_Mais où sont les neiges d'antan?_ As I transcribe once more that
ancient sigh, perhaps the most real sigh in all literature, it is high
mid-summer, and the woodland surrounding the little cabin in which I am
writing lies in a trance of green and gold, hot and fragrant and dizzy
with the whirring of cicadas, under the might of the July sun. Bees buzz
in and out through my door, and sometimes a butterfly flits in, flutters
a while about my bookshelves, and presently is gone again, in search of
sweets more to his taste than those of the muses, though Catullus is
there, with
Songs sweeter than wild honey dripping down,
Which once in Rome to Lesbia he sang.
As I am caught by the dream-drowsy spell of the hot murmuring afternoon,
and my eyes rest on the thick vines clustering over the rocks, and the
lush grasses and innumerable underbrush, so spendthrift in their
crowding luxuriance, I try to imagine the ground as it was but four
months ago still in the grasp of winter, when the tiniest blade of
grass, or smallest speck of creeping green leaf, seemed like a miracle,
and it was impossible to realize that under the broad snowdrifts a
million seeds, like hidden treasure, were waiting to reveal their
painted jewels to the April winds. Snow was plentiful then, to be had by
the ton--but now, the thought suddenly strikes me, and brings home with
new illuminating force Villon's old refrain, that though I sought the
woodland from end to end, ransacked its most secret places, not one
vestige of that snow, so lately here in such plenty, would it be
possible to find. Though you were to offer me a million dollars for as
much as would fill the cup of a wild rose, say even a hundred million, I
should have to see all that money pass me by. I can think of hardly
anything that it couldn't buy--but such a simple thing as last year's
snow!
Could there be a more poignant symbol of irreclaimable vanished things
than that so happily hit on by the old ballade-maker:
Nay, never ask this week, fair lord,
Where they are gone, nor yet this year,
Save with thus much for an overword--
But where are the snows of yester-year?
Villon, as we know, has a melancholy fondness for asking these sad,
hopeless questions of snow and wind. He muses not only of the drift of
fair faces, but of the passing of mighty princes and all the arrogant
pride and pomp of the earth--"pursuivants, trumpeters, heralds, hey!"
"Ah! where is the doughty Charlemagne?" They, even as the humblest, "the
wind has carried them all away." They have vanished utterly as the snow,
gone--who knows where?--on the wind. "'Dead and gone'--a sorry burden of
the Ballad of Life," as Thomas Lowell Beddoes has it in his _Death's
Jest Book_. "Dead and gone!" as Andrew Lang re-echoes in a sweetly
mournful ballade:
Through the mad world's scene
We are drifting on,
To this tune, I ween,
"They are dead and gone!"
"Nought so sweet as melancholy," sings an old poet, and, while the
melancholy of the exercise is undoubted, there is at the same time an
undeniable charm attaching to those moods of imaginative retrospect in
which we summon up shapes and happenings of the vanished past, a tragic
charm indeed similar to that we experience in mournful music or elegiac
poetry.
For, it is impossible to turn our eyes on any point of the starlit vista
of human history, without being overwhelmed with a heart-breaking sense
of the immense treasure of radiant human lives that has gone to its
making, the innumerable dramatic careers now shrunk to a mere mention,
the divinely passionate destinies, once all wild dream and dancing
blood, now nought but a name huddled with a thousand such in some dusty
index, seldom turned to even by the scholar, and as unknown to the world
at large as the moss-grown name on some sunken headstone in a country
churchyard. What an appallingly exuberant and spendthrift universe it
seems, pouring out its multitudinous generations of men and women with
the same wasteful hand as it has filled this woodland with millions of
exquisite lives, marvellously devised, patterned with inexhaustible
fancy, mysteriously furnished with subtle organs after their needs,
crowned with fairy blossoms, and ripening with magic seeds,--such a vast
treasure of fragrant sunlit leafage, all produced with such elaborate
care, and long travail, and all so soon to vanish utterly away!
Along with this crushing sense of cosmic prodigality, and somewhat
lighting up its melancholy, comes the inspiring realization of the
splendid spectacle of human achievement, the bewildering array of all
the glorious lives that have been lived, of all the glorious happenings,
under the sun. Ah! what men this world has seen, and--what women! What
divine actors have trod this old stage, and in what tremendous dramas
have they taken part! And how strange it is, reading some great dramatic
career, of Caesar, say, or Luther, or Napoleon, or Byron, to realize
that there was a time when they were not, then a time when they were
beginning to be strange new names in men's ears, then all the romantic
excitement of their developing destinies, and the thunder and lightning
of the great resounding moments of their lives--moments made out of
real, actual, prosaic time, just as our own moments are made, yet once
so splendidly shining on the top of the world, as though to stay there
forever, moments so glorious that it would seem that Time must have
paused to watch and prolong them, jealous that they should ever pass and
give place to lesser moments!
Think too of those other fateful moments of history, moments not
confined to a few godlike individuals, but participated in by whole
nations, such moments as that of the great Armada, the French
Revolution, or the Declaration of American Independence. How strangely
it comes upon one that these past happenings were once only just taking
place, just as at the moment of my writing other things are taking
place, and clocks were ticking and water flowing, just as they are doing
now! How wonderful, it seems to us, to have been alive then, as we are
alive now, to have shared in those vast national enthusiasms, "in those
great deeds to have had some little part"; and is it not a sort of poor
anti-climax for a world that has gone through such noble excitement to
have sunk back to this level of every day! Alas! all those lava-like
moments of human exaltation--what are they now, but, so to say, the
pumice-stone of history. They have passed as the summer flowers are
passing, they are gone with last year's snow.
But the last year's snow of our personal lives--what a wistful business
it is, when we get thinking of that! To recall certain magic moments out
of the past is to run a risk of making the happiest present seem like a
desert; and for most men, I imagine, such retrospect is usually busied
with some fair face, or perhaps--being men--with several fair faces,
once so near and dear, and now so far. How poignantly and unprofitably
real memory can make them--all but bring them back--how vividly
reconstruct immortal occasions of happiness that we said could not, must
not, pass away; while all the time our hearts were aching with the sure
knowledge that they were even then, as we wildly clutched at them,
slipping from our grasp!
That summer afternoon,--do you too still remember it, Miranda?--when,
under the whispering woodland, we ate our lunch together with such
prodigious appetite, and O! such happy laughter, yet never took our eyes
from each other; and, when the meal was ended, how we wandered along the
stream-side down the rocky glen, till we came to an enchanted pool among
the boulders, all hushed with moss and ferns and overhanging boughs--do
you remember what happened then, Miranda? Ah! nymphs of the forest
pools, it is no use asking me to forget.
And, all the time, my heart was saying to my eyes:--"This fairy hour--so
real, so magical, now--some day will be in the far past; you will sit
right away on the lonely outside of it, and recall it only with the
anguish of beautiful vanished things." And here I am today surely
enough, years away from it, solitary on its lonely outside!
I suppose that the river, this summer day, is making the same music
along its rocky bed, and the leafy boughs are rustling over that haunted
pool just the same as when--but where are the laughing ripples--ah!
Miranda--that broke with laughter over the divinely troubled water, and
the broken reflections, as of startled water-lilies, that rocked to and
fro in a panic of dazzling alabaster?
They are with last year's snow.
Meriel of the solemn eyes, with the heart and the laughter of a child,
and soul like the starlit sky, where should one look for the snows of
yester-year if not in your bosom, fairy girl my eyes shall never see
again. Wherever you are, lost to me somewhere among the winding paths of
this strange wood of the world, do you ever, as the moonlight falls over
the sea, give a thought to that night when we sat together by a window
overlooking the ocean, veiled in a haze of moonlit pearl, and, dimly
seen near shore, a boat was floating, like some mystic barge, as we
said, in our happy childishness, waiting to take us to the _Land East of
the Sun and West of the Moon_? Ah! how was it we lingered and lingered
till the boat was no more there, and it was too late? Perhaps it was
that we seemed to be already there, as you turned and placed your hand
in mine and said: "My life is in your hand." And we both believed it
true. Yes! wherever we went together in those days, we were always in
that enchanted land--whether we rode side by side through London streets
in a hansom--"a two-wheeled heaven" we called it--(for our dream
stretches as far back as that prehistoric day--How old one of us seems
to be growing! You, dear face, can never grow old)--or sat and laughed
at clowns in London music halls, or wandered in Surrey lanes, or gazed
at each other, as if our hearts would break for joy, over the snow-white
napery of some country inn, and maybe quoted Omar to each other, as we
drank his red wine to the immortality of our love. Perhaps we were
right, after all. Perhaps it could never die, and Time and Distance are
perhaps merely illusions, and you and I have never been apart. Who knows
but that you are looking over my shoulder as I write, though you seem so
far away, lost in that starlit silence that you loved. Ah! Meriel, is it
well with you, this summer day? A sigh seems to pass through the sunlit
grasses. They are waving and whispering as I have seen them waving and
whispering over graves.
Such moments as these I have recalled all men have had in their lives,
moments when life seemed to have come to miraculous flower, attained
that perfect fulfilment of its promise which else we find only in
dreams. Beyond doubt there is something in the flawless blessedness of
such moments that links our mortality with super-terrestrial states of
being. We do, in very deed, gaze through invisible doors into the ether
of eternal existences, and, for the brief hour, live as they, drinking
deep of that music of the infinite which is the divine food of the
enfranchised soul. Thence comes our exaltation, and our wild longing to
hold the moment for ever; for, while it is with us, we have literally
escaped from the everyday earth, and have found the way into some other
dimension of being, and its passing means our sad return to the
prison-house of Time, the place of meetings and partings, of distance
and death.
Part of the pang of recalling such moments is a remorseful sense that
perhaps we might have held them fast, after all. If only we might bring
them back, surely we would find some way to dwell in them for ever. They
came upon us so suddenly out of heaven, like some dazzling bird, and we
were so bewildered with the wonder of their coming that we stretched out
our hands to seize them, only when they were already spreading their
wings for flight. But O if the divine bird would but visit us again!
What golden nets we would spread for him! What a golden cage of worship
we would make ready! Our eyes would never leave his strange plumage, nor
would we miss one note of his strange song. But alas! now that we are
grown wise and watchful, that "moment eternal" comes to us no more.
Perhaps too that sad wisdom which has come to us with the years would
least of all avail us, should such moments by some magic chance suddenly
return. For it is one of the dangers of the retrospective habit that it
incapacitates us for the realization of the present hour. Much dwelling
on last year's snow will make us forget the summer flowers. Dreaming of
fair faces that are gone, we will look with unseeing eyes into the fair
faces that companion us still. To the Spring we say: "What of all your
blossom, and all your singing! Autumn is already at your heels, like a
shadow; and Winter waits for you like a marble tomb." To the hope that
still may beckon we say: "Well, what though you be fulfilled, you will
pass, like the rest. I shall see you come. We shall dwell together for a
while, and then you will go; and all will be as it was before, all as if
you had never come at all." For the retrospective mood, of necessity,
begets the anticipatory; we see everything finished before it is begun,
and welcome and valediction blend together on our lips. "That which hath
been is now; and that which is to be hath already been."
In every kiss sealed fast
To feel the first kiss and forebode the last--
that is the shadow that haunts every joy, and sicklies o'er every action
of him whom life has thus taught to look before and after.
Youth is not like that, and therein, for older eyes, lies its tragic
pathos. Superficial--or, if you prefer it, more normal--observers are
made happy by the spectacle of eager and confident young lives, all
abloom and adream, turning towards the future with plumed impatient
feet. But for some of us there is nothing quite so sad as young joy. The
playing of children is perhaps the most unbearably sad thing in the
world. Who can look on young lovers, without tears in their eyes? With
what innocent faith they are taking in all the radiant lies of life! But
perhaps a young mother with her new-born babe on her breast is the most
tragical of all pictures of unsuspecting joy, for none of all the
trusting sons and daughters of men is destined in the end to find
herself so tragically, one might say cynically, fooled.
Cynically, I said; for indeed sometimes, as one ponders the lavish
heartless use life seems to make of all its divinely precious
material--were it but the flowers in one meadow, or the butterflies of a
single summer day--it does seem as though a cruel cynicism inhered
somewhere in the scheme of things, delighting to destroy and
disillusionize, to create loveliness in order to scatter it to the
winds, and inspire joy in order to mock it with desolation. Sometimes it
seems as though the mysterious spirit of life was hardly worthy of the
vessels it has called into being, hardly treats them fairly, uses them
with an ignoble disdain. For, how generously we give ourselves up to
life, how innocently we put our trust in it, do its bidding with such
fine ardours, striving after beauty and goodness, fain to be heroic and
clean of heart--yet "what hath man of all his labours, and of the
vexation of his heart, wherein he hath laboured under the sun." Yea,
dust, and fallen rose-leaves, and last year's snow.
And yet and yet, for all this drift and dishonoured decay of things,
that retrospective mood of ours will sometimes take another turn, and,
so rare and precious in the memory seem the treasure that it has lost,
and yet in imagination still holds, that it will not resign itself to
mortal thoughts of such manifest immortalities. The snows of
yester-year! Who knows if, after all, they have so utterly vanished as
they seem. Who can say but that there may be somewhere in the universe
secret treasuries where all that has ever been precious is precious
still, safely garnered and guarded for us against some wonderful moment
which shall gather up for us in one transfiguring apocalypse all the
wonderful moments that have but preceded us into eternity. Perhaps, as
nothing is lost in the world, so-called, of matter, nothing is lost too
in the world of love and dream.
O vanished loveliness of flowers and faces,
Treasure of hair, and great immortal eyes,
Are there for these no safe and secret places?
And is it true that beauty never dies?
Soldiers and saints, haughty and lovely names,
Women who set the whole wide world in flames,
Poets who sang their passion to the skies,
And lovers wild and wise:
Fought they and prayed for some poor flitting gleam
Was all they loved and worshipped but a dream?
Is Love a lie and fame indeed a breath?
And is there no sure thing in life--but death?
Ah! perhaps we shall find all such lost and lovely things when we come
at length to the Land of Last Year's Snow.
X