has the franchise of Eternity.
Into his soul through every sense there steal
Immortal melodies. This song of praise,
This verdant life, this fragrance, the blue sky,
Those mighty mountains and the distant sea
Are symbols of the everlasting song
Swelling from age to age among the stars._
Self-expression is life, What gives more satisfaction to one’s being
than to have expressed oneself. One builds a house and expresses
himself, another writes a poem and expresses himself, another begets
a large family and expresses himself--and looking back, they can say
“_Vixi_”: “I have lived.”
Some years ago they used to sell on the streets little blue revolving
spheres for a penny; spheres with the continents and seas painted on
them. They were toys. For a penny you could give your baby the world to
play with.
That is what he needs, and what the world was made for. We were
given the world to play with, as blocks with letters on are given to
children, for play and--for expression. The whole object of the world
is to help us to say a few words about ourselves. I think it is Novalis
says: “The world--all nature--is an encyclopædical index of our own
souls.” If you would read the cypher of your soul you must use the
cypher key of Nature. If you would learn and read the language of the
heart, the world, the visible universe, shall be your dictionary.
When Richard Jeffries wrote _The Story of My Heart_ it proved to be
all birds, flowers, bees, grasses, skies and trees and airs. It was
no cinema story, no Tarzan romance. Nor was it booklore. He did not go
to the British Museum to obtain materials for the story of his heart,
did not “mug it up” with the help of great authorities. But in the
wild woods and on the Wiltshire hills he spelt it out with his fingers
letter by letter, like a blind man fingering Braille.
I sometimes think that the gold of all literature and art is
self-expression of this kind, and that after all, the best passages and
the best pictures are “_impressions de voyage_.” After we die we may be
set to write an essay on our life story. It will be “_impressions de
voyage_.” Fifty years in an office will be found shriveled up to a dot,
and a few days in the wilds will expand into the whole essay.
Why do we stare at beautiful things? We see them--is that not enough,
can we not merely glance and pass on? We stop and we stare, at that
mountain side, at that flower, at that dreaming lake. We cannot pass
at once. We seem to be looking intently, stargazing at something
further off and yet more kindred than the stars, but we are not using
our physical eyes. Perhaps we are not using our eyes at all. We are
listening. Nature is trying to tell us something; she is speaking to us
on a long-distance wave.
Your mind is haunted. You have forgotten something, and the flower is
trying to tell you. It is reminding you of a forgotten air. Something
you cannot quite hear, cannot quite make out. Once you belonged to a
kingdom where ... once you knew some one young and fair ... once you
were lost, still lost, always lost.... But you could join us yet, did
you dare ... what is the flower trying to say? What does the mountain
say, and the lone bird on the branch? The heart aches. You lie on the
downs; heaven is alive with birds. The bosom of the sky heaves with
their song. And you, down below on the cropped grass of the hills,
lying on the chalk, shading the eyes with a hand, look up--and the
heart aches. It aches with homesickness, with love for that some one of
whom the flowers speak and the lark sings.
You are camped by the side of a stream, and a boatman goes past in his
boat in the dusk; you are dreaming by your fire in the morning, and
a wild bird comes unbidden to your wrist; you are yourself mirrored
in the water below a rock just before you are about to plunge; you
watch an eagle bridge a chasm with its flight; you see cliffs shaped
like giants and trees like dwarfs. The snake serpentines through the
dust across your path, drawing a line--thus far and no further--which,
however, you overstep. You find yourself treading in primeval forest,
where no step of man has ever been heard before. The trees change into
great armies marching upward in platoons, in serried battalions. You
come to great walls--termini. You overclimb them: death, new life. You
are out of touch with below. It is the great plateau: you can yearn
upward with your hands, you cannot yearn downward to those you have
left below. Lark’s song comes up to you from other people’s heaven.
You are in upper mountain country among glaciers and scarred rocks,
amid frogs, amid storms. You dance in the air with the snowflakes. The
soul plumbs the depth of the world with a sad thought dropped from the
height. Listen--the little avalanches--a crack, a rumble, a thudding, a
whispering. You reach and stand astride the pass between two countries.
God divided up the world, and you are a pair of compasses in His hand.
The first tramp left Eden many years ago. They say he died. But to my
mind he is still wandering. God made him wander. He has wandered so
far his wits are wandering too. He doesn’t remember much about the
garden now. It was a pleasant place. It had a snake in it, however.
Very pleasant: a place in which one could lie down and rest for an
eternity at a time, if it were not for the snakes in the grass. The
devil got loose in it. Still, it was the only place in which one could
feel at home for ever and ever. And outside of it one must wander. Life
is a wandering and a seeking where it was once a sitting still and an
adoring.
So the tramp’s life is a type of existence. I like the symbolism of
the Jewish Passover, the standing dressed for departure into the
wilderness. Man is not man sitting down; he is man on the move. _Le
tramp c’est l’homme._
Even if in small measure the tramp is a pilgrim. His adventure is a
spiritual adventure or it is nothing. The clouds part and Orion is
disclosed. The rude pencilings are erased and the main curve remains,
and the curve of your adventure is a broken arc. “On earth the broken
arc; in heaven the perfect round,” says Browning. But given the arc
the center can be found. We revolve about the sun, but there are
planets revolving around a sun invisible to us. Our souls, I suppose,
revolve about some invisible spiritual sun which we are always thinking
about--a center called God.
So with all our hilarity, our joyous meetings, our madcap doings,
with all the fun of the tramping expedition there is the deeper
interest underlying all. Most people will make the tramp without one
conscious deeper thought. It does not matter. Their nature is getting
something intuitively, although the mind has no knowledge of it. The
gay undergraduate, all vim and no soul, shies at religion and has no
thought except about climbs, leaps, jumps, food, sporting chances,
pedestrian achievement! He may not see this glorious jaunt in a poetic
light until years afterwards. Cunninghame Graham remarks in one of his
clever prefaces that nothing in the present ever seems so good as what
is past. Some years pass, and your present, which is silver to-day,
becomes gold in recollection. You lie in a matter-of-fact mood under
the stars in the midst of the mountains. Your mind is at rest, you ask
for nothing beyond perhaps good sleep, and belike you thank neither God
nor yourself for having got there. But ten years later you look back
with a sigh and say “How wonderful it was, ah, I was happy then!”
The intuitive understanding rises slowly to the mind, like light
traveling from a distant planet to this earth. But you get it at last
and see.
So the experience is kindred for all manner of minds. The poet may
exult too feverishly at first, and grow tired of his own rhapsodies;
the reflective intellectual may become bored by his own meditations.
But neither the poetic rhapsodies nor the intellectual notes record
the measure of the tramp. For it is a measure of hidden honey that is
being stored, and you are seldom allowed by Nature to eat of your own
store day by day. We are bees rather than wasps.
The true beehive of inner experience is in you, and yet, of course,
there are what may be called auxiliary beehives. I believe the
conscious experience of a tramp can be greatly increased in a
pleasurable way by the use of notebooks. It is worth while keeping
a record if only to remind yourself in other years. The details of
your spiritual adventures fade out unless you have a good memory or
an _aide-mémoire_. The whole work of some writers is no more than a
tramp’s notebook, Blake, for instance, a series of marvelously scrawled
hieroglyphics--the story of his journey from one world to another. But
one does not need to be a “writer” as it is called, or an “artist.” It
is a spurious classification. We are all writers and artists from the
day when we scrawl with our toy spades in the wet sand to the day when
we put the seal of death to our wills. Man as such is an artist. Being
public, being printed, being exhibited, are matters connected with the
minor function of being professionally artistic. Giotto drew a perfect
circle to show what he could do. We shall draw imperfect ones and be
more true to Art.
The fact is he has lost a great deal who has not kept a daybook of the
soul. Something very sweet happened to Leigh Hunt one day and he wrote.
_Time you thief who love to get
Sweets into your list, put that in._
It was entered in his daybook. Certain happenings make a day worth
while and perhaps forever memorable to you. “To-day I knew that I had
conquered all my doubtings,” wrote Carlyle once in his diary, recording
his transit from scepticism to positive belief. It was an entry in his
daybook.
As a practical detail, I love page-a-day diaries, the new sort used
mostly in America and France. It is a nicely bound thin-paper book with
a whole page for each day in the year and no postal information or cash
columns. Unfortunately in England such books are generally bound to
look like Bibles and have appropriate Scripture references at the head
of each page. One is reminded of the Lessons and the Collects. That
is very well, but we require a minimum of printed matter on our daily
page. It is ours, like our life when we wake up in the morning, free
and open, and we may write there only what is given to us personally to
write. Such a notebook should be free from conventions. If we wish to
draw sketches in it mixed with written notes, we will. If we need to
overstep the limits of a page we will find a less-covered page among
our yesterdays and let to-day spill over to fill out the measure of
time past. If you have had a tramping expedition in the midst of an
otherwise sedentary year how the empty pages will fill up from the more
glorious days!
The artist’s notebook is free for sketches, notes, impressions of
moments, _bon mots_, poems, things overheard, maps and plans, names
of friends and records of their idiosyncrasies, paradoxes, musical
notations, records of folksongs and other songs which you copy in order
that you may sing for years afterwards. But it should not contain
too much banal detail, such as petty accounts, addresses, druggists’
prescriptions, number of season ticket and fire-insurance policy, memos
to send rent. These things are apt to clutter up your book, and when
you come to Old Year’s Night, and sit waiting for the chime of bells
which rings in another year--and you have your daybook before you, and
you go over its pages, you do not want to pause on a scrawled laundry
list or some Falstaffian account of wine and bread consumed at such and
such an inn.
The artist’s daybook is his own living gospel--something coming after
Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John--and should be sacred to him, if he is
not merely a flippant and cynical fellow seeing life in large part as a
buffonade.
A thought recorded, one that is your own, written down the day when
it occurred, is a mental snapshot, and is at least as valuable as the
photographs you may take on your journey. Yesterday’s thought is worth
considering again, if only as the stepping stone of your dead self.
The thoughts of some people are constant, but of others varying and
contradictory. It is like landscape. Some live their lives in the sight
of a great range of mountains--they live in the presence of certain
ever-abiding thoughts; others change their mental scenery from day to
day, in the shallows and flats of the low country. But we all have our
epochal days, our epochal thoughts. We turn to a page in our notebook
and say: “On this day the thought occurred to me in the light of which
I have lived ever since.” You draw two candles there, with light rays,
to show the thought of the year.
It is much the same if the expression of the thought has been given you
by another. Your thought of the year may take the form of a quotation.
Those who search while they read naturally find in the expression of
others what their souls need. I remember long periods of living with
certain thoughts derived from books--Browning’s:
_He placed thee midst this dance
Of plastic circumstance
This present thou forsooth would’st fain arrest._
and then at another time Richter’s:
“_We are near awakening when we dream that we dream._”
Persistent thoughts on a path of life’s pilgrimage! Morning after
morning one awakens and the thought awakens with one and goes through
the day in company, in communion with one.
Each day Nature puts her magic mirror in our hands. “Oh child, do you
see yourself to-day?”
We look, we look, and answer wistfully, “Not to-day, not to-day.”
Is it that the reflection is dim and vague, or that our eyes have not
yet cleared? Shortsighted people see curious distortions of themselves
in the glass.
But it may even be true that no one has yet seen his own face. You can
never be sure that what you see in a glass is what other people see
in your face. So also in the spiritual mirror of Nature, one seeks
to identify oneself and yet never is satisfied. Cheek and nose are
wandering with the ripples of the lake. Every pool in the marsh has
its star reflections, and as you bend o’er one of them your visage is
broken by the starlight.
On the desolate North Cape, amid ice floes and leaping seals, with the
bleak homeless winds of the Arctic about your ears, you are as near
to your own image as in the warmth of Gibraltar’s opening gates. In
the center of the Great Pyramid your heart turns to dust, but coming
forth it vivifies again and is young as the year of your age. Pharaoh’s
uncovered face is a faded hieroglyphic, but still it asks thousands of
years after death--who am I; whither do I go?
So life’s scroll is full of question marks, pointers, index fingers,
records of bearings, soundings, answers and partial answers to the
question: Where am I? Drake climbs a goodlie and high tree in Darien
and descries afar the Southern Sea. It is a picture in his artist’s
notebook. Such an artistic thing to do, and life made him do it! It was
no pose, his going forth to singe the King of Spain’s beard. It was
more of a pose, I think, when he refused to allow his game of bowls to
be interrupted by the approach of the Armada.
Pose is, unfortunately, a prevalent disease of the quest. Some natures
are betrayed to striking attitudes on the top of molehills. To-day I
conquered the Mendips; henceforth there are no Mendips. But good hard,
earnest living--tramping and seeking, will cure most people of the
false theatrical. Beware of going to Jerusalem in order that you may
come back and tell the world you have been. It spoils all you found
on the way. I do not like the palmers; those who have been and have
come back. Admitted that it is a vice of ourselves, we professional
_littéraires_, we go and then partially spill over when we return,
selling the wine of experience for so much. When it is genuine
experience you well may:
_Wonder what the vintners buy
One half so precious as the goods they sell._
But, of course, one can tell one’s story and yet escape pose. “Make
thyself small,” saith Buddha. Make thyself unobtrusive, lest some one
may think that a very ornate and luxurious loud speaker is responsible
for the music itself. In an old-fashioned phrase so difficult to
stomach nowadays--“Give God the glory.”
The personal diary, however, that daybook of the soul, is not meant for
other gaze. I should imagine oneself shy even of the eyes of one’s most
intimate friend, wife, sweetheart, _alter ego_. There is a delicacy, a
secrecy about the functions of mind and soul. You do not wish others to
see what you have written and blush at the thought of half a line being
read over your shoulder. And the better the diary is kept the more
private and personal it becomes.
I do not consider Pepys’ Diary to be the type of a good daybook, though
it is extremely valuable as a record of the life of the age in which
Pepys lived. It is one of the great curiosities of literature. As after
a lifelong imprisonment one might find the diary of a prisoner, written
to kill time, so after Pepys’ life one finds this astonishing document,
wherein as it were, _all_ is written down. But that all of Pepys’ Diary
is not all. It is all that is immaterial. There is much that escaped
Pepys because he was not on the lookout for it. The chief omissions
are the answers or attempted answers to the questions: “Who was Pepys?
Whom did Pepys think he was?” The answers to these questions covering
the whole of Pepys’ life could well occupy as much space as the famous
diary we have.
But Pepys, perhaps without intention, described his England very well.
He set down so much detail that he provided something resembling cinema
films of daily life. As you read his pages you drop away from your own
century and walk in his. His work is not a selection of phenomena; you
make your selection from it. You can, in fact, make a diary from his
diary. His many pages become one page, or half a page, in your diary.
There was in Russia, up to the Revolution, in which he perished a
Pepysian writer, more selective, it is true, but determined to write
down _all_, everything that occurred to him from day to day through
life. He became naturally voluminous, and put down all manner of
things, discreet and indiscreet, some very shocking to decent minds.
But in one of his later volumes of fragments and thoughts he wrote,
“It may be asked what possible interest is there is these things I am
recording, but that is my affair. For a long while now I have been
writing without reader. If some one reads, that is his lookout; I do
not invite him. One resolution I have made, and will carry out, and
that is to print _all_.” So many of his daybook entries have curious
tags after them, such as “Written on my cuff at Mme. So-and-So’s
reception”; “Written while waiting for the tram on Nevski.”
It is fair to him to say that he only recorded thoughts and
observations. If he was making love to a Captain’s wife at any time
he did not tell of it--but only gave current reflections on love and
what women really are. His whole literary output makes one spiritual
notebook.
Few people however have much persistence. The January mood is familiar;
this year I will keep a diary. The February pages of most diaries
look pale and consumptive. March may pass without a single entry, as
if throughout that glorious month nothing of moment had passed before
one’s eyes or occurred to one’s being. That is not, however, such a
default as may appear. One drops the diary; one resumes it. To-day
I take stock of life and thought and all good things that are mine;
to-morrow I will swing all day on the garden gate singing a nursery
rhyme; the day after I shall put on my silk hat and go to the city and
a company meeting; I shall promenade at night. Something will occur
sooner or later and I shall say, “Hah, my diary, my tablets, my ink
fountain, that I may write down something special and wonderful and
curious that has occurred to me this day.”
Some are so fortunate that their professional and intellectual life
blend--the writer, the artist, the social worker, the barrister,
sometimes the lawyer, the politician, often the doctor. Matters of
deep interest professionally have also a personal spiritual interest.
But whatever the profession or calling all interests become one on an
occasion of travel, on a tramping expedition or visit to a strange
country. Then the daybook rests in the inner pocket, the ready helpmeet
of one’s thoughts.
In visiting foreign countries and studying other peoples, I always
look out for what may be called key phenomena. I like to be able to
record a fact which means so much more than its bare utterance seems
to imply. Such a fact, bursting with brilliant significance is like
a luminary on the page. It may be light on your way for the whole of
the year. A nation reveals its secret in a sentence. Or it may be,
an animal tells its nature by one trait observed. There is a curious
satisfaction of the soul in knowing about the ways of men and of beasts.
Of course, I do not mean that there is any particular satisfaction in
recording trivialities and prejudices. A man once wrote in his diary,
“The Frenchmen eat frogs: I do not like them.” It was not worth his
writing down. But one day, tramping with a hungry American, I was
astonished to hear him exclaim, “I wish I could see a frog; I would
soon have him in the pot.” That rid me of a prejudice, and I sat down
complacently afterwards to a dish of frogs’ legs. It was worth a line
in the diary.
A pilgrim once said to me: “I do not know you; to know a man one
must eat forty pounds of salt.” It was worth a line in my diary.
“_Nitchevo_,” said a Russian peasant servant to Bismarck, when out
hunting they were lost in the snow in the forest. “_Nitchevo_,” and
it lasted Bismarck all his life. He never forgot _Nitchevo_ and
was always fond of saying it. “He is a gentleman; he keeps a gig,”
Carlyle overheard, and it became one of the brevities of his spiritual
life--“gigmanity.” “I am a workingman; I have carried my dinner pail,”
some one else said, defining himself and a workingman at the same time.
Such definitions and explanations, pointers, and street lamps, are
worth keeping.