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Page 1
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.
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