The Works of Fiona Macleod Part 35

Pondering thus, Alan rose, and looked out, into the night. In that great stillness, wherein the moonlight lay like the visible fragrance of the earth, he gazed long and intently. How shadow, now, were those lives that had so lately palpitated in this very place: how strange their silence, their incommunicable knowledge, their fathomless peace!

Was it all lost ... the long endurance of pain, the pangs of sorrow? If so, what was the lesson of life? Surely to live with sweet serenity and gladness, content against the inevitable hour. There is solace of a kind in the idea of a common end, of that terrible processional march of life wherein the myriad is momentary, and the immeasurable is but a pa.s.sing shadow. But, alas, it is only solace of a kind: for what heart that has beat to the pulse of love can relinquish the sweet dream of life, and what coronal can philosophy put upon the brows of youth in place of eternity.

No, no: of this he felt sure. In the Beauty of the World lies the ultimate redemption of our mortality. When we shall become at one with nature in a sense profounder even than the poetic imaginings of most of us, we shall understand what now we fail to discern. The arrogance of those who would have the stars as candles for our night, and the universe as a pleasance for our thought, will be as impossible as their blind fatuity who say we are of dust, briefly vitalised, that shall be dust again, with no fragrance saved from the rude bankruptcy of life, no beauty raised up against the sun to bloom anew.

It is no idle dream, this: no idle dream that we are a peris.h.i.+ng clan among the sons of G.o.d, because of this slow waning of our joy, of our pa.s.sionate delight, in the Beauty of the World. We have been unable to look out upon the s.h.i.+ning of our star, for the vision overcomes us; and we have used veils which we call "scenery," "picturesqueness," and the like--poor, barren words that are so voiceless and remote before the rustle of leaves and the lap of water, before the ancient music of the wind, and all the sovran eloquence of the tides of light. But a day may come--nay, shall surely come--when indeed the poor and the humble shall inherit the earth: they who have not made a league with temporal evils and out of whose heart shall arise the deep longing, that shall become universal, of the renewal of youth.

... Often, too, alone in his observatory, where he was wont to spend much of his time, Alan knew that strange nostalgia of the mind for impossible things. Then, wrought for a while from his vision of green life, and flamed by another green fire than that born of the earth, he dreamed his dream. With him, the peopled solitude of night was a concourse of confirming voices. He did not dread the silence of the stars, the cold remoteness of the stellar fire.

In that other watch-tower in Paris, where he had spent the best hours of his youth, he had loved that nightly watch on the constellations. Now, as then, in the pulse of the planets he found a.s.surances which faith had not given him. In the vast majestic order of that nocturnal march, that diurnal retreat, he had learned the law of the whirling leaf and the falling star, of the slow aeon-delayed comet and of the slower wane of solar fires. Looking with visionary eyes into that congregation of stars, he realised, not the littleness of the human dream, but its divine impulsion. It was only when, after long vigils into the quietudes of night, he turned his gaze from the palaces of the unknown, and thought of the baffled fretful swarming in the cities of men, that his soul rose in revolt against the sublime inept.i.tude of man's spiritual leaguer against destiny.

Destiny--"An Dan"--it was a word familiar to him since childhood, when first he had heard it on the lips of old Ian Macdonald. And once, on the eve of the Feast of Paschal, when Alan had asked Daniel Dare what was the word which the stars spelled from zenith to nadir, the Astronomer had turned and answered simply, "_C'est le Destin_."

But Alan was of the few to whom this talismanic word opens lofty perspectives, even while it obscures those paltry vistas which we deem unending and dignify with vain hopes and void immortalities.

_To live in Beauty is to sum up in four words all the spiritual aspiration of the soul of man._--F. M.

A DREAM

_To G. R. S. MEAD_

_Our thought, our consciousness, is but the scintillation of a wave: below us is a moving shadow, our brief forecast and receding way; beneath the shadow are depths sinking into depths, and then the unfathomable unknown._--F. M.

A Dream

I was on a vast, an illimitable plain, where the dark blue horizons were sharp as the edges of hills. It was the world, but there was nothing in the world. There was not a blade of gra.s.s nor the hum of an insect, nor the shadow of a bird's wing. The mountains had sunk like waves in the sea when there is no wind; the barren hills had become dust. Forests had become the fallen leaf; and the leaf had pa.s.sed. I was aware of one who stood beside me, though that knowledge was of the spirit only; and my eyes were filled with the same nothingness as I beheld above and beneath and beyond. I would have thought I was in the last empty glens of Death, were it not for a strange and terrible sound that I took to be the voice of the wind coming out of nothing, travelling over nothingness and moving onward into nothing.

"There is only the wind," I said to myself in a whisper.

Then the voice of the dark Power beside me, whom in my heart I knew to be Dalua, the Master of Illusions, said: "Verily, this is your last illusion."

I answered: "It is the wind."

And the voice answered: "That is not the wind that you hear, for the wind is dead. It is the empty, hollow echo of my laughter."

Then, suddenly, he who was beside me lifted up a small stone, smooth as a pebble of the sea. It was grey and flat, and yet to me had a terrible beauty because it was the last vestige of the life of the world.

The Presence beside me lifted up the stone and said: "It is the end."

And the horizons of the world came in upon me like a rippling shadow.

And I leaned over darkness and saw whirling stars. These were gathered up like leaves blown from a tree, and in a moment their lights were quenched, and they were further from me than grains of sand blown on a whirlwind of a thousand years.

Then he, that terrible one, Master of Illusions, let fall the stone, and it sank into the abyss and fell immeasurably into the infinite. And under my feet the world was as a falling wave, and was not. And I fell, though without sound, without motion. And for years and years I fell below the dim waning of light; and for years and years I fell through universes of dusk; and for years and years and years I fell through the enclosing deeps of darkness. It was to me as though I fell for centuries, for aeons, for unimaginable time. I knew I had fallen beyond time, and that I inhabited eternity, where were neither height, nor depth, nor width, nor s.p.a.ce.

But, suddenly, without sound, without motion, I stood steadfast upon a vast ledge. Before me, on that ledge of darkness become rock, I saw this stone which had been lifted from the world of which I was a shadow, after shadow itself had died away. And as I looked, this stone became fire and rose in flame. Then the flame was not. And when I looked the stone was water; it was as a pool that did not overflow, a wave that did not rise or fall, a shaken mirror wherein nothing was troubled.

Then, as dew is gathered in silence, the water was without form or colour or motion. And the stone seemed to me like a handful of earth held idly in the poise of unseen worlds. What I thought was a green flame rose from it, and I saw that it had the greenness of gra.s.s, and had the mystery of life. The green herb pa.s.sed as green gra.s.s in a drought; and I saw the waving of wings. And I saw shape upon shape, and image upon image, and symbol upon symbol. Then I saw a man, and he, too, pa.s.sed; and I saw a woman, and she, too, pa.s.sed; and I saw a child, and the child pa.s.sed. Then the stone was a Spirit. And it shone there like a lamp. And I fell backward through deeps of darkness, through unimaginable time.

And when I stood upon the world again it was like a glory. And I saw the stone lying at my feet.

And One said: "Do you not know me, brother?"

And I said: "Speak, Lord."

And Christ stooped and kissed me upon the brow.

NOTES

_Unity does not lie in the emotional life of expression which we call Art, which discerns it; it does not lie in nature, but in the Soul of man._--F. M.

Notes to First Edition

THE DIVINE ADVENTURE

When "The Divine Adventure" appeared in the _Fortnightly Review_ in November and December last, I received many comments and letters. From these I infer that my present readers will also be of two sections, those who understand at once why, in this symbolical presentment, I ignore the allegorical method--and those who, accustomed to the artificial method of allegory, would rather see this "story of a soul"

told in that method, without actuality, or as an ordinary essay stript of narrative.

But each can have only his own way of travelling towards a desired goal.

I chose my way, because in no other, as it seemed to me, could I convey what I wanted to convey. Is it so great an effort of the imagination to conceive of the Mind and Soul actual as the Body is actual? And is there any tragic issue so momentous, among all the tragic issues of life, as the problem of the Spirit, the Mind--the Will as I call it; that problem as to whether it has to share the a.s.sured destiny of the Body, or the desired and possible destiny of the Soul? There is no spiritual tragedy so poignant as this uncertainty of the Will, the Spirit, what we call the thinking part of us, before the occult word of the Soul, inhabiting here but as an impatient exile, and the inevitable end of that Body to which it is so intimately allied, with which are its immediate, and in a sense its most vital interests, and in whose mortality it would seem to have a dreadful share.

The symbolist, unlike the allegorist, cannot disregard the actual, the reality as it seems: he must, indeed, be supremely heedful of this reality as it seems. The symbolist or the mystic (properly they are one) abhors the vague, what is called the "mystical": he is supremely a realist, but his realism is of the spirit and the imagination, and not of externals, or rather not of these merely, for there, too, he will not disregard actuality, but make it his base, as the lark touches the solid earth before it rises where it can see both Earth and Heaven and sing a song that partakes of each and belongs to both. "In the kingdom of the imagination the ideal must ever be faithful to the general laws of nature," wrote one of the wisest of mystics. Art is pellucid mystery, and the only spiritually logical interpretation of life; and her inevitable language is Symbol--by which (whether in colour, or form, or sound, or word, or however the symbol be translated) a spiritual image illumines a reality that the material fact narrows or obscures.

For the rest, "The Divine Adventure" is an effort to solve, or obtain light upon, the profoundest human problem. It is by looking inward that we shall find the way outward. The G.o.ds--and what we mean by the G.o.ds--the G.o.ds seeking G.o.d have ever penetrated the soul by two roads, that of nature and that of art. Edward Calvert put it supremely well when he said "I go inward to G.o.d: outward to the G.o.ds." It was Calvert also who wrote:--

"To charm the truthfulness of eternal law into a guise which it has not had before, and clothe the invention with expression, this is the magic with which the poet would lead the listener into a world of his own, and make him sit down in the charmed circle of his own G.o.ds."

_Page 96. The Felire na Naomh Nerennach_ (so spelt, more phonetically than correctly) is an invaluable early "Chronicle of Irish Saints."

Uladh--or Ulla--is the Gaelic for Ulster, though the ancient boundaries were not the same as those of the modern province; and at periods Uladh stood for all North Ireland. Tara in the south was first the capital of a kingdom, and later the federal capital. Thus, at the beginning of the Christian era, Concobar mac Nessa was both King of the Ultonians (the clans of Uladh) and Ard-Righ or High-King of Ireland, a nominal suzerainty.

The name of Mochaoi's abbacy, _n' Aondruim_, was in time anglicised to Antrim.