The glory of the moment was great. Our boldness in coming so far was rewarded, and at the same time it seemed as though we had proved our skill against the hostile and alien force. Now we could go back to bed and to the safe house. And then, standing there with the moth safely in our hands, suddenly a volley of shot rang out, a hollow rattle of sound in the deep silence of the wood which had I know not what of mournful and ominous about it. It waned and spread through the forest: it died away, then another of those deep sighs arose. An enormous silence succeeded. “A tree,” we said at last. A tree had fallen.
What is it that happens between the hour of midnight and dawn, the little shock, the queer uneasy moment, as of eyes half open to the light, after which sleep is never so sound again? Is it experience, perhaps — repeated shocks, each unfelt at the time, suddenly loosening the fabric? breaking something away? Only this image suggests collapse and disintegration, whereas the process I have in mind is just the opposite. It is not destructive whatever it may be, one might say that it was rather of a creative character.
Something definitely happens. The garden, the butterflies, the morning sounds, trees, apples, human voices have emerged, stated themselves. As with a rod of light, order has been imposed upon tumult; form upon chaos. Perhaps it would be simpler to say that one wakes, after Heaven knows what internal process, with a sense of mastery. Familiar people approach all sharply outlined in morning light. Through the tremor and vibration of daily custom one discerns bone and form, endurance and permanence. Sorrow will have the power to effect this sudden arrest of the fluidity of life, and joy will have the same power. Or it may come without apparent cause, imperceptibly, much as some bud feels a sudden release in the night and is found in the morning with all its petals shaken free. At any rate the voyages and memoirs, all the lumber and wreckage and accumulation of time which has deposited itself so thickly upon our shelves and grows like a moss at the foot of literature, is no longer definite enough for our needs. Another sort of reading matches better with the morning hours. This is not the time for foraging and rummaging, for half closed eyes and gliding voyages. We want something that has been shaped and clarified, cut to catch the light, hard as gem or rock with the seal of human experience in it, and yet sheltering as in a clear gem the flame which burns now so high and now sinks so low in our own hearts. We want what is timeless and contemporary. But one might exhaust all images, and run words through one’s fingers like water and yet not say why it is that on such a morning one wakes with a desire for poetry.
There is no difficulty in finding poetry in England. Every
English home is full of it. Even the Russians have not a deeper fountain of spiritual life. With us it is, of course, sunk very deep; hidden beneath the heaviest and dampest deposit of hymn books and ledgers. Yet equally familiar and strangely persistent, in the most diverse conditions of travel and climate, is the loveliness of the hurrying clouds, of the sun-stained green, of the rapid watery atmosphere, in which clouds have been crumbled with colour until the ocean of air is at once confused and profound. There will certainly be a copy of Shakespeare in such a house, another Paradise Lost, and a little volume of George Herbert. There may be almost as probably, though perhaps more strangely, Vulgar Errors and the Religio Medici. For some reason the folios of Sir Thomas Browne are to be found on the lowest shelf of libraries in other respects entirely humdrum and utilitarian. His popularity in the small country house rests perhaps chiefly upon the fact that the Vulgar Errors treats largely of animals. Books with pictures of malformed elephants, baboons of grotesque and indecent appearance, tigers, deer, and so on, all distorted and with a queer facial likeness to human beings, are always popular among people who care nothing for literature. The text of Vulgar Errors has something of the same fascination as these woodcuts. And then it may not be fanciful to suppose that even in the year nineteen hundred and nineteen a great number of minds are still only partially lit up by the cold light of knowledge. It is the most capricious illuminant. They are still apt to ruminate, without an overpowering bias to the truth, whether a kingfisher’s body shows which way the wind blows; whether an ostrich digests iron; whether owls and ravens herald ill-fortune; and the spilling of salt bad luck; what the tingling of ears forebodes, and even to toy pleasantly with more curious speculations as to the joints of elephants and the politics of storks, which came within the province of the more fertile and better-informed brain of the author. The English mind is naturally proneto take its ease and pleasure in the loosest whimsies and humours. Sir Thomas ministers to the kind of wisdom that farmers talk over their ale, and housewives over their tea cups, proving himself much more sagacious and better informed than the rest of the company, but still with the door of his mind wide open for any curious thing that chooses to enter in. For all his learning, the doctor will consider what we have to say seriously and in good faith. He will perhaps give our modest question a turn that sends it spinning among the stars. How charming, for example, to have found a flower on a walk, or a chip of pottery or a stone, that might equally well have been thunderbolt, or cannon ball, and to have gone straightway to knock upon the doctor’s door with a question. No business would have had precedence over such a matter as this, unless indeed someone had been dying or coming into the world. For the doctor was evidently a humane man, and one good to have at the bedside, imperturbable, yet sympathetic. His consolations must have been sublime; his presence full of composure; and then, if something took his fancy, what enlivening speculations he must have poured forth, talking, one guesses, mostly in soliloquy, with the strangest sequences, in a rapt pondering manner, as if not expecting an answer, and more to himself than to a second person.
What second person, indeed, could answer him? At Montpellier and Padua he had learnt, but learning, instead of settling his questions, had, it seems, greatly increased his capacity for asking them. The door of his mind opened more and more widely. In comparison with other men he was indeed learned; he knew six languages; he knew the laws, customs, and policies of several states, the names of all the constellations, and most of the plants of his country; and yet — must one not always break off thus?— “yet methinks, I do not know so many as when I did but know a hundred, and had scarcely ever simpled further than Cheapside.” Suppose indeed that certainty had been attainable; it had been proved to be so, and so it must be; nothing would have been more intolerable to him. His imagination was made to carry pyramids. “Methinks there be not impossibilities enough in religion for an active faith.” But then the grain of dust was a pyramid. There was nothing plain in a world of mystery. Consider the body. Some men are surprised by sickness. Sir Thomas can only “wonder that we are not always so”; he sees the thousand doors that lead to death; and in addition — so he likes to speculate and fantastically accumulate considerations— “it is in the power of every hand to destroy us, and we are beholden unto everyone we meet, who doth not kill us”. What, one asks, as considerations accumulate, is ever to stop the course of such a mind, unroofed and open to the sky? Unfortunately, there was the Deity. His faith shut in his horizon. Sir Thomas himself resolutely drew that blind. His desire for knowledge, his eager ingenuity, his anticipations of truth, must submit, shut their eyes, and go to sleep. Doubts he calls them. “More of these no man hath known than myself; which I confess I conquered, not in a martial posture, but on my knees.” So lively a curiosity deserved a better fate. It would have delighted us to feed what Sir Thomas calls his doubts upon a liberal diet of modern certainties, but not if by so doing we had changed him, but that is the tribute of our gratitude. For is he not, among a variety of other things, one of the first of our writers to be definitely himself? His appearance has been recorded — his height moderate, his eyes large and luminous, his skin dark, and constantly suffused with blushes. But it is the more splendid picture of his soul that we feast upon. In that dark world, he was one of the explorers; the first to talk of himself, he broaches the subject with an immense gusto. He returns to it again a
nd again, as if the soul were a wondrous disease and its symptoms not yet recorded. “The world that I regard is myself; it is the microcosm of my own frame that I cast mine eye on: for the other I use it but like my globe, and turn it round sometimes for my recreation.” Sometimes, he notes, and he seems to take a pride in the strange gloomy confession, he has wished for death. “I feel sometimes a hell within myself; Lucifer keeps his court in my breast; Legion is revived in me.” The strangest ideas and emotions have play in him, as he goes about his work, outwardly the most sober of mankind, and esteemed the greatest physician in Norwich. Yet, if his friends could see into his mind! But they cannot. “I am in the dark to all the world, and my nearest friends behold me but in a cloud.” Strange beyond belief are the capacities that he detects in himself, profound the meditation into which the commonest sight will plunge him, while the rest of the world passes by and sees nothing to wonder at. The tavern music, the Ave Mary Bell, the broken pot that the workman has dug out of the field — at the sight and sound of them he stops dead, as if transfixed by the astonishing vista. “And surely it is not a melancholy conceit to think we are all asleep in this world, and that the conceits of this life are as mere dreams—” No one so raises the vault of the mind, and, admitting conjecture after conjecture, positively makes us stand still in amazement, unable to bring ourselves to move on.
With such a conviction of the mystery and miracle of things, he is unable to reject, disposed to tolerate and contemplate without end. In the grossest superstition there is something of devotion; in tavern music something of divinity: in the little world of man something “that was before the elements and owes no homage unto the sun”. He is hospitable to everything and tastes freely of whatever is set before him. For upon this sublime prospect of time and eternity, the cloudy vapours which his imagination conjures up, there is cast the figure of the author. It is not merely life in general that fills him with amazement, but his own life in particular, “which to relate were not a history, but a piece of poetry, and would sound to common ears like a fable.” The littleness of egotism has not as yet attacked the health of his interest in himself. I am charitable, I am brave I am averse from nothing, I am full of feeling for others, I am merciless upon myself, “For my conversation, it is like the sun’s, with all men, and with a friendly aspect to good and bad”; I, I, I — how we have lost the secret of saying that!
In short Sir Thomas Browne brings in the whole question, which is afterwards to become of such importance, of knowing one’s author. Somewhere, everywhere, now hidden, now apparent in what ever is written down is the form of a human being. If we seek to know him, are we idly occupied, as when, listening to a speaker, we begin to speculate about his age and habits, whether he is married, has children, and lives in Hampstead? It is a question to be asked, and not one to be answered. It will be answered, that is to say, in an instinctive and irrational manner, as our disposition inclines us. Only one must note that Sir Thomas is the first English writer to rouse this particular confusion with any briskness. Chaucer — but Chaucer’s spelling is against him. Marlowe then, Spencer, Webster, Ben Jonson? The truth is the question never presents itself quite so acutely in the case of a poet. It scarcely presents itself at all in the case of the Greeks and Latins. The poet gives us his essence, but prose takes the mould of the body and mind entire.
Could one not deduce from reading his books that Sir Thomas Browne, humane and tolerant in almost every respect, was nevertheless capable of a mood of dark superstition in which he would pronounce that two old women were witches and must be put to death? Some of his pedantries have the very clink of the thumbscrew: the heartless ingenuity of a spirit still cramped and fettered by the bonds of the Middle Ages. There were impulses of cruelty in him as in all people forced by their ignorance or weakness to five in a state of servility to man or nature. There were moments, brief but intense, in which his serene and magnanimous mind contracted in a spasm of terror More often by far he is, as all great men are, a little dull. Yet the dullness of the great is distinct from the dullness of the little. It is perhaps more profound. We enter into their shades acquiescent and hopeful, convinced that if light is lacking the fault is ours. A sense of guilt, as the horror increases, mingles itself with our protest and increases the gloom. Surely, we must have missed the way? If one stitched together the passages in Wordsworth, Shakespeare, Milton, every great writer in short who has left more than a song or two behind him, where the light has failed us, and we have only gone on because of the habit of obedience, they would make a formidable volume — the dullest book in the world.
Don Quixote is very dull too. But his dullness, instead of having that lethargy as of a somnolent beast which is characteristic of great people’s dullness— “After my enormous labours, I’m asleep and intend to snore if I like,” they seem to say — instead of this dullness Don Quixote has another variety. He is telling stories to children. There they sit round the fire on a winter’s night, grown up children, women at their spinning, men relaxed and sleepy after the day’s sport, “Tell us a story — something to make us laugh — something gallant, too — about people like ourselves only more unhappy and a great deal happier.” Obedient to this demand, Cervantes, a kind accommodating man, spun them stories, about princesses lost and amorous knights, much to their taste, very tedious to ours. Let him but get back to Don Quixote and Sancho Panza and all is well, for him, we cannot help thinking, as for us. Yet what with our natural reverence and inevitable servility, we seldom make our position, as modern readers of old writers, plain. Undoubtedly all writers are immensely influenced by the people who read them. Thus, take Cervantes and his audience — we, coming four centuries later, have a sense of breaking into a happy family party. Compare that group with the group (only there are no groups now since we have become educated and isolated and read our books by our own firesides in our own copies) but compare the readers of Cera Cervantes with the readers of Thomas Hardy. Hardy whiles away no firelit hour with tales of lost princesses and amorous knights — refuses more and more sternly to make things up for our entertainment. As we read him separately so he speaks to us separately, as if we were individual men and women, rather than groups sharing the same tastes. That, too, must be taken into account. The reader of to-day accustomed to find himself in direct communication with the writer, is constantly out of touch with Cervantes. How far did he himself know what he was about — how far again do we over-interpret, mis-interpret, read into Don Quixote a meaning compounded of our own experience, as an elder person might read a meaning into a child’s story and doubt whether the child himself was aware of it? If Cervantes had felt the tragedy and the satire as we feel them, could he have foreborne as he does to stress them — could he have been as callous as he seems? Yet Shakespeare dismissed Falstaff callously enough. The great writers have this large way with them, nature’s way; which we who are further from nature call cruel, since we suffer more from the effects of cruelty, or at any rate judge our suffering of greater importance, than they did. None of this, however, impairs the main pleasure of the jolly, delightful, plain spoken book built up, foaming up, round the magnificent conception of the Knight and the world which, however people may change, must remain for ever an unassailable statement of man and the world. That will always be in existence. And as for knowing himself what he was about — perhaps great writers never do. Perhaps that is why later ages find what they seek.
But to return to the dullest book in the world. To this volume Sir Thomas has added certainly one or two pages. Yet should one desire a loophole to escape it is always possible to find one in the chance that the book is difficult, not dull. Accustomed as we are to strip a whole page of its sentences and crush their meaning out in one grasp, the obstinate resistance which a page of Urne Burial offers at first trips us and blinds us. “Though if Adam were made out of an extract of the Earth, all parts might challenge a restitution, yet few have returned their bones farre lower than they might receive them” — We must st
op, go back, try out this way and that, and proceed at a foot’s pace. Reading has been made so easy in our days that to go back to these crabbed sentences is like mounting only a solemn and obstinate donkey instead of going up to town by an electric train. Dilatory, capricious, governed by no consideration save his own wish, Sir Thomas seems scarcely to be writing in the sense that Froude wrote or Matthew Arnold. A page of print now fulfils a different office. Is it not almost servile in the assiduity with which it helps us on our way, making only the standard charge on our attention and in return for that giving us the full measure, but not an ounce over or under our due? In Sir Thomas Browne’s days weights and measures were in a primitive condition, if they had any existence at all. One is conscious all the time that Sir Thomas was never paid a penny for his prose. He is free since it is the offering of his own bounty to give us as little or as much as he chooses. He is an amateur; it is the work of his leisure and pleasure; he makes no bargain with us. Therefore, as Sir Thomas has no call to conciliate his reader, these short books of his are dull if he chooses, difficult if he likes, beautiful beyond measure if he has a mind that way. Here we approach the doubtful region — the region of beauty. Are we not already lost or sunk or enticed with the very first words? “When the Funeral pyre was out, and the last valediction over, men took a lasting adieu to their interred Friends.” But why beauty should have the effect upon us that it does, the strange serene confidence that it inspires in us, none can say. Most people have tried and perhaps one of the invariable properties of beauty is that it leaves in the mind a desire to impart. Some offering we must make; some act we must dedicate, if only to move across the room and turn the rose in the jar, which, by the way, has dropped its petals.
Complete Works of Virginia Woolf Page 465
