The Moon in Literature

THE moon is a satellite, or secondary planet, revolving about the earth in an elliptic orbit inclined 5° 8' 48" to the ecliptic, and doing the trip in 27 days, 7 hours, 43 minutes, 11-461 seconds. Its average distance from the earth is 238,833 miles, and any scientist will be able to supply the number of odd feet and inches. Its volume is, roughly, one fiftieth, and its weight one eightieth of that of our own globe. The moon is airless, waterless, lifeless — a corpse of a world; and its principal glory is (as the ladies say) ‘not her own.’ The total surface visible to us is approximately twice the size of Europe, and one must picture it as a barren continent of peak and precipice, crag and crater, with mountains standing fang-like in frozen light, and valleys plunged in utter blackness. There is no bush or tree, no blade of grass or smudge of lichen; no sound of bird or beast; no chuckle of water, or whine of midge. The petrified silence threatens to burst the eardrums.

Such is the moon of astronomy — a veritable nightmare, the horror of which makes Dante’s Infernos appear comparatively endurable. To dismiss the moon in this fashion is very much like dismissing one of Rodin’s statues as so many hundredweight of calcium carbonate.

The moon is a silver shield, a celestial halo, the lamp of heaven, a fairy godmother, an enchantress, a goddess — Luna, Astarte, Isis, Phoebe (gentle sister of the ardent sun), or Diana (who still bathes in forest pools). This is the moon of our human acquaintance, the moon of Egyptian and Druidical worship, the moon that shines through poetry and romance, that illumines life and literature. The astronomer’s conception may be the ultimate fact, but fact is dead: the poet’s vision is truth, and truth is alive.

The moon may be (for all we know) the cause of tides or earthquakes; but the important thing about her is that she shares our secrets — secrets that are too good to tell. The moon may be 6OO,000 times less brilliant than the sun. If so, it matters nothing. The vital difference between them is that the sun is epic while the moon is lyric. The textbooks assure us that the sun is 65,000,000 times the size of the moon — a triviality hardly worth the trouble of calculating. The supreme point is that the sun is masculine and the moon feminine. The man who denies it is a miserable literalist, and deserves a professorship at a Prussian university.

The sun gives light; the moon gives illusion. The sun gives so much light that there is little room left for imagination. We do not easily make legends about the sun; but the moon keeps alive that sense of the mystic without which we might as well be in the prehistoric cave or jungle. The people are on the side of the poets. We have folk tales by the hundred — of the man who tried to rake the moon out of the pond, of the exhilarated cow that jumped over the moon, of the moon’s being made of green cheese (albeit there is no life on it), of goats dancing on their hind-legs at full of moon, of the man in the moon, and that sumptuous dream of fairytales— the blue moon. Popular fancy delights to play with the moon. Elves and pixies hold their revels and eisteddfods in the moonlit glades; leprechauns roam the woods; and Puck is loosed to play his nocturnal pranks. Human lovers take their walks in a world of moonshine. Always there is this association of glamour and witchery with moonlight; and as long as the moon endures, the common people will believe in that elusive beauty which restores the illusions banished by day.

The full glare of daylight tends to make matter-of-fact. Essential darkness inspires an elemental dread at the abysmal nothingness of it all. But in the mysterious hours between the gloaming and the murk, one gets gleams and glimpses, suggestions rather than details. There is awakened that feeling of fugitive beauty and evanescent loveliness. Magic touches the earth, revealing the queerness of houses and the strangeness of trees. Imagination has free play with the outlines of familiar things. The whiteness of moonshine and the violet of dusk belong to the world of legends and old dreams. That may explain why travelers like to see Niagara, the Taj Mahal, and Venice, in the moonlight.

We see faces in the moon. We personify it in our poems. We deify it in our religions, fragments of which survive in countless lunar superstitions. The scientist knows the moon only as an oblate spheroid — a sort of byproduct of the earth, a globular mass that revolves with the regularity of a metronome. But literature reminds us that the moon is a big symbol, a toy left over from some primeval revelry, a lamp more magical than Aladdin’s.

The sun is always a circle, but there are as many moons as there are moods in a woman. Sometimes the moon is sad: —

Or,

But that is a rare mood. Sometimes she is weird; sometimes she is pensive; often she is gay; many times she is dazzling with witchery.

We found a poem the other day which represents the sauciness of the moon: —

There may be a grammatical mistake in the third line; there may be an astronomical error in the first and fifth; but there is a distinct emotion which is original and true, and the poet was lucky enough to catch it.

There are hundreds of moons, of varying phase and color, and every one of them suggests a different feeling. As certainly as the emotions of childhood are revived by some chance odor or drifting perfume, so are the moods of youth, with its wondrous summer evenings and winter nights, recalled by a glimpse of the moon. Lest the notion may seem somewhat too fantastic, we offer a few suggestions at random.

Take the case of color, for example. It is common enough to hear of a yellow moon. The line of a coon-song, —

conjures up a picture of a plantation, with the ‘nigger-gals’ sitting in a long black row; but if we get the fundamental sentiment of coon-songs, it is somehow associated with that ‘yaller’ moon. Try the experiment of blotting out the moon, or of substituting daylight, and the whole feeling is changed.

But a careful artist is not satisfied with a yellow moon. Hardy talks of a ‘chrome-yellow’ moon, which is better, because the more distinctive color gives a more exact emotion. It gives one a rich feeling that evades definition. Hugh Walpole speaks of an ‘apricottinted moon,’ and yet again of ‘the pale primrose of a crescent moon.’ That expression, if we mistake not, does more than paint a picture in a single stroke: it paints an emotion with brilliance and vividness.

Compton Mackenzie has described ‘an ivory moon shimmering in the blue dusk.’ His descriptions of the sunsetcolors, the ‘topaz eves of May,’ the ‘silver nights of June,’ bring back by a subtle spell the very feelings of youth spent in London. Young Michael Fane went to Oxford, and his chief recollection of the city of dreaming spires was of the silver moonlight flooding the silent streets of night. The whole meaning of Oxford lies imprisoned in that memory. The love-story of Guy Hazlewood began with a sub-lunar adventure on a September evening, when he saw the moon of dislustred gold that grew more and more burnished as it mounted above the hills.

Oscar Wilde, another precisian in matters of color, describes a ‘honeycolored moon hanging in the indigo dusk.’ But in another book, Dorian Gray, steeped in a life of infamy and crime, saw the moon that grinned at him like a skull. That horrible fancy seems to lay bare the secret of his soul.

In describing the island of the LotosEaters, Tennyson says: —

We all know that moon — pale in the afternoon light. In the magic of twilight, as children, we howled for the moon; the Lotos-Eaters saw it as a ghost of a dead world, a thing not worth crying for. Nothing was worth desiring.

The entrancing illusions that make life worth striving for had been explained away. Everything was vanity, futility, disillusion; and that faded moon gives exactly the touch required. But how different from the moons of infancy, of childhood and of youth!

Mr. G. K. Chesterton describes a nightmare in which a man stepped into the open air and walked alone through the empty streets of London, which were blank with white moonshine. Indeed it seemed not so much moonlight as ‘dead daylight on some alien planet.’ Another feeling — an uncanny one this time —which comes from the moon. Contrast this with the feeling in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, where Titania commands her fairy attendants to

There is nothing uncanny here, but all the beneficent enchantment of fairyland.

In his Island Nights’ Entertainments, Stevenson describes a murder done in a tropical forest in the green moonlight. Those huge and hideous dolls, which Case employed to terrify the natives, had been blown up by gunpowder, and lay blazing in the weird light. The scene is bizarre enough as a setting for the murder, and the green moonlight added the last freakish touches that saved the story from becoming merely a boys’ ‘Blood.’ The mention of Stevenson reminds one of his poem on the moon; but it is too well known for quotation.

As a final illustration, we might refer to Sir William Watson’s poem on Wordsworth’s grave: —

There seems to be the essence of Wordsworth in that picture; yet how different from the moon of Stevenson’s verse!

One might go on indefinitely. One thinks of the crescent moon on Turkish mosques and minarets, and the vision somehow conjures up the very soul of Mohammedanism. Or of the Arabs on the desert as the sun sinks and a thin sickle gleams in the west — a scimitar suspended in heaven as a symbol of the faith which has been kept, and a sign that the fast of Ramadan is ended. (Glory be to Allah!)

The round moon dreams over Persian rose-gardens, where Omar wandered with his sweet companion — the moon of his delight that knew no wane. It floats in the purple twilight of Spain. It shines, brilliant and white, through the forests of India. It rises like Aphrodite from the Eastern sea. It stares over Arctic snows, and glows golden over warm South Seas. The watchdog barks at the moon in Hans Andersen’s tale. Another watchdog bays by the Tiber while Lord Byron muses in the Coliseum at midnight. We see the moon as a silver gondola, or as ‘a bow new-bent in heaven.’ It bathes in blue lakes with golden shores, among the clouds of early spring; it covers the roads of summer nights like new-fallen snow; the broad face of the harvest moon gazes sadly over the fields of standing sheaves; the last strip of the withered moon makes the winter mornings weird and wizard-like. It stirs innumerable emotions, from the eeric to the lovelorn, from chastity to voluptuousness — all, except, perhaps, courage.

Then, too, if we may venture a step further, there is a distinct moonlight element in art. Wc do not mean the direct treatment of the subject, as in Beethoven’s ‘Moonlight Sonata,’ or Byron Cooper’s pictures, or Ben Jonson’s ‘Hymn to Diana’; but rather that sense of lyric enchantment which reminds us of the tantalizing and naiadlike beauty of moonshine. It is not found in Russian literature. There must be a moon in Russia, but there is no hint of moon-loveliness in the stories of the people — only of gray dawns, cold daylight, and sombre nightfalls. There is always a feeling as of an iron bell tolling through a Russian story. But France is full of love and laughter, and the haunting beauty of things seen in moonlight. Maupassant’s short story, Clair de Lune, is probably one of the world’s masterpieces, and it deals specifically with moonshine. But there is moonshine in most of Maupassant’s stories.

Arnold Bennett’s tales seem to move in a strong noon light which discloses the details of things as they really are: that is why the author writes prose instead of poetry —he sees too much; he knows too well. The writers who aim at reality decline to be misled by illusions. But without illusion, most of us would find life unendurable.

There is more moon-enchantment in Coleridge than in Wordsworth; more in Shelley than in Byron; more in Keats than in any of these. But best of all is Shakespeare. All his comedies are Midsummer Nights’ Dreams. We do not suggest that his heroines are elusive. They are essentially healthy animals, and Shakespeare is never so happy as when he can dress them up as boys — Viola, Imogen, Portia, Julia, Jessica. But they have a witchery and glamour that scarcely belongs to our workaday world. By sheer power of magic, Shakespeare can create the very ache of first love. He weaves a spell of sensuous delight. He leads his dukes into forests and wrecks them on enchanted islands, and even in court they talk about the sweet sound that breathes upon a bank of violets. Rich perfumes snare the senses; wandering strains of music ravish the ears; it seems as natural to make love as to breathe or sing. Miranda sits within her cave making love to Ferdinand; Juliet leans from her balcony, responding to the vows of Romeo; musicians are serenading Silvia; Demetrius and Hermia, Lysander and Helena sleep in the woods; Jessica and Lorenzo sit on a moonlit bank while the sounds of music creep into their ears; Fenton elopes with Anne Page while fairies dance round Falstafl ; Rosalind and Celia have fled to the forest of Arden. But where is Mrs. Grundy? Where are the complications of modern life — the financial problems, the social difficulties, the moral restrictions, the limitations imposed by civilization, etiquette, religion? The Shakespearean comedy is gay with elemental emotions and pagan merriment. It is the world of Puck, and Pan, and Dan Cupid; of Phyllis, Corydon, Amaryllis, Philomel — and MOONSHINE!