Let me recall by way of envoi that fine story in Montaigne. When the town of Nola was destroyed by the barbarians, Paulinus, the bishop, was stripped of all he possessed and taken prisoner. And as he was led away he prayed, "O Lord, make me to bear this loss, for Thou knowest that they have taken nothing that is mine: the riches that made me rich and the treasures that made me worthy are still mine in their fullness."
ON WORD-MAGIC
I see that a discussion has arisen in the Spectator on the "Canadian Boat Song." It appeared in Blackwood's nearly a century ago, and ever since its authorship has been the subject of recurrent controversy. The author may have been "Christopher North," or his brother, Tom Wilson, or Gait, or the Ettrick Shepherd, or the Earl of Eglinton, or none of these. We shall never know. It is one of those pleasant mysteries of the past, like the authorship of the Junius Letters (if, indeed, that can be called a mystery), which can never be exhausted because they can never be solved. I am not going to offer an opinion; for I have none, and I refer to the subject only to illustrate the magic of a word. The poem lives by virtue of the famous stanza:
From the lone shieling of the misty island
Mountains divide us, and the waste of seas —
Yet still the blood is strong, the heart is Highland.
And we in dreams behold the Hebrides.
It would be an insensible heart that did not feel the surge of this strong music. The yearning of the exile for the motherland has never been uttered with more poignant beauty, though Stevenson came near the same note of tender anguish in the lines written in far Samoa and ending:
Be it granted me to behold you again, in dying.
Hills of home, and to hear again the call.
Hear about the graves of the martyrs the peewees crying —
And hear no more at all.
But for energy and masculine emotion the unknown author takes the palm. The verse is like a great wave of the sea, rolling in to the mother shore, gathering impetus and grandeur as it goes, culminating in the note of vision and scattering itself triumphantly in the splendour of that word "Hebrides."
It is a beautiful illustration of the magic of a word used in its perfect setting. It gathers up the emotion of the theme into one chord of fulfilment and flings open the casement of the mind to far horizons. It is not the only instance in which the name has been used with extraordinary effect. Wordsworth's "Solitary Reaper" has many beautiful lines, but the peculiar glory of the poem dwells in the couplet in which, searching for parallels for the song of the Highland girl that fills "the vale profound," he hears in imagination the cuckoo's call
Breaking the silence of the seas
Among the farthest Hebrides.
Wordsworth, like Homer and Milton, and all who touch the sublime in poetry, had the power of transmuting a proper name to a strange and significant beauty. The most memorable example, perhaps, is in the closing lines of the poem to Dorothy Wordsworth:
But on old age serene and bright,
And lovely as a Lapland night,
Shall lead thee to thy grave.
"Lapland" is an intrinsically beautiful word, but it is its setting in this case that makes it shine, pure and austere, like a star in the heavens of poetry. And the miraculous word need not be intrinsically beautiful. Darien is not, yet it is that word in which perhaps the greatest of all sonnets finds its breathless, astonished close:
Silent – upon a peak – in Dar – ien.
And the truth is that the magic of words is not in the words themselves, but in the distinction, delicacy, surprise of their use. Take the great line which Shakespeare puts into the mouth of Antony —
I am dying, Egypt, dying.
It is the only occasion in the play on which he makes Antony speak of Cleopatra by her territorial name, and there is no warrant for the usage in Plutarch. It is a stroke of sheer word-magic. It summons up with a sudden magnificence all the mystery and splendour incarnated in the woman for whom he has gambled away the world and all the earthly glories that are fading into the darkness of death. The whole tragedy seems to flame to its culmination in this word that suddenly lifts the action from the human plane to the scale of cosmic drama.
Words of course have an individuality, a perfume of their own, but just as the flame in the heart of the diamond has to be revealed by the craftsman, so the true magic of a beautiful word only discloses itself at the touch of the master. "Quiet" is an ordinary enough word, and few are more frequently on our lips. Yet what wonderful effects Wordsworth, Coleridge and Keats extract from it!
It is a beauteous evening, calm and free;
The holy time is quiet as a nun,
Breathless with adoration.
The whole passage is a symphony of the sunset, but it is that ordinary word "quiet" which breathes like a benediction through the cadence, filling the mind with the sense of an illimitable peace. And so with Coleridge's "Singeth a quiet tune," or Keats's
Full of sweet dreams and health and quiet breathing.
Or when, "half in love with easeful Death," he
Called him soft names in many a musèd rhyme
To take into the air my quiet breath.
And again:
Far from the fiery noon and eve's one star
Sat grey-hair'd Saturn, quiet as stone.
There have been greater poets than Keats, but none who has had a surer instinct for the precious word than he had. Byron had none of this magician touch, Shelley got his effects by the glow and fervour of his spirit; Swinburne by the sheer torrent of his song, and Browning by the energy of his thought. Tennyson was much more of the artificer in words than these, but he had not the secret of the word-magic of Shakespeare, Wordsworth, or Keats. Compare the use of adjectives in two things like Shelley's "Ode to the Skylark," and Keats's "Ode to the Nightingale," and the difference is startling. Both are incomparable, but in the one case it is the hurry of the song, the flood of rapture that delights us: in the other each separate line holds us with its jewelled word. "Embalmèd darkness," "Verdurous glooms," "Now more than ever seems it rich to die." "Cooled a long age in the deep-delvèd earth." "Darkling I listen." "She stood in tears amid the alien corn." "Oh, for a beaker full of the warm south." "With beaded bubbles winking at the brim." "No hungry generations tread thee down." And so on. Such a casket of jewels can be found in no other poet that has used our tongue. If Keats's vocabulary had a defect it was a certain over-ripeness, a languorous beauty that, like the touch of his hand, spoke of death. It lacked the fresh, happy, sunlit spirit of Shakespeare's sovran word.
Word-magic belongs to poetry. In prose it is an intrusion. That was the view of Coleridge. It was because, among its other qualities, Southey's writing was so free from the shock of the dazzling word that Coleridge held it to be the perfect example of pure prose. The modulations are so just, the note so unaffected, the current so clear and untroubled that you read on without pausing once to think "What a brilliant writer this fellow is." And that is the true triumph of the art. It is an art which addresses itself to the mind, and not the emotions, and word-magic does not belong to its essential armoury.
ODIN GROWN OLD
I had a strange dream last night. Like most dreams, it was a sort of wild comment on the thought that had possessed me in my waking hours. We had been talking of the darkness of these times, how we walked from day to day into a future that stalked before us like a wall of impenetrable night that we could almost touch and yet never could overtake, how all the prophets (including ourselves) had been found out, and how all the prophecies of the wise proved to be as worthless as the guesses of the foolish. Ah, if we could only get behind this grim mask of the present and see the future stretching before us ten years, twenty years, fifty years hence, what would we give? What a strange, ironic light would be shed upon this writhing, surging, blood-stained Europe. With what a shock we should discover the meaning of the terror. But the Moving Finger writes on with inscrutable secrecy. We cannot wipe out a syllable that it has written; we cannot tell a syllable that it will write…
You deserved bad dreams, you will say, if you talked like this…
When I awoke (in my sleep) I seemed like some strange reminiscence of myself, like an echo that had gone on reverberating down countless centuries. It was as if I had lived from the beginning of Time, and now stood far beyond the confines of Time. I was alone in the world. I forded rivers and climbed mountains and traversed endless plains; I came upon the ruins of vast cities, great embankments that seemed once to have been railways, fragments of arches that had once sustained great bridges, dockyards where the skeletons of mighty ships lay rotting in garments of seaweed and slime. I seemed, with the magic of dreams, to see the whole earth stretched out before me like a map. I traced the course of the coast lines, saw how strangely altered they were, and with invisible power passed breathlessly from continent to continent, from desolation to desolation. Again and again I cried out in the agony of an unspeakable loneliness, but my cry only startled a solitude that was infinite. Time seemed to have no meaning in this appalling vacancy. I did not live hours or days, but centuries, æons, eternities. Only on the mountains and in the deserts did I see anything that recalled the world I had known in the immeasurable backward of time. Standing on the snowy ridge of the Finsteraarjoch I saw the pink of the dawn still flushing the summits of the Southern Alps, and in the desert I came upon the Pyramids and the Sphinx.
And it was by the Sphinx that I saw The Man. He seemed stricken with unthinkable years. His gums were toothless, his eyes bleared, his figure shrunken to a pitiful tenuity. He sat at the foot of the Sphinx, fondling a sword, and as he fondled it he mumbled to himself in an infantile treble. As I approached he peered at me through his dim eyes, and to my question as to who he was he replied in a thin, queasy voice:
"I am Odin – hee! hee! I possess the earth, the whole earth … I and my sword … we own it all … we and the Sphinx … we own it all… All … hee! hee!.." And he turned and began to fondle his sword again.
"But where are the others? What happened to them?"
"Gone … hee! hee! … All gone… It took thousands of years to do it, but they've all gone. It never would have been done if man hadn't become civilised. For centuries and centuries men tried to kill themselves off with bows and arrows, and spears and catapults, but they couldn't do it. Then they invented gunpowder, but that was no better. The victory really began when man became civilised and discovered modern science. He learned to fly in the air and sail under the water, and move mountains and make lightnings, and turn the iron of the hills into great ships and the coal beneath the earth into incredible forms of heat and power. And all the time he went on saying what a good world he was making … hee! hee! Such a wonderful Machine… Such a peaceful Machine … hee! hee! … Age of Reason, he said… Age of universal peace and brotherhood setting in, he said… hee! hee! … We have been seeking God for thousands of years, he said, and now we have found Him. We have made Him ourselves – out of our own heads. We got tired of looking for Him in the soul. Now we have found Him in the laboratory. We have made Him out of all the energies of the earth. Great is our God of the Machine. Honour, blessing, glory, power – power of things. Power! Power! Power!"
His voice rose to a senile shriek.
"And all the time … hee, hee! … all the time he was making the Machine for me – me, Odin, me and my servants, the despots, the kings, the tyrants, the dictators, the enemies of men. I laughed … hee, hee! … I laughed as I saw his Machine growing vaster and vaster for the day of his doom, growing beyond his own comprehension, making him more and more the slave of itself, the fly on its gigantic wheel. What a willing servant is this Power we have made, he said. What a friend of Man. How wonderful we are to have created this Machine of Benevolence…
"And it was mine … hee, hee! … Mine. And when it was completed I handed it over to my servants. And the Machine of Benevolence became the Monster of Destruction. First one tyrant seized it and fell; then another and he fell. This white race got the Machine for a season, then another white race got it; then the yellow race. And they all perished … hee, hee! … They all perished… And with every victory the Machine grew more deadly. All the gifts of the earth and all the labour of men went to feed its mighty hunger. It devoured its creators by thousands, by millions, by nations. It slew, it poisoned, it burned, it starved. The whole earth became a desolation…
"And now I own it all … hee, hee! … I and my sword. We own it all… We and the Sphinx." His voice, which had grown strong with excitement, sank back to its infantile treble.
"And what was the meaning of it all?" I asked. "And what will you do with your victory?"
"The meaning … the meaning … I don't know… I've come to ask the Sphinx. I've sat here for years, centuries … oh, so long. But she says nothing – only looks out over the desert with that terrible calm, as though she knew the riddle but would never tell it… Look … look now… Aren't her lips…"
His thin voice rose to a tremulous cry. The sword shook in his palsied hands. His rheumy eyes looked up at the image with a senile frenzy.
I looked up, too… Yes, surely the lips were moving. They were about to open. I should hear at last the reading of the enigma of the strange beings who made a God that slew them… The lips were open now … there was a rattling in throat…
But as I waited for the words that were struggling into utterance there came a sudden wind, hot and blinding and thick with the dust of the desert. It blotted out the sun and darkened the vision of things. The Sphinx vanished in the swirling folds of the storm, the figure of the Man faded into the general gloom, and I was left alone in the midst of nothingness…
ON A SMILE IN A SHAVING GLASS
As I looked into the shaving glass in the privacy of the bathroom this morning, I noticed that there was a very pronounced smile on my face. I was surprised. Not that I am a smileless person in ordinary: on the contrary, I fancy I have an average measure of mirthfulness – a little patchy perhaps, but enough in quantity if unequal in distribution. But I have not been hilarious for a week past. There is not much to be hilarious about in these anxious days when the tide of war is sweeping back over the hills and valleys of the Somme and every hour comes burdened with dark tidings. I find the light-hearted person a trial, and gaiety an offence, like a foolish snigger breaking in on the mad agony of Lear.
Why, then, this smiling face in the glass? Only last night, coming up on the top of the late bus, I was irritated by the good humour of a fat man who came and sat in front of me. He looked up at the brilliant moonlit sky and round at the passengers, and then began humming to himself as though he was full of good news and cheerfulness. When he was tired of humming he began whistling, and his whistling was more intolerable than his humming, for it was noisier. Hang the fellow, thought I, what is he humming and whistling about? This moon that is touching the London streets with beauty – what scenes of horror and carnage it looks down on only a few score miles away! What nameless heroisms are being done for us as we sit under the quiet stars in security and ease! What mighty issues are in the balance! … And this fellow hums and whistles as though he had had no end of a good day. Perhaps he is a profiteer. Anyhow, I was relieved when he went down the stairs, and his vacuous whistling died on the air… Yet this face in the glass looked as though it could hum or whistle quite as readily as that fat man whom I judged so harshly last night.
It was certainly not the sunny morning that was responsible. The beauty of these wonderful days would, in ordinary circumstances, charge my spirits to the brim, but now I wake to them with a feeling of resentment. They are like a satire on our tragedy – like marriage garments robing the skeleton of death. Moreover, they are a practical as well as a spiritual grievance. They are the ally of the enemy. They have come when he needed them, just as they deserted us last autumn when we needed them, and when day after day our gallant men floundered to the attack in Flanders through seas of mud. No, most Imperial Sun, I cannot welcome you. I would you would hide your face from the tortured earth, and leave the rough elements to deal out even justice between the disputants in this great argument… No, this smile cannot be for you. And it is not wholly a tribute to the letter that has just come from that stalwart boy of nineteen, boy of the honest, open face and the frequent hearty laugh, stopped on the eve of his first leave and plunged into this hell of death. Dated Saturday. All well up to Saturday. The first two terrible days survived. Those who love him can breathe more freely.
But though that was perhaps the foundation, it did not explain the smile. Ah, I had got it! It was that paragraph I had read in the newspaper recording the Kaiser's message to his wife on the victory of his armies, and concluding its flamboyant braying with the familiar blasphemy, "God is with us." I find that when I am cheerless a message from the Kaiser always provides a tonic, and that his patronage of the Almighty gives me confidence. This crude, humourless vanity cannot be destined to win the world. It cannot be that humanity is to suffer so grotesque a jest as to fall under the heel of this inflated buffoon and of the system of which he is the symbol. I know that other warriors have claimed the Almighty and have justified the claim have won even in virtue of the claim. Mohammedanism swept the Christian world before it to the cry of "Allah-il-Allah," and to Cromwell the presence of the Lord of Hosts at his side was as real as the presence of Jehovah was to the warriors of Israel. Stonewall Jackson was all the more terrible for the grim, fanatical faith that burned in him from the days of his conversion in Mexico, and, though Lincoln had no orthodox creed, the sense of divine purpose was always present to him, and no one used the name of the Almighty in great moments with more sincere and impressive beauty.
You have only to turn to Lincoln or Cromwell to feel the vast gulf between their piety and this vulgar impiety. And the reason is simple. They believed in the spiritual governance of human life. Cromwell may have been mistaken in his conception of God, but it was a God of the spirit whom he served and whose unworthy instrument he was in achieving the spiritual redemption of men. The material victory was nothing to him except as a means of accomplishing the emancipation of the soul of man, of which political liberty was only the elementary expression. But the Kaiser's conception of God is a denial of everything that is spiritual and humane. He talks of his God as if he were a brigand chief, or an image of blood and iron wrought in his own likeness, a family deity, a sort of sleeping partner of the firm of Hohenzollern, to be left snoring when villainy is afoot and nudged into wakefulness to adorn a triumph. It is the negation of the God of the spirit. It is the God of brute force, of violence and terror, trampling on the garden of the soul in man. It is the God of materialism at war with all that is spiritual. In a word, this thing that the Kaiser calls God is not God at all. It is the Devil.
On this question of the partisanship of the Almighty in regard to our human quarrels, the best attitude is silence. Lincoln, with his unfailing wisdom, set the subject in its right relationship when a lady asked him for the assurance that God was on their side. "The important thing," he said, "is not whether God is on our side, but whether we are on the side of God." This attitude will save us from blasphemous arrogance and from a good deal of perplexity. For when we claim that God is our champion and is fighting exclusively for us we get into difficulties. We have only finite tests to apply to an infinite purpose, and by those tests neither the loyalty nor the omnipotence of the Almighty will be sustained. And what will you do then? Will you, when things go wrong, ask with the poet,
Is he deaf and blind, our God? … Is he indeed at all?
The Greeks disposed of the dilemma by having many deities who took the most intimate share in human quarrels, but adopted opposite sides. They could do much for their earthly clients, but their efforts were neutralised by the power of the gods briefed on the other side. Vulcan could forge an impenetrable shield for Achilles, and Juno could warn him, through the mouth of his horse Xanthus, of his approaching doom, but neither could save him. This guess at the spiritual world supplied a crude working explanation of the queer contrariness of things on the human plane, but it left the gods pale and ineffectual shadows of the mind.
We have lost this ingenuous explanation of the strange drama of our life. We do not know what powers encompass us about, or in what vast rhythm the tumultuous surges and wild discords of our being are engulfed. No voice comes from the void and no portents are in the sky. The stars are infinitely aloof and the face of nature offers us neither comfort nor revelation. But within us we feel the impulse of the human spirit, seeking the free air, turning to the light of beautiful and reasonable things as the flower turns to the face of the sun. And in that impulse we find the echo to whatever far-off, divine strain we move. We cannot doubt its validity. It is the authentic, indestructible note of humanity. We may falter in the measure, stumble in our steps, get bewildered amidst the complexity of intractable and unintelligible things. But the spiritual movement goes on, like the Pilgrim's Chorus fighting its way through the torrent of the world. It may be submerged to-day, to-morrow, for generations; but in the end it wins – in the end the moral law prevails over the law of the jungle. The stream of tendency has many turnings, but it makes for righteousness and saps ceaselessly the foundations of the god of violence. It is to that god of harsh, material things that the Kaiser appeals against the eternal strivings of man towards the divine prerogative of freedom. Like the false prophets of old he leaps on his altar, gashes himself with knives till the blood pours out and cries, "Oh, Baal, hear us." And it is because Baal is an idol of wood and stone in a world subject to the governance of the spirit that, even in the darkest hour of the war, we need not lose faith.
That, I think, is the meaning of the smile I caught in the shaving glass this morning.