Hi 3 182201713 2572 *' UN VERS TY OF CALIFORNIA, SAN DIEGO . 3 1822017132572 Central University Library University of California, San Diego Please Note: This item is subject to recall. Date Due DEC 2 9 I993 DEC 1 6 1993 Cl 39 (7/93) UCSD Lib. "H/xrro rStv &irc6i>Tur ' cita Kal iro\\ol irdOov : "Effn Si tpv\ov iv todp&troiffi /taratiraToi', "Oortj nla m )(iivwv lirt.'X&pta va.TTT6.ivti rd tropau, PINDAR, Pythian, iiL 20. trenua By iremca calmer lot. They are a sorrow or a diversion to their neighbourhood, according as the hearts of those who regard them are hard or pitiful* Their estate is become a byword : there never grew such tares. And then there was a poor man who was caught by the music, going to the mill one late winter morning. It seemed to be only a sound of birds calling out of the darkness ; and it took him wholly unawares. After that day the great revolving belts that hummed about him at his work ceased to deaden his soul as before, but called it into new wakefulness ; they were so changed that they might have been the music of the spheres. He lost time listening to them ; he earned less ; his credit fell with his overseer and comrades, the one suspecting him of brooding mischief, the others writing him down a madman. For a time he seemed irresolute what key to The farm of tares. The enchanted mill. The enchanted mill. ^irenica strike in answer to that strange music. At first he was enraged at the injustice which kept him moiling in a maze of wheels and cogs, while so many had freedom for thought and fancy ; but gradu- ally he perceived in that machinery a perfect plant for the manufactur- ing of the dreams he loved, there being no place known to him so favourable to this as the mill, and no hours so wonderful as some of those which he passed in its walls. For other men it might produce commodities or wages ; but to him it gave at rare moments, in overflowing measure, things un- saleable and splendid, so that by degrees the suspicious mood left him and he abandoned thoughts of enmity to oafs and ruffians. As years went by, the principle of his existence became more and more a mystery to those about him ; it seemed to remove ever further from their understanding into un- ^irenica searched deeps of the man's being, as in the aged the life shrinks into far physical recesses where even death is perplexed and slow to find it. Something other than his labour was wearing him to a shadow ; his look seemed that of one anxious before the time and listening for a curfew at noonday. He was negligent of himself, and would often have starved but for those of whose presence about him he seemed but half aware. This man also lost the peace of his home ; it became to him a tent in Kedar, a place for the sleep of weariness, and housing visions less well than the dream-factory with its boom- ing music. His own folks, in the wisdom of the simple, took some witchery for granted, and let him be, according to his own desire of being. They endured his un- profitableness as a judgment, and lived on less to cover the damage of the visitation. If times were The enchanted mill. 86 The enchanted mill. bad, they might give him a hard word ; but their common way was to excuse him to each other by nods and winks silently exchanged behind his back. For all that they did to mar him, he might have been always happy ; but the mischief lay in his own breast where the Sirens' song had brought it. Fair weather or foul, he would walk leagues of Sundays over fields and hills, and along the brown river, coming back so tired that he would be late at the mill gate next morning. Sometimes, in the prime of the year, he would disappear for days, returning with the look of a con- spirator, or of a spy fresh from Eldorado. Dejection followed, until they urged him back amid the machinery, which in time re- conciled him to a continuance of life. So year in year out they kept him somehow at work, and a roof over his head, until some shock of mental change laid him dead among them with his secret un- discovered. So many there are whose lives are thus forfeit at a beck, that sometimes a doubt creeps into the mind whether, after all is said, the loud genius of this age triumphs, or whether the Sirens begin once more to gain on the world. Is it so sure that, in this stour and welter of confused hopes, we fare better against the magic than the Greeks with their lucid scheme, their fine positive convention ? There have been so many strategies, and none final yet ; so often the Sirens have heard tell of their own death. 'Twas thought the Renaissance killed them, overbrowing them with sheer pride of life. But they came again, until once more the eighteenth century held them at wits' length by outworks drawn like the lines of Vauban. Each period of resistance passed, the one like glory of youth, the other like The Citadel of Noise. The Citadel of Noise. an accomplished prime ; shall this dynamic genius of ours bring a more lasting conquest ? It has achieved great things ; but per- chance we expect of it what no human power can assure, letting ourselves hope too fondly without cause. For it seemed to come to us as an undreamed relief, a god of the machine, proclaiming the life mechanical; it drowned the lament of Werther and the tumid voice of Manfred with such a burst of sound that we fancied the reign of all insidious arts at an end for ever and a day. Man committed his handicrafts to wheels and pis- tons ; he steamed to his goal ; he filled the earth with clangour, bandying his discords across ever vaster space, until no sound which held of music was like to survive the unanswerable cacophony. Here at last seemed final safety ; the earth reverberant, Romance pro- testing in all metres to gods and men, and cast beyond appeal. But The 11 i . T_ i ,** . Citadel of in ail this heyday the sanguine Noise. world forgot once more the char- acter of the adversary. That pertinacity which the logic of the Hellene could never rebut was not to be quelled by din. The Sirens studied the new warfare ; Ligeia sent forth a carrying voice to pene- trate the central tumult. Our increased immunity against be- witchment may prove but a bare assumption ; for souls are still everywhere decoyed, and of those most visibly enchanted, many are taken in the central bruit, snatched from the inviolable citadel of noise. The world goes on more fortune to the roar of it and the multi- tude does not perceive the loss, each vanishing unmarked as a man may drown in a splashing crowd of bathers. But the watchful grow uneasy, doubting the worth of the new violence. To them it seems that the chosen guardians are no 90 The longer a. sure defence ; the ears NoUe. of Cerberus relax, the goose gives up the Capitol. And looking out upon a world of gathering dis- content, they wonder if it were not well by some eclectic skill to unite the schemes of all the com- bative ages, and insinuate a Greek temperance amid these turbulent forces. They begin to fear that no system yet essayed shall wholly avail ; they would combine the best of each, to attain the one possible success, a resistance obstinate as the attack. For the Sirens will always sing, and many will always hear, and haply all that is effected by our thunder- claps is to make the hearing harder. Egyptians / T~ > HE Sirens sing, and the vic- ofthe , 8 ' wayside. tims of a chance are urged beyond the endurance of then* mor- tality ; they grow unquiet as the sea tossing beyond the last shore under clouds like visible forms of sorrow. They cannot be resigned ; the world is not their friend, nor the world's law ; they murmur even against a better jurisdiction. Over the pages of the very Scriptures dance minims and quavers of a music which never accorded with that text, till the solemn rubric sinks out of sight beneath them as a stone under rippling water. They are poor, if to desire unattainable things is poverty ; they are mad, if a despair of peace is madness. They do not find the cynic's wish fulfilled, that the chains in this gaol of the world should be warmed for the delicate among mortal prisoners. Seduced into a pursuit of visions, they may not dream of quietness ; they must ever be computing prospects, or making estimate of their strength. The athlete, living for the day of trial, is not more harassed than these, for whom, as for the Stoic, life is Egyptian of the wayside. 92 Egyptians of the wayside. rather a wrestler's than a dancer's practice. The ruled existence, whether of religion or of science, refuses to them its thrice-blessed complacencies. They are not content to treat with Infinity by delegation, or learn of the deep at second hand from the Delian divers of theology. It is not given them to find tranquillity either in the daily ritual or in those appeasing exercises of induction with which some natures would replace the exercise of faith. The sameness of set devotion irks them. Science repels by exaggerated claims ; it is a practical system of unrealities ; and they cannot pre- fer the specialist's fenced acre to the old Limitless of Anaximander. Religion itself they may have, but unruly and individual, steeped in poetry to the fabric of its articles, unsoothed by external acts, in- different alike to the manuals of sound doctrine or the cordials of ^irenica the belief which ails. They must feed their souls after their own way, like those idiorhythmic monks on Athos who provide meats for them- selves, and will not be gathered in the common refectory. Though they long sorely for a part in rites, and the solace flowing from these, the fatal music always finds them out in the churches, stealing be- tween Cantores and Decani until the spirit which was almost soothed to acquiescence rebels again and is made incredulous of its peace. They would bestow all their goods for a ritual which would compel to rest, some discipline of hard rule enforced by an Ironside in doctrine ; but when they seem to have found the one system heaven- sent for their need, it fails them upon the trial ; and there comes to them the ancient fear that he who may love no human being perfectly shall never attain the love of God. The Sirens sing, and all proves 93 Lgyptians of the wayside. 94 Egyptians of the wayside. ^ttentca vanity. Remains the sweet well- being of aspiration as Augustine knew it, with the brightness, the fragrance, the caressing presences by which, in elect hours, humanity heightens all which it undergoes ; glories of the dear earth carried heavenward by the adventuring soul. That rare emotion will sometimes seem more near attain- ment ; but it is personal to the individual nature, and tires with its weakness ; it has no strength of strands like the bond of a confederated worship. The thin thread is snapped continually ; and though it may be tied again and again, it is a string of knots swaying in the wind, with no support for heaviness. And the ordered knowledge of facts has no better comfort. For learning too wide for communication estranges from men ; and a narrow learning, though it make for happiness, is often so closely shut to sentiment ^ircnica that it chills the enchanted mind. In the lairs of subdivided know- ledge, chascun dans sa chascuni&re, each with God's universe all to himself, dwell those who have solved that final problem to their satisfaction, and learned to bury the Infinite below the Finite where it shall never disturb them more. These also are happy ; the place of the Sirens' liegemen can never be with these. He and his kind are as the Egyptians of the highway who tarry for a night under the clipped garden-hedges ; but are driven on with the morning, hag- ridden souls, misprising the given good, and pursuing on hurt feet the marsh-light of their illusion. Forever following, forever thwar- ted, dreaming all and fulfilling nothing, they would long for death, were it the indisputable end of ends. But death too is suspected of them as no last issue, itself a phase in the processes of change, a 95 Egyptians of the wayside. Egyptians of the wayside. Amiel. ^irenica vagrancy continuing into another world the deception born in this, where arch-achievement is of trifles only, and nothing that is real or great is ever utterly done. And even the exalted paths of contemplation are not true ways of escape ; though, with a refinement of their first cruelty, the Sirens will suffer one slave here and an- other there to steal far along them and dream for a moment of manu- mission. The soul of a sensitive cast they will let climb from height to height of perverse and delicate mislife, until it is grown almost too fastidious to endure the ways of earth ; then, upon the very hour of its absorption into the Infinite, they send their song up to it, to draw it back to action and to itself. Such usage they meted to Amiel, a soul unserviceably fine like a vessel of rare glass made long ago in a caprice by a cunning master in Murano. Broken by the handling ^trenica of the rough world, buried deep under mounded sorrows, he de- cayed to a marvellous iridescence, beautiful with fugitive and delin- quent splendours. A vessel from which none ever drank sustaining draughts, but thin potions of dis- illusion, elixirs of a bewildering despair. For him there was at last but one joy, to mark the aud- ible stream of time and the flow- ing downward of universal being. All else that men call delight lost for him its pertinence and sweet- ness ; in this alone he found ob- livion of many sufferings. While this endured, the sorrow of his sterility was fainter to him ; he knew suavity of release such as the wounded and the sick may know when the siege of physical pain is raised, and in the passing away of agony, a film of ease floats over the stilled consciousness. Qui scruta- tor est majestatis opprimetur a gloria. The beatific vision had 97 Amiel. ^irenica spoiled his sight for all that was nearer and more human ; when the radiance of Infinity faded round him, he beheld forms of men as through a telescope reversed, ants of the wayside, unworthy of his regard to whom all immensity lay open, and the sound of rolling worlds was a familiar thing. His thought flowed away in soft pro- fusion ; the banks that once held it were left unstrengthened and the sluices unrepaired, until at last it had no strength more for human service and was evaporated in a lifeless waste of sand. Born with all fine instincts of affection, intending faithful comradeship, he forsook them without knowing the betrayal. Personality grew pale to him ; he lived aloof, disenamoured of appearances, a shadow belated in embodiment. Yet even this man was called back again and ever again that he might taste the full bitterness of vanity ; even this man 99 with his voice that whispered of entranced worlds, like a tired wind dying into the heart of wintry forests. For the hard enchantresses will give men over to the falsest hopes, letting them dream even the East- ern dream of reabsorption into the eternal being. They give them to see the celestial Buddha in the clouds, the Lord of the Measureless Light, the Deliverer who redeems out of passion all with a pure heart calling ten times upon his name. They suffer them to approach the delicate hands used to benediction ; they leave them almost at the foot of the lotus-throne. It is the most subtle of all their cruelties. For there is in the Eastern dream a peace which Hellas herself did not imagine, the passionless calm which in the grey hours the soul desires more than anything in earth or heaven. There is in it that which even the Christian Amiel. The Measure- less Light 100 The Measure- less Light. ^irenica hope but imperfectly assures, since after personal redemption some old agony of the several life might revive in an immortal body. But should not the soul be absolved of all this fear, and all that menace be removed from her timeless pros- pect, if she obeyed the bidding of those mild eyes and made the tenfold invocation ? The heaven of forms and contours once aban- doned, there should be no peril of relapse, but lenient influences, oblivion, deep peace, a chastity of imperishable light. There are moods in which the countenance of Amitabha can say more than the lit face of Hermes, leader of souls, more than the brows of the Christ of Pity. At such times, when the feet have strayed out far from all companionship and seem almost brought to the flaming cincture of our world, the calm exotic- pres- ence rises upon the dark as the lord proper to an impending exile ; it ^trentca persuades us by a natural authority into treason, until then feared more than death. But he whom the Sirens hold under their enchant- ment may never enjoy the promise. Before the invocation has passed his lips, their voices come to him again, the golden mist dissolves ; the august shape is lost in a form- less tide of light. And thereupon the spirit is drawn back to a life made harder by this dream, half initiate now, and chilled at the thought of the puny strength in which once it had taken its pride. It is dismayed by vastness, and abased beneath the starry heaven, having less hope than before that the power which controls the galaxy should regard an individual life here among men in the corner of a minor star. With the scope of dismay enlarged, it is condemned once more to fret within the infinitesimal self, discovering a deeper vanity in all things ; the 101 The Measure- less Light. The Measure- ess Light Edens 102 ^irenica kingdoms of the earth are paltry plots, their histories a tale of notches on a stick. Man passes away like the shadow of a shade, like all that imagination may conceive most frail and inessential ; shall he not be suffered to pass unvexed, in the silence which is the one privilege of shades ? But whether the cruelty be simple, or refined to this last subtlety among oriental visions, none who have borne the yoke can shake it off, or ever be wholly free again. There is a story that in their first night of exile Eve and Adam returned to Eden, picking their way in the darkness where the angel seemed to sleep, his sword glowing upon the ground beside him. But when they came into the garden, it was all changed. The creatures, that very day car- essed and fawning, now rose with bared fangs and threatened them. The trees were still bowed with ^irenica fruit, but when they plucked and would have eaten, they tasted only ashes. One tree alone fulfilled its promise : it was the tree of know- ledge of good and evil, which had given them understanding. Upon its branches the orbed and ruddy fruit hung yet luscious, as when the serpent praised it. They plucked and plucked again, biting to the core in the hope of slaked thirst and sated hunger. But from the moment that they ate, hope fled ; a wintriness touched Eden, and they felt it more desolate to them now than the outer world of exile. They were dismayed at the em- bittering of kindly and familiar things ; the snarling of great beasts grew louder, unquiet footsteps closed in narrowing circles round them. They looked into each other's eyes, and, without a word or a backward glance, went out again into the place of weary labour. And now they did not 103 104 Edens walk delicately as they approached the angel ; they went with natural steps, as knowing the worst, care- lessly and without heed of danger. He saw them depart, as he had seen them come ; but his hand was holden, that they might see with their own eyes and accept the judgment. When they were gone forth, he rose to his feet and girded on his extinguished sword. Dawn was breaking ; his work was done. Absolved now of his ungrateful duty, he lightly spread his wings, and soaring out over the four rivers and the garden of God, was lost at one flight in the clouds of morning. There is no restoring of the pro- tected Eden which to each was as a royal garden of youth before the Sirens' song was heard ; there is only such brief return, that the soul may assure herself of her state and see the lees in the cup of des- tiny. If in young life the Sirens' music float towards you over still 105 waters, put the helm about while it is yet an uncertain sound ; let those whose ears are closed lash you to the mast until the echoes are heard no longer. Beware lest for a moment's heedlessness your days be consumed away, lest kindred, fatherland, and friends be lost to you, and your bones lie bleaching upon that shore. Be- lieve it not, when pride or flattery would persuade that you are of a force to meet the insidious danger ; none are of that force, not even the heroes and the slayers of many dragons. If fortune offers peace of happiness, with all its estimable solid gain, its neighbourhood of minds and profitable communions, why go the lonelier way, consort- ing with shadows, feeding upon vanity of dreams ? You are like to become among men as the poplar among the trees, too sensitive to dwell in commonality, whitening the wayside with a floss that none Edens lost. 1 06 The Second Best. g>irenica shall spin. Be wise, return among the happy of mankind for whom laws are framed and politics con- structed ; who, trenching them- selves within a pale and taming down ambitions, receive their cer- tain wages in the weighed gold of tranquillity. For they only hold a safer course who have never heard that call, they whom the medi- tator in old Norwich knew, souls " having not the apprehension to deplore their own natures, and framed so far within the circum- ference of hope that the wisdom of God has necessitated their con- tentment." But if the die is cast, and the Imagined Better Thing spoil for you even the good thing in the moment of achieving, do not there- fore cease from action ; that were to lose the life for the uncertain promise, propter vivendi causas perdere vitam. Remain among men : fear that inhuman solitude 107 where the influence of sweet chari- ties is never known. The Sirens will not forbid a forced activity in the interlude of their enchant- ment ; they will rather approve, knowing that it keeps the nature in mobility and prepared for the effort which they will demand again in their hour. Use there- fore all means to be doing, lest a sick weariness of deeds, that old acedia or staleness of the uninter- ested mind, creep into the blood of the great veins and make despair a habit. Use every art, use even jealousy itself ; it is marvel what a clean envy without malice will do for one who in his heart despises the things of competition. If it cannot bring him joy of victory, it will yet disturb indifference, and though the service of the whole heart is of the greener virtue, there is a good sap in the half. That is an old fallacy which rejects all but the intense glow before the The Second Best. io8 The Second Best. ^irenica deed ; " with half my heart " is not always a fool's device, but often the word of considered wisdom. It is a principle not despised by the preacher of holiness, who knows the labyrinthine world, and the flesh in its presumption ; it is better to toil for a dim spark, like the savage, painfully revolving his drill for fire, than to languish weary days in cold and idleness. " Perform the outward action of fervour," says St. Francis of Sales, " though the fervour itself be lack- ing." It is a principle to which even genius has been beholden. Many a true artist sees the forms of his high fancy displaced by crowd- ing of baser shapes, and common life encroaching upon him ; but he does not cease to work ; he paints on, that he may keep his soul fluent and alert for the return of more noble visions. Much he may do at such times unworthy of his re- pute, but he lives watching, and 109 seizes the good hour upon the The ~ 6 V , . Second wing. Do likewise upon your Best. lower plane ; cold though you be to deeds, yet keep doing. Be busy over measurable things, be occupied with temporalities and outputs ; their hold is stringent to the soul, like a tightening of the belt upon the body in hunger. At the worst there is some gain from this feint of sustenance ; the nature bears up longer against life's hard- ship. And sometimes, by a high chance, the secondary drab thing is transanimate and made other than itself ; the insignificant glows with meaning ; the trivial becomes great with wonders of suggestion. So a foul pane will flame with red of opals against the setting sun; an iron swung against a grate will chime like the Bourdon of Notre Dame. " But," he who doubts may say, The half " I who desire the purple distances and follow after things delicate and intangible, how should I hew this no ^trenica The half withered wood and draw this stagnant water ? How should I practise a gross envy for things un- enviable of my soul ? How should I rival Pandect, the man of Law, of Futurus of the Exchange, or the ungentle scholar Preterite ; how cope with Agricola, my country neighbour, who lives intent upon byres and barns, and is enraptured by a vision of fatted cattle ? Shall I leave the glory of the far heavens for the nice alignment of a fur- row, or forget the aerial thought, reckoning a crass weight of swine ? I could not, for Nestor's counsel, compete for prizes or for solidities of profit ; as well bid me prefer to Turner's skies the earth- loving heavens of a Dutchman's landscape." "Protest, but try," the counsellor will answer ; the hour comes you will wonder at its swift feet when the lawyer's reputation will be to you for a re- proach, and the scholar's name for 1 1 1 an incitement ; when your sleep will be troubled by the desire to outcultivate Agricola, and the fingers too delicate for rough use will tingle for a grasp of his plough. While the envy endures, the poppies in the corn and the sorrel in the hay will be to you no more, as in enchanted hours, the final cause of all the field ; but as base weeds to the farmer, marring all the prospect of good harvest. Therefore indulge clean envy well ; let it run out its course. These jealousies and fervours are health- ful for you ; they counter the detachment to which you were else abandoned ; you were in a fair way towards madness ; they will keep you human. The things that awaken them have not, be it confessed, the virtue of the true gods or the perdurable ; yet they are useful idols of a meanwhile ; they will possess the mind until the lodestar shines again. They The half heart. The half shall hold your spirit to such an heart. ' , r , exacting round as most you need, averting it from wild thoughts and the last irreligion of despair. When the song sounds to you again, and the shadow of the gnomon falls once more upon the hour of divine impossible things, you shall not soar or dream the worse for this service in the house of bondage ; nor, when the flight ends, shall the mind have aught but benefit from that alternation of concern amid sound things coveted and prac- tised. What if it be never yours to seek them with a whole heart ? Give what dimidiated zeal you may, and bear with them in good faith for their nearness to human- ity. And though sometimes they are done in a stupor, as a man might labour the morning after ruin, or between shocks of earthquake, this very insensibility has charm. There is a pleasant recklessness in des- perate hours, which have their own ^irenica sufficiency, and may hold the spirit almost upon the verge of happiness. For without the common tasks and feasible plain things of compe- tition the world is too hard for the Siren's bondman, who must wait often in weariness for the return of the soul's desire. The intervals be- tween his joys are too long for still endurance ; remoter sounds and happenings of a life not truly shared become intolerable to the spirit held motionless and expectant ; it is in silence that the water maddens, heard dripping upon the stone, in the stillest night that the heart is frozen. Without the anodyne of planned activity, he will be drawn down into the gulf that yawns for him : there will be nothing fixed and firm to stay him, no handhold for his clutching fingers. In the deeps to which then he falls there is existence, but not life ; there the infolded thoughts, lost to all beyond, flock inward upon them- The Unknown Worse. 114 The Unknown Worse. selves ; or if one dash out for free- dom, a swift memory will head it back, as the shepherd's fierce dog rounds in the sheep. There is no release in swoon, for when con- sciousness returns it flows more darkly, as to one fallen asleep in the pain of evil tidings. At the moment of such awakening, the heart is felt to sink ; all sinks with it and falls, pressed beneath a descend- ing cloud of misery, down and ever further down into those bottomless depths where the soul implores annihilation and is not answered. There is known the suspended fear of the unknown Worse, which is before, behind, and round about, an incalculable infesting presence. The brain seems quickened for one end only, to revolve misery ; in the dim light, the eye is aware of things moving, glimmering forms of concealed but certain fear, " glancing, shifting mortal woes " luminous with then* own faint and 115 sinister light. And sometimes, in The the most dreadful hour, a lordlier worse form of terror passes, formidable and slow, as the Angel of the Abyss might fly over his gulf, and all sounds be stilled but the beat of his darkening wings. Tremen- dous hours, incommunicable be- tween soul and soul, unimaginable after escape as tortures of other beings in a world remote from ours, yet always near to many, high and low, learned or without letters, to this man who governs a State, or that man who goes about a little business, and nearest of all to those who have heard the Sirens' song. If there be any labour which may avert these hours, God bring it to the hand and send it done. The victim who would not thus go under must use his intervals in a fury and wrath of action. He must use them with such fierce diligence, that the work which he has to show at the end may absolve n6 Centri- petal force. him from the charge of vanity. He must stifle his inner conviction of an absurdness in these tasks, and win an approval from the general judgment which may never be ac- corded by his own, in secret won- dering that any such things should avail, yet illogically willing to be justified. He will not have worked amiss if this his second best appear his whole ambition, for he will have won in spare hours a testi- mony of good service which shall stand him in lasting stead ; he shall be habilitated before others, and somewhat ease, by a softly- cheating fallacy, the pain of in- achievement which gnaws within him. It is well for him to have known the compelling attraction of mankind, which, like the attrac- tion of earth for material things, is ever operative upon the soul. For as the earth draws the torn leaf, and will have it at last, how- ever long the winds toss it up or ^irenica whirl it in the air, so every soul yields to this indrawing strength, which is an indefeasible power, constant as gravitation itself, and as quietly exerted. The wonder- ful path of man was made straight by common deeds ; our forefathers inaugurated the world's course with nothing better ; all through the ages they strove with each other, doing, getting and exchang- ing, by concussion and hard argu- ment of life no less than by its friendliness, joined indissolubly to each other. Often the strife was violent, but it welded ; there was chaos, but the good ground formed ; it solidified ; it has re- mained. In the underworld of for- gotten time the fancy sees customs and beliefs overlie and mingle with each other ; it is as if, in a dream of creation, you watched the earth molten, and strata of ancient rocks flow to their first repose. The plain forces worked out their way ; 117 Centri- petal force. H 118 Centri- petal force. In ipsis floribus. ^irenica the world settled to plain life ; it is so that humanity was shaped into its greatness. Our common days continue the old heroic effort ; who would not drudge between two dreams for a share of them ? Happy is the life which is not uttered all in parenthesis, but spoken out full in rounded periods. It is amenable in the hour of weari- ness to the obvious and approved recreation. Does he who lives it tire awhile of his unmemorable activities ? There are the reliefs of nature, of art, of religion, each fashioned for his convenience in usum deficientis. But the Sirens do not permit any victim of theirs such light release. Though he is exhausted to a faintness, they will weigh out to him each remedy of the worn soul as it were by the drachm and scruple ; like the chir- urgeon at the pulse of the racked prisoner, they watch for the hour when the heart shall prove of a ^irenica 119 torturable strength ; and stinting / i . t 11 r e floribus. it of rest to the last point of safety, compel it to the hard assay once more. And they are too fine to end the respite by any visible brutality ; that does not assort with their subtle purpose. They softly overcloud and delicately blight, until the mind becomes aware of a disillusion imparted it knows not whence or how. Each mercy thins from its fullness into a dis- satisfying vapour, as if impercep- tibly it thwarted itself to serve them ; unconscious of the process used upon him, the sufferer awakes in a new strength, but with an abated confidence. Neither re- ligion, nor art, nor nature is frank to him, but each has an insincerity of second intent ; which he resents the more, in that he went to them like a man foredone in a great ex- haustion, desperately trustful, and in such evil case as only a malig- nance could abuse. Nature her- 120 In if sis floribus. self is suborned against him ; even in her plenary hour she inexplic- ably fails, changing without seen cause the motherly to the novercal face. In her festival of high sum- mer she prepares so many glories that the mind is held rapt in one long pleasure of surprise, until all suspicion is drowned in the bright flood. Like healing like, this new enchantment seems to prevail over the old ; the earth laughs doubt away. The lime-tree is fragrant on the air ; the honeysuckle crowns the lustrous holly and the briony the hedges ; the hop-bines sway in the breeze, reaching out after each other from pole to pole ; in the cottage gardens the great lilies ranged before the larkspurs image the white clouds upon the sky above them. Invisible gnats keep a sustained murmur above ; a distant wain makes for the barn behind which the fresh-ploughed land runs back, like a faintly rippled 121 sea bounding a peninsula of trees. / All floats on the summit and crest of full perfection ; it is the ripe hour of all things. No sign of autumn appears yet among the leaves ; in the gardens the time of the sad asters is far ; the nights have breathed balm upon them after every sunset, and there is still no breath of decay. Shall he be- lieve that Nature betrays him with a kiss of peace, so that the mind forgets its warfare, living for a while in a pathetic wonder, like a child used to blows and suddenly caressed ? Yet she does betray ; the Sirens teach her their art and force her to do their bidding. And often she must do it under that cloudless heaven in the third hour after the meridian, which is the day's autumn, the fatal hour, un- bearably steeped in sorrow. For then an English afternoon may wear that evil brilliance of the tropic under which men know 122 In ipsis floribus. The Sirens' own art. themselves mocked, and the heart is made empty, and despair flows into the soul which love has left unguarded ; and many, asked in what hour they have perceived themselves most desolate and under Medusa's eyes, would answer : " At this hour, and upon a summer's day." By such an effluence of pure sadness the cruel end is at- tained, and this serene heaven is used as readily as the known min- isters of unrest, the unharboured clouds, or fretting waves, or mists, or the broken silences of pine- woods when the cones fall one by one. The voice of the Sirens is of so divine a charm that even the mother of all created things her- self must do their pleasure. T HE Sirens can trouble all the healing wells, even the deep well of Nature. The well of Faith they disturb lightly ; they know where haunt the little breaths of ^irenica 123 sly heresy and noisier gusts of The schism which come suddenly down own e art. to flaw it. The bright well of Art they also trouble, causing it to shimmer from the deeps with a multitude of springs that bubble out of the rock and blurr the still reflections upon its face. The painter must often yield to their voice ; even the sculptor may not always resist ; the architect can- not but obey. But the musician anticipates the song, and seems almost to catch it upon their lips. For this is their own art, and for- midable indeed to all who confess their sovereignty. In the percep- tion of this danger the Hellenes conspicuously proved their insight, though they knew nothing of the bow, by which the supreme magic passes into instruments of strings. For them there was a peril even in Terpander's lyre ; but what dread had not been theirs if some god or hero had taught them this last 124 The Sirens' own art. device ; if Apollo on Parnassus, or Orpheus in the world of Shades, had drawn the bow over the viol, as Raphael and Signorelli have por- trayed them, unwilling to conceive the heaven or the hell which could be charmed without it. Music was never safe for enchanted minds ; even for the mind subdued to custom it may be rife with hidden menace. The Hellene did not err when he sought to control it always in bonds of language, suffering it to range abroad only under guard of words, and held always within the cold scrutiny of reason. He feared the imploring harmonies which entice into the measureless by measure, and tempt the geo- metric mind out of its fastness. Absolute music, freed, like a sym- phony, from constraint of words, he denounced as an incalculable and uncivic power. For he marked the deceitful art begin with un- assuming notes, a march of smooth ^ircnica plastic forms made audible, which seem at first to brace and temper the spirit. But behind this stage he perceived another, which threat- ened to destroy the man, to waste away his spirit, and, in the phrase of Plato, to cut out the sinews of his soul, until he should decline into a feeble citizen and an un- victorious warrior. Against these insidious arts of decay he waged unremitted war. We may smile at this strait philosophy, and at the law which would sanction none but the Dorian style ; for to-day an agora will not contain a nation, nor may a people be corrupted in the fleeting of an hour. We put our trust in size, and ask safety of mere tumult, which subjects all music to the distracting din of life. In the market and the street, men cannot hear the fine strain if they will ; securely multitudinous, they go their ways ignorant of danger, and whistling uncharmed melodies 125 The Sirens' own art. 126 The Sirens' own art. down the wind, where all is merged with the echo of traffic, or dispute, or pastime. But withdrawn into some still place in some moving hour, the individual is yet im- perilled; and above all, he whom the Sirens have taught to hear. For him the risk is not less, but tenfold greater. For this art has grown beyond the range of Greek imagination, and the adventuring mind once thoroughly searched by it can conceive no longer a limit to its omnipotence. When the great musician of modern Germany came to interpret the genius of Beethoven, he found the master supreme in this, that he had trans- ported music beyond the aesthetic beauty of rhythm and symmetry, away into her proper sphere of the Sublime, where the mere form is perceived subordinate and is beaten down under her wings. For since Beethoven, she soars out into high places where the unaided reason is 127 too short-breathed to follow ; she The speaks a language of divine mean- own e art. ing and beyond competence of your analysing thought. In her kingdom there is no tyrant's art of definition, no pedant's love of marshalled concepts ; the reason may only pass its borders exalted by the glow of spiritual fire. How much more perilous is she thus become with the glamour of high philosophy about her name, and herself, as a philosopher has said, auricular metaphysic with incanta- tion for half her argument. Music is not safe for you, followers of the Sirens ; look back and recall the dangers into which in past years she has beguiled you, and say if, in the knowledge of her power, you would dare blindly to follow her flight. Remember how in some hour when all things have con- sented to a deep emotion, the con- trol of the very life was lost to you ; not a blow could you have struck 128 The Sirens' own art. ^ttentca for freedom, as you stood heark- ening without help or counsel, stilled to a voluptuous helplessness, drunken with the joy of your bond- age. Perhaps in some crowded place your soul was clean taken from your governance, or perhaps in the company of one other only ; taken it was, and humbled until it knew itself no more. As the moon rose over the fields of harvest I have heard an arpeggio struck by invisible hands, preluding to a great music. In the succeeding pause all the mysteries of the hour and place seemed gathered for an inspiration ; at last the deep notes came quivering from the strings, and all that the pent conscious- ness embraced was dissolved into the relieving flood of sound. Plain- tive chords, undulant and joyous harmonies, they flowed out from the brimming chamber over lawns and paths, meeting the sigh of night as it replied from the hushed, 129 attending forest. In such an hour what control was left to the will, what discipline remained to reason overwhelmed by the surge of in- finite divine things ? When the tide breaks, the dyke of reason goes down like the ramparts of a child's castle in the sand ; the set ordi- nances of life are annulled ; the soul is drawn away on a celestial pilgrimage ; the call of the Sirens has been obeyed. Following paths of wonder, she knows swift change of joy and suffering ; she moves over the formless waters of the uncreated, hovering in the heart of the void, drinking the crimson wine of dawn and sunset. Free, and glorying, and elate she wings over the coasts of light ; she hears the waves break far below her, and the winds moan by ; the wonder of things vast and infini- tesimal consumes her, as she floats dissolved in the trance of her unincarnate passion. Under that The Sirens' own art. The Sirens' own art. enchantment all the fabric of laws and religions and philosophies is tossed away upon the wind, as thistledown adrift over the mea- dows. Nothing is fastheld more, or founded ; all flows and changes, descending, mounting, approach- ing, withdrawn, in regions dark with austere shadows, aglow with splendours of inapprehensible light. They who once adventure where these things are, would never ex- change the starry ways for the firm ground of earth, or the cloud- walls for its bonded masonries, or for its most assured rewards, the superb impossibilities of hope. When certain harmonies encom- pass them, they are severed from the world ; at each return the fiery particles of the soul are stirred more deeply. This influence is an affection of elements ; its power is ultimate, it abides. The Rus- sian mystic was not alone among thinkers who in our day have The Sirens' own art. The song (Hccnfa shared the dread which disturbed the ancient world. But he has described the terror well, confes- sing that the music which he had so loved in youth became at last an art of arcane power, and awful to him in contemplation. His mind misgave him for the dread of it. He feared with a more than Hellenic fear. By mastery of such an art, ,. , , renewed. aggrandised to a new scope, the Sirens are now advantaged in the onset. It is the first preparation of their spell ; scarce are the words of the magic framed, when already the soul is a yielded prey. They sing to these new harmonies the old sweet cajoleries and bitter taunts. " What part have you in the reaped earth, children of the divine un- rest ? Would you turn from us now ? would you pretend forget- fulness ? You on whose ears the great charm fell, have done with vile content ! These among whom 132 The song you hide are deceivers of their own souls, gilding the grey lead for gold. Come forth from among them, come forth far ; ascend to sight ; know ecstasy, and moments as the lit foam of time. Know daring ; love the inordinate hope ; un- swathe the soul ; arise. About you murmurs the unuttered life which might be spoken, the im- prisoned life which might be free, the obedient life which need not serve. Have no lot with serfs. Let the thought leap out ; shake from you all that clings ; fling off the encumbering folds. Come ; for these are cowering and remiss natures, clusterers, afraid alone ; slow-thighed bees, clogged with their own honey, forgetful of the tree-tops, insects of the tended hive. Come forth from them ; they are blind to joy ; their life is a dupery, their love a straitening. Let them go in the rote of the nether ease ; let them piece out 133 cloying happiness ; their days are The song a dust and bestowed in vanity ; the world wastes the ages. Dis- dain their restless round, and come far ; as the bird whirrs from the low grass, come out upon the great winds, clean as the breath of seas. For a while, when our voices were not heard, it was permitted to you to share their foolishness, to re- volve for their pleasure and cheat sorrow with speed, to be the toy of their solemn pastime. The top sleeps upon the point ; while the game lasts, it is well. But now we are come again, singing low and clear and nigh you, cease and look cloudward. For now the dreamed Better Thing appears, and you shall win to it ; from false goals and dull aims misrevered you shall depart, you shall soar out till you look down upon the hillock Olympus. Know this, that more worth is lost by peace than by pas- sion. The quickening joy scathes, 134 ^trenica The song but have pride of your scars ; that which has not suffered does not know ; the unwounded have not lived. Come forth, trust no sanc- tuary ; you are ours, and neither shrine, nor fortalice, nor uttermost dark retreat shall divide us from our own. Though you are carried from the verdure and the bloom, and the thickets thronged with birds ; though all be gone which assuaged this servitude, gentleness and kind looks and caring voices, yet be not dismayed ; for we will take the need of them from your heart and set your desire upon nobler sounds and presences. Would you shrink back because men say that to approach the im- mortal is to endure more pain ? And were it even so, what argu- ment that for noble natures ? All that is noble grows in pain ; as it ever was, so it shall be ever, till Fate get eyes or be tamed to pity. Come then to the life emulous and ^trenica 135 uncrowned ; is there no pleasure The song of upward strife, is not the supreme thing far and half-discerned more than the near conspicuous vanity ? If life were a haunting of quiet and green places, it should satisfy a heart, but a bird's heart if that were all of life. And if it were a diligence of bearing loads, it would suffice a mind, but an ant's mind if that were all. Absolute whole life is more than ease or profit ; it is an ascent and a transcending, it evades ; it loves the outrance. He who cramps it in the press dishonours it with unfair misuse. We touch you with shafts of golden sound ; cling to your safe mean no more, but come where the high strains wander ; where the free life wins glory of health, and the pest of ordinance is overcome ; where the unwarded soul, without sentinel or patron, is proven in the great space alone. Come forth from among them, children of An immortal Sophistry. 136 ^itemca The song Divine unrest ; you on whose ears the great charm fell, have done with vile content." With such words they provoke the spirit, interfusing through the wild music their own irresistible self. And the bondman rises to obey, as Odysseus rose, though long years have gone by since last they sang to him. He obeys, knowing in his heart they lie, but like the wild thing captured, un- able to contrive his deliverance. He knows that happiness, his birth- right, is rapt from him by a sleight of immortal sophistry ; he knows that the song of freedom cozens, and the singers themselves are bond, compelled by a fate which calls for ruin of men. With what- ever charm they sing, with what promises soever they entice, what- soever disgust with present things their voice may instil, in the very hour of capitulation some instinct yet will tell him that the unmys- ^trentca terious fond things are best, the things of every day, that they alone nourish life, that he was only born to love them. He must rise ; he must follow. Yet among all who obey the call, scarce one but would not liever remain, might he pause to cast a balance and measure the need of his own humanity. But no briefest respite is accorded ; he is swept away too fast for the saving calculation. Thereupon all regret for the broken ties pales first to affectionate contempt and then to cold oblivion, as joy eclipses happiness, and every memory of calm delights is lost in the splen- dour of its appearing. For the voices come, as to one imprisoned at a desk memories of shore or moorland, perverting the mind from every covenant of duty. When they are abroad, interflow- ing with the sounds of life, all that was solid and firm dissolves, all pomp and consequence is as a An immortal Sophistry. The poison of Nonacris. "38 The poison of Nonacris. >!tenica shadow. While that music still trembles in the air, how vain the homily of the Industrious Appren- tice who rose to claim a place upon the dai's, and sat in a carved chair, an exemplar to unadventuring souls. For such moralities there is then no room ; who follows whither the Sirens call is lost to the rich promises of fortune and shall find no promotion in the world. Lost also to things less dispensable than these, stayed from gladness, diminished in the heart's virtue. For the roots which the heart throws out to others are weakened and die back ; instead of a com- mingling, there is at first an un- certain touch ; at last they wither, and search no longer after the true food of their life. The heart be- witched is made ungenial ; only the glad are kind. Even the tried affection is dimmed ; and slowly, as a stone weathers, the spirit darkens from the old fidelities. 139 Like the rule of some rigid order, The the service of the Sirens chills Nonacn ? s. human sympathy ; theirs is a sequestering law, too strange to share with many. Every hour of abandonment, each adventurous escape, enfeebles the hold upon common life ; the colours of love and dislike grow paler, as all is said to pale when a long sickness draws to its end, and the soul is near its passing. The surface of the mind dulls like a mirror of silver tarnished ; the reflections that once played over it come no more ; it is estranged from the old light and the moving images of the world. To one thus in- humanly entreated, all men be- come as travellers moving in the next room of the inn, arriving and departing, brought nearer or removed by a machinery of unshared indifferent fates. His nature is slowly frozen ; a fatal coldness rises in him, as from that 140 The poison of Nonacris. The bond want. ^irenica icy poison of Nonacris of which it is fabled that Alexander died. AN old religious writer has said of wild /-% that human wants are the true ligatures between God and man ; had we not wanted, we had never been gratified ; we are bound by an infinite debt because our needs are without end. There is solace in this thought of the soul's need as bond between the passing and the eternal life, be- tween that which yearns and that which satisfies ; it seems to cover unrest with a grace of divine pro- tection, and confute that evil old doctrine of the Envy of the Gods. None who have hearkened to the Sirens' music but will follow the argument thus far. But they can- not stay within the bound set by this man of fortunate piety ; it is too near for their extravagance, they must lend another meaning than his to infinity of desire. For 141 how should he know the strange places of half-perception, the re- fuges of the driven soul, the wastes of the outer light ? The very- name of infinity awed him ; his mind shrank from the approaches of it ; he recked too much of many things to be the true guide of their audacity. The sheltered plats and borders of his parsonage were never planted with herbs of magic ; they stood thick with old-world flowers disposed about a dial, offer- ing their nectaries to the bees, stems to be plucked in a quiet hour and set in a bowl of Delft among piled folios of the Fathers. But the Sirens lead the steps among blooms of another beauty, such growths as sprang from the be- witched soil in Virgil's garden of Avellino, and dangerous in the gathering as the strange root man- dragora. Wild wants, insatiable desires, these also are bonds no less than the sanctioned wish which in The bond of wild want. 142 The bond ^irenica shamefastness receives its appor- tioned gift. These also are of divine descent, the Sirens say ; it may not be that they should be disowned by any god. For what celestial name but should lose nobility preventing these, which bid the soul dare to forget her mortal deference, to despise all gain, to leap out beyond count of life and profit? The sweet sound comes, the spirit answers ; and all molecular affairs are as the dust under a lee when a great wind veers to scatter it. Then is the hour of quest after invisible per- fections for ever beyond seizure ; of joy rewarding the pursuit, in- stant as swift flame and incompar- able with all other guerdons. Joy wild and pure born in the purple of deep skies, consuming like a fire, maddening like a potion, but of the stained nature never known, from the common slave of sense to Sardanapalus, Akyndaraxes' son. ^irenica With this joy the Sirens lure the impassioned soul, now exquisitely troubled, and able no more to abide in the calm ease which flows on a curve and rounds to the full circle of contentment. With joy they charm her, the glory of stars, the flower of the miraculous heaven. For joy and happiness, confused in the thought of men, are in truth of different kindred ; from their very birth they are estranged ; the heart which the one frequents is often abandoned by the other. To joy the house of happiness is a kempt place too trimly tended, ordered by unbearable wonts of peace, shuttered and barred in too close a privacy ; and all that is beyond its firelight is lost to it as the far side of the moon. It seems a place of sedentary affections and imperfect generosities ; the love which pours a mild ray through its chambers is too placid for ardent life. And to the happy, joy is a 143 Happi- ness and Joy. 1 44 Happi- ness and Joy. strange vagrant spirit, and too way- ward for their company, a haunter of brinks and perilous verges which are not for guided feet. It passes, but they keep close within ; none who would know still days would unbar for such a visitant : a pro- found instinct bids them fear it. Happiness is all things to all men ; a thousand definitions should not describe its nature. It is suffi- ciency for the day ; it is the peace of the good conscience ; it is the virtuous use of intellectual ener- gies ; it is the wealth of nations ; it is any heartsease or all, if its range be but short and its aim feasible. The happy are they who reach their want, who achieve, who set hand to those things only which are done utterly and to the end, who com- plete their work in a good conceit of their sufficiency. Their secret lies in the sage limit of attempt and the assurance of swift fulfilment. From Hesiod to Burns, all who ^ircmca have sung happiness have gone to the countryside for the exemplar of it, where the horizon of all work is near, and each task all feasible and visibly completed. " What a fine life the countryman's, who ploughs his field all day with his pair of oxen, and at eve brings them home and feeds them, and eats himself, and sleeps soundly." The marrow of happiness is in this strait activity ; the unknown Italian of the fifteenth century who put it so, set forth the truth for all ages ; the aphorist did but para- phrase when he said that he is happy who is fit for one thing only, and does it. Light are the foot- steps of the Hours which have their ways in the furrows ; this was well sung, O Hellene ; no feet have moved lighter, or perhaps shall move while man loves a harvest. For the scattered seed grows and ripens, it is reaped and threshed ; the foreseen gift is present and the Happi- ness and Joy. 146 Happi- ness and Joy. ^irentca long labour crowned. Raise the plane of life, change the occupa- tion ; something in all whole satisfaction will still tell of the old Georgic straitness. Happiness is the use that wears patiently to a comfort ; it is the habit of the heart's ease ; it moves upon the path which millions have trodden smooth. But joy is elate, im- moderate, ungovernable ; it flies, and is uncontained within any bound. Happiness is current gold ; worn in the markets and multiplied in transaction. Joy is neither weighed nor minted ; its revenues are beyond exchange, visionary treasures of desire laid up in the clouds and eternally unimparted. Happiness is still a wine ; there is a fume upon joy, which seethes in the cup and is beaded about its brim ; the draught of it exalts the soul of him who drinks, until the world falls far from him as the earth below rapt Ganymede ; he ^irenica looks down, and the great globe is gone from beneath him like a thing rejected. Happiness is of a hem- pen texture ; joy is woven of the stuff of dreams ; it shall be rent by the lightest wing that flutters, of so fine a gossamer is its substance. Joy is of instants, born and dead in one darting point of time ; happi- ness is of hours, and completed upon the long rounds of leisure. Happiness is of silver afternoons. The mother of joy is night ; it wells golden out of the darkness ; it is auroral, it cometh in the morning. Its voice rings like the bells which bear its name. In a moment it is rung out upon the dull world ; it calls to far winds and rides upon them into the distance ; it returns, and the profound air is rumorous with the gathering music. Sometimes, upon a day of festival, you may hear the ringers mass their rippling peal into sudden intermit- ting chimes, each flung upon the Happi- ness and Joy. 148 Happi- ness and Joy. air in one sonorous fall, a cataract of sound that breaks upon the city and races far over its roofs, until at last the intervals are lost, and all is tremulous with echoes, flying, fol- lowing, and overtaken. The high tower rocks to the tossing bells ; the mind is shaken with pulsing of delight. Could joy flow suave as happiness, who would not abandon all for it ? Nothing but this were then the world's desire. But the magical wild power is fitful and un- sustained ; it troubles and alarms ; hearts are not healed but seared at its touch, and the bereaving hours which end that rapture are often grey with desolation. It sets aflame, and roaring out its life, leaves ember and ash to die down in a freezing night. In this dread usage it does not spare or attemper; the fierce change rives at the very life, which is worn down by them and at each return diminished. In tropic mountains, where night trenica frosts follow upon the glare of raging suns, the peaks are splin- tered by the fury of the succeed- ing heat and cold. Fragments fall from them in the high solitudes ; their flanks are scarred with wounds ; more is reft in short years from their adamantine sub- stance than in quiet centuries from the slopes of English hills. What virtue, then, has this un- steadfast creature that it should rival happiness ? It is various and rich in change and is so commended to mutable humanity. Its tran- sience quickens ; the nature grows more sensitive to fine subtleties of transformation, and is enriched, as by an art of delicate experience. The mere passing in or passing out becomes in itself such a delight as the steady follower of happiness, in his plain issues and returns, perhaps may never know. Without warn- ing given, in the dreariest hour there steals upon the mind a sense 149 Happi- ness and Joy. Peri- pheral things. 50 ^irenica Peri- of strain relaxed ; a film draws thing! over it ; all softens and is clothed with colour. It is an amnesty, a sudden glory of release, as when the iron Arctic ground yields to the sun of spring, and is pierced with the tender roots of flowers. These gliding passages of sense come at last to be desired for themselves ; they have a several existence and awaken their own delight. No longer dreaded as vain delays, they add to joy a cer- tain sweetness of suspense, like the false dawn which checks the day to make it fairer. The day comes at last, more beautiful for the prelude; so joy breaks and flows free through things, quickening the soul with a more marvellous flame. And joy, being vast in range, makes the athlete soul ; for it summons to divine hardship and leads into the far-unfolding spaces entered of none save those stripped of para- ments and trinkets. He who would find it must penetrate the heart of deserts not to be crossed by the encumbered spirit. "Nudos amat Eremus" said St. Jerome ; and there is but one truth for the saint and the bewitched. In these great spaces, where joy is made manifest, the Soul is central to a horizon upon all sides remote, yet felt as an immediate and em- bracing presence ; the void that divides her from it is lit with a familiar splendour. On the bor- ders of immensity she is searched by influences fresh from the spring of days, streaming in upon her and meeting, as it were, in a foam of light. This far-sent radiance be- comes her life ; by the magic of it she is drawn away from earth, from care, from home and kindred. All loveliness flows away into un- attainable things ; these only are vital to her ; for these alone she cares to live. The sense and rea- son are fused in a strange passion, Peri- pheral things. 152 Peri- pheral things. "Dalit piu alte sttlle." revealed at last as that " light in- tellectual fulfilled in love " which is the supreme boon of mind. Such love of far peripheral things is their help whom the Sirens have sent wandering away beyond the pales of happiness. It is often poured first into the heart by a half-uttered voice of nature, learned upon the sea, made actual by a journey into wildernesses. The sense of this strange union is bracing as keen air ; there is a sharpness upon it as of the early spring ; its offspring are born in danger and endure but a little while, like the crocus-flowers aflame under the clenched un- sheltering buds. This farness of descent, this affinity with the dis- tance as the one thing needful, absorbed the mind of Michel- angelo ; it is the gospel of his poems. With a persistence born of revelation, he tells it in phrases uneasily combined, labouring at an '53 art which was not his own, chisel- ling painfully at the words which resist him to the end like granite. Often the springs of fancy seem to fail him ; he repeats to weariness his similes of ice and fire. But the message is clear at last ; the sense breaks through with a concise and noble utterance : " from the stars of the uttermost height comes the splendour down ; to these it draws the heart's desire ; this is that which is named love." In these lines his faith is all confessed ; his soul is eased of a burden ; he has said the say for which he believed the sculptor called to become a poet. They shine through the obscure approaches like the light of altars down glooming aisles ; they bring the gold of daffodils into a chamber dark with winter. These words have comfort when sadness or privation of joy troubles the enchanted spirit ; when, too rapt even to love, it is driven " Dalle piu alte stelU." 154 "Dalle piu alU stelle." beyond the ways of happiness, or goes aside, reluctantly averse, from the hearths of consolation. Their echoes impart new steadfastness ; like the Lucretian strain to which they bear affinity, they rebind in a high allegiance. At such times, it is with them as with the traveller, when in the charmed night- silences he sits alone under eastern stars. The dearest memory grows pale to him then as the moonlit sands ; and whatever fulfilment life holds is summed in that per- fected hour of solitude. As in some exercise of skill a man cares no more for rudiments when once he is advanced toward mastery, but is intent only upon the difficult and subtle problems of the game, so he who is estranged from near affections is blest in deli- cate and faintest contacts to which only the trained sense may make some imperfect answer. He is environed of things, exquisite and 155 starry. He seeks that which is beyond plain apprehension and yet suffers pursuit ; he is impassioned at a light breath, as the poplar quivers when all other trees are still. The spark falls ; the life grows quick ; it flames out its ecstatic hour. For the desire of intellectual beauty, however tenu- ous it seem, is passion still ; a violence, a force, a fury, a vibra- tion. It descends from the clouds ; like the Love of Sappho's unfor- gotten verse, it comes to the earth in purple ; it pulses with life as it comes. Transitory it may be, un- abiding, unknown, and never all possessed. Yet such is the high charm, that its memory lives when all else dies ; it shall endure through the greater pain and overpass the profounder gulf; they who obey it may not be tempted by a more certain wage to another service. Though they suffer more and longer, the reward is worth the : 5 6 "Dalle piu altf stelle." anguish ; and they would not change its moment for a thousand placid morrows of fruition. For them the glow which is intense and perfect is never of the foreground ; it is like fire of sunset among the hills, where the best is always furthest, and upon the last verge of sight. The near range holds its several shapes and colours, with fields, trees, and farms yet all dis- tinct ; the second yields up its varied hues and forms, and looms unfeatured, steeped to the ex- treme rims in azure shadows ; from the third the darkness and the mass are already gone, and all is dissolved in pearly light. But beyond, the last range lifts peaks that burn like topaz, now seen, now hidden again, as the clouds move about it, molten in a surge of fire. Such is the loveliness which their souls pursue, ethereal, apparitional ; and even so it passes, lost in an amazing confluence of 157 splendours before which a nearer cloud spreads at last its darkening veil. Toy works alone ; it asks no Joy ., . . -in steadfast. contribution ; it avoids the pomps and standards, and all the un- needed, vain necessities of spoiled lives. The solitary place is suffi- cient for its habitation ; it is freed, as the Stoics would have said, from the tyranny of external things. It does not recede, like happiness, with lost friends or vanished youth, when the ways of life darken to the bereaved, like deep lanes poured full with evening shadows. They who have known it once may pos- sess it always. For them there shall be no sadness of surrender, but that ecstasy of endeavour shall be pro- longed to the end. They shall not see the pleasures which they have loved come down like autumn leaves, or sigh over the meagre cheer of age, remembering lost activities. For the tree of their 158 joy life shall not slowly rust to dull hues, but flush to a swift splendour in the woods of autumn, until at last it is absorbed into one clear flame, as though it should not die, but glow into annihilation. While the mind performs its office, and the wedlock of body and soul holds undissolved, there shall still be scope for dreams not unimpas- sioned, the soul shall yet be quick- ened with the unquenchable fire. So long as the eye has light, the heart shall yet be enamoured of arduous hopes, as in the blazing days of manhood. And in the dis- tance there shall be surer glimpses of that which youth but half per- ceived ; the things which were invisible but not vain shall seem now to pause for them, the flash shall linger ; a steadfast sight shall perceive the vision. Yet, as in wonder- tales the most Joy fugitive. splendid gift of the magician is often granted upon some hard J 59 terms, not hidden or kept back by the giver, but forgotten awhile by the receiver in the bravery of first possession, so it has ever been with this gift of joy. It is lit with starry lights and touched with amazing fires ; but it remains of a supernal nature beyond their ex- pression or control ; it is ever to be redeemed by pain. None shall summon it at will, or keep it con- tinually under guard ; it will not outstay its hour even for tears or passionate supplication. It has not that great selfless quality which makes happiness seem best when most divided ; it is incommunic- able, and may not be shared at will with others. Only souls of an im- perial genius may bid it abide or persuade it to return when they list ; for them alone will it consent to linger under the regard, as they follow from height to height, proving the wings of the soul. A Shelley or a Schubert will come Joy fugitive. 160 ^irenica Joy radiant to earth with it, and hold- fugitive . . mg it visible awhile, send it homing to tjie stars where, by the gods' grace, he came upon it ; a Words- worth draws it into the circle of his hills and gives it rest in the arbour of a cottage garden. These wizards had some word of power with which to call it down, potent as charms of old magic, Agla, or Ananizapta, or Tetragrammaton the Unutterable Name ; they knew some spell by which it should seem to be imparted ; for them alone it outstayed the cockcrow and knew serene hours of day. But for all the rest there is no such high control ; the music out of the spheres escapes them when most they love it ; the starry form is consumed away in a quick jeal- ousy of darkness. Yet even the residue is riches ; that which fleets from sight is steadfast in remem- brance. There is pleasure from the flying shadows of clouds upon 161 the fields, though none may trace their outline, or stay them for a moment as they pass. The Sirens are cruel mistresses, yet often royal in largesse. They teach the spirit to beat off be- leaguering circumstance ; they dis- cover to it sovereign simples against oppression, dittany for great wounds and infallible charms of fernseed. The soul to which they call will travel on the prompting of an instant ; it can be out and away while others only dream of stirring ; before heavy lids are rubbed, it is departed. It knows no frontiers which might bar escape ; it observes the will of ncne, and waits the hazards of no caprice. In a well-known passage, Sterne has told how literature could carry him far from the sad ways of life ; how, in a moment, when the path became too rough or steep for his feet, he was off it upon soft lawns and places The recipe of fernseed. 162 The recipe of fernseed. ^ttenica scattered with rosebuds of delight. Such deliverance the Sirens also promise ; and if in the regions whither they entice, the flowers are flames and the lawns immeasurable fields of space, there is the same elation of escape, there is the same joy over the filed gyves left behind. They sweep away the ambitions which conflict with freedom or make subservient to a patronage; the soul which they have taught to dream shall take no heed of jealous judg- ment ; the treasures which it en- joys are of a divine abundance and beyond the talons of the harpies. It avoids the torment of Reputa- tion, besieged upon its pinnacle, and, like that priest of Nemi, torn hourly by fear of the supplanter, who shall creep through the grove, and cut the golden bough, and take the priesthood at the point of the sword. It does not listen in an anguish for the footstep of the challenger, or by a sick fancy call 163 The recipe of fernseed. down defeat out of the void. It never knows the dwindling of men's applause and slow withdrawal of favour, feared as a woman fears the loss of an acclaimed beauty, and defended, as she defends, by pathetic artifices of self-deception, until some quick brutality of chance tells that all was done in vain. They who have never known praise are spared this sadness ; on this stage they were not engaged ; they do not hang upon an audience or watch their fortunes cruelly tossed upon a sea of faces. The Roman, tired of the city, with its smoke and din, and the r 11 -^ -L j Abiding. oppression of ail its riches, prepared for himself a place of refuge in the country where he might hear the fall of waters, and look out upon blue, silent mountains. He lived two lives, confessing that neither might satisfy his nature ; his wheels devoured the road between town and country, bearing him at the The shadow of the 164 The shadow of the Abiding. headlong speed which alone could assuage his fever. The Sirens' liegeman, when the hard world oppresses, escapes into a refuge more sure than Tusculan villa or Sabine farm, whence the eye ranges over a vaster distance to heights more arduous than Soracte. The life of man, it has been said, has many lurking-coigns and deep recesses ; more often than we know it is doubly lived by seeming simple men, because the Sirens have come unawares and changed them wholly. The character that we deemed transparent is made im- penetrable ; parents grow opaque to children, husband to wife, and friend to friend. They fashion to themselves deep secrets which the eyes of Argus should never find. The habitation of their soul is as a house hung with concealing tapestries, and pierced with many posterns invisible to the stranger or even the guest ; but when these ^trenica 165 are gone, the arras is lifted up. a The 1 i_ 11 11 shadow stone revolves in the wall, and the of the wind in the hidden stairway calls to freedom. When others think that a soul lodged after this wise keeps the hearth, often it is leagues away, on seas or mountains or in the for- ests where no axe has ever sounded. There it follows things fugitive and swift, fleeter than hart or hare, and of a more infinite endurance ; there it tastes the proven delight of a servitude exchanged, for it serves still, but now aerial and winged powers. And though the wan- derer in these wild places may lose the comfortable shelter of circum- scription, he is no more encom- passed or impounded ; he has leaped the enclosures of that life where eyes are focussed to one length, and slow to perceive at every other. It may be peace to ignore immensity and dwell within a fold ; to build a sanctuary, and at appointed times to circumambulate 66 ^irenica The its walls ; to leave the infinite shadow . - . of the to the care of sworn interpreters. Achievement it may be to saw out measured lengths of fact, and with dovetail and rebate to complete the cunning joinery. But those who have been once allured beyond the workshop and 'the chapel, distrust the peace and mislike the car- pentry. They abstain from the deep cups of induction with which the world's thirst is quenched. " It is brief," they say, " this little nonce of life, but not too short for brave adventure. Though we forsake the sure prospect, who shall prove it madness ? For who shall tell us which is best, to know the transient well, or to follow after the shadow of the abiding ? " Truancy. The wanderer knows a more generous wine than the thin vin- tage of Abiezer ; and the spice in it is the joy of truancy, which outlasts the days of youth and is ttmft* inextinguishable in all to whom the Sirens have ever sung. The man remembers with delight how in boyhood he would steal afield on a summer night to chase moths along the hedges, exalted under the influence of the bland moon- light, drawn into mysterious dis- tances by a charm beyond the vision of fluttering wings or the desire of a difficult prey. How the great moth would appear not at all, or only under a waned moon, gleaming high above his net, and never for his seizure ; how he would find himself far from home, when the night began to fail and the shadows under the boughs gave back before the dawn ; how he would race home on feet drenched with dews, and sleep like a young god exhausted. A mystery breathes to him still out of those suave nights, so vast, so delicately haun- ted, heavy with the fragrance of the meadow-sweet, with the whirr 167 Truancy. 68 ^irenica Truancy, and subdued murmur of soft wings ; nights of the dreamy fields and silent paths, when the pursuer was taken himself in an enchantment, and winged himself, and lifted up to an unimaginable rapture. Somewhat of that joy survives to all who are held in the allegiance of the Sirens ; they are always truant in soul ; through the long days they may obey the punctu- alities of rule, and keep the statutes of observance, but their hearts are in the ghostly meadows where the great moth hovered and was never taken. He who thus outwardly conforms is fast vowed to errantry ; the desire of it is inveterate in him ; for the secret joy of it he lives aloof in a seeming poverty of affec- tion. A weak competitor for all solid gains, but in the retrospect at the end of life perhaps in better case than Amurath the Caliph, who in age looked back on a career of royal opportunity and knew but 169 fourteen days of happiness. The memories of those great escapes shall come to him in the still chambers where he sits impris- oned ; they shall not find him mute to them, but like a violin of the Amati, he shall grow more resonant with years, and at the end take up the master- theme ; it shall return with nobler harmonies ; his soul shall stir to its departure upon that sound. god is dead who ever won an enduring worship. Evil or good, mild or terrible, all must live on ; it is not given them to die. The timid pagan erred who told of a voice over the waters crying : " Great Pan is dead." Hephaestus forges dread arms; Athena governs ; Aphrodite roams the world, and Our Lady of the Wild Creatures. And the nature which is half divine is also immortal ; Herakles girds to new labours ; Prometheus toils for Truancy. No more dead than Pan. 170 ^iremca NO more men ; the Muses are still present dead than * T i r Pan. deities. Let none, therefore, won- der that the ancient enemies of the Nine live also ; for if Pan signifies all nature, the Muses and the Sirens together mean all art, and the Sirens alone romance. And therefore policy has feared them, and all the deedful and strenuous energies have rallied for their undo- ing. Philosophers have preached and good men practised to com- pass their destruction. Religion has been fain to save their victims from themselves with the murmur of her liturgies. And yet they are not silenced, nor are their victims saved. For all who have heard the song to its end are marked for wanderings as surely as the re- turned Odysseus, who visited the temples, and performed his vows, but was none the less in jeopardy for all his offerings, and died search- ing he knew not what in the peril of the outer seas. It may be that in ^itenica comparison with the great gods of War and Love and Wealth, the Sirens are weak in retinue ; but where once their dart flies home it wounds perdurably, and the weapon of Eros is a child's bow to theirs. They spread before all eyes the royal colour they love, the hue of the great distances and the deep skies ; it passes into the texture of life, and like the dye which the great waters might not wash out, it holds ineradicable to the end. And if their voice was full of peril in the youth of the world, how fatally resistless now, when they have added to the old spell new charms drawn from all experience and the subtlest arts of life, until it is become the arch- music, binding the soul from the first chords with enchainments of perfect sound. What things were dreamed of Xanadu or stolen from the heavens for Adonais, what whispers breathed into enchanted 171 No more dead than Pan. 172 No more dead than Pan. The clouded fire. flutes or called out of haunted lands for Euryanthe, all the promises which man has overheard in the winds, or surprised in the night- watches, these they have engrafted upon their own and made integral with the former sorcery. Like the hunter who slew the eagle with a shaft winged from its own feather, they have used dreams of men for the wounding of human kind. Only the child of the gods, the divine changeling in the cradle, may obey their call and approach the vision, and yet have full part in a human happiness. For the rest there is but the swift flash of joy, coming from the darkness and returning to it; or the gleam of that Intellectual Beauty which to the poet was as the music of the night- wind over the strings of an unfingered lute. The song of the Sirens is sung with mastery : they did not strive with the Muses in vain. All that ^itcnica the rhetorician knows they know : to magnify, to make significant, or to suppress, that their cause may always seem the better. They do not sing of the drear interludes between sight and sight, or of the soul outstripped and fallen exhausted. They do not sing of achievement betraying promise, or the misery of affinities never joined. They leave unsung the visions that blind, and the dark- ness that dismays ; the grief, the abandonment, the slowly murder- ing silences. They veil the clear Hellenic light with wreaths of magical cloud. But they sing the glory of the chase in enchanted forests and the straining to the quarry over the mountains ; of adventure, of ascent, of soaring valiance, of Infinity brought to man's compass ; of time and space annulled, the aeon and the moment made one ; of the almightiness of joy approaching the splendour of '73 The clouded fire. '74 The clouded fire. tremendous thrones. These things they sing; and whosoever shall hear out their song shall hate as they hate, and love as seems good to them, suffered only to hide under heaped memories, like seeds be- neath dead leaves, the little after- thoughts and treasons which they have not deigned to crush. Their bondman shall forsake Pheidias for Scopas ; he shall ask of Shelley the transcending forms which Sophocles saw and renounced ; he shall desire above that which is simple and august and still, the sonorous, the moving, and the richly dyed ; he shall give up his soul to the lure of divine impos- sible things. The crystal classic thought shall satisfy him no more ; through its clear shoals he shall see the natural man ; but what is that to him who has looked into Eastern rubies and discerned his angel there ? All this lucidity is false to him ; it is barren and pale ; the ^itentca 175 glow and the wonder are analysed The I- . i . .-i , clouded away, it is his punishment and fire. his very grievous loss ; for whom the classic spirit informs, it saves for happiness ; romance has no like redemption. But the colour, and the glow, and the clouded inward fire he must have, though the pure line of beauty perish under his eyes. He receives in place of the clear good the inapprehensible gift, committing, in the sight of prudence, an in- effable folly of exchange. But what if the clear be shallow, and the sharpest facet of proof the most arrant artifice ; if your precise, trimmed knowledge be vain as lore of heraldry, exact in forms that never were ; if the symbol con- fessed, the aspiration, the dream, win nearer than your definitions to the beating heart of truth ? If all that is drawn from penumbra into hard light is only man's conve- nient fiction, were there not some 176 The clouded fire. ^itenica consolation then for the exchange which prudence deems so mad ? If the Real lives only in the Vague, should not the Sirens deserve praise despite their cruelty, sing- ing the eternal truth, and the terror and dread joy that come to the soul out of the deeps in which it dwells ? Such doubt is ever goading him and all his fellows in unrest. And whenever a pre- science of that returning song begins to trouble them, they make answer to all who in compassion would keep them from the way : " Let us alone," they say ; " the pansy of the dune is more to us than the ranged flowers along your walls. We must go far where the hours are unimputed ; we must be harmed of light. We shall soar and fall ; yet we shall have known joy of ascent, and nothing shall take from us the remembrance. Say no more that this ecstasy is against nature ; it is the very way 177 of the soul. For she was never wholly of the creation and is not to be contained by its laws. Hers is a transcending spirit which is abused, forever constrained to present things. And she is not least faithful to her own nature when she disdains to be held by them, passing for awhile into the limitless and untempered, out of which she came. Let us go, then, without reproach ; a permitted force carries beyond your happi- ness. But when we return, once more defeated, we will again seek to do your pleasure in gratitude for your goodwill. For often when you might have turned from us you have forgiven, endeavour- ing to make us share that which you deem to be the greatest good for men. When we are released, we will toil with the most patient, though there be not one among the least of you but shall have greater satisfaction of his labour. The clouded fire. , 7 8 The clouded fire. ^itcnica Only suffer us always to look for the sign and to depart upon its coming ; for when the mystical wind stirs, and the music streams into these shadows, then we must rise and go, though all the mercy of earth were put forth to hold us back." BY THE SAME AUTHOR APOLOGIA DIFFIDENTIS Crown 8vo, yj. 6d. net PRESS OPINIONS Athenceum. " It is a pleasant thing, a real good to have the cadences of Mr. Leith in our ears." Times. " His work is a genuine contribution to literature, and it was well worth doing indeed better worth doing than most, for it is a sincere and often beautiful attempt to depict the character of a sensitive self-conscious Ishmael." Outlook. "Mr. Leith revives the forgotten day of the essayists, the writers who wrote beautifully on some large human subject. Of the excellence of his English there cannot be any question. He can express himself with nicety and elegance ; he can turn a metaphor with any man from Browne to Stevenson." Academy. "Mr. Compton Leith has a fine feeling for literature, genuine distinction of style all the virtues most to be admired in an age of slipshod writing. ... A really ad- mirable analysis of the sensations and emotions of the shy man." Daily Mail." Mr. Leith has written a very beautiful book, and perhaps the publisher's claim that this will prove a new classic is not too bold. " Mr. ARTHUR C. BENSON in Saturday Review." The book has high literary merit ; the style is full of melody and colour, M APOLOGIA DIFFIDENTIS PRESS OPINIONS continued and the rich dreamy sentences rise into the air like wreaths of fragrant incense smoke. But there is an inner charm as well ; the book comes, one feels, from the heart, and is the expression of a refined and tender nature forced, or at all events believing itself forced, into a reluctant renunciation of the very qualities which lend to life its inner glow. . . . And then in words and phrases of curious and haunted beauty this sad soul traces its attempt to find comfort in nature, in stoicism, in metaphysics and so the pathetic pilgrimage draws to an end." Pall Mall Gazette. "The book, pathetically interesting, well- written, and containing many passages of real beauty of expression, will allure any reader who knows what that moral wilderness is into which highly sensitive natures are sometimes driven natures that long for response and companionship, yet by a provoking contrariety in themselves retire into reserve when, their will would do otherwise. . . . Nevertheless he finds, after all, many bits of balms and palliatives, so artisti- cally and plaintively told, that we will not spoil our readers' anticipation by quoting them." Daily Chronicle. ' ' Mr. Leith's literary style is truly admir- able ; it is elegance touched by fire. His metaphors are novel and striking ; and the ' viewless wind ' has not blown the Greek spirit on him in vain." Mr. R. A. SCOTT JAMES in Daily News.' ' I can think of very few living authors who have the same capacity of com- bining flexible harmonious diction with a precise expression of opinion. To pick up this book at any point is to feel that we are in a rare atmosphere ; that here is someone who feels that words have value, and who has a view of life which he cannot do otherwise than communicate." Observer. " It takes its place at once as a human document, a literary achievement, and enrols its author in the little band of literary prose writers. . . . Open this book where one may, APOLOGIA DIFFIDENTIS PRESS OPINIONS continued the intellect is at once arrested and quickened. This is style fine, flowing English prose. It is full of subtle shades of thought, descriptive writing, suggestion, and human sympathy. . . . The literary expression of an intellectual mind." Guardian. "A writer who can pen descriptions as diverse and as admirable, each in its own way, as those of the Eastern landscape, of the elm-tree, of an evening at Greenwich, has achieved such mastery over his tools as is not given to all." Daily Graphic. "A singularly beautiful and interesting book." Dundee Advertiser. ' ' His message is greatly needed in these days of hurry. Mr. Leith is a stylist with a rare appreciation of the true value of words and the melody of phrases. To open his book at any page is to find oneself in an atmosphere of wondrous rarity." Scotsman. " He unbosoms himself with rich, ripe philosophy and with a rare, engaging eloquence in language." Evening Standard. "Mr. Leith reminds us often of Pater." Glasgow Evening News. "The style is that of Mr. Arthur Christopher Benson, polished and made precious to an unusual degree. It will not surprise me if we learn by and by that Mr. Benson is in truth the author." Methodist Quarterly Review. "Mr. Compton Leith's style, in its stateliness, reminds us of Sir Thomas Browne, though it is Browne without his pedanticism. " Sunday School Chronicle. " . . . Here is gracious, dignified, stately prose, and the style is one in which you are made to feel the swell of noble thought and are yet conscious of the restraint APOLOGIA DIFFIDENTIS PRESS OPINIONS continued of the true artist. Robert Louis Stevenson was our best stylist. It is no treason to Stevenson's name to say that he never rose to the level of the glowing paragraph I have quoted." Leeds Mercury. " The prose attains a fine, broad, musical eloquence ; the general statement is that of a cultured observer and aesthetic temperament, and is sure to attract wide atten- tion." Yorkshire Observer. "He has undeniable command of language, and with much beauty of diction expresses the pure and lofty thought of a sensitive nature." Yorkshire Post. " It is all equally graceful in thought and phrase. None could have written it but a man of culture and refinement." Public Opinion. " It is good to have such visions written in such a style for our advantage who cannot see them, and the seeing of them gave balm to the writer." Liverpool Courier. "To many who care for the wizardry of literature, for the enchantment that spreads beauty on the printed page to flash to the uttermost ends of personal con- sciousness, this miracle of shyness breaking into song will seem a thing of strange and exquisite fascination." Manchester Courier." His English is gracious, graceful, fluent, and beautiful. His theme is at once original and appealing, and the combination of matter and manner prove irresistible. . . . His book is a sincere and masterly piece of prose creation." JOHN LANE, THE BODLEY HEAD, LONDON, W. JOHN LANE COMPANY, NEW YORK G/Q University of California SOUTHERN REGIONAL LIBRARY FACILITY 405 Hilgard Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90024-1388 Return this material to the library from which it was borrowed. JAN172NK JDED o I /%" ''''' *'i'i