a quantity of wholly uninteresting things have happened. i have with infinite rackings of thought made ￡290 on the stock exchange, and never was money more hardly earned. i am also well on the way to lose the whole of it. if, as seems highly probable, i do, never will money be more hardly lost. i have returned from grindelwald to find a london of the most icy cold, followed by a london of the most sickening tepidity, swimming in mud, the colour of which and the texture of which is that of nightmares. a pallid daylight strikes through rods of rain, the streets smell of mackintosh, and an unfathomable depression prevails. the county council have seized this unrivalled opportunity for taking up the whole of the principal thoroughfares, and it is impossible to get anywhere without going in a totally different direction. i{26} played bridge last night, revoked and was not detected, which argues a mournful level of intelligence both in one’s self and one’s adversaries, and went to bed only to dream of a fifth suit, which, dimly veiled, swallowed aces of trumps, or any such cards, like oysters, a gulp and no more, and woke to find the same dark streaming and leaden heavens.
it is the weather that with me is chiefly responsible both for these despondencies and for sky-scraping spirits. and i know of nothing so hard to bear as weather-depressions. one cannot by employment of idleness get rid of them, so long as the conditions that gave the depressions birth still continue. and of all weather-depressions the one that occurs when spring struggles to be born from dying winter is the most despondent. one’s body, especially after a month in switzerland, has been adjusted to low temperatures, and the effect of the change is the same as that produced by a tepid bath in the morning instead of a cold one. briskness of body and spirit alike vanish, and to-day, though i am accustomed to these annual visitations, i went{27} so far as to take my temperature, there being, as i well knew, nothing whatever the matter with me. of course it was normal.
this transition-weather has now lasted a week, but there have been certain intervals and alleviations. one of these occurred last sunday. i went in the afternoon to the oratory at brompton, and heard that service of vespers and benediction which, whether mumbled unintelligibly by a shabby priest in an empty church, or conducted with that splendid sense of ‘form’ which characterizes the oratory, never fails to give me a feeling of ‘uplifting’ which i cannot hope to express. there in the morning has the symbol of that divine mystery been laid on the lord’s table, and there after the candles have been lit, and the worshipper cleansed by the incense, is again revealed the ‘salutaris hostia,’ the sign, outward and visible, of the love through which existence is.
then i crossed the park, and by degrees the unutterable languor of the early spring began to thaw its way back into me, when suddenly i saw a large tract of grass white with snowdrops that{28} had budded and blossomed in the last few days. pointed leaves with the white line one knows so well had first pricked the ground; then the weak, soft flower had followed, led upwards from the buried bulb by the instinct it must obey, for no purpose—who knows?—but to remind a stupid person or two like me that there were other things in the world besides him. and i swear to you that as i looked i blushed with shame. to-morrow i shall go and look at them again, for i am afraid the memory is no longer medicinal.
depend upon it, there is nothing so morbid as to encourage in one’s self ‘questionings.’ any average ordinary person who walks down a london street, and for five minutes devotes himself to the problem as to what is the meaning of all these swarming people, what do they make of their lives, what is the ultimate outcome—it is easy enough to find words, but quite unnecessary—will reduce himself to a state of maudlin incompetence in a week’s time. it is emphatically not one’s business to be cheaply vague in this manner, and the man who helps a stumbler—be he drunk or sober—across a street, or rings a bell for a{29} small child who cannot reach it, has done his duty and his part in the world’s work far better that day than any philosopher who thinks a great deal and does nothing. indeed, i doubt not that a man who makes a friend smile at some idiotic remark has better earned his daily bread than the man who has given rise to profound thought, if thought is only to end in thought. ‘the world is made by the poet for the dreamer’ was said by someone—i forget who. he might just as well have said, ‘the world is made by the butcher for the baker.’
it is a very false estimate we should get of the world if we only looked at other people from our own standpoint. it is useless, for instance, to imagine one’s self in the position of a newsboy from whom i usually buy an evening paper at the corner just outside. he is frightfully ragged. why his coat, for instance, holds together at all is beyond my comprehension, and his boots are in a similar state of disintegration. certainly, if it was my lot to stand at that corner earning a penny only out of every twelve papers i sold, and for the sake of earning my bread at all being com{30}pelled to stand there for hours in frost, rain or fog, i should quite assuredly be most unhappy. yet nothing is falser than to imagine that he is unhappy; he has, on the contrary, a ‘frolic welcome’ for everything that comes along, and evidently circumstances which would depress what we may call the comfortable classes have no effect whatever on his spirits. on the other hand, there are things which happen to you and me every day, which we bear without undue complaints, that would be almost insufferable to him. he would certainly revolt at a bath in the morning; and though he would very likely be pleased at the breakfast that followed it, i feel by no means certain that he would not sooner sit on a coal-sack and chaff the nearest policeman, as he does, with his mouth bulging with large crusts. again, i doubt whether ‘the bloke,’ which is the name by which he is known in the neighbourhood of his stand, could live through the sort of morning we live through. he would consider it so unbearably dull to have to sit in a room for hour after hour, while london and the humming streets roared outside, and read a book—or, worse, write{31} one. for supposing we endue him for a moment with that sort of veneer of the mind which we call culture, literary taste, artistic taste, or what not, a thing which he does not probably possess at present, even then, should we set him down at ‘romeo and juliet,’ let us say, what will be his verdict? why, that he can see the thing itself every evening, and, perhaps, has acted it, too, poor little devil! and why should he spend his time in reading a pale moonlight translation when the original jostles him? here at this point, of course, the literati will hold up hands of horror. do i mean to say, they will ask, that the immortal tragedy i have referred to is to be brought into comparison, even for a jest, with the idylls of the street corner, with the walking out of a man with a maid, a marriage in the registry office, or, perhaps, the omission of that ceremony? yes, if they will think, i mean all that. for why, if we consider the question more closely, does the tragedy of ‘romeo and juliet’ strike us, and rightly, as a masterpiece? and why does the sordid account of ‘murder and suicide’ in the daily press strike us as a page to be turned over with a{32} ‘poor thing!’ shudder, if we are people of discernment, but if we are only refined to be passed over in utter unconsciousness? it is because shakespeare showed us the terror and the tragedy of one, and we have not the genius to see the terror and the tragedy of the other. had not shakespeare been a man of human insight, he could never have written his plays; but if we could see, we should find in life what he found. that he gave it in the form of drama to the world is another matter. that was because nature—or i prefer to say god—gave a man of this humanity this power of speech as well as the sense of drama. hundreds, i soberly believe, felt as keenly as shakespeare felt, but are, so to speak, born dumb; hundreds could write as shakespeare wrote, could they but feel. it is this conjunction of the two, rare as the transit of venus, that makes the supreme artist.
to return to ‘the bloke.’ all morning we have given him a translation instead of the original, and the morning over we give him lunch. he will eat largely, because for all the years he has lived it has been his instinct to eat{33} all there was to eat, for fear that there would soon be nothing to eat when he wanted to eat. he will drink in immoderation for the same reason, and grow somnolent. but he is plucked from his slumber to call on someone who bores him, to be polite when he does not want to be polite, and he will return to ‘dress’ in a collar that hurts him, and to eat a dinner which he does not want. that evening he will be sick, and three days later have a bilious attack.
but turn from this gloomy picture to the reality. ‘the bloke,’ as i saw him this evening, had a huge crust stuffed into one cheek; in the other corner of his mouth was a cigarette. there was news about a test match in australia, and papers were going like hot cakes. his pockets were not to be trusted, and that mouth of his had eight coppers on one side, and the crust, not yet masticated, on the other. but did ‘the bloke’ think about verdigris-poisoning and other inanities? not a bit. if there was a moment to spare, wet pennies were ejected and stowed in a pocket somewhere at the back of his trousers. if there was no moment to spare, he merely cursed{34} and prayed for a sixpence which got rid of five wet pennies. all the time he was shouting ‘re-markable collapse!’ chaffing the policeman at the corner, shouting hoarse profanities to the drivers of passing buses, and ogling miles of girls of his acquaintance.
now consider, oh my cultured friend, where would you and i have been in such a crisis, which, you must remember, was a feast and a high-day to ‘the bloke.’ we should have retired behind a hoarding to eat our crust, and sat still—god help us—for several minutes in order to digest it. then we should have lost the cream of the sale. then, coyly re-entering oxford street, we should have murmured quaveringly, ‘a bad score on the colonial side’; we should have put our pennies in the untrustworthy pocket, whence they would have slithered coldly down our legs on to the pavement. grasping the inadequacy of this, we should have held them in our other hand, and impeded the swift passage of the papers. we should have cast apprehensive glances at the policeman for fear he should tell us to move on—he tells ‘the bloke’ to move on, and ‘the{35} bloke’ says ‘garn!’—we should have frowned at bus-drivers who nearly ran over us, and made a feint of taking their numbers. we should have made a quantity of depressing reflections about the young women in london, so bold and bad-mannered, and as an upshot we should have sold, with infinite depression, one-fifth of what ‘the bloke’ sells with a gusto indescribable. and what is, perhaps, worst of all, we should have prayed that evening, if we were not too sleepy, for all the starving, homeless creatures of the street. ‘the bloke’ does not pray—but if he did, he would say, with browning, ‘god’s in his heaven; all’s right with the world.’
exit ‘the bloke.’
p.s. no, not exit just then. yesterday only, i was coming round the corner from davies street, and caught sight of ‘the bloke’ dancing excitedly in mid-street, with his sheaf of papers, shouting the verdict of the tonbridge murder. next moment he had been knocked down by an omnibus and the wheel had gone over him. with many others i ran out into the roadway, and it so happened i was there first.{36}
i picked ‘the bloke’ up and carried him to the pavement. his head bent inwards from my elbow to my chest, and two wet pennies fell into the crook of my arm from his mouth. his sheaf of papers had fallen from him and still lay in the road. before we reached the pavement he looked up and saw me.
‘i’m damned dirty, sir,’ he said; ‘take care of your noo coat. that bloody bus—— gawd—i’ll talk to jim—running over me like that.’
there was an ambulance near at hand, and i delivered up ‘the bloke.’ someone had picked up his papers from the roadway and put them by the side of the thin little body, and the pennies which he had dropped out of his mouth i put there too.
next day i went to the hospital where he had been taken. but ‘the bloke’ will not stand at his corner any more.
sad? heaven help us all if we are going to be sad, because we are (quite assuredly) going to die; the sooner we die and get it over, the better. anticipating sadness is an absolute drug in the{37} market, and is it not better to be glad because at the present moment we happen to be alive, and not sad because at some future moment we are going to die? how long would the world go on if we all sat and sighed because we were going to die?
yes, decidedly spring has come, and it amazes me to look back on what i wrote only a week ago, and find myself so blinded by that moment of languor which announced it, as not to have foreseen what should so shortly follow. yet if that obsession of languor had not been so complete, i suppose this effervescence of spring would not have run riot in me as it did, and it is with infinite misgivings that i attempt to put into words any of that bubbling thrill, that ecstasy in the sensation of mere living, which is felt, i believe, in every growing thing, down to the humblest blade of grass which is trodden underfoot, even as the varnish of springtime is on it—at that divinest of all moments in the year, when in man and brute and as yet leafless tree the sap once more stirs.
this year it came upon me in spate; that great{38} flood of renewed vitality which follows round the earth from continent to continent as the spring returns suddenly lifted me off my feet, dictating what i did as imperatively as an electric current dictates the involuntary twitching of the muscles it passes through. and on this wise.
i was out of town for two days last week, staying in sussex at a house on the high downland near ashdown forest. as i drove from the station, i was aware that some huge and subtle change was in the air, but put it down only to the contrast of country breezes with the density of london. the briskness of winter was altogether gone, but in its place was the smell of earth and growing things, very fragrant and curiously strong; for rain, which brings out all scent into the air, be it good or bad, had fallen heavily that afternoon, drawing out, as i have said, the smell of growth, and leaving behind it, just as a water-cart does in streets, the smell of dust laid, or, rather, the smell which air has when there is no longer any dust in it. also the vividness of colour surprised me; and in the yet leafless trees there was a certain vigorous look,{39} which i had missed all winter, a crispness of outline, a look of tension as in an instantaneous photograph of a man about to leap. a thrush bubbled suddenly in a bush by the roadside, and, fool that i was, i did not know what was happening. i thought it was only a thrush singing. but had i known, it was spring.
that night after dinner, instead of sitting down to bridge or some gray pursuit glorified by the title of game, eight sober and mature people did the silliest things. we played blindman’s-buff; we cock-fought on the hearth-rug; we fell heavily to the ground in attempting to take out with our teeth pins placed in inaccessible positions on the legs of chairs: nobody cared what anybody else was doing; everyone talked simultaneously and laughed causelessly. eventually we dispersed to our rooms flushed and hot.
my window had been shut, and a blind drawn down: here were the first things to be remedied; up went the screaming blind, up went the window, and the huge, exultant night poured in. that was better, but still bad, and i tore off my clothes, leaving them on the floor, and as my mother{40} bore me, and as i shall go back to the great mother of all, leaned out into the night, full of the excitement which at last i understood. it was night—night, the time when even a stockbroker (who had made ￡290 on the stock exchange) reverts in some degree to the beast from which he has been evolved, when, unless one is fuddled with wine, or stupefied with food, or addled and rotten with sensual thought, one occasionally wins back to the old primeval prowling, excited joy of being alive, to the bliss which childhood knows in nightfall, robbed of its terrors. there it was, waiting for me, and i, as far as might be, ready for it, free from all desire, carnal, mental, or spiritual, but caught and burning in the flame of mere life. huge and soft the night beckoned; humped gray shapes of bushes were blots on the lawn outside, above them rose the still gaunt shapes of trees, but hissing like a gas-jet with the pressure from within. rain-clouds obscured the sky, the cold infinite stars were shut out, and only by the fact that it was not very dark did i know that the moon was somewhere risen, though invisible. that was as i{41} would have it: for the time i was just a live thing, conscious of life. i wanted no distant stars to remind me how small i was, or how immense was heaven—for the time i desired only the kind warm earth—no moon to evoke, as she always does, the need of companionship. i was about on this earth, which, like i, was bursting with the promise of spring. mating-time was not yet; not yet was the time of fresh leaves, or any outward sign of vitality. the vitality was within, everything had drawn a long breath, and the long breath hung suspended for the moment. soon in a shower of starlike blossoms, in a mist of green hung round the trees, in the complete song of birds, in achievement or effort on my part, the tension would break. it was the physical moment when completion is assured, and the pause comes, delicious because all, all has been leading up to this, and one is content, if it is possible to be content, because fruition is sure. exquisite pangs have gone before, the pangs of anticipation. exquisite pangs of completion will follow, but nothing can ever approach the completeness of the assured moment.{42}
night and its veiled darkness, a soft rain falling and hissing among the shrubs, the sleeping house—unless, indeed, there might be other watchers like myself unclothed beside an open window—utter loneliness, and the thrill of life. but it was not enough to stand there; i had to mix with the night, i had to do my utmost to take it, the dripping shrubs, the falling rain, the whole growing, quickening earth, nearer to me. it was not enough to look at it. so for convention’s sake i pulled on trousers again, buttoned a coat over me, and, hatless and barefooted, opened my window further—a ground-floor window—and stepped out into the night. what i wanted i did not know: it was certain, at any rate, i did not want anybody else to be there; yes, i know, i wanted only to be part of the growing sap-stirred world. no thought of either spiritual or carnal aspiration did i feel; no gratitude to god, who made this ecstatic machine called me, entered into my mind, no thought of love or lust or desire. the gray curtain of cloud was the blanket under which, like a child, i buried my head; i was too far gone, you will understand, to ‘talk french’;{43} simply, i was possessed by the joy of life, that life which moved my muscles, making them tense and slack in turn as i walked, that held a long breath in my lungs and blew it out again, that made the soft rain drip from the clouds, that made the earth drink it in instinctively, that made the shrubs whisper to its falling and give out the odours of dampness and growth. step by step, as i went over the lawn, with my feet already dripping and my hair growing matted with the benediction of the falling rain, this impulse grew and grew. before i knew it, from walking i had passed to running, before i knew it my coat was lying somewhere on the grass, and the rain fell thick and cool on my back and shoulders. dim shapes of shrubs fled by me; then in front there sprang out of the dark the lines of a wooden fence bounding the lawn. this was taken in the stride almost, and the longer, coarser fibre of the meadow grass wrapped itself round my feet. then a sandpan—a bunker guarding the eighteenth green of the golf-links—showed yellow in front, and next moment a flag waved to my right. thereafter coarser grass again, and a{44} hundred yards beyond, the streamlet, where i have delved patiently with a niblick. beyond, another fence, and in the field—out of bounds—large dark shapes of cows lying down. one underneath the shadow of a tree i stumbled against, leaving a snort and a stir behind, and i remember laughing at that. then in due time a certain failure of wind, and a halt underneath a thin, young beech-tree with smooth, rounded stem. next moment the trunk was between my knees, and between my arms strongly wound round it, my cheek against the bark, and, panting, i clung to it. it, too, was alive, and strong and hard, and with that, turning my head, i remember biting the bark, till strips of it came off and my lips bled. then a bed of old brown bracken, and with my fingers i dug in the earth till i felt the buds of springing stems an inch below the ground.
there i lay, a minute it may have been, or ten years, and the climax, i must suppose, was reached. there was no more possible to me, the riddle was unsolved, and for the moment i knew it to be insoluble: not because it was a silly riddle, but{45} because it was no riddle at all, but the mystery of all mysteries—life. as far as i personally could, i had done my best to answer it, not by thought, which is futile, but by being of the earth, by making myself one with growing things at the moment of spring-time, and this not, i do assure you, consciously, but because i had to. the current that ran through everything else ran through me also. i was a savage, an animal, what you will.
the greatest moment was over; again i was conscious of one slack arm hanging by my side, and one braced at the elbow to support my weight as i sat up. i knew that my feet were wet, that my hair had to be brushed from my eyes, that rain-drops fell from my eyebrows on to my face, that a torn, distracted, mud-covered blackness represented dress-trousers, that my coat was lying somewhere on the lawn, and that my bedroom window was an invitation to robbers. so i rose and walked back, slowly, and designedly slowly, in order to enjoy what i had not known. i had enjoyed before, but had simply taken. the cool rain was exquisite to the skin, so, too, the cool grass to the{46} feet; the night above and around was huge and solemn and ennobling. thus the moral consciousness, i must suppose, awoke. i was filled with edifying thoughts. they would be dull if recorded; they were dull even then, for the memory of the savage moments was still hot as a dream.
well, what then? there is no ‘what then.’ that wild running through the dark is flesh and blood of me. perhaps you have no taste for cannibalism. that is a very comfortable defect.
the next twenty-four hours were, it is true, full of spring, but to me, licking the chops of my climax, they were jejune. my coat i picked up on the lawn; i entered through my window—no robber could have come in that sacred hour—gazed on the wreck of dress-trousers, and went to bed, and to sleep instantly and dreamlessly, awaking to a great bold sunlight that streamed in through the windows when my valet drew up the blinds. with him i held a shamefaced colloquy, as he gathered my dress-clothes.
‘i’m afraid they’re rather muddy,’ said i, stifling my face beneath the sheet.
‘yessir.{47}’
‘do they happen to be torn?’
a short pause.
‘yessir—torn in five places.’
‘well, see what can be done. have i any more?’
‘no, sir. cold or hot bath, sir?’
bath! that was a sitting in a tin pan and lifting teaspoonfuls of water on to one’s spine; acrobatic performances to get wet, towel, huddling on of clothes.
‘oh, cold! bring it in half an hour.’
for half an hour i half dozed, half thought of the performance of the night. i carefully considered the question as to whether i had gone mad, and decided—rightly, i believe—that i had not, though other people would say so.
then after breakfast we went to play golf. yes, i was right; the anticipation, the unfulfilled certainty was over; already small buds were red on the limes, and yellow on the elm. spring had come, and we all talked about its delights. but none knew of mine.
eventually the eighteenth hole was reached, after a game that i should normally consider exciting,{48} since my adversary and i were all square at the seventeenth. but this morning it struck me as colourless. here, however, his second shot—full with the cleek—was short, and he went into the sandpan guarding the green, across which i had jumped in my outward journey, and walked through on my return. i stopped on the edge of the bunker, for i had warned him he could not be up, having myself played a full shot landing just over it. upon which this accursed man took his niblick, and amid a shower of sand lay nearly dead.
‘curious,’ says he.
meantime i had been examining the sand, and saw there the trace of a bare foot.
‘there’s something much more curious than any shot of yours close by you,’ said i. ‘look; do you see the trace of a naked foot close by you on the sand?’
he looked.
‘by god,’ he said, ‘let me putt first.’
he missed it. so i had two for the hole and won.
