The Rhythm of Life and Other Essays(生命的旋律)

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The Rhythm of Life and Other Essays

The Rhythm of Life and

Other Essays

The Rhythm of Life and Other Essays

THE RHYTHM OF LIFE

If life is not always poetical, it is at least metrical. Periodicity rules

over the mental experience of man, according to the path of the orbit of his

thoughts. Distances are not gauged, ellipses not measured, velocities not

ascertained, times not known. Nevertheless, the recurrence is sure. What

the mind suffered last week, or last year, it does not suffer now; but it will

suffer again next week or next year. Happiness is not a matter of events;

it depends upon the tides of the mind. Disease is metrical, closing in at

shorter and shorter periods towards death, sweeping abroad at longer and

longer intervals towards recovery. Sorrow for one cause was intolerable

yesterday, and will be intolerable tomorrow; today it is easy to bear, but

the cause has not passed. Even the burden of a spiritual distress unsolved

is bound to leave the heart to a temporary peace; and remorse itself does

not remain--it returns. Gaiety takes us by a dear surprise. If we had made

a course of notes of its visits, we might have been on the watch, and would

have had an expectation instead of a discovery. No one makes such

observations; in all the diaries of students of the interior world, there have

never come to light the records of the Kepler of such cycles. But

Thomas e Kempis knew of the recurrences, if he did not measure them.

In his cell alone with the elements--'What wouldst thou more than these?

for out of these were all things made'--he learnt the stay to be found in the

depth of the hour of bitterness, and the remembrance that restrains the soul

at the coming of the moment of delight, giving it a more conscious

welcome, but presaging for it an inexorable flight. And 'rarely, rarely

comest thou,' sighed Shelley, not to Delight merely, but to the Spirit of

Delight. Delight can be compelled beforehand, called, and constrained to

our service--Ariel can be bound to a daily task; but such artificial violence

throws life out of metre, and it is not the spirit that is thus compelled.

THAT flits upon an orbit elliptically or parabolically or hyperbolically

curved, keeping no man knows what trysts with Time.

It seems fit that Shelley and the author of the IMITATION should both

have been keen and simple enough to perceive these flights, and to guess

The Rhythm of Life and Other Essays

at the order of this periodicity. Both souls were in close touch with the

spirits of their several worlds, and no deliberate human rules, no

infractions of the liberty and law of the universal movement, kept from

them the knowledge of recurrences. Eppur si muove. They knew that

presence does not exist without absence; they knew that what is just upon

its flight of farewell is already on its long path of return. They knew that

what is approaching to the very touch is hastening towards departure. 'O

wind,' cried Shelley, in autumn,

'O wind, If winter comes, can spring be far behind?'

They knew that the flux is equal to the reflux; that to interrupt with

unlawful recurrences, out of time, is to weaken the impulse of onset and

retreat; the sweep and impetus of movement. To live in constant efforts

after an equal life, whether the equality be sought in mental production, or

in spiritual sweetness, or in the joy of the senses, is to live without either

rest or full activity. The souls of certain of the saints, being singularly

simple and single, have been in the most complete subjection to the law of

periodicity. Ecstasy and desolation visited them by seasons. They

endured, during spaces of vacant time, the interior loss of all for which

they had sacrificed the world. They rejoiced in the uncovenanted

beatitude of sweetness alighting in their hearts. Like them are the poets

whom, three times or ten times in the course of a long life, the Muse has

approached, touched, and forsaken. And yet hardly like them; not always

so docile, nor so wholly prepared for the departure, the brevity, of the

golden and irrevocable hour. Few poets have fully recognised the

metrical absence of their Muse. For full recognition is expressed in one

only way--silence.

It has been found that several tribes in Africa and in America worship

the moon, and not the sun; a great number worship both; but no tribes are

known to adore the sun, and not the moon. For the periodicity of the sun

is still in part a secret; but that of the moon is modestly apparent,

perpetually influential. On her depend the tides; and she is Selene,

mother of Herse, bringer of the dews that recurrently irrigate lands where

rain is rare. More than any other companion of earth is she the Measurer.

Early Indo-Germanic languages knew her by that name. Her metrical

The Rhythm of Life and Other Essays

phases are the symbol of the order of recurrence. Constancy in approach

and in departure is the reason of her inconstancies. Juliet will not receive

a vow spoken in invocation of the moon; but Juliet did not live to know

that love itself has tidal times--lapses and ebbs which are due to the

metrical rule of the interior heart, but which the lover vainly and unkindly

attributes to some outward alteration in the beloved. For man--except

those elect already named--is hardly aware of periodicity. The individual

man either never learns it fully, or learns it late. And he learns it so late,

because it is a matter of cumulative experience upon which cumulative

evidence is lacking. It is in the after-part of each life that the law is learnt

so definitely as to do away with the hope or fear of continuance. That

young sorrow comes so near to despair is a result of this young ignorance.

So is the early hope of great achievement. Life seems so long, and its

capacity so great, to one who knows nothing of all the intervals it needs

must hold--intervals between aspirations, between actions, pauses as

inevitable as the pauses of sleep. And life looks impossible to the young

unfortunate, unaware of the inevitable and unfailing refreshment. It

would be for their peace to learn that there is a tide in the affairs of men, in

a sense more subtle--if it is not too audacious to add a meaning to

Shakespeare-- than the phrase was meant to contain. Their joy is flying

away from them on its way home; their life will wax and wane; and if they

would be wise, they must wake and rest in its phases, knowing that they

are ruled by the law that commands all things--a sun's revolutions and the

rhythmic pangs of maternity.

The Rhythm of Life and Other Essays

DECIVILISED

The difficulty of dealing--in the course of any critical duty--with

decivilised man lies in this: when you accuse him of vulgarity-- sparing

him no doubt the word--he defends himself against the charge of

barbarism. Especially from new soil--transatlantic, colonial--he faces

you, bronzed, with a half conviction of savagery, partly persuaded of his

own youthfulness of race. He writes, and recites, poems about ranches

and canyons; they are designed to betray the recklessness of his nature and

to reveal the good that lurks in the lawless ways of a young society. He

is there to explain himself, voluble, with a glossary for his own artless

slang. But his colonialism is only provincialism very articulate. The

new air does but make old decadences seem more stale; the young soil

does but set into fresh conditions the ready-made, the uncostly, the refuse

feeling of a race decivilising. American fancy played long this pattering

part of youth. The New-Englander hastened to assure you with so self-

denying a face he did not wear war-paint and feathers, that it became

doubly difficult to communicate to him that you had suspected him of

nothing wilder than a second-hand dress coat. And when it was a

question not of rebuke, but of praise, the American was ill-content with the

word of the judicious who lauded him for some delicate successes in

continuing something of the literature of England, something of the art of

France; he was more eager for the applause that stimulated him to write

romances and to paint panoramic landscape, after brief training in

academies of native inspiration. Even now English voices, with violent

commonplace, are constantly calling upon America to begin--to begin, for

the world is expectant. Whereas there is no beginning for her, but instead

a continuity which only a constant care can guide into sustained

refinement and can save from decivilisation.

But decivilised man is not peculiar to new soil. The English town,

too, knows him in all his dailiness. In England, too, he has a literature,

an art, a music, all his own--derived from many and various things of price.

Trash, in the fulness of its in simplicity and cheapness, is impossible

The Rhythm of Life and Other Essays

without a beautiful past. Its chief characteristic--which is futility, not

failure--could not be achieved but by the long abuse, the rotatory

reproduction, the quotidian disgrace, of the utterances of Art, especially

the utterance by words. Gaiety, vigour, vitality, the organic quality,

purity, simplicity, precision--all these are among the antecedents of trash.

It is after them; it is also, alas, because of them. And nothing can be

much sadder than such a proof of what may possibly be the failure of

derivation.

Evidently we cannot choose our posterity. Reversing the steps of

time, we may, indeed, choose backwards. We may give our thoughts

noble forefathers. Well begotten, well born our fancies must be; they

shall be also well derived. We have a voice in decreeing our inheritance,

and not our inheritance only, but our heredity. Our minds may trace

upwards and follow their ways to the best well-heads of the arts. The

very habit of our thoughts may be persuaded one way unawares by their

antenatal history. Their companions must be lovely, but need be no

lovelier than their ancestors; and being so fathered and so husbanded, our

thoughts may be intrusted to keep the counsels of literature.

Such is our confidence in a descent we know. But, of a sequel which

of us is sure? Which of us is secured against the dangers of subsequent

depreciation? And, moreover, which of us shall trace the contemporary

tendencies, the one towards honour, the other towards dishonour? Or

who shall discover why derivation becomes degeneration, and where and

when and how the bastardy befalls? The decivilised have every grace as

the antecedent of their vulgarities, every distinction as the precedent of

their mediocrities. No ballad-concert song, feign it sigh, frolic, or laugh,

but has the excuse that the feint was suggested, was made easy, by some

living sweetness once. Nor are the decivilised to blame as having in their

own persons possessed civilisation and marred it. They did not possess it;

they were born into some tendency to derogation, into an inclination for

things mentally inexpensive. And the tendency can hardly do other than

continue. Nothing can look duller than the future of this second-hand

and multiplying world. Men need not be common merely because they

are many; but the infection of commonness once begun in the many, what

The Rhythm of Life and Other Essays

dulness in their future! To the eye that has reluctantly discovered this

truth--that the vulgarised are not UNcivilised, and that there is no growth

for them--it does not look like a future at all. More ballad-concerts, more

quaint English, more robustious barytone songs, more piecemeal pictures,

more anxious decoration, more colonial poetry, more young nations with

withered traditions. Yet it is before this prospect that the provincial

overseas lifts up his voice in a boast or a promise common enough among

the incapable young, but pardonable only in senility. He promises the

world a literature, an art, that shall be new because his forest is untracked

and his town just built. But what the newness is to be he cannot tell.

Certain words were dreadful once in the mouth of desperate old age.

Dreadful and pitiable as the threat of an impotent king, what shall we

name them when they are the promise of an impotent people? 'I will do

such things: what they are yet I know not.'

The Rhythm of Life and Other Essays

A REMEMBRANCE

When the memories of two or three persons now upon earth shall be

rolled up and sealed with their records within them, there will be no

remembrance left open, except this, of a man whose silence seems better

worth interpreting than the speech of many another. Of himself he has

left no vestiges. It was a common reproach against him that he never

acknowledged the obligation to any kind of restlessness. The kingdom of

heaven suffereth violence, but as he did none there was nothing for it but

that the kingdom of heaven should yield to his leisure. The delicate, the

abstinent, the reticent graces were his in the heroic degree. Where shall I

find a pen fastidious enough to define and limit and enforce so many

significant negatives? Words seem to offend by too much assertion, and

to check the suggestions of his reserve. That reserve was life- long.

Loving literature, he never lifted a pen except to write a letter. He was

not inarticulate, he was only silent. He had an exquisite style from which

to refrain. The things he abstained from were all exquisite. They were

brought from far to undergo his judgment, if haply he might have selected

them. Things ignoble never approached near enough for his refusal; they

had not with him so much as that negative connexion. If I had to equip

an author I should ask no better than to arm him and invest him with

precisely the riches that were renounced by the man whose intellect, by

integrity, had become a presence-chamber.

It was by holding session among so many implicit safeguards that he

taught, rather than by precepts. Few were these in his speech, but his

personality made laws for me. It was a subtle education, for it persuaded

insensibly to a conception of my own. How, if he would not define,

could I know what things were and what were not worthy of his gentle and

implacable judgment? I must needs judge them for myself, yet he

constrained me in the judging. Within that constraint and under that

stimulus, which seemed to touch the ultimate springs of thoughts before

they sprang, I began to discern all things in literature and in life--in the

chastity of letters and in the honour of life--that I was bound to love. Not

The Rhythm of Life and Other Essays

the things of one character only, but excellent things of every character.

There was no tyranny in such a method. His idleness justified itself by

the liberality it permitted to his taste. Never having made his love of

letters further a secondary purpose, never having bound the literary

genius--that delicate Ariel--to any kind of servitude, never having so much

as permitted himself a prejudice whereby some of his delights should be

stinted while others were indulged beyond the sanctions of modest reason,

he barely tolerated his own preferences, which lay somewhat on the hither

side of full effectiveness of style. These the range of his reading

confessed by certain exclusions. Nevertheless it was not of deficiencies

that he was patient: he did but respect the power of pause, and he

disliked violence chiefly because violence is apt to confess its own limits.

Perhaps, indeed, his own fine negatives made him only the more sensible

of any lack of those literary qualities that are bound in their full

complement to hold themselves at the disposal of the consummate author--

to stand and wait, if they may do no more.

Men said that he led a DILETTANTE life. They reproached him

with the selflessness that made him somewhat languid. Others, they

seemed to aver, were amateurs at this art or that; he was an amateur at

living. So it was, in the sense that he never grasped at happiness, and

that many of the things he had held slipped from his disinterested hands.

So it was, too, in this unintended sense; he loved life. How should he not

have loved a life that his living made honourable? How should he not

have loved all arts, in which his choice was delicate, liberal, instructed,

studious, docile, austere? An amateur man he might have been called,

too, because he was not discomposed by his own experiences, or shaken

by the discovery which life brings to us-that the negative quality of which

Buddhism seems to accuse all good is partaken by our happiness. He had

always prayed temperate prayers and harboured probable wishes. His

sensibility was extreme, but his thought was generalised. When he had

joy he tempered it not in the common way by meditation upon the general

sorrow but by a recollection of the general pleasure. It was his finest

distinction to desire no differences, no remembrance, but loss among the

innumerable forgotten. And when he suffered, it was with so quick a

The Rhythm of Life and Other Essays

nerve and yet so wide an apprehension that the race seemed to suffer in

him. He pitied not himself so tenderly as mankind, of whose capacity for

pain he was then feelingly persuaded. His darkening eyes said in the

extreme hour: 'I have compassion on the multitude.'

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TheRhythmofLifeandOtherEssays1TheRhythmofLifeandOtherEssaysTheRhythmofLifeandOtherEssays2THERHYTHMOFLIFEIflifeisnotalwayspoetical,itisatleastmetrical.Periodicityrulesoverthementalexperienceofman,accordingtothepathoftheorbitofhisthoughts.Distancesarenotgauged,ellipsesnotmeasured,velocitiesnotascertai...

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