The pleasantest hour of my day is the hour about midnight. It is then
that I leave the throbbing heart of Fleet Street behind me, jump on to
the last bus bound for a distant suburb, and commandeer the back corner
seat. If the back seat is not vacant I sit as near as I can and watch
the enemy who possesses it with a vigilant eye. When he rises I pounce
on the quarry like a kestrel on its prey. I love the back seat, not
only because it is the most comfortable, but also because it gives you
the sense of solitude in the midst of a crowd, which is one of the most
enjoyable sensations I know. To see, and not be seen, to watch the
human comedy unobserved, save by the friendly stars who look down very
searchingly but never blab, to have the advantages of both solitude and
society in one breath, as it were--this is my idea of enjoyment.
But most of all I love the back seat on such a night as last night,
when the crescent moon is sailing high in a cloudless sky and making
all the earth a wonder of romance. The garish day is of the earth,
"the huge and thoughtful night" when no moon is seen and the
constellations blaze in unimaginable space is of the eternal; but here
in this magic glamour of the moon where night and day are wedded is the
realm of romance. You may wander all day in the beech woods and never
catch a glimpse of Tristan and Iseult coming down the glades or hear an
echo of Robin Hood's horn; but walk in the beech woods by moonlight and
every shadow will have its mystery and will talk to you of the legends
of long ago.
That is why Sir Walter Scott had such a passion for "Cumnor Hall."
"After the labours of the day were over," said Irving, "we often walked
in the meadows, especially in the moonlight nights; and he seemed never
weary of repeating the first stanza:
The dews of summer night did fall--
The moon, sweet regent of the sky,
Silvered the walls of Cumnor Hall,
And many an oak that stood thereby."
There you have the key to all the world of Sir Walter. He was the King
of the Moonlighters. He was a man who would have been my most dreaded
rival on the midnight bus. He would have wanted the back seat, I know,
and there he would have sat and chanted "Cumnor Hall" to himself and
watched the moonlight touching the suburban streets to poetry and
turning every suburban garden into a twilight mystery.
There are, of course, quite prosaic and even wicked people who love "a
shiny night." There is, for example, the gentleman from "famous
Lincolnshire" whose refrain is:
Oh, 'tis my delight
On a shiny night,
In the season of the year.
I love his song because it is about the moonlight, and I am not sure
that I am much outraged by the fact that he liked the shiny night
because he was a poacher. I never could affect any indignation about
poachers. I suspect that I rather like them. Anyhow, there is no
stanza of that jolly song which I sing with more heartiness than:
Success to every gentleman that lives in Lincolnshire,
Success to every poacher that wants to sell a hare.
Bad luck to every gamekeeper that will not sell his deer.
Oh, 'tis my delight, etc.
And there was Dick Turpin. He, too, loved the moonlight for very
practical reasons. He loved it not because it silvered the oak, but
because of that deep shadow of the oak in which he could stand with
Black Bess and await the coming of his victim.
And it is that shadow which is the real secret of the magic of
moonlight. The shadows of the day have beauty but no secrecy. The
sunlight is too strong to be wholly or even very materially denied.
Even its shadows are luminous and full of colour, and the contrast
between light and shade is not the contrast between the visible and the
invisible, between the light and the dark: it is only a contrast
between degrees of brightness. Everything is bright, but some things
are more bright than others. But in the moonlight the world is etched
in black and white. The shadows are flat and unrevealing. They have
none of the colour values produced by the reflected lights in the
shadows of the day. They are as secret as the grave; distinct
personalities, sharply figured against the encompassing light, not mere
passages of colour tuned to a lower key. And the quality of the
encompassing light itself emphasises the contrast. The moon does not
bring out the colour of things, but touches them with a glacial pallor:
.... Strange she is, and secret.
Strange her eyes; her cheeks are cold as cold sea-shells.
See the moonlight fall upon your house-front and mark the wonderful
effect of black and white that it creates. Under the play of the
moonbeams it becomes a house of mysteries. The lights seem lighter
than by day, but that is only because the darks are so much darker.
That shadow cast by the gable makes a blackness in which anything may
lurk, and it is the secrecy of the shadow in a world of light that is
the soul of romance.
Take a walk in the woods in the bright moonlight over the tracks that
you think you could follow blindfold, and you will marvel at the tricks
which those black shadows of the trees can play with the most familiar
scenes. Keats, who was as much of a moonlighter in spirit as Scott,
knew those impenetrable shadows well:
.... tender is the night,
And haply the Queen-moon is on her throne,
Cluster'd around by all her starry Fays;
But here there is no light,
Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown
Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways.
In this moonlight world you may skip at will from the known to the
unknown, have publicity on one side of the way and secrecy on the
other, walk in the light to see Jessica's face, and in the shadow to
escape the prying eyes of Shylock. Hence through all time it has been
the elysium of lovers, and "Astarte, queen of heaven, with crescent
horns," has been the goddess whom they serve,
To whose bright image nightly by the moon,
Sidonian virgins paid their vows and songs.
Perhaps it is the eternal lover in us that responds so unfailingly to
the magic of the moonlight.