A Traveller in Little Things Part 17

And with Elizabeth Potecary, that dear lady dead these three centuries and longer, I must bring this particular Little Thing to an end.

x.x.xVI

THE DEAD AND THE LIVING

The last was indeed in essence a small thing, but was running to such a great length it had to be ended before my selected best inscriptions were used up, also before the true answer to the question: "Why, if inscriptions do not greatly interest me, do I haunt churchyards?" was given. Let me give it now: it will serve as a suitable conclusion to what has already been said on the subject in this and in a former book.

When we have sat too long in a close, hot, brilliantly-lighted, over- crowded room, a sense of unutterable relief is experienced on coming forth into the pure, fresh, cold night and filling our lungs with air uncontaminated with the poisonous gases discharged from other lungs. An a.n.a.logous sense of immense relief, of escape from confinement and joyful liberation, is experienced mentally when after long weeks or months in London I repair to a rustic village. Yet, like the person who has in his excitement been inhaling poison into his system for long hours, I am not conscious of the restraint at the time. Not consciously conscious. The mind was too exclusively occupied with itself--its own mind affairs. The cage was only recognised as a cage, an unsuitable habitation, when I was out of it. An example, this, of the eternal disharmony between the busy mind and nature--or Mother Nature, let us say; the more the mind is concentrated on its own business the blinder we are to the signals of disapproval on her kindly countenance, the deafer to her warning whispers in our ear.

The sense of relief is chiefly due to the artificiality of the conditions of London or town life, and no doubt varies greatly in strength in town and country-bred persons; in me it is so strong that on first coming out to where there are woods and fields and hedges, I am almost moved to tears.

We have recently heard the story of the little East-end boy on his holiday in a quiet country spot, who exclaimed: "How full of sound the country is! Now in London we can't hear the sound because of the noises." And as with sound--the rural sounds that are familiar from of old and find an echo in us--so with everything: we do not hear nor see nor smell nor feel the earth, which he is, physically and mentally, in such per-period, the years that run to millions, that it has "entered the soul"; an environment with which he is physically and mentally, in such perfect harmony that it is like an extension of himself into the surrounding s.p.a.ce. Sky and cloud and wind and rain, and rock and soil and water, and flocks and herds and all wild things, with trees and flowers--everywhere gra.s.s and everlasting verdure--it is all part of men, and is me, as I sometimes feel in a mystic mood, even as a religious man in a like mood feels that he is in a heavenly place and is a native there, one with it.

Another less obvious cause of my feeling is that the love of our kind cannot exist, or at all events not unmixed with contempt and various other unpleasant ingredients, in people who live and have their being amidst thousands and millions of their fellow-creatures herded together. The great thoroughfares in which we walk are peopled with an endless procession, an innumerable mult.i.tude; we hardly see and do not look at or notice them, knowing beforehand that we do not know and never will know them to our dying day; from long use we have almost ceased to regard them as fellow-beings.

I recall here a tradition of the Incas, which tells that in the beginning a benevolent G.o.d created men on the slopes of the Andes, and that after a time another G.o.d, who was at enmity with the first, spitefully transformed them into insects. Here we have a contrary effect--it is the insects which have been transformed; the millions of wood-ants, let us say, inhabiting an old and exceedingly populous nest have been transformed into men, but in form only; mentally they are still ants, all silently, everlastingly hurrying by, absorbed in their ant-business. You can almost smell the formic acid. Walking in the street, one of the swarming mult.i.tude, you are in but not of it. You are only one with the others in appearance; in mind you are as unlike them as a man is unlike an ant, and the love and sympathy you feel towards them is about equal to that which you experience when looking down on the swarm in a wood-ants' nest.

Undoubtedly when I am in the crowd, poisoned by contact with the crowd- mind--the formic acid of the spirits--I am not actually or keenly conscious of the great gulf between me and the others, but, as in the former case, the sense of relief is experienced here too in escaping from it. The people of the small rustic community have not been de- humanised. I am a stranger, and they do not meet me with blank faces and pa.s.s on in ant-like silence. So great is the revulsion that I look on them as of my kin, and am so delighted to be with them again after an absence of centuries, that I want to embrace and kiss them all. I am one of them, a villager with the village mind, and no wish for any other.

This mind or heart includes the dead as well as the living, and the church and churchyard is the central spot and half-way house or camping-ground between this and the other world, where dead and living meet and hold communion--a fact that is unknown to or ignored by persons of the "better cla.s.s," the parish priest or vicar sometimes included.

And as I have for the nonce taken on the village mind, I am as much interested in my incorporeal, invisible neighbours as in those I see and am accustomed to meet and converse with every day. They are here in the churchyard, and I am pleased to be with them. Even when I sit, as I sometimes do of an evening, on a flat tomb with a group of laughing children round me, some not yet tired of play, climbing up to my side only to jump down again, I am not oblivious of their presence. They are there, and are glad to see the children playing among the tombs where they too had their games a century ago. I notice that the village woman pa.s.sing through the ground pauses a minute with her eyes resting on a certain spot; even the tired labourer, coming home to his tea, will let his eyes dwell on some green mound, to see sitting or standing there someone who in life was very near and dear to him, with whom he is now exchanging greetings. But the old worn-out labourer, who happily has not gone to end his days in captivity in the bitter Home of the Poor-- he, sitting on a tomb to rest and basking in the sunshine, has a whole crowd of the vanished villagers about him.

It is useless their telling us that when we die we are instantly judged and packed straight off to some region where we are destined to spend an eternity. We know better. Nature, our own hearts, have taught us differently. Furthermore, we have heard of the resurrection--that the dead will rise again at the last day; and with all our willingness to believe what our masters tell us, we know that even a dead man can't be in two places at the same time. Our dead are here where we laid them; sleeping, no doubt, but not so soundly sleeping, we imagine, as not to see and hear us when we visit and speak to them. And being villagers still though dead, they like to see us often, whenever we have a few spare minutes to call round and exchange a few words with them.

This extremely beautiful--and in its effect beneficial--feeling and belief, or instinct, or superst.i.tion if the superior inhabitants of the wood-ants' nest, who throw their dead away and think no more about them, will have it so--is a sweet and pleasant thing in the village life and a consolation to those who are lonely. Let me in conclusion give an instance.

The churchyard I like best is situated in the village itself, and is in use both for the dead and living, and the playground of the little ones, but some time ago I by chance discovered one which was over half a mile from the village; an ancient beautiful church and churchyard which so greatly attracted me that in my rambles in that part I often went a mile or two out of my way just for the pleasure of spending an hour or two in that quiet sacred spot. It was in a wooded district in Hampshire, and there were old oak woods all round the church, with no other building in sight and seldom a sound of human life. There was an old road outside the gate, but few used it. The tombs and stones were many and nearly covered with moss and lichen and half-draped in creeping ivy. There, sitting on a tomb, I would watch the small woodland birds that made it their haunt, and listen to the delicate little warbling or tinkling notes, and admire the two ancient picturesque yew trees growing there.

One day, while sitting on a tomb, I saw a woman coming from the village with a heavy basket on her head, and on coming to the gate she turned in, and setting the basket down walked to a spot about thirty yards from where I sat, and at that spot she remained for several minutes standing motionless, her eyes cast down, her arms hanging at her sides.

A cottage woman in a faded cotton gown, of a common Hampshire type, flat-chested, a rather long oval face, almost colourless, and black dusty hair. She looked thirty-five, but was probably less than thirty, as women of their cla.s.s age early in this county and get the toil-worn, tired face when still young.

By-and-by I went over to her and asked her if she was visiting some of her people at that spot. Yes, she returned; her mother and father were buried under the two gra.s.s mounds at her feet; and then quite cheerfully she went on to tell me all about them--how all their other children had gone away to live at a distance from home, and she was left alone with them when they grew old and infirm. They were natives of the village, and after they were both dead, five years ago, she got a place at a farm about a mile up the road. There she had been ever since, but fortunately she had to come to the village every week, and always on her way back she spent a quarter or half an hour with her parents. She was sure they looked for that weekly visit from her, as they had no other relation in the place now, and that they liked to hear all the village news from her.

All this and more she told me in the most open way. Like Wordsworth's "simple child," what could she know of death? But being a villager myself I was better informed than Wordsworth, and didn't enter on a ponderous argument to prove to her that when people die they die, and being dead, they can't be alive--therefore to pay them a weekly visit and tell them all the news was a mere waste of time and breath.

x.x.xVII

A STORY OF THREE POEMS

I wrote in the last sketch but one of the villager with a literary gift who composes the epitaphs in rhyme of his neighbours when they pa.s.s away and are buried in the churchyard. This has served to remind me of a kindred subject--the poetry or verse (my own included) of those who are not poets by profession: also of an incident. Undoubtedly there is a vast difference between the village rhymester and the true poet, and the poetry I am now concerned with may be said to come somewhat between these two extremes. Or to describe it in metaphor, it may be said to come midway between the crow of the "tame villatic fowl" and the music of the nightingale in the neighbouring copse or of the skylark singing at heaven's gate. The impartial reader may say at the finish that the incident was not worth relating. Are there any such readers? I doubt it. I take it that we all, even those who appear the most matter-of- fact in their minds and lives, have something of the root, the elements, of poetry in their composition. How should it be otherwise, seeing that we are all creatures of like pa.s.sions, all in some degree dreamers of dreams; and as we all possess the faculty of memory we must at times experience emotions recollected in tranquillity. And that, our masters have told us, is poetry.

It is hardly necessary to say that it is nothing of the sort: it is the elements, the essence, the feeling which makes poetry if expressed. I have a pa.s.sion for music, a perpetual desire to express myself in music, but as I can't sing and can't perform on any musical instrument, I can't call myself a musician. The poetic feeling that is in us and cannot be expressed remains a secret untold, a warmth in the heart, a rapture which cannot be communicated. But it cries to be told, and in some rare instances the desire overcomes the difficulty: in a happy moment the unknown language is captured as by a miracle and the secret comes out.

And, as a rule, when it has been expressed it is put in the fire, or locked up in a desk. By-and-by the hidden poem will be taken out and read with a blush. For how could he, a practical-minded man, with a wholesome contempt for the small scribblers and people weak in their intellectuals generally, have imagined himself a poet and produced this pitiful stuff!

Then, too, there are others who blush, but with pleasure, at the thought that, without being poets, they have written something out of their own heads which, to them at all events, reads just like poetry.

Some of these little poems find their way into an editor's hands, to be looked at and thrown aside in most cases, but occasionally one wins a place in some periodical, and my story relates to one of these chosen products--or rather to three.

One summer afternoon, many years ago--but I know the exact date: July 1st, 1897--I was drinking tea on the lawn of a house at Kew, when the maid brought the letters out to her mistress, and she, Mrs. E. Hubbard, looking over the pile remarked that she saw the _Selborne Magazine_ had come and she would just glance over it to see if it contained anything to interest both of us.

After a minute or two she exclaimed "Why, here is a poem by Charlie Longman! How strange--I never suspected him of being a poet!"

She was speaking of C. J. Longman, the publisher, and it must be explained that he was an intimate friend and connection of hers through his marriage with her niece, the daughter of Sir John Evans the antiquary, and sister of Sir Arthur Evans.

The poem was _To the Orange-tip b.u.t.terfly_.

Cardamines! Cardamines!

Thine hour is when the thrushes sing, When gently stirs the vernal breeze, When earth and sky proclaim the spring; When all the fields melodious ring With cuckoos' calls, when all the trees Put on their green, then art thou king Of b.u.t.terflies, Cardamines.

What though thine hour be brief, for thee The storms of winter never blow, No autumn gales shall scorn the lea, Thou scarce shalt feel the summer's glow; But soaring high or flitting low, Or racing with the awakening bees For spring's first draughts of honey--so Thy life is pa.s.sed, Cardamines.

Cardamines! Cardamines!

E'en among mortal men I wot Brief life while spring-time quickly flees Might seem a not ungrateful lot: For summer's rays are scorching hot And autumn holds but summer's lees, And swift in autumn is forgot The winter comes, Cardamines.

So well pleased were we with this little lyric that we read it aloud two or three times over to each other: for it was a hot summer's day when the early, freshness and bloom is over and the foliage takes on a deeper, almost sombre green; and it brought back to us the vivid spring feeling, the delight we had so often experienced on seeing again the orange-tip, that frail delicate flutterer, the loveliest, the most spiritual, of our b.u.t.terflies.

Oddly enough, the very thing which, one supposes, would spoil a lyric about any natural object--the use of a scientific instead of a popular name, with the doubling and frequent repet.i.tion of it--appeared in this instance to add a novel distinction and beauty to the verses.

The end of our talk on the subject was a suggestion I made that it would be a nice act on her part to follow Longman's lead and write a little nature poem for the next number of the magazine. This she said she would do if I on my part would promise to follow her poem with one by me, and I said I would.

Accordingly her poem, which I transcribe, made its appearance in the next number.

MY MOOR

Purple with heather, and golden with gorse, Stretches the moorland for mile after mile; Over it cloud-shadows float in their course,-- Grave thoughts pa.s.sing athwart a smile,-- Till the shimmering distance, grey and gold, Drowns all in a glory manifold.

O the blue b.u.t.terflies quivering there, Hovering, flickering, never at rest, Quickened flecks of the upper air Brought down by seeing the earth so blest; And the gra.s.shoppers shrilling their quaint delight At having been born in a world so bright!

Overhead circles the lapwing slow, Waving his black-tipped curves of wings, Calling so clearly that I, as I go, Call back an answering "Peewit," that brings The sweep of his circles so low as he flies That I see his green plume, and the doubt in his eyes.

Harebell and crowfoot and bracken and ling Gladden my heart as it beats all aglow In a brotherhood true with each living thing, From the crimson-tipped bee, and the chaffer slow, And the small lithe lizard, with jewelled eye, To the lark that has lost herself far in the sky.

Ay me, where am I? for here I sit With bricks all round me, bilious and brown; And not a chance this summer to quit The bustle and roar and the cries of town, Nor to cease to breathe this over-breathed air, Heavy with toil and bitter with care.

Well,--face it and chase it, this vain regret; Which would I choose, to see my moor With eyes such as many that I have met, Which see and are blind, which all wealth leaves poor, Or to sit, brick-prisoned, but free within, Freeborn by a charter no gold can win?

When my turn came, the poem I wrote, which duly appeared, was, like my friend's _Moor_, a recollected emotion, a mental experience relived. Mine was in the New Forest; when walking there on day, the loveliness of that green leafy world, its silence and its melody and the divine sunlight, so wrought on me that for a few precious moments it produced a mystical state, that rare condition of beautiful illusions when the feet are off the ground, when, on some occasions, we appear to be one with nature, unbodied like the poet's bird, floating, diffused in it. There are also other occasions when this transfigured aspect of nature produces the idea that we are in communion with or in the presence of unearthly ent.i.ties.

THE VISIONARY