Five Nights | Page 6

how would death seem to one here, already so far removed from men
and all desire and lust of the world, here, where already all earthly
things had almost ceased to be and one's spirit had merged into the
Infinite?
Death would seem to one in different guise from when he comes to us
in the midst of the delights of the world, with the baubles of life around

us, or in the stress of the battle-field in the moment of victory,
surrounded by our comrades.
Death here would come but as the crown, the climax to the solitude, the
detachment, the isolation, would seem but as the laying down the head
on the breast of Nature, becoming one with her immensity, her
grandeur.
For some minutes I was keenly tempted to stay, the idea held my mind
and fascinated it, but with the vision of death came the recoil from it
born from the remembrance of my art. The same recoil that had saved
me many times before, for youth is usually greatly inclined to suicide,
either directly or indirectly in the dangers it courts. But in an artist this
is strangely balanced by his love for his work. When he has ceased to
wish for life or heed it for himself he still feels instinctive revolt against
extinguishing that diviner spark than life itself, his genius, lent him
from the celestial fire.
The thought of my work dispelled the enchanted dream into which I
had fallen. Instinctively I turned and very slowly began to retrace my
steps amongst the yawning pitfalls. As I did so I heard a hoarse hoot
from the steamer lying below, to tell me it was about to leave, another
and another resounded dully from it, warning me to hasten my return.
I made my way back to the shore where the boat and the impatient
sailors awaited me. I took my seat in it, turning my eyes to the
glistening, glimmering white palisade rising over the sapphire sea.
When we had reached the steamer and its head was turned round I
stood at the stern and watched that palisade for long, as it receded and
receded. At last the blue distance swallowed it up. I could see no more
than a silvery line dividing the blues of meeting sea and sky. Then I
went down to my cabin and locked the door and lay down on my berth
in the quiet, trying to live over again that one hour of close contact with
the beauty of the North.
After dinner that night I wrote a long letter to my cousin Viola about
the beauty of the Muir. She would understand, I knew. What I thought

she would feel, for our brains were cast in the same mould. The letter
finished, it was still too early to go to bed; so I picked up a curious
book called "Life's Shop Window" which I had been reading the
previous night, and read this passage which had struck me before, over
again:
"So, as we look into our future, we see ourselves beloved and wealthy;
victorious, famous, and free to wander through the sweetest paths of the
world, passing through a thousand scenes, sometimes loving,
sometimes warring, tasting and drinking of everything sweet and
stimulating, knowing all things, enjoying all in turn; but this is the life
of a God, not a man. And it is perhaps the God in us which so savagely
demands the life of a God."
"But it is not granted to us."
Yet this was the life I was trying to lead, and to some extent I
succeeded. Change, change, it is the life of life, perhaps especially to
the artist.
And I was an artist now, thanks to the decision of the Royal Academy
last year to accept the worst picture I had submitted to them for four
years. Ever since my fingers could clasp round anything at all they had
loved to hold a brush; for years in my teens I had studied painting
under the best teachers of technique in Italy. For two or three years I
had done really good work, with the divine afflatus thrilling through
every vein. And last year I had painted rather a commonplace picture
and it had been hung on the line in the Academy, and so my friends all
said I really was an artist now, and I modestly accepted the style and
title, with outward diffidence.
How little any of them guessed, as they congratulated me, of the wild
rapture of feeling, of intense gratitude with which I had listened to the
Divine whisper that had come to my ears as a boy of seventeen sitting
in a small bare bedroom, on the floor with the sheet of paper before me
on