The Forgotten Threshold written by Arthur Middleton
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Arthur Middleton >> The Forgotten Threshold
THE FORGOTTEN THRESHOLD
A Journal of Arthur Middleton
TO W.S.B.
FOR SUBSTANTIAL EMBODIMENT
PREFATORY NOTE
Before Arthur Middleton died he gave me this record among others in
the belief that it would help to tell me what he had always known in
the silences, yet could never in life transmute into the friendly
counters of speech. During the last years of his all too brief
experience of his friends, more than once he shyly sought to tell what
he knew, yet always silence claimed him, and nothing but the wonder of
his eyes revealed the dream that consumed his heart. Because beauty
claims these words in a deeper knowledge than we had before, I have
transcribed this fragment of them here, confident that in these white
intuitions of his youth there is a revelation of the Light behind
beauty beyond our poor knowledge and still poorer faith. I have
omitted only what was most sacred to the privacies of his heart and
our affection. He was of the old faith and would have wished had he
published these pages to have expressed his entire and passionate
loyalty to the Roman Catholic Church in faith and deed, and to have
disclaimed any word therein which conflicted with the intimacies of
its truth. I can do no more than to echo his wish, and mourn the
unhappy chance which took him from us on an April tide, though it
befell on the Easter that he loved and at that hour when the flaming
symbol of the Divine Sacrifice was setting in the west. So the passion
of the sun and tide which reflected his belief witnessed the
consummation of his great desire.--THE EDITOR.
THE FORGOTTEN THRESHOLD
THE JOURNAL
(N.B.--On the opening pages of the blank book in which this journal is
contained there is a short fragment which bears no relation that I can
discover to the entries that follow, and I am inclined to believe that
it is the beginning of an autobiography which Middleton never
continued. In my uncertainty, however, I print it, and accordingly it
is transcribed below.--THE EDITOR.)
_Fragment_.--I was not more than three years old when the sunlight
first made me happy as it stole through the curtains and over the
coverlet till it kissed my lips and wrapped me in its warm embrace.
Then I would fall asleep again and my dreams, if I dreamed at all,
were white and faintly stirred me to a smile. I never tried to catch
the sunbeams, for I felt their gold in my heart, nor could they have
been nearer than they were, being associated with my mother's
watchfulness as she stole in to smile upon my slumbers and claim the
second silent unconscious kiss. On Sunday morning they would be
freighted with a quiet whiter light, more peaceful and hushed to the
feeling of the day, and somehow the peace was guarded with finger on
lip throughout the house, so that it was implicit in my nest of images
long before reason took note of it or sought to explain it to my
consciousness. Once again as a boy of fifteen I knew it with a catch
of delighted and almost tearful surprise when I stroked the breast of
a wounded pigeon who found shelter in my room. The world is not as
quiet in these days, nor is the hum of traffic in the mart attuned so
kindly to the flow of light as when it ran so gently by the bedside of
the dreaming boy. ...
(The journal now follows, written in a small cramped hand, without
paragraphing or division. I omit the first few entries as purely
personal. Middleton had gone to a group of remote western islands, and
these notes are the fruit of his sojourn there.)--THE EDITOR.
July 5.
Yesterday found me on the island with its silences, and last night the
host was red and sacrificial and rode on a thunder cloud. This
afternoon the planets go singing through my flesh and my song of
praise has widened to the arches of the sun. The sea is moaning slowly
on the sand. I stripped to the cool salt air for the first time. ...
Walking I found my way out on the long gray dunes.
July 6.
On the dunes today with my mother. My hand swept idly over the soft
white sand, shifting the order of many thousands of starry worlds.
What a chord of music if one could but hear it in its entirety! As it
was, I caught wonderful echoes that would light the beauties of many a
sunrise. The silent man reminds me of Synge in his drifting life and
the fires glowing in his eyes. Today I saw the-beauty of a flower. ...
Some day I shall write a play about the stars. The action will burn in
their seedtime and blow on the winds of Fate with all its ironies. ...
Tonight in the sitting room I heard in my heart the singing of the
sands. It is on the shifting desert, I feel, that we shall discover
the secret origin of language. How the infinitely aspiring music must
sound tonight along the dunes!
July 7.
The night before last after I retired I felt that lifted feeling
physically which represents the beating of the tides. Last night it
coalesced with the singing of the sands. At Mass this morning the
voices at the Credo thundered out _Et Homo factus est_ in a torrent of
living sound. At the elevation I saw a thin white flame rise from the
uplifted chalice and disappear. It takes a beam of light one hundred
and eight years to travel from Arcturus to the earth. Are we similar
traveling beams, and is death merely our arrival on another planet
which we illumine? Today I read aloud on the cliffs from the glories
of Plato's _Phaedrus_.
July 8.
In the morning I wandered onto the dunes leading out toward Wonder
Island, but was driven off by the terns who were nesting. ... The
billows of the wind today mingled in me with the sands and the tide,
so that I experienced from a new angle Landor's "We are what suns and
winds and waters make us." ...
July 9.
My life will see much traveling.
July 10.
Morning on the dunes. A cold clear bath while mists drove over the
sands. Returning home, as I came to the deep sand on the road, I
perceived the mystery of the resurrection of the body. In death there
is no physical decay. The singing planets of the human body merely
part to combine in other songs, recurring again in the end to their
old disposal and song, exchanging other worlds for their own once
more, and recurring to the first motif of the symphony. I was sad this
afternoon for the will failed me in my work. Sitting on the sand this
morning the singing dunes had attained to the harmony of silence. All
at once a little wisp of seaweed--hardly more than a thread--started
to beat time upon the sands. And then I knew and saw it to be in its
happy beating the pulse that governed the music of the stars. Can the
heart conduct the symphony of the body? Tonight the sun set, borne
away--a Grail--by angels from the questing Galahad. There was a great
silence in my heart as I sat in the crowded room.
July 11.
A day of northeast wind and upward thunder. The joy of the wind was in
me, and I lost the sense of space. The air was so buoyant that it was
closely kin to the sea. ... Today I succeeded a little better with my
will. I had a strange sensation this afternoon, which told me that
bare lonely places are the only places to write drama, since there
only can we find the pure dynamic forces of life disentangled from the
subtle and complicated web of human ambitions and interests. The air
was very thin and clear at twilight, but the sun was hidden in the
clouds. ...
July 12.
... There was a great silence this evening in the crowded room.
Closing my eyes, I raised the upper lids as far as possible without
seeing material things, and so saw myself in fearful wonder elevating
the host and chalice on high. I know now the inner meaning of "Domine,
non sum dignus _ut intres sub tecta mea_." Under these two arched
roofs of the eyes hidden from all light save Light, there is a secret
dwelling. ... A day of close-shrouded palling fog--a chrism confirming
the strength of beauty.
July 13.
This morning the wind blew through the fields of grass like countless
angels in the courts of heaven. Shadow and color and light and
movement dancing before the first syllable of the Name. A gull flew
down almost to my hand, and the sunlight thundered in my ears. Last
night the sea was sadly purifying the earth. I now understand the
Washer of the Ford. Majesty lies in darkness, and grief is only the
privilege of seeing Majesty. Today on the porch with closed eyes
buried in my hands the winds swept over me in a torrent of living
light. A symphony is a wonderful symbol. In the first place, it is
music. In the second place, it is a name of praise with four
syllables. Then it completes a cycle, and returns on a higher plane to
the motif with which it began. It is the history of a soul, and in its
last movement typifies the resurrection of the body, by means of this
very return,--a return to the order and disposal in which it was
created and which it now reassumes to praise its Creator for all
eternity by the harmony of the original Thought. I looked at twilight
into the tiny white heart of a flower that grew among the grasses, and
out of the heart pulsed the Sacred Body in wounds all glorified, with
Hands outstretched conducting the music of the worlds. I know now that
the flower was a chalice. The sadness of it cannot die as the Man can,
and I know that it is with me ready to be shared. As I write this,
there is a mist within my room. I always sleep now like one ready to
soar. In the crowded room tonight I felt myself making the movements
of swimming, as if the air were water and I an expert swimmer.
July 14.
_Views of the unveiled heavens alone forth bring Prophets who
cannot sing_.
A day of tempestuous wind and rain with all the keen dynamic life of
time poised 'mid eternities. The happiest of my days battling with the
elements in wonderful silences. At Mass with wonder the shining of the
Host. My eyes were veiled from the chalice, but I felt two angels
--guarding the acolytes. Again at the Credo the thunder of _Et Homo
factus est_. With Shelley in the afternoon and a perilous walk on the
cliffs. ... I am gaining in detachment. The desire and passion for
solitude grows and I meditate a winter on the islands. How unworthy I
am to partake of mysteries! They fill me with fear, for it is hard for
the body to live in eternity. In the evening with Gordon Craig. Is he
right about masks? A mask is a symbol, but a face may be a sacrament.
The Mass, after all, is the supreme dream and drama of the world.
Sadness is majesty, as I found the other night, and majesty is always
impenetrable, for it is a secret full of awe and mysterious silence.
Tonight I see that great drama, whether it be a tragedy or no, must
reveal time poised in infinity. Beauty, I think, contains everything
save the human will, and it is the ideal of the will to be thus
contained and of beauty to be the container. ... In the supreme drama
of Gethsemane and Calvary, Christ used the human body as the supreme
visible instrument of drama.
July 15.
... Tonight the fog broke through the sunset and scattered gold across
the sea. Clouds hung over the cliffs. ... I prayed through the sunset,
and won a victory for the will.
July 16.
Last night in the darkness I learned many things. The human will is
the unit, the core of flame which binds all elements together. It is
sad because it is the force of impact tearing things from their
detached and comfortable places and placing them in new relations. It
is the magnet, the summoning voice, our own conscience, the expression
of Majesty. It disposes reluctant and conflicting notes in harmony.
And we have control of it given into our hands. And then, too, I
learnt that words are worlds. At every breath, nay, by the slightest
thought, we create planets. Pray that they harmonize! They have power.
Are they angels? They convey our messages, but their harmony of
inter-woven song and meaning was lost at Babel to our ears. Yet by
them if our will is strong and we do not fail in deeds we may take our
part in the symphony as truly as life itself. And so we must not use
them idly. How can anyone dare to tell a lie? One begins to see how
God is a Name. I felt before how the secret of language was to be
found among the sands. It is because the sands are the nearest and
most visible planets we possess. Words are planets. But planets are
sands on the shore of eternity. Words are sands. We are little words
made flesh, little echoes in the image of the great Word made Flesh.
His creation is the complete echo made flesh, His Image and likeness
which He contemplates. And so we are in our measure part of the song
made flesh, and the little common words that we use are our brothers.
July 17.
The sunset tonight was a glorious crucifixion after the day of clouds.
It was human in its beckoning. I cannot find the secret of the moon,
but it reminds me of Lionel's phrase, if it be his, "golden
mediocrities." Is it the astral embodiment of "They also serve who
only stand and wait"? Why is it that the little human beauties of
Nature pass me by as entities, and that I seek bare places? Is there a
parallel in my personal attitude toward all but those who are
specially dear to me? I thought of how I looked down on the city from
the mountain in May, and felt the whole city to be my prayer. It had
been given into my control for a few minutes, and the only worthy use
to which I could put it was to offer it up with a prayer for my people
and all the desire of my heart that the prayer would be answered. The
half-million souls with all their dreams were under my care then, and
their acts were mine. So little are cities, and so little I found my
worthiness that I could not hide my tears. Later I crossed to the
height looking down on the cemetery, the world was silent save for the
flaming heart of the city pulsing below, and reflecting the Flaming
Heart above as the sun set. The woodpeckers did not fear me, and I
sank slowly and deeply into God. I think that some day I shall know
His wounds. I cannot understand why I was delivered from temptation at
the moment that the city was put into my hands.
July 18.
... I bathed on the dunes on Wonder Island. The sun set tonight
sacramentally just as it set that night at ---- when I failed to
speak. Never had I felt stronger, but something held me back from
telling him how the dearest wish of my life was that he should
participate in the Holy Eucharist. The flame was in my hands to lay
upon his heart, but something bade me wait. I distrusted it, and asked
him to walk with me on the shore. The thunder of the tide and the moon
were too strong. Why could I not have told him? We were silent for
hours while his heart lay with the _Titanic_, and even his little
daughter was quiet in the room.
July 19.
The stars are the dust rubbed off from human souls. "Dust unto dust
thou shalt return." At the last judgment, they will fly together in an
angelic hosting, and clothe once more the souls which moved in them,
and our souls will rule their songs. Human suffering is the friction
of angels making stars. ... I know now that the end of one's forty
days is not complete knowledge, but only a clear indication of the
road. The joy is in that, and also the sorrow. It is the direction
given to the will, orders to be so carefully obeyed. This is the
greatest discovery of all. Words do not reveal it. It is absolutely
prosaic, though it is eternal beauty. But what I have written does not
reflect it even faintly as it seems to me. Read Hello this afternoon.
The freedom of the dunes this morning seemed to extend more than is
usual. Later I read from Plato's "Symposium."
July 20.
... The proverbial symbol of impermanence is writing upon sand. What
could be more gloriously permanent? To have one's message spelled out
by singing planets, to write upon the stars. It is so that our songs
have immortality. "Verba scripta manent" takes on a majestic
significance. Are not joy and sadness the same? The only difference is
one of rapidity. Sadness is made up of the long, slow, majestic chords
of the song. It seems to me that when a wheel seems to cease motion,
and finally attains a state of motionlessness, it is perhaps merely
turning into a terrible speed which we cannot perceive. It is the
turning of an hour-glass. When I am dead, I wish only my faults to be
chronicled, for these alone have any value for the world. I have
dreamt always of cycles of infinities. As a decimal always tends by
evolution towards a number, so also we evolve toward an infinity. Yet
at that goal another infinity starts, as another infinity starts in
numbers,--the symbol of patience after all.
"Unto the man of yearning thought
And aspiration, to do nought
Is in itself almost an act,--
Being chasm-fire and cataract
Of the soul's utter depths unseal'd.
Yet woe to thee if once thou yield
Unto the act of doing nought!"
Read Hello and Elia. I am learning how to see in crowds. These past
few days I have succeeded in withdrawing into life for long periods in
the midst of a general conversation, yet my absence was not noted in
the least. Out of it I hope will develop the ability to be with life
always in the tangle and confusion of city circumstance. This
afternoon I read _Phaedrus_ aloud on a sunny cliff, and in the evening
read aloud Keats' "I stood tiptoe" on the green heights in the wind
and the rain. Rossetti's lines do not forbid a life of contemplation,
but rather encourage it as distinguished from quietism. ... Through
the summer I am to see the Crucifixion. How I envy St. Francis the
Stigmata! Even as a little boy I desired them--but I shall never be
able perhaps to love passionately enough. The nights that I cried as a
little fellow without knowing why, just because I loved, were nearer
than I shall ever be again.
July 21.
At Benediction after Mass today I saw the Wonder in all Humanity with
Light surrounding It, and I shook with an awful thunder of sound. ...
Today I have been happy to tears, and in the blue afternoon on the
cliffs with my mother, I shared "Endymion" and "Epipsychidion." ... I
do not understand why silence is spoken of as a precept. To me it is
the living attribute of God. ... How nobly scornful is Sir Aubrey De
Vere's phrase, "witless ecstasies"!
July 22.
Simply a day of hard work. But I was happy in it. In an odd way I felt
as I wrote all day on the smooth white paper that I was stroking the
sleek breasts of doves. Tonight the steady patter of the rain upon the
eaves.
July 23.
A day of hard routine work. ... Tonight in the inky darkness I walked
to the postoffice in the thundering wind and rain and surf, and
learned how the deeps can praise the Lord. I have always felt the
wonder of that psalm.
July 24.
Rose at 4:30 and saw the sun rise a pure and shimmering symbol of the
Host above the silver outline of Wonder Island. The day was dumb. A
little boy has come whose face is his sacrament. What a song he must
sing! I look forward to the morrow as a day of special grace and
wonder. ...
July 25.
It is evident to me that music is wrong before a play or during
intermissions. But it is necessary until our dramatists provide some
other prelude. That prelude must be a beautiful setting of silence for
a few moments showing the protagonist under the light of eternity. In
the beginning all words contained a spiritual "import,"--were angels.
At Babel many fell. Now all our spiritual words are material words
grown out of their meanings. When expression becomes passion, it is
the passion of creation, clothing itself in images as God does through
eternity in the Passion of Creation. This is near the heart of life's
most awful secret, but words conceal it except from experience. For
Passion proceeds from Creation as Preservation proceeds from both,
though they are all from Eternity in the Unity of the Godhead. All my
planets at the contemplation of This are dancing before the throne.
The thunderous rhythm of their music is shaking me physically like the
engines of a steamer in shallow water. Every atom struggles against
the law of cohesion. God loves the beautiful boy. His name is Henry
R----. The Greeks, Emerson says, called the world _Cosmos_, Beauty.
Reading this on the veranda this afternoon, I closed my eyes and sank
contentedly into life. When I returned the faces were foreign, and
even my mother never knew. On the dunes this morning I heard the
silence of Eternity on the edge of time. I think it is a pine forest.
Babel took away the Word, until It came to earth, and in material form
took on supreme Spirit coming from the Father. ...
July 26.
I wish I could raise a singing altar of planets by some great
sacrifice. My fingers drummed upon the sands this morning a crude and
simple rhythm. I thought of its influence in displacing planets, and
of the almost infinite musical variations that were set in motion, and
then I compared my crude thrumming with the majestic thunders of the
sea, and realized the insupportable beauty of absolute music. A dog
talks by smell. There are vibrations of smell, as well as of sound or
of heat or of light. And the blind reveal vibration of touch, the
holiest of the senses. We talk now by sound, but are learning to talk
by heat and light. When shall we learn to talk by smell and touch?
Flowers, too, talk by smell. There is nothing but vibration in the
image of God, for LIFE IS NOTHING MORE THAN THE TREMBLING OF HIS
BEAUTY. The awful speed of Truth hardens into fact. Words must not say
more.
A dog taught me this,--Prince, the companion of the silent man. One
should be a priest when he marries two ideas. In any one of the
planets within the singing tissue of my flesh are Dantes and St.
Francises. Creation requires of us infinite crucifixions which we
shall never be able to consummate alone. When I lie on my breasts on
the sand and bury my face in my hands, all Nature receives me as a
human bridegroom, and I sink through time to eternity _creating_ space
around me, that widens and narrows to the reaches of immortality. It
is always on the sands that I find the friendliest depths, or in the
snow drift of cold planets upon a winter day or else within in the
terrible energy of my body, as my heart beats time to the universal
spheral rhythm. Think of the literal meaning of "universal!" Tonight
in the silence I read _Prometheus Bound_. I love the grace of the
boy's eyes. I pray to be guarded from the pride of humility.
July 27.
[Illustration: Circle with a cross through it.]
... It was a day of silences. I traced this figure idly on the sand
today, and suddenly understood the symbolism of the scarab. But did
the Egyptians anticipate the Redemption? As men are impressed by the
face of the world, so is the world impressed by their faces. The face,
as mirror of the soul, shines forth with electricity and makes an
impression on life, altering the song of those it acts upon as the
violin sound alters the formation of sands resting on a tightened
drum. By what ancient intuition does the Latin word "malum" mean both
"apple" and "evil"? Music creates substance through the speed of
gaiety, and God in His Creation is a cosmic humorist. (Cosmic means
beautiful.) To distinguish between fascination and sympathy is a
counsel of perfection for critics which has its spiritual analogies.
... Angels ran in hosts through the grasses.
July 28.
"His soul's most secret thought,
Eternal Light declares."
I read Lionel's poems on the cliffs, and almost discovered the secret
of the blue. Today for the first time I realized the remoteness of
these islands, and it was a great joy. It was a golden day of sunshine
on the cliffs with blue cloudless sky over quiet waters. Life is
turning inward to the heart of silence, and out of it will come the
beauty of my dream if life is willing.
July 29.
... I met a man today who knew beauty. He was a French country
lawyer. ... The sunset tonight revealed all the sadness of the Burning
Babe. I failed today.
July 30.
Another sadder failure of the will. Yet beauty came in the evening.
The love of man, far more the love of God, is God in heaven descended
upon earth, eternity made time in beauty, "majestic instancy," the
Word made Flesh. The soul is the pool wherein God and we see our
images, and Heaven will be the mutual contemplation of our souls. So
that human love is the adoration of God in human flesh, and therein
may the beloved be seen as the image of God in time. The praise of Our
Lady should then be the praise of God. Was this Patmore's secret? Or
Dante's and Petrarch's? "My lady was desired in the high heaven." ...
I see now how in Heaven there is no marriage or giving in marriage.
Far flowing ramparts of a starry world! The _flammantia moenia mundi_
of Lucretius. To contemplate Beauty FACE TO FACE! What a wonderful
proof of the beauty of our souls. Twin mirrors of a single singing
thought, the face of man looking into the Face of God, soul mingling
with Soul in immortal music, bathed in the cool wind of Our Lady's
eyes. Today I lost a nation in the cycle of my soul. What is the blood
but the history of my planets as engraved upon the constellations of
my flesh? It is the book of the angel of judgment for the first
syllable of my song, as the emotions, the intellect, and, alas, the
will, for the second, third, and fourth. The flesh is the ebb tide
from God, as the emotions are the flood. The intellect is the second
ebb, and in the will pray God that it may be flood! The other is
Hell....