The Centaur | Page 6

so obviously vain and worthless,
and, though he never even in his highest moments felt the claims of
sainthood, it puzzled and perplexed him deeply that the conquest over
Nature in all its multifarious forms today should seem to them so
infinitely more important than the conquest over self. What the world
with common consent called Reality, seemed ever to him the most
crude and obvious, the most transient, the most blatant un-Reality. His
love of Nature was more than the mere joy of tumultuous pagan

instincts. It was, in the kind of simple life he craved, the first step
toward the recovery of noble, dignified, enfranchised living. In the
denial of all this external flummery he hated, it would leave the soul
disengaged and free, able to turn her activities within for spiritual
development. Civilization now suffocated, smothered, killed the soul.
Being in the hopeless minority, he felt he must be somewhere wrong, at
fault, deceived. For all men, from a statesman to an engine-driver,
agreed that the accumulation of external possessions had value, and that
the importance of material gain was real.... Yet, for himself, he always
turned for comfort to the Earth. The wise and wonderful Earth opened
her mind and her deep heart to him in a way few other men seemed to
know. Through Nature he could move blind-folded along, yet find his
way to strength and sympathy. A noble, gracious life stirred in him then
which the pettier human world denied. He often would compare the
thin help or fellowship he gained from ordinary social intercourse, or
from what had seemed at the time quite a successful gathering of his
kind, with the power he gained from a visit to the woods or mountains.
The former, as a rule, evaporated in a single day; the other stayed, with
ever growing power, to bless whole weeks and months.
And hence it was, whether owing to the truth or ignorance of his
attitude, that a sense of bleak loneliness spread through all his life, and
more and more he turned from men to Nature.
Moreover, foolish as it must sound, I was sometimes aware that deep
down in him hid some nameless, indefinable quality that proclaimed
him fitted to live in conditions that had never known the restraints of
modern conventions--a very different thing to doing without them once
known. A kind of childlike, transcendental innocence he certainly
possessed, naïf, most engaging, and--utterly impossible. It showed
itself indirectly, I think, in this distress under modern conditions. The
multifarious apparatus of the spirit of Today oppressed him; its rush
and luxury and artificiality harassed him beyond belief. The terror of
cities ran in his very blood.
When I describe him as something of an outcast, therefore, it will be
seen that he was such both voluntarily and involuntarily.

"What the world has gained by brains is simply nothing to what it has
lost by them--"
"A dream, my dear fellow, a mere dream," I stopped him, yet with
sympathy because I knew he found relief this way. "Your constructive
imagination is too active."
"By Gad," he replied warmly, "but there is a place somewhere, or a
state of mind--the same thing--where it's more than a dream. And,
what's more, bless your stodgy old heart, some day I'll get there."
"Not in England, at any rate," I suggested.
He stared at me a moment, his eyes suddenly charged with dreams.
Then, characteristically, he snorted. He flung his hand out with a
gesture that should push the present further from him.
"I've always liked the Eastern theory--old theory anyhow if not
Eastern--that intense yearnings end by creating a place where they are
fulfilled--"
"Subjectively--"
"Of course; objectively means incompletely. I mean a Heaven built up
by desire and intense longing all your life. Your own thought makes it.
Living idea, that!"
"Another dream, Terence O'Malley," I laughed, "but beautiful and
seductive."
To argue bored him. He loved to state his matter, fill it with detail,
blow the heated breath of life into it, and then leave it. Argument
belittled without clarifying; criticism destroyed, sealing up the sources
of life. Any fool could argue; the small, denying minds were always
critics.
"A dream, but a damned foine one, let me tell you," he exclaimed,
recovering his brogue in his enthusiasm. He glared at me a second, then

burst out laughing. "Tis better to have dhreamed and waked," he added,
"than never to have dhreamed at all."
And then he poured out O'Shaughnessy's passionate ode to the
Dreamers of the world:
We are the music-makers, And we are the dreamers of dreams,
Wandering by lone sea-breakers, And sitting by desolate streams;
World-losers and world-forsakers, On whom the pale moon gleams;
Yet we are the movers and shakers Of the world forever, it seems.
With