9 September: Boreham on James Hilton

The Blue Danube
This is the birthday of Mr. James Hilton, and one of the choicest things that Mr. Hilton has given us is his story of the way in which Mr. Chips discovered that the Danube is blue. Surveying the murky waters, Mr. Chips simply could not understand how anybody could find a colour in them. His companion complained that the adjective was a pigment of lovers and honeymoon couples. Later on, Mr. Chips, having tasted romance in the interval, the two schoolmasters are again on the river. Mr. Chips eyes the stream meditatively. "Chips," inquires his friend, with a sly twinkle, "the Danube doesn't by any chance look blue to you, does it?" Mr. Chips does not answer; but his smile is enough.

Life consists of two hemispheres, the internal and the external. It is commonly assumed that if the outer hemisphere is brightly lit, the inner responds with content and felicity. The song that everybody seems to be lilting just now is evidently designed to show that, in reality, it is the other way around. It is the outer realm that depends for its illumination on the inner. Our happiness depends, not on something in our circumstances but on something in ourselves.

I may be right; I may be wrong;
But I'm perfectly willing to swear
That
when you turned and smiled at me
A nightingale sang in Berkeley Square.

"I may be right; I may be wrong!" Was he right or was he wrong? He was both. He was wrong, for there are no nightingales in Berkeley Square. Yet, in a deeper sense, he was right; for when his inmost emotions thrilled with such ecstasy as her smile brought him, the birds were singing everywhere, even in Berkeley Square. It is not the nightingales that bring the smile; it is the smile that brings the nightingales.

When Wordsworth was rebuked for singing of dancing daffodils he was compelled to confess that daffodils do not dance. He could only suppose he pleaded, that, since the sight of the daffodils set his soul dancing with delight, he had unconsciously transferred the inner sensation to the outward object. It is a law that operates every day.

Are The Chimes The Echo Of Ourselves?
Paul Dombey wondered whether the bells he heard when a funeral was in progress were different bells from those that pealed so blithely for a wedding, or were they the same bells sounding differently in differing circumstances? Paul was unconsciously probing to the heart of a profound psychological problem. For the fact is that the bells take us as they find us and set us to music—that is all. Paul Dombey who died young, half suspected it, and Trotty Veck, another figure in the Dickens gallery, lived long enough to prove it to the hilt. When things were going badly with Trotty, and the magistrate said that he and those like him ought to be put down with the utmost rigour of the law, the chimes, when they pealed out suddenly, made the air ring with the refrain: "Put 'em down! Put 'em down! Facts and figures! Facts and figures! Put 'em down! Put 'em down!" If, Dickens says, the chimes said anything, this is what they said; and they said it until Trotty's brain fairly reeled.

Later on in the story we have the same chimes and the same people listening to them. But this time all is going well. Meg and Richard are to be married on the morrow, and Trotty is at the height of his felicity. "Just then the bells, the old familiar bells, his own dear, constant, steady friends, the chimes, began to ring. When had they ever rung like that before? They chimed out so lustily, so merrily, so happily, so gaily, that he leapt to his feet and broke the spell that bound him." And in a few minutes Trotty and Richard and Meg were dancing with delight to the gay, glad music of the bells. When they themselves were sad the chimes seemed mournful; when they were happy the chimes seemed blithe. So true is it that the smiles bring the nightingales, not the nightingales the smiles.

The Smile That Awakens The Song
In the most majestic and appealing of all his poems, Wordsworth tells how he twice visited Tintern Abbey, first in 1793 and again in 1798. But the thing that startles him is that, when he returns to the noble old ruin after that interval of five years the lovely place stands transfigured before his eyes. Can it be indeed the same? Of course it is! Centuries come and centuries go, but Tintern Abey does not change. Then, all at once, a startling discovery breaks upon the poet. Tintern Abbey is the same Abbey but he is not the same man! He is gazing upon the old scenes with new eyes. In 1793 the leafy trees, graceful valleys, and fragrant flowers were just trees and valleys and flowers. Nature, that is to say, was sufficient in itself. He saw its outward beauty with his outward eyes; but he had no soul for its soul. Like his own Peter Bell, a primrose by the river's brim a yellow primrose was to him, and it was nothing more. During the five years since he had looked on this enchanting landscape, a new life has been born within him, and, as a consequence, the primrose is so much more than a primrose and Tintern Abbey so much more than Tintern Abbey.

In the interval he has learned, as he says, "to look on nature not as in the hour of thoughtless youth," but as a revelation of something higher. And, above all, he continues,

I have felt
A presence that disturbs me, with the joy
Of elevated
thoughts: a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused
Whose
dwelling is the light of setting suns.

In the old days, the shallows had called to the shallows. Now the deeps called to the deeps. In 1793 the physical appealed to the physical, the sensuous to the sensuous. In 1798 the sublimities about him ministered to the sublimities within him. And the transformation had been effected, not by a change in the realm without but by a profound experience in the depths of his being which, as he himself confesses, had made a new man of him. The phenomenon is not uncommon. William Blake when his inspiration comes to him, hears angels singing in the trees of Peckham Rye. A hundred years later Francis Thompson, fresh from the abyss, hears the seraphim chanting their Holy, Holy, Holy, above the roar of the London traffic. One of the sublimest facts of human experience is the fact that, when men have beheld a smile of reconciliation and understanding in the face of Heaven, Earth has been flooded with melodies that their ears had never before detected. And that, lifted to its loftiest plane, is the principle that underlies the popular song.

F W Boreham

Image: The river Danube.