From a Cornish Window Part 28

As we thread our dim way homeward among the riding-lights flickering on the black water, the last pale vision of her alone and lightless follows and reminds me of the dull winter ahead, the short days, the long nights.

She is haunting me yet as I land on the wet slip strewn with dead leaves to the tide's edge. She follows me up the hill, and even to my library door. I throw it open, and lo! a bright fire burning, and, smiling over against the blaze of it, cheerful, companionable, my books have been awaiting me.

[1] The discarded opening stanza ran:--

"Though you should build a bark of dead men's bones, And rear a phantom gibbet for a mast, St.i.tch shrouds together for a sail, with groans To fill it out blood-stained and aghast; Although your rudder be a dragon's tail Long-sever'd, yet still hard with agony, Your cordage large uprootings from the skull Of bald Medusa, certes you would fail To find the Melancholy--whether she Dreameth in any isle of Lethe dull."

NOVEMBER.

Will the reader forgive, this month, a somewhat more serious gossip?

In my childhood I used to spend long holidays with my grandparents in Devons.h.i.+re, and afterwards lived with them for a while when the shades of the prison-house began to close and I attended my first 'real' school as a day-boy. I liked those earlier visits best, for they were holidays, and I had great times in the hayfields and apple orchards, and rode a horse, and used in winter-time to go shooting with my grandfather and carry the powder-flask and shot-flask for his gun--an old muzzle-loader. Though stern in his manner, he was (as I grew to learn) extraordinarily, even extravagantly, kind; and my grandmother lived for me, her eldest grandchild. Years afterwards I gathered that in the circle of her acquaintance she pa.s.sed for a satirical, slightly imperious, lady: and I do seem to remember that she suffered fools with a private reserve of mirth. But she loved her own with a thoroughness which extended--good housewife that she was--down to the last small office.

In short, here were two of the best and most affectionate grandparents in the world, who did what they knew to make a child happy all the week. But in religion they were strict evangelicals, and on Sunday they took me to public wors.h.i.+p and acquainted me with h.e.l.l. From my eighth to my twelfth year I lived on pretty close terms with h.e.l.l, and would wake up in the night and lie awake with the horror of it upon me. Oddly enough, I had no very vivid fear for myself--or if vivid it was but occasional and rare.

Little pietistic humbug that I was, I fancied myself among the elect: but I had a desperate a.s.surance that both my parents were d.a.m.ned, and I loved them too well to find the conviction bearable. To this day I wonder what kept me from tackling my father on the state of his soul. The result would have been extremely salutary for me: for he had an easy sense of humour, a depth of conviction of his own which he united with limitless tolerance, and a very warm affection for his mother-in-law. Let it suffice that I did not: but for two or three years at least my childhood was tormented with visions of h.e.l.l derived from the pulpit and mixed up with two terrible visions derived from my reading--the ghost of an evil old woman in red-heeled slippers from Sir Walter Scott's story, _The Tapestried Room_, and a jumble of devils from a chapter of Samuel Warren's _Diary of a Late Physician_. I had happened on these horrors among the dull contents of my grandfather's book-case.

For three or four years these companions--the vision of h.e.l.l particularly and my parents in it--murdered my childish sleep. Then, for no reason that I can give any account of, it all faded, and boy or man I have never been troubled at all by h.e.l.l or the fear of it.

The strangest part of the whole affair is that no priest, from first to last, has ever spoken to me in private of any life but this present one, or indeed about religion at all. I suppose there must be some instinct in the sacerdotal mind which warns it off certain cases as hopeless from the first . . . and yet I have always been eager to discuss serious things with the serious.

There has been no great loss, though--apart from the missing of sociableness--if one may judge the arguments that satisfy my clerical friends from the a.n.a.logies they use in the pulpit. The subject of a future life is one, to be sure, which can hardly be discussed without resort to a.n.a.logy. But there are good and bad a.n.a.logies, and of all bad ones that which grates worst upon the nerves of a man who will have clear thinking (to whatever it lead him) is the common one of the seed and the flower.

"The flowers that we behold each year In chequer'd meads their heads to rear, New rising from the tomb; The eglantines and honey daisies, And all those pretty smiling faces That still in age grow young-- Even those do cry That though men die, Yet life from death may come,"

Wrote John Hagthorpe in verses which generations of British schoolboys have turned into Latin alcaics; and how often have we not 'sat under' this argument in church at Easter or when the preacher was improving a Harvest Festival? Examine it, and you see at once that the argument is not _in pari materia_; that all the true correspondence between man and the flower-seed begins and ends in this world. As the seed becomes a plant, blossoms and leaves the seeds of other flowers, so of seed man is begotten, flourishes and dies, leaving his seed behind him--all in this world. The 'seed' argument makes an illicit jump from one world to another after all its a.n.a.logies have been met and satisfied on this side of the grave. If flowers went to heaven and blossomed there (which is possible indeed, but is not contended) it might be cogent. As things are, one might as validly reason from the man to prove that flowers go to heaven, as from the flower to prove that man goes thither. St. Paul (as I do not forget) uses the similitude of the seed: but his argument is a totally different one. St. Paul bids us not be troubled in what form the dead shall be raised; for as we sow "not the body that shall be, but bare grain, it may chance of wheat or of some other grain," so G.o.d will raise the dead in what form it pleases Him: in other words, he tells us that since bare grain may turn into such wonderful and wonderfully different things as wheat, barley, oats, rye, in this world, we need not marvel that bare human bodies planted here should be raised in wonderful form hereafter. Objections may be urged against this ill.u.s.tration: I am only concerned to point out that it ill.u.s.trates an argument entirely different from the common pulpit one, which (I suspect) we should have to endure far less frequently were it our custom to burn our dead, and did not interment dig a trap for facile rhetoric.

Further, St. Paul's particular warning, if it do not consciously contain, at least suggests, a general warning against interpreting the future life in terms of this one, whereas its delights and pains can have little or nothing in common with ours. We try to imagine them by expanding or exaggerating and perpetuating ours--or some of them; but the attempt is demonstrably foolish, and leads straight to its own defeat. It comes of man's incapacity to form a conception of Eternity, or at any rate to grasp and hold it long enough to reason about it; by reason of which incapacity he falls back upon the easier, misleading conception of 'Everlasting Life.' In Eternity time is not: a man dies into it to-day and awakes (say) yesterday, for in Eternity yesterday and to-day and to-morrow are one, and ten thousand years is as one day. This vacuum of time you may call 'Everlasting Life,' but it clearly differs from what men ordinarily and almost inevitably understand by 'Everlasting Life,' which to them is an endless prolongation of time. Therefore, when they imagine heaven as consisting of an endless prolongation and exaggeration or rarefication of such pleasures as we know, they invite the retort, "And pray what would become of any one of our known pleasures, or even of our conceivable pleasures, if it were made everlasting?" As Jowett asked, with his usual dry sagacity, in his Introduction to the _Phaedo_--

"What is the pain that does not become deadened after a thousand years? or what is the nature of that pleasure or happiness which never wearies by monotony? Earthly pleasures and pains are short in proportion as they are keen, of any others which are both intense and lasting we have no experience and can form no idea. . . . To beings const.i.tuted as we are the monotony of singing psalms would be as great an affliction as the pains of h.e.l.l, and might even be pleasantly interrupted by them."

This is trenchant enough, and yet we perceive that the critic is setting up his rest upon the very fallacy he attacks--the fallacy of using 'Eternity' and 'Everlasting Life' as convertible terms.

He neatly enough reduces to absurdity the prolongation, through endless time, of pleasures which delight us because they are transitory: he does not see, or for the moment forgets, that Eternity is not a prolongation of time at all, but an absolute negation of it.

There seems to be no end to the confusion of men's thought on this subject. Take, for example, this extract from our late Queen's private journal (1883):--

"After luncheon saw the great poet Tennyson in dearest Albert's room for nearly an hour; and most interesting it was. He is grown very old, his eyesight much impaired. But he was very kind. Asked him to sit down. He talked of many friends he had lost, and what it would be if he did not feel and know that there was another world where there would be no partings: and then he spoke with horror of the unbelievers and philosophers who would make you believe that there was no other world, no immortality, who tried to explain all away in a miserable manner. We agreed that, were such a thing possible, G.o.d, who is Love, would be far more cruel than any human being."

It was, no doubt, a touching and memorable interview--these two, aged and great, meeting at a point of life when grandeur and genius alike feel themselves to be lonely, daily more lonely, and exchanging beliefs upon that unseen world where neither grandeur nor genius can plead more than that they have used their gifts for good. And yet was not Tennyson yielding to the old temptation to interpret the future life in terms of this one? Speculation will not carry us far upon this road; yet, so far as we can, let us carry clear thinking with us. Cruelty implies the infliction of pain: and there can be no pain without feeling. What cruelty, then, can be inflicted on the dead, if they have done with feeling? Or what on the living, if they live in a happy delusion and pa.s.s into nothingness without discovering the cheat? Let us hold most firmly that there has been no cheat; but let us also be reasonable and admit that, if cheat there be, it cannot also be cruel, since everything that would make it a cheat would also blot out completely all chance of discovery, and therefore all pain of discovering.

This is a question on which, beyond pleading that what little we say ought to be (but seldom is) the result of clear thinking, I propose to say little, not only because here is not the place for metaphysics, but because--to quote Jowett again--"considering the 'feebleness of the human faculties and the uncertainty of the subject,' we are inclined to believe that the fewer our words the better. At the approach of death there is not much said: good men are too honest to go out of the world professing more than they know. There is perhaps no important subject about which, at any time, even religious people speak so little to one another."

I would add that, in my opinion, many men fall into this reticence because as they grow older the question seems to settle itself without argument, and they cease by degrees to worry themselves about it. It dies in sensible men almost insensibly with the death of egoism. At twenty we are all furious egoists; at forty or thereabouts--and especially if we have children, as at forty every man ought--our centre of gravity has completely s.h.i.+fted. We care a great deal about what happens to the next generation, we care something about our work, but about ourselves and what becomes of us in the end I really think we care very little. By this time, if we have taken account of ourselves, ourselves are by no means so splendidly interesting as they used to be, but subjects rather of humorous and charitable comprehension.

Of all the opening pa.s.sages in Plato--master of beautiful openings--I like best that of the _Laws_. The scene is Crete; the season, midsummer; and on the long dusty road between Cnosus and the cave and temple of Zeus the three persons of the dialogue--strangers to one another, but bound on a common pilgrimage--join company and fall into converse together. One is an Athenian, one a Cretan, the third a Lacedaemonian, and all are elderly.

Characteristically, the invitation to talk comes from the Athenian.

"It will pa.s.s the time pleasantly," he suggests; "for I am told that the distance from Cnosus to the cave and temple of Zeus is considerable, and doubtless there are shady places under the lofty trees which will protect us from the scorching sun. Being no longer young, we may often stop to rest beneath them, and get over the whole journey without difficulty, beguiling the time by conversation."

"Yes, Stranger," answers Cleinias the Cretan, "and if we proceed onward we shall come to groves of cypresses, which are of rare height and beauty, and there are green meadows in which we may repose and converse."

"Very good."

"Very good indeed; and still better when we see them. Let us move on cheerily."

So, now walking, anon pausing in the shade to rest, the three strangers beguile their journey, which (as the Athenian was made, by one of Plato's cunning touches, to foresee) is a long one; and the dialogue, moving with their deliberate progress, extends to a length which no doubt in the course of some 2,300 years has frightened away many thousands of general readers. Yet its slow amplitude, when you come to think of it, is appropriate; for these elderly men are in no hurry, although they have plenty to talk about, especially on the subjects of youth and religion.

"They have," says Jowett, "the feelings of old age about youth, about the state, about human things in general. Nothing in life seems to be of much importance to them: they are spectators rather than actors, and men in general appear to the Athenian speaker to be the playthings of the G.o.ds and of circ.u.mstances. Still they have a fatherly care of the young, and are deeply impressed by sentiments of religion. . . ."

"Human affairs," says the Athenian, "are hardly worth considering in earnest, and yet we must be in earnest about them--a sad necessity constrains us. . . . And so I say that about serious matters a man should be serious, and about a matter which is not serious he should not be serious; and that G.o.d is the natural and worthy object of our most serious and blessed endeavours. For man, as I said before, is made to be the plaything of G.o.d, and this, truly considered, is the best of him; wherefore also every man and woman should walk seriously and pa.s.s life in the n.o.blest of pastimes, and be of another mind from what they are at present."

But on the subject of youth, too, our Athenian is anxiously, albeit calmly, serious: and especially on the right education of youth, "for," says he, "many a victory has been and will be suicidal to the victors; but education is never suicidal." By education he explains himself to mean--

"That education in virtue from youth upwards which makes a man eagerly pursue the ideal perfection of citizens.h.i.+p, and teaches him how rightly to rule and how to obey. This is the only education which, upon our view, deserves the name; and that other sort of training which aims at the acquisition of wealth or bodily strength, or mere cleverness apart from intelligence and justice is mean and illiberal, and is not worthy to be called education at all."

Plato wrote this dialogue when over seventy, an age which for many years (if I live) I shall be able to contemplate as respectable. Yet, though speaking at a guess, I say pretty confidently that the talk of these three imaginary interlocutors of his upon youth, and the feeling that colours it, convey more of the truth about old age than does Cicero's admired treatise on that subject or any of its descendants. For these treatises start with the false postulate that age is concerned about itself, whereas it is the mark of age to be indifferent about itself, and this mark of indifference deepens with the years. Nor did Cicero once in his _De Senectute_ get hold of so fine or so true a thought as Plato's Athenian lets fall almost casually--that a man should honour an aged parent as he would the image of a G.o.d treasured up and dwelling in his house.

The outlook of Plato's three elderly men, in fact, differs little, if at all, from Mr Meredith's as you may see for yourself by turning back to the September chapter and reading the part from "Not long ago an interviewer called on Mr. Meredith," through to the excerpt from 'Lucifer in Starlight'. Speaking as a parent, I say that this outlook is--I won't say the right one, though this too I believe--the outlook a man _naturally_ takes as he grows older: naturally, because it is natural for a man to have children, and he who has none may find alleviations, but must miss the course of nature. As I write there comes back to me the cry of my old schoolmaster, T. E. Brown, protesting from the grave--

"But when I think if we must part And all this personal dream be fled-- O, then my heart! O, then my useless heart!

Would G.o.d that thou wert dead-- A clod insensible to joys or ills-- A stone remote in some bleak gully of the hills!"

I hear the note of anguish: but the appeal itself pa.s.ses me by. 'All this personal dream' must flee: it is better that it should flee; nay, much of our present bliss rests upon its transitoriness. But we can continue in the children.

I think that perhaps the worst of having no children of their own is that it makes, or tends to make, men and women indifferent to children in general. I know, to be sure, that thousands of childless men and women reach out (as it were) wistfully, almost pa.s.sionately towards the young.

Still, I know numbers who care nothing for children, regard them as nuisances, and yet regard themselves as patriots--though of a state which presumably is to disappear in a few years, and with their acquiescence. I own that a patriotism which sets up no hope upon its country's continuous renewal and improvement, or even upon its survival beyond the next few years, seems to me as melancholy as it is sterile.

Some of these good folk, for example, play the piano more sedulously than that instrument, in my opinion, deserves; yet are mightily indignant, in talk with me, at what they call the wickedness of teaching mult.i.tudes of poor children to play upon pianos provided by the rates. As a historical fact, very few poor children play or have ever played on pianos provided by the rates. But I prefer, pa.s.sing this correction over, to point out to my indignant friends that the upper and middle cla.s.ses in England are ceasing to breed, and that therefore, unless the Anglo-Saxon race is to lose one of its most cherished accomplishments--unless we are content to live and see our national music ultimately confined to the jews' harp and penny whistle--we must endow the children of the poor with pianos--or perhaps as 'labour certificates' abbreviate the years at our disposal for instruction, with pianolas, and so realise the American sculptor's grand allegorical conception of 'Freedom presenting a Pianola to Fisheries and the Fine Arts.'

To drop irony--and indeed I would expel it, if I could, once and for all from these pages--I like recreation as much as most men, and have grown to find it in the dull but deeply absorbing business of sitting on Education Committees. Some fifteen years ago, in the first story in my first book of short stories, I confessed to being haunted by a dreadful sound: 'the footfall of a mult.i.tude more terrible than an army with banners, the ceaseless pelting feet of children--of Whittingtons turning and turning again.' Well, I still hear that footfall: but it has become less terrible to me, though not one whit less insistent: and it began to grow less terrible from the hour I picked up and read a certain little book, _The Invisible Playmate_, to the author of which (Mr. William Canton) I desire here to tender my thanks. In a little chapter of that little book Mr.

Canton tells of an imaginary poem written by an imaginary Arm.

(Arminius?), Altegans, an elderly German cobbler of 'the village of Wieheisstes, in the pleasant crag-and-fir region of Schlaraffenland.' Its name is the 'Erster Schulgang,' and I will own, and gratefully, that few real poems by real 'cla.s.sics' have so sung themselves into my ears, or so shamed the dulness out of drudgery, as have the pa.s.sages which I here set down for the mere pleasure of transcribing them:--

"The poem opens with a wonderful vision of children; delightful as it is unexpected; as romantic in presentment as it is commonplace in fact. All over the world--and all under it, too, when their time comes--the children are trooping to school. The great globe swings round out of the dark into the sun; there is always morning somewhere; and for ever in this s.h.i.+fting region of the morning-light the good Altegans sees the little ones afoot--s.h.i.+ning companies and groups, couples, and bright solitary figures; for they all seem to have a soft heavenly light about them!

"He sees them in country lanes and rustic villages; on lonely moorlands, where narrow, brown foot-tracks thread the expanse of green waste, and occasionally a hawk hovers overhead, or the mountain ash hangs its scarlet berries above the huge fallen stones set up by the Druids in the old days; he sees them on the hill-sides, in the woods, on the stepping-stones that cross the brook in the glen, along the sea-cliffs and on the wet ribbed sands; trespa.s.sing on the railway lines, making short cuts through the corn, sitting in ferry-boats: he sees them in the crowded streets of smoky cities, in small rocky islands, in places far inland where the sea is known only as a strange tradition.

"The morning-side of the planet is alive with them; one hears their pattering footsteps everywhere. And as the vast continents sweep 'eastering out of the high shadow which reaches beyond the moon,' and as new nations with _their_ cities and villages, their fields, woods, mountains, and sea-sh.o.r.es, rise up into the morning-side, lo! Fresh troops, and still fresh troops, and yet again fresh troops of 'these small school-going children of the dawn.' . . .

"What are weather and season to this incessant panorama of childhood?

The pigmy people trudge through the snow on moor and hill-side; wade down flooded roads; are not to be daunted by wind or rain, frost or the white smother of 'millers and bakers at fisticuffs.' Most beautiful of all, he sees them travelling schoolward by that late moonlight which now and again in the winter months precedes the tardy dawn."

My birthday falls in November month. Here, behind this Cornish window, we are careful in our keeping of birthdays; we observe them solemnly, stringent in our cheerful ritual;--and this has been my birthday sermon!