Talks To Teachers On Psychology; And To Students On Some Of Life's Ideals
your lantern?' and a gratified 'Yes!' That was the shibboleth, and very
needful, too; for, as it was the rule to keep our glory contained, none
could recognize a lantern-bearer unless (like the polecat) by the smell.
Four or five would sometimes climb into the belly of a ten-man lugger,
with nothing but the thwarts above them,--for the cabin was usually
locked,--or chose out some hollow of the links where the wind might
whistle overhead. Then the coats would be unbuttoned, and the
bull's-eyes discovered; and in the chequering glimmer, under the huge,
windy hall of the night, and cheered by a rich steam of toasting
tinware, these fortunate young gentlemen would crouch together in the
cold sand of the links, or on the scaly bilges of the fishing-boat, and
delight them with inappropriate talk. Woe is me that I cannot give some
specimens!... But the talk was but a condiment, and these gatherings
themselves only accidents in the career of the lantern-bearer. The
essence of this bliss was to walk by yourself in the black night, the
slide shut, the top-coat buttoned, not a ray escaping, whether to
conduct your footsteps or to make your glory public,--a mere pillar of
darkness in the dark; and all the while, deep down in the privacy of
your fool's heart, to know you had a bull's-eye at your belt, and to
exult and sing over the knowledge.
"It is said that a poet has died young in the breast of the most stolid.
It may be contended rather that a (somewhat minor) bard in almost every
case survives, and is the spice of life to his possessor. Justice is not
done to the versatility and the unplumbed childishness of man's
imagination. His life from without may seem but a rude mound of mud:
there will be some golden chamber at the heart of it, in which he dwells
delighted; and for as dark as his pathway seems to the observer, he will
have some kind of bull's-eye at his belt."
... "There is one fable that touches very near the quick of life,--the
fable of the monk who passed into the woods, heard a bird break into
song, hearkened for a trill or two, and found himself at his return a
stranger at his convent gates; for he had been absent fifty years, and
of all his comrades there survived but one to recognize him. It is not
only in the woods that this enchanter carols, though perhaps he is
native there. He sings in the most doleful places. The miser hears him
and chuckles, and his days are moments. With no more apparatus than an
evil-smelling lantern, I have evoked him on the naked links. All life
that is not merely mechanical is spun out of two strands,--seeking for
that bird and hearing him. And it is just this that makes life so hard
to value, and the delight of each so incommunicable. And it is just a
knowledge of this, and a remembrance of those fortunate hours in which
the bird _has_ sung to _us_, that fills us with such wonder when we turn
to the pages of the realist. There, to be sure, we find a picture of
life in so far as it consists of mud and of old iron, cheap desires and
cheap fears, that which we are ashamed to remember and that which we are
careless whether we forget; but of the note of that time-devouring
nightingale we hear no news."
... "Say that we came [in such a realistic romance] on some such business
as that of my lantern-bearers on the links, and described the boys as
very cold, spat upon by flurries of rain, and drearily surrounded, all
of which they were; and their talk as silly and indecent, which it
certainly was. To the eye of the observer they _are_ wet and cold and
drearily surrounded; but ask themselves, and they are in the heaven of a
recondite pleasure, the ground of which is an ill-smelling lantern."
"For, to repeat, the ground of a man's joy is often hard to hit. It may
hinge at times upon a mere accessory, like the lantern; it may reside in
the mysterious inwards of psychology.... It has so little bond with
externals ... that it may even touch them not, and the man's true life,
for which he consents to live, lie together in the field of fancy.... In
such a case the poetry runs underground. The observer (poor soul, with
his documents!) is all abroad. For to look at the man is but to court
deception. We shall see the trunk from which he draws his nourishment;
but he himself is above and abroad in the green dome of foliage, hummed
through by winds and nested in by nightingales. And the true realism
were that of the poets, to climb after him like a squirrel, and catch
some glimpse of the heaven in which he lives. And the true realism,
always and everywhere, is that of the poets: to find out where joy
resides, and give it a voice far beyond singing."
"For to miss the joy is to miss all. In the joy of the actors lies the
sense of any action. That is the explanation, that the excuse. To one
who has not the secret of the lanterns the scene upon the links is
meaningless. And hence the haunting and truly spectral unreality of
realistic books.... In each we miss the personal poetry, the enchanted
atmosphere, that rainbow work of fancy that clothes what is naked and
seems to ennoble what is base; in each, life falls dead like dough,
instead of soaring away like a balloon into the colors of the sunset;
each is true, each inconceivable; for no man lives in the external truth
among salts and acids, but in the warm, phantasmagoric chamber of his
brain, with the painted windows and the storied wall."[D]
[D] 'The Lantern-bearers,' in the volume entitled 'Across the
Plains.' Abridged in the quotation.
These paragraphs are the best thing I know in all Stevenson. "To miss
the joy is to miss all." Indeed, it is. Yet we are but finite, and each
one of us has some single specialized vocation of his own. And it seems
as if energy in the service of its particular duties might be got only
by hardening the heart toward everything unlike them. Our deadness
toward all but one particular kind of joy would thus be the price we
inevitably have to pay for being practical creatures. Only in some
pitiful dreamer, some philosopher, poet, or romancer, or when the common
practical man becomes a lover, does the hard externality give way, and a
gleam of insight into the ejective world, as Clifford called it, the
vast world of inner life beyond us, so different from that of outer
seeming, illuminate our mind. Then the whole scheme of our customary
values gets confounded, then our self is riven and its narrow interests
fly to pieces, then a new centre and a new perspective must be found.
The change is well described by my colleague, Josiah Royce:--
"What, then, is our neighbor? Thou hast regarded his thought, his
feeling, as somehow different from thine. Thou hast said, 'A pain in him
is not like a pain in me, but something far easier to bear.' He seems to
thee a little less living than thou; his life is dim, it is cold, it is
a pale fire beside thy own burning desires.... So, dimly and by instinct
hast thou lived with thy neighbor, and hast known him not, being blind.
Thou hast made [of him] a thing, no Self at all. Have done with this
illusion, and simply try to learn the truth. Pain is pain, joy is joy,
everywhere, even as in thee. In all the songs of the forest birds; in
all the cries of the wounded and dying, struggling in the captor's
power; in the boundless sea where the myriads of water-creatures strive
and die; amid all the countless hordes of savage men; in all sickness
and sorrow; in all exultation and hope, everywhere, from the lowest to
the noblest, the same conscious, burning, wilful life is found,
endlessly manifold as the forms of the living creatures, unquenchable as
the fires of the sun, real as these impulses that even now throb in
thine own little selfish heart. Lift up thy eyes, behold that life, and
then turn away, and forget it as thou canst; but, if thou hast _known_
that, thou hast begun to know thy duty."[E]
[E] The Religious Aspect of Philosophy, pp. 157-162
(abridged).
* * * * *
This higher vision of an inner significance in what, until then, we had
realized only in the dead external way, often comes over a person
suddenly; and, when it does so, it makes an epoch in his history. As
Emerson says, there is a depth in those moments that constrains us to
ascribe more reality to them than to all other experiences. The passion
of love will shake one like an explosion, or some act will awaken a
remorseful compunction that hangs like a cloud over all one's later day.
This mystic sense of hidden meaning starts upon us often from non-human
natural things. I take this passage from 'Obermann,' a French novel that
had some vogue in its day: "Paris, March 7.--It was dark and rather
cold. I was gloomy, and walked because I had nothing to do. I passed by
some flowers placed breast-high upon a wall. A jonquil in bloom was
there. It is the strongest expression of desire: it was the first
perfume of the year. I felt all the happiness destined for man. This
unutterable harmony of souls, the phantom of the ideal world, arose in
me complete. I never felt anything so great or so instantaneous. I know
not what shape, what analogy, what secret of relation it was that made
me see in this flower a limitless beauty.... I shall never enclose in a
conception this power, this immensity that nothing will express; this
form that nothing will contain; this ideal of a better world which one
feels, but which it would seem that nature has not made."[F]
[F] De Senancour: Obermann, Lettre XXX.
Wordsworth and Shelley are similarly full of this sense of a limitless
significance in natural things. In Wordsworth it was a somewhat austere
and moral significance,--a 'lonely cheer.'
"To every natural form, rock, fruit, or flower,
Even the loose stones that cover the highway,
I gave a moral life: I saw them feel
Or linked them to some feeling: the great mass
Lay bedded in some quickening soul, and all
That I beheld respired with inward meaning."[G]
[G] The Prelude, Book III.
"Authentic tidings of invisible things!" Just what this hidden presence
in nature was, which Wordsworth so rapturously felt, and in the light of
which he lived, tramping the hills for days together, the poet never
could explain logically or in articulate conceptions. Yet to the reader
who may himself have had gleaming moments of a similar sort the verses
in which Wordsworth simply proclaims the fact of them come with a
heart-satisfying authority:--
"Magnificent
The morning rose, in memorable pomp,
Glorious as ere I had beheld. In front
The sea lay laughing at a distance; near
The solid mountains shone, bright as the clouds,
Grain-tinctured, drenched in empyrean light;
And in the meadows and the lower grounds
Was all the sweetness of a common dawn,--
Dews, vapors, and the melody of birds,
And laborers going forth to till the fields."
"Ah! need I say, dear Friend, that to the brim
My heart was full; I made no vows, but vows
Were then made for me; bond unknown to me
Was given, that I should be, else sinning greatly,
A dedicated Spirit. On I walked,
In thankful blessedness, which yet survives."[H]
[H] The Prelude, Book IV.
As Wordsworth walked, filled with his strange inner joy, responsive thus
to the secret life of nature round about him, his rural neighbors,
tightly and narrowly intent upon their own affairs, their crops and
lambs and fences, must have thought him a very insignificant and foolish
personage. It surely never occurred to any one of them to wonder what
was going on inside of _him_ or what it might be worth. And yet that
inner life of his carried the burden of a significance that has fed the
souls of others, and fills them to this day with inner joy.