EXPERIENTIA DOCET.

Otago Witness, Issue 2785, 31 July 1907, Page 86

EXPERIENTIA DOCET.

By Jotcm Joceltn.

(For the Witness.) When Tennyson puts royal speech into Ulysses' mouth he beautifully defines experience as An arch where /thro' Gleams that untravell'd. world whose margin fades For ever and ever when I move — a jewelled picture of a shifting scene, a poetic definition by no means complete. Tennyson, to compare him with his peeTs, had travelled little, and was not overfond of society ; his seeing bad been perspective, introspective, retrospective; but of the wide prospects, the high mountains, broad rivers, and deep-sea soundings of human experience, he had little ken. His verse possesses sculptural beauty, pillared solitudes inviting to repose, majestic colonnades whence one- may view from, far the works and ways of men, but into the arena with its hourly fight, its instant victory or defeat, he does not ask us to descend. He sees the pathos of the one, and gives the glory of the battle to the hero, but it is "thro' the arch" that he reviews the battlefield and eings so exquisitely of life and love and death. Presented more or less as spectacles, they are not all-absorbing, all-compelling, to our gaze. The looker-on is often forced to regard the portrayer almost as closely as the scene portrayed. This compulsion is a sense of proof of power —a tribute exacted by the artist to, himself; has skill in composition, his admirable delineation. How perfect,, how exquisite, it is no one loving literary form for a moment would deny; nor need we sacrifice the lovely image because of its incompleteness. Perhaps the "arch" might more fitly be described as crowning the doorway of a temple having its foundation on tfie rock of past experience, resting thereon as do the walls enveloping us from youth to age. This great and growing house has its loopholes and its windows, its festal places, and its chamber of correction: sometimes, alas! its dungeon; and it has also —and this is of most cheerful grace —by very grace of God, its sweet and airy pleasaunce, its conning towers, and trysting gate. And not only to the individual does this apply, but in broader measnre to the race itself. National experience has its birthdays and its festivals, its days of colour and of mourning —'its years both fat and lean. To one land while feasting it is given to behold the famine of its neighbour ; to one riding upon high places to see another visited by pestilence or war. To learn by suffering while others are grasping the prizes of existence is a bitter But salutary lesson, for it teaches, cleanses, and later heals and binds. The ignorance and the education, the disease and its purgation, the scattering and the binding, are each and all absolutely necessary to the warp and woof, the stuff and tissue of individual or collective life. Experience has also been defined as a "deduction from the past for the service of the present," a counsellor always ready to serve the calls of memory and judgment. Is not wisdom magnified in the culling- and comparing of circumstances and actions, |of motive and events? Is it not the source of our tendency to overlook the mistakes I of youth and our unwillingness in general to condone the errors of maturity? Is not biography, and history to take a wider i view, a condensing record of the hopes and aims, the sins and follies, of the race, not necessarily of those who have the most worthily overcome —very often it is the most picturesque —the heroes who have "cut a figure on the stage of life" ; of wrestlere who, like Ulysses, have felt that "Life piled on life were all too little?" "Something more" is wanted —"a bnnger of new things." For, like the Athenians, we are all pining —the young, the middle-aged, and old —for the revelation of the new ; all that lies between anticipated birth and stark, inevitable death. What matters the unfading margin of untravelled worlds? Though the gulfs wash us down, we still dream on that we shall touch, the happy isles and see the great Achilles. And so though one descending from. Homeric heights might dare to be prosaic, and call experience the

Fvery vertebra of thought, the bone and marrow of it 6 raison d'etre, he knows full I well that the lovely tissue which enwrapsthe skeleton of fact may not be torn away. It is in "far-folded mists and gleaming halls of morn" that we become conscious of that Divinity wfiieh shapes our ends. It is the dream of youth which animates the growing purpose; the seed of what is possible that brings in proper course the ripe fulfilment. And it is the vision, blurred, the dream forgotten, that meanathe birth of tragedy. Alas for this grey shadow, once * man So glorious in his beauty and thy choice; But thy strong hours indignant work'd their will. .... left me maimed, And all I was in asihes. .... - This is despairing language; the language of one dissatisfied with Alrwise" allotment; of one who, having quarrelled with his span of time, would pass "beyond the goal of ordinance where all should pause"; who, according to the classic legend, was doomed to continuous, existence : as an insect to Chirp for ever 'mid the withering" grass, To see frail man arise, and sink, asd pass; To shtill in cadences, alas, alest There are doubtless many who, like the' fabled Greek, would wish their recording" dial to " mark only the bright hours, and, that these should last for ever." The contemplation of Tithonus, whose cruel in. mortality was the price of his im-* patient yearning, may veil give us pauseto ask if oar days be flitting by no-'. ' heeded, or are fitting us for splendid and. _ immortal future; if there be any dignity, or purpose and grandeur in oar aim; if , oar experience help or mar the growth of character; whether the world be. merely a vast pleasure ground bounded only by our passionate desire, or a noble quarry where blocks are hewn and. fashioned into beauty, each chiselling stroke, each point of contact, bringing a lovely fabric to perfection? Certain it is, and God he thanked that so it is, that happy warriors and workers have so fought and wrought tb*fc the building oi each individual fife might be likened to the rearing of a stately edifice well towered and battlemented. It is impossible to pursue the subject without reference to circumstance and opportunity, which might well be called step-si6ters to experience. And here it may not be inappropriate to recall in illustration the name of one of the world's great architects. As an inventive genius -and a writer on subjects the most abstruse, and also as professor of astronomy atOxford, Sir Christopher Wren had already achieved distinction when he was commissioned to undertake the restoration of St. Paul's,, and it was th© destruction, of this cathedral in -the Fixe of London which brought bis opportunity, for the idea, of restoration had to be abandoned, and the rebuilding was entrusted to his hands. His genius was more than equal to the. rehabilitation of the city, but large vested interests prevented acceptance of bis offer. i His splendid powers, however, Bad foil | scope in other undertakings —in the supervision of some 50 churches, the worfbs at' Windsor Castle, the repair of Westminster Abbey, and designs for Greenwich Hospital. To these vast responsibilities were added the presidency of the Royal Society and the representation of two boroughs— Weymouth and Melcombe Regis. It -was his also —great and gifted already to such a remarkable degree—4o submit greatly I to the chastening touches of experience, | being, through adverse political influence, deprived of office at the age af 85. His few remaining years were devoted to scientific pursuit* and the study of the Scriptures, and then, dying at the age of j 90, to the choir of the great Cathedral all that was mortal of tbe man -who had conceived it was carried to repose. Above the entry is inscribed in Latia: — "Beneath is laid the builder of this church and city, who lived above 9& ! years, not lor himself, but for the public good. Reader, if thou aeekest bis monnirent, look around." . . . "Non sibi sed bono publico" is a kingly sentiment, a royal and a loyal motto. Was it any wonder that a man who had earned so noble an epitaph, should b& classed by Newton as one of the greatest geometricians of the age, or that the time devoted to close and careful study of the most ennobling of the sciences should have borne such fruit? It is nob matter for surprise that such, a- .history should awaken thought, and sometimes, alas! a vast regret. The restless spirit of Ulysses, who had drunk delight of battle with his peers, and been a part of all that he had met, roaming with a hungry heart, is contrast sad to contemplate. Almost as. sad as the craving of Tithonus, yoked to lingering mortality, and lamenting that "the cods • themselves cannot restore their gifts.?* Surely it belongs to those who reap tha benefits of this rapidly advancing age to see that every gift may be advanced in value; that the simplest talent*may be I gJorioasly multiplied, and the earthem vessel submitted to tbe potter so , adequately moulded that " tbe ■workmanship may be more valuable than the raw material.'"

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