The Rhythm of Life and other Essays | Page 4

be sought in mental
production, or in spiritual sweetness, or in the joy of the senses, is to
live without either rest or full activity. The souls of certain of the saints,
being singularly simple and single, have been in the most complete
subjection to the law of periodicity. Ecstasy and desolation visited them
by seasons. They endured, during spaces of vacant time, the interior
loss of all for which they had sacrificed the world. They rejoiced in the
uncovenanted beatitude of sweetness alighting in their hearts. Like
them are the poets whom, three times or ten times in the course of a
long life, the Muse has approached, touched, and forsaken. And yet
hardly like them; not always so docile, nor so wholly prepared for the
departure, the brevity, of the golden and irrevocable hour. Few poets
have fully recognised the metrical absence of their Muse. For full
recognition is expressed in one only way--silence.
It has been found that several tribes in Africa and in America worship
the moon, and not the sun; a great number worship both; but no tribes
are known to adore the sun, and not the moon. For the periodicity of the
sun is still in part a secret; but that of the moon is modestly apparent,
perpetually influential. On her depend the tides; and she is Selene,
mother of Herse, bringer of the dews that recurrently irrigate lands

where rain is rare. More than any other companion of earth is she the
Measurer. Early Indo-Germanic languages knew her by that name. Her
metrical phases are the symbol of the order of recurrence. Constancy in
approach and in departure is the reason of her inconstancies. Juliet will
not receive a vow spoken in invocation of the moon; but Juliet did not
live to know that love itself has tidal times--lapses and ebbs which are
due to the metrical rule of the interior heart, but which the lover vainly
and unkindly attributes to some outward alteration in the beloved. For
man--except those elect already named--is hardly aware of periodicity.
The individual man either never learns it fully, or learns it late. And he
learns it so late, because it is a matter of cumulative experience upon
which cumulative evidence is lacking. It is in the after-part of each life
that the law is learnt so definitely as to do away with the hope or fear of
continuance. That young sorrow comes so near to despair is a result of
this young ignorance. So is the early hope of great achievement. Life
seems so long, and its capacity so great, to one who knows nothing of
all the intervals it needs must hold--intervals between aspirations,
between actions, pauses as inevitable as the pauses of sleep. And life
looks impossible to the young unfortunate, unaware of the inevitable
and unfailing refreshment. It would be for their peace to learn that there
is a tide in the affairs of men, in a sense more subtle--if it is not too
audacious to add a meaning to Shakespeare-- than the phrase was
meant to contain. Their joy is flying away from them on its way home;
their life will wax and wane; and if they would be wise, they must
wake and rest in its phases, knowing that they are ruled by the law that
commands all things--a sun's revolutions and the rhythmic pangs of
maternity.

DECIVILISED

The difficulty of dealing--in the course of any critical duty--with
decivilised man lies in this: when you accuse him of vulgarity-- sparing
him no doubt the word--he defends himself against the charge of
barbarism. Especially from new soil--transatlantic, colonial--he faces
you, bronzed, with a half conviction of savagery, partly persuaded of

his own youthfulness of race. He writes, and recites, poems about
ranches and canyons; they are designed to betray the recklessness of his
nature and to reveal the good that lurks in the lawless ways of a young
society. He is there to explain himself, voluble, with a glossary for his
own artless slang. But his colonialism is only provincialism very
articulate. The new air does but make old decadences seem more stale;
the young soil does but set into fresh conditions the ready-made, the
uncostly, the refuse feeling of a race decivilising. American fancy
played long this pattering part of youth. The New-Englander hastened
to assure you with so self-denying a face he did not wear war-paint and
feathers, that it became doubly difficult to communicate to him that you
had suspected him of nothing wilder than a second-hand dress coat.
And when it was a question not of rebuke, but of praise, the American
was ill-content with the word of the judicious who lauded him for some
delicate successes in continuing something of the literature of England,
something of the