But
what pleased me most of all was the old parson, and his way of conducting the
service. He was white-haired, with a bristly moustache. He did everything
himself single-handed: said the prayers, read the lessons, collected the
offertory, played the harmonium that did duty for an organ, preached the
sermon. And all these things he did methodically and without hurry or
self-consciousness, as you might imagine him looking after a roomful of
friends at supper in the little rectory across the road. His sermon was short
and full of personalities, but all kindly and gentle-humoured. His
announcements of times of services, appointments for weddings, christenings and
what not, were interspersed with detailed and homely explanations, given not
in the least
ex cathedra
but as if across the breakfast-table. One
particularly I remember, when he gave out: "Hymn number one hundred and
forty: the one hundred and fortieth hymn:
Jesus lives! No longer now Can thy terrors, death,
appal us."
Then, before
sitting down to the harmonium, he looked very benevolently at his little flock
over the tops of his spectacles, and said, "I want everybody to try and
get the words right. Some people make a mistake about the first line of this
hymn, and give it quite a wrong meaning. Remember to pause after 'lives':
'Jesus lives!' Don't do like some people do, and say 'Jesus lives no longer
now': that is quite wrong: gives quite a wrong meaning: it makes nonsense. Now
then: 'Jesus lives! No longer now';'* and he sat down to the harmonium and
began.
'It
was just at that moment, as we all stood up to sing that innocent hymn with its
difficult first line, that I first saw Lessingham. He was away to my right, at
the back on the south side, and as the congregation rose I looked half round
and saw him. I remember, years later, his describing to me the effect of the
sudden view you get of Nanga Parbat from one of those Kashmir valleys; you have
been riding for hours among quiet richly wooded scenery, winding up along the
side of some kind of gorge, with nothing very big to look at, just lush, leafy,
pussy-cat country of steep hillsides and waterfalls; then suddenly you come
round a corner where the view opens up the valley, and you are almost struck
senseless by the blinding splendour of that vast face of ice-hung precipices
and soaring ridges, sixteen thousand feet from top to toe, filling a whole quarter
of the heavens at a distance of, I suppose, only a dozen, miles. And now,
whenever I call to mind my first sight of Lessingham in that little daleside
church so many years ago, I think of Nanga Parbat. He stood half a head taller
than the tallest man there, but it was the grandeur of his bearing that held
me, as if he had been some great lord of the renaissance: a grandeur which
seemed to sit upon every limb and feature of him with as much fitness, and to
be carried with as little regard or notice from himself, as the scrubby old
Norfolk jacket and breeches in which he was dressed. His jacket was threadbare,
frayed at the cuffs, strapped with leather at the elbows, but it was as if
lighted from within, as the flame shows in a horn lantern, with a sense of
those sculptured heroes from the Parthenon. I saw the beauty of his hand where
it rested on the window-sill, and the ruby burning like a coal in the strange
ring he wore on the middle finger. But just as, in a snow mountain, all sublimities
soar upwards to the great peak in the empyrean, so in him was all this majesty
and beauty and strength gathered at last in the head and face; that serene forehead,
those features where Apollo and Ares seemed to mingle, the strong luxurious
lines of the mouth showing between the upcurled moustache and the cataract of
black beard: that mouth whose corners seemed the lurking-places of all wild
sudden gleams, of delightful humour, and melancholy, and swift resolution, and
terrible anger. At length his unconscious eyes met mine, and, looking through
me as lost in a deep sadness, made me turn away in some confusion.
'I
thought he had been quite unaware of me and my staring; but as we came out into
the lane when church was over (it was starlight now, and the moon risen behind
the hills) he overtook me and fell into step beside me, saying he noticed that
we wore the same tie. I hardly know which was to me the more astonishing, that
this man should deign to talk to me at all, or that I should find myself within
five minutes swinging along beside him down the lake road, which was my way
home, and talking as easily as if it had been to an intimate friend of my own
age instead of a man old enough to be my father: a man too who, to all outward
seeming, would have been more in his element in the company of Cesare Borgia or
Gonsalvo di Cordova. It was not, of course, till some time after this that I
knew he traced his descent through many generations of English forefathers to
King Eric Bloodaxe in York, the son of Harald Hairfair, that Charlemagne of
the north, and, by the female line, from the greatest ruler of men that
appeared in Europe in the thousand years between Charlemagne and Napoleon: the
Emperor Frederick II, of whom it has been written that "the power, which
in the rout of able and illustrious men shines through crannies, in him pours
out as through a rift in nature." In after years I helped Lessingham a
good deal in collecting material for his ten-volume
History of Frederick II,
which is of course to-day the standard authority
on that period, and ranks, as literature, far and away above any other history
book since Gibbon.
'We
talked at first about Eton; then about rowing, and riding, and then about
mountains, for I was at that time newly bitten with the climbing-madness and I
found him an old hand at the game, though it was not for a year or so that I
discovered that he was among the best (though incomparably the rashest) of
contemporary climbers. I do not think we touched on the then recent War, in
which he attained great distinction, mainly in East Africa. At length the wings
of our talk began to take those wider sweeps which starlight and steady walking
and that aptness of mind to mind which is the basis of all true friendship
lead to; so that after a while I found myself telling him how much his presence
had surprised me in that little church, and actually asking him whether he was
there to pray, like the other people, or only to look on, like me. Those were
the salad-days of my irreligious fervour, when the strange
amor mortis
of adolescence binds a panache of glory on the
helmet of every unbelief, and when books like
La Revoke des Anges
or Swinburne
's
Dolores
send
a thrill down the spine that can never be caught again in its pristine vigour
when years and wisdom have taught us the true terrors of that drab,
comfortless, and inglorious sinking into not-being which awaits us all at last.
He answered he was there to pray. This I had not expected, though I had been
puzzled at the expression on his face in church: an expression that I thought
sat oddly on the face of a pagan God or an atheistical tyrant of the
renaissance. I mumbled some awkwardness about his not looking to me much like a
churchman. His laughter at this seemed to set the whole night a-sparkle: he
stopped, caught me by the shoulder with one hand and spun me round to face him.
His mouth was smiling down at me in the moonlight in a way which made me think
of Pater's essay about Mona Lisa. He said nothing, but I felt as if I and my
half-fledged impieties shrank under that smile to something very naked and
nerveless: a very immature Kapaneus posturing before Thebes; a ridiculous
little Aias waving a toy sword against the lightning. We walked on beside the
dark lake. He said nothing, neither did I. So completely had he already bound
me to his chariot-wheels that I was ready, if he had informed me that he was
Anabaptist or Turk, to embrace that sect. At length he spoke, words that for some
reason I have never forgotten: "No doubt", he said, "we were
both in that little place for the same reason. The good, the true, the
beautiful: within that triangle, (or rather, upon that point; for 'truth' is
but to say that beauty and goodness are the ultimate reality; and goodness is
servant to beauty), are not the Gods protean?" Rank bad philosophy, as I
soon learned when I had made some progress in metaphysics. And yet it was out
of such marsh-fires that he built up in secret places of his mind, (as, from
time to time in our long friendship, I have from fleeting revelations and rare
partial confidences discovered), a palace of pleasure or house of heart's
desire, a creed, a myth, a fabric of pure poetry, more solid in its
specifications and more concrete in its strange glorious fictions and vanities
beyond opium or madness than this world is, and this life that we call real.
And more than that, for he moulded life to his dreams; and, besides his poems
and writings "more lasting than brass," his paintings and sculptures
that are scrambled for by the picture-galleries of Europe, and those other
(perhaps the most astounding) monuments of his genius, the communities of men
who have felt the iron and yet beneficent might of his statecraft, as here in
Lofoten,—besides all these things, I know very well that he found in this
Illusion of Illusions a something potent as the fabled unction of the Styx, so
that no earthly loss, pain, or grief, could touch him.
Tt
was not until after many years of friendship that I got some inkling of the
full power of this consolation; for he never wore his heart for daws to peck
at. The bare facts I was soon informed of: his marriage, when he was not yet
twenty-six, and she barely twenty, to the beautiful and brilliant Lady Mary Scarnside,
and her death fifteen years later in a French railway accident along with their
only child, a girl. This tragedy took place about two years before our meeting
in Mardale church. Lessingham never talked of his wife. I learned that he had,
soon after her death, deliberately burnt down their lovely old house in
Wastdale. I never saw her portrait: several, from his own brush, were destroyed
in the fire; he told me, years later, that he had subsequently bought up every
picture or photograph of her that he could trace, and destroyed them. Like most
men who are endowed with vigorous minds and high gifts of imagination,
Lessingham was, for as long as I have known him, a man of extreme attractiveness
to women, and a man to whom (as to his imperial ancestor) women and the beauty
of women were as mountain air and sunshine. The spectacle of the unbroken
succession and variety of ladies, who crowned, like jewels, the ever increasing
splendour and pomp of his existence, made me think that his marriage had been without
significance, and that he never spoke of his wife because he had forgotten her.
Later, when I heard about the burnt portraits, I changed my mind and supposed
he had hated her. It was only when our friendship had ripened to a deep
understanding in which words were scarcely needed as messengers between our
minds, that I realized how things stood: that it was only his majestic if
puerile belief in her personal immortality, and his own, beyond the grave, that
upheld him in all the storm and peace and magnificence and high achievement of
the years (fifty, as it turned out) that he was to live on without her.
These
pragmatical sophisters, with their loose psychology and their question-begging
logic-chopping that masquerades as metaphysic! I would almost give them leave
to gag truth and lead the world by the nose like a jackass, if they could but
be men as this man, and bend error and self-deception to high and lofty
imaginings as he did. For it is certain mankind would build better if they
built for themselves; few can love and tender an unknown posterity. But this
man, as I have long observed him, looked on all things
sub specie aeternitatis;
his actions all moved (like the slow procession
of this northern summer night) to slow perfection, where the common run of men
spoil all in their make-shift hurry. If he followed will-o'-the-wisps in
metaphysics, they proved safe lights for him in practical affairs. He
was
neither
deceived
nor
alarmed
by
the
rabble's
god,
mere Quantity, considering that if you inflate it big enough the Matterhorn
becomes as insignificant as a grain of sand, since the eye can no longer
perceive it,
and that a nebula in which our who
le
earth would be but
as a pa
rticl
e in a cloud of tobacco
-
smoke is, (unles
s as a
whetter of imaginati
on's appet
ite),
more uni
mportant than that
smoke, because further divorced from life. And so, with sound wisdom, he
applied all his high gifts of nature, and that sceptre which his colossal
wealth set ready in his hand, not to dissipate them in the welter of the world,
but to fields definite enough to show the effect. And for all his restless
vigour and love of action, he withheld himself as a rule from action in the
world, except where he could find conditions, as in Paraguay and again in
Lofoten, outside the ordinary texture of modern life. For he felt, I think, by
a profound instinct, that in modern life action swallows up the individual.
There is no scope for a good climber, he said, to show his powers in a
quagmire. Well, it is night now; and no more climbing.'