Under the Trees and Elsewhere Part 5

III

Well, this is the Forest of Arden.

The first sensation that comes to one who finds himself at last within the boundaries of the Forest of Arden is a delicious sense of freedom.

I am not sure that there is not a certain sympathy with outlawry in that first exhilarating consciousness of having gotten out of the conventional world--the world whose chief purpose is that all men shall wear the same coat, eat the same dinner, repeat the same polite commonplaces, and be forgotten at last under the same epitaph. Forests have been the natural refuge of outlaws from the earliest time, and among the most respectable persons there has always been an ill-concealed liking for Robin Hood and the whole fraternity of the men of the bow. Truth is above all things characteristic of the dwellers in Arden, and it must be frankly confessed at the beginning, therefore, that the Forest is given over entirely to outlaws; those who have committed some grave offence against the world of conventions, or who have voluntarily gone into exile out of sheer liking for a freer life.

These persons are not vulgar law-breakers; they have neither blood on their hands nor ill-gotten gains in their pockets; they are, on the contrary, people of uncommonly honest bearing and frank speech. Their offences evidently impose small burden on their conscience, and they have the air of those who have never known what it is to have the Furies on one's track. Rosalind was struck with the charming naturalness and gaiety of every one we met in our first ramble on that delicious and never-to-be-forgotten morning when we arrived in Arden.

There was neither a.s.sumption nor diffidence; there was rather an entire absence of any kind of self-consciousness. Rosalind had fancied that we might be quite alone for a time, and we had expected to have a few days to ourselves. We had even planned in our romantic moments--and there is always a good deal of romance among the dwellers in Arden--a continuation of our wedding journey during the first week.

"It will be so much more delightful than before," suggested Rosalind, "because n.o.body will stare at us, and we shall have the whole world to ourselves." In that last phrase I recognised the ideal wedding journey, and was not at all dismayed at the prospect of having no society but Rosalind's for a time. But all such antic.i.p.ations were dispelled in an hour. It was not that we met many people--it is one of the delights of the Forest that one finds society enough to take away the sense of isolation, but not enough to destroy the sweetness of solitude; it was rather that the few we met made us feel at once that we had equal claim with themselves on the hospitality of the place.

The Forest was not only free to every comer, but it evidently gave peculiar pleasure to those who were living in it to convey a sense of ownership to those who were arriving for the first time. Rosalind declared that she felt as much at home as if she had been born there; and she added that she was glad she had brought only the dress she wore. I was a little puzzled by the last remark; it seemed not entirely logical. But I saw presently that she was expressing the fellowship of the place which forbade that one should possess anything that was not in use, and that, therefore, was not adding constantly to the common stock of pleasure. Concerning the feeling of having been born in Arden, I became convinced later that there was good reason for believing that everybody who loved the place had been born there, and that this fact explained the home feeling which came to one the instant he set foot within the Forest. It is, in fact, the only place I have known which seemed to belong to me and to everybody else at the same time; in which I felt no alien influence. In our own home I had something of the same feeling, but when I looked from a window or set foot from a door I was instantly oppressed with a sense of foreign ownership. In the great world how little could I call my own! Only a few feet of soil out of the measureless landscape; only a few trees and flowers out of all that boundless foliage! I seemed driven out of the heritage to which I was born; cheated out of my birthright in the beauty of the field and the mystery of the Forest; put off with the beggarly portion of a younger son when I ought to have fallen heir to the kingdom. My chief joy was that from the little s.p.a.ce I called my own I could see the whole heavens; no man could rob me of that splendid vision.

In Arden, however, the question of ownership never comes into one's thoughts; that the Forest belongs to you gives you a deep joy, but there is a deeper joy in the consciousness that it belongs to everybody else.

The sense of freedom, which comes as strongly to one in Arden as the smell of the sea to one who has made a long journey from the inland, hints, I suppose, at the offence which makes the dwellers within its boundaries outlaws. For one reason or another, they have all revolted against the rule of the world, and the world has cast them out. They have offended smug respectability, with its pa.s.sionless devotion to deportment; they have outraged conventional usage, that carefully devised system by which small natures attempt to bring great ones down to their own dimensions; they have scandalised the orthodoxy which, like Memnon, has lost the music of its morning, and marvels that the world no longer listens; they have derided venerable prejudices--those ugly relics by which some men keep in remembrance their barbarous ancestry; they have refused to follow flags whose battles were won or lost ages ago; they have scorned to compromise with untruth, to go with the crowd, to acquiesce in evil "for the good of the cause," to speak when they ought to keep silent and to keep silent when they ought to speak. Truly the lists of sins charged to the account of Arden is a long one, and were it not that the memory of the world, concerned chiefly with the things that make for its comfort, is a short one, it would go ill with the lovers of the Forest. More than once it has happened that some offender has suffered so long a banishment that he has taken permanent refuge in Arden, and proved his citizenship there by some act worthy of its glorious privileges. In the Forest one comes constantly upon traces of those who, like Dante and Milton, have found there a refuge from the Philistinism of a world that often hates its children in exact proportion to their ability to give it light. For the most part, however, the outlaws who frequent the Forest suffer no longer banishment than that which they impose on themselves. They come and go at their own sweet will; and their coming, I suspect, is generally a matter of their own choosing. The world still loves darkness more than light; but it rarely nowadays falls upon the lantern-bearer and beats the life out of him, as in "the good old times." The world has grown more decent and polite, although still at heart no doubt the bad old world which stoned the prophets. It sneers where it once stoned; it rejects and scorns where it once beat and burned. And so Arden has become a refuge, not so much from persecution and hatred as from ignorance, indifference, and the small wounds of small minds bent upon stinging that which they cannot destroy.

IV

. . . Fleet the time carelessly, as they did in the golden world.

Rosalind and I have always been planning to do a great many pleasant things when we had more time. During the busy days when we barely found opportunity to speak to each other we were always thinking of the better days when we should be able to sit hours together with no knock at the door and no imperative summons from the kitchen. Some man of sufficient eminence to give his words currency ought to define life as a series of interruptions. There are a good many valuable and inspiring things which can only be done when one is in the mood, and to secure a mood is not always an easy matter; there are moods which are as coy as the most high-spirited woman, and must be wooed with as much patience and tact: and when the illusive prize is gained, one holds it by the frailest tenure. An interruption diverts the current, cuts the golden thread, breaks the exquisite harmony. I have often thought that Dante was far less unfortunate than the world has judged him to be. If he had been courted and crowned instead of rejected and exiled, it might have been that his genius would have missed the conditions which gave it immortal utterance. Left to himself, he had only his own nature to reckon with; the world pa.s.sed him by, and left him to the companionship of his sublime and awful dreams. To be left alone with one's self is often the highest good fortune. Moreover, I detest being hurried: it seems to me the most offensive way in which we are reminded of our mortality; there is time enough if we know how to use it.

People who, like Goethe, never rest and never haste, complete their work and escape the friction of it.

One of the most delightful things about life in Arden is the absence of any sense of haste; life is a matter of being rather than of doing, and one shares the tranquillity of the great trees that silently expand year by year. The fever and restlessness are gone, the long strain of nerve and will relaxed; a delicious feeling of having strength and time enough to live one's life and do one's work fills one with a deep and enduring sense of repose.

Rosalind, who had been busy about so many things that I sometimes almost lost sight of her for days together, found time to take long walks with me, to watch the birds and the clouds, and talk by the hour about all manner of pleasant trifles. I came to feel after a time that just what I antic.i.p.ated would happen in Arden had happened. I was fast becoming acquainted with her. We spent days together in the most delightful half-vocal and half-silent fellowship; leaving everything to the mood of the hour and the place. Our walks took us sometimes into lovely recesses, where mutual confidences seemed as natural as the air; sometimes into solitudes where talk seemed an impertinence, and we were silent under the spell of rustling leaves and thrilling melodies coming from we knew not what hidden minstrelsy. But whether silent or speaking, we were fast coming to know each other. I saw many traits in her, many characteristic habits and movements which I had never noted before; and I was conscious that she was making similar discoveries in me. These mutual revelations absorbed us during our first days in the Forest; and they confirmed the impression which I brought with me that half the charm of people is lost under the pressure of work and the irritation of haste. We rarely know our best friends on their best side; our vision of their n.o.blest selves is constantly obscured by the mists of preoccupation and weariness.

In Arden life is pitched on the natural key; n.o.body is ever hurried; n.o.body is ever interrupted; n.o.body carries his work like a pack on his back instead of leaving it behind him as the sun leaves the earth when the day is over and the calm stars shine in the unbroken silence of the sky. Rosalind and I were entirely conscious of the transformation going on within us, and were not slow to submit ourselves to its beneficent influence. We felt that Arden would not put all its resources into our hand until we had shaken off the dust and parted from the fret of the world we had left behind.

In those first inspiring days we went oftenest to the heart of the pines, where the moss grew so deep that our movements were noiseless; where the light fell in subdued and gentle tones among the closely cl.u.s.tered trees; and where no sound ever reached us save the organ music of the great boughs when the wind evoked their sublime harmonies.

Many a time, as we have sat silent while the tones of that majestic symphony rose and fell about us, we seemed to become a part of the scene itself; we felt the unfathomed depth of a music produced by no conscious thought, wrought out by no conscious toil, but akin, in its spontaneity and naturalness, with the fragrance of the flower. And with these thrilling notes there came to us the thought of the calm, reposeful, irresistible growth of Nature; never hasting, never at rest; the silent spreading of the tree, the steady burning of the star, the noiseless flow of the river! Was not this sublime unconsciousness of time, this glorious appropriation of eternity, something we had missed all our lives, and, in missing it, had lost our birthright of quiet hours, calm thought, sweet fellowship, ripening character? The fever and tumult of the world we had left were discords in a strain, that had never yielded its music before.

For nature beats in perfect tune, And rounds with rhyme her every rune, Whether she work in land or sea, Or hide underground her alchemy.

Thou canst not wave thy staff in air, Or dip thy paddle in the lake, But it carves the bow of beauty there, And the ripples in rhymes the oars forsake.

After one of these long, delicious days in the heart of the pines, Rosalind slipped her hand in mine as we walked slowly homeward.

"This is the first day of my life," she said.

V

And this our life, exempt from public haunt, Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, Sermons in stones, and good in everything.

It was one of those entrancing mornings when the earth seems to have been made over under cover of night, and one drinks the first draught of a new experience when he sees it by the light of a new day. Such mornings are not uncommon in Arden, where the nightly dews work a perpetual miracle of freshness. On this particular morning we had strayed long and far, the silence and solitude of the woods luring us hour after hour with unspoken promises to the imagination. We had come at length to a place so secluded, so remote from stir and sound, that one might dream there of the sacredness of ancient oracles and the revels of ancient G.o.ds.

Rosalind had gathered wild flowers along the way, and sat at the base of a great tree intently disentangling her treasures. With that figure before me, I thought of nearer and more sacred things than the old woodland G.o.ds that might have strayed that way centuries ago; I had no need to recall the vanished times and faiths to interpret the spirit of an hour so far from the commonplaces of human speech, so free from the pa.s.sing moods of human life. The sweet unconsciousness of that face, bent over the ma.s.s of wild flowers, and akin to them in its unspoiled loveliness, was to that hour and place like the illuminated capital in the old missal; a ray of colour which unlocked the dark mystery of the text. When one can see the loveliness of a wild flower, and feel the absorbing charm of its sentiment, one is not far from the kingdom of Nature.

As these fancies chased one another across my mind, lying there at full length on the moss, I, too, seemed to lose all consciousness that I had ever touched life at any point than this, or that any other hour had ever pressed its cup of experience to my lips. The great world of which I was once part disappeared out of memory like a mist that recedes into a faint cloud and lies faint and far on the boundaries of the day; my own personal life, to which I had been bound by such a mult.i.tude of gossamer threads that when I tried to unloose one I seemed to weave a hundred in its place, seemed to sink below the surface of consciousness. I ceased to think, to feel; I was conscious only of the vast and glorious world of tree and sky which surrounded me. I felt a thrill of wonder that I should be so placed. I had often lain thus under other trees, but never in such a mood as this. It was as if I had detached myself from the hitherto unbroken current of my personal life, and by some miracle of that marvellous place become part of the inarticulate life of Nature. Clouds and trees, dim vistas of shadow and flower-starred s.p.a.ce of sunlight, were no longer alien to me; I was akin with the vast and silent movement of things which encompa.s.sed me.

No new sound came to me, no new sight broke on my vision; but I heard with ears, and I saw with eyes, to which all other sounds and sights had ceased to be. I cannot translate into words the mystery and the thrill of that hour when, for the first time, I gave myself wholly into the keeping of Nature, and she received me as her child. What I felt, what I saw and heard, belong only to that place; outside the Forest of Arden they are incomprehensible. It is enough to say that I had parted with all my limitations, and freed myself from all my bonds of habit and ignorance and prejudice; I was no longer worn and spent with work and emotion and impression; I was no longer prisoned within the iron bars of my own personality. I was as free as the bird; I was as little bound to the past as the cloud that an hour ago was breathed out of the heart of the sea; I was as joyous, as unconscious, as wholly given to the rapture of the hour as if I had come into a world where freedom and joy were an inalienable and universal possession. I did not speculate about the great fleecy clouds that moved like galleons in the ethereal sea above me; I simply felt their celestial beauty, the radiancy of their unchecked movement, the freedom and splendour of the inexhaustible play of life of which they were part. I asked no questions of myself about the great trees that wove the garments of the magical forest about me; I felt the stir of their ancient life, rooted in the centuries that had left no record in that place save the added girth and the discarded leaf; I had no thought about the bird whose note thrilled the forest save the rapture of pouring out without measure or thought the joy that was in me; I felt the vast irresistible movement of life rolling, wave after wave, out of the unseen seas beyond, obliterating the faint divisions by which, in this working world, we count the days of our toil, and making all the ages one unbroken growth; I felt the measureless calm, the sublime repose, of that uninterrupted expansion of form and beauty, from flower to star and from bird to cloud; I felt the mighty impulse of that force which lights the sun in its track and sets the stars to mark the boundaries of its way. Unbroken repose, unlimited growth, inexhaustible life, measureless force, unsearchable beauty--who shall feel these things and not know that there are no words for them! And yet in Arden they are part of every man's life!

And all the time Rosalind sat weaving her wild flowers into a loose wreath.

"I must not take them from this place," she said, as she bound them about the venerable tree, as one would bind the fancy of the hour to some eternal truth.

"Yesterday," she added, as she sat down again and shook the stray leaves and petals from her lap--"yesterday was the first day of my life; to-day is the second."

It is one of the delights of Arden that one does not need to put his whole thought into words there; half the need of language vanishes when we say only what we mean, and what we say is heard with sympathy and intelligence. Rosalind and I were thinking the same thought.

Yesterday we had discovered that an open mind, freedom from work and care and turmoil, make it possible for people to be their true selves and to know each other. To-day we had discovered that Nature reveals herself only to the open mind and heart; to all others she is deaf and dumb. The worldling who seeks her never sees so much as the hem of her garment; the egotist, the self-engrossed man, searches in vain for her counsel and consolation; the over-anxious, fretful soul finds her indifferent and incommunicable. We may seek her far and wide, with minds intent upon other things, and she will forever elude us; but on the morning we open our windows with a free mind, she is there to break for us the seal of her treasures and to pour out the perfume of her flowers. She is cold, remote, inaccessible only so long as we close the doors of our hearts and minds to her. With the drudges and slaves of mere getting and saving she has nothing in common; but with those who hold their souls above the price of the world and the bribe of success she loves to share her repose, her strength, and her beauty.

In Arden Rosalind and I cared as little for the world we had left as children intent upon daisies care for the dust of the road out of which they have come into the wide meadows.

VI

Here feel we but the penalty of Adam, The season's difference, as the icy fang And churlish chiding of the winter wind, Which, when it bites and blows upon my body, Even till I shrink with cold, I smile and say, This is no flattery: these are counsellors That feelingly persuade me what I am.

If the ideal conditions of life, of which most of us dream, could be realised, the result would be a padded and luxurious existence, well-housed, well-fed, well-dressed, with all the winds of heaven tempered to indolence and cowardice. We are saved from absolute shame by the consciousness that if such a life were possible we should speedily revolt against the comforts that flattered the body while they ignored the soul. In Arden there is no such compromise with our immoral desires to get results without work, to buy without paying for what we receive. Nature keeps no running accounts and suffers no man to get in her debt; she deals with us on the principles of immutable righteousness; she treats us as her equals, and demands from us an equivalent for every gift or grace of sight or sound she bestows. She rejects contemptuously the advances of the weaklings who aspire to become her beneficiaries without having made good their claim by some service or self-denial; she rewards those only who, like herself, find music in the tempest as well as in the summer wind; joy in arduous service as well as in careless ease. A world in which there were no labours to be accomplished, no burdens to be borne, no storms to be endured, would be a world without true joy, honest pleasure, or n.o.ble aspiration. It would be a fool's paradise.

The Forest of Arden is not without its changes of weather and season.

Rosalind and I had fancied that it was always summer there, and that sunlight reigned from year's end to year's end; if we had been told that storms sometimes over-shadowed it, and that the icy fang of winter is felt there, we should have doubted the report. We had a good deal to learn when we first went to Arden; in fact, we still have a great deal to learn about this wonderful country, in which so many of the ideals and standards with which we were once familiar are reversed. It is one of the blessed results of living in the Forest that one is more and more conscious that he does not know and more and more eager to learn. There are no shams of any sort in Arden, and all pride in concealing one's ignorance disappears; one's chief concern is to be known precisely as he is. We were a little sensitive at first, a little disposed to be cautious about asking questions that might reveal our ignorance; but we speedily lost the false shame we had brought with us from a world where men study to conceal, as a means of protecting, the things that are most precious to them. When we learned that in the Forest n.o.body vulgarises one's affairs by making them matter of common talk, that all the meannesses of slander and gossip and misinterpretation are unknown, and that charity, courtesy, and honour are the unfailing law of intercourse, we threw down our reserves and experienced the refreshing freedom and sympathy of full knowledge between man and man.

After a long succession of golden days we awoke one morning to the familiar sound of rain on the roof; there was no mistake about it; it was raining in Arden! Rosalind was so incredulous that I could see she doubted if she were awake; and when she had satisfied herself of that fact she began to ask herself whether we had been really in the Forest at all; whether we had not been dreaming in a kind of double consciousness, and had now come to the awakening which should rob us of this golden memory. At last we recognised the fact that we were still in Arden, and that it was raining. It was a melancholy awakening, and we were silent and depressed at breakfast; for the first time no birds sang, and no sunlight flickered through the leaves and brought the day smiling to our very door. The rain fell steadily, and when the wind swept through the trees a sound like a sob went up from the Forest.

After breakfast, for lack of active occupation, we lighted a few sticks in the rough fireplace, and found ourselves gradually drawn into the circle of cheer in the little room. The great world of Nature was for a moment out of doors, and there seemed no incongruity talking about our own experiences; we recalled the days in the world we had left behind; we remembered the faces of our neighbours; we reminded each other of the incidents of our journey; we retold, in antiphonal fashion, the story of our stay in the Forest; we grew eloquent as we described, one after another, the n.o.ble persons we had met there; our hearts kindled as we became conscious of the wonderful enrichment and enlargement of life that had come to us; and as the varied splendours of the days and scenes of Arden returned in our memories, the spell of the Forest came upon us, and the mysterious cadence of the rain, falling from leaf to leaf, added another and deeper tone to the harmony of our Forest life. The gloom had gone; we had all the delight of a new experience in our hearts.

"I am glad it rains," Rosalind said, as she gave the fire one of her vigorous stirrings; "I am glad it rains: I don't think we should have realised how lovely it is here if we were not shut in from time to time. One is played upon by so many impressions that one must escape from them to understand how beautiful they are. And then I'm not sure that even dark days and rain have not something which sunshine and clear skies could not give us." As usual, Rosalind had spoken my thought before I had made it quite clear to myself; I began to feel the peculiar delight of our comfort in the heart of that great forest when the storm was abroad. The monotone of the rain became rhythmic with some ancient, primeval melody, which the woods sang before their solitude had been invaded by the eager feet of men always searching for something which they do not possess. I felt the spell of that mighty life which includes the tempest and the tumult of winds and waves among the myriad voices with which it speaks its marvellous secret. Half the meaning would go out of Nature if no storms ever dimmed the light of stars or vexed the calm of summer seas. It is the infinite variety of Nature which fits response to every need and mood, renews forever the freshness of contact with her, and holds us by a power of which we never weary because we never exhaust its resources.

"After all, Rosalind," I said, "it was not the storms and the cold which made our old life hard, and gave Nature an unfriendly aspect; it was the things in our human experience which gave tempest and winter a meaning not their own. In a world in which all hearts beat true, and all hands were helpful, there would be no real hardship in Nature. It is the loss, sorrow, weariness, and disappointment of life which give dark days their gloom, and cold its icy edge, and work its bitterness.

The real sorrows of life are not of Nature's making; if faithlessness and treachery and every sort of baseness were taken out of human lives, we should find only a healthy and vigorous joy in such hardship as Nature imposes upon us. Upon men of sound, sweet life, she lays only such burdens as strength delights to carry, because in so doing it increases itself."

"That is true," said Rosalind. "The day is dark only when the mind is dark; all weathers are pleasant when the heart is at rest. There are rainy days in Arden, but no gloomy ones; there are probably cold days, but none that chill the soul."

I do not know whether it was Rosalind's smile or the sudden breaking of the sun through the clouds that made the room brilliant; probably it was both. Rosalind opened the lattice, and I saw that the rain had ceased. The drops still hung on every leaf, but the clouds were breaking into great shining ma.s.ses, and the blue of the sky was of unsearchable purity and depth. The sun poured a flood of light into the heart of the Forest, and suddenly every tiny drop, that a moment ago might have seemed a symbol of sorrow, held the radiant sun on its little disk, and every sphere shone as if a universe of fairy creation had been suddenly breathed into being. And the splendour touched Rosalind also.

VII

. . . Pray you, if you know, Where in the purlieus of this forest stands A sheep-cote fenc'd about with olive trees?

The rank of osiers by the murmuring stream Left on your right hand, brings you to the place.