Virginia Intermont College - Intermont Yearbook (Bristol, VA)

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SENSE AND NONSENSE. 17 he would communicate. This was not its extent. The “ great chain wherewith we are bound ” included in its constraining links more than this. It drew him also to the contemplation of the lights and shadows of the heart and soul. Here, too, for him, the fogs shed a peculiar glow on dark towers, and here, too, the beam of yellow light was rich in beauty’s inner meaning. In and through all he seemed to feel “ The sweet presence of a good diffused, And in diffusion ever more intense.” “ Throughout that elaborate and lifelong education of his receptive powers he had ever kept in view the purpose of preparing himself towards possible further revelation some day — towards some ampler vision, which should take up into itself and explain this world’s delightful shows; as the scattered fragments of a poetry, till then but half understood, might be taken up into the best of a lost epic, recovered at last. At this moment his unclouded receptivity of soul, grown so steadily through all those years, from experience to experience, was at its height, the house ready for the possible guest; the tablet of the mind white and smooth, for whatsoever divine fingers might choose to write there. And was not this precisely the condition, the attitude of mind, to which something higher than he, yet akin to him, would be likely to reveal itself; to which that influence he had felt now and again like a friendly hand upon his shoulder, amid the actual obscurities of the world, would be likely to make a further explanation?” Here was the inner receptivity — the rarer quality — that capacity which so often philosophies and religions smother out of their devotees — the openness to truth. It was the same thing which, in our own Sage of Concord, “ made him greet every comer as if he expected to hear from him a wiser word than had yet been spoken.”

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16 SENSE AND NONSENSE. development of our finest human capacities. The senses were to be “ a wonderful machinery of observation,” through which to col- lect material for “ a life of various yet select sensation.” A beam of yellow light was a never failing source of complete delight to him. The fog was redeemed for him “ because of the crimson lights which fell from it sometimes upon the chimneys.” “ The coolness of the dark, cavernous shops round the great church,” “the angle at which the sun in the morning fell on the pillow,” “ the sweet carvings of the lips of those who seemed to him comely persons, modulated in such delicate unison to the things they said or sang,” — to these things ' he tells us, lie owed “ certain inward lights under which things most naturally presented them- selves to him.” And to us he communicates his art, so that we realize, with a new intelligence, how all these things “ become parts of the great chain wherewith we are bound” — the chain that is far stronger than precept or creed or statute, either to make or to mar the beauty of our lives. And yet, “ not pleasure, but a general completeness of life,” was his philosophy. Just as man has risen above the brutes by development of his higher capacities, so must he go on to perfec- tion by the completeness of that growth. And so Pater, leaving to others the metaphysical questionings as to what is beyond, digni- fied and spiritualized the maxim, “ Be perfect as to what is here and now” — rather the opposite of the theological lucubrations of Christianity, which too often, doting on a gaudy hereafter, count, and thereby make, the life that now is a deplorable calamity. Much nearer was Pater to the unperverted truth — “ not that thou shouldst take them out of the world.” But this keen sensibility to physical beauty, this capacity for perfect pleasure in “ the golden thread inwoven,” was only one fea- ture, or rather one degree, of his fine receptivity — that art which

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18 SENSE AND NONSENSE. Such was the philosophy — with its demonstration — of one who was eminently “ a special soul.” The element of his nature which came to him from that mysterious realm of our being, into which the spirit of modern research seems about to let a little light — his heredity — was peculiarly sensitive and delicately susceptible to impressions. The other element, his environment, Avas what he made it, the feeding ground of his tine capacities. Together they made the embodiment of a refined and spiritualized epicureanism, in its nature as far from Avhat avc are apt to understand by that term, as Christianity from the dead philosophies in which Ave can trace resemblances to it. It Avas the first, undegenerate form of the ancient philosophy, vitalized by the modern spirit. It breathes a warm faith in the possibilities of human nature. It dignities and spirit- ualizes the uses of our world, and glows Avith an earnest optimism. It stops the eternal debate about the eternal by bidding our natures grow eternally, healthfully and beautifully, Avhere they are. It has in it the anodyne of beauty; not the beauty of effeminacy, hut that “ beauteous order that controls Avitli growing sway the grow- ing life of man.” C. W. S.