LITMIR.BIZ

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by moonlight and every shadow will have its mystery and will talk to you of the legends of long ago.

      That is why Sir Walter Scott had such a passion for "Cumnor Hall." "After the labours of the day were over," said Irving, "we often walked in the meadows, especially in the moonlight nights; and he seemed never weary of repeating the first stanza:

      The dews of summer night did fall —

          The moon, sweet regent of the sky,

      Silvered the walls of Cumnor Hall,

          And many an oak that stood thereby."

      There you have the key to all the world of Sir Walter. He was the King of the Moonlighters. He was a man who would have been my most dreaded rival on the midnight bus. He would have wanted the back seat, I know, and there he would have sat and chanted "Cumnor Hall" to himself and watched the moonlight touching the suburban streets to poetry and turning every suburban garden into a twilight mystery.

      There are, of course, quite prosaic and even wicked people who love "a shiny night." There is, for example, the gentleman from "famous Lincolnshire" whose refrain is:

      Oh, 'tis my delight

      On a shiny night,

      In the season of the year.

      I love his song because it is about the moonlight, and I am not sure that I am much outraged by the fact that he liked the shiny night because he was a poacher. I never could affect any indignation about poachers. I suspect that I rather like them. Anyhow, there is no stanza of that jolly song which I sing with more heartiness than:

      Success to every gentleman that lives in Lincolnshire,

      Success to every poacher that wants to sell a hare.

      Bad luck to every gamekeeper that will not sell his deer.

                  Oh, 'tis my delight, etc.

      And there was Dick Turpin. He, too, loved the moonlight for very practical reasons. He loved it not because it silvered the oak, but because of that deep shadow of the oak in which he could stand with Black Bess and await the coming of his victim.

      And it is that shadow which is the real secret of the magic of moonlight. The shadows of the day have beauty but no secrecy. The sunlight is too strong to be wholly or even very materially denied. Even its shadows are luminous and full of colour, and the contrast between light and shade is not the contrast between the visible and the invisible, between the light and the dark: it is only a contrast between degrees of brightness. Everything is bright, but some things are more bright than others. But in the moonlight the world is etched in black and white. The shadows are flat and unrevealing. They have none of the colour values produced by the reflected lights in the shadows of the day. They are as secret as the grave; distinct personalities, sharply figured against the encompassing light, not mere passages of colour tuned to a lower key. And the quality of the encompassing light itself emphasises the contrast. The moon does not bring out the colour of things, but touches them with a glacial pallor:

                  … Strange she is, and secret.

      Strange her eyes; her cheeks are cold as cold sea-shells.

      See the moonlight fall upon your house-front and mark the wonderful effect of black and white that it creates. Under the play of the moonbeams it becomes a house of mysteries. The lights seem lighter than by day, but that is only because the darks are so much darker. That shadow cast by the gable makes a blackness in which anything may lurk, and it is the secrecy of the shadow in a world of light that is the soul of romance.

      Take a walk in the woods in the bright moonlight over the tracks that you think you could follow blindfold, and you will marvel at the tricks which those black shadows of the trees can play with the most familiar scenes. Keats, who was as much of a moonlighter in spirit as Scott, knew those impenetrable shadows well:

                  … tender is the night,

      And haply the Queen-moon is on her throne,

      Cluster'd around by all her starry Fays;

          But here there is no light,

      Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown

      Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways.

      In this moonlight world you may skip at will from the known to the unknown, have publicity on one side of the way and secrecy on the other, walk in the light to see Jessica's face, and in the shadow to escape the prying eyes of Shylock. Hence through all time it has been the elysium of lovers, and "Astarte, queen of heaven, with crescent horns," has been the goddess whom they serve,

      To whose bright image nightly by the moon,

      Sidonian virgins paid their vows and songs.

      Perhaps it is the eternal lover in us that responds so unfailingly to the magic of the moonlight.

      ON GIVING UP TOBACCO

      This evening I am morally a little unapproachable. I feel too good to be true. Perhaps it would be possible for me to endure the company of Mr. Pecksniff; but that good man is dead, and I am lonely in a world that is not quite up to my moral handicap. For I have given up tobacco. For a whole day not a wreath of smoke has issued from my lips, not a pipe, or a cigar, or a cigarette has had the victory over me… For a whole day! I had not realised how long a day could be. It is as though I have ceased to live in time and have gone into eternity. I once heard a man say: "Dear me! How time flies!" It struck me at the moment as a true and penetrating remark, and I have often repeated it since. But now I know it to be false. I know that that man must have been a slave to tobacco, that subtle narcotic that gives the illusion of the flight of time. If he had the moral courage to follow my example, he would not say "How time flies!" He would say, as I do (with tears in his voice, and with a glance at his pipe on the mantel-piece), "How time stands still!" He would find that a day can seem as long as a year; that he can lengthen his life until he is terrified at the prospect of its endlessness.

      I have been contemplating this thing for years. Some day, I have said to myself, I will have a real trial of strength with this Giant Nicotine who has held me thrall to his service. Long have I borne his yoke – ever since that far-off day when I burned a hole in my jacket pocket with a lighted cigar that I hid at the approach of danger. (How well I remember that day: the hot sunshine, the walk in the fields, the sense of forbidden joys, the tragedy of the burnt hole, the miserable feeling of physical nausea.) I have kicked against the tyranny of a habit that I knew had become my master. It was not the tobacco I disliked. Far from it. I liked the tobacco; but disliked the habit of tobacco. The tendency of most of us is to become creatures of habit and to lose our freedom – to cease to be masters of our own actions. "Take away his habits, and there is nothing of him left," says a character in some play, and the saying has a wide application. I did not possess a pipe: it was the pipe that possessed me. I did not say with easy, masterful assurance, "Come, I have had a hard day (or a good dinner); I will indulge myself with a pipe of tobacco." It was the pipe which said, "Come, slave, to your devotions." And though as the result of one of my spiritual conflicts I threw away my pipe and resolved to break the fall with an occasional cigarette, I found it was the old tyrannous habit in a new disguise. The old dog in a new coat, as Johnson used to say.

      There are some people who approach the question frivolously. The young man called John in the "Breakfast Table" is an example. When the lady in bombazine denounced tobacco and said it ought all to be burned, the young man John agreed. Someone had given him a box of cigars, he said, and he was going to burn them all. The lady in bombazine rejoiced. Let him make a bonfire of them in the backyard, she said. "That ain't my way," replied the young man called John. "I burn 'em one at a time – little end in my mouth, big end outside." Similarly wanting in seriousness was the defence of tobacco set up by the wit who declared that it prolonged life. "Look at the ancient Egyptians," he said. "None of them smoked, and they are all dead." Others again discover virtues to conceal the tyranny. Lord Clarendon, when he was Foreign Minister, excused the fact that his room always reeked with

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