Now day by day, indoors and out of doors, the conquest of spring proceeds to the music of the conquerors. One evening the first chafer comes to the lamp, and his booming makes the ears tremble with dim apprehension. He climbs, six-legged and slow, up the curtain, supporting himself now and then by unfurling his wings, or if not he falls with a drunken moan, then begins to climb again, and at last blunders about the room like a ball that must strike something, the white ceiling, the white paper, the lamp, and when he falls he rests. In his painful climbing he looks human, as perhaps a man looks angelic to an angel; but there is nothing lovelier and more surprising than the unfurling of his pinions like a magic wind-blown cloak out of that hard mail. Another day the far-off woods in a hot, moist air first attain their rich velvet mossiness, and even near at hand the gorse-bushes all smouldering with bloom are like clouds settled on the earth, having no solidity, but just colour and warmth and pleasantness.
The broad-backed chestnuts bloom. On the old cart-lodge tiles the vast carapace of the house-leek is green and rosy, and out of the midst of it grow dandelions and grass, and the mass of black mould which it has accumulated in a century bends down the roof.
The hawthorn-bloom is past before we are sure that it[122] has reached its fulness. Day after day its warm and fragrant snow clouded the earth with light, and yet we waited, thinking surely to-morrow it will be fairer still, and it was, and the next day we thought the same and we were careless as in first love, and then one day it lay upon the grass, an empty shell, the vest of departed loveliness, and another year was over. The broad grass is full of buttercups’ gold or it is sullen silvery under a burning afternoon sun, without wind, the horizon smoky, the blue sky and its white, still clouds almost veiled by heat; the red cattle are under the elms; the unrippled water slides under sullen silvery willows.
The night-haze peels off the hills and lets the sun in upon small tracts of wood—upon a group of walnuts in the bronze of their fine, small leaf—upon downland grass, and exposes blue sky and white cloud, but then returns and hides the land, except that the dewy ground-ash and the ivy and holly gleam; and two cuckoos go over crying and crying continually in the hollow vale.
Already the ash-keys hang in cool, thick bunches under the darker leaves. The chestnut-bloom is falling. The oak-apples are large and rosy. The wind is high, and the thunder is away somewhere behind the pink mountains in the southern sky or in the dark drifts overhead. And yet the blue of the massy hangers almost envelops the beechen green; the coombes and the beeches above and around their grassy slopes of juniper are soft and dim, and far withdrawn, and the nightjar’s voice is heard as if the wind there were quiet. The rain will not come; the plunging wind in the trees has a sound of waterfalls all night, yet cannot trouble the sleep of the orange-tip butterfly on the leopard’s-bane’s dead flower.
[123]
Now the pine blooms in the sandy lands, above the dark-fronded brake and glaucous-fruited whortleberry, the foxgloves break into bell after bell under the oaks and birches. The yellow broom is flowering and scented, and the white lady’s bedstraw sweetens the earth’s breath. The careless variety of abundance and freshness makes every lane a bride. Suddenly, in the midst of the sand, deep meadows gleam, and the kingfisher paints the air with azure and emerald and rose above the massy water tumbling between aspens at the edge of a neat, shaven lawn, and, behind that, a white mill and miller’s house with dark, alluring windows where no one stirs.
June puts bronze and crimson on many of her leaves. The maple-leaves and many of the leaves of thorn and bramble and dogwood are rosy; the hazel-leaves are rosy-brown; the herb-robert and parsley are rose-red; the leaves of ash and holly are dark lacquered. The copper beeches, opulently sombre under a faintly yellowed sky, seem to be the sacred trees of the thunder that broods above. Presently the colour of the threat is changed to blue, which soiled white clouds pervade until the whole sky is woolly white and grey and moving north. There is no wind, but there is a roar as of a hurricane in the trees far off; soon it is louder, in the trees not so remote; and in a minute the rain has traversed half-a-mile of woods, and the distant combined roar is swallowed up by the nearer pattering on roof and pane and leaf, the dance of leaves, the sway of branches, the trembling of whole trees under the flood. The rain falls straight upon the hard road, and each drop seems to leap upward from it barbed. Great drops dive among the motionless, dusty nettles. The thunder unloads its ponderous burden upon[124] the resonant floor of the sky; but the sounds of the myriad leaves and grass-blades drinking all but drowns the boom, the splitting roar, and the echo in the hills. When it is over it has put a final sweetness into the blackbird’s voice and into the calm of the evening garden when the voice of a singer does but lay another tribute at the feet of the enormous silence. Frail is that voice as the ghost-moth dancing above the grass so faithfully that it seems a flower attached to a swaying stem, or as the one nettle-leaf that flutters in a draught of the hedge like a signalling hand while all the rest of the leaves are as if they could not move again, or as the full moon that is foundering on a white surf in the infinite violet sky. More large and more calm and emptier of familiar things grows the land as I pass through it, under the hoverings of the low-flying but swiftly-turning nightjar, until at midnight only a low white mist moves over the gentle desolation and warm silence. The mist wavers, and discloses a sky all strewn with white stars like the flowers of an immense jessamine. It closes up again, and day is born unawares in its pale arms, and earth is for the moment nothing but the tide of downs flowing west and the branch of red roses that hangs heavily laden and drowsed with its weight and beauty over my path, dipping its last spray in the dew of the grass.
The day is a Sunday, and no one is on foot or on wheel in the broad arable country that ripples in squares of green, or brown, or yellow, or grey, to the green Downs and their dark, high-perched woods. As if for some invisible beholder, the green elders and their yellow-green flower-buds make their harmony with the yellow-lichened barns against which they lean; the grass and the noble[125] trees, the groups of wayside aspen, the line of horse-chestnuts, the wych-elms on both sides of the road, the one delicate sycamore before the inn and the company of sycamores above the cross—the spacious thatch and tiles of the farmyard quadrangle—the day newly painted in white and blue—the green so green in the hedges, and the white and purple so pure in the flowers—all seem to be meant for eyes that know nothing of Time and of what “brought death into the world and all our woe.” And in this solitude the young birds are very happy. They have taken possession of the thick hedges, of the roadside grass, of the roads themselves. They flutter and run and stumble there; they splash in the pools and in the dust, which not a wheel nor a foot has marked. These at least are admitted into the kingdom along with that strange wildfowl that lives “to maintain the trade and mystery of typographers.”
Such a day, in the unblemished summer land, invariably calls up thoughts of the Golden Age. As mankind has looked back to a golden age, so the individual, repeating the history of the race, looks back and finds one in his own past. Historians and arch?ologists have indeed made it difficult for men of our time to look far back for a golden age. We are shown a skull with supraciliary prominences and are told that its owner, though able to survive the mammoth by means of tools of flint, lived like the Tasmanian of modern times; and his was no Golden Age. Then we look back to heroic ages which poetry and other arts have magnified—to the Greece of Homer or Pheidias, to the Ireland of Cuchulain, to the Wales of Arthur, to the England which built the great cathedrals or produced Chaucer, Sir Philip Sidney, Izaak Walton.
[126]
In the same way, few men can now look back to their childhood like Traherne and say that
“All appeared new and strange at first, inexpressibly rare and delightful and beautiful. I was a little stranger which at my entrance into the world was saluted and surrounded with innumerable joys. My knowledge was Divine. I knew by intuition those things which since my Apostasy I collected again by the highest reason. My very ignorance was advantageous. I seemed as one brought into the Estate of Innocence. All things were spotless and pure and glorious; yea, and infinitely mine, and joyful and precious. I knew not that there were any sins or complaints or laws. I dreamed not of poverties, contentions or vices. All tears and quarrels were hidden from mine eyes. Everything was at rest, free and immortal. I knew nothing of sickness or death or rents or exaction, either for tribute or bread.... All Time was Eternity, and a perpetual Sabbath. Is it not strange, that an infant should be heir of the whole world and see those mysteries which the books of the learned never unfold?”[3]
We blink, deliberately or not, unpleasant facts in our own lives, as in the social life of Greece or the Middle Ages. Some have no need to do so; robustly or sensitively made, their childish surroundings have been such as to meet their utmost needs or to draw out their finest powers or to leave them free. Ambition, introspection, remorse had not begun. The vastness and splendour and gloom of a world not understood, but seen in its effects and hardly at all in its processes, made a theatre for their happiness which—especially when seen through a mist of years—glorify it exceedingly, and it becomes like a ridge of the far-off downs transfigured in golden light, so that[127] we in the valley sigh at the thought that where we have often trod is heaven now. Such beauties of the earth, seen at a distance and inaccessibly serene, always recall the equally inaccessible happiness of childhood. Why have we such a melting mood for what we cannot reach? Why, as we are whirled past them in a train, does the sight of a man and child walking quietly beside a reedy pond, the child stooping for a flower and its gossip unheard—why should we tremble to reflect that we have never tasted just that cloistered balm?
Perhaps the happiest childhoods are those which pass completely away and leave whole tracts of years without a memory; those which are remembered are fullest of keen joy as of keen pain, and it is such that we desire for ourselves if we are capable of conceiving such fantastic desires. I confess to remembering little joy, but to much drowsy pleasure in the mere act of memory. I watch the past as I have seen workless, homeless men leaning over a bridge to watch the labours of a titanic crane and strange workers below in the ship running to and fro and feeding the crane. I recall green fields, one or two whom I loved in them, and though no trace of such happiness as I had remains, the incorruptible tranquillity of it all breeds fancies of great happiness. I recall many scenes: a church and churchyard and black pigs running down from them towards me in a rocky lane—ladslove and tall, crimson, bitter dahlias in a garden—the sweetness of large, moist yellow apples eaten out of doors—children: I do not recall happiness in them, yet the moment that I return to them in fancy I am happy. Something like this is true also of much later self-conscious years. I cannot—I am not tempted to—allow what then spoiled the[128] mingling of the elements of joy to reappear when I look back. The reason, perhaps, is that only an inmost true self that desires and is in harmony with joy can perform these long journeys, and when it has set out upon them it sheds those gross incrustations which were our curse before.
Many are the scenes thus to be recalled without spot or stain. It is a May morning, warm and slightly breezy after midnight rain. In the beech-woods the trees are unloading the dew, which drops from leaf to leaf and down on to the lemon-tinged leaves of dark dog’s-mercury. At the edge of the wood the privet branches are bent down by the weight of raindrops of the size of peas. The dewy white stitchwort stars and the feathered grasses are curved over on the banks. The sainfoin is hoary and sparkling as I move. Already the sun is hot and the sky blue, with faint white clouds in whirls. And in the orchard-trees and drenched luxuriant hedges the garden-warbler sings a subdued note of rushing, bubbling liquidity as of some tiny brook that runs in quick pulsations among the fleshy-leaved water-plants. The bird’s head is uplifted; its throat is throbbing; it moves restlessly from branch to branch, but always renews its song on the new perch; being leaf-like, it is not easily seen. And sometimes through this continuous jargon the small, wild song of the blackcap is heard, which is the utmost expression of moist warm dawns in May thickets of hawthorn-bloom and earliest roses. On such a dawn the very spirit bathes in the dew and nuzzles into the fragrance with delight; but it is no sooner left behind with May than it has developed within me into an hour and a scene of utmost grace and bliss, save that I am in it myself.
[129]
It is curious, too, how many different kinds of Eden or Golden Age Nature has in her gift, as if she silently recorded the backward dreams of each generation and reproduced them for us unexpectedly. It is, for instance, an early morning in July. The cows pour out from the milking-stalls and blot out the smell of dust with their breath in the white road between banks of hazel and thorn. The boy who is driving them to the morning’s pasture calls to them monotonously, persuasively, in turn, as each is tempted to crop the roadside sward: “Wo, Cherry! Now, Dolly! Wo, Fancy! Strawberry!... Blanche!... Blossom!... Cowslip!... Rosy! Smut!... Come along, Handsome!... Wo, Snowdrop!... Lily!... Darky!... Roany!... Come along, Annie!” Here the road is pillowed with white aspen-down, there more fragrant than pines with the brown sheddings of yew, and here thick with the dry scent of nettle and cow-parsnip, or glorious in perfect mingling of harebell and foxglove among the bracken and popping gorse on the roadside. The cows turn into the aftermath of the sainfoin, and the long valley echoes to their lowing. After them, up the road, comes a gypsy-cart, and the boy hangs on the gate to see the men and women walking, black-haired, upright, bright-eyed, and on the name-board of the cart the words: “Naomi Sherwood, Burley, Hampshire.” These things also propose to the roving, unhistoric mind an Eden, one still with us, one that is passing, not, let us hope, the very last.
Some of these scenes, whether often repeated or not, come to have a rich symbolical significance; they return persistently and, as it were, ceremoniously—on festal days—but meaning I know not what. For example, I[130] never see the flowers and scarlet-stained foliage of herb-robert growing out of old stone-heaps by the wayside without a feeling of satisfaction not explained by a long memory of the contrast between the plant and the raw flint; so also with the drenched lilac-bloom leaning out over high walls of unknown gardens; and inland cliffs, covered with beech, jutting out westward into a bottomless valley in the mist of winter twilights, in silence and frost. Something in me belongs to these things, but I hardly think that the mere naming of them will mean anything except to those—many, perhaps—who have experienced the same. A great writer so uses the words of every day that they become a code of his own which the world is bound to learn and in the end take unto itself. But words are no longer symbols, and to say “hill” or “beech” is not to call up images of a hill or a beech-tree, since we have so long been in the habit of using the words for beautiful and mighty and noble things very much as a book-keeper uses figures without seeing gold and power. I can, therefore, only try to suggest what I mean by the significance of the plant in the stone-heap, the wet lilac, the misty cliff, by comparing it with that of scenes in books where we recognize some power beyond the particular and personal. All of Don Quixote’s acts have this significance; so have the end of Mr. Conrad’s story of Youth and the opening of Mr. Hudson’s El Ombu—the old man sitting on a summer’s day under the solitary tree to tell the history “of a house that had been.” Malory’s Morte d’Arthur is full of scenes like this. For ten centuries, from the battle of Badon to the writing of Morte d’Arthur, these stories were alive on the lips of many kinds of men and women in many lands, from[131] Connemara to Calabria. Many of these men and women survive only in the turns which their passionate hearts gave to these ghostly, everlastingly wandering tales. Artists have worked upon them. Bards have sung them, and the sound of their harping is entangled in the words that have reached us to-day. This blending of many bloods is suggested by the Saracen in the Morte d’Arthur who was descended from Hector and Alexander and Joshua and Maccab?us; by Taliesin, whose “original country is the region of the summer stars,” who was with Noah and Alexander and at the birth of Christ. And thus has the tale become so full in the ear of humanity, so rich in scenes designed to serve only an immediate purpose, yet destined by this grace to move all kinds of men in manifold ways. Such is the chess-playing in The Dream of Rhonabwy; the madness of Tristram when he ran naked in the wood many days, but was lured by the music of a damsel playing on his own harp; the speech of Arthur at the scattering of his knights in the Sangraal quest; Launcelot’s fighting with the black knights against the white; Launcelot’s adventures ending at the castle of Carbonek, where he put on all his arms and armour and went—“and the moon shone clear”—between the lions at the gate and forced open the door, and saw the “Holy Vessel, covered with red samite, and many angels about it”; and Arthur and Guenevere watching the dead Elaine in the barge; and in the wars of Arthur and Launcelot, the scene opening with the words: “Then it befell upon a day in harvest-time, Sir Launcelot looked over the walls, and spake on high unto King Arthur and Sir Gawaine....”
No English writer has expressed as well as Traherne[132] the spiritual glory of childhood, in which Wordsworth saw intimations of immortality. He speaks of “that divine light wherewith I was born” and of his “pure and virgin apprehensions,” and recommends his friend to pray earnestly for these gifts: “They will make you angelical, and wholly celestial.” It was by the “divine knowledge” that he saw all things in the peace of Eden—
“The corn was orient and immortal wheat, which never should be reaped, nor was ever sown. I thought it had stood from everlasting to everlasting. The dust and stones of the street were as precious as gold; the gates were at first the end of the world. The green trees when I saw them first through one of the gates transported and ravished me; their sweetness and unusual beauty made my heart to leap and almost mad with ecstasy; they were such strange and wonderful things. The Men! O what venerable and reverend creatures did the aged seem! Immortal Cherubims! And young men glittering and sparkling angels, and maids strange seraphic pieces of life and beauty! Boys and girls tumbling in the street, and playing, were moving jewels. I knew not that they were born or should die; but all things abided eternally as they were in their proper places. Eternity was manifest in the light of the day, and something infinite behind everything appeared, which tallied with my expectation and moved my desire....”
Yet was this light eclipsed. He was “with much ado” perverted by the world, by the temptation of men and worldly things and by “opinion and custom,” not any “inward corruption or depravation of Nature.”
For he tells us how he once entered a noble dining-[133]room and was there alone “to see the gold and state and carved imagery,” but wearied of it because it was dead, and had no motion. A little afterwards he saw it “full of lords and ladies and music and dancing,” and now pleasure took the place of tediousness, and he perceived, long after, that “men and women are, when well understood, a principal part of our true felicity.” Once again, “in a lowering and sad evening, being alone in the field, when all things were dead quiet,” he had the same weariness, nay, even horror. “I was a weak and little child, and had forgotten there was a man alive in the earth.” Nevertheless, hope and expectation came to him and comforted him, and taught him “that he was concerned in all the world.” That he was “concerned in all the world” was the great source of comfort and joy which he found in life, and of that joy which his book pours out for us. Not only did he see that he was concerned in all the world, but that river and corn and herb and sand were so concerned. God, he says, “knoweth infinite excellencies” in each of these things; “He seeth how it relateth to angels and men.” In this he anticipated Blake’s Auguries of Innocence. He seems to see the patterns which all living things are for ever weaving. He would have men strive after this divine knowledge of things and of their place in the universe.
He came to believe that “all other creatures were such that God was Himself in their creation, that is, Almighty Power wholly exerted; and that every creature is indeed as ............