experience. It may be true that all men are brothers, but it is not
logical to infer from that that all brothers are the better for each
other's society. The raw Brazilians, Chilians, Nicaraguans and what
not who were drawn from their native forests and plunged into the
company of blockish Yorkshire lads, or sharp-faced London boys, were
only scared into rebellion and to demonstration after their manner.
They used the knife sometimes; they hardly ever assimilated; and they
taught us nothing that we were the better of knowing. Quite the
contrary. We taught them football, I think, and I remember a negro
from Bermuda, a giant of a fellow who raged over the ground like a
goaded bull when that game was being played, to the consternation of
his opponents. He had a younger brother with inordinately long arms,
like a great lax ape, a cheerful, grinning, harmless creature as I
remember him. He was a football player too; his hug was that of an
octopus which swallowed you all. As for the English, in return for
their football lore they received the gift of tobacco. I learned to
smoke at fifteen from a Chilian called Perez, a wizened,
preternaturally wise, old youth. Nobody in the world could have been
wise as he looked, and nobody else in the school as dull as he really
was. Over this motley assembly was set as house-master a ferocious
Scotchman of great parts, but no discretion; and there were
assistants, too, of scholarship and refinement, who, if they had had
the genius for education, without which these things are nothing,
might have put humanity into some of us. When it was past the time I
discovered this, and one of them became my friend and helper. I then
discovered the tragedy of our system from the other side. For the
pain is a two-edged sword, and imbrues the breast of the pedagogue
even while it bleeds the pupil to inanition. That poor man, scholar,
gentleman, humourist, poet, as he was, held boys in terror. He
misdoubted them; they made him self-conscious, betrayed him into
strange hidden acts of violence, rendered him incapable of instruction
except of the most conventional kind. All his finer nature, his
humanism, was paralysed. We thought him a poor fool, and got a crude
entertainment out of his antics. Actually he was tormenting in a
flame; and we thought his contortions ridiculous. God help us all, how
are we to get at each other, caged creatures as we are! But this is
indeed a tragic business, and I don't want you to tear your hair.
I remained at Spring Grove, I think, four or five years, a barren,
profitless time. I remember scarcely one gleam of interest which
pierced for more than a few moments the thick gloom of it. The cruel,
dull, false gods of English convention (for thought it is not) held me
fast; masters and pupils alike were jailers to me. I ate and drank of
their provision and can recall still with nausea the sour, stale
taste, and still choke with the memory of the chaff and grit of its
quality. Accursed, perverse generation! God forbid that any child of
mine should suffer as I suffered, starve as I starved, stray where I
was driven to stray. The English boarding-school system is that of the
straw-yard where colts are broken by routine, and again of the
farmyard where pups are walked. Drill in school, _laissez-faire_ out
of it. It is at once too dull and too indolent to recognise character
or even to look for it; it recks nothing of early development or late;
it measures young humanity for its class-rooms like a tailor, with the
yard measure. The discipline of boy over boy is, as might be expected,
brutal or bestial. The school-yard is taken for the world in small,
and so allowed to be. There is no thought taken, or at least betrayed,
that it is nothing more than a preparation for the world at large.
There is no reason, however, to suppose that the International College
was worse than any other large boarding-school. I fancy, indeed, that
it was in all points like the rest. There were no traces in my time of
the Brotherhood of Man about it. A few Portuguese, a negro or two were
there, and a multitude of Jews. But I fancy I should have found the
same sort of thing at Eton.
I was not in any sense suited to such a place as this; if I had been
sent to travel it had been better for me. I was "difficult," not
because I was stiff but because I was lax. I resisted nothing except
by inertia. If my parents did not know me--and how should they?--if I
did not know myself, and I did not, my masters, for their part, made
no attempt to know me nor even inquired whether there might be
anything to know. I was unpopular, as might have been expected, made
no friends, did no good. My brother, on the other hand, was an ideal
schoolboy, diligent, brisk, lovable, abounding in friendships, good at
his work and excellent at his play. His career at Spring Grove was one
long happy triumph, and he deserved it. He has a charming nature, and
is one of the few naturally holy persons I know. Wholesome, thank God,
we all are, or could be; pious we nearly all are; but holiness is a
rare quality.
If I were to try and set down here the really happy memories which I
have of Spring Grove they would be three. The first was the revelation
of Greece which was afforded me by Homer and Plato. The surging music
and tremendous themes of the poet, the sweet persuasion of the sophist
were a wonder and delight. I remember even now the thrill with which I
heard my form-master translate for us the prayer with which the
_Phaedrus_ closes: "Beloved Pan, and all ye other gods who haunt this
place...." Beloved Pan! My knowledge of Pan was of the vaguest, and
yet more than once or twice did I utter that prayer wandering alone
the playing field, or watching the evening mist roll down the Thames
Valley and blot up the elm trees, thick and white, clinging to the day
like a fleece. The third Iliad again I have never forgotten, nor the
twenty-fourth; nor the picture of the two gods, like vulture birds,
watching the battle from the dead tree. Nor, again, do I ever fail to
recapture the beat of the heart with which I apprehended some of
Homer's phrases: "Sandy Pylos," Argos "the pasture land of horses," or
"clear-seen" Ithaca. These things happened upon by chance in the dusty
class-room, in the close air of that terrible hour from two to three,
were as the opening of shutters to the soul, revealing blue distances,
dim fields, or the snowy peaks of mountains in the sun. One seemed to
lift, one could forget. It lasted but an instant; but time is of no
account to the inner soul, of no more account than it is to God. I
have never forgotten these moments of escape; nor can I leave Homer
without confessing that his books became my Bible. I accepted his
theology implicitly; I swallowed it whole. The Godhead of the
Olympians, the lesser divinity of Thetis and Alpheios and Xanthos were
indisputable. They were infinitely more real to me than the deities of
my own land; and though I have found room for these later on in life,
it has not been by displacing the others. Nor is there any need for
that, so far as I see. I say that out of Homer I took his Gods; I add
that I took them instantly. I seemed to breathe the air of their
breath; they appealed to my reason; I knew that they had existed and
did still exist. I was not shocked or shaken in my faith, either, by
anything I read about them. Young as I was and insipient, I was
prepared for what is called the burlesque Olympus of the Iliad, so
grievous to Professor Murray. I think I recognised then, what seems
perfectly plain to me now, that you might as well think meanly of a
God of Africa because the natives make him of a cocoanut on a stick,
as of Zeus and Hera because Homer says that they played peccant
husband and jealous wife. If Homer halted it is rash to assume that
Hephaistos did. The pathetic fallacy has crept in here. Mythology was
one of the few subjects I diligently read at school, and all I got out
of it was pure profit--for I realised that the Gods' world was not
ours, and that when their natures came in conflict with ours some such
interpretation must always be put upon their victory. We have a moral
law for our mutual wellbeing which they have not. We translate their
deeds in terms of that law of ours, and it certainly appears like a
standing fact of Nature that when the beings of one order come into
commerce with those of another the result will be tragic. There is
only a harmony in acquiescence, and the way to that is one of blood
and tears.
Brooding over all this I discerned dimly, even in that dusty, brawling
place, and time showed me more and more clearly, that I had always
been aware of the Gods and conscious of their omnipresence. It seemed
plain to me that Zeus, whose haunt is dark Dodona, lorded it over the
English skies and was to be heard in the thunder crashing over the
elms of Middlesex. I knew Athene in the shrill wind which battled
through the vanes and chimneys of our schoolhouse. Artemis was Lady of
my country. By Apollo's light might I too come to be led. Poseidon of
the dark locks girdled my native seas. I had had good reason to know
the awfulness of Pan, and guessed that some day I should couch with
Kore the pale Queen. I called them by these names, since these names
expressed to me their essence: you may call them what you will, and so
might I, for I had not then reasoned with myself about names. By their
names I knew them. The Gods were there, indeed, ignorantly worshipped
by all and sundry. Then the Dryad of my earlier experience came up
again, and I saw that she stood in such a relation to the Gods as I
did, perhaps, to the Queen of England; that she, no less than they,
was part of a wonderful order, and the visible expression of the
spirit of some Natural Fact. But whether above all the Gods and
nations of men and beasts there were one God and Father of us all,
whether all Nature were one vast synthesis of Spirit having
innumerable appearance but one soul, I did not then stay to inquire,
and am not now prepared to say. I don't mean by that at all that I
don't believe it. I do believe it, but by an act of religion; for
there are states of the individual mind, states of impersonal soul in
which this belief is a positive truth, in the which one exults madly,
or by it is humbled to the dust. Religion, to my mind, is the result
of this consciousness of kinship with the principle of Life; all the
emotion and moral uplifting involved in this tremendous certainty, and
all the lore gathered and massed about it--this is Religion. Young as
I was at the time I now speak of, ignorant and dumb as I was, I had my
moments of exultation and humility,--moments so wild that I was
transported out of myself. I left my body supine in its narrow bed and
soared above the stars. At such times, in an aether so deep that the
blue of it looked like water, I seemed to see the Gods themselves, a
shining row of them, upon the battlements of Heaven. I called Heaven
Olympus, and conceived of Olympus as a towered city upon a white hill.
Looming up out of the deep blue arch, it was vast and covered the
whole plateau: I saw the walls of it run up and down the ridges, in
and out of the gorges which cut into the mass. It had gates, but I
never saw forms of any who entered or left it. It was full of light,
and had the look of habitancy about it; but I saw no folk. Only at
rare moments of time while I hovered afar off looking at the wonder
and radiance of it, the Gods appeared above the battlements in a
shining row--still and awful, each of them ten feet high.
These were fine dreams for a boy of sixteen in a schoolhouse
dormitory. They were mine, though: but I dreamed them awake. I awoke
before they began, always, and used to sit up trembling and wait for
them.
An apologue, if you please. On the sacred road from Athens to Eleusis,
about midway of its course, and just beyond the pass, there is a fork
in it, and a stony path branches off and leads up into the hills.
There, in the rock, is a shallow cave, and before that, where once was
an altar of Aphrodite, the ruins of her shrine and precinct may be
seen. As I was going to Eleusis the other day, I stopped the carriage
to visit the place. Now, beside the cave is a niche, cut square in the
face of the rock, for offerings; and in that niche I found a fresh
bunch of field flowers, put there by I know not what dusty-foot
wayfarer. That was no longer ago than last May, and the man who did
the piety was a Christian, I suppose. So do I avow myself, without
derogation, I hope, to the profession; for no more than Mr. Robert
Kirk, a minister of religion in Scotland in the seventeenth century,
do I consider that a knowledge of the Gods is incompatible with belief
in God. There is a fine distinction for you: I believe that God
exists; I infer him by reason stimulated by desire. But I know that
the Gods exist by other means than those. If I could be as sure of God
as I am of the Gods, I might perhaps be a better Christian, but I
should not believe any less in the Gods.
* * * * *
I found religion through Homer: I found poetry through Milton, whose
_Comus_ we had to read for examination by some learned Board. If any
one thing definitely committed me to poesy it was that poem; and as
has nearly always happened to me, the crisis of discovery came in a
flash. We were all there ranked at our inky desks on some drowsy
afternoon. The books lay open before us, the lesson, I suppose,
prepared. But what followed had not been prepared--that some one began
to read:
"The star that bids the shepherd fold
Now the top of Heav'n doth hold;
And the gilded car of day
His glowing axle doth allay
In the steep Atlantic stream"--
and immediately, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, it was
changed--for me--from verse to poetry; that is, from a jingle to a
significant fact. It was more than it appeared; it was transfigured;
its implication was manifest. That's all I can say--except this, that,
untried as I was, I jumped into the poetic skin of the thing, and felt
as if I had written it. I knew all about it, "_e'l chi, e'l quale_"; I
was privy to its intricacy; I caught without instruction the
alternating beat in the second line, and savoured all the good words,
_gilded car_, _glowing axle_, _Star that bids the shepherd fold_.
_Allay_ ravished me, young as I was. I knew why he had called the
Atlantic stream _steep_, and remembered Homer's "[Greek: Stugos
hudatos aipa rheethra]." Good soul, our pedagogue suggested _deep_! I
remember to this hour the sinking of the heart with which I heard him.
But the flash passed and darkness again gathered about me, the normal
darkness of those hateful days. "Sabrina fair" lifted it; my sky
showed me an amber shaft. I am recording moments, the reader will
remember, the few gleams which visited me in youth. I was far from the
time when I could connect them, see that poetry was the vesture of
religion, the woven garment whereby we see God. Love had to teach me
that. I was not born until I loved.
My third happy memory is of a brief and idyllic attachment, very
fervent, very romantic, entirely my own, and as I remember it, now,
entirely beautiful. Nothing remains but the fragrance of it, and its
dream-like quality, the sense I have of straying with the beloved
through a fair country. Such things assure me that I was not wholly
dead during those crushing years of servitude.
But those are, as I say, gleams out of the dark. They comfort me with
the thought that the better part of me was not dead, but buried here
with the worse. They point also to the truth, as I take it to be, that
the lack of privacy is one of the most serious detriments of
public-school life. I don't say that privacy is good for all boys, or
that it is good for any unless they are provided with a pursuit. It is
true that many boys seek to be private that they may be vicious, and
that the having the opportunity for privacy leads to vice. But that is
nearly always the fault of the masters. Vice is due to the need for
mental or material excitement; it is a crude substitute for romance.
If a boy is debarred from good romance, because he doesn't feel it or
hasn't been taught to feel it, he will take to bad. It is nothing else
at all: he is bored. And remembering that a boy can only think of one
thing at a time, the single aim of the master should be to give every
boy in his charge some sane interest which he can pursue to the death,
as a terrier chases a smell, in and out, up and down, every nerve bent
and quivering. There is a problem of the teaching art which the
College at Spring Grove made no attempt to solve while I was there.
You either played football and cricket or you were negligible. I was
bad at both, was negligible, and neglected.
I suspect that my experiences are very much those of other people, and
that is why I have taken the trouble to articulate them, and perhaps
to make them out more coherent than they were. We don't feel in images
or think in words. The images are about us, the words may be at hand;
but it may well be that we are better without them. This world is a
tight fit, and life in it, as the Duke said of one day of his own
life, is "a devilish close-run thing." If the blessed Gods and the
legions of the half-gods in their habit as they live, were to be as
clear to us as our neighbour Tom or our chief at the office, what
might be the lot of Tom's wife, or what the security of our high stool
at the desk? As things are, our blank misgivings are put down to
nerves, our yearning for wings to original sin. The policeman at the
street corner sees to it, for our good, that we put out of sight these
things, and so we grow rich and make a good appearance. It is only
when we are well on in years that we can afford to be precise and,
looking back, to remember the celestial light, the glory and the
freshness of the dream in which we walked and bathed ourselves.
THE SOUL AT THE WINDOW
When I had been in London a year or two, and the place with its hordes
was become less strange and less formidable to me, I began to discover
it for myself. Gradually the towering cliffs resolved themselves into
houses, and the houses into shrouded holds, each with character and
each hiding a mystery. They now stood solitary which had before been
an agglutinated mass. Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came.... I knew
one from the other by sight, and had for each a specific sensation of
attraction or repulsion, of affection or terror. I read through the
shut doors, I saw through the blank windows; not a house upon my daily
road but held a drama or promised a tragedy. I had no sense for comedy
in those days; life to me, waking life, was always a dreadful thing.
And sometimes my bodily eyes had glimpses which confirmed my
fancy--unexpected, sudden and vivid flashes behind curtained windows.
I once saw two men fighting, shadowed black upon a white blind. I once
looked out of a window at the Army and Navy Stores into a mean
bedroom across the way. There was a maidservant in there, making beds,
emptying slops, tidying this and that. Quite suddenly she threw her
head up with a real despair, and next moment she was on her knees by
the bed. Praying! I never saw prayer like that in this country. The
soul went streaming from her mouth like blown smoke. And again, one
night, very late, I was going to bed, and leaned out of my window for
air. Before me, across back yards, leafless trees, and a litter of
packing-cases and straw, rose up a dark rampart of houses, in the
midst of it a lit window. I saw a poorly furnished sitting-room--a
table with a sewing machine, a paraffin lamp, a chair with an
antimacassar. A man in his shirt sleeves sat there by the table,
smoking a pipe. Then the door opened and a tall, slim woman came in,
all in white, with loose dark hair floating about her shoulders. She
stood between door and table and rested her hand upon the edge of the
table. The man, after a while of continuing to read, quite suddenly
looked up and saw her. They looked at each other motionless. He cast
down his paper, sprang up and went to her. He fell to his knees before
her and clasped hers. She looked across, gravely considering, then
laid her hand upon his head. That was all. I saw no more. Husband and
wife? Mother and son? Sinner and Saviour? What do I know?
As with the houses, homes of mystery, so with the men and women one
passed; homes, they too, of things hidden yet more deep. The noise of
the streets, at first paralysing, died down to a familiar rumble, and
the ear began to distinguish voices in the tide. Sounds of crying,
calls for help, hailings, laughter, tears, separated themselves and
appealed. You heard them, like the cries of the drowning, drifting by
you upon a dark tide-way. You could do nothing; a word would have
broken the spell. The mask which is always over the face would have
covered the tongue or throttled the larynx. You could do nothing but
hear.
Finally, the passing faces became sometimes penetrable, betrayed by
some chance gleam of the eyes, some flicker of the lips, a secret to
be shared, or conveyed by a hint some stabbing message out of the deep
into the deep. That is what I mean by the soul at the window. Every
one of us lives in a guarded house; door shut, windows curtained. Now
and then, however, you look up above the street level and catch a
glimpse of the scared prisoner inside. He may be a satyr, a fairy, an
ape or an angel; he's a prisoner anyhow, who sometimes comes to the
window and looks strangely out. You may see him there by chance,
saying to himself like Chaucer's Creseyde in the temple, "Ascaunces,
What! May I not stonden here?" And I found out for myself that there
is scarcely a man or woman alive who does not hold such a tenant more
or less deeply within his house.
Sometimes the walls of the house are transparent, like a frog's foot,
and you see the prisoner throbbing and quivering inside. This is rare.
Shelley's house must have been a filmy tenement of the kind. With
children--if you catch them young enough--it is more common. I
remember one whom I used to see nearly every day, the child of poor
parents, who kept a green-grocer's shop in Judd Street, Saint Pancras,
a still little creature moving about in worlds not recognised. She was
slim and small, fair-haired, honey-coloured, her eyes wells of blue. I
used to see her standing at the door of the shop, amid baskets of
green stuff, crimsoned rhubarb, pyramided dates, and what not. I never
saw her dirty or untidy, nor heard her speak, nor saw her laugh. She
stood or leaned at the lintel, watching I know not what, but certainly
not anything really there, as we say. She appeared to be looking
through objects rather than at them. I can describe it no otherwise
than that I, or another, crossed her field of vision and was conscious
that her eyes met mine and yet did not see me. To me she was instantly
remarkable, not for this and not for any beauty she had--for she was
not at all extraordinary in that quality--but for this, that she was
not of our kind. Surrounded by other children, playing gaily, circling
about her, she was _sui generis_. She carried her own atmosphere,
whereby in the company of others she seemed unaccountable, by herself
only, normal. Nature she fitted perfectly, but us she did not fit.
Now, it is a curious thing, accepted by all visionaries, that a
supernatural being, a spirit, fairy, not-human creature, if you see it
among animals, beasts and birds, on hills or in the folds of hills,
among trees, by waters, in fields of flowers, _looks at home_ and
evidently is so. The beasts are conscious of it, know it and have no
fear of it; the hills and valleys are its familiar places in a way
which they will never be to the likes of us. But put a man beside it
and it becomes at once supernatural. I have seen spirits, beings,
whatever they may be, in empty space, and have observed them as part
of the landscape, no more extraordinary than grazing cattle or
wheeling plover. Again I have seen a place thick with them, as thick
as a London square in a snow-storm, and a man walk clean through them
unaware of their existence, and make them, by that act, a mockery of
the senses. So precisely it was with this strange child, unreal to me
when she was real to everybody else.
She had a name, a niche in the waking world. Marks, Greengrocer, was
the inscription of the shop. She was Elsie Marks. Her father was a
stout, florid man of maybe fifty years, with a chin-beard and
light-blue eyes. Good-humoured he seemed, and prosperous, something of
a ready wit, a respected and respectable man, who stamped his way
about the solid ground in a way which defied dreams.