‘I would not have offered it to the emperor; but, verily, we will
carouse therewith--_vinum bonum et suave lætificat_.’
‘_Gurgle, gluck, gluck!_’ sang the Wine as it came forth again into the
world after a century of slumber.
‘Hearest thou?’ cried the old man. ‘_Gluck, gluck!_ They are words of
good omen. This day I have had good luck.’
And he drank solemnly--_feierlich_--to his guest.
‘The wine,’ said Flaxius, as he touched his glass to his host’s--it
was like the ringing of cow-bells heard afar on a mountain side in
the Tyrol--‘is like a butterfly long imprisoned as a chrysalis under
earth, which now comes forth to shine in light for a brief space--the
butterfly gladdens the child, and wine gladdens man.’
‘And poetry like that gladdens everybody,’ cried the host; ‘albeit I
confess that I love it best when it is printed in a rare old book.’
‘What is this?’ said Flaxius, taking up a little manuscript.
‘Truly a quaint thing, a fourteenth-century transcript, or translation
of a far older work of earliest German times, the _Vision of Baldemar_,
now lost. It is unique. I pray you accept it as a gift.’
Flaxius would have declined the offer, but the old man, who had
inquired the name of his visitor, took a pen and wrote therein in
a very ancient, but distinct, hand, which seemed to be uniform and
contemporary with the writing of the manuscript itself:
_To the Moſt Learned and Very Honourable
DOMINO FLAXIO_
_This Work is preſented with humbleſt Regards as a trifling
Teſtimonial of inexpreſſible Gratitude from his
Moſt Devoted Servant_
_BUCHERWURM SCHMOKER._
~‘Hast mir geschassen großes Glück;~
~Doch wenig geb’ ich Dir zurück:~
~Giebst Du mir Was,~
~Schenk’ ich Dir Das.’~
‘_Great pleasure hast thou made for me
But little I return thee.
Thou giv’st a lot,
I but a jot._’
‘What a thing,’ thought Flaxius, ‘it is for man in this life to set
his mind on something, and when so setting to make a dead set, cooking
all his victuals, as the gypsies say, “_adré yeck Kekavi_,” in one
pot. For they hold by tradition--the Romany cook-book being as yet
unpublished--that when all conceivable food is thus boiled it acquires,
like Mississippi punch, an additional agreeable flavour with every
new ingredient, eggs, carrots, ham, butter, chickens, bread, turnips,
honey, hedgehogs, snails, oatcake, rice, herrings, a sucking-pig,
mutton-chops, raisins, bacon, cold plum-pudding, cabbage and anything
else edible being welcomed to the _mixtum-compositum_; which is
declared to be so palatable that the author of _Rookwood_ assures us
that when Dick Turpin the highwayman first tasted it he actually shed
tears of delight.
‘So hath it been with the venerable Bucherwurm Schmoker who hath
cast into the one passion of antique literature all the emotions and
feelings, hopes and affections of life. I have heard that among the
Five Thousand Commandments which were appended by the devil and Society
to those of Moses--the which I do propose some day to publish--there is
one which says, “Put not all thy eggs into one basket.” But there is
great pleasure in breaking commandments, especially when one desires,
like the French lady, to make with them an _omelette aux confitures_;
and there is also great delight in concentrating our feelings, as the
devil observed when he saw that the mystics united the excess of piety
with that of earthly pleasure. “_Cela suffit_”--quotha.
‘This venerable Schmoker seems to me like the thorn-bush of the poet,
of which it would be hard to say how it could ever have been young, it
looks so old and grey, like rock or stone all overgrown with lichens to
the very top, or thoughts of some primeval time which fain would give
it all the grime which they have gathered up. Yet underneath this aged
thorn there is a lovely hill of moss, wherein are exquisite curling
lines and scarlet-orange-tawny-sable-ivory flowers, which, seen with
a glass, do to perfection resemble the enlacements and tracery and
fancied flowers of an illuminated manuscript; and therein and therefore
do the fairies love to dwell and sit love-making of a moon-lit night.
‘And if I think thereon I needs must laugh, remembering that all the
world thinks that such an erudite old Dryasdust leads the most arid,
infestive, humdrum, prosy life, given to old and long-forgotten things,
buried in the rust of antiquity, palætiology, archæology, which all,
like the Dismal Grove in Tieck’s wondrous tale, do but conceal a sunny
elfin-land of quaint caprice and merry, wanton joy. As every antiquary
and folk-lorist who is anything better than a mechanical maker of
tables, and a clipper and collector of variants, well knows.
_Serious_, indeed! Now, an’ I had time, good people, I would tackle
Calvin, Knox, and Chalmers, and Young of the _Night Thoughts_, and show
you what Mephistopheli, what humbugs, what subtle deceivers of self or
others, and what mad humorists they all were, and in what Hampton Court
mazes they led their followers. For, meaning it or not, it came to
that; and ye who cannot perceive it, think that the partition six feet
high, over which ye cannot peep, is the top of heaven’s wall. Yea, I
repeat: For, meaning it or not, it comes to that!
* * * * *
‘_Vale, Corcule!_ Good-night, old Parable, for there is in thee a
deeper meaning than men divine. Sleep well, O mirror of ten thousand
books, whom I have made happy by adding unto them “one volume more!” as
Dibdin sweetly sang.’
When Flaxius opened the door, it was a bright, full-moon-lit night;
clear and fresh, and gently breezy, gauzy cloudlets flitting now and
then before the stars, like transparent veils blowing away or waving
before the eyes of Eastern girls. So he went to his dwelling, and
the night being young, sat down to read the little book, which ran as
follows:
BALDEMAR’S TROUME
THE VISION OF BALDEMAR
As in slumber once I lay
In a wood one summer day,
All beneath an oaken tree,
With green leaf-curtain, fair to see;
Flowers peeped upward from below
To the sun as he did go,
And the drops fresh from the showers
Looked lovingly upon the flowers,
Like bright eyes as clear as glass,
Or diamonds glittering in the grass;
And all around from many a bloom
There came a pleasant, fresh perfume,
While in the forest all day long,
Dame Nightingale did tell her song.[12]
By me ran a spring full clear,
And it sounded to my ear,
With its steady murmuring,
Like children who a lesson sing,
Or as one who reads alone
To himself in single tone;
While the wind in harmony
Rustled sweet in every tree.
Flies and bees the measure kept
All in chorus--so I slept.
Now whether I from sleep awoke
To life again beneath the oak,
Or whether I did deeper sink,
In dreams, I know not what to think,
Yet this I know that I was there,
Where I had been, but in the air;
And all around there was a change,
Unto another life and strange,
As if one should sleep in spring
When all is green and burgeoning;
Then wake in autumn to behold
The trees all clad in red and gold;
For other sounds I seemed to hear,
Other scents were in the air,
Elfin light shone all around,
And new herbage on the ground,
There full silently had come,
As strangers move into a home.
There I sat but had not known,
It was on the Wildè Stone[13]
That I had fallen into sleep,
Since there the elves their watches keep,
And he who sitteth there an hour
For all that week is in their power.
But this secret well I knew,
And now lived to find it true,
That the man who passes well
Into the spirit of the spell,
Meets with nothing to alarm,
Nor will come to any harm;
Many marvels he may learn,
Many wondrous things discern,
If he sleep an hour alone
In faith upon the Wildè Stone.
As in silence still I sat,
Marvelling in amaze thereat,
I soon heard a sudden sound,
As of a footstep on the ground,
And looking up, there in the wood,
A vision fair before me stood:
When all at once the forest rang,
In chorus all the birdés sang,
And wondrous flowers in bright array,
Came shooting to the light of day,[14]
And in all her beauty’s sheen
Before me stood the fairy queen.
Thus she spoke: ‘O minstrel dear!
Long have I longed to see thee here!
For it is in our destiny
That if not placed in poetry,
Although we live in lordly state,
With wealth and power and titles great,
We’ll pass unto oblivion’s shame
Unless some poet notes our name.
There is more life in one small song
Than in a century ‘mid the throng,
With all their work, and war and strife;
Song only is eternal life.
‘Mid all great deeds--too great to last--
Men seek the poems of the past,
And one sweet lay, as all may see,
May make an Immortality.
It may full long forgotten lie,
Yea sleep for many a century,
Hidden away in darkling nook,
Yet be revived in many a book:
For though states fade and tongues may die,
There is no death for poetry,
Since unto it we well may say:
“A thousand years are as a day,”
’Tis God’s own voice which, when it spoke,
In poetry the silence broke:
To inspiration doth belong,
And it alone, the power of song.
Even we who are of fairy kind
Are least of all unto it blind,
Since all the life which we receive,
Legends or lays unto us give.
For all of our appointed time
Is measured by the poet’s rhyme,
Unless we’re sung we soon are not,
And even our name would be forgot:
Therefore to me, O Baldemere!
Thou art indeed of men most dear.
Long I have lived in hope to be
But mentioned in thy minstrelsy:
Even in one line be’t low or high,
For then I know I ne’er can die.’
All had grown silent as she spoke,
No sound the forest stillness woke:
The nightingales had ceased to sing,
The brook had stopped its murmuring,
A sudden peace had come to pass
Over the wrangling flowers and grass,[15]
For well I noted all had been
Listening with joy unto their queen,
With some sweet hope that they might be
Included in the poetry:
And this I did with love recall,
That fairy life is in them all.
Her voice again the silence broke,
And wavering with the sunshine spoke:
As it came flickering through the leaves:
As broideress her pattern weaves,
Singing meanwhile a melody
With her design in harmony,
And thus she said: ‘O come with me
And thou a wondrous sight shalt see
Fit for a song, my Baldemere,
If thou canst read its meaning clear,
For we must go.’ I naught could say,
So followed as she showed the way.
Right wild and rugged was the road,
Through passes strange, which long we trode:
Great rocks above us darkly hung,
While peaks like towers o’er them sprung,
And grim and griesly was the way,
Scaping so oft the light of day,
We did not seem to climb a steep
But rather down in earth to creep,
Wherein we heard and time again
The sough of winds, the rush of rain,
Then wended from a passage cold
Into a forest grey and old
Where every tree seemed all alone,
For they had changed long since to stone;
Every leaf and twig was there,
As if they had been carven fair,
And all y-wrought in imagery
As men do work in ivory,
Making for brides their caskets rare:
Anon we came unto a stair;
Each step whereof was wondrous broad,
And strangely high. It was with awe
I asked its meaning, and was told,
’Twas made by giant hands of old.
Yet up we went, nor did we stop,
Till we had gained the mountain top,
Where in the twilight golden brown
Upon a bench we sate adown.
Long it was ere I could speak,
For both my soul and tongue were weak
With all the wonderful surprise
At what was spread before my eyes;
For never yet in dream or scroll
Came such a picture to my soul,
Nor yet in visions told of eld,
Compared to what I there beheld.
Straight from our feet like any wall,
An awful precipice did fall,
Ne’er had I thought of one so steep
It seemed ten thousand fathoms deep,
While down below a valleyed bay
Spread beyond vision far away,
And the wild waters of that sea
Showed all that in eternity,
Since earth hath been or Time began,
Was ever seen by living man.
Rising from darkness into light,
Then fading into sheen more bright,
A life which was a sparkling spring,
And then anon evanishing,
For there were forms of women fair,
Like ivory--then lost in air,
Or buried in the billow-caves,
As goblins vanish into graves,
Strong warriors with stretching arms
Pursuing still those wondrous forms,
Or revelling as at glorious feasts:
With all were mingled fearful beasts,
Up-leaping, roaring, rioting,
Withal full many an idle thing,
As minstrels carolling their lays,
And forms of long-forgotten days,
And dwarfs who dwell in mossy stone,
And spectres flitting all alone,
And dead men floating in their shrouds,
With dragons breathing fiery clouds,
Blinding all round with ruddy light,
And then in darkness lost to sight:
There too were castles, halls, and bowers,
With wondrous battlements and towers,
Beyond them others rising high,
And others still unto the sky,
With gardens broad and forests fair,
Yet ever fading into air,
And fields with fountains interlaid,
Where troops of merry children played,
With gentle deer and snow-white lambs,
And nuns a-singing even-psalms;
Fading anon with all the rest,
Like sun-set clouds into the West:
On earth there is no thing I ween
Which in that sea could not be seen,
All that is common, all that’s rare,
All that is humble or is fair
With every known or unknown thing,
Coming to life and vanishing,
All blending, tending into one,
As vapours fade before the sun:
Chasing, embracing, or anon
In deadly strife, and then agone:
Therein I felt all that can be
In Life to all Eternity.
Long at that wondrous sea I gazed,
As one half pleased but more amazed,
Till step by step upon my soul
There came the feeling of the whole,
And then a strange and boundless awe
As I conceivéd what I saw,
Until the thought which seized me there
Became too terrible to bear,
For what surpasses poetry,
I ween is far too much for me:
Life hath its limits, and this strife
Is far too great for mortal life:
A shudder seemed in me to rise,
And, over-borne, I closed my eyes
When a soft whisper in my ear
Said, ‘’Tis enough, O Baldemere!’
And as the fairy to me spoke,
I started at the word and woke.
I lay upon the Wildè-Stone,
All in the forest and alone,
Deep-thinking on the things I’d seen,
And then I sang, ‘O Fairy Queen!
Thou shalt in deed recorded be
By Baldemere in poetry:
God grant that this my humble lay,
May live in truth for many a day.
Would I could give it grace divine!
Not for my honour, but for thine!’
* * * * *
‘_Haec fabula docet_,’ wrote the master, ‘firstly, that there is no
earthly immortality like that of Song. Now it is to be noted that in
their day and time men give little real heed to any save a very few
of the greatest living poets, treating minor bards with a neglect
which history clearly shows is most undeserved. For the _vitality_ of
even fourth-class poetry is marvellous. It is recovered and reprinted
centuries after it has been forgotten by all. What scholar is there who
when raking over piles of fifteenth-century, theological, legal, and
even historical rubbish, which will only sell for waste-paper, has not
been charmed at finding in it--O happy man!--a book of ballads, or even
of poetry of _any_ kind? ’Tis little thought upon, this life of song.
There’s not one poet of the present day, however small his art and weak
his lay, who hath not better chance to live for aye, and speak at times
to some congenial soul than any other fancied famous man.
‘There is many a small being--ay, more than any dream--who will live
like a fly in amber, merely because he has known, conversed with, and
thereby identified himself with some poet, so small that even the fly
did not know that the other had ever rhymed at all. It is little to
the credit of any civilised country that it can excessively honour and
envy and glorify an Upper Ten, or Twenty Thousand in Great Britain,
or a Four Hundred in America, and not include in the number more than
a dozen poets. If people cared more for poetry they would enlarge the
number, for there are in very truth some hundreds cruelly ignored--all
sneering critics to the contrary.
He is an evil being, to me, who would belittle, crush, or condemn
almost any poetry whatever. For even in the very mediocre, where there
has been inspiration and love, there is a gleam as of something divine,
which I must needs reverence. Truly, indeed, the muse may have been
only a very small fairy, elf, or goblin, or even a witch, but it has a
spark of the supernatural or occult; treat it tenderly therefore, as
something born with mystic powers!
And there is also a lesson in the Bookseller himself, which, rightly
read and widely understood, would do good in the world. There are
thousands of people who would fain travel into foreign lands and see
strange people, when there are all around them in life men far more
marvellous than Turks or Indians, or beings well-nigh as queer as
goblins. They go about silently like shadows in a kind of twilight of
society, living in a fourth dimension, enjoying senses all unknown to
us, hearing sounds which never reach our ears, lit by a light which
never cheered our eyes. Such are the collectors and readers, like this
old man, who steep their very hearts of hearts in the feelings of
the past, and give to every thought that chiaroscuro of the romance
of age which is the final beauty of art. It is one of the sarcasms
of truth that such a Dryasdust, who has become among fools the very
type and symbol of common-place dulness, is in reality all the time
in a fairyland too fine for the Philistine with his great horny eyes
to even perceive; for he in a blackletter book feels with exquisite
sympathy all that romance which was in all life in an earlier age,
feels it directly and _in itself_, while another only gets a coarse
burlesque or imitation of it from novels, plays, and Lord-Mayor-Shows
of poems.
There are very few in this world who feel or even understand in
reality this spirit in which the Bookseller has his being, more’s the
pity!--for it brings a great deal of happiness to the possessor. Hand
in hand with it, like a twin, goes the fairy of Collecting. This spirit
too is far misunderstood. He who, having got together more money than
he can spend, ridicules the collector of postage-stamps or buttons is
like the lunatic in Hogarth’s picture, laughing at his like. They are
all, one or the other, inspired by what the gambler-scholar Pascasius
Justus called the _insatiabilis habendi libido, similis ventriculi
magnæ voracitatis_, the unsatiable desire of possession, which is
like a gnawing, ceaseless hunger, the which, as he adds, may do no
harm if it be properly supplied with good food. The delight of the
collector is in renewing certain pleasant feelings which he experienced
before, which some think is nine-tenths of the pleasure of love, or of
intoxication, or anything else; and that in very truth man is _man_
because he has more memory and passion than any other animal, and more
ganglion. Nay, there have been rakes and Don Juans who found their
chief pleasure, not in pleasure, but in accumulating conquests, that
is, by collecting, by adding to the list which some pitiful Leporello
bears.
Now, as Collecting is a human-animal instinct (as is shown by the
raven, magpie, and other creatures), and love and religion and art were
nothing more in their beginnings, it may be that as we improve, it too
may be developed to a holy thing or a great institution; for in it lies
the secret of history and of folk-lore and of preservation of relics;
which will be clear to ye all when ye read my great work on the science
of collecting in all its branches.
[12]
‘Vor dem Walde was sîn ganc,
Dâ diu naktegale sanc.’
_Walther von der Vogelweide._
[13]
‘Der arme Grêgôrius,
Nü beleip er alsus;
Uf dem Wilden Steine,
Aller gnāden eine.’
_Hartmann von der Aue._ 1320. _Gregorius._
[14]
‘Bluomen springent,
Vogellên singent,
Wünneclîchen schal.’
_Leutold von Seven._ A.D. 1230.
[15]
‘Alsô stritents ûf dem Anger
Bluomen un de Klë.’
_Leutold von Seven._ (_Maienwunder._)
FLAXIUS IN THE FUTURE
‘What I was is passèd by,
What I am away doth fly,
What I shall be none do see,
Yet in that my beauties be.’--_Old Epitaph._
I KNOW not to what land or region strange the immortal Magian betook
himself, after this century had reached its end and tumbled over
Time’s great precipice. All that I know is this, that it was in some
realm within the realm of shadowed sense, where he forgot the stars,
the moon, and sun; where he forgot the blue above the trees; where
he forgot the dells where water runs; where he forgot the chilly
autumn breeze; where he forgot there had been newspapers or stocks or
pigeon-shoots at Hurlingham, or wondrous things at the Aquarium, or
Piccadilly or the Savile Club--yea, all of earth and what there is of
life--most useful, beautiful, æsthetical--all this had vanished like
the lightest dream.
Now whether he had dipped a while in Dîs, to talk with Pluto, whom he
much admired, or sailed to some celestial violet star, to exercise
strange senses here unknown, expanding in the fourth di-men-si-on, this
is certain, that it was about the time when the Twentieth century had
attained its majority of two thousand, Flaxius found himself again on
earth, suddenly dropped from some supernal height or upward shot from
the great world below.
... Seated on a very comfortable bench under the lee of the Great Wall
of China in a remote corner of Manchuria, he was not there a minute ere
he realised that remarkable, not to say radical, changes had swept over
the face of the whole world since his evanishment.
For he observed, firstly, that the Great Wall, which he had last
seen in a most dilapidated, eroded, crumbled, and top-worn state
of oxidation and moss-grown rustiness, was now, so far as he could
behold--and it wound like a serpent up and down rolling hills, and over
tremendous rocks for half a century of miles, till it vanished in an
invisible, grey thread--completely restored as if by contract, all its
ancient towers being likewise correctly renewed, as if by some Chinese
Gilbert Scott. At its base, at the rate of about one to the acre, were
bungalows of graceful construction, but all without chimneys,[16] rising
from tufted groves and gardened plains, in whose architecture the old
Chinese style seemed curiously mingled with other influences. A very
striking feature indeed was that of many colossal towers, about a mile
one from the other; every one, as Flaxius estimated, being about one
thousand feet in height.
Hearing a rustling sound hard by, he, looking up, perceived a man
alighting from what he at once understood was a flying-machine. It had
come unseen and noiselessly as an owl, whence, as Flaxius divined, it
had proceeded with incredible speed. The new-comer, who seemed to be
about thirty years of age, was a man of attractive countenance, manly,
and evidently intelligent, altogether the right sort of man for the
right sort to meet. He was clad in a graceful, but extremely practical
garb of some material new even to the Sage. As for nationality, he was
certainly European, and probably English, but his first greeting to the
Immortal was in a singular jargon, which appeared to be based upon the
Pidgin, once dear to Flaxius in bygone years.
‘_Come sta_, my flin? What one-piecey man you be? My no savvy you--_no
hè te jamas visto_--never look-see you before one-time, allo my life-o!’
‘I understand you,’ replied Flaxius; ‘but I also speak English.’
‘Oh, of course,’ replied the stranger with a genial smile, ‘only a
fellow gets so into the habit of pidgining; it comes from flying
about----’
‘Naturally,’ observed Flaxius.
The stranger darted at him a quick glance, and then looked about
anxiously, as if fearful that some one had overheard them, observing in
a hurried, low tone:
‘I say, don’t do that again. Joking’s against the law, you know.’
‘I did not know it,’ replied Flaxius. ‘But why are you so much
astonished at not knowing me?’
‘Because,’ replied the stranger, ‘I cannot recall ever meeting anybody
in all my life whom I had not seen before. You know how it is nowadays,
when everybody goes flying about, and all the world is acquainted. And
as you are evidently a superior sort of person, I am indeed _utterly_
amazed at not knowing you, because I would have sworn that from China
to Peru there was not one gentleman with whom I was not, I may say,
intimate.’
‘But you must count your acquaintances by _millions_,’ replied Flaxius.