Part 11

And yet, even though we are not quite the right recipients, it is well for us that such gleams come. Who shall say that an existence which is capable of being even thus temporarily lifted above itself is not for that very reason a goodly and a desirable one? What proportion of discomfort, what proportion even of sheer pain, of numbing weakness, of crushing sorrow were not worth enduring so long as one knew--knew as a matter of absolute certainty--that they would be now and again pierced by gleams of such celestial potency? The hard thing, and the thing that for all mortals will always be hardest to bear patiently, is--not the uncertainty even--so much as the desperate transitoriness of such visitations. Almost before we have time to see and to confer with them, our enchanting visitors have spread out their gauzy wings, and have vanished beyond recall. They are gone, but where they are gone to, or when they will next revisit us we have not the faintest notion. Ariel and Titania have disappeared into the abyss, but Caliban and Bottom on the contrary remain permanently behind, and are continually at our elbows. At this very moment, and while I am still thinking about it, the light is shifting rapidly. The day has grown older; more crowded. A thousand bloated nothings have sprung up like so many fungi in the path. Shadows, slight, but impenetrable, have gathered over the foreground. My own mood too has shifted, and what a while ago seemed so clear has grown fainter and fainter, and seems to be upon the point of disappearing altogether. The good little hour has passed!

JULY 7, 1900

Once more the great outside tide of life has beaten down the little barricades that one erects against it, and has come thundering in over them in an avalanche, tossing them to right and left, as though they were so many straws in its path! This week that has just ended has been for millions--for all Europe, for the whole world in fact--stamped with the impress of what one would fain still hope to be an incredible horror. Personally this Pekin nightmare has centred itself for me in the fact that E. B. was reported to be still there. Recently she was known to have been there, and whether she had, or had not left seemed at first impossible to ascertain. At last, though not until after days of suspense, of uncertainty, of growing hopelessness, came the telegram--“Safe at Hong Kong,” and the relief is greater than it is easy, without exaggeration, to put into words.

So great has been that relief that for me it has perceptibly altered the whole situation, as I suppose it was inevitable that it should do. Nevertheless, the tragedy as a tragedy remains, and if anything seems to be deepening daily. The newspapers certainly do nothing to minimise it; perhaps they would say that it was hardly their province to do so! Such headings, however, as “The Chinese Cawnpore!” “Last shots reserved for the women!” “White children carried on spears!” seem to be rather more than it is their absolute duty to offer to their readers! As regards hope, no one appears to have any left, so that it seems mere optimism to cherish any. A ray reached us two days ago from our neighbour S. B., who had heard of a reassuring telegram from someone in Sir R. Hart’s employment in Pekin. No such gleam, however, seems to have travelled down to the murky depths of our newspapers, so that one can only fear that there must be some mistake.

It is with a sort of angry helplessness, mixed with an instinctive feeling of self-defence, that one turns from such accumulated, such carefully elaborated horrors, and tries to forget them in whatever little pursuit happens to lie nearest to one’s hand. It is not particularly creditable to one’s humanity that one should succeed in doing so, and there is no denying that one’s attitude is essentially that of a kitten, or other small Unreasonable, which runs after its ball, though disaster may be hovering, or conflagration about to involve, it and everyone else. Happily, we are made so, just as surely as the kitten is so made. We catch at straws, and in nine cases out of ten the straw saves us. Were it not for this same blessed prerogative of being interested in trifles, what, one sometimes asks oneself, would become of all our poor wits? or where on a journey so full of loss and sorrow, shock and trouble, would they have got to before the final goal is reached?

JULY 14, 1900

With a mind full of China, and its abominations, I happened this afternoon to take up _The Opium Eater_, and opened full upon the passages describing the results of the Malay’s visit. What imagery to be sure! What an amazing rhetorician! Certainly if all life were the feverish dream, the half nightmare, one is tempted sometimes to call it, no greater exponent of its terrors has ever existed than Thomas de Quincey. Take this as a prelude.

“The Malay has been a frightful enemy for months. I have been every night, through his means, transported into Asiatic scenes. I know not whether others share my feelings on this point, but I have often thought that if I were compelled to forego England, and to live in China, and among Chinese manners, and modes of life and scenery I should go mad. The causes of my horror lie deep, and some of them must be common to others. Southern Asia in general is the seat of awful images and associations. As the cradle of the human race it would alone have a dim and reverential feeling connected with it. But there are other reasons.... The mere antiquity of Asiatic things, of their institutions, histories, modes of faith, etc., is so impressive, that to me the vast age of the race and name overpowers the sense of youth in the individual. A young Chinese seems to me an antediluvian man renewed.... It contributes much to these feelings that Southern Asia is and has been for thousands of years, the part of the earth most swarming with human life. The great _officina gentium_. Man is a weed in these regions. The vast empires into which the enormous population of Asia has always been cast, give a further sublimity to the feelings associated with all Oriental names and images. In China, over and above what it has in common with the rest of Southern Asia, I am terrified by the modes of life, by the manners, and the barrier of utter abhorrence and want of sympathy, placed between us by feelings deeper than I can analyse. I could sooner live with lunatics, or brute animals.”

Now for the dream proper.

“Under the connecting feeling of tropical heat and vertical sunlights, I brought together all creatures, birds, beasts, reptiles, all trees and plants, usages and appearances, that are found in all tropical regions, and assembled them together in China, or Indostan. From kindred feelings I soon brought Egypt and all her gods under the same law. I was stared at, grinned at, hooted at, chattered at, by monkeys, by paraquets, by cockatoos. I ran into pagodas; and was fixed for centuries at the summit, or in secret rooms; I was the idol; I was the priest; I was worshipped; I was sacrificed; I fled from the wrath of Brahma through all the forests of Asia: Vishnu hated me; Seeva laid wait for me. I came suddenly upon Isis and Osiris; I had done a deed, they said, which the ibis and the crocodile trembled at. I was buried for a thousand years in stone coffins, with mummies and sphinxes, in narrow chambers, at the heart of eternal pyramids. I was kissed with cancerous kisses by crocodiles, and laid, confounded with all unutterable slimy things, amongst reeds and Nilotic mud.”

JULY 28, 1900

The last ten or twelve days have been different from any that I ever remember before. Circumstances have made them so, yet it has seemed as though there were something about themselves that has, as it were, affected those circumstances. For one thing it has been extraordinarily hot, so that we have been thankful for every breath of air that has travelled to us across the downs. The new little water-lily pond has been most kindly, and has contrived to produce an amazing illusion of coolness, while the oaks in whose shadow it lies have provided us with the reality of shade. We two have sat day after day for hours beside it, and the minutes have slipped along, like bubbles upon some very slow stream. There is a strange sense of unreality over everything; a sense that everything is very near its end. The hours of a summer’s day, and the years of a man’s life seem to be much the same thing, and the one hardly longer than the other. The chimes from the clock across the valley are almost the only sounds that break in upon our stillness, for the birds sing very little just now. It has been a most strange fortnight; curiously unreal; extraordinarily dreamy and spectral-like. One by one its days have slipped by, very, very slowly, yet now that they are almost gone I say to myself--“How terribly swiftly!”

AUGUST 1, 1900

There are times--surely we all know them--when the injustices of life, of the individual destiny, seem more than can be silently endured. “Why should this? and this? and this be?” we ask. “To what end such superfluous happiness heaped upon one head, such equally uncalled-for refusals of it consigned to another? What does it mean? or who is the better for such unendurable partiality?”

The question is the oldest of all questions, yet it is the question of to-day, as it will be the question of to-morrow, and of many more to-morrows. Job asked it about himself, as some of us ask it about those whom we know to be infinitely better than ourselves. Moreover it is not alone the apparent injustice of a life as a whole, but of the several parts of it, that we murmur at. There are acts of courage, of silent endurance, of unrecognised heroism, which only need to be performed in some more conspicuous fashion, or upon a larger field, to awaken the whole world to admiration. Yet they pass away unnoticed; oblivion enshrouds them, and they are never so much as heard of.

When such suppressions, such seeming injustices, occur at the beginning of things, while the sun is still high, and Time seems a friendly factor, one is able to reassure oneself. One says--“Wait a little longer!” “The time will come!” When such illusion, however, is no longer possible; when the sands have run out, or been scattered in mid-career; what is one to say _then_? What faith, what philosophy, what stoicism, or what mixture of all three, will enable one to accept it without complaint?

AUGUST 4, 1900

Of the vicissitudes of this year there seem to be no end! After we have mourned over these victims of Pekin as men mourn over those for whom there is absolutely no hope; after we have enumerated their names, like the names upon a death-roll, and all but held a national funeral service in their memory; and after we have followed their last moments; gloried in its heroism; wept over its tragedy; starved, sighed, bled, almost died with them; lo, it appeareth now that none of them are dead at all! Was ever an entire continent in the history of the world so mercilessly defrauded before of its tears?

I have no notion how they may feel about it themselves, but my impression is that were I the responsible head of a daily newspaper I should prefer to immure myself from society for the next few days! There is a pile of such papers at this moment in my sanctum, which I have just been turning over, and reading a few of the headlines with some little inward entertainment. Not that I pretend for a moment to have been one whit wiser, or less lugubrious myself! Far from it. We have all been a flight of ravens and screech-owls together, only that some of us have screeched and flapped our wings a little more energetically, and in rather a more public fashion than the rest!

AUGUST 6, 1900.

Few of the minor experiences of life are, I think, more consoling than to come across some small link in the chain of natural law, over the right connections of which one has long groped blindly. Such a little bit of good luck befell me only yesterday. In itself it was what one calls the veriest trifle; simply a question as to the relationship of certain obscure organisms, profoundly uninteresting to the world at large. To myself it seemed, for a while at all events, to be of some little consequence. It imparted--for fully ten minutes--an entirely new impression of a vast, a peaceful, and a most orderly progress. It seemed to open up vistas into the perfection, into the breadth, no less than the complexity, of that great scheme of Life, of which we ourselves form a part. It came as a sudden vision, as a conception of possibilities--I hardly know what to call it--the vividness of which it would be difficult without exaggeration to put into words.

For those who, like myself, are the mere irresponsible camp-followers of science, the importance of any given solution seems often to be less in what it actually teaches us, than in what it allows us indirectly to guess at. The new fact may or may not be important, but the ideas that it starts in our minds can hardly fail to be so. In the imaginative realm there is literally no limit to the revelations to which the tiniest of natural phenomena may not serve as an introduction. The fact itself may be the minutest of facts; a mere pin-point, a scarce perceptible chink of light, but it is a chink in the walls as it were of a great cathedral of discovery, the doors of which may, for anything one knows to the contrary, be thrown widely open to oneself, and to everyone else to-morrow.

This, if I am not misleading myself, is the real attractiveness of every pursuit which has the elucidation of Nature for its end and aim; one perhaps most felt, or at all events most enjoyed, by the more ignorant of her votaries. Properly directed ignorance is in truth a most desirable haze, and when some stray beam does traverse its obscurity, how great is the illumination which follows! What may not be possible where there is no dead-weight of fact to keep our feet upon the solid earth; no panoply of unescapable knowledge to bid our pleasant fancies nay?

Even for those less comfortably unfettered by circumstances, it must be an alleviation surely of the prose of life that in this region of the ideas no man can ever positively say what may not be in store for him. However tame, however dull his foreground, there is always the chance of something ahead; something that when it comes, will sweep his thoughts away with it to the very verge of the horizon. There is never a day, there is hardly an hour, in which some new idea may not be upon its road. Now a really new idea for the time being remakes life. It is a solvent which dissolves all old impressions, and rebuilds them anew. Men live by ideas, as surely, almost as literally, as they live by bread, and a world into which no new idea ever entered would be a dead world, tenanted only by corpses.

The strange thing is that we should any of us doubt this, or that in those innermost citadels which we call our brains, we should really very greatly care about anything else. Surely for people so oddly circumstanced as ourselves the quest for ideas, ever larger, ever more comprehensive ideas, is the only perfectly rational occupation? Stranded upon the shores of the Unknown; rocked to and fro by all the winds of mystery; ignorant of whence precisely we came, whither precisely we are going; for people in so strange a position as this to be continually on the quest for some new intimation, for some further hint, or indication, seems as natural as for shipwrecked sailors to be for ever on the watch for sails.

I remember--it is years since, yet the impression is as clear as though it were yesterday--one who, during the vigils of a sleepless night, slipped suddenly into a dream. And in that dream it seemed to the dreamer as though he stood upon a narrow-topped hill, encompassed by all the stars, and lifted high in air above the slumbering earth. And, looking upwards, he was aware of a sky, immeasurably vaster and higher, or so he thought, than he had ever observed any sky to be before. And, still gazing into that vast sky, the dreamer perceived that it was filled with what at first he took to be snowflakes. Looking more closely he saw that, if snowflakes, then they were snowflakes lit up by all the colours of the prism. And one of these snowflakes, just then slowly descending, touched the dreamer’s head with a soft, but quite a sensible impact. And as it touched him, lo, a new thought sprang up, alive, full-fledged, wonderful, within his brain; a thought absolutely unsuspected by him before; vast, formative, irresistible, like some new law of Evolution, or of Gravitation. And, with it, light seemed to break in upon him from every side at once, and a great joy, and a sense of elasticity such as he had never known before. And a voice said--“These are the thoughts with which this earth of yours has been built up, and all yonder other earths, of which this is one of the very least.” And another voice said--“They are as the sands of the sea for multitude, and of the secrets hidden in them, and of the wonder, and satisfaction, and delight of those secrets there is no end.”

Then that sleeper awoke, and, though the night was still long and dark, the thought of his dream remained with him, and was like the song of a thrush in his heart until the morning.

AUGUST 10, 1900

Life; Life the indomitable, the multifarious; Life, as it rises in the scale, becoming conscious of itself--the thought of this recurs again and again to one’s mind, and each time with a greater sense of power, and of a sort of consolation. What limit need be assigned, one asks oneself, to its capabilities, to the endless transformations, to the possibilities, as yet unguessed at, which may have been destined for it by its Inventor from the beginning of things? If the mere personal consciousness, the precarious personal life, is rarely without an element of discomfort, in this larger sense that personal life all but disappears, and with the loss of it comes--not perhaps actual joy, that could hardly be looked for--but at least a great exhilaration, an extraordinary sense of width, of serenity, and of detachment.

As the mind descends deeper and deeper into that serene abyss it seems to shake itself free for the time being from all that confused, battling, disturbing sea in which its daily lot is cast. As that downward course continues, all that appertains to the surface becomes more and more dreamlike, as it might to a diver, and the mind widens and strengthens insensibly with each descending fathom. “Life” is indeed a marvellous shibboleth; a spell that unlocks innumerable doors; a word of varied and manifold meanings. Merely to write it down, merely to utter it, seems to clear the atmosphere. Mental fogs of all kinds at that touch roll up their dingy tents, and depart. An impression of morning--fresh, imperishable morning--hovers around it; youth, health, fecundity, vigour belong to it. All the winds of Spring--“driving sweet buds, like flocks to feed in air"--rush after it, and fan it on its course. The sense of the good green earth, and of all those good green things that belong to it, pours in a stream of joy through even the dreariest veins. “And if one little planet is able to show it in this inexhaustible profusion, what of all the other planets?” one thinks. “What of those countless other worlds, all belonging to the same great plan; all built and upheld by the same architectonic hand; all strung, as it were, upon one great string, and vibrating eternally to a single immortal touch?”

AUGUST 18, 1900

Standing, shortly after dusk yesterday evening, upon the edge of the slope which drops suddenly into the valley enclosing our village and its church, my ear was filled with a variety of sounds, all of them familiar, yet none somehow quite recognisable; all with a certain strangeness about them, born no doubt of the mist and of the oncoming obscurity.

Sounds which reach our ears after nightfall never seem to be quite the same sounds as in the daytime, even though they may be produced by exactly the same means. Commonplace in reality, they are never perfectly commonplace in their effect. They awaken curious echoes. They bring back odd, and half-vanished thoughts. They play the same rather uncanny tricks with the brain as they doubtless did in the days of the Patriarchs, or of the Shepherd Kings. The bark of a dog half a mile away will conjure up visions of hunting scenes, swift and phantasmagoric as the pageant of a dream. The sharp “click-clack” of a horse’s hoof; the crunching of a waggon-wheel; most of all, perhaps, the thin, lamentable, bleating of sheep floating up from the valley; all these set vibrating fibres within us which have their roots as far back in the history of the race as anything well can be. Our life of to-day, with all its crowded impedimenta, tends at such moments to sink suddenly, and to disappear. We realise--if only during the duration of a lightning flash--that we are standing, not in the least upon any apex, merely upon some small peak on one of the sides of the great organic mountain. That we are looking at a scene which has witnessed the arrival of our race, as of other races, upon it, and which will assuredly one day witness its departure again. That all that we can discern is but, as it were, a few front streaks upon the surface of an ocean, rolling on without bourne or limit. And at that realisation the mind is apt to start, and to shiver instinctively, as before some yawning gulf, opening unexpectedly below the feet.

Such little mental peaks afford, in truth, but a dizzy standing ground, and are best, perhaps for that reason, not ascended too often. Just as the trade of the astronomer is said to need a sound leaven of stolidity before it can be safely embarked upon, so only a very strong head can with safety peer long into a void, hardly less perturbing and intoxicating than that into which it is his business to pry. Those capricious little particles, upon which all our comfort depends, dislike it, and they are probably right in doing so. It is true that what we call the Past, that which is entirely put away, and done with, might seem to be a harmless enough subject of contemplation. So conceivably it might be, were it not for the fact that in following it one is apt to find oneself brought suddenly face to face with the other, and the far more formidable brother; the one whose kingdom lies, not behind us, but ahead. At those dim barriers all real advance is inexorably stayed; into the recesses beyond them no secular lantern has ever peered; while even our most authoritative, our most convinced guides, can at best assure us as to its geography with hesitating, and often curiously conflicting voices.

To abstain from all attempts at peering into that obscurity is more perhaps than can be asked of mortals. The less of such peerings we indulge in, however, surely the better, because the saner, because, also, the more trustful. Of all the cataracts of words, poured in verbal Niagaras over this momentous topic, have there been many, I wonder, wiser or truer than these of old Hooker? I write them down as they have lodged in my memory; probably therefore quite incorrectly.

“Rash were it for the feeble mind of man to wade far into the doings of the Almighty. For though ’tis Joy to know Him, and Pride to make mention of His name, yet our deepest Wisdom is to know that we know Him not, and our truest Homage is our Silence.”

AUGUST 25, 1900