_DEALS WITH LIFE AND THE LUST OF IT, BUT HAS NO DIRECT BEARING ON MY
STORY._[1]
Shall we not weary in the windless days
Hereafter, for the murmur of the sea,
The cool salt air across some grassy lea?
Shall we not go bewildered through a maze
Of stately streets with glittering gems ablaze,
Forlorn amid the pearl and ivory,
Straining our eyes beyond the bourne to see
Phantoms from out life's dear forsaken ways?
Give us again the crazy clay-built nest,
Summer, and soft unseasonable spring,
Our flowers to pluck, our broken songs to sing,
Our fairy gold of evening in the West;
Still to the land we love our longings cling,
The sweet vain world of turmoil and unrest.
--Graham R. Tomson.
Let me frankly confess that I love this world and the things of it,
and so, I believe, do all in whom the "great, glad, aboriginal" and
God-given love of life is whole and healthy, and not stunted by
sickness of mind or body. For the bereaved and the sorrow-stricken
I make every allowance and would have all tenderness, but I suspect
either the honesty or the health (and by "health" I mean, of course,
mental as well as physical soundness) of those who express themselves
as being "desirous of departing," or who assert that love of this
world is irreconcilable with the love of God.
It is not God's world, with its love and friendship and little
children, its fields and flowers, sea and sky, sunlight and starshine,
and sweet consolations of Art and Song, against which we are bidden to
beware. No it is _man's_ world--the world which devotes itself to gain,
or to the wish to be somebody in society; to the frittering away of our
days in fashionable frivolity, or in struggling to outdo our neighbour,
not in the purity of our lives, or the dignity of our actions, but in
our clothes, our carriages, and the company we keep--_this_ world it is
which cannot be rightly loved by one in whom dwelleth the love of the
Father.
But God's world we can never love half enough, can never sufficiently
appreciate and enjoy. Suppose that you and I, my reader, had to make
a world--call it a heaven if you will--of our own designing, and were
entrusted with infinite potentialities for the purpose. Could we, could
all of us combined, ever conceive of anything half so beautiful as this
world at which so many of us gaze with apathetic eyes?
"An idle poet, here and there,
Looks round him, but for all the rest,
The world, unfathomably fair,
Is duller than a witling's jest."
At best we could but copy, but if it so happened that we, to whom it
was given to create, had never been permitted to set eyes even upon
this earth beforehand, what sort of a world then, think you, should we
contrive to construct?
I believe that if God were to make a man, a full-grown man in a moment,
and were to set him down in the midst of the world, to look upon it
with new eyes, and for the first time, instead of letting him grow up
from a child, _to become accustomed to it_--for it is true, as Mr.
Lowell says, that "we glance carelessly at the sunrise, and get used to
Orion and the Pleiades,"--I believe that that man would be in danger
of delirium from his overwhelming joy and wonder at the beauty and the
boundlessness of that which he saw around.
Even this grim old London is full of beauty and of boundlessness; of
beauty which strikes me breathless, and of boundlessness of life, and
sky; for in what slum of it, be it never so stifling, are we quite shut
out from view of the stars or the sunshine, or of the human faces that
come and go in the streets? But a moment ago, while looking out from
my window upon a crowded, choking city thoroughfare, I caught one
glimpse of a woman's profile, as she passed with her head poised, and
half-turned towards me; and though the vision was gone in an instant,
the sweep of the queenly neck, ivory-white and stately as a lily-stem,
set my senses vibrating with a thrill of exquisite pleasure. And
yonder, looking into a window, I see another face, the sweet pure face
of a maiden. I run my eye like a finger along the profile, I follow
the flowing line of the hair; but even as I look, she turns, is gone
and is forgotten, for her place is taken by a girl with a basket of
flowers, the flowers that I love as I love nothing else but poetry.
It is Emerson, I think, who tells us that God's loveliest gifts are
the commonest; and that sun and sky and flowers are scarce denied to
a beggar's call; and it is pitiful, as he says in another passage,
the things by which we call ourselves rich or poor. Why, I have gone
home from my morning's walk, feeling richer in the possession of a
handful of honey-suckle than if I had found a purse of sovereigns by
the wayside; nor could all the art-treasures of Bond Street (not that
I fail to appreciate them, either) give me a more exquisite thrill of
sweetly-saddened pleasure than does the tender perfume of a bunch of
violets.
As a child I used to fancy that I found in a flower all my whitest
and purest thoughts crystallized into a thing; and now, though I am
a man, the white-pure thoughts of my childhood still live for me in
every flower that blossoms in the meadows; for the flowers bring me
back not only my vanished childhood, but my childhood's innocence
and peace. Even in those remote child-days I was persuaded that the
flowers were not of earth, but of heaven, nor while I had them could
I believe heaven to be so very far off, after all. "Else how could the
flower-seeds have been blown over its edge, and fallen down to the
earth-land?" I would say to myself. And I find myself fancying now, as
I fancied then, that God takes the flowers home to His heaven in the
winter, and every spring when I welcome them back, I feel that they
have come as direct from Him and from heaven as if He had leant down
out of the skies to give them to me; and I feel that they are not my
flowers, but His flowers; for even as I gather them to call them mine,
He puts forth His hand and claims them, so that they fade away again to
the heaven whence they came.
Yes, I love this world, and the things of it. To me the mere
consciousness of life is a gladness, the pulsing of my heart a
pleasure. I pencil the latter part of this chapter while lying lazily
in a sun-filled meadow, and as I write I seem to feel the very drawing
of my breath a joy. The sky spreads above me, a shimmering sea of
blue--not the cool, crystalline sapphire of early morning, but the deep
dense azure of a midsummer noon. How hot the bees must feel in that
furry coat! As I lie here, basking in the sunlight, and watching the
buttercups dancing and dipping above the grass, like golden banners
amid an army of green-bladed bayonets, I do not wonder that the poor
bees keep up a dull droning hum of monotonous murmuring. I can see the
hot air simmering and quivering above the clover fields, but all else
is drowsily, dreamily still. I know that the streets of the far-off
city are reeking and smoking with dry and dusty heat, but here I am in
another world, and the bees and the birds are my brothers. This meadow
is my boundless prairie; my head is below the level of the grass tops,
and they spread feathery, filmy arms above, like the boughs of a vast
forest.
Yes, lying here in this sun-filled meadow on this summer morning, I am
conscious that I love my life, and that I should be loath to leave it.
I love to feel the wind upon my cheek, and to hear it as it whistles
by me, singing in my ears, as in the hollow convolutions of a shell.
I love to stand and look out upon the sea, or upon open plains and
broad sky-spaces, which give us _eyesight room_ and room for our souls
to be. I love to lie and listen to the song of the wind among the
pine-trees,--the "sailing" pine trees,--and to watch them swing and
sway like storm-tossed barks at sea. I love to see the rook beat up
against the wind, and poise and hover and soar, and slide down upon the
edge of the blast with rigid blade-like wings that shear the air like a
knife. And when I watch him cut the ether in circles as full and fair
as the curves of a woman's bosom, I think of him less as a bird than as
some winged artist of the heights, who delights in flowing line, and
grace of form and feature; and I too feel buoyant and airy, and to my
very limbs is lent the lightness of his flight.
I love, too, the companionship of those who love the things that
I love--my spiritual brethren and fellow-worshippers; for, to my
thinking, the lovers of Art, Music, Nature, Poetry, or of Religion,
are all of them in one attitude of mind, and are animated by one
and the same spirit--I call it the Worshipping Spirit. It may body
itself forth in the homage-love of the musician for harmony, in the
artist-worship of sensuous beauty, or, highest of all, in the adoration
of Christ and of that which is spiritually perfect; and yet all these
loves are not many loves, but one love, for they are but different
expressions of one and the same spirit. Hence to turn from a chapter
of St. John to a sunset, a sonnet from Wordsworth, or a picture by
Botticelli, is to me not unseemly, but natural, for each of these
arouses, in different degrees, one and the same emotion, and that
emotion has its source in one and the same Worshipping Spirit.
I love also travel, change and adventure. I love the Botticellis, the
Fra Angelicos and the Leonardo of our own princely National Gallery,
not the less, but the better for an occasional ramble in the Louvre, or
among the galleries of Holland or Italy. I love the life, the stir and
bustle of our London streets; but I love, too, the old-world rest and
repose of Bruges or of Berne; and many a time have I lingered the long
day through in the antique streets of Antwerp, listening to the sweet
uproar and silvern wrangling that ripples, cloud-borne and wind-wafted,
from where the stately belfry soars lark-like above the world. To
me to have been happy once is to establish a claim upon happiness
thenceforward, and it is for this reason, I suppose, that I love so
to re-live the past, and to dwell on the memory of former sights and
scenes. It is true, as Frederick Robertson says, that the "first time
never returns," and shall I ever forget the exultation of the moment
when, after repeated failures, I first set foot on that inaccessible
mountain-height which I had risked my life to scale? Even now, lying
here in this sunny English meadow, I seem to re-live that moment, and
to see that scene again. Before me rises one wild and wasteful world of
white--a white on which the fierce rays of the sun beat and burn with
blinding, blazing, intolerable brilliance. Above, swimming and soaring
away into unfathomable azure, spreads the silent heaven, but around,
about, beneath, all is white, deathly-white, save only where the vast
angles of ice-crag or column deepen into a lustrous turquoise, or where
a blue mist broods athwart the mouth of yawning crevasse or cavern.
Below me and afar--so far that it seems as if I were cut off from it
for ever,--lies the sunny village that I left so many toilsome hours
ago, just visible, a wee white dot upon the green. There the air is
sweet with the breath of flowers and of the clover-fields, there, too,
are the bees, and the butterflies, and the music of rushing water.
But here, where the wasteful snows writhe and wreathe around in arch
and cave and column, vast and wonderful to behold--above, the shining
zenith, below, the sheer abyss and the treacherous descent--here in the
solemn solitude and silence of this whited wilderness, I can scarcely
believe that I am still on the earth, and of it, and that the dazzling
dome on which I am standing is but the white and swelling bosom of the
Great Mother from whom we all sprang.
Or, weary of the silence and the snow-solitudes, I close my eyes,
and lo! I am down in the valley again, and all around me spreads a
blithe and beauteous scene of serenest summer. On every breeze that
sings from sunny slope or smiling pasture is borne the windy chime and
clamour of countless cattle-bells from the hillside, but beyond that,
and the unbroken _buzz_ and _burr_, which bespeak the deep content of
innumerable bees, all is still, drowsily still. Here, if anywhere, one
can realize for a moment the deep, dreamy peacefulness that pervades
the opening lines of Mr. Swinburne's majestic "Garden of Proserpine,"--
"Here, where the world is quiet,
Here, where all trouble seems
Dead winds' and spent waves' riot
In doubtful dream of dreams;
I watch the green field growing,
For reaping folk and sowing,
For harvest time and mowing,
A sleepy world of streams."
Here are the bees, the birds, and the butterflies; here, too, nestling
cosily on hillside or meadow, are dotted dozens of umber-brown châlets,
each of which seems to suggest that "haunting sense of human history"
of which George Macdonald speaks, when he says that "many a simple home
will move one's heart like a poem, many a cottage like a melody."
And now there is a change in the picture: the drowsiness and
the dreaminess are gone, and there is the free, fresh sense of
motion, and of the open. In my ears is the journeying music of the
_diligence_--music which despite its jingle never becomes monotonous,
for every now and then the horses toss their heads to shake off the too
persistent flies, and sprinkle the air with spray of silvery sounds.
The road winds along a mountain path overlooking a lake, and the
mirroring of sunset fire upon the surface of the water, the cool clear
crystal of the blue depths that swim away below, the purple distance
of the farther hills, fast-shrouding in light-drawn mist, and lastly,
the solemn splendour of that sky-hung, soaring summit, brooding like
a presence athwart the skies,--all these make up a scene upon which I
am never weary of dwelling, and which I dearly love to recall; a scene
of such indescribable loveliness as to leave me at last bowed and
breathless, and
"Sad with the whole of pleasure."
I thought when I penned the last paragraph that I had made an end
of telling you of my love of life and of the things of it, but that
half-line which I have quoted from Rossetti's most beautiful sonnet
sets me thinking of another love of which I have not yet spoken. Need I
say that I mean the love of music? not only of the music which is "like
soft hands stealing into ours in the dark, and holding us fast without
a spoken word," but also of those sobbing soaring strains, which sound
as sadly in our ears as does the wintry flittering of dead leaves upon
a withered bough? To those who feel that every ray of morning sunlight
which strikes across their path calls them to a higher and holier
living; to whose hearts the pure petals of a primrose are as a silent
reproach against their own impurity; to whom a glint of blue sky,
gleaming out between rain-beaten tree-tops is as an aspiration towards
a loftier, lovelier life; to whom the very wind, as it sings from the
gates of morning, cries out "Unclean! unclean!"--to such, I suppose,
music must ever contain less of joy than of sadness, if, indeed, it
appeal not with a pleasure which cuts to the heart like a pain. It is
to them as if an angel from heaven had cast, for one passing second,
upon a cloud-screen drawn across the soul, a vision of what they
_might_ be, of what they were _meant_ to be, and of what in God's good
time they may yet become; and as if at the very moment when the spirit
was pouring itself forth in one unutterable cry of longing after the
Divine beauty of that ideal, there rose before them the shadow-horror
of what they really are.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 1: Then why print it here? asks the reader. For the reason,
I reply, that this Diary is the history, not only of a sin, but of a
soul; and that to leave the aspect of my subject here treated unnoticed
would be to give but a maimed and one-sided representation. I do not
think any reader who studies my sketch-outline as a whole will consider
the introduction of this chapter as inartistic.]
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