Under the Trees and Elsewhere - Hamilton Wright Mabie (any book recommendations txt) 📗

dwellers in Arden-a continuation of our wedding journey during the first week.

"It will be so much more delightful than before," suggested Rosalind, "because nobody will stare at us, and we shall have the whole world to ourselves." In that last phrase I recognised the ideal wedding journey, and was not at all dismayed at the prospect of having no society but Rosalind's for a time. But all such anticipations were dispelled in an hour. It was not that we met many people-it is one of the delights of the Forest that one finds society enough to take away the sense of isolation, but not enough to destroy the sweetness of solitude; it was rather that the few we met made us feel at once that we had equal claim with themselves on the hospitality of the place. The Forest was not only free to every comer, but it evidently gave peculiar pleasure to those who were living in it to convey a sense of ownership to those who were arriving for the first time. Rosalind declared that she felt as much at home as if she had been born there; and she added that she was glad she had brought only the dress she wore. I was a little puzzled by the last remark; it seemed not entirely logical. But I saw presently that she was expressing the fellowship of the place which forbade that one should possess anything that was not in use, and that, therefore, was not adding constantly to the common stock of pleasure. Concerning the feeling of having been born in Arden, I became convinced later that there was good reason for believing that everybody who loved the place had been born there, and that this fact explained the home feeling which came to one the instant he set foot within the Forest. It is, in fact, the only place I have known which seemed to belong to me and to everybody else at the same time; in which I felt no alien influence. In our own home I had something of the same feeling, but when I looked from a window or set foot from a door I was instantly oppressed with a sense of foreign ownership. In the great world how little could I call my own! Only a few feet of soil out of the measureless landscape; only a few trees and flowers out of all that boundless foliage! I seemed driven out of the heritage to which I was born; cheated out of my birthright in the beauty of the field and the mystery of the Forest; put off with the beggarly portion of a younger son when I ought to have fallen heir to the kingdom. My chief joy was that from the little space I called my own I could see the whole heavens; no man could rob me of that splendid vision.

In Arden, however, the question of ownership never comes into one's thoughts; that the Forest belongs to you gives you a deep joy, but there is a deeper joy in the consciousness that it belongs to everybody else.

The sense of freedom, which comes as strongly to one in Arden as the smell of the sea to one who has made a long journey from the inland, hints, I suppose, at the offence which makes the dwellers within its boundaries outlaws. For one reason or another, they have all revolted against the rule of the world, and the world has cast them out. They have offended smug respectability, with its passionless devotion to deportment; they have outraged conventional usage, that carefully devised system by which small natures attempt to bring great ones down to their own dimensions; they have scandalised the orthodoxy which, like Memnon, has lost the music of its morning, and marvels that the world no longer listens; they have derided venerable prejudices-those ugly relics by which some men keep in remembrance their barbarous ancestry; they have refused to follow flags whose battles were won or lost ages ago; they have scorned to compromise with untruth, to go with the crowd, to acquiesce in evil "for the good of the cause," to speak when they ought to keep silent and to keep silent when they ought to speak. Truly the lists of sins charged to the account of Arden is a long one, and were it not that the memory of the world, concerned chiefly with the things that make for its comfort, is a short one, it would go ill with the lovers of the Forest. More than once it has happened that some offender has suffered so long a banishment that he has taken permanent refuge in Arden, and proved his citizenship there by some act worthy of its glorious privileges. In the Forest one comes constantly upon traces of those who, like Dante and Milton, have found there a refuge from the Philistinism of a world that often hates its children in exact proportion to their ability to give it light. For the most part, however, the outlaws who frequent the Forest suffer no longer banishment than that which they impose on themselves. They come and go at their own sweet will; and their coming, I suspect, is generally a matter of their own choosing. The world still loves darkness more than light; but it rarely nowadays falls upon the lantern-bearer and beats the life out of him, as in "the good old times." The world has grown more decent and polite, although still at heart no doubt the bad old world which stoned the prophets. It sneers where it once stoned; it rejects and scorns where it once beat and burned. And so Arden has become a refuge, not so much from persecution and hatred as from ignorance, indifference, and the small wounds of small minds bent upon stinging that which they cannot destroy.


IV

. . . Fleet the time carelessly, as they did in the
golden world.


Rosalind and I have always been planning to do a great many pleasant things when we had more time. During the busy days when we barely found opportunity to speak to each other we were always thinking of the better days when we should be able to sit hours together with no knock at the door and no imperative summons from the kitchen. Some man of sufficient eminence to give his words currency ought to define life as a series of interruptions. There are a good many valuable and inspiring things which can only be done when one is in the mood, and to secure a mood is not always an easy matter; there are moods which are as coy as the most high-spirited woman, and must be wooed with as much patience and tact: and when the illusive prize is gained, one holds it by the frailest tenure. An interruption diverts the current, cuts the golden thread, breaks the exquisite harmony. I have often thought that Dante was far less unfortunate than the world has judged him to be. If he had been courted and crowned instead of rejected and exiled, it might have been that his genius would have missed the conditions which gave it immortal utterance. Left to himself, he had only his own nature to reckon with; the world passed him by, and left him to the companionship of his sublime and awful dreams. To be left alone with one's self is often the highest good fortune. Moreover, I detest being hurried: it seems to me the most offensive way in which we are reminded of our mortality; there is time enough if we know how to use it. People who, like Goethe, never rest and never haste, complete their work and escape the friction of it.

One of the most delightful things about life in Arden is the absence of any sense of haste; life is a matter of being rather than of doing, and one shares the tranquillity of the great trees that silently expand year by year. The fever and restlessness are gone, the long strain of nerve and will relaxed; a delicious feeling of having strength and time enough to live one's life and do one's work fills one with a deep and enduring sense of repose.

Rosalind, who had been busy about so many things that I sometimes almost lost sight of her for days together, found time to take long walks with me, to watch the birds and the clouds, and talk by the hour about all manner of pleasant trifles. I came to feel after a time that just what I anticipated would happen in Arden had happened. I was fast becoming acquainted with her. We spent days together in the most delightful half-vocal and half-silent fellowship; leaving everything to the mood of the hour and the place. Our walks took us sometimes into lovely recesses, where mutual confidences seemed as natural as the air; sometimes into solitudes where talk seemed an impertinence, and we were silent under the spell of rustling leaves and thrilling melodies coming from we knew not what hidden minstrelsy. But whether silent or speaking, we were fast coming to know each other. I saw many traits in her, many characteristic habits and movements which I had never noted before; and I was conscious that she was making similar discoveries in me. These mutual revelations absorbed us during our first days in the Forest; and they confirmed the impression which I brought with me that half the charm of people is lost under the pressure of work and the irritation of haste. We rarely know our best friends on their best side; our vision of their noblest selves is constantly obscured by the mists of preoccupation and weariness.

In Arden life is pitched on the natural key; nobody is ever hurried; nobody is ever interrupted; nobody carries his work like a pack on his back instead of leaving it behind him as the sun leaves the earth when the day is over and the calm stars shine in the unbroken silence of the sky. Rosalind and I were entirely conscious of the transformation going on within us, and were not slow to submit ourselves to its beneficent influence. We felt that Arden would not put all its resources into our hand until we had shaken off the dust and parted from the fret of the world we had left behind.

In those first inspiring days we went oftenest to the heart of the pines, where the moss grew so deep that our movements were noiseless; where the light fell in subdued and gentle tones among the closely clustered trees; and where no sound ever reached us save the organ music of the great boughs when the wind evoked their sublime harmonies. Many a time, as we have sat silent while the tones of that majestic symphony rose and fell about us, we seemed to become a part of the scene itself; we felt the unfathomed depth of a music produced by no conscious thought, wrought out by no conscious toil, but akin, in its spontaneity and naturalness, with the fragrance of the flower. And with these thrilling notes there came to us the thought of the calm, reposeful, irresistible growth of Nature; never hasting, never at rest; the silent spreading of the tree, the steady burning of the star, the noiseless flow of the river! Was not this sublime unconsciousness of time, this glorious appropriation of eternity, something we had missed all our lives, and, in missing it, had lost our birthright of