Moreover, in my own experience, the further secret, whatever it is, is by no means wholly joyful and not at all light-hearted. It seems to me at such times that it is rather solemn, profound, serious, difficult, and sad. But it is not a heavy or depressing sadness— indeed, the thought is at once hopeful and above everything beautiful. It has nothing that is called sentimental about it. It is not full of rest and content and peace; it is rather strong and stern, though it is gentle too; but it is the kind of gentle strength which faces labour and hardness, not troubled by them, and indeed knowing that only thus can the secret be attained. There is no hint of easy, childlike happiness about the mood; there is a happiness in it, but it is an old and a wise happiness that has learned how to wait and is fully prepared for endurance. There is no fretfulness in it, no chafing over dreams unrealised, no impatience or disappointment. But it does not speak of an untroubled bliss—rather of a deep, sad and loving patience, which expects no fulfilment, no easy satisfaction of desire.
It always seems to me that the quality which most differentiates men is the power of recognising the Unknown. Some natures acquiesce buoyantly or wretchedly in present conditions, and cannot in any circumstances look beyond them; some again have a deep distaste for present conditions whatever they are; and again there are some who throw themselves eagerly and freely into present conditions, use experience, taste life, enjoy, grieve, dislike, but yet preserve a consciousness of something above and beyond. The idealist is one who has a need in his soul to worship, to admire, to love. The mistake made too often by religious idealists is to believe that this sense of worship can only be satisfied by religious and, even more narrowly, by ecclesiastical observance. For there are many idealists to whom religion with its scientific creeds and definite dogmas seems only a dreary sort of metaphysic, an attempt to define what is beyond definition. But there are some idealists who find the sense of worship and the consciousness of an immortal power in the high passions and affections of life. To these the human form, the spirit that looks out from human eyes, are the symbols of their mystery. Others find it in art and music, others again in the endless loveliness of nature, her seas and streams, her hills and woods. Others again find it in visions of helping and raising mankind out of base conditions, or in scientific investigation of the miraculous constitution of nature. It has a hundred forms and energies; but the one feature of it is the sense of some vast and mysterious Power, which holds the world in its grasp—a Power which can be dimly apprehended and even communicated with. Prayer is one manifestation of this sense, though prayer is but a formulation of one's desires for oneself and for the world.
But the essential and vital part of the mystery is not what the soul asks of it, but the signals which it makes to the soul. And here I am but recording my own experience when I say that the lights and gleams of sunset, its golden inlets and cloud-ripples, the dusky veil it weaves about the world, is for my own spirit the solemnity which effects for me what I believe that the mass effects for a devoted Catholic—the unfolding in hints and symbols of the mysteries of God. An unbeliever may look on at a mass and see nothing but the vesture and the rite, a drama of woven paces and waving hands, when a believer may become aware of the very presence of the divine. And the sunset has for me that same unveiling of the beauty of God; it illumines and transfigures life; it shows me visibly and sacredly that beauty pure and stainless runs from end to end of the universe, and calls upon me to adore it, to prostrate myself before its divine essence. The fact that another may see it carelessly and indifferently makes no difference. It only means that not thus does he perceive God. But, for myself, I know no experience more wholly and deeply religious than when I pass in solitude among deep stream-fed valleys, or over the wide fenland, or through the familiar hamlet, and see the dying day flame and smoulder far down in the west among cloudy pavilions or in tranquil spaces of clear sky. Then the well-known land whose homely, day- long energies I know seems to gather itself together into a far and silent adoration, to commit itself trustfully and quietly to God, to receive His endless benediction, and in that moment to become itself eternal in a soft harmony of voiceless praise and passionate desire.
VII
THE HOUSE OF PENGERSICK
There are days—perhaps it is well that they are not more common— when by some singular harmony of body and spirit, every little sound and sight strikes on the senses with a peculiar sharpness and distinctness of quality, has a keen and racy savour, and comes as delightfully home to the mind as cool well-water to thirsty lips. Everything seems in place, in some well-designed combination or symphony of the senses; and more than that—the sound, the sight, whatever it be, sets free a whole train of far-reaching and mysterious thoughts, that seem to flash the secret of life on the spirit—or rather hint it in a tender, smiling way, as a mother nods a delighted acquiescence to the eager questions of a child face to face with some happy surprise. That day of January was just such a day to me, as we drove along the dreary road from Marazion to Helston, by ruined mine-towers with their heaps of scoriae, looking out to the sea on the one hand, and on the other to the low, monotonous slopes of tilth and pasture, rising and falling like broad-backed waves, with here and there a wild and broken wood of firs, like the forest of Broceliande, or a holt of wind-brushed, fawn-coloured ash-trees, half empurpled by the coming of spring, in some rushy dingle by the stream side.
It was a cool grey day, with a haze over the sea, the gusty sky of yesterday having hardened into delicate flakes of pearly cloud, like the sand on some wave-beaten beach. It was all infinitely soft and refreshing to the eye, that outspread pastoral landscape, seen in a low dusk, like the dusk of a winter dawn.
It was then that in a little hollow to our right we saw the old House of Pengersick—what a grim, lean, hungry sort of name! We made our way down along a little road, the big worn flints standing up out of the gravel, by brakes of bramble, turf-walls where the ferns grew thick, by bits of wild upland covered with gorse and rusty bracken, and down at last to the tiny hamlet—four or five low white houses, in little gardens where the escallonia grew thick and glossy, the purple veronica bloomed richly, and the green fleshy mesembryanthemum tumbled and dripped over the fences. The tower itself rose straight out of a farmyard, where calves stared through the gate, pigs and hens routed and picked in the mire. I have seldom seen so beautiful a bit of building: it was a great square battlemented tower, with a turret, the mullioned windows stopped up with sea-worn boulders. The whole built of very peculiar stone, of a dark grey tinge, weathered on the seaward side to a most delicate silvery grey, with ivy sprawling over it in places, like water shot out from a pail over a stone floor. There were just a few traces of other buildings in the sheds and walls, and bits of carved stonework piled up in a rockery. No doubt the little farm itself and the cottages were all built out of the ruins.
From the tower itself—it has a few bare rooms filled with farm lumber—one can see down the valley to the long grey line of the Prah sands, and the low dusky cliffs of Hove point, where the waves were breaking white.
I suppose it needed to be a strong place. The Algiers and Sallee pirates used to make descents upon this coast till a comparatively recent date. As late as 1636 they kidnapped seven boats and forty- two fishermen off the Manacles, none of whom were ever heard of again. Eighty fishermen from Looe were captured in one day, and there is a complaint extant from the justices of Cornwall to the lord lieutenant that in one year Cornwall had lost above a thousand mariners thus!