Page images
PDF
EPUB

66

Matthew

only be compromising the future of the race. Arnold described it all, wailfully well, in his plaint about the way that we " each half-live a hundred different lives," strive without quite knowing what we strive for, and doubt and fluctuate and make fresh starts and then have fresh misgivings and nag and chatter and rant about ideals we do not live up to, until we falter life away" with little done. At least for some eager and absorbed hours your true rambler has washed all that futilitarianism out of his soul and has started fair again in a heaven of simple effort and clear aim; a career in life opens before him at breakfast; success in life warms him at bedtime. He has discovered a way of playing from which most ways of working have something to learn-concentration and joy and the sense of an absolute value in any hand's turn that is done with a will.

"I had never," a modern philosopher wrote from the Alps some years ago, "been before on the sort of places we went up-mostly rocks-and I found it as much as I could do. But I got better as I went on, and am certainly glad of the experience. I don't think I can ever get along without occasionally doing something physically violent. It seems necessary to prevent thought from degenerating into flabbiness. Or rather, perhaps, it helps me to realise that the qualities wanted in what are called 'physical efforts' are really just as much wanted in what are called 'mental.'" Two years later he died of exposure in a storm on Mont Blanc, just as the man did on Kinder. That such things should sometimes—very seldom-befall, in this greatest of sports, as well as in hunting and football

and swimming and every great sport you can name, is nothing against it or them. The mere retention of life is never a big enough aim to absorb all its powers. And even here it may count for a little that death by a fall on a mountain, or by exposure on one, is as a rule, death disarmed, for the dying, of many distresses-those that you know when you see men die, as the grimly ironical phrase is, "quietly in their beds.”

If we all knew the dates of our deaths and could choose only the manner, who would take long over the choice? On the one side the stilled, unnatural room; the long, slow losing fight for breath; the lonely waiting, perhaps, in a kind of ante-chamber to extinction, impenetrable by your friends; perhaps worse. On the other an Enoch's translation from the full height and heat of radiant vigour, effort and joy: an instant fall down two thousand feet of ice or rock wall into peace, or the restful collapse of all the muscles into the acquiescence of bodily exhaustion; and this in no smothering prison of curtains and lamplight, but with the sane and clean touch of sun and wind on you still, perhaps with the blown granules of ice lightly stinging your cheek as you take your departure.

And here indeed might Death be fair

If death be dying into air,

If souls evanished mix with the

Illumined heaven, eternal sea.

The handsome lines recur to the mind as you think of an ending so clear of the minor charges, at least, that most of us have to bring against death.

Still, death may be met at any turn of a street and has nothing especial to do with the rambler on mountains, those vivifiers of life. For life is nowhere more itself, its hardy, invincible self, than on the crown of the Pennine. There the land lies black for mile after mile of soaked bog, just endless hummocks of peat, the whole waste reticulated and sluggishly drained by ditch-like depressions which moat each hummock off from the rest and receive the sullen brown oozings from its saturated tissues. The place, if you give it only a summary glance, may seem morose, lethargic, almost dead. Looked at more closely it becomes the scene of endless gallant or stoic contrivance, the dodges and shifts of unbeaten stickers to life. Bilberries, heather and sedges have made themselves leathery coats, like the airman, to keep out the cold when the ground shall lie for months under snow; bog moss and cotton grass have renounced the delicate and dressy tints of their kindred who live in luxurious lowlands; all crouch low, bracing themselves compactly to hold together in the furious winds that scrape mountain ridges; they keep their leaves narrow and wiry, taking no needless risks of expansion; most of them drive deep roots far into the stony ridge's thirty-foot coating of peat, mindful of the searching droughts when that mighty sponge, wet through and through for most of the year, dries down to depths at which earth is never dry in the plains. Up here a splendid hardihood is always showing, as men sometimes show in a shipwreck, a famine, or a war, the enormity of the vicissitudes which the stubborn will to live can adapt the feeble body to endure. And under foot, wherever you go, is

that singular monument of the continuity and the unquenchableness of life, the peat itself, in which the roots of mosses that grew ten thousand years ago are still so intimate a means of life to mosses green above them to-day that you can hardly feel any part of the whole mass to be quite dead. Layer after layer, the leaves of to-day become the wet-nurses of the leaves of to-morrow. Tomorrow over, they bear up the nurses of yet another generation and keep their breasts from running dry. Nothing comes to be without a function in that tribal life of the bog, although its function may change. It is as if the joint life of a race, or of mankind, could become visible at the same time, in its whole evolution, so that we should see quite easily how much we incline to overrate the completeness and importance of death. It may be no great things that are brought to an end when it comes; and much may yet be done by those whom it has visited.

COUNTRY HOUSES

Such a man, sir, should be encouraged; for his performances show the extent of the human powers in one instance, and thus tend to raise our opinion of the faculties of man. He shows what may be attained by persevering application; so that every man may hope that by giving as much application, although he may never ride three horses at a time, or dance upon a wire, yet he may be equally expert in whatever profession he has chosen to DR. JOHNSON, on Circuses.

pursue.

I

OR most of us commonplace men-I am not so sure about women-the way of life that is most

[ocr errors]

profoundly and durably pleasant, for most of our time, is that of the ordinary English country house. It satisfies the greatest possible number of the wants of the average man and gives generally healthy play to the greatest possible number of his sane impulses. That worthy is not a deep student or thinker; nor is he an absolute saint; his body has much more to do with him than theirs has with them, though he is no mere creature of sensual appetites either. He feels the various engines of his body and his spirit to be running their best in this life of rude health, of effort mainly physical, and not exhausting at that, of easy and unexacting social activity, of unmistakable personal consequence, and all these amenities flavoured with a certain consciousness of welldoing by the addition of some light and unperplexing

« ՆախորդըՇարունակել »