The strange thing is that we should any of us doubt this, or that in those innermost citadels which we call our brains, we should really very greatly care about anything else. Surely for people so oddly circumstanced as ourselves the quest for ideas, ever larger, ever more comprehensive ideas, is the only perfectly rational occupation? Stranded upon the shores of the Unknown; rocked to and fro by all the winds of mystery; ignorant of whence precisely we came, whither precisely we are going; for people in so strange a position as this to be continually on the quest for some new intimation, for some further hint, or indication, seems as natural as for shipwrecked sailors to be for ever on the watch for sails.
I remember—it is years since, yet the impression is as clear as though it were yesterday—one who, during the vigils of a sleepless night, slipped suddenly into a dream. And in that dream it seemed to the dreamer as though he stood upon a narrow-topped hill, encompassed by all the stars, and lifted high in air above the slumbering earth. And, looking upwards, he was aware of a sky, immeasurably vaster and higher, or so he thought, than he had ever observed any sky to be before. And, still gazing into that vast sky, the dreamer perceived that it was filled with what at first he took to be snowflakes. Looking more closely he saw that, if snowflakes, then they were snowflakes lit up by all the colours of the prism. And one of these snowflakes, just then slowly descending, touched the dreamer’s head with a soft, but quite a sensible impact. And as it touched him, lo, a new thought sprang up, alive, full-fledged, wonderful, within his brain; a thought absolutely unsuspected by him before; vast, formative, irresistible, like some new law of Evolution, or of Gravitation. And, with it, light seemed to break in upon him from every side at once, and a great joy, and a sense of elasticity such as he had never known before. And a voice said—“These are the thoughts with which this earth of yours has been built up, and all yonder other earths, of which this is one of the very least.” And another voice said—“They are as the sands of the sea for multitude, and of the secrets hidden in them, and of the wonder, and satisfaction, and delight of those secrets there is no end.”
Then that sleeper awoke, and, though the night was still long and dark, the thought of his dream remained with him, and was like the song of a thrush in his heart until the morning.
August 10, 1900
LIFE; Life the indomitable, the multifarious; Life, as it rises in the scale, becoming conscious of itself—the thought of this recurs again and again to one’s mind, and each time with a greater sense of power, and of a sort of consolation. What limit need be assigned, one asks oneself, to its capabilities, to the endless transformations, to the possibilities, as yet unguessed at, which may have been destined for it by its Inventor from the beginning of things? If the mere personal consciousness, the precarious personal life, is rarely without an element of discomfort, in this larger sense that personal life all but disappears, and with the loss of it comes—not perhaps actual joy, that could hardly be looked for—but at least a great exhilaration, an extraordinary sense of width, of serenity, and of detachment.
As the mind descends deeper and deeper into that serene abyss it seems to shake itself free for the time being from all that confused, battling, disturbing sea in which its daily lot is cast. As that downward course continues, all that appertains to the surface becomes more and more dreamlike, as it might to a diver, and the mind widens and strengthens insensibly with each descending fathom. “Life” is indeed a marvellous shibboleth; a spell that unlocks innumerable doors; a word of varied and manifold meanings. Merely to write it down, merely to utter it, seems to clear the atmosphere. Mental fogs of all kinds at that touch roll up their dingy tents, and depart. An impression of morning—fresh, imperishable morning—hovers around it; youth, health, fecundity, vigour belong to it. All the winds of Spring—“driving sweet buds, like flocks to feed in air"—rush after it, and fan it on its course. The sense of the good green earth, and of all those good green things that belong to it, pours in a stream of joy through even the dreariest veins. “And if one little planet is able to show it in this inexhaustible profusion, what of all the other planets?” one thinks. “What of those countless other worlds, all belonging to the same great plan; all built and upheld by the same architectonic hand; all strung, as it were, upon one great string, and vibrating eternally to a single immortal touch?”
August 18, 1900
STANDING, shortly after dusk yesterday evening, upon the edge of the slope which drops suddenly into the valley enclosing our village and its church, my ear was filled with a variety of sounds, all of them familiar, yet none somehow quite recognisable; all with a certain strangeness about them, born no doubt of the mist and of the oncoming obscurity.
Sounds which reach our ears after nightfall never seem to be quite the same sounds as in the daytime, even though they may be produced by exactly the same means. Commonplace in reality, they are never perfectly commonplace in their effect. They awaken curious echoes. They bring back odd, and half-vanished thoughts. They play the same rather uncanny tricks with the brain as they doubtless did in the days of the Patriarchs, or of the Shepherd Kings. The bark of a dog half a mile away will conjure up visions of hunting scenes, swift and phantasmagoric as the pageant of a dream. The sharp “click-clack” of a horse’s hoof; the crunching of a waggon-wheel; most of all, perhaps, the thin, lamentable, bleating of sheep floating up from the valley; all these set vibrating fibres within us which have their roots as far back in the history of the race as anything well can be. Our life of to-day, with all its crowded impedimenta, tends at such moments to sink suddenly, and to disappear. We realise—if only during the duration of a lightning flash—that we are standing, not in the least upon any apex, merely upon some small peak on one of the sides of the great organic mountain. That we are looking at a scene which has witnessed the arrival of our race, as of other races, upon it, and which will assuredly one day witness its departure again. That all that we can discern is but, as it were, a few front streaks upon the surface of an ocean, rolling on without bourne or limit. And at that realisation the mind is apt to start, and to shiver instinctively, as before some yawning gulf, opening unexpectedly below the feet.
Such little mental peaks afford, in truth, but a dizzy standing ground, and are best, perhaps for that reason, not ascended too often. Just as the trade of the astronomer is said to need a sound leaven of stolidity before it can be safely embarked upon, so only a very strong head can with safety peer long into a void, hardly less perturbing and intoxicating than that into which it is his business to pry. Those capricious little particles, upon which all our comfort depends, dislike it, and they are probably right in doing so. It is true that what we call the Past, that which is entirely put away, and done with, might seem to be a harmless enough subject of contemplation. So conceivably it might be, were it not for the fact that in following it one is apt to find oneself brought suddenly face to face with the other, and the far more formidable brother; the one whose kingdom lies, not behind us, but ahead. At those dim barriers all real advance is inexorably stayed; into the recesses beyond them no secular lantern has ever peered; while even our most authoritative, our most convinced guides, can at best assure us as to its geography with hesitating, and often curiously conflicting voices.