An Undiscovered Island
I
Come unto these yellow sands,
And then take hands;
Curtsied when you have, and kiss'd
The wild waves whist,
Foot it featly here and there;
And, sweet sprites, the burden bear.
One winter evening, some time after the memorable year of our first
visit to the Forest of Arden, Rosalind and I were planning a return to
that enchanting place, and in the glow of the fire on the hearth were
picturing to ourselves the delights that would be ours again, when the
clang of the knocker suddenly recalled us from our dreams. Hospitably
inclined, as I trust and believe we are, at that moment an interruption
seemed like an intrusion. But our momentary annoyance was speedily
dispelled when the library door opened, and, with the freedom which
belongs to old friendship, the Poet entered unannounced. No one could
have been more welcome on that wintry night than this genial and human
soul, bound to us by many ties of familiar association as well as by
frequent neighbourliness in the woods of Arden. It had happened again
and again that we had found ourselves together in the recesses of the
Forest, and enchanting beyond all speech had been those days and nights
of mingled talk and dreams.
The Poet is one of the friends whose coming is peculiarly welcome
because it always harmonises with the mood of the moment, and no speech
is needed to bring us into agreement. Rosalind took the visitor into
our plan at once, and urged him to go with us on this mysterious
journey; whereupon he told us that, by one of those delightful
coincidences which are always happening to people of kindred tastes and
aims, this very errand had brought him to our door. The time had come,
he said, when he could no longer resist the longing for Arden! We all
smiled at that sudden outburst; how well we knew what it meant! After
months of going our ways dutifully in the dust and heat of the world,
the longing for Arden would on the instant become irresistible. Come
what might, the hunger for perfect comprehension and fellowship, the
thirst for the beauty and repose of the deep woods, must be satisfied,
and forsaking whatever was in hand we fled incontinently across the
invisible boundaries into that other and diviner country. No sooner
had the Poet made his confession than we hastened to make ours, and,
without further consideration, we resolved the very next day to shake
the dust from our feet and escape into Arden. This question settled, a
great gaiety seized us, and we began to plan new journeys for the years
to come; journeys which had this peculiar charm--that they belonged to
a few kindred spirits; the world knows nothing of them, and when some
obscure reference brings them to mind, smiles its sceptical smile, and
goes on with its money-getting. Rosalind drew from its hiding-place
the chart of this world of the imagination which we were given to
studying on long winter evenings, and of which only a few copies exist.
These charts are among the few things not to be had for money; if they
fall into alien hands they are incomprehensible. It is true of them,
as of the books which describe the Forest of Arden, that they have a
kind of second meaning, only to be discerned by those whose eyes detect
the deeper things of life. It is another peculiarity of these charts
that while science has indirectly done not a little for their
completeness, the work of preparing them has fallen entirely into the
hands of the poets; not, of course, the writers of verse alone, but
those who have had the vision of the great world as it lies in the
imagination, and who have heard that deep and incommunicable music
which sings at the heart of it.
Rosalind spread this chart on the table, and we drew our chairs around
it, noting now one and now another of the famous places of which all
men have heard, but which to most men are mere figments of dreams.
Here, for instance, in a certain latitude plainly marked on the margin,
is that calm sweet land of the Phaeacians where reigns Alcinoüs the
great-souled king, and the white-armed Nausicaä sings after her bath on
the river's brink:
Without the palace court and near the gate
A spacious garden of four acres lay;
A hedge inclosed it round, and lofty trees
Flourished in generous growth within--the pear
And the pomegranate, and the apple tree
With its fair fruitage, and the luscious fig,
And olive always green. The fruit they bear
Falls not, nor ever fails in winter time
Nor summer, but is yielded all the year.
The ever-blowing west wind causes some
To swell and some to ripen; pear succeeds
To pear; to apple, apple, grape to grape,
Fig ripens after fig.
Here, as Rosalind moves her finger, lies the valley of Avalon, whither
Arthur went to heal his overmastering sorrow, and where the air is
always sweet with the smell of apple blossoms. In this deep wood lives
Merlin, still weaving, as of old, the magic spells. There is the
castle of the Grail, and as our eyes fall on it, suddenly there comes a
hush, and we seem to hear the sublime antiphony, choir answering choir
in heavenly melody, as Parsifal raises the cup, and the light from
above smites it into sudden glory. We are travelling eastward,
touching here and there those names which belong only to the greatest
poetry, when Rosalind's finger--the index of our wanderings--suddenly
pauses and rests on an island, not large, as it lies amid that silent
sea, but wonderful above all islands to which thought has ever wandered
or where imagination has ever made its home. Under the light of the
lamp, with Rosalind's face bending over it, no island ever slept in a
deeper calm than this little circle of land about which the greatest of
the poets once evoked the most marvellous of tempests. Rosalind's
finger does not move from that magical point, and, peering on the
chart, our eyes suddenly meet, and a single thought is in them all.
Why not postpone Arden for the moment and explore the isle of Miranda's
morning beauty and Prospero's magical wisdom?
"Why not?" says Rosalind, speaking aloud, and instead of answering her
question the Poet and I are wondering why we have never gone before.
Straightway we fall to studying the map more closely; we note the
latitude and longitude; it is but a little way from the mainland where
stretches the green expanse of the Forest of Arden. We might have gone
long ago if we had been a little more adventurous; at least we think we
might at the first blush; but when we talk it over, as we proceed to do
when Rosalind has rolled up the chart and put it in its place, we are
not quite so sure about it. It is one of the singular things about
this kind of journeying that one learns how to travel and where to go
only by personal observation. Before we went to Arden, for instance,
we had no clear knowledge of any of these countries; we had often heard
of them; their names were often on our lips; but they were not real to
us. That happy day when Arden ceased to be a dream to us was the
beginning of a rapid growth of knowledge concerning these invisible
countries; one by one they seemed to rise within the circle of our
expanding experience until we became aware that we were masters of a
new kind of geography. That delightful discovery was not many years
behind us, but this new knowledge had already become so much a part of
our lives that we often confused it with the knowledge of commoner
things.
That night, before we parted, our plans were completed; on the morrow,
when night came, the fire on the hearth would be unlighted, for we
should be on Prospero's island.
II
O, rejoice
Beyond a common joy; and set it down
With gold on lasting pillars: in one voyage
Did Claribel her husband find at Tunis;
And Ferdinand, her brother, found a wife
Where he himself was lost; Prospero, his dukedom,
In a poor isle; and all of us, ourselves,
Where no man was his own.
"Honest Gonzalo never spoke truer word," said the Poet, answering
Rosalind, who had been quoting the old counsellor's summing up of the
common good fortune on the island when Prospero dispelled his
enchantments and the shipwrecked company found themselves saved as by
miracle. It was our first evening on the island; one of those
memorable nights when all things seem born anew into some larger
heritage of beauty. The moon hung low over the quiet sea, sleeping now
under the spell of the summer night, as if no storm had ever vexed it.
So silent, so hushed was it that but for the soft ripple on the sand we
should have thought it calmed in eternal repose. Far off along the
horizon the stars hung motionless as the sea; overhead they shone out
of the measureless depths of space with a soft and solemn splendour.
Not a branch moved on the great trees behind us, folded now in the
universal mystery of the night. The little stretch of beach, over
whose yellow sands the song of the invisible Ariel once floated, lay in
the soft light fit for the feet of fairies, or the gentle advance and
retreat of the sea. The very air, suffused through all that vast
immensity with a mysterious light, seemed like a dream of peace.
In such a place, at such an hour, one shrinks from speech as from the
word that breaks the spell. When one is so much a part of the sublime
order of things that the universal movement of force that streams
through all things embraces and thrills him with the consciousness of
common fellowship, how vain is all human utterance! The greatest of
poems, the sublime harmony in which all things are folded, has never
been spoken, and never will be. No lyre in any human hand will ever
make those divine chords audible. The poets hear them, know them, live
by them; but no verse contains them. So much a part of that wondrous
night were we that any speech would have seemed like a severance of
things that were one; all the deep meaning of the hour was clear to us
because we were included in it. How long we sat in that silence I do
not know; we had forgotten the world out of which we had escaped, and
the route by which we came; we knew only that an infinite sea of beauty
and wonder rippled on the beach at our feet, and that over us the
heavens were as a delicate veil, beyond which diviner loveliness seemed
waiting on the verge of birth.
It was Rosalind who spoke at last, and spoke in words which flashed the
human truth of the hour into our thoughts. On this island we had found
ourselves; so often lost, at times so long forgotten, in the busy world
that lay afar off. And then we fell a-talking of the island and of all
the kindred places where men have found homes for their souls; sweet
and fragrant retreats whence the noise of strife and toil died into a
faint murmur, or was lost in some vast silence. At Milan, Prospero
found the cares of state so irksome, the joy of "secret studies" so
alluring, that, despairing of harmonising things so alien, he took
refuge with his books, and found his "library was dukedom large
enough." But the problem was not solved by this surrender; out of the
library, as out of the dukedom, he was set adrift, homeless and
friendless, until he set foot on the island where he was to rule with
no divided sway. Here was his true home; here the spirits of the air
and the powers of the earth were his ministers; here his word seemed
part of the elemental order; he spoke and it was done, for the winds
and the sea obeyed him. And when, in the working out of destiny which
he himself directed, he returns to the dukedom from which he had been
thrust out, he is no longer the Prospero of ineffective days.
Henceforth he will rule Milan as he rules the quiet dukedom of his
books; he has become a master of life and time, and his sovereignty
will never again be disputed.
Prospero did not find the island; he created it. It was the necessity
of his life that he should fashion this bit of territory out of the
great sea, that here his soul might learn its strength and win its
freedom; that here, far from dukedom and courtiers, he might discover
that a great soul creates its own world and lives its own life. Milan
may cast him out, as did Florence another of his kind, but this human
rejection will but bring him into that empire which no enmity may
touch, in the calm of whose divinely ordered government treasons are
unknown. No man finds himself until he has created a world for his own
soul; a world apart from care and weakness and the confusions of
strife, in which the faiths that inspire him and the ideals that lead
him are the great and lasting verities. To this world-building all the
great poetic minds are driven; within this invisible empire alone can
they reconcile the life that surrounds them with the life that floats
like a dream before them. No great mind is ever at rest until in some
way the Real and the Ideal are found to be one. Literature is full of
these beautiful homes of the soul, reared without the sound of chisel
or hammer by the magic of the Imagination--divinest of the faculties,
since it is the only one which creates. The other faculties observe,
record, compare, combine; the imagination alone uses the brush, the
chisel, or the pen!
If one were to record these kingdoms of the mind, how long and luminous
would be the catalogue! The golden age and the fabled Atlantis of the
elder poets; the "Republic" of the broad-browed Athenian; the secret
gardens, impregnable castles, sweet and inaccessible retreats of the
mediaeval fancy; the Paradise of Dante; the enchanting world through
which the Fairy Queen moves; the "Utopia" of the noble More; the Forest
of Arden--what visions of peace, what glimpses of beauty, accompany
every name! To all these worlds of supernal loveliness there is a
single key; fortunate among men are they who hold it!
III
Be not afraid; the isle is full of noises,
Sounds and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not.
Sometimes a thousand twanging instruments
Will hum about mine ears; and sometimes voices,
That, if I then had waked after long sleep,
Will make me sleep again; and then, in dreaming,
The clouds methought would open, and show riches
Ready to drop upon me, that, when I waked,
I cried to dream again.
When the sun rose the next morning, we rose with it, eager to explore
our little world about which the sea never ceased to sing its mighty
hymn of solitude and mystery. There was something impressive in the
consciousness of our isolation; between us and any noise of human
occupation the waters were stretched as a barrier against which all
sound died into silence. There was something enchanting in the beauty
and strangeness of this tiny continent, unreported by any geography,
unmarked on any chart save that which a few possess as a kind of sacred
heritage, untravelled as yet by our eager feet. There was something
thrilling in the associations that touched the island with such a light
as never fell from sun or star. With beating hearts we set out on that
wondrous exploration. Who does not remember the thrill of the first
discovery of a new world; that joy of the soul in possession of a great
new truth which passes all speech? There are hours in this troubled
life when the mists are lifted and float away like faint clouds against
the blue, and the great world lies like a splendid vision before us,
and "the immeasurable heavens break open to the highest," and in a
sudden rift of human limitation the whole sublime order opens before
us, sings to us out of the fathomless depths of its harmony, thrills us
with a sudden sense of God and of the undiscovered range and splendour
of our lives; and when they have passed, these hours remain with us in
the afterglow of clearer vision and deeper faith. Such hours are the
peculiar joy of those who hold the key of the Imagination in their
grasp and are able to unlock the gate of dreams, or make themselves the
companion of the great explorers in the realms of truth and beauty.
These are the secret joys which people solitude and make the quiet days
one long draught of inspiration.
In such a mood our quest began and ended. We skirted the beach; we
plunged deep into the recesses of the woods; we stretched ourselves on
the broad expanse of greensward in the shade of the great boughs; we
followed the rivulet to the hushed and shadowy solitude where it issued
from the moss-grown rock; wherever we bent our step the song of the sea
followed us, and the day was calm and cool as with its breadth and
freshness. The island had its own beauty; the beauty of virgin forests
and untrodden paths, of a certain fragrant sweetness gathered in years
of untroubled solitude, of a certain pastoral repose such as comes to
Nature when man is remote but that which gave us the thrill of
something strangely sweet and satisfying, something apart from the
world we had left, was not anything we saw with eye. All that was
visible was beautiful, but it was a loveliness not unfamiliar; it was
the invisible continually breaking in upon our consciousness that laid
us under a spell. We were conscious of something lovelier than we saw;
a world not to be discerned by sight, but real and unspeakably
beautiful to the soul. Even to Caliban the isle was "full of noises;"
"sounds and sweet airs that give delight" did not escape his brutish
sense. Sometimes "a thousand twangling instruments" hummed about his
ears; sometimes voices whose soft music was akin to sleep floated about
him; and sometimes the clouds "would open and show riches ready to drop
upon" him. There was a sweet enchantment in the air to which the
dullest could not be indifferent. It hovered over us like some finer
beauty, just beyond the vision of sense, and yet as real, almost as
tangible, as the things we touched and saw.
Alone as we were upon the little island, we felt the diviner world of
which that tiny bit of earth was part; we knew the higher beauty of
which all that visible loveliness was but a sign and symbol. The song
of the sea, breathed from we knew not what depths of space, was not
more real than this melody, haunting the island and dropping from the
air like blossoms from a ripening tree. Turn where we would, this
music went with us; it mingled with the murmur of the trees; it blended
with the limpid note of the rivulet; it melted with the breeze that
swept across the grassy places. All day, and for many another day, we
were conscious of a larger world of harmony and beauty folding in our
little world of tree and soil; we lived in it as freely and made it
ours as fully as the bit of earth beneath our feet. Through all our
talk this thread of melody was run, and our very thoughts were set to
this unfailing music. In those days the Poet wrote no verses; what
need of verse when poetry itself, that deep and breathing beauty of the
soul of things, filled every hour and overflowed all the channels of
thought and sense!
But if we were dumb in the hearing of a music beyond our mastery, we
were not blind to the parable conveyed in every sound and sight; in
those delicious days and nights a great truth cleared itself forever in
our minds. We know henceforth how all dream-worlds, all beautiful
hopes and visions and ideals, are fashioned. They are not of human
making; they but make visible things which already exist unseen; they
but make audible sounds which are already vocal unheard. He who
dreams, sleeps, and another fills the chamber of his brain with moving
figures; he who aspires, hopes and believes, unlocks the door, and
another world, already furnished with beauty, lies before him. Our
ideals are God's realities. We build the new worlds of our knowledge
out of the dust of worlds already swinging in space; the stately homes
of our imagination, rise on foundations of the common earth.
Prospero's island was made of common soil; flowers, trees, and grass
grow on it as they grow about the homes of work and care. The same sea
washes its shores which beats upon the coasts of ancient continents;
over it bends that same sky which enfolds all the generations of men.
Prospero's island is no mirage, hovering unreal and evanescent on the
far horizon; no impalpable phantom of reality floating like some
strayed flower on the lovely sea of dreams. It is as solid as the
earth, as real as the soul that fashioned it. No miracle was wrought,
no law violated, in its making. Beautiful, true, and enduring, it lies
upon the waters; a haven for men in the storms that beat upon the high
seas of this troubled life. That which is strange and wonderful about
it is the music which forever hovers about it; that which makes it
enchanted ground is the sound of voices sweet as the quietness of
sleep, the vision of clouds ready to drop unmeasured riches! An island
solid as the great world out of which it was fashioned, but sweet with
heavenly voices and sublime with heavenly visions--such is the island
of Prospero's enchantments. And such are all true ideals, dreams, and
aspirations. They have their roots in the same earth whence the
commonest weed grows; but the light and life of the heavens are theirs
also. In them the visible and the invisible are harmonised; in them
the real finds its completion in the ideal. The common earth is common
only to those who are deaf to the voices and blind to the visions which
wait on it and make its flight a music and its path a light. Out of
these common things the great artists build the homes of our souls.
Rock-founded are they, and broad-based on our mother earth; but they
have windows skyward, and there, above the tumult of the little earth,
the great worlds sing.
IV
You do yet taste
Some subtilities o' the isle, that will not let you
Believe things certain.
One brilliant morning, the sky cloudless and the sea singing under a
freshening wind, we sat under a great tree, with a bit of soft sward
before us, and talked of Prospero. In that place the master presence
was always with us; there was never an hour in which we did not feel
the spell of his creative spirit. We were always secretly hoping that
we should come upon him in some secluded place, his staff unbroken, and
his book undrowned. But what need had we of sight while the island
encompassed us and the multitudinous music filled the air?
On that fair morning the magical beauty of the world possessed us, and
our talk, blending unconsciously with the music of the invisible choir,
was broken by long pauses. The Poet was saying that the world thought
of Prospero as a magician, a wonder-worker, whose thought borrowed the
fleetness of Ariel, whose staff unleashed the tempest and sent it back
to its hiding-place when its work was done, and in whose book were
written all manner of charms and incantations. This was the Prospero
whom Caliban knew, and this is the Prospero whom the world remembers.
"For myself," said he, "I often try to forget the miracles, so stained
and defiled seem the great artists by this homage which is only another
form of materialism. The search for signs and wonders is always
vulgar; it defiles every great spirit who compromises with it, because
it puts the miracle in place of the truth. That which gives a wonder
its only dignity and significance is the spiritual power which it
evidences and the spiritual knowledge which it conveys. To the
greatest of teachers this hunger for miracles was a bitter experience;
he who came with the mystery of the heavenly love in his soul must have
felt defiled by the homage rendered as to a necromancer, a doer of
strange things. The curiosity which draws men to the masters of the
arts has no real honour in it; the only recognition which is real and
lasting is that which springs from the perception of truth and beauty
disclosed anew in some noble form. Prospero was a magician, but he was
much more and much greater than a wonder-worker; not Caliban, but
Ferdinand and Miranda and Gonzalo, are the true judges of his power.
Prospero was the master spirit of the world which moved about him. He
alone knew its secret and used its forces; on him alone rested the
government of this marvellous realm. His command had stirred the seas
and sent the winds abroad which brought Milan and Naples within his
hand; at his bidding the isle was full of sounds; Ariel served him with
tireless devotion; he read the sweet thought that flashed from Miranda
to Ferdinand; he unearthed the base conspiracy of Caliban, Trinculo,
and Stephano; he read the treacherous hearts of Antonio and Sebastian;
in his hand all these threads were gathered, and upon all these lives
his will was imposed. In that majestic drama of human character and
action, powers of air and earth, the highest and the lowest alike
serving, it is a lofty soul and a noble mind possessed by a great
purpose, which control and triumph. The magical arts are simply the
means by which a great end is served; when the work is accomplished,
the staff will be broken and the book sunk beneath the sea, lower than
any sounding of plummet."
"Yes," said Rosalind impulsively, carrying the thought another step
forward, "Prospero deals with natural, substantial things for great,
real ends, not with magical powers for fantastic purposes. When it
falls in his way, he evokes forces so unusual that they seem
supernatural to those who do not understand his power, but the end
which lies before him is always real, enduring, and noble; something
which belongs to the eternal order of things."
"For that matter," I interrupted, "it grows more and more difficult to
distinguish between the forces and the achievements that we have
thought real and possible, and those which have seemed only dreams and
visions. Men are doing things every day by mechanical agencies which
the most famous of the old magicians failed to accomplish. The visions
of great minds are realities discovered a little in advance of their
universal recognition."
"As I was saying," continued the Poet, "most men hold Prospero to be a
mere wonder-worker, a magician who puts his arts on and off with his
robe; they do not know that he stands for the greatest force in the
world. For the Imagination is not only the inspiring leader of men in
their strange journey through life, but their nearest, most constant,
and most practical helper and sustainer. That our souls would have
starved without the Imagination we are all, I think, agreed; without
Imagination we should have seen and remembered nothing on our long
journey but the path at our feet. The heavens above us, the great,
mysterious world about us, would have meant no more to us than to the
birds and the beasts that have perished without thought or memory of
the beauty which has encompassed them. All this the Imagination has
interpreted for us. It has fashioned life for us, and the dullest mind
that plods and counts and dies is ministered to and enriched by it. It
does magical things. It puts on its robe and opens its book, and
straightway the heavens rain melody and drop riches upon us. But this
is its play. In these displays of its art it hints at the resources at
its command, at the marvels it will yet bring to pass. Meanwhile it
has made the earth hospitable for us and taught men how to live above
the brutes."
The Poet stopped abruptly, as if he had been caught in the act of
preaching, and Rosalind gave the sermon a delightful ending.
"I wonder," she said, "if love would be possible without the
Imagination? For the heart of love is the perception of a deep and
genuine fellowship of the soul, and the end of love is the happiness
which comes through ministry. Could we understand a human soul or
serve it if the Imagination did not aid us with its wonderful light?
Is it not the Imagination which enables me to put myself in another's
place, and so to sympathise with another's sorrow and share another's
joy? Could a man feel the sufferings of a class or a race or the world
if the Imagination did not open these things to him? And if he did not
understand, could he serve?"
No one answered these questions, for they made us aware on the instant
how dependent are all the deep and beautiful relations of life on this
wonderful faculty. But for this "master light of all our seeing," how
small a circle of light would lie about our feet, how vast a darkness
would engulf the world!
V
O wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,
That has such people in 't!
We had never thought of the island in the old days save as lashed by
tempests; but now the suns rose and set, dawn wore its shining veil and
night its crest of stars and not a cloud darkened the sky; we seemed to
be in the heart of a vast and changeless calm. There was no monotony
in the unbroken succession of the days, but the changes were wrought by
light, not by darkness. The singing of the sea, never rising into
those shrill upper notes which bode disaster, nor sinking into the deep
lower tones through which the awful thunder of the elements breaks,
came to us as out of the depths of an infinite repose. The youth of an
untroubled world was in it. The joy of effortless activities breathed
through it. We felt that we were once more in the morning of the
world's day, and hope gave the keynote to all our thought. Life is
divided between hope and memory; when memory holds the chief place, the
shadows are lengthening and the day declining.
It was one of the pleasures of the island that we were alone upon it.
There was no trace of any other human occupation, although we never
forgot those who had been before us in these enchanting scenes. One
morning, when we had been talking about the delight of seclusion,
Rosalind said that, although the silence and repose were really
medicinal, people had never seemed so attractive to her as now when she
remembered them under the spell of the island. It seemed to her, as
she recalled them now, that the dull people had an interest of their
own, the vulgar people were not without dignity, nor the bad people
without noble qualities. The Poet, who had evidently been giving
himself the luxury of dreaming, declared that we cannot know people
save through the Imagination, and that lack of Imagination is at the
bottom of all pessimism in philosophy, religion, and personal
experience. A fact taken by itself and detached from the whole of
which it is part is always hard, bare, repellent; it must be seen in
its relations if one would perceive its finer and inner beauty; and it
is the Imagination alone which sees things as a whole. The theologians
who have stuck to what they call logic have spread a veil of sadness
over the world which the poets must dissipate. "I do not mean," he
added, "that there are not sombre and terrible aspects of life, but
that these things have been separated from the whole, and discerned
only in their bare and crushing isolated force. The real significance
of things lies in their interpretation, and the Imagination is the only
interpreter."
I had often had the same thought, and found infinite consolation in it;
indeed, I rested in it so securely that I would trust myself with far
more confidence to the poets than to the logicians. The guess of a
great poetic mind has as solid ground under it as the speculation of a
scientist; it differs from the scientific theory only in that it is an
induction from a greater number of significant facts. The Imagination
follows the arc until it "comes full circle;" observation halts and
waits for further sight.
Rosalind thought it very beautiful that Miranda's first glance at men
should have discovered them so fair and noble; there was evil enough in
some of them, but standing beside Prospero Miranda saw only the "brave
new world." I remembered at that moment that even Caliban discloses to
the Imagination the germ of a human development; has not another poet
written his later story and recorded the birth of his soul? It was
characteristic of Rosalind that she should see the people in the
marvellous drama through Miranda's eyes, and that straightway the whole
world of men and women should reveal itself to her in a new light. "To
see the good in people," she said, "is not so much a matter of charity
as of justice. Our judgments of others fail oftenest through lack of
Imagination. We fail to see all the facts; we see one or two very
clearly, and at once form an opinion. To see the whole range of a
human character involves an intellectual and spiritual quality which
few of us possess. There is so little justice among us because we
possess so little intelligence. I ought not to pronounce judgment on a
fellow-creature until I know all that enters into his life; until I can
measure all the forces of temptation and resistance; until I can give
full weight to all the facts in the case. In other words, I am never
in a position to judge another."
The Poet evidently assented to this statement, and I could not gainsay
it; is there not the very highest authority for it? The time will come
when there will be a universal surrender of that authority which we
have been usurping all these centuries. We shall not cease to
recognise the weakness and folly of men, but we shall cease to decide
the exact measure of personal responsibility. That is a function for
which we were never qualified; it is a task which belongs to infinite
wisdom. The Imagination helps us to understand others because it
reveals the vast compass of the influences that converge on every human
soul like the countless rivulets that give the river its volume and
impetus. To look at men and women through the vision of the
Imagination is to see a very different race than that which meets our
common sight. To this larger vision, within which the past supplements
the present, the great army of men and women moves to a solemn and
appealing music. The pathos of life touches them with an indescribable
dignity; the work of life gives them an unspeakable nobility. Under
the meanest exterior there are one knows not what tragedies of denied
hopes and unappeased longings; behind the mask of evil there shines one
knows not what struggling virtue overborne by impulses that flow from
the past like irresistible torrents. Hidden under all manner of
disguises--weakness, poverty, ignorance, vulgarity--there waits a world
of ideals never realised but never lost; the fire of aspiration burns
in a thousand thousand souls that are maimed and broken, bruised and
baffled, but which still survive. Is not this the unquenchable spark
that some day, in freer air, shall break into white flame? It is the
Imagination only that discerns in a thousand contradictions, a thousand
obscurities, the large design to be revealed when the ring of the
hammer has ceased, the dust of toil been laid, the scaffolding removed,
and the finished structure suddenly discloses the miracle wrought among
those who were blind.
VI
I might call him
A thing divine; for nothing natural
I ever saw so noble.
Rosalind was deeply interested in Prospero; and when the Poet and I had
talked long and eagerly about him, she often threw into the current
some comment or suggestion that gave us quite another and clearer view
of his genius and work. But at heart Rosalind's chief interest was in
Miranda and Ferdinand. The presence of Prospero had given the island a
solemn and far-reaching significance in the geography of the world;
Miranda and Ferdinand had left an unfailing and beguiling charm about
the place. If we could have known the point where these two fresh and
unspoiled natures met, I am confident we should have stayed there by
common but unspoken consent. After all our discoveries in this
mysterious world, youth and love remain the first and sweetest in our
thoughts: there is nothing which takes their place, nothing which
imparts their glow, nothing which conveys such deep and beautiful hints
of the better things to be. Miranda had known no companionship but her
father's, no world but the sea-encircled island, no life but the
secluded and eventless existence in that wave-swept solitude. She had
had the rare good fortune to ripen under the spell of pure, high
thoughts, and so near to Nature that no grosser currents of influence
had borne her away from the most wholesome and consoling of all
companionships. Ferdinand came from the shows of royalty and small
falsities of courtiers; the palace, the city, the crowded,
self-seeking, hypocritical world had encompassed him from youth, robbed
him of privacy, cheated him of that repose which brings a man to a
knowledge of himself, and despoils him of those sweet and
tranquillising memories which grow out of a quiet childhood as the wild
flowers spring along the edges of the woods.
Coming, one from the stillness of a solitary island and the other from
the roar and rush of a court and a city, these two met, and there
flashed from one to the other that sudden and thrilling intelligence
which on the instant gives life a new interpretation and the world an
all-conquering loveliness. Nowhere, surely, has the eternal romance
found more significant setting than on this magical island, about which
sea and sky, day and night, weave and weave again those vanishing webs
of splendour in which day-break and evening stars are snared; with such
music throbbing on the air as invisible spirits make when the command
of the master is on them! Here, surely, was the home of this drama of
the soul, the acting of which on the troubled stage of life is a
perpetual appeal to faith and hope and joy! For youth and love are
shining words in the vocabulary of the Imagination--words which contain
the deepest of present and predict the sweetest of future happiness.
So deeply interwoven is the real significance of these words with the
Imagination that, separated from it, they lose all their magical glow
and beauty. Youth moves in no narrow territory; its boundary lines
fade out into infinity. It feels no iron hand of limitation; it
discerns no impassable wall of restriction. Life stretches away before
and about it limitless as space and full of unseen splendours as the
stars that crowd and brighten it. The great wings of hope, unbruised
yet by any beatings of the later tempests, shine through the air,
lustrous and tireless, as if all flights were possible. And far off,
on the remote horizon lines where sight fails, the mirage of dreams
dissolves and reappears in a thousand alluring forms.
Love knows even less of limitation and infirmity. Its eyes, sometimes
oblivious of the things most obvious, pierce the remotest future, read
the innermost soul, discern the last and highest fruitions. The seed
in its hand, hard, black, unbroken, is already a flower to its thought;
out of the bare, stern facts of the present its magical touch brings
one knows not what of joy and loveliness. And when youth and love are
one, the heavens are not bright enough for their thoughts, nor eternity
long enough for their deeds. Amid the shadows of life they seem to
have caught a momentary radiance from beyond the clouds; amid sorrows
and sins and all manner of weariness they are the recurring vision and
revelation of the eternal order. All the world waits on them and
rejoices in them; and the bitter knowledge of what lies before the
eager feet, waiting with passionate hope on the threshold, does not
lessen the perennial interest in that fair picture; for in youth and
love are realised the universal ideals of men. Youth and love are the
mortal synonyms of immortality; all that freshness of spirit, buoyancy
of strength, energy of hope, boundlessness of joy, completeness and
glory of life, imply, are typified in these two things, always
vanishing and yet always reappearing among men. Wearing the beautiful
masks of youth and love, the gods continually revisit the earth, and in
their luminous presence faith forever rebuilds its shattered temples.
That which makes youth and love so precious to us is the play they give
to the Imagination; indeed, the better part of them both is compounded
of Imagination. The horizons recede from their gaze because the second
sight of Imagination is theirs--that prescience which pierces the mists
which enfold us, and discerns the vaster world through which we move
for the most part with halting feet and blinded eyes. Youth knows that
it was born to life and power and exhaustless resources; love knows
that it has found and shall forever possess those beautiful ideals
which are the passion of noble natures.
Are they blind, these flower-crowned, joy-seeking figures; or are we
blind who smile through tears at their illusions? On this island there
is but one answer to that question; for do we not know that they only
who believe and trust discern the truth, and that to faith and hope
alone is true vision given? "As yet lingers the twelfth hour and the
darkness, but the time will come when it shall be light, and man will
awaken from his lofty dreams and find--his dreams all there, and that
nothing is gone save his sleep."