Part 3 (2/2)

Emerson somewhere says, writing about the most difficult of Plato's dialogues, that one must often wait long for the hour when one is strong enough to grapple with and master it, but sooner or later the fitting morning will come. It is the morning which gives us faith in the most arduous achievements, and invigorates us to undertake them.

In the morning all things are possible because the heavens and the earth are so visibly united in the fellows.h.i.+p of common life; the one pouring down a measureless and penetrating tide of vitality, the other eagerly, wors.h.i.+pfully receptive. Nature has no more inspiring truth for us than this constant and complete enfolding of our life by a higher and vaster life, this unbroken play of a diviner purpose and force through us. Nothing is lost, nothing really dies; all things are conserved by an energy which transforms, reorganises, and perpetuates in new and finer forms all visible things. The silence of winter counterfeits the repose of death, but it is not even a pause of life; invisibly to us the great movement goes on in the earth under our feet.

While we watch by our household fires, the unseen architects are planning the summer, and the sublime march of the stars is noiselessly bringing back the bloom and the perfume that seem to have vanished forever. Every morning restores something we thought lost, recalls some charm that seemed to have escaped.

In all n.o.ble natures there is an ineradicable idealism which constantly interprets life in its higher aspects. In the dust of the road the mountains sometimes disappear from our vision, but we know that they still loom in undiminished majesty against the horizon; the G.o.ds sometimes hide themselves, but there is something within which affirms that we shall again look on their serene faces, calm amid our turbulence and unchanging amid our vicissitudes. It is this heavenly inheritance of insight and faith which makes Nature so divinely significant to us, and matches all its forms and phenomena with spiritual realities not to be taken from us by time or change or by that mysterious angel of the last great transformation which we call death. The morning is always breaking over the low horizon lines of some sea or continent; voices of birds are always ”carolling against the gates of day;” and so, through unbroken light and song, our life is solemnly and sublimely moved onward to the dawn in which all the faint stars of our hope shall melt into the eternal day.

Chapter XVII

A Summer Noon

The stir of the morning has given place to a silence broken only by the shrill whir of the locust. The distant sh.o.r.e lines that ran clear and white against the low background of green have become dim and indistinct; all things are touched by a soft haze which changes the sentiment of the landscape from movement to repose, from swift and mult.i.tudinous activity to the hush of sleep. The intense blue of the morning sky is dimmed and the great ma.s.ses of trees are motionless.

The distant harvest fields where the rhythmic lines of the mowers have moved alert and harmonious through the morning hours are deserted. On earth silence and rest, and in the great arch of the sky a sea of light so full and splendid that it seems almost to dim the fiery effluence of the sun itself. In such an hour one stretches himself under the trees, and in a moment the spell is on him, and he cares neither to think nor act; he rejoices to lose himself in the universal repose with which Nature refreshes herself. The heat of the day is at its height, but for an hour the burden slips from the shoulders of care, and the rest comes in which the gains of work are garnered.

The whir of the locust high overhead, by some earlier a.s.sociation, always recalls that matchless singer, some of whose notes Nature has never regained in all these later years. The whir of the cicada and the white light on the remote country road are real to us today, though one went silent and the other faded out of Sicilian skies two thousand years and more ago, because both are preserved in the verse of Theocritus. The poet was something more than a mere observer of Nature, and the beautiful repose of his art more than the native grace and ease of one to whom life meant nothing more strenuous than a dream of a blue sea and fair sky. He had known the din of the crowded street as well as the silence of the country road, the forms and shows of a royal court as well as the simplicity and sincerity of tangled vines and gnarled olives on the hillside. He had seen, with those eyes which overlooked nothing, the pomps and vanities of power, the fret and fever of ambition, the impotence and barrenness of much of that activity in which mult.i.tudes of men spend their lives under the delusion that mere stir and bustle mean progress and achievement. Out of Syracuse, with its petty court about a petty tyrant, Theocritus had come back to the sea and the sky and the hardy pastoral life with a joy which touches some of his lines with penetrating tenderness. Better a thousand times for him and for us the long, tranquil days under the pine and the olive than a great position under Hiero's hand and the weary intrigue and activity which made the melancholy semblance of a successful life for men less wise and genuine. The lines which the hand of Theocritus has left on the past are few and marvellously delicate, but they seem to gain distinctness from the remorseless years that have almost obliterated the features of the age in which he lived. It is better to see clearly one or two things in life than to move confused and blinded in the dust of an impotent activity; it is better to hear one or two notes sung in the overshadowing trees than to spend one's years amid a murmur in which nothing is distinctly audible. Theocritus, shunning courts and cities, sought to a.s.suage the pain of life at the heart of Nature, and did not seek in vain. He gave himself calmly and sincerely to the sweet and natural life which surrounded him, and in his tranquil self-surrender he gained, unsuspecting, the immortality denied his eager and restless cotemporaries [Transcriber's note: contemporaries?].

Life is so vast, so unspeakably rich, that to have reported accurately one swift glimpse, or to have preserved the melody of one rarely heard note, is to have mastered a part of the secret of the Immortals.

Struggle and anguish have their place in every genuine life, but they are the stages through which it advances to a strength which is full of repose. The bursting of the calyx announces the flower; but the beauty of the perfect blossoming obliterated the very memory of its earlier growth. The climb upward is often a long anguish, but the dust and weariness are forgotten when once the eye rests on the vast outlook.

”On every height there lies repose” is the sublime declaration of one who had looked into most things deeper than his fellows, and had learned much of the profounder processes of life. Emerson long ago noted that even in action the forms of the Greek heroes are always in repose; the crudity of pa.s.sion, the distorting agony of half-mastered purpose, are lost in a self-forgetfulness which borrows from Olympus something of the repose of the G.o.ds. The sublime calm which imparts to great works of art a hint of eternity is born of complete mastery of life; all the stages of evolution have been accomplished, the whole movement of growth has been fulfilled, before the hand of art sets the seal of perfection on the thing that is done. Shadow and light, heat and cold, tempest and quiet days, have all wrought together before the blooming of the flower which in its perfect grace and beauty gives no hint of its troubled growth. As the consummation of all toil and struggle and anguish, there comes at last that deep repose, born not of idleness and indifference, but of the harmony of all the elements in their last and finest form.

In the unbroken silence of the noon-tide such thoughts come unbidden and almost unnoticed to one who surrenders himself to the hour and the scene. Nature has her tempests, but her harvests are gathered amid the calm of days that often seem filled with the peace of heaven, and the mighty and irresistible movement of her life goes on in unbroken silence. The deepest thoughts are always tranquillising, the greatest minds are always full of calm, the richest lives have always at heart an unshaken repose.

Chapter XVIII

Eventide

When the shadows lengthen and the landscape becomes indistinct, the common life of men seems to touch the life of Nature most closely and sympathetically. The work of the day is accomplished; the sense of things to be done loses its painful tension; the mind, freed from the cares which engrossed it, opens unconsciously to the sights and sounds of the quiet hour. The fields are given over to silence and the gathering darkness; the roads cease to be thoroughfares of toil; and over all things the peace of night settles like an unspoken benediction. To the most preoccupied there comes a consciousness that the world has changed, and that, while the old framework remains intact, a strange and transforming beauty has touched and spiritualised it. At eventide one feels the soul of Nature as at no other hour. Her labours have ceased, her birds are silent; she, too, rests, and in ceasing to do for us she gives us herself. One by one the silvery points of light break out of the darkness overhead, and the faithful stars look down on the little earth they have watched over these countless years. The very names they bear recall the vanished races who waited for their appearing and counted them friends. Now that the lamps are lighted and the work of the day is done, is it strange that the venerable mother, whose lullabies have soothed so many generations into sleep, should herself appeal to us in some intimate and personal way?

With the fading out of sh.o.r.e and sea and forest line something deeper and more spiritual rises in the soul as the mists rise on the lowlands and over the surface of the waters. We surrender ourselves to it silently, reverently, and a change no less subtle and penetrating is wrought in us. Our personal ambitions, the sharply defined aims of our working hours, the very limitations of our individuality, are gone; we lose ourselves in the larger life of which we are part. After the fret of the day we surrender ourselves to universal life as the bather, worn and spent, gives himself to the sea. There is no loss of personal force, but for an hour the individual activity is blended with the universal movement and the peace and quiet of infinity calm and restore the soul. Meditation comes with eventide as naturally as action with the morning; our soul opens to the soul of Nature, and we discover anew that we are one. In the n.o.blest pa.s.sage in Latin poetry Lucretius invokes the universal spirit of Nature, and identifies it with the creative force which impels the stars and summons the flowers to strew themselves in the path of the sun. There is nothing so refres.h.i.+ng, so reinvigorating, as fresh contact with the fountain whence all visible life flows, as a renewed sense of oneness with the mighty appearance of things in which we live. Now that all outlines are softened, all distinctive features are lost. Nature loses its materialism, and becomes to our thought the vast, silent, unbroken flow of force which the later science has subst.i.tuted for an earlier and cruder conception.

And this invisible stream leads us back, as our thoughts unconsciously follow it, to One whose thought it is and whose mind shares with our mind something of the unsearchable mystery of its purpose and nature.

Some one has said that a man is great rather by reason of his unconscious thought than by reason of his deliberate and self-directed thinking. Released from meditation on definite and special themes, the thought of a great man instinctively returns to the mystery of life.

No poet creates a Hamlet unless he has brooded long and almost unconsciously on the deeper things that make up the inner life; such a figure, forever externalising the profounder and more obscure phases of being, is born of secret and habitual contact with the deepest experiences and the most fundamental problems. The mind of a Shakespeare must often, forsaking the busy world of actuality, meditate in the twilight which seems to release the soul of things seen, and, veiling the actual, reveal the realities of existence.

Revery becomes of the highest importance when it subst.i.tutes for definite thinking that deep and silent meditation in which alone the soul comes to know itself and pierces the wonderful movement of things about it to its source and principle. One of Amiel's magical phrases is that in which he describes revery as the Sunday of the soul. Toil over, care banished, the world forgotten, one communes with that which is eternal. In the long course of centuries the forests are as short-lived as the flowers; all visible forms are but momentary expressions of the creative force. In the work of the greatest mind all spoken and written thoughts are but partial and pa.s.sing utterances of a life of whose volume and movement they afford only half-comprehended hints. After a Shakespeare has written thirty immortal plays he must still feel that what was deepest in him is unuttered. There is that below all expression of life which remains forever unspoken and unspeakable; it is ours, but we cannot share it with others; we drop our plummets into its depths in vain. It is deeper than our thought, and it is only at rare moments, when we surrender ourselves to ourselves, that the sense of what it contains and means fills us with a sudden and overpowering consciousness of immortality. Out of this deeper life all great thoughts rise into consciousness, losing much by imprisonment in any form of speech, but still bringing with them indubitable evidence of their more than royal birth. From time to time, like the elder race of prophets, they enter into our speech and renew the fading sense of the divinity of life, and so, through individual souls, the deeper truths are retold from generation to generation.

As one meditates in this evening hour, the darkness has gathered over the world and folded it out of sight. The few faint stars have become a s.h.i.+ning host, and the immeasurable heavens have subst.i.tuted for the near and familiar beauty of the earth their own sublime and awful commingling of unsearchable darkness and unquenchable light. So in every human life the near and the familiar is overarched by infinity and eternity.

Chapter XIX

The Turn of the Tide

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