The postman came just now, and among the letters he brought was one from
North Wales. It was fat and soft and bulgy, and when it was opened we found
it contained a bit of seaweed. The thought that prompted the sender was
friendly, but the momentary effect was to arouse wild longings for the sea,
and to add one more count to the indictment of the Kaiser, who had sent us
for the holidays into the country, where we could obey the duty to
economise, rather than to the seaside, where the temptations to
extravagance could not be dodged. "Oh, how it smells of Sheringham," said
one whose vote is always for the East Coast. "No, there is the smack of
Sidmouth, and Dawlish, and Torquay in its perfume," said another, whose
passion is for the red cliffs of South Devon. And so on, each finding, as
he or she sniffed at the seaweed, the windows of memory opening out on to
the foam of summer seas. And soon the table was enveloped in a rushing tide
of recollection--memories of bathing and boating, of barefooted races on
the sands, of jolly fishermen who always seemed to be looking out seaward
for something that never came, of hunting for shells, and of all the
careless raptures of dawn and noon and sunset by the seashore. All awakened
by the smell of a bit of seaweed.
It is this magic of reminiscence that makes the world such a storehouse of
intimacies and confidences. There is hardly a bird that sings, or a flower
that blows, or a cloud that sails in the blue that does not bring us some
hint from the past, and set us tingling with remembrance. We open a drawer
by chance, and the smell of lavender issues forth, and with that lingering
perfume the past is unrolled like a scroll, and places long unseen leap to
the inward eye and voices long unheard are speaking to us:--
We tread the path their feet have worn.
We sit beneath their orchard trees,
We hear, like them, the hum of bees,
And rustle of the bladed corn.
Who can see the first daffodils of spring without feeling a sort of
spiritual festival that the beauty of the flower alone cannot explain? The
memory of all the springs of the past is in their dancing plumes, and the
assurance of all the springs to come. They link us up with the pageant of
nature, and with the immortals of our kind--with Wordsworth watching them
in "sprightly dance" by Ullswater, with Herrick finding in them the sweet
image of the beauty and transience of life, with Shakespeare greeting them
"in the sweet o' the year" by Avon's banks long centuries ago.
And in this sensitiveness of memory to external suggestion there is
infinite variety. It is not a collective memory that is awakened, but a
personal memory. That bit of seaweed opened many windows in us, but they
all looked out on different scenes and reminded us of something individual
and inexplicable, of something which is a part of that ultimate loneliness
that belongs to all of us. Everything speaks a private language to each of
us that we can never translate to others. I do not know what the lilac says
to you; but to me it talks of a garden-gate over which it grew long ago. I
am a child again, standing within the gate, and I see the red-coated
soldiers marching along with jolly jests and snatching the lilac sprays
from the tree as they pass. The emotion of pride that these heroes should
honour our lilac tree by ravishing its blossoms all comes back to me,
together with a flood of memories of the old garden and the old home and
the vanished faces. Why that momentary picture should have fixed itself in
the mind I cannot say; but there it is, as fresh and clear at the end of
nearly fifty years as if it were painted yesterday, and the lilac tree
bursting into blossom always unveils it again.
It is these multitudinous associations that give life its colour and its
poetry. They are the garnerings of the journey, and unlike material gains
they are no burden to our backs and no anxiety to our mind. "The true
harvest of my life," said Thoreau, "is something as intangible and
indescribable as the tints of morning and evening." It was the summary, the
essence, of all his experience. We are like bees foraging in the garden of
the world, and hoarding the honey in the hive of memory. And no hoard is
like any other hoard that ever was or ever will be. The cuckoo calling over
the valley, the blackbird fluting in the low boughs in the evening, the
solemn majesty of the Abbey, the life of the streets, the ebb and flow of
Father Thames--everything whispers to us some secret that it has for no
other ear, and touches a chord of memory that echoes in no other brain.
Those deeps within us find only a crude expression in the vehicle of words
and actions, and our intercourse with men touches but the surface of
ourselves. The rest is "as intangible and indescribable as the tints of
morning and evening." It was one of the most companionable of men, William
Morris, who said:
That God has made each one of us as lone
As He Himself sits.
That is why, in moments of exaltation, our only refuge is silence, and the
world of memory within answers the world of suggestion without.
"And what does the seaweed remind you of?" said one, as I looked up after
smelling it. "It reminds me," I said, "of all the seas that wash our
shores, and of all the brave sailors who are guarding these seas day and
night, while we sit here secure. It reminds me also that I have an article
to write, and that its title is 'A Bit of Seaweed.'"