The Rhythm of Life and other Essays

by Alice Meynell
Contents

The Rhythm of Life
Decivilised

A Remembrance
The Sun

The Flower
Unstable Equilibrium

The Unit of the World
By the Railway Side

Pocket Vocabularies
Pathos

The Point of Honour
Composure

Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes
James Russell Lowell

Domus Angusta
Rejection

The Lesson of Landscape
Mr. Coventry Patmore's Odes

Innocence and Experience
Penultimate Caricature

THE RHYTHM OF LIFE
If life is not always poetical, it is at least metrical.

Periodicity rules over the mental experience of man, according to
the path of the orbit of his thoughts. Distances are not gauged,

ellipses not measured, velocities not ascertained, times not known.
Nevertheless, the recurrence is sure. What the mind suffered last

week, or last year, it does not suffer now; but it will suffer again
next week or next year. Happiness is not a matter of events; it

depends upon the tides of the mind. Disease is metrical, closing in
at shorter and shorter periods towards death, sweepingabroad at

longer and longer intervals towards recovery. Sorrow for one cause
was intolerableyesterday, and will be intolerable tomorrow; today

it is easy to bear, but the cause has not passed. Even the burden
of a spiritualdistress unsolved is bound to leave the heart to a

temporary peace; and remorse itself does not remain--it returns.
Gaiety takes us by a dear surprise. If we had made a course of

notes of its visits, we might have been on the watch, and would have
had an expectation instead of a discovery. No one makes such

observations; in all the diaries of students of the interior world,
there have never come to light the records of the Kepler of such

cycles. But Thomas e Kempis knew of the recurrences, if he did not
measure them. In his cell alone with the elements--'What wouldst

thou more than these? for out of these were all things made'--he
learnt the stay to be found in the depth of the hour of bitterness,

and the remembrance that restrains the soul at the coming of the
moment of delight, giving it a more consciouswelcome, but presaging

for it an inexorable flight. And 'rarely, rarely comest thou,'
sighed Shelley, not to Delight merely, but to the Spirit of Delight.

Delight can be compelled beforehand, called, and constrained to our
service--Ariel can be bound to a daily task; but such artificial

violence throws life out of metre, and it is not the spirit that is
thus compelled. THAT flits upon an orbit elliptically or

parabolically or hyperbolically curved, keeping no man knows what
trysts with Time.

It seems fit that Shelley and the author of the IMITATION should
both have been keen and simple enough to perceive these flights, and

to guess at the order of this periodicity. Both souls were in close
touch with the spirits of their several worlds, and no deliberate

human rules, no infractions of the liberty and law of the universal
movement, kept from them the knowledge of recurrences. Eppur si

muove. They knew that presence does not exist without absence; they
knew that what is just upon its flight of farewell is already on its

long path of return. They knew that what is approaching to the very
touch is hastening towards departure. 'O wind,' cried Shelley, in

autumn,
'O wind,

If winter comes, can spring be far behind?'
They knew that the flux is equal to the reflux; that to interrupt

with unlawful recurrences, out of time, is to weaken the impulse of
onset and retreat; the sweep and impetus of movement. To live in

constant efforts after an equal life, whether the equality be sought
in mental production, or in spiritualsweetness, or in the joy of

the senses, is to live without either rest or full activity. The
souls of certain of the saints, being singularly simple and single,

have been in the most complete subjection to the law of periodicity.
Ecstasy and desolation visited them by seasons. They endured,

during spaces of vacant time, the interior loss of all for which
they had sacrificed the world. They rejoiced in the uncovenanted

beatitude of sweetness alighting in their hearts. Like them are the
poets whom, three times or ten times in the course of a long life,

the Muse has approached, touched, and forsaken. And yet hardly like
them; not always so docile, nor so wholly prepared for the

departure, the brevity, of the golden and irrevocable hour. Few
poets have fully recognised the metrical absence of their Muse. For

full recognition is expressed in one only way--silence.
It has been found that several tribes in Africa and in America

worship the moon, and not the sun; a great number worship both; but
no tribes are known to adore the sun, and not the moon. For the

periodicity of the sun is still in part a secret; but that of the
moon is modestlyapparent, perpetually influential. On her depend

the tides; and she is Selene, mother of Herse, bringer of the dews
that recurrently irrigate lands where rain is rare. More than any

other companion of earth is she the Measurer. Early Indo-Germanic
languages knew her by that name. Her metrical phases are the symbol

of the order of recurrence. Constancy in approach and in departure
is the reason of her inconstancies. Juliet will not receive a vow

spoken in invocation of the moon; but Juliet did not live to know
that love itself has tidal times--lapses and ebbs which are due to

the metrical rule of the interior heart, but which the lover vainly
and unkindly attributes to some outwardalteration in the beloved.

For man--except those elect already named--is hardly aware of
periodicity. The individual man either never learns it fully, or

learns it late. And he learns it so late, because it is a matter of
cumulative experience upon which cumulative evidence is lacking. It

is in the after-part of each life that the law is learnt so
definitely as to do away with the hope or fear of continuance. That

young sorrow comes so near to despair is a result of this young
ignorance. So is the early hope of great achievement. Life seems

so long, and its capacity so great, to one who knows nothing of all
the intervals it needs must hold--intervals between aspirations,

between actions, pauses as inevitable as the pauses of sleep. And
life looks impossible to the young unfortunate, unaware of the

inevitable and unfailing refreshment. It would be for their peace
to learn that there is a tide in the affairs of men, in a sense more

subtle--if it is not too audacious to add a meaning to Shakespeare--
than the phrase was meant to contain. Their joy is flying away from

them on its way home; their life will wax and wane; and if they
would be wise, they must wake and rest in its phases, knowing that

they are ruled by the law that commands all things--a sun's
revolutions and the rhythmic pangs of maternity.

DECIVILISED
The difficulty of dealing--in the course of any critical duty--with

decivilised man lies in this: when you accuse him of vulgarity--
sparing him no doubt the word--he defends himself against the charge

of barbarism. Especially from new soil--transatlantic, colonial--he
faces you, bronzed, with a half conviction of savagery, partly

persuaded of his own youthfulness of race. He writes, and recites,
poems about ranches and canyons; they are designed to betray the

recklessness of his nature and to reveal the good that lurks in the
lawless ways of a young society. He is there to explain himself,

voluble, with a glossary for his own artless slang. But his
colonialism is only provincialism very articulate. The new air does

but make old decadences seem more stale; the young soil does but set
into fresh conditions the ready-made, the uncostly, the refuse