On Nothing and Kindred Subjects (18 page)

Now this was difficult, for he had no hobby, and the book which
should satisfy him must be one that should describe or summon up,
or, it is better to say, hint at—or, the theologians would say,
reveal, or the Platonists would say
recall
—the Unknown Country,
which he thought was his very home.

I had known his habit of seeking such books for two years, and had
half wondered at it and half sympathised. It was an appetite partly
satisfied by almost any work that brought to him the vision of a
place in the mind which he had always intensely desired, but to
which, as he had then long guessed, and as he is now quite certain,
no human paths directly lead. He would buy with avidity travels to
the moon and to the planets, from the most worthless to the best. He
loved Utopias and did not disregard even so prosaic a category as
books of real travel, so long as by exaggeration or by a glamour in
the style they gave him a full draught of that drug which he
desired. Whether this satisfaction the young man sought was a
satisfaction in illusion (I have used the word "drug" with
hesitation), or whether it was, as he persistently maintained, the
satisfaction of a memory, or whether it was, as I am often tempted
to think, the satisfaction of a thirst which will ultimately be
quenched in every human soul I cannot tell. Whatever it was, he
sought it with more than the appetite with which a hungry man seeks
food. He sought it with something that was not hunger but passion.

That evening he found a book.

It is well known that men purchase with difficulty second-hand books
upon the stalls, and that in some mysterious way the sellers of
these books are content to provide a kind of library for the poorer
and more eager of the public, and a library admirable in this, that
it is accessible upon every shelf and exposes a man to no control,
except that he must not steal, and even in this it is nothing but
the force of public law that interferes. My friend therefore would
in the natural course of things have dipped into the book and left
it there; but a better luck persuaded him. Whether it was the
beginning of the rain or a sudden loneliness in such terrible
weather and in such a terrible town, compelling him to seek a more
permanent companionship with another mind, or whether it was my
sudden arrival and shame lest his poverty should appear in his
refusing to buy the book—whatever it was, he bought that same. And
since he bought the Book I also have known it and have found in it,
as he did, the most complete expression that I know of the Unknown
Country, of which he was a citizen—oddly a citizen, as I then
thought, wisely as I now conceive.

All that can best be expressed in words should be expressed in
verse, but verse is a slow thing to create; nay, it is not really
created: it is a secretion of the mind, it is a pearl that gathers
round some irritant and slowly expresses the very essence of beauty
and of desire that has lain long, potential and unexpressed, in the
mind of the man who secretes it. God knows that this Unknown Country
has been hit off in verse a hundred times. If I were perfectly sure
of my accents I would quote two lines from the Odyssey in which the
Unknown Country stands out as clear as does a sudden vision from a
mountain ridge when the mist lifts after a long climb and one sees
beneath one an unexpected and glorious land; such a vision as greets
a man when he comes over the Saldeu into the simple and secluded
Republic of the Andorrans. Then, again, the Germans in their idioms
have flashed it out, I am assured, for I remember a woman telling me
that there was a song by Schiller which exactly gave the revelation
of which I speak. In English, thank Heaven, emotion of this kind,
emotion necessary to the life of the soul, is very abundantly
furnished. As, who does not know the lines:

  Blessed with that which is not in the word
  Of man nor his conception: Blessed Land!

Then there is also the whole group of glimpses which Shakespeare
amused himself by scattering as might a man who had a great oak
chest full of jewels and who now and then, out of kindly fun, poured
out a handful and gave them to his guests. I quote from memory, but
I think certain of the lines run more or less like this:

  Look how the dawn in russet mantle clad
  Stands on the steep of yon high eastern hill.

And again:

  Night's candles are burnt out, and jocund day
  Stands tiptoe on the misty mountain tops.

Which moves me to digress…. How on earth did any living man pull
it off as well as that? I remember arguing with a man who very
genuinely thought the talent of Shakespeare was exaggerated in
public opinion, and discovering at the end of a long wrangle that he
was not considering Shakespeare as a poet. But as a poet, then, how
on earth did he manage it?

Keats did it continually, especially in the
Hyperion
. Milton
does it so well in the Fourth Book of
Paradise Lost
that I
defy any man of a sane understanding to read the whole of that book
before going to bed and not to wake up next morning as though he had
been on a journey. William Morris does it, especially in the verses
about a prayer over the corn; and as for Virgil, the poet Virgil, he
does it continually like a man whose very trade it is. Who does not
remember the swimmer who saw Italy from the top of the wave?

Here also let me digress. How do the poets do it? (I do not mean
where do they get their power, as I was asking just now of
Shakespeare, but how do the words, simple or complex, produce that
effect?) Very often there is not any adjective, sometimes not any
qualification at all: often only one subject with its predicate and
its statement and its object. There is never any detail of
description, but the scene rises, more vivid in colour, more exact
in outline, more wonderful in influence, than anything we can see
with our eyes, except perhaps those things we see in the few moments
of intense emotion which come to us, we know not whence, and expand
out into completion and into manhood.

Catullus does it. He does it so powerfully in the opening lines of

Vesper adest
…

that a man reads the first couplet of that Hymeneal, and immediately
perceives the Apennines.

The nameless translator of the Highland song does it, especially
when he advances that battering line—

And we in dreams behold the Hebrides.

They all do it, bless their hearts, the poets, which leads me back
again to the mournful reflection that it cannot be done in prose….

Little friends, my readers, I wish it could be done in prose, for if
it could, and if I knew how to do it, I would here present to you
that Unknown Country in such a fashion that every landscape which
you should see henceforth would be transformed, by the appearing
through it, the shining and uplifting through it, of the Unknown
Country upon which reposes this tedious and repetitive world.

Now you may say to me that prose can do it, and you may quote to me
the end of the
Pilgrim's Progress
, a very remarkable piece of
writing. Or, better still, as we shall be more agreed upon it, the
general impression left upon the mind by the book which set me
writing—Mr. Hudson's
Crystal Age
. I do not deny that prose
can do it, but when it does it, it is hardly to be called prose, for
it is inspired. Note carefully the passages in which the trick is
worked in prose (for instance, in the story of Ruth in the Bible,
where it is done with complete success), you will perceive an
incantation and a spell. Indeed this same episode of Ruth in exile
has inspired two splendid passages of European verse, of which it is
difficult to say which is the more national, and therefore the
greatest, Victor Hugo's in the
Legende des Siecles
or Keats's
astounding four lines.

There was a shepherd the other day up at Findon Fair who had come
from the east by Lewes with sheep, and who had in his eyes that
reminiscence of horizons which makes the eyes of shepherds and of
mountaineers different from the eyes of other men. He was occupied
when I came upon him in pulling Mr. Fulton's sheep by one hind leg
so that they should go the way they were desired to go. It happened
that day that Mr. Fulton's sheep were not sold, and the shepherd
went driving them back through Findon Village, and up on to the high
Downs. I went with him to hear what he had to say, for shepherds
talk quite differently from other men. And when we came on to the
shoulder of Chanctonbury and looked down upon the Weald, which
stretched out like the Plains of Heaven, he said to me: "I never
come here but it seems like a different place down below, and as
though it were not the place where I have gone afoot with sheep
under the hills. It seems different when you are looking down at
it." He added that he had never known why. Then I knew that he, like
myself, was perpetually in perception of the Unknown Country, and I
was very pleased. But we did not say anything more to each other
about it until we got down into Steyning. There we drank together
and we still said nothing more about it, so that to this day all we
know of the matter is what we knew when we started, and what you
knew when I began to write this, and what you are now no further
informed upon, namely, that there is an Unknown Country lying
beneath the places that we know, and appearing only in moments of
revelation.

Whether we shall reach this country at last or whether we shall not,
it is impossible to determine.

A woman whose presence in English letters will continue to increase
wrote of a cause to which she had dedicated her life that it was
like that Faery Castle of which men became aware when they wandered
upon a certain moor. In that deserted place (the picture was taken
from the writings of Sir Walter Scott) the lonely traveller heard
above him a noise of bugles in the air, and thus a Faery Castle was
revealed; but again, when the traveller would reach it, a doom comes
upon him, and in the act of its attainment it vanishes away.

We are northern, full of dreams in the darkness; this Castle is
caught in glimpses, a misty thing. It is seen a moment—then it
mixes once again with the mist of our northern air, and when that
mist has lifted from the heath there is nothing before the watcher
but a bare upland open to the wind and roofed only by hurrying
cloud. Yet in the moment of revelation most certainly the traveller
perceived it, and the call of its bugle-guard was very clear. He
continues his way perceiving only the things he knows—trees bent by
the gale, rude heather, the gravel of the path, and mountains all
around. In that landscape he has no companion; yet he cannot but be
haunted, as he goes, by towers upon which he surely looked, and by
the sharp memory of bugle-notes that still seem to startle his
hearing.

In our legends of Western Europe this Castle perpetually returns. It
has been seen not only on the highlands of Ireland, of Wales, of
Brittany, of the Asturias, of Normandy, and of Auvergne, but in the
plains also, and on those river meadows where wealth comes so fast
that even simple men early forget the visions of the hills. The
imagination, or rather the speech, of our race has created or
recognised throughout our territory this stronghold which was not
altogether of the world.

Queen Iseult, as she sat with Tristan in a Castle Garden, towards
the end of a summer night, whispered to him: "Tristan, they say that
this Castle is Faëry; it is revealed at the sound of a Trumpet, but
presently it vanishes away," and as she said it the bugles rang
dawn.

Raymond of Saragossa saw this Castle, also, as he came down from the
wooded hills after he had found the water of life and was bearing it
towards the plain. He saw the towers quite clearly and also thought
he heard the call upon that downward road at whose end he was to
meet with Bramimonde. But he saw it thence only, in the exaltation
of the summits as he looked over the falling forest to the plain and
the Sierra miles beyond. He saw it thence only. Never after upon
either bank of Ebro could he come upon it, nor could any man assure
him of the way.

In the Story of Val-es-Dunes, Hugh the Fortinbras out of the
Cotentin had a castle of this kind. For when, after the battle, they
count the dead, the Priest finds in the sea-grass among other bodies
that of this old Lord….

  … and Hugh that trusted in his glass,
      But rode not home the day;
  Whose title was the Fortinbras
      With the Lords of his Array.

This was that old Hugh the Fortinbras who had been Lord to the
Priest's father, so that when the battle was engaged the Priest
watched him from the opposing rank, and saw him fall, far off, just
as the line broke and before the men of the Caux country had room to
charge. It was easy to see him, for he rode a high horse and was
taller than other Normans, and when his horse was wounded….

  … The girth severed and the saddle swung
      And he went down;
  He never more sang winter songs
      In his High Town.

  In his High Town that Faery is
      And stands on Harcourt Lea;
  To summon him up his arrier-ban
  His writ beyond the mountain ran.
  My father was his serving-man;
      Although the farm was free.
  Before the angry wars began
      He was a friend to me!

  In his High Town that Faery is
      And stands on Harcourt bay;
  The Fisher driving through the night
      Makes harbour by that castle height
      And moors him till the day:
  But with the broadening of the light
      It vanishes away.

So the Faery Castle comes in by an illusion in the Ballad of the
Battle of Val-es-Dunes.

* * * * *

What is this vision which our race has so symbolised or so seen and
to which are thus attached its oldest memories? It is the miraculous
moment of intense emotion in which whether we are duped or
transfigured we are in touch with a reality firmer than the reality
of this world. The Faery Castle is the counterpart and the example
of those glimpses which every man has enjoyed, especially in youth,
and which no man even in the dust of middle age can quite forget. In
these were found a complete harmony and satisfaction which were not
negative nor dependent upon the absence of discord—such completion
as criticism may conceive—but as positive as colour or as music,
and clothed as it were in a living body of joy.