Forgetfulness

FRIEND, the years to you have been Autumnal, and when the
war-horns of life are filled with dust you will not be
frightened at the silence. Do you still feel the want for remem-
brance, the horror of the future’s indifference ? Do the faded
figures experience has woven into the tapestry of your days still
keep a reality for you that makes you sad to leave them ? Do
you dread the cold dark and the changelessness of oblivion ?

For some lives the world is a waste of every-days that are all
accounted for by mean causes and are useless and without a
significant great end. And some lives are for ever haunted by
an unattainable triumph that is for ever a little beyond—and
beyond. But you have been interested in things as a sad, wise
man, and yet have heard no loud ambition calling. A nature
that realises sadness is never expressive, and its depths exist in
silence and hide away from men. So, your life has been on the
defensive, and in your isolation you have been mournfully un-
protected against dreams. Your instinct of knowledge allowed
you illusive consolations, and loneliness, the loneliness that dwells
upon the altitudes, the loneliness of a wise mind, interpreted man-
kind to you.

Hope is God’s jest and Memory His curse : but Indifference is

                                                His

His blessing. And you have lived indifferent, but kind from a
great pity ; and you have not been angry with men.

Some souls move through the world to soft sounds, but some,
more wildly strong, sweep through the years with uproar and
endeavour. But the tune of your life has been silence, which is
the divinest harmony when understood in love.

If the unnumberable voices of the world’s years live and echo
everlastingly around the globe, I wonder whether they result in a
mighty music huge with the accumulated cries of ages. Or do
they drown away into the unbroken silence of the distances
between the stars ? I wonder which is the more awful and
pitiful.

You have gazed from your isolation at the alien years as they
trod unevenly past, and have seen how men must turn away
from the faces of their old ideals, never looking back, lest former
thought-friends become sad, as former world-friends, at re-meeting.
Ideals are cruel in that they change, and the reason we pity them
is because they cannot help being cruel to us. So, we constantly
remove further along the paths of wonder, leaving the old places
and levels empty. But time to you does not seem to progress,
because you yourself do not change, and the moods of the years
do not entice you.

You have seen how in these days men search for laughter, the
slighted jester-angel too wayward for long attendance. Sick of
the ache for truth, we turn to amusement to soothe the eternal
disappointment. But we must woo laughter, and delicately
practise it just enough, and entice it, for the hands of our minds
are become awkward with work and their gentle touch is gone.
But you have found laughter ready to your call, for your mind
has remained sensitive in solitude.

You have seen how a spirit of discontent drives us, and how

                                                weary

weary we are, and you have seen our sorrow in the age’s dissolu-
tion, that man can not reverse time’s glass when the sands run
out. But you have not found music enough in the world’s
applause to care to listen for it, and you are so sad that you have
become friendly with fatigue.

Oh, my friend, is there anything piteous like the piteousness of
life, life that stretches its hands to the empty sky and says”—I
came from yonder, take me back again” ? And old Hope has
blind beautiful eyes and smiles, and Sorrow’s eyes are deep with
sight, and she is always young.

Are you so spiritual that you feel the pain of the world’s look ?
Does it see more than the reflection of itself ? The world is a
great dreamer though it credits only its exceptions with its
dreams.

Facts and reasons we acquire and leave off again, their use
dead. Experience is impersonal, only our applications of it
become any kin to us. Time fades out of us the distinctness of
old things, merging them in association in his shadow—reason’s
right is mixed with living’s wrong, and what has stood large and
plain is fore-shortened into dimness in the years ; it is events that
stretch the spaces in memory. We know only the midway of
things and the beginnings and endings are in the dark ; for man’s
knowledge is a lantern that he himself carries and the light falls
round him. All this the world knows is true.

But when we hear youth calling, and, turning our heads, find
that we are old, we take a landscape view of life, and we realise
that our light has been the light of dreams, and with the puny
lantern of our wisdom we have been groping in an unknown
country and have not seen the sun.

Life tyrannises over us ; ambition leads us on for ever after the
illusive music of success played by the eternal invisible minstrels.

                                                We

We burden our gods with useless prayers, and God is cruel when
only His silence answers ; or we pass our lives singing our con-
sciences to sleep with excuses, its lullabies.

We are founded on dreams and greatly planned, but we are
smaller-minded architects than nature, and have built every-day
dwellings on the foundations of palaces.

The grassless path of generations still is resonant with the echo
of ringing feet, now resting—the feet of the men whose minds
struck a sharp note through the monotony of the years. But I
think that beside the great ones there walk silently men as great,
men who do not care so much for expression and whose souls
sing to themselves alone.

Silence is master of spirits, but we must speak to him in a
tongue of great emotions that we are not often cursed with the
memory of. For silence to let loose his legions of thoughts upon
us, we must be in the extreme to receive them, else they become
silence again. So we rush to sound, and as noise is the standard
of our importance, so music is that of our beauty.

Among men of keen senses the gate of the emotions most
easily hinged is the gate of harmonious sound. Their souls are
like guitar-boards—responsive innately to the running of the notes
overhead. But in some men Nature’s dulling thumb rests upon
the high strings of their souls, her slow fingers touching only the
bass chords of their heavy reason, drawing flat notes and level.

Surely our minds have many strings, and the harmony becomes
a monotony by the twanging of any one of them. Surely it is
the philosophy of the utter philosopher to spoil no harmony,
though the vanity we call truth make a truthful discord. For
when vanity has laid her painted hand upon our eyes we prate of
truths we never saw before.

But you, my friend, are cursed with too clear sight in men—

                                                the

the cold sight, not like the tinged vision of the enthusiast. You
have not the blessing of credulity, that soothing hand that strokes
keen thought to slumber. Surely men whose sharp perception
has never been corroded with the rust of reverence see too finely
to be ever quite content. And contentment is what we strive for
by many strange, sad paths, trod out by the tired feet of former
men.

One man’s self holds many natures, some of them sleeping :
perhaps we should be much alike could we ever be quite awake.
And to be content is the result alone of that which we never
practise nor give care to—our own natures. We live eager after
exterior things, and try to yield to what is acquired the place of
that which we boast is everlasting and cannot be acquired—our
personality. But this unnoticed possession sits on a shadowy
throne that cannot be usurped, and our noisy every-days pass over
it like foam on deep water.

Once a story grew into a reality in my mind in the years, the
story of an Indian beyond the Father of Waters. He grew mad
and followed after the setting sun in its smoky crimson. But the
place where it touched the earth receded and for ever receded
across the plains, and the shadows grew suddenly out of the nowhere
where they wait eternally. The gaunt hunter followed across the
rolling lands and over the mountains, till, after many months, the
ocean touched his hard feet. The strangers who watched from
the shore saw his canoe lessen down the fiery path of the sunset,
become small, very tiny, disappear into the sad last light ; and
the sun went down, and the dusk came, and the night came.

This is sad to you and me, for there is disappointment in it and
ecstasy of too high ideals.

A boy walks in a cathedral, sacred and silent, in the city of
reality. All round him rise the statues of his ideals, memorable

                                                and

and prophetic. Some day he goes out into the city to listen to its
voices. And when he tires of the voices and enters again into the
quiet cathedral, a very old man, the statues are all fallen down from
their pedestals, and he walks among their ruins where he walked
many years before.

Thus we hear the voices of thoughts calling, insistent, incom-
prehensible. They call to us in appeal, their questioning livens
the dark—not only the voices of the shapes that we have passed
within the staunch reality of the day, but the voices of the shapes
that outnumber these, the shapes of loneliness and disillusion, and
the wordless voices of those two are terrible. Our reveries are
importuned by the past and the future, by that eternal future
that we will not forget, by that eternal past that we cannot
forget.

What else is there worth living or learning or laughing for, but
forgetfulness ? Expedient forgetfulness ! Old successes come to
be standards against our failures, old energies against our new
fatigues ; old happy moods become slight-pained regrets, and age
laughs sadly at unwise, dear youth. Men swerved in the all-desire
to forget, embrace oblivion, and they are wise. Forgetfulness is a
blessing, like the blessing of whole-hearted, unweary laughter to a
world-tired man.

But, my friend, thoughts, too sad thoughts, have dulled the
world to the shade of ashes and disappointment, and we are become
old too young. There are autumn leaves in the bowls of our spirits,
withered flame of bright colour. We have lived too much with
books, and books eat out a man’s youth ; a spell of other days and
other lives winds him in the melodious woof of dreams, and
modern thoughts drown and die away in the unnoticed sound
of modern years. To such minds the stones that bore the tops of
history’s heels are not mere paving-stones, and in all places where

                                                men

men have thought great thoughts invisible cathedrals erect them-
selves where understanding worships.

Books pursue us through the long avenues of days that are not
our own.

He bows unalertly, Mephistopheles. He is always tired, and he
never quite convinces us, this German allegory of the ancient evil.

It is our dangerous friend Paul, of the subtle mind in debate,
Paul the thistle-down-tongued, who spoke fetters aside.

It is the gentleman whom we know through the imagination
of that Spaniard of whom we know so little. His blade peeps and
his stocking is darned with a differing coloured silk. He stands,
the wittiest, wisest, realest, maddest of mankind, cursed with a
Sancho who has blessed us ever since—he bends and bows grave
welcome.

The brittle laughter or the elastic cares of life find no response
in the ceremonious welcome of their greeting.

Men leave us, and moods depart, and perhaps hurt memory at
re-meeting ; but books have no unkindness, and it is we who
change. Friends force on us their content, or exhibit their woes
as sign-boards to say our laughter trespasses on life. But books
gravely await our coming and are our hospitable hosts entertaining
the moods of us, their guests.

The better a book is the better it could be, yet it is a good
book that for centuries can uphold reputation’s incessant challenge,
for it is more difficult to bear a reputation than to make it.

Now, our hurried days seldom admit of the building of a great
fortress-book—our strong books are only outworks around
literature. We are tired with eccentricity, the cheapest apology
for originality. We are ashamed of the nakedness of sincerity and
deal in transient things—from the shades no wail immortal of sad
Orpheus ascends from his interminable search.

                                                You,

You, my friend, see books from the standpoint of men, knowing
men too well. Sorrow sees deep and is kind, and you know men
yet you care for them. Yet surely it is more easy to feel friendly
towards nations, for History is a cold-voiced minstrel, and her
nonsense seems unhuman, and her griefs and laughter come from
very far away.

People are like the weather. Some discourage us into departure
for sunnier climates by their overcoat faces, some soothe us into
resistance by their long-drawn content, till our levelled senses
ache for a discord, but these are sordid, stupid men the temples in
whose minds were built with closed doors; and the stupid man is
his own contentment, as a great man is his own destiny.

A few cold winds have lifted voices sweet with the chill, pure
wonder of the dawning air, and have spoken of the creations of
their minds and called them loves. We have not such loves. Some
men are blessed with never finding out that ideals live only in the
ideal. The little door of Heaven does not turn on its hinges of
light to our knocking, and only a ray of the luminous beyond steals
out to us under its threshold.

A few men whose minds are dark with sorrows and whose
laughters are all asleep have spoken in huge, soft organ tones, and
made the world colder in the shadow of their everlasting pain as
when a great berg passes by on the ocean in the dark.

But we cannot live upon the altitudes ; our minds seek the
balance of the valleys, and in our life’s ending we see that the sum
of the year’s exaltations and depressions is nearly a level, and feel
that it is well if our path has inclined but a little upward.

All great thoughts are sad because they are lonely, and there
are only two whole, lonely joys, that of creation and that of
destruction.

We try for distinction from the men about us, and our minds

                                                become

become stages where our whims dance to the world’s amusement.
The various moods of our lives colour our souls with shades of
impression, till memory in the years becomes tinged like the fiery
afternoon woods in the autumn.

But loneliness is colourless, and remains as a shadow, for ever
breeding strength. It is only in loneliness that a soul becomes
defensive, as it is only in the silence of a great tragedy that it
becomes impregnable. The growth of deep power in a mind
implies a shady place aside from the surface sunlight of the day’s
events, a secret city in one’s nature away from the noises of exterior
happenings.

I know a story of a man who became divine in loneliness one
night on the long sand, where the solemn thought of the sea spoke
in a whisper. But afterwards he could not express the divinity he
had understood, but he laughed his way through life to no tense
purpose among the every-days. Once the midnight questioned
him in the Fall of the year, and he answered that he had become
a part of that divinity and could not speak. Surely all of us have
one time understood a divinity that eludes expression. We feel it
possible to be our best, but the harmony of our souls is broken by
the discords of life, which demand loudly, and give no care to the
hesitating depths of thought that stand always upon the threshold.
Perhaps we are all the trumpets of the Deity, but we cannot
speak what the invisible lips have breathed into our being.
Possibly we are all beautiful each with a self beauty of our own,
only circumstance spoils us.

We see this more easily in looking at the organised crowds of
prejudices called Nations.

Nations die, some violently, struggling against outward causes,
and their fall is noticed, making a page of battles in history ;
some slowly, and like a very old man, and their end comes as a

                                                transition,

transition, leaving a sentence as an epitaph. Sometimes the course
of nations crimsons at their setting, sometimes it fades like a
twilight. A man being thought of as one, and as of a single
impressiveness, his loss passes on with him and with him is
forgotten, but a nation being a union of many voices becomes
suddenly impressive when it breaks, the voices scattering. Nations
roar to their finish, or change and grow indistinct as when one
river joins another.

Death is always a tragedy because of its possibilities—perhaps
it is change, perhaps oblivion, and the former is the more tragical,
for when things change away and confute memory by dissemblance
it is more pitiful than when they fall, becoming memories.

Sometimes nations die of their own satisfaction, and the strength
grown vigorous in combating adversity sinks into listlessness in
their ease ; so, they decline of their own content, and die, like
over-feeding men in an after-dinner mood.

Race, which is below nations, rests unseen for the reason of the
silence, yet when, in its time, this deeper vitality that evolves
nations, speaks, methods of rule are powerless, and governors seem
insignificant.

When that great captive animal we call a people roars its fatigue
the voices of the trainers are lost ; when race grows feeble and
old, the noise of government sinks into complaining.

Surely history, who was born old, is very tired, tired with the
fatigue of the ages and their unoriginality, tired and sick, and
sorrowful with knowledge of men. She has been so long ring-
master in the circus of the generations, watching their ceaseless
round to the cracked old music of the years, God must seem
very cruel to her.

You feel the balancing of the centuries very delicately, my
friend, and their results are finely weighed in your understanding,

                                                for

for your mind is sensitive to the characteristics of peoples, to the
huge racial tones too large to be hurriedly heard. You know the
roar of the ways of men, its sum and its insignificance. And,
like God, in understanding man’s fallibility you pardon it.

There are so few strong men. The strong man, self-willed
and of no reverence, uses himself as a sledge, of which his will is
handle, and bangs out the glowing shapes of his mind on the anvil
of the world ; he can look into the empty skies and tell his gods
that he enjoys their life because he is their creator.

The wise man may be a fool in all but other men’s gathered
wisdom. The renowned man is a strange waster of the hours
when he slights loud reputation. The fool may find his folly, in
the end, applies to more of the world’s days than does the hesitation
of the overlearned mind.

But the strong deep man of modernity rests firm in self-reliance
and command, and is not malleable ; and he knows that he is
strong. Egotism is a wageless labourer who begins our greatest
works for us, and when our completions justify his grand begin-
nings we are as great as he whom we slighted is. A great man
always has great egotisms. But modernity has given man a new
sorrow, fatigue of man. We wonder which outbalances this
weariness, and ingratitude, and sickness, and loss of companions,
or laughing, the dear vanity of loving, careless thoughts, and the
boisterous wills of the animal. Sometimes we have been hurried
through these fancies when old moods hurt us, or when illness
gave us tired knowledge of the persistent angles of a room. Time
is tired of us, and we are tired of time.

Each of us walks with a companion called delusion towards
whom we some day turn, and when we look into his face we see
that we have been walking with a voice, an air, a mere reflection
of ourselves, that only our love has warmed into the semblance of

                                                life.

life. We are come from the country of youth where life cried
with a sound as of triumph in the morning ; now the valleys of
evening hold us ; our energy glows dully in the ashes of fatigue ;
and the wonderful voices of the dawn are whispers in the twilight
of our lives.

My friend, you know great cynicism, too sad to be trivial, and
an indifference born of fatigue ; but there is one thing that rests.

There is one pure emotion for man on earth, one huge, simple
thing that expression shrinks from, that noise shuns, that the days
slight. It slights, and shuns, and shrinks from being known.
It does not feel the want of pity, for it is beautiful in an ever-
lasting strength, and with the indifference beyond sorrow. This
is hate.

Hate is a quiet giant who never explains himself to weak men.
Anger, exasperation, envy, and jealousy pass by him unnoticed,
and he sits brooding with an animosity that is too deep to stoop
to revenge. He hopes that the soul he hates may know it, though,
some day.

Exasperation fades from distance of time or place, and anger is
as short-lived as a fire. We cannot remain faithful in these things.
As the years of our life pass by, and we learn how pitiful things
are, as time teaches us our vanity, and thought becomes bounded
in thinking, memory draws back to the years that are gone, and
joins the shadows of our ancient selves that lag behind us. But
great hate, the hate that we have met upon the way and have
looked into the eyes of, which so walks on with us for ever—this
admits of no anger, no exasperation, no tirades, or curses. Its
nature is silence and it shall not be forgotten.

Men are many-doored houses, and the visitors to our natures
depart. But beyond the gaudy drawing-rooms, decorated with

                                                our

our best and least loved, there rests a sanctuary that strangers do
not enter ; and here is such hate in place.

Envy is the slim rapier, and the more we handle it the lighter
it feels to our grasp. It is a delicate weapon and prolific of
imagination. Yet, once dropped, the cunning feel of the blade
leaves us, and its fickle laugh looks whimsical, not formidable,
along the ground.

Anger is sudden, or, like the storm long gathering, breaks in
thunder and crooked lightning, that runs jagged over the face of
the tumult, while our disturbed senses hurry across the lighter
skies of our natures like clouds.

Exasperation is physical, the itch inside the thumb, the tran-
sient wish for suffering. Like a dog growling, or the Arab
stabbing up between the bloody hoofs, we turn the gaze back to
savagery, and with a shrug cast off the painted blanket of our
civilisation. Then our arms are free, and we crouch and are
dangerous.

Jealousy, the much maligned, yet a man’s quality, and more
tragic than funny, is much, in minds hard of trust. The jealous
have been laughed at as buffoons and all their sadness missed, for
it is long before some men trust and belief comes struggling ; yet
once seated the fall of mountains is insignificant. Jealousy
prompts men to rash deeds and often repented, yet it is but a
winding path and it leads to a stronghold.

But great hate ; not dependent upon circumstances, not an
elation nor a depression, unstorming, barren, lasting and unpro-
ductive—few natures have the silence to harbour it. Silence is
the home of great emotions who feel the hopelessness of words.
All great speech has broken silence, the noises scare it, and it
remains underground ; only it comes forth in the stillnesss of the
night like the elves and flies at the trivial tread of the light. In

The Yellow Book—Vol. XIII. Q

                                                such

such silence hate lives and draws its everlasting, imperceptible
breaths.

Great places or great deeds can lift little men to their level, but
hate is not violent and requires great men.

And there is a love in hate and a contentment ; a love of itself
and a contentment in its own existence. In the years it becomes
a dear possession to a man as progressing with him, and its
fidelity makes it firm-placed, and cared for as something to be
trusted.

Nothing can so lift a thoughtful man in his own eyes as the
realisation that something in his nature is faithful to him. For
fidelity is the most nobly human of all qualities and a man faithful
to himself the strongest of men.

So great hate becomes dear in the changes as something re-
maining beyond all things. Great hate and great love are pair,
but love is the feminine and the most beautiful and is unhuman ;
while great hate is a man and its strength is earth-strength, not
like the woman’s.

Hate also is unthoughtful, being thought, for the action or
thinking implies levels, but hate rests quiet, and is almost for-
gotten. Memory is fickle, and a man must woo constantly or she
becomes indifferent. Hate may drowse into sleep. Memory as
often implies struggle as calm and sadness is her companion. But
great hate is quiescent and can smile in its sure fidelity.

All large thoughts lift us on invisible wings broadening our
horizon, yet make us sadder as seeing further ; the gods must be
very sad from so far on high. A man of little thoughts can
understand grief, but never sadness or sorrow. Thus great hate
brings a man’s position in self-command, and gives him sight in
the distance.

And large thoughts remove a man so far out of the trivial,

                                                walling

walling him apart from other men. And thus great hate gives a
man distinction, as being individual, and not only relative as most
of us are.

Great loves do not see oblivion, trusting through it, but great
hate, not of God, but of the nature below our feet, has neither
care nor trust, its existence being sufficient for its satisfying.

It leads in sleep the jangling emotions of the earth, while love
stands by.