If life is not always poetical, it is at least metrical. Periodicity
rules over the mental experience of man, according to the path of the
orbit of his thoughts. Distances are not gauged, ellipses not measured,
velocities not ascertained, times not known. Nevertheless, the
recurrence is sure. What the mind suffered last week, or last year, it
does not suffer now; but it will suffer again next week or next year.
Happiness is not a matter of events; it depends upon the tides of the
mind. Disease is metrical, closing in at shorter and shorter periods
towards death, sweeping abroad at longer and longer intervals towards
recovery. Sorrow for one cause was intolerable yesterday, and will be
intolerable to-morrow; to-day it is easy to bear, but the cause has not
passed. Even the burden of a spiritual distress unsolved is bound to
leave the heart to a temporary peace; and remorse itself does not
remain--it returns. Gaiety takes us by a dear surprise. If we had made
a course of notes of its visits, we might have been on the watch, and
would have had an expectation instead of a discovery. No one makes such
observations; in all the diaries of students of the interior world, there
have never come to light the records of the Kepler of such cycles. But
Thomas a Kempis knew of the recurrences, if he did not measure them. In
his cell alone with the elements--"What wouldst thou more than these? for
out of these were all things made"--he learnt the stay to be found in the
depth of the hour of bitterness, and the remembrance that restrains the
soul at the coming of the moment of delight, giving it a more conscious
welcome, but presaging for it an inexorable flight. And "rarely, rarely
comest thou," sighed Shelley, not to Delight merely, but to the Spirit of
Delight. Delight can be compelled beforehand, called, and constrained to
our service--Ariel can be bound to a daily task; but such artificial
violence throws life out of metre, and it is not the spirit that is thus
compelled. _That_ flits upon an orbit elliptically or parabolically or
hyperbolically curved, keeping no man knows what trysts with Time.
It seems fit that Shelley and the author of the "Imitation" should both
have been keen and simple enough to perceive these flights, and to guess
at the order of this periodicity. Both souls were in close touch with
the spirits of their several worlds, and no deliberate human rules, no
infractions of the liberty and law of the universal movement, kept from
them the knowledge of recurrences. _Eppur si muove_. They knew that
presence does not exist without absence; they knew that what is just upon
its flight of farewell is already on its long path of return. They knew
that what is approaching to the very touch is hastening towards
departure. "O wind," cried Shelley, in autumn,
O wind,
If winter comes can spring be far behind?
They knew that the flux is equal to the reflux; that to interrupt with
unlawful recurrences, out of time, is to weaken the impulse of onset and
retreat; the sweep and impetus of movement. To live in constant efforts
after an equal life, whether the equality be sought in mental production,
or in spiritual sweetness, or in the joy of the senses, is to live
without either rest or full activity. The souls of certain of the
saints, being singularly simple and single, have been in the most
complete subjection to the law of periodicity. Ecstasy and desolation
visited them by seasons. They endured, during spaces of vacant time, the
interior loss of all for which they had sacrificed the world. They
rejoiced in the uncovenanted beatitude of sweetness alighting in their
hearts. Like them are the poets whom, three times or ten times in the
course of a long life, the Muse has approached, touched, and forsaken.
And yet hardly like them; not always so docile, nor so wholly prepared
for the departure, the brevity, of the golden and irrevocable hour. Few
poets have fully recognized the metrical absence of their muse. For full
recognition is expressed in one only way--silence.
It has been found that several tribes in Africa and in America worship
the moon, and not the sun; a great number worship both; but no tribes are
known to adore the sun, and not the moon. On her depend the tides; and
she is Selene, mother of Herse, bringer of the dews that recurrently
irrigate lands where rain is rare. More than any other companion of
earth is she the Measurer. Early Indo-Germanic languages knew her by
that name. Her metrical phases are the symbol of the order of
recurrence. Constancy in approach and in departure is the reason of her
inconstancies. Juliet will not receive a vow spoken in invocation of the
moon; but Juliet did not live to know that love itself has tidal
times--lapses and ebbs which are due to the metrical rule of the interior
heart, but which the lover vainly and unkindly attributes to some outward
alteration in the beloved. For man--except those elect already named--is
hardly aware of periodicity. The individual man either never learns it
fully, or learns it late. And he learns it so late, because it is a
matter of cumulative experience upon which cumulative evidence is long
lacking. It is in the after-part of each life that the law is learnt so
definitely as to do away with the hope or fear of continuance. That
young sorrow comes so near to despair is a result of this young
ignorance. So is the early hope of great achievement. Life seems so
long, and its capacity so great, to one who knows nothing of all the
intervals it needs must hold--intervals between aspirations, between
actions, pauses as inevitable as the pauses of sleep. And life looks
impossible to the young unfortunate, unaware of the inevitable and
unfailing refreshment. It would be for their peace to learn that there
is a tide in the affairs of men, in a sense more subtle--if it is not too
audacious to add a meaning to Shakespeare--than the phrase was meant to
contain. Their joy is flying away from them on its way home; their life
will wax and wane; and if they would be wise, they must wake and rest in
its phases, knowing that they are ruled by the law that commands all
things--a sun's revolutions and the rhythmic pangs of maternity.