"Ye dragons, and all deeps; Fire and hail, snow and vapour; Stormy wind fulfilling his word; Mountains and all hills; Fruitful trees and all cedars, ..."
and he read it as though it were a draper"s sale bill. And yet it needs but a very little imagination for such a pa.s.sage to become a series of vivid pictures. Fire, hail, snow, vapour, hills, mountains, cedars, dragons and deeps--every word is "a word of power" if only there is no hurry, if only each word as it comes is given time to call up the picture of the real thing before the inward eye.
And you may hear children of fourteen and fifteen who have pa.s.sed examinations in "English" recite line after line of, say, Matthew Arnold"s _The Forsaken Merman_ with a glib self-a.s.sured colourlessness due solely to the fact that no teacher has ever taught them respect for simple words. And what simpler words could there be than these, for example--
"Where great whales come sailing by, Sail and sail, with unshut eye, Round the world, for ever and aye"?
Simple, common words; yet if there is that leisurely attention to each one as it comes what an exhilarating picture arises of the great sea-beasts, and of "the round ocean and the living air."
I am not pleading for the stylist"s concentration on words which exalts them above the things they body forth. The most vivid and beautiful description of dawn in the English language--
"Night"s candles are burned out, and jocund morn Stands tiptoe on the misty mountain tops"
though spoken by the most sensitively vibrant voice in the world, can never come near the real dawn breaking across real mountains. But the point is that those two lines composed of simple English words have power, if we pay them respect, to create the dawn within the mind, and to supply the spirit with that beauty which is its very breath.
If this patience with words, this respect for the familiar fine things of our native tongue, this desire to make them yield up their strength and beauty, if this has nothing to do with healthy living I don"t know what has. William Wordsworth"s--
"And vital feelings of delight Shall rear her form to stately height"
is only a metrical expression of a great and practical truth. You do not need to be a "Christian Scientist" to know that ideas and emotions can affect the stoop of the shoulders or the lines of the mouth. Other people besides "Eugenists" have observed that ugly or mean-spirited parents seldom have beautiful children.
But though the power of ideas is a commonplace, and though psychologists tell us how much we may improve mental concentration by letting the words of any sentence call up each its own picture, what they a omit to do is to recognise the need of the human spirit for beauty. You can concentrate your thought on the list of pickles in a grocer"s price list: it is doubtless a good exercise. But the same exercise directed to some great phrase, such as Emerson"s _Trust thyself: ever" heart vibrates to that iron string_; or some vivid lyrical image such as _All the trees of the field shall clap their hands_, or even a complete poem of simple words but permanent beauty, such as that one of Wordsworth"s beginning _I wandered lonely as a Cloud_; this will not only improve concentration and sharpen memory: it will enrich the mind with ever-available sources of inspiration, courage and joy.
EDGAR J. SAXON.
THE WORLD"S WANDERERS.
Tell me, thou star, whose wings of light Speed thee in thy fiery flight, In what cavern of the night Will thy pinions close now?
Tell me, moon, thou pale and grey Pilgrim of heaven"s homeless way, In what depth of night or day.
Seekest thou repose now?
Weary wind, who wanderest Like the world"s rejected guest, Hast thou still some secret nest On the tree or billow?
PERCY BYSSHE Sh.e.l.lEY.
CLOUD-CAPPED TOWERS.
Building castles in the air has always been one of the favourite amus.e.m.e.nts of mankind. To it we owe much, not only of the zest of life, but also of motive power for overcoming difficulties and reaching out towards new possibilities. Yet all literature, and tradition that is earlier than any written literature, is full of a deep note of warning; over and over again we see in the dim past the shadow of a tower that was built in vain, of walls that were piled too high and toppled into ruin, of crests that tapped the thunder-clouds and drew down lightning to their own destruction. Evidently man has seen danger in his own desire! The castle must be built with wisdom as well as with industry and boldness if it is to escape disaster and to become a storehouse, a safe defence or a vantage-ground for surveying earth and sky.
There is one obvious precaution we should observe in building our castles, and that is to realise that all which we imagine and think about tends sooner or later to externalise itself and pa.s.s into action. Every idea tends to glide into an ideal. Nearly all thinkers have recognised this, and have seen that morality lies much farther back than action, farther back than conscious will. Banquo had dreams of ambition, as had Macbeth, but they dealt differently with them; while Macbeth allowed his visions to lead him on to treachery and murder, Banquo prayed against the temptations that came to him in sleep. To most of us imagination, sleeping or waking, comes in less dramatic form, but we should all think more sanely and act more wisely if we interposed a definite revision by the conscious mind and will of all our plans and ideals between their (perhaps quite automatic) formation in our imagination and their translation into fact. Slack muscle should go with the daydream or picture of the future; we should not strike or clench or lift until we have decided that the action is right and just and wise. The girl who counted her chickens and broke the eggs is a true enough example: every doctor and coroner knows many instances of results far more tragic.
But sometimes the vision has nothing in it but what is pure and good and n.o.ble. Are there any dangers even here?
There is this danger always, that we find the picture so lovely and so satisfying that we cannot summon up courage and energy to turn away from it towards the serious work which it suggests. The castle in the air is radiant and tall, but it is generally meant as a model for a tougher building made out of common earth, by toil and pain, amidst mud and dust. It is so much easier, as Sordello knew, to imagine than to do. Actual circ.u.mstances, real life, other people all this that lies round us is sterner stuff than our easily moulded material of dreams. Who has not at some time or other lain sleepily in bed of a morning and gone through in thought the processes of getting up, until a louder call or an alarum bell has awakened the realisation that the task is not yet begun? Who has not been tempted to shirk practice of some sort in thinking of a prize? Who has not sometimes built expectation higher and higher until his demands of fate have become so great that, in despair of making good, he has let the whole plan slip away into the valley of forgotten dreams?
These dangers, the almost involuntary carrying out of unworthy aims that have been cherished in thought and the loss of vigour for real achievement, due to too easy an indulgence in blameless aspiration, are fairly obvious and have long been recognised.
There is another that has been seen from time to time and occasionally expressed.[16] We have seen that too loose a dream-world may make the world in which we live seem dull and ordinary. But is not the converse at least as often true? If our thought-world is too narrow, too selfish or too weak, all our ordinary work, sound and compact though it may be, is stultified, misdirected, often wasted. We all know how in the industrial world something more than industry is needed; in the emotional world something more than a clumsy and unapprehending goodwill. We need a certain insight to turn these solid qualities of labour and feeling to the best account. "A man"s reach should exceed his grasp," a great poet tells us, and even the birds or beavers do not go on quite blindly with their building, but, when effort on effort has been destroyed by wind and water or man"s interference, they at last accommodate their instinct to circ.u.mstances so as to give themselves a better chance of fulfilling their deeper purpose. In many ways we have hardly outgrown the beaver stage: wars, accidents, disease, disputes--how many times must we try over again the same path which has led us before into trouble and disaster before we put our imagination seriously to work on the problem and try to find some more complete solution?
Of all the dangers of the use of the imagination, perhaps the greatest of all is the neglect to use it, the denial of it and its consequent starvation.
E.M. COBHAM.
[16] Mrs Book sees an allusion to this danger, as well as to the first, in the warnings against covetousness in the Tenth Commandment.
THE PLAY SPIRIT[17]: A CRITICISM.
[17] See the article, "The Play Spirit," in the November issue.
With your contributor"s description of the play spirit, that happy leisure from self and its responsibilities in order that time and thought and heart may be filled with wider inspiration, most of your readers will, I think, entirely agree, and all of us will be grateful for the spirited claim on behalf of "play."
The one criticism that occurs to the mind is that a touch of professionalism, of patronage towards the ordinary person, has crept into the author"s thought and peeps out through many of the sentences.
"Common men" ... "ordinary everyday people" ... "average humanity,"
... "a worker" who ... "cannot play"; does the writer of the Play Spirit really show us what is in their hearts? He is an artist in words, he is a keen admirer of other arts, he is interested in thinking; it seems all but impossible to him that anyone can have "freedom" without the power of expressing it, without even the consciousness of its possession.
We are all too apt, I think, to imagine that our own discoveries of the mystery and magic of life are peculiar to ourselves, or shared only with a sympathetic few, pa.s.sed on sometimes (by the _very_ few who have both will and power to do so) to such of the outsiders as are interested enough to enter into that enchanted garden and take gifts from it. But has not the supreme discovery of the greatest artists, philosophers and teachers been that the "everyday people" _do_ live as deeply and broadly as the thinkers and artists? They are inarticulate and cannot tell what they see, but to them life is made amusing, or interesting, or consecrated according to their temperament.
Who can say what the Cornish sea means to that tired worker? At least it seems a boldness that is almost insolence to decide what it did _not_ mean to her!
Has not every life its revelations? Is it not because we do _not_ see as G.o.d does that some one particular life which strikes across our path cannot reveal its revelation over again to us?
Surely "the commonplace is the highest place." Or rather, there are no hierarchies of the soul. Artist or seamstress or carpenter, we live by the glory that flows to us through whatever curtains of environment are round us.
I have not a word of criticism for the writer"s ideal. All that I would suggest is that the ideal is really present in the world, "common" as the "everyday" flowers at his feet. Not all can sing or paint or write, but many more can laugh or run and all, perhaps, can love and pray.
L.E. HAWKS.
ON LEARNING TO BREATHE.[18]
[18] This is article has been specially written as a preface for _Health Through Breathing_, by Olga Lazarus, shortly to be published (1s. net).