Leaves in the Wind Part 13

Still to ourselves in every place consigned Our own felicity we make or find.

In its political intention I have always disagreed with this verse.

Johnson was a Tory who loved liberty in its social meanings, but distrusted it as a political ideal and hated all agitation for reform.

And because he hated reform he said that our happiness had no relation to the conditions in which we live.

It is an argument which must be a great comfort to the slum-owner, the slave-owner, the profiteer, and all the odious people who live by exploiting others. And like most falsities there is a sense in which it is true. The child playing in a sunless court laughs as gaily and probably experiences as much animal happiness--a.s.suming it is sufficiently fed and sufficiently warm--as the boy in the Eton playing-fields. It is a mercy it is so. It is a mercy that we have this reservoir of defiant happiness within that answers the harsh and bitter blows of outward circ.u.mstance. But he who advances this fact as a political argument is not a wise man. Is the quality of happiness nothing? Is it nothing to us whether we find our happiness over a pint-pot, or in the love of gardens, the beauties of the world and the infinite fields of the mind's adventures? Is it nothing to society?

We have learned that even the pig is better for a clean sty.

But putting aside the quality of happiness and its social aspects, there is much truth in Johnson's lines. Happiness is an entirely personal affair. We have it in large measure or in small, but in so far as we have it it is wholly and completely ours and not the sport of fortune. I do not say that if you put me in a dungeon it will not lessen the sum of my happiness, for personal freedom is the soul of happiness. If you are a sensitive person the sorrows of the world will afflict you, but they will afflict you as a personal thing, and it may be doubted whether their magnitude will add to the affliction. I hope it is not a shocking thing to say, but I sometimes doubt, looking on the world as it appears to me and putting aside the infinity of sheer physical suffering, whether the sum of personal happiness is less to-day than in normal times.

I was talking the other day to a well-known author, who expressed satisfaction that he had had the good fortune to live in the most "interesting" period of the world's history. There was an indignant protest against the word from another member of the company; but the author insisted. Yes, interesting. Could not tragedy be interesting as well as comedy? Could not one feel all the horror and misery and insanity of this frightful upheaval, shoulder one's tasks, take one's part in the battle, and still preserve in the quiet chambers of the mind a detached and philosophic contemplation of the drama and p.r.o.nounce it--yes, interesting? His own record of unselfish service during the war, and his pa.s.sionate desire for a sane and ordered world were too unquestionable for his meaning to be misunderstood.

And the idea he wished to convey was sound enough. There has never been an event on the earth which has so absorbed the thought, the energies, and the faculties of men as the catastrophe through which we are living. It overshadows every moment of our lives, colours everything that we do, roots up our habits, cuts down our food, breaks up our homes, scatters the dead like leaves over the plains of Europe, and sows the seas with the wreckage of a thousand ships. I can fancy that when our great-grand-children in 2017 look back upon the days of their forefathers they will picture us cowering like sheep before the tempest, with no thought except of the gigantic cataclysm that has overtaken us. In a sense they will be right. In another sense they will be wrong. We are living through a nightmare, but we laugh in our dreams. The vastness of the general calamity might be expected to plunge us individually in despair. But it doesn't. Individually we seem to preserve a defiant cheerfulness, s.n.a.t.c.h our pleasures with a sharpened appet.i.te, can even find a fascination in the wild sky and the lightnings that stab the tortured earth.

As I look up I see the buses pa.s.sing and read the announcements on the knife-boards. You might, reading them, suppose that we were living in the most light-hearted of worlds. There is "A Little Bit of Fluff" at one theatre, "High Jinks" at another, "Monty's Flapper" here, the "Bing Girls" there, and someone called Shirley Kellogg invites me to "Zig-Zag." These, my dear child of A.D. 2017, are the things with which England amused itself in the time of the tempest. And do not forget also that it was during the great war that Charlie Chaplin swept the two hemispheres with the magic of his incomparable idiocy. Perhaps without the great war he could not have achieved such unparalleled renown. For this levity is largely a counterpoise to our anxieties--a violent reaction against events, an attempt to keep the balance of things even. The strain on us is so heavy that we tend to go a little wildly in extremes, as the ship sailing through heavy seas plunges into the trough of the waves and then soars skyward, but preserves its equilibrium throughout.

We are seen both at our best and our worst--stripped naked as it were to the soul, our disguises gone, our real selves revealed to ourselves and to our neighbours, and with equal surprise to both. Our nerve-ends are bare, and our reactions to circ.u.mstance are violent and irrational.

We are at once more generous and more bitter. We are the sport even of the weather. If we see the silver lining of our spiritual cloud more brilliantly when the sun laughs in our faces, our depression touches a more abysmal note when the east wind blows and we flounder in the slush of our winter nights. I could not help a.s.sociating with the procession of happy faces in the Strand another widely different incident that I witnessed in a bus the other night. It seemed the reverse side of the same shield. A respectably dressed, middle-aged pair came in out of the darkness and the sleet. They were both rather large, and there was not much room, but they squeezed themselves into two vacant places with an air of silent resolution which indicated that they would stand no nonsense, knew how to demand their "rights" and had no civility to waste on anybody. You know the sort of people. If you don't get out of their way in double quick time they simply sit down on you. They do not say "Is there room?" or "Can you make room?" That would be a sign of weakness, an act of politeness, and they abominate politeness, except in other people. They expect it in other people.

"Where are you going to?" asked the woman when they were seated.

"Victoria," said the man with a snap.

"Well you needn't bite my head off," said the woman.

"I've told you six times," snapped the man.

"What a bully you are," retorted the woman. Then they subsided into silence. Husband and wife, I thought--bursting with bad temper to such an extent that they boil over even in a bus full of people. Probably they have been snarling like that ever since their honeymoon, and will go on snarling until one puts on c.r.a.pe for the other.

But, on second thoughts, I concluded that this was probably unjust.

They had come in out of the slush and the blackness, and had got the gloom of the London night in their souls. Most of us get it in our souls more or less. It makes us ill-humoured and depressed. In the early days there was a certain novelty in the darkened streets, and some ecstatic writers discovered that London had never been so beautiful before. They even wrote poems about it. When you blundered into a pillar-box and began making profuse apologies, or stumbled against the kerb-stone, or fell into the arms of some invisible but substantial part of the darkness, or scurried frantically across Trafalgar Square, you felt that it was all part of the great adventure of war and was in its way rather romantic and exhilarating. But three winters of that experience have exhausted our enthusiasm and have made London at night a mere debauch of depression except for those who make it a debauch of another kind.

But whatever the explanation of that little scene in the bus, there is no doubt that as the long strain goes on it plays havoc with our nerves and our tempers. We are tired and angry with this mad world, and since we cannot visit our anger on the enemy we visit it very unreasonably on each other. The shattered vase of life lies in ruins at our feet, and there is an overmastering temptation to grind the fragments to dust rather than piece them together for the healing future to restore. We have lost faith in men, in principles, in ideals, in ourselves, and are subdued to the naked barbarism into which civilisation has collapsed.

Religion was never at so low an ebb, so openly repudiated, or, what is worse, so travestied by charlatans and blackguards. I heard the other day the description of an address at a public gathering by a person who mixed up his blasphemies about some new G.o.d of the creature's imagining with obscenities that would be impossible on a music-hall stage.

In the Divorce Court last week the counsel for the lady in the case gravely advanced the plea that in these days, when men are dying by the million in mud and filth, the women at home must not be denied their excitements, their flirtations and their late suppers. When Mars is abroad Venus must be abroad, too. Murder is the sole business of the world and l.u.s.t is its proper pastime. Take a glance at any bookstall and note the garbage which lines its shelves. Dip into the mora.s.s of the popular Sunday newspapers with their millions of circulation, and see the broth of foulness in which the great public take their weekly intellectual bath. The tide has overwhelmed the Stage as it has overwhelmed the Church, and a wild levity companions our illimitable tragedy.

It is no new phenomenon. In time of peril humanity always reveals these extravagant contrasts, and Boccaccio, with the true instinct of the artist, set his tales of merriment and licentiousness against the background of a city perishing of plague. We live at once more intensely and more frivolously. The pendulum of our emotions swings violently from extreme to extreme and a defiant exhilaration answers the mood of depression and anxiety. I can conceive that that couple in the bus were quite merry when they saw the sun shine in the morning and read that Vimy Ridge had been won. There is, in Pepys' Diary, a delightful ill.u.s.tration of the swift transitions by which the mind in times of stress seeks to keep its equipoise. It is the 10th of September (Lord's Day), 1665. The plague is at its worst and the whole city seems doomed. The war with the Dutch is going badly. Mrs.

Pepys's father is dying, and everything looks black. But there comes news of a success at sea and Pepys goes down the river to meet Lord Brouncker and Sir J. Minnes at Greenwich--

--where we supped [there was also Sir W. Doyly and Mr. Evelyn]; but the receipt of this news did put us all into such an extasy of joy that it inspired into Sir J. Minnes and Mr. Evelyn such a spirit of mirth that in all my life I never met so merry a two hours as our company this night. Among other humours, Mr. Evelyn's repeating of some verses made up of nothing but the various acceptations of may and can, and doing it so aptly upon occasion of something of that nature, and so fast, did make us all die almost with laughing, and did so stop the mouth of Sir J. Minnes in the middle of all his mirth that I never saw any man so out-done in all my life; and Sir J. Minnes's mirth to see himself out-done was the crown of all our mirth.

Isn't that a wonderful picture? And think of the grave John Evelyn having this gaiety in him! You will read the whole of his Diary and not get one smile from his severe countenance. I had the curiosity to turn to his own record of the same time. He has no entry for the 10th, but two days before, he says:

Came home, there perishing neere 10,000 poor creatures weekly; however, I went all along the City and suburbs from Kent Streete to St. James's, a dismal pa.s.sage, and dangerous to see so many coffins expos'd in the streetes, now thin of people; the shops shut up and all in mourneful silence, as not knowing whose turn might be next.

And then, at the receipt of a bit of good news this austere man is seized with "such an extasy of joy" that he gives Pepys the merriest evening of his life. And Pepys was a good judge of merry evenings.

The truth is expressed somewhere in Hardy's works, where he says that the soul's specific gravity is always less than that of the sea of circ.u.mstances into which it is cast, and rises unfailingly to the surface. There comes to my mind as ill.u.s.trating this truth a pa.s.sage in that great and moving book "Under Fire"--the most tremendous picture of the horror and squalor of war ever painted by man. One of the squad of French soldiers with whom the book deals is in the trenches near Souchez and the Vimy Ridge. It is before the English had taken over that part of the line. There is a quiet time and some of the men get on companionable terms with the enemy. This man's wife and child are in Lens, just behind the German lines. He has not seen them for eighteen months, and out of sheer good nature the German soldiers lend him a uniform and smuggle him into a coal fatigue which is going into Lens. He pa.s.ses in the disguise among his enemy companions by his own house and sees through the open door his wife and the widow of a comrade sitting at their work. In the room with them are two German non-commissioned officers, and his child is on the knee of one of them.

But the thing that strikes him to the heart is the fact that his wife is smiling as she talks to the non-coms.--"Not a forced smile, not a debtor's smile, non, a real smile that came from her, that she gave."

He did not doubt her affection or her loyalty, and when the bitterness had pa.s.sed and he was back in his lines and telling his comrade of the adventure, he defended her from the criticism of his own mind in words of extraordinary beauty:

"She's quite young, you know; she's twenty-six. She can't hold her youth in, it's coming out of her all over, and when she's resting in the lamplight and the warmth, she's got to smile; and even if she burst out laughing, it would just simply be her youth singing in her throat.

It isn't on account of others, if truth were told; it's on account of herself. It's life. She lives. Ah, yes, she lives and that's all.

It isn't her fault if she lives. You wouldn't have her die? Very well, what do you want her to do? Cry all day on account of me and the Boches? Grouse? One can't cry all the time, nor grouse for eighteen months. Can't be done. It's too long, I tell you. That's all there is to it."

In that poignant story we touch the root of the matter. We live. And, living, the light and shadow of life play across the surface of ourselves, though deep down in our hearts there is the sense of the unspeakable tragedy of things. We may wonder that we can be happy and may be rather ashamed of it, but "we live" and we cannot deny our natures. We may, like Miss Havisham, draw down the blinds, shut out the world, and dwell in darkness, but then we cease to live and become mad. We must laugh if only to keep our sanity, and nature arranges that we shall laugh even in the face of terrible things. There was a good deal of truth in the remark of the French lady to Boswell that "Our happiness depends on the circulation of the blood." The wild current of affairs sweeps us on whithersoever it will, but in our separate little eddies we whirl around and find relief in private distractions and pleasures that seem independent of the great march of events. Jane Austen wrote her novels in the midst of the Napoleonic wars, yet I cannot recall one hint in them of that world-shaking event.

She mentioned a battle in one of her letters, but then only a little callously. And a friend of mine told me the other day that he had had the curiosity to turn up the newspaper files of the time of Austerlitz and found that the public were apparently all agog, not about the battle that had changed the current of the world, but about the merits of the Infant Roscius. It is well that we have this faculty of detachment and independent life. If there were no private relief for this public tragedy the world would have gone mad. But perhaps you will say it has gone mad....

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 ill.u.s.trate 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 sh.o.r.e, 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 ill.u.s.tration 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 cas.e.m.e.nt 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 trans.m.u.ting 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: