I gladly abide by my word of yesterday. The portion of my days here in
the bush which I like best is the dawn time. But the nights have their
good, and--well--and their less good times, too. My evening meal is
apt to be sketchy. There is a special vein of laziness in me which
makes me shirk the setting out of plates and cutlery, and, even more,
their removal when used; despite the fact that I have had, perhaps,
rather more experience than most men of catering for myself. Hence,
the evening meal is apt to be sketchy; a furtive and far from
creditable performance, with the vessels of the midday meal for its
background.
Then, with a sense of relief, I shut the door upon that episode, and
the evidences thereof, and betake me to the room which is really mine;
where the big hearth is, and the camp-bed, and the writing-table, the
books, and the big Ceylon-made lounge-chair. The first evening pipe is
nearly always good; the second may be flavoured with melancholy, but
yet is seldom unpleasing. The third--there are decent intervals
between--bears me company in bed, with whatever book may be occupying
me at the time. The first hour in the big chair and the first hour in
bed are both exceedingly good when I am anything like well. I would
not say which is the better of the two, lest I provoke a Nemesis. Both
are excellent in their different ways.
Nine times out of ten I can be asleep within half an hour of dousing
the candle, and it is seldom I wake before three hours have passed.
After that come hours of which it is not worth while to say much. They
are far from being one's best hours. And then, more often than not,
will come another blessed two hours, or even more, of unconsciousness,
before the first purple grey forecasts of a new day call me out into
the bush for my morning lesson in serenity: Nature's astringent
message to egoists and all the sedentary, introspective tribe, that
bids us note our own infinite insignificance, our utter and
microscopical unimportance in her great scheme of things, and her
sublime indifference to our individual lives; to say nothing of our
insectile hopes, fears, imaginings, despairs, joys, and other forms of
mental and emotional travail.
It may or may not be evidence of mental exhaustion or indolence, but I
notice that I have experienced here no inclination to read anything
that is new to me. I have read a good deal under this roof, including
a quite surprising amount of fiction; but nothing, I think, that I had
not read before. During bouts of illness here, I have indulged in such
debauches as the rereading of the whole of Hardy, Meredith, Stevenson,
W. E. Henley's poems, and the novels of George Gissing, Joseph Conrad,
and H. G. Wells. Some of the better examples of modern fiction have
always had a special topographical appeal to me. I greatly enjoy the
work of a writer who has set himself to treat a given countryside
exhaustively. This, more even than his masterly irony, his philosophy,
his remarkable fullness of mind and opulent allusiveness, has been at
the root of the immense appeal Hardy's work makes to me. ('Q,' in a
different measure, of course, makes a similar appeal.) Let the Wessex
master forsake his countryside, or leave his peasants for gentlefolk,
and immediately my interest wanes, his wonderful appeal fails.
Since I have been here in the bush I have understood, as never before,
the great and far-reaching popularity of Thomas Hardy's work among
Americans. He gives so much which not all the wealth, nor all the
genius of that inventive race, can possibly evolve out of their New
World. But, upon the whole, I ought not to have brought my fine, tall
rank of Hardy's here, still less to have pored over them as I have.
There is that second edition of _Far From the Madding Crowd_ now, with
its delicious woodcuts by H. Paterson. It is dated 1874--I was a boy
then, newly arrived in this antipodean land--and the frontispiece
shows Gabriel Oak soliciting Bathsheba: 'Do you happen to want a
shepherd, ma'am?' No, I cannot say my readings of Hardy have been good
for me here. There is _Jude the Obscure_ now, a masterpiece of
heart-bowing tragedy that. And, especially insidious in my case, there
are passages like this from that other tragedy in the idyllic vein,
_The Woodlanders_:
_Winter in a solitary house in the country, without society, is
tolerable, nay, even enjoyable and delightful, given certain
conditions; but these are not the conditions which attach to the life
of a professional man who drops down into such a place by mere
accident.... They are old association--an almost exhaustive
biographical or historical acquaintance with every object, animate and
inanimate, within the observer's horizon. He must know all about those
invisible ones of the days gone by, whose feet have traversed the
fields which look so grey from his windows; recall whose creaking
plough has turned those sods from time to time; whose hands planted
the trees that form a crest to the opposite hill; whose horses and
hounds have torn through that underwood; what birds affect that
particular brake; what bygone domestic dramas of love, jealousy,
revenge, or disappointment have been enacted in the cottages, the
mansions, the street, or on the green. The spot may have beauty,
grandeur, salubrity, convenience; but if it lack memories it will
ultimately pall upon him who settles there without opportunity of
intercourse with his kind._
No, that was not discreet reading for a dyspeptic man of letters,
alone in a two-roomed gunyah in the midst of virgin bush, in a land
where the respectably old dates back a score of years, the historic,
say, fifty years, and 'the mists of antiquity' a bare century. One
recollection inevitably aroused by such a passage brought to mind
words comparatively recent, spoken by Mrs. Oldcastle:
'In the Old World, even for a man who lives alone on a mountain-top,
there is more of intellectuality--in the very atmosphere, in the
buildings and roads, the hedges and the ditches--than the best cities
of the New World have to offer.'
Quite apart from its grimly ironic philosophy, the topography, the
earthy quality--'take of English earth as much as either hand may
rightly clutch'--of the Wessex master's work makes it indigestible
reading for an exile of more than thirty or forty; unless, of course,
he is of the fine and robust type, whose minds and constitutions
function with the steadiness of a good chronometer, warranted for all
climes and circumstances.
But this mention of Hardy reminds me of a curious literary coincidence
which I stumbled upon a few months ago. For me, at all events, it was
a discovery. I was reading, quite idly, the story which should long
since have been dramatised for the stage, _The Trumpet Major_,
written, if I mistake not, in the early 'nineties. I came to chapter
xxiii., which opens in this wise:
_Christmas had passed. Dreary winter with dark evenings had given
place to more dreary winter with light evenings. Rapid thaws had ended
in rain, rain in wind, wind in dust. Showery days had come--the season
of pink dawns and white sunsets...._
This reading was part of my Hardy debauch. A week or two earlier I had
been reading what I think was his first book, written a quarter of a
century before _The Trumpet Major_. I refer to _Desperate Remedies_;
with all its faults, an extraordinarily full and finished production
for a first book. Now, with curiosity in my very finger-tips, I turned
over the pages of this volume, reread no more than a week previously.
I came presently upon chapter xii., and, following upon its first
sentence, read these words:
_Christmas had passed; dreary winter with dark evenings had given
place to more dreary winter with light evenings. Thaws had ended in
rain, rain in wind, wind in dust. Showery days had come--the period of
pink dawns and white sunsets...._
That (with a quarter of a century, the writing of many books, and the
building up of a justly great and world-wide reputation between the
two writings) strikes me as a singular, and, in a way, pleasing
literary coincidence; singular, as a freak of subconscious memory for
words, pleasing, as a verification in mature life of the writer's
comparatively youthful observations of natural phenomena. I wonder if
the author, or any others among his almost innumerable readers, have
chanced to light upon this particular coincidence!
Another writer of fiction, whose bent of mind, if sombre, was far from
devoid of ironical humour, has occupied a deal of my leisure here--George
Gissing. I rank him very high among the Victorian novelists.
His work deserves a higher place than it is usually accorded by the
critics. He was a fine story-teller, and for me (though their
topographical appeal is not, perhaps, very obvious) his books are very
closely packed with living human interest. But again, for such an one
as myself, so situated, I would not say that a course of Gissing
formed particularly wholesome or digestible reading. Here, for
example, is a passage associated in my recollection with a night which
was among the worst I have spent in this place:
_He thought of the wretched millions of mankind to whom life is so
barren that they must needs believe in a recompense beyond the grave.
For that he neither looked nor longed. The bitterness of his lot was
that this world might be a sufficing Paradise to him, if only he could
clutch a poor little share of current coin...._
No, for such folk as I, that was not good reading. But--and let this
be my tribute to an author who won my very sincere esteem and
respect--when morning had come, after a bad night, and I had had my dawn
lesson from Nature, and my converse with Punch, I turned me to another
volume of Gissing, and with a quieter mind read this:
_Below me, but far off, is the summer sea, still, silent, its ever
changing blue and green dimmed at the long limit with luminous noon-tide
mist. Inland spreads the undulant vastness of the sheep-spotted
downs; beyond them the tillage and the woods of Sussex weald, coloured
like to the pure sky above them, but in deeper tint. Near by, all but
hidden among trees in yon lovely hollow, lies an old, old hamlet, its
brown roofs decked with golden lichen; I see the low church tower, and
the little graveyard about it. Meanwhile, high in the heaven, a lark
is singing. It descends, it drops to its nest, and I could dream that
half the happiness of its exultant song was love of England...._
That is his little picture of a recollection of summer. And then,
returning to his realities of the moment, this miscalled 'savage'
pessimist and 'pitiless realist' continues thus:
_It is all but dark. For a quarter of an hour I must have been writing
by a glow of firelight reflected on my desk; it seemed to me the sun
of summer. Snow is still falling. I can see its ghostly glimmer
against the vanishing sky. To-morrow it will be thick upon my garden,
and perchance for several days. But when it melts, when it melts, it
will leave the snow-drop. The crocus, too, is waiting, down there
under the white mantle which warms the earth._
But I would not say that even this was well-chosen reading for me--here
in my bush hermitage--any more than is that masterpiece of
Kipling's later concentration, _An Habitation Enforced_, followed by
its inimitable _Recall_:
_I am the land of their fathers,
In me the virtue stays;
I will bring back my children
After certain days.
* * * * *
Till I make plain the meaning
Of all my thousand years--
Till I fill their hearts with knowledge,
While I fill their eyes with tears._
No, nor yet, despite its healing potency in its own place, the same
master craftsman's counsel to the whole restless, uneasy, sedentary
brood among his countrymen:
_Take of English earth as much
As either hand may rightly clutch,
In the taking of it breathe
Prayer for all who lie beneath--
Lay that earth upon your heart,
And your sickness shall depart!
It shall mightily restrain
Over busy hand and brain,
Till thyself restored shall prove
By what grace the heavens do move._
None of these good things are wholly good for me, here and now,
because--because, for example, they recall a prophecy of Mrs.
Oldcastle's, and the grounds upon which she based it.
Who should know better than I, that if my life-long mental
restlessness chances, when I am less well than usual, or darkness is
upon me, to take the form of nostalgia, with clinging, pulling
thoughts of England--never of the London I knew so well, but always of
the rural England I knew so little, from actual personal experience,
yet loved so well--who should know better than I (sinning against the
light in the writing of this unpardonably involved sentence) that such
restlessness, such nostalgia, are no more based upon reason than is a
bilious headache. The philosopher should, and does, scorn such an itch
of the mind, well knowing that were he foolish enough to let it affect
his actions or guide his conduct he would straightway cease to be a
philosopher, and become instead a sort of human shuttlecock, for ever
tossing here and there, from pillar to post, under the unreasoning
blows of that battledore which had been his mind. Nay, rather the
strappado for me, at any time, than abandonment to foolishness so
crass as this would be.
Over and above all this I deliberately chose my 'way out,' and it is
good. I am assured the life of this my hermitage is one better suited
to the man I am to-day than any other life I could hope to lead
elsewhere. The mere thought of such a fate as a return to the
maelstrom of London journalism--is it not a terror to me, and a thing
to chill the heart like ice? Here is peace all about me, at all
events, and never a semblance of pretence or sham. And if I, my inner
self, cannot find peace here, where peace so clearly is, what should
it profit me to go seeking it where peace is not visible at all, and
where all that is visible is turmoil, hurry, and fret?
Australia is a good land. Its bush is beautiful; its men and women are
sterling and kindly, and its children more blessed (even though,
perhaps, rather more indulged) than the children of most other lands.
For the wage-earner who earns his living by his hands, and purposes
always to do so, I deliberately think this is probably the best
country in all the world. It is his own country. He rules it in every
sense of the word; and there is no class, institution, or individual
exercising any mastery over him. Millionaires are scarce here, and so
perhaps are men brilliant in any direction. But really poor folk,
hungry folk, folk who must fight for bare sustenance, are not merely
scarce--they are unknown in this land.
That is a great thing to be able to say for any country, and surely
one which should materially affect the peace of mind of every thinking
creature in it. Whilst very human, and hence by no means perfect, the
people of this country have about them a pervasive kindliness, which
is something finer than simple good nature and hospitality. The people
as a whole are sincerely possessed by guiding ideals of kindness and
justice. The means by which they endeavour to bring about realisation
of their ideals are, I believe, fundamentally wrong and mistaken in a
number of cases. Their 'ruling' class is naturally new to the task of
ruling, recruited as it is from trade union ranks. But they truly
desire, as a people, that every person in their midst should be given
a fair, sporting chance in life. 'A fair thing!' In three words one
has the national ideal, and who shall say that it is not an admirable
one, remembering that its foundation and mainspring are kindness, and
if not justice, then desire for justice?
'All this is very worthy, no doubt, but deadly dull. Does it not make
for desperate attenuation on the artistic and intellectual side?
Beautifully level and even, I dare say; like a paving stone, and about
as interesting.'
Thus, my old friend Heron in a recent letter. The dear fellow would
smile if I told him he was a member of England's privileged classes.
But it is true, of course. Well, Australia has no privileged classes--and
no submerged class. I admit that the highest artistic and
intellectual levels of the New World are greatly lower than the
highest artistic and intellectual levels of the Old World. But what of
the average level, speaking of the populace as a whole? How infinitely
higher are Australia's lowest levels than the depths, the ultimate pit
in Merry England!
I am an uneasy, restless creature, mentally and bodily. I have not
quite finished as yet the task, deliberation upon which, when it is
completed, is to bring me rest and self-understanding. Vague hungers
by the way are incidents of no more permanent importance than one's
periodical colds in the head. To complain of intellectual barrenness
in any given environment must surely be to confess intellectual
barrenness in the complainant. I am well placed here in my bush
hermitage. And, in short, _Je suis, je reste!_