The Collected Novels of Algernon Blackwood (11 Titles in One Edition). Algernon Blackwood
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"In the spiritual Nature-Kingdom, man must everywhere seek his peculiar territory and climate, his best occupation, his particular neighborhood, in order to cultivate a Paradise in idea; this is the right system…. Paradise is scattered over the whole earth, and that is why it has become so unrecognizable."
—NOVALIS, Translated by U.C.B.
"Man began in instinct and will end in instinct. Instinct is genius in
Paradise, before the period of self-abstraction (self-knowledge)."
—Ibid
"Look here, old man," he said to me, "I'll just tell you what it was, because I know you won't laugh."
We were lying under the big trees behind the Round Pond when he reached this point, and his direct speech was so much more graphic than the written account that I use it. He was in one of his rare moments of confidence, excited, hat off, his shabby tie escaping from the shabbier grey waistcoat. One sock lay untidily over his boot, showing bare leg.
Children's voices floated to us from the waterside as though from very far away, the nursemaids and perambulators seemed tinged with unreality, the London towers were clouds, its roar the roar of waves. I saw only the ship's deck, the grey and misty sea, the uncouth figures of the two who leaned with him over the bulwarks.
"Go on," I said encouragingly; "out with it!"
"It must seem incredible to most men, but, by Gad, I swear to you, it lifted me off my feet, and I've never known anything like it. The mind of that great fellow got hold of me, included me. He made the inanimate world—sea, stars, wind, woods, and mountains—seem all alive. The entire blessed universe was conscious—and he came straight out of it to get me. I understood things about myself I've never understood before—and always funked rather;—especially that feeling of being out of touch with my kind, of finding no one in the world today who speaks my language quite—that, and the utter, God-forsaken loneliness it makes me suffer—"
"You always have been a lonely beggar really," I said, noting the hesitation that thus on the very threshold checked his enthusiasm, quenching the fire in those light-blue eyes. "Tell me. I shall understand right enough—or try to."
"God bless you," he answered, leaping to the sympathy, "I believe you will. There's always been this primitive, savage thing in me that keeps others away—puts them off, and so on. I've tried to smother it a bit sometimes—"
"Have you?" I laughed.
"'Tried to,' I said, because I've always been afraid of its getting out too much and bustin' my life all to pieces:—something lonely and untamed and sort of outcast from cities and money and all the thick suffocating civilization of today; and I've only saved myself by getting off into wildernesses and free places where I could give it a breathin' chance without running the risk of being locked up as a crazy man." He laughed as he said it, but his heart was in the words. "You know all that; haven't I told you often enough? It's not a morbid egoism, or what their precious academic books so stupidly call 'degenerate,' for in me it's damned vital and terrific, and moves always to action. It's made me an alien and—and—"
"Something far stronger than the Call of the Wild, isn't it?"
He fairly snorted. "Sure as we're both alive here sittin' on this sooty London grass," he cried. "This Call of the Wild they prate about is just the call a fellow hears to go on 'the bust' when he's had too much town and's got bored—a call to a little bit of license and excess to safety-valve him down. What I feel," his voice turned grave and quiet again, "is quite a different affair. It's the call of real hunger—the call of food. They want to let off steam, but I want to take in stuff to prevent—starvation." He whispered the word, putting his lips close to my face.
A pause fell between us, which I was the first to break.
"This is not your century! That's what you really mean," I suggested patiently.
"Not my century!" he caught me up, flinging handfuls of faded grass in the air between us and watching it fall; "why, it's not even my world! And I loathe, loathe the spirit of today with its cheap-jack inventions, and smother of sham universal culture, its murderous superfluities and sordid vulgarity, without enough real sense of beauty left to see that a daisy is nearer heaven than an airship—"
"Especially when the airship falls," I laughed. "Steady, steady, old boy; don't spoil your righteous case by overstatement."
"Well, well, you know what I mean," he laughed with me, though his face at once turned earnest again, "and all that, and all that, and all that…. And so this savagery that has burned in me all these years unexplained, these Russian strangers made clear. I can't tell you how because I don't know myself. The father did it—his proximity, his silence stuffed with sympathy, his great vital personality unclipped by contact with these little folk who left him alone. His presence alone made me long for the earth and Nature. He seemed a living part of it all. He was magnificent and enormous, but the devil take me if I know how."
"He said nothing—that referred to it directly?"
"Nothing but what I've told you,—blundering awkwardly with those few modern words. But he had it in him a thousand to my one. He made me feel I was right and natural, untrue to myself to suppress it and a coward to fear it. The speech-center in the brain, you know, is anyhow a comparatively recent thing in evolution. They say that—"
"It wasn't his century either," I checked him again.
"No, and he didn't pretend it was, as I've tried to," he cried, sitting bolt upright beside me. "The fellow was genuine, never dreamed of compromise. D'ye see what I mean? Only somehow he'd found out where his world and century were, and was off to take possession. And that's what caught me. I felt it by some instinct in me stronger than all else; only we couldn't talk about it definitely because—because—I hardly know how to put it—for the same reason," he added suddenly, "that I can't talk about it to you now! There are no words…. What we both sought was a state that passed away before words came into use, and is therefore beyond intelligible description. No one spoke to them on the ship for the same reason, I felt sure, that no one spoke to them in the whole world—because no one could manage even the alphabet of their language.
"And this was so strange and beautiful," he went on, "that standing there beside him, in his splendid atmosphere, the currents of wind and sea reached me through him first, filtered by his spirit so that I assimilated them and they fed me, because he somehow stood in such close and direct relation to Nature. I slipped into my own region, made happy and alive, knowing at last what I wanted, though still unable to phrase it. This modern world I've so long tried to adjust myself to became a thing of pale remembrance and a dream…."
"All in your mind and imagination, of course, this," I ventured, seeing that his poetry was luring him beyond where I could follow.
"Of course," he answered without impatience, grown suddenly thoughtful, less excited again, "and that's why it was true. No chance of clumsy senses deceiving one. It was direct vision. What is Reality, in the last resort," he asked, "but the thing a man's vision brings to him—to believe? There's no other criterion. The criticism of opposite types of mind is merely a confession of their own limitations."
Being myself of the "opposite type of mind," I naturally did not argue, but suffered myself to accept his half-truth for the whole—temporarily. I checked him from time to time merely lest he should go too fast for me to follow what seemed a very wonderful tale of faerie.
"So this wild thing in me the world today has beggared and denied," he went on, swept by his Celtic enthusiasm, "woke in its full strength. Calling to me like some flying spirit in a storm, it claimed me. The man's being summoned me back to the earth and Nature, as it were, automatically. I understood that look on his face, that sign in his eyes. The 'Isles of Greece' furnished some faint clue, but as yet I knew no more—only that he and I were in the same region and that I meant to go with him and that he accepted me with delight that was joy. It drew me as empty space draws a giddy man to the precipice's edge. Thoughts from another's mind," he added by way of explanation,