Part 1

Produced by Delphine Lettau, Ross Cooling and the Online Distributed Proofreading Canada Team at http://www.pgdpcanada.net

CONSTABLE'S MISCELLANY OF ORIGINAL & SELECTED PUBLICATIONS IN LITERATURE

SPIRITUAL

ADVENTURES

BY

ARTHUR

SYMONS

CONSTABLE·AND·CO·LIMITED·LONDON

_First Published_ 1905. _Constable's Miscellany_ 1928.

Printed in Great Britain by Lowe & Brydone Printers Limited. Park Street, N.W.1.

TO

THOMAS HARDY

CONTENTS

PAGE

A PRELUDE TO LIFE 3

ESTHER KAHN 57

CHRISTIAN TREVALGA 91

THE CHILDHOOD OF LUCY NEWCOME 125

THE DEATH OF PETER WAYDELIN 157

AN AUTUMN CITY 189

SEAWARD LACKLAND 213

EXTRACTS FROM THE JOURNAL OF HENRY LUXULYAN 253

A PRELUDE TO LIFE.

I

I am afraid I must begin a good way back if I am to explain myself to myself at all satisfactorily. I can see how the queer child I was laid the foundation of the man I became, and yet I remember singularly little of my childhood. My parents were never very long in one place, and I have never known what it was to have a home, as most children know it; a home that has been lived in so long that it has got into the ways, the bodily creases, of its inhabitants, like an old, comfortable garment, warmed through and through by the same flesh. I left the town where I was born when I was one year old, and I have never seen it since. I do not even remember in what part of England my eyes first became conscious of the things about them. I remember the hammering of iron on wood, when a great ship was launched in a harbour; the terrifying sound of cannons, as they burst into smoke on a great plain near an ancient castle, while the soldiers rode in long lines across the grass; the clop-clop of a cripple with a wooden leg; with my intense terror at the toppling wagons of hay, as I passed them in the road. I remember absolutely nothing else out of my very early childhood; I have not even been told many things about it, except that I once wakened my mother, as I lay in a little cot at her side, to listen to the nightingales, and that Victor Hugo once stopped the nurse to smile at me, as she walked with me in her arms at Fermain Bay, in Guernsey. If I have been a vagabond, and have never been able to root myself in any one place in the world, it is because I have no early memories of any one sky or soil. It has freed me from many prejudices in giving me its own unresting kind of freedom; but it has cut me off from whatever is stable, of long growth in the world.

I could not read until I was nine years old, and I could not read because I resolutely refused to learn. I declared that it was impossible; that I, at all events, never could do it; and I made the most of a slight weakness in my eyes, saying that it hurt them, and drawing tears out of my eyes at the sight of a book. I liked being read to, and I used to sit on the bed while my sister, who often had to lie down to rest, read out stories to me. I had a theory that a boy must never show any emotion, and the pathetic parts of 'Uncle Tom's Cabin' tried me greatly. On one occasion I felt my sobs choking me, and the passion of sorrow, mingled with the certainty that my emotion would betray itself, sent me into a paroxysm of rage, in which I tore the book from my sister's hands, and attacked her with my fists.

I never learned to read properly until I went to school at the age of nine. I had been for a little while to a dame's school, and learned nothing. I could only read easy words, out of large print books, and I was totally ignorant of everything in the world, when I suddenly found I had to go to school. I was taken to see the schoolmaster, whom I hated, because I had been told he had only one lung, and I heard them explaining to him how backward I was, and how carefully I had to be treated. When the day came I left the house as if I were going to the scaffold, walked very slowly until I had nearly reached the door of the school, and then, when I saw the other boys hurrying in with their satchels, and realised that I was to be in their company, to sit on a form side by side with strangers, who knew all the things I did not know, I turned round and walked away much more quickly than I had come. I took some time in getting home, and I had to admit that I had not been to school. In the afternoon I was sent back, not alone. I have no recollection of more than the obscure horror of that first day at school. I went home in the evening with lessons that I knew had to be learned. Life seemed suddenly to have become serious. Up to then I had always fancied that the grave things people said to me had no particular meaning for me; for other people, no doubt, but not for me. I had played with other boys on the terrace facing the sea; I had seen them going off to school, and I had not had to go with them. Now everything had changed. There was no longer any sea; I had to live in a street; I had lessons to learn, and other people were to be conscious how well I learned them.

It was that which taught me to read. What had seemed to me not worth doing when I had only myself to please, for I could never realise that my parents, so to speak, counted, became all at once a necessity, because now there were others to reckon with. It was discovered that in the midst of my unfathomable ignorance I had one natural talent; I could spell, without ever being taught. I saw other boys poring over the columns of their spelling-books, trying in vain to get the order of the letters into their heads. I never even read them through; they came to me by ear, instinctively. Finding myself able to do without trying something that the others could not succeed in doing at all, I felt that I could be hardly less intelligent than they, and I felt the little triumph of outdoing others. I began to learn greedily.

The second day I was at school I found the schoolroom door shut when I came into the playground, and I was told that I could not come in. I climbed the gymnasium ladder and looked through the window. Two boys were having a furious fight, and the bigger boys of the school were gravely watching it. I was completely fascinated; it was a new sensation. That day a boy bigger than myself jeered at me. I struck him. There was a rapid fight before all the school, and I knocked him down. I never needed to fight again, nor did I.

When I had once begun to learn, I learned certain things very quickly, and others not at all. I never understood a single proposition of Euclid; I never could learn geography, or draw a map. Arithmetic and algebra I could do moderately, so long as I merely had to follow the rules; the moment common sense was required I was helpless. History I found entertaining, and I could even remember the dates, because they had to do with facts which were like stories. French and Latin I picked up easily, Greek with more difficulty. German I was never able to master; I had an instinctive aversion to the mere sound of it, and I could not remember the words; there were no pegs in my memory for them to hang upon, as there were for the words of all the Romance languages. When a thing did not interest me, nothing could make me learn it. I was not obstinate, I was helpless. I have never been able to make out why geography was so completely beyond my power. I have travelled since then over most of Europe, and I have learned geography with the sight of my eyes. But with all my passion for places I have never been able to find my way in them until I have come to find it instinctively, and I suppose that is why the names in the book or on the map said nothing to me. At an examination when I was easily taking half the prizes, I have read through my papers in geography and in Euclid, and taken them up to the head-master's desk, and handed them back to him, calmly telling him that I could not answer a single question. I was never able to go in for matriculation, or any sort of general public examination, to the great dissatisfaction of my masters, because, while I could have come out easily at the top in most of the subjects, there were always one or two in which I could do nothing.

I was not popular, at any of my schools, either with the boys or with the masters, but I was not disliked. I neither hated out-of-door games nor particularly cared for them. I rather liked cricket, but never played football. I was terribly afraid of making a mistake before other people, and would never attempt anything unless I was sure that I could do it. I did not make friends readily, and I was somewhat indifferent to my friends. I cannot now recollect a single school-friend at all definitely, except one strange little creature, with the look and the intelligence of a grown man; and I remember him chiefly because he seemed to care very much for me, not because I ever cared much for him. He had a mathematical talent which I was told was a kind of genius, but, even then, he was only just kept alive, and he died in boyhood. He seemed to me different from any one else I knew, more like a girl than a boy; some one to be pitied. I remember his saying good-bye to me when they took him away to die.

What the masters really thought of me I never quite knew. I looked upon them as a kind of machine, not essentially different from the blackboard on which they wrote figures in chalk. They sometimes made mistakes about things which I knew, and this gave me a general distrust of them. I took their praise coolly, as a thing which was my due, and I was quite indifferent to their anger. I took no pains to conceal my critical attitude towards them, and one classical master in particular was in terror of me. He was not a sound scholar, and he knew that I knew it. Every day he watched me out of the corner of his eye to see if I was going to expose him, and he bribed me by lending me books which I wanted to read. I loathed him, and left him alone. One day he carried his deceit too far; there was an inquiry, and he disappeared. I have no doubt my criticism was often unjust; I had the insolence of the parvenu in learning. It had come to me too late for me to be able to take it lightly. I corrected the dictation, put Maréchal for 'Marshal' because the word was used in reference to Ney, who I knew was a Frenchman; and was furious when my pedantry lost me a mark.

During all this time I was living in the country, in small country towns in the South of England, places to which Blackmore and Kingsley had given a sort of minor fame. I remember long drives by night over Dartmoor, and the sea at Westward Ho. Dartmoor had always a singular fascination for me, partly because of its rocky loneliness, the abrupt tors on which one could so easily be surprised in the mist, and partly because there was a convict prison there, in a little town which we often had occasion to visit. The most exquisite sensation of pleasure which the drinking of water has ever given me was one hot day on Dartmoor, when I drank the coldest water there ever was in the world out of the hollow of my hand under a little Roman bridge that we had to cross in driving to Princetown. The convict settlement was at Princetown, and as we came near we could see gangs of convicts at work on the road. Warders with loaded muskets walked up and down, and the men, in their drab clothes marked in red with the broad-arrow, shovelled and dug sullenly, like slaves. I thought every one of them had been a murderer, and when one of them lifted his head from his work to look at us as we passed I seemed to see some diabolical intention in his eyes. I still remember one horrible grimace, done, I suppose, to frighten me. I feared them, but I pitied them; I felt certain that some one was plotting how to escape, and that he would suddenly drop his shovel and begin to run, and that I should see the musket pointed at him and hear the shot, and see the man fall. Once there was an alarm that two convicts had escaped, and I expected at every moment to see them jump out from behind a rock as we drove back at night. The warders had been hurrying through the streets, I had seen the bloodhounds in leash; I sickened at the thought of the poor devils who would be captured and brought back between two muskets. Once I saw an escaped convict being led back to prison; his arms were tied with cords, he had a bloody scar on his forehead, his face was swollen with heat and helpless rage.

But I have another association with Princetown besides the convicts. It was in the house of one of the warders that I first saw 'Don Quixote.' We had gone in to get some tea, and, as we waited in the parlour, and my father talked with the man, a grave, powerful person dressed in dark-blue clothes, I came upon a book and opened it, and began to read. I thought it the most wonderful book I had ever seen; I could not put it down, I refused to be separated from it, and the warder said he would lend it to me, and I might take it back with me that night. There was a thunderstorm as we drove back over the moor in the black darkness; I remember the terror of the horse, my father's cautious driving, for the road was narrow and there was a ditch on each side; the rain poured, and the flashes of lightning lit up the solid darkness of the moor for an instant, and then left us in the hollow of a deeper darkness. I clutched the book tight under my overcoat; the majesty of the storm mingled in my head with the heroic figure of which I had just caught a glimpse in the book; I sat motionless, inexpressibly happy, and when we reached home I had to waken myself out of a dream.

The dream lasted until I had finished the book, and after. I cannot remember how I felt, I only know that no book had ever meant so much to me. It was 'Don Quixote' which wakened in me the passion for reading. From that time I read incessantly, and I read everything. The first verse I read was Scott, and from Scott I turned to Byron, at twelve or thirteen, as to a kind of forbidden fruit, which must be delicious because it is forbidden. I had been told that Byron was a very, very great poet, and a very, very wicked man, an atheist, a writer whom it was dangerous to read. At school I managed to get hold of a Byron, which I read surreptitiously at the same moment that I was reading 'The Headless Horseman.' I thought 'The Headless Horseman' very fine and gory, but I was disappointed in the Byron, because I could not find 'Don Juan' in it. I knew, through reading a religious paper which condemned wickedness in great detail, that 'Don Juan' was in some way appallingly wicked. I wanted to see for myself, but I never, at that time, succeeded in finding an edition immodest enough to contain it.

II.

While all this, and much more that I have forgotten, was building up about me the house of life that I was to live in, I was but imperfectly conscious of more than a very few things in the external world, and but half awake to more than a very few things in the world within me. I lived in the country, or at all events with lanes and fields always about me; I took long walks, and liked walking; but I never was able to distinguish oats from barley, or an oak from a maple; I never cared for flowers, except slightly for their colour, when I saw many of them growing together; I could not distinguish a blackbird from a thrush; I was never conscious in my blood of the difference between spring and autumn. I always loved the winter wind and the sunlight, and to plunge through crisp snow, and to watch the rain through leaves. But I would walk for hours without looking about me, or caring much for what I saw; I was never tired, and the mere physical delight of walking shut my eyes and my ears. I was always thinking, but never to much purpose; I hated to think, because thinking troubled me, and whenever I thought long my thoughts were sure to come round to one of two things: the uncertainty of life, and the uncertainty of what might be life after death. I was terribly afraid of death; I did not know exactly what held me to life, but I wanted it to last for ever. I had always been delicate, but never with any definite sickness; I was uneasy about myself because I saw that others were uneasy about me, and my voracious appetite for life was partly a kind of haste to eat and drink my fill at a feast from which I might at any time be called away. And then I was still more uneasy about hell.

My parents were deeply religious; we all went to church, a Nonconformist church, twice on Sunday; I was not allowed to read any but pious books or play anything but hymns or oratorios on Sunday; I was taught that this life, which seemed so real and so permanent to me, was but an episode in existence, a little finite part of eternity. We had grace before and after meals; we had family prayers night and morning; we seemed to live in continual communication with the other world. And yet, for the most part, the other world meant nothing to me. I believed, but could not interest myself in the matter. I read the Bible with keen admiration, especially Ecclesiastes; the Old Testament seemed to me wholly delightful, but I cared less for the New Testament; there was so much doctrine in it, it was so explicit about duties, about the conduct of life. I was taught to pray to God the Father, in the name of God the Son, for the inspiration of God the Holy Ghost. I said my prayers regularly; I was absolutely sincere in saying them; I begged hard for whatever I wanted, and thought that if I begged hard enough my prayer would be answered. But I found it very difficult to pray. It seemed to me that prayer was useless unless it were uttered with an intimate apprehension of God, unless an effort of will brought one mentally into His presence. I tried hard to hypnotise myself into that condition, but I rarely succeeded. Other thoughts drifted through my mind while my lips were articulating words of supplication. I said, over and over again, 'O Lord, for Jesus' sake!' and even while I was saying the words with fervour I seemed to lose hold of their meaning. I was taught that being clever mattered little, but that being good mattered infinitely. I wanted to want to be good, but all I really wanted was to be clever. I felt that this in itself was a wickedness. I could not help it, but I believed that I should be punished for not being able to help it. I was told that if I was very good I should go to heaven, but that if I was wicked I should go to hell. I saw but one alternative.

And so the thought of hell was often in my mind, for the most part very much in the background, but always ready to come forward at any external suggestion. Once or twice it came to me with such vividness that I rolled over on the ground in a paroxysm of agony, trying to pray God that I might not be sent to hell, but unable to fix my mind on the words of the prayer. I felt the eternal flames taking hold on me, and some foretaste of their endlessness seemed to enter into my being. I never once had the least sensation of heaven, or any desire for it. Never at any time did it seem to me probable that I should get there.

I remember once in church, as I was looking earnestly at the face of a child for whom I had a boyish admiration, that the thought suddenly shot across my mind: 'Emma will die, Emma will go to heaven, and I shall never see her again.' I shivered all through my body, I seemed to see her vanishing away from me, and I turned my eyes aside, so that I could not see her. But the thought gnawed at me so fiercely that a prayer broke out of me, silently, like sweat: 'O God, let me be with her! O God, let me be with her!' When I came out into the open air, and felt the cold breeze on my forehead, the thought had begun to relax its hold on me, and I never felt it again, with that certainty; but it was as if a veil had been withdrawn for an instant, the veil which renders life possible, and, for that instant, I had seen.

When my mother talked to me about pious things, I felt that they were extraordinarily real to her, and this impressed me the more because her thirst for this life was even greater than mine, and her hold on external things far stronger. My father was a dryly intellectual, despondent person, whose whole view of life was coloured by the dyspepsia which he was never without, and the sick headaches which laid him up for a whole day, every week or every fortnight. He was quite unimaginative, cautious in his affairs, a great reader of the newspaper; but he never seemed to me to have had the same sense of life as my mother and myself. I respected him, for his ability, his scholarship, and his character; but we had nothing akin, he never interested me. He was severely indulgent to me; I never knew him to be unkind, or even unreasonable. But I took all such things for granted, I felt no gratitude for them, and I was only conscious that my father bored me. I had no dislike for him; an indifference, rather; perhaps a little more than indifference, for if he came into the room, and I did not happen to be absorbed in reading, I usually went out of it. We might sit together for an hour, and it never occurred to either of us to speak. So when he spoke to me of my soul, which he did seriously, sadly, with an undertone of reproach, my whole nature rose up against him. If to be good was to be like him, I did not wish to be good.

With my mother, it was quite different. She had the joy of life, she was sensitive to every aspect of the world; she felt the sunshine before it came, and knew from what quarter the wind was blowing when she awoke in the morning. I think she was never indifferent to any moment that ever passed her by; I think no moment ever passed her by without being seized in all the eagerness of acceptance. I never knew her when she was not delicate, so delicate that she could rarely go out of doors in the winter; but I never heard her complain, she was always happy, with a natural gaiety which had only been strengthened into a kind of vivid peace by the continual presence of a religion at once calm and passionate. She was as sure of God as of my father; heaven was always as real to her as the room in which she laughed and prayed. Sometimes, as she read her Bible, her face quickened to an ecstasy. She was ready at any moment to lay down the book and attend to the meanest household duties; she never saw any gulf between meditation and action; her meditations were all action. When a child, she had lain awake, longing to see a ghost; she had never seen one, but if a ghost had entered the room she would have talked with it as tranquilly as with a living friend. To her the past, the present, and the future were but moments of one existence; life was everything to her, and life was indestructible. Her own personal life was so vivid that it never ceased, even in sleep. She dreamed every night, precise, elaborate dreams, which she would tell us in the morning with the same clearness as if she were telling us of something that had really happened. She was never drowsy, she went to sleep the moment her head was laid on the pillow, she awoke instantly wide awake. There were things that she knew and things that she did not know, but she was never vague. A duty was as clear to her as a fact; infinitely tolerant to others, she expected from herself perfection, the utmost perfection of which her nature was capable. It was because my mother talked to me of the other world that I felt, in spite of myself, that there was another world. Her certainty helped to make me the more afraid.