He smiled at me and stooped again, raised the plant and gave it to me. It had a fresh sharp fragrance of the woodland and blowing winds, but the thorns pricked my hands. . . .
The dream was gone, and I awoke; lying there, trying to recover the thing which I had seen, I heard the first faint piping of the birds begin in the ivy round my windows, as they woke drowsily and contentedly to life and work. The truth flashed upon me, in one of those sudden lightning-blazes that seem to obliterate even thought.
"Yes," I cried to myself, "that is the secret! It is that life does not end; it goes on. To find what I am in search of, to understand, to interpret, to see clearly, to sum it up, that would be an end, a soft closing of the book, the shutting of the door—and that is just what I do not want. I want to live, and endure, and suffer, and experience, and love, and NOT to understand. It is life continuous, unfolding, expanding, developing, with new delights, new sorrows, new pains, new losses, that I need: and whether we know that we need it, or think we need something else, it is all the same; for we cannot escape from life, however reluctant or sick or crushed or despairing we may be. It waits for us until we have done groaning and bleeding, and we must rise up again and live. Even if we die, even if we seek death for ourselves, it is useless. The eye may close, the tide of unconsciousness may flow in, the huddled limbs may tumble prone; a moment, and then life begins again; we have but flown like the bird from one tree to another. There is no end and no release; it is our destiny to live; the darkness is all about us, but we are the light, enlacing it with struggling beams, piercing it with fiery spears. The darkness cannot quench it, and wherever the light goes, there it is light. The herb Moly is but the patience to endure, whether we like it or no. It delivers us, not from ourselves, not from our pains or our delights, but only from our fears. They are the only unreal things, because we are of the indomitable essence of light and movement, and we cannot be overcome nor extinguished—we can but suffer, we cannot die; we leap across the nether night; we pass resistless on our way from star to star."
XV
BEHOLD, THIS DREAMER COMETH
I saw in one of the daily illustrated papers the other day a little picture—a snapshot from the front—which filled me with a curious emotion. It was taken in some village behind the German lines. A handsome, upright boy of about seventeen, holding an accordion under his arm—a wandering Russian minstrel, says the comment—has been brought before a fat, elderly, Landsturm officer to be interrogated. The officer towers up, in a spiked helmet, holding his sword-hilt in one hand and field-glasses in the other, looking down at the boy truculently and fiercely. Another officer stands by smiling. The boy himself is gazing up, nervous and frightened, staring at his formidable captor, a peasant beside him, also looking agitated. There is nothing to indicate what happened, but I hope they let the boy go! The officer seemed to me to typify the tyranny of human aggressiveness, at its stupidest and ugliest. The boy, graceful, appealing, harmless, appeared, I thought, to stand for the spirit of beauty, which wanders about the world, lost in its own dreams, and liable to be called sharply to account when it strays within the reach of human aggressiveness occupied in the congenial task of making havoc of the world's peaceful labours.
The Landsturm officer in the picture had so obviously the best of it; he was thoroughly enjoying his own formidableness; while the boy had the look of an innocent, bright-eyed creature caught in a trap, and wondering miserably what harm it could have done.
Something of the same kind is always going on all the world over; the collision of the barbarous and disciplined forces of life with the beauty-loving, detached instinct of man. The latter cannot give a reason for its existence, and yet I am by no means sure that it is not going to triumph in the end.
There is every reason to believe that within the last twenty years the sowing of education broadcast has had an effect upon the human outlook, rather than perhaps upon the human character, which has not been adequately estimated. The crop is growing up all about us, and we hardly yet know what it is. I am going to speak of one out of the many results of this upon one particular section of the community, because I have become personally aware of it in certain very definite ways. It is easy to generalise about tendencies, but I am here speaking from actual evidence of an unmistakable kind.
The section of the community of which I speak is that which can be roughly described as the middle class—homes, that is, which are removed from the urgent, daily pressure of wage-earning; homes where there is a certain security of outlook, of varying wealth, with professional occupation in the background; homes in which there is some leisure; and some possibility of stimulating, by reading, by talk, by societies, an interest in ideas. It is not a tough, intellectual interest, but it ends in a very definite desire to idealise life a little, to harmonise it, to give colour to it, to speculate about it, to lift it out of the region of immediate, practical needs, to try experiments, to live on definite lines, with a definite aim in sight—that aim being to enlarge, to adorn, to enrich life.