The Rhythm of Life

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The Rhythm of Life and Other Essays


Contents

The Rhythm of Life
Decivilised
A Remembrance
The Sun
The Flower
Unstable Equilibrium
The Unit of the World
By the Railway Side
Pocket Vocabularies
Pathos
The Point of Honour
Composure
Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes
James Russell Lowell
Domus Angusta
Rejection
The Lesson of Landscape
Mr. Coventry Patmore's Odes
Innocence and Experience
Penultimate Caricature




THE RHYTHM OF LIFE


If life is not always poetical, it is at least metrical. Periodicity
rules over the mental experience of man, according to the path of the
orbit of his thoughts. Distances are not gauged, ellipses not measured,
velocities not ascertained, times not known. Nevertheless, the
recurrence is sure. What the mind suffered last week, or last year, it
does not suffer now; but it will suffer again next week or next year.
Happiness is not a matter of events; it depends upon the tides of the
mind. Disease is metrical, closing in at shorter and shorter periods
towards death, sweeping abroad at longer and longer intervals towards
recovery. Sorrow for one cause was intolerable yesterday, and will be
intolerable tomorrow; today it is easy to bear, but the cause has not
passed. Even the burden of a spiritual distress unsolved is bound to
leave the heart to a temporary peace; and remorse itself does not
remain--it returns. Gaiety takes us by a dear surprise. If we had made
a course of notes of its visits, we might have been on the watch, and
would have had an expectation instead of a discovery. No one makes such
observations; in all the diaries of students of the interior world, there
have never come to light the records of the Kepler of such cycles. But
Thomas a Kempis knew of the recurrences, if he did not measure them. In
his cell alone with the elements--'What wouldst thou more than these? for
out of these were all things made'--he learnt the stay to be found in the
depth of the hour of bitterness, and the remembrance that restrains the
soul at the coming of the moment of delight, giving it a more conscious
welcome, but presaging for it an inexorable flight. And 'rarely, rarely
comest thou,' sighed Shelley, not to Delight merely, but to the Spirit of
Delight. Delight can be compelled beforehand, called, and constrained to
our service--Ariel can be bound to a daily task; but such artificial
violence throws life out of metre, and it is not the spirit that is thus
compelled. _That_ flits upon an orbit elliptically or parabolically or
hyperbolically curved, keeping no man knows what trysts with Time.

It seems fit that Shelley and the author of the _Imitation_ should both
have been keen and simple enough to perceive these flights, and to guess
at the order of this periodicity. Both souls were in close touch with
the spirits of their several worlds, and no deliberate human rules, no
infractions of the liberty and law of the universal movement, kept from
them the knowledge of recurrences. _Eppur si muove_. They knew that
presence does not exist without absence; they knew that what is just upon
its flight of farewell is already on its long path of return. They knew
that what is approaching to the very touch is hastening towards
departure. 'O wind,' cried Shelley, in autumn,

'O wind,
If winter comes, can spring be far behind?'

They knew that the flux is equal to the reflux; that to interrupt with
unlawful recurrences, out of time, is to weaken the impulse of onset and
retreat; the sweep and impetus of movement. To live in constant efforts
after an equal life, whether the equality be sought in mental production,
or in spiritual sweetness, or in the joy of the senses, is to live
without either rest or full activity. The souls of certain of the
saints, being singularly simple and single, have been in the most
complete subjection to the law of periodicity. Ecstasy and desolation
visited them by seasons. They endured, during spaces of vacant time, the
interior loss of all for which they had sacrificed the world. They
rejoiced in the uncovenanted beatitude of sweetness alighting in their
hearts. Like them are the poets whom, three times or ten times in the
course of a long life, the Muse has approached, touched, and forsaken.
And yet hardly like them; not always so docile, nor so wholly prepared
for the departure, the brevity, of the golden and irrevocable hour. Few
poets have fully recognised the metrical absence of their Muse. For full
recognition is expressed in one only way--silence.

It has been found that several tribes in Africa and in America worship
the moon, and not the sun; a great number worship both; but no tribes are
known to adore the sun, and not the moon. For the periodicity of the sun
is still in part a secret; but that of the moon is modestly apparent,
perpetually influential. On her depend the tides; and she is Selene,
mother of Herse, bringer of the dews that recurrently irrigate lands
where rain is rare. More than any other companion of earth is she the
Measurer. Early Indo-Germanic languages knew her by that name. Her
metrical phases are the symbol of the order of recurrence. Constancy in
approach and in departure is the reason of her inconstancies. Juliet
will not receive a vow spoken in invocation of the moon; but Juliet did
not live to know that love itself has tidal times--lapses and ebbs which
are due to the metrical rule of the interior heart, but which the lover
vainly and unkindly attributes to some outward alteration in the beloved.
For man--except those elect already named--is hardly aware of
periodicity. The individual man either never learns it fully, or learns
it late. And he learns it so late, because it is a matter of cumulative
experience upon which cumulative evidence is lacking. It is in the after-
part of each life that the law is learnt so definitely as to do away with
the hope or fear of continuance. That young sorrow comes so near to
despair is a result of this young ignorance. So is the early hope of
great achievement. Life seems so long, and its capacity so great, to one
who knows nothing of all the intervals it needs must hold--intervals
between aspirations, between actions, pauses as inevitable as the pauses
of sleep. And life looks impossible to the young unfortunate, unaware of
the inevitable and unfailing refreshment. It would be for their peace to
learn that there is a tide in the affairs of men, in a sense more
subtle--if it is not too audacious to add a meaning to Shakespeare--than
the phrase was meant to contain. Their joy is flying away from them on
its way home; their life will wax and wane; and if they would be wise,
they must wake and rest in its phases, knowing that they are ruled by the
law that commands all things--a sun's revolutions and the rhythmic pangs
of maternity.




DECIVILISED


The difficulty of dealing--in the course of any critical duty--with
decivilised man lies in this: when you accuse him of vulgarity--sparing
him no doubt the word--he defends himself against the charge of
barbarism. Especially from new soil--transatlantic, colonial--he faces
you, bronzed, with a half conviction of savagery, partly persuaded of his
own youthfulness of race. He writes, and recites, poems about ranches
and canyons; they are designed to betray the recklessness of his nature
and to reveal the good that lurks in the lawless ways of a young society.
He is there to explain himself, voluble, with a glossary for his own
artless slang. But his colonialism is only provincialism very
articulate. The new air does but make old decadences seem more stale;
the young soil does but set into fresh conditions the ready-made, the
uncostly, the refuse feeling of a race decivilising. American fancy
played long this pattering part of youth. The New-Englander hastened to
assure you with so self-denying a face he did not wear war-paint and
feathers, that it became doubly difficult to communicate to him that you
had suspected him of nothing wilder than a second-hand dress coat. And
when it was a question not of rebuke, but of praise, the American was ill-
content with the word of the judicious who lauded him for some delicate
successes in continuing something of the literature of England, something
of the art of France; he was more eager for the applause that stimulated
him to write romances and to paint panoramic landscape, after brief
training in academies of native inspiration. Even now English voices,
with violent commonplace, are constantly calling upon America to begin--to
begin, for the world is expectant. Whereas there is no beginning for
her, but instead a continuity which only a constant care can guide into
sustained refinement and can save from decivilisation.

But decivilised man is not peculiar to new soil. The English town, too,
knows him in all his dailiness. In England, too, he has a literature, an
art, a music, all his own--derived from many and various things of price.
Trash, in the fulness of its in simplicity and cheapness, is impossible
without a beautiful past. Its chief characteristic--which is futility,
not failure--could not be achieved but by the long abuse, the rotatory
reproduction, the quotidian disgrace, of the utterances of Art,
especially the utterance by words. Gaiety, vigour, vitality, the organic
quality, purity, simplicity, precision--all these are among the
antecedents of trash. It is after them; it is also, alas, because of
them. And nothing can be much sadder than such a proof of what may
possibly be the failure of derivation.

Evidently we cannot choose our posterity. Reversing the steps of time,
we may, indeed, choose backwards. We may give our thoughts noble
forefathers. Well begotten, well born our fancies must be; they shall be
also well derived. We have a voice in decreeing our inheritance, and not
our inheritance only, but our heredity. Our minds may trace upwards and
follow their ways to the best well-heads of the arts. The very habit of
our thoughts may be persuaded one way unawares by their antenatal
history. Their companions must be lovely, but need be no lovelier than
their ancestors; and being so fathered and so husbanded, our thoughts may
be intrusted to keep the counsels of literature.

Such is our confidence in a descent we know. But, of a sequel which of
us is sure? Which of us is secured against the dangers of subsequent
depreciation? And, moreover, which of us shall trace the contemporary
tendencies, the one towards honour, the other towards dishonour? Or who
shall discover why derivation becomes degeneration, and where and when
and how the bastardy befalls? The decivilised have every grace as the
antecedent of their vulgarities, every distinction as the precedent of
their mediocrities. No ballad-concert song, feign it sigh, frolic, or
laugh, but has the excuse that the feint was suggested, was made easy, by
some living sweetness once. Nor are the decivilised to blame as having
in their own persons possessed civilisation and marred it. They did not
possess it; they were born into some tendency to derogation, into an
inclination for things mentally inexpensive. And the tendency can hardly
do other than continue. Nothing can look duller than the future of this
second-hand and multiplying world. Men need not be common merely because
they are many; but the infection of commonness once begun in the many,
what dulness in their future! To the eye that has reluctantly discovered
this truth--that the vulgarised are not _un_civilised, and that there is
no growth for them--it does not look like a future at all. More ballad-
concerts, more quaint English, more robustious barytone songs, more
piecemeal pictures, more anxious decoration, more colonial poetry, more
young nations with withered traditions. Yet it is before this prospect
that the provincial overseas lifts up his voice in a boast or a promise
common enough among the incapable young, but pardonable only in senility.
He promises the world a literature, an art, that shall be new because his
forest is untracked and his town just built. But what the newness is to
be he cannot tell. Certain words were dreadful once in the mouth of
desperate old age. Dreadful and pitiable as the threat of an impotent
king, what shall we name them when they are the promise of an impotent
people? 'I will do such things: what they are yet I know not.'




A REMEMBRANCE


When the memories of two or three persons now upon earth shall be rolled
up and sealed with their records within them, there will be no
remembrance left open, except this, of a man whose silence seems better
worth interpreting than the speech of many another. Of himself he has
left no vestiges. It was a common reproach against him that he never
acknowledged the obligation to any kind of restlessness. The kingdom of
heaven suffereth violence, but as he did none there was nothing for it
but that the kingdom of heaven should yield to his leisure. The
delicate, the abstinent, the reticent graces were his in the heroic
degree. Where shall I find a pen fastidious enough to define and limit
and enforce so many significant negatives? Words seem to offend by too
much assertion, and to check the suggestions of his reserve. That
reserve was life-long. Loving literature, he never lifted a pen except
to write a letter. He was not inarticulate, he was only silent. He had
an exquisite style from which to refrain. The things he abstained from
were all exquisite. They were brought from far to undergo his judgment,
if haply he might have selected them. Things ignoble never approached
near enough for his refusal; they had not with him so much as that
negative connexion. If I had to equip an author I should ask no better
than to arm him and invest him with precisely the riches that were
renounced by the man whose intellect, by integrity, had become a presence-
chamber.

It was by holding session among so many implicit safeguards that he
taught, rather than by precepts. Few were these in his speech, but his
personality made laws for me. It was a subtle education, for it
persuaded insensibly to a conception of my own. How, if he would not
define, could I know what things were and what were not worthy of his
gentle and implacable judgment? I must needs judge them for myself, yet
he constrained me in the judging. Within that constraint and under that
stimulus, which seemed to touch the ultimate springs of thoughts before
they sprang, I began to discern all things in literature and in life--in
the chastity of letters and in the honour of life--that I was bound to
love. Not the things of one character only, but excellent things of
every character. There was no tyranny in such a method. His idleness
justified itself by the liberality it permitted to his taste. Never
having made his love of letters further a secondary purpose, never having
bound the literary genius--that delicate Ariel--to any kind of servitude,
never having so much as permitted himself a prejudice whereby some of his
delights should be stinted while others were indulged beyond the
sanctions of modest reason, he barely tolerated his own preferences,
which lay somewhat on the hither side of full effectiveness of style.
These the range of his reading confessed by certain exclusions.
Nevertheless it was not of deficiencies that he was patient: he did but
respect the power of pause, and he disliked violence chiefly because
violence is apt to confess its own limits. Perhaps, indeed, his own fine
negatives made him only the more sensible of any lack of those literary
qualities that are bound in their full complement to hold themselves at
the disposal of the consummate author--to stand and wait, if they may do
no more.

Men said that he led a _dilettante_ life. They reproached him with the
selflessness that made him somewhat languid. Others, they seemed to
aver, were amateurs at this art or that; he was an amateur at living. So
it was, in the sense that he never grasped at happiness, and that many of
the things he had held slipped from his disinterested hands. So it was,
too, in this unintended sense; he loved life. How should he not have
loved a life that his living made honourable? How should he not have
loved all arts, in which his choice was delicate, liberal, instructed,
studious, docile, austere? An amateur man he might have been called,
too, because he was not discomposed by his own experiences, or shaken by
the discovery which life brings to us-that the negative quality of which
Buddhism seems to accuse all good is partaken by our happiness. He had
always prayed temperate prayers and harboured probable wishes. His
sensibility was extreme, but his thought was generalised. When he had
joy he tempered it not in the common way by meditation upon the general
sorrow but by a recollection of the general pleasure. It was his finest
distinction to desire no differences, no remembrance, but loss among the
innumerable forgotten. And when he suffered, it was with so quick a
nerve and yet so wide an apprehension that the race seemed to suffer in
him. He pitied not himself so tenderly as mankind, of whose capacity for
pain he was then feelingly persuaded. His darkening eyes said in the
extreme hour: 'I have compassion on the multitude.'




THE SUN


Nowhere else does the greater light so rule the day, so measure, so
divide, so reign, make so imperial laws, so visibly kindle, so
immediately quicken, so suddenly efface, so banish, so restore, as in a
plain like this of Suffolk with its enormous sky. The curious have an
insufficient motive for going to the mountains if they do it to see the
sunrise. The sun that leaps from a mountain peak is a sun past the dew
of his birth; he has walked some way towards the common fires of noon.
But on the flat country the uprising is early and fresh, the arc is wide,
the career is long. The most distant clouds, converging in the beautiful
and little-studied order of cloud-perspective (for most painters treat
clouds as though they formed perpendicular and not horizontal scenery),
are those that gather at the central point of sunrise. On the plain, and
there only, can the construction--but that is too little vital a word; I
should rather say the organism--the unity, the design, of a sky be
understood. The light wind that has been moving all night is seen to
have not worked at random. It has shepherded some small flocks of cloud
afield and folded others. There's husbandry in Heaven. And the order
has, or seems to have, the sun for its midst. Not a line, not a curve,
but confesses its membership in a design declared from horizon to
horizon.

To see the system of a sky in fragments is to miss what I learn to look
for in all achieved works of Nature and art: the organism that is unity
and life. It is the unity and life of painting. The Early Victorian
picture--(the school is still in full career, but essentially it belongs
to that triumphal period)--is but a dull sum of things put together, in
concourse, not in relation; but the true picture is _one_, however
multitudinous it may be, for it is composed of relations gathered
together in the unity of perception, of intention, and of light. It is
organic. Moreover, how truly relation is the condition of life may be
understood from the extinct state of the English stage, which resembles
nothing so much as a Royal Academy picture. Even though the actors may
be added together with something like vivacity (though that is rare),
they have no vitality in common. They are not members one of another. If
the Church and Stage Guild be still in existence, it would do much for
the art by teaching that Scriptural maxim. I think, furthermore, that
the life of our bodies has never been defined so suggestively as by one
who named it a living relation of lifeless atoms. Could the value of
relation be more curiously set forth? And one might penetrate some way
towards a consideration of the vascular organism of a true literary style
in which there is a vital relation of otherwise lifeless word with word.
And wherein lies the progress of architecture from the stupidity of the
pyramid and the dead weight of the Cyclopean wall to the spring and the
flight of the ogival arch, but in a quasi-organic relation? But the way
of such thoughts might be intricate, and the sun rules me to simplicity.

He reigns as centrally in the blue sky as in the clouds. One October of
late had days absolutely cloudless. I should not have certainly known it
had there been a hill in sight. The gradations of the blue are
incalculable, infinite, and they deepen from the central fire. As to the
earthly scenery, there are but two 'views' on the plain; for the aspect
of the light is the whole landscape. To look with the sun or against the
sun--this is the alternative splendour. To look with the sun is to face
a golden country, shadowless, serene, noble and strong in light, with a
certain lack of relief that suggests--to those who dream of landscape--the
country of a dream. The serried pines, and the lighted fields, and the
golden ricks of the farms are dyed with the sun as one might paint with a
colour. Bright as it is, the glow is rather the dye of sunlight than its
luminosity. For by a kind of paradox the luminous landscape is that
which is full of shadows--the landscape before you when you turn and face
the sun. Not only every reed and rush of the salt marshes, every
uncertain aspen-leaf of the few trees, but every particle of the October
air shows a shadow and makes a mystery of the light. There is nothing
but shadow and sun; colour is absorbed and the landscape is reduced to a
shining simplicity. Thus is the dominant sun sufficient for his day. His
passage kindles to unconsuming fires and quenches into living ashes. No
incidents save of his causing, no delight save of his giving: from the
sunrise, when the larks, not for pairing, but for play, sing the only
virginal song of the year--a heart younger than Spring's in the season of
decline--even to the sunset, when the herons scream together in the
shallows. And the sun dominates by his absence, compelling the low
country to sadness in the melancholy night.




THE FLOWER


There is a form of oppression that has not until now been confessed by
those who suffer from it or who are participants, as mere witnesses, in
its tyranny. It is the obsession of man by the flower. In the shape of
the flower his own paltriness revisits him--his triviality, his sloth,
his cheapness, his wholesale habitualness, his slatternly ostentation.
These return to him and wreak upon him their dull revenges. What the
tyranny really had grown to can be gauged nowhere so well as in country
lodgings, where the most ordinary things of design and decoration have
sifted down and gathered together, so that foolish ornament gains a
cumulative force and achieves a conspicuous commonness. Stem and petal
and leaf--the fluent forms that a man has not by heart but certainly by
rote--are woven, printed, cast, and stamped wherever restlessness and
insimplicity have feared to leave plain spaces. The most ugly of all
imaginable rooms, which is probably the parlour of a farm-house arrayed
for those whom Americans call summer-boarders, is beset with flowers. It
blooms, a dry, woollen, papery, cast-iron garden. The floor flourishes
with blossoms adust, poorly conventionalised into a kind of order; the
table-cover is ablaze with a more realistic florescence; the wall-paper
is set with bunches; the rigid machine-lace curtain is all of roses and
lilies in its very construction, over the muslin blinds an impotent sprig
is scattered. In the worsted rosettes of the bell-ropes, in the plaster
picture-frames, in the painted tea-tray and on the cups, in the pediment
of the sideboard, in the ornament that crowns the barometer, in the
finials of sofa and arm-chair, in the finger-plates of the 'grained'
door, is to be seen the ineffectual portrait or to be traced the stale
inspiration of the flower. And what is this bossiness around the grate
but some blunt, black-leaded garland? The recital is wearisome, but the
retribution of the flower is precisely weariness. It is the persecution
of man, the haunting of his trivial visions, and the oppression of his
inconsiderable brain.

The man so possessed suffers the lot of the weakling--subjection to the
smallest of the things he has abused. The designer of cheap patterns is
no more inevitably ridden by the flower than is the vain and transitory
author by the phrase. But I had rather learn my decoration of the
Japanese, and place against the blank wall one pot plain from the wheel,
holding one singular branch in blossom, in the attitude and accident of
growth. And I could wish abstention to exist, and even to be evident, in
my words. In literature as in all else man merits his subjection to
trivialities by a kind of economical greed. A condition for using justly
and gaily any decoration would seem to be a certain reluctance.
Ornament--strange as the doctrine sounds in a world decivilised--was in
the beginning intended to be something jocund; and jocundity was never to
be achieved but by postponement, deference, and modesty. Nor can the
prodigality of the meadows in May be quoted in dispute. For Nature has
something even more severe than moderation: she has an innumerable
singleness. Her butter-cup meadows are not prodigal; they show
multitude, but not multiplicity, and multiplicity is exactly the disgrace
of decoration. Who has ever multiplied or repeated his delights? or who
has ever gained the granting of the most foolish of his wishes--the
prayer for reiteration? It is a curious slight to generous Fate that man
should, like a child, ask for one thing many times. Her answer every
time is a resembling but new and single gift; until the day when she
shall make the one tremendous difference among her gifts--and make it
perhaps in secret--by naming one of them the ultimate. What, for
novelty, what, for singleness, what, for separateness, can equal the
last? Of many thousand kisses the poor last--but even the kisses of your
mouth are all numbered.