The Story of My Heart
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Richard Jefferies >> The Story of My Heart
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Another was to the Greek sculpture galleries in the British
Museum. The statues are not, it is said, the best; broken too, and
mutilated, and seen in a dull, commonplace light. But they were
shape--divine shape of man and woman; the form of limb and torso, of bust
and neck, gave me a sighing sense of rest. These were they who would have
stayed with me under the shadow of the
oaks while the blackbirds fluted and the south air swung the
cowslips. They would have walked with me among the reddened
gold of the wheat. They would have rested with me on the hill-tops and in
the narrow valley grooved of ancient times. They would have listened with me
to the sob of the summer sea drinking theland. These had thirsted of sun,
and earth,
and sea, and sky. Their shape spoke this thirst and desire like
mine--if I had lived with them from Greece till now
I should not have had enough of them. Tracing the form of limb and torso
with the eye gave me a sense of rest.
Sometimes I came in from the crowded streets and ceaseless hum;
one glance at these shapes and I became myself. Sometimes I came from the
Reading-room, where under the dome I often looked up from the desk and
realised the crushing hopelessness of books, useless, not equal to one
bubble borne along on the running brook I had walked by, giving no thought
like the spring when I lifted the water in my hand and saw the light gleam
on it. Torso and limb, bust and neck instantly returned me to myself; I felt
as I did lying on the turf listening to the wind among the grass; it would
have seemed natural to have found butterflies fluttering among he statues.
The same deep desire was with me. I shall always go to speak to them; they
are a place of pilgrimage; wherever there is a beautiful statue there is a
place of pilgrimage.
I always stepped aside, too, to look awhile at the head of
Julius Caesar. The domes of the swelling temples of his broad
head are full of mind, evident to the eye as a globe is full of
substance to the sense of feeling in the hands that hold it.
The thin worn cheek is entirely human; endless difficulties
surmounted by endless labour are marked in it, as the sandblast,
by dint of particles ceaselessly driven, carves the hardest
material. If circumstances favoured him he made those
circumstances his own by marvellous labour, so as justly to
receive the credit of chance. Therefore the thin cheek is entirely
human--the sum of human life made visible in one
face--labour, and endurance, and mind, and all in vain. A
shadow--of deep sadness has gathered on it in the years that
have passed, because endurance was without avail. It is sadder
to look at than the grass-grown tumulus I used to sit by,
because it is a personality, and also on account of the extreme
folly of our human race ever destroying our greatest.
Far better had they endeavoured, however hopelessly, to keep him
living till this day. Did but the race this hour possess one-
hundredth part of his breadth of view, how happy for them! Of
whom else can it be said that he had no enemies to forgive
because he recognised no enemy? Nineteen hundred years ago he
put in actual practice, with more arbitrary power than any
despot, those very principles of humanity which are now put
forward as the highest culture. But he made them to be actual things under
his sway.
The one man filled with mind; the one man without avarice,
anger, pettiness, littleness; the one man generous and truly
great of all history. It is enough to make one despair to think
of the mere brutes butting to death the great-minded Caesar. He
comes nearest to the ideal of a design-power arranging the
affairs of the world for good in practical things. Before his
face--the divine brow of mind above, the human suffering-drawn
cheek beneath--my own thought became set and strengthened. That
I could but look at things in the broad way he did; that I
could not possess one particle of such width of intellect to
guide my own course, to cope with and drag forth from the iron-
resisting forces of the universe some one thing of my prayer for
the soul and for the flesh.
CHAPTER VI
THERE is a place in front of the Royal Exchange where the wide
pavement reaches out like a promontory. It is in the shape of a
triangle with a rounded apex. A stream of traffic runs on either side, and
other streets send their currents down into the
open space before it. Like the spokes of a wheel converging
streams of human life flow into this agitated pool. Horses and carriages,
carts, vans, omnibuses, cabs, every kind of conveyance cross each other's
course in every possible direction. Twisting in and out by the wheels and
under the horses' heads, working a devious way, men and women of
all conditions wind a path over. They fill the interstices
between the carriages and blacken the surface, till the
vans almost float on human beings. Now the streams slacken, and now they
rush amain, but never cease; dark waves are always rolling down the incline
opposite, waves swell out from the side rivers, all London converges into
this focus. There is an indistinguishable noise--it is not clatter, hum, or
roar, it is not resolvable; made up of a thousand thousand footsteps, from a
thousand hoofs, a thousand wheels--of haste, and shuffle, and quick
movements, and ponderous loads; no attention can resolve it into a fixed
sound.
Blue carts and yellow omnibuses, varnished carriages and brown
vans, green omnibuses and red cabs, pale loads of yellow straw,
rusty-red iron cluking on pointless carts, high white wool-
packs, grey horses, bay horses, black teams; sunlight sparkling
on brass harness, gleaming from carriage panels; jingle, jingle,
jingle! An intermixed and intertangled, ceaselessly changing jingle, too,of
colour; flecks of colour champed, as it were, like bits in the horses'
teeth, frothed and strewn about, and a surface always of dark-dressed people
winding like the curves on fast-flowing water. This is the vortex and
whirlpool, the centre of human life today on the earth. Now the tide rises
and now it sinks, but the flow of these rivers always continues. Here it
seethes and whirls, not for an hour only, but for all present time, hour by
hour, day by day, year by year.
Here it rushes and pushes, the atoms triturate and grind, and,
eagerly thrusting by, pursue their separate ends. Here it
appears in its unconcealed personality, indifferent to all else
but itself, absorbed and rapt in eager self, devoid and stripped
of conventional gloss and politeness, yielding only to get its own way;
driving, pushing, carried on in a stress of feverish force like a bullet,
dynamic force apart from reason or will, like the force that lifts the tides
and sends the clouds onwards. The friction of a thousand interests evolves a
condition of electricity in which men are moved to and fro without
considering their steps. Yet the agitated pool of life is stonily
indifferent, the thought is absent or preoccupied, for it is evident that
the mass are unconscious of the scene in
which they act.
But it is more sternly real than the very stones, for all these
men and women that pass through are driven on by the push of
accumulated circumstances; they cannot stay, they must go,
their necks are in the slave's ring, they are beaten like
seaweed against the solid walls of fact. In ancient times,
Xerxes, the king of kings, looking down upon his myriads, wept to think that
in a hundred years not one of them would be left. Where will be these
millions of to-day in a hundred years? But, further than that, let us ask,
Where then will be the sum and outcome of their labour? If they wither away
like summer grass, will not at least a result be left which those of a
hundred years hence may be the better for? No, not one jot! There will not
be any sum or outcome or result of this ceaseless labour and movement; it
vanishes in the moment that it is done, and in a hundred years nothing will
be there, for nothing is there now. There will be no more sum or result than
accumulates from the motion of a revolving cowl on a housetop. Nor do they
receive any more sunshine during their lives, for they are unconscious of
the sun.
I used to come and stand near the apex of the promontory of pavement which
juts out towards the pool of life; I still go there to ponder. Burning in
the sky, the sun shone on me as when I rested in the narrow valley carved in
prehistoric time.
Burning in the sky, I can never forget the sun. The heat of summer is dry
there as if the light carried an impalpable dust; dry, breathless heat that
will not let the skin respire, but
swathes up the dry fire in the blood. But beyond the heat and light, I felt
the presence of the sun as I felt it in the solitary valley, the presence of
the resistless forces of the
universe; the sun burned in the sky as I stood and pondered. Is there any
theory, philosophy, or creed, is there any system or
culture, any formulated method able to meet and satisfy each separate item
of this agitated pool of human life? By which they may be guided, by which
hope, by which look forward? Not a mere illusion of the craven
heart--something real, as real as the solid walls of fact against which,
like drifted sea-weed, they are dashed; something to give each separate
personality sunshine and a flower in its own existence now; something to
shape this million-handed labour to an end and outcome that will leave more
sunshine and more flowers to those who must succeed? Something real now, and
not in the spirit-land; in this hour now, as I stand and the sun burns. Can
any creed, philosophy, system, or culture endure the test and remain
unmolten in this fierce focus ofhuman life?
Consider, is there anything slowly painted on the once mystic and now
commonplace papyri of ancient, ancient Egypt, held on the mummy's withered
breast? In that elaborate ritual, in the procession of the symbols, in the
winged circle, in the laborious sarcophagus? Nothing; absolutely nothing!
Before the
fierce heat of the human furnace, the papyri smoulder away as paper
smoulders under a lens in the sun. Remember Nineveh and
the cult of the fir-cone, the turbaned and bearded bulls of
stone, the lion hunt, the painted chambers loaded with tile
books, the lore of the arrow-headed writing. What is in
Assyria? There are sand, and failing rivers, and in Assyria's
writings an utter nothing. The aged caves of India, who shall
tell when they were sculptured? Far back when the sun was
burning, burning in the sky as now in untold precedent time.
Is there any meaning in those ancient caves? The indistinguish-able noise
not to be resolved, born of the human struggle, mocks in answer.
In the strange characters of the Zend, in the Sanscrit, in the
effortless creed of Confucius, in the Aztec coloured-string
writings and rayed stones, in the uncertain marks left of the
sunken Polynesian continent, hieroglyphs as useless as those of
Memphis, nothing. Nothing! They have been tried, and were found an illusion.
Think then, to-day, now looking from this apex
of the pavement promontory outwards from our own land to the utmost bounds
of the farthest sail, is there any faith or culture at this hour which can
stand in this fierce heat? From the various forms of Semitic, Aryan, or
Turanian creed now existing, from the printing-press to the palm-leaf volume
on to those who call on the jewel in the lotus, can aught be gathered which
can face this, the Reality? The indistinguishable noise, non-resolvable,
roars a loud contempt.
Turn, then, to the calm reasoning of Aristotle; is there
anything in that? Can the half-divine thought of Plato, rising
in storeys of sequential ideas, following each other to the
conclusion, endure here? No! All the philosophers in Diogenes
Laertius fade away: the theories of medimval days; the organon
of experiment; down to this hour--they are useless alike. The
science of this hour, drawn from the printing-press in an endless web of
paper, is powerless here; the indistinguishable noise echoed from the
smoke-shadowed walls despises the whole. A thousand footsteps, a thousand
hoofs, a thousand wheels roll over and utterly contemn them in complete
annihilation. Mere illusions of heart or mind, they are tested and thrust
aside by the irresistible push of a million converging feet.
Burning in the sky, the sun shines as it shone on me in the
solitary valley, as it burned on when the earliest cave of India
was carved. Above the indistinguishable roar of the many feet I
feel the presence of the sun, of the immense forces of the
universe, and beyond these the sense of the eternal now, of the
immortal. Full well aware that all has failed, yet, side by
side with the sadness of that knowledge, there lives on in me an
unquenchable belief, thought burning like the sun, that there is yet
something to be found, something real, something to give each separate
personality sunshine and flowers in its own existence now. Something to
shape this million-handed labour to an end and outcome, leaving accumulated
sunshine and flowers to those who shall succeed. It must be dragged forth by
might of thought from the immense forces of the universe.
To prepare for such an effort, first the mind must be cleared of
the conceit that, because we live to-day, we are wiser than the
ages gone. The mind must acknowledge its ignorance; all the
learning and lore of so many eras must be erased from it as an
encumbrance. It is not from past or present knowledge, science
or faith, that it is to be drawn. Erase these altogether as they are erased
under the fierce heat of the focus before me. Begin wholly afresh. Go
straight to the sun, the immense forces of the universe, to the Entity
unknown; go higher than a god; deeper than prayer; and open a new day. That
I might but have a fragment of Caesar's intellect to find a fragment of this
desire!
>From my home near London I made a pilgrimage almost daily to an
aspen by a brook. It was a mile and a quarter along the road,
far enough for me to walk off the concentration of mind
necessary for work. The idea of the pilgrimage was to get away
from the endless and nameless circumstances of everyday
existence, which by degrees build a wall about the mind so that
it travels in a constantly narrowing circle. This tether of the
faculties tends to make them accept present knowledge, and
present things, as all that can be attained to. This is all--
there is nothing more--is the iterated preaching of house-life.
Remain; becontent; go round and round in one barren path, a
little money, a little food and sleep, some ancient fables,
old age and death. Of all the inventions of casuistry with man for ages has
in various ways which manacled himself, and stayed his own advance, there is
none equally potent with the supposition that nothing more is possible. Once
well impress on the mind that it has already all, that advance is impossible
because there is nothing further, and it is chained like a horse to an iron
pin in the ground. It is the most deadly--the most fatal poison of the mind.
No such casuistry has ever for a moment held me, but still, if permitted,
the constant routine of house-life, the same work, the same thought in the
work, the little circumstances regularly recurring, will dull the keenest
edge of thought. By my daily pilgrimage, I escaped from it back to the sun.
In summer the leaves of the aspen rustled pleasantly, there was
the tinkle of falling water over a hatch, thrushes sang and
blackbirds whistled, greenfinches laughed in their talk to each
other. The commonplace dusty road was commonplace no longer.
In the dust was the mark of the chaffinches' little feet; the
white light rendered even the dust brighter to look on. The air
came from the south-west--there were distant hills in that
direction--over fields of grass and corn. As I visited the spot
from day to day the wheat grew from green to yellow, the wild
roses flowered, the scarlet poppies appeared, and again the
beeches reddened in autumn. In the march of time there fell
away from my mind, as the leaves from the trees in autumn, the
last traces and relics of superstitions and traditions acquired
compulsorily in childhood. Always feebly adhering, they finally
disappeared.
There fell away, too, personal bias and prejudices, enabling me
to see clearer and with wider sympathies. The glamour of
modern science and discoveries faded away, for I found them no
more than the first potter's wheel. Erasure and reception
proceeded together; the past accumulations of casuistry were
erased, and my thought widened to receive the idea of something
beyond all previous ideas. With disbelief, belief increased.
The aspiration and hope, the prayer, was the same as that which
I felt years before on the hills, only it now broadened.
Experience of life, instead of curtailing and checking my prayer, led me to
reject experience altogether. As well might
the horse believe that the road the bridle forces it to traverse
every day encircles the earth as I believe in experience. All
the experience of the greatest city in the world could not
withhold me. I rejected it wholly. I stood bare-headed before
the sun, in the presence of the earth and air, in the presence
of the immense forces of the universe. I demand that which will make me more
perfect now, this hour. London convinced me of my own thought. That thought
has always been with me, and always grows wider.
One midsummer I went out of the road into the fields, and sat
down on the grass between the yellowing wheat and the green
hawthorn bushes. The sun burned in the sky, the wheat was full
of a luxuriant sense of growth, the grass high, the earth giving
its vigour to tree and leaf, the heaven blue. The vigour and
growth, the warmth and light, the beauty and richness of it
entered into me; an ecstasy of soul accompanied the delicate
excitement of the senses: the soul rose with the body. Rapt in
the fulness of the moment, I prayed there with all that
expansion of mind and frame; no words, no definition,
inexpressible desire of physical life, of soul-life, equal to
and beyond the highest imagining of my heart.
These memories cannot be placed in exact chronological order.
There was a time when a weary restlessness came upon me, perhaps from
too-long-continued labour. It was like a drought--a moral drought--as if I
had been absent for many years from the sources of life and hope. The inner
nature was faint, all was dry and tasteless; I was weary for the pure, fresh
springs of thought. Some instinctive feeling uncontrollable drove me to the
sea; I was so under its influence that I could not arrange the journey so as
to get the longest day. I merely started, and of course had to wait and
endure much inconvenience. To get to the sea at some quiet spot was my one
thought; to do so I had to travel farther, and from want of prearrangement
it was between two and three in the afternoon before I reached the end of my
journey. Even then, being too much preoccupied to inquire the way, I missed
the road and had to walk a long distance before coming to the shore. But I
found the sea at last; I walked beside it in a trance away from the houses
out into the wheat. he ripe corn stood up to the beach, the waves on one
side of the shingle, and the yellow wheat on the other.
There, alone, I went down to the sea. I stood where the foam
came to my feet, and looked out over the sunlit waters. The
great earth bearing the richness of the harvest, and its hills
golden with corn, was at my back; its strength and firmness
under me. The great sun shone above, the wide sea was before
me, the wind came sweet and strong from the waves. The life of
the earth and the sea, the glow of the sun filled me; I touched
the surge with my hand, I lifted my face to the sun, I opened my
lips to the wind. I prayed aloud in the roar of the waves--my
soul was strong as the sea and prayed with the sea's might. Give me fulness
of life like to the sea and the sun, to the earth and the air; give me
fulness of physical life, mind equal and beyond their fulness; give me a
greatness and perfection of soul higher than all things; give me my
inexpressible desire which swells in me like a tide--give it to me with all
the force of the sea.
Then I rested, sitting by the wheat; the bank of beach was
between me and the sea, but the waves beat against it; the sea
was there, the sea was present and at hand. By the dry wheat I
rested, I did not think, I was inhaling the richness of the sea,
all the strength and depth of meaning of the sea and earth came
to me again. I rubbed out some of the wheat in my hands, I took
up a piece of clod and crumbled it in my fingers--it was a joy to touch
it--I held my hand so that I could see the sunlight gleam on the slightly
moist surface of the skin. The earth and sunwere to me like my flesh and
blood, and the air of the sea
life.
With all the greater existence I drew from them I prayed for a
bodily life equal to it, for a soul-life beyond my thought, for
my inexpressible desire of more than I could shape even into
idea. There was something higher than idea, invisible to
thought as air to the eye; give me bodily life equal in fulness
to the strength of earth, and sun, and sea; give me the soul-
life of my desire. Once more I went down to the sea, touched
it, and said farewell. So deep was the inhalation of this life
that day, that it seemed to remain in me for years. This was a
real pilgrimage.
Time passed away, with more labour, pleasure, and again at last, after much
pain and wearinesss of mind, I came down again to the sea. The circumstances
were changed--it was not a hurried glance--there were opportunities for
longer thought. It mattered scarcely anything to me now whether I was alone,
or whether houses and other people were near. Nothing could disturb my
inner vision. By the sea, aware of the sun overhead, and the
blue heaven, I feel that there is nothing between me and space.
This is the verge of a gulf, and a tangent from my feet goes
straight unchecked into the unnknown. It is the edge of the abyss as much as
if the earth were cut away in a sheer fall of
eight thousand miles to the sky beneath, thence a hollow to the
stars. Looking straight out is looking straight down; the eye-
glance gradually departs from the sea-level, and, rising as that
falls, enters the hollow of heaven. It is gazing along the face
of a vast precipice into the hollow space which is nameless.
There mystery has been placed, but realising the vast hollow
yonder makes me feel that the mystery is here. I, who am here
on the verge, standing on the margin of the sky, am in the mystery itself.
If I let my eye look back upon me from the extreme opposite of heaven, then
this spot where I stand is in the centre of the hollow. Alone with the sea
and sky, I presently feel all the depth and wonder of the unknown come back
surging up around, and touching me as the foam runs to my feet. I am in it
now, not to-morrow, this moment; I cannot escape from it. Though I may
deceive myself with labour, yet still I am in it; in sleep too. There is no
escape from this immensity.
Feeling this by the sea, under the sun, my life enlarges and
quickens, striving to take to itself the largeness of the heaven. The frame
cannot expand, but the soul is able to stand
before it. No giant's body could be in proportion to the earth,
but a little spirit is equal to the entire cosmos, to earth and
ocean, sun and star-hollow. These are but a few acres to it.
Were the cosmos twice as wide, the soul could run over it,
and return to itself in a time so small, no measure exists to mete it.
Therefore, I think the soul may sometimes find out an existence as superior
as my mind is to the dead chalk cliff.
With the great sun burning over the foamflaked sea, roofed with
heaven--aware of myself, a consciousness forced on me by these
things--I feel that thought must yet grow larger and correspond
in magnitude of conception to these. But these cannot content
me, these Titanic things of sea, and sun, and profundity; I feel
that my thought is stronger than they are. I burn life like a
torch. The hot light shot back from the sea scorches my cheek--
my life is burning in me. The soul throbs like the sea for a
larger life. No thought which I have ever had has satisfied my
soul.
CHAPTER VII
MY strength is not enough to fulfil my desire; if I had the strength of the
ocean,and of the earth, the burning vigour of the sun implanted in my limbs,
it would hardly suffice to gratify the measureless desire of life which
possesses me. I have often walked the day long over the sward, and,
compelled
to pause, at length, in my weariness, I was full of the same eagerness with
which I started. The sinews would obey no longer,
but the will was the same. My frame could never take the violent exertion my
heart demanded. Labour of body was like meat
and drink to me. Over the open hills, up the steep ascents, mile after mile,
there was deep enjoyment in the long-drawn breath,
the spring of the foot, in the act of rapid movement. Never have I had
enough of it; I wearied long before I was satisfied,
and weariness did not bring a cessation of desire; the thirst was still
there. I rowed, I used the axe, I split tree-trunks with wedges; my arms
tired, but my spirit remained fresh and chafed against the physical
weariness. My arms were not
strong enough to satisfy me with the axe, or wedges, or oars. There was
delight in the moment, but it was not enough. I swam,
and what is more delicious than swimming? It is exercise and luxury at once.
But I could not swim far enough; I was always dissatisfied with myself on
leaving the water.
Nature has not given me a great frame, and had it done so I should still
have longed for more. I was out of doors all day, and often half the night;
still I wanted more sunshine, more air, the hours were too short. I feel
this even more now than in the violence of early youth: the hours are too
short, the day should be sixty hours long. Slumber, too, is abbreviated and
restricted; forty hours of night and sleep would not be too much. So little
can be accomplished in the longest summer day, so little rest and new force
is accumulated in a short eight hours of sleep.
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