Chapter 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

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TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES

● Fixed typos; non-standard spelling and dialect retained. ● Enclosed italics font in _underscores_.