The Passionate Friends
things that are at once bodiless and soundless and lightless and yet
infinitely close and real. And moreover with that mysterious and subtle
change of heart in me there came also a change in the quality and range
of my ideas. I seemed to rise out of a tangle of immediacies and
misconceptions, to see more largely and more freely than I had ever done
before.
I have told how in my muddled and wounded phase I had snatched at the
dull project of improving my languages, and under the cloak of that
spying a little upon German military arrangements. Now my mind set such
petty romanticism on one side. It had recovered the strength to look on
the whole of life and on my place in it. It could resume the ideas that
our storm of passion had for a time thrust into the background of my
thoughts. I took up again all those broad generalizations that had
arisen out of my experiences in South Africa, and which I had been not
so much fitting into as forcing into the formulæ of English politics; I
recalled my disillusionment with British Imperialism, my vague but
elaborating apprehension of a profound conflict between enterprise and
labor, a profound conflict between the life of the farm and the life of
trade and finance and wholesale production, as being something far truer
to realities than any of the issues of party and patriotism upon which
men were spending their lives. So far as this rivalry between England
and Germany, which so obsessed the imagination of Europe, went, I found
that any faith I may have had in its importance had simply fallen out of
my mind. As a danger to civilization, as a conceivable source of
destruction and delay, it was a monstrous business enough, but that in
the long run it mattered how or when they fought and which won I did not
believe. In the development of mankind the thing was of far less
importance than the struggle for Flanders or the wars of France and
Burgundy. I was already coming to see Europe as no more than the
dog's-eared corner of the page of history,--like most Europeans I had
thought it the page--and my recovering mind was eager and open to see
the world beyond and form some conception of the greater forces that lay
outside our insularities. What is humanity as a whole doing? What is the
nature of the world process of which I am a part? Why should I drift
from cradle to grave wearing the blinkers of my time and nationality, a
mere denizen of Christendom, accepting its beliefs, its stale
antagonisms, its unreal purposes? That perhaps had been tolerable while
I was still an accepted member of the little world into which my lot had
fallen, but now that I was thrust out its absurdity glared. For me the
alternative was to be a world-man or no man. I had seemed sinking
towards the latter: now I faced about and began to make myself what I
still seek to make myself to-day, a son of mankind, a conscious part of
that web of effort and perplexity which wraps about our globe....
All this I say came into my mind as if it were a part of that recovery
of my mind from its first passionate abjection. And it seemed a simple
and obvious part of the same conversion to realize that I was ignorant
and narrow, and that, too, in a world which is suffering like a beast in
a slime pit by reason of ignorance and narrowness of outlook, and that
it was my manifest work and purpose to make myself less ignorant and to
see and learn with all my being. It came to me as a clear duty that I
should get out of the land of hotels and leisure and go seeking the
facts and clues to human inter-relationship nearer the earthy roots of
things, and I turned my thoughts to India and China, those vast enigmas
of human accumulation, in a spirit extraordinarily like that of some
mystic who receives a call. I felt I must go to Asia and from Asia
perhaps round the world. But it was the greatness of Asia commanded me.
I wanted to see the East not as a spectacle but as the simmering vat in
which the greater destiny of man brews and brews....
§ 7
It was necessary to tell my father of my intentions. I made numerous
beginnings. I tore up several letters and quarrelled bitterly with the
hotel pens. At first I tried to describe the change that had happened to
my mind, to give him some impression of the new light, the release that
had come to me. But how difficult this present world is with its tainted
and poisoned phrases and its tangled misunderstandings! Here was I
writing for the first time in my life of something essentially religious
and writing it to him whose profession was religion, and I could find no
words to convey my meaning to him that did not seem to me fraught with
the possibilities of misinterpretation. One evening I made a desperate
resolve to let myself go, and scrawled my heart out to him as it seemed
that night, a strange, long letter. It was one of the profoundest
regrets that came to me when I saw him dead last winter that I did not
risk his misunderstanding and post that letter. But when I re-read it in
the next morning's daylight it seemed to me so rhetorical, so full
of--what shall I call it?--spiritual bombast, it so caricatured and
reflected upon the deep feelings sustaining me, that I could not post it
for shamefacedness, and I tore it up into little pieces and sent
instead the briefest of notes.
"I am doing no good here in Switzerland," I wrote. "Would you mind if I
went east? I want to see something of the world outside Europe. I have a
fancy I may find something to do beyond there. Of course, it will cost
rather more than my present allowance. I will do my best to economize.
Don't bother if it bothers you--I've been bother enough to you...."
He replied still more compactly. "By all means. I will send you some
circular notes, Poste Restante, Rome. That will be on your way. Good
wishes to you, Stephen. I'm glad you want to go east instead of just
staying in Switzerland."
I sit here now and wonder, little son, what he thought, what he
supposed, what he understood.
I loved my father, and I began to perceive he loved me wonderfully. I
can imagine no man I would have sooner had for a priest than him; all
priestcraft lays hands if it can, and with an excellent wisdom, upon the
titles and dignity of fatherhood; and yet here am I left to guessing--I
do not know whether my father ever worshipped, whether he ever prayed
with his heart bared to God. There are times when the inexpressiveness
of life comes near to overwhelming me, when it seems to me we are all
asleep or entranced, and but a little way above the still cows who stand
munching slowly in a field. Why couldn't we and why didn't we talk
together?... We fear bathos too much, are shyly decent to the pitch of
mania. We have neither the courage of our bodies nor of our souls....
I went almost immediately to Rome. I stayed in Rome some days, getting
together an outfit, and incidentally seeing that greater city of the
dead in whose embrace the modern city lies. I was now becoming
interested in things outside my grooves, though my grooves were still
there, deep and receptive, and I went about the place at last almost
eagerly, tracing the outlines of that great departed city on whose
colossal bones the churches and palaces of the middle ages cluster like
weeds in the spaces and ruins of a magnificent garden. I found myself
one day in the Forum, thinking of that imperialism that had built the
Basilica of Julius Cæsar, and comparing its cramped vestiges with that
vaster second administrative effort which has left the world the
monstrous arches of Constantine. I sat down over against these last
among the ruins of the Vestals' House, and mused on that later
reconstruction when the Empire, with its science aborted and its
literature and philosophy shrivelled to nothing, its social fabric
ruined by the extravagances of financial adventure and its honor and
patriotism altogether dead, united itself, in a desperate effort to
continue, with all that was most bickeringly intolerant and destructive
in Christianity--only to achieve one common vast decay. All Europe to
this day is little more than the sequel to that failure. It is the Roman
Empire in disintegration. The very churches whose domes rise to the
northward of the ancient remains are built of looted stones and look
like parasitic and fungoid growths, and the tourists stream through
those spaces day by day, stare at the marble fragments, the arches, the
fallen carvings and rich capitals, with nothing greater in their minds
and nothing clearer....
I discovered I was putting all this into the form of a letter to Mary.
I was writing to her in my mind, as many people talk to themselves. And
I remember that I wandered upon the Palatine Hill musing over the idea
of writing a long letter to her, a long continuous letter to her, a sort
of diary of impressions and ideas, that somewhen, years ahead, I might
be able to put into her hands.
One does not carry out such an idea into reality; it is so much easier
to leave the letter imagined and unwritten if there lives but little
hope of its delivery; yet for many years I kept up an impalpable
correspondence in my thoughts, a stream of expression to which no answer
came--until at last the habits of public writing and the gathering
interests of a new rôle in life diverted it to other ends.
§ 8
One morning on the way from Brindisi to Egypt I came up on deck at dawn
because my mind was restless and I could not sleep. Another solitary
passenger was already up, so intently watching a pink-lit rocky
coast-line away to the north of us that for a time he did not observe
me.
"That's Crete," he said, when at last he became aware of me close at
hand.
"Crete!" said I.
"Yes," he said, "Crete."
He came nearer to me. "That, sir," he said with a challenging emphasis,
"is the most wonderful island I've ever yet set eyes on,--quite the most
wonderful."
"Five thousand years ago," he remarked after a pause that seemed to me
to be calculated, "they were building palaces there, better than the
best we can build to-day. And things--like modern things. They had
bathrooms there, beautifully fitted bathrooms--and admirable
sanitation--admirable. Practically--American. They had better artists to
serve them than your King Edward has, why! Minos would have laughed or
screamed at all that Windsor furniture. And the things they made of
gold, sir--you couldn't get them done anywhere to-day. Not for any
money. There was a Go about them.... They had a kind of writing,
too--before the Phoenicians. No man can read it now, and there it is.
Fifty centuries ago it was; and to-day--They grow oranges and lemons.
And they riot.... Everything else gone.... It's as if men struggled up
to a certain pitch and then--grew tired.... All this Mediterranean; it's
a tired sea...."
That was the beginning of a curious conversation. He was an American, a
year or so younger than myself, going, he said, "to look at Egypt."
"In our country," he explained, "we're apt to forget all these
worked-out regions. Too apt. We don't get our perspectives. We think the
whole blessed world is one everlasting boom. It hit me first down in
Yucatan that that wasn't so. Why! the world's littered with the remains
of booms and swaggering beginnings. Americanism!--there's always been
Americanism. This Mediterranean is just a Museum of old Americas. I
guess Tyre and Sidon thought they were licking creation all the time.
It's set me thinking. What's _really_ going on? Why--anywhere,--you're
running about among ruins--anywhere. And ruins of something just as good
as anything we're doing to-day. Better--in some ways. It takes the heart
out of you...."
It was Gidding, who is now my close friend and ally. I remember very
vividly the flavor of morning freshness as we watched Crete pass away