Chapter 24

The old life of Cambridge--it was all there, after the long years, just the same, full of freshness and laughter; but I came into it as a _revenant_, and yet with no sense of sadness, rather of joy that it should all be so continuous and bright. I did not want it back; I did not desire any part in it, but was merely glad to watch and remember. I thought of myself as a fitful boy full of dreams and hopes, some fulfilled, some unfulfilled; those that I have realised so strangely unlike what I expected, those unrealised still beckoning with radiant visage. I did not even desire any companionship, any interchange of thought and mood. Was it selfish, dull, unenterprising to be so content? I do not think so, for a stream of gentle emotion, which I know was sweet and which I think was pure, lapsed softly through my mind all day. It is not always thus with me, and I took the good day from the hands of God as a perfect gift; and though it would be easy to argue that I could have been better employed, a deeper instinct said to me that I was meant to be thus, and that, after all, God sends us into the world to live, though often enough our life tosses like a fretful stream among rocky boulders and under troubled skies. God can give and he can withhold; I do not question his power or his right; I mourn over the hard gifts from his hand; but when he sends me a sweet gift, let me try to realise, what I do not doubt, that indeed he wishes me well.

Once in the afternoon we stayed our boat, and I climbed to the top of the flood-bank and sate looking out over the wide fen; I saw the long dykes run eastward, the far-off churches, the distant hazy hills; and I thought of all the troubles that men make for each other, adding so wantonly to the woes of the world. And I wondered what was this strange fibre of pain so inwoven in the life of the world, wondered wistfully and rebelliously, till I felt that I drew nearer in that quiet hour to the Heart of God. I could not be mistaken. There was peace hidden there, the peace that to-day brooded over the kindly earth, all carpeted with delicate green, in the cool water lapping in the reeds, in the green thorn-bush and the birds' sudden song, even in this restless heart that would fain find its haven and its home.

LVII

To-day was oppressively hot, brooding, airless; or rather, not so much without air, as that the air was thick and viscous like honey, without the thin, fine quality. One drank rather than breathed it. Yet nature revelled and rejoiced in it with an almost shameless intoxication; the trees unfolded their leaves and shook themselves out, crumpled by the belated and chilly spring. The air was full of clouds of hurrying, dizzy insects, speeding at a furious rate, on no particular errand, but merely stung with the fierce joy of life and motion. In the road crawled stout bronze-green beetles, in blind and clumsy haste, pushing through grass-blades, tumbling over stones, waving feeble legs as they lay helpless on their backs, with the air of an elderly clergyman knocked down by an omnibus--and, on recovering their equilibrium, struggling breathlessly on. The birds gobbled fiercely in all directions, or sang loud and sweet upon the hedges. I saw half-a-dozen cuckoos, gliding silvery grey and beating the hedges for nests. Everything was making the most of life, in a prodigious hurry to live.

Indeed, I was very well content with the world myself as I sauntered through the lanes. I found a favourite place, an old clunch-quarry, on the side of a hill, where the white road comes sleepily up out of the fen. It is a pretty place, the quarry; it is all grass-grown now, and is full of small dingles covered with hawthorns. It is a great place for tramps to camp in, and half the dingles have little grey circles in them where the camping fires have been lit. I did not mind that evidence of life, but I did not like the cast-off clothing, draggled hats, coats, skirts, and boots that lay about. I never can fathom the mystery of tramps' wardrobes. They are never well-dressed exactly, but wherever they encamp they appear to discard clothing enough for two or three persons, clothing which, though I should not personally like to make use of it, still appears to be serviceable enough. I suppose it is a part of the haphazard life of the open air, and that if a tramp gets an old coat given him which is better than his own, he just leaves the old one behind him at the next halting-place.

The chalk-pit to-day was full of cowslips and daisies, the former in quite incredible profusion. I suppose it is a cowslip year. The common plants seem to have cycles, and almost each year has a succession of characteristic flowers, which have found, I suppose, the particular arrangements of the season suit them; or rather, I suppose that an outburst of a particular flower in a particular year shows that the previous year was a good seeding-time. This year has been remarkable for two plants so far, a sort of varnished green ground-weed, with a small white flower, and a dull crimson dead-nettle; both of them have covered the ground in places in huge patches. This is both strange and pleasant, I think.

I loitered about in my chalk-pit for a while; noted a new flower that sprinkled the high grassy ledges that I had never seen there before; and then sate down in a little dingle that commanded a wide view of the fen. The landscape to-day was dark with a sort of indigo-blue shadows; the clouds above big and threatening, as though they were nursing the thunder--the distance veiled in a blue-grey haze. Field after field, with here and there a clump of trees, ran out to the far horizon. A partridge chirred softly in the pastures up above me, and a wild screaming of sparrows came at intervals from a thorn-thicket, where they seemed to be holding a fierce and disorderly meeting.

I should like to be able to recover the thread of my thoughts in that quiet grassy place, because they ran on with an equable sparkle, quite without cause or reason. I had nothing particularly pleasing to think about; but the mood of retrospect and anticipation seemed to ramble about, picking sweet-smelling flowers from the past and future alike. I seemed to desire nothing and to regret nothing. My cup was full of a pleasant beverage, neither cloying nor intoxicating, and the glad spring-time tempered it nicely to my taste. There seemed to brood in the air a quiet benevolence as of a Father watching His myriad children at play; and yet as I saw a big blackbird, with a solemn eye, hop round a thorn-bush with a writhing worm festooned round his beak, I realised that the play was a deadly tragedy to some of the actors. I suppose that such thoughts ought to have ruffled the tranquil mood, but they did not, for the whole seemed so complete. I suppose that man walks in a vain shadow; but to-day it only seemed that he disquiets himself in vain. And it was not a merely selfish hedonism that thrilled me, for a large part of my joy was that we all seemed to rejoice together. As far as the eye could see, and for miles and miles, the flowers were turning their fragrant heads to the light, and the birds singing clear. And I rejoiced with them too, and shared my joy with all the brave world.

LVIII

One of the most impressive passages in Wordsworth's poems describes how he rowed by night, as a boy, upon Esthwaite Lake, and experienced a sense of awestruck horror at the sight of a dark peak, travelling, as the boat moved, beyond and across the lower and nearer slopes, seeming to watch and observe the boy. Of course it may be said that such a feeling is essentially subjective, and that the peak was but obeying natural and optical laws, and had no concern whatever with the boy. That there should be any connection between the child and the bleak mountains is, of course, inconsistent with scientific laws. But to arrive at a scientific knowledge of nature is not at all the same thing as arriving at the truth about her; one may analyse everything, peak and lake and moonlight alike, into its component elements, and show that it is all matter animated and sustained by certain forces. But one has got no nearer to knowing what matter or force is, or how they came into being.

And then, too, even from the scientific point of view, the subjective effect of the contemplation of nature by the mind is just as much a phenomenon; it is there--it demands recognition. The emotions of man are a scientific fact, too, and an even more complicated scientific fact than matter and force. When Wordsworth says that he was

"Contented if he might enjoy The things that others understand,"

he is but stating the fact that there is a mystical poetical perception of nature as well as a scientific one. Perhaps when science has done her work on elemental atoms and forces, she will turn to the analysis of psychological problems. And meanwhile it must suffice to recognise that the work of the scientist is as essentially poetical, if done in a certain spirit, as the work of the poet. It is essentially poetical, because the deeper that the man of science dives into the mystery, the darker and more bewildering it becomes. Science, instead of solving the mystery, has added enormously to its complexity by disposing of the old comfortable theory that man is the darling of Nature and that all things were created for his use. We know now that man is only a local and temporary phenomenon in the evolution of some dim and gigantic law; that he perhaps represents the highest development which that law has at present evolved, but that probably we are rather at the threshold than at the climax of evolution, and that there will be developments in the future that we cannot even dimly apprehend. If the contemplation of nature and the scientific analysis of nature are meant to have any effect upon humanity at all, it seems as though both were intended to stimulate our wonder and to torture us with the desire for solving the enigma.

Perhaps the difference between the poetical view and the scientific view of nature is this--that while scientific investigation stimulates a man to penetrate the secret as far as he can, with the noble desire to contribute what minute discoveries he may to the solution of the problem, the poetical contemplation of nature tends to produce in the mind a greater tranquillity of emotion. The scientist must feel that, even when he has devoted his whole life to investigation, he has but helped on the possibilities of solution a little. There can be no sense of personal fruition as long as the abyss remains unplumbed; and therefore nature is to him like a blind and blank mystery that reveals its secrets slowly and almost reluctantly, and defies investigation. Whereas the poet may rather feel that he at this precise point of time may master and possess the emotion that nature can provide for his soul, and that he is fully blessed if the sight of the mountain-head above the sunset cloud-banks, the green gloom of the summer woodland, the lake lashed with slanting storm, gives him a sense of profound emotion, and fills him to the brim with the pure potion of beauty. He may rest in that, for the time; he may feel that this is the message of nature to him, thus and now; and that the more perfectly and passionately that the beauty of nature comes home to him, the nearer he comes to the thought of God.

This does not, either in the case of the man of science or the poet, solve the further mystery--the mystery of complex human relationships. But the investigation of science ardently pursued is more likely to tend to isolate the explorer from his kind than the poetical contemplation of nature, for the simple reason that the scientist's business is not primarily with emotion but with concrete fact; while to the poet the emotions of love and friendship, of patriotism and duty, will all tend to be the object of impassioned speculation too. Both alike will be apt to be somewhat isolated from the ordinary life of the world, because both to the poet and the man of science the present condition of things, the problems of the day, will be dwarfed by the thought of the vast accumulation of past experience; both alike will tend to minimise the value of human effort, because they will both be aware that the phenomenon of human activity and human volition is but the froth and scum working on the lip of some gigantic forward-moving tide, and that men probably do not so much choose what they shall do, as do what they are compelled to do by some unfathomable power behind and above them. This thought may seem, to men of practical activity, to weaken the force of effective energy in both poet and scientist. But they will be content to be misunderstood on this point, because they will be aware that such activity as they manifest is the direct effect of something larger and greater than human volition, and that the busiest lives are as much the inevitable outcome of this insuperable force as their own more secluded, more contemplative lives.

The Mareway is an old track or drift-road, dating from primitive times, which diverges from the Old North Road and runs for some miles along the top of the low chalk downs which bound my southern horizon. Its name is a corruption of the word Mary--Mary's way--for there was an ancient shrine of pilgrimage dedicated to the Virgin Mary that stood on the broad low bluff still known as Chapel Hill, where the downs sink into the well-watered plain. No trace of the shrine exists, and it is not known where it stood. Perhaps its walls have been built into the little irregular pile of farm-buildings which stands close to where the way ends. In a field hard by that spot, the leaden seal of a Pope, the _bulla_ that gives its name to a Pope's bull, was once ploughed up; but the chapel itself, which was probably a very humble place, was unroofed and wrecked in an outburst of Puritanical zeal, with a practical piety which could not bear that a place should gather about itself so many hopes and prayers and holy associations. Well, it is all history, both the trust that raised the shrine and the zeal that destroyed it; and we are the richer, not the poorer, for our losses as well as for our gains.

The Mareway passes through no villages, and only gives access to a few lonely, wind-swept farms. The villages tend to nestle along the roots of the down, in sheltered valleys where the streams break out, the orchard closes and cottage gardens creeping a little way up the gentle slopes; and thus when the time came for the roads to be metalled there was little use for the high ridgeway; for its only advantage had been that it gave in more unsettled times a securer and more secluded route for the pack-horse of the pilgrim--a chance of seeing if danger threatened or risk awaited him.

And so the old road keeps its solitary course, unfrequented and untrimmed, along the broad back of the down. Here for a space it is absorbed into a plough-land, there it melts with a soft dimple into the pasture; but for the most part it runs between high thorn hedges, here with deep ruts worn by heavy farm-carts, there trodden into miry pools by sheep. In places it passes for a space through patches of old woodland, showing by the deep dingles, the pleasant lack of ordered planting, that it is a tract of ancient forest-land never disparked. Here you may see, shouldering above the irregular copse, the bulk of some primeval oak, gnarled and hollow-trunked, spared partly because it would afford no timber worth cutting, and partly, we may hope, from some tender sense of beauty and veneration which even now, by a hint of instinctive tradition haunting the rustic mind, attends the ancient tree and surrounds it with a sense of respect too dim to be called a memory even of forgotten things. To right and left green roads dip down to the unseen villages, and here and there the way itself becomes a metalled road leading to some larger highway; but even so, you can soon regain the grassy tract, following the slow curve of the placid down.

There is no sweeter place to be found on a hot summer day than the old drift-road. The hedges are in full leaf, and the undergrowth, sprinkled with flowers, weaves its tapestry over the barer stems of the quicksets. The thrushes sing clear in the tiny thickets, and the blackbird flirts with a sudden outcry in and out of his leafy harbourage. Here the hedge is all hung with briony or traveller's joy; there is a burst of wild-roses, pale discs of faintest rose-jacinth, each with a full-seeded heart. The elder spreads its wide cakes of bloom, and the rich scent hangs heavy on the air. One seems in a moment to penetrate the very heart of the deep country-side, and even the shepherd or the labourer whom one passes shares the silence of the open field, and the same immemorial quality of quiet simplicity and primitive work. It is then that there flashes upon one a sense of the inexplicable mystery of these inexpressive lives, toiling to live and living to toil, half pathetic, half dignified, wholly mysterious in the lie that they give, by their meek persistence, to restless ambitions and dreams of social amelioration. For, whatever happens, such work must still be done until the end of time; and the more that mind and soul awake, the less willing will men be to acquiesce in such uncheered drudgery. If one could but educate the simpler hearts into a joyful and tranquil consent to conditions which, after all, are simple and wholesome enough; if one could implant the contented love of field and wood, wide airs and flying clouds life, love, ease, labour, sorrow--all that is best in our experience--could be tasted here and thus; while the troubles bred by the covetous brain and the scheming mind would find no place here. It is a better lot, after all, to live and feel than to express life and feeling, however subtly and ingeniously, and I for one would throw down in an instant all my vague dreams and impossible hopes, my artificial cares and fretful ambitions, for a life unconscious of itself and an unimpaired serenity of mood. The dwellers in these quiet places neither brood over what might have been nor exercise themselves over what will be. They live in the moment, and the moment suffices them.

In the winter weather the Mareway, in its dreary and sodden bareness, is to my mind an even more impressive place. The wind comes sharply up over the shoulder of the down. The trees are all bare; the pasture is yellow-pale. The water lies in the ruts and ditches. The silence in the pauses of the wind is intense. You can hear the soft sound of grass pulled by the lips of unnumbered browsing sheep behind the hedgerow, or the cry of farmyard fowls from the byre below, the puffing of the steam-plough on the sloping fallow, the far-off railway whistle across the wide valley. The rooks stream home from distant fields, and discuss the affairs of the race with cheerful clamour in the depth of the wood. The day darkens, and a smouldering sunset, hung with gilded clouds streaked with purple bars, begins to burn behind the bare-stemmed copse.

But what is, after all, the deepest charm that invests the old road is the thought of all the sad and tender associations clothing it in the minds of so many vanished generations. Even an old house has a haunting grace enough, as a place where men have been born and died, have loved and enjoyed and suffered; but a road like this, ceaselessly trodden by the feet of pilgrims, all of them with some pathetic urgency of desire in their hearts, some hope unfulfilled, some shadow of sickness or sin to banish, some sorrow making havoc of home, is touched by that infinite pathos that binds all human hearts together in the face of the mystery of life. What passionate meetings with despair, what eager upliftings of desirous hearts, must have thrilled the minds of the feeble and travel-worn companies that made their slow journeys along the grassy road! And one is glad to think, too, that there must doubtless have been many that returned gladder than they came, with the burden shifted a little, the shadow lessened, or at least with new strength to carry the familiar load. For of this we may be sure, that however harshly we may despise what we call superstition, or however firmly we may wave away what we hold to have been all a beautiful mistake, there is some fruitful power that dwells and lingers in places upon which the hearts of men have so concentred their swift and poignant emotions--for all, at least, to whom the soul is more than the body, and whose thoughts are not bounded and confined by the mere material shapes among which, in the days of our earthly limitations, we move uneasily to and fro.

EPILOGUE