In the same way, few men can now look back to their childhood like Traherne and say that
“All appeared new and strange at first, inexpressibly rare and delightful and beautiful. I was a little stranger which at my entrance into the world was saluted and surrounded with innumerable joys. My knowledge was Divine. I knew by intuition those things which since my Apostasy I collected again by the highest reason. My very ignorance was advantageous. I seemed as one brought into the Estate of Innocence. All things were spotless and pure and glorious; yea, and infinitely mine, and joyful and precious. I knew not that there were any sins or complaints or laws. I dreamed not of poverties, contentions or vices. All tears and quarrels were hidden from mine eyes. Everything was at rest, free and immortal. I knew nothing of sickness or death or rents or exaction, either for tribute or bread.... All Time was Eternity, and a perpetual Sabbath. Is it not strange, that an infant should be heir of the whole world and see those mysteries which the books of the learned never unfold?”[3]
We blink, deliberately or not, unpleasant facts in our own lives, as in the social life of Greece or the Middle Ages. Some have no need to do so; robustly or sensitively made, their childish surroundings have been such as to meet their utmost needs or to draw out their finest powers or to leave them free. Ambition, introspection, remorse had not begun. The vastness and splendour and gloom of a world not understood, but seen in its effects and hardly at all in its processes, made a theatre for their happiness which—especially when seen through a mist of years—glorify it exceedingly, and it becomes like a ridge of the far-off downs transfigured in golden light, so that we in the valley sigh at the thought that where we have often trod is heaven now. Such beauties of the earth, seen at a distance and inaccessibly serene, always recall the equally inaccessible happiness of childhood. Why have we such a melting mood for what we cannot reach? Why, as we are whirled past them in a train, does the sight of a man and child walking quietly beside a reedy pond, the child stooping for a flower and its gossip unheard—why should we tremble to reflect that we have never tasted just that cloistered balm?
Perhaps the happiest childhoods are those which pass completely away and leave whole tracts of years without a memory; those which are remembered are fullest of keen joy as of keen pain, and it is such that we desire for ourselves if we are capable of conceiving such fantastic desires. I confess to remembering little joy, but to much drowsy pleasure in the mere act of memory. I watch the past as I have seen workless, homeless men leaning over a bridge to watch the labours of a titanic crane and strange workers below in the ship running to and fro and feeding the crane. I recall green fields, one or two whom I loved in them, and though no trace of such happiness as I had remains, the incorruptible tranquillity of it all breeds fancies of great happiness. I recall many scenes: a church and churchyard and black pigs running down from them towards me in a rocky lane—ladslove and tall, crimson, bitter dahlias in a garden—the sweetness of large, moist yellow apples eaten out of doors—children: I do not recall happiness in them, yet the moment that I return to them in fancy I am happy. Something like this is true also of much later self-conscious years. I cannot—I am not tempted to—allow what then spoiled the mingling of the elements of joy to reappear when I look back. The reason, perhaps, is that only an inmost true self that desires and is in harmony with joy can perform these long journeys, and when it has set out upon them it sheds those gross incrustations which were our curse before.
Many are the scenes thus to be recalled without spot or stain. It is a May morning, warm and slightly breezy after midnight rain. In the beech-woods the trees are unloading the dew, which drops from leaf to leaf and down on to the lemon-tinged leaves of dark dog’s-mercury. At the edge of the wood the privet branches are bent down by the weight of raindrops of the size of peas. The dewy white stitchwort stars and the feathered grasses are curved over on the banks. The sainfoin is hoary and sparkling as I move. Already the sun is hot and the sky blue, with faint white clouds in whirls. And in the orchard-trees and drenched luxuriant hedges the garden-warbler sings a subdued note of rushing, bubbling liquidity as of some tiny brook that runs in quick pulsations among the fleshy-leaved water-plants. The bird’s head is uplifted; its throat is throbbing; it moves restlessly from branch to branch, but always renews its song on the new perch; being leaf-like, it is not easily seen. And sometimes through this continuous jargon the small, wild song of the blackcap is heard, which is the utmost expression of moist warm dawns in May thickets of hawthorn-bloom and earliest roses. On such a dawn the very spirit bathes in the dew and nuzzles into the fragrance with delight; but it is no sooner left behind with May than it has developed within me into an hour and a scene of utmost grace and bliss, save that I am in it myself.
It is curious, too, how many different kinds of Eden or Golden Age Nature has in her gift, as if she silently recorded the backward dreams of each generation and reproduced them for us unexpectedly. It is, for instance, an early morning in July. The cows pour out from the milking-stalls and blot out the smell of dust with their breath in the white road between banks of hazel and thorn. The boy who is driving them to the morning’s pasture calls to them monotonously, persuasively, in turn, as each is tempted to crop the roadside sward: “Wo, Cherry! Now, Dolly! Wo, Fancy! Strawberry!... Blanche!... Blossom!... Cowslip!... Rosy! Smut!... Come along, Handsome!... Wo, Snowdrop!... Lily!... Darky!... Roany!... Come along, Annie!” Here the road is pillowed with white aspen-down, there more fragrant than pines with the brown sheddings of yew, and here thick with the dry scent of nettle and cow-parsnip, or glorious in perfect mingling of harebell and foxglove among the bracken and popping gorse on the roadside. The cows turn into the aftermath of the sainfoin, and the long valley echoes to their lowing. After them, up the road, comes a gypsy-cart, and the boy hangs on the gate to see the men and women walking, black-haired, upright, bright-eyed, and on the name-board of the cart the words: “Naomi Sherwood, Burley, Hampshire.” These things also propose to the roving, unhistoric mind an Eden, one still with us, one that is passing, not, let us hope, the very last.
Some of these scenes, whether often repeated or not, come to have a rich symbolical significance; they return persistently and, as it were, ceremoniously—on festal days—but meaning I know not what. For example, I never see the flowers and scarlet-stained foliage of herb-robert growing out of old stone-heaps by the wayside without a feeling of satisfaction not explained by a long memory of the contrast between the plant and the raw flint; so also with the drenched lilac-bloom leaning out over high walls of unknown gardens; and inland cliffs, covered with beech, jutting out westward into a bottomless valley in the mist of winter twilights, in silence and frost. Something in me belongs to these things, but I hardly think that the mere naming of them will mean anything except to those—many, perhaps—who have experienced the same. A great writer so uses the words of every day that they become a code of his own which the world is bound to learn and in the end take unto itself. But words are no longer symbols, and to say “hill” or “beech” is not to call up images of a hill or a beech-tree, since we have so long been in the habit of using the words for beautiful and mighty and noble things very much as a book-keeper uses figures without seeing gold and power. I can, therefore, only try to suggest what I mean by the significance of the plant in the stone-heap, the wet lilac, the misty cliff, by comparing it with that of scenes in books where we recognize some power beyond the particular and personal. All of Don Quixote’s acts have this significance; so have the end of Mr. Conrad’s story of Youth and the opening of Mr. Hudson’s El Ombu—the old man sitting on a summer’s day under the solitary tree to tell the history “of a house that had been.” Malory’s Morte d’Arthur is full of scenes like this. For ten centuries, from the battle of Badon to the writing of Morte d’Arthur, these stories were alive on the lips of many kinds of men and women in many lands, from Connemara to Calabria. Many of these men and women survive only in the turns which their passionate hearts gave to these ghostly, everlastingly wandering tales. Artists have worked upon them. Bards have sung them, and the sound of their harping is entangled in the words that have reached us to-day. This blending of many bloods is suggested by the Saracen in the Morte d’Arthur who was descended from Hector and Alexander and Joshua and Maccabæus; by Taliesin, whose “original country is the region of the summer stars,” who was with Noah and Alexander and at the birth of Christ. And thus has the tale become so full in the ear of humanity, so rich in scenes designed to serve only an immediate purpose, yet destined by this grace to move all kinds of men in manifold ways. Such is the chess-playing in The Dream of Rhonabwy; the madness of Tristram when he ran naked in the wood many days, but was lured by the music of a damsel playing on his own harp; the speech of Arthur at the scattering of his knights in the Sangraal quest; Launcelot’s fighting with the black knights against the white; Launcelot’s adventures ending at the castle of Carbonek, where he put on all his arms and armour and went—“and the moon shone clear”—between the lions at the gate and forced open the door, and saw the “Holy Vessel, covered with red samite, and many angels about it”; and Arthur and Guenevere watching the dead Elaine in the barge; and in the wars of Arthur and Launcelot, the scene opening with the words: “Then it befell upon a day in harvest-time, Sir Launcelot looked over the walls, and spake on high unto King Arthur and Sir Gawaine....”
No English writer has expressed as well as Traherne the spiritual glory of childhood, in which Wordsworth saw intimations of immortality. He speaks of “that divine light wherewith I was born” and of his “pure and virgin apprehensions,” and recommends his friend to pray earnestly for these gifts: “They will make you angelical, and wholly celestial.” It was by the “divine knowledge” that he saw all things in the peace of Eden—