--He said, as I returned it to him, You have heard military men say that
such a person had an eye for country, have n't you? One man will note
all the landmarks, keep the points of compass in his head, observe how
the streams run, in short, carry a map in his brain of any region that
he has marched or galloped through. Another man takes no note of any of
these things; always follows somebody else's lead when he can, and gets
lost if he is left to himself; a mere owl in daylight. Just so some men
have an eye for an equation, and would read at sight the one that
you puzzled over. It is told of Sir Isaac Newton that he required no
demonstration of the propositions in Euclid's Geometry, but as soon as
he had read the enunciation the solution or answer was plain at once.
The power may be cultivated, but I think it is to a great degree a
natural gift, as is the eye for color, as is the ear for music.
--I think I could read equations readily enough,--I said,--if I could
only keep my attention fixed on them; and I think I could keep my
attention on them if I were imprisoned in a thinking-cell, such as the
Creative Intelligence shapes for its studio when at its divinest work.
The young man's lustrous eyes opened very widely as he asked me to
explain what I meant.
--What is the Creator's divinest work?--I asked.
--Is there anything more divine than the sun; than a sun with its
planets revolving about it, warming them, lighting them, and giving
conscious life to the beings that move on them?
--You agree, then, that conscious life is the grand aim and end of
all this vast mechanism. Without life that could feel and enjoy,
the splendors and creative energy would all be thrown away. You know
Harvey's saying, omnia animalia ex ovo,--all animals come from an
egg. You ought to know it, for the great controversy going on about
spontaneous generation has brought it into special prominence lately.
Well, then, the ovum, the egg, is, to speak in human phrase, the
Creator's more private and sacred studio, for his magnum opus. Now, look
at a hen's egg, which is a convenient one to study, because it is large
enough and built solidly enough to look at and handle easily. That would
be the form I would choose for my thinking-cell. Build me an oval with
smooth, translucent walls, and put me in the centre of it with Newton's
“Principia” or Kant's “Kritik,” and I think I shall develop “an eye for
an equation,” as you call it, and a capacity for an abstraction.
But do tell me,--said the Astronomer, a little incredulously,--what
there is in that particular form which is going to help you to be a
mathematician or a metaphysician?
--It is n't help I want, it is removing hindrances. I don't want to see
anything to draw off my attention. I don't want a cornice, or an angle,
or anything but a containing curve. I want diffused light and no single
luminous centre to fix my eye, and so distract my mind from its one
object of contemplation. The metaphysics of attention have hardly been
sounded to their depths. The mere fixing the look on any single object
for a long time may produce very strange effects. Gibbon's well-known
story of the monks of Mount Athos and their contemplative practice is
often laughed over, but it has a meaning. They were to shut the door of
the cell, recline the beard and chin on the breast, and contemplate the
abdominal centre.
“At first all will be dark and comfortless; but if you persevere day
and night, you will feel an ineffable joy; and no sooner has the soul
discovered the place of the heart, than it is involved in a mystic and
ethereal light.” And Mr. Braid produces absolute anaesthesia, so that
surgical operations can be performed without suffering to the patient,
only by making him fix his eyes and his mind on a single object; and
Newton is said to have said, as you remember, “I keep the subject
constantly before me, and wait till the first dawnings open slowly by
little and little into a full and clear light.” These are different, but
certainly very wonderful, instances of what can be done by attention.
But now suppose that your mind is in its nature discursive, erratic,
subject to electric attractions and repulsions, volage; it may be
impossible for you to compel your attention except by taking away
all external disturbances. I think the poets have an advantage and a
disadvantage as compared with the steadier-going people. Life is
so vivid to the poet, that he is too eager to seize and exhaust its
multitudinous impressions. Like Sindbad in the valley of precious
stones, he wants to fill his pockets with diamonds, but, lo! there is
a great ruby like a setting sun in its glory, and a sapphire that, like
Bryant's blue gentian, seems to have dropped from the cerulean walls
of heaven, and a nest of pearls that look as if they might be unhatched
angel's eggs, and so he hardly knows what to seize, and tries for too
many, and comes out of the enchanted valley with more gems than he can
carry, and those that he lets fall by the wayside we call his poems. You
may change the image a thousand ways to show you how hard it is to make
a mathematician or a logician out of a poet. He carries the tropics with
him wherever he goes; he is in the true sense felius naturae, and Nature
tempts him, as she tempts a child walking through a garden where all the
finest fruits are hanging over him and dropping round him, where
The luscious clusters of the vine
Upon (his) mouth do crush their wine,
The nectarine and curious peach,
Into (his) hands themselves do reach;
and he takes a bite out of the sunny side of this and the other, and,
ever stimulated and never satisfied, is hurried through the garden, and,
before he knows it, finds himself at an iron gate which opens outward,
and leaves the place he knows and loves--
--For one he will perhaps soon learn to love and know better,--said the
Master.--But I can help you out with another comparison, not quite so
poetical as yours. Why did not you think of a railway-station, where the
cars stop five minutes for refreshments? Is n't that a picture of the
poet's hungry and hurried feast at the banquet of life? The traveller
flings himself on the bewildering miscellany of delicacies spread before
him, the various tempting forms of ambrosia and seducing draughts of
nectar, with the same eager hurry and restless ardor that you describe
in the poet. Dear me! If it wasn't for All aboard! that summons of the
deaf conductor which tears one away from his half-finished sponge-cake
and coffee, how I, who do not call myself a poet, but only a questioner,
should have enjoyed a good long stop--say a couple of thousand years--at
this way-station on the great railroad leading to the unknown terminus!
--You say you are not a poet,--I said, after a little pause, in which I
suppose both of us were thinking where the great railroad would land us
after carrying us into the dark tunnel, the farther end of which no man
has seen and taken a return train to bring us news about it,--you say
you are not a poet, and yet it seems to me you have some of the elements
which go to make one.
--I don't think you mean to flatter me,--the Master answered,--and, what
is more, for I am not afraid to be honest with you, I don't think you do
flatter me. I have taken the inventory of my faculties as calmly as if I
were an appraiser. I have some of the qualities, perhaps I may say many
of the qualities, that make a man a poet, and yet I am not one. And in
the course of a pretty wide experience of men--and women--(the Master
sighed, I thought, but perhaps I was mistaken)--I have met a good many
poets who were not rhymesters and a good many rhymesters who were not
poets. So I am only one of the Voiceless, that I remember one of you
singers had some verses about. I think there is a little music in me,
but it has not found a voice, and it never will. If I should confess the
truth, there is no mere earthly immortality that I envy so much as the
poet's. If your name is to live at all, it is so much more to have it
live in people's hearts than only in their brains! I don't know that
one's eyes fill with tears when he thinks of the famous inventor of
logarithms, but song of Burns's or a hymn of Charles Wesley's goes
straight to your heart, and you can't help loving both of them, the
sinner as well as the saint. The works of other men live, but their
personality dies out of their labors; the poet, who reproduces himself
in his creation, as no other artist does or can, goes down to posterity
with all his personality blended with whatever is imperishable in his
song. We see nothing of the bees that built the honeycomb and stored it
with its sweets, but we can trace the veining in the wings of insects
that flitted through the forests which are now coal-beds, kept
unchanging in the amber that holds them; and so the passion of Sappho,
the tenderness of Simonides, the purity of holy George Herbert, the
lofty contemplativeness of James Shirley, are before us to-day as if
they were living, in a few tears of amber verse. It seems, when one
reads,
“Sweet day! so cool, so calm, so bright,”
or,
“The glories of our birth and state,”
as if it were not a very difficult matter to gain immortality,--such an
immortality at least as a perishable language can give. A single lyric
is enough, if one can only find in his soul and finish in his intellect
one of those jewels fit to sparkle “on the stretched forefinger of
all time.” A coin, a ring, a string of verses. These last, and hardly
anything else does. Every century is an overloaded ship that must sink
at last with most of its cargo. The small portion of its crew that get
on board the new vessel which takes them off don't pretend to save a
great many of the bulky articles. But they must not and will not leave
behind the hereditary jewels of the race; and if you have found and cut
a diamond, were it only a spark with a single polished facet, it will
stand a better chance of being saved from the wreck than anything, no
matter what, that wants much room for stowage.
The pyramids last, it is true, but most of them have forgotten their
builders' names. But the ring of Thothmes III., who reigned some
fourteen hundred years before our era, before Homer sang, before the
Argonauts sailed, before Troy was built, is in the possession of Lord
Ashburnham, and proclaims the name of the monarch who wore it more than
three thousand years ago. The gold coins with the head of Alexander the
Great are some of them so fresh one might think they were newer than
much of the silver currency we were lately handling. As we have been
quoting from the poets this morning, I will follow the precedent, and
give some lines from an epistle of Pope to Addison after the latter had
written, but not yet published, his Dialogue on Medals. Some of these
lines have been lingering in my memory for a great many years, but I
looked at the original the other day and was so pleased with them that I
got them by heart. I think you will say they are singularly pointed and
elegant.
“Ambition sighed; she found it vain to trust
The faithless column and the crumbling bust;
Huge moles, whose shadows stretched from shore to shore,
Their ruins perished, and their place no more!
Convinced, she now contracts her vast design,
And all her triumphs shrink into a coin.
A narrow orb each crowded conquest keeps,
Beneath her palm here sad Judaea weeps;
Now scantier limits the proud arch confine,
And scarce are seen the prostrate Nile or Rhine;
A small Euphrates through the piece is rolled,
And little eagles wave their wings in gold.”
It is the same thing in literature. Write half a dozen folios full of
other people's ideas (as all folios are pretty sure to be), and you
serve as ballast to the lower shelves of a library, about as like to be
disturbed as the kentledge in the hold of a ship. Write a story, or a
dozen stories, and your book will be in demand like an oyster while
it is freshly opened, and after tha--. The highways of literature are
spread over with the shells of dead novels, each of which has been
swallowed at a mouthful by the public, and is done with. But write a
volume of poems. No matter if they are all bad but one, if that one is
very good. It will carry your name down to posterity like the ring of
Thothmes, like the coin of Alexander. I don't suppose one would care a
great deal about it a hundred or a thousand years after he is dead,
but I don't feel quite sure. It seems as if, even in heaven, King
David might remember “The Lord is my Shepherd” with a certain twinge of
earthly pleasure. But we don't know, we don't know.
--What in the world can have become of That Boy and his popgun while all
this somewhat extended sermonizing was going on? I don't wonder you
ask, beloved Reader, and I suppose I must tell you how we got on so
long without interruption. Well, the plain truth is, the youngster was
contemplating his gastric centre, like the monks of Mount Athos, but in
a less happy state of mind than those tranquil recluses, in consequence
of indulgence in the heterogeneous assortment of luxuries procured with
the five-cent piece given him by the kind-hearted old Master. But you
need not think I am going to tell you every time his popgun goes
off, making a Selah of him whenever I want to change the subject.
Occasionally he was ill-timed in his artillery practice and
ignominiously rebuked, sometimes he was harmlessly playful and nobody
minded him, but every now and then he came in so apropos that I am
morally certain he gets a hint from somebody who watches the course of
the conversation, and means through him to have a hand in it and stop
any of us when we are getting prosy. But in consequence of That Boy's
indiscretion, we were without a check upon our expansiveness, and ran on
in the way you have observed and may be disposed to find fault with.
One other thing the Master said before we left the table, after our long
talk of that day.
--I have been tempted sometimes,--said he, to envy the immediate
triumphs of the singer. He enjoys all that praise can do for him and at
the very moment of exerting his talent. And the singing women! Once in
a while, in the course of my life, I have found myself in the midst of
a tulip-bed of full-dressed, handsome women in all their glory, and when
some one among them has shaken her gauzy wings, and sat down before
the piano, and then, only giving the keys a soft touch now and then to
support her voice, has warbled some sweet, sad melody intertwined with
the longings or regrets of some tender-hearted poet, it has seemed to me
that so to hush the rustling of the silks and silence the babble of the
buds, as they call the chicks of a new season, and light up the flame of
romance in cold hearts, in desolate ones, in old burnt-out ones,--like
mine, I was going to say, but I won't, for it isn't so, and you may
laugh to hear me say it isn't so, if you like,--was perhaps better than
to be remembered a few hundred years by a few perfect stanzas, when
your gravestone is standing aslant, and your name is covered over with a
lichen as big as a militia colonel's cockade, and nobody knows or cares
enough about you to scrape it off and set the tipsy old slate-stone
upright again.
--I said nothing in reply to this, for I was thinking of a sweet singer
to whose voice I had listened in its first freshness, and which is now
only an echo in my memory. If any reader of the periodical in which
these conversations are recorded can remember so far back as the first
year of its publication, he will find among the papers contributed by
a friend not yet wholly forgotten a few verses, lively enough in their
way, headed “The Boys.” The sweet singer was one of this company of
college classmates, the constancy of whose friendship deserves a better
tribute than the annual offerings, kindly meant, as they are, which for
many years have not been wanting at their social gatherings. The small
company counts many noted personages on its list, as is well known to
those who are interested in such local matters, but it is not known
that every fifth man of the whole number now living is more or less of
a poet,--using that word with a generous breadth of significance. But
it should seem that the divine gift it implies is more freely dispensed
than some others, for while there are (or were, for one has taken his
Last Degree) eight musical quills, there was but one pair of lips which
could claim any special consecration to vocal melody. Not that one that
should undervalue the half-recitative of doubtful barytones, or
the brilliant escapades of slightly unmanageable falsettos, or the
concentrated efforts of the proprietors of two or three effective notes,
who may be observed lying in wait for them, and coming down on them
with all their might, and the look on their countenances of “I too am
a singer.” But the voice that led all, and that all loved to listen to,
the voice that was at once full, rich, sweet, penetrating, expressive,
whose ample overflow drowned all the imperfections and made up for all
the shortcomings of the others, is silent henceforth forevermore for all
earthly listeners.
And these were the lines that one of “The Boys,” as they have always
called themselves for ever so many years, read at the first meeting
after the voice which had never failed them was hushed in the stillness
of death.