Things near & far
Meyrick, if he could have been jerked for a moment by
his creator into a semblance of real existence, would
justify the worst outrages wrought upon him by his equally
incredible _alma mater_. He is a sentimental philanderer
with æsthetic Catholicism, a mystical Celtic dreamer, a
Soho Bohemian (before Soho was ruined, of course); but
these crimes are as nothing compared to his incorrigible
penchant for ‘poetic prose.’ Mr. Machen has encouraged him
in it. He will have a great deal more to answer for in the
day of judgment than the schoolmaster who tried to beat him
out of it.”
There! That notice, which appeared in “The Nation and the Athenæum,”
was signed by Mr. J. Middleton Murry, generally recognised as being
one of the most eminent literary critics of the day, if he is not
rather to be accounted as the most eminent literary critic of the
day. He is also, as a fellow-writer assured me, regarded as “the
leader of the younger intelligentsia.” Anyhow, I like a man who
speaks his mind. I try to do so myself, sometimes.
And “there!” again. I think I have written enough about the manner in
which I thought of my books, the manner in which I wrote my books,
the manner in which I broke down more or less lamentably in the
beginning, the middle and the end of my books, the manner in which
they were welcomed by eager publishers, and the manner in which they
finally tottered into print and were acclaimed by the Press. Enough
has been said on all these topics, and perhaps a good deal too much
for the patience of a weary world.
Let us now be brief on this matter. The year 1898 I spent in the
service of “Literature,” a weekly journal that had just been started
by “The Times.” In 1899 I wrote “Hieroglyphics” and “The White
People,” and the first chapter of “A Fragment of Life.” Then a great
sorrow which had long been threatened fell upon me: I was once more
alone.
_Chapter IX_
It was somewhere about the autumn of 1899 that I began to be
conscious that the world was being presented to me at a new angle.
I find now an extreme difficulty in the choice of words to convey
my meaning; “a new angle” is clumsy enough, “here in this world he
changed his life” is far too high in its associations; but there
certainly came to be a strangeness in the proportion of things, both
in things exterior and interior. And it is in these latter that I
held and still hold that the true wonder, the true mystery, the
true miracle reside. There is the old proverb, of course: “Seeing
is believing” and, for once, the old proverb is widely astray. All
phenomenal perception is apt to be deceitful, and very often is
deceitful. This is in the nature of things, as Berkeley pointed out
a very long time ago. That castle tower that looks round in the
distance is found to be square when you get a little nearer to it;
the red and golden glory and the magic architecture of the sunset
cloud would change, if you were in it, into something like a London
fog. And if it be objected: “Yes, exactly; when you are far away
from an object you see it incorrectly, but when you come near it
you see it correctly”--that is not so. If you were near enough to
the tower, with your nose within six inches of it, you only see a
certain limited extent of stone surface; the tower, qua tower, has
entirely disappeared. But you see the stone surface accurately? No,
you don’t. The ant crawling up it has a wildly different vision and
perception of that stone surface from your vision and perception; and
a microscope gives yet another vision, different from either; and as
magnification must be infinite in potentiality, though not _in actu_,
it is quite clear that no one can ever see the truth of any external
object presented to the eyes: there must always be, in theory and
perhaps, eventually, in fact, another microscope of still higher
magnifying power, which will entirely change the aspect of the thing
seen. And thus, without tedious specification and example of all the
other senses, I mustn’t even call the poker stiff, lest the man in
the chair on the other side of the fire take it up and tie it into a
knot before my eyes, proving that I have been talking foolishly. And
get the rarest Bordeaux that money can buy, and offer Bill the navvy
a glass; and watch his face as he calls for ale to wash that muck,
that ... something muck, out of his mouth.
All this, of course, is mere philosophic A B C, and if I thought this
book likely to penetrate into philosophic circles I should apologise
for a clumsy rehash of Berkeley’s irresistible conclusions; but I do
not think that the readers of “Mind” will trouble themselves about
me; and I am afraid that those of us who have not been rectified by
the study of philosophy are still inclined to think that seeing is
believing and that some things are hard and others soft, and so on.
And, no doubt, there is a kind of relative and highly inferior sort
of truth in these propositions: don’t knock your head against a stone
wall, for instance, is a perfectly sound bit of practical advice,
since, considered in relation to your skull, the stone wall is hard
and will hurt. And so with “seeing is believing”: in nine hundred and
ninety-nine cases out of a thousand you will be absolutely correct in
saying: “Hullo! There’s old Secretan walking up the garden path.” But
there is that thousandth--or millionth--case in which it turns out
that old Secretan was busy in Tibet or busy dying at the moment you
were quite certain that you saw him approaching the hall-door of The
Cedars: and then where is your “seeing is believing” maxim? I had a
curious instance of this in the midst of the famous “Angels of Mons”
controversy. An officer of very high distinction wrote to me from
the front, and described a most remarkable experience which had been
vouchsafed to him and to others during the retreat of August, 1914.
The battle of Le Cateau was fought on August 26th. My correspondent’s
division, as he writes--his letter is quoted at length in the
Introduction to the second edition of “The Bowmen”--was heavily
shelled, “had a bad time of it,” but retired in good order. It was on
the march all the night of the 26th, and throughout August 27th, with
only about two hours’ rest.
“By the night of the 27th we were all absolutely worn out with
fatigue--both bodily and mental fatigue. No doubt we also suffered
to a certain extent from shock; but the retirement still continued
in excellent order, and I feel sure that our mental faculties were
still quite sound and in good working condition. On the night of
the 27th I was riding along in the column with two other officers.
We had been talking and doing our best to keep from falling asleep
on our horses. As we rode along I became conscious of the fact
that, in the fields on both sides of the road along which we were
marching, I could see a very large body of horsemen. These horsemen
had the appearance of squadrons of cavalry, and they seemed to be
riding across the fields and going in the same direction as we were
going, and keeping level with us. The night was not very dark, and I
fancied that I could see squadron upon squadron of these cavalrymen
quite distinctly. I did not say a word about it at first, but I
watched them for about twenty minutes. The other two officers had
stopped talking. At last one of them asked me if I saw anything in
the fields. I then told him what I had seen. The third officer then
confessed that he too had been watching these horsemen for the past
twenty minutes. So convinced were we that they were really cavalry
that, at the next halt, one of the officers took a party of men out
to reconnoitre, and found no one there.... The same phenomenon was
seen by many men in our column.... I myself am absolutely convinced
that I saw these horsemen; and I feel sure that they did not exist
only in my imagination.”
Now I have not the faintest notion what really happened to the
Colonel, to the two officers and to many of the men in the column.
What concerns us for the moment is that these people were at
first perfectly certain that they saw sensible objects, that is,
cavalrymen, and then were perfectly certain that there were no
sensible objects to see; and therefore it may be concluded from this
instance and from many instances, of like sort, that the senses are
deceptive; that the world of the senses is very largely a world
of illusion and delusion. To give a sharp example of what I mean:
I would say that the old story of the oak and the dryad is much
nearer to the real and final truth about the oak than the scientific
classification and description of the tree in a manual of Dendrology.
Not that I believe that a spirit in the shape of a beautiful woman
of another order of being to our own is somehow bound up with the
life of the oak tree; but I do believe that the truth about the oak
tree--as about all else--is a great mystery, which is quite beyond
the purview of all sensible--that is scientific--perception and
enquiry.
And so, when I speak of that singular rearrangement of the world
into which I entered in the late summer of 1899, I do not desire to
lay much stress on the sensible, or material, phenomena which were
presented to me. I marvel, but I marvel with caution, remembering the
manifold deceits of the senses, the phantasmagoria or shadow show
that they are always displaying before us; remembering also that when
the super-normal is manifested it is usually, in nine cases out of
ten, irrelevant and insignificant. For example, in the case of old
Secretan, seen walking up the path to the hall-door of The Cedars,
but discovered afterwards to have an undoubted _alibi_, either on his
dying bed or in Tibet. Suppose the latter case, suppose that Secretan
returns and that you collar him and ask him if he remembers what he
was doing about five o’clock of the afternoon of June 28th.
“What makes you ask that?” he may reply, likely enough. “I thought it
rum at the time. Here’s the entry in my diary. ‘June 28th. Had rank
goat and tea with rancid butter in it in the afternoon. Thought of
the jolly tea and tennis parties at The Cedars and wondered how old
Jones was getting on in the City.’”
And, it seems shocking, but it is probably the truth, that if
Secretan had been really engaged, not in Tibet but in dying, his
thought, the force which projected his shadow on that gravel path of
The Cedars, Thames Ditton, was: “Beastly taste in my mouth! Wish I
could get round to old Jones’s and wash it out with a glass of his
pre-war whiskey. Eh?” ... and the silence.
And all this, as I say, is irrelevant and insignificant; and then
again the rats and snakes and other objects seen by the delirium
tremens patient; they really don’t matter--save to the patient
aforesaid, who, of course, is quite sure that they are there. So,
again, I distrust the senses, and though I wondered and still wonder,
I make nothing much of the great gusts of incense that were blown in
those days into my nostrils, of the odours of rare gums that seemed
to fume before invisible altars in Holborn, in Claremont Square,
in grey streets of Clerkenwell, of the savours of the sanctuary
that were perceived by me in all manner of grim London wastes and
wanderings. One would like to think of the Knights of the Grail who
were ware of the “odour of all the rarest spiceries in the world”
before the Vision was given to them: but ... if one is not a Knight
of the Grail, but far otherwise?
Then, again, there was that morning, a bright, keen morning of
November it seems in my recollection, when I was walking up Rosebery
Avenue with a friend, and suddenly became aware of a strange
sensation, and as suddenly recollected the old proverb: “walking on