Part 15

The Renaissance was rightly named a new birth. Out of the womb of this long night arose once again the mind of the West in its natural shape. Slowly beauty, knowledge, health, regained their old empire. Life grew in importance, and the futile, millennial-long struggle against death began to seem what it truly was--a mere terrified dream of the darkness.

All this appears a long way around to Stevenson, but it is by this avenue I travelled--amid all those soft declamations--to find him the typical poet of the nineteenth century. Stevenson is pure Roman, not a touch of the Semitic is upon him. Every line of his prose and verse attests it. Someone said the other day that Hardy was not so much a pagan as a "revolted Christian," and brought as a charge against him that he did not resent the hard fates of the characters in his books. The second charge, of course, contradicts the first. It was the Eastern rebellion against Fate--against things as they are--that nourished its mysticism. But however one may decide as to Hardy there is no uncertainty as to Stevenson. His relish for life--life with all its pains and limitations--was keen to ecstasy. He leaves no dubiety on that head. Here was no wish for a city of gold and pearl, fenced from care, in which to take the refuge of ease in an impossible Elysium. His "House Beautiful" was

"A naked house, a naked moor"

and

--"the incomparable pomp of Eve"

was all he asked to make desirable "this earth, our hermitage."

That this life leads to nothing more does not daunt him.

"On every hand the roads begin, And people walk with zeal therein, But wheresoe'er the highways tend Be sure there's nothing at the end."

To which he adds cheerfully:

"Hail and farewell! I must arise, Leave here the fatted cattle, And paint on foreign lands and skies My Odyssey of battle.

"The untented Cosmos my abode, I pass, a wilful stranger; My mistress still the open road And the bright eyes of danger.

"Come ill or well, the Cross, the Crown, The rainbow, or the thunder, I fling my soul and body down For God to plow them under."

He will allow no mistake as to the purpose of his existence. He cares not what may lie beyond the portals of an undreaded death, but this bright, present existence is for manful struggle; a struggle not maintained in hope of future, or terror of punishment, but because he loves not only

"Flowers in the garden, meat in the hall, A bin of wine, a spice of wit, A house with lawns enclosing it, A living river by the door, A nightingale in the sycamore"--

but loves also to

"---- Climb Where no undubbed civilian dares, In my war-harness, the loud stairs Of honour ----"

Nothing so moves his scorn as the lazy maggot who shuts himself into the snug nut of his religion and concern himself only to save his own poor, unimportant little soul. Hear the call of his "Lady of the Snows" to the pallid monks uttering prayers and _memento mori_. And Stevenson speaks as does he who knows. It is easy enough for those sitting cozily at home to talk loudly of war and danger, but this was a man who literally fought with death daily. An extract from one of his private letters, written shortly before the end, says:

"For fourteen years, I have not had a day's real health; I have wakened sick and gone to bed weary; and I have done my work unflinchingly. I have written in bed, and written out of it, written in hemorrhages, written in sickness, written torn by coughing, written when my head swam for weakness; and for so long, it seems to me I have won my wager and recovered my glove. I am better now, have been, rightly speaking, since first I came to the Pacific; and still, few are the days when I am not in some physical distress. And the battle goes on--ill or well, is a trifle; so as it goes. I was made for a contest, and the Powers have so willed that my battlefield should be this dingy, inglorious one of the bed and the physic bottle. At least I have not failed, but I would have preferred a place of trumpetings and the open air over my head."

And after a desperate illness, when he rose gasping from the waters of extinction, his first cry on feeling the earth beneath his feet once more were those brave verses "Not Yet my Soul."

He was not upborne by any of that so amazing sense of superiority to the rest of the universe which has aided vain humanity to minimize its defeats. He knew how small was his place in what Carlyle calls "the centre of immensities, the conflux of eternities." Hear him paint what he calls his "Portrait," and he reiterated that his noblest impulses were akin to "a similar point of honour which sways the elephant, the oyster, and the louse, of whom we know so little."

Finally, in the famous Christmas Sermon he sums up in prose the thoughts that breathe through all the varying cadence of his verse--

"Whether we regard life as a lane leading to a dead wall--a mere bag's end, as the French say--or whether we think of it as a vestibule or gymnasium where we wait our turn and prepare our faculties for some nobler destiny ... whether we look justly for years of health and vigour, or are about to mount into a bath chair as a step towards the hearse,--in each and all of these situations there is but one conclusion possible; that a man should stop his ears to paralyzing terror, and run the race that is set before him with a single mind."

In that Sermon is all the philosophy of Greece, the stern courage of Rome.

December 23.

"Philistia, be Thou Glad of Me."

Strange things rise up to us out of the deeps. Because I am a heathen, and Apollo is my god rather than any other, I have never been quite able to comprehend the powerful appeal the Hebrew Messiah makes to the hearts of so many. The solution is to be found in this "De Profundis"--Oscar Wilde's posthumous volume. It is a beautiful book: likely to become a classic of our language by reason of its beautiful, limpid English, its amazing exposition of the course of reasoning by which an outcast of humanity reaches peace and reconciliation with his own soul.

The man's crime, I think, was the result of his reluctance to relinquish youth, with its passions and stimulations of the senses. We all find its relinquishment a tragedy. Some of us refuse to accept the slow, cold enveloping of that cruel serpent of Time, which squeezes out of us our beauty, our vigour, our warmth, and leaves us pallid and eviscerated before devouring us entirely. Wilde, whose whole existence was the pursuit of passion and beauty, violently resenting the fact that with the lapse of years he was no longer able to wake the old thrill of existence by any of the old methods--finding that poetry, art, and the beauty of women all left him more and more jaded and cold, he grasped at vice as a means of heat, and brought himself within the iron clutch of the law. One can guess, even without the aid of his own confessions, at the hysterical rage of this sybaritic dandy caught in the grim trap of the reprobation of Society. Not only the physical discomforts and restraints bore heavily, but more intolerable was the contempt and disgust of the average man--the Philistine--to whom he had always held himself airily and scornfully superior. The old primal laws of the struggle for life lie too deep for even the boldest of us to lightly face universal condemnation. The worst of rebels and cynics is so dependent upon the countenance of his fellows that when good-will is withdrawn a sort of madness of despair falls upon him, and this vain, sensitive poet makes it plain how the passionate protest of the ordinary criminal was in his case intensified to ecstasy. One sees the poor creature, like a rat in a cage, darting hither and thither, and shivering with sick and furious helplessness at the rigidity of the barriers by which the world had shut him away from any further part in the body corporate.

In the last exhaustion of his grief a light dawned for him. There was one who had protested against these laws of reprobation which Society had codified--one who had mercy for the sinner; who had insisted that the suffering and sorrow experienced by those not conforming themselves to the pattern Society demanded regenerated the victims of sorrow, and they became of more worth than those who condemned them. Here was a means of regaining his own peace with himself. Here was a way out of his imprisonment in the scorn of his fellows.

Mary Magdalen, because of her sumptuous repentance, was of more value than the busy and virtuous Martha. The Prodigal Son was more welcome than the patient home-keeper. The lost sheep was the really important member of the flock. The repentant thief was the heir of Paradise. The sinning woman was bid go in peace. All the offenders against the laws of Society were welcomed: the dull walkers in the beaten path were contumeliously branded as Philistines and Pharisees. At once, by this point of view, the prisoner was freed from his cell. It was possible to stand upright once more and return frown for frown with his judges. All these were redeemed by their "beautiful moment"--? Well, let him too have his beautiful moment and he was really of more worth than those who had condemned him.

Here is the secret of the hold the Hebrew thinker has had upon humanity.

When our race slowly began to stand up on their hind legs and to live a life in common, they found--as the ants and bees had done before them--that the common life was only to be made feasible by adopting some general law of behaviour which would enable individuals to assimilate; and so morals and conscience had their generation. A man might never leave his home if the tribe would not accept it as an evil to steal; might never sleep in peace if murder were not a crime; would not feed his children were there not a rule against adultery which ensured him against assuming duties to cuckoos. How bitter, slow, and toilsome was that upward struggle to subdue for the good of the mass the lusts of the individual all history relates. Always a remnant have protested against these hard exactions of the general good at their expense. Always the tribe has, for its own safety, slain, imprisoned, cast out the rebels. The war is not over yet; will, possibly, never end. Always those who prefer their own ends will strive to find justification for their wilfulness; will seek some ground for answering scorn with scorn--and their vociferousness, their lofty, sentimental phrases confuse the minds of the slow-witted.

Alas! dear Philistine--what contumely you suffer at the hands of the revolted! You have grown apologetic for your virtues, which the idealists cast in your teeth as a reproach. You are so foolish you cannot eat of the fruit of desire and at once make it as though it had never been by one "beautiful moment" of emotion. You are so stupid you cannot content the neighbour who owned the fruit by accusing him of being hard because your repentance does not satisfy him for his loss. You are "stodgy"; you are "narrow." You are bitter and untender because you worship the God of Things as They Are, instead of accepting a theism of Things as They Might Be. Of course you really rule the world, and when your critics become too aggressive your logic of stone walls and iron bars makes a trenchant reply, but you are very inarticulate. No one gives you credit for your patient, dull self-restraint. You almost apologize to the scoffers for your persistent moral drudgery. You talk very little about the temptations you have resisted--so much less dramatic than sins against your fellows histrionically washed away by repentant tears. Your painful drudging up the path of obvious duty dazzles and touches no one.--But I, at least, love and respect you--you poor old self-denying Pharisee!

December 24.

"Oh King Live Forever!"

Oh, King!--great King Afar in that pleasant place-- (Sleeping in Avalon, Island of Queens--) What are thy dreams? Where no sound cometh at all Save the lapping of waves, Of the lake's waves lapping the shore; And the moving of winds Stirring a rustle and ripple of leaves-- An infinite rustle and ripple of leaves-- And lifting a little, a little thy wide-strewn hair Fadeless and gold-- What are thy dreams? There where no bird sings, Nor is any bruit by thy head Save only the singing of Queens-- Seven and sad-- Singing of swords and of war, Singing of Carleon-- Singing a magical lay, Sweeter than lutes, A song made of magic by Merlin Dead in the wood.... What are thy dreams, oh King!-- Arthur--thy dreams? Tristram is dead, and Gawain. Galahad gone, and Sir Bors. Merlin is dead in the wood. The base peasant tramples the mire That once was the heart and the lips Of Mordred the base and the liar. The wind of the Breton coast, Stormy and sad, Has blown for a thousand years The dust of that Knight-- Launcelot's dust-- Dust of his bones-- To and fro in the roads-- And the dust of his sword Blows in the eyes of brave men passing that way And stings them to tears. Oh, dread King, what are thy dreams? Guinevere is but a name-- Frail, and lovely, and sad. All whom thou lovedst are gone. Beauty availed them not; Courage, nor pride, nor desire. The sound of their singing is dumb; The sword is broken in twain; Magic to folly is turned; Even love might not avail. Only the King liveth still-- Only the King Liveth and dreams. Only the heart above self-- Only the heart steadfast and wise Liveth forever in Avalon, Hearing a song Always of swords and of war, But dreaming of Peace, Dreaming of Honour, oh King! Dreaming great dreams.

January 1.

The Little Room.

I remember that long ago when I used to be made to memorize Campbell's sentimental lines on The Exile, beginning,

"There came to the beach a poor exile of Erin"--

they only called forth my unsympathetic infantile jeers; but last spring I went home. Suddenly, as we passed along the tawny marshes lying like great dun lions by the edge of the misty gulf, I realized that for twenty discontented years I too had been suffering the pangs of the Exile. Memories and emotions, so long disused as to be almost forgotten, boiled up with the impetuosity of geysers. Possessions of my secret life that I think I was never really conscious of at all came to life. I haven't the least idea, for example, why the buoyant feathery boughs of the first Southern cedar I saw made me strongly wish to weep lovely, sentimental tears, but I knew at once why I had invariably felt bored with the conventional admiration of mountains. Why, indeed, _should_ scenery only be important when perpendicular? To my mind, to have the landscape getting up on its hind legs and hiding the view is simply tiresome. Here one could see everything--could open one's lungs and breathe what the Creoles used to call _la grande air_, and let one's heart go out to the land.

You blessed mother country! Those people where I have lived so long seem not to care particularly for their birthplaces. Their patriotism is satisfied by an immense political abstraction and a striped flag. I have always suspected that if one took off the heads of such folk and looked down inside one would find inside only wheels and coiled springs, instead of flesh and blood. David Yandell used to say, "I'm for the Yandells against the whole world, but if it's between the Yandells and Dave, then I'm for Dave!" One might be for that political abstraction against the world, but between that abstraction and Louisiana, then I'm for Louisiana.

I began to suspect too that some of my heresies and revolts had really been caused by the bitterness of exile, though from the very beginning I have seen the King without his mantle. When my elders handed out to me the accepted platitudes in answer to my early attempts to realize the world in which I moved, I stared at them "in a wild surmise," the aforesaid conventionalities appearing to me to be so at variance with the facts as I saw them. They appeared to me--these elders--to be imagining a King's cloak to cover the world as it really was; to be neglecting and minimizing the things really worth while; to be inventing ideals and standards not in themselves noble.

I struggled long against the mask and domino which muffled words and impeded action, but time and the years have made me more patient. I have grown to see that they may have their uses. The average man shrinks aghast from the naked truth, even when it is beautiful. There is a sort of universal prudery that shrinks from the nude in life as well as in art. Perhaps these universal draperies cover as much that is repulsive as it does of the beautiful.

Verestchagin, the Russian painter who was blown up on the Petropalovsk, had three pictures with him when he was in this country that conveyed to me a much needed lesson. He called them "Christ in the Wilderness," "The Sermon on the Mount," and "The Cursing of Jerusalem."--A haggard boy fleeing to the desert for meditation upon the tragedies of existence, for which he is sure there must be some panacea if one could only think it out; the triumphant youth announcing to humanity the solution of all its difficulties; and the disappointed man crying reproachfully to the heedless multitude preferring its own old way--"how often would I have gathered thy children together as a hen doth gather her brood under her wings, and _ye would not_!"

As time cools our cocksureness, more and more is one willing to let the world go its own gait and retire into one's secret life; and there comes at last one day a revelation of the meaning of it all, and this revelation brings peace and poise. The four walls of character and environment are an unescapable prison. Heroic effort will not open a door or break through its blank solidity. One may look out upon the world from one's little room, but there one must live one's appointed time. In youth one does not understand or accept this: then anything seems possible of expansion or change, but _veillesse savait_.

Once this is accepted--not by word alone, but mentally grasped and realized--the disordered, confusing bits of existence fall at once into an ordered pattern. Life must be lived in the Little Room. Others may not enter; one's self may not escape. Action falls within its space and can, therefore, be calmly ordered and planned. One will not undertake aught that is impossible within its compass, and struggle, discontent, and confusion are therefore at an end. And within this inviolate enclosure one is safe and private. To those regarding it from without its appearance is much like that of all the other cubicles, but inside, if one chooses, it may be richly hung, sumptuously adorned, with the treasures of one's secret life. Odd, outworn weapons of opinion may give a martial touch to the walls here and there; treasures brought up from the deep may speak of the wild winds of young fancy, and taste yet of the salt of long dried tears. Soft imaginings may invite the weary head, fine embroideries wrought from the many-coloured threads of life may lie beneath the foot. The prison is, should one choose it, a palace.

Long ago, of a summer morning, threading with soundless paddle and slow-sliding canoe one of the quiet streams that wound like a blue vein across the sunburned breast of those marshes, I found in the deep grasses, that everywhere grew breast high, an illimitable garden of flowers. Looked at from above there was but the smooth, deep fleece of verdure--but thus intimate, close to the warm skin of these vast salt prairies, thousands of beautiful freakish blossoms revealed themselves--many-tinted, heavy as wax, fragile as cobwebs, perfumed, fantastic, multitudinous....

I stared a little, pondering, and then passed on carelessly about my childish business, unrealizing that I had found a picture and a parable to hang, after many years, upon the walls of my Little Room.

January 2.

Aftermath.

If it might be, Life's harvest being past, And past the perfect fruitage of the soul, I yet might gather up some small sweet dole From out Time's fingers in the wide fields cast-- If it might be that though from out the vast Blue spaces all the tides of light did roll, There yet might linger some pale aureole To faintly flush my western sky at last-- I would forbear youth's lordly large demands, Nor swallow tears at sight of loaded wains Of others who all full and rich did go; Content that I, no more with empty hands, Might bear across the level darkening lands My sweet few sheaves home through the afterglow.

* * * * *

Transcriber's note:

Obvious punctuation errors were corrected.

The Greek quotation on p70 [preceded by the phrase "Achilles, blackly melancholy in his tent, heard the old voice cry"] is from Homer's Iliad, Book 9, line 319. One possible translation is: "and in one honour are held both the coward and the brave".