purely personal interest in her has extended itself somehow beyond what
we know as the realm of time and space. This sounds rather esoteric, but
what I mean is that I am very happy whenever I think of her, whether I
am with her or not. I feel very near her though we are separated by a
hundred miles; and I should not be surprised if, in the muffled 'Woof!
Woof!' of her dreams, she often lives again what I happen to be thinking
of at the moment--wonderful runs with Teddy, the cocker spaniel, or the
homeric combat with the woodchuck beside Simon Brook.
As I sit thinking of Viola, there happens to come into my mind, by one
of those odd associations that have so little logic in them, an
apparently trivial incident that took place a day or so ago. A couple of
little girls stopped me on Arlington Street, Boston, and asked the way
to Marlboro Street. It chanced that I was going to Marlboro Street
myself, and I offered to conduct them there, but they were walking in
the leisurely way of children, taking in everything on the way, and I
soon outstripped them. At the corner of Marlboro Street, however, I
turned and waved to them to indicate that this was the street they
wanted, and they waved back to show that they understood.
That was apparently the end of the incident; but two or three blocks up
Marlboro Street, something impelled me to turn. The children had found
the street, they were following safely, they were evidently watching me;
for as soon as I turned, they waved again. As I went up the steps of the
house where I had an appointment, I looked back for the third time. The
children, now become almost fairy-like figures, were still watching me.
Up went their hands and up went mine, and across the long length of city
street, we waved in greeting and farewell.
I do not know why the incident should have seemed to contain an element
of real beauty. I was reminded of George E. Woodberry's poem in which a
somewhat similar incident is celebrated. A boy, you remember, while
playing, ran heedlessly into the poet, and the poem ends,--
It was only the clinging touch
Of a child in a city street;
It hath made the whole day sweet.
What struck me even more than the beauty of my adventure was the quality
of permanence that it seemed to wear. In my under-consciousness, there
was something immortal about it. Can it be possible that our casual
relations, where love is,--our relations with children, or with
strangers whom we shall never see again, or with the lower animals whose
span of life is necessarily very limited,--can it be possible that these
relations are less ephemeral than we think? Would it be too much to hope
that the relation between Viola and myself is a small but permanent
addition to the store of worth-while things?
[Illustration]
Haunted Lives
By Laura Spencer Portor
I
It is my increasing belief, to which the careful observation and study
of years give strength, that all lives may be said to be haunted in
greater or less degree by certain recurrent thoughts or influences or
impressions or realizations, which, visiting and revisiting the chambers
of the mind, probably from earliest years, come at last to dwell
persistently with us, returning again and again like the French ghostly
_revenants_, making free to haunt those long-closed rooms of the memory
where once, it may be, they moved in the full daylight of consciousness
and realization, as delights or dreads, joys or terrors of the soul.
'Two ideas,' says Pater, in writing of Leonardo, 'were especially fixed
in him, as reflexes of things that touched his brain in childhood beyond
the measure of other impressions--the smiling of women, and the motion
of great waters.' And later on, 'He became above all a painter of
portraits; faces of a modeling more skillful than has been seen before
or since, embodied with a reality which almost amounts to illusion on
dark air. To take a character as it was, and delicately sound its stops,
suited one so curious in observation, curious in invention.'
So we seem to see Leonardo possessed always by the interest and beauty
and meaning of faces, fascinated by the individuality, the infinite
variety, the delicately interpretative meanings of them; reminiscent of
the charm of them; visited by a hundred recurrent lovelinesses of them;
preoccupied by their mystery; and above all, it seems, haunted and
summoned by the lovely and enigmatic smiling of women.
To recognize this is to know much of Leonardo and his work; and even if
we read no more of Pater's memorable essay, he has succeeded in these
three sentences in bringing before us some impression of the essential
man which is not readily forgotten, and has admitted us as it were to a
partial knowledge of that great and diverse mind.
But all this is rare, very rare in biography. We write biography, for
the most part, as we write history--with a leaning toward dates and
successions of events.
M. Taine in the introduction to his _History of English Literature_
makes a strong protest, it will be remembered, against this method of
writing history. He cites Carlyle's _Cromwell_ and Sainte-Beuve's _Port
Royal_ as examples of the opposite and more modern method. In these
event and happening are given but secondary place; in these it is
always rather the subtle underlying causes which are touched on with
particular insistence. It is the tragedy of the soul of Cromwell which
is so memorably recorded by Carlyle; and by Sainte-Beuve it is the
intricate psychology of an entire institution which is laid bare.
It is according to this method, Taine argues, not only that history
should be written, but also that we should study the literature of any
nation. He then proceeds through his several volumes to his memorable
consideration of English literature, dwelling repeatedly on the
psychology of the English people as it manifests itself in their
literature. He calls attention again and again to certain recurring
ideas or ideals which manifest themselves persistently in this
particular race, which haunt it almost as an individual is haunted by
certain not always definite, yet strongly formative influences.
All this is not very new in substance, yet in application it belongs
distinctly to modern times. It falls in with the spirit of research and
inquiry so active in the past half century, and announces as with
prophetic voice--for it was written as much as fifty years ago--the
psychology of nations, of which we only lately begin to speak with real
seriousness.
We have long admitted, it is true, a certain psychology of eras--a kind
of 'soul' of certain times, or 'spirit' of certain ages, manifesting
itself diversely in diverse periods. And, quite as the name of an
individual not alone summons to the mind that individual and no other,
but connotes a particular personality, so such wide phrases as 'The
Elizabethan Age,' 'The Renaissance,' 'The Homeric Age,' the 'Age of
Chivalry' do not alone designate certain ages, but in each case connote
some essential quality which went to render that particular age
memorable and significant. This quality is found to be in every instance
dependent upon some idea or ideal which, drawing its power often from
unremarked and not always discoverable sources, moulds and fashions the
thought and motives of the times.
So the art, the science, the religion, the philosophy of any given age,
all these do but flower from causes that have their roots deep under the
surface; and he who would acquaint himself with any notable period must
study, not so much the outward and obvious facts and happenings of that
period, as the hidden and subtle forces lying beneath all these.
But if the true history of a people cannot be given, or the true spirit
of an era be revealed by a mere citing of events, however important or
carefully chosen, what shall be said of the futility of studying that
infinitely more delicate thing, the history of a human soul, by method
of index and compilation? Yet that is precisely what much of our
accepted and well-credited biography amount to, and we have little of
what might be called the more modern method. One looks in vain in the
average Lives of great men for any careful consideration or analysis of
the remote causes or springs of personality.
Certain biographical facts are, it would seem, expected and provided.
These facts the average biographer sets out in a perfectly conventional
order, somewhat as the host of the conventional inn--I hope I may be
forgiven the comparison--sets out the usual _table d'hote_ in certain
courses time-honored and anticipated. If the biographer is a well-known
man,--if this be at the sign of Chesterton, or Colvin, or Birrell, or
Gosse,--then there will be added, without extra cost, the sprightly
light wine of easy style.
In a well-known biography of Hawthorne we have for chapter titles the
following: 'Early Years'; 'Early Manhood'; 'Early Writings'; 'Brook Farm
and Concord'; 'The Three American Novels'; 'England and Italy'; 'Last
Years.'
In an equally well-known life of Keats,--and in lieu of something better
it is perhaps the least unsatisfactory of them all,--we have, among
other page and chapter headings: 'Leigh Hunt'; 'Determination to
Publish'; 'Poems of 1817'; 'Margate'; 'Winter at Hampstead'; 'Doubts of
Success'; 'Northern Tour'; 'Absorption in Love and Poetry'; 'Haydon and
Money Difficulties'; 'The Odes'; 'The Plays'; 'Recast of Hyperion';
'Last Days and Death.' It is true that there comes a whole chapter at
the very last, under the promising title, 'Character and Genius'; but
reading it hopefully, one finds but talk of 'self-control,' 'sweetness
of disposition' 'sympathy,' 'good sense,' 'honor,' 'manliness'--with a
somewhat hackneyed reference to the Greek purity and the mediaeval
richness of imagery which characterize Keat's poetry, and a few words
concerning his influence on a later age.
Now, considering the vivid and marvelous personality of the man, if
these be not the bare bones and laboratory skeletons of biography, then
I do not know bare bones or skeletons when I have sight of them.
No one questions that these are helpful if one is studying anatomy; that
they may even be admitted as necessary to an understanding of that
timely temple of abode in which the fiery spirit for a while took up its
residence; but to call this a 'life' of the man, which gives so little
knowledge of his spirit's habits of living!
If I turn to a little volume of Shelley on my table, where only eighteen
small pages out of five hundred and ninety-two are devoted, as it
happens, to the same subject, and only at that to the closing incident
of Keats's career,--his untimely death,--I find him spoken of in
somewhat more adequate fashion.
I shall not quote the words metred out in verse, as they stand in the
volume, but shall ask to be allowed to set them down as if they were
mere running prose, as follows:--
For he is gone where all things wise and fair descend.
So much for the sense of shining and resplendent peace that comes with
the going of so large a spirit! But let us read on. It is Urania now who
is addressed concerning the poet:--
Thy youngest dearest one has perished; thy extreme hope, the
loveliest and the last. The bloom whose petals, nipt before they
blew, died in the promise of the fruit, is waste; the broken lily
lies--the storm is overpast. The quick Dreams, the passion-winged
ministers of thought, who were his flocks, whom near the living
streams of his young spirit he fed, and whom he taught the love
which was its music, wander not, wander no more.... And one with
trembling hand clasps his cold head, and fans him with her
moonlight wings, and cries: 'Our love, our hope, our sorrow is not
dead; see on the silken fringe of his faint eyes, like dew upon a
sleeping flower, there lies a tear some Dream has loosened from his
brain.' ... And others came,--Desires and Adorations, Winged
Persuasions, and Veiled Destinies, Splendors and Glooms and
glimmering Incarnations of hopes and fears and twilight Phantasies
... all he had loved and moulded into thought from shape, and hue
and odor and sweet sound, lamented Adonais.... He is made one with
Nature; there is heard his voice in all her music, from the moan of
thunder to the song of night's sweet bird; he is a presence to be
felt and known in darkness and in light, from herb and stone,
spreading itself where'er that Power may move which has withdrawn
his being to its own; ... he is a portion of the loveliness which
once he made more lovely; ... he is gathered to the kings of
thoughts who waged contention with their times' decay, and of the
past are all that cannot pass away.
And this further, this little bit about the poet's grave:--
Here pause, these graves are all too young as yet, to have outgrown
the sorrow which consigned its charge to each; and if the seal is
set, here, on one fountain of a mourning mind, break it not
thou!... From the world's bitter wind seek shelter in the shadows
of the tomb. What Adonais is, why fear we to become?
It will be objected that this is not biography at all, but poetry, and
very famous poetry at that. I am aware, full aware of it. I have only to
remark that, since there is a beating upon the gates and the starved
people demand bread and there is none, 'Why then, let them eat cake!'
There is perhaps more pure essence of biography in lines like these,
which purport not to be biography at all, than in any pompous
three-volume 'Life,' which comes decked in scarlet, and heralded by the
trumpet-blasts of publishers well versed in the psychology of
advertising.
Or take all these supreme lines away and leave me but that one by the
same hand, 'The soul of Adonais like a star,' and I am not sure that I
am not richer by that, than by many biographical chapters.
II
It has always seemed to me that the best possible biographer, even
including the immortal Boswell, would have been Horatio. Ophelia might
have been better still had she kept her poor senses. Even having lost
them, she seems to do no less than draw back a shimmering veil from the
soul and life of Hamlet in the few remarks she makes concerning him:
'Where is the beauteous majesty of Denmark?'
Horatio, never having dreamed, certainly, of writing an account of
Hamlet's life at all, yet seems to set forth in his few words more of
Hamlet than is to be found in all the commentaries. What is there not
revealed in his 'Here, sweet lord, at your service,' and his 'O my dear
lord!'
There is further evidence of his qualification, of course, in Hamlet's
unforgettable words concerning him:--
'Horatio, thou art e'en as just a man
As e'r my conversation coped withal.'
and at the very last,--
'Horatio, I am dead,
Thou livest; report me and my cause aright
To the unsatisfied.'
But that which fits Horatio more than all, it seems to me, to bring
report to others concerning the life, the motives and character of his
'sweet lord,' is that he had long been aware of those fearful and
familiar hauntings of his lord's mind--hauntings which, for the purposes
of the play, must be dramatized into the very form of a ghost, but which
were in reality something far subtler still, and less bodied. It was of
these delicate and awful visitings that Horatio was, more than the rest,
aware and sensitively expectant.
It is such an eagerness, such an expectancy, and such an ability as
well, I take it, that are needed by him who would understand the life of
any great man and would hope to interpret it to others. He who would
give us an adequate study of any life whatsoever must, it would seem,
reckon on and investigate those subtle hauntings of mind and spirit of
which the biographers have as yet, apparently, taken so little account,
having left such investigations to be followed, and that only along
somewhat morbid lines, by the psychiatrists and psycho-analysts.
For these, it is true, have recognized clearly that there are such
hauntings, though they do not call them such. It is recognized by them
that there is frequently an unconscious retention by the mind, and a
repression within the unconscious self, of former striking and formative
experiences. Freud and his followers tell us that an unpleasant or
shocking experience, long dead to the conscious memory, may nevertheless
return to haunt and newly shock and distress us when consciousness
sleeps. In dreams it is, they tell us, that morbid fears or hateful
repressions or unlawful desires of all kinds return to move where they
will, unhindered and invulnerable. In whatever scientific or psychologic
terms we speak of these things, it all sounds very ghostlike, and the
more so when one recalls that these haunting manifestations vanish at
the awaking to consciousness, as ghosts at the crowing of the cock;
then, be it ghost or old repression, 'the extravagant and erring spirit
hies to his confines' once more.
The avowed task of the Freud school is the anticipation, the
expectation, and at last the careful analysis of these morbid
hauntings, these repressions and forbidden desires. It is the
self-appointed task of the psycho-analyst to watch for these things, to
recognize them, speak with them, and examine into their meanings and
purposes, as Hamlet with the ghost of his father on the battlements of
Elsinore. All this has been looked upon--rightly, no doubt--as
epoch-making in the history of psychology, and more especially as it
applies to the study and treatment of nervous and mental disorders.
But to deal only with the morbid hauntings of the mind is to look upon
the gloom and night of things only. For, by the same token, it would
seem there must be other presences not morbid; other haunting
influences, not dreadful, but lovely. There must be without doubt many
an exquisite or startling experience or impression, long since passed
over into the world of our dead memories--perhaps the frail beauty of
flower or leaf, some unearthly delicacy of laced moonlight on the floor
of the forest, the spaciousness of dawn, the beauty of women, the kindly
clinging touch of hands--some impression which found in us, in early
youth it may be, a congenial abode, and returning to us again and again
(never in the full daylight of consciousness, but in a dim and twilight
fashion, in some delicate haunting form 'as the air invulnerable'),
obtains at last a ghostly possession of some chamber of the mind, holds
from there a kind of subtle occupancy of our thoughts, in time a sort
of dominion over our personalities, and even at last, it must be, exerts
a definite influence upon our characters.
For it is precisely the exact and delicate response to such subtle
visitings, whether it be a visiting of fear and dread or of beauty and
delight, which, expressing itself in the individual's manner of living
and taste for life, we call personality; which, manifesting itself in
his art, we call style; which, exhibiting itself in his purpose and
action, we call character.
It is in this sense, then, that the lives of all of us, and very
especially the lives of the great, may, without fantastical imagery, be
said to be haunted. And if this be true, then it is obvious that,
without reference to such hauntings, no so-called 'lives' or biographies
of great men can be complete.
III
It seems likely that the new criticism must more and more take into
account these delicate and psychological reckonings; but meanwhile how
shall we, the unelect, seeking unacademically among the lives of the
great, become aware of these subtle influences which forever haunt the
characters and the works of great men? How shall we put ourselves
sensitively in touch with that which is so essentially characteristic;
with those mysterious influences of personality which, working together,
make, for instance, a poem of Arnold's a poem of Arnold's unmistakably,
and a painting of Raphael's so much his own that we are wont to speak
of it as 'a Raphael'?
Again I turn to Horatio. There must first of all be in us, I believe, a
deep love of the men whom we would know--'O my sweet lord!' There must
be on our part all that loyal and watchful friendship which would make
any hearsay or report concerning them a matter of interest to us;
further, there must be that full intimate companionship to be had, not
by hearsay at all, but only by living day after day with these men and
their works; and lastly, there must be in us a sensitiveness to
spiritual and haunting presences in their lives--a patient and sensitive
watching as it were upon the battlements of Elsinore.
If we turn from Leonardo, as Pater presents him to us, to another
notable and equally strong type--to Isaiah; if we ignore all those facts
usually insisted upon in biography; if we dismiss as less important the
kings and rulers of his age and the dramatic yet negligible
circumstances of his times; and if we give our attention rather to the
subtle predilections and preoccupations of this great mind, we find
Isaiah visited again and again, haunted unceasingly it would seem, by
certain effects and meanings, and lovelinesses and memories of light.
Again and again we see him sensitive to its manifestations. Here and
there throughout his writings we find him noting and delighting in its
return, greeting it with relief and rejoicing, as after a long night's
watching; calling to his people passionately to arise and waken from the
darkness of their sins, holding up his own streaming torch, as it were,
across their night, in shining prophecy of the better luminary already
on the way, which was to be the light of the world.
'Arise! Shine!' he cries, 'for thy light is come and the glory of the
Lord is risen upon thee.... The People that walked in darkness have seen
a great light; they that dwell in the land of the shadow of death, upon
them hath the light shined.... Then shall thy light break forth as the
morning.... And the Gentiles shall come to thy light, and kings to the
brightness of thy rising.... The Lord shall be to thee an everlasting
light, and thy God thy glory.... The sun shall no more go down, neither
shall thy moon withdraw herself.'
His mention also of trees and their boughs and roots and branches is
even more frequent still. Here, likewise, 'two ideas' seem 'especially
fixed in him as reflexes of things that touched his brain in childhood
beyond the measure of other impressions.'
When we study Dante carefully and watch with him also, we find him to
have been, hardly less than Isaiah, haunted by the same loveliness, the
beauty and meaning of light. For him not less, light would seem to have
had a most insistent and spiritual appeal. Far too many to quote are his
innumerable exact and sensitive descriptions of it, his careful and
repeated observations of its gradations and delicate alterations.
Memorably, too, he has it in mind in speaking of Saint Francis of
Assisi, that sun of righteousness risen out of the mediaeval night. 'Call
it not Assisi,' he cries; 'if you would truthfully name it, call it the
East because of the sun that rose there.'
Likewise, one who watches patiently and devotedly with Homer cannot but
become sensible at last how his mind entertains constantly the thought
and moving beauty of the various air. Perpetually, it must have been, he
was haunted by the freshness and loveliness of it as it moved across the
AEgean and the windy isles of Greece. Pure and awful, in the semblance of
the blue-eyed Athena, it was the air which passed among his Greek hosts
at eventide, or went stirringly among the serried ranks, reviving with a
touch the old spirit in them; or in the tent of Achilles took him by the
yellow hair, and directed him, a spirit and a presence.