GREECE AND RUSSIA
All through my London life (fifteen years) I lectured there and
in the provinces. Being one of a family of twelve, my fortune was
slender, and social life is costly. I regret those lecturing years. I
was voluble and had instant success, but it was mentally demoralising
and very exhausting. Though I was almost fatally fluent, I could
never face a big audience without a sinking in the pit of what is
now called the _solar plexus_. Moreover, I was lecturing on art, a
subject for which I had no natural gifts. My reactions to art are,
I think, always second-hand; hence, about art, I am docile and open
to persuasion. In literature I am absolutely sure of my own tastes,
and a whole Bench of Bishops could not alter my convictions. Happily,
however, bit by bit, art and archæology led to mythology, mythology
merged in religion; there I was at home. All through my London life I
worked very hard--but, no! I remember that Professor Gilbert Murray
once told me that I had never done an hour’s really hard work in my
life. I think he forgets that I have learnt the Russian declensions,
which is more than he ever did. But I believe he is right. He mostly
is. I never work in the sense of attacking a subject against the
grain, tooth and nail. The kingdom of heaven from me “suffereth no
violence”. The Russian verb “to learn” takes the dative, which seems
odd till you find out that it is from the same root as “to get used
to”. When you learn you “get yourself used to” a thing. That is
worth a whole treatise of pedagogy. And it explained to me my own
processes. One reads round a subject, soaks oneself in it, and then
one’s personal responsibility is over; something stirs and ferments,
swims up into your consciousness, and you know you have to write a
book. That may not be “hard work”, but let me tell Professor Murray
it is painfully and pleasantly like it in its results; it leaves you
spent, washed out, a rag, but an exultant rag.
* * * * *
My London life was happily broken by much going abroad. All my
archæology was taught me by Germans. The great Ernst Curtius, of
Olympian fame, took me round the museums of Berlin. Heinrich Brunn
came to see me in my lodgings at Munich, where I was thriftily living
on four marks a day. I remember his first visit--a knock, a huge
figure looming in the doorway, a benevolent, bearded, spectacled
face, and he presented himself with the words, “Brunn bin Ich”.
Dörpfeld was my most honoured master--we always called him “Avtos”.
He let me go with him on his _Peloponnesos Reise_ and his _Insel
Reise_. They were marvels of organisation, and the man himself was
a miracle. He would hold us spellbound for a six hours’ peripatetic
lecture, only broken by an interval of ten minutes to partake of a
goat’s-flesh sandwich and _etwas frisches Bier_. Once I saw, to my
sorrow, three Englishmen tailing away after the _frisches Bier_. I
was more grieved than surprised. They were Oxford men--the (then)
Provost of Oriel, the Principal of Brasenose and an eminent fellow of
Balliol. It was worth many hardships to see forty German professors
try to mount forty recalcitrant mules. My own horsemanship, as
already hinted, is nothing to “write home about”, but compared to
those German professors I am a centaur. How it all comes back to me,
for only last month, to my great joy, I met the grandson of Ernst
Curtius, Professor Robert Ernst Curtius, a worthy descendant.
Greece in those days held many adventures. To one of these I still
look back with poignant shame for my own bad manners. We arrived
at Vurkano, just as the monastery gates were closing, and were
hospitably received. The Hegoumenos led me into supper, placed me
by his side, and fed me with titbits from his own plate. The Greek
clergy, even the monks who may not marry, are quite simple and
friendly to women. After the Roman attitude, it is refreshing to be
accepted as a man and a brother--if a weaker one--and not looked
at with sour eyes as an incarnate snare. I remember at Tinos I was
watching the procession of the miraculous Eikon; the priest carrying
the Eikon saw that I was the only West-European woman struggling
in a throng of men, and sent a young priest to fetch me to walk by
his side. There I could safely watch all that went on, the bowings,
the kissings of the Eikon, and the priests’ splendid vestments,
the cures. But to return to my Hegoumenos. After supper he said he
had a question to ask me. He had heard that rich Englishmen had
in their mouths “stranger” (or “guest”) teeth made of gold, and
which moved. Was it true? It was. Had I in my mouth by any chance
a stranger tooth? I had, I owned, one, but in the best Oriental
fashion I deprecated any mention of it. It was but a poor thing,
made not of gold, but of an elephant’s tusk. Did I ever take it out?
Yes. When? “Oh,” nervously, “only very early in the morning.” After
a short sleep--sleep in a Greek monastery is rarely for long--I
woke. The Hegoumenos was seated at my bed-head telling his beads
and ... watching. Oh, why, why did I not take out that “stranger”
tooth? I might so easily have made a good man happy. The Graiæ
themselves pointed the way. But I was young, and youth is vain and
cruel. He was too polite to press the matter, and withdrew himself,
slowly and sadly. In about ten minutes he was back, his face dark
with anger. A terrible scandal had arisen in the monastery, its
sanctity was outraged; we must leave at once. For one bad moment I
feared that the scandal was my wholly unchaperoned state. No such
thing. With a Greek _the_ great impropriety for a woman is to travel
alone and unprotected. What had happened was this. The friend with
whom I was travelling, after a feverish night spent in wrestling
with the hosts of Midian, had gone out to get cool, seen a pump
in the monastery courtyard, and incontinently proceeded to have a
much-needed shower-bath. The news flew like wildfire through the
Brotherhood, and the Hegoumenos was summoned to purge the outrage.
I ruthlessly sacrificed my kind protector. The “Lord”, I said, was
young and ignorant; he knew no Greek letters (a gross libel); he
had been born and reared not in Christian England, but in a strange
barbarian hyperborean land, where raiment was scanty and Christian
modesty unknown. Would His Reverence pardon the young man and teach
him better? Fired with missionary zeal, the Hegoumenos sent for the
“Lord”, and finding him dumb, pointed to a place about an inch above
his wrists, told him that thus far, without danger to his soul,
could a Christian man wash himself. The “Lord” was heard to mutter
to himself words to the effect that he would “jolly well like to put
the Hegoumenos under his own pump”. This I hastily translated into
a solemn promise that while life lasted the “Lord”, by the heads of
his fathers, would never exceed the limit. The crisis passed. When we
left next morning we gave more than the wonted largesse in the hope
of atoning for the bath. But the outraged saint was far too fine a
Christian and a gentleman to be won by money. The adieus were frigid.
We left under a cloud. At parting I gave him my photograph. He placed
it below the Eikon of the Virgin and solemnly commended me to her
protection against the spiritual dangers to which I was so obviously
exposed.
Long after, I visited Mount Athos. Of course, as a woman I could
not set foot on the sacred promontory. My friends started off elate
in the early morning, to visit the monasteries. Mr. Logan Pearsall
Smith, I remember, proudly led the way. We mere women were left
behind on the yacht disconsolate. They came back in the evening after
the usual Pauline adventures in baskets, and with them came some
Mount Athos monks to see the ship and the women, and sell rosaries,
etc. One of the monks--a Russian, I think, for I could not understand
his Greek, gave me a sheet of letter-paper with, for heading, a
brightly coloured picture of the Mountain Mother issuing from Mount
Athos. He pointed to the picture and then to me, and then to the
mountain, as though he would say: Well, we’ve smuggled in one woman
anyhow. It was wonderful to find the Great Mother here in her own
Thrace, and worshipped still not by women but by her own celibate
priests, the Kouretes.
The British Legation, at Athens, kept open house, and in those days
the cheery young men who dwelt there made it a pleasant place. It
was the proud boast of some of them that they had never been up to
the Acropolis, and that they only knew one word of modern Greek and
that was _sitheróthromos_, the Greek for railway station, by means
of which they hoped shortly to make their escape. They pretended, of
course, that they were frightened to death of me because of my Greek,
and that they dare not ask me to dance. They maligned themselves;
they feared nothing in the world except that they might have to apply
their minds to something sometime. They might have said with Punch’s
malingering marine, “Well sir, it’s this way with me. I eats well and
I sleeps well, but when I sees a bit o’ work, I’s all of a tremble.”
At Athens I met Samuel Butler. We were in the same hotel; he saw me
dining alone and kindly crossed over to ask if he might join me. Of
course I was delighted and looked forward to pleasant talks, but,
alas! he wanted me only as a safety-valve for his theory on the
woman-authorship of the Odyssey, and the buzzing of that crazy bee
drowned all rational conversation.
The first time I went to Athens I had the luck to make a small
archæological discovery. I was turning over the fragments in
the Acropolis Museum, then little more than a lumber-room. In a
rubbish pile in the corner, to my great happiness, I lighted on
the small stone figure of a bear. The furry hind paw was sticking
out and caught my eye. I immediately had her--it was manifestly a
she-bear--brought out and honourably placed. She must have been set
up originally in the precinct of Artemis Brauronia. Within this
precinct, year by year, went on the _arkteia_ or bear-service. No
well-born Athenian would marry a girl unless she had accomplished her
_bear-service_, unless she was, in a word, _confirmed_ to Artemis.
In the _Lysistrata_ of Aristophanes the chorus of women chant of the
benefits they have received from the state, and the sacred acts they
had accomplished before they came to maturity, and say, “I, wearing
a saffron robe, was a bear at the Brauronian festival.” Always these
well-born, well-bred little Athenian girls must, to the end of their
days, have thought reverently of the Great She-Bear. Among the
Apaches to-day, we are told, only ill-bred Americans or Europeans
who have never had any “raising” would think of speaking of the Bear
without his reverential prefix of “Ostin”, meaning “Old One”, the
equivalent of the Roman senator.
* * * * *
Crete I visited again and again, and to Crete I owe the impulse to
my two most serious books, the _Prolegomena to the Study of Greek
Religion_ and _Themis_. Somewhere about the turn of the century
there had come to light in the palace of Cnossos a clay sealing
which was a veritable little manual of primitive Cretan faith and
ritual. I shall never forget the moment when Mr. Arthur Evans first
showed it me. It seemed too good to be true. It represented the
Great Mother standing on her own mountain with her attendant lions,
and before her a worshipper in ecstasy. At her side, a shrine with
“horns of consecration”. And another sealing read the riddle of
the horns. The Minotaur is seated on the royal throne, and the
Minotaur is none other than the human King--God wearing the mask
of a bull. Here was this ancient ritual of the Mother and the Son
which long preceded the worship of the Olympians: here were the true
_Prolegomena_. Then when, some years later, I again visited Crete, I
met with the sequel that gave me the impulse to _Themis_, the _Hymn
of the Kouretes_ found in the temple of Diktaean Zeus. Here we have
embodied the magical rite of the Mother and the Son, the induction
of the Year-Spirit who long preceded the worship of the Father. My
third book on Greek religion, the _Epilegomena_, is, in the main, a
résumé of the two first, and an attempt to relate them to our modern
religious outlook. I should like to apologise here for the clumsy
and pedantic titles _Prolegomena_ and _Epilegomena_, but they really
express the relation of the two books to my central work--_Themis_.
* * * * *
Copenhagen possesses a small but valuable collection of vases, and I
had long planned to go there. I was delighted when a friend offered
to take me in his yacht. My childhood having been passed between sea
and moor, I have always had a passion for the sea and for sailing;
but I am a wretched sailor, and the friends who are kind enough to
take me on their yachts have always cause for repentance. The voyage
began with disaster. In the North Sea we met bad weather, and the
vessel, a yawl of only 20 tons, was in some danger. When she got back
to dock at Cowes, they told us it was a wonder we had not all gone
to the bottom. The last thing I remember was crawling on deck and
seeing above me waves mountain high that seemed as if they must fall
and swallow us. Then I suppose I lost consciousness, for I woke--as
I thought--in heaven, in utter bliss. Round me were kneeling angels
in blue gowns and white caps with streamers. Under stress of weather
we had put in at Heligoland, and they had landed me in a boat and,
every hand being needed aboard, had left me lying on the shore,
and the women of Heligoland crowded to see me. I suppose it was the
relief from the heaving sea, but I knew then the extreme of physical
rapture after physical anguish. We were weather-bound for a couple
of days and then made our way into the Eider Canal, where all was
peace. Arguing on philosophy all day long, for my host was a hard
thinker as well as a bold and skilful seaman, we drifted through
long lines of one-legged storks and into the Baltic, with its fiords
and its beech trees, with their branches dipping into the water. The
Baltic is a “short” unpleasant sea, but I remember with pride that
I recovered sufficiently to steer the yacht into Copenhagen. There
I learnt what honesty is. The keeper of the Museum met me the first
day, but the second he was engaged. He left me a huge bunch of keys
and the freedom of the place. I had the yacht’s boat in the canal at
the Museum door and could easily have looted the whole place. But it
seems, among the hardy Norsemen, these things simply are not done.
Yet in my own England, at the British Museum, when I am at work a
member of the staff never leaves me. Ostensibly he is there to help
me, but really as policeman. I remember Sir Francis Darwin telling me
that in Stockholm he and a Swedish friend were crossing a bridge
and they saw a gold watch lying on the pavement. Sir Francis stooped
to pick it up and said: “I suppose we must take it to the police.”
“Oh no,” said the Swede, “just put it on the parapet, where it will
be safe; the man who lost it is sure to come back.” I fancy if you
left a gold watch on the parapet of London Bridge it would not wait
long for its owner; yet we English are supposed to be an honest
people.
[Illustration: JANE HARRISON AND HOPE MIRRLEES.
_To face page 90._
]
Stockholm, whither I went to see the great prehistoric museum, was a
sad disappointment. I had heard it called the “Venice of the North”.
It is common to the verge of squalor. It contains one beautiful
building, the architect of which was a Frenchman. I have come to
realise that many people, if they see water and some islands or a
lake, feel that it must be beautiful. In the same way they find
mountains always beautiful and inspiring. The Matterhorn is, to me,
one of the ugliest objects in all nature, like nothing on earth but a
colossal extracted fang turned upside down, but all the same, every
night during the season, the terrace of the Riffel Alp’s Hotel is
crowded with archdeacons gazing raptly at the Matterhorn and praising
God for the beauties of His handiwork.
To Petersburg I journeyed solely and simply to study the Kertsch
antiquities in the Hermitage. I knew no word of Russian, and cared
nothing then for Russia; my eyes were blinded for the moment by
the “glory that was Greece”. I had taken letters from the British
Museum, and was at once shown into a gorgeous room in which sat a
still more gorgeous official, smoking cigarettes. He was all courtesy
and kindness--what could he do for me? Did I know So-and-so? Had I
seen this and that?--but no mention of Kertsch. I am now convinced
that, though he must have known the name, he had no notion of its
archæological significance, nor even that it had been an Athenian
colony. At last, timidly, I tried to state my business. Could I
have the vases out of their cases, and was there yet any material
unpublished by Stephani that I could have access to? He looked rather
blank, and then with a sort of twinkle in his deep-set eyes said
if there was anything about social matters or the court in which
he could help me, would I command him; but as for these learned
matters, would I pardon him if he referred me to the gentleman who
was good enough to act as his brains. Here he significantly touched
his handsome empty head. He took me to a distant room where a shabby
German Pole was at work, surrounded by papers and potsherds. He
proved an efficient specialist. I saw my noble backwoodsman no
more--no doubt he was gladly rid of the “mad Englishwoman”. I
couldn’t help liking the friendly creature; he had the simple,
perfect manners of which Russians hold the secret. But in those
days I was a ferocious moralist, and his quite open and shameless
inadequacy made a premature Bolshevist of me. But oh, what a fool,
what an idiot I was to leave Russia without knowing it! I might so
easily have made the pilgrimage to Tolstoy; I might even have seen
Dostoevsky. It has been all my life my besetting sin that I could
only see one thing at a time. I was blinded by over-focus. I am
bitterly, eternally punished. Never now shall I see Moscow and Kiev,
cities of my dreams.
Literally of my dreams. Twice only in my life have I dreamt a
significant dream. This is one. One night soon after the Russian
revolution I dreamt I was in a great, ancient forest--what in Russian
would be called “a dreaming wood”. In it was cleared a round space,
and the space was crowded with huge bears softly dancing. I somehow
knew that I had come to teach them to dance the Grand Chain in the
Lancers, a square dance now obsolete. I was not the least afraid,
only very glad and proud. I went up and began trying to make them
join hands and form a circle. It was no good. I tried and tried, but
they only shuffled away, courteously waving their paws, intent on
their own mysterious doings. Suddenly I knew that these doings were
more wonderful and beautiful than any Grand Chain (as, indeed, they
might well be!). It was for me to learn, not to teach. I woke up
crying, in an ecstasy of humility.
That may stand for what Russia has meant to me. And let there be no
misunderstanding. It is not “the Slav soul” that drew me. Not even,
indeed, Russian literature. Of course, years before I had read and
admired Turgenev and Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, but at least by the
two last I was more frightened than allured. I half resented their
probing poignancy, and some passages, like the end of the _Idiot_ and
the scene between Dimitri Karamasov and Grushenka, seemed to me in
their poignancy to pass the limits of the permissible in art. They
hurt too badly and too inwardly. No, it was not these portentous
things that laid a spell upon me. It was just the Russian language.
If I could have my life over again, I would devote it not to art
or literature, but to language. Life itself may hit one hard, but
always, always one can take sanctuary in language. Language is as
much an art and as sure a refuge as painting or music or literature.
It reflects and interprets and makes bearable life; only it is a
wider, because more subconscious, life.
CONCLUSION
I have spoken much of people, nothing of books--yet the influence
of books on my life has been intimate and incessant. When I first
came to London I became a Life Member of the London Library. London
life was costly, but I felt that, if the worst came to the worst,
with a constant supply of books and a small dole for tobacco, I
could cheerfully face the Workhouse. Three books stand out as
making three stages in my thinking: Aristotle’s _Ethics_, Bergson’s
_L’Évolution créatrice_ and Freud’s _Totemism and Taboo_. By
nature I was a Platonist, but Aristotle, I think, helped me more
than Plato. It happened that the _Ethics_ was among the set books
for my year at Cambridge. To realise the release that Aristotle
brought, you must have been reared as I was in a narrow school of
Evangelicalism--reared with sin always present, with death and
judgement before you, Hell and Heaven to either hand. It was like
coming out of a madhouse into a quiet college quadrangle where
all was liberty and sanity, and you became a law to yourself. The
doctrine of virtue as the Mean--what an uplift and revelation to one
“born in sin”! The notion of the _summum bonum_ as an “energy”, as
an exercise of personal faculty, to one who had been taught that God
claimed all, and the notion of the “perfect life” that was to include
as a matter of course friendship. I remember walking up and down in
the College garden, thinking could it possibly be true, were the
chains really broken and the prison doors open.
In 1907 came _L’Évolution créatrice_. Off and on I had read
philosophy all my life, from Heracleitos to William James, but of
late years I had read it less and less, feeling that I got nothing
new, only a ceaseless shuffling of the cards, a juggling with the
same glass balls, and then suddenly it seemed this new Moses struck
the rock and streams gushed forth in the desert. But I need not tell
of an experience shared in those happy years by every thinking man in
Europe.
With Freud it was quite different. By temperament I am, if not a
prude, at least a Puritan, and at first the ugliness of it all
sickened me. I hate a sick-room, and have a physical fear of all
obsessions and insanity. Still I struggled on, feeling somehow that
behind and below all this sexual mud was something big and real.
Then fortunately I lighted on _Totemism and Taboo_, and at once
the light broke and I felt again the sense of release. Here was a
big constructive imagination; here was a mere doctor laying bare
the origins of Greek drama as no classical scholar had ever done,
teaching the anthropologist what was really meant by his _totem and
taboo_, probing the mysteries of sin, of sanctity, of sacrament--a
man who, because he understood, purged the human spirit from fear. I
have no confidence in psycho-analysis as a method of therapeutics. I
am sure that Mr. Roger Fry is right and Freud quite wrong as to the
psychology of art, but I am equally sure that for generations almost
every branch of human knowledge will be enriched and illumined by the
imagination of Freud.
* * * * *
Looking back over my own life, I see with what halting and stumbling
steps I made my way to my own special subject. Greek literature
as a specialism I early felt was barred to me. The only field of
research that the Cambridge of my day knew of was textual criticism,
and for fruitful work in that my scholarship was never adequate.
We Hellenists were, in truth, at that time a “people who sat in
darkness”, but we were soon to see a great light, two great
lights--archæology, anthropology. Classics were turning in their long
sleep. Old men began to see visions, young men to dream dreams. I had
just left Cambridge when Schliemann began to dig at Troy. Among my
own contemporaries was J. G. Frazer, who was soon to light the dark
wood of savage superstition with a gleam from _The Golden Bough_.
The happy title of that book--Sir James Frazer has a veritable
genius for titles--made it arrest the attention of scholars. They
saw in comparative anthropology a serious subject actually capable
of elucidating a Greek or Latin text. Tylor had written and spoken;
Robertson Smith, exiled for heresy, had seen the Star in the East; in
vain; we classical deaf-adders stopped our ears and closed our eyes;
but at the mere sound of the magical words “Golden Bough” the scales
fell--we heard and understood. Then Arthur Evans set sail for his new
Atlantis and telegraphed news of the Minotaur from his own labyrinth;
perforce we saw this was a serious matter, it affected the “Homeric
Question”.
By nature, I am sure, I am not an archæologist--still less an
anthropologist--the “beastly devices of the heathen” weary and
disgust me. But, borne along by the irresistible tide of adventure,
I dabbled in both archæology and anthropology, and I am glad I
did, for both were needful for my real subject--religion. When I
say “religion”, I am instantly obliged to correct myself; it is
not religion, it is ritual that absorbs me. I have elsewhere[2]
tried to show that Art is not the handmaid of Religion, but that
Art in some sense springs out of Religion, and that between them
is a connecting link, a bridge, and that bridge is Ritual. On that
bridge, emotionally, I halt. It satisfies something within me that
is appeased by neither Religion nor Art. A ritual dance, a ritual
procession with vestments and lights and banners, move me as no
sermon, no hymn, no picture, no poem has ever moved me; perhaps
it is because a procession seems to me like life, like _durée_
itself, caught and fixed before me. Only twice have I seen a ritual
dance, and first the dance of the Seises before the high altar in
the Cathedral at Seville. It was at Carnival time I saw it. I felt
instantly that it was frankly Pagan. Its origin is, as the Roman
Church frankly owns, “perdue dans la nuit des temps”--we can but
conjecture that it took its rise in the dances of the Kouretes of
Crete to Mother and Son. The dance was accompanied by a prayer to
the setting sun, a prayer for light and healing. The movements
executed by six choristers are attenuated to a single formal step.
It is decorous, even prim, like some stiff stylised shadow. But it
is strangely moving in the fading light with the wondrous setting of
the high altar and the golden grille, and above all the sound of the
harsh, plangent Spanish voices. Great Pan, indeed, is dead--his ghost
still dances.
[2] _Art and Ritual_ (Home University Library).
Only last year I saw a wondrous ritual procession, a marked contrast
to the Seville dance. It is held at Echternach each year, on the
Tuesday after Pentecost. It is, I think, the most living survival
of the ritual dance to be seen in Europe. Thanks to the kindness of
a Luxembourgoise lady, Madame Emil Mayerisch de Saint Hubert, I was
able to observe it in every detail. The dancing procession is held
now in honour of our Saxon saint, St. Willibrord, but obviously it
goes back to magical days. The dancers muster at the bridge below
the little town and, gathering numbers as they go, dance through
the streets, halting here and there and ending in the Basilica. As
the dance is magical, it is essential that the whole town should be
traversed. The clergy are in attendance, any one and every one dances
or rather leaps, for it is a jumping step; like the Cretan Kouretes
they “leap for health and wealth”. I saw an old, old woman, scarcely
able to walk, but she “lifted her foot in the dance”. I saw a woman
with a sick baby in her arms, and she danced for healing; but most of
all it was the young men, the Kouretes, who danced.
The ritual dance is all but dead, but the ritual drama, the death and
the resurrection of the Year-Spirit, still goes on. I realised this
when I first heard Mass celebrated according to the Russian, that is
substantially the Greek rite. There you have the real enacting of a
mystery--the mystery of the death and resurrection of the Year-Spirit
which preceded drama. It is hidden, out of sight; the priest comes
out from behind the golden gate to announce the accomplishment. It is
the coming out of the Messenger in a Greek play to announce the Death
and the Resurrection. The Roman Church has sadly marred its mystery.
The rite of consecration is performed in public before the altar and
loses thereby half its significance.
I mention these ritual dances, this ritual drama, this bridge between
art and life, because it is things like these that I was all my life
blindly seeking. A thing has little charm for me unless it has on
it the patina of age. Great things in literature, Greek plays for
example, I most enjoy when behind their bright splendours I see
moving darker and older shapes. That must be my _apologia pro vita
mea_.
* * * * *
At the close of one’s reminiscences it is fitting that one should
say something as to how life looks at the approach of Death. As to
Death, when I was young, personal immortality seemed to me axiomatic.
The mere thought of Death made me furious. I was so intensely alive
I felt I could defy any one, anything--God, or demon, or Fate
herself--to put me out. All that is changed now. If I think of Death
at all it is merely as a negation of life, a close, a last and
necessary chord. What I dread is disease, that is, bad, disordered
life, not Death, and disease, so far, I have escaped. I have no hope
whatever of personal immortality, no desire even for a future life.
My consciousness began in a very humble fashion with my body; with my
body, very quietly, I hope it will end.
Nox est perpetua una dormienda.
And then there is another thought. We are told now that we bear
within us the seeds, not of one, but of two lives--the life of the
race and the life of the individual. The life of the race makes for
racial immortality; the life of the individual suffers _l’attirance
de la mort_, the lure of death; and this from the outset. The
unicellular animals are practically immortal; the complexity of
the individual spells death. The unmarried and the childless cut
themselves loose from racial immortality, and are dedicate to
individual life--a side track, a blind alley, yet surely a supreme
end in itself. By what miracle I escaped marriage I do not know,
for all my life long I fell in love. But, on the whole, I am glad.
I do not doubt that I lost much, but I am quite sure I gained more.
Marriage, for a woman at least, hampers the two things that made
life to me glorious--friendship and learning. In man it was always
the friend, not the husband, that I wanted. Family life has never
attracted me. At its best it seems to me rather narrow and selfish;
at its worst, a private hell. The rôle of wife and mother is no easy
one; with my head full of other things I might have dismally failed.
On the other hand, I have a natural gift for community life. It seems
to me sane and civilised and economically right. I like to live
spaciously, but rather plainly, in large halls with great spaces and
quiet libraries. I like to wake in the morning with the sense of a
great, silent garden round me. These things are, or should be, and
soon will be, forbidden to the private family; they are right and
good for the community. If I had been rich I should have founded
a learned community for women, with vows of consecration and a
beautiful rule and habit; as it is, I am content to have lived many
years of my life in a college. I think, as civilisation advances,
family life will become, if not extinct, at least much modified and
curtailed.
* * * * *
Old age, believe me, is a good and pleasant thing. It is true you
are gently shouldered off the stage, but then you are given such a
comfortable front stall as spectator, and, if you have really played
your part, you are more than content to sit down and watch. All
life has become a thing less strenuous, softer and warmer. You are
allowed all sorts of comfortable little physical licences; you may
doze through dull lectures, you may go to bed early when you are
bored. The young all pay you a sort of tender deference to which you
know you have no real claim. Every one is solicitous to help you; it
seems the whole world offers you a kind, protecting arm. Life does
not cease when you are old, it only suffers a rich change. You go on
loving, only your love, instead of a burning, fiery furnace, is the
mellow glow of an autumn sun. You even go on falling in love, and
for the same foolish reasons--the tone of a voice, the glint of a
strangely set eye--only you fall so gently; and in old age you may
even show a man that you like to be with him without his wanting to
marry you or thinking you want to marry him.
But then “old age is lonely”. Not if you follow my example! My
friends, men and women, are most of them some twenty years younger
than I am. I have only one friend made in my ’seventies, Mr. Guy
le Strange, if he will let me so account him. He taught me, with
infinite patience and kindness, when I was over seventy the elements
of Persian, a sure road to my heart. And, I admit, Fate has been very
kind to me. In my old age she has sent me, to comfort me, a ghostly
daughter, dearer than any child after the flesh, more gifted than any
possible offspring of Aunt Glegg.
* * * * *
I should like to run on and tell of my life since I left Cambridge.
For leave Cambridge, with measureless regret, I did. I began to feel
that I had lived too long the strait Academic life with my mind
intently focussed on the solution of a few problems. I wanted before
the end came to see things more freely and more widely, and, above
all, to get the new focus of another civilisation. Russia, my “Land
of Heart’s Desire”, was closed to me. France and America in France
have received me with a kindness I can neither repay nor forget.
If only I might tell of the wonderful new friends, French and
Russian, I have made in Paris and at Pontigny! But these things are
too present, too intimate--so my tale must end.
AMERICAN WOMEN’S UNIVERSITY CLUB,
4 RUE DE CHEVREUSE, PARIS.