The preceding essay is about a half-built house upon my private horizon;
I wrote it sitting in a garden-chair; and as, though it was a week
ago, I have scarcely moved since then (to speak of), I do not see why
I should not go on writing about it. Strictly speaking, I have moved; I
have even walked across a field--a field of turf all fiery in our early
summer sunlight--and studied the early angular red skeleton which has
turned golden in the sun. It is odd that the skeleton of a house is
cheerful when the skeleton of a man is mournful, since we only see it
after the man is destroyed. At least, we think the skeleton is mournful;
the skeleton himself does not seem to think so. Anyhow, there is
something strangely primary and poetic about this sight of the
scaffolding and main lines of a human building; it is a pity there is
no scaffolding round a human baby. One seems to see domestic life as
the daring and ambitious thing that it is, when one looks at those open
staircases and empty chambers, those spirals of wind and open halls of
sky. Ibsen said that the art of domestic drama was merely to knock one
wall out of the four walls of a drawing-room. I find the drawing-room
even more impressive when all four walls are knocked out.
I have never understood what people mean by domesticity being tame; it
seems to me one of the wildest of adventures. But if you wish to see
how high and harsh and fantastic an adventure it is, consider only the
actual structure of a house itself. A man may march up in a rather bored
way to bed; but at least he is mounting to a height from which he could
kill himself. Every rich, silent, padded staircase, with banisters of
oak, stair-rods of brass, and busts and settees on every landing, every
such staircase is truly only an awful and naked ladder running up into
the Infinite to a deadly height. The millionaire who stumps up inside
the house is really doing the same thing as the tiler or roof-mender who
climbs up outside the house; they are both mounting up into the void.
They are both making an escalade of the intense inane. Each is a sort
of domestic mountaineer; he is reaching a point from which mere idle
falling will kill a man; and life is always worth living while men feel
that they may die.
I cannot understand people at present making such a fuss about flying
ships and aviation, when men ever since Stonehenge and the Pyramids
have done something so much more wild than flying. A grasshopper can go
astonishingly high up in the air, his biological limitation and weakness
is that he cannot stop there. Hosts of unclean birds and crapulous
insects can pass through the sky, but they cannot pass any communication
between it and the earth. But the army of man has advanced vertically
into infinity, and not been cut off. It can establish outposts in the
ether, and yet keep open behind it its erect and insolent road. It would
be grand (as in Jules Verne) to fire a cannon-ball at the moon; but
would it not be grander to build a railway to the moon? Yet every
building of brick or wood is a hint of that high railroad; every chimney
points to some star, and every tower is a Tower of Babel. Man rising on
these awful and unbroken wings of stone seems to me more majestic and
more mystic than man fluttering for an instant on wings of canvas and
sticks of steel. How sublime and, indeed, almost dizzy is the thought of
these veiled ladders on which we all live, like climbing monkeys! Many a
black-coated clerk in a flat may comfort himself for his sombre garb by
reflecting that he is like some lonely rook in an immemorial elm. Many
a wealthy bachelor on the top floor of a pile of mansions should look
forth at morning and try (if possible) to feel like an eagle whose
nest just clings to the edge of some awful cliff. How sad that the
word “giddy” is used to imply wantonness or levity! It should be a high
compliment to a man's exalted spirituality and the imagination to say he
is a little giddy.
I strolled slowly back across the stretch of turf by the sunset, a field
of the cloth of gold. As I drew near my own house, its huge size began
to horrify me; and when I came to the porch of it I discovered with an
incredulity as strong as despair that my house was actually bigger than
myself. A minute or two before there might well have seemed to be a
monstrous and mythical competition about which of the two should swallow
the other. But I was Jonah; my house was the huge and hungry fish; and
even as its jaws darkened and closed about me I had again this dreadful
fancy touching the dizzy altitude of all the works of man. I climbed the
stairs stubbornly, planting each foot with savage care, as if ascending
a glacier. When I got to a landing I was wildly relieved, and waved my
hat. The very word “landing” has about it the wild sound of some one
washed up by the sea. I climbed each flight like a ladder in naked sky.
The walls all round me failed and faded into infinity; I went up the
ladder to my bedroom as Montrose went up the ladder to the gallows; sic
itur ad astro. Do you think this is a little fantastic--even a little
fearful and nervous? Believe me, it is only one of the wild and
wonderful things that one can learn by stopping at home.