THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 LOS ANGELES 
 
 GIFT OF 
 
 Kate Gordon Moore
 
 

 
 Cfie @>iience0 of t&e
 
 Silences of 
 t|)e fl^oon 
 
 By 
 
 ILOIlDon: John Lane, The 
 Bodley Head. J0to gOtk: 
 
 John Lane Company, MCMXI
 
 COPYRIGHT, I9II, BY JOHN LANE COMPANY 
 
 D. B. UPDIKE, THE MERRYMOUNT PRESS, BOSTON, U. S. A.
 
 TO W. COMPTON LEITH 
 
 865949
 
 of t^e 
 
 i 
 
 EARLY in the morning I saw the 
 pigeons outward bound from the 
 opposite wood, with the sunlight under 
 their wings, for the sun had only just 
 risen. Three hours later I saw the first 
 butterfly; it was a common white one, 
 but it stayed with me for ten minutes 
 and inspected every flower. Together we 
 made the round of all my beds, stopping 
 to chat with the glad-faced occupants 
 of each, like any couple of district vis 
 itors. The rosebuds under the window 
 are still unopened; they are like white 
 hands folded in prayer. In the corner by 
 the door stand the tulips, great dames of a 
 magnificence grander than the pomp of 
 Versailles the staunch upholders of the 
 garden's dying aristocracy. These strange 
 flowers seem to have all the scornful pride 
 of an Atalanta without a huntress's grace 
 of bearing ; but they have most of the femi 
 nine virtues beauty (both of form and 
 colour), purity, pride, reserve. If you 
 have not marked the latter quality, look 
 at them in their prime, when their cups 
 
 'God 
 
 Almighty first 
 planted a 
 Garden ' 
 
 The patrician 
 tulip
 
 be Silences 
 
 CHAPTER 
 I 
 
 House 
 martins 
 
 are still almost nut-shaped: you will see 
 them wear an expression nearly amount 
 ing to primness. Humility, which we only 
 pretend to admire in women, they have 
 not; and how should a queen among 
 spring flowers be humble? They are 
 parables understood by a few, and by 
 them first reverenced and afterwards 
 loved. That rich temperament of the 
 midsummer rose is as far removed from 
 them as is the daisy's simplicity ; but more 
 than any flower they have the sovereign 
 beauty of a nature as dual and contra 
 dictory as humanity and feminine 
 humanity most of all. For their colours, 
 gorgeous as the raiment of a Cleopatra, 
 are a standing protest against their chill 
 spirituality; they are like painted images 
 of the Madonna. In this strange mingling 
 of the voluptuous and the ascetic they 
 continually remind us of passages in 
 Plato and the Christian mystics. 
 
 I HAVE counted, too, over fifty house 
 martins sunning themselves on the 
 roof at once, and listened to their twitter 
 a cooing recitative like a cradle-song, 
 the cradle-song of the infant summer, 
 but all too short the merest gurgle of
 
 oftbe^oon 
 
 bubbling notes. It is so soon over, like 
 the spring that it sings to, and like the 
 chelidonisma or swallow-song which the 
 boys and maids of Hellas sang each year 
 at the return of the migratory birds. 
 
 Now the sun is on the point of taking 
 his last plunge, and for a few moments 
 I, a human being justly self-despised, 
 I may watch the pink light dreaming in 
 the hollows between the eternal hills 
 the hills whose eternity passes like a 
 dream. 
 
 THE rooks are coming home across 
 meadows of fire, where lie shadowy 
 isles which are really the tops of the oak- 
 trees. To see them rise above the horizon, 
 those ominous galleys under sail before 
 the dying breeze, making their port in 
 yonder patriarchal elms, to watch the 
 first of the flight, an old hierarch with 
 conscious premonition in every flap of 
 his wings, is to travel across the centu 
 ries in an instant far back to Aegeus on 
 the promontory of Sunium and the black- 
 sailed ship from the cruel isle of Crete. 
 I sometimes think that if the voice of 
 the nightingale brings us to such thoughts 
 as Plato called a ' recollection ' of the 
 
 CHAPTER 
 
 I 
 
 Rooks
 
 4 
 
 Cfce Silences 
 
 CHAPTER 
 I 
 
 'Mothy 
 curfewtide' 
 
 divine, and if the blackbird and thrush 
 sing, one the melancholy and the other 
 the joy of earthly existence, then in 
 these black hulls of the heavens there is 
 something unearthly and Plutonian. That 
 cry of inexpressible foreboding from a 
 throat hoarse with the repetition through 
 immemorial generations of one caco 
 phonous chord was surely heard upon 
 the banks of Cocytus, c River of Wail- 
 ing'! 
 
 NOW the rooks are still, the black 
 bird's crescendo of groundless 
 alarm has subsided, and the starlings 
 have stopped whistling amazement over 
 their scandals; even the sparrows are 
 tired of their own endless dialectic. One 
 of those' night-sailing skiffs of the mea 
 dows, the cockchafers, has just tacked 
 across the garden and rounded the house 
 with the purblind navigation of all his 
 race. The cows by the river, the sheep 
 under the hill's lea, the dogs at outlying 
 farms who take it in turns to bark in the 
 tentative manner of children beginning 
 to cry, all are silent at last ; only the 
 owl is abroad, chilling the woods with his 
 banshee note.
 
 oft&e 
 
 SO with me has passed one of the 
 spring days at which man has no 
 time to wonder, because he is so busily 
 'making money.' Fool! 
 
 I AM a slave and dependent of Nature, 
 but what a freedom that is ! I live like 
 the birds and beasts, having wilfully 
 abandoned all that is held to be true and 
 right in religion and in ethics ; but I have 
 taken my stand on the only immovable 
 truth that man has yet found. I am 
 already forgetting to covet my fellows' 
 wealth and to hanker after their creeds; 
 my riches and religion are both to be 
 found in the earth's fruits, and my creed 
 cannot be recited or put into a book, 
 but only pondered and lived. 
 
 IT is a searching test of true poetry and 
 lofty prose to enquire into the quan 
 tity of thought and imagination which 
 is compressed into a single epithet. Ho 
 mer's ' rosy-fingered Dawn ' and Milton's 
 ' sable-vested Night ' are not mere nouns 
 with adjectives attached to them; they are 
 themselves part of the mint from which 
 singers coin their fancies; to change the 
 figure, they are the germs which under 
 
 CHAPTER 
 
 I 
 
 'Sic 
 transit ' 
 
 Freedom 
 
 'Arnica 
 silentia 
 lunae'
 
 Silences 
 
 CHAPTER 
 
 I 
 
 the shaping care of another poet may 
 some day grow into a lyric, as a phrase 
 of primitive speech has so often grown 
 into a myth. You remember, reader, the 
 occasion of those three words in the 
 Aeneid arnica silentia lunae? The Ar- 
 gives had left their wooden horse before 
 the walls of Troy, had embarked their 
 troops and drawn off their fleet as if in 
 precipitate flight. Packed with silent, lis 
 tening heroes, the great beast stood alone 
 upon the windy Ilian plain. The Trojans, 
 an inquisitive mob of chieftains and men- 
 at-arms, came down from the city to make 
 a circuit of its giant form; the voice of 
 Sinon, the traitor, raised in the plausi 
 ble rhetoric of his race, reached faintly 
 the ears of the prisoned company. For a 
 moment, when Laocoon, suspecting the 
 treachery, hurled his spear into the flank 
 of the horse, the fate of Priam's kingdom 
 still hung balanced; but there was a call 
 for ropes and rollers, and a hundred half- 
 willing hands dragged the monster into 
 the city as a trophy and a sacrifice to Pal 
 las. The sun fell seaward; the shadows 
 lay like fallen colossi upon the plains; the 
 guards upon the walls might have seen 
 the peaks of Ida blush and darken and
 
 vanish but there were no guards upon 
 the walls to heed the sight, for in the 
 city were revels and music. Night fell. 
 The songs languished, and, one by one, 
 ceased for ever. 
 
 'Vertitur interea coelum et ruit Oceano nox, 
 Involvens umbra magna terramque polumque 
 Myrmidonumque dolos; fusi per moenia Teucri 
 Conticuere j sopor fessos compleftitur artus. 
 Et jam Argiva phalanx instruftis navibus ibat 
 A Tenedo tacitae per arnica silentia lunae 
 Litora nota petens.' 
 
 AENEID, n. 250. 
 
 I have been a long while in getting to 
 the point: I pray the reader's forgive 
 ness. But ' The friendly silences of 
 the moon ' ! I feel as if I must cry out, 
 as De Quincey cried about a passage 
 in Hydriotapkia, ' What ifluctus decuma- 
 nus of rhetoric ! ' Those three words are 
 among my most priceless possessions; 
 they are set high among my mind's Pe 
 nates beside a flower-spray of Sappho's 
 song and a sob from the melodies of 
 Mozart, beside a few of those chipped 
 fragments and battered torsos of poetry 
 for which we would willingly lose a whole 
 epic. Mark 'the silences of the moon' 
 not 'silence' as if she had fits or moods 
 of silence ; and so she has. You, reader, 
 
 CHAPTER 
 I
 
 Cfce Silences 
 
 CHAPTER 
 I 
 
 W.B.Yeats, 
 
 The Shadowy 
 Waters. 
 
 Created 
 personality 
 
 if you have watched the variable moods 
 of Nature and know their startling hu 
 manity, will not accuse me of romanc 
 ing ; you can recall a thousand days and 
 nights when not two hearts alone, but 
 three hearts seemed to beat together; 
 when it was your comradeship that the 
 birds sang about and your thoughts that 
 the trees whispered each to his friend and 
 neighbour. You know also, if you have 
 gazed from the hills at the graceful 
 wheeling of the heavens, the long spaces 
 of night-stillness when the pulse of the 
 world seems to have stopped, but the 
 pulses of her two children are racing 
 the pauses between a smile and a smile, 
 between a dream and a dream ; surely, 
 these are 'the friendly silences of the 
 moon ' ? 
 
 'I looked upon the moon, 
 Longing to knead and pull it into shape 
 That I might lay it on your head as a crown.'* 
 
 IT is something besides the familiar 
 ity and comparative nearness of the 
 moon which has made her the patient 
 confidante of the sorrowful for centu 
 ries. In that apparently placid, yet seared 
 and tortured shape, seeming aged, yet
 
 of t&e 
 
 really of so young and transient an exist 
 ence as to demand our human sympathy, 
 once by man endowed with divinity, yet 
 really more helpless than man, we can 
 discern the likeness of a personality re 
 mote, but not inaccessible, lovely, be 
 nign, and ironically made helpless the 
 semblance of such a happily feminine 
 temperament as that one of which Pope 
 tenderly has written: 
 
 ' An equal mixture of good humour 
 And sensible soft melancholy.' 
 
 The millions of pensive mortal eyes that 
 have gazed upon her, the thousands of 
 passionate-speaking mortal lips that have 
 sung to her, have given her this accumu 
 lative personality of infinite tenderness 
 and delicacy; thus also the broad and 
 smiling heaven became under the light 
 touch of a few Aryan generations the 
 broad-smiling Dyaus or Zeus who was 
 so amiable to mortal women. As in the 
 ploughlands which have seen so many 
 golden harvests, in the cliffs which have 
 faced so many furies of storm, so there is 
 a deceptive show of permanence in this 
 worn phantom of a world which has been 
 present as a speechless, derisive spectator 
 
 CHAPTER 
 
 I
 
 IO 
 
 Cfre 
 
 CHAPTER 
 I 
 
 De profundis 
 
 at countless of the dramatic splendours 
 and follies of man. We are looking upon 
 the face which lonely Hagar looked upon 
 in the desert, which little Ishmael won 
 dered at, and which was turned to pallor 
 by certain bonfires of Nero. 
 
 Cornelius Agrippa, with that half-con 
 scious sublimity of symbolism which was 
 peculiar to the medieval pseudo-sciences, 
 speaks of the moon as having astrological 
 influence over wildernesses, woods, rocks 
 and mountains, waters and seashores 
 that is to say, over the habitations of soli 
 tude and non-human voices, in places 
 where Eternity is almost a materialised 
 presence. To step out into moonlight is, 
 after all, to step into the presence of a 
 god ; sorrow which has ached for what 
 seemed many ages melts away at the 
 touch of so rich a maturity, so deep an 
 experience ; it is as though in the midst 
 of our whimpering we were suddenly 
 confronted by the Mater Dolorosa. 
 
 BUT, alas ! sometimes it happens that 
 these silences are all too unbroken. 
 We fly from the coarseness and tangi 
 bility of human sympathy to wander 
 under those rays which we have known
 
 oftbe^oon 
 
 to fall upon the sense like the memory 
 of a dead and forgotten song. But now 
 they descend upon a face twisted with 
 agony like rain upon the wrinkled foli 
 age of a tree which ivy is strangling; 
 everything near breaks into a long sigh 
 of thankfulness, but for that one tree 
 no thrill of refreshment is possible. We 
 know that under these same beams in 
 palaces and hovels children are sobbing 
 pitifully, women are trying to pray, men 
 are hating and cursing; the lambs in the 
 meadow are bleating of their imaginary 
 discomforts, the creatures of night weary 
 ing themselves with surreptitious crusades 
 against theirweaker fellows. Thethought 
 of all this multiform misery unrolling it 
 self under the calm glances of the rising 
 orb, while it may and does shew us the 
 comparative insignificance of our proper 
 troubles, shews also the real impotence 
 of even the loveliest and most powerful 
 beauty to drug the gnawing pains of grief. 
 
 IN whatever aspect we look at Nature 
 we see her a creature of moods, and 
 of our moods: joyful, because all her 
 children are sometimes joyful ; sorrow 
 ing, because they must mourn ; passion- 
 
 CHAPTER 
 
 i 
 
 Nature's 
 sympathy
 
 C&e 
 
 CHAPTER 
 I 
 
 ate, for they are passionate too. Thus it 
 is that at one time the crescent moon 
 will look like an old man, wrinkled and 
 hunchbacked and wan, at another like 
 the incarnation of a dream. In this adapt 
 able sympathy towards us of each giant 
 and weakling among earthly things of 
 the violet and the pine no less than the 
 moon is deeply hidden the unity of 
 purpose which lies at the heart of all ex 
 istence and which shaped the first stir 
 rings of religion into animistic and pan 
 theistic forms. Let my will be thwarted 
 and my spirit crushed; the bluff rock 
 rallies me to defiance, for does it not 
 speak of hardihood and mineral wealth 
 gained by the weight of burden laid upon 
 burden and carried through immemorial 
 years? At times I may long for wealth 
 and glitter, but then the pine whispers 
 of beauty and the austerity of her songs, 
 of freedom and her sternness, of poverty 
 and the hermit's ever increasing store. 
 And here I must take leave to enter 
 upon a digression, for except in the light 
 of such digression these attributes of the 
 pine its aloofness and, as it were, a 
 certain inscrutable sanctity may seem 
 arbitrary or fantastic ideas of my own.
 
 oftfoe 
 
 EVEN in his dimly lighted age Plato 
 could linger tenderly over the idea, 
 darkly expressed, of character in inor 
 ganic and low organic forms of life of 
 personality which a relentless Power had 
 doomed never or very gradually to pass 
 beyond the embryonic stage of existence. 
 We, with our wider outlook upon Nature, 
 can single out as from a panorama some 
 flower here, there a tree or a rock, and, 
 with searching, find in it some trace of 
 those qualities which by force of estab 
 lished habit we attribute to humanity 
 alone. Let us remember the monastic 
 ideal of starvation social, intellectual, 
 and bodily. Let us remember how Pater 
 speaks of l the clear, cold, inaccessible, 
 impossible heights of the Book of the 
 Imitation.' Then at one time or another, 
 however subconsciously, the thought 
 must come to us, what an ascetic among 
 trees is the pine! Think, how it loves 
 a poor soil; how it can live on sand and 
 rock ; how it can breathe the rarefied air of 
 mountain-tops ; how its delight is in con 
 ditions which to the grosser folk of its 
 kind would bring blasted branches and 
 death. Its chill spirituality makes it the 
 fit companion of silence and the undy- 
 
 CHAPTER 
 
 i 
 
 Personality 
 again 
 
 The pine
 
 Cfce 
 
 CHAPTER 
 I 
 
 The speech 
 of dumb 
 things 
 
 ing snows. Moreover, like a cowled fig 
 ure, low-voiced and sparely clad, it sug 
 gests less of time than of eternity; there 
 is something lurid and unearthly about 
 its bare, reddish trunk and funereal 
 crest; its voice is hollow, like the voices 
 of all coniferous trees. So are the voices 
 of poor, stripped branches in winter and 
 of a man who feels himself chilled by 
 the shadow of nearing death. It would 
 seem, too, that the pines have learned 
 the secret of the waves and murmur it 
 to their own hearts day and night ; so 
 faithfully do they mimic the primordial 
 cadences of the shore. 
 
 FROM Nature we may learn all vir 
 tues and true arts ; from the poplar 
 its solitary introspection, and patience 
 from the watching heron. There are 
 aisles in the arching grass where ants 
 walk as mightily as bishops; and what 
 builder can imitate the symmetry of 
 spruce or larch ? Nothing, if it is true 
 to its own nature, is contemptible. Out 
 of 'dumb' matter we derive all purity of 
 colour and most beauties of line; and to 
 the visible materialisations of Nature be 
 long the accumulated wisdom and song of
 
 oftbe cpoon 
 
 all the world since the Chaldeans first felt 
 their kinship with the stars; she is the 
 true Pallas Athene, in wisdom eternally 
 at her prime, in beauty immortally fair. 
 
 WHAT a glorious belief is that in 
 the immortality of the human 
 memory! It delights me to think that 
 all my recolle&ions are painted in col 
 ours more permanent than the worlds ; 
 that when the great nebula in Orion has 
 settled down to an orderly existence as 
 a group of solar systems, when its plan 
 ets have cooled, become habitable, and 
 passed on to such desolation as we see 
 upon our own satellite, I shall still re 
 member how many times I watched the 
 transient apocalypse which mencall'sun- 
 set.' Once I looked west up the ancient 
 valley of the Severn, of old a chain of 
 lakes, now a surge of pastures, rolling in 
 billowy perspective from somewhere be 
 neath the horizon mountainous green 
 waves dotted with black coppices and 
 black fallows. Along the green of earth 
 lay the green of atmosphere, evening's 
 miracle of transparent colour, the lowest 
 rung of a spectrum; above that the strata 
 of clouds, tiers of solemn spectators at 
 
 CHAPTER 
 
 i 
 
 Memory
 
 i6 
 
 Cfce Silences 
 
 CHAPTER 
 
 I 
 
 a world-drama the lowest cloud, apall ; 
 the next, a veil; the third, a pink rose 
 petal; the fourth, a golden fleece; thefifth, 
 a thin flame what an allegory ! In the 
 northwest and across the zenith danced 
 a swarm of evanescent shapes, gayest 
 ephemera of theheavens, dying and com 
 ing to a new birth in a few moments 
 melting into the infinite background 
 and painting it over again as with a 
 master hand airy swimmers, diving, 
 as it seemed, beneath a blue surface and 
 rising to view further on in the wind's 
 wake. Southward the clouds were denser, 
 but feathery still little black feathers, 
 dishevelled and angry; little white fea 
 thers, full of light; little gold feathers, full 
 of fire beneath them, the moon, a slen 
 der fairy, curled to sleep above a spec 
 tral horizon, where the hills, robed in 
 a golden chlamys, were less substantial 
 than the clouds. I looked eastward down 
 the valley, and saw detached and shat 
 tered and drifting forms, ghosts of de 
 parted cumuli the cloudy cattle of the 
 gods driven home from their pasture in 
 high heaven. The top of the opposite hill 
 gradually ceased to show points of vivid 
 light, the reflection of the west in ob-
 
 oftfceepoon 
 
 scure cottage windows; the roan cows on 
 the hillside lower down were no longer 
 blood-red spots in a meadow of fire. 
 
 Having seen but once this unveiling 
 of an existence more beautiful than him 
 self, what man can die in misery? 
 
 THAT dogmatism which denies to 
 the flowers the possession of any 
 thing but growth and procreative power, 
 and names them inanimate or soulless 
 things, men call science. I call it blind 
 ness. When they talk of the proletariat 
 and its vegetative existence, they cast a 
 slur on the delicate lily and on the au 
 stere pine. They have read The Sensitive 
 Plant and Melampus, yet they can still 
 tell me with scorn in their eyes and on 
 their lips that I do not live, but vegetate. 
 They are right of course I vegetate. I 
 would willingly make a vaunt of my adop 
 tion into the race which can boast of the 
 rose and the lily and the common grass ; 
 I am with them in all seasons, in their 
 birth and in their dying ; in time they 
 will tell me more of themselves, and I 
 shall become less blind to their beauty, 
 quicker of ear to their undertones of mer 
 riment and ruth. 
 
 CHAPTER 
 
 i 
 
 Science 
 
 and 
 blindness
 
 Cfre Silences 
 
 CHAPTER 
 I 
 
 Modern 
 animism 
 
 IN our childhood we fly to Nature as 
 to a mother; in youth she is our 
 mistress, who has reckoned the greatest 
 hearts in all history among her lovers ; 
 in age we sit at her feet with tears in our 
 eyes because it seems that we must soon 
 look no more upon her features. It is 
 then at the last that each of us finds com 
 fort some more, some less in a cer 
 tain animistic veneration of her beauty, 
 in strengthening our kinship with her 
 who has been to us mother and queen, 
 in drawing into our own lives the impul 
 siveness of the wind and the patience of 
 the sea, the harmony of natural colours 
 and voices and forms. From flowers 
 and trees and the strata of rocks we learn 
 the beauty of silent growth and its ulti 
 mate strength ; we see that, as Emerson 
 told us, c the force of character is cumula 
 tive,' and we begin to apply the maxim to 
 what fools call dumb matter. For the rose, 
 the pine, and the mountain are speech 
 less only because the strident human 
 voice shouts them down ; if we would 
 but be silent, and learn their moods, 
 and honour their diffidence and reserve 
 as we honour that of a woman or of a 
 friend, then we should learn that their
 
 oftbe 
 
 lives are not motionless nor unprogres- 
 sive, nor lived for the moment's beauty 
 or utility alone, but that they are full of 
 an infinite and primeval purpose, full 
 of an upward striving and flaming, differ 
 ent merely in degree from the striving of 
 animals and mankind and the gods, or 
 as we call these latter now heroes, 
 patriots, seers. But the animistic habit of 
 thought, though it is found in all of us, 
 is habitual only to a few. We have read 
 Plato, it may be, and so we can sympa 
 thise with the search for personality in 
 every 'dumb' thing; yet to remember in 
 daily life that the crocus and violet can 
 tell us of other things besides spring, is 
 not always easy ; to watch for individ 
 uality in every cloud and every breath 
 of wind is possible hardly to anyone in 
 a world which deifies man's wealth and 
 slights the uncoined riches of beast and 
 flower. 
 
 IT will be said, I know, that this at 
 tachment of mine to the flowers is 
 only a monomania, that a rose is a rose, 
 a cabbage a cabbage, and there 's an end 
 of the matter. But if we think for a mo 
 ment, we who profess so great a love 
 
 CHAPTER 
 
 i 
 
 Animism the 
 eternal creed
 
 C6c Silences 
 
 CHAPTER 
 I 
 
 The aspiring 
 spiril, 
 
 for 4 the glory that was Greece,' we 
 can hardly deny that this almost inevit 
 able flight of the sorrowful, the love- 
 stricken, the disillusioned, to the flowers 
 that nod so wisely over our perplexities 
 and the trees that droop and sigh with 
 us in our woe, is a flight along the same 
 road as the Hellenes took in those dreams 
 of theirs where they stumbled among the 
 tales of Daphne and Clytie and Narcis 
 sus and Hyacinthus and many another. 
 The fragility of plant life, its flamelike 
 glory and flamelike evanescence, make 
 of it a satirical parallel to humanity and 
 its vaunted permanences. For the flowers 
 pass away even while we gaze, yet they 
 outlive the promises on which once we 
 set our faith, and their perfume is less 
 transient than the ideals for which once 
 we willingly would have died. 
 
 TOOK how the crocus, most impa- 
 1 j tient of delay and restraint, cleaves 
 the sod with its tender leaves ! In this 
 upward striving, not to be resisted by 
 any earthy power, the delicate flower is 
 comrade to the long array of saints and 
 heroes is engaged in the same conflict, 
 animated by the same buoyant spirit.
 
 of tbe 
 
 There is wisdom in that story of Jack 
 and the Great Beanstalk that grew up to 
 heaven ; it teaches us to look beyond the 
 law of gravitation. I hear people say that 
 it is an impossible fairy-tale ; I say that 
 it is founded on facT: the fat of end 
 less growth, or, if you will, of evolution. 
 Nor is it any marvel when Xanthus, the 
 tawny-maned, or the good steed Gran 
 talks with Achilles or Gudrun : the gift 
 of speech is denied to nothing that can 
 be apprehended by our five senses. 
 
 AS youth fades from us like a soft- 
 .XJL coloured dream, we begin to weary 
 of this militant and aspiring spirit; our 
 vernal optimism loses its vivid colouring 
 and puts on a russet cloak ; our outlook 
 grows a little more melancholy and au 
 tumnal ; having proved all things and 
 paid the priceless tribute of enthusiasm 
 at the shrine of many a saint and phi 
 losopher, we gather together, as devout 
 pilgrims, the relics which from time to 
 time we found and laid aside, and tramp 
 away with them, our most valued trea 
 sure, to lay them creeds and ideals and 
 philosophies and dreams (I put them 
 in order of climax) at the feet of the 
 
 CHAPTER 
 I 
 
 Enthusiasms
 
 Cbe Silences 
 
 CHAPTER 
 I 
 
 only steadfast mother of them all, whom, 
 when we have once devoutly approached, 
 we shall never leave either for the world 
 with its philtres and spells, or for the 
 cloister's coronal of painless sighs. Yet 
 to find a rest in Nature is not to join the 
 castaways on a lotos isle ; she hands us 
 no narcotic, but a stimulant not a 
 phial from Lethe, but the ne&ar of the 
 Everliving Ones. It is true that hereby 
 we become forgetful of much which we 
 formerly held sacred ; that is the penalty 
 of every conversion. It is true that our 
 enthusiasms will lose their keen edge ; 
 they are to be merged in the one enthu 
 siasm truly so called (we gain everything 
 by remembering the word's derivation), 
 which brooks no rival faith. If it is their 
 fate to grow dull, yet our senses will be 
 quickened and our hearts made to beat 
 high by an intimate converse with a 
 wider, saner world than that of politics 
 or society, a converse unbroken by pro 
 pagandist street-cries; we soon find that 
 a sparrow can teach us more of the spirit 
 of Nature than the Pre-Raphaelites. 
 
 I 
 
 T was a deeper wisdom than we 
 think which conceived the circle to
 
 oftbe^oon 
 
 be the fundamental form, the symbolical 
 sum and limit of all endeavour. Since the 
 beginning of history we have been sor 
 rowfully familiar with renascence and 
 decadence and darkness and renascence 
 again, following each other as inevitably 
 as the watches of day and night. The 
 Golden Ages of Hellenic, of Italian art 
 were gone almost as soon as men began 
 to suspect their presence ; the glorious 
 dawn of medieval philosophy, which gave 
 birth to the dreams of universal know 
 ledge and universal sovereignty over 
 Nature's economy, passed into an era 
 of empiricism and disagreeable fa6ts and 
 what America calls sham-smashing. In 
 later times we have climbed from Pales- 
 trina to Wagner; and who shall say that 
 Parsifal is wholly a triumph and not in 
 some ways ominous of decline ? Before 
 we know that we have topped the wave 
 we are rushing headlong into the trough ; 
 who will blame us if we cry out against 
 this bitterness ? There is one remedy and 
 only one, for aught that I know: let us 
 go for comfort to her whose ideal is un 
 changing, whose existence is one long 
 Saturnian reign, and in whom we can 
 discern neither decadence, nor renas- 
 
 CHAPTER 
 
 i 
 
 The eternal 
 Golden Age
 
 Cfre 
 
 CHAPTER 
 I 
 
 cence, nor prime, but the graceful mo 
 tion of evolution alone. She is no strange 
 Goddess whom we are to set out to re 
 store, for our fathers, the cave-dwellers, 
 worshipped her in their own crude way ; 
 the Hellenes, our ancestors in art and 
 thought, served her under a hundred dif 
 ferent names, but with fear and rever 
 ence always; the philosophy of the Re 
 nascence, with its noble contempt of 
 authority and the idols of dogma, was no 
 less than a return to her religion from 
 the stilted creed, of gorgeous, wonder 
 ful, stiffened raiment, which saw a devil 
 in the nightingale and damnation in all 
 the five senses. These were her servants, 
 her worshippers, her students ; it has been 
 left for us and for our children to be 
 called her lovers. In the future we shall 
 speak of Wordsworth and Turner as we 
 speak now of Dante and Cimabue ; they 
 will be as the outrunners of a host or 
 the first stars of a rising constellation. 
 But then, as it seems, after the first 
 years must come the reaction; under the 
 law of eternal motion and change this 
 passionate Nature-spirit, which now so 
 softly walks among us, will be whirling 
 back to its apogee, and we shall return
 
 oftfieeioon 
 
 from the companionship of flowers to 
 grubbing with our fellow-men in the 
 search for misery and gold. We shall be 
 just as we were perhaps, a little more 
 soured and broken-spirited. Now this is 
 an objection which cannot be answered ; 
 but let any man come to Nature as a 
 true lover, and if he has thenceforward 
 no longing to forsake her, he has already 
 answered it for himself. 
 
 I KNOW that there is danger in such 
 a forgetfulness of what custom fool 
 ishly calls the realities of life; that there 
 arises a temptation to sing philosophy to 
 sleep with Arcadian ditties : but it may be 
 overcome, if we remember that Nature 
 asks more of us than the woodcraft and 
 weather-wisdom of a yokel, which is but 
 a few stages above instinct. As her gifts 
 to us have been more lavish, so she re 
 quires a worthier return; the countryman 
 sees her reflection in his folklore, we in 
 our sciences and creeds. The bucolic 
 types of II Pastor Fido and of the Wessex 
 novels touch the flying skirt of Nature's 
 garment surely, that is why we love 
 them? but we ourselves shall look in 
 her face, because we are the heirs of the 
 
 CHAPTER 
 I 
 
 Bona Dea
 
 Silences 
 
 CHAPTER 
 I 
 
 art and poetry and wisdom of centuries. 
 For in listening to the voice of Aratus or 
 Turner we are listening to an echo of her 
 own, and when they have taught us of 
 the stars and the sun's rising and setting, 
 we become clearer of vision. We fall 
 short in some measure of the monkish 
 and Neoplatonic ideals; we do not think 
 of all fair forms and colours as no more 
 than a prototype or a shadow, but the 
 earth and her divers races become more 
 real. We learn to view man from an out 
 lying peak on his own horizon; not from 
 his own standpoint, but from the stand 
 point of the rest of existence; then our 
 intimacy with the non-human economy 
 grows apace. Animism is an air which 
 has outworn many variations, many a 
 stirring song and grafted melody. It is 
 as old as religion and as modern as Em 
 erson. Among those to whom Nature is 
 rather a mistress than a veiled and speech 
 less nun an animistic habit of thought is 
 almost universal ; such as love Nature for 
 herself cannot choose but worship her. 
 Many people think that they love Nature 
 because she is God's wonderful creation ; 
 they must love her alone, and only thus 
 will she reveal to them her secrets. The
 
 waverers will say that to know her a man 
 must be a pagan; but he must be more 
 than that he must be a whole-hearted 
 idolater. 
 
 IN nature, in art, in life, in religion, 
 in philosophy, the foreground is no 
 thing ; only the distance matters. Show 
 us a landscape full of light, and it is the 
 distance that gives us the subtler grada 
 tions of colour; in life we fix our eyes 
 on the future, in religion on Heaven or 
 Nirvana; in philosophy we may concede 
 or reject the premises, but nearly always 
 we admire the conclusions. Men may 
 dislike the preliminary 'blasphemies' of 
 Nietzsche, but they cannot despise the 
 ideal which he built up from their chaos. 
 Such ideals lie on the horizon of thought, 
 and it is the glory of their vague forms 
 and colours which allures us to study the 
 truth of their foreground. How many 
 people must have first read Plato because 
 in some stray quotation they caught an 
 echo from the far heights of the Phae- 
 drus ! Do we then wonder at Plato? It is 
 because he can paint for us the remote 
 metaphysical distances which lesser men 
 cannot even see. Are we dumb before a 
 
 CHAPTER 
 
 i
 
 Cfce Silences 
 
 CHAPTER 
 
 I 
 
 Beyond the 
 finite 
 
 fdentis, by 
 W. Compton 
 Leith. 
 
 sunset of Turner or fired by a rhapsody 
 of Emerson ? It is because they give us 
 a glimpse of infinity. 
 
 THIS longing for the remote, the vi 
 sionary, the transcendental, is older 
 than Hellenic philosophy, as old as Aryan 
 mythology contemporary with Zeus 
 and Cronos and the heavenward specu 
 lations which gave them birth. It has re 
 appeared under heavy cloak or filmy garb 
 in the Fourth Gospel, in the Vita Nova, 
 in the German mystics, in bold thinkers 
 like Bruno and gentle recluses like San 
 Juan de la Cruz. In one of the noblest 
 books of recent days I found it written 
 that c Not Plato's or Dante's creative 
 power, but truth surviving all incarna 
 tions of genius has kept this celestial gem 
 aglow ; they have but celebrated that 
 which was never mortal, and guided dis 
 tracted eyes to heaven's most beautiful 
 star.'* Now in this day when material 
 ism seems so plausible and sufficient, I 
 can still believe with Bruno that ' man's 
 infinite desire is itself a pledge of its ful 
 fillment in an eternal life;' for though 
 there are times when the common, mar 
 vellous beauty of a flower, or the com-
 
 oftfre 
 
 mon, marvellous song of a bird, will 
 lead us to what seem like the confines 
 of sleep (so fully are our senses gratified 
 and even sated with the perception of 
 beauty), yet has a man ever in all 
 his days been sated with thought ? In 
 all Nature's scheme, so far as we know 
 it, there is nothing insatiate save the 
 mind ; and that, as it would seem, is in 
 satiable. 
 
 WE who live to-day are a complex 
 folk, yet all our current specu 
 lation may be traced to two original 
 quests of Nature and of the super 
 natural. Only now, after many thousands 
 of years, are we beginning to realise that 
 these two ideas are really one that 
 natural and supernatural are the same 
 thing under different aspects. There can 
 be nothing above Nature, for there is 
 nothing outside. In speaking of Nature 
 we connote all existences. So it comes 
 about that the rudest shepherd who ever 
 cried to Arcadian Pan was nearer to the 
 truth than the mass of mankind to-day. 
 We know far more of Nature's ways 
 and means than the Hellene, yet we 
 understand her temperament less than 
 
 CHAPTER 
 
 i 
 
 Culture and 
 credulity
 
 Cbe Silences 
 
 CHAPTER 
 1 
 
 he. It is the inevitable bitterness of em 
 piricism and research that, as our know 
 ledge of Nature grows, our childish inti 
 macy with her dies away. We lose sight 
 of her sweet womanliness, the changing 
 moods, the merrymaking and sorrow; 
 we give up the fair vision of personality; 
 we forget the distance in poring over the 
 foreground, and despise generalisations 
 because the time is all too short even 
 to study the individual aspect. It is this 
 attitude which has killed the nymphs 
 and satyrs ; let us see that it does not 
 kill the idea which gave them birth, for 
 the idea was the first gift of Nature to 
 the thought of mankind. Men sometimes 
 are heard to marvel at the credulity 
 which could people the oaks with Dry 
 ads, and see the cry of mourning on the 
 petals of the hyacinth. The marvel is 
 really this that so long ago as the age 
 of Hellas, men should have been playing, 
 like children, on the threshold of wis 
 dom, whereas we are so far away. The 
 march of science, the wane of supersti 
 tion, the ascendancy of reason, have all 
 cleared our way to Nature; and instead 
 of going to her for a new religion and a 
 new rule of life, we try to raise a second-
 
 hand fabric from the rubbish which has 
 been moved from our path. 
 
 EVERY a& of a man's life, every 
 passion of his body, every thought 
 of his mind, should sing to Nature a 
 panegyric that shall never cease; the 
 whole world should be her cathedral of 
 perpetual adoration. As Christianity tells 
 us that in violating one of its ten com 
 mandments we violate the spirit of all, 
 so all wickedness should be, and, in time, 
 will be, summed up in one sin the sin 
 ning against Nature. The righteousness 
 which is contrary to what is natural is 
 no righteousness; the piety which ignores 
 Nature is itself ignored by her, and will 
 presently perish of its own vanity. It has 
 taken us countless centuries to find that 
 nature lay at the root of all religions, and 
 now that we know it, we must still spend 
 ages in spinning out of our new ideals the 
 web of a new religion which shall ex 
 clude nothing but what is unnatural. We 
 are to take our lessons not from super- 
 civilisation, but from the fields; not from 
 Baudelaire, but from the saga and the 
 chanson de geste. Men talk of the noble 
 stream of progress and forget that a 
 
 CHAPTER 
 
 i 
 
 Service and 
 freedom 
 
 Back to 
 
 the truth
 
 Cbe Silences 
 
 CHAPTER 
 I 
 
 stream is noblest at its source; at many 
 a stage in history we must return to the 
 primal springs of inspiration which lie 
 on the horizon of thought. Nor is this 
 a reversion to barbarism and its crude 
 economies ; it is a regaining of the old 
 trail, a return to the truth from specious 
 half-lies, as were also the Renascence 
 and the age of the Pre-Raphaelites, in 
 philosophy the age of Paracelsus, in music 
 the age of Wagner. Though a retracing 
 of steps seems to be implied when we 
 speak of going back to Nature, there is 
 really no retrogression, but an advance; 
 and it was necessary that we should taste 
 the bitterest dregs of civilisation before 
 we could be convinced of the deaden 
 ing effect of the draught. I cannot illus 
 trate this necessity more forcibly than 
 by quoting Amiel's words : ' Comprendre 
 les choses, c'est avoir t dans les choses 
 puis en etre sorti; il y faut done captivit, 
 puis delivrance, illusion et disillusion, 
 enjouement et desabusement. Celui qui 
 est encore sous le charme et celui qui 
 n'a pas subi lecharme sont incompetents. 
 On ne connait bien que ce qu'on a cru 
 puis juge. Pour comprendre il faut etre 
 libre et ne 1'avoir pas toujours te. Cela
 
 of tfee oon 
 
 33 
 
 est vrai,qu'il soit question de 1'amour, de 
 1'art, de la religion, du patriotisme.' 
 
 WHEN summer goes hot-cheeked 
 on the south wind, among all 
 her tricks of contrasted colour none is 
 of so finely balanced harmony as the 
 yellow corn with the white butterflies 
 breasting its waves and the red poppies 
 dipping beneath them. These poppies 
 are in some respects alien to our occi 
 dental idea of beauty. They are eastern 
 in their pleonasm of colour and their 
 theatrical airs ; they delight but they do 
 not rest the eye. They have none of the 
 daisy's ' function apostolical,' for their 
 message is a flaming glory rather than 
 a moral; surely this difference is not to 
 be imputed as a shortcoming to either ? 
 They lack the tulip's stately disdain and 
 the more human queenliness of the rose ; 
 their flaunting seems at first sight barely 
 to avoid vulgarity. Their stiff and crin 
 kled petals with the absence of leafage 
 anywhere near the calyx give them an 
 appearance strangely artificial ; they are 
 the most easily imitated of flowers, a 
 miracle of substantial unreality. If we 
 compare the daisy to a Griselda, we may 
 
 CHAPTER 
 I 
 
 Poppies
 
 34 
 
 6e Silences 
 
 CHAPTER 
 I 
 
 liken the poppy to Horace's irresponsible 
 Pyrrha, ' simplex munditiis '; but such com 
 parison would be purely superficial, for 
 the poppy's character is not read, as is 
 that of some flowers, at a single glance. 
 Every flower has its proper atmosphere, 
 its influence upon us in calling up cer 
 tain distinctive images and associations ; 
 and, like nearly all the flowers which 
 fable has woven into its chaplet of song, 
 the poppy has a secondary significance, 
 a personality as well as lineaments ; of 
 this personality, elusive, inconsistent, and 
 unforeseen, mythology is the expression, 
 though not the source. If the mimosa has 
 fits of shyness and the narcissus spells 
 of pensive egoism, then it may be said 
 that the poppy is a creature of moods. 
 Tossing defiant heads above the ground- 
 swell of the corn, they are flashes of 
 beauty in a workaday, utilitarian world, 
 glimpses such as meet the city toiler in 
 a streak of light in the west, or such as 
 arrest him with their visionary fairness 
 at his entry into a crowded gallery of art. 
 In the bright sunlight their expanded 
 petals forget all but their own gaiety ; 
 a breath of wind causes them almost 
 hysterical flappings. Under sunshine and
 
 oftbe^oon 
 
 35 
 
 the world's admiration they are in their 
 element, but theirs is a transient opti 
 mism. The approach of evening, a fall of 
 the barometer, the shade of a tree travel 
 ling across their corner of the cosmos, 
 will close the petals and change all their 
 levity to gloom ; moonlight shows them 
 as sullen fires in a world by comparison 
 turned pale. In the very midst of their 
 radiance there is something darkly omi 
 nous and sad, just as in the middle of 
 each petal there lies in some varieties a 
 stain of pitchiest black. The juice in 
 which Demeter found solace for her un 
 dying grief is the juice of the white poppy 
 (papaver somniferurn), less familiar to our 
 northern eyes ; but if its opiate strength 
 is less, the scarlet flower with its som 
 bre heart under folds of a garish cloak 
 has a power over the eye and imagina 
 tion equalled by few among plants of the 
 temperate zone. The tale of the white 
 flower once created for slumber's sake 
 at the time of autumn sorrow has cast 
 its shadow upon its brighter sister, so 
 that both are for ever latent in our minds 
 when we think of the sad, chastened 
 figure of Demeter. The passing of Per 
 sephone, queen of the early year, type 
 
 CHAPTER. 
 
 I
 
 Cfre Silences 
 
 CHAPTER 
 I 
 
 Demeter 
 of Knidos 
 
 of cyclic birth and decay, becomes a vis 
 ible masque to eyes watching these gar 
 ish and frivolous ephemera of the year's 
 high noon. At all hours and seasons the 
 poppy is present in the memory of man 
 as his symbol of rest ; but its festival 
 is surely in the penumbral midnights of 
 summer, for it was then that the busts of 
 Hypnos, brooding over the silent streets, 
 once wore for their garlands these most 
 gorgeous yet most melancholy of aesti- 
 val blooms. 
 
 THE Demeter of Knidos has al 
 ways been for me the most elo 
 quent of all the works of Hellenic art, 
 for in her we seem to draw most near to 
 the heart of Nature. We have learned, 
 and learned rightly, to look for the no 
 blest expression of sorrow wedded to 
 resignation in those passionless yet allu 
 sive features of the Madonna to which 
 the clairvoyant portraiture of the Renas 
 cence gave a significance more than 
 human. But, whereas these are the 
 work of the children of Art, the Deme 
 ter is the work of the children of Na 
 ture I had almost called her an ema 
 nation of Nature herself, just as much
 
 oft&e 
 
 37 
 
 as the olive and pomegranate and cy 
 press that lavished (but surely did not 
 waste) their beauty in her birthplace of 
 Knidos. It is because she is a Hellene, 
 the work of a Hellene, and therein closer 
 than medievalism to the mystery of Na 
 ture, that I take her as the type of that 
 deep-hearted sadness which underlies 
 earth's fairest scenes and is audible even 
 in her most dithyrambic moods. It is not 
 only on those autumn evenings when 
 we feel that melancholy is come to hold 
 silent carnival with her votaries, but at 
 all times and before all scenery the tones 
 of sorrow come home in some degree 
 to the dullest sense. The very glad 
 ness of the young year, when spring 
 comes faltering like an Oread over the 
 hills, has its tragic note, in tune with 
 the half-solved mystery of birth; sum 
 mer's fulness is not without foreboding; 
 autumn has ever been the advent sea 
 son of a spirit of gloom. The yearly 
 masque of Persephone's abduction and 
 return has as deep a meaning for us as 
 for the nameless sculptor of Knidos ; the 
 brooding figure that speaks of sorrow's 
 dignity is no less than a portrait of Na 
 ture. 
 
 CHAPTER 
 
 I 
 
 The Sorrow 
 ful Mother
 
 be Silences 
 
 CHAPTER 
 I 
 
 Nature's 
 antitypes 
 
 MEN have always thought of Na 
 ture as a woman; she is Tonan- 
 tzi or Holda or Demeter or Bona Dea. 
 Now the worship of Bona Dea prepared 
 the way for the more beautiful cult of the 
 Virgin protectress of crops and humble 
 toilers in the field, so that this new and 
 most radiant divinity, the 'sum of virtue 
 virginal,' was welcomed to earth with 
 the eagerness which always attends the 
 re-incarnation of a long venerated ideal. 
 When, therefore, under the symbol of 
 a saint or goddess who is benign, if also 
 sorrowful, we offer allegiance to Nature, 
 we are taking a step which is neither 
 novel nor retrograde. And here let it 
 be said that the holiness of the saints 
 equally with the immortality of the gods 
 finds an antitype in Nature ; we must 
 go to her if we would learn justice and 
 purity justice free from commenta 
 ries and purity stripped of etiquette. The 
 saint or the martyr or the virgin is heart 
 to heart with Nature; though you shear 
 away her golden hair and put out the eyes 
 where celestial dreams once had their 
 lodging, though you fetter her hands that 
 never again they may chase the fever from 
 any brow, what have you done after all ?
 
 oftfie 
 
 39 
 
 She is still a saint and all-strong in the 
 spirit of Nature; you, I, the world, are 
 her playthings. It is so with Nature her 
 self, the strong spirit whom man thinks 
 to have tamed ; he may hew down her 
 trees for his purpose and break her forces 
 to his will, he may banish the elves and 
 satyrs to the company of children and 
 simple folk, but he cannot destroy the 
 Idea which is mother to elf and satyr 
 and all true philosophy and all true song 
 the complex Idea which we with our 
 English brevity summarise in the one 
 word Nature. 
 
 SYMBOLS are the fairest blossoms 
 of all thought, even of philosophical 
 thought, wherein they are exotic ; they 
 are alien to logic, hand in hand with 
 imagination. We can never dispense 
 with them any more easily than we could 
 dispense with one of our senses; life 
 without symbols would be a language 
 without metaphors. They are the foun 
 dation of every attempt to explain deity 
 by religion or philosophy or the arts ; they 
 lie at the root of all beauty expressible 
 or inexpressible by words. We may talk 
 of ideals, but our words carry sense not 
 
 CHAPTER 
 
 i 
 
 Symbolism
 
 be Silences 
 
 CHAPTER 
 I 
 
 before we have reduced them to the 
 terms of a symbol. It is obvious that 
 we cannot live save under one or other 
 of the potent spells of religion; worship, 
 whether of a God or a Lover or an Ideal, 
 is the mind's needed respite from self. 
 It is for this reason that the quasi-religion 
 of Nature cannot be other than symbolic, 
 that is, dependent upon symbols for its 
 realisation; we must find a species of 
 personality, however ill-defined, in that 
 which we would approach as loving and 
 divine. So fierce is this hunger for some 
 thing spiritually tangible, something in 
 dividual, upon which to lavish our whole 
 souls, that to the lonely and disappointed, 
 who have been driven from the haunts of 
 men and hounded away to the fields and 
 woods by the ghastly spectres of their 
 old illusions, the search for a latent per 
 sonality in crude organic and inorganic 
 objedts becomes the infinite reward of 
 past and less and less remembered tribu 
 lations ; the flying pessimist becomes 
 a learner in the school of gratitude, the 
 fool in the world's eyes attains a grasp 
 of the truest wisdom. For out of this 
 personality, too shadowy to grow stale, 
 too remote ever to be stained with the
 
 oftbe spoon 
 
 4 1 
 
 dyes which poison and deface humanity, 
 he may draw out a sympathy the deeper 
 because it is unspoken, the more elo 
 quent in that it cannot be wholly under 
 stood. So that although the religion which 
 we seek may be less a creed than a com 
 radeship, at once tender and reverent, 
 with Nature, it is nevertheless the one 
 possible, even satisfying alternative for 
 the heart that has vainly pined (and what 
 sensitive heart has not?) to possess the 
 white and Elysian flowers of religion 
 without the foulness, clinging at their 
 roots, of dogma, ignorance, insanity, 
 misbelief. A dogma is in its rudiments 
 nothing more than an encrusted symbol ; 
 it is such crust of commentaries and 
 interpretations which we see fall away 
 in scales when we go open-hearted to 
 Nature. Animism, the first and the last 
 of religions, the crudest and the most 
 delicate, exerts its power equally upon 
 Wordsworth and the Bushmen, as gravi 
 tation does upon the thistle-down and 
 the boulder ; each interprets differently 
 the magnetic pull which he cannot help 
 but feel, yet the difference is in him, not 
 in Nature. The intermediate creeds all 
 have served to refine the primitive, not 
 
 CHAPTER 
 
 I 
 
 The last of 
 the creeds
 
 Cfte Silences 
 
 CHAPTER 
 
 I 
 
 Nihilism and 
 saintship 
 
 to supersede it, and they alone can see 
 the fair features and sanity of animism 
 whom culture has taught to love what is 
 natural j we must study the deformities of 
 art before we can place even an approxi 
 mate value upon the one form of beauty 
 utterly free from any taint of the gro 
 tesque, the beauty of natural lines and 
 colours. 
 
 WHEN we glance over the vaunted 
 superiorities of man, this bom 
 bastic and sacrosanct mammal, and turn 
 our attention even momentarily to the 
 enormous content of matter and the in 
 finite vistas of space in respect of which 
 his senses are helpless and his reason 
 delusive, and when we compare his tri 
 vial, homespun wisdom with that which 
 assuredly he will gain if the solar and 
 terrestrial conditions remain favourable 
 to his race, the dawn-streaks of the pre 
 sent with the blazing noonlight of the 
 future, then we naturally fall to wonder 
 ing how such names as atheist and dog 
 matist, materialist and spiritualist, can be 
 deemed indispensable words among men 
 and women even of the veriest simplicity 
 and of an education the most superficial,
 
 43 
 
 without provoking the same tolerant 
 smile which meets now those once so 
 fascinating sciences (fascinating, because 
 at least they were lavish in promise, if 
 not always lofty in ideal), the knowledge 
 of alchemy and enchantment, or the 
 childish wisdom of astrology, that bor 
 derland of the ridiculous and the sub 
 lime. 
 
 ATHEISM and spiritualism, though 
 as names they are continually on 
 our lips, as ideas are equally antiquated 
 with any such errors of science in the 
 past ; and of the many philosophical 
 quackeries and fashions none is less phi 
 losophical and more difficult to hear 
 without impatience than the arrogant de 
 nial of all imperceptible existence. We 
 say that there is no God, when the ut 
 most that we are rationally entitled to 
 say is that the human faculties in their 
 present condition are incapable of form 
 ing a reasonable conception of God. We 
 say that man has no soul, when we are 
 only justified in saying that the mental 
 or psychic functions are not, as we once 
 imagined, to be differentiated from other 
 branches of our physiological activity. 
 
 CHAPTER 
 
 i 
 
 The futility 
 of negations
 
 44 
 
 C6e Silences 
 
 CHAPTER 
 I 
 
 Natural 
 sanftity 
 
 The almost inconceivable capacity which 
 the human brain may yet reach forbids 
 us to deny the possibility of any devel 
 opment. Man is potentially anything ! 
 We must be ready, therefore, to believe 
 anything concerning his future which 
 the past has not refuted; the future must 
 find us all-credulous. At the same time 
 we shall believe nothing which the laws 
 of evidence show to be not proven ; we 
 shall not trust the wisdom of the present; 
 we must stand forth as passive nihilists, 
 craving the union (still vulgarly despised 
 as an immorality) of nihilism and saint- 
 ship but not the saintship of rosaries 
 and chaunted myth. For we do not al 
 ways remember that there is a sanctity 
 essential to Nature as well as the sanc 
 tity derived from creeds; among beasts 
 and flowers, who nestle close to Nature, 
 is to be found neither conscious foulness, 
 nor dishonesty, nor broken vows ; the 
 cynical or the obscene point of view is 
 not possible to one who lives intelligently 
 among these beasts and plants and trees; 
 vulgarity is utterly alien to all organic 
 existence save man. It is undeniable that 
 the saintly ideal is of all the most grace 
 ful, the most delicate, a lily among ideals ;
 
 oftbe^oon 
 
 45 
 
 we cannot look unmoved upon its tight 
 hand-clasp of purity, its rapture wrung 
 from suffering, its faith plainly to be 
 read in eyes glassing eternity. The cause 
 which was mother to the Paradiso and 
 the De Imitatione Christi, which has made 
 heroes of the earth's offscourings, and 
 which could bring Cynewulf to dream 
 the Dream of the Rood, has shown us 
 that the desire for sanctity is inherent in 
 the human race, has shown us to what 
 heights, higher than snow-clad, the will 
 unsupported by reason may rise. Grant 
 to this faithful and masterful will, not 
 yet proof against the foolish knaveries 
 and knavish fooleries which we call sin, 
 the eyes open to see upon what a base, 
 broadening to infinity, the desire of sanc 
 tity has been placed, with what tender 
 ness it has been cherished by Nature 
 among her pet children (for is not this 
 the lesson which we learn from Saint 
 Francis among his birds and flowers ?), 
 and how the fairest creed is only a cup 
 of cold water to leave us the more madly 
 thirsting and man shall sow the seeds 
 of a new saintship beside which the ho 
 liness of the Fathers shall seem paro 
 chial. The workaday piety of the Puritan, 
 
 CHAPTER 
 I 
 
 Christianity, 
 
 the world's 
 
 loveliest 
 
 phase 
 
 hitherto
 
 Cbe 
 
 CHAPTER 
 I 
 
 The making 
 of Man 
 
 though we may ever learn from him his 
 disdain of misnamed realities, cannot fail 
 ultimately to become a sounding cym 
 bal, as must all religions founded upon 
 a principle foreign to Nature's scheme ; 
 the passionate orisons of the darlings of 
 Christ, though they are born of a love so 
 fiery as to blind the eyes of such as ap 
 proach through curiosity and unguarded 
 by reverence, must flicker and fail in the 
 presence of perennial laws laws of as 
 tronomy, of biology, of geology, of chem 
 istry. The men and women who walked 
 apart from Nature because they seemed 
 to detedt guile in the rose's heart and 
 desire in the pleading of the nightingale 
 have loved and died almost in vain, for 
 their lavish passion went to crown an 
 abstraction and their martyrdom only 
 confirmed a mistaken belief. We are 
 tempted to think, perhaps, if this is so, 
 what a tragedy ! what irony, more biting 
 than Sophoclean ! But there is no tragedy, 
 though the irony is perceptible which is 
 eternally attendant upon organic exist 
 ence ; for out of the generations nour 
 ished upon Christ conies the ardent mar 
 tyr-spirit, careless of pain ; from the trust 
 in an almighty being who was before the
 
 oftije^oon 
 
 47 
 
 worlds comes the faith in a nature-of- 
 things essentially and ultimately wise, 
 even if fortuitously; from the icy asceti 
 cism, spotless in a not exemplary age, 
 comes the power to see purity inherent 
 in all living things. Without this clear 
 ing of the cumbered ground, this laying 
 down of smooth roads for the wayfaring 
 soul, the birth of the wooers of Nature 
 had been postponed for centuries ; we 
 owe our close and earnest comradeship 
 with all visible beauty to Christianity 
 as well as to Hellas, for if the latter 
 showed us the fairness of the human 
 form, the former told us by what means 
 it is made fair. We, therefore, to whom 
 history and science have become so pro 
 pitious, need make no flight to a far and 
 supersensuous beauty, nor build ephem 
 eral shrines and temples on the sands of 
 a dream, nor pile rubric on statute for 
 the better storming of an impregnable 
 heaven : for since we see both the sen 
 suous and the supersensuous to be fair 
 and persuasive and hold them both sa 
 cred, we shall go back to the groves for 
 our worship and chaunt our human stro 
 phe and antistrophe of sorrow and joy 
 under aisles unbuilt by human hands, in 
 
 CHAPTER 
 
 I
 
 Cbe Silences 
 
 CHAPTER 
 
 I 
 
 'There is no 
 saint like the 
 sky, sunlight 
 shining from 
 its face' 
 
 an oratory whose sights and sounds and 
 fragrance bring us a sympathy or com 
 passion (in the most literal meaning of 
 the words) passing the charity of men. 
 But though we fly to the groves, it is not 
 to bow down to an Astarte; the purity of 
 Nature, pervading and inherent in us all, 
 is our safeguard against her too cogent 
 appeal to our senses, and if she entices 
 us to excess, it is that we may gain the 
 strength of a vanquished temptation. 
 
 THE cries of frenzied communities 
 over their barterings and supersti 
 tions and strife are a hum in our ears 
 long after we have cast their objects 
 adrift. It is impossible to attain at a leap 
 a detachment from futilities which the 
 accumulated wealth of ages has sanc 
 tioned ; we have done well if at the end 
 of a long life we have cast away a sin 
 gle one of the stiff and faded cerements 
 in which each of us is wrapped (strange 
 irony of convention!) on his entry into 
 the world. For though at last we may 
 tear away, not without pain, one or two 
 of these entrammelling garments, others 
 are left still to be torn away; if the shroud 
 of the delusion of religious dogma must
 
 oftbe spoon 
 
 49 
 
 soon be cast off, it is not always followed 
 by the shroud of the delusion of etiquette, 
 of wealth, of nobility foolishly so called. 
 Our eidola are no fewer now than they 
 were when Bacon smiled gravely over 
 their vanity ; but they are more subtle, 
 highly developed, and elusive; they can 
 be destroyed only by years of intimacy 
 with the wisdom of visible fa<5ts and 
 beauties. So that if at first we find none 
 of the comfort in tangible things which 
 we were used to find in abstractions, we 
 must try not to despair or call Nature 
 morose. Though the temperament which 
 craves for Christianity also craves for 
 sympathy, yet in a while we find it in 
 the gaze of flowers and the tender side 
 long glances of birds ; later on, peculiar 
 affinities are merged in the general good 
 will, and we take Nature a willing lover 
 into our arms. Years may elapse (for 
 banished Christianity leaves more than 
 a momentary hiatus) before we are drawn 
 close to the symbolic spirit of Nature by 
 that same reciprocal ardency of passion 
 which we knew in the symbolic Christ ; 
 but it is given us to be freed almost imme 
 diately from the dulness of sense which 
 in a bird's song can hear nothing but a 
 
 CHAPTER 
 I 
 
 Iconoclasm 
 
 The theoretic 
 faculty
 
 5 
 
 CHAPTER 
 I 
 
 Steadfastness 
 under change 
 
 bird singing ; it is given us to know the 
 cradle of the Gods, to pass beyond the 
 Propylaeum with its thousand caryatid 
 mythologies into the fane of the great 
 mother alike of god and myth. Knowing 
 how to detecl: the true and the false, we 
 shall run no risk of grasping at shadows 
 instead of substance ; placing no value 
 upon superstition, we shall yet have the 
 senses able and quick to see the alal upon 
 the curly hyacinth, or to hear Thor's 
 hammer and the tears of the sorrowful 
 mother of Baldur in the boom and wail 
 ing of the northeast wind. The way to a 
 new religion lies ever through the old ; we 
 pass the landmarks of vanished beliefs at 
 every step on our way to the parent creed 
 landmarks which, in so far as they are 
 true attempts to visualise the spirit of 
 Nature, we shall build into the fabric of 
 our new life. 
 
 IN time Nature lets us into the secret 
 of what we had been pleased to call 
 her caprices womanly caprices. Slan 
 dered Nature ! Slandered womankind ! 
 When shall we learn that, as caprices 
 are traits the least admirable and, there 
 fore, the least characteristic of woman-
 
 of t&e spoon 
 
 5 1 
 
 hood, so wanton changefulness is in 
 Nature the quality most rarely found, 
 most foreign to her serenity? We find 
 ourselves referring to her, as we learn 
 more and more of her marvellous ways, 
 the ' character of large-browed steadfast 
 ness ' which is never absent in the best 
 of women. Watch her spirit in the con 
 templative idleness of the cirrus and in 
 the energy of the flying scud ; in the 
 rise and fall of the wheatfield, a heaving 
 bosom beneath cloth of gold ; in the 
 throat-curve of a Mary lily, the flower 
 which is sacredly luminous at darkest 
 night ; in the hills, which always seem 
 remote, even when you stand upon their 
 summits. It would be hard to find her 
 in moods more diverse, in attitudes more 
 individually symbolic ; but she may be 
 seen under thousand forms and colours 
 whenever we wish in the hedgerow, 
 in the garden, in the sky, and every time 
 we look out of a window. Now this very 
 diversity is the cloak of deepest steadfast 
 ness, the play of smile and changing ex 
 pression over changeless features : under 
 all variation and apparent divergence 
 from purpose there is the same pertina 
 city. For every divergence is but an off- 
 
 CHAPTER 
 
 i
 
 &e Silences 
 
 CHAPTER 
 I 
 
 The 
 
 evolution of 
 the perfect 
 
 shoot of Nature in search of some new 
 development of beauty; the branches 
 feel their way outwards, but the growth 
 of the tree is eternally upwards. See the 
 countless religions which have sprouted 
 from the central idea of a self-existent 
 guiding power (a God, as we used to say) : 
 trace them in the ascending scale from 
 animism through Plato to Spinoza : has 
 not the strife been not merely expansion, 
 but an everlasting ascent? There remains 
 the further climb to a wise and purified 
 animism which is the perception of an 
 eternal progress behind the parable of 
 temporal things j it is this meaning which 
 brings animism into line with every noble 
 creed of this and other days by showing 
 the ideal trivialities of the world to be its 
 only realities, and the things to which it 
 attaches so much importance to be the 
 scrannel trinkets deified by a social in 
 telligence less than puerile. But whereas 
 the ascetic ideals of the past have always 
 laid natural impulse under a ban, and 
 generally natural beauty also, it is the 
 glory of Nature's own asceticism that it 
 is built upon those very foundations 
 which a rudimentary knowledge of man 
 and his relation to the universe rejected
 
 53 
 
 as treacherous. We no longer walk in 
 the earth's garden with closed senses; 
 our whole life is a seeing, a hearing, an 
 understanding, and a helping of others 
 to see, hear, and understand likewise. 
 There is less play for the emotions be 
 cause we have destroyed hysterical reli 
 gion ; there is more play for the emotions 
 because we have become keener of sense. 
 Future religion will be neither of reason 
 nor of emotion, but of a sanity which 
 includes both, knowing them not to be 
 contradictory. 
 
 THE beginning and end, the cause 
 and effecl:, of all worship is the out 
 pouring of a mind to that which is beau 
 tiful like itself : so that, when I speak 
 of worshipping a flower, I mean just as 
 much and just as little as when I speak 
 of worshipping a God. Call this Beauty, 
 universally immanent, by what name we 
 will, Eros, or Nature, or World-Spirit, 
 or Christ, we must needs yield to it all 
 honour and devotion, either mediately 
 through the passion of human love, or 
 immediately, as is the lot of some few 
 who are unloved, and therein both for 
 tunate and sorrowful : in such case have 
 
 CHAPTER 
 
 i 
 
 Worship, 
 
 or the 
 perception 
 of Beauty
 
 54 
 
 J)e Silences 
 
 CHAPTER 
 I 
 
 Justice 
 
 been hermits and Nazarites and seers of 
 every country and age. As earthly love 
 may be a prelude to the love of the bright 
 abstractions of thought which men called 
 Gods, so it may swell from these thin 
 nest pipings to the complex music which 
 is knowledge and love of Nature. When, 
 one after another, the tokens of her ten 
 derness are discovered, clasped uncon 
 sciously in our own hands, then our love- 
 song begins to grow, as it were, orches 
 tral ; we become aware of harmonies 
 hitherto undreamed ; what was a ditty is 
 expanding into an overture. 
 
 BUT a man foul-minded or malevo 
 lent is the laughing-stock of Nature, 
 though he rule continents. If the king to 
 whom you are asked to do servile obei 
 sance plays the gallant or the toss-pot, 
 his crown is a fool's cap; you may hear 
 the same healthful, derisive laughter of 
 the Gods as greeted the snaring of Ares 
 and Aphrodite in the net of Hephaestus. 
 Nature is the eternal source of what we 
 call poetical justice. In the end the op 
 pressor is always worsted and the injured 
 cause set right. Collectively there has 
 never been any such thing as injustice,
 
 55 
 
 nor the necessity for any such thing as 
 law ; in sum every acl: is balanced by its 
 consequence, every flicker of thought 
 works out its own punishment or reward. 
 Adi: and consequence are as indissoluble 
 as subject and predicate; though the con 
 sequence of our thought at this moment 
 may be as a dry grain of wheat for a few 
 thousand years, it will one day bear its 
 stalk of golden corn : as there is nothing 
 unrequited, so there is nothing trivial 
 and unimportant. The existence of such 
 words as' injustice ' is a blasphemy against 
 the holy spirit of Nature ; it should be 
 blotted out of a language along with its 
 hideous kindred 'illegal,' and 'sinful,' 
 and 'unfair.' Never do things prey upon 
 each other save in everlasting orbits; man 
 destroys the proudest beasts of the forests 
 and himself falls a prey to comparatively 
 ignoble forms of life which are, perhaps, 
 ultra-microscopic. One plant is robbed 
 of its sweetness by the insect, and another 
 snares the insect for its food. Neither in 
 the past nor the present is there such a 
 thing as a wrong unrequited in its due 
 proportion. 
 
 CHAPTER 
 
 i
 
 6e Silences 
 
 CHAPTER 
 i 
 
 The progress 
 
 from 
 pessimism 
 
 MILLET said: 'One is never so 
 Greek as in painting naively 
 one's own impressions, no matter where 
 they were received.' I have tried here on 
 long summer evenings to paint my im 
 pressions of the coy and reticent spirit of 
 Nature, who in all ages has shown herself 
 veiled and in briefest glimpses to man: 
 who planted in him the instindt of ani 
 mism and faery lore; who by her hints 
 of dormant personality led him to dream 
 of her and call her divine, and brought to 
 the birth in his mind such fair offspring 
 as the stories of Brynhild, or the Sweet 
 Briar Rose, or Hyacinthus,or Syrinx flee 
 ing from the arms of Pan. 
 
 II 
 
 I SUPPOSE it must be granted that 
 pessimism is generally plausible, nay, 
 at first sight full of conviction. We seem 
 to be so tantalised and perpetually be 
 trayed ; our fairest flowers of hope are 
 blighted, the harvest of our ats is all too 
 mean. We find so much that is univer 
 sally applicable in the gloomy myths of 
 Daedalus and Niobe and Faust, so little
 
 oftfce^oon 
 
 57 
 
 in the reassuring myths of the Golden 
 Fleece, of Odysseus' return, and of the 
 achieving of the San Graal ; such truth 
 in the irony of Sophocles, such blindness 
 in the optimism of Browning. There is 
 the quintessence of melancholy in Hera- 
 clitus' brief summary of philosophy 
 'Nothing pauses: all things flow;' and, 
 viewed from one standpoint, there is 
 the same sadness in every change of or 
 ganic life. If we are momentarily buoyed 
 up by a glimpse of earthly beauty or an 
 intuition of spiritual delight, if we are 
 borne away on the gtary of starlight or of 
 high speculative thofught, it is only to be 
 cast down again as suddenly as we seem 
 to fall in a dream. As in a dream, too, our 
 vision, however deliriously sweet, has 
 always some bitterness, even if it be only 
 in the awakening. 
 
 YET eventually it becomes plain, 
 though nothing but time and growth 
 will make it so, that this idea of ours is 
 no more than superficial. The sullen grey 
 of stormy waves (the c unharvested sea' 
 to the landlubber, but not to the fisher 
 men or the pearl-divers) conceals form and 
 colour and infinite miracle beneath : it 
 
 CHAPTER 
 II 
 
 through 
 Nature
 
 CHAPTER 
 II 
 
 is so with all existence. There is unity in 
 those flashes of confidence which seem 
 unrelated and parenthetical; they are 
 like the islands apparently sown broad 
 cast in the ocean, really the peaks of a 
 hidden mountain range. Their connec 
 tion is only submerged ; their apparent 
 irrelation incites us to prove them related. 
 The fa& that they are momentary and 
 infrequent shows them to be precious ; 
 they follow the law of farseeing Nature 
 which says,You shall have but few saints 
 in a century, and they shall have but few 
 rhapsodies in a life. As the ideal of saint- 
 ship has never died, knows neither Time 
 nor Space, but keeps reappearing as a 
 thread of gold in the immense tapestry of 
 history, so it must be with everything of 
 tried and enduring value. The apparent 
 evanescence of such conceptions is in 
 inverse ratio to their durability. Thus the 
 ideas of patriotism, self-denial, temper 
 ance, chastity, wax and wane and leave 
 their periods marked on the world's story 
 as clearly as ripples on a sandy shore. 
 Aristippus of Cyrene, or the Encyclo 
 paedists, or the modern philosophy of 
 Egoism may seem to banish them, but 
 the more total their disappearance, the
 
 of tbe spoon 
 
 59 
 
 more certain is their return. The friend 
 ship of men and of women, the love of 
 man and woman, the devotion, annihi 
 lating self, to country or conviction, the 
 centripetal flight of the human mind to 
 her or him who is called Nature and God 
 every radiance of ideal purity and 
 every grandeur of ideal self-sacrifice 
 all these are too real to be temporal, too 
 transient not to be immortal. 
 
 YOU remember Kingsley's saying in 
 that most wonderful of all his 
 books, the Water Babies, that c a game 
 keeper is only a poacher turned inside 
 out ' ? So we find with our pessimistic 
 view : turn it inside out, and it is found to 
 be optimism after all ! We must be dole 
 ful as long as we see only the tops of 
 the islands instead of their roots in the 
 depth of the sea. A dilettante philosophy 
 is never to be trusted, and it is either 
 muddily pessimistic or the shallowest 
 optimism ; if we make our philosophy the 
 first question of life, it will always be 
 found confident and scornful of despair. 
 After all, the great test question for 
 every philosophy is, How does it come 
 into line with Nature ? She is the canon 
 
 CHAPTER 
 
 ii 
 
 optimism
 
 6o 
 
 C6e Silences 
 
 CHAPTER 
 II 
 
 Ecle&icism 
 
 of all arts and dogmas, the focus of all 
 thought : let us take our creed to the hills 
 and the running streams, and lay its puny 
 half-truths beside the austerity of the one 
 and the low-crooned cradle-song of the 
 other, so that, if it is a pure creed, it may 
 expand into a possession worth dying for, 
 and, if so, worth living for also. 
 
 WE hear the materialist tell us that 
 the tangible is all-inclusive; and 
 we hear the Christian saying that this 
 world is but a shadow of the true sub 
 stance. We may learn from both; from 
 the one his wisdom of living the hour 
 for the hour's sake, from the other his 
 intellectual beauty and his fair ideal. But 
 let us beware of devotion to either; for 
 have we not given the whole heart to 
 Nature, who understands no treachery ? 
 We must not see with the materialist, 
 for to him Nature means no more than 
 an apotheosis of protoplasm, nor with 
 the Christians, for they hold their dogma 
 to be higher than Nature's laws. If our 
 guides are chosen from either of these, 
 we are to follow them blindfold, lest a 
 greater beauty than they can offer should 
 draw us away. Surely this is to become
 
 oftbe epoon 
 
 61 
 
 pilgrims of a darker night than ever we 
 deemed at setting out? Yet there is not 
 a creed nor an enthusiasm that cannot 
 teach us something. The dervish and the 
 fakir teach us their indifference to the 
 moment's life or its pains, the saint his 
 thaumaturgy of faith making visible a 
 beauty beyond mortal sight. We have 
 come here on earth to learn; our philoso 
 phy must be a world-wide eclecticism. 
 Past eclectics have compiled their systems 
 from human philosophies; our wisdom 
 will include the philosophy of the moun 
 tains and streams; what these stand for 
 we shall aim at their strength and pa 
 tience, their striving towards one end, 
 namely, the symmetry of things organic 
 and inorganic. 
 
 DOES it not seem incredible thateven 
 one of all the striving and brow 
 beaten souls at war on this earth should 
 have its beginning and end in a short 
 cycle of years or centuries? Yet hundreds 
 of wise men and books tell me that I have 
 only just come into existence, that my 
 age can be reckoned in orbits of the earth 
 and phases of the moon. I ask them how 
 they know that I did not exist when the 
 
 CHAPTER 
 II 
 
 Time and 
 mortality
 
 62 
 
 Cfje Silences 
 
 CHAPTER 
 II 
 
 The paths of 
 Beauty 
 
 earth was a gaseous vortex, and they 
 laugh pitifully. But their laughter does 
 not explain anything. Meanwhile I am 
 assured by my longings which nothing 
 transient or mortal can assuage, by the 
 lives of men to whom temporal honours 
 are almost unendurable, by the friend 
 ship which shall laugh at death, that no 
 man, unless he desires it, is of a race 
 merely earthly : I am not, as that all- 
 sufficing materialism will tell me, haled 
 up from deep-sea silence into the shout 
 ing turmoil of breakers, and flung back, 
 a sinking relic, with the next ebb-tide. 
 A man may prate to me of apes and 
 evolution, but he is telling me no great 
 marvel; let him show me the perspective 
 beyond evolution, and I will be his slave. 
 
 THE noblest heroisms, epics, tran 
 scendentalisms, are only bubbles in 
 the broad wake of destiny ; yet what love 
 liness they have, what colours, what 
 in the most literal sense of the word 
 what an iridescence ! and each of them 
 reflects the whole world. For there is 
 one meaning alike in the voyages of Co 
 lumbus and the quest of the San Graal; 
 there is one compelling power in modern
 
 oftbe^oon 
 
 science and in the search for the phi 
 losopher's stone. Dante and Omar sang 
 no different songs ; Napoleon and Saint 
 Francis of Assisi trod the same path only 
 to a different measure the one iron- 
 shod, the other shuffling along barefoot. 
 What, then, means this warfare of Christ 
 with Mahomet, of Reason with Faith, 
 of Baron with Peasant ? There is no 
 royal road to the true and the beauti 
 ful; there are but innumerable bypaths, 
 over the mountain, where the hermit has 
 beaten a track in the snow, under the 
 trees, where Nature sits writing her pas 
 torals all leading to one end rather, 
 all leading in the same direction towards 
 an unattainable, because infinite, perfec 
 tion. By every creed and by every nega 
 tion, by peace and strife, by enthusiasms 
 and cynicisms, by hymns to Dahana, the 
 rosy-fingered, and to Mary, the 'woman 
 clothed with the Sun, and the Moon 
 under her feet, and upon her head a crown 
 of twelve stars,' man has drawn nearer 
 to the face of beauty and the quickening 
 heart of truth. Let a man have his fetish, 
 if he will ; let him bow down to it, though 
 it be a Priapus: for out of the inevitable 
 satiety which awaits him whose Gods are 
 
 CHAPTER 
 II
 
 Cfre Silences 
 
 CHAPTER 
 II 
 
 The failure 
 of aesthetic 
 
 born not of his higher but of his lower 
 nature will come forth an acuter hear 
 ing, a vision more delicate, a wider de 
 sire. We who live to-day, we who have 
 seen monarchy spurn democracy and 
 democracy trample on kings, who have 
 watched invention added to invention, 
 and creed superimposed upon creed 
 we can see that the trend of history is 
 always forward, that the strongest back 
 water is part of the stream. 
 
 NOW those who have drunk of the 
 elixir of Plotinus know his saying 
 that every beauty has its shaping and 
 perfecting soul. They know that apart 
 from a soul noble and, as it were, high 
 born there can be no enduring beauty 
 so that we must see many genera 
 tions of pure and noble ancestry pass 
 away before we reach beauty either of 
 intellect or of body : and that in beauty 
 something lies beyond what the eye can 
 see and the tongue can speak of. It is 
 this something beyond, common to all 
 beautiful trees and flowers and grasses 
 and rocks and animals, which gives them 
 their form, draws us to them, makes us 
 their kin. If not this, what is it that gives
 
 of tfjc Q300U 
 
 them their hold upon us ? What is their 
 magic ? It is not symmetry, as has often 
 been alleged and disproved ; certainly it 
 is nothing fortuitous. I love the spruce 
 and the poplar; I would spend countless 
 lives in watching them in wind and rain 
 and sun, at twilight and at midday. 
 Symmetry, you say? Perspective acting 
 as a narcotic on the eye? I have as strong 
 a love for the yew : is that, too, born of 
 symmetry ? And as to what corresponds 
 to symmetry in colour, is that always 
 beautiful? In the end we must admit 
 something utterly irreducible to terms ; 
 beauty is still c #,' the unknown, the all- 
 important, tangible to some degree in 
 material things, but most of all in the 
 word and deed of her worshippers. For 
 the noble men and true women of whom 
 we read and dream hold us solely by 
 reason of their being each a facet to catch 
 one or another of the lights of beauty ; 
 as, this one the steadfastness, that one 
 the striving, and this one again the calm. 
 Yet it seems sometimes that when we 
 have gone as pilgrims to this and that 
 human shrine of beauty, to the mind of 
 Pythagoras, Plato, Plotinus to poets 
 in words, to poets in form and colour, 
 
 CHAPTER 
 II
 
 66 
 
 Cbe Silences 
 
 CHAPTER 
 II 
 
 Beauty and 
 self-rule 
 
 and to the saints, who are poets in a& 
 and when in place of that rare delight 
 under whose faintest shadow we have 
 not failed to weep and tremble we find 
 sketches ruder than the scratchings of the 
 cave-dweller on his wall, we feel some 
 thing of the barrenness which stretches 
 across the world for the bereaved lover. 
 Quomodo sedet sola Civitasf 
 
 BUT then by that fortunate irony 
 which makes known to us the ful 
 ness of our adoration only when the 
 Beloved is taken away, we draw nearer 
 to what seems to be eternally lost. In a 
 desperate and auspicious hour we learn 
 to look at beauty in the chastened spirit 
 required of her stainless knights ; we have 
 been schooled in her laws of chivalry ; 
 we know at last that the mere dying with 
 her name on our lips is a destiny glori 
 ously fulfilled. We can understand Emer 
 son when he says : 4 What we love, that 
 we have; but by desiring we bereave 
 ourselves of the love.' We cannot see 
 beauty face to face, but only through a 
 thousand veils; what we see we cannot 
 analyse or describe. Even before these 
 grosser manifestations of beauty of which
 
 oftbe^oon 
 
 our senses are now susceptible it hap 
 pens that our oaths and superlatives pale 
 like lamps in the dawn: we are elated 
 and inarticulate : we hang aloft over the 
 worlds, poised between a rhapsody and 
 a lament. 
 
 4 TN heaven,' said Swedenborg, 'the 
 i angels are advancing continually to 
 the springtime of their youth, so that 
 the oldest angel appears the youngest.' It 
 is so with what we call the beautiful 
 an angel or messenger who was before 
 Swedenborg, before philosophy, and who 
 to each generation of men as they awake 
 is contemporary and playmate and lover, 
 if they will. Eternally young and fair, 
 eternally wise, is this beauty, like the 
 Gods ; infinitely diverse, infinitely ap 
 proachable, whether by Platonism, by the 
 Christ-spirit, by the contemplation of the 
 mystic, or by mere aptness of temper 
 by a family resemblance, as it might be 
 said, to that Idea of beauty whose kin 
 ship men have claimed from time to time 
 in all ages, and by intuition of its ways. 
 As for this last, may it not be the truest 
 way of approach at least the readiest, 
 most susceptible of moods ? It is thus that 
 
 CHAPTER 
 II 
 
 The Idea 
 of beauty
 
 68 
 
 Cfre 
 
 CHAPTER 
 II 
 
 Mysticism 
 and the 
 roving of 
 the mind 
 
 beauty showed her form, half-veiled, to 
 most of the rare men and women beside 
 whom we feel ourselves to be so earthy 
 and who have gone so much farther 
 than we, so that we seem to be cripples, 
 hunchbacked, shamblers, hardly reck 
 oned of the same pilgrimage, hardly pil 
 grims at all perhaps, rather, loafers at 
 the road-crossings, with a mind to turn 
 aside into every green meadow. 
 
 THAT wandering of the mind over 
 the high places of Christianity 
 which we vaguely call mysticism is a 
 tracking of the footsteps of this same 
 Idea of beauty along one of its number 
 less paths. The religion of the mystics 
 of every period and of every creed has 
 all the ardencies of youth vigour and 
 longing, poetry, wonder, grace ; it has 
 ever been the lyrical note in holiness, 
 the reanimation of languescent faith. It 
 is restless, for its night-visions and wak 
 ing thoughts are all one, and that is no 
 worship which can ever sleep ; rather 
 is true worship (again I will add, either 
 of a God, or a Lover, or an Ideal) that 
 which is with us in our hours of watch 
 ing, and which, when we have passed
 
 oftbe^oon 
 
 6 9 
 
 beyond the border into the country 
 of dreams, or (a little farther) into the 
 valley of death, is waiting for us there 
 also. The lives of those who climbed to 
 the heights familiar to the sweet tran- 
 scendentalist of Patmos and to him who 
 was called ' the minnesinger of the love 
 of God ' were full of a perpetual surprise. 
 In the world of the senses men say that 
 there is nothing new ; in this supersen- 
 suous world there is nothing old, yet 
 everything has been from infinite ages 
 before the nebular birth of the world. 
 For the experience of the mind is end 
 less ; and though it is sometimes sought 
 in a round of passive and sentimental 
 exaltations traversed again and again 
 with the same yet seeming new delight, as 
 by most of the saints of Italy and Spain, 
 yet it is sometimes seen as a spiral whose 
 base is set on the earth, its flights grow 
 ing steeper to infinity and permitting 
 neither repetition nor backward look. 
 This hunger for the divine, the ultimate 
 beauty is more than a dull longing: it is 
 the voracity, the keen desire, of one who, 
 rescued from starvation, is allowed so 
 meagre a diet as only stirs the appetite 
 to cry out afresh. The mind can never 
 
 CHAPTER 
 II
 
 Cfre Silences 
 
 CHAPTER 
 II 
 
 The Saints of 
 Christianity 
 
 know satiety, for as its desire is infinite, 
 the highest delight to which it can attain 
 has a beyond, just as on earth man can 
 never reach the horizon. 
 
 THE saint of Christianity has gen 
 erally been fated to pay his visit to 
 this earth like an unwilling guest and slip 
 away unnoticed ; we see him, but do not 
 trouble to speak to him : suddenly some 
 one notices a gap in the noisy circle, and 
 finding no oneto fill it gracefully, we dress 
 up a dummy, call it by his name, and can 
 onise it; then to the symposium again, 
 for 'To-morrow,' says the fool who sat 
 next to our saint, ' to-morrow we die.' Yet 
 the saint is the lure of analytic minds, 
 and their despair. He makes havoc of 
 preconceptions : he contemns classifica 
 tion. He comes to earth for the briefest 
 moment and is cursed and heckled: he 
 leaves mankind stupidly agape as after 
 a vanished aurora. There can be no fore 
 cast of the coming of these eccentric 
 orbs; as they cross the dark centuries 
 they leave a trail of fire which we exam 
 ine telescopically and regretfully as our 
 only available link with a curious por 
 tent. They are so wildly fascinating to us
 
 oftfje^oon 
 
 because at heart we are all mystics. You 
 are impatient of this life which we call 
 finite. You long for more than a mortal 
 love. Your dreams are concerned with 
 eternity and space, your waking thoughts 
 with your dreams. Then you are already 
 of kin to the mystic spirit; its loveliness 
 will not be a matterof indifference to you, 
 and its infinity will not be intangible. 
 
 THE age is at last drawing to an 
 end, when man's location of himself 
 as it were on a temple pinnacle, over 
 looking prostrate Nature, was an integral 
 part of his faith. We have passed through 
 the epoch of baseless authority and are 
 passing through that of baseless dissent. 
 We have abandoned the artificial asceti 
 cism which is the fairest aspect of all the 
 dualist creeds, and we are approaching as 
 a hardly discovered country the fresh and 
 inevitable asceticism of Nature. The self- 
 conscious and almost euphuistic garb in 
 which the monastic ideal has appeared 
 in conjunction with religious beliefs is 
 to be changed for a virtue without Puri 
 tanism, an austerity without maceration 
 or fast. It was because the saintliness 
 of medieval Christianity put out its own 
 
 CHAPTER 
 
 II 
 
 The saintly 
 ideal is 
 eternal
 
 Cfre Silences 
 
 CHAPTER 
 II 
 
 Generations 
 of creeds 
 
 The religion 
 
 of the 
 supermen 
 
 eyes that it perished and is met now only 
 in one rare mind here and there: it is 
 because the saintliness latent in all or 
 ganic life is before everything keen of 
 sense to the beauties of sense that it is 
 destined to override every successive army 
 of theologies. History shows us its pools 
 of semi-stagnation fed and emptied by 
 the occasional torrents of progress, and 
 cries to us that only a new faith can give 
 a new impulse. The birth of Christianity 
 came when the more irrational Gods of 
 Hellas and Rome were discredited and 
 held in derision; the birth of empiricism 
 when reason had. grown stiff in the fet 
 ters of the school-men ; the birth of natu 
 ralism comes at a time when senescent 
 Christianity is leaving us has already left 
 us stripped of all fellowship with the 
 Gods. The present is a time of plumb 
 ing and proving, and of plumbing espe 
 cially the depths of theosophies and prov 
 ing the warrants of authority. As we pass 
 through the deepest valleys of nihilism 
 (and pass we must, unless we would go 
 back to the picturesque enigmas which 
 puzzled medieval minds, for the human 
 mind at all costs will ever be thinking), 
 we learn to know the roots of the faiths
 
 oft&e 
 
 73 
 
 which rise above us on all sides like cold, 
 white mountains of unearthly height and 
 design; and having studied the embryo 
 logy of religion we shall distinguish what 
 is permanent and noble in the Idea of 
 worship from what is transient and foul. 
 As the onset of empirical science cleared 
 the way for speculation, so nihilism, a 
 flying column of negations, must clear 
 the way for a new and purified ideal. We 
 can raise no lasting fabric upon the ruins 
 of crumbled beliefs. No precaution must 
 be forgotten which shall prevent a re 
 crudescence of superstition, no measure 
 neglected which shall help on the devel 
 opment of broad, hale philosophy. Not 
 but that its teaching will be found to come 
 into line in a greater or less degree with 
 every primitive instinct and every de 
 veloped article of belief which men have 
 held; for all creeds, even the most arti 
 ficial, have sprung in the beginning from 
 a contemplative awe in the presence of 
 natural objects and powers. Let it be 
 granted that the religion called by the 
 name of the Christ is in purity and sub 
 limity the noblest of all religions which 
 have yet risen to greatness; but look at 
 Christianity in the light of the religion 
 
 CHAPTER 
 II
 
 74 
 
 CHAPTER 
 II 
 
 which is still to come, and it is foul and 
 subsimious. But our knowledge of Nature 
 is even now so limited and our love for 
 her of so recent, although so gradual, 
 a growth, that it seems to me there can 
 scarcely, until half a century ago, have 
 been material to form such a character 
 as shall express at once the chastity and 
 sensuous receptiveness which are parallel 
 veins running through all organic exist 
 ence, and which have been vainly set at 
 right angles by a monastic misdevelop- 
 ment of the worshipping instinct in man. 
 Let me say at once that I do not mean the 
 ideals encased in monasticism to be de 
 rided. They are among the noblest of all 
 ideals which circumstance has yet driven 
 the mind of man to spin ; they became 
 ignoble only by being appropriated as sup 
 ports to the tottering Christian mytho 
 logy which affe&ed to be above and was, 
 therefore, in conflict with Nature. 
 
 PERHAPS it is necessary here to 
 guard against a misunderstanding. I 
 shall be told that the monastic ideal was 
 born of Christianity in its vigour and not 
 adopted by Christianity in its old age; in 
 other words, that monasticism was the
 
 oft&eflpoon 
 
 75 
 
 direct offspring of the religion founded 
 by Christ, and that this religion was not 
 dependent upon the monastic ideal for 
 what is called a new lease of life. In an 
 swer to such objections it is sufficient to 
 call attention to the substrata of Plato- 
 nism, Kabbalism, and Sufism underlying 
 the mystic and speculative ideas of the 
 cloister, and to the strictly parallel ideas 
 of self-annihilation inflicted on the fleshly 
 Ego and the consequent final merging 
 of the individual in the All-Soul which 
 inspire the similarly misdirected asceti 
 cism of the East ; and, secondarily, to 
 imagine (as far as that is possible) a me 
 dieval Europe without monks, without 
 monasteries, and therefore without either 
 charity, or saint, or literature, or art, and 
 to imagine an illiterate and unprogressive 
 Christianity set to deal with a continent 
 of princes brutalised by hereditary power 
 and mobs vicious by uneducated instinct. 
 The briefest contemplation of the Chris 
 tian world before and after the monastic 
 period is enough to show that the epoch 
 was one of temporarily arrested decay. 
 
 It is not strange, though, perhaps, gen 
 erally unsuspected, that monasticism,like 
 every spell which man has laid upon the 
 
 CHAPTER 
 II
 
 be Silences 
 
 CHAPTER 
 II 
 
 The vitality 
 of religion 
 
 world, has its type and counterpart in 
 Nature. It is so often forgotten that to 
 her as the mother of ideals we ought to 
 pay our reverence for the great victories 
 over ugliness, the high thoughts, whether 
 aimed at or fully achieved, the world- 
 conquering institutions, which are each 
 'the lengthened shadow of one man.' It 
 is forgotten that without light a man can 
 throw no shadow; the light which throws 
 across the ages the shadow of Saint An 
 tony streams from the face of Nature. 
 
 EVEN with the knowledge which 
 has been piled up on the subject by 
 ethnology and comparative philology, it 
 is still necessary to ask ourselves, What 
 is religion? Whence is this vitality of 
 dead superstitions, this power over the 
 world wielded by men whom the world 
 (in practice, if not always in theory) has 
 agreed to call madmen? 
 
 Thomas Hammerchen, I am told, was 
 no better than an idiot in practical affairs, 
 even if he did write the De Imitatione 
 Christi, which, perhaps, he did not ; yet 
 thousands of men and women have been 
 moved even to tears by this same book, 
 and hundreds of thousands will be moved
 
 oftbe a^oon 
 
 77 
 
 to tears in the future. Religion, it seems, 
 is not yet quite exanimate, and may be 
 studied with profit. Once again, whence 
 comes that clear call which few hear 
 more than once or twice on earth, borne 
 towards us and beyond, a bell-note on 
 the swell of a breeze the summons of 
 a Power, wiser than are we, to cleanse 
 ourselves of the mire social, political, 
 and individual which clings to us in 
 our momentary flight through Time ? I 
 have never ceased to remember a childish 
 experience, terrible in its earnestness, in 
 its sweetness more luxurious than any 
 pleasure of the senses, which opened my 
 eyes at the age of six or seven years to 
 the beauty and wonder of the loveliest 
 poem ever conceived by the mind of man 
 the poem of the idea of Christ and 
 Christianity. I did not know then, as I 
 know now, that this epic was not the 
 work of a single mind, as was Paradise 
 Lost, but of generations; I knew nothing 
 of the countless visions of obscure monks 
 and nuns, each vision adding a new lus 
 tre to the radiant figure clothed in the 
 broideries of a world's imagination in 
 such a manner that, like the great solar 
 myths of the Aryan nations, the idea of 
 
 CHAPTER 
 II 
 
 Christ and 
 Christianity 
 
 A world's 
 master-poem
 
 Cbe 
 
 CHAPTER 
 II 
 
 Christ may be considered as a poem 
 wrought by the whole civilized world. 
 But I felt then, as I shall never feel 
 again, that during that instant's rapture 
 of sorrow and burden of ethereal joy I 
 had touched a hand stretched in an im 
 pulse of the most passionate love and 
 pity from somewhere behind the silences 
 of stellar space. Suggested by I know 
 not what tenuous chain of thought, this 
 sudden lull in the uproar of existence 
 came upon me in the midst of some 
 childish games upon a Sunday evening 
 in winter; and, as in a large company of 
 people, all talking at once, a sudden and 
 universal silence produces a kind of ner 
 vous shudder, so now I suffered a Panic 
 tremor of delicious affright. I ran out of 
 the house, which was full of light and 
 movement ; outside, where I half hoped, 
 half feared, and wholly expected to meet 
 him whom I had lovingly been taught 
 to adore as the son of God, I found only 
 darkness and heard only what seemed 
 as the contrite sighing of the grass and 
 trees. That the darkness was peopled by 
 myriads of beings with pitiful eyes, and 
 that the trees sighed in sympathy with 
 a heart that was never again to know
 
 of t&e Spoon 
 
 79 
 
 even a moment of such ineffable joy, 
 was a consolation hidden from me until 
 many years afterwards, when time had 
 softened some of the bitterness of exile 
 for ever from all such luxuries of spir 
 itual life. For all these years I remem 
 bered only that once, l in a moment of 
 time, in the twinkling of an eye,' I had 
 seemed to hear vibrating to some inner 
 sense the same voice which said ages 
 ago by the shore of the little Galilean 
 sea, ' Simon, son of Jonas, lovest thou 
 me?' I think that I felt then something 
 of the nature of that which I cannot even 
 now analyse: I mean what William Law 
 speaks of when he says, 'This is that 
 instinct of goodness, attraction of God, 
 or witness of himself in the soul of every 
 man, which without arguments and rea 
 sonings rises up in the soul.' Since then, 
 when I have thought of that strange fig 
 ure, so sweetly feminine, yet of so lofty 
 and unwavering hardihood; of such set 
 tled melancholy, and so lavish of joy to 
 the simple folk who alone were wise 
 enough almost to understand him ; playing 
 so great a part upon so paltry a stage; then 
 I have wondered whether across any other 
 world than this has fallen, in the dawn of 
 
 CHAPTER 
 ii
 
 8o 
 
 Cfre Silences 
 
 CHAPTER 
 II 
 
 Solitude 
 
 its wisdom and hope, that same mysteri 
 ous shadow of the cross. 
 
 I HAVE found that solitude strips the 
 soul and leaves it defenceless, but also 
 unshackled. In the first Ennead of Plo- 
 tinus we may read, l To those that go 
 up to the holy celebrations of the mys 
 teries there are appointed purifications 
 and the laying aside of the garments worn 
 before and the approach in nakedness; 
 until, passing on the upward path all that 
 is other than the God, each in the lone 
 liness of himself beholds that lonely- 
 dwelling Being, the Apart, the Single, 
 the Pure.' So it happens when the sur 
 render of the mind to the dim-peopled 
 world of solitude is accomplished : at 
 every step the trammelling robes of self- 
 indulgence and self-deceit fall away in 
 rags ; and when we remember that among 
 men these rags were blessed and hon 
 oured as the purple of kings, it some 
 times seems that after all we have chosen 
 the fool's portion and foregone such 
 pleasure as the world gives, only to be a 
 laughing-stock to our own nature. But 
 this is not so. The rewards of this fair 
 lady Solitude, even to those who serve
 
 oft&e 
 
 81 
 
 her but for an hour, are perennial. To 
 turn from her is to turn from immensity 
 to puerilities, from the comradeship of 
 the stars to acquaintance with foulness 
 and vice. On the other hand, every hour 
 spent in her shadow is a regeneration ; 
 the sights which cross the vision and the 
 thoughts which invade the mind during 
 complete abandonment to the influence 
 of solitude leave prints indelible by the 
 wear of centuries. In solitude I meet my 
 own vileness face to face; it is there 
 that I am able to overthrow this elusive 
 doppelganger who hitherto has been my 
 master. There at length the phantoms 
 and silhouettes which once passed for 
 realities fade away in the light of self- 
 knowledge ; the als which once were 
 stupendous lose their stature ; the thoughts 
 which were refulgent are seen to wane 
 and grow pale. We are confronted with 
 the necessity of countless revisions of 
 judgment : he who would be solitary 
 must above all men think for himself; 
 ' what everyone believes is never true.' 
 The solitary man proves himself to be of 
 the lineage of Ishmael in every thought ; 
 even in the world of ideas, in the com 
 radeship of the chosen teachers in his 
 
 CHAPTER 
 II 
 
 Ishmaelism
 
 Cfce Silences 
 
 CHAPTER 
 II 
 
 library, he must bow down to no dogma, 
 nor suffer his mind to lie at ease beneath 
 the caress of rhythmic language nor to 
 swoon under the spell of alien philoso 
 phies. The turn of a phrase which delights 
 the ear for a day, the fabric raised by a 
 musing intellect which delights the reason 
 for a few scores of centuries, are such 
 meteoric phenomena as the mind may 
 reflect upon to give point to their eva 
 nescence, but to which it may offer no 
 allegiance and from which it must accept 
 no bias of judgment. Though your phi 
 losophy be fairer than the Taj Mahal and 
 more firmly grounded than the Pyramids, 
 as a hard and fast rule I will have none 
 of it. I will admit that the mind must 
 needs be thrilled at the touch of a Plato, 
 as the body at the touch of a loved hand ; 
 the voice of a saint, heard across centu 
 ries, not less than the voice of a lover, 
 heard across a garden of flowers, falls 
 too musically upon the heart to awake 
 no echo of answering song. By the gift 
 of enthusiasm, our divinest possession, 
 we are not permitted to be indifferent to 
 the least of the emanations of beauty. 
 Of man we may say,
 
 'Son coeur est un luth suspendu; 
 Shot qu'on le louche, il resonne.' 
 
 The Roman who wrote in the sad- 
 cadenced metre of Sappho the rapturous 
 misery of passion, 
 
 ' Lingua sed torpet, tenuis sub artus 
 Flamma demanat, sonitu suopte 
 Tintinnant aures geminae, teguntur 
 Lumina nocte,' 
 
 and the Florentine who, though he 
 taught the world to love, made also this 
 confession, 
 
 'E s' P levo gli occhi per guardare, 
 Nel cor mi si comincia un terremuoto, 
 Che T anima da' polsi fa partire/ 
 
 spoke, it is certain, no more than the 
 truth j and they spoke of that kind of 
 beauty which over the minds of noble 
 men and of true women has the least 
 power, the beauty of a mortal form. Far 
 less transient, far more potent in its sway 
 over the loftiest and most insular of man 
 kind, are those waves of intellectual 
 emotion which pass over us when we 
 stand before some splendour of human 
 art, or hear through dreams some rainfall 
 of human music, or read in books the 
 thoughts which, a thousand years after 
 the vanishing of their thinkers, have not 
 
 CHAPTER 
 
 ii 
 
 ' Immortal 
 hilarity '
 
 8 4 
 
 Cfre Silences 
 
 CHAPTER 
 II 
 
 ceased to vibrate. Of these waves, which 
 are the swell of a past storm in a greater 
 mind than ours, we may hear the thun 
 dered message and wonder at the majesty, 
 but we must not suffer ourselves to be 
 borne away upon their flood. A man must 
 pass through his youth's wanderjabre 
 among the ghosts of philosophies and the 
 ruins of faiths, but let him remember al 
 ways that he stands as it were at Hillah 
 and Mosul, which once were Babylonand 
 Nineveh. Among these eldola of philo 
 sophy, the tottering memories of a former 
 grandeur, let him walk as under the con 
 stellations, which of old were called eter 
 nal ; it is not to such that he may sacrifice 
 his mind's autocracy. With her myriad 
 voices Nature calls us to be up and think 
 ing; the gods, the heroes, the saints, and 
 each of all the prophetic voices of the 
 world echo this cry alone. And why am 
 I to consult authorities for my ethics 
 or my belief? If my ethics fulfil Nature's 
 high purpose, they can never be super 
 seded ; if they ignore her laws, I and my 
 race are inevitably punished. In neither 
 case can any religion or system of thought 
 afFecl: my destiny ; a man is not handsome 
 because his clothes are fashionable, nor
 
 of tfee a^oon 
 
 noble because he is a Hindoo or a Chris 
 tian. A dominant religion and a sartorial 
 craze pass away in about the same length 
 of time the latter in a few weeks, the 
 former in a few centuries; in eternity the 
 difference is nonexistent. 
 
 HEREIN, then, lies the benediction 
 of the lady Solitude: for those who 
 love her she equates the Past with the Fu 
 ture and the Present with both; history 
 and prophecy and the stream of current 
 events are judged by the same standard, 
 for all are equidistant. Under those grave 
 eyes of hers it is not possible to be car 
 ried away by the storms of fanaticism, or 
 moved by a breath of self-deceit; in lone 
 liness we learn the stability of the mind. 
 The moving tapestry upon which kings 
 and queens are seen to acl: their solemn 
 pageantries passes under the eyes of the 
 lonely watcher and leaves him unmoved 
 passes aus der Ewigkeit zu der Ewlg- 
 keit bin, yet never out of his ken. For 
 the earth-groveller intent on gain there 
 is neither Past nor Future ; for the dweller 
 in solitary place there is no Present. At no 
 moment does he say, 4 Now is prophecy 
 being verified,' or,' Now are adtions pass- 
 
 CHAPTER 
 
 ii 
 
 Perspeftive
 
 86 
 
 Cbe Silences 
 
 CHAPTER 
 II 
 
 The tragedy 
 of wasted 
 intellea 
 
 ing into history j' he sees clearly that, be 
 fore he has spoken, the prophecy is ful 
 filled, the actions are historical. In loneli 
 ness a man takes of existence as it were 
 a bird's-eye view ; he surveys the world as 
 might a spirit afloat in space or a fabulous 
 inhabitant of the moon. Standing at a 
 distance from earth, he has attained the 
 focus of all thought and notional experi 
 ence, can see the paltriness of the most 
 long-sighted statesmanship, and know 
 the established creed of centuries to be 
 a momentary phase as transient as the 
 phases of Venus, and like hers, ever re 
 current, though in worlds other than our 
 own. 
 
 SOME years ago it was my affectation 
 to think that my favourite study was 
 the tragedy of wasted intellect. I quoted 
 to myself the dead sciences of astrology 
 and alchemy and the instances of Ray 
 mond Lull, who discovered a key to uni 
 versal knowledge and was murdered by 
 the Moors whom he thought to enlighten, 
 of Michael Scot, who foretold by magic 
 art the exadt hour and place and manner 
 of his death, yet did not escape dying 
 as he had predicted, and of Cornelius
 
 Agrippa, who in his youth wrote an 
 exhaustive treatise upon occult science 
 and in his age a treatise upon The Vanity 
 of all Arts and Sciences whatsoever. The 
 subject is now, as then, one upon which 
 I often dwell ; no longer, however, as a 
 pessimistic reverie, but as a paradox in 
 optimism. For since then it has become 
 clear to me that the musing hierarchy 
 whose wisest watched from the towers of 
 the Babylonian desert the majestic motion 
 of the constellations could not have been 
 better employed, nor the searchers for 
 elixir and the stone of philosophers have 
 gained a possession more priceless than 
 their enthusiasm. As we are happy, so 
 is the good that we do in the world; no 
 miserable man ever benefited the race. 
 The tragedy of wasted intellect is for me, 
 then, no longer a tragedy, though ironi 
 cal still, and now with a twofold irony; 
 for that, which to the Chaldeans and 
 to the Middle Ages seemed wisdom, to 
 us seems foolishness, and was neverthe 
 less wisdom after all! For, surely, that 
 is wise which best fits us for enduring 
 bravely and nobly achieving; must we 
 not, therefore, treasure those two gifts 
 (which are like beautiful twin children) 
 
 CHAPTER 
 II
 
 88 
 
 Cfte 
 
 CHAPTER 
 II 
 
 Life no more 
 than a mo 
 mentary con 
 templation 
 
 of our lady Mother called enthusiasm 
 and contemplation ? For by contempla 
 tion and steady labour and the recep 
 tivity of a mind schooled in enthusiasm 
 we discern reflected in our hearts, as in a 
 sheltered pool, such starry worlds as the 
 stream never dreams of; for the rush and 
 froth of our so-called society gives back 
 no light from the brightest of skies. These 
 worlds and constellations of thought, as 
 they move across our zenith in the night 
 of uncertainty, are sufficient to sustain 
 our patience and to lighten our hearts for 
 this present moment of time; in the few 
 days or few years which divide each of 
 us from death it may happen that we shall 
 be nearer to their origin and truth per 
 haps that we shall hardly escape blind 
 ness from their light. Such glimpses of 
 the mind's faeryland which come to us 
 in a solitary life serve at least to sustain 
 our faith and lend their colour to our 
 ideals. Without them our outlook is upon 
 mere light and shade: we may gaze at 
 the world and profess to admire it, but 
 in reality we see it only as a lunar land 
 scape ; it is colourless, because we have 
 taken away its atmosphere. Moreover, 
 who that has not sometimes lost his way
 
 oftbe^oon 
 
 8 9 
 
 and followed innumerable Will-o'-the- 
 wisps ever reached the goal of his desire? 
 
 THAT pregnant Laconism, 'Know 
 thyself ' (said to be heaven-sent), 
 brings forth its abundant fruit only in 
 solitude. Yet our apotheosis of solitude 
 is utterly vain as long as we have for 
 companion that earthy-minded part of 
 our nature upon which the saints heaped 
 curses not all unjustly. Until we have 
 purged away all dross of wealth and vul 
 garity, we know nothing of the value of 
 solitude; until we have cast away the 
 stained garments, beloved of the whole 
 world, called social duties, we may visit 
 Eleusis, but we see no mysteries. Soli 
 tude will yield herself only to the pure- 
 hearted; to the world-befouled, though 
 most wildly penitent, she can be only 
 tenderly pitiful. For those who go to her 
 wearing a mask there is no help, but 
 rather temptation to self-destruction. You 
 remember the woods of Westermain ? 
 
 A F 
 
 ' Enter these enchanted woods 
 You who dare.' 
 
 I3OVE all things, honesty is de 
 manded if a man is to benefit by 
 
 CHAPTER 
 
 ii 
 
 The woods of 
 Westermain 
 
 Singleness 
 of heart
 
 Cbe Silences 
 
 CHAPTER 
 II 
 
 Perspe&ive 
 
 transcenden- 
 talised 
 
 being solitary. Throw up the business 
 of deceiving others and turn to deceiv 
 ing yourself what gain is that ? It would 
 be far better for a man to go on with his 
 cheating and money-making, for there 
 is said to be satisfaction in that, and by 
 force of habitual repetition of commer 
 cial maxims a man may almost come to 
 believe them. But if we wish to carve 
 a soul to fairness and not to dishonour, 
 let us remember that solitude is Nature's 
 own cool hand on the human brow, and 
 that of all imbecilities Nature most de 
 tests a lie. It has ever been her privilege 
 to offer favours with one hand and to 
 take them away with the other : in our 
 simplicity we call this the irony of fate, 
 seeing in it nothing of the perversity of 
 man, nothing of the justice of Nature, 
 who gives and takes with the logic of a 
 pair of scales. Dishonesty, applauded as 
 astuteness in business life, is moral sui 
 cide when solitude makes it a self-decep 
 tion ; a lie then (when the world is behind 
 your back at last) is a leap seaward with 
 a millstone at your neck. 
 
 M 
 
 EN speak and write of Alexander, 
 of Hannibal, of Napoleon, as not
 
 only heroes but almost as demigods. Well ! 
 a man has conquered a state, an empire, 
 a world. One world? Only one? And 
 we make him a hero? But we are to fit 
 ourselves for the conquest of innumerable 
 worlds. We stand here in the palaestra 
 of great minds; our Shakespeares and 
 Napoleons are giants, but in their hobble- 
 dehoyhood. We must not be loungers, 
 idle spectators of their discipline and toil; 
 into the bout with the rest, where defeat 
 itself is a glory ! 
 
 MOREOVER, though this hour is 
 to be spent in sowing, it is a seed 
 time which is its own harvest. It is our 
 fortune to taste here the first fruits of 
 what we planted with our eyes bent on 
 eternity ; and looking along the pointed 
 finger of analogy, we can guess what we 
 are to reap hereafter from what we see 
 here as half-grown. The spirit of change, 
 flux, progress, which rules as a moon the 
 tides of nations, shouts us a warning that 
 the sowing and reaping are co-eternal. So 
 far from our bringing nothing into the 
 world and carrying nothing out, we both 
 bring and carry away all things ; we lay 
 down nothing but our bodies, and these 
 
 CHAPTER 
 
 ii 
 
 Sowing
 
 be Silences 
 
 CHAPTER 
 II 
 
 Age 
 
 as easily as a workman lays down his 
 tool, his other hand already taking up 
 another and more serviceable. How can 
 a man dull and worn with age cling to 
 his blunted edge of a life, when the finest 
 tempered steel is ready to his hand ? Men 
 say, ' A bird in the hand ' that slug 
 gard's proverb ! 
 
 THAT man who has neither whined 
 for death nor clung to life has said 
 the last word upon existence; he has 
 shown a fallacy in creeds and no-creeds. 
 He believes nothing, is ready to believe 
 all things; he stands for empiricism in 
 metaphysic, for a firm base upon which 
 to pile experience. His philosophy is 
 no fabric, but an accretion ; he passes 
 through a life and it leaves a deposit of 
 truth. That which we learn in our three 
 score years is the paltriest knowledge; 
 we are yet at our schooling. Our idea of 
 the universe is worth as much and as 
 little as a child's opinion of Catullus. It 
 may be our fate (who knows how soon ?) 
 to develop instincts as inconceivable to 
 us now as is the instinct of generation 
 to a child. In our moments or epochs of 
 senile depression let us remember that
 
 oftbe 
 
 93 
 
 we are only half-grown; we must out 
 grow many senilities. Our immediate 
 object, so far as concerns this passing 
 phase of existence, should be so to live 
 that we may stand erecl: both in mind 
 and body in our old age. Whenever we 
 depart from Nature's plan and purpose, 
 we add another chance to the possibilities 
 of our becoming mentally and physically 
 cripples. A man should stand in his age 
 like Odysseus among the suitors with 
 his tattered illusions fallen away and his 
 mind stripped for conflict with whatso 
 ever may be his next foe. An old man 
 whose mind and bodily frame alike con 
 temn support, who can still hold aloof 
 from the narcotism of religious faiths, 
 is immeasurably the most sublime of all 
 spectacles which humanity can show. 
 But it is given to few of our frail race 
 to retain the clear autonomy of thought 
 until the hour of death. The more sound 
 and healthy the body, the slower, com 
 monly, is its decline, so that sickly per 
 sons are the most likely to be in full pos 
 session of the powers of reasoning at the 
 time of death. Nevertheless, it is good to 
 make it our aim to cling fast to the ideals 
 of our maturity, nor suffer for a moment 
 
 CHAPTER 
 
 ii 
 
 Its sublimi 
 ties and 
 absurdities
 
 94 
 
 Cfje >tfences 
 
 CHAPTER 
 II 
 
 Age a greater 
 calamity 
 than death 
 
 that cowardice which at the supreme hour 
 flies for comfort yes, for comfort! to 
 religion. For such comfort will benumb 
 the reason and fetter the free will: it is 
 the intellectual counterpart of drugs and 
 alcohol. What a pathetic spectacle is man 
 commonly when his body's puny strength 
 forsakes it and his hair begins to whiten ! 
 What a sorry, dyspeptic Silenus, bab 
 bling now of by-gone feasts and loves, 
 now mumbling ill-remembered prayers! 
 The Past, in long and lurid perspective, 
 and the Future, already slipping into the 
 Past, rise alternately before him with his 
 varying moods, the latter bringing with it 
 a flood of too tardy devotion. How hastily 
 they come tumbling out, these negledled 
 petitions, treading hard upon each other's 
 heels in pitiable confusion, for the time 
 is all too short! The schoolboy with 
 an unprepared lesson is hardly in more 
 tragic plight: surely, there is no sadder 
 nor more ridiculous sight in all our brief 
 comedy. Yet it is absurd as well as cruel 
 to say to a man who has lost his physical 
 vigour, 'You can be strong at least in 
 mind.' Our mental health is as much and 
 as little under our control as bodily health; 
 and when age comes with its blurring of
 
 oftfte^oon 
 
 95 
 
 fine distinctions and its torpor of the 
 senses, when the tense strife of existence 
 slowly gives place to one long dream, and 
 there is neither true waking nor true 
 sleep, then all firmness and all ideals are 
 dormant as they were in the untaught 
 child. The keen glance has become a 
 flicker : the masterful will has forgotten 
 how to frame a command ; it inspires no 
 more terror than the mummy of a Pha 
 raoh, at whose word nations once trem 
 bled. There is, then, clearly a duty laid 
 upon us (and by that I mean simply that 
 it is due to ourselves) to put on now the 
 habit of thought which we should wish to 
 be wearing in death, since in age we can 
 not initiate any new thoughts or ideals. 
 That this habit of thought will be over 
 laid in our minds by concerns purely tem 
 porary and trivial need not make us think 
 of such preparation as a useless labour. 
 Our old ideals will be with us, encased 
 in a chrysalis; they will be our last wak 
 ing thoughts before we sink to sleep, and 
 so it may chance that they will shape our 
 first vision of the more than earthly dawn. 
 
 T 
 
 O the dwellers far beyond the out 
 skirts of a country town the bells 
 
 CHAPTER 
 
 ii 
 
 The intangi 
 ble ideas
 
 Cfje Silences 
 
 CHAPTER 
 II 
 
 infinity 
 
 time 
 
 space 
 
 of the great churches, with a clamour 
 ing chorus from lesser belfries, peal out 
 across the rolling country, over fold, over 
 fallow, confused in a tempest of echo 
 and chime. The fusillade of the small 
 bells, the cannonade of the great, the 
 volleys and file-firing and detonation of 
 mingling peals that spring into space 
 from haze-blue spires as the clocks strike 
 six on Sunday evening, never fail to bring 
 home to me the same ideas of power and 
 solemnity as are suggested to every human 
 mind by the thunder, which is the rever 
 berant hammer of Thor and the voice of 
 Zeus in the council of the Immortals. As 
 in the waves of the sea, so in these roar 
 ing billows of sound, you may hear now 
 the ululatus of fiends, now the antiphon 
 of archangels. 
 
 SUCH are they not ? are our hu 
 man ideas of eternity and infinity; of 
 that to which man has given so many 
 shapeless forms and which he has so long 
 foolishly worshipped under so many fool 
 ish names ; of that in which (for aught 
 that I can tell) my own lady may now have 
 sounded the profoundest deeps and ranged 
 the remotest distances; of that which (for
 
 of tbe 
 
 97 
 
 aught that I can tell) may still be to her 
 the same insoluble riddle that it is to you 
 and to me. The very words infinity 
 eternity are just such a roll of thunder 
 in the mind ; our thoughts about them 
 reach a terrific grandeur, a chill and Al 
 pine sublimity, yet they are nothing but 
 echoes following each other with thou 
 sandfold reduplication. At the moment 
 when death came to the Blessed Fina, 
 Virgin of San Gimignano and Spouse of 
 Christ, all the bells of the churches in 
 the town were set ringing with a sweeter 
 than mortal harmony. They were touched 
 by no human hands; they were heard in 
 the streets, and far out on the hillsides 
 the peasant folk rested from their toil to 
 gaze with mild perplexity towards the city 
 of a hundred towers. Our ideas of such 
 transcendental notions as eternity are 
 this same super-mortal harmony, heard so 
 rarely, never understood. We ourselves 
 cannot grasp the noblest of our thoughts, 
 so volatile are they, so full of sinuous 
 variations which lead us somewhere be 
 yond the limits of comprehension. In 
 the end the floating vision is crystallised 
 and meagre. We have learned that it 
 cannot be otherwise : there are soft, grey 
 
 CHAPTER 
 
 II 
 
 The legend 
 
 of the 
 Blessed Fina
 
 9 8 
 
 Cfje Silences 
 
 CHAPTER 
 II 
 
 outlines, the poetry of dawn; afterwards, 
 common daylight, and on the horizon 
 a little cloud of disillusionment. So have 
 fared many, nay, most of our strivings 
 after the mind's phantasmal desires 
 strivings whether of saint or philosopher, 
 of mystics orthodox or delirious. Yet I 
 may hear all that a man can tell me of 
 eternity in the shouts and wailing of a 
 sea cave. If I want a definition of the 
 infinite, I shall go not to a priest, but to 
 a hill-top from which I may look down 
 into the eyes of the dawn. 
 
 Love 
 
 Coma 
 Berenices 
 
 III 
 
 I LEANED upon the parapet of a 
 church tower and looked downward 
 into a darkness splashed with the pallor 
 of monumental stones, upward into the 
 spangled veil of the stars which is the veil 
 of my lady ; and the voice of my lady, 
 whom her relations call dead, spoke to 
 me. l Alas, poor dreamer!' she said, c so 
 hard ridden by your dreams!' 
 
 T 
 
 HAT patch like an asphodel mea 
 dow, lying in space between Leo
 
 oftbe 
 
 99 
 
 and Bootes, and called Berenice's hair, 
 is love's symbol set among the stars. I 
 need not tell at length that sad tale with 
 happy ending how, when Ptolemy Eu- 
 ergetes left his kingdom for a savage and 
 bloodthirsty war, he left also his queen 
 Berenice of flame-yellow hair and tender 
 devotion; how she sorrowed over his 
 memory, for no news came from the 
 army, nor any token ; how, at last, she 
 shore away the fine gold from her head, 
 and hung it up before the altars of the 
 gods ; how it was stolen, and Ptolemy 
 returned; how he raged over the doubly 
 sacrilegious theft ; how the astronomer 
 Konon, like the ready-witted Hellene 
 that he was, saved the lives of the temple's 
 priests by taking the wedded lovers to the 
 palace roof and showing them where the 
 lady Berenice's tresses hung in the ebony 
 sky of that old Egyptian night ; and how 
 they believed him implicitly, for they were 
 not astronomers, and were not the gods 
 ever gracious to them that loved faith 
 fully? So Berenice and her king have be 
 come immortal among the nations: think 
 you that besides this pair no man and 
 woman ever loved in that ancient world ? 
 On the contrary, a name written among 
 
 CHAPTER 
 III
 
 100 
 
 Cfre Silences 
 
 CHAPTER 
 III 
 
 The universal 
 transcenden- 
 talist 
 
 the stars perishes, but a name written in 
 the heart of a man or a woman endures. 
 In some few millions of centuries the 
 threads of cosmic gold will grow dim 
 and be seen no more; our earth will for 
 get its dynasty of Ptolemies, the heavens 
 will know no Coma Berenices; but do you 
 think that Berenice is forgotten, or that 
 Berenice forgets ? 
 
 THE lover speaks beyond the senses 
 and his whisper is audible across 
 centuries. Life is nothing to him, nor 
 death either ; by loving he has put them 
 both among the trivialities. You may 
 hear him sigh, if for anything, for such 
 trial as man never yet endured for 
 persecution bitterer than any martyrdom 
 and tortures more refinedly cruel than 
 screw or rack why ? That he may 
 prove his right to be scornful of earth- 
 lings and their pains, for, if of their pains, 
 then also of their sensualities. As a boy 
 looks forward to manhood as to a time 
 when he shall repeat with a greater free 
 dom and intensity of pleasure the hap 
 piest games of childhood, so the lover 
 looks beyond life and beyond death for 
 the fulfilment of that passion which dur-
 
 of t&e 
 
 IOI 
 
 ing our momentary dalliance in time can 
 never grow out of its infancy. He over 
 rides the aeons of time and stands aloft 
 above eternity; behind him and before are 
 countless lovers made visible : behind, the 
 lovers, so noble ! of all history; before, the 
 lovers, yet nobler, who still are to come: 
 behind, how great an army! before, a 
 vista of shadowy armies, host upon host, 
 multitude surging upon multitude, with 
 faces all upturned under starlight the 
 glow of the stars which we see and the 
 glare of the stars which lie beyond mortal 
 sight. Such an assemblage of his kindred 
 stretching away below an infinite hori 
 zon is the lover, and he alone, privileged 
 to see and dream upon. 
 
 THE heavens are calmed, the night 
 lit with auroral glow, to him who 
 rises above the cloud-scud of obscuring 
 Time with its microscopic fa6t and event 
 and desire. He cannot walk, as other 
 men, merely beneath the stars, but in 
 their company; swung between heaven 
 and earth, he is above all passions save 
 that one tumultuous stillness of love. In 
 so far as he is truly a lover, he may de 
 spise the world and yet be no egoist, de- 
 
 CHAPTER 
 
 in 
 
 The universal 
 poet
 
 IO2 
 
 &e Silences 
 
 CHAPTER 
 III 
 
 The universal 
 prophet 
 
 ride fadts and institutions without being 
 a visionary. He cannot fail to be in some 
 sort a poet, or ' creator,' whose song is 
 the growth of his own soul and its re 
 action upon a fairer. Test the world's 
 lovers by this standard, and most will fall 
 short of it ; nevertheless, it is the stand 
 ard to which the lovers in all history 
 have in some degree striven to attain. 
 
 YOU may say, if you are this true 
 lover, that the beauty of the sun's 
 setting is her beauty, and that the very 
 talk of the dead leaves is concerning her: 
 to look in the book of Nature is to find 
 her story written and her anciently em 
 blazoned heraldry. She is immortal, if 
 God and the universe are immortal ; for 
 she herself is the universe, and she is 
 God. The saying of Christ is as true 
 in her mouth as in his, 'I and my fa 
 ther are one.' The battle-shout of certain 
 knights was, 'For God and my lady!' 
 So the love of God would be no obstacle 
 to the love of this his fair daughter, for 
 in serving either the lover serves both. 
 
 A lover stalks the earth as a man among 
 lay figures; he has the right, and he alone. 
 The whole world is his unravished bride,
 
 oftbe^oon 
 
 103 
 
 for in this his ideal of womanhood the 
 whole world is, as it were, the animat 
 ing soul. Away with boundaries and dis 
 tinctions! They cramp a fine lover. The 
 microcosm and the macrocosm are all 
 one; they begin and end in one priceless 
 soul. This lover knows no limits ; he deals 
 with infinities, and he can see nothing 
 on this side of the horizon. For him the 
 riddle of earth has solved itself; the very 
 silence of infinite space is articulate in 
 his ears. He comes to earth as the Gods 
 did for a brief sojourn in a corner of 
 his demesne. Fetter him there, if you 
 know how ; the cunning of Hephaestus 
 and the strength will scarcely avail, for 
 a lover is stronger than the Immortals. 
 His life is a triumphal progress ; in his 
 train the heroes and poets of all ages 
 walk as captives, for he has superseded 
 them all and put them all to use in the 
 building of his own soul. What is noble 
 for the philosopher, the artist in sounds 
 or colours, the soldier, is noble for him 
 also, inasmuch as he sums in himself all 
 their nobilities. To the men of his own 
 time and planet this triumph will seem 
 a street-farce, this sublime gait no more 
 than stagger ; but let him know that he 
 
 CHAPTER 
 
 HI
 
 Cbe 
 
 CHAPTER 
 III 
 
 The universal 
 artist 
 
 loves and that even for this cause alone 
 he lives for all time. Never lover yet 
 missed immortality ; can our sins be writ 
 ten in a book of God, as priests tell us, 
 and not that love which made them hide 
 ous? Shall a hero in aft be immortal, 
 and a hero in all else be forgotten ? Or 
 shall not the singer live as well as his 
 theme ? 
 
 These two minds need express them 
 selves by no language, whether of lip or 
 of eye, but by the thought alone ; Har 
 mony becomes the greatest of the Im 
 mortals, for by her grace they may free 
 themselves of the cumbrance of speech, 
 yet never cease to hold converse. Alas! 
 for the mind which has no other to read 
 its unwritten periods and understand its 
 silences. 
 
 THE poet, the philosopher, the mys 
 tic, are all potential lovers, and we, 
 when we are ripe for love, are their wor 
 shippers. But when love actually comes, 
 riding upon a gale, we have no thought 
 for them again. What are Plato and 
 Dante to us then ? Where in our thoughts 
 is the Helen of Homer or of Goethe ? 
 Then we are authors of Platonism as well
 
 oft&e^oon 
 
 105 
 
 as readers, though we can barely enun 
 ciate a word clearly for the rush of our 
 thoughts ; every art is ours as much as 
 Dante's, or Michael Angelo's,or Beetho 
 ven's, and every longing and thrill of 
 half-attainment which the mystic knows 
 we know also. We can see sympatheti 
 cally with the optimist or with the pes 
 simist at will ; for to us all the world is 
 a golden setting to one fair jewel, and 
 apart from her it is bare and hideous. 
 Thus it happens that no standpoint is 
 amiss to us ; we can rail at woman with 
 Schopenhauer, or exalt her with Rossetti, 
 for it is but one that we worship, and her 
 we can justly neither praise nor blame. 
 
 THE moment of love's awakening 
 is full of discoveries and portents ; 
 long avenues of utterly new and inter 
 minable thought lie there, cleared of mist ; 
 the joy of a scholar over the dawning of 
 light from obscured pages is a pallid like 
 ness of the wild mirth wherewith a lover 
 watches the vanishing of the shades which 
 were wont to throng his starved and cre 
 puscular existence. But to a lover are 
 given also the clues which lead, this one 
 to heaven, that one to hell ; and not even 
 
 CHAPTER 
 
 HI 
 
 Birth-hour
 
 io6 
 
 be Silences 
 
 CHAPTER 
 III 
 
 The flaming 
 heart 
 
 himself may always know the difference 
 between them until the time of choos 
 ing has utterly gone by. There is darkest 
 peril in the birth-hour of love, and dawn 
 ing salvation. We of dim sight stand 
 between clear vision and a thicker blind 
 ness; if we fail, we have foregone an 
 unveiling of eternity. We come then to 
 a crisis more than temporal ; as we carry 
 ourselves then, so are we shaping two 
 souls to ugliness or to a beauty surpass 
 ing that of fairest bodily forms. 
 
 THE fa 61 of my being a lover lifts 
 me from the clay to magnificence ; 
 for a lover has wealth beyond the count 
 ing, can give generously, can bear all 
 things with equanimity, even to the loss 
 of her to whom he has given his worship, 
 if that loss be merely by death. That 
 most portentous scene in a life of por 
 tents, when the Christ (as it is related) 
 ascended from the Mount of Olives to 
 the sky, is reena&ed in each of our lives 
 when we are bereft of our best-beloved ; 
 for the lady of my heart cannot go from 
 earth but in a cloud of glory, cannot have 
 an end less glorious than the saints. The 
 death of my lady must hallow us both :
 
 oftbe^oon 
 
 107 
 
 her, because now no foulness can touch 
 her memory; me, because the remem 
 brance of her every and inmost thought 
 will keep me purified. Moreover, from 
 my servitude I have learned the language 
 of the great among lovers; I am closer to 
 Petrarca for having loved another Laura, 
 to Dante for being thrall to another 
 Beatrice ; and is not every true woman 
 rightly named Beatrice, ' she who holds 
 the gift of blessing ' ? Let a man willingly 
 suffer, if once he has loved, for now no 
 fate can restore a balance of evil; though 
 shame be piled upon sorrow, and fear 
 upon pain, he can endure them all in the 
 strength of remembered counsels from 
 purest lips ; to him the blessing of Lethe 
 is a curse, for all power lies in memory 
 does she not acT: as bearer of messages 
 from the lady's stilled heart? 
 
 WHEN we read the Vita Nova, we 
 hear the call from the heights of 
 a lover's idealism which no man, be he 
 lover or not, can help at least longing to 
 obey. In that tiny miracle of a book is 
 found the sum of all earthly experience, 
 or at least so much of it as is not infer 
 nal; its songs hold the germ of the Para- 
 
 CHAPTER 
 III 
 
 La Vita 
 Nova
 
 io8 
 
 Cfre Silences 
 
 CHAPTER 
 III 
 
 *'My lady is 
 desired in the 
 high heaven.' 
 
 The Queen 
 of Glory 
 
 diso. In it we actually witness the meta 
 morphosis of a good and beautiful woman 
 into an eternal idea for worlds to dream 
 upon ; the birth of the ideal Beatrice 
 Portinari in the mind of Dante is an 
 event, or, rather, a process comparable 
 to the birth of the ideal Madonna in 
 the mind of visionary medievalism. We 
 find the pride which can say without 
 vaunting, 
 
 'Madonna e disiata in sommo celo/ * 
 
 and the high veneration which knows 
 the lordship of Love to be good, l in that 
 he draws the mind of his faithful one 
 from all worthless things.' We read also 
 this passage : c Now it fell on a day, that 
 this most gracious creature was sitting 
 where words were to be heard of the 
 Queen of Glory.' You or I would have 
 spoken of our Beatrix as sitting ' in a 
 church ; ' not so the poet, far-sighted be 
 yond the veils of sense. Where better 
 can the lady pray, the lover watch, than 
 where the triumph is being celebrated 
 of temperance over the body's desires ? 
 for in that ideal drama of Mary, Virgin 
 of Nazareth, c Mother of the Fair De 
 light,' the world's lovers bear all a part.
 
 oftfee 
 
 109 
 
 Never yet lived the Christian woman 
 who had no wish to be to her a daughter 
 and a bower-maiden ; never yet fought 
 stainless knight whose slumbers were 
 not painted with his lady's features show 
 ing through Madonna's form. Herein is 
 poets' glory, to wake the echoes in our 
 minds by a hint, to show us our clay 
 transfigured, dust shining as fine grains 
 of gold. There 'where words were to 
 be heard of the Queen of Glory,' where 
 gazed her faithful from lofty niche, where 
 minds rose upon her ritual to seek her 
 self, the lover is to gaze upon his lady : 
 what place more fitting, save, perhaps, 
 a mountain-top under cloudless, sky ? 
 Thus are we shown that love and re 
 ligion are but two sides of the Janus- 
 faced idea of worship, the latter looking 
 outwards from the gates of the heart, the 
 former inwards to the heart's citadel and 
 shrine. The impious mind cannot love ; 
 the loveless mind cannot adore. Did the 
 Semitic folk ever pray to Moloch? They 
 bawled at him, they slashed themselves, 
 they devoted their children to the flames, 
 but to pray was impossible to them. 
 From Dante we learn that assuredly 
 that is no prayer which can be spoken, or 
 
 CHAPTER 
 
 HI
 
 I IO 
 
 Cfce Silences 
 
 CHAPTER 
 III 
 
 * ' Another 
 was just then 
 with me.' 
 
 Loneliness 
 and com 
 panionship 
 
 ' Abashed, 
 the pilgrim 
 spirit stands 
 at gaze.' 
 
 Arfturus 
 
 even thought; then only have we prayed, 
 when we can say truly, ' Altre era teste 
 mecho.' * Lastly, we sight the meaning 
 of that utter loneliness in the apparent 
 absence (by reason of what is called 
 death) of the Beloved, which is yet hap 
 piness because it is deepest intercourse 
 a loneliness which may happen to be 
 ours in actual experience also. 'La tua 
 mirabile donna e partita di questo secolo.' 
 So steadily in the hand of this godlike 
 lover is the balance held between the 
 trivial and the matter of real import ; 
 'thy wonderful lady is no longer of this 
 time,' knows now neither epochs, nor 
 moons, nor birth-anniversaries, yet is she 
 still Beatrice, 'giver of blessing.' She of 
 whom it was said, while she was on 
 earth, that no evil could bear her pre 
 sence, has not gone utterly from sight ; 
 still, as in former days, is her salutation 
 given, and still, as then, 'lo peregrine 
 spirito la mira.' * 
 
 THAT star in the west sinking into 
 the arms of the river-valley and 
 reddened by the veils of the river fog is 
 Ar6lurus ; the beams which are falling 
 on my eyes with the gentleness of dis-
 
 oft&e^oon 
 
 tant candle-light left their blazing sun 
 nearly one hundred and nine years ago, 
 and during that time have been travel 
 ling at the rate of 186,000 miles to the 
 second. Below Ar&urus a cloud is ris 
 ing from the horizon, and there must be 
 a hurricane blowing in the upper strata 
 of our atmosphere, for the speed of its 
 approach is like that of a sandstorm. It is 
 more than impressive, almost terrifying, 
 this sight of a lonely cloud errant in night 
 spaces, this silent, scudding hyperbole of 
 darkness where all is dark : and now 
 Arturus has gone. 
 
 HERE I come to my moral. The 
 presence of the heaviest and most 
 intolerable misfortunes coming between 
 a human mind and the passion which is 
 to make it realise its own immortality 
 is of no more consequence than is that 
 Titan of writhing mists, who has now 
 overspread half the sky, to the immemo 
 rial flare in the heavens which man has 
 named Ar&urus. We forget very easily, 
 do we not ? the pettiness of even the 
 apparently stupendous among sublunary 
 things. We forget that agonies the most 
 horrible and sorrows the most bitterly 
 
 CHAPTER 
 III 
 
 Dust in the 
 balance
 
 I 12 
 
 Cfje Silences 
 
 CHAPTER 
 III 
 
 ( I place them 
 in ascending 
 order of the 
 magnitude of 
 their effect on 
 the heroic 
 mind. 
 
 corrosive are not only past, but forgotten, 
 before the ray which is now leaving Arc- 
 turus has reached the earth. What are 
 worries to a lover? What are death, pain, 
 dishonour,* to a mind conscious of its 
 rectitude ? They are still less to a heart 
 conscious of its passion. Is not the longest 
 Reign of Terror but a historical episode in 
 a dozen centuries? If you are a lover, you 
 are set above the worlds : as the moon 
 was called Asterodia, 4 she whose way lies 
 among the stars,' so are you almost now 
 in a trice of years set free to leave 
 this earth to its jesting and to rise beyond 
 death in company with the fair soul over 
 whose beauty the aeons can throw no veil. 
 
 BUT, as we learn so early and so sud 
 denly, it is folly to believe that there 
 is no black underside to the Nature who 
 broods over us, though she be like the 
 loveliest of cumulus forms ever wrought 
 by wooing wind. It is the dark side of 
 the cloud, threatening horrors, that we 
 find eternally most visible, hiding the airy 
 pinnacle and glowing wall. The gloom 
 and awful, uplifted hand of Nature is no 
 dream ; the angel above the threshing- 
 floor of Oman, the bloody crosses and
 
 oft&e apoon 
 
 flaming serpents which an imaginative 
 ignorance saw in the comets of past ages, 
 are suggestive of a fa& which men are 
 ever thrusting aside, the facl that Nature 
 violated will take thousandfold venge- 
 
 O 
 
 ance. Let a man offend her, and he in 
 volves a score of generations in her nets ; 
 his children are born into a smiling world 
 with halters round their necks. And why 
 not ? The halters were placed there by 
 himself, not by Nature. Would we have 
 our goddess a laughing-stock, a weak 
 ling, without the power to enforce her 
 sanctions? We know men knew be 
 fore Lucretius articulated their unspoken 
 thought that in this fearful and inex 
 orable mood she is at her noblest. No 
 towering Jove astride the lurid heavens, 
 not even the silent majesty of Athene 
 Parthenos, grey-eyed, agaze from the 
 city across leagues of sea, nor the purity, 
 whiter and deadlier than molten steel, 
 of the All-Wise, to whom it was said 
 that the yearning soul fled mothlike to its 
 glory and doom, can be compared with 
 her in the grandeur of her wrath. We 
 know, though we deny it daily, that our 
 wickedness is her grief; the cruel at, the 
 chilled heart, send a pang through Na- 
 
 CHAPTER 
 
 HI 
 
 The wrath 
 of Nature
 
 Cfre Silences 
 
 CHAPTER 
 III 
 
 Reparation 
 
 ture; we never wrong an individual, but 
 a world, a universe. The anger of this 
 our Mother is raised to the tragic sub 
 limity by its being tempered with grief. 
 I say 'with grief,' but never with relent 
 ing; and in the apparent horror of those 
 dark times, when she stalks abroad in 
 purple and spreads a pall over Memphis 
 or Babylon or Hellas, the hands of the 
 discerning are never raised to an inexo 
 rable power, however the timorous, the 
 ignorant, the strangers to bird and beast 
 and field may fall into a hysterical invo 
 cation of this and that divinity. Yet, 
 though her law is unaltered, acl: and re 
 ward being not merely inseparable, but 
 one event, she finds a way to repair the 
 mischief by building her faithful hearts 
 into the new race. As Greece tamed her 
 Roman conquerors, so it has been in all 
 the cataclysms of history. We learn from 
 a beaten foe, and, if we have ourselves 
 yielded, we are caught up in the cyclone 
 of a conquering people. What deed of 
 Gods or prophets has equalled, what can 
 even suggest, these miracles of simulta 
 neous vengeance and renovation, so irre 
 sistible, so automatic ? From the wars of 
 cellular bodies to the tumults of flaming
 
 oftbe 
 
 suns, the balance of death and new birth, 
 of generation and decay, is eternally 
 self-adjusting even to a feather's weight. 
 It is possible for us of this age, with our 
 free gaze down the aisles of history, to 
 see what Egypt and Babylon could not 
 see that Nature caresses most tenderly 
 where she has struck hardest. 
 
 A> Nature's treatment of worlds and 
 nations, so is her treatment of each 
 beast and plant and everything possessed 
 of never so rudimentary a personality. I 
 may have done nothing wrong, nor my an 
 cestors, yet in suffering sorrow I am suf 
 fering no injustice. The balance of cosmic 
 good and evil requires that I should suf 
 fer, and who am I, that I should dispute 
 the laws of a mechanism which has been 
 working smoothly for millions of years ? 
 Sometimes we are inclined to complain, 
 naturally, though wrongly; then let us go 
 out under the stars, and consider whether 
 those vast deserts of stellar inanity do 
 not dwarf our high tragedy to the light 
 est and most momentary of masques ? 
 I would not be thought to slight a hu 
 man sorrow; the mimes of those world- 
 dramas that recur from time to time in 
 
 CHAPTER 
 
 in 
 
 Justice
 
 n6 
 
 Cfre 
 
 CHAPTER 
 III 
 
 Development 
 
 the pages of history, as at Salamis, Zama, 
 Waterloo, cause no greater stir among the 
 stars ; even Laconian Helen, that radiant 
 ideal, one of the human imagination's 
 chosen lovers, must fade to a dancing, 
 diaphanous ephemeron under our con 
 templation of infinite vistas of worlds. 
 
 IN the keenest lancinating pains which 
 the mind can suffer we are not being 
 hardly treated. We are receiving measure 
 for measure. If for an hour, or a year, 
 or a thousand years, our burdens shall 
 have been more than is common, then 
 our strength is grown by so much greater 
 than the strength of our fellows. On this 
 earth we are thwarted, confined, under 
 authority ; then we shall be the stronger 
 for our sojourn here. To nations and men 
 and ideas oppression ever has been a wise 
 nurse, stiffening the spirit to conquest ; 
 all history tells only of the swingof a pen 
 dulum. 'To-morrow we die,' says one. 
 'Let us eat and drink.' Rather let us fast 
 and be sober, in case the morrow bring 
 fighting. Another cries, ' Rest ? Shall I 
 not have all eternity to rest in ? ' and is 
 almost as far from the truth. Because 
 we find no rest here, are we to infer a
 
 of tbe 
 
 117 
 
 rest hereafter ? We ought rather to infer, 
 groping, as ever, among analogies, that 
 everywhere is restlessness, everywhere 
 motion and activity. When has a man 
 seen an eddy in a stagnant pond ? Yet 
 that is his idea of this earthly life. More 
 over, in Paradise and Nirvana can be no 
 life, but only existence no real sleep 
 nor waking, but only a doze. Would you 
 take a strong, unyielding soul, to whom 
 the strife against great odds is the very 
 breath of his life, and pen him in a gar 
 den? The lion eating straw like the ox is a 
 more credible fancy. It behoves us rather 
 to lengthen our stride, to follow the 
 straight trail with no mirage of ultimate 
 Elysian fields, no hope of our war-song 
 ever dying away to a vesper hymn. 'Man 
 is something to be surpassed; ' because he 
 can never be surpassed in this life we need 
 not despair. We are not pressed for time; 
 we have infinite space for a workshop 
 and eternity in which to labour. We may 
 spend this time on earth in slumber, but 
 then it will be harder to put on the har 
 ness and clench the mailed fist ; it is bet 
 ter spent in preparation for whatsoever 
 task may arise. On the eve of battle the 
 wise heart cannot slumber; rather it takes 
 
 CHAPTER 
 III
 
 u8 
 
 Cbe Silences 
 
 CHAPTER 
 III 
 
 The boon 
 of anguish 
 
 counsel until the dawn and the battle are 
 at hand. We give time and care, and far 
 too much of both, to makingourselves effi 
 cient for this life, instead of for the thou 
 sand lives to come. It matters little that 
 we cannot write a Hamlet or add two and 
 two, if only we can rule our own souls 
 and shape them loan existence more than 
 temporal. 
 
 WHAT we deem to be Fortune's 
 smile is a sorry grimace after all ; 
 her frown has the truer beauty. That 
 man or woman achieves the highest no 
 bility who is left single-handed against 
 the greatest odds ; the very best fate that 
 can befall us is to be deserted by those 
 upon whose aid we rely, and betrayed by 
 the hearts which have beat against our 
 own. Such desertion or betrayal may,cause 
 us the keenest anguish which it is possi 
 ble in our presently limited range of emo 
 tions to experience; but in spite of this, 
 nay, rather for this very reason, it is the 
 greatest boon that can fall to our lot. By 
 adversity we learn to stand alone, and to 
 repudiate, though we might have reaped 
 a benefit therefrom, the infirm ideal of 
 bearing one another's burdens. By ad-
 
 oftfce^oon 
 
 versity we grow cold to the transient gain, 
 and turn with deliberation to the shaping 
 our own souls. By adversity we add cu 
 bits to our stature and grow to manhood 
 in an hour; as we hear of men turning 
 grey in a single night through great sor 
 row, so we may be sure that it is not in 
 outward appearance only that suffering 
 adds years to our age. It is strange and, 
 in part, unfortunate that, when once they 
 are at an end, the long, sunless hours of 
 pain fade swiftly from the sight, and we 
 forget them; but the brief moments of 
 joy, like stars gathered in familiar con 
 stellations round the memorable things 
 of our lives, are with us until death 
 and why not beyond? Yet even with such 
 vision as we have, we may see, if we will, 
 a myriad of new stars. They are the stars 
 of a nebula which is called Pain. 
 
 YESTERDAY the field beyond this 
 garden-hedge was being mown in 
 the old-fashioned way which still lingers 
 on here. The scythe swept through the 
 grass, a gleaming, malformed Destiny ; 
 I saw its rhythmic rise and fall, heard 
 its ironical sigh as each swath of tender 
 green lives sank to forgetfulness beneath 
 
 CHAPTER 
 
 iii 
 
 Death
 
 I2O 
 
 Cf)e Silences 
 
 CHAPTER 
 III 
 
 Its insignifi 
 cance 
 
 its icy touch. That sigh is the audible 
 expression of the chill cynicism, freezing 
 the heart, which we call too euphemis 
 tically the irony of fate. I had watched 
 the grass in this field since it was the pal 
 est, most inexperienced of greennesses ; 
 in the heyday of its youth ; in its June 
 vigour and boisterous Saturnalia, with 
 those gay mummers, the poppies, dancing 
 through the long day in its midst. Here 
 sun and rain and the morning dew had 
 squandered their treasure ; the earth had 
 given her best gifts ; and now under the 
 dry, summer mists, into which the song 
 of the lark fell from far above in tiny drops 
 of sound, came the sudden gleam and tre 
 mor, the rustle of proud, stricken stems. 
 
 IT is not possible to forget how the 
 author of the one hundred and third 
 Psalm wrote: 4 As for man, his days are 
 as grass : as a flower of the field, so he 
 flourisheth. For the wind passeth over it, 
 and it is gone ; and the place thereof shall 
 know it no more.' Yet those two inci 
 dents, birth and death, to one of which 
 we attach all conceivable epithets of hor 
 ror and finality and gloom, are no more a 
 beginning and an end than are the sun's
 
 oftfte^oon 
 
 121 
 
 rising and setting, or the sleep and wak 
 ing of delicate flowers. The darkness 
 which stills the thrush's rondo and the 
 sparrow's travesty on three notes brings 
 with it the call of the owl and the nightin 
 gale's plaintive romance; and mythology, 
 the storehouse of primary and beautiful 
 truths, knows these two as the birds of 
 wisdom and of dolorous love. So the hour 
 when twilight edges away to the dark 
 ness, the hour when life for a space grows 
 placid in death, are alike no more than 
 a time of exchanging old songs for new; 
 and whether it happens hereafter that 
 we sleep or wake, there will always and 
 in all places be heard something of the 
 clear tones of wisdom and the exquisite 
 sorrowing of love. These and all the ele 
 mental truth and beauty which the ages 
 have shaped must be in every world eter 
 nal and ageless imperfect, perhaps, or 
 overcast with superstitions, but at no 
 time non-existent. We ought, therefore, 
 to meet death with our minds intent upon 
 nothing but what is immortal upon 
 those things which must have been at 
 our sides in all worlds hitherto, if such 
 there have been, and in all worlds to 
 come await us as radiant brides ; and to 
 
 CHAPTER 
 
 in
 
 122 
 
 &e Silences 
 
 CHAPTER 
 III 
 
 Its 
 
 adventitious 
 solemnity 
 
 cherish the spirit of that farewell of Saint 
 Paul to the Philippians : l Whatsoever 
 things are true, whatsoever things are 
 honest, whatsoever things are just, what 
 soever things are pure, whatsoever things 
 are lovely, whatsoever things are of good 
 report ; if there be any virtue, and if there 
 be any praise, think on these things.' 
 
 WE are apt to feel, perhaps, that 
 there are notions belonging to 
 death so solemn and terrific that man 
 kind in general can never cease to re 
 gard it as a horror to be long postponed 
 and even spoken of in undertones as of 
 fear. Its mysterious finality the com 
 plete dissolution the fact that in all 
 history there is not a single authenticated 
 instance of one returning after death to 
 revisit the earth these, you say, are 
 facts which no man will ever contem 
 plate without some misgiving. But this 
 appearance of finality, of total extinction, 
 is no more than an error of perspective: 
 we stand in the shadow both of birth 
 and death, as in a narrow gorge, and so 
 close to either that their true nature is 
 utterly indistinguishable. Could we take 
 a wider cosmic view, birth and death
 
 oftfje^oon 
 
 123 
 
 would appear as ridges in a furrowed field 
 as mere contingencies in a cycle of ex 
 istence of which this earth is the merest 
 fragment. Do we marvel that the butter 
 fly never returns to the chrysalis state ? 
 
 IT is such absence or error of per 
 spective that the animistic habit of 
 thought can correct. When we watch 
 the flowers that die day by day and the 
 insects whose life may be reckoned in 
 hours, when we live among these small 
 and weakly forms of existence, of a 
 frailty so pathetically human, and range 
 ourselves beside them as our fellow- 
 travellers through 'the everlasting Now,' 
 then we learn to see man as a fragment 
 of the Cosmos and not the cosmos as 
 a supplement to Man; and in the passing 
 of all existence, the lovely and the foul, 
 through the change which we call death, 
 we see only the splitting of the blind 
 and sleepy chrysalis, the bursting of the 
 seedling in its tomb. Concerning our 
 modern life the text of the animistic 
 spirit is the poverty of mere wealth; con 
 cerning death it has a single message 
 'Wait!' By following this time-spirit of 
 animism, though it seem never so plainly 
 
 CHAPTER 
 
 in 
 
 Death and 
 animism
 
 124 
 
 &e Silences 
 
 CHAPTER 
 III 
 
 Inaudible 
 harmonies 
 
 A dream 
 
 to be a swan's song to the ear and to the 
 eye a Jack-o'-lantern, we come at length 
 to accept as a compromise that state of ex 
 pectation which best can fit us for the time 
 of striking tents and setting forth upon 
 the next stage of our progress whither? 
 
 WHAT is death, that we should 
 hate the thought of it ? I think 
 I cannot help thinking of death as a 
 stepping out into open air, as the dawn 
 ing of a new vision, or as a recollection 
 of forgotten things when the last ca 
 dences of this our earthly nocturne are 
 floating into the soul, wave upon sleepy 
 wave, until all our hopes and ideals mur 
 mur in gorgeous consonance with its 
 harmonies. You remember with what 
 alternation of gloom and sunshine, so 
 wonderfully painted in Wagner's music, 
 the Gods crossed the rainbow-bridge into 
 Walhalla? It is as crossing such a bridge 
 and as hearing such music that a man 
 should pass from his cradle in Time to 
 a wider, unfettered manhood in Eternity. 
 
 OF the psychology of dreams much 
 has been written, little is known ; 
 but almost any dream faithfully told has
 
 oftbe @oon 
 
 125 
 
 a deep and hardly expressible interest. 
 I dreamed at a time when death had been 
 lately present in my thoughts that I met in 
 the fields a child of marvellous beauty and 
 grace. Of his dress, his bearing, and his 
 mien I remember ah ! the perversity of 
 dreams! nothing except their princely 
 and Oriental magnificence ; only in his 
 eyes can I recall the limitless depths 
 'deeper than e'er plummet sounded' 
 of expression. In their gaze was nothing 
 chill or wintry, but rather something of 
 an autumnal temper of a half-volup 
 tuous languor, as in the eyes of one who 
 had gazed too long upon woods of beaten 
 copper and trees gilded by the Midas 
 touch of death, upon fathomless glow of 
 sunset and mist-wreaths twisted by the 
 twilight airs for summer's bier, and who 
 had heard in the thin rustle of the willows, 
 as they sigh their leaves into the stream, 
 the song of La Belle Dame sans Merci. 
 I gazed at him, and his beauty and sorrow 
 became in some strange way no longer 
 his, but mine ; as by a transient gleam 
 of light I understood for one moment 
 of luxurious anguish the nature of that 
 mingled pain and delight of which I had 
 read in Saint Teresa's story of her life. 
 
 CHAPTER 
 III
 
 126 
 
 Cfre Silences 
 
 CHAPTER 
 III 
 
 Dreaming 
 
 A warning voice from some immense 
 distance urged me to fly, but like a heed 
 less lover I brushed discretion aside, and, 
 'Tell me your name !' I said. I caught 
 the child's small, white hand. It was 
 colder, far colder, than ice ; and, before 
 he could tell me his name, I awoke. 
 
 Even now the extreme bitterness of 
 that awakening has scarcely faded from 
 my memory, for with every day the be 
 lief has grown fast upon me, now amount 
 ing to certainty, that his name was no 
 other than Death. 
 
 I CANNOT help thinking that such 
 dreams as these, which seem like a 
 coquetry of Beauty with the enamoured 
 soul momentarily freed from its prison, 
 have a deeper significance than we prac 
 tical beings suppose. I know that in 
 thinking about a subject which is bar 
 nacled with old superstitions, I may be 
 unconsciously affected by their influence. 
 I know that dreams are to a great extent 
 dependent upon physiological causes. Yet 
 in spite of all this I continue to specu 
 late upon a matter about which I shall 
 never have any certain knowledge as long 
 as I remain on earth. Perhaps also the
 
 oftfje^oon 
 
 127 
 
 only fa6l of which I am really sure in 
 regard to this 
 
 'Weird, wild clime that lieth sublime 
 Out of Space, out of Time,' 
 
 which we call Dreamland, is that I have 
 brought back from its wilderness a store 
 of such memories as the heart longs for. 
 In a life passed, like mine, less among 
 men and women than among lights and 
 shadows, and girt with shadowy joys and 
 pains, these dreams are events, their 
 scenery is powerfully dramatic, the mem 
 ory of them forms a character; of those 
 that are remembered at all, none is ever 
 forgotten; of those that are remembered, 
 the remembrance is priceless. How often 
 does one voice speak to us across the 
 distance of dreams ! How often through 
 their tinted haze do we see one form ! 
 I would hardly believe that these were 
 wholly illusions, though that voice itself 
 should tell me; to do so were to take the 
 first and irrevocable step to the moral 
 helplessness of disillusion, for they are 
 a link with all beauty. Nor this one form 
 only, but the other fairest souls and most 
 beautiful of human shapes to which his 
 tory and art and imagination have given 
 
 CHAPTER. 
 Ill
 
 128 
 
 Cbe Silences 
 
 CHAPTER 
 III 
 
 Birthdays 
 
 birth Socrates, with his toad-like form 
 and god-like nature, and Galahad, that 
 l good man of his hands' who was also 
 found pure, and the lady Mary of Naz 
 areth, the model of veiled sisterhoods 
 and 'ladies bright in bower,' in whom are 
 the first and last of all womanly ideals 
 these too have shed the radiance of 
 their presence and left the ring of their 
 voices in my dreams : am I, then, to value 
 these latter, so rare and so wonderful, 
 less than the vulgarities which are my 
 waking thoughts ? 
 
 WHEN I was a boy I began to 
 compile an almanac of the birth 
 days of my loved heroes, poets, saints, 
 and beautiful women. I used to print the 
 names of my battle-heroes in red, the hue 
 of the blood which they shed; the names 
 of poets in green, the colour of the fields 
 which they loved ; the names of women 
 in blue was it not the colour of their 
 eyes? and the names of the saints in all 
 three, for in them were united the valour 
 of the soldier and the high thoughts of the 
 singer and the devotion passing the love 
 of women. For a time these days were my 
 festivals, and upon the vigil of each it was
 
 oft&e^oon 
 
 129 
 
 my custom to ponder over the immensity 
 of issues which lay behind the curtain of 
 the morrow. Upon the i oth of November 
 in the year 1483, a tiny animal of con 
 temptible weakness and fragility was born 
 at Eisleben in Thuringia; upon the I5th 
 of August in the year 1769, an animal 
 tinier still, of even less apparent signifi 
 cance, was born at Ajaccio. Yet the 
 great Papal power would have trembled 
 at the birth of the first, and powers 
 greater than the Pope at the birth of the 
 second, had they foreseen to what world- 
 stature these two would grow; for they 
 were Luther and Napoleon. But after 
 a while I began to see that, however 
 portentous to the world may be the birth 
 of a giant soul, a greater significance to 
 the soul itself lies in its passing from 
 the earth by death. This simple transi 
 tion round which man has grouped, like 
 ghastly statuary, his most stupendous 
 thoughts, his gravest emblems of mys 
 tery and extinction, this, as I told my 
 self, is of no greater moment in itself 
 than a birth, of infinitely less moment 
 than a marriage, but from its conse 
 quences it draws an adventitious impor 
 tance which makes it our wonder and 
 
 CHAPTER. 
 
 Ill
 
 130 
 
 Cbe 
 
 CHAPTER 
 III 
 
 Nunc dimittis 
 
 our bewilderment. From one point of 
 view it is true, as Spinoza told us, that 
 ' Death is the most insignificant event of 
 life, absolutely without effect on charac 
 ter, and utterly incapable of influencing 
 an eternal destiny.' From another point 
 of view, death is the parting of the last 
 link in the fetters of our strange human 
 dualism, the vanishing of the familiar 
 harbour-lights, the passing of the Pillars 
 of Hercules. We watch our friends, when 
 they start upon a sea voyage, until their 
 ship is hull-down upon the horizon; it 
 is thus that I muse over the death, and 
 no longer the birth, of the mailed fighters 
 good at need and the saintly hearts whose 
 battles were won in silence and, alas ! 
 (cannot we pity them most of all in this?) 
 often in comradeless gloom. 
 
 A DYING man told me that he no 
 longer feared death (as if that were 
 so great a matter for congratulation!), but 
 that he thought it hard not to live a little 
 longer in this beautiful world. I asked 
 him, 'Have you once seen the sunrise 
 on the craters of the moon ? Or have 
 you once heard the birds' song in dark 
 spring dawns? Then do you not yet know
 
 oftfje 
 
 the spirit of the Nunc Dimittis ? ' Not 
 only these, but countless wonderful sights 
 and sounds have been given for our plea 
 sure; Nature has been our lavish mis 
 tress ; can we pout and call her niggard, 
 because she sends us on an unknown 
 quest? Ought we not rather to take our 
 leave of her like bold knights errant, with 
 hearts trusting in our Gloriana ? Count 
 less worlds are fellow-ad venturers with us: 
 whither we are going matters nothing, 
 nor whence; it is enough that here we 
 are permitted to see a wonder of beauty 
 before we yield our place to others. Even 
 if we are to endure ages of suffering 
 greater than is conceivable by the hu 
 man mind, we shall still be in debt to 
 Nature. 
 
 Let us, then, go to death as the gulls 
 swoop to the waves after stormy weather 
 with a cry of 'The Sea!' and the 
 laughter of a soul long pent inland. 
 
 I WALKED through the black abyss 
 es of shadow which the cypresses cast 
 on the ground; for the moon had risen. 
 The cypress has that monstrous and dae 
 monic character which belongs to the 
 scenery of the Apocalypse and of dreams. 
 
 CHAPTER 
 
 III 
 
 The cypress
 
 132 
 
 Cfre 
 
 CHAPTER 
 III 
 
 Suetonius, in a phrase like a thunderclap, 
 speaks of the Emperor Claudius as a 
 prodigy of a man (portentum hominis}, 
 and the expression returns inevitably to 
 my mind at the sight of a cypress por 
 tentum arboris. Other trees have a dispo 
 sition, the cypress hasacharac-ter; other 
 trees have emotions, but in the cypress Is 
 incarnate the inhuman tranquillity of fate. 
 A clump of almost any other trees delights 
 the eye like a bevy of beautiful women ; 
 to meet with a clump of cypresses is like 
 meeting a bronze group of the Parcae. 
 Every school of philosophy has its disci 
 ples among the trees. We thinkof the oak 
 as self-sufficient and a Stoic, the pine as 
 an ascetic on the mountains, 'whose heads 
 touch heaven,' the poplar as a subjective 
 spirit wrapped in dreams; but the cypress 
 is the saturnine and cynical witness of 
 those momentary pomps and fading em 
 blazonries by which the world fans itself 
 into a flutter of optimism. For, being 
 planted, as it is, round the churches where 
 men and women go through the stately 
 rites of marriage and where their children 
 are joyfully baptized, yet passionless 
 spectator of a tragedy whose crisis is 
 never reached, dusky sentinel over the
 
 oftfre^oon 
 
 illimitable fields of death, it has been for 
 centuries the symbol of mortality, the 
 tutelary genius of that last irony in the 
 drama of worldly existence, the burial of 
 unconquerable Man. 
 
 I WALKED home by the river, whose 
 serpentine shape the wind and moon 
 were covering with scales; past the hill 
 ocks between which mist always lies like 
 water in the palm of a giant hand; past 
 the poplars, ghostly effigies that were 
 now black, now white, as the breeze 
 raised and fondled and jilted their leaves; 
 under the hills, stretched like recumbent 
 beasts in a landscape of neutral tints; 
 hearing the peewit's sorry lament; crum 
 pling the leaves which made in their death 
 such a fair Byzantine mosaic upon the 
 road that I almost forgot to look for the 
 Gothic tracery of branches overhead. For 
 the last hours before the dawn wood and 
 meadow reserve their most potent magic, 
 for then the night is telling her secrets 
 to her lovers to the owls and moths 
 and the voluble spirits of trees and run 
 ning water to man and woman, if they 
 will but stop to listen to her undertones. 
 In an hour the sky will be over-clouded; 
 
 CHAPTER 
 
 in 
 
 Night
 
 Cbe Silences 
 
 CHAPTER 
 III 
 
 The clouds 
 
 from the western horizon a cloud is 
 flying over the plain like the he-goat 
 in Daniel's vision, that l came from the 
 west on the face of the whole earth, and 
 touched not the ground.' 
 
 THE clouds bring us in their deep 
 and silent hearts the same happi 
 ness finely coloured with melancholy as 
 the high rapture of music, or the as 
 piration of philosophy, or the tremor of 
 poetry, or the memory of a lovely dream. 
 Among all that earth can show of pure 
 and beautiful forms they are the purest, 
 yet also the strongest in their appeal to 
 the one sense by which they are percepti 
 ble. Where else upon the earth are there 
 these million variations upon Nature's 
 most heavenly theme, the melody of the 
 curve ? Where is there such a fulfilment 
 of the delicacy and gradual variation 
 which Burke demanded as inalienable 
 conditions of beauty? Where such 'a 
 spirit-like feeling, a capricious mocking 
 imagery of passion and life,' as makes of 
 the shapes of heaven ironical symbols 
 and wraiths of the shapes of earth? Those 
 skiffs with vanishing sails and galleons 
 freighted with transoceanic wealth, des-
 
 oft&e^oon 
 
 tined to reach no harbour, but only to 
 pass through the cycles of existence as 
 ghostly derelicts of the sky, are Nature's 
 arch parody of human fortunes. It was 
 thus that the Immortals laughed at man 
 to teach him wisdom. I never see one of 
 these sylphid forms trailing robes golden 
 in sunlight or silvered over by the moon 
 without thinking of the tale of Ixion 
 surely one of the saddest (in the parabo 
 lic significance which is so easily attached 
 to it) of all the sad Hellenic mythology. 
 The story, strong in the irony of all solar 
 myths, is the very tragedy of human 
 idealism in brief. The love of Ixion, the 
 radiant sun, for Hera, the large-eyed, 
 the white-stoled, the queen of the ether, 
 the wife of Zeus; her contempt of his 
 passion; how she enticed him by the 
 cloud shaped in woman's delicate form 
 and veiled with airy vestures like her own; 
 how, when Ixion, at the beginning of 
 his weary ascent of heaven, came upon 
 the white shape dreaming above the hill 
 tops, and rushed to clasp it in his arms, 
 it faded away, yet returned when he had 
 passed the spot; how he lingered near it 
 (what lover would not?) until he was 
 caught and bound for ever to the revolv- 
 
 CHAPTER 
 
 in 
 
 Ixion
 
 136 
 
 Cfre Silences 
 
 CHAPTER 
 III 
 
 The wind 
 
 ing wheel as a punishment of his pre 
 sumptuous passion for an Immortal: this 
 is the history, all too veracious, of many 
 a soul that is passionate at its wooing 
 and many pure ideals that are never won. 
 
 ON this afternoon the west wind is 
 racing down from the hills across 
 twenty miles of open country and break 
 ing on the window in solid billows. I 
 can see each squall tear at the limbs of 
 a great beech on the sky-line a mile away, 
 snatching from them handfuls of leaves; 
 a minute later it is screaming round the 
 tall firs close to the house. Two rooks, 
 whom hunger or the spirit of adventure 
 has tempted to try their fortune on the 
 walnut-tree in the little orchard, are beat 
 ing up for their third attempt at a land 
 ing. When they have come to an anchor, 
 they fix their beaks in a walnut and throw 
 themselves headlong from the branch ; 
 the hurricane and the law of gravitation 
 do the rest, though ungracefully. How I 
 welcome these equinoctial gales, which 
 bring days of Bacchantic revelling in the 
 woods weeks of revelling and witches' 
 sabbaths ! Again it is early in October, 
 the polychrome month of the year, and
 
 of t&e 
 
 137 
 
 I have been listening for an hour to the 
 declamation of a certain poplar. It is 
 at this season that the most reticent of 
 trees throws off its mask of reserve and 
 joins with its comrades in shouting its 
 secrets across a shouting countryside. I 
 have often stood on a windy night about 
 twelve paces to leeward from three of 
 these monumental figures of Nature's 
 modelling, and watched them curl over 
 their black plumage, the home of unut 
 terable woes ; those bowed and despair 
 ing crests are the emblems of Life-in- 
 Death, as the cypress is the emblem of 
 Death himself. It has been said, 4 We 
 only see poplars in the sunset ; they ap 
 pear with the bats and the first stars.'* 
 In the lulls of the hurricane they croon 
 together, nodding wise heads over what 
 we must suppose to be their peculiar met 
 aphysical problems. At such times the 
 song of the poplar, more mournful in 
 the depth of its moaning than the mon 
 ody of the reed-maiden Syrinx, and in 
 its multitudinary chorus of sadness more 
 impressive than the singing together of 
 the morning stars, is a chaunt the most 
 noble and the most harrowing of all the 
 inexhaustible psalmody of Nature. For 
 
 CHAPTER 
 
 in 
 
 The poplar 
 
 George 
 
 Moore, E-velyt 
 Innes.
 
 138 
 
 C6e Silences 
 
 CHAPTER 
 III 
 
 its voice is the composite voice of a hun 
 dred thousand leaves, each having its 
 own tiny personality. Imagine all hu 
 manity to be built up into a single in 
 dividual being, a breathing colossus of 
 loves and hatreds more innumerable than 
 the sand of the shore, possessed of the 
 accents of Memnon and the stature of 
 a Sphinx : to such a colossus, bowing be 
 neath infinite reduplication of woes, the 
 poplar would be the natural prototype. 
 Upon a gusty day like this it is full of ca 
 prices, ruffling the silence with humour- 
 some shouts; at midnight, when the wind 
 has nearly dropped, it will be a campa 
 nile of melodious, sorrowful chimes. 
 
 WHILE I have been writing these 
 poor thoughts, upon which the 
 tolerant smile of one long gone hence 
 sheds their only glory,! have seen Nature 
 in all her familiar aspects. I have seen the 
 childlike face of the country in spring, 
 smiling through tears as it was said of 
 Andromache, Sa/cpudev ycXao-acra: in sum 
 mer, when the buttercups paint our Eng 
 land like the plains of El Dorado: in 
 autumn, when the fire has died out of 
 the heart of the year, leaving it happy in
 
 oftbe^oon 
 
 139 
 
 motherhood; when wind and rain are 
 making their progress through the land, 
 dragging grey skirts over the hills : in the 
 night of winter, with the earth clad in her 
 white vesture and radiant in sleep. The 
 seasons roll past; the stars rise and set. 
 Just now, when I sat down to write these 
 last pages, I heard the noisy homecoming 
 of the birds and saw the setting of the 
 blood-red sun or, as our Aryan fathers 
 said, when they gazed awefully upon the 
 same sight, I saw Indra dyeing the heavens 
 with the gore of Vritra. Now the light has 
 gone and the wind has gone ; candles are 
 lit, the bats are squeaking round the fir- 
 tops, and the moon is alighting upon the 
 Welsh hills with the same noiseless tread 
 as when she stole over the slopes of 
 Mount Latmos in search of young Endy- 
 mion. How, think you, has the world 
 changed since those days of Indra and 
 Vritra, Dian and Endymion? Just as 
 much and as little as it has changed since 
 I lit my candles, so far as I am con 
 cerned : for did I not love before 
 the dawn of Time, and 
 do I not love 
 still? 
 
 CHAPTER 
 HI
 
 APOLOGIA DIFFIDENTIS 
 
 BY W. COMPTON LEITH 
 
 PRESS OPINIONS 
 
 The book has high literary merit ; the style is full of melody 
 and colour, 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 renun 
 ciation of the very qualities which lend to life its inner glow. 
 
 SATURDAY REVIEW. 
 
 Mr. Leith'g literary style is truly admirable ; 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. DAILY CHRONICLE. 
 
 A genuine contribution to literature. ... A sincere and often 
 beautiful attempt to depict the character of a sensitive self- 
 conscious Ishmael. TIMES. 
 
 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. DAILY MAIL. 
 
 Open the book where we may, the intellect is at once ar 
 rested and quickened. ... It is a human document, a literary 
 achievement. OBSERVER. 
 
 A singularly beautiful and interesting book. DAILY GRAPHIC. 
 
 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 can 
 not do otherwise than communicate. DAILY NEWS. 
 
 His English is graceful, gracious, fluent, and beautiful. His 
 theme is at once original and appealing, and the combination 
 of matter and manner proves irresistible. ... A sincere and 
 masterly piece of prose creation. MANCHESTER COURIER. 
 
 A really admirable analysis of the sensations and the emo 
 tions of the shy man. . . . Mr. Compton Leith has a fine feel 
 ing for literature, genuine distinction of style all the virtues 
 most to be admired in an age of slipshod writing. ACADEMY.
 
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