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 e 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