Chapter 9

Here we anchored, and lay all day long. Provisions running short, a boat had to be sent to land, and the sailors purchased, among other things, some peculiarly detestable bread--according to them, _cotto al sole_. There was not a cloud in the sky; till evening, the wind whistled above our heads, but the sea about us was blue and smooth. I sat in hot sunshine, feasting my eyes on the beautiful cliffs and valleys of the thickly-wooded shore. Then came a noble sunset; then night crept gently into the hollows of the hills, which now were coloured the deepest, richest green. A little lighthouse began to shine. In the perfect calm that had fallen, I heard breakers murmuring softly upon the beach.

At sunrise we entered the port of Brindisi.

IV.

The characteristic motive of English poetry is love of nature, especially of nature as seen in the English rural landscape. From the "Cuckoo Song" of our language in its beginnings to the perfect loveliness of Tennyson's best verse, this note is ever sounding. It is persistent even amid the triumph of the drama. Take away from Shakespeare all his bits of natural description, all his casual allusions to the life and aspects of the country, and what a loss were there! The reign of the iambic couplet confined, but could not suppress, this native music; Pope notwithstanding, there came the "Ode to Evening" and that "Elegy" which, unsurpassed for beauty of thought and nobility of utterance in all the treasury of our lyrics, remains perhaps the most essentially English poem ever written.

This attribute of our national mind availed even to give rise to an English school of painting. It came late; that it ever came at all is remarkable enough. A people apparently less apt for that kind of achievement never existed. So profound is the English joy in meadow and stream and hill, that, unsatisfied at last with vocal expression, it took up the brush, the pencil, the etching tool, and created a new form of art. The National Gallery represents only in a very imperfect way the richness and variety of our landscape work. Were it possible to collect, and suitably to display, the very best of such work in every vehicle, I know not which would be the stronger emotion in an English heart, pride or rapture.

One obvious reason for the long neglect of Turner lies in the fact that his genius does not seem to be truly English. Turner's landscape, even when it presents familiar scenes, does not show them in the familiar light. Neither the artist nor the intelligent layman is satisfied. He gives us glorious visions; we admit the glory--but we miss something which we deem essential. I doubt whether Turner tasted rural England; I doubt whether the spirit of English poetry was in him; I doubt whether the essential significance of the common things which we call beautiful was revealed to his soul. Such doubt does not affect his greatness as a poet in colour and in form, but I suspect that it has always been the cause why England could not love him. If any man whom I knew to be a man of brains confessed to me that he preferred Birket Foster, I should smile--but I should understand.

V.

A long time since I wrote in this book. In September I caught a cold, which meant three weeks' illness.

I have not been suffering; merely feverish and weak and unable to use my mind for anything but a daily hour or two of the lightest reading. The weather has not favoured my recovery, wet winds often blowing, and not much sun. Lying in bed, I have watched the sky, studied the clouds, which--so long as they are clouds indeed, and not a mere waste of grey vapour--always have their beauty. Inability to read has always been my horror; once, a trouble of the eyes all but drove me mad with fear of blindness; but I find that in my present circumstances, in my own still house, with no intrusion to be dreaded, with no task or care to worry me, I can fleet the time not unpleasantly even without help of books. Reverie, unknown to me in the days of bondage, has brought me solace; I hope it has a little advanced me in wisdom.

For not, surely, by deliberate effort of thought does a man grow wise. The truths of life are not discovered by us. At moments unforeseen, some gracious influence descends upon the soul, touching it to an emotion which, we know not how, the mind transmutes into thought. This can happen only in a calm of the senses, a surrender of the whole being to passionless contemplation. I understand, now, the intellectual mood of the quietist.

Of course my good housekeeper has tended me perfectly, with the minimum of needless talk. Wonderful woman!

If the evidence of a well-spent life is necessarily seen in "honour, love, obedience, troops of friends," mine, it is clear, has fallen short of a moderate ideal. Friends I have had, and have; but very few. Honour and obedience--why, by a stretch, Mrs. M--- may perchance represent these blessings. As for love--?

Let me tell myself the truth. Do I really believe that at any time of my life I have been the kind of man who merits affection? I think not. I have always been much too self-absorbed; too critical of all about me; too unreasonably proud. Such men as I live and die alone, however much in appearance accompanied. I do not repine at it; nay, lying day after day in solitude and silence, I have felt glad that it was so. At least I give no one trouble, and that is much. Most solemnly do I hope that in the latter days no long illness awaits me. May I pass quickly from this life of quiet enjoyment to the final peace. So shall no one think of me with pained sympathy or with weariness. One--two--even three may possibly feel regret, come the end how it may, but I do not flatter myself that to them I am more than an object of kindly thought at long intervals. It is enough; it signifies that I have not erred wholly. And when I think that my daily life testifies to an act of kindness such as I could never have dreamt of meriting from the man who performed it, may I not be much more than content?

VI.

How I envy those who become prudent without thwackings of experience! Such men seem to be not uncommon. I don't mean cold-blooded calculators of profit and loss in life's possibilities; nor yet the plodding dull, who never have imagination enough to quit the beaten track of security; but bright-witted and large-hearted fellows who seem always to be led by common sense, who go steadily from stage to stage of life, doing the right, the prudent things, guilty of no vagaries, winning respect by natural progress, seldom needing aid themselves, often helpful to others, and, through all, good-tempered, deliberate, happy. How I envy them!

For of myself it might be said that whatever folly is possible to a moneyless man, that folly I have at one time or another committed. Within my nature there seemed to be no faculty of rational self-guidance. Boy and man, I blundered into every ditch and bog which lay within sight of my way. Never did silly mortal reap such harvest of experience; never had any one so many bruises to show for it. Thwack, thwack! No sooner had I recovered from one sound drubbing than I put myself in the way of another. "Unpractical" I was called by those who spoke mildly; "idiot"--I am sure--by many a ruder tongue. And idiot I see myself, whenever I glance back over the long, devious road. Something, obviously, I lacked from the beginning, some balancing principle granted to most men in one or another degree. I had brains, but they were no help to me in the common circumstances of life. But for the good fortune which plucked me out of my mazes and set me in paradise, I should no doubt have blundered on to the end. The last thwack of experience would have laid me low just when I was becoming really a prudent man.

VII.

This morning's sunshine faded amid slow-gathering clouds, but something of its light seems still to linger in the air, and to touch the rain which is falling softly. I hear a pattering upon the still leafage of the garden; it is a sound which lulls, and tunes the mind to calm thoughtfulness.

I have a letter to-day from my old friend in Germany, E. B. For many and many a year these letters have made a pleasant incident in my life; more than that, they have often brought me help and comfort. It must be a rare thing for friendly correspondence to go on during the greater part of a lifetime between men of different nationalities who see each other not twice in two decades. We were young men when we first met in London, poor, struggling, full of hopes and ideals; now we look back upon those far memories from the autumn of life. B. writes to-day in a vein of quiet contentment, which does me good. He quotes Goethe: "_Was man in der Jugend begehrt hat man im Alter die Fulle_."

These words of Goethe's were once a hope to me; later, they made me shake my head incredulously; now I smile to think how true they have proved in my own case. But what, exactly, do they mean? Are they merely an expression of the optimistic spirit? If so, optimism has to content itself with rather doubtful generalities. Can it truly be said that most men find the wishes of their youth satisfied in later life? Ten years ago, I should have utterly denied it, and could have brought what seemed to me abundant evidence in its disproof. And as regards myself, is it not by mere happy accident that I pass my latter years in such enjoyment of all I most desired? Accident--but there is no such thing. I might just as well have called it an accident had I succeeded in earning the money on which now I live.

From the beginning of my manhood, it is true, I longed for bookish leisure; that, assuredly, is seldom even one of the desires in a young man's heart, but perhaps it is one of those which may most reasonably look for gratification later on. What, however, of the multitudes who aim only at wealth, for the power and the pride and the material pleasures which it represents? We know very well that few indeed are successful in that aim; and, missing it, do they not miss everything? For them, are not Goethe's words mere mockery?

Apply them to mankind at large, and perhaps, after all, they are true. The fact of national prosperity and contentment implies, necessarily, the prosperity and contentment of the greater number of the individuals of which the nation consists. In other words, the average man who is past middle life has obtained what he strove for--success in his calling. As a young man, he would not, perhaps, have set forth his aspirations so moderately, but do they not, as a fact, amount to this? In defence of the optimistic view, one may urge how rare it is to meet with an elderly man who harbours a repining spirit. True; but I have always regarded as a fact of infinite pathos the ability men have to subdue themselves to the conditions of life. Contentment so often means resignation, abandonment of the hope seen to be forbidden.

I cannot resolve this doubt.

VIII.

I have been reading Sainte-Beuve's _Port Royal_, a book I have often thought of reading, but its length, and my slight interest in that period, always held me aloof. Happily, chance and mood came together, and I am richer by a bit of knowledge well worth acquiring. It is the kind of book which, one may reasonably say, tends to edification. One is better for having lived a while with "Messieurs de Port-Royal"; the best of them were, surely, not far from the Kingdom of Heaven.

Theirs is not, indeed, the Christianity of the first age; we are among theologians, and the shadow of dogma has dimmed those divine hues of the early morning, yet ever and anon there comes a cool, sweet air, which seems not to have blown across man's common world, which bears no taint of mortality.

A gallery of impressive and touching portraits. The great-souled M. de Saint-Cyran, with his vision of Christ restored; M. Le Maitre, who, at the summit of a brilliant career, turned from the world to meditation and penitence; Pascal, with his genius and his triumphs, his conflicts of soul and fleshly martyrdom; Lancelot, the good Lancelot, ideal schoolmaster, who wrote grammar and edited classical books; the vigorous Arnauld, doctoral rather than saintly, but long-suffering for the faith that was in him; and all the smaller names--Walon de Beaupuis, Nicole, Hamon--spirits of exquisite humility and sweetness--a perfume rises from the page as one reads about them. But best of all I like M. de Tillemont; I could have wished for myself even such a life as his; wrapped in silence and calm, a life of gentle devotion and zealous study. From the age of fourteen, he said, his intellect had occupied itself with but one subject, that of ecclesiastical history. Rising at four o'clock, he read and wrote until half-past nine in the evening, interrupting his work only to say the Offices of the Church, and for a couple of hours' breathing at mid-day. Few were his absences. When he had to make a journey, he set forth on foot, staff in hand, and lightened the way by singing to himself a psalm or canticle. This man of profound erudition had as pure and simple a heart as ever dwelt in mortal. He loved to stop by the road and talk with children, and knew how to hold their attention whilst teaching them a lesson. Seeing boy or girl in charge of a cow, he would ask: "How is it that you, a little child, are able to control that animal, so much bigger and stronger?" And he would show the reason, speaking of the human soul. All this about Tillemont is new to me; well as I knew his name (from the pages of Gibbon), I thought of him merely as the laborious and accurate compiler of historical materials. Admirable as was his work, the spirit in which he performed it is the thing to dwell upon; he studied for study's sake, and with no aim but truth; to him it was a matter of indifference whether his learning ever became known among men, and at any moment he would have given the fruits of his labour to any one capable of making use of them.

Think of the world in which the Jansenists were living; the world of the Fronde, of Richelieu and Mazarin, of his refulgent Majesty Louis XIV. Contrast Port-Royal with Versailles, and--whatever one's judgment of their religious and ecclesiastical aims--one must needs say that these men lived with dignity. The Great Monarch is, in comparison, a poor, sordid creature. One thinks of Moliere refused burial--the king's contemptuous indifference for one who could do no more to amuse him being a true measure of the royal greatness. Face to face with even the least of these grave and pious men, how paltry and unclean are all those courtly figures; not _there_ was dignity, in the palace chambers and the stately gardens, but in the poor rooms where the solitaries of Port-Royal prayed and studied and taught. Whether or not the ideal for mankind, their life was worthy of man. And what is rarer than a life to which that praise can be given?

IX.

It is amusing to note the superficial forms of reaction against scientific positivism. The triumph of Darwin was signalized by the invention of that happy word Agnostic, which had great vogue. But agnosticism, as a fashion, was far too reasonable to endure. There came a rumour of Oriental magic, (how the world repeats itself!) and presently every one who had nothing better to do gossipped about "esoteric Buddhism"--the saving adjective sounded well in a drawing-room. It did not hold very long, even with the novelists; for the English taste this esotericism was too exotic. Somebody suggested that the old table-turning and spirit-rapping, which had homely associations, might be re-considered in a scientific light, and the idea was seized upon. Superstition pranked in the professor's spectacles, it set up a laboratory, and printed grave reports. Day by day its sphere widened. Hypnotism brought matter for the marvel-mongers, and there followed a long procession of words in limping Greek--a little difficult till practice had made perfect. Another fortunate terminologist hit upon the word "psychical"--the _p_ might be sounded or not, according to the taste and fancy of the pronouncer--and the fashionable children of a scientific age were thoroughly at ease. "There _must_ be something, you know; one always felt that there _must_ be something." And now, if one may judge from what one reads, psychical "science" is comfortably joining hands with the sorcery of the Middle Ages. It is said to be a lucrative moment for wizards that peep and that mutter. If the law against fortune-telling were as strictly enforced in the polite world as it occasionally is in slums and hamlets, we should have a merry time. But it is difficult to prosecute a Professor of Telepathy--and how he would welcome the advertisement!

Of course I know very well that all that make use of these words are not in one and the same category. There is a study of the human mind, in health and in disease, which calls for as much respect as any other study conscientiously and capably pursued; that it lends occasion to fribbles and knaves is no argument against any honest tendency of thought. Men whom one cannot but esteem are deeply engaged in psychical investigations, and have convinced themselves that they are brought into touch with phenomena inexplicable by the commonly accepted laws of life. Be it so. They may be on the point of making discoveries in the world beyond sense. For my own part, everything of this kind not only does not interest me; I turn from it with the strongest distaste. If every wonder- story examined by the Psychical Society were set before me with irresistible evidence of its truth, my feeling (call it my prejudice) would undergo no change whatever. No whit the less should I yawn over the next batch, and lay the narratives aside with--yes, with a sort of disgust. "An ounce of civet, good apothecary!" Why it should be so with me I cannot say. I am as indifferent to the facts or fancies of spiritualism as I am, for instance, to the latest mechanical application of electricity. Edisons and Marconis may thrill the world with astounding novelties; they astound me, as every one else, but straightway I forget my astonishment, and am in every respect the man I was before. The thing has simply no concern for me, and I care not a _volt_ if to- morrow the proclaimed discovery be proved a journalist's mistake or invention.

Am I, then, a hidebound materialist? If I know myself, hardly that. Once, in conversation with G. A., I referred to his position as that of the agnostic. He corrected me. "The agnostic grants that there _may_ be something beyond the sphere of man's knowledge; I can make no such admission. For me, what is called the unknowable is simply the non-existent. We see what is, and we see all." Now this gave me a sort of shock; it seemed incredible to me that a man of so much intelligence could hold such a view. So far am I from feeling satisfied with any explanation, scientific or other, of myself and of the world about me, that not a day goes by but I fall a-marvelling before the mystery of the universe. To trumpet the triumphs of human knowledge seems to me worse than childishness; now, as of old, we know but one thing--that we know nothing. What! Can I pluck the flower by the wayside, and, as I gaze at it, feel that, if I knew all the teachings of histology, morphology, and so on, with regard to it, I should have exhausted its meanings? What is all this but words, words, words? Interesting, yes, as observation; but, the more interesting, so much the more provocative of wonder and of hopeless questioning. One may gaze and think till the brain whirls--till the little blossom in one's hand becomes as overwhelming a miracle as the very sun in heaven. Nothing to be known? The flower simply a flower, and there an end on't? The man simply a product of evolutionary law, his senses and his intellect merely availing him to take account of the natural mechanism of which he forms a part? I find it very hard to believe that this is the conviction of any human mind. Rather I would think that despair at an insoluble problem, and perhaps impatience with those who pretend to solve it, bring about a resolute disregard of everything beyond the physical fact, and so at length a self-deception which seems obtuseness.

X.

It may well be that what we call the unknowable will be for ever the unknown. In that thought is there not a pathos beyond words? It may be that the human race will live and pass away; all mankind, from him who in the world's dawn first shaped to his fearful mind an image of the Lord of Life, to him who, in the dusking twilight of the last age, shall crouch before a deity of stone or wood; and never one of that long lineage have learnt the wherefore of his being. The prophets, the martyrs, their noble anguish vain and meaningless; the wise whose thought strove to eternity, and was but an idle dream; the pure in heart whose life was a vision of the living God, the suffering and the mourners whose solace was in a world to come, the victims of injustice who cried to the Judge Supreme--all gone down into silence, and the globe that bare them circling dead and cold through soundless space. The most tragic aspect of such a tragedy is that it is not unthinkable. The soul revolts, but dare not see in this revolt the assurance of its higher destiny. Viewing our life thus, is it not easier to believe that the tragedy is played with no spectator? And of a truth, of a truth, what spectator can there be? The day may come when, to all who live, the Name of Names will be but an empty symbol, rejected by reason and by faith. Yet the tragedy will be played on.

It is not, I say, unthinkable; but that is not the same thing as to declare that life has no meaning beyond the sense it bears to human intelligence. The intelligence itself rejects such a supposition; in my case, with impatience and scorn. No theory of the world which ever came to my knowledge is to me for one moment acceptable; the possibility of an explanation which would set my mind at rest is to me inconceivable; no whit the less am I convinced that there is a Reason of the All; one which transcends my understanding, one no glimmer of which will ever touch my apprehension; a Reason which must imply a creative power, and therefore, even whilst a necessity of my thought, is by the same criticized into nothing. A like antinomy with that which affects our conception of the infinite in time and space. Whether the rational processes have reached their final development, who shall say? Perhaps what seem to us the impassable limits of thought are but the conditions of a yet early stage in the history of man. Those who make them a proof of a "future state" must necessarily suppose gradations in that futurity; does the savage, scarce risen above the brute, enter upon the same "new life" as the man of highest civilization? Such gropings of the mind certify our ignorance; the strange thing is that they can be held by any one to demonstrate that our ignorance is final knowledge.

XI.