Part 9

Very early on this morning came the old knight Gurnemanz from his hermit’s hut nigh the sacred spring to look with dim eyes on the beauty of the dawning springtime; and as he looked on the flowering meadows he heard, so he thought, the cry of some wounded animal. ‘Yet animal,’ said he to himself, ‘it can scarcely be; for what four-footed thing grieves like that?’ Then searched he in the thicket by the spring, and found no animal, but the witch-woman Kundry who for long time had not set foot in the kingdom of the Holy Grail. And something of the spring moved in his old bones, and he said to her, ‘Awake, Kundry, awake! for the winter is over and past, and spring is here.’ Yet she moved not; and when she lay so still he wondered if she were dead, and his soul was sorry for her, since the curse of laughter was still not removed from her. But soon, in answer to his ministrations of pity, she moved and stirred; and when she had come to herself, she got up very quietly, saying only: ‘I serve, I serve.’ Then she busied herself in his hermit’s hut, and fetched fresh water, and plucked rushes for his floor. And he wondered, for he knew not how in the garden of sorceries she had tempted the young lad who came thither, and how he had resisted her wiles, and how from that moment there had entered into her heart the sweet and bitter pain which men call remorse, and which, indeed, is naught else but the voice of our humble Saviour speaking low and lovingly to our hard hearts.

But as Gurnemanz stood and wondered, behold, there drew near a knight clad in armour from head to foot. In his hand he held a spear, and his feet went wearily. Then did Gurnemanz tell him--for he knew not who it was--that this was the holy and peaceful kingdom of the Grail, where none went armed. And the strange knight answered him not, but he put off his armour, and the spear he set upright in the ground, and knelt down in prayer, raising his eyes to it. Then slowly to the old man came recognition, and he knew what spear that was, and he knew him who bore it--Parsifal.

So when Parsifal had prayed, he rose, and told Gurnemanz of his wanderings and of that sacred thing he bore, and how pity had enlightened him, so that he loved the sinner, yet hated the sin. And now to the kingdom of the Grail he had come again. Then, in turn, he heard of the long sorrows of the knights, and how the strength had gone from them now that they no more beheld the Holy Grail, and that for lack of the sight thereof the old King Titurel was dead. And when he heard that, pity for the sin of the world so seized him that he staggered where he stood, and he lay in swoon near the spring. Then did the old knight Gurnemanz minister to his faintness; and from his hut came Kundry, who knew Parsifal’s helm, and she knew him--that it was he whom she had tempted in Klingsor’s garden. But now he rebuffed her not, and she loosened his armour also, and laid it by; and she washed his feet in the spring, and with the hair of her head she dried them. Then Gurnemanz anointed him on the head, and when she had dried his feet Kundry anointed them also, and he rose, and saw the woman, who she was; and Christ Jesus spoke to his heart, and told him that her redemption was near, for her heart was sorry at last. So with water from the spring he baptized her, and bade her trust in her Redeemer. And as he spoke the ice and the laughter in her breast were melted, and with her hair she made a darkness for her eyes, and she wept.

Then, too, were Parsifal’s eyes opened, and he looked on the beauty of the spring-time, and talked with Gurnemanz awhile, that even on the day on which the Blessed Lord was crucified it was very fit that all Nature should rejoice, because her trespasses were pardoned, and that since the great Intercessor Himself pleaded, not the pity of the sacrifice, but the peace which passed understanding, was chiefly shed on the earth.

Yet across the joyous day there now sounded the funeral bells for the King Titurel, and soon the new-anointed King of the Grail took the Sacred Spear and went through the blossoming woods to the chapel of the Grail. There were all the knights assembled; but little gladness was theirs, for they starved for the spiritual meat and holy drink, and for the sight of the Holy Grail, which Amfortas for his wound could not reveal to them. And they cried aloud to him to show them the mystery, and for very agony he could not, but called on them to kill him. Then was brought in for burial the body of Titurel, and for a moment sorrow smote them silent.

And while they were silent there entered one who bore a spear, and there followed him the old knight Gurnemanz and a woman. He went to the couch where Amfortas lay, and with the spear he touched his wound, and the wound was healed. Then turned he to those who bore the curtained Grail and bade them unveil it; and he took the Holy Grail in his hand, and with his other hand he held the Sacred Spear, and the chapel grew dark, and from the Grail shone out the Salutation of the Lord.

But in the darkness the woman Kundry had crept to his feet, and as the radiance from the Grail grew bright she lifted her eyes to it, and her redemption was accomplished, and she died.

SEPTEMBER

The barren, sterile emotions which Art gives us, though they have the advantage of harmlessness over the emotions of Life itself, that tree of sweet and bitter fruits, bear with them the inherent defects of their unreality; and whereas there is hardly an emotion of Life which does not leave us stronger and more vivified, there is hardly an emotion of Art where one’s senses are stirred, not by actual events of joy or sorrow, but the imagined scenes thereof, which does not leave us flat and unbraced in proportion as the emotion excited has been keen. Love and death, the two great _motifs_ on which the drama of Life is based, whether they are whispered on the shivering strings, or piped on remote flutes, or thundered with the blast of trumpets and the clash of cymbals, leave us, when such actual experience has touched us, the richer for it, and stronger and more vivified. But such is not the case in the reflection of experience which Art gives us; vivid it may be--so vivid, indeed, that reality after it seems shadow-like and unreal--but its life is temporary. We thrill with ecstasies that are not really ours; our soul, in its secret place, sickens with sin or withers with renunciations which are not its own; and when the mimic spectacle is over, and we wake from the storms or sunshine of a coloured dream to a gray morning, and have to take up again the dispiriting thread of uneventful hours, it is with an intolerable sense of flatness that we at first look out over the undistinguished landscape of life. For a week, perhaps, or a fortnight, we have agonized with the throes of Titans; monstrous joys and sorrows have been our portion, and for the monstrous we take up again the minute. We have been burning with alien fires and passions not our own: the temptation of Kundry has shaken us; the sorrow of Wotan, as wide as the world and as bitter as the sea, has for the time been ours; we have been laid to sleep on a mountain-top, like Brunehilde, and, like Siegfried, have dreamed in the green shade of woods until the voice of Nature has become intelligible, and the twittering of birds articulate through the murmur of the forest. The quintessence of human emotion, in all its terror and beauty, has shaken and enthralled us. Then--then the curtain came down, and we go out again into the real world, which for the time Art has rendered shadow-like, where a hundred petty duties await us, in no way refreshed or strung up for their accomplishment, but impatient, irritated, and bored.

Such, at least, were my own feelings when on a morning I awoke and remembered (what at first seemed incredible) that there was to be no opera that day, and that the curtain was down on the stage at Bayreuth for two years. The little backwater of a town, which on arrival had seemed so instinct with such sweet repose and tranquillity, was insupportable: its tranquillity was the stagnation of decay; its repose a creeping death-trance, with gray nightmare to ride its rest. Instead of finding that the fiery dreams of the last fortnight had gilded its streets and woven themselves into its gardens and trellises, it appeared to me merely the most dismal little sun-baked suburb I had ever seen. A glorious lamp had burned there, but the lamp was quenched, and instead of a reflection of its light lingering there, there was only a smell of oil. But the immediate and vital question was what to do and where to go. I could not imagine myself finding existence tolerable anywhere, and least of all, perhaps, could I imagine myself back in England in my own quiet little house in the country town, since for the time being, at any rate, all the minute pleasures which had built up that delightful life and made it so full of happiness were incomprehensible. Not long ago a quiet morning of work, with glances into the garden to see what new plant had flowered, a game of golf over the breezy down, the face of a friend, the hundred details of my life which I have tried to describe in these pages, were overflowingly sufficient to make me more than content. But now there was exasperation in the very multitude of them. And all the time there were, so to speak, images of glorious brightness shut away in some dark place of my brain. The Valkyries were there and Parsifal, Hans Sachs, mellow and unembittered, looked on the love of others and smiled, and Walter sang of spring-time, and everywhere was melody.

Here, if you please, is egotism _in excelsis_, for I solemnly told myself that, instead of going back home like a sober and average person, I was bound--no less--to go somewhere and to do something by which I could the more fully apprehend and crystallize these images; and the grounds on which I put this to myself--that is my only excuse--were genuine. For I believe that one of the main duties of man to God and to himself is to realize beauty and understand it, and that one of his main duties to his neighbour is to produce beauty in some shape or form, moral, mental, or physical--if, indeed, there is any real difference between them. The last fortnight had given me new material; that part of me which is capable in its small way of feeling beauty had been shown wonderful things. If I went back home to the ordinary routine of daily life, I felt that I should not only do my part in it exceedingly ill, but also that the monotony and triviality of it would tarnish and dull the brightness of my new possessions. In other words, I began--a solemn prig--to think about my artistic temperament, and make plans for its well-being. And that confession made--in the hope that _Qui s’accuse s’excuse_ in some small degree--the mind-narrative can go on its way. My body--after an effusion of telegrams--sped South to the house of a friend in Capri, where it arrived two days later.

* * * * *

Here in this remote island, separated by a few leagues of sea only from that vividly modern and restless place called Naples, can be recaptured without effort something of the early days of the world, and from the steamer one steps out of all the responsibilities and codes which the stupidity and wickedness of mankind have built up, into paganism and fairyland. The gray walls compounded of priggishness and puritanism (yet knitted together with the mortar of good intentions and morality) with which this civilized century has fortressed itself fall as the walls of Jericho fell at the blast of the trumpet, and there is left sunlight and sea and the beauty of the seven days of creation, which was pronounced by God to be good.

The red, waxlike flowers of the pomegranate are in full bloom, and as evening falls they glow like hot coals over the rough stone walls that bound the path up to Capri, where the green lizards slip in and out. The smell of the vines is in the air, heavy and warm, and once or twice as I walked through the dusky trellises my heart hammered in me, for I knew that but a little more and I should see Dionysus himself, with the vine-leaves in his hair, and delicate hand holding the cup that brimmed with purple; and at noonday often have I all but seen in the briar-decked clefts of rock the great god Pan himself, to the music of whose fluting the whole world dances. Up and down their steep paths, with head erect beneath the wine-jars, walk the maidens of Capri, and something of Aphrodite lives in their wine-painted faces and moulded bosoms; and young Apollo, bare-footed and splashed to the knee in the trodden vats, strips the nut-husks off with his gleaming teeth, and looks at the passer-by with brown soft eye. He has pushed a pomegranate flower behind his ear, and his shirt is open, so that the smooth brown breast is seen. What thoughts fill day by day that gay, lazy Italian brain? He is not religious, although he goes to Mass most regularly, for from Mass he passes back again to paganism; and he only goes there because he is a child and is vaguely afraid--or would be if he did not go to Mass--of what the priests have told him about a remote bogie--for so God seems to him--who can make him burn in unquenchable fires if he does not. Nor does he weary his mind with any question of morality or code of ethics: the sun is warm to him, or, if the sun be hot, the shade is cool, and the almond fruit is sweet, and the fumes of the fermenting vats mysteriously exciting, and the maiden with whom he is in treaty to wed very fair and loving, and her dowry is good. And for the passer-by he has his bright smile, and the expression of his hope that I have enjoyed my bathe. No, he has not bathed to-day, for the work of the vintage is heavy, and he is paid by the hour. Ah, a cigarette? The signor is too kind. Will not the signor take his pomegranate flower? Indeed the signor will.

Day by day this sunny and innocent paganism gets more possession of me, and day by day the beauty of that which I saw at Bayreuth glows more brightly. Yesterday, about evening, a sudden summer squall came storming over from Posillippo, gleaming with lightning and riotous with thunder, and to me it was Wotan who steered from the north. On Monte Solaro the Valkyries awaited his coming, and when the whistling winds had passed away over our heads, while the house shuddered, and the moon again rose in a velvet sky with stars swarming thick round her, I knew that on the mountain-top Brunehilde slept within a ring of fire, waiting for the man who should claim her with his kiss. But the morning again to-day was very clear and hot, and instead of going up Mount Solaro, as I had intended, I went, as usual, down to the Bagno, a white pebbly beach with pockets of sand to lie on. I took with me a basket of figs and a flask of wine stoppered with vine-leaves, and my friend took a book which we often read and a straw case of cigarettes. And together we swam through the chrysoprase of sunlit sea far out to a brown, seaweed-covered rock. The water was very deep round it, and fathoms down something shone very brightly with wavering, subaqueous gleam, and, half laughing at myself, I dived and dived--for I knew it was the Rhinegold that shone there--until I could dive no more. Yet still I could not get deep enough. Then, having rested, we swam back, and lay on pockets of hot sand, and drank from the leaf-stoppered bottle, and ate the purple of the figs; and my friend read in the book which he had brought, beginning at the seventh chapter, and to this effect:

‘Did I seriously believe that that contemplation of God which is the prime duty laid on us by religion must, or even could, legitimately give us any touch of sadness of whatever kind, I would throw religion away as heedlessly as I throw away the end of a smoked-out cigarette, for I have no use for it. Yet although on every side, and most of all in every pulpit, I see the lamentable Puritan jowl, and hear the lamentable Puritan whine, which bids me look with horror on the sin of the world and with sorrow on its sufferings, I do not for a moment believe that this impious gabble is the result of religion, but rather of grossest irreligion, on the part of its exponents. For me, I know that the contemplation of God is my duty, and if I make it my whole and absorbing duty I cannot go very far astray. For above all things is God love, and above all things is He beauty, and the love which engirdles Him joins without break to the human love which it is our duty always to give and take, giving with both hands and taking by the armful. So, too, His beauty joins without break to the beauty of all He has made, and in the golden hair of women and in the rose-petal, in the smooth swift limbs of youth and in the faceted diamond, in the curve of a girl’s lips and in the rose-flushed clouds, in the blue chalice of the sky of morning, equally and everywhere must we look for and absorb the beauty which is implanted there.

‘It is here that Christianity, with its mournful, man-invented morality, has gone so far astray from its Founder that many Christians turn from beauty as if beauty was evil, instead of ever seeking it and worshipping it, find it where they will, until the dross of their gross minds is burned up in that fine fire. Hence, too, sprang--by “hence,” I mean from impious Puritanism--such phrases as the “temptations and dangers of physical beauty,” whereas to the man whose mind is set on God it is by and through beauty that the uttermost death-stroke is dealt to the writhing earthworm of carnalism. For the truth is that no beauty of soul, and no completeness, was ever framed on the mutilation or starvation of self, and at the Last Day the gray and pallid ascetic will find that what he thought was virtue, and what he taught as self-control, was sheer darkness of soul and purblind vision.

‘It is this that must be cast away. We are people that sit in darkness, content that our religion should make us sad, and as such we have a lesson humbly to learn from paganism, and in particular from the paganism of the Greeks, whose hierarchy of gods were enthroned in brightness, and the name thereof was Beauty. And that Beauty, the search of which to them was worship and prayer and praise, they found everywhere: in the sunlight and the blue dome of heaven; in the crisp, curly acanthus leaf which they set to twine about the capitals of their marble-hewn columns and on the necks of the vases of the dead; in the radiance of jewels and in the tragedies of heroes; and above all in the beauty of the human form. Disfigured and astray their worship often went, and it wore strange garbs, but through all its sin and its misconceptions, its thousand errors and distortions, we can see gleaming, deep below, the bright shining of its truth. And this, to my mind, gleams less brightly in the sadder worship of to-day.

‘For I doubt very much whether anybody is in the least benefited by the actual sorrow or repentance of anyone, though no doubt such--especially to sour and brooding natures--is necessary. But the best repentance, if one has sufficient vitality, will be momentary, a fiery sword-thrust, which will leave no ache or throb behind. It is better, I dare say, that a man should suffer the fires of remorse for years rather than that he should not suffer them at all, but I think that the man who is capable of throwing his remorse off and starting fresh and unwounded is the more Godlike creature, for the reason that it is infinitely better to be happy and smiling than to go frowning through the world. For sin is seldom born of a happy impulse, stare as you may, unless from a happy impulse which has been, so to speak, shut up in the dark and has gone putrid.

‘And here in this divine place’ (the book I am quoting from was written at Athens), ‘where beauty is thrown broadcast over all one sees, and happiness is so easy, it seems to me to follow as a corollary that things which a Northern and gloomy people consider wrong are less wrong. For supposing in foggy London every shopkeeper tried to cheat one, one would say that the middle class was going to the dogs. Quite so--it would be. But the middle class is not in the least going to the dogs here. Why not? For a variety of reasons: partly because there is more sun here and no fog, and because the Parthenon is near at hand. Ah, yes, indeed it is so: Gaiety covers a multitude of sins, and while they are covered, Beauty blots them out.

‘O beautiful God of this beautiful world, let me make somebody laugh to-day. Amen.’

At that point I laughed.

‘So his prayer is heard,’ said my friend. ‘Have you eaten all the figs while I have been reading?’

‘Yes; but don’t be unhappy. Remember it is your duty to be happy. You may have the last cigarette. No--we’ll toss for it.’

‘I’ll be shot if we do!’ said he.

‘Well, I’ll cut it in half.’

‘So that neither of us gets any,’ said he. ‘Give it me;’ and he very rudely snatched at it. Here ensued a scuffle, and, the bowels of the cigarette being scattered about the beach, neither of us got any, and the occasion gave rise to moral reflections. Also immoral ones. Then peace and plenty descended in the shape of a friend also coming down to bathe with a supply of fresh tobacco, and the sun was warm again and the sea blue. Then my friend (whom I must call Toby, because he objects to his real name being known, saying that I am certain to keep all the beautiful remarks for myself and give him all the idiocy) held forth:

‘The man is shallow,’ he said; ‘it is only a gospel of surfaces he preaches, and you think it profound merely because he loads it with grave words. I have done for years exactly what he preaches: I have succeeded in being always happy and usually gay, and I spend my whole life in looking for what I consider beautiful. Yet what did you call me last night? A second-hand sensualist, I think.’

‘Very likely. That is because you are not strenuous. Your pursuit of beauty must be passionate, and the pursuit must be an act of worship. Your pursuit of beauty is not an act of worship; it is more like sucking sweets.’

Toby laughed loudly and idiotically.

‘Or eating all the figs,’ said he, and the discussion ended.

It is close on noon, and only the faintest breeze is stirring. The bay is silent and waveless, except that at intervals a ripple falls like the happy sigh of some beautiful basking creature on to the hot, white pebbles of the beach. There, like a living sapphire, lies the dear sea, the thing in this world I love best and understand best, though I do not understand it at all. Never have I seen it so luminous as it is to-day; you would say that the sunlight of centuries had been lit in its depths. Gray rocks run out from the precipitous land, fringed with seaweed, and under the water the seaweed shows purple. A brown-sailed fishing-boat lies becalmed a mile out, and across the bay Naples sparkles white and remote, and only the thin line of smoke streaming upwards from Vesuvius speaks of the fierce and everlasting stir of forces which underlie the world. In the thickets which come down to the water’s edge of this tideless sea there is now no sound of life, though an hour ago they were resonant with the whirring of the cicalas. The lizards have crept out in the stillness and bask on the white stones, as still as if once more Orpheus charmed them; and high above me a hawk, with wings motionless, floats slowly, in seeming sleep, down some breeze in the upper air.