The outbreak of war in the year 1914 found me by chance in England,
and there I remained, chiefly at Oxford, until the day of the peace.
During those five years, in rambles to Iffley and Sandford, to Godstow
and Wytham, to the hospitable eminence of Chilswell, to Wood Eaton or
Nuneham or Abingdon or Stanton Harcourt,
Crossing the stripling Thames at Bab-lock-hithe,
these Soliloquies were composed, or the notes scribbled from which they
have been expanded. Often over Port Meadow the whirr of aeroplanes sent
an iron tremor through these reveries, and the daily casualty list,
the constant sight of the wounded, the cadets strangely replacing the
undergraduates, made the foreground to these distances. Yet nature
and solitude continued to envelop me in their gentleness, and seemed
to remain nearer to me than all that was so near. They muffled the
importunity of the hour; perhaps its very bitterness and incubus of
horror drove my thoughts deeper than they would otherwise have ventured
into the maze of reflection and of dreams. It is a single maze, though
we traverse it in opposite moods, and distinct threads conduct us; for
when the most dire events have assumed their punctiform places in the
history of our lives, where they will stand eternally, what are they
but absurd episodes in a once tormenting dream? And when our despised
night-dreams are regarded and respected as they deserve to be (since
all their troubles are actual and all their tints evident), do they
prove more arbitrary or less significant than our waking thoughts, or
than those more studious daylight fictions which we call history or
philosophy? The human mind at best is a sort of song; the music of it
runs away with the words, and even the words, which pass for the names
of things, are but poor wild symbols for their unfathomed objects. So
are these Soliloquies compared with their occasions; and I should be
the first to hate their verbiage, if a certain spiritual happiness did
not seem to breathe through it, and redeem its irrelevance. Their very
abstraction from the time in which they were written may commend them
to a free mind. Spirit refuses to be caught in a vice; it triumphs
over the existence which begets it. The moving world which feeds it
is not its adequate theme. Spirit hates its father and its mother. It
spreads from its burning focus into the infinite, careless whether
that focus burns to ashes or not. From its pinnacle of earthly time it
pours its little life into spheres not temporal nor earthly, and half
in playfulness, half in sacrifice, it finds its joy in the irony of
eternal things, which know nothing of it.
Spirit, however, cannot fly from matter without material wings;
the most abstract art is compacted of images, the most mystical
renunciation obeys some passion of the heart. Images and passion,
even if they are not easily recognizable in these Soliloquies as now
coldly written down, were not absent from them when inwardly spoken.
The images were English images, the passion was the love of England
and, behind England, of Greece. What I love in Greece and in England
is contentment in finitude, fair outward ways, manly perfection and
simplicity. Admiration for England, of a certain sort, was instilled
into me in my youth. My father (who read the language with ease
although he did not speak it) had a profound respect for British polity
and British power. In this admiration there was no touch of sentiment
nor even of sympathy; behind it lay something like an ulterior
contempt, such as we feel for the strong man exhibiting at a fair. The
performance may be astonishing but the achievement is mean. So in the
middle of the nineteenth century an intelligent foreigner, the native
of a country materially impoverished, could look to England for a model
of that irresistible energy and public discipline which afterwards
were even more conspicuous in Bismarckian Germany and in the United
States. It was admiration for material progress, for wealth, for the
inimitable gift of success; and it was not free, perhaps, from the poor
man's illusion, who jealously sets his heart on prosperity, and lets
it blind him to the subtler sources of greatness. We should none of us
admire England to-day, if we had to admire it only for its conquering
commerce, its pompous noblemen, or its parliamentary government. I
feel no great reverence even for the British Navy, which may be in
the junk-shop to-morrow; but I heartily like the British sailor, with
his clear-cut and dogged way of facing the world. It is health, not
policy nor wilfulness, that gives true strength in the moral world,
as in the animal kingdom; nature and fortune in the end are on the
side of health. There is, or was, a beautifully healthy England hidden
from most foreigners; the England of the countryside and of the poets,
domestic, sporting, gallant, boyish, of a sure and delicate heart,
which it has been mine to feel beating, though not so early in my life
as I could have wished. In childhood I saw only Cardiff on a Sunday,
and the docks of Liverpool; but books and prints soon opened to me more
important vistas. I read the poets; and although British painting,
when it tries to idealize human subjects, has always made me laugh, I
was quick to discern an ethereal beauty in the landscapes of Turner.
Furgueson's _Cathedrals of England_, too, and the great mansions in
the Italian style depicted in the eighth edition of the _Encyclopaedia
Britannica_, revealed to me even when a boy the rare charm that can
envelop the most conventional things when they are associated with
tender thoughts or with noble ways of living.
It was with a premonition of things noble and tender, and yet
conventional, that after a term at the University of Berlin I went to
spend my first holidays in England. Those were the great free days of
my youth. I had lived familiarly in Spain and in the United States;
I had had a glimpse of France and of Germany, and French literature
had been my daily bread: it had taught me how to think, but had not
given me much to think about. I was not mistaken in surmising that in
England I should find a _tertium quid_, something soberer and juster
than anything I yet knew, and at the same time greener and richer.
I felt at once that here was a distinctive society, a way of living
fundamentally _foreign_ to me, but deeply attractive. At first all
gates seemed shut and bristling with incommunication; but soon in
some embowered corner I found the stile I might climb over, and the
ancient right of way. Those peaceful parks, and those minds no less
retired, seemed positively to welcome me; and though I was still
divided from them by inevitable partitions, these were in places so
thin and yielding, that the separation seemed hardly greater than is
requisite for union and sympathy between autonomous minds. Indeed, I
was soon satisfied that no climate, no manners, no comrades on earth
(where nothing is perfect) could be more congenial to my complexion.
Not that I ever had the least desire or tendency to become an
Englishman. Nationality and religion are like oar love and loyalty
towards women: things too radically intertwined with oar moral essence
to be changed honourably, and too accidental to the free mind to be
worth changing. My own origins were living within me; by their light
I could see clearly that this England was pre-eminently the home of
decent happiness and a quiet pleasure in being oneself. I found here
the same sort of manliness which I had learned to love in America, yet
softer, and not at all obstreperous; a manliness which when refined
a little creates the gentleman, since its instinct is to hide its
strength for an adequate occasion and for the service of others. It is
self-reliant, but with a saving touch of practicality and humour; for
there is a becoming self-confidence, based on actual performance, like
the confidence of the athlete, and free from any exorbitant estimate of
what that performance is worth. Such modesty in strength is entirely
absent from the effusive temperament of the Latin, who is cocky and
punctilious so long as his conceit holds out, and then utterly humbled
and easily corrupted; entirely absent also from the doctrinaire of the
German school, in his dense vanity and officiousness, that nothing can
put to shame. So much had I come to count on this sort of manliness
in the friends of my youth, that without it the most admirable and
gifted persons seemed to me hardly _men_: they fell rather into an
ambiguous retinue, the camp followers of man, cleverer but meaner than
himself--the priests, politicians, actors, pedagogues, and shopkeepers.
The _man_ is he who lives and relies directly on nature, not on the
needs or weaknesses of other people. These self-sufficing Englishmen,
in their reserve and decision, seemed to me truly men, creatures of
fixed rational habit, people in whose somewhat inarticulate society
one might feel safe and at home. The low pressure at which their minds
seemed to work showed how little they were alarmed about anything:
things would all be managed somehow. They were good company even when
they said nothing. Their aspect, their habits, their invincible likes
and dislikes seemed like an anchor to me in the currents of this
turbid age. They were a gift of the gods, like the sunshine or the
fresh air or the memory of the Greeks: they were superior beings, and
yet more animal than the rest of us, calmer, with a different scale
of consciousness and a slower pace of thought. There were glints in
them sometimes of a mystical oddity; they loved the wilds; and yet
ordinarily they were wonderfully sane and human, and responsive to the
right touch. Moreover, these semi-divine animals could talk like men
of the world. If some of them, and not the least charming, said little
but "Oh, really," and "How stupid of me," I soon discovered how far
others could carry scholarly distinction, rich humour, and refinement
of diction. I confess, however, that when they were very exquisite or
subtle they seemed to me like cut flowers; the finer they were the
frailer, and the cleverer the more wrong-headed. Delicacy did not come
to them, as to Latin minds, as an added ornament, a finer means of
being passionate, a trill in a song that flows full-chested from the
whole man; their purity was Puritanism, it came by exclusion of what
they thought lower. It impoverished their sympathies, it severed them
from their national roots, it turned to affectation or fanaticism,
it rendered them acrid and fussy and eccentric and sad. It is truly
English, in one sense, to fume against England, individuality tearing
its own nest; and often these frantic poses neutralize one another and
do no harm on the whole. Nevertheless it is the full-bodied Englishman
who has so far ballasted the ship, he who, like Shakespeare, can wear
gracefully the fashion of the hour, can play with fancy, and remain a
man. When he ceases to be sensual and national, adventurous and steady,
reticent and religious, the Englishman is a mad ghost; and wherever he
prevails he turns pleasant England, like Greece, into a memory.
Those first holidays of mine, when I was twenty-three years of
age, laid the foundation of a lifelong attachment--of which these
Soliloquies are a late fruit--to both Oxford and Cambridge: not so much
to the learned society of those places as to their picturesque aspects
and to the possibility of enjoying there in seclusion the intense
companionship of the past and of the beautiful; also the intense
companionship of youth, to which more advanced years in themselves are
no obstacle, if the soul remains free. I have never liked the taste of
academic straw; but there are fat grains and seeds of novelty even at
universities, which the lively young wits that twitter in those shades
pick up like hungry sparrows, yet without unmitigated seriousness; and
unmitigated seriousness is always out of place in human affairs. Let
not the unwary reader think me flippant for saying so; it was Plato,
in his solemn old age, who said it. He added that our ignominious
condition forces us, nevertheless, to be often terribly in earnest.
Wanton and transitory as our existence is, and comic as it must appear
in the eyes of the happy gods, it is all in all to our mortal nature;
and whilst intellectually we may judge ourselves somewhat as the gods
might judge us, and may commend our lives to the keeping of eternity,
our poor animal souls are caught inextricably in the toils of time,
which devours us and all our possessions. The artist playing a farce
for others suffers a tragedy in himself. When he aspires to shed as
much as possible the delusions of earthly passion, and to look at
things joyfully and unselfishly, with the clear eyes of youth, it is
not because he feels no weight of affliction, but precisely because he
feels its weight to the full, and how final it is. Lest it should seem
inhuman of me to have been piping soliloquies whilst Rome was burning,
I will transcribe here some desperate verses extorted from me by events
during those same years. I am hardly a poet in the magic sense of the
word, but when one's thoughts have taken instinctively a metrical form,
why should they be forbidden to wear it? I do not ask the reader to
admire these sonnets, but to believe them.