Chapter II: Part I: Towards Democracy (1)

TOWARDS DEMOCRACY

_The sun, the moon and the stars, the grass, the water that flows round the earth, and the light air of heaven:_

_To You greeting. I too stand behind these and send you word across them._

I

Freedom at last!

Long sought, long prayed for—ages and ages long:

The burden to which I continually return, seated here thick-booted and obvious yet dead and buried and passed into heaven, unsearchable;

[How know you indeed but what I have passed into you?]

And Joy, beginning but without ending—the journey of journeys—Thought laid quietly aside:

These things I, writing, translate for you—I wipe a mirror and place it in your hands.

II

The sun shines, as of old; the stars look down from heaven; the moon, crescent, sails in the twilight; on bushy tops in the warm nights, naked, with mad dance and song, the earth-children address themselves to love;

Civilisation sinks and swims, but the old facts remain—the sun smiles, knowing well its strength.

The little red stars appear once more on the hazel boughs, shining among the catkins; over waste lands the pewit tumbles and cries as at the first day; men with horses go out on the land—they shout and chide and strive—and return again glad at evening; the old earth breathes deep and rhythmically, night and day, summer and winter, giving and concealing herself.

* * * * *

I arise out of the dewy night and shake my wings.

Tears and lamentations are no more. Life and death lie stretched below me. I breathe the sweet æther blowing of the breath of God.

Deep as the universe is my life—and I know it; nothing can dislodge the knowledge of it; nothing can destroy, nothing can harm me.

Joy, joy arises—I arise. The sun darts overpowering piercing rays of joy through me, the night radiates it from me.

I take wings through the night and pass through all the wildernesses of the worlds, and the old dark holds of tears and death—and return with laughter, laughter, laughter:

Sailing through the starlit spaces on outspread wings, we two—O laughter! laughter! laughter!

III

Freedom! the deep breath! the word heard centuries and centuries beforehand; the soul singing low and passionate to itself: Joy! Joy!

Not as in a dream. The earth remains and daily life remains, and the scrubbing of doorsteps, and the house and the care of the house remains; but Joy fills it, fills the house full and swells to the sky and reaches the stars: all Joy!

O freed soul! soul that has completed its relation to the body! O soaring, happy beyond words, into other realms passing, salutations to you, freed, redeemed soul!

* * * * *

What is certain, and not this? What is solid?—the rocks? the mountains? destiny?

The gates are thrown wide open all through the universe. I go to and fro—through the heights and depths I go and I return: All is well.

I conceive the purport of all suffering. The blear-eyed boy, famished in brain, famished in body, shivering there in his rags by the angle of the house, is become divine before me; I hold him long and silently by the hand and pray to him.

I conceive a millennium on earth—a millennium not of riches, nor of mechanical facilities, nor of intellectual facilities, nor absolutely of immunity from disease, nor absolutely of immunity from pain; but a time when men and women all over the earth shall ascend and enter into relation with their bodies—shall attain freedom and joy;

And the men and women of that time looking back with something like envy to the life of to-day, that they too might have borne a part in its travail and throes of birth.

All is well: to-day and a million years hence, equally. To you the whole universe is given for a garden of delight, and to the soul that loves, in the great coherent Whole, the hardest and most despised lot is even with the best; and there is nothing more certain or more solid than this.

IV

Freedom! the deep breath!

The old Earth breathes deep and rhythmically, night and day, summer and winter; the cuckoo calls across the woodland, and the willow-wren warbles among the great chestnut buds; the laborer eases himself under a hedge, and the frog flops into the pond as the cows approach;

In the theatre Juliet from her balcony still bends in the moonlight, and Romeo leans up from the bushes below; in the pale dawn, still, faint with love he tears himself away; the great outlines of the fields and hills where you were born and grew up remain apparently unchanged.

If I am not level with the lowest I am nothing; and if I did not know for a certainty that the craziest sot in the village is my equal, and were not proud to have him walk with me as my friend, I would not write another word—for in this is my strength.

My thoughts are nothing, but I myself will reach my arms through time, constraining you.

* * * * *

These are the days which nourished and fed me so kindly and well; this is the place where I was born, the walls and roofs which are familiar to me, the windows out of which I have looked. This is the overshadowing love and care of parents; these are the faces and deeds, indelible, of brothers and sisters—closing round me like a wall—the early world in which I lay so long.

This is to-day: the little ship lies ready, the fresh air blowing, the sunlight pouring over the world. These are the gates of all cities and habitations standing open; this is the love of men and women accompanying me wherever I go; these are the sacred memories of that early world, time may never change.

And this is the word which swells the bosom of the hills and feeds the sacred laughter of the streams, for man: the purpose which endures for you in those old fields and hills and the sphinx-glance of the stars.

V

I, Nature, stand, and call to you though you heed not: Have courage, come forth, O child of mine, that you may see me.

As a nymph of the invisible air before her mortal beloved, so I glance before you—I dart and stand in your path—and turn away from your heedless eyes like one in pain.

I am the ground; I listen the sound of your feet. They come nearer. I shut my eyes and feel their tread over my face.

I am the trees; I reach downward my long arms and touch you, though you heed not, with enamored fingers; my leaves and zigzag branches write wonderful words against the evening sky—for you, for you—say, can you not even spell them?

O shame! shame! I fling you away from me (you shall not know that I love you). Unworthy! I strike you across the face; does the blood mount to your cheek now? my glove rings at your feet: I dare you to personal combat.

Will you come forth? will you do the daring deed? will you strip yourself naked as you came into the world, and come before me, and regard unafraid the flashing of my sword? will you lose your life, to Me?

* * * * *

O child of mine!

See! you are in prison, and I can give you space;

You are choked down below there, by the dust of your own raising, and I can give you the pure intoxicating air of the mountains to breathe;

I can make you a king, and show you all the lands of the earth;

And from yourself to yourself I can deliver you, and can come, your enemy, and gaze long and long with yells of laughter into your eyes!

VI

The caddis worm leaves the water, and takes on wings and flies in the upper air; the walking mud becomes amorous of the winged sunlight, and behaves itself in an abandoned manner.

The Earth (during its infancy) flies round the Sun from which it sprang, and the mud flies round the pond from which it sprang.

The earth swims in space, the fish swim in the sea, the bird swims in the air, and the soul of man in the ocean of Equality—towards which all the other streams run.

* * * * *

Here, into this ocean, everything debouches; all interest in life begins anew. The plantain in the croft looks different from what it did before.

Do you understand? To realise Freedom or Equality (for it comes to the same thing)—for this hitherto, for you, the universe has rolled; for this, your life, possibly yet many lives; for this, death, many deaths; for this, desires, fears, complications, bewilderments, sufferings, hope, regret—all falling away at last duly before the Soul, before You (O laughter!) arising the full grown lover—possessor of the password.

The path of Indifference—action, inaction, good, evil, pleasure, pain, the sky, the sea, cities and wilds—all equally used (never shunned), adopted, put aside, as materials only; you continuing, love continuing—the use and freedom of materials dawning at last upon you.

O laughter! the Soul invading, looking proudly upon its new kingdom, possessing the offerings of all pleasures, forbidden and unforbidden, from all created things—if perchance it will stoop to accept them; the everlasting life.

* * * * *

From that day forward objects turn round upon themselves with an exceedingly innocent air, but are visibly not the same;

Fate is leveled, and the mountains and pyramids look foolish before the glance of a little child; love becomes possessed of itself, and of the certainty of its own fruition (which it never could have before).

* * * * *

Here the essence of all expression, and the final surrender of Art—for this the divine Artists have struggled and still struggle;

For this the heroes and lovers of all ages have laid down their lives; and nations like tigers have fought, knowing well that this life was a mere empty blob without Freedom.

Where this makes itself known in a people or even in the soul of a single man or woman, there Democracy begins to exist.

Of that which exists in the Soul, political freedom and institutions of equality, and so forth, are but the shadows (necessarily thrown); and Democracy in States or Constitutions but the shadow of that which first expresses itself in the glance of the eye or the appearance of the skin.

Without that first the others are of no account, and need not be further mentioned.

VII

Inevitable in time for man and all creation is the realisation: the husks one behind another keep shelling and peeling off.

Rama crosses to Ceylon by the giant stepping-stones; and the Ganges floats with the flowers and sacred lamps of pilgrims; Diotima teaches Socrates divine lore; Benedict plunges his midnight lust in nettles and briars; and Bruno stands prevaricating yet obstinate before his judges.

The midnight jackals scream round the village; and the feigned cry of the doe is heard as she crosses the track of the hunter pursuing her young; the chaffinch sits close in her perfect nest, and the shining leaping waters of the streams run on and on.

The great stream of history runs on.

Over the curve of the misty horizon, out of the dim past (do you not see it?) over the plains of China and the burning plains of India, by the tombs of Egypt and through the gardens beneath the white tower of Belus and under the shadow of the rock of Athens, the great stream descends:

Soft slow broad-bosomed mother-stream—where the Ark floats, and Isis in her moon-shaped boat sails on with the corpse of Osiris, and the child-god out of the water rises seated on a lotus flower, and Brahma two-sexed dwells amid the groves, and the maidens weep for Adonis.

* * * * *

Mighty long-delaying vagrant stream! Of innumerable growing rustling life! Out of some cavern mouth long ago where the cave-dwellers sat gnawing burnt bones, down to to-day—with ever growing tumult, and glints of light upon thee in the distance as of half-open eyes, and the sound of countless voices out of thee, nearer, nearer, past promontory after promontory winding, widening, hastening!

Now to-day, turbid wild and unaccountable in sudden Niagara-plunge toward thy nearer oceanic levels descending—

How wonderful art thou!

VIII

Lo! to-day the falling waters—the ribbed white perpendicular seas—shaking the ground with their eternal thunder! Lo! above all rising like a sign into the immense height of the sky, the columned vapor and calm exhalation of their agony—

The Arisen and mighty soul of Man!

[The word runs like fire along the ground; who shall contain it? the word that is nothing—as fire is nothing and yet it devours the land in a moment.]

* * * * *

Lo! to-day the eagle soul that stretches its neck into the height, looking before and after; the living banner calling with audible inaudible voice through all times; the spirit whose eyes are heavy with gazing out over the immense world of MAN!

[O spirit! spirit! spirit! spirit! stretching thy arms out over the world,

Calling to thy children—spirit of the brow of love and feet of war and thunder—

Thou art let loose within me!

No delicate fiction art thou to me now—the sound of thy steps appals me with joy as thou stridest—fills me with joy and power.

Go, go, my soul, stream out on the wind with this one—I laugh as the ancient cities shake like leaves in the din and tumult;

Go shout on the winds that the world is alive, that the Arisen one controls it—

I laugh as the ground rocks under my feet, I laugh as I walk through the forest, and the trees reel to and fro, and their great dead branches chatter——

Shout on the winds, though the foaming hell grows hoarse with gusty thunder, shout that the crashing distracted hurrying eddying world is taken

Prisoner in the highest!]

Ah! the live Earth trembles beneath thy footsteps; the passionate deep shuddering words run along the ground: who shall contain, who shall understand them?

Surely, surely, age after age out of the ground itself arising, from the chinks of the lips of the clods and from between the blades of grass, up with the tall-growing wheat surely ascending——

Deep-muttered, vast, inaudible—they come—the strange new words, through the frame of the great Mother and through the frames of her children trembling:

* * * * *

Freedom!

And among the far nations there is a stir like the stir of the leaves of a forest.

Joy, Joy arising on Earth!

And lo! the banners lifted from point to point, and the spirits of the ancient races looking abroad—the divinely beautiful daughters of God calling to their children.

* * * * *

The nations of the old and of the new worlds!

See, what hastening of feet, what throngs, what rustling movement!

Lo! the divine East from ages and ages back intact her priceless jewel of thought—the germ of Democracy—bringing down! [Gentle and venerable India well pleased now at last to hear fulfilled the words of her ancient sages.]

Lo, Arabia! peerless in dignity, eternal in manhood of love and war—pivoting like a centre the races of mankind; Siberia, the aged mother, breaking forth uncontrollable into exultant shouting, from Kokan to farthest Kamschatka and the moss-morasses of the Arctic Sea!

See how they arise and call to each other! Norway with wild hair streaming, dancing frantic on her mountain tops? Italy from dreams, from languid passionate memories amid her marble ruins, to deeds again arising; Greece; Belgium; Denmark; Ireland—liberty’s deathless flame leaping on her Atlantic Shore!

O the wild races of Africa, beautiful children of the sun, hardy and superb, givers of gifts to the common stock without which all the other gifts were useless! The native tribes still roaming in the freedom of the earth and the waters: the Greenlander and his little boy together in their canoe towing the dead seal, the tawny bronzed Malay, and Papuan, and Australian through the interminable silent bush tracking infallibly for water or the kangaroo!

Lo! the great users and accumulators of materials, the proud and melancholy Titans struggling with civilisation! England, ringed with iron and with the glitter of her waves upon her; Germany; France; Russia—and the flow of East and West, and the throes of womanhood and the future; lo! Spain—dark, proud, voiceless, biting her lips, with high white arm beckoning beckoning! And you, too, ye manifold Stars and Stripes—unto what great destiny!

The peoples of the Earth; the intertwining many-colored streams!

China, gliding seemingly unobservant among the crowd, self-restrained, of her own soul calmly possessed; the resplendent-limbed Negro and half-caste (do you not see that old woman there with brow and nose and jaw dating conclusively back from far away Egypt?); the glitter-eyed caressing-handed Hindu, suave thoughtful Persian, and faithful Turk; Mexico and the Red Indian (O unconscious pleading eyes of the dying races!); Japan and the Isles of the Pacific, and the caravan wanderers and dwellers in the oases of Sahara.

O glancing eyes! O leaping shining waters! Do I not know that thou Democracy dost control and inspire, that thou, too, hast relations to these—and a certainty—

As surely as Niagara has relations to Erie and Ontario?

IX

Lo! the spirit floats in the air.

On his lips it kisses the young man from China, and the patient old man, and the spiritual-faced boy;

And on his lips the long-eyed Japanee; and on his thick lips the Negro:

Come!

And to the forlorn emigrant, to the old Irish woman with shriveled brown anxious face, and to her barefoot beautiful daughter, and to the young fair-haired woman from Sweden:

Come!

And to the Portuguese lad with shining teeth and smiling mouth, and to the long-haired Italian, and to the ruddy Scot;

And to the young Tamil boy holding up flowers and pouring his morning libation of water to the Sun, and to his grandmother superintending the household with quiet loving care; and to the rows of Hindu villagers squatted by the water tanks at early morning, bathing and chatting, and to the women their wives cleaning their brass-glancing waterpots; and to the noble Mahratta women, and to the beautiful almond-eyed women of Egypt, and to the shifty clever Eurasian, and to the stunted dweller by the sacred unfrozen lake of Thibet:

Come!—and to the wanderers lighting their camp-fires at the feet of the world-old statues at Thebes; and to the sacred exiles on the march to Irkutsk; to the wild riders across the plains of Wallachia;

And to the sweet healthy-bodied English girl, and to the drink-marked prostitute, and to the convicted criminals, the diseased decrepit and destitute of all the Earth:

Lo! my children I give myself to you; I stretch my arms; on the lips each one in the name of all I kiss you:

Come! And out of your clinging kisses, see! I create a new world.

X

Who understands?

Who draws close as a little child?

Ah! who is he who stands closest? And has heard the word, himself, uttered out of the ground from between the clods?

* * * * *

Who is the wise statesman who walks hand in hand with his people, guiding and guided?

Who is the child of the people, moving joyous, liquid, free, among his equals, touching nearest the serene untampered facts of earth and sky?

Who is the poet whom love has made strong strong strong with all strength?

Ah! who is he who says to the great good Mother: _Cling fast, O Mother, and hold me; clasp thy fingers over my face and draw me to thee for ever?_

XI

The scene changes; the sun and the stars are veiled, the solid earth alone is left. I am buried (I too that I may rise again) deep underfoot among the clods.

Each one a transparent miracle, competent with man and his vast-aspiring religions and civilisations—but for me they are only dirt.

Level wastes of sand and scrub; mudflats by the mouths of rivers; old disheveled rocks and oozy snow; trickling slime-places and ponds and bogs and mangrove marshes and chattering shale-slopes and howling deserted ridges and heaps of broken glass and old bones and shoes and pots and pans in blind alleys and fogs along flat shores and crimes betrayals murders thefts respectability, bad smells by house doors, filthy-smelling interiors of factories and drawing-rooms, stale scents, gas, dirt, evil faces, drunkenness, cruelty to animals, and the cruelty of animals to each other——

This is the solid earth in the midst of which I am buried.

* * * * *

O I am mad! the lightning flashes on evil raw places. I stretch uneasily in my grave and tumble the towers of great cities with my feet; the volcanos lurch and spill their molten liquor.

I hate those nearest me, and am closed, captious and intolerant. I sweep a great space round me and sulk in the middle of it.

Now underneath the earth on which you walk I sport in the fire of Hell;

Satan is my friend and vicious blood-spilling lusts and clenched teeth push the way for me to destruction. I dance in the flames and will claw every one in: take care how you cross me!

Your talk of goodness I despise. To every conceivable sin I hold out my hand. My touch blackens you. I crawl forth out of slime and worms and blink at the sun. I press my way madly through the gallows-crowd to him who bears my reprieve held up on high.

This is the Cross; these are the eyes of Christ—and of the crossing-sweeper;

This is the Divine love which encloses and redeems all evil. Ah! here is peace!

* * * * *

Flat curtains hang round me in every direction (as they hang round you), and behind them the live people go dancing and laughing: but we are not going to be baffled.

Sex still goes first, and hands eyes mouth brain follow; from the midst of belly and thighs radiate the knowledge of self, religion, and immortality.

XII

The clods press suffocating closer and closer—grit and filth accumulate in the eyes and mouth, I can neither see nor speak—the devil and the worms dance around.

The immortal worms make their obeisance to you, and the religious devil grins at you—they compliment you on your superiority.

The Earth is for you, and all that is therein—save what anyone else can grab; and universal love is for you—and to sleek yourself smoother than others in the glass; and to fly on from world to world, leaving sweet odors behind you, and to get cleverer and cleverer and better and better as you go, and to be generally superior!

How very nice! the devil and the worms thank you for your kind invitation to accompany them; but regret that they are engaged.

XIII

This is poison! do not touch it—the black brew of the cauldron out of which Democracy firks its horned and shameless head.

O disrespectable Democracy! I love you. No white angelic spirit are you now, but a black and horned Ethiopian—your great grinning lips and teeth and powerful brow and huge limbs please me well.

Where you go about the garden there are great footmarks and an uncanny smell; the borders are trampled and I see where you have lain and rolled in a great bed of lilies, bruising the sweetness from them.

I follow you far afield and into the untrodden woods, and there remote from man you disclose yourself to me, goat-footed and sitting on a rock—as to the Athenian runner of old.

You fill me with visions, and when the night comes I see the forests upon your flanks and your horns among the stars. I climb upon you and fulfil my desire.

XIV

The heights heighten and the depths deepen; from beneath the eyelids of man look forth new heavens and a new earth. The glitter of sunlight upon the waves is there.

Here underneath, the great lubricous roots grasp downward in darkness at the rocks; there the tall shaft shoots into air, and the leaves float poised in the sunshine—but the word conceals itself.

* * * * *

Of the goat-legged God peering over the tops of the clouds; of the wild creature running in the woods of whom the rabbits are not afraid; of him who peeps his horns in at the windows of the churches, and the congregation cross themselves and the parson saws his loudest; of the shameless lusty unpresentable pal; of the despised one hobbling on hoofs—I dream.

Of the despised and rejected, arising with healing in his wings, of the sane sweet companion in the morning, of the Lover who neither adorns nor disguises himself—I dream.

XV

O Democracy, I shout for you!

* * * * *

Back! Make me a space round me, you kid-gloved rotten-breathed paralytic world, with miserable antics mimicking the appearance of life.

England! for good or evil it is useless to attempt to conceal yourself—I know you too well.

I am the very devil. I will tear your veils off, your false shows and pride I will trail in the dust,—you shall be utterly naked before me, in your beauty and in your shame.

For who better than I should know your rottenness, your self-deceit, your delusion, your hideous grinning corpse-chattering death-in-life business at top? (and who better than I the wonderful hidden sources of your strength beneath?)

Deceive yourself no longer.

* * * * *

Do you think your smooth-faced Respectability will save you? or that Cowardice carries a master-key of the universe in its pocket—scrambling miserably out of the ditch on the heads of those beneath it?

Do you think that it is a fine thing to grind cheap goods out of the hard labor of ill-paid boys? and do you imagine that all your Commerce Shows and Manufactures are anything at all compared with the bodies and souls of these?

Do you suppose I have not heard your talk about Morality and Religion and set it face to face in my soul to the instinct of one clean naked unashamed Man? or that I have not seen your coteries of elegant and learned people put to rout by the innocent speech of a child, and the apparition of a mother suckling her own babe!

Do you think that there ever was or could be Infidelity greater than this?

Do you grab interest on Money and lose all interest in Life? Do you found a huge system of national Credit on absolute personal Distrust? Do you batten like a ghoul on the dead corpses of animals, and then expect to be of a cheerful disposition? Do you put the loving beasts to torture as a means of promoting your own health and happiness? Do you, O foolishest one, fancy to bind men together by Laws (of all ideas the most laughable), and set whole tribes of unbelievers at work year after year patching that rotten net? Do you live continually farther and farther from Nature, till you actually doubt if there be any natural life, or any avenging instinct in the dumb elements?— And then do you wonder that your own Life is slowly ebbing—that you have lost all gladness and faith?

I do not a bit. I am disgusted with you, and will not cease till I have absolutely floored you. I do not care; you may struggle; but I am the stronger.

* * * * *

Ah, England! Have I not seen, do I not see now, plain as day, through thy midst the genius of thy true life wandering—he who can indeed, who can alone, save thee—

Seeking thy soul, thy real life, out of so much rubbish to disentangle?

Plaintive the Divine Child haply a moment by some cottage door, or by the side of some mechanic at his bench, lingering, passes on;

Through the great magnificent land, through its parks and country palaces and bewildering splendors of the resorts of wealth and learning, shy and plaintive, passes:

Is there no hand held out?

Do not the learned people know him? Have the wealthy nothing to give? Will not the philanthropic reach a hand to this one?

* * * * *

The guides are all talking. They are settling the affairs of the universe. [They never cease.]

They have not settled yet which way to go themselves: how shall they give help to an ignorant child?

They are busy moreover distributing money and pamphlets: and surely nothing more can be needed.

They are very busy. They are worn out and rest not. Their faces are without sleep.

Nevertheless they go on. Was it said that any man could be contented? It is a lie;—or happy? It is mere foolishness. These things are the dreams of youthful ignorance.

The affairs of the universe and the continual fluctuations of the Stock Exchange are too great an anxiety.

* * * * *

Meanwhile the old woman was staggering homeward under a load of sticks—but none offered to relieve her of her burden. But indeed when you think of it, how could they? for it would have spoiled their clothes.

The poor boy was taken with a fit upon the doorstep, but it was best not to take him all dirty and slavering into the nicely-carpeted house!

The criminal had suffered shipwreck in life and was deserted; but of course it would not have done to be seen consorting with him.

O happy happy guides! to whom such mighty issues are confided!

Happy happy Child! who need not stay to hear the end of their talk! whom I saw, in vision, silent and musing within itself, pass away from among those people.

XVI

Will you continually deny yourself, you? Will you for ever turn aside? These are not the times, remember, of canary birds—when the thunder growls along the horizon.

O England, do I not know thee—as in a nightmare strangled tied and bound?

Thy poverty—when through thy filthy courts from tangles of matted hair gaunt women with venomous faces look upon me?

When I see the thin joyless faces of their children, and the brick walls scarcely recognisable as brick for dirt, and the broken windows; when I breathe the thick polluted air in which not even plants will live; when oaths and curses are yelled in my ears, and the gibbering face of drink starts upon me at every corner;

When I turn from this and consider throughout the length and breadth of the land, not less but more hateful, the insane greed of riches—of which poverty and its evils are but the necessary obverse and counterpart;

When I see deadly Respectability sitting at its dinner table, quaffing its wine, and discussing the rise and fall of stocks; when I see the struggle, the fear, the envy, the profound infidelity (so profound that it is almost unconscious of itself) in which the moneyed classes live;

When the faces of their children come to me pleading, pleading—every bit as much as the children of the city poor—pleading for one touch of nature: Of children who have been stuffed with lies all their lives, who have been told that they cannot do without this and that and a thousand things—all of which are wholly unnecessary, and a nuisance, (as who should tell one that it were not safe to walk on the naked Earth, but only on ground embarrassed with straw and all manner of rubbish up to one’s knees;)

Of children who have been taught to mix the nonsense manners and diarrhœa of drawing-rooms with their ideals of right and wrong; to despise manual labor and to reverence ridicule; to eat and drink and dress and sleep in unbelief and against all their natural instincts; and in all things to mingle the disgust of repletion with the very thought of pleasure—till their young judgments are confused and their instincts actually cease to be a guide to them;

Of strong healthy boys who positively believe they will starve unless they enter the hated professions held out to them;

When I see avenues of young girls and women, with sideway flopping heads, debarred from Work, debarred from natural Sexuality, weary to death with nothing to do, (and this thy triumph, O deadly respectability discussing stocks!)

When I see, flickering around, miserable spectrums and nostrums of reform—mere wisps devoid of all body—philanthropic chatterboxes, [Nay, I do not hold with you! For if you kill me to death talking to me in a drawing-room, what in the name of heaven are you going to do to the unfortunate in hospital?]

When I hear and see the droning and see-sawing of pulpits; when the vision of perfect vulgarity and commonplaceness arises upon me—of society—and of that which arrogates to itself the sacred name of England;

The puppet dance of gentility—condescension, white hands, unsoiled dress, charitable proprietorship—in the street, the barracks, the church, the shop, the house, the school, the assembly,

In eating drinking and saying Good morning and Good night—of the theory of what it is to be a lady or a gentleman;

Of exclusiveness, and of being in the swim; of the drivel of aristocratic connections; of drawing-rooms and levees and the theory of animated clothespegs generally; of belonging to clubs and of giving pence to crossing-sweepers without apparently seeing them; of helplessly living in houses with people who feed you, dress you, clean you, and despise you; of driving in carriages; of being intellectual; of prancing about and talking glibly on all subjects on the theory of setting things right—and leaving others to do the dirty work of the world; of having read books by the score, and being yet unable to read a single page; of writing, and yet ignorant how to sign your name; of talking about political economy and politics and never having done a single day’s labor in your life; of being a magistrate or a judge and never having committed a common crime, or been in the position to commit one; of being a parson and afraid to be seen toping with Christ in a public; a barrister and to travel in a third class carriage; an officer and to walk with one of your own men;

When I see the sea, spreading, of infidelity, of belief in externals—in money, big guns, laws, views, accomplishments, cheap goods—towncouncilors, cabinet ministers, M.P.’s, generals, judges, bishops—all alike;

When I look for help from the guides and see only a dead waste of aimless abject closeshaven shabby simpering flat pompous peaked punctilious faces:

O England, whither—strangled tied and bound—whither whither art thou come?

XVII

I choke!

[Or should choke—did I not know very well I could tear all these bonds to pieces like withes of dry grass: did I not know too that these are after all in place as they are, nor could be better than they are:

The natural sheath protecting the young bud—fitting close, stranglingly close, till the young thing gains a little more power, and then falling dry, useless, their work finished, to the ground.]

Strangled, O God? Nay—the circle of gibbering faces draws closer, the droning noises become louder, the weight gets heavier, unbearable—One instant struggle! and lo!

* * * * *

It is Over!—daylight! the sweet rain is falling and I hear the songs of the birds.

* * * * *

Blessings and thanks for ever for the sweet rain; blessings for the fresh fresh air blowing, and the meadows illimitable and the grass and the clouds;

Blessings and thanks for you, you wild waters eternally flowing: O come flowing, encroaching, over me, in my ears: I salute you who are pure and sweet (ah! what designs, what love, are hid within you!)—

I praise you for your faithfulness for ever.

XVIII

To descend, first;

To feel downwards and downwards through this wretched maze of shams for the solid ground—to come close to the Earth itself and those that live in direct contact with it;

To identify, to saturate yourself with these, their laws of being, their modes of life, their needs (the Earth’s also), thoughts, temptations and aspirations;

This—is it not the eternal precept?—is the first thing: to dig downwards. Afterwards the young shoot will ascend—and ascending easily part aside the overlying rubbish.

These are not the times of canary birds—nor of trifling with art and philosophy and impertinent philanthropic schemes; this is the time of grown Men and Women:

Of or among the people; always living close to the earth and the people, and creating what they create, out of them.

* * * * *

Young Men and Women, I—though not of myself alone—call you: the time is come. (Is not the sweet rain falling?)

You—for whom the bitter cup and the sweet are so strangely mixed—how strangely none but you can tell;

You—in whom divine strength is one with the uttermost weakness;

In soberness of spirit, as to some long and patient task in death alone ending, I call.

* * * * *

Strong in peace, strong in turmoil and conflict, strong in yourselves, undaunted, with large hearts, with large strong hands,

Spreaders of health (better than any doctor) to individuals, to the diseased prostrate nation, sustainers of ridicule, clearers of the ground laden with the accumulated wreck and rubbish of centuries,

Lovers of all handicrafts and of labor in the open air, confessed passionate lovers of your own sex,

Arise!

Heroes of the enfranchisement of the body (latest and best gift long concealed from men), Arise!

As the North wind in summer runs over the world, making a clear light down to the very horizon—so is the world prepared for you.

* * * * *

Come! I too call you. I too have looked in your eyes, O you of great faith and few words; you cannot escape, now.

Under your eyelids I have seen, shy, hidden away, pure without taint, one with the fresh air to sweeten all the world—lo! the greatest faith of all.

You sacred ones, first interpreters, you holders up of new ideals, you greatest and least,

You who are and by your mere presence create Democracy—Arise!

Thou Woman, gentleborn and sensitive, yet incapable of being shocked or disgusted—Arise!

Thou one strong Man in love sufficient, out of the heart of the people—Arise!

XIX

Heroes, lovers, judges; despised, outcast, ridiculed; princes and kings and destitute; drudges and slaves; mothers, free women and feminine neuters; actors, parsons, squires, capitalists, rich dinners, fine houses (it is all the same: I go back upon my own words), the parks and the opera; unobtrusive, unguessed, day by day, and year by year; talking loud, talking soft, in the fashion, and out; dreaming of duty, love, release, nature, organisation, hatred, death; ascetic, lusty, genial, maimed, incoherent, proud; by tradition military, money-broking, official, commercial, idle, literary, church, chapel and club; in all forms and in all places; weary yet unwearied; before dawn rising and through the window peering at the untroubled sky; weak yet indomitable; suffering yet filled with exceeding joy—

Age after age, under the Earth, hidden, the womb of the dead generations arising to life again, myriads of seeds, chrysalids, pupæ, cysts, rootlets, transparent white bulbs of souls in Hades, by faith working many miracles; thrills of magnetism through the whole vast frame, summer heat and winter cold and the kiss of the living air; death and decay and weakness and prostration and poisonous inbreaths, and nearer nearer nearer nearer life and joy everlasting.

Through the city crowd pushing wrestling shouldering, against the tide, face after face, breath of liquor, money-grubbing eye, infidel skin, shouts, threats, greetings, smiles, eyes and breasts of love, breathless, clutches of lust, limbs, bodies, torrents, bursts, savage onslaughts, tears, entreaties, tremblings, stranglings, suicidal, the sky, the houses, surges and crests of waves, white faces from afar bearing down nearer nearer, almost touching, and glances unforgotten and meant to be unforgotten.

XX

I do not forget you: I see you quite plainly.

* * * * *

Tangles of social claims, convenances, toy-duties, fine soft-carpeted house, array of servants, failing and failing health, growing and settled sadness, ennui, wearisome pleasures, hyper-sensitiveness.

Golden hand-cuffs, the prison life of Custom without one touch of nature, desperate beating of wings and breast against the bars, trailing slime and winding web of lies impossible to escape from.

Careful obediences; sleek hat and well-brushed coat; blameless deference to public opinion; the desk, the counter, the Exchange, the walk home, the favorable comments of passers-by;

And within, blinding burning hatred, bottomless yawning pits opening in the midst of life—of love, of jealousy, of desire—vast gales and whirlwinds carrying away the superstructure and the plans of years.

Waves and storms of the ocean within; shipwreck and disaster of life; fortune, health, honor, love, gone down seeming irretrievably in the great signless waste; and still the stars shining calm on the flying spray, and the immense placid heaven unmoved going back to innumerable other worlds and radiant birth-places and pilgrimages and possessions of the Soul without end.

XXI

I do not forget you. I see you quite plainly.

But why should one god leave his throne to scrape favors at the feet of other gods?

Surely it is enough to be here—and always to be Here.

* * * * *

I weave these words about myself to form a seamless web without beginning or ending. I do not spin a yarn for you to reel off at your leisure; nor do I pour out water into pots.

This is one of my bodies—of the female—which if you penetrate with true sexual power, clinging it shall conceive, and you shall know me in part—by the answer of the eyes of children, yours and mine, looking up from the grass and down from the sky upon you as you walk.

And if you understand me I will draw you away from all sorrow—so that no evil can happen to you. Not at first will it be so, but afterwards, after a time.

XXII

You cannot escape me (and this place of my Presence I will never leave till I have saturated myself, till the waves of my love have traveled over the whole vast ocean of existence from where I stand):

The horse galloping over the plains cannot escape the plains it gallops over.

Leagues and leagues out in the sunlight I lie, the winds of heaven blow over me—I desire nothing more, I am perfectly content.

* * * * *

Yes, you cannot escape me.

At night I creep down and lie close in the great city—there I am at home—hours and hours I lie stretched there; the feet go to and fro, to and fro, beside and over me.

Oaths and curses and obscene jokes; the group of laughing men and girls tumbling out of the doors of the beershop, the haggard old woman under the flaring gas-jet by the butcher’s stall (the butcher sometimes gives her a bit of waste meat in charity), the butcher himself with his smooth grisled hair and florid face—you cannot escape me.

You, soaring yearning face of youth threading the noisy crowd, though you soar to the stars you cannot escape me.

* * * * *

I remain where I am. I make no effort. Wherever you go it is the same to me: I am there already.

The murmuring of many voices is in my ears. As I lie on my side hour after hour the drowse of myriads of feet is upon me:

Hour after hour, hour after hour,—and I sleep, well content.

XXIII

Closer and closer will I come, till I lay hold of you—myself and none other.

As one grasps a drowning man with a grasp that will not be relaxed, so will I grasp you—you shall not escape me.

* * * * *

Ah! Death, and Hell with thy gaping jaws, into thee at length I am curious to descend; curious am I to go where the old empty masks of Fear and Disaster are kept, and to see where they hang—hereafter useless for ever.

XXIV

Are you laughed at, are you scorned? Do they gaze at you and giggle to each other as you pass by? Do they despise you because you are mis-shapen, because you are awkward, because you are peculiar, because you fail in everything you do—and you know it is true?

Do you go to your chamber and hide yourself and think that no one thinks of you, or when they do only with contempt?

My child, there is One that not only thinks of you, but who cannot get on at all without you.

* * * * *

Are you alone in the world?

Have you sinned? have you a terrible secret within you which must out, yet you dare not reveal it?

Have you a face so disfigured that no one will look straight in your eyes?

Have you a mortal disease? do you feel the beating pulse of it in the dead of the night? At midday when the passers by go to and fro in the bright sunshine, do you feel the shadowy call of it to another world?

Are you tormented with inordinate clutching lusts which you dare not speak? are you nearly mad with the sting of them, and nearly mad with terror lest they should betray you?

My child, there is One who understands perfectly. There is nothing betrayed, and there is nothing to betray.

* * * * *

It is all straightforward.

There is no fraction of your days, your body, your thoughts, your passions, which has not deliberately and calmly been prepared—and which shall not deliberately and calmly be removed again when it has played its part.

There is no prejudice here, or weakness or self-righteousness, nor any apartness at all;

You are included, and all that is done and felt by you is done and felt at the same instant by not you;

Whatever you are and whatever you do, there is One who will and does look you candidly in the face, and understands you.

* * * * *

You may recoil from that gaze; but if you learn to encounter and return it (whether in one or many lifetimes) you will see that from it at length all secret terrors, shams, disfigurements, death itself, vanish away;

And you will not only not be alone in the world, but you will be a sovereign lord over the world.

XXV

Apart from all evil—from all that seems to you evil—your Soul, my friend, that towards which you aspire, which will become you one day—your true Self—rides,

Above your phantasmal self continually.

* * * * *

Do not fear: it is there.

Through all the baffling and confusion, through all the seeming haphazard and labyrinth darkness of life, it is there—overseeing; quietly selecting, directing, ordaining. It is lord of all.

If there were chance, it were evil: but there is not. The soul surrounds chance and takes it captive;

And all experience—what you call good and what you call evil, alike—it takes and greedily absorbs, nor ever can have enough.

* * * * *

Are you not sometimes aware of your own body how it goes about, moving hither and thither? are you not aware of it in the street among others, exchanging greetings (and those who exchange the greetings absolutely equal before you)?

Are you not aware of it at night, lying awake, perhaps in pain? Are you not aware of it wandering over the hills at sunrise, or out at sea—in the agonised white faces of the people on board—and the ship is foundering?

Are you not aware of it North and South, East and West, by day and night, in winter and summer, in childhood and in age, gathering, culling, assimilating, without end, and with unerring instinct?

And You, all the time—YOU?

What?—Like some great Egyptian King-God, seated, marble, with wide eyes looking out over the procession, chariots and horsemen, which creeps past in his honour—over them to the plains and the winding river.

* * * * *

Do not fear; do not be discouraged by the tiny insolences of people. For yourself be only careful that you are true.

The dreams of the dark-faced yearning swift-souled Egyptians, conceiving into stone eternal types of calm passion, the dreams of Pheidias, the dreams of the dreamers of all the earth falling passionate before the visionary beauty of womanhood and manhood—Are true.

The dust, the wretched blur and distortion are but for a moment. They are no more than they are. When you shall behold yourself in the clean mirror of God you shall be wholly satisfied.

* * * * *

The body is a root of the soul. As the body in air, so the soul sustains itself in love.

The medium in which the Knowledge of Yourself subsists is Equality. When you have penetrated into that medium (as the young shoot penetrates into the sunlight) you shall know that it is so—you shall realise Yourself—but not till then.

* * * * *

Hereafter the face of Nature, the faces of the sea and the fields, the faces of the animals—hereafter the faces of them that pass in the street—are changed.

Nothing escapes, the line is cast over them all, they cannot choose but yield themselves—to you, my friend—delivering the essence of their life to you.

Hereafter certain things, all-important before, become indifferent; certain thoughts with which you had tormented yourself torment you no longer; the chains fall off. On the other hand the ways which were forbidden and inaccessible become accessible—on all hands the doors stand open to your touch.

XXVI

Wonderful! The doors that were closed stand open. Yet how slight a thing it is.

The upturning of a palm? the curve of a lip, an eyelid? Nothing.

Nothing that can be seen with the mortal eye or heard by the ear, nothing that can be definitely thought, spoken, or written in a book—

Yet the doors that were trebled-bolted and barred, and the doors weed-overgrown and with rusty old hinges,

Fly open of themselves.

XXVII

Did you once desire to shine among your peers—or did you shrink from the knowledge of your own defect in the midst of them?

Did you, friend, covet so to be more beautiful, witty, virtuous—to be able to tell a story or sustain an argument well, or to be able to discourse on any subject, or to be a skilful rider or a good shot?

Or shrank from the ridicule which the reverse of these excited—which was certain and is still certain to come upon you?

Was it really your own anxious face you used to keep catching in the glass? was it really you who had so many things, one way or another, you wanted to conceal from others—so many opinions too to disguise?

* * * * *

All that is changed now.

But what if your prayers had been granted? What if you had become exceptional and had secured for yourself a place with the strong and the gifted and the beautiful?

What if when you arrived the eyes of all had been turned upon you; and when you had passed by—one by one, sad, thoughtful, depressed, the weak more conscious of his or her weakness, the stupid more conscious of stupidity, the deformed more painfully conscious of his or her deformity, to their solitary chambers they had gone apart and prayed they had never been born?

What if you had taken advantage of the weak and defenceless and oppressed of the whole Earth—and had bartered away belief in the Soul standing omnipotent in the most despised things?

What if you had gladly disguised and covered your own defect, allowing thus the ignorant ridicule of the world to fall more heavily on those who could not or would not act a lie?

What if you had been a rank deserter, a cowardly slave, taking refuge always with the stronger side?

Ah! what if to one weary traveler in the world, in the steep path painfully mounting, you making it steeper still had added the final stone of stumbling and despair?

Better to be effaced, crazy, criminal, deformed, degraded.

Better instead of the steep to be the most dull flat and commonplace road.

Better to go clean underfoot of all weak and despised persons—so that they shall not even notice that you are there;

None so rude and uneducated but you shall go underfoot of them, none so criminal but you shall when the occasion serves go underfoot of them, none so outcast but they shall pass along you and not even notice that you are there.

XXVIII

The undistinguished old Earth! the dusty clods!

The mere brown handfuls crumbled through the fingers, out of which proceed the trees and the grasses and the animals roaming through them, and man with his vast-aspiring religions and civilisations.

The common and universal;

The servant girl tying up her hair before the broken mirror hung from a nail in the wall; the daisy child-face looking at you from the side of the path as you pass; the slow humor of old gaffers on the village seat in the sun:

These contain you. With all your ambitions you cannot escape and go beyond these. It is impossible.