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Title: Michael Fairless
her life and writings
Author: William Scott Palmer
A. M. Haggard
Illustrator: Elinor Dowson
Release date: May 22, 2026 [eBook #78729]
Language: English
Original publication: London: Duckworth & Co., 1913
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/78729
Credits: Richard Tonsing, Carla Foust, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MICHAEL FAIRLESS ***
MICHAEL FAIRLESS
_BY W. SCOTT PALMER._
=FROM THE FOREST.
PILGRIM MAN.
A MODERN MYSTIC’S WAY.
WINTER AND SPRING.=
By W. SCOTT PALMER.
_Uniform with this Volume._
_Fcap. 8vo_, 2s. 6d. _net each_.
DUCKWORTH & CO.,
3 HENRIETTA STREET, LONDON, W.C.
=THE DIARY OF A MODERNIST.=
By W. SCOTT PALMER.
_Crown 8vo_, 5s. _net_.
EDWARD ARNOLD,
41 AND 43 MADDOX STREET, LONDON, W.
[Illustration: Drawn from life, July 1901.]
Michael Fairless
Her Life and Writings
By
W. Scott Palmer (M. E. Dowson)
and
A. M. Haggard
With Two Portraits
by
Elinor Dowson
❦
London
Duckworth & Co.
3 Henrietta Street, W.C.
1913
CONTENTS
PAGE
INTRODUCTION 3
HER LIFE 13
HER WRITINGS—
THE ROADMENDER 45
THE GATHERING OF BROTHER HILARIUS 111
THE GREY BRETHREN 120
INTRODUCTION
I
_On ne doit jamais écrire que de ce qu’on aime._ It is my happy fortune
that I love Michael Fairless; and although, before I began to write of
her, I thought the demand anything but happy that compelled me to break
the silence she desired, I have come to think even this a part of my
good fortune too. I have come indeed to feel that, since her wish to
remain unknown must be set aside in face of circumstances she could
never have foreseen, this may bring new fulfilment to a desire that lay
far nearer to her heart—the desire to give away all she had, to hoard
nothing, not even her own self.
Much that Mrs. Haggard says of her sister’s early childhood is new to
me; but all is congruous, as the bud is congruous with the rose. The
child with her pet animals I have seen in the woman for whom all
animals, even the very fierce, were friends, telling each its own secret
and able to receive something of the great human secret offered them in
her. They grew, these creatures, grew in spirit, under the magic of her
hands and in the stirring warmth of her heart. The wild ones knew her as
they knew the little poor man upon the Umbrian hills. Birds would perch
about her, rabbits play; even the ‘tramp cats,’ as she calls them in her
Christmas Idyll—cats who had taken to the woods and become worse than
wild—learnt from her the graces of home life and laid savagery down.
‘She had a way with her,’ as they say in Ireland. And this way stretched
beyond the kingdom of the beasts and bees and birds. When I first learnt
to know her she had a little cottage on a high road, the great Bath road
of many tramps. It had been the lodge of an abandoned manor house, and
was, of course, close to the gateway. There she tamed her tramp men and
made them friends. Every man who came had a table and chair under
shelter; the plainest, simplest food; materials for mending his clothes,
tea or cocoa to drink, her smile, her wonderful eyes upon his, her open
heart and word. Never a thing was stolen from her doors, her wide
windows; never a penny did she give; but many a man begged leave to chop
wood for her, to dig in her garden—some little thing to show what she
had done for him.
It seemed to me illuminating; it pointed me to the one great hope for
this world, the hope of the coming of the kingdom of God in the power of
man’s self-sharing, fearless, love for men.
Mrs. Haggard alludes very briefly to Michael Fairless’s ‘psychic’ gifts.
Of these I had said nothing; she herself made nothing of them. But they
were strong, too strong to be overlooked by anyone who knew her well. It
would lead me outside my province if I were to attempt here an adequate
discussion of the matter. I will say only that she was ‘telepathic’ in a
high degree, had that sympathetic insight which reveals actual facts
hidden from the physical senses. The connexion of this with power over
animals is a problem of great interest for which, again, there is no
place here. How far her insight—her interior vision—reached I cannot
say; that it went beyond animals, tramps, and her best friends I am
assured by my experience of her. There is an instance given in ‘A Modern
Mystic’s Way’ which is true to the letter. The account given there was
transcribed in every point from notes taken at the time and signed by
her as correct.
She was one whom we who knew her do not try to measure by ordinary
standards, the rules of everyday, in any of the relations of life. Need
I say that there were people whom she puzzled, bewildered? Or that there
were others who not only failed to understand, but wholly misunderstood
her? They always do it; they will do it still, no doubt, even when they
have read every word Mrs Haggard and I have written here.
W. S. P.
HARTFIELD, _January 1913_.
II
It has always been a matter of wonder to the writer that the affection
of the public for a favourite author should stop short of observing his
wishes. Michael Fairless most straitly charged those who would represent
her to abstain from the publication of her identity. But demand creates
supply, and the interest in her has become so extended that if
authorised information about her is not forthcoming, something of an
unauthorised and incorrect nature will probably be produced. Only one
thing would have made Michael Fairless more vexed than the publication
of the truth about her, and that thing would have been the publication
of untruth. So many garbled statements, inaccurate assertions and pure
fictions have appeared about her that it is time for uncertainty to be
dispelled. Death has left absolutely authentic knowledge in the hands of
two people only—the writers of this volume. Her eldest sister has
chronicled such of the very simple happenings of Michael Fairless’s life
as have left some record of her character, and save for brief mention,
is confidently leaving the treatment of her work and its effect in the
competent and devoted hands of Mrs Dowson, her dear friend and literary
executor.
A. M. HAGGARD.
CHELSEA, _January 1913_.
HER LIFE
BY
A. M. HAGGARD
[Illustration: Drawn from a photograph.]
HER LIFE
Margaret Fairless Barber was born on the 7th of May 1869 at Castle Hill,
Rastrick, in the W. Riding of Yorkshire, in the house that had been her
grandfather’s, and where her father was also born. She was the youngest
of the three daughters of the late Fairless Barber and Maria Musgrave,
his wife, and was christened after the great-grandmother, whose violet
eyes she inherited, eyes that had reappeared in one member of each
generation, though in Margaret’s case the violet gradually turned to a
most beautiful grey. It is perhaps worth recording for the curious in
such matters, that this family of five members had but three birthdays.
The eldest and youngest girls were born on the same day at a nine years’
interval, and the second girl on her father’s birthday: only the mother
had a day to herself, a fact for which the children used to feel it
appropriate to offer affectionate sympathy as being such a lonely
condition. A grandchild—her eldest daughter’s first child—subsequently
removed this reproach by appearing within a few hours of the
anniversary. As Michael Fairless undoubtedly inherited many of their
tendencies, it may not be inappropriate to give a slight description of
her parents and the home in which she spent her earlier years.
Her father was educated at St Peter’s at York, where he distinguished
himself in mathematics, painting, and poetry, writing the Prize Poem one
year. He subsequently took up his father’s profession of the law, and
acquired a large practice. All the work which this entailed did not,
however, prevent him from the pursuit of his private tastes, which were
antiquarian and literary. He collected old oak and books, and gradually
amassed a library of his favourite subjects: archeology, topography,
travels, essays, poetry; standard novels and the Cornhill Magazine,
which in those days contained the work of Thackeray, George Eliot,
George Meredith, Mrs Browning, and others. He was gentle, quiet, and
studious, well-read, an excellent Latin scholar, and a man with a keen
sense of humour, absolutely devoted to his home and family.
Her mother had received an unusually liberal education for early
Victorian days, and had studied French, German, and Italian; she was a
highly cultivated woman, with a fine taste in literature. Tennyson,
Ruskin, Eugénie de Guérin, Schiller, Pascal’s Pensées and Jeremy Taylor
recur to the memory as being amongst others on her shelves. She was also
an exquisite needlewoman, and an admirable housekeeper and accountant.
In her younger days Mesmerism and Animal Magnetism were being socially
discussed, and she discovered herself possessed of great mesmeric power.
But she never pursued the matter as a study, and mention is only made of
it because it is probably from her mother’s tendencies that Michael
Fairless derived the germs of her own psychic development. Parents and
children were most deeply attached, and husband and wife so completely
wrapped up in each other that their devotion was almost proverbial in
the neighbourhood. The children used to show their mother all their
various little efforts in sewing, painting, or scribbling, and due
encouragement was always given. But they were never allowed to think
that it was quite the best they could do, or that anything they did was
at all wonderful. Thus the spirit of ambition was fostered, and any idea
of precocity discouraged, for Mrs Barber had the greatest objection to
anything in the nature of an infant phenomenon. The household was a very
quiet one, in outward observances almost what would now be considered
puritanical; in mental outlook extremely wide-minded, liberal and
unprejudiced. Since environment counts for a good deal in development,
this sketch will enable the reader to trace the source of some of
Michael Fairless’s characteristics.
The house stood in a large garden and was a long, irregular building, on
the site of an ancient Danish fort. It was fronted with a large and
extremely solid porch, and its rooms were spacious and mostly lined with
books. The bedroom windows were hung from spring to autumn with white
dimity, after the old fashion, and this was replaced, when the brief
Yorkshire summer ended, by curtains of dark crimson woollen which shut
out the wild inclement weather, when the days drew in, and sent the
children clustering round the fire, and making tales, as all children
do, about the visions they saw in its glowing depths. That large snug
nursery saw many games; with the two elder girls housekeeping was a
favourite one, in the course of which the baby came in very handily as a
baby instead of the doll which had hitherto served. She was also taken
out driving and sailing—the nursery sofa serving equally well for a
steamer or a carriage.
Michael was called Baba until she was four or five years old, when she
became Marjorie, which name she afterwards retained. At this time she
was a very pretty child with fair hair, a rather snub nose, a large but
quite perfectly shaped mouth, and a pair of most beautiful eyes. An
enterprising and enquiring disposition found, perhaps, its earliest
manifestation in a large and surreptitious bite at the soap during a
bath, in spite of her old nurse’s warnings, who had vainly tried to
check an inclination for this experiment. It was the first and last
bite, for a certain clear shrewdness and common sense were early
developed and retained. When she was about three years old her mother
went abroad for three months, and during her absence the child developed
croup, terrifying her father, who was the most devoted of parents, and
went far towards spoiling her. Indeed, beyond a mild scolding, he never
found it in his heart to inflict a more severe punishment than shaking
his closed umbrella at her on an occasion when—just ready to go out—he
had been recalled to deal with some extra naughtiness; Baba howled with
rage, but it is to be feared that the proceeding did not act as much of
a deterrent. She always knew exactly what she wanted, and seldom
regretted her proceedings in those very youthful days. Once, when in
charge of an aunt, she killed a fly on the window with a dab of her
little fist. The aunt sought to improve the occasion, “See what you have
done, Baba; how cruel! You killed that poor little fly, and if you try
and try you can never make it alive again.” “No,” returned Baba, “I know
I can’t; I don’t want to.”
Later, when she was seven years old, her sisters went to school, and
then came the time she speaks of as her lonely childhood. The
neighbourhood was singularly wanting in children of her own age, and she
was obliged to play by herself and find her own amusements. It was at
this period too that she fraternised with the frog, who lived in the
little brook that ran through the home-field. She was still very much of
a pet, and, though independent in character, had no objection to be run
after and waited on. Sometimes, however, even affectionate supervision
had serious drawbacks; on one occasion, a Sunday evening, the maid who
put her to bed being out, that duty was undertaken by Franklin, the
cook, usually regarded as a firm friend. On this particular evening Baba
did not at all wish to go to bed, and was caught for the purpose after
some chasing and insistence; she was quiet, but most dignified during
the disrobing process, and said her prayers with much unction, adding an
additional petition, “And pray, God, forgive Franklin for being so
unkind to me!”
She learnt to read when very young, and reading was always her favourite
occupation; she did not care much for dolls or toys. When she was about
nine her eldest sister, who had then left school, taught her the moves
of chess, and she picked up the game very rapidly. Her sister, it is
true, was a slow mover, and by no means a formidable opponent, and the
child very soon became able to give her checkmate. She would sit at the
board with a book beside her, which she read between moves, looking up
when it was her turn to play and giving a rapid glance at the pieces.
Then swiftly and unhesitatingly the move was made and she returned to
the book. She probably won two-thirds of the games.
Although she was but a child she greatly resented what she called being
made into a baby. Her eldest sister, who often undertook to give her her
lessons, insisted one day on a dictation being written on a slate
instead of on a piece of paper, since Marjorie was careless with ink.
Like the man in Calverley’s poem, Marjorie “argued right, she argued
left, she also argued round about her.” The sister, who had already been
through painful experiences with Marjorie’s use of pens and ink, stood
firm, and, ruling lines on the slate, placed it before her reluctant
pupil, who was by this time much out of breath from the length and
variety of her conversation on the subject of being treated as a baby.
Seizing the slate Marjorie waved it dramatically above her head, and
shouted, “Aggie! when I was a child, I thought as a child, I understood
as a child, but when I became a man” (here the slate was banged down
upon the table), “I put away childish things.”
On another occasion Marjorie was forbidden to bring two favourite
playthings to lessons. They were two small balls of home manufacture and
surprising powers of bounce, and she called them Winkie and Nobbs. After
considerable delay W. and N. were most unwillingly put out of sight and
reach—physical reach—and with strangely sudden docility a dictation was
begun. It concerned Henry VIII. and Anne Boleyn, and Marjorie wrote on,
with the most praiseworthy attention. When correction time came her
sister’s feelings may be imagined, as she made the discovery that
whenever Henry VIII. was in question, he was alluded to as King Winkie,
while the unhappy Anne had become Queen Nobbs! The effect was so
ludicrous that the sisters laughed over it together until they cried.
About this time Marjorie took up hero-worship with a zest and
thoroughness which she devoted to all her pursuits, and if anyone
ventured to suggest that even her own particular heroes had their weak
points, she would wax quite fierce in their defence. In this way
Horatius Cocles (she had just been introduced to the Lays of Ancient
Rome), Julius Cæsar, and Napoleon all had their day; she cried with
anger when certain indisputable faults were pointed out to her in the
last-mentioned personage. She had now developed remarkable powers of
expression, and wrote quite interesting letters. Her father being
suddenly taken ill, and it becoming necessary to keep the house quite
quiet, she was invited by an elderly relative, who lived a few miles
away, to stay with her for a short visit. Marjorie was not at all
anxious to go, but finally consented, one of the inducements being that
she might help with the fowls which her cousin kept, and that there
would be beautiful new-laid eggs for breakfast. Her letter, after a few
days’ stay, was most amusing. It was a very old-fashioned house, and she
had been put to sleep in a four-post bedstead, which she said reminded
her of a hearse, while the newspapers, placed upon the top to keep off
the dust, “rustled like the flowers at the funeral.” “As for eggs,” she
continued, “I haven’t seen as much as the white of an egg since I came.”
Like her sisters she had read omnivorously; the nursery shelves, though
well furnished, did not last her long, and she browsed in the library.
She had got through all Dickens and most of Sir Walter Scott before she
was twelve. She read very quickly, and had the knack of mastering the
essentials of her reading with extraordinary rapidity, so that in a very
short time she could discuss her subject even when it chanced to be
rather more serious than fiction. Natural history she was extremely fond
of, and with all animals she was an instant friend. Some time later,
Whiskey, the white rat, and a tamed starling, fallen from the nest and
picked up half-fledged, were the objects of great devotion. They
involved a tiny tragedy too, for to the faithful Whiskey it appeared
that overmuch affection was bestowed upon the bird, and he, who had
hitherto lived in amity with his feathered companion, flew at him one
afternoon and fatally injured him. His mistress never quite forgave
Whiskey, though after a temporary estrangement, due to that unfortunate
fit of temper, the rat was readmitted to fellowship. In her later years
there was Trilby, a stray cat, who somehow suggested a depressed
charwoman; Phœbus, a magnificent orange Persian, who purred under his
daily brushing if she undertook it, but growled and swore in other
hands. There was also a poor dancing bear whose sore foot she dressed at
the street door, while his owner looked on expecting to see her attacked
in spite of the muzzle, but watched Bruin fawn on her instead. You can
trace her understanding of all living things whenever she writes of
them. Who can forget the anxious hen in “The Roadmender,” or “The
Follering Bürd,” or the tortoise, making “a stately meal of buttercups,”
or the sense of myriad life which came to her as she lay under the great
tree on her last day in the garden?
Her father died in 1881, when she was twelve years old; and her mother,
never a very strong woman, was completely prostrated by her loss. At
about thirteen Marjorie went to school at Torquay with a relative for a
few months, and subsequently spent a short time in another school near
London, whose principal was far from appreciating her. Except for
home-teaching and wide and constant reading this was all the education
she had.
Between 1882 and 1884 Marjorie’s health became affected by her rapid
growth, and some spinal weakness was disclosed. Her rather delicate
condition, as well as her mother’s invalidism, and the fact that one of
her sisters was already married and the other away from home, finally
decided Mrs Barber to give up the house in Yorkshire, now so much too
large for the diminished family, and settle somewhere experimentally
until a final residence could be fixed on. Marjorie’s health then
improved, and she went to a small children’s hospital on the outskirts
of London maintained by the private generosity of two ladies. Here she
began training as a sick-nurse, a profession for which she had much
natural aptitude, and here she went through the ordeal of being present
at her first operation. It did not affect her as much as she had
imagined might be the case, but she did not stay more than a few months
at the hospital as her own health was too indifferent to permit of
longer training. About this time she joined a modelling class, and her
master, when shown her work, refused to believe that it was her first
effort, and that she had never previously had a lesson. Between 1886 and
1891 she spent a certain amount of time in Torquay, where she helped to
nurse a relative in failing health, and after her death became for a
time parish nurse. She also worked in the East End for a short time, in
the district well (or ill) known as the Jago. In 1891 her mother died in
the small Suffolk town where she had taken a house; it was the Bungay so
faithfully described as the goal of the blind friar’s journey in Brother
Hilarius. Here Marjorie used to enjoy rowing herself on the river, and
here the tradespeople still remember her as ‘so nice to talk to.’ She
was intuitive to a high degree, and therefore could sympathise with
widely divergent joys and griefs. Her keen sense of humour, too,
prevented her ever being depressed or unamused, and probably in all her
life she never felt bored.
Marjorie was twenty-two years old when her mother died. She was very
tall, with a fair complexion, a good deal of brown hair, very large grey
eyes full of expression—an index indeed of whatever she was speaking or
thinking about. They could beam with serene pleasure, grow tenderly
sympathetic or dance with mischievous fun as the spirit moved her. Her
face and appearance were most arresting and her conversation quite
fascinating, for she was extremely witty. Quick to see the humorous side
of a thing, she yet responded to any mood of her companions. Her eldest
sister once heard her described by a bluff and frank naval officer as
‘rattling good company,’ and the words were apt.
After her mother’s death, which occurred rather unexpectedly, Marjorie
lived for a time a somewhat varied existence partly in England and
partly in Germany, where with a friend she stayed for a while in a
quaint little place on the Rhine. Their lodgings were in an old tower,
where they were one night serenaded by students to Marjorie’s great
delight and amusement. She was also for some time in Wiesbaden under
treatment for her eyesight, which was just then giving her trouble. She
was here overtaken by a sudden and serious attack of illness, during
which she was most devotedly nursed by the little Sister of Charity, a
“scant five feet” high, described in “A German Christmas Eve.”
After her recovery and return to England she again took up philanthropic
work, and it was an errand of this nature which first introduced her to
the household into which she was afterwards adopted. The family’s
interests were literary, scientific, and artistic, and they were not
slow to appreciate the combination of rare and valuable qualities which
they perceived in Marjorie. Her position at the time was an independent
but singularly lonely one. Both her sisters were married, one always
abroad, and she had no especial claim on any of her other relatives. She
was financially independent; her health was already most uncertain, and
she was subject to distressing and painful attacks of illness. Here was
a home whose doors were open for her; a circle of friends with hands
outstretched in welcome and invitation. When she decided to enter the
one and accept the other, many of her own relatives disapproved, and
when, with characteristic thoroughness of accomplishment, she dropped
her own family name and took that of her adopted one, sundry hard things
were written and spoken. To her eldest sister, however, the “adoption”
brought nothing but relief and approval; to feel that one so needing it
would for the future have every care and attention that could be given
in either sickness or health; that she would live among the most
congenial surroundings and be able to follow her artistic bent in
whatever direction it might suggest itself—these things weighed heavier
than the superficial loss of identity which the change of name entailed.
Nor was her content ever disturbed. As time passed and Marjorie’s health
grew feebler, redoubled care was exercised, and every expedient which
science could supply or affection suggest, was used in the endeavour to
ease, when, alas, it became apparent that her deathward way could only
be smoothed but by no means arrested.
Marjorie’s temperament was essentially creative; the need for expression
was so strong that as her health broke down, and one pursuit after
another became impossible, she found fresh outlets. When she could no
longer go about much she took up her modelling again, and executed,
among other things, a really wonderful crucifix. Her power of entering
into the spirit of her work was extraordinary; she became, as it were,
obsessed with it. On seeing the crucifix a good judge of mediæval work
asked its owners where they got their “14th century” work? Marjorie’s
mind, at the time she executed this, was full of Florentine work of that
period, and it set its sign on what she wrought.
When she became too ill to go on with her modelling, she began to write;
when writing could not be done in a sitting position, she propped the
paper on her chest and wrote lying down; by and by the right hand could
no longer be used, so she wrote with her left, a beautiful legible
script. When increased physical weakness made writing in every way
impossible, she dictated.
She lived in those days in an old Georgian house on Chelsea Embankment,
a house from which she could hear the gulls scream over the Thames,
recalling “Daddy Whiddon” and “The Follerin’ Bürd,” and where, under her
window, grew the grimy tree in which the sparrow brethren chattered and
squabbled. Round her room one of her adopted sisters had designed the
frieze of flowers which was “Like the Rose tree in Alice in Wonderland.”
For many, many weeks she lay, suffering acutely, yet always writing,
piecing together that exquisite literary mosaic called “The Roadmender.”
By and by when the summer came and the heat, when London noises wearied
ear and brain alike, she sighed for the green peace of the country. Her
condition was then such that no one could tell how long she might still
be spared. Every precaution against fatigue or shaking could not really
eliminate either from the journey, which was an awful strain on an
enfeebled frame. But once among the Sussex fields, with the downs in
sight, her contentment grew daily in spite of terrible pain and
exhaustion. She had the clear sunshine, the clean air, the swallows that
twittered from their nests above her windows, and her cup of
satisfaction was full. The watchers knew their task would be but a brief
one, yet none could know when the end might come. She was extremely
happy with those she loved around her; her dear animal friends were
there too, for Phœbus, the big cat, and Jacob, most faithful of little
bull-dogs (he was of the French breed), had migrated to the country
also. Marjorie was almost unable to take any nourishment of any kind by
now, yet her courage and cheerfulness never failed, and she showed the
keenest interest in any subject discussed. The proofs of “Brother
Hilarius” were coming in daily for correction, and she weighed every
word as it was read to her; she would insert a comma here, begin a fresh
paragraph there, and secure the cadence of every sentence. She would
sometimes add or take away even a syllable in some phrase which struck
her sensitive ear as not properly balanced or harmonious. At this time
she was failing very rapidly, and it seemed doubtful if she would finish
the proofs. But her interest was unabated though she was in the last
stages of intense weakness, and it seemed as if she could not leave her
work until it was done. She lived to complete the task; and a few days
later, after many hours of unconsciousness, she passed through that
white gate whence her words have echoed back with such gracious
insistence. Her suffering had been awful, her courage wellnigh
incredible, but none could regret the peace she had won, and it was not
without reason that her eldest sister, roaming the garden for flowers in
the twilight of early dawn, chose out of all blossoms the heartsease
that fashioned the first cross laid on her breast. She died on the 24th
of August 1901, in her thirty-third year.
Looking back over the time which has elapsed since she cried her
farewell, it is comparatively easy to give some idea of her marvellous
development during her last six years of life, the years, that is to
say, when experiment had taught relative importance, and experience had
brought certainty. During her time of comparative health, when able to
work and travel, to make acquaintances and friends—and how many and
faithful they were—to strive after the betterment of poverty and
sickness, during that time Marjorie had accumulated a magnificent series
of what may be called mental photographs. All her days she had been a
keen and humorous observer, with an extraordinary and retentive memory,
and when ill-health narrowed the circle of physical activity her
mentality asserted itself more strongly. She turned, as it were, to the
portfolio of her memory and looked over its pictures, seeing them now
more truly because she was their spectator, and no longer swayed or
diverted by the momentary action which had made them hers. She dipped
the brush of imagination into the colours of reality, and lo, they
became living as they limned forth those scenes which her life and its
happenings had gathered; for Michael Fairless’s art, in whatever
direction, owed its rare loveliness to its absolute truth, and it is the
width of appeal in the truth as she set it forth which has won her so
many readers. Her subjects were never out of the way or far-fetched, yet
her unerring instinct set the seal of speciality on whatever subject she
touched. Page after page of her writing reveals fresh beauty in the
simplest things; the busy little German nun, the child trotting with its
cats to seek counsel, the London sparrows, old Gawdine, “Luvly Miss” and
her owner, a pathetic little bundle in cotton wool, dying of her burns,
and cheered at the last by the resurrection of her treasure; the old man
on his way to the workhouse, the woman haymaking and nursing her
love-child in the field-corner, the parson who stayed to talk with the
roadmender and bestowed rare tobacco—they are a veritable
portrait-gallery. Think, too, of that scene at the inn when Brother
Hilarius guides the blind friar, and Piping Hugh of Mildenhall whistles
like a bird on his oaten straw. The pictures are produced without
effort; Michael Fairless saw with the inner vision, and to her
expression was easy. Hers was a delicate and a subtle gift, perfect of
its kind, a gift that has drawn many after her along the road she
mended, ay, the gift that for many has changed a darksome portal into a
white gate, framed in clustering boughs, and set in the gracious
sunlight of summer.
HER WRITINGS
BY
W. SCOTT PALMER
(M. E. DOWSON)
THE ROADMENDER
I
Michael Fairless was an artist, with the artist’s longing for creative
expression. But while she was able to move about among her fellows her
imaginative force, together with such strength of body as she had and
her fine intellectual endowment, was spent on their behalf. She gave
herself without stint and, it appeared, without regret for much that
must consequently stand aside. Men and their miseries, their poverty,
pleasures, joys and pain, seemed to take the place for her of the
artist’s material in language or clay or colour. The material she chose
was life, life in all its crudity or evasiveness, its stubborn
resistance, forbidding weakness, its failures and faults; and with the
far-reaching promise upon which only faith as strong as hers can keep a
constant hold. In each man she saw, through disfigurement and disguise,
his proper reflexion of the divine image, as a sculptor sees in the
block of marble the one beauty that he is to set free.
There were times when I thought this passion of hers would always be
enough. I thought the fountain of charity in her heart would never allow
her artistic longings to be carried into any field but that of life.
When the claims of human needs and suffering for the moment slackened, I
saw that there was always the attraction of a perennial love and
carefulness for every creature of the earth, even the very lowest. From
the blade of grass and the clod on which it grew, to every beast and
bird, all things entered her soul to become her own, to become centres
of the active, self-devoted interest that one gives only to one’s own. I
might well think that she would live and die without any disturbing
recognition of another longing unfulfilled. Moreover, her enjoyment of
the creative work of others was never tainted by self-pity, or by that
base alloy of envy which kills delight in many of us, whose gifts and
executive powers are far inferior to hers. It seemed reasonable to think
that her love of beauty would be satisfied with what her indomitable
eagerness and energy enabled her to absorb from literature, painting and
sculpture, from music and, above all, from the symbolism of religion in
its poetry of psalm and stately hymn, and in those lovely myths with
which the childlike heart of man has clothed his intuitions of divine
things. But I was wrong. The impulse to create, though often overborne,
was very masterful.
Out of that impulse sprang the crucifix now in St John Baptist’s church
in London (Pimlico Road). In this she shewed a promise of what might
have been had she been trained and practised in a plastic art. But I am
sure, nevertheless, that nothing short of inability to go out into the
highways of life, to seek and find, or at the least to be sought and
found by, troubled men and women, would have turned her finally to any
engrossing work other than that which she could do for them.
Twenty months before she died the opportunity came—as mortal sickness.
To most of us it would hardly have been an opportunity. Among our
writers only a few unconquerable spirits, of whom Robert Louis Stevenson
perhaps is chief, have been able to overcome flesh and its hindrances by
the governance of the soul, when the weight of Death’s heavy hand has
been laid upon them. For men of this rank, life, when it meets new
difficulty in a body nearing to the grave, rises against that difficulty
in a fresh uplifting of power. The men themselves are carried beyond the
atmosphere of oppression caused by the disabilities of mortal sickness;
and we watch them working miracles, as though these were trifles light
as air. Of that rare company was Michael Fairless. But she knew when and
how she was beaten; for there is another thing to be noted of that
company—an illuminated common sense. They work miracles, it is true; but
they are not often found trying impossibilities. Their faith is potent,
but it is neither superstitious nor absurd. Behind what looks to many of
us a reckless venture and a foolish hope it seems that there is, in
reality, something which takes the place of a prudent man’s prudent
calculation. It seems that where other men must calculate they _see_—yet
without knowing that they see. They know what they can and what they
cannot do; but it is as though by a concealed interior vision, not by
mere guess, that they make discoveries. Their decisions are, for the
most part, not to be justified by the maxims and habits of ordinary
usage in life, yet are very often crowned with good success and are
richly productive as ordinary ways are not. They have, as I said, their
common sense.
So, when Michael Fairless met defeat, she laid down her arms, the wonted
weapons of her charity, but took up others. And with these she made a
way, not only to hearts beyond any range of hers before, but also for
her artist-soul, frustrate in the years gone by. We who looked on
thought that but for the help she could give to friends able to come to
her bedside, most likely she would do nothing more. Again we were wrong.
We took her away from London to the Down country that she loved, hoping
for some recovery—against hope and against her own conviction. There, in
her ‘cool light room on the garden level’ with windows opening to the
ground, day after day she looked ‘across the bright grass—_il verde
smalto_—’ and beyond ‘the promise of coming lilies,’ to the Gate of her
symbolic fancy:—‘I know now,’ she says in “The Roadmender,” ‘that
whenever and wherever I die my soul will pass out through this white
gate.’
There, beside the gate, the roadmender was born. I suppose he was fully
grown in the spirit of her meditation before she spoke of him. Certainly
it was her own soul, mind, heart, and life’s experience that he
embodied. He was conceived of her, bone of her bone, spirit of her
spirit. Who knows him knows her; in following his life and death we
follow hers. His realized ideal is hers that was unrealized. But indeed
in him she touched realization. ‘I am a roadmender,’ she said to me,
‘there, by the white gate.’ As in all true artists, life passed from her
into her creation, virtue went forth from her, and she with virtue: she
_was_ that roadmender.
I think she would have been content with giving him life thus, within
her own artistic cognizance, but for another thing. She wanted to earn
money, little or much; had a hundred uses for it; saw that perhaps some
would come into her hands this way. So she demanded of me pencil and
paper, and wrote down (with her left hand, the right being disabled; and
without being lifted up in bed) the first chapter of ‘The Roadmender.’
She wrote easily, it appeared, and as well and clearly, almost as
quickly, as before this last disabling sickness. She hardly ever paused
for thought or word, and made small correction. To the best of my
present memory the second chapter was written next day and with the same
swift facility.
Neither of these, nor any that followed, was thought of by her (or for
that matter by me) as a chapter; each was no more than a sketch, a
little paper telling of the roadmender she was. Not until much later, in
fact just before the end, did it occur to either of us that she had been
writing a book.
We sent those sketches, the first and second, to Mr Lathbury, the editor
of _The Pilot_, who accepted them with encouraging, and to her
surprising, readiness. They were published; and from that time to this
their readers, in a fast increasing number, have asked for news, facts,
about the writer. Unquestionably The Roadmender’s appeal, whatever it
was, went home there and then and has never ceased to find response. But
this is not the place in which that appeal should be discussed; it shall
be dealt with later. Here I only allude to it in passing, as a
significant piece of the short history of an all too short literary
life.
For anyone who knew the previous life of the author, the fitness of her
roadmender to present herself and her ideals was obvious. ‘After all,’
he says for her in that opening chapter, ‘what do we ask of life, here
or indeed hereafter, but leave to serve, to live, to commune with our
fellow-men and with ourselves; and from the lap of earth to look up into
the face of God?’ That aspiration to service and communion had been in
her no affair of mere aspiration; it had been a burning force, not a
quietistic scheme. Yet always her heart and soul rested gladly in ‘the
lap of earth’; and she turned her face towards the face of God as she
discerned that vision everywhere, in earth and earth’s little ones, and
in the face of man. But a new peacefulness came with the laying down of
arms, and she could picture herself quietly at work on the common road,
serving ‘the footsteps of her fellows’; indeed joining with contentment
‘the company of weary old men who sit on the sunny side of the workhouse
wall and wait for the tender mercies of God.’
Death it is that in truth she waits for in the pages of ‘The
Roadmender.’ You will find death everywhere, a friend, a ‘strong angel’
and, as here, ‘the tender mercies of God.’ The road, too, although the
common road of service and of the common labour of man, is the one that
leads into the great silence; the mysteries of God and man cast shadows
in the sunshine of its ‘white highway.’ This is the background, or the
chorus if you will, even of the first part of the book, where she is
giving a picture of the man and herself, and furnishing his experience
from her own experience in past days. There is the snake, bringing in
Melampus and the revealing of secrets by the fatal kiss; there is the
old widow, waiting, as she herself was waiting, for death and a ‘“kind”
burial’ in ‘the little churchyard which has been a cornfield, and may
some day be one again.’ The sea brings memories of ‘its secret dead in
the caverns of Peace,’ and of ‘the still and silent Sea of Glass’ and
‘the Voice as the voice of many waters.’ But withal there is love, the
constant love of earth’s fair face, and its living adornment; the love
for which she thanks God as ‘the Brotherhood of the Poor’; even the
bitter-sweet love of death itself:—‘Very pleasant art thou, O Brother
Death, thy love is wonderful, passing the love of women.’
‘“Surely all men should be roadmenders,”’ the parson says. ‘O wise
parson, so to read the lesson of the road!’ That is her heart-felt
comment.
The first part of the book ended with the ending of autumn, when we
brought her back to London—to our house, 91 Cheyne Walk. She was borne
to the station on a mattress laid in the bottom of a covered cart, the
tilt thrown open at the back. As the cart went on, she watched through
this opening, the receding lane—‘lay as in a blissful dream,’ she says.
‘The looped-back tarpaulin framed the long vista of my road with the
downs beyond; and I lay in the cool dark, caressed by the fresh breeze
in its thoroughfare, soothed by the strong monotonous tramp of the great
grey team and the music of the jangling harness.’ ‘It is like Life,’ she
goes on, ‘this travelling backwards—that which has been, alone
visible—like Life, which is, after all, retrospective with a steady
moving on into the Unknown, Unseen, until Faith is lost in Sight and
experience is no longer the touchstone of humanity.’
I believe she thought, then, that she would never come back to her road,
to the green fields she loved so well, the garden that was ‘an epitome
of peace,’ the sycamore-tree that made a microcosmic world for her as
she lay beneath it, caressed by the sunlight scattered through its
leaves. She thought, I believe, that Brother Death would meet her among
the close-set houses of the town, while she lay isolated in the great
city. So she said farewell, not only with the roadmender to roadmending,
but to the country of her love. Yet she says it with a characteristic
qualifying:—‘It is scarcely a farewell, for my road is ubiquitous,
eternal; there are green ways in Paradise and golden streets in the
beautiful City of God. Nevertheless, my heart is heavy; for, viewed by
the light of the waning year, roadmending seems a great and wonderful
work which I have poorly conceived of and meanly performed: yet I have
learnt to understand dimly the truth of three great paradoxes—the
blessing of a curse, the voice of silence, the companionship of
solitude—and so take my leave of this stretch of road, and of you who
have fared along the white highway through the medium of a printed page.
‘Farewell! It is a roadmender’s word; I cry you Godspeed to the next
milestone—and beyond.’ In her mind, I am sure, these words were the last
she was to write.
II
The roadmender, however, had become part of herself, and as her life
went on so he in her went on. But we cease to watch the moving picture
of a fictitious experience at the roadside where men and the sacrificial
beasts—the procession of a common life—went by. We are embarked upon the
swiftly flowing river of her own life, as it passes to the sea.
Henceforth the author speaks of herself almost undisguised; she is still
the roadmender, but he lives, moves towards his death, rejoices,
suffers, contemplates, reflects, as she does, in the actual process of
her being. What happens happens here and now—this is a day-book we are
reading, very faithful, very candid, and only the more pathetic to us
when we know it as it really is.
‘The next milestone’ marked for her the entrance to the valley of the
shadow of death. She knew that still the days might but slowly drag out
their tale, and she be long, yet, in passing through; she was assured
now, and not only by her own conviction, that never would she pass from
beneath that shadow until the gate of earth closed behind her, and she
found herself in some such ‘brave new world’ as she had seen before in
dream or vision, where the inner world of spirit, of the joy and light
and hope in which her spirit dwelt while she was here, would show itself
more plainly, less confused.
‘Out of the Shadow’ the new set of papers came, and thus they were
headed when she wrote the first. ‘I am no longer a roadmender,’ she
says; ‘the stretch of white highway which leads to the end of the world
will know me no more; the fields and hedgerows, grass and leaf stiff
with the crisp rime of winter’s breath, lie beyond my horizon; the ewes
in the folding, their mysterious eyes quick with the consciousness of
coming motherhood, answer another’s voice and hand; while I lie here,
not in the lonely companionship of my expectations, but where the shadow
is bright with kindly faces and gentle hands, until one kinder and
gentler still carries me down the stairway into the larger room.’
There, in an old house fronting the Thames, she watched from her bed no
longer the green grass, the meadows and the white gate with the
roadmender’s road, but the highway of water, ‘the silent river of my
heart’ she calls it, ‘with its tale of wonder and years.’
Her love of roads and of running water is significant for the
understanding of her character and mind. She is of those for whom life
is movement, and time is real.
Nothing for her stands still, is fixed—static, as we say now; the whole
creation moves with the movement and communicated freedom of the
purposes of God, and with the outpouring of the divine spirit in the
spirits of men. Even in the flux of earth she sees the flowing of the
great rivers of the heavenly love; and all earth’s roads and streams are
but ways of that eternal journey of man, of which his temporal journeys
are at once the cloak and sacrament.
As she looks upon the landscape of the world it grows transparent for
her, and paradise, with its lucent life and many-coloured waters, shines
through. The life of the spirit is more real to her than any life
beside, more real, more powerful, constraining. When she writes of
little things you see that for her there are no little things; each
touches the eternal and has its endless depth of meaning there. And
because there is this endless meaning, this unfathomed background, this
movement of all within the movement that is carrying all, roads have
magic in her eyes—or rather are symbols of a more than magical truth.
She watches the multitude travelling there along the ages in the
pilgrimage of life that every man must share. No event, no spectacle in
earth or heaven stands alone; she has the mystic’s sense of wholeness
and continuity, as of the dark impenetrable wonders underlying
everything that can be seen even by the mystic’s eye. Therefore, that
which is seen signifies, carries with it, all the rest; every road
‘leads to the end of the world,’ every river has ‘its tale of wonder and
years’ and flows into the sea where its waters shall be transformed.
She tells us that to meet death in the town was not what she had
desired. ‘I, a shy lover of the fields and woods, longed always, should
a painless passing be vouchsafed me, to make my bed on the fragrant pine
needles in the aloneness of a great forest; to lie once again as I had
lain many a time, bathed in the bitter sweetness of the sun-blessed
pines, lapped in the manifold silence; my ear attuned to the wind of
Heaven with its call from the Cities of Peace. In sterner mood, when
Love’s hand held a scourge, I craved rather the stress of the moorland
with its bleaker mind imperative of sacrifice. To rest again under the
lee of Rippon Tor, swept by the strong peat-smelling breeze; to stare
untired at the long cloud-shadowed reaches, and watch the mist-wraiths
huddle and shrink round the stones of blood; until my sacrifice too was
accomplished, and my soul had fled. A wild waste moor; a vast void sky;
and naught between heaven and earth but man, his sin-glazed eyes seeking
afar the distant light of his own heart.’
But these moods had passed, and although the scourge Love held now in
his hand was heavy and the sacrifice long of its accomplishment, she
was, as she says, content to lie patiently in the great capital, with
its stir of life and death, of toil and strife and pleasure, which she
had thought ‘an ill place for a sick man to wait in’; and there find
‘the fulfilment by antithesis of all desire.’ ‘“It is not good that the
man should be alone,” said the Lord God.’
Day and night she follows the great barges on the waterway, as she
followed in her mind the coming and going on the road near her white
gate. ‘Throughout the long watches of the night I follow them; and in
the early morning they slide by, their eyes pale in the twilight; while
the stars flicker and fade, and the gas lamps die down into a dull
yellow blotch against the glory and glow of a new day.’ ‘It is like
Life,’ she would have said again had you asked her; but she tells you
nothing of her weariness in those night-watches nor of her pain.
On the wooden cross that marks her grave there are these words: ‘Lo, how
I loved thee!’ They are taken from her last gift to me, Mother Julian’s
‘Revelations of Divine Love.’
In the groaning and travailing of creation she bore her part, but never
alone; always God was there bearing his part and the part of every one.
Across the whole world there lay for her the light of the glory of
divine sacrifice. Not for her was any picture of a serene and far-away
God without ‘parts or passions,’ looking on at the world’s pain; it was
the glory of her God to share all pain. There was nothing, no weariness
of hers or any man’s, no suffering, even of the beasts, that was not
his. And faith in God gave her also faith in suffering, in the value of
a sacrifice to be accomplished, of a travail that should bring forth
fruit to all eternity, of groaning that was the utterance of slaves
working towards their manumission and the freedom of divine sons. ‘Lo,
how I loved thee!’ All men shall hear this when their own sacrifice is
indeed accomplished, and their ‘sin-glazed eyes’ open to see who it is
that has sacrificed himself in them. This was her strength.
Why, then, should she tell us of the suffering she bore, as she went
through the valley of the shadow comforted in the strength of the divine
Companion of her way, the Love that so loved her and all the world?
It is fitting that she writes here the story of Gawdine, the
organ-grinder whom it was once her ‘privilege to know’; it is fitting
that I repeat it now.
‘He was a hard swearer, a hard drinker, a hard liver, and he fortified
himself body and soul against the world: he even drank alone, which is
an evil sign.’
‘One day to Gawdine sober came a little dirty child, who clung to his
empty trouser leg—he had lost a limb years before—with a persistent
unintelligible request. He shook the little chap off with a blow and a
curse; and the child was trotting dismally away, when it suddenly
turned, ran back, and held up a dirty face for a kiss.
‘Two days later Gawdine fell under a passing dray which inflicted
terrible internal injuries on him. They patched him up in hospital, and
he went back to his organ-grinding, taking with him two friends—a pain
which fell suddenly upon him to rack and rend with an anguish of
crucifixion, and the memory of a child’s upturned face. Outwardly he was
the same save that he changed the tunes of his organ, out of
long-hoarded savings, for the jigs and reels which children hold dear,
and stood patiently playing them in child-crowded alleys, where pennies
are not as plentiful as elsewhere.
‘He continued to drink; it did not come within his new code to stop,
since he could “carry his liquor well”; but he rarely, if ever, swore.
He told me this tale through the throes of his anguish as he lay
crouched on a mattress on the floor; and as the grip of the pain took
him he tore and bit at his hands until they were maimed and bleeding, to
keep the ready curses off his lips.
‘He told the story, but he gave no reason, offered no explanation: he
has been dead now many a year, and thus would I write his epitaph:—
‘He saw the face of a little child, and looked on God.’
Love the supreme Sculptor at work on Gawdine, as on herself in her
weariness and pain, at work too on the welter of all this world, calling
forth from the rudest marble the divine Beauty that love is—this she
sees. Love, too, looking from the face of a child and searching out his
own image, his own response, from behind the battered mask that hides it
from every other eye. And pain, the friend of sinners, the opportunity
of love human and divine, love no less divine in that it has entered
into man—this, too.
The whole philosophy to which Michael Fairless had attained is written
in the true tale of Gawdine; a living, vibrant philosophy it was,
entering into herself, her action, her judgements whether of reflective
thought or of intuitive discovery.
It is not her way to see in an ill-driven dray the miraculous handiwork
of God or a punishment for sin. “All things,” she would have told us, as
she tells us here, “work together for good” in those who do not resist
good when it comes. The dray and the face of the child are for her
instruments and channels of God; yet neither is constrained,
compelled—each is free according to its measure, each follows the law of
its own being. So both are sacraments of the universal sacrament in
which our lives are set and, according to their different measure,
become mediators of the divine. The opportunity for both God and man is
to be found everywhere by those who are willing to receive a gift; in
pain or pleasure, riches or poverty, good hap or disaster. You have not
to go in search of it; but neither must you turn away, or deny it even
when it comes as the bitterest drop in the cup that you must drink. ‘Two
friends—an anguish of crucifixion, and the memory of a child’s upturned
face.’
One thing more this story brings out—a conviction which establishes for
her, once for all, that without the law there is no sin. A new law is
born in Gawdine telling him, through the wound he gives to a little
child, that he must ‘keep the ready curses off his lips.’ But he could
“carry his liquor well,” he was still guiltless of offence in that,
still waiting for a new law concerning that. And his judges must wait
too.
This is of her abiding sense of movement in every man’s life—a movement
that gathers as it goes, and in which the man changes, not as a dead
thing, a tool, or toy, is changed, but by a free and living creation, in
which nothing is made actual and real that does not spring from the
creative heart of his own character. You do not make a character as you
build a house, laying one stone upon another; nor do you alter it as you
might alter a house, pulling out these stones, and putting others in. It
grows by inherent power, assimilating, rejecting, amplifying or
transmuting, as though that which comes to it were food, which indeed it
is—food from heaven or from hell. And every particle of this food that
is truly incorporated in the man’s life goes to change character through
and through, may be trusted to do it. Therefore, behind laws outworn and
habits that should be outgrown, the charity that believes all things and
hopes all things discovers the man as he really is, with promise of the
man that he will be. Therefore, too, it is a charity that works for men
in the light of knowledge of the men, and works wonders—as did Michael
Fairless by its means. She says of the thirteenth century bishop about
whom she writes a little later, that ‘he has known darkness and light
and the minds of many men; most surely, too, he has known that God
fulfils Himself in strange ways.’ We may say the same of her, for she
never forgot the ‘strange ways’ of God with men.
Winter drew towards its end, and she still lived to enjoy once more
winter’s promise of the spring and the memories alive in her of springs
gone by. ‘On Sunday,’ she writes, ‘my little tree’ [the tree outside her
window-panes] ‘was limned in white and the sparrows were craving shelter
at my window from the blizzard. Now the mild thin air brings a breath of
spring in its wake and the daffodils in the garden wait the kisses of
the sun. Hand-in-hand with memory I slip away down the years, and
remember a day when I awoke at earliest dawn, for across my sleep I had
heard the lusty golden-throated trumpeters heralding the spring.’
Verily I believe she had heard those golden-throated trumpeters, for the
blood of the plants ran in her veins, as did the blood of beasts and
birds, and of all the common life. She was of the community of earth and
nothing could ever set her apart. ‘The earth called,’ she says, ‘the
fields called, the river called—that pied piper to whose music a man
cannot stop his ears. It was with me as with the Canterbury pilgrims:—
‘“So priketh hem nature in hir corages;
Than longen folk to gon on pilgrimages.”’
In memory she sped on, ‘light of heart and foot with the new wine of the
year,’ until she heard ‘the voice of the stream,’ as with her body’s
ears, and as with her body’s eyes saw spring’s pageant; ‘green pennons
waving, dainty maids curtseying, and a host of joyous yellow trumpeters
proclaiming “Victory” to an awakened earth.’
Then—so like her—she notes the solitary flower, one growing apart close
to the old tree’s side. ‘I sat down by my lonely little sister, blue sky
overhead, green grass at my feet, decked, like the pastures of the
Blessèd, in glorious sheen; a sea of triumphant golden heads tossing
blithely back as the wind swept down to play with them at his pleasure.’
‘It was all mine,’ she says, from one of her deepest convictions, ‘to
have and to hold without severing a single slender stem or harbouring a
thought of covetousness; mine, as the whole earth was mine, to
appropriate to myself without the burden and bane of worldly
possession.’
* * * * *
‘The river of God is full of water. The streets of the City are pure
gold. Verily, here also having nothing we possess all things.’
Thus she comes back to her sick-room in the dreadful yet beautiful city
of earth, possessing ‘all things.’
The gulls from the river sought the open sea; ‘the swoop and circle of
silver wings in the sunlight’ was for her to be no more; and with her
heart she followed them ‘to the free airs of their inheritance, to the
shadow of sun-swept cliffs and the curling crest of the wind-beaten
waves.’
The little lime-tree before her window spoke to her of the green
country—was ‘gemmed with buds, shy, immature, but full of promise.’ With
the glory of that promise her desire went forth, but upborne by another
promise—that of the greater spring for which her spirit waited looked
and longed from the valley of the shadow. Of that she writes in the last
chapter of this part, as the coming of a new life and a new light.
‘The dawn breaks, but it does not surprise us, for we have watched from
the valley and seen the pale twilight. Through the wondrous Sabbath of
faithful souls, the long day of rosemary and rue, the light brightens in
the East; and we pass on towards it with quiet feet and opening eyes,
bearing with us all of the redeemed earth that we have made our own,
until we are fulfilled in the sunrise of the great Easter Day, and the
peoples come from north and south and east and west to the City which
lieth foursquare—the Beatific Vision of God.’
Then her heart sings with one of the old hymns that she delighted in:—
_Vere Ierusalem est illa civitas
Cuius pax iugis et summa ucunditas;
Ubi non prœvenit rem desiderium,
Nec desiderio minus est prœmium._
Great indeed is the reward that could match with the desire of her soul,
with its need and its capacity; yet having nothing she possessed all
things even here, and I do not doubt that she does so still.
III
Spring came, and in May she bade her last farewell to London. With
infinite difficulty, and at the cost of an unforeseen agony of pain, we
took her once more into the country, where she could see the white gate
again from her garden room, and sometimes, on good days—more rarely than
we hoped—be carried out to lie ‘on a green carpet, powdered yellow and
white with the sun’s own flowers; overhead a great sycamore where the
bees toil and sing; and sighing shimmering poplars golden grey against
the blue.’ There, at the White Gate, she wrote the last chapters of ‘The
Roadmender,’ beginning, if I remember well, in June.
‘A great joy has come to me’; she says, in the first of those papers,
‘one of those unexpected gifts which life loves to bestow after we have
learnt to loose our grip of her. I am back in my own place very near my
road—the white gate lies within my distant vision; near the lean grey
Downs which keep watch and ward between the country and the sea; very
near, nay, in the lap of Mother Earth.’... ‘The day of Persephone has
dawned for me, and I, set free like Demeter’s child, gladden my eyes
with this foretaste of coming radiance, and rest my tired sense with the
scent and sound of home. Away down the meadow I hear the early scythe
song, and the warm air is fragrant with the fallen grass. It has its own
message for me as I lie here, I who have obtained yet one more mercy,
and the burden of it is life, not death.’
Then the roadmender must be himself again and go a-haymaking in another
reminiscence, one that tells her a secret of the ‘rain upon the mown
grass’ and the ‘failure’ of the fallen swathes. “_My ways are not your
ways, saith the Lord._” ‘I remember how I went home along the damp
sweet-scented lanes through the grey mist of the rain, thinking of the
mown field and Elizabeth Banks [a sinner blessed through her very sin],
and many, many more; and that night, when the sky had cleared and the
nightingale sang, I looked out at the moon riding at anchor, a silver
boat in a still blue sea ablaze with the headlights of the stars, and
the saying of the herdsman of Tekoa came to me—as it has come oftentimes
since:—
‘“Seek Him that maketh the seven stars and Orion, and turneth the shadow
of death into the morning, and maketh the day dark with night; that
calleth for the waters of the sea and poureth them out upon the face of
earth; the Lord is His name.”’
She was within a very little of the end, we thought, even then while it
was still possible to carry her into the garden and lay her in the
shelter of her tree, where, the last time but one that she was out, she
wrote the second paper of this part. She thought so herself, as her
meditation shews. ‘I feel not so much desire for the beauty to come,’
she says, ‘as a great longing to open my eyes a little wider during the
time which remains to me in this beautiful world of God’s making, where
each moment tells its own tale of active, progressive life in which
there is no undoing. Nature knows naught of the web of Penelope, that
acme of anxious pathetic waiting, but goes steadily on in ever widening
circle towards the fulfilment of the mystery of God.
‘There are, I take it, two master keys to the secrets of the universe,
viewed _sub specie æternitatis_, the Incarnation of God, and the
Personality of Man; with these it is true for us as for the pantheistic
little man of contemptible speech, that “all things are ours,” yea, even
unto the third heaven.
‘I have lost my voracious appetite for books;’ she goes on, ‘their
language is less plain than scent and song and the wind in the trees;
and for me the clue to the next world lies in the wisdom of earth rather
than in the learning of men. “_Libera me ab fuscina Hophni_,” prayed the
good Bishop, fearful of religious greed. I know too much, not too
little; it is realisation that I lack, wherefore I desire these last
days to confirm in myself the sustaining goodness of God, the love which
is our continuing city, the New Jerusalem whose length, breadth, and
height are all one.’
The cares of this world, such as they were for her, and the most part of
them were other people’s, had slipped away:—‘It is a time,’ she says,
‘of exceeding peace. There is a place waiting for me under the firs in
the quiet churchyard; thanks to my poverty I have no worldly anxieties
or personal dispositions; and I am rich in friends, many of them unknown
to me, who lavishly supply my needs and make it ideal to live on the
charity of one’s fellow-men. I am most gladly in debt to all the world:
and to Earth, my mother’—she writes, as though having suddenly turned
her eyes to the loveliness around—‘for her great beauty.’ Then, with a
backward reflexion on the long history of the human spirit in its
groping after the divine, she exclaims:—‘There is more truth in the
believing cry, “Come from thy white cliffs, O Pan!” than in the religion
that measures a man’s life by the letter of the Ten Commandments, and
erects itself as judge and ruler over him, instead of throwing open the
gate of the garden where God walks with man from morning until morning.’
The end of that paper is a breath of her heart’s longing for rest:—‘As I
write the sun is setting; in the pale radiance of the sky above his
glory there dawns the evening star; and earth, like a tired child, turns
her face to the bosom of the night.’
Once more she wrote from beneath the tree on one of the last days of
June:—‘The poplar has lost its metallic shimmer, the chestnut its tall
white candles; and the sound of the wind in the fully-leaved branches is
like the sighing of the sea.’ Summer was coming to fullness; yet she
lingered still. The eyes of her soul sought day by day a land whose
boundaries begin where those of this world end:—‘Looking across at the
white gate I wonder concerning the quiet pastures and still waters that
lie beyond, even as Brother Ambrose wondered long years ago in the
monastery by the forest.’ She asked for the manuscript of her little
book, ‘Hilarius,’ not thinking that it would ever see light in print;
and copied what she had written there of the vision of Brother Ambrose,
monk and painter. In ‘a still night of many stars’ he saw, ‘from a great
and high mountain,’ a radiant path in the heavens, and between the
stars, as they ‘gathered themselves together on either side until they
stood as walls of light,’ he beheld ‘the Holy City with roof and
pinnacle aflame, and walls aglow with such colours as no earthly limner
dreams of, and much gold;’ until to his great grief, ‘a little grey
cloud came out of the north and hid the city from his sight.’
The end of that vision is an expression on her part of the perennial,
universal sorrow of the artist of every kind. ‘Brother Ambrose fell sick
because of the exceeding great longing he had to limn the Holy City, and
was very sad; but the Prior bade him thank God, and remember the
infirmity of the flesh, which, like the little grey cloud, veiled
Jerusalem to his sight.’
Just as she was writing these words the monastery bell of St Hugh rang
out, and another, yet harmonious, note sounded in the many-stringed
instrument of her soul:—
‘They still have time for visions behind those guarding walls,’ she
says, ‘but for most of us it is not so. We let slip the ideal for what
we call the real, and the golden dreams vanish while we clutch at
phantoms: we speed along life’s pathway, counting to the full the sixty
minutes of every hour, yet the race is not to the swift nor the battle
to the strong.... And yet, looking back to the working days, I know how
much goodness and loving kindness there is under the froth and foam. If
we do not know ourselves we most certainly do not know our brethren:
that revelation awaits us, it may be, first in Heaven. To have faith is
to create; to have hope is to call down blessing, to have love is to
work miracles.’
Then, back to the mystic’s and the artist’s wide-eyed longing:—‘Above
all let us see visions, visions of colour and light, of green fields and
broad rivers, of palaces laid with fair colours, and gardens where a
place is found for rosemary and rue.’
The dominant note in Michael Fairless’s religion was mystical, as any
man may see; and she had the large freedom of judgement, the
understanding of and patience with sin, imperfection, failure, that are
given only by the insight of the heart.
It is true, no doubt, that in every religious man an acute realization
of one of the three great elements in religion—the mystical, the
intellectual, and the institutional—naturally carries with it some
degree of subordination of the rest. The mystic is apt to undervalue
reflective thought; for his soul opens to him avenues of vision, which
are but poorly represented by the attempts of theologians to formulate
the poetic utterances of the prophets and the symbolic pictures of
saints. He is apt, also, to think too little of the outward sign,
however effectual it may be, simply because, in an intimate awareness of
his soul, the spiritual grace sweeps it aside. He may forget, in his
wordless communion with God, the need there is for utterance—for the
language of rite or word or ceremonial gesture—if men of different
intellectual and spiritual ranks or stages in development are to bear
each his proper part in a common religious life, and to make clear, even
to themselves, the depth and height and breadth of their emptiness
without God. Even those among us not justly to be called mystics, in an
eminent or distinguishing sense, rarely attain anything near an equal
balance between what they apprehend by intellect—by reasoning—and what
the institution gives them, as it were, ready made; very many so hold
the scales as to let the religion of the heart—of experience of the
real, which is all men’s mysticism—be outweighed by one or other of
those two, perhaps by each. In Michael Fairless heart knowledge and
worship, the spirit’s admiration and pursuit, ruled all the rest. But
from the character of this pursuit and worship in her, from its
intensity and inclusiveness, sprang her high appreciation and glad
sharing of the rest. The love of the brethren, of all brethren, of all
that lives, was as the breath of her own soul’s life. She knew, by her
hold upon the inner truth for spirit of a material world, the
significance for spiritual growth awaiting every man in the least of
little things. These material things, small or great, were hers, of her
flesh and of her spirit; she could no more give them up, set them aside
from her religion, than she could give up God or man. Therefore she
sought, as the temple of her worship, a place where there should be room
for all; not only for angels and archangels, saints and prophets, but
for the sinful and the foolish among men, and for the common things of
earth close by and the far-away revealing of the stars. In her Church—by
implication at least and promise—all the worlds of life and death, of
the spirit and the flesh, should be embraced and held together. Pan on
his white cliffs—‘we can never be too Pagan,’ she says, ‘if we are truly
Christian’—the ancient Mysteries, Jewish sacrifice, the ancient
world-wide myths—those ‘eternal truths held fast in the Church’s
net’—for all these and more there must be hands held out in a temple of
the God whose witness was everywhere and in all, whose Spirit fills not
only the whole round world but the spaces of the spheres.
By implication and promise, in principle you may say if not in practice,
she found what she sought in the English Church; although like the rest
of us she had to carry promise forward, by hope and faith, to a
fulfilment she could not look for now. But she found sacraments now,
bringing to her more than promise. These, in her institutional life, she
must have—she for whom all life was sacramental—and especially the
greatest, ‘the most social sacrament,’ she called it. There in the
Church they were for every one of us, as she demanded them; with a
meaning plain to be read by men obliged to run; calling aloud upon the
ignorant and the blind; showing beacon-lights for those who wandered
from the way. There earth and heaven met and the sinner and the saint;
there the life of man was taken up into the life and manhood and love of
God. The universe was focussed there; and there she worshipped in peace,
as one at home.
You see how by disinterestedness she escaped the fate of mystics who
lack that sovran antiseptic against self-corruption. You see, too, how
it was that she never ceased to value—some might say to over-value—the
institutional element in religion. But she was far from thinking that
she had discovered, or ever would discover, a Church as it ought to be.
She knew too well what the very promise of catholicity entails of past
and present and long-lasting imperfection. She could not help but know
and see that an _ecclesia_, a gathering in which all nations and
generations should be embraced, and which needed from every man the
gifts of the divine spirit that were his, must be marred for want of
them. Here was a noble but ill-shapen body composed of ill-shapen
members whose number reached back into the dim ages of the life of man,
and would stretch into the yet dimmer ages of his life to come—a slowly
organizing body, shaping itself and being shapen always anew, suffering,
wounded, bearing the marks of scars and of disease that had eaten into
its flesh. How could it be anything but as and what it was, even though
its Head were the eternal Christ himself, the Humanity of God sharing
that scarred and injured flesh? She knew something of what all this
implies of beauty and truth to come slowly, very slowly; she saw
something of what sin and folly, ignorance and weakness bring to every
work and all the assemblies of mankind. Seeing clearly and confessing
that in the greatest religious experiment ever tried upon this earth
these things must be reckoned with, must qualify judgement, set a pause
upon both complacency and too ready condemnation, she was content, nay
happy, to remain where promise opens out an endless way. Can any one of
us do more or better?
So much for her attitude towards the institution of the Christian
Church. With regard to the intellectual element in religion—especially
the schematic and scientific interpretation which we call theology—she
was wholly without fear. She had neither leisure nor taste nor
scholarship for historical or documentary criticism, but when the
results of criticism came her way she was, as always, eager to learn.
Serious work of this kind, she was sure, could do the cause of religion
nothing but good. Theological interpretation must, of course,
emphatically and above all things make sense when face to face with the
saints and prophets; an interpretation that did not must go. But it must
also make sense in face of better knowledge, whether of history, of
science, or of philosophy. Her mind was as hospitable as her heart; and
with a delicate and rational discrimination, a power of sifting and
rejection, that over and over again served her well in her adventurous
career of thought. You wrote in marble, not in sand, when you corrected
her mistakes; or rather you wrote as though with some fluent leaven that
ran through all the living stuff of her. You found its traces everywhere
long after, and learnt to wonder why such vital receptivity was so rare.
She sought truth and ensued it. Moreover, her sense of the height and
depth of mystery in man’s life and experience precluded for her the easy
satisfaction of those superficial dogmatists who ‘need no repentance.’
‘The universe,’ she writes, ‘is full of miracle and mystery: the
darkness and silence are set for a sign we dare not despise.’ She was
among those for whom that sign is sacramental, conveying that which it
declares, bearing with it the ineffable promise embraced for men within
the darknesses and silences of God. These, for the mystic, are no
barrier, but rather the ocean where his love finds the immense waters of
the love of God. ‘A sign,’ she says, ‘that we dare not despise’—one that
tells us to set our hand before our lips, lest we blaspheme God with our
little self-made rules for him. The one rule to which she clung was the
rule of Love and Faith and Hope, the all-sufficing rule of men who feel
the stir of the mighty winds of that spirit which blows where it listeth
and cannot be stilled.
Summer was going fast when the last scene of her long act of death
opened. In the early days of August she grew much worse; after the third
she was unable to take any food—only a few drops of water now and then.
On the twelfth she told me she must try to keep a promise she had made
to Mr Lathbury that she would write something more for him if she could.
By this time she was almost blind, and speech was very difficult and
painful to her. In spite of this she succeeded in dictating to me, after
nine days of starvation and months of wasting, the last chapter of ‘The
Roadmender.’ It was a deed of heroism.
Her mind travelled from the sound of rain after drought, outside her
window, and the roused and eager business of the little birds she loved,
back to the panorama of past years. She revived her childhood—‘the scent
of the first cowslip field under the warm side of the hedge’ where she
sang to herself ‘for pure joy of their colour and fragrance’; bluebells
‘like the backwash of a southern sea’; Watcombe Down—‘a stretch of
golden gorse and new-turned blood-red field, the green of the headland,
and beyond, the sapphire sea.’ Fragrance, music, above all colour—these
surged from out her distant memories. And as the roll unfolded and later
years revived, it was still the same. Germany, ‘the warm-scented breath
of the pines,’ ‘the tiny shifting lamps’ of glow-worms ‘pale yellow,
purely white, green as the underside of a northern wave,’ and in
Switzerland a solitary blue gentian—her first—‘what need of another, for
finding one I had gazed into the mystery of all.’
Then the past slipped away, giving place to ‘the uneventful road’ on
which she was travelling now. ‘Each day questions me as it passes; each
day makes answer for me “not yet.”’
‘Do I travel alone,’ she asks, with a glance at the passage in the
Odyssey, ‘or am I one of a great company?’ The voices of Penelope’s
suitors send her to the chorus of the voices of earth, the language of
worship that ‘lies very nigh’ to man:—‘What better note can our frail
tongues lisp than the voice of wind and sea, river and stream,’ those
grateful servants giving all and asking nothing, the soft whisper of
snow and rain eager to replenish, or the thunder proclaiming a majesty
too great for utterance? ‘Here, too, stands the angel with the censer
gathering up the fragrance of teeming earth and forest-tree, of flower
and fruit, and sweetly pungent herb distilled by sun and rain for joyful
use. Here, too, come acolytes lighting the dark with tapers—sun, moon,
and stars—gifts of the Lord that His sanctuary may stand ever served.’
She comes back to the earth, this child of earth, bearing sheaves of the
harvest of heaven. For her there was no gulf set between these two—was
not the Incarnation of God one of her ‘master-keys’? Heaven and earth
were joined in one for her by the life and love that men might share, in
which all things are made one. When, at the very last, earth fills her
memory and mind with its scent and colours and sound, it is an earth
transmuted and transparent. And beyond earth and even heaven is greater
marvel still, that which she never forgot—the mystery of the darkness
and silence of God, ‘the silence greater than speech, darkness greater
than light.’ So, this memory dominating all, she says her last farewell.
We think, or may well think, of Rabindra Nath Tagore:—
‘I have got my leave. Bid me farewell, my brothers. I bow to you all and
take my departure.
‘Here I give back the keys of my door—and I give up all claims to my
house. I only ask for last kind words from you.
‘We were neighbours for long, but I received more than I could give. Now
the day has dawned and the lamp that lit my dark corner is out. A
summons has come and I am ready for my journey.’
IV
The after-history of ‘The Roadmender’ is worthy of note. Messrs
Duckworth published it on February 28th, 1902, in the now familiar green
covers. Six times in that year it was reprinted; ever since, impression
has followed impression until now, when, in the last month of 1912, its
thirty-first appears. It had no adventitious aids when it was sent out
into the crowded, jostling world of books, where so many good things are
lost, crushed by mere numbers. No ‘log-rolling,’ no powerful trumpeter
of its merits, made a way for it. Why, then, did it make one for itself
that has widened and gone farther through eleven years, and seems as
though it would grow wider and go farther still for many a year to come?
Journalists have learnt to call this little book a ‘classic’; they use
it to condemn or praise a new man’s style; it has become for critics a
standard in its class. But the more or less professional literary
judgement is of small importance and easy to account for. The question
that is of real value for us who read this book, without even the
desire, much less the skill, to frame a literary judgement on it, is why
it is our own book, why, as I heard the traveller of a great publisher
say, ‘it is everybody’s book.’ You may see workmen reading it in
omnibuses and trams, hear of queens commanding it, find it ready for you
in all the shops for selling books that are new, waste your time if you
look for copies in those dusty treasure-houses where they sell them only
second-hand. ‘Everybody’ buys it; nobody throws it away. There is a
hard-headed prince of commerce, I am told—there may be many another, for
anything I know—who keeps a pile of those little green volumes of
mingled poetry and religion, that he may give one to any friend who has
unaccountably passed it by. In the States it is served out to
millionaires on Japanese vellum or fine hand-made paper, with heaven
knows what outside glory. Certain reviewers, at first—before they had
learnt caution or, may be, taken pains—said that ‘this kind of thing’
had been done before. Many of them have told us that it has been all too
abundantly done since. Yet the history of ‘The Roadmender’ is unique
among histories of what people mean by ‘this kind of thing.’ We have to
account for that uncontested fact.
For my part I allow myself to think that the reviewer’s diagnosis is
wrong. ‘The Roadmender’ is not that kind of thing; it stands by itself,
it is a thing of personal and individual life. That is one reason why it
calls forth so living a welcome when we handle it, it seems to _breathe_
in our hands. We learn to love it as something that accepts us and
responds to us; understands us and finds out our needs in a way of its
own.
Here we touch the bottom of the problem, I believe. Nothing, in fact, is
heartily welcomed anywhere unless either a real or an artificial need
exists for it and, either openly or secretly, demands it.
I think we may say at once that ‘The Roadmender’ does not meet
artificial needs, such as those created by idleness of body or,
especially, of soul, or by the faults and follies of a civilization that
has hardly yet begun to grow up. For myself—and I believe I represent a
large consensus—I say unhesitatingly that it meets real needs rooted
deeply in every one of us, so deeply that very many of us live and die
without discovering that they are there. It is addressed, in its
profound simplicity, to what is common to man, what is discovered in all
men who are truly men, by those who have learnt to read secrets of the
heart.
We do not know ourselves; we have no suspicion, very many of us, that we
are not only in need of beauty, let us say, but are craving for it,
starved for want of it, going hungry and empty while we try to satisfy
ourselves with a thousand worthless mockeries of the real. It is the
same with goodness: we are satiated but not satisfied with its
substitutes, with imitations and travesties, or rank blasphemies and
denials; our appetite is tricked and we are deceived. Even when we have
the good will not the bad, goodness, above all holiness (especially the
Christian sort), has no charm, we think; it is a mawkish affair, or a
fearful and greedy hypocrisy, as Nietzsche tells us. But when we meet
it—meet the real thing, noble as well as sweet—then we discover a new
region of ourselves and find it empty. We too are able, nay, despite our
baser selves, willing and desiring, to worship reality, to follow after
goodness, beauty, and truth—the modes and manners of the almighty Love
that searches out our secrets. Yet, until some magic touch releases us
from the enchantment of our slavery to lower things and from a far too
low esteem of our own spiritual capacity, we do not know it.
So, when the magic touch comes we are a little stirred; weakly perhaps,
but yet with true response, we thrill in answer to it. We may go to
sleep again, but nothing can ever be as though we had not felt that
touch; we may be the worse for it, as they are who shut their eyes to
light, or we may be the better through all the lives and worlds to come.
‘The Roadmender’ has given and will give this touch—rousing the real
self of men and women everywhere; or coming to them with the
outstretched and friendly hand of one who can speak as like to like and
by heart to heart.
This, I think, is why it lives.
THE GATHERING OF BROTHER HILARIUS
‘Hilarius’ (as we have always called the book) was written first as a
shorter story, a mere sketch, and later filled in and amplified. It was
meant to be a parable, a lesson delicately conveyed to a young painter
of high artistic promise and sincere religious feeling, but prone to
rigid judgements and the use of an inflexible and all too simple moral
standard—in fact, Hilarius himself.
So, in her story, Michael Fairless sends this young man—boy indeed he
was, even in years—forth from an arranged and sheltered life in the
cloister, and from a benumbing established scheme of thought and things,
to the rude world, the many-coloured, confused, everchanging world of
men and women and children, of transforming values, of sin that is not
sinful and condemnation that does not condemn—a real world where God is
and works, joins in the strife of men, treads with them the dust of the
highway, is known by them who seek him not, and in fashions very strange
to those righteous who need neither repentance nor redeeming love.
Tracts (this tale was avowedly written as a tract) do not always pierce
their mark; but the arrow of a tract is not often so sharply pointed or
feathered with such grace. I incline to think that this one has found
the joints of many a man’s armour besides his at which it was aimed.
Assuming, for the moment, the attitude of the critic, I am bound to
admit—the writer herself would be the first to admit—that she is an
author of one book, as we say; the book of her life and death, written
in a fine disinterestedness and from the fullness and with the candour
of her heart. But that is the one book which for any author would either
crown his work or cast everything else into the shade. Moreover, this
author wrote under disabilities that for most people would have made
writing out of any question; and these disabilities chiefly affected
work done ‘for a purpose’—not welling, as it were, from her creative
soul. In a sense, Hilarius is made, not born like the roadmender; and
you will think the book skilfully or unskilfully made according to the
standard of your taste. But if you choose you may enjoy it well and find
in it beautiful things—the singular grace of style its author seemed to
possess as a natural gift; her real mind; her vision too; and something
of the wit and gaiety in which we who knew her found continual delight,
and for which there was no place when she wrote at the White Gate and
from the Valley of the Shadow.
You will find, too, reminders, echoes, of ‘The Roadmender.’ When she
speaks of ‘this peace of prayerful service, where the clang of the
blacksmith’s hammer smote the sound of the Office bell,’ you have the
roadmender spirit:—‘After all, what do we ask of life, here or indeed
hereafter, but leave to serve, to live, to commune with our fellow-men
and with ourselves; and from the lap of earth to look up into the face
of God?’
There is the same rejoicing in ‘fair colours,’ in music and the fragrant
incense of the earth; the happy knowledge of little children and their
transparency to God; the eye that sees the great sacrament of life. And
here, as in ‘The Roadmender,’ the divine sacrament includes, as life
includes, our misshapen world and the sinful men and women in it.
Hilarius is blind; his eyes shall be opened to the meaning of love and
of the craving needs of men, his good will roused to new accomplishment,
both head and heart stirred to a widening range. “Blind eyes!” are the
parting words of the dancer in the forest, who sows in him the seed of
promise, yet is ‘a sight for gods, but not for monks; above all, not for
untutored novices’ like him:—‘“Blind eyes, the very forest could teach
thee these things an thou would’st learn. Farewell, good novice, back to
thy Saints and thy nursery; for me the wide wide world; hunger and
love—love—love!”’
Hunger and love will tutor Hilarius, tell him secrets of the world, of
himself, of those other strange selves, and of God whom he knows too
easily under a false name. ‘“Hast thou ever loved?”’ asks the ‘flower
incarnate’ when he found her dancing in the wind of the woods. Then,
answering his shocked surprise:—‘“Why, boy, the world is full of love,
and not all for the Saints and the Brethren, and it is good—good—good!
’Tis the devil and the monks who call it evil. Hast thou never seen the
birds mate in the springtime, nor heard the nightingale sing?”’ ‘“Did’st
thou ever hunger, master?”’ the dancer’s brother asks, rebuked by
Hilarius out of the Ten Commandments for stealing ‘the Convent’s hens.’
Hunger and love in body and soul, coming to man from earth his mother
and from the earthly creatures who are all his kin; the nature he shares
with them as the ground of his sin and also of his holiness—these
Hilarius shall learn. He shall learn that without knowledge and interior
acceptance of a law of the spirit there is neither holiness nor sin.
This is to learn of the charity and justice of God; to learn to see that
only the writing scored by a man on the roll of his self-created
character makes or mars him. Nature waits in every man, from the first
fathers of us all to the last of our sons, for the conversion of spirit.
It is as the earth, this unconverted nature of ours; it is turned
neither one way nor the other, is neither virtuous nor vile, until we
make it so. But without the ground of nature there would be no standing
for the spirit, no place from which it could either soar or sink.
Hilarius must learn of nature and of spirit too. He must learn of the
slow learning of the law and of man’s slow growth into even a
possibility of sin. But above all he must learn of the infinite humility
of the love of God as he stoops to find a way into the human heart.
Meanwhile ‘he plucked aside his skirts and walked in judgement,’
calling, blind-eyed, on the judgement of God to ratify his poor
decisions. ‘“’Tis an evil, evil world,” quoth young Hilarius.’
The judgement of God he finds easily enough, as when we are blind we do.
‘London, that light-minded city, was a heap of graves’ filled by the
great reaper of the wrath of God with the plague-smitten corpses of the
judged. Wherefore Hilarius, ‘having seen much evil and the justice of
the Almighty,’ turns his back on it and will learn to be a great
painter, and then return to his monastery in peace. He had watched the
falling of a Tower of Siloam that had crushed the evil-doers and
confirmed the faith of the righteous. And then the true judgement of
God, which is new light in the soul of him who is judged, smote him on
the way he had chosen; and he learnt to steal that he might have food
for the child of a woman taken in adultery. ‘“See,” said the dancer,
“thou hast learnt to hunger and to love.”’
Myself, I would have had the story stop there; where, as my memory
serves, it stopped in the original version, the painter’s tract. But it
would never have been published if it had; and that, of course, its
author soon discovered. Mr John Murray kindly hastened on the
preparation of proofs, and they came just in time for her to read some
herself and have others read to her when she could no longer see. The
book appeared shortly after her death, some months earlier than ‘The
Roadmender,’ in book form. Mr Murray has recently added to his many
kindnesses by allowing it to be produced by Messrs Duckworth uniform
with the rest of her work. He has also produced it himself in a new and
cheaper edition.
THE GREY BRETHREN
For the collection of the stories, poems and sketches published under
this title I alone am responsible. There is no need to repeat what I
said in the preface about their previous publication in this or that
magazine or weekly paper. I had rather, and I think more fitly, discuss
some few of them in relation to aspects of the author’s character that
they point to or reveal.
In ‘A Song of Low Degree’ she speaks from the heart of her philosophy,
as of her religion:—
‘Lord, I am small, and yet so great.
The whole world stands to my estate
And in Thine Image I create.’
It is the same note that we hear as the roadmender chants the glories of
the daffodil-field, and here too it rouses deeper harmonies.
‘All, all are mine; and yet so small
Am I, that lo, I needs must call,
Great King, upon the Babe in Thee.’
· · · · ·
‘We who are made Kings after His likeness,’ she wrote in ‘The
Roadmender,’ ‘possess all things, not after this world’s fashion but in
proportion to our poverty.’ Only as we are kings, she saw—masters, not
slaves, to the things that we own—do we in fact own, instead of being
owned by, either the outer gifts of the world, or the nature and
passions in ourselves. So she tells us; and it is the burden of every
inclusive mystic’s song.
All these mystics are of one family and speak the same language. They
are great and small, eloquent or halting in their speech—everywhere they
have one mind and one tongue, whether they stammer, or utter music of
the spheres. You may take, for example, one of the very great, Rabindra
Nath Tagore; and, turning over the slender volume of his songs, you will
find the fulfilment of the voice of the soul of Michael Fairless. Take
this, the first in his ‘Gitanjali.’
‘Thou hast made me endless, such is thy pleasure. This frail vessel thou
emptiest again and again, and fillest it ever with fresh life.
‘This little flute of a reed thou hast carried over hills and dales, and
hast breathed through it melodies eternally new.
‘At the immortal touch of thy hands my little heart loses its limits in
joy and gives birth to utterance ineffable.
‘Thy infinite gifts come to me only on these very small hands of mine.
Ages pass, and still thou pourest, and still there is room to fill.’
Of one family are these, elder and younger, little or great; of one
family and—marvellous to record—of the same family as every one of us.
Do we not know it when their word finds its echo in us or an answering
thrill, however faint and quickly dying away?
Even when they sing of earth and its joys, we, who ruin those joys at
their source and are blind to the real earth, making for it a cloak of
thick darkness of our stupidity and sins, find that our blood stirs in
answer.
‘The same stream of life that runs through my veins night and day runs
through the world and dances in rhythmic measures.
‘It is the same life that shoots in joy through the dust of the earth in
numberless blades of grass and breaks into tumultuous waves of leaves
and flowers.
‘It is the same life that is rocked in the ocean-cradle of birth and of
death, in ebb and in flow.
‘I feel my limbs are made glorious by the touch of this world of life.
And my pride is from the life-throb of ages dancing in my blood this
moment.’
East or West, the voices join in one, and we are able to listen—that is
the wonder of us and the ground of our hope.
There are charming pieces in ‘The Grey Brethren,’ notably ‘A German
Christmas Eve,’ and ‘A Christmas Idyll,’ with the sermon that is Michael
Fairless telling (through the mouth of the Forest Recluse) news of the
Kingdom of God and Man. ‘My brothers and sisters,’ she says to us,
‘to-night we keep the Birth of the Holy Babe, and to-night you and I
stand at the gate of the Kingdom of Heaven, the gate which is undone
only at the cry of a little child. “Except ye be converted and become as
little children, ye shall not enter.”
‘The Kingdom is a great one, nay, a limitless one; and many enter in
calling it by another name. It includes your own hearts and this
wonderful forest, all the wise and beautiful works that men have ever
thought of or done, and your daily toil; it includes your nearest and
dearest, the outcast, the prisoner, and the stranger; it holds your
cottage home and the jewelled City, the New Jerusalem itself. People are
apt to think the Kingdom of Heaven is like church on Sunday, a place to
enter once a week in one’s best: whereas it holds every flower, and has
room for the ox and the ass, and the least of all creatures, as well as
for our prayer and worship and praise.
‘“Except ye become as little children.” How are we to be born again,
simple children with wondering eyes?
‘We must learn to lie in helpless dependence, to open our mouth wide
that it may be filled, to speak with halting tongue the language we
think we know; we must learn, above all, our own ignorance, and keep
alight and cherish the flame of innocency in our hearts.
‘It is a tired world, my brethren, and we are most of us tired men and
women who live on it, for we seek ever after some new thing. Let us pass
out through the gate into the Kingdom of Heaven and not be tired any
more, because there we shall find the new thing that we seek. Heaven is
on earth, the Kingdom is here and now; the gate stands wide to-night,
for it is the birthnight of the Eternal Child. We are none of us too
poor, or stupid, or lowly; it was the simple shepherds who saw Him
first. We are none of us too great, or learned, or rich; it was the
three wise kings who came next and offered gifts. We are none of us too
young; it was little children who first laid down their lives for Him;
or too old, for Simeon saw and recognised Him. There is only one thing
against most of us—we are too proud.
‘My brethren, “let us now go even unto Bethlehem, and see this thing
which is come to pass, which the Lord hath made known to us.”’
Here is the authentic message of the mystic and of religion. It is the
proclamation of sovran Love; from which nothing is shut out, by which
nothing can ever be forgotten or ignored. ‘There is only one thing
against most of us—we are too proud.’ But for that,—say Michael Fairless
and the whole mystical chorus,—but for that, we too should be
proclaiming the beauty of the Lord and of his kingdom within us and
without.
Of Michael Fairless, as she is in the last of the four stories told to
children, the last thing in the book, I wrote thus in the original
preface:—
‘Some of the many readers who have found her there will understand me
when I say that the story of her life and death, and of her life too (as
I believe) after death, is written down in the little tale of “The
Tinkle-Tinkle,” first told to her best beloved in the wild garden at
Kew, among blue hyacinths and shining grasses of the spring that spoke
to her of Paradise.’
I have told the story of her life and death at greater length now and
with comments and comparisons. But I still think that it is all in ‘The
Tinkle-Tinkle,’ and far better told than I can tell it. There will be
some who will not agree with me; but they have never known her as I do.
They do not see her looking upon herself and every one in the world, and
saying, ‘I cannot tell you what he was like, because no man knows, not
even the Tinkle-Tinkle himself.’ For anyone who had not watched her
infinite variety, her swift transitions, her adaptability, the surprises
of her, there would be little enough sense in being told that her very
self is there when she says:—‘Sometimes he lived on the ground,
sometimes in a tree, sometimes in the water, sometimes in a cave; and I
can’t tell you what he lived on, for no man knows, not even the
Tinkle-Tinkle himself.’
We find her, as well as her interpretation of life, from the beginning
of this little tale to the end. And here in this refrain of ignorance,
‘no man knows, not even the Tinkle-Tinkle himself,’ we find an
expression of her always reverent agnosticism, the agnosticism of the
mystic—of him who sees too deeply to be able to persuade himself that he
sees all.
It is she, too, who hears ‘a piteous weeping’ from the least and lowest
of the lost creatures of the earth, and would lead each one of them to
its own home— but I cannot tell you how he went, for no man knows, not
even the ‘Tinkle-Tinkle.’ No man really knows the secret of the
irresistible power of love; no man knows, even when it is at work in him
and is working by him.
Yet man, as the Tinkle-Tinkle knows, must be ever a seeker; therefore
‘it was a great grief to the Tinkle-Tinkle not to know what he was, or
how he lived, or where he was going,’—the grief of the metaphysician,
with his ever-repeated questions, whence and what? why? whither?—the
grief, too, of every honest thinker who does not answer himself with
lies. Yet here is the lofty and special privilege of these two, as
Michael Fairless was aware; and they must hide both their privilege and
their grief:— ‘It often made him depressed, but he always concealed it
from the dormice, appearing a most cheerful and contented creature.’
This is of the tenderness that guards bruised reeds and the smoking
flax. But of the privilege and indeed of the grief there comes to the
like of Tinkle-Tinkle an opening of wonders. ‘Now it happened on a
certain evening that the Tinkle-Tinkle was travelling over the sea, when
suddenly in the depths he caught sight of a most beautiful creature. It
was all sorts of colours—white, rosy pink, and deep crimson, and pale
blue fading into white and gold. It had no face but a bright light; and
it had quantities of beautiful iridescent wings, like the rainbow; and
the most lovely voice you ever heard, like the sighing of the waves in
the hollow of the sea.’
(‘Thy sunbeam,’ says the great Indian poet and seer, ‘comes upon this
earth of mine with arms outstretched, and stands at my door the livelong
day to carry back to thy feet clouds made of my tears and sighs and
songs.
‘With fond delight thou wrappest about thy starry breast that mantle of
misty cloud, turning it into numberless shapes and folds and colouring
it with hues everchanging.
‘It is so light and so fleeting, tender and tearful and dark, that is
why thou lovest it, O thou spotless and serene. And that is why it may
cover thy awful white light with its pathetic shadows.’)
‘And the beautiful Creature cried out to him, and its voice made
Tinkle-Tinkle remember a dream he had once had of sunshine, and forest
trees, and the song of birds; and the Creature said, “Ah, Tinkle-Tinkle!
you are lonely and perplexed and sad, and you do not know whence you
came nor why you are here; but the dormice know and the green bird
knows, and I know, and we are glad for your being. Go on, Tinkle-Tinkle,
and do not sorrow, for some day you shall come back to me, and I will
wrap you in my wings and take you where you belong, and then you will
understand.”’
Love knows and love shall reveal, and the beginning of the tale of love
makes its hearer ‘glad with a strange new gladness’; so that when he
returns to ‘his cave’ he is ‘not alone, for the spirit of hope’ goes
with him.
Not only the metaphysician hidden in other men as in Michael Fairless
speaks in this child’s tale, but the artist too. ‘The Tinkle-Tinkle had
one gift—he could sing—how, no man knew, not even the Tinkle-Tinkle
himself; and this is how he discovered his gift.
‘One day in a secluded spot in the forest he found a dying stag, and the
Tinkle-Tinkle was moved with great compassion and yet could do nothing.
‘The great stag’s head drooped lower and lower till even the sun melted
in a mist of pity, and the trees sighed, and the breezes hushed their
voices. Then suddenly the Tinkle-Tinkle crept close and began to sing,
why or how he knew not. As he sang, the birds and the stream were
silenced and the breezes ceased, and the great stag’s breathing grew
less and less laboured, and his eyes brightened, and presently he rose
slowly to his feet and paced away to join the rest of the herd, and the
Tinkle-Tinkle went with him.
‘When the stag’s companions heard the story, they wept for all that had
befallen their leader, but rejoiced also and blessed the Tinkle-Tinkle;
and he sang once more for them, and the star-spirits leaned out of their
bright little windows to listen, and the night was glad.’
A dumb poet, a frustrate artist, the singer of this child’s song was
when she sang it. She could not know that her swan-song would travel
through all the world of her own people and bring her blessing; but she
knew the artist’s longing and had felt, too, not a little of the
strength of the power of beauty in his hands.
The end of the story comes as the Tinkle-Tinkle began ‘to feel very old
and worn and weary,’ and the spirit of hope, that went back with him to
the world’s cave when he had seen in a vision the light of its day,
stirred within his heart. ‘Then he remembered the promise of the
beautiful Creature, and went slowly over the sea hoping the time had
come for it to be fulfilled, and it had. The beautiful Creature
stretched out its lovely rose and purple wings and wrapped the
Tinkle-Tinkle in their warm soft greatness, and bore him down and down
through the depths till they came to the Great Gate. At the beautiful
Creature’s voice it swung slowly back, and they passed down the Blue
Pathway, which is all ice, cut and carved into lovely pinnacles and
spires, very blue with the blue of the summer sky and the southern seas.
The Tinkle-Tinkle could just see it from between the beautiful
Creature’s wings, stretching away in the blue distance, and at the end
one star.
‘Presently—and though the time had been one thousand years it had not
seemed long to the Tinkle-Tinkle—they came out into a beautiful place
that was nothing but light, and the beautiful Creature set the
Tinkle-Tinkle down. He looked around him and saw many other
Tinkle-Tinkles, and he knew them for what they were and loved their
beauty; and the Creature gently swept one of its purple pinions across
him, and the Tinkle-Tinkle took form. He had many, many little soft,
strong hands and many little white feet, and long sweeping wings and a
face which shone with something of the light of the beautiful Creature;
and the Tinkle-Tinkle saw and understood and sang for joy.’
_Vere Ierusalem est illa civitas
Cuius pax iugis et summa iucunditas;
Ubi non prœvenit rem desiderium,
Nec desiderio minus est prœmium._
PRINTED BY
TURNBULL AND SPEARS,
EDINBURGH
[Illustration: Back cover]
------------------------------------------------------------------------
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES
● Fixed typos; non-standard spelling and dialect retained.
● Enclosed italics font in _underscores_.
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