they to me, I used to watch them very closely, and, as I have said,
came to weave them into my dreams. Some figured as heroes, some as
magnanimous allies, some as malignant enemies, some who struck me as
beautiful received of me the kind of idolatry, the insensate
self-surrender which creatures of my sort have always offered up to
beauty of any sort. I remember T----e, a very shapely and
distinguished youth. I worshipped him as a god, and have seen him
since--alas! I remember B---- also, a tall, lean, loose-limbed young
man. He was a great cricketer, a good-natured, sleepy giant, perfectly
stupid (I am sure) but with marks of breed about him which I could not
possibly mistake. Him, too, I enthroned upon my temple-frieze; he
would have figured there as Meleager had I been a few years older. As
it was, he rode a blazoned charger, all black, and feutred his lance
with the Knights of King Arthur's court. Then there was H----n, a
good-looking, good-natured boy, and T----r, another. Many and many a
day did they ride forth with me adventuring--that is, spiritually they
did so; physically speaking, I had no scot or lot with them. We were
in plate armour, visored and beplumed. We slung our storied shields
behind us; we had our spears at rest; we laughed, told tales, sang as
we went through the glades of the forest, down the rutted
charcoal-burner's track, and came to the black mere, where there lay a
barge with oars among the reeds. I can see, now, H----n throw up his
head, bared to the sky and slanting sun. He had thick and dark curly
hair and a very white neck. His name of chivalry was Sagramor. T----r
was of stouter build and less salient humour. He was Bors, a brother
of Lancelot's. I, who was moody, here as in waking life, was Tristram,
more often Tramtris.
Of other more sinister figures I remember two. R----s, who bullied me
until I was provoked at last into facing him; a greedy, pale,
lecherous boy, graceless, a liar, but extremely clever. I had a horror
of him which endures now. If he, as I have, had a dweller in the deeps
of him, his must have been a satyr. I cannot doubt it now. Disastrous
ally for mortal man! Vice sat upon his face like a grease; vice made
his fingers quick. He had a lickorous tongue and a taste for sweet
things which even then made me sick. So repulsive was he to me, so
impressed upon my fancy, that it was curious he did not haunt my inner
life. But I never met him there. No shape of his ever encountered me
in the wilds and solitary places. In the manifest world he afflicted
me to an extent which the rogue-fairy in the wood could never have
approached. Perhaps it was that all my being was forearmed against
him, and that I fought him off. At any rate he never trespassed in my
preserves.
The other was R----d, a bleared and diseased creature, a thing of pity
and terror to the wholesome, one of those outcasts of the world which
every school has to know and reckon with. A furtive, nail-bitten,
pick-nose wretch with an unholy hunger for ink, earth-worms and the
like. What terrible tenant do the likes of these carry about with
them! He, too, haunted me, but not fearfully; but he, too, I now
understand too well, was haunted and ridden to doom. I pitied him,
tried to be kind to him, tried to treat him as the human thing which
in some sort he was. I discovered that when he was interested he
forgot his loathsome cravings, and became almost lovable. I went home
with him once, to a mean house in ----. He took me into the backyard
and showed me his treasury--half a dozen rabbits, as many guinea-pigs,
and a raven with a bald head. He was all kindness to these prisoners,
fondled them with hands and voice, spoke a kind of inarticulate baby
language to them, and gave them pet names. He forgot his misery, his
poverty--I remember that he never had a handkerchief and always wanted
one, that his jacket-sleeves were near his elbow, and that his wrist
bones were red and broken. But now there shone a clear light in his
eye; he could face the world as he spoke to me of the habits of his
friends. We got upon some sort of terms by these means, and I always
had a kind of affection for poor R----d. In a sense we were both
outcasts, and might have warmed the world for each other. If I had not
been so entirely absorbed in my private life as to grudge any moment
of it unnecessarily spent I should have asked him home. But boys are
exorbitant in their own affairs, and I had no time to spare him.
I was a year at ---- before I got so far with any schoolfellow of mine
there; but just about the time of my visit to R----d I fell in with
another boy, called Harkness, who, for some reason of his own, desired
my closer acquaintance and got as much of it as I was able to give to
anybody, and a good deal more than he deserved or I was the better of.
He, too, was a day-boy, whose people lived in a suburb of the town
which lay upon my road. We scraped acquaintance by occasionally
travelling together so much of the way as he had to traverse; from
this point onward all the advances were his. I had no liking for him,
and, in fact, some of his customs shocked me. But he was older than I,
very friendly, and very interesting. He evidently liked me; he asked
me to tea with him; he used to wait for me, going and returning. I had
no means of refusing his acquaintance, and did not; but I got no good
out of him.
As he was older, so he was much more competent. Not so much vicious as
curious and enterprising, he knew a great many things which I only
guessed at, and could do much--or said that he could--which I only
dreamed about. He put a good deal of heart into my instruction, and
left me finally with my lesson learned. I never saw nor heard of him
after I left the school. We did not correspond, and he left no mark
upon me of any kind. The lesson learned, I used the knowledge
certainly; but it did not take me into the region which he knew best.
His grove of philosophy was close to the school, in K---- Park, which
is a fine enclosure of forest trees, glades, brake-fern and deer.
Here, in complete solitude, for we never saw a soul, my sentimental
education was begun by this self-appointed professor. As I remember,
he was a good-looking lad enough, with a round and merry face, high
colour, bright eyes, a moist and laughing mouth. Had he known the way
in he would have been at home in the Garden of Priapus, where perhaps
he is now. He was hardy in address, a ready speaker, rather eloquent
upon the theme that he loved, and I dare say he may have been as
fortunate as he said, or very nearly. Certainly what he had to tell me
of love and women opened my understanding. I believe that I envied him
his ease of attainment more than what he said he had attained. I might
have been stimulated by his adventures to be adventurous on my own
account, but I never was, neither at that time nor at any other. I am
quite certain that never in my life have I gone forth conquering and
to conquer in affairs of the heart. You need to be a Casanova--which
Harkness was in his little way--and I have had no aptitude for the
part. But as I said just now I absorbed his teachings and made use of
them. So far as he gave me food for reflection I ate it, and
assimilated it in my own manner. Neither by him nor by any person far
more considerable than himself has my imagination been moved in the
direction of the mover of it. Let great poet, great musician, great
painter stir me ever so deeply, I have never been able to follow him
an inch. I was excited by pictures to see new pictures of my own, by
poems to make poems--of my own, not of theirs. In these, no doubt,
were elements of theirs; there was a borrowed something, a quality, an
accent, a spirit of attack. But the forms were mine, and the setting
always so. All my life I have used other men's art and wisdom as a
spring-board. I suppose every poet can say the same. This was to be
the use to me of the lessons of the precocious, affectionate, and
philoprogenitive Harkness.
I remember very well one golden summer evening when he and I lay
talking under a great oak--he expounding and I plucking at the grass
as I listened, or let my mind go free--how, quite suddenly, the mesh
he was weaving about my groping mind parted in the midst and showed me
for an appreciable moment a possibility of something--it was no
more--which he could never have seen.
From the dense shade in which we lay there stretched out an avenue of
timber trees, whereunder the bracken, breast high, had been cut to
make a ride. Upon this bracken, and upon this smooth channel in the
midst the late sun streamed toward us, a soft wash of gold. Behind all
this the sky, pale to whiteness immediately overhead, deepened to the
splendid orange of the sunset. Each tree cast his shadow upon his
neighbour, so that only the topmost branches burned in the light.
Over and above us floated the drowsy hum of the insect world; rarely
we heard the moaning of a wood-dove, more rarely still the stirring of
deer hidden in the thicket shade. This was a magical evening, primed
with wonders, in the glamour of which Master Harkness could find
nothing better for him to rehearse than the progress of his amours
with his mother's housemaid. Yet something of the evening glow,
something of the opulence of summer smouldered in his words. He
painted his mistress with the colour of the sunset, he borrowed of it
burnt gold to deck her clay. He hymned the whiteness of her neck, her
slender waist, her whispers, the kisses of her mouth. The scamp was
luxuriating in his own imaginings or reminiscences, much less of a
lover and far more of a rhapsodist than he suspected. As such his paean
of precocious love stirred my senses and fired my imagination, but not
in the direction of his own. For the glow which he cast upon his
affair was a borrowed one. He had dipped without knowing into the
languid glory of the evening, which like a pool of wealth lay ready to
my hand also. I gave him faint attention from the first. After he had
started my thoughts he might sing rapture after rapture of his young
and ardent sense. For me the spirit of a world not his whispered, "_A
te convien tenere altro viaggio_," and little as I knew it, in my
vague exploration of that scene of beauty, of those scarcely stirring,
stilly burning trees, of that shimmering-fronded fern, of that misty
splendour, I was hunting for the soul of it all, for the informing
spirit of it all. Harkness's erotics gave ardour to my search, but no
clew. I lost him, left him behind, and never found him again. He fell
into the Garden of Priapus, I doubt. As for me, I believed that I was
now looking upon a Dryad. I was looking certainly at a spirit
informed. A being, irradiate and quivering with life and joy of life,
stood dipt to the breast in the brake; stood so, bathing in the light;
stood so, preening herself like a pigeon on the roof-edge, and saw me
and took no heed.
She had appeared, or had been manifest to me, quite suddenly. At one
moment I saw the avenue of lit green, at another she was dipt in it. I
could describe her now, at this distance of time--a radiant young
female thing, fiercely favoured, smiling with a fierce joy, with a
gleam of fierce light in her narrowed eyes. Upon her body and face was
the hue of the sun's red beam; her hair, loose and fanned out behind
her head, was of the colour of natural silk, but diaphanous as well as
burnished, so that while the surfaces glittered like spun glass the
deeps of it were translucent and showed the fire behind. Her garment
was thin and grey, and it clung to her like a bark, seemed to grow
upon her as a creeping stone-weed grows. Harkness would have admired
the audacity of her shape, as I did; but I found nothing provocative
in it. As well might a boy have enamoured himself of a slim tree as of
that unearthly shaft of beauty.
I said that she preened herself; the word is inexact. She rather stood
bathing in the light, motionless but for the lifting of her face into
it that she might dip, or for the bending of her head that the warmth
behind her might strike upon the nape of her neck. Those were all her
movements, slowly rehearsed, and again and again rehearsed. With each
of them she thrilled anew; she thrilled and glowed responsive to the
play of the light. I don't know whether she saw me, though it seemed
to me that our looks had encountered. If her eyes had taken me in I
should have known it, I think; and if I had known it I should have
quailed and looked at her no more. So shamefaced was I, so
self-conscious, that I can be positive about that; for far from
avoiding her I watched her intently, studied her in all her parts, and
found out some curious things.
Looking at her beside the oaks, for instance, whence she must have
emanated, I could judge why it was that I had not seen her come out.
Her colouring was precisely that of her background. Her garment, smock
or frock or vest as you will, was grey-green like the oak stems, her
whites were those of the sky-gleams, her roses those of the sun's
rays. The maze of her hair could hardly be told from the photosphere.
I tested this simply and summarily. Shutting my eyes for a second,
when I opened them she was gone. Shutting them again and opening,
there she was, sunning herself, breathing deep and long, watching her
own beauties as the light played with them. I tried this many times
and it did not fail me. I could, with her assistance, bring her upon
my retina or take her off it, as if I had worked a shutter across my
eyes. But as I watched her so I got very excited. Her business was so
mysterious, her pleasure in it so absorbing; she was visible and yet
secret; I was visible, and yet she could be ignorant of it. I got the
same throbbing sort of interest out of her as many and many a time I
have got since out of watching other wild creatures at their affairs,
crouching hidden where they could not discern me by any of their
senses. Few things enthral me more than that--and here I had my first
taste of it. I remember that my heart beat, I remember that I
trembled. Nothing could have torn me from the spot but what precisely
did, an alien intervention. The besotted Harkness stopped short in
his recital and asked me what I was staring at.
That was the end of it. I had rather have died than tell him. Perhaps
I was afraid of his mockery, perhaps I dared not risk his unbelief,
perhaps I felt ashamed that I had been prying, perhaps I grudged him
the sight of her moulded beauty and keen wild face. "What am I staring
at? Why, nothing," I said. I got up and put the strap of my school
satchel over my head. I never looked for her again before I walked
away. Whether she left when I left, whether she was really there or a
projection of my mind, whether my inner self, my prisoner, had seen
her, or my schoolboy self through his agency, whether it was a trick
of the senses, a dream, or the like I can't tell you. I only know that
I have now recalled exactly what I seemed to see, and that I have seen
her since--her or her co-mate--once or twice.
I can account for her now easily enough. I can assure myself that she
was really there, that she, or the like of her, pervades, haunts,
indwells all such places; but it seems that there must be a right
relation between the seer and the object before the unseen can become
the seen. Put it like this, that form is a necessary convention of our
being, a mode of consciousness just as space is, just as time, just
as rhythm are; then it is clear enough that the spirits of natural
fact must take on form and sensible body before we can apprehend them.
They take on such form for us or such body through our means; that is
what I mean by a right relation between them and ourselves. Now some
persons have the faculty of discerning spirits, that is, of clothing
them in bodily form, and others have not; but of those who have it all
do not discern them in the same form, or clothe them in the same body.
The form will be rhythmical to some, to other some audible, to others
yet again odorous, "aromatic pain," or bliss. These modes are no
matter, they are accidents of our state. They cause the form to be
relative, just as the conception of God is; but the substance is
constant. I have seen innumerable spirits, but always in bodily form.
I have never perceived them by means of any other sense, such as
hearing, though sight has occasionally been assisted by hearing. If
during an orchestral symphony you look steadily enough at one musician
or another you can always hear his instrument above the rest and
follow his part in the symphony. In the same way when I look at fairy
throngs I can hear them sing. If I single out one of them for
observation I hear him or her sing--not words, never words; they have
none. I saw once, like a driven cloud, the spirits of the North-west
wind sweep down the sky over the bare ridge of a chalk down, winged
and shrouded, eager creatures, embattled like a host. They were grey
and dun-coloured, pale in the face. Their hair swept forward, not
back; for it seemed as if the wind in gusts went faster than
themselves, and was driving them faster than they could go. Another
might well have heard these beings like a terrible, rushing music, as
cries of havoc or desolation, wild peals of laughter, fury and
exultation. But to me they were inaudible. I heard the volleying of
the wind, but them I saw. So in the still ecstasy of that Dryad
bathing in light I saw, beyond doubt, what the Greeks called by that
name, what some of them saw; and I saw it in their mode, although at
the time of seeing I knew nothing of them or their modes, because it
happened to be also my mode. But so far I did not more than see her,
for though I haunted the place where she had been she never came there
again, nor never showed herself. It became to me sacred ground, where
with awed breath I could say, "Here indeed she stood and bathed
herself. Here I really saw her, and she me;" and I encompassed it with
a fantastic cult of my own invention. It may have been very comic, or
very foolish, but I don't myself think it was either, because it was
so sincere, and because the impulse to do it came so naturally. I used
to bare my head; I made a point of saving some of my luncheon (which
I took with me to school) that I might leave it there. It was real
sacrifice that, because I had a fine appetite, and it was pure
worship. In my solitary hours, which were many, I walked with her of
course, talked and played with her. But that was another thing,
imagination, or fancy, and I don't remember anything of what we said
or did. It needs to be carefully distinguished from the first
apparition with which imagination, having nothing whatever to proceed
upon, had nothing whatever to do. One thing, however, I do remember,
that our relations were entirely sexless; and, as I write, another
comes into mind. I saw no affinity between her and the creature of my
first discovery. It never occurred to me to connect the two either
positively, as being inhabitants of a world of their own, or
negatively, as not being of my world. I was not a reflective boy, but
my mind proceeded upon flashes, by leaps of intuition. When I was
moved I could conceive anything, everything; when I was unmoved I was
as dull as a clod. It was idle to tell me to think. I could only think
when I was moved from within to think. That made me the despair of my
father and the vessel of my schoolmaster's wrath. So here I saw no
relationship whatsoever between the two appearances. Now, of course, I
do. I see now that both were fairies, informed spirits of certain
times or places. For time has a spirit as well as space. But more of
this in due season. I am not synthesising now but recording. One had
been merely curious, the other for a time enthralled me. The first had
been made when I was too young to be interested. The second found me
more prepared, and seeded in my brain for many a day. Gradually,
however, it too faded as fancy began to develop within me. I took to
writing, I began to fall in love; and at fifteen I went to a
boarding-school. Farewell, then, to rewards and fairies!
THE GODS IN THE SCHOOLHOUSE
Who am I to treat of the private affairs of my betters, to evoke your
fragrant names, Felicite, Perpetua, loves of my tender youth? Shall I
forget thee, Emilia, thy slow smile and peering brown eyes of mischief
or appeal? Rosy Lauretta, or thee, whom I wooed desperately from afar,
lured by thy buxom wellbeing, thy meek and schooled replies? And if I
forget you not, how shall I explore you as maladies, trace out the
stages of your conquest as if you were spores? Never, never. Worship
went up from me to you, and worship is religion, and religion is
sacred. So, my dears, were you, each of you in your turn, sacred in
your shrines. Before each of you in turn I fell down, suddenly, "_Come
corpo morto cadde_." And to each of you in turn I devoted those waking
hours which fancy had hitherto claimed of me. Yet this I do feel free
to say, by leave of you ladies, that calf-love has not the educative
value of the genuine passion. It is blind worship by instinct; it is a
sign of awakening sense, but it is not its awakener. It is a lovely
thing as all quick or burning growth is, but it has little relation
to the soul, and our Northern state is the more gracious that
consummation of it is not feasible. Apart from the very obvious
drawbacks there is one not quite so obvious: I mean the early
exhaustion of imaginative sympathy. Love, indeed, is an affair of
maturity. I don't believe that a man, in this country, can love before
forty or a woman before thirty-five. They may marry before that and
have children; and they will love their children, but very rarely each
other. I am thinking now of love at its highest rating, as that
passion which is able to lift a man to the highest flight of which the
soul is capable here on earth--a flight, mind you, which it may take
without love, as the poet's takes it, or the musician's, but which the
ordinary man's can only take by means of love. Calf-love is wholly a
sex matter, perfectly natural, mostly harmless, and nearly always a
beautiful thing, to be treated tenderly by the wise parent.
In my own case my mother treated it so, with a tact and a reverential
handling which only good women know, and I had it as I had mumps and
measles, badly, with a high temperature and some delirium but with no
aggravation from outside. It ran its course or its courses and left me
sane. One of its effects upon me was that it diverted the mind of my
forensic self from the proceedings or aptitudes of my recondite. I
neither knew nor cared what my wayward tenant might be doing; indeed,
so much was my natural force concerned in the heart-affair of the
moment that the other wretch within me lay as it were bound in a
dungeon. He never saw the light. The sun to him was dark and silent
was the moon. There, in fact, he remained for some five or six years,
while sex pricked its way into me intent upon the making of a man. He,
maybe, was to have something to say to that, something to do with
it--but not yet.
So much for calf-love; but now for a more important matter. I left the
Grammar School at S----, at the age when boys usually go to their
Harrow and Winchester, as well equipped, I daresay, as most boys of my
years; for with the rudiments I had been fairly diligent, and with
some of them even had become expert. I was well grounded in Latin and
French grammar, and in English literature was far ahead of boys much
older than myself. Looking back now upon the drilling I had at S----,
I consider it was well done; but I have to set against the benefits I
got from the system the fact that I had much privacy and all the
chance which that gives a boy to educate himself withal. My school
hours limited my intercourse with the school world. Before and after
them I could develop at my own pace and in my own way--and I did. I
believe that when I went to my great school I had the makings of an
interesting lad in me; but I declare upon my conscience that it was
that place only which checked the promise for ten years or more, and
might have withered it altogether.
My father was an idealist of 1851; he showed the enthusiasm and nursed
in his bosom the hopes and beliefs of the promoters of the
International Exhibition of that year. There was a plentiful planting
of foreign stock in England after that, and one of its weedy saplings
was an International Education Company, which out of a magniloquent
prospectus and some too-confident shareholders bore one fruit, the
London International College at Spring Grove. It never came to
maturity, and is now dropped and returned to the ground of all such
schemes. I suppose it had been on the stalk some fifteen years when I
went to feed of it.