BY a curious irony of fate, the places to which we are sent when health
deserts us are often singularly beautiful. Often, too, they are places
we have visited in former years, or seen briefly in passing by, and kept
ever afterwards in pious memory; and we please ourselves with the fancy
that we shall repeat many vivid and pleasurable sensations, and take up
again the thread of our enjoyment in the same spirit as we let it fall.
We shall now have an opportunity of finishing many pleasant excursions,
interrupted of yore before our curiosity was fully satisfied. It may be
that we have kept in mind, during all these years, the recollection of
some valley into which we have just looked down for a moment before we
lost sight of it in the disorder of the hills; it may be that we have
lain awake at night, and agreeably tantalised ourselves with the thought
of corners we had never turned, or summits we had all but climbed: we
shall now be able, as we tell ourselves, to complete all these unfinished
pleasures, and pass beyond the barriers that confined our recollections.
The promise is so great, and we are all so easily led away when hope and
memory are both in one story, that I daresay the sick man is not very
inconsolable when he receives sentence of banishment, and is inclined to
regard his ill-health as not the least fortunate accident of his life.
Nor is he immediately undeceived. The stir and speed of the journey, and
the restlessness that goes to bed with him as he tries to sleep between
two days of noisy progress, fever him, and stimulate his dull nerves into
something of their old quickness and sensibility. And so he can enjoy
the faint autumnal splendour of the landscape, as he sees hill and plain,
vineyard and forest, clad in one wonderful glory of fairy gold, which the
first great winds of winter will transmute, as in the fable, into
withered leaves. And so too he can enjoy the admirable brevity and
simplicity of such little glimpses of country and country ways as flash
upon him through the windows of the train; little glimpses that have a
character all their own; sights seen as a travelling swallow might see
them from the wing, or Iris as she went abroad over the land on some
Olympian errand. Here and there, indeed, a few children huzzah and wave
their hands to the express; but for the most part it is an interruption
too brief and isolated to attract much notice; the sheep do not cease
from browsing; a girl sits balanced on the projecting tiller of a canal
boat, so precariously that it seems as if a fly or the splash of a
leaping fish would be enough to overthrow the dainty equilibrium, and yet
all these hundreds of tons of coal and wood and iron have been
precipitated roaring past her very ear, and there is not a start, not a
tremor, not a turn of the averted head, to indicate that she has been
even conscious of its passage. Herein, I think, lies the chief
attraction of railway travel. The speed is so easy, and the train
disturbs so little the scenes through which it takes us, that our heart
becomes full of the placidity and stillness of the country; and while the
body is borne forward in the flying chain of carriages, the thoughts
alight, as the humour moves them, at unfrequented stations; they make
haste up the poplar alley that leads towards the town; they are left
behind with the signalman as, shading his eyes with his hand, he watches
the long train sweep away into the golden distance.
Moreover, there is still before the invalid the shock of wonder and
delight with which he will learn that he has passed the indefinable line
that separates South from North. And this is an uncertain moment; for
sometimes the consciousness is forced upon him early, on the occasion of
some slight association, a colour, a flower, or a scent; and sometimes
not until, one fine morning, he wakes up with the southern sunshine
peeping through the _persiennes_, and the southern patois confusedly
audible below the windows. Whether it come early or late, however, this
pleasure will not end with the anticipation, as do so many others of the
same family. It will leave him wider awake than it found him, and give a
new significance to all he may see for many days to come. There is
something in the mere name of the South that carries enthusiasm along
with it. At the sound of the word, he pricks up his ears; he becomes as
anxious to seek out beauties and to get by heart the permanent lines and
character of the landscape, as if he had been told that it was all his
own—an estate out of which he had been kept unjustly, and which he was
now to receive in free and full possession. Even those who have never
been there before feel as if they had been; and everybody goes comparing,
and seeking for the familiar, and finding it with such ecstasies of
recognition, that one would think they were coming home after a weary
absence, instead of travelling hourly farther abroad.
It is only after he is fairly arrived and settled down in his chosen
corner, that the invalid begins to understand the change that has
befallen him. Everything about him is as he had remembered, or as he had
anticipated. Here, at his feet, under his eyes, are the olive gardens
and the blue sea. Nothing can change the eternal magnificence of form of
the naked Alps behind Mentone; nothing, not even the crude curves of the
railway, can utterly deform the suavity of contour of one bay after
another along the whole reach of the Riviera. And of all this, he has
only a cold head knowledge that is divorced from enjoyment. He
recognises with his intelligence that this thing and that thing is
beautiful, while in his heart of hearts he has to confess that it is not
beautiful for him. It is in vain that he spurs his discouraged spirit;
in vain that he chooses out points of view, and stands there, looking
with all his eyes, and waiting for some return of the pleasure that he
remembers in other days, as the sick folk may have awaited the coming of
the angel at the pool of Bethesda. He is like an enthusiast leading
about with him a stolid, indifferent tourist. There is some one by who
is out of sympathy with the scene, and is not moved up to the measure of
the occasion; and that some one is himself. The world is disenchanted
for him. He seems to himself to touch things with muffled hands, and to
see them through a veil. His life becomes a palsied fumbling after notes
that are silent when he has found and struck them. He cannot recognise
that this phlegmatic and unimpressionable body with which he now goes
burthened, is the same that he knew heretofore so quick and delicate and
alive.
He is tempted to lay the blame on the very softness and amenity of the
climate, and to fancy that in the rigours of the winter at home, these
dead emotions would revive and flourish. A longing for the brightness
and silence of fallen snow seizes him at such times. He is homesick for
the hale rough weather; for the tracery of the frost upon his
window-panes at morning, the reluctant descent of the first flakes, and
the white roofs relieved against the sombre sky. And yet the stuff of
which these yearnings are made, is of the flimsiest: if but the
thermometer fall a little below its ordinary Mediterranean level, or a
wind come down from the snow-clad Alps behind, the spirit of his fancies
changes upon the instant, and many a doleful vignette of the grim wintry
streets at home returns to him, and begins to haunt his memory. The
hopeless, huddled attitude of tramps in doorways; the flinching gait of
barefoot children on the icy pavement; the sheen of the rainy streets
towards afternoon; the meagre anatomy of the poor defined by the clinging
of wet garments; the high canorous note of the North-easter on days when
the very houses seem to stiffen with cold: these, and such as these,
crowd back upon him, and mockingly substitute themselves for the fanciful
winter scenes with which he had pleased himself a while before. He
cannot be glad enough that he is where he is. If only the others could
be there also; if only those tramps could lie down for a little in the
sunshine, and those children warm their feet, this once, upon a kindlier
earth; if only there were no cold anywhere, and no nakedness, and no
hunger; if only it were as well with all men as it is with him!
For it is not altogether ill with the invalid, after all. If it is only
rarely that anything penetrates vividly into his numbed spirit, yet, when
anything does, it brings with it a joy that is all the more poignant for
its very rarity. There is something pathetic in these occasional returns
of a glad activity of heart. In his lowest hours he will be stirred and
awakened by many such; and they will spring perhaps from very trivial
sources; as a friend once said to me, the “spirit of delight” comes often
on small wings. For the pleasure that we take in beautiful nature is
essentially capricious. It comes sometimes when we least look for it;
and sometimes, when we expect it most certainly, it leaves us to gape
joylessly for days together, in the very home-land of the beautiful. We
may have passed a place a thousand times and one; and on the thousand and
second it will be transfigured, and stand forth in a certain splendour of
reality from the dull circle of surroundings; so that we see it “with a
child’s first pleasure,” as Wordsworth saw the daffodils by the lake
side. And if this falls out capriciously with the healthy, how much more
so with the invalid. Some day he will find his first violet, and be lost
in pleasant wonder, by what alchemy the cold earth of the clods, and the
vapid air and rain, can be transmuted into colour so rich and odour so
touchingly sweet. Or perhaps he may see a group of washerwomen relieved,
on a spit of shingle, against the blue sea, or a meeting of
flower-gatherers in the tempered daylight of an olive-garden; and
something significant or monumental in the grouping, something in the
harmony of faint colour that is always characteristic of the dress of
these southern women, will come home to him unexpectedly, and awake in
him that satisfaction with which we tell ourselves that we are the richer
by one more beautiful experience. Or it may be something even slighter:
as when the opulence of the sunshine, which somehow gets lost and fails
to produce its effect on the large scale, is suddenly revealed to him by
the chance isolation—as he changes the position of his sunshade—of a yard
or two of roadway with its stones and weeds. And then, there is no end
to the infinite variety of the olive-yards themselves. Even the colour
is indeterminate and continually shifting: now you would say it was
green, now gray, now blue; now tree stands above tree, like “cloud on
cloud,” massed into filmy indistinctness; and now, at the wind’s will,
the whole sea of foliage is shaken and broken up with little momentary
silverings and shadows. But every one sees the world in his own way. To
some the glad moment may have arrived on other provocations; and their
recollection may be most vivid of the stately gait of women carrying
burthens on their heads; of tropical effects, with canes and naked rock
and sunlight; of the relief of cypresses; of the troubled, busy-looking
groups of sea-pines, that seem always as if they were being wielded and
swept together by a whirlwind; of the air coming, laden with virginal
perfumes, over the myrtles and the scented underwood; of the empurpled
hills standing up, solemn and sharp, out of the green-gold air of the
east at evening.
There go many elements, without doubt, to the making of one such moment
of intense perception; and it is on the happy agreement of these many
elements, on the harmonious vibration of many nerves, that the whole
delight of the moment must depend. Who can forget how, when he has
chanced upon some attitude of complete restfulness, after long uneasy
rolling to and fro on grass or heather, the whole fashion of the
landscape has been changed for him, as though the sun had just broken
forth, or a great artist had only then completed, by some cunning touch,
the composition of the picture? And not only a change of posture—a
snatch of perfume, the sudden singing of a bird, the freshness of some
pulse of air from an invisible sea, the light shadow of a travelling
cloud, the merest nothing that sends a little shiver along the most
infinitesimal nerve of a man’s body—not one of the least of these but has
a hand somehow in the general effect, and brings some refinement of its
own into the character of the pleasure we feel.
And if the external conditions are thus varied and subtle, even more so
are those within our own bodies. No man can find out the world, says
Solomon, from beginning to end, because the world is in his heart; and so
it is impossible for any of us to understand, from beginning to end, that
agreement of harmonious circumstances that creates in us the highest
pleasure of admiration, precisely because some of these circumstances are
hidden from us for ever in the constitution of our own bodies. After we
have reckoned up all that we can see or hear or feel, there still remains
to be taken into account some sensibility more delicate than usual in the
nerves affected, or some exquisite refinement in the architecture of the
brain, which is indeed to the sense of the beautiful as the eye or the
ear to the sense of hearing or sight. We admire splendid views and great
pictures; and yet what is truly admirable is rather the mind within us,
that gathers together these scattered details for its delight, and makes
out of certain colours, certain distributions of graduated light and
darkness, that intelligible whole which alone we call a picture or a
view. Hazlitt, relating in one of his essays how he went on foot from
one great man’s house to another’s in search of works of art, begins
suddenly to triumph over these noble and wealthy owners, because he was
more capable of enjoying their costly possessions than they were; because
they had paid the money and he had received the pleasure. And the
occasion is a fair one for self-complacency. While the one man was
working to be able to buy the picture, the other was working to be able
to enjoy the picture. An inherited aptitude will have been diligently
improved in either case; only the one man has made for himself a fortune,
and the other has made for himself a living spirit. It is a fair
occasion for self-complacency, I repeat, when the event shows a man to
have chosen the better part, and laid out his life more wisely, in the
long run, than those who have credit for most wisdom. And yet even this
is not a good unmixed; and like all other possessions, although in a less
degree, the possession of a brain that has been thus improved and
cultivated, and made into the prime organ of a man’s enjoyment, brings
with it certain inevitable cares and disappointments. The happiness of
such an one comes to depend greatly upon those fine shades of sensation
that heighten and harmonise the coarser elements of beauty. And thus a
degree of nervous prostration, that to other men would be hardly
disagreeable, is enough to overthrow for him the whole fabric of his
life, to take, except at rare moments, the edge off his pleasures, and to
meet him wherever he goes with failure, and the sense of want, and
disenchantment of the world and life.
It is not in such numbness of spirit only that the life of the invalid
resembles a premature old age. Those excursions that he had promised
himself to finish, prove too long or too arduous for his feeble body; and
the barrier-hills are as impassable as ever. Many a white town that sits
far out on the promontory, many a comely fold of wood on the mountain
side, beckons and allures his imagination day after day, and is yet as
inaccessible to his feet as the clefts and gorges of the clouds. The
sense of distance grows upon him wonderfully; and after some feverish
efforts and the fretful uneasiness of the first few days, he falls
contentedly in with the restrictions of his weakness. His narrow round
becomes pleasant and familiar to him as the cell to a contented prisoner.
Just as he has fallen already out of the mid race of active life, he now
falls out of the little eddy that circulates in the shallow waters of the
sanatorium. He sees the country people come and go about their everyday
affairs, the foreigners stream out in goodly pleasure parties; the stir
of man’s activity is all about him, as he suns himself inertly in some
sheltered corner; and he looks on with a patriarchal impersonality of
interest, such as a man may feel when he pictures to himself the fortunes
of his remote descendants, or the robust old age of the oak he has
planted over-night.
In this falling aside, in this quietude and desertion of other men, there
is no inharmonious prelude to the last quietude and desertion of the
grave; in this dulness of the senses there is a gentle preparation for
the final insensibility of death. And to him the idea of mortality comes
in a shape less violent and harsh than is its wont, less as an abrupt
catastrophe than as a thing of infinitesimal gradation, and the last step
on a long decline of way. As we turn to and fro in bed, and every moment
the movements grow feebler and smaller and the attitude more restful and
easy, until sleep overtakes us at a stride and we move no more, so desire
after desire leaves him; day by day his strength decreases, and the
circle of his activity grows ever narrower; and he feels, if he is to be
thus tenderly weaned from the passion of life, thus gradually inducted
into the slumber of death, that when at last the end comes, it will come
quietly and fitly. If anything is to reconcile poor spirits to the
coming of the last enemy, surely it should be such a mild approach as
this; not to hale us forth with violence, but to persuade us from a place
we have no further pleasure in. It is not so much, indeed, death that
approaches as life that withdraws and withers up from round about him.
He has outlived his own usefulness, and almost his own enjoyment; and if
there is to be no recovery; if never again will he be young and strong
and passionate, if the actual present shall be to him always like a thing
read in a book or remembered out of the far-away past; if, in fact, this
be veritably nightfall, he will not wish greatly for the continuance of a
twilight that only strains and disappoints the eyes, but steadfastly
await the perfect darkness. He will pray for Medea: when she comes, let
her either rejuvenate or slay.
And yet the ties that still attach him to the world are many and kindly.
The sight of children has a significance for him such as it may have for
the aged also, but not for others. If he has been used to feel humanely,
and to look upon life somewhat more widely than from the narrow loophole
of personal pleasure and advancement, it is strange how small a portion
of his thoughts will be changed or embittered by this proximity of death.
He knows that already, in English counties, the sower follows the
ploughman up the face of the field, and the rooks follow the sower; and
he knows also that he may not live to go home again and see the corn
spring and ripen, and be cut down at last, and brought home with
gladness. And yet the future of this harvest, the continuance of drought
or the coming of rain unseasonably, touch him as sensibly as ever. For
he has long been used to wait with interest the issue of events in which
his own concern was nothing; and to be joyful in a plenty, and sorrowful
for a famine, that did not increase or diminish, by one half loaf, the
equable sufficiency of his own supply. Thus there remain unaltered all
the disinterested hopes for mankind and a better future which have been
the solace and inspiration of his life. These he has set beyond the
reach of any fate that only menaces himself; and it makes small
difference whether he die five thousand years, or five thousand and fifty
years, before the good epoch for which he faithfully labours. He has not
deceived himself; he has known from the beginning that he followed the
pillar of fire and cloud, only to perish himself in the wilderness, and
that it was reserved for others to enter joyfully into possession of the
land. And so, as everything grows grayer and quieter about him, and
slopes towards extinction, these unfaded visions accompany his sad
decline, and follow him, with friendly voices and hopeful words, into the
very vestibule of death. The desire of love or of fame scarcely moved
him, in his days of health, more strongly than these generous aspirations
move him now; and so life is carried forward beyond life, and a vista
kept open for the eyes of hope, even when his hands grope already on the
face of the impassable.
Lastly, he is bound tenderly to life by the thought of his friends; or
shall we not say rather, that by their thought for him, by their
unchangeable solicitude and love, he remains woven into the very stuff of
life, beyond the power of bodily dissolution to undo? In a thousand ways
will he survive and be perpetuated. Much of Etienne de la Boetie
survived during all the years in which Montaigne continued to converse
with him on the pages of the ever-delightful essays. Much of what was
truly Goethe was dead already when he revisited places that knew him no
more, and found no better consolation than the promise of his own verses,
that soon he too would be at rest. Indeed, when we think of what it is
that we most seek and cherish, and find most pride and pleasure in
calling ours, it will sometimes seem to us as if our friends, at our
decease, would suffer loss more truly than ourselves. As a monarch who
should care more for the outlying colonies he knows on the map or through
the report of his vicegerents, than for the trunk of his empire under his
eyes at home, are we not more concerned about the shadowy life that we
have in the hearts of others, and that portion in their thoughts and
fancies which, in a certain far-away sense, belongs to us, than about the
real knot of our identity—that central metropolis of self, of which alone
we are immediately aware—or the diligent service of arteries and veins
and infinitesimal activity of ganglia, which we know (as we know a
proposition in Euclid) to be the source and substance of the whole? At
the death of every one whom we love, some fair and honourable portion of
our existence falls away, and we are dislodged from one of these dear
provinces; and they are not, perhaps, the most fortunate who survive a
long series of such impoverishments, till their life and influence narrow
gradually into the meagre limit of their own spirits, and death, when he
comes at last, can destroy them at one blow.
* * * * *
NOTE.—To this essay I must in honesty append a word or two of
qualification; for this is one of the points on which a slightly greater
age teaches us a slightly different wisdom:
A youth delights in generalities, and keeps loose from particular
obligations; he jogs on the footpath way, himself pursuing butterflies,
but courteously lending his applause to the advance of the human species
and the coming of the kingdom of justice and love. As he grows older, he
begins to think more narrowly of man’s action in the general, and perhaps
more arrogantly of his own in the particular. He has not that same
unspeakable trust in what he would have done had he been spared, seeing
finally that that would have been little; but he has a far higher notion
of the blank that he will make by dying. A young man feels himself one
too many in the world; his is a painful situation: he has no calling; no
obvious utility; no ties, but to his parents. and these he is sure to
disregard. I do not think that a proper allowance has been made for this
true cause of suffering in youth; but by the mere fact of a prolonged
existence, we outgrow either the fact or else the feeling. Either we
become so callously accustomed to our own useless figure in the world, or
else—and this, thank God, in the majority of cases—we so collect about us
the interest or the love of our fellows, so multiply our effective part
in the affairs of life, that we need to entertain no longer the question
of our right to be.
And so in the majority of cases, a man who fancies himself dying, will
get cold comfort from the very youthful view expressed in this essay.
He, as a living man, has some to help, some to love, some to correct; it
may be, some to punish. These duties cling, not upon humanity, but upon
the man himself. It is he, not another, who is one woman’s son and a
second woman’s husband and a third woman’s father. That life which began
so small, has now grown, with a myriad filaments, into the lives of
others. It is not indispensable; another will take the place and
shoulder the discharged responsibility; but the better the man and the
nobler his purposes, the more will he be tempted to regret the extinction
of his powers and the deletion of his personality. To have lived a
generation, is not only to have grown at home in that perplexing medium,
but to have assumed innumerable duties. To die at such an age, has, for
all but the entirely base, something of the air of a betrayal. A man
does not only reflect upon what he might have done in a future that is
never to be his; but beholding himself so early a deserter from the
fight, he eats his heart for the good he might have done already. To
have been so useless and now to lose all hope of being useful any
more—there it is that death and memory assail him. And even if mankind
shall go on, founding heroic cities, practising heroic virtues, rising
steadily from strength to strength; even if his work shall be fulfilled,
his friends consoled, his wife remarried by a better than he; how shall
this alter, in one jot, his estimation of a career which was his only
business in this world, which was so fitfully pursued, and which is now
so ineffectively to end?