Auld Lang Syne
Time of year – the end of August. Locality, not the Tottenham Court Road, but one of the northernmost points of the Northumberland border – a wild, rough, hard land – the fighting ground, for centuries upon centuries, first of the old Romans, and then of our own border laddies, who held it against the “rieving Scots” – a land over which the famous Sixth Legion has marched – a land which has seen Hotspur fight and Douglas fall – a land where almost every hillside and burn has its legend and ballad – a land on which one would reasonably expect to see the gloaming, as distinguished from twilight, fall! I had had ten days walking after wild grouse – tramping through the heather, generally dripping wet, for the Scotch mist did not observe or keep the border line, worse luck to it. At last a fine day, and a long tramp on the moors. At the close of it, having first walked enough over the soft moss and young heather to make me exult in the grand condition for exercise which ten days’ hill air will give, I separated from my party to try for a snipe down by a little tarn, lying in the midst of a “faded bent” in the moor, intending to tramp home afterwards in my own company – and in my own company it was that I had full opportunity of studying the effect of the gloaming.
The sun was getting low as I separated from my party and walked up the side of a long hill covered with old heather, moss, patches of grass, patches of reeds, and bogs. It was a glorious scene! A sea of moorland – wave over wave of undulating hill – rolled from me northward to the foot of old Cheviot, whose long back, some twenty miles away, was lit up by the brilliant sinking sun so clearly that I could distinguish the gullies and inequalities in its time-honoured old sides. Wave over wave, southward and westward, rolled those same moorland hills from my feet, seemingly into the still more distant hills of Cumberland, and from north to south, east to west, was a sea of purple heather in its fullest bloom, lit up by the golden floods of light of the setting sun. In another five minutes the sun had disappeared, and I was down by the side of the little Tarn. Already the air, always fresh on the hills, became fresher; the golden light was dying out of the sky; the blue of the Heaven above me was darkening, the hills, a mass of purple sheen so few minutes ago, stood out sharp and black against the sky; and so I started on my long tramp home, watching the growth of the “gloaming.” There was still the heather. I was still tramping through it, but its colour was gone. It was now an expanse of purple blackness. More intensely dark became the blue of the sky above me as the red streaks, still hovering over the place where the sun had dipped, faded. Gradually, imperceptibly was darkness spreading over everything; and as the darkness spread, the stillness and sweetness of the “gloaming” made itself felt. The stillness and freshness of the air, the mysterious blackness of the hills; the startling white flashes of the little pools, in the moors, looking as though they had absorbed light from somewhere, and were loth to part with it; the faintly reflected colours of the fading sky given back by the burns and streamlets which crossed my path, the whispering of the reeds and long grass; the great grey boulders looming here and there through the dark heather and bracken – boulders behind which at that hour one could not help believing that Kelpies and Pixies were hiding, and might dart out at any moment for some Tam-o’-Shanter frolic over the moor – and the soft springy moss, grass, and heather, still under my feet deadening all the sound of my tread. Light dying, fading, and darkness, a rich purple darkness, spreading; and everywhere the scent of heather bloom and stillness and freshness – freshness indescribable, a stillness only broken by the call here and there of the scattered grouse; or the soft rush of wings and whistling of golden plover far away over head; or the cry of the lapwing – or the bark miles away of a collie dog; or the dripping and murmuring and bubbling of the little burns in the gullies!
Light still dying away! What was left only “dealt a doubtful sense of things not so much seen as felt.” And then it was that I realized what Robert Burns had sung: —
“Gie me the hour o’ gloamin grey,For it mak’s my heart sae cheery O.”SKETCHES
Sketches of life upon the slabs of deathOur loving hand on living stone indites:Sketches of death upon the screens of lifeTime, the great limner, for a warning writes.Sketches of joy upon the face of sorrow,Still credulous, our aching fingers trace:Time steals the pencil, and with bitter scorn,Sketches old sorrow on our young joy’s face.E’en so our sketch of life is framed and fashion’d;In vain with glowing touches we begin —By day we work upon the light and colour,Time comes by night and puts the shadows in.SKETCHES.
A CONVERSATION.
KATEY
“There! I have finished my sketch of the sloping field, and the misty strip of woodland above, in its autumn dress, by putting you in in the foreground, the only living thing in my misty-autumn picture; though, after all, you don’t look much more than a brown spot on the green, with your brown hat and skirt and your old brown book. I am much obliged to it for keeping you still so long this misty morning. What is there in it?”
“Sketches,” I answered. “Misty sketches like this of yours.” And I stretched out my hand for my cousin’s drawing, while she looked over my shoulder down on to the volume on my knee and uttered an exclamation of surprise when her eye fell on nothing but black letters on a damp spotted yellow page. “‘Treating of the four complexions, into which men are bound during their sojourn in their earthly houses,’” she read aloud; “what does it mean? Let me look on. ‘Of those that draw their complexion from the dark and melancholy earth. Of those who take their complexion from the friendly air. Of those who are complexioned after the manner of fire. Of those who partake of the nature of the subtle and yielding water;’ who writes this queer stuff; is it sense or nonsense?” I held up the book that she might read the faded gilt letters on its wormeaten leather back. “Letters of Jacob Böhme to John Schauffman and others,” she read. “Oh!” – rather a doubtful “oh!” it was, as if the name did not settle the question about sense or nonsense as completely as she had expected it would.
“This is rather a rare book I flatter myself,” I went on. “I bought it at a book-stall because it looked so odd and old, and found to my great joy that it was a miscellaneous collection of Jacob Böhme’s letters, on all sorts of subjects; the four that I have been reading this morning about the four different temperaments, or, as he calls it, complexions into which men may be divided, come in oddly enough among much more mystical and transcendental matter. They are, as I said, misty sketches of character, but I think they show that the dreamy old cobbler knew something about his fellow-men.”
K. “What are Jacob Böhme’s writings like?”
“Oh, I can’t tell you that, I can only tell you what it makes one feel like to read them. Something, as we should feel, you and I, if we climbed up to that peak above the wood there, and looked down on the mist in the valley now the sun is gilding it. We should have a vague feeling of having got up on to a height, and perceived something glorious; but we should not be able to give much account of what we had seen when we came down.”
K. “But I hope you will be able to give me an account of what you have been reading to-day. I want you to explain to me about the four complexions as we walk home.”
“Well, I will try; these four letters have something in them that one can get hold of and venture to put into fresh words. You must remember, to begin with, that Böhme still held to there being only four elements – earth, air, fire, and water – and thought that everything, our bodies included, was made up of various proportions of these elemental substances – the soul, a pure indivisible essence, he thinks of as living imprisoned in these compound bodies. Shadowed and clouded and hindered in its work by the material form that shuts it in from the true fount of being; individualizing it and debasing it at the same time. Character, according to him, depends upon the element that preponderates in the composition of our bodies; our souls work through it and are more or less free. His theory of the causes of differences of character may be ever so foolish, yet I think the classification he draws from it is interesting, and does somehow or other help us to understand ourselves and our fellow-creatures a little better.”
K. “Let me see, he divides people into earth, air, fire, and water people. What sort of character does he suppose the earth element colours the soul with?”
“You are quite right to use the word colour, Böhme thinks of the complexion, or, as we should say, the humour of a person, as of an independent atmosphere through which the soul works, but which is no part of it. He speaks of souls shut up in the dark and melancholy earth element; these are the silent, sensitive, brooding people, who find it very difficult either to give out or receive impressions to or from their fellow-creatures. They are shut up, and as the earth (so at least Böhme says) draws a great deal more heat and light from the sun than it ever gives back, and darkly absorbs and stores up heat within itself, so these earth men and women, separated from their fellows, have the power of drawing great enlightenment and deep warmth of love direct from the spiritual source of light and love. Religious enthusiasts are all of this class; Böhme was an earth person himself, he says so; so was Dante and John Bunyan, and all the other people one reads of who have had terrible experiences in the depths of their own souls and ecstatic visions to comfort them. Böhme says that the very best and the very worst people are those shut in by the earth. They are the most individual, the most thoroughly separated; if conquering this hindrance, they re-absorb the Divine into themselves by direct vision; they rise to heights of wisdom, love, and self-sacrifice that no other souls can reach; but if by pride and self-will they cut themselves from spiritual influences, they remain solitary, dark, hungry, always striving vainly to extract the light and warmth they want from some one or two of their fellow-creatures, and being constantly disappointed, because, not having the power of ray-ing out love, they can rarely attract it. They are eaten up by a sad dark egotism. If they have a great deal of intellect they throw themselves vehemently into some one pursuit or study, and become great but never happy.”
K. “I am thankful to say I don’t know any earth people.”
“Nor do I, pure earth, but I think I have come across one or two with a touch of earth in their temperaments. The air folk are much more common. They are the eager inquisitive people, who want to get into everything and understand everything, just as the air pervades and permeates all creation. Great lovers of knowledge and scientific observers must always be air people. Böhme thinks that in spite of their not being generally very spiritual, they have the best chance of getting to heaven, because of all classes they have most sympathy and are least shut up in themselves, getting everywhere, like their element the air: they get into the souls of others and understand them and live in them. Their influence is of a very peculiar kind; not being very individual, they don’t impress the people round them with a strong sense of their personality; they are not loved passionately, and they don’t love passionately, but people turn to them to be understood and helped, and they are always benevolently ready to understand and help. They are satisfied that their influence should be breathed like the air, without being more recognized than the air: Shakespeare was, I expect, a typical air man. He had been everywhere, into all sorts of souls, peering about, and understanding them all, and how little any one seems to have known about himself! He was separated as little as possible from the universal fount of Being.”
K. “Socrates was an air man too I suppose? Your air people would be all philosophers.”
“More or less lovers of knowledge they must be; but remember that temperament does not affect the quality of the soul itself, it is only more or less of a hindrance. The peculiar faults of air people are, as you will imagine, fickleness and coldness; their sympathy partakes of the nature of curiosity, and they easily adapt themselves to changes of circumstance; they can as easily live in one person as in another, and the love of knowledge in little souls would degenerate into restless curiosity and fussiness.”
K. “Would not Goethe be as good a type of the air temperament as Shakespeare? He certainly had the besetting faults of the complexion, fickleness and coldness.”
“Yes, but the great influence he exercised over his contemporaries, points to his drawing something too from the fire nature.”
K. “Those complexioned after the manner of the fire are, I suppose, the warm-hearted, affectionate souls?”
“Not at all; Böhme would not have consented to lay hold of such an obvious analogy. He dives deeper into fire characteristics than to think chiefly of its warmth. It is above all a consuming element; it takes substances of all kinds and transmutes them into itself, a greedy devourer, reckless of the value of what it takes, intent only on increasing and maintaining itself. The fire people are the ambitious conquerors and rulers of the world, who by the strength and attractive warmth of their own natures force others to bend to them and become absorbed in their projects. They are in reality as great egotists as the earth people, only they don’t keep their egotism at smouldering fever heat in their own hearts; they let it blaze forth into a living flame, which draws weaker natures to be consumed in it, or at least forces them to live only in its heat and light. Napoleon Bonaparte, I think, might stand for a typical fire man. In women the fire nature shows rather differently: pure fire women have acted very conspicuous parts in the world’s history, and generally very disastrous ones, they are the women who inspire great passions and feel very little themselves. They draw others to them for the sake of homage to add to their own light. Madame de Chevreuse and Madame de Longueville must have been pure fire women, I should say. Don’t suppose, however, that the fire, more than any other temperament, secures greatness or real superiority; it enables those who follow its complexion to impress themselves more on other people than the air spirits can, but their influence may be only temporary, and it may be very disagreeable, and in the end repelling. Don’t you know people, both men and women, who have a mysterious way of making their will felt, and who always count for something in whatever society they are in as long as they are present, but who leave no permanent impression? Those I suppose would be, according to Böhme, stupid souls acting through the fire temperament. The influence of the air souls, inconspicuous as it is, is more permanent. Like the air it nourishes and changes without destroying; air people give more than they take. Fire people take more than they give.”
K. “And now what are the water followers? I hope we are coming to some amiable, pleasant people at last, for you have not described anything very attractive yet.”
“I am afraid you will like the water complexion least of all, and be obliged to acknowledge too that ‘the subtle and yielding water’ has more followers than any of the other elements. The water element has a sort of resemblance to the air element; it mimics it without having its power. Water people are that large majority of mankind who have too weak a hold on life to be anything very distinctive of themselves. They simulate living and thinking, rather than really think and live. Just as water receives impressions in itself that it cannot clasp and hold, that seem to be part of it and are not. They are easily influenced by others – by air people for example; but they only image their thoughts in themselves. They look like them when they are with them, and when the influence is removed they are empty like a lake when a veil of clouds is drawn over the sky. The distinctive mark of water people is that they are self-conscious, they are always thinking of themselves, because they live a sort of double life – occupied not only with what they are doing but with the thought that they actually are doing it. Unconsciously they are continually acting a part. They have notions about themselves and act up to them. They see themselves in different lights, and everything else as it concerns themselves. Seeing not the real thing, but the thing reflected in themselves. You must know such people, though they are difficult to describe, and I cannot just now think of any historical typical water person to help out my description. Perhaps Napoleon the Third would do. I think he must be what Böhme meant by ‘those who partake of the nature of the subtle and yielding nature;’ and, by the way, Böhme does not describe the water people as really yielding; on the contrary, he says they are very persistent. In a slow, obstinate way, by seeming to yield and always returning to the point from which they had been diverging (always finding their own level) they have more power than the followers of any of the other elements.”
K. “Is there nothing good about these poor water creatures? Have they no redeeming qualities?”
“Oh yes! The water temperament conduces to industry and perseverance. Water men and women are very good imitators, not actors, and do most of the second-rate work in the world. They are not un-sympathizing. Like air people, they take in easily the thoughts and lives of others, only they are always conscious of taking them in; they don’t lose themselves in others, as it is possible for the air followers to do. While they sympathize, they think how nice it is to be sympathetic; or, if they are women, perhaps the thought is how interesting I look while I am listening to this sad story.”
K. “Come now, I believe you have some particular water person in your mind, for you are getting satirical. It is well we are nearly home. What I can’t understand is, why all the four complexions have so much that is disagreeable in them. In which class would Böhme put really good and noble people?”
“They might come into any one of the four classes. You must remember that according to Böhme the temperament is an outer material atmosphere surrounding the soul, and of necessity partly evil, because it is material; the pure soul has to work through it, and conquer it, according to Böhme.”
SKETCHES
(In a Garden.)A LADY. – A POETThe LadyISir POET, ere you crossed the lawn (If it was wrong to watch you, pardon)Behind this weeping birch withdrawn, I watched you saunter round the garden.I saw you bend beside the phlox; Pluck, as you passed, a sprig of myrtle,Review my well-ranged hollyhocks, Smile at the fountain’s slender spurtle;IIYou paused beneath the cherry-tree, Where my marauder thrush was singing,Peered at the bee-hives curiously, And narrowly escaped a stinging;And then – you see I watched – you passed Down the espalier walk that reachesOut to the western wall, and last Dropped on the seat before the peaches.IIIWhat was your thought? You waited long. Sublime or graceful, – grave, – satiric?A Morris Greek-and-Gothic song? A tender Tennysonian lyric?Tell me. That garden-seat shall be, So long as speech renown disperses,Illustrious as the spot where he — The gifted Blank – composed his verses.The PoetIVMadam, – whose uncensorious eye Grows gracious over certain pages.Wherein the Jester’s maxims lie, It may be, thicker than the Sage’sI hear but to obey, and could Mere wish of mine the pleasure do you,Some verse as whimsical as Hood, — As gay as Praed, – should answer to you.VBut, though the common voice proclaims Our only serious vocationConfined to giving nothings names, And dreams a “local habitation;”Believe me, there are tuneless days, When neither marble, brass, nor vellum,Would profit much by any lays That haunt the poet’s cerebellum.VIMore empty things, I fear, than rhymes, More idle things than songs, absorb it;The “finely-frenzied” eye, at times, Reposes mildly in its orbit;And, painful truth, at times, to him, Whose jog-trot thought is nowise restive,“A primrose by a river’s brim” Is absolutely unsuggestive.VIIThe fickle Muse! As ladies will, She sometimes wearies of her wooer;A goddess, yet a woman still, She flies the more that we pursue her;In short, with worst as well as best, Five months in six, your hapless poetIs just as prosy as the rest, But cannot comfortably show it.VIIIYou thought, no doubt, the garden-scent Brings back some brief-winged bright sensationOf love that came and love that went, — Some fragrance of a lost flirtation,Born when the cuckoo changes song, Dead ere the apple’s red is on it,That should have been an epic long, Yet scarcely served to fill a sonnet.IXOr else you thought, – the murmuring noon, He turns it to a lyric sweeter,With birds that gossip in the tune, And windy bough-swing in the metre;Or else the zigzag fruit-tree arms Recall some dream of harp-prest bosoms,Round singing mouths, and chanted charms, And mediæval orchard blossoms, —XQuite à la mode. Alas! for prose, — My vagrant fancies only rambledBack to the red-walled Rectory close, Where first my graceless boyhood gambolled,Climbed on the dial, teased the fish, And chased the kitten round the beeches,Till widening instincts made me wish For certain slowly-ripening peaches.XIThree peaches. Not the Graces three Had more equality of beauty:I would not look, yet went to see; I wrestled with Desire and Duty;I felt the pangs of those who feel The Laws of Property beset them;The conflict made my reason reel, And, half-abstractedly, I ate them; —XIIOr Two of them. Forthwith Despair — More keen than one of these was rotten —Moved me to seek some forest lair Where I might hide and dwell forgotten,Attired in skins, by berries stained, Absolved from brushes and ablution; —But, ere my sylvan haunt was gained, Fate gave me up to execution.XIIII saw it all but now. The grin That gnarled old Gardener Sandy’s features;My father, scholar-like and thin, Unroused, the tenderest of creatures;I saw – ah me – I saw again My dear and deprecating mother;And then, remembering the cane, Regretted – THAT I’D LEFT THE OTHER.THINGS GONE BY
Is it that things go by, or is it that people go by the things? If the former, it is no wonder that a good deal of gloom hangs about the matter. To be standing still, and to have a panorama constantly moving by one, bearing on its face all things fair and beautiful – happy love scenes, kindly friends, pleasant meetings, wise speeches, noble acts, stirring words, national epochs, as well as gay landscapes of hill and dale, and river and sun, and shade and trees, and cottages and labouring men and grazing cattle; to have all things moving by one, and oneself to stagnate and alone to be left behind, as all else moves on to greet the young, the hopeful, and the untried, – there is indeed something sad in this. We have seen these good and beautiful and soul-touching visions once. They charmed and entranced us as they lingered with us for a few brief and blissful moments, but they have gone by and left us alone. We shall never look upon them again. Yes, it is bitter – too bitter almost for man to dwell upon much. He must turn elsewhere, and try to bury the past in forgetfulness, gazing on the new visions as they in turn pass by him, knowing that their time is short, and that they too, like all the old ones, will very soon be as though they were not.
But it is not so. Man is passing the world by, and not the world man. Man is passing on, year after year, in his magnificent and irresistible course, never losing, and ever gaining. All he sees, and knows, and feels, and does becomes an inseparable part of himself, far more closely bound up with his life and nature than even his flesh, and nerves, and bones. It is not merely that he remembers the past and loves the past, but he is the past; and he is more the whole assembly of the past than he is anything else whatever. Man alone moves onward to perfection and to happiness, as a universe stands still ministering to his lordly progress. Even the life, the passions, and the personal progress of each particular man stand still, as it were, in the service of all the rest, and become their lasting and inalienable treasure. Nothing is wasted or irreparable but wrong-doing, and that too is not lost.
