watchful will note this persistency and preoccupation, this recurrent
observation of the air in its manifold behaviors, as of something dear
or memorable, from the swirling, snatching Harpies to the clean-breathed
morning; from the sullen sultriness of Achilles's wrath--a stubborn heat
that will not stir--to the swift flight of windy arrows cleansing the
banquet-hall of Ithaca. So too, that divinity to whom he paid his most
constant homage was Athena, goddess of knowledge and of the air, who
exquisitely typified, not alone wisdom, but, as almost one with wisdom,
the most moving and yielding of the elements.
How well by these things have we come to know Homer--who yet know not by
seven chances even so much as the city of his birth! The bare facts of
biography seem poor when compared with these preferences, these
preoccupations and predilections of the very man himself.
So, too, though we knew little else about him, it were possible to take
the full measure of St. Francis of Assisi by his haunting persistent
love of brotherhood. Nothing else in all his deeds and words is half so
strong. One even comes to believe that his devotion to his beloved Lady
Poverty was--doubtless unknown to himself--rendered solely because it
made him one of a larger fraternity and brother to a greater number of
men. The fire that burned and seared him was his brother, even as was
the beneficent luminary that warmed him. From his triumphant salutation
to his radiant 'brother the sun,' on down to the delicate and gentle
admonishings of his 'little brothers' the birds and fishes, the thought
of an unlimited and unfettered fraternity perpetually dominates his
loving spirit.
In like manner I have noted in my many readings of Matthew Arnold that
his mind seems to have responded with a peculiar sensitiveness, and been
often subject to the sound and meaning of moving waters, and to the
high destiny of stars. It would seem that 'the unplumbed, salt,
estranging sea' came in time to have a definite power over him in the
ordering of his images and even in the determining of his philosophies;
that rivers flowing silver under the sun, or, unguessed, in subterranean
chambers, became to him interpretative of life itself, and their course
and channel and ultimate end a promise to his soul. It is not alone in
his poetry that one finds the 'incognizable sea,' and hears so
frequently of its coasts and beaches and sands and watery wastes and
isles; of voyages and charts; the 'swinging waters and the clustered
pier'; the ebbing and flowing of tides; and the still stars: one comes
upon these in his prose not less, very especially and memorably in his
_Study of Poetry_.
It may be argued that these might be mere favorite figures and symbols;
but it is hardly thinkable, after a careful study of them, that they are
not rather haunting influences and impressions having long a familiar
access to the chambers of his mind, now taking him with his forsaken
Merman,--
Down, down, down!
Down to the depths of the sea!
or with the Neckan beside the green Baltic, pointing out the sounding
deeps, and the starry poles, and interpreting life's meanings by them.
So too,--to pass but lightly from one to another,--we can hardly read
Chaucer devotedly without at length becoming aware how this poet seems
to have been haunted by the idea of the freshness and loveliness of the
day's awaking; his very heroes and heroines again and again seeming to
partake of it, and to be like dawn themselves upon the hills.
Up rose the sun and up rose Emilie.
The 'yonge squire' too, of 'twenty yere of age':--
Embrouded was he, as it were a mede
All full of fresshe floures, white and red.
Singing he was, or floyting all the day.
He was as fresshe as is the moneth of May.
In his most delicate descriptions one feels the presence as of a
breaking light, and the birds seem forever to sing in his green coverts.
It is the dawn and early morning of the year not less which is dear to
him--and which he has chosen, perhaps by an election not wholly his own,
as the season in which to order and assemble his famous pilgrimage.
When that Aprille with his schowres swoote
The drought of Marche hath pierced to the roote
* * * * *
Then longen folke to gon on pilgrimages.
And so, out into the dawn of the year they go, making an immortal
morning of it.
IV
Two more lives suggest themselves as especially rich in the testimony
they bring of haunting influences which permanently moulded them--those
of Keats and Rossetti.
It is well known how completely the early life of Rossetti came under
the influence of the Florence of the Middle Ages, and how from the very
beginning there fell athwart his life and across his very name the
shadow of her greatest son. It is doubtful whether we gain as much
knowledge of him by a study of the modern times in which he lived, as by
turning our attention to the history and ideals of the Florence of the
time of Dante and Lorenzo de' Medici.
'It has been said,' writes Pater, 'that all the great Florentines were
preoccupied with death. _Outre-tombe! Outre-tombe!_ is the burden of
their thoughts, from Dante to Savonarola. Even the gay and licentious
Boccaccio gives a keener edge to his stories by putting them in the
mouths of a party of people who had taken refuge from the danger of
death by plague, in a country house. It was to this inherited sentiment,
this practical decision that to be preoccupied with the thought of death
was in itself dignifying and a note of high quality, that the
seriousness of the great Florentines of the fifteenth century was partly
due; and it was reinforced in them by the actual sorrows of their
times.'
A careful study of Rossetti reveals him also, like them, early and
profoundly preoccupied with death. The richly lighted chambers of his
mind are in their dark moments visited repeatedly by its pity and its
melancholy. Space does not admit of citing here the many evidences; but
if ever a mind was visited, preoccupied, and at last mastered by a
strong idea, a dominant persuasion, the mind of Dante Gabriel Rossetti
was so haunted--so dominated--by the idea of death.
When we turn to Keats's life and writings, they offer examples hardly
less notable. For as Rossetti was haunted by the idea of death, so Keats
would seem from the first to have been preoccupied by the idea of
beauty. By his own memorable confession he had worshiped the spirit of
it in all things; he has not the slightest feeling of humility, he says,
toward anything in existence with three exceptions only: The Eternal
Being, the Memory of Great Men, and the Principle of Beauty.
There is further and ample evidence throughout his writings that he was
perpetually possessed by certain definite forms of beauty: by the beauty
of mead and moon, the wash of waters at their priestly task, the
splendor of the night's starred face; but very especially and more
often, it would seem, was he haunted by that most intimate and tangible
of all lovelinesses--the loveliness of flowers.
There is constant reference to them, a constant recurring delight in
them. Their influence again and again visited him and pervaded his most
delicate observations. The memory of flowers again and again laid a
detaining hand upon him, and must have ministered to him unrecorded in
how many a night hour, mindful, reminiscential, with what gentle
ministerings!
They bloom in his lines everywhere, familiar as the name of the beloved
on the lips. It will be recalled that they stand among those things of
beauty which he names with so much devotion as 'joys forever';
'daffodils, with the green world they live in' shedding an ethereal
sunlight across the more sombre beauty of 'the dooms we have imagined
for the mighty dead.'
So, too, 'hushed cool rooted flowers, fragrant-eyed,' touch his memory
with an ever-freshening sensibility. The greatest pleasure he has
experienced in life, he tells us, is in watching the growth of flowers;
and to him--as Hazlitt recalls--Hebrew poetry was faulty because it made
so little mention of them; and for the converse reason, it would seem
likely, Chaucer and Spenser were forever his delight.
What he specially longs for now, he writes,--he has been ill, and is
within a year of his death,--is 'the simple flowers of Spring.'
In the same letter we get a glimpse of certain early personal
associations not fully followed, which would seem to lend an added
loveliness to flowers which he had always found in themselves so
lovely.
'How astonishingly,' he writes, ' ...does the chance of leaving the
world impress a sense of its natural beauties upon us! Like poor
Falstaff, though I do not "babble," I think of green fields; I muse with
the greatest affection on every flower I have known from my
infancy--their shapes and colors are as new to me as if I had just
created them with a superhuman fancy. It is because they are connected
with the most thoughtless and happiest moments of our lives. I have seen
foreign flowers in hothouses, of the most beautiful nature, but I do not
care a straw for them. The simple flowers of our Spring are what I want
to see again!'
He did see them once again, and then no more.
In the account of his drive to Rome, he who reads sympathetically must
enjoy most, it seems to me, as doubtless Keats did, the autumn flowers
which Severn gathered for him by the way and put into his remembering
hand.
Lying quiet at the last, as Severn tells us, with his hand clasped on
the white carnelian Fanny Brawne had given him, when all other presences
seemed to have departed from him,--Love and Ambition having for the last
time visited him,--and when life itself, with her hand already on the
latch, stood ready to depart, there lingered yet awhile beside him that
old sense of loveliness that had so often, even from earliest infancy,
visited and haunted his spirit--the loveliness and friendliness of
flowers. Already, in some vision of his spirit, he was laid down in
their green world he knew so well and loved. 'I feel,' he said, 'the
flowers growing over me.'
V
The observations I have suggested are here touched on but lightly, and
in passing. I have made no profound study of them, or of the infinitely
subtle psychology which, without doubt, underlies such hauntings of the
spirit. I have but known these men from childhood and from early youth:
have watched with them in many watchings. If there be one boast left me
when I also shall go down into the darkness to which they have so long
lent splendor, it may well be that these I have loved and have cherished
with a whole heart, and would have served them if I could, than Horatio
not less eager: 'Here, sweet lord, at your service.'
But be all that as it may, I am yet persuaded that it is by some such
means as I have here touched on that all biography of the better sort
must in time be written. Turn where we will among the great, we find
facts of date and birth and schooling and death and all outward
circumstance to have been the lesser factors. All these Time at
last--the only lastingly considerable biographer--rejects and throws
away. That which Time retains as precious and imperishable is rather
some fine essence of the spirit, some essential personality built up and
moulded by preferences, predilections, and prepossessions of a most
highly spiritual order. The loves, the desires, the dear delights of
men; the returning dreams, the recurrent longings that will not be
gainsaid; the dead and long-lost dreamings that revisit the glimpses of
our moon--these are indeed the spirits of us, and our immortalities.
Nor is it only as aids to a more just analysis of the great that these
infinitely subtle influences may be considered. _Plus on connait de
langues plus on est de personnes_. If the knowledge of another language
gives one another life, as it were,--makes of one yet another
person,--what may not be said to be added unto us by the knowledge--not
the mere speculation, but the intimate knowledge--of another soul, and
that soul one of the great ones of the earth?
This can be had only by an intimate companionship, not with the mere
flagrant facts, but with the spiritual visitings, the dear desires and
predilections, which haunt all rich lives significantly, perpetually,
even as they haunt life itself.
For life is but an infinitely ancient abode, haunted by recurring
presences surpassingly spiritual; as he knows who has seen death pass in
and out of the ancient chambers in the night watches, or who has heard
the autumn rains how reminiscent in patient woodlands, or who has been
aware of lovely springs long-gone keeping tryst at certain seasons with
the evening star in the twilight, or has felt them stealing back,
ghostly and exquisite, when the April crescent hangs thoughtful and
remote above dark apple-boughs.
In life as in lives, the presences move dark and dread or shining and
lovely; and in the lives of the great as in life itself the shining and
lovely would seem to be the more constant visitants. It is not to be
forgotten that, though Banquo knocks his fearful summons, and the
murdered Dane speaks with hollow mouthings, yet drifting forms dance no
less gayly and delicately on midsummer nights in woodsy hollows by the
moon.
It is noteworthy and remarkable that even those among the great whose
lives have been sombre with tragedy have been visited--indeed they often
more than others--by recurring influences of a most haunting beauty,
like Beethoven, who with ears dull yet heard high symphonies, and
Milton, who with sight closed to all outward loveliness saw yet in the
darkened chambers a vision as of squadrons of bright-harnessed angels
ranged in order serviceable, and knew the pastures and the silent woods
to be full of sweet voices and light steps:--
Oh, friend, I hear the tread of nimble feet,
Hasting this way!
It is of all such haunting and recurrent presences, be they dread or
lovely, that he who most knows life is most aware, and that he who
would know the lives of great men must be most sensitively observant.
These are the things that must be watched for faithfully and with a
whole heart and a single devotion: 'Here, sweet lord, at your service!'
Leaving all prejudice or interest of our own, it is for us, in studying
the lives of great men, to make their affair ours as wholly as may be;
and to forget ourselves in a knowledge so much more dearly to be
desired.
And by no means, I believe, may this be done so surely as by a patient
study of those high elections, those persistent hauntings of mind and
spirit which have influenced and, it may be, in so large a measure
directed the lives of all great men; giving their mind its bent, their
personality its leanings; often guiding, it must be, their motives, and
suggesting their high behaviors; laying upon them, as the ghost upon
Hamlet, purposes and duties thence never to be avoided, inevitably to be
discharged; lending to their speech its lovely and broidered figures, or
to the work of the hand its so memorable distinctions, and to all their
activities that which we call 'characteristic'--something particularly
and peculiarly their own; some chosen and essential and precious manner
of expression which, mortal though they be, lives on, surviving them;
and which is not to be found elsewhere in its kind or measure throughout
all the rich and inexhaustible ages.
[Illustration]
The Acropolis and Golgotha
By Anne C. E. Allinson
The following letters contain a true record of a mind's journey.
ATHENS, _May 1, 1914_.
MY DEAR FRIEND:--
We drove in from Eleusis this afternoon, once more breathlessly watching
the Acropolis offer its white and golden marbles to adornment by the
setting sun. Our Greek winter is drawing to an end and this was our
good-bye visit to the Mysteries. How clear and lucid the beauty of the
place seemed to-day, from the brightness of the sea and the firm
modeling of the mountains to the bloom of the placated earth! Demeter
and Persephone were evidently together in safety, the mystery of the
unseen forgotten in the palpable joy of life restored.
On our way back we stopped, of course, at the Convent of Daphne, to make
ourselves tea in the sunlit courtyard, and to take one more look at the
Byzantine mosaics. I confess that this time they seemed to me quaint
bits of the wreckage of mediaevalism cast upon the shore of Hellenism.
If the mediaeval part of Christianity is as inextricable as you say it
is, then I will grant you that 'Christian thought' is an outworn system
compared with the immortal mind of Greece. As we crossed the bridge over
the Cephisus, the Parthenon, which is far more mutilated than the little
convent, once more sent abroad from broken colonnades and crumbling
pediments the impression that some perennial spirit and undying vitality
had, indeed, as Plutarch once suggested, mingled in its very
composition. The Shrine of Wisdom seemed to take up and weld together
all the mysticism and all the rationalism of the world.
Was it really ten years ago that I wrote to you after such another
journey along the Sacred Way? And ten more still since I last saw you at
the little station of Eleusis? You were going back to Patras to take
ship for Italy, and we--and those others--had ended an afternoon spent
among the ruins by speculating on
those great nights of Demeter,
Mystical, holy.
I remember how sure you were that the wilder ideas in the Mysteries,
which allowed for the redeeming death of gods and over-stated
immortality, were but vagrants in the ordered area of Greek reason and
sanity. Somebody older and wiser than I began to appeal to Plato on
behalf of Greek transcendentalism, but you retorted that he was only the
most disorderly vagabond of them all. Then your train clattered into
the toy station, and you held my hand for a moment and said with a kind
smile, '_Au revoir, petite savante, icibas_.'
But we never have seen each other again and probably never shall. Only
an odd accident, you know, led to the annual letters which have spun the
leisurely web of intimacy between two travelers so disparate in age and
in nationality. You said that the differences in our experience, speech
and traditions were lost in our common pilgrimage to Greece. My youth
reminded you of the youth of Hellas, your age embodied for me her store
of wisdom.
It is your book which has set me on the trail of these old memories. For
when we began our letters you said that, since we knew little of each
other's objective lives, we should have to concern ourselves with inner
impressions; and now your printed opinions open up the question how the
years have treated us in this matter of subjective experience. For one
thing, automatically they have made me your equal. When we met, you, at
forty-five, had experienced middle age. At sixty-five you are but
confirming its revelation. You have yet to come to the fresh experience
of old age. So that now, when I am forty-five, I may for a time talk
with you eye to eye.
Your twenty years, unless you have misled me, have held no transforming
experiences. Joys have but grown more dear and familiar. Sorrows, of a
shattering kind, have let you alone. Your work prospers, your fame is
assured, your children have grown up to be well in body and mind. All
your fruit is ripening in the tranquil sunshine. My years, on the other
hand, sweeping me out of the twenties into the forties, have been packed
with fresh happenings to heart and head and will. Disaster has been left
out of the brew, but almost everything else I have tasted. Perhaps this
difference between us--unless it is one of sex--explains why you, in the
books you have written lately, deal with philosophies and religions as
if they sprang, Athena-like, out of the intellect, while to me they seem
the issue of a normal union: if they are begotten of thought they are
brought forth in anguish by experience.
In this last book you are interested in Hellenism and Christianity as
forms--or attributes--of 'civilization.' I cannot forget that each of
them means the way in which men and women have managed and are managing
their diurnal round. You remember, don't you, the delightful story of
Plato lecturing one day in the Academy on the Absolute Good, and his
audience drifting away from him--except one man who was Aristotle? I
have often wondered about the different things the other men did that
day after they had run away from the Idea! At any rate the complex was
as 'Hellenic' as the conversation of the philosophers.
And when one turns to Christianity,--why, the very philosopher who first
intellectualized a Way and a Life had himself been born anew of the
intensely personal experience of sin and repentance. Do you know
Frederic Myers's _Saint Paul_?--ah! there was a 'Greek scholar' who
understood a Christian!--
So shall all speech of now and of to-morrow,
All he hath shown me or shall show me yet,
Spring from an infinite and tender sorrow,
Burst from a burning passion of regret.
You, reading history, would be willing to obliterate Christianity and
restore Hellenism as a universal ideal. I would rather see them united
in each separate life.
Before I explain what I mean by this I must beguile you by some
agreement with you in your criticism of 'cardinal' Christian doctrines!
You are right, I think, in objecting to the emphasis laid by the church
upon a future life. But you seem to me unnecessarily disturbed by a
theory. Christians, like the followers of many other faiths, do
'believe' in immortality. In fact, I suspect that only specifically
intellectual people actually disbelieve in it--and, with all respect to
yourself, I must add that the opinion of intellectualists on the destiny
of the spirit fails to hold my attention! The authority of the
spiritually gifted--including both Socrates and St. Francis--is
overwhelmingly on the side of the soul being immortal. But does that
make any more difference in the life of the flesh to-day than in the
time of Alcibiades? Mediaeval Christians certainly went mad over heaven
and hell; but who now neglects Demeter's green earth for apocalyptic
visions? You are depressed by a shadow cast from the printed page. Stop
reading and look about at your friends! They are not too startled by the
white radiance of eternity to install the latest electric lights!
As to your horror over the Christian 'adoration of suffering,' that
seems to me better founded in view of the historic and continued
insistence upon the cross as a symbol. I agree with you. I can scarcely
express the revulsion which I feel in picture galleries before the
endless succession of crucifixions and tortured saints. Until we conquer
disease or discard violence there will be physical suffering in the
world. But it is a thing to fight against, not to worship. For man to
have painted and carved as _beautiful_ a racked body seems to me an
insult to the God who made straight limbs and fair flesh, and a strange
betrayal of the Galilean who wished to heal the suffering of others as
long as he lived, and only accepted it for himself as an incidental
necessity at the end. _He_ had no mediaeval disregard for the flesh. The
agony in Gethsemane consisted in facing the obligation to offer up a
body and a life which were very precious to him. The glory consisted in
the sacrifice, not in the temporary torture to which it led. Love, not
suffering, is the core of Christianity. A truer symbol than the defeated
body on the cross would be the same body strong and beneficent among
men.
Here the Periclean sculptor would have done better for us than the
mediaeval painter. But only here. Neither he nor any of his
contemporaries could have understood Gethsemane. Their greatness
consisted in their selection, out of the prodigal abundance which lies
before man, of noble possessions. They were far superior to the Puritans
in that they retained art with morals, and they were equally superior to
the modern Romanticists in that they picked and chose only such beauty
as they believed could be amalgamated with character. Their inferiority
to the Christians lay in their failure to hold their treasures in trust
for humanity.