Leaves in the Wind
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But whatever the explanation of that little scene in the bus, there is no doubt that as the long strain goes on it plays havoc with our nerves and our tempers. We are tired and angry with this mad world, and since we cannot visit our anger on the enemy we visit it very unreasonably on each other. The shattered vase of life lies in ruins at our feet, and there is an overmastering temptation to grind the fragments to dust rather than piece them together for the healing future to restore. We have lost faith in men, in principles, in ideals, in ourselves, and are subdued to the naked barbarism into which civilisation has collapsed. Religion was never at so low an ebb, so openly repudiated, or, what is worse, so travestied by charlatans and blackguards. I heard the other day the description of an address at a public gathering by a person who mixed up his blasphemies about some new god of the creature's imagining with obscenities that would be impossible on a music-hall stage.
In the Divorce Court last week the counsel for the lady in the case gravely advanced the plea that in these days, when men are dying by the million in mud and filth, the women at home must not be denied their excitements, their flirtations and their late suppers. When Mars is abroad Venus must be abroad, too. Murder is the sole business of the world and lust is its proper pastime. Take a glance at any bookstall and note the garbage which lines its shelves. Dip into the morass of the popular Sunday newspapers with their millions of circulation, and see the broth of foulness in which the great public take their weekly intellectual bath. The tide has overwhelmed the Stage as it has overwhelmed the Church, and a wild levity companions our illimitable tragedy.
It is no new phenomenon. In time of peril humanity always reveals these extravagant contrasts, and Boccaccio, with the true instinct of the artist, set his tales of merriment and licentiousness against the background of a city perishing of plague. We live at once more intensely and more frivolously. The pendulum of our emotions swings violently from extreme to extreme and a defiant exhilaration answers the mood of depression and anxiety. I can conceive that that couple in the bus were quite merry when they saw the sun shine in the morning and read that Vimy Ridge had been won. There is, in Pepys' Diary, a delightful illustration of the swift transitions by which the mind in times of stress seeks to keep its equipoise. It is the 10th of September (Lord's Day), 1665. The plague is at its worst and the whole city seems doomed. The war with the Dutch is going badly. Mrs. Pepys's father is dying, and everything looks black. But there comes news of a success at sea and Pepys goes down the river to meet Lord Brouncker and Sir J. Minnes at Greenwich —
– where we supped [there was also Sir W. Doyly and Mr. Evelyn]; but the receipt of this news did put us all into such an extasy of joy that it inspired into Sir J. Minnes and Mr. Evelyn such a spirit of mirth that in all my life I never met so merry a two hours as our company this night. Among other humours, Mr. Evelyn's repeating of some verses made up of nothing but the various acceptations of may and can, and doing it so aptly upon occasion of something of that nature, and so fast, did make us all die almost with laughing, and did so stop the mouth of Sir J. Minnes in the middle of all his mirth that I never saw any man so out-done in all my life; and Sir J. Minnes's mirth to see himself out-done was the crown of all our mirth.
Isn't that a wonderful picture? And think of the grave John Evelyn having this gaiety in him! You will read the whole of his Diary and not get one smile from his severe countenance. I had the curiosity to turn to his own record of the same time. He has no entry for the 10th, but two days before, he says:
Came home, there perishing neere 10,000 poor creatures weekly; however, I went all along the City and suburbs from Kent Streete to St. James's, a dismal passage, and dangerous to see so many coffins expos'd in the streetes, now thin of people; the shops shut up and all in mourneful silence, as not knowing whose turn might be next.
And then, at the receipt of a bit of good news this austere man is seized with "such an extasy of joy" that he gives Pepys the merriest evening of his life. And Pepys was a good judge of merry evenings.
The truth is expressed somewhere in Hardy's works, where he says that the soul's specific gravity is always less than that of the sea of circumstances into which it is cast, and rises unfailingly to the surface. There comes to my mind as illustrating this truth a passage in that great and moving book "Under Fire" – the most tremendous picture of the horror and squalor of war ever painted by man. One of the squad of French soldiers with whom the book deals is in the trenches near Souchez and the Vimy Ridge. It is before the English had taken over that part of the line. There is a quiet time and some of the men get on companionable terms with the enemy. This man's wife and child are in Lens, just behind the German lines. He has not seen them for eighteen months, and out of sheer good nature the German soldiers lend him a uniform and smuggle him into a coal fatigue which is going into Lens. He passes in the disguise among his enemy companions by his own house and sees through the open door his wife and the widow of a comrade sitting at their work. In the room with them are two German non-commissioned officers, and his child is on the knee of one of them.
But the thing that strikes him to the heart is the fact that his wife is smiling as she talks to the non-coms. – "Not a forced smile, not a debtor's smile, non, a real smile that came from her, that she gave." He did not doubt her affection or her loyalty, and when the bitterness had passed and he was back in his lines and telling his comrade of the adventure, he defended her from the criticism of his own mind in words of extraordinary beauty:
"She's quite young, you know; she's twenty-six. She can't hold her youth in, it's coming out of her all over, and when she's resting in the lamplight and the warmth, she's got to smile; and even if she burst out laughing, it would just simply be her youth singing in her throat. It isn't on account of others, if truth were told; it's on account of herself. It's life. She lives. Ah, yes, she lives and that's all. It isn't her fault if she lives. You wouldn't have her die? Very well, what do you want her to do? Cry all day on account of me and the Boches? Grouse? One can't cry all the time, nor grouse for eighteen months. Can't be done. It's too long, I tell you. That's all there is to it."
In that poignant story we touch the root of the matter. We live. And, living, the light and shadow of life play across the surface of ourselves, though deep down in our hearts there is the sense of the unspeakable tragedy of things. We may wonder that we can be happy and may be rather ashamed of it, but "we live" and we cannot deny our natures. We may, like Miss Havisham, draw down the blinds, shut out the world, and dwell in darkness, but then we cease to live and become mad. We must laugh if only to keep our sanity, and nature arranges that we shall laugh even in the face of terrible things. There was a good deal of truth in the remark of the French lady to Boswell that "Our happiness depends on the circulation of the blood." The wild current of affairs sweeps us on whithersoever it will, but in our separate little eddies we whirl around and find relief in private distractions and pleasures that seem independent of the great march of events. Jane Austen wrote her novels in the midst of the Napoleonic wars, yet I cannot recall one hint in them of that world-shaking event. She mentioned a battle in one of her letters, but then only a little callously. And a friend of mine told me the other day that he had had the curiosity to turn up the newspaper files of the time of Austerlitz and found that the public were apparently all agog, not about the battle that had changed the current of the world, but about the merits of the Infant Roscius. It is well that we have this faculty of detachment and independent life. If there were no private relief for this public tragedy the world would have gone mad. But perhaps you will say it has gone mad…
Let me recall by way of envoi that fine story in Montaigne. When the town of Nola was destroyed by the barbarians, Paulinus, the bishop, was stripped of all he possessed and taken prisoner. And as he was led away he prayed, "O Lord, make me to bear this loss, for Thou knowest that they have taken nothing that is mine: the riches that made me rich and the treasures that made me worthy are still mine in their fullness."
ON WORD-MAGIC
I see that a discussion has arisen in the Spectator on the "Canadian Boat Song." It appeared in Blackwood's nearly a century ago, and ever since its authorship has been the subject of recurrent controversy. The author may have been "Christopher North," or his brother, Tom Wilson, or Gait, or the Ettrick Shepherd, or the Earl of Eglinton, or none of these. We shall never know. It is one of those pleasant mysteries of the past, like the authorship of the Junius Letters (if, indeed, that can be called a mystery), which can never be exhausted because they can never be solved. I am not going to offer an opinion; for I have none, and I refer to the subject only to illustrate the magic of a word. The poem lives by virtue of the famous stanza:
From the lone shieling of the misty island Mountains divide us, and the waste of seas —Yet still the blood is strong, the heart is Highland. And we in dreams behold the Hebrides.It would be an insensible heart that did not feel the surge of this strong music. The yearning of the exile for the motherland has never been uttered with more poignant beauty, though Stevenson came near the same note of tender anguish in the lines written in far Samoa and ending:
Be it granted me to behold you again, in dying. Hills of home, and to hear again the call.Hear about the graves of the martyrs the peewees crying — And hear no more at all.But for energy and masculine emotion the unknown author takes the palm. The verse is like a great wave of the sea, rolling in to the mother shore, gathering impetus and grandeur as it goes, culminating in the note of vision and scattering itself triumphantly in the splendour of that word "Hebrides."
It is a beautiful illustration of the magic of a word used in its perfect setting. It gathers up the emotion of the theme into one chord of fulfilment and flings open the casement of the mind to far horizons. It is not the only instance in which the name has been used with extraordinary effect. Wordsworth's "Solitary Reaper" has many beautiful lines, but the peculiar glory of the poem dwells in the couplet in which, searching for parallels for the song of the Highland girl that fills "the vale profound," he hears in imagination the cuckoo's call
Breaking the silence of the seasAmong the farthest Hebrides.Wordsworth, like Homer and Milton, and all who touch the sublime in poetry, had the power of transmuting a proper name to a strange and significant beauty. The most memorable example, perhaps, is in the closing lines of the poem to Dorothy Wordsworth:
But on old age serene and bright,And lovely as a Lapland night,Shall lead thee to thy grave."Lapland" is an intrinsically beautiful word, but it is its setting in this case that makes it shine, pure and austere, like a star in the heavens of poetry. And the miraculous word need not be intrinsically beautiful. Darien is not, yet it is that word in which perhaps the greatest of all sonnets finds its breathless, astonished close:
Silent – upon a peak – in Dar – ien.And the truth is that the magic of words is not in the words themselves, but in the distinction, delicacy, surprise of their use. Take the great line which Shakespeare puts into the mouth of Antony —
I am dying, Egypt, dying.It is the only occasion in the play on which he makes Antony speak of Cleopatra by her territorial name, and there is no warrant for the usage in Plutarch. It is a stroke of sheer word-magic. It summons up with a sudden magnificence all the mystery and splendour incarnated in the woman for whom he has gambled away the world and all the earthly glories that are fading into the darkness of death. The whole tragedy seems to flame to its culmination in this word that suddenly lifts the action from the human plane to the scale of cosmic drama.
Words of course have an individuality, a perfume of their own, but just as the flame in the heart of the diamond has to be revealed by the craftsman, so the true magic of a beautiful word only discloses itself at the touch of the master. "Quiet" is an ordinary enough word, and few are more frequently on our lips. Yet what wonderful effects Wordsworth, Coleridge and Keats extract from it!
It is a beauteous evening, calm and free;The holy time is quiet as a nun,Breathless with adoration.The whole passage is a symphony of the sunset, but it is that ordinary word "quiet" which breathes like a benediction through the cadence, filling the mind with the sense of an illimitable peace. And so with Coleridge's "Singeth a quiet tune," or Keats's
Full of sweet dreams and health and quiet breathing.Or when, "half in love with easeful Death," he
Called him soft names in many a musèd rhymeTo take into the air my quiet breath.And again:
Far from the fiery noon and eve's one starSat grey-hair'd Saturn, quiet as stone.There have been greater poets than Keats, but none who has had a surer instinct for the precious word than he had. Byron had none of this magician touch, Shelley got his effects by the glow and fervour of his spirit; Swinburne by the sheer torrent of his song, and Browning by the energy of his thought. Tennyson was much more of the artificer in words than these, but he had not the secret of the word-magic of Shakespeare, Wordsworth, or Keats. Compare the use of adjectives in two things like Shelley's "Ode to the Skylark," and Keats's "Ode to the Nightingale," and the difference is startling. Both are incomparable, but in the one case it is the hurry of the song, the flood of rapture that delights us: in the other each separate line holds us with its jewelled word. "Embalmèd darkness," "Verdurous glooms," "Now more than ever seems it rich to die." "Cooled a long age in the deep-delvèd earth." "Darkling I listen." "She stood in tears amid the alien corn." "Oh, for a beaker full of the warm south." "With beaded bubbles winking at the brim." "No hungry generations tread thee down." And so on. Such a casket of jewels can be found in no other poet that has used our tongue. If Keats's vocabulary had a defect it was a certain over-ripeness, a languorous beauty that, like the touch of his hand, spoke of death. It lacked the fresh, happy, sunlit spirit of Shakespeare's sovran word.
Word-magic belongs to poetry. In prose it is an intrusion. That was the view of Coleridge. It was because, among its other qualities, Southey's writing was so free from the shock of the dazzling word that Coleridge held it to be the perfect example of pure prose. The modulations are so just, the note so unaffected, the current so clear and untroubled that you read on without pausing once to think "What a brilliant writer this fellow is." And that is the true triumph of the art. It is an art which addresses itself to the mind, and not the emotions, and word-magic does not belong to its essential armoury.
ODIN GROWN OLD
I had a strange dream last night. Like most dreams, it was a sort of wild comment on the thought that had possessed me in my waking hours. We had been talking of the darkness of these times, how we walked from day to day into a future that stalked before us like a wall of impenetrable night that we could almost touch and yet never could overtake, how all the prophets (including ourselves) had been found out, and how all the prophecies of the wise proved to be as worthless as the guesses of the foolish. Ah, if we could only get behind this grim mask of the present and see the future stretching before us ten years, twenty years, fifty years hence, what would we give? What a strange, ironic light would be shed upon this writhing, surging, blood-stained Europe. With what a shock we should discover the meaning of the terror. But the Moving Finger writes on with inscrutable secrecy. We cannot wipe out a syllable that it has written; we cannot tell a syllable that it will write…
You deserved bad dreams, you will say, if you talked like this…
When I awoke (in my sleep) I seemed like some strange reminiscence of myself, like an echo that had gone on reverberating down countless centuries. It was as if I had lived from the beginning of Time, and now stood far beyond the confines of Time. I was alone in the world. I forded rivers and climbed mountains and traversed endless plains; I came upon the ruins of vast cities, great embankments that seemed once to have been railways, fragments of arches that had once sustained great bridges, dockyards where the skeletons of mighty ships lay rotting in garments of seaweed and slime. I seemed, with the magic of dreams, to see the whole earth stretched out before me like a map. I traced the course of the coast lines, saw how strangely altered they were, and with invisible power passed breathlessly from continent to continent, from desolation to desolation. Again and again I cried out in the agony of an unspeakable loneliness, but my cry only startled a solitude that was infinite. Time seemed to have no meaning in this appalling vacancy. I did not live hours or days, but centuries, æons, eternities. Only on the mountains and in the deserts did I see anything that recalled the world I had known in the immeasurable backward of time. Standing on the snowy ridge of the Finsteraarjoch I saw the pink of the dawn still flushing the summits of the Southern Alps, and in the desert I came upon the Pyramids and the Sphinx.
And it was by the Sphinx that I saw The Man. He seemed stricken with unthinkable years. His gums were toothless, his eyes bleared, his figure shrunken to a pitiful tenuity. He sat at the foot of the Sphinx, fondling a sword, and as he fondled it he mumbled to himself in an infantile treble. As I approached he peered at me through his dim eyes, and to my question as to who he was he replied in a thin, queasy voice:
"I am Odin – hee! hee! I possess the earth, the whole earth … I and my sword … we own it all … we and the Sphinx … we own it all… All … hee! hee!.." And he turned and began to fondle his sword again.
"But where are the others? What happened to them?"
"Gone … hee! hee! … All gone… It took thousands of years to do it, but they've all gone. It never would have been done if man hadn't become civilised. For centuries and centuries men tried to kill themselves off with bows and arrows, and spears and catapults, but they couldn't do it. Then they invented gunpowder, but that was no better. The victory really began when man became civilised and discovered modern science. He learned to fly in the air and sail under the water, and move mountains and make lightnings, and turn the iron of the hills into great ships and the coal beneath the earth into incredible forms of heat and power. And all the time he went on saying what a good world he was making … hee! hee! Such a wonderful Machine… Such a peaceful Machine … hee! hee! … Age of Reason, he said… Age of universal peace and brotherhood setting in, he said… hee! hee! … We have been seeking God for thousands of years, he said, and now we have found Him. We have made Him ourselves – out of our own heads. We got tired of looking for Him in the soul. Now we have found Him in the laboratory. We have made Him out of all the energies of the earth. Great is our God of the Machine. Honour, blessing, glory, power – power of things. Power! Power! Power!"
His voice rose to a senile shriek.
"And all the time … hee, hee! … all the time he was making the Machine for me – me, Odin, me and my servants, the despots, the kings, the tyrants, the dictators, the enemies of men. I laughed … hee, hee! … I laughed as I saw his Machine growing vaster and vaster for the day of his doom, growing beyond his own comprehension, making him more and more the slave of itself, the fly on its gigantic wheel. What a willing servant is this Power we have made, he said. What a friend of Man. How wonderful we are to have created this Machine of Benevolence…
"And it was mine … hee, hee! … Mine. And when it was completed I handed it over to my servants. And the Machine of Benevolence became the Monster of Destruction. First one tyrant seized it and fell; then another and he fell. This white race got the Machine for a season, then another white race got it; then the yellow race. And they all perished … hee, hee! … They all perished… And with every victory the Machine grew more deadly. All the gifts of the earth and all the labour of men went to feed its mighty hunger. It devoured its creators by thousands, by millions, by nations. It slew, it poisoned, it burned, it starved. The whole earth became a desolation…
"And now I own it all … hee, hee! … I and my sword. We own it all… We and the Sphinx." His voice, which had grown strong with excitement, sank back to its infantile treble.
"And what was the meaning of it all?" I asked. "And what will you do with your victory?"
"The meaning … the meaning … I don't know… I've come to ask the Sphinx. I've sat here for years, centuries … oh, so long. But she says nothing – only looks out over the desert with that terrible calm, as though she knew the riddle but would never tell it… Look … look now… Aren't her lips…"
His thin voice rose to a tremulous cry. The sword shook in his palsied hands. His rheumy eyes looked up at the image with a senile frenzy.
I looked up, too… Yes, surely the lips were moving. They were about to open. I should hear at last the reading of the enigma of the strange beings who made a God that slew them… The lips were open now … there was a rattling in throat…
But as I waited for the words that were struggling into utterance there came a sudden wind, hot and blinding and thick with the dust of the desert. It blotted out the sun and darkened the vision of things. The Sphinx vanished in the swirling folds of the storm, the figure of the Man faded into the general gloom, and I was left alone in the midst of nothingness…
ON A SMILE IN A SHAVING GLASS
As I looked into the shaving glass in the privacy of the bathroom this morning, I noticed that there was a very pronounced smile on my face. I was surprised. Not that I am a smileless person in ordinary: on the contrary, I fancy I have an average measure of mirthfulness – a little patchy perhaps, but enough in quantity if unequal in distribution. But I have not been hilarious for a week past. There is not much to be hilarious about in these anxious days when the tide of war is sweeping back over the hills and valleys of the Somme and every hour comes burdened with dark tidings. I find the light-hearted person a trial, and gaiety an offence, like a foolish snigger breaking in on the mad agony of Lear.
Why, then, this smiling face in the glass? Only last night, coming up on the top of the late bus, I was irritated by the good humour of a fat man who came and sat in front of me. He looked up at the brilliant moonlit sky and round at the passengers, and then began humming to himself as though he was full of good news and cheerfulness. When he was tired of humming he began whistling, and his whistling was more intolerable than his humming, for it was noisier. Hang the fellow, thought I, what is he humming and whistling about? This moon that is touching the London streets with beauty – what scenes of horror and carnage it looks down on only a few score miles away! What nameless heroisms are being done for us as we sit under the quiet stars in security and ease! What mighty issues are in the balance! … And this fellow hums and whistles as though he had had no end of a good day. Perhaps he is a profiteer. Anyhow, I was relieved when he went down the stairs, and his vacuous whistling died on the air… Yet this face in the glass looked as though it could hum or whistle quite as readily as that fat man whom I judged so harshly last night.
It was certainly not the sunny morning that was responsible. The beauty of these wonderful days would, in ordinary circumstances, charge my spirits to the brim, but now I wake to them with a feeling of resentment. They are like a satire on our tragedy – like marriage garments robing the skeleton of death. Moreover, they are a practical as well as a spiritual grievance. They are the ally of the enemy. They have come when he needed them, just as they deserted us last autumn when we needed them, and when day after day our gallant men floundered to the attack in Flanders through seas of mud. No, most Imperial Sun, I cannot welcome you. I would you would hide your face from the tortured earth, and leave the rough elements to deal out even justice between the disputants in this great argument… No, this smile cannot be for you. And it is not wholly a tribute to the letter that has just come from that stalwart boy of nineteen, boy of the honest, open face and the frequent hearty laugh, stopped on the eve of his first leave and plunged into this hell of death. Dated Saturday. All well up to Saturday. The first two terrible days survived. Those who love him can breathe more freely.