“The longer I live, and the clearer I discern between true and false in
society, the more does the inclination to live, not as a savage or a
misanthrope, but as a solitary man on the frontiers of society, on the
outskirts of the world, gain strength and grow in me. The birds come and
go and make nests around our habitations, they are fellow-citizens of
our farms and hamlets with us; but they take their flight in a heaven
which is boundless, but the hand of God alone gives and measures to them
their daily food, but they build their nests in the heart of the thick
bushes, or hang them in the height of the trees. So would I, too, live,
hovering round society, and having always at my back a field of liberty
vast as the sky.”
In the same spirit he longed for travel. “When one is a wanderer,” he
writes to his sister, “one feels that one fulfils the true condition of
humanity.” And the last entry in his journal is,—“The stream of travel
is full of delight. Oh, who will set me adrift on this Nile!”
Assuredly it is not in this temperament that the active virtues have
their rise. On the contrary, this temperament, considered in itself
alone, indisposes for the discharge of them. Something morbid and
excessive, as manifested in Guérin, it undoubtedly has. In him, as in
Keats, and as in another youth of genius, whose name, but the other day
unheard of, Lord Houghton has so gracefully written in the history of
English poetry,—David Gray,—the temperament, the talent itself, is
deeply influenced by their mysterious malady; the temperament is
_devouring_; it uses vital power too hard and too fast, paying the
penalty in long hours of unutterable exhaustion and in premature death.
The intensity of Guérin’s depression is described to us by Guérin
himself with the same incomparable touch with which he describes happier
feelings; far oftener than any pleasurable sense of his gift he has “the
sense profound, near, immense, of my misery, of my inward poverty.” And
again: “My inward misery gains upon me; I no longer dare look within.”
And on another day of gloom he does look within, and here is the
terrible analysis:—
“Craving, unquiet, seeing only by glimpses, my spirit is stricken by all
those ills which are the sure fruit of a youth doomed never to ripen
into manhood. I grow old and wear myself out in the most futile mental
strainings, and make no progress. My head seems dying, and when the wind
blows I fancy I feel it, as if I were a tree, blowing through a number
of withered branches in my top. Study is intolerable to me, or rather it
is quite out of my power. Mental work brings on, not drowsiness, but an
irritable and nervous disgust which drives me out, I know not where,
into the streets and public places. The Spring, whose delights used to
come every year stealthily and mysteriously to charm me in my retreat,
crushes me this year under a weight of sudden hotness. I should be glad
of any event which delivered me from the situation in which I am. If I
were free I would embark for some distant country where I could begin
life anew.”
Such is this temperament in the frequent hours when the sense of its own
weakness and isolation crushes it to the ground. Certainly it was not
for Guérin’s happiness, or for Keats’s, as men count happiness, to be as
they were. Still the very excess and predominance of their temperament
has given to the fruits of their genius a unique brilliancy and flavor.
I have said that poetry interprets in two ways; it interprets by
expressing with magical felicity the physiognomy and movement of the
outward world, and it interprets by expressing, with inspired
conviction, the ideas and laws of the inward world of man’s moral and
spiritual nature. In other words, poetry is interpretative both by
having _natural magic_ in it, and by having _moral profundity_. In both
ways it illuminates man; it gives him a satisfying sense of reality; it
reconciles him with himself and the universe. Thus Æschylus’s “δράσαντι
παθεῖν” and his “ὰνήριθμον γέλασμα” are alike interpretative. Shakspeare
interprets both when he says,
“Full many a glorious morning have I seen,
Flatter the mountain-tops with sovran eye;”
and when he says,
“There’s a divinity that shapes our ends,
Rough-hew them as we will.”
These great poets unite in themselves the faculty of both kinds of
interpretation, the naturalistic and the moral. But it is observable
that in the poets who unite both kinds, the latter (the moral) usually
ends by making itself the master. In Shakspeare the two kinds seem
wonderfully to balance one another; but even in him the balance leans;
his expression tends to become too little sensuous and simple, too much
intellectualized. The same thing may be yet more strongly affirmed of
Lucretius and of Wordsworth. In Shelley there is not a balance of the
two gifts, nor even a co-existence of them, but there is a passionate
straining after them both, and this is what makes Shelley, as a man, so
interesting: I will not now inquire how much Shelley achieves as a poet,
but whatever he achieves, he in general fails to achieve natural magic
in his expression; in Mr. Palgrave’s charming _Treasury_ may be seen a
gallery of his failures.[14] But in Keats and Guérin, in whom the
faculty of naturalistic interpretation is overpoweringly predominant,
the natural magic is perfect; when they speak of the world they speak
like Adam naming by divine inspiration the creatures; their expression
corresponds with the thing’s essential reality. Even between Keats and
Guérin, however, there is a distinction to be drawn. Keats has, above
all, a sense of what is pleasurable and open in the life of nature; for
him she is the _Alma Parens_: his expression has, therefore, more than
Guérin’s, something genial, outward, and sensuous. Guérin has, above
all, a sense of what there is adorable and secret in the life of Nature;
for him she is the _Magna Parens_; his expression has, therefore, more
than Keats’s, something mystic, inward, and profound.
-----
Footnote 14:
Compare, for example, his “Lines Written in the Euganean Hills,” with
Keats’s “Ode to Autumn” (_Golden Treasury_, pp. 256, 284). The latter
piece _renders_ Nature; the former _tries to render_ her. I will not
deny, however, that Shelley has natural magic in his rhythm; what I
deny is, that he has it in his language. It always seems to me that
the right sphere for Shelley’s genius was the sphere of music, not of
poetry; the medium of sounds he can master, but to master the more
difficult medium of words he has neither intellectual force enough nor
sanity enough.
-----
So he lived like a man possessed; with his eye not on his own career,
not on the public, not on fame, but on the Isis whose veil he had
uplifted. He published nothing: “There is more power and beauty,” he
writes, “in the well-kept secret of one’s-self and one’s thoughts, than
in the display of a whole heaven that one may have inside one.” “My
spirit,” he answers the friends who urge him to write, “is of the
home-keeping order, and has no fancy for adventure; literary adventure
is above all distasteful to it; for this, indeed (let me say so without
the least self-sufficiency), it has a contempt. The literary career
seems to me unreal, both in its own essence and in the rewards which one
seeks from it, and therefore fatally marred by a secret absurdity.” His
acquaintances, and among them distinguished men of letters, full of
admiration for the originality and delicacy of his talent, laughed at
his self-depreciation, warmly assured him of his powers. He received
their assurances with a mournful incredulity, which contrasts curiously
with the self-assertion of poor David Gray, whom I just now mentioned.
“It seems to me intolerable,” he writes, “to appear to men other than
one appears to God. My worst torture at this moment is the over-estimate
which generous friends form of me. We are told that at the last judgment
the secret of all consciences will be laid bare to the universe; would
that mine were so this day, and that every passer-by could see me as I
am!” “High above my head,” he says at another time, “far, far away, I
seem to hear the murmur of that world of thought and feeling to which I
aspire so often, but where I can never attain. I think of those of my
own age who have wings strong enough to reach it, but I think of them
without jealousy, and as men on earth contemplate the elect and their
felicity.” And, criticising his own composition, “When I begin a
subject, my self-conceit” (says this exquisite artist) “imagines I am
doing wonders; and when I have finished, I see nothing but a wretched
made-up imitation, composed of odds and ends of color stolen from other
people’s palettes, and tastelessly mixed together on mine.” Such was his
_passion for perfection_, his disdain for all poetical work not
perfectly adequate and felicitous. The magic of expression, to which by
the force of this passion he won his way, will make the name of Maurice
de Guérin remembered in literature.
I have already mentioned the _Centaur_, a sort of prose poem by Guérin,
which Madame Sand published after his death. The idea of this
composition came to him, M. Sainte-Beuve says, in the course of some
visits which he made with his friend, M. Trebutien, a learned
antiquarian, to the Museum of Antiquities in the Louvre. The free and
wild life which the Greeks expressed by such creations as the Centaur
had, as we might well expect, a strong charm for him; under the same
inspiration he composed a _Bacchante_, which was meant by him to form
part of a prose poem on the adventures of Bacchus in India. Real as was
the affinity which Guérin’s nature had for these subjects, I doubt
whether, in treating them, he would have found the full and final
employment of his talent. But the beauty of his _Centaur_ is
extraordinary; in its whole conception and expression this piece has in
a wonderful degree that natural magic of which I have said so much, and
the rhythm has a charm which bewitches even a foreigner. An old Centaur
on his mountain is supposed to relate to Melampus, a human questioner,
the life of his youth. Untranslatable as the piece is, I shall conclude
with some extracts from it:—
“THE CENTAUR.
“I had my birth in the caves of these mountains. Like the stream of this
valley, whose first drops trickle from some weeping rock in a deep
cavern, the first moment of my life fell in the darkness of a remote
abode, and without breaking the silence. When our mothers draw near to
the time of their delivery, they withdraw to the caverns, and in the
depth of the loneliest of them, in the thickest of its gloom, bring
forth, without uttering a plaint, a fruit silent as themselves. Their
puissant milk makes us surmount, without weakness or dubious struggle,
the first difficulties of life; and yet we leave our caverns later than
you your cradles. The reason is that we have a doctrine that the early
days of existence should be kept apart and enshrouded, as days filled
with the presence of the gods. Nearly the whole term of my growth was
passed in the darkness where I was born. The recesses of my dwelling ran
so far under the mountain that I should not have known on which side was
the exit, had not the winds, when they sometimes made their way through
the opening, sent fresh airs in, and a sudden trouble. Sometimes, too,
my mother came back to me, having about her the odors of the valleys, or
streaming from the waters which were her haunt. Her returning thus,
without a word said of the valleys or the rivers, but with the
emanations from them hanging about her, troubled my spirit, and I moved
up and down restlessly in my darkness. ‘What is it,’ I cried, ‘this
outside world whither my mother is borne, and what reigns there in it so
potent as to attract her so often?’ At these moments my own force began
to make me unquiet. I felt in it a power which could not remain idle;
and betaking myself either to toss my arms or to gallop backwards and
forwards in the spacious darkness of the cavern, I tried to make out
from the blows which I dealt in the empty space, or from the transport
of my course through it, in what direction my arms were meant to reach,
or my feet to bear me. Since that day, I have wound my arms round the
bust of Centaurs, and round the body of heroes, and round the trunk of
oaks; my hands have assayed the rocks, the waters, plants without
number, and the subtlest impressions of the air,—for I uplift them in
the dark and still nights to catch the breaths of wind, and to draw
signs whereby I may augur my road; my feet,—look, O Melampus, how worn
they are! And yet, all benumbed as I am in this extremity of age, there
are days when, in broad sunlight, on the mountain-tops, I renew these
gallopings of my youth in the cavern, and with the same object,
brandishing my arms and employing all the fleetness which yet is left to
me.
. . . . . . . .
“O Melampus, thou who wouldst know the life of the Centaurs, wherefore
have the gods willed that thy steps should lead thee to me, the oldest
and most forlorn of them all? It is long since I have ceased to practise
any part of their life. I quit no more this mountain summit to which age
has confined me. The point of my arrows now serves me only to uproot
some tough-fibred plant; the tranquil lakes know me still, but the
rivers have forgotten me. I will tell thee a little of my youth; but
these recollections, issuing from a worn memory, come like the drops of
a niggardly libation poured from a damaged urn.
“The course of my youth was rapid and full of agitation. Movement was my
life, and my steps knew no bound. One day when I was following the
course of a valley seldom entered by the Centaurs, I discovered a man
making his way up the stream-side on the opposite bank. He was the first
whom my eyes had lighted on: I despised him. ‘Behold,’ I cried, ‘at the
utmost but the half of what I am! How short are his steps! and his
movement how full of labor! Doubtless he is a Centaur overthrown by the
gods, and reduced by them to drag himself along thus.’
. . . . . . . .
“Wandering along at my own will like the rivers, feeling wherever I went
the presence of Cybele, whether in the bed of the valleys, or on the
height of the mountains, I bounded whither I would, like a blind and
chainless life. But when Night, filled with the charm of the gods,
overtook me on the slopes of the mountain, she guided me to the mouth of
the caverns, and there tranquillized me as she tranquillizes the billows
of the sea. Stretched across the threshold of my retreat, my flanks
hidden within the cave, and my head under the open sky, I watched the
spectacle of the dark. The sea-gods, it is said, quit during the hours
of darkness their palaces under the deep; they seat themselves on the
promontories, and their eyes wander over the expanse of the waves. Even
so I kept watch, having at my feet an expanse of life like the hushed
sea. My regards had free range, and traveled to the most distant points.
Like sea beaches which never lose their wetness, the line of mountains
to the west retained the imprint of gleams not perfectly wiped out by
the shadows. In that quarter still survived, in pale clearness,
mountain-summits naked and pure. There I beheld at one time the god Pan
descend, ever solitary; at another, the choir of the mystic divinities;
or I saw pass some mountain nymph charm-struck by the night. Sometimes
the eagles of Mount Olympus traversed the upper sky, and were lost to
view among the far-off constellations, or in the shade of the dreaming
forests.
“Thou pursuest after wisdom, O Melampus, which is the science of the
will of the gods; and thou roamest from people to people like a mortal
driven by the destinies. In the times when I kept my night-watches
before the caverns, I have sometimes believed that I was about to
surprise the thought of the sleeping Cybele, and that the mother of the
gods, betrayed by her dreams, would let fall some of her secrets; but I
have never made out more than sounds which faded away in the murmur of
night, or words inarticulate as the bubbling of the rivers.
“‘O Macareus,’ one day said the great Chiron to me, whose old age I
tended; ‘we are, both of us, Centaurs of the mountain; but how different
are our lives! Of my days all the study is (thou seest it) the search
for plants; thou, thou art like those mortals who have picked up on the
waters or in the woods, and carried to their lips, some pieces of the
reed-pipe thrown away by the god Pan. From that hour these mortals,
having caught from their relics of the god a passion for wild life, or
perhaps smitten with some secret madness, enter into the wilderness,
plunge among the forests, follow the course of the streams, bury
themselves in the heart of the mountains, restless, and haunted by an
unknown purpose. The mares beloved of the winds in the farthest Scythia
are not wilder than thou, nor more cast down at nightfall, when the
North Wind has departed. Seekest thou to know the gods. O Macareus, and
from what source men, animals, and the elements of the universal fire
have their origin? But the aged Ocean, the father of all things, keeps
locked within his own breast these secrets; and the nymphs, who stand
around, sing as they weave their eternal dance before him, to cover any
sound which might escape from his lips half-opened by slumber. The
mortals, dear to the gods for their virtue, have received from their
hands lyres to give delight to man, or the seeds of new plants to make
him rich; but from their inexorable lips, nothing!’
. . . . . . . .
“Such were the lessons which the old Chiron gave me. Waned to the very
extremity of life, the Centaur yet nourished in his spirit the most
lofty discourse.
. . . . . . . .
“For me, O Melampus, I decline into my last days, calm as the setting of
the constellations. I still retain enterprise enough to climb to the top
of the rocks, and there I linger late, either gazing on the wild and
restless clouds, or to see come up from the horizon the rainy Hyades,
the Pleiades, or the great Orion; but I feel myself perishing and
passing quickly away, like a snow-wreath floating on the stream; and
soon shall I be mingled with the waters which flow in the vast bosom of
Earth.”