The Passionate Friends
unhurried things. This year we are in a walled garden upon the Seine,
about four miles above Château Galliard, and with the forest reaching up
to the paddock beyond the orchard close....
You will understand better when I have told you my story why I saw
Burnmore for the last time when I was one-and-twenty and why my memories
of it shine so crystalline clear. I have a thousand vivid miniatures of
it in my mind and all of them are beautiful to me, so that I could quite
easily write a whole book of landscapes from the Park alone. I can still
recall quite vividly the warm beauty-soaked sensation of going out into
the morning sunshine of the Park, with my lunch in a little green Swiss
tin under my arm and the vast interminable day all before me, the
gigantic, divinely unconditional day that only boyhood knows, and the
Park so great and various that it was more than two hours' going for me
to reach its eastern fences. I was only a little older then than you are
now. Sometimes I went right up through the woods to the house to
companion with Philip and Guy Christian and their sister--I loved her
then, and one day I was to love her with all my heart--but in those
boyish times I liked most to go alone.
My memories of the Park are all under blue sky and sunshine, with just a
thunderstorm or so; on wet days and cold days I was kept to closer
limits; and it seems to me now rather an intellectual conviction than a
positive memory that save for a few pine-clad patches in the extreme
south-east, its soil was all thick clay. That meant for me only
beautiful green marshes, a number of vividly interesting meres upon the
course of its stream, and a wealth of gigantic oaks. The meres lay at
various levels, and the hand of Lady Ladislaw had assisted nature in
their enrichment with lilies and water plants. There were places of
sedge and scented rush, amidst which were sapphire mists of
forget-me-not for long stretches, skirmishing commandoes of yellow iris
and wide wastes of floating water-lilies. The gardens passed insensibly
into the Park, and beyond the house were broad stretches of grass,
sun-lit, barred with the deep-green shadows of great trees, and animated
with groups and lines of fallow deer. Near the house was an Italianate
garden, with balustradings and statuary, and a great wealth of roses and
flowering shrubs.
Then there were bracken wildernesses in which the does lurked with the
young fawns, and a hollow, shallow and wide, with the turf greatly
attacked by rabbits, and exceptionally threadbare, where a stricken oak,
lightning-stripped, spread out its ghastly arms above contorted rotting
branches and the mysterious skeletons of I should think five several
deer. In the evening-time the woods behind this place of bones--they
were woods of straight-growing, rather crowded trees and standing as it
were a little aloof--became even under the warmest sunset grey and
cold--and as if they waited....
And in the distant corner where the sand was, rose suddenly a steep
little hill, surmounted by a wild and splendid group of pines, through
which one looked across a vale of cornfields at an ancient town that
became strange and magical as the sun went down, so that I was held
gazing at it, and afterwards had to flee the twilight across the windy
spaces and under the dim and darkling trees. It is only now in the
distant retrospect that I identify that far-off city of wonder, and
luminous mist with the commonplace little town, through whose narrow
streets we drove to the railway station. But, of course, that is what it
must have been.
There are persons to be found mixed up in those childish memories,--Lady
Ladislaw, tall and gracious, in dresses of floating blue or grey, or
thin, subtly folding, flowering stuffs, Philip and his sister, Guy, the
old butler, a multitude of fainter figures long become nameless and
featureless; they are far less vivid in my memory than the fine
solitudes of the Park itself--and the dreams I had there.
I wonder if you dream as I dreamt. I wonder whether indeed I dreamt as
now I think I did. Have I, in these latter years, given form and
substance and a name to things as vague in themselves as the urgencies
of instinct? Did I really go into those woods and waving green places as
one keeps a tryst, expectant of a fellowship more free and delicate and
delightful than any I knew. Did I know in those days of nymphs and
dryads and fauns and all those happy soulless beings with which the
desire of man's heart has animated the wilderness. Once certainly I
crawled slowly through the tall bracken and at last lay still for an
interminable while, convinced that so I should see those shadows
populous with fairies, with green little people. How patiently I lay!
But the stems creaked and stirred, and my heart would keep on beating
like a drum in my throat.
It is incredible that once a furry whispering half-human creature with
bright brown eyes came and for a time played with me near where the tall
ferns foam in a broad torrent from between the big chestnuts down to the
upper mere. That must have been real dreaming, and yet now, with all my
sanities and scepticisms, I could half believe it real.
§ 2
You become reserved. Perhaps not exceptionally so, but as all children
become reserved. Already you understand that your heart is very
preciously your own. You keep it from me and everyone, so much so, so
justifiably so, that when by virtue of our kindred and all that we have
in common I get sudden glimpses right into your depths, there mixes with
the swift spasm of love I feel, a dread--lest you should catch me, as it
were, spying into you and that one of us, I know not which, should feel
ashamed.
Every child passes into this secret stage; it closes in from its first
frankness; it carries off the growing jewel of its consciousness to hide
from all mankind.... I think I can see why this should be so, but I
cannot tell why in so many cases no jewel is given back again at last,
alight, ripened, wonderful, glowing with the deep fires of experience. I
think that is what ought to happen; it is what does happen now with true
poets and true artists. Someday I think it will be the life of all
normal human souls. But usually it does not seem to happen at all.
Children pass out of a stage--open, beautiful, exquisitely simple--into
silences and discretions beneath an imposed and artificial life. And
they are lost. Out of the finished, careful, watchful, restrained and
limited man or woman, no child emerges again....
I remember very distinctly how I myself came by imperceptible increments
of reservation to withdraw those early delicacies of judgments, those
original and personal standards and appreciations, from sight and
expression. I can recall specific moments when I perceive now that my
little childish figure stood, as it were, obstinately and with a sense
of novelty in a doorway denying the self within.
It was partly, I think, a simple instinct that drew that curtain of
silences and concealments, it was much more a realization that I had no
power of lucidity to save the words and deeds I sought to make
expressive from complete misunderstanding. But most of all it was the
perception that I was under training and compulsion for ends that were
all askew and irrelevant to the trend of my imaginations, the quality of
my dreams. There was around me something unfriendly to this inner
world--something very ready to pass from unfriendliness to acute
hostility; and if, indeed, I succeeded in giving anything of my inner
self to others, it was only, as people put it, to give myself away.
My nurses, my governess, my tutor, my father, the servants about me,
seemed all bent upon imposing an artificial personality upon me. Only in
a very limited sense did they want me. What they wanted was something
that could be made out of me by extensive suppressions and additions.
They ignored the fact that I had been born with a shape of my own; they
were resolved I should be pressed into a mould and cast.
It was not that they wanted outer conformity to certain needs and
standards--that, I think, would be a reasonable thing enough to
demand--but they wanted me to subdue my most private thoughts to their
ideals. My nurses and my governesses would rate me for my very feelings,
would clamor for gratitude and reproach me bitterly for betraying that I
did not at some particular moment--love.
(Only yesterday I heard Mademoiselle Potin doing that very same thing to
you. "It is that you do not care, Master Steve. It is that you do not
care. You do not want to care.")
They went too far in that invasion of my personal life, but I perceive
quite clearly the present need for most of the process of moulding and
subjugation that children must undergo. Human society is a new thing
upon the earth, an invention of the last ten thousand years. Man is a
creature as yet not freely and instinctively gregarious; in his more
primordial state he must have been an animal of very small groups and
limited associations, an animal rather self-centred and fierce, and he
is still but imperfectly adapted either morally or physically to the
wider social life his crowding interactions force upon him. He still
learns speech and computation and civility and all the devices of this
artificially extended and continually broadening tribal life with an
extreme reluctance. He has to be shaped in the interests of the species,
I admit, to the newer conditions; the growing social order must be
protected from the keen edge of his still savage individuality, and he
must be trained in his own interests to save himself from the
destruction of impossible revolts. But how clumsily is the thing done!
How we are caught and jammed and pressed and crippled into citizenship!
How excessive and crushing is the suppression, and how inadequate!
Every child feels that, even if every child does not clearly know it.
Every child presently begins to hide itself from the confused tyrannies
of the social process, from the searching inspections and injunctions
and interferences of parent and priest and teacher.
"I have got to be _so_," we all say deep down in ourselves and more or
less distinctly according to the lucidities of our minds; "but in my
heart I am _this_."
And in the outcome we all try to seem at least to be _so_, while an
ineffectual rebel struggles passionately, like a beast caught in a trap,
for ends altogether more deep and dangerous, for the rose and the star
and the wildfire,--for beauty and beautiful things. These, we all know
in our darkly vital recesses, are the real needs of life, the obediences
imposed upon us by our crude necessities and jostling proximities, mere
incidentals on our way to those profounder purposes....
And when I write thus of our selves I mean our bodies quite as much as
our imaginations; the two sides of us are covered up alike and put alike
into disguises and unnatural shapes, we are taught and forced to hide
them for the same reasons, from a fear of ourselves and a fear of the
people about us. The sense of beauty, the sense of one's body, the
freedom of thought and of desire and the wonder of life, are all
interwoven strands. I remember that in the Park of Burnmore one great
craving I had was to take off my clothes there altogether, and bathe in
a clear place among loosestrife and meadowsweet, and afterwards lie wet
and naked upon the soft green turf with the sun shining upon me. But I
thought also that that was a very wicked and shameful craving to have,
and I never dared give way to it.
§ 3
As I think of myself and all these glowing secrecies and hidden fancies
within, walking along beside old Siddons, and half listening to his
instructive discourse, I see myself as though I was an image of all