Part 31 (1/2)
Another chapter which I believed I was going to write in this book was to be devoted to inscriptions. I have always loved the art of the epigraphists, and I wanted to quote some examples, including (1) an inscription for a sun-dial, (2) an inscription for a memorial to Lord Halifax, the trimmer, the greatest of Whig statesmen, (3) another to William Pitt, and (4) an inscription to the Quakers who fought and died in the War,--men whose n.o.ble combination of patriotism and self- abnegation impressed me profoundly.
Their ashes in a peaceful urn shall rest, Their names a great example stand to show How strangely high endeavour may be blest When Piety and Valour jointly go.
Another Surrey chapter might have dealt with my activities as Sheriff and my conceptions of that office.
Still another chapter ought to have centred in my personal life at Newlands. It was at Newlands that my health broke down and I saw, or thought I saw, as did my doctors, the advance of the penumbra, the shadow of eclipse which was to engulf my life. I wanted very much, when I began this book, to put on record a description of how utterly different than is commonly supposed are the feelings of the occupant of the condemned cell. I should also like to have recorded certain reflections upon how a serious illness becomes a kind of work of art, a drama or film in real life, in which the patient, the doctors, the nurses, the friends, and the relations all play their appropriate parts, and contribute each in his order to the central theme. But this and ”The Adventure of Dying,” a theme which has never yet been adequately treated, but ought some day to be, must await not, of course, the actual coming of the Gondolier, for that is too late, but that interval between life and death which the Emperor Diocletian boasted that he had created for himself.
Another unwritten chapter on a subject which may sound dull, but which might very well have been one of the best, was to be called ”The Consolations of the Cla.s.sics.” It would have told how in his later years new stars had risen for the adventurer in the voyage of life, while many of the planets that were in their zenith in his youth have suffered decline.
As a boy, and even in the prime of life, I knew nothing of Racine. I now bend my head in adoration. Again, I knew little or nothing of Balzac. I now think of him as one of the greatest of the a.n.a.lysts of human conduct,--not as great as Shakespeare, but, all the same, very great, and almost as terrible as he is great. If ever a man fascinates and is intolerable, it is Balzac.
I should have liked, but that is not a thing which can be compressed or sandwiched into any chapter, to have written quite frankly and fully about my religious beliefs. Here, indeed, I had planned with some care.
I wanted to say not what I thought other men ought to believe, nor what I thought I ought to believe myself, or, again, what I ought not to believe in order to make my _credo_ look reasonable and ”according to plan.” What I wanted to do was to say frankly, fairly, and truthfully what I do believe as a matter of fact and not as a matter of ought or ought not. I wanted to record an existing set of actualities, not to write a piece of philosophy or metaphysics. _I wanted, in fact, to photograph my soul._ But this, again, must wait, though I hope it will not wait very long.
If I write such a paper I shall certainly take for my motto Lord Halifax's words to Bishop Burnet: ”I believe as much as I can: and G.o.d Almighty will, I am sure, pardon me if I have not the digestion of an ostrich.”
I will neither be put off on the one side by making an effort to express belief in more than I can believe, nor, again, refuse to record my honest belief in some ”fact of religion” because it will not be thought creditable for me, or because certain people will think me superst.i.tious and unreasonable, just as other people will think me too rationalistic.
I will yield nothing to the demand, ”You cannot possibly believe _this_, when you have just said that you don't believe _that_.
The two things must hang together. You cannot pick and choose like this at your fancy.”
My answer is, I can, I do, and I will. My endeavour is not an attempt to reconcile beliefs, but to say for good or for evil what I do believe. I believe that London lies to the Northeast of the place at which I am dictating these words. Faith is a fact, not a fragment of reasoning, and I mean to put down the said fact for what it is worth.
How I wish I could write my chapter on the odd things that have happened to me in life, and record the strange and inexplicable things that I have heard of from other people. I don't mean by this that I have a number of second-hand ghost-stories to tell. All the same I could t-ell of certain things much more impressive because they are so much less sensational. It was my habit as a young man, a habit which I wish I had not abandoned, to ask everybody I came across, who was worth interrogating, what was the oddest thing that had happened in their lives. One would have supposed that I should often have got for my impertinence a surly answer, or, at any rate, an elegant rapier-thrust, or some other form of snub. Strangely enough, I never found anyone ”shy”
at my question, but I did get many curious answers, and some of these I have a perfect right to record. A section of this chapter should deal with accidental conversations and accidental confessions. It has been my good luck once or twice to listen to the most strange talk in trains and other public places, and again, by straight questions I have sometimes elicited very crooked answers.
For example, when I was a young man I once heard an old gentleman in a third-cla.s.s railway carriage remark vaguely and yet impressively to the company at large, as follows: ”I once saw six men hanged in a very rustic manner.” That, I think everyone will agree with me, was an excellent conversational opening. The full story, though I cannot tell it here, was quite as good. So was the story of William Harvey, ”_the girt big Somersets.h.i.+re man_” and what he did in a fight with Spanish Pilots in the Bilbao River. Of this story, told to me in the broadest Somersets.h.i.+re dialect by a Somersets.h.i.+re boatman who was present at the fight, I cannot resist quoting one pa.s.sage: ”They were all dressed in white and fighting with their long knives. But William Harvey, who was six feet six high, got hold of the axe we always kept on deck for cutting away the mast if it went in a storm, and he knocked them over with that. And as fast as he did knock them over, we did chuck the bodies into the water.”
Another of my accidental conversations opened with these words: ”And she never knew till she followed her to her grave that she was her own mother.” The personal p.r.o.nouns are slightly mixed, but the story might well develop like a Greek play.
Again, I planned a chapter to describe the four most beautiful human beings seen by me in the course of my life. Strangest of all, and perhaps most beautiful of all, using beauty in rather a strained sense, was the man alluded to in my dedication,--the man my wife and I saw in the Jews' Garden at Jahoni. We were resting in the garden after a very long ride in very hot weather, when there entered a young man in a white tunic, with bare feet and legs. On his head was a wide hat of rough straw, and across his shoulder a mattock. His face and form could only be described in the famous words, ”Beauty that shocks you.” Why his beauty shocked us, and must have shocked any other seers possessed of any sensibility, I cannot say. Thinking he was a gardener, we asked our Dragoman to ask him some simple question but he could not, or did not, obtain any information. The creature was like the figures of Faunus or Vertumnus, or one of those half-deities or quarter-deities that one sees among the marbles in public collections. ”Graeco-Roman School, of the late Antonine Period; probably representing a Rural Deity, or G.o.d of Spring or Agriculture in the Latin mythology.” Certainly the more decadent side of late Greek or Roman art seemed in some strange way to be living again in this amazing being.
Far more really beautiful, far more interesting, and far more impressive was a woman whom I and my younger brother met with in a tram-car outside the Porta del Popolo in Rome. Up till then I had spent much time in wondering why the Italian population had declined in the matter of good- looks and why one never saw anyone like a Bellini or a Raphael Madonna.
And then I looked up after having my ticket clipped and saw the perfect youthful mother of the Cinquecento painters sitting opposite me. A more exquisitely harmonious face and expression were never vouchsafed to my eyes. She was a countrywoman of the richer peasant cla.s.s, and was apparently making her first visit to the city accompanied by her husband. One would gladly have taken oath at first sight that she was the perfect wife and mother, and yet there was no sentimental pose about her--only the most naive and innocent delight told in smiles, laughter, and blushes. The things she saw from the tram window seemed to make her whole being ripple with pleasure. Happily I cannot here be judged as a sentimental visionary for my companion will avouch the facts.
Curiously enough, though I think English women, as a whole, far surpa.s.s the Italians in their looks, the other perfectly beautiful woman whom I have seen was also an Italian. I was taking an early walk, with my younger brother, from Baveno to the summit, or at any rate, to the shoulder of the Monte Moteroni. The time was between five and six o'clock in the morning, and the place a small peasant's farm just at the fringe of the land between the open mountain and the cultivated slopes.
I looked over the hedge or wall, I forget which, and there was a bare- legged girl of some seventeen or eighteen working in the field with her father and her brothers, hoeing potatoes. Here, indeed, was something worth writing home about--a figure like the Lombard girl in Browning's ”Italian in England, ”--a face gentle, simple, kind, but, above all, beautiful, and a figure worthy of the face.
The fourth figure in my gallery of the visions that the turn of the road took from my eyes and ”swept into my dreams for ever” was seen during a purely prosaic walk in South Kensington. Unsuspecting, unperturbed, I was bent on a const.i.tutional, or maybe a shopping expedition, when there suddenly arose before my astonished eyes, out of a man-hole in the middle of the street--I honestly believe it was the Cromwell Road--a young workman with flaxen hair and a short beard,--a man with something of the face and figure which the Italian painters gradually came to attribute to the Christ. But here again, as in the case of the Madonna of the tram-car, the man evidently had never been told of, or thought of, the resemblance. He seemed perfectly unconscious and natural. Though the trained eye might notice a resemblance in the outline of the face, the happy smile and negligent air showed nothing of the Man of Sorrows.
He was just an ordinary Englishman.
When I think of those four figures of resplendent beauty--and especially of the two women, for the Syrian had something sinister and uncanny about him and the young Englishman was too prosaic in essentials--I recall the pa.s.sage which I know is somewhere in Sir Thomas Browne, though I am quite unable to find it, in which the Physician Philosopher declares that when he sees specially beautiful persons he desires to say a grace or thanksgiving to Heaven for the joy that has been vouchsafed him.
As to the strange stories and strange things told me, I should have liked particularly to chronicle two at length. One is the story of a tiny Indian spindle that spun by itself in the dust, and the other, though it had no marvel in it, except the marvel of maternal feeling, is the story of a chamois and her young one on a glacier-pa.s.s. The English mountaineer who told it me, was on a difficult climb. Suddenly he saw to his astonishment a chamois, the shyest of all animals, standing stock- still on a steep glacier. She actually let him come so close to her that he could have touched her with his hand, and then he saw the reason. The chamois stood at the very edge of a deep creva.s.se, and up from its cold, blue depths came the cry of a terrified and agonised creature--cries that were answered by the mother chamois. The little chamois had fallen through the ice-bridge and lay some hundred feet or so below and beyond all recovery. The narrator was an ordinary table-d'hote Smoking-Room tourist, but he could hardly recount the story without tears. He tried, but it was impossible to effect a rescue, and he had to leave the wretched mother where she was. As he said, ”Considering what chamois are, it sounds absolutely incredible that the mother should have been able to overcome her shyness of mankind and stay by the young one. I wouldn't have believed it if I hadn't seen it. She took no more notice of me and my guide than if we had been rocks. Poor brute!”
Another chapter would have recorded the influence upon my life of great writers, great poets, great painters, great sculptors, and great musicians. Next, I should have loved to give in detail accounts of my travels, not in strange or dangerous parts of the earth, but through some of the most beautiful scenery of Europe and in the fringes of Africa and Asia. As a young man, I journeyed in sledges over most of the Alpine pa.s.ses in the winter, for, owing to my uncle John Symonds being one of the discoverers of the High Alps in winter, I was early, so to speak, in the snow-field. To this day nothing attracts me more than the thought of a long day or night spent in a sledge.
I crossed the Splugen by day in the winter, and by moon-light in the summer. I crossed the St. Gothard (before the tunnel was made) in a Vetturino carriage. I have crossed the Simplon, and I have many times crossed the Bernina and all the other pa.s.ses of the Orisons in the snow in mid-winter. For those who like, as I do, sharp cold, and ardent sunlight, there is nothing more delightful, and if as sometimes happens, one can see or hear an avalanche really close, without getting into it, a pleasant spice of danger is added. But I did not love the Alps merely in the winter. Though no expert climber, I was fond of the mountains to the point of fanaticism, and though I never got higher than 11,000 feet, or a little over, I had the extremely interesting experience of falling into a creva.s.se. Fortunately I was well held by the rope against the white grey edge of the blue abyss, while my legs kicked freely in the illimitable inane.
Is there anything in the world like being aroused in the grey of dawn by the man with the axe and the rope? Can anything equal that succession of scenes, the Alpine village in sleepy silence, the pastures and the cultivated land, the inevitable little bridge on the inevitable stream, then the belt of pines, then the zone of rocks and flowers, best and gayest of all gardens, and last the star gentians and the eternal snows?