An old Western river port, lying in a wrinkle of the hills--a
sharp slope down to the yellow water, glowing under the sun like
molten bronze--a broken hollow square of buildings framing it in,
whose basements had been made green by the lipping of water during
inundations periodical as the rising of the Nile--a cannonade-rumble
of drays over the boulders, and muffled-drum thumping of cotton
bales--white signs black-lettered with names of steamboat companies,
and the green lattice-work of saloon doors flanked by empty
kegs--above, church spires cutting the blue--below, on the slope,
hogsheads, bales, drays, cases, boxes, barrels, kegs, mules,
wagons, policemen, loungers, and roustabouts, whose apparel is at
once as picturesque, as ragged, and as colorless as the fronts of
their favorite haunts on the water-front. Westward the purple of
softly-rolling hills beyond the flood, through a diaphanous veil of
golden haze--a marshaled array of white boats with arabesque lightness
of painted woodwork, and a long and irregular line of smoking chimneys.
The scene never varied save with the varying tints of weather and
season. Sometimes the hills were gray through an atmosphere of
rain--sometimes they vanished altogether in an autumn fog; but the
port never changed. And in summer or spring, at the foot of the iron
stairway leading up to a steamboat agency in the great middle building
facing the river, there was a folding stool--which no one ever tried
to steal--which even the most hardened wharf thieves respected--and
on that stool, at the same hour every day, a pleasant-faced old man
with a very long white beard used to sit. If you asked anybody who
it was, the invariable reply was: "Oh! that's old Captain-; used to
be in the New Orleans trade;--had to give up the river on account of
rheumatism;--comes down every day to look at things."
Wonder whether the old captain still sits there of bright afternoons,
to watch the returning steamers panting with their mighty run from the
Far South--or whether he has sailed away upon that other river, silent
and colorless as winter's fog, to that vast and shadowy port where much
ghostly freight is discharged from vessels that never return? He haunts
us sometimes--even as he must have been haunted by the ghosts of dead
years.
When some great white boat came in, uttering its long, wild cry of
joy after its giant race of eighteen hundred miles, to be reëchoed
by the hundred voices of the rolling hills--surely the old man must
have dreamed upon his folding stool of marvelous nights upon the
Mississippi--nights filled with the perfume of orange blossoms under
a milky palpitation of stars in amethystine sky, and witchery of
tropical moonlight.
The romance of river-life is not like the romance of the sea--that
romance memory evokes for us in the midst of the city by the simple
exhalations of an asphalt pavement under the sun--divine saltiness,
celestial freshness, the wild joy of wind-kissed waves, the hum of
rigging and crackling of cordage, the rocking as of a mighty cradle.
But it is perhaps sweeter. There is no perceptible motion of the river
vessel; it is like the movement of a balloon, so steady that not we but
the world only seems to move. Under the stars there seems to unroll
its endlessness like an immeasurable ribbon of silver-purple. There
is a noiseless ripple in it, as of watered silk. There is a heavy,
sweet smell of nature, of luxuriant verdure; the feminine outlines
of the hills, dotted with the chrome-yellow of window-lights, are
blue-black; the vast arch of stars blossoms overhead; there is no
sound but the colossal breathing of the laboring engines; the stream
widens; the banks lessen; the heavens seem to grow deeper, the stars
whiter, the blue bluer. Under the night it is all a blue world, as in
a planet illuminated by a colored sun. The calls of the passing boats,
sonorous as the music of vast silver trumpets, ring out clear but
echoless;--there are no hills to give ghostly answer. Days are born in
gold and die in rose-color; and the stream widens, widens, broadens
toward the eternity of the sea under the eternity of the sky. We sail
out of Northern frosts into Southern lukewarmness, into the luxuriant
and somnolent smell of magnolias and lemon-blossoms--the sugar-country
exhales its incense of welcome. And the giant crescent of lights, the
stream-song of joyous boats, the world of chimneys, the forests of
spars, the burst of morning glory over New Orleans viewed from the deck
of a pilot-house....
These may never be wholly forgotten; after the lapse of fifty years in
some dusty and dreary inland city, an odor, an echo, a printed name may
resurrect their recollection, fresh as one of those Gulf winds that
leave sweet odors after them, like coquettish women, like Talmudic
angels.
So that we beheld all these things yesterday and heard all these dead
voices once more; saw the old Western port with its water-be-slimed
warehouses, and the Kentucky hills beyond the river, and the old
captain on his folding stool, gazing wistfully at the boats; so that
we heard once more the steam whistles of vessels that have long ceased
to be, or that, changed into floating wharves, rise and fall with the
flood, like corpses.
And all because there came an illustrious visitor to us, who reminded
us of all these things; having once himself turned the pilot's wheel,
through weird star-light or magical moonshine, gray rain or ghostly
fog, golden sun or purple light--down the great river from Northern
frosts to tepid Southern winds--and up the mighty stream into the misty
North again.
To-day his name is a household word in the English-speaking world;
his thoughts have been translated into other tongues; his written wit
creates mirth at once in Paris salons and in New Zealand homes. Fortune
has also extended to him her stairway of gold; and he has hobnobbed
much with the great ones of the world. But there is still something
of the pilot's cheery manner in his greeting, and the keenness of the
pilot's glance in his eyes, and a looking out and afar off, as of the
man who of old was wont to peer into the darkness of starless nights,
with the care of a hundred lives on his hands.
He has seen many strange cities since that day--sailed upon many
seas--studied many peoples--written many wonderful books.
Yet, now that he is in New Orleans again, one cannot help wondering
whether his heart does not sometimes prompt him to go to the river,
like that old captain of the far Northwestern port, to watch the white
boats panting at the wharves, and listen to their cries of welcome or
farewell, and dream of nights beautiful, silver-blue, and silent--and
the great Southern moon peering into a pilot-house.
"HIS HEART IS OLD"[32]
Chrystoblepharos--Elikoblepharos--eyelids grace-kissed--the eyes of
Leucothea--the dreaming marble head of the Capitoline Museum--the
face of the girl-nurse of the wine-god, with a spray of wine-leaves
filleting her sweet hair--that inexpressible, inexplicable, petrified
dream of loveliness, which well enables us to comprehend old monkish
tales regarding the infernal powers of enchantment possessed by the
antique statues of those gods who Tertullian affirmed were demons.
For in howsoever thoughtless a mood one may be when he first visits
the archæological shrine in which the holiness of antique beauty
reposes, the first glorious view of such a marble miracle compels the
heart to slacken its motion in the awful wonder of that moment. One
breathes low, as in sacred fear lest the vision might dissolve into
nothingness--as though the witchery might be broken were living breath
to touch with its warm moisture that wonderful marble cheek. Vainly
may you strive to solve the secret of this magical art; the exquisite
mystery is divine--human eye may never pierce it; one dare not laugh,
dare not speak in its presence--that beauty imposes silence by its very
sweetness; one may pray voicelessly, one does not smile in presence
of the Superhuman. And when hours of mute marveling have passed,
the wonder seems even newer than before. Shall we wonder that early
Christian zealots should have dashed these miracles to pieces, maddened
by the silent glamour of beauty that defied analysis and seemed,
indeed, a creation of the Master-Magician himself?
And the Centauress, in cameo, kneeling to suckle her little one;--the
supple nudity of exquisite ephebi turning in eternal dance about the
circumference of wondrous vases;--gentle Psyche, butterfly-winged,
weeping on a graven carnelian;--river-deities in relief eternally
watching the noiseless flow of marble waves from urns that gurgle
not;--joyous Tritons with knotty backs and seaweed twined among
their locks;--luxurious symposia in sculpture, such as might have
well suggested the Oriental fancy of petrified cities, with their
innumerable pleasure-seekers suddenly turned to stone;--splendid
processions of maidens to the shrine of the Maiden-Goddess, and
Bacchantes leading tame panthers in the escort of the Rosy God: all
these and countless other visions of the dead Greek world still haunted
me, as I laid aside the beautiful and quaint volume of archæological
learning that inspired them--bound in old fashion, and bearing the
imprint of a firm that had ceased to exist ere the close of the French
Revolution--a Rococo Winkelmann. And still they circled about me, with
the last smoke-wreaths of the last evening pipe, on the moonlight
balcony, among the shadows.
Then as I dreamed the beautiful dead world seemed to live again, in
a luminous haze, in an Elysian glow. The processions of stone awoke
from their sleep of two thousand years, and moved and chanted;--marble
dreams became lithe flesh;--the phantom Arcadia was peopled with
shapes of unclad beauty;--I saw eyelids as of Leucothea palpitating
under the kisses of the Charities--the incarnate loveliness superhuman
of a thousand god-like beings, known to us only by their shadows in
stone;--and the efflorescent youth of that vanished nation, whose idols
were Beauty and Joy--who laughed much and never wept--whose perfect
faces were never clouded by the shadow of a grief, nor furrowed by the
agony of thought, nor wrinkled by the bitterness of tears.
I found myself in the honeyed heart of that world, where all was youth
and joy--where the very air seemed to thrill with new happiness in a
paradise newly created--where innumerable flowers, of genera unknown
in these later years, filled the valley with amorous odor of spring.
But I sat among them with the thoughts of the Nineteenth Century, and
the heart of the Nineteenth Century, and the garb of the Nineteenth
Century, which is black as a garb of mourning for the dead. And they
drew about me, seeing that I laughed not at all, nor smiled, nor
spoke; and low-whispering to one another, they murmured with a silky
murmur as of summer winds:
"His heart is old!"
And I pondered the words of the Ecclesiast: "Sorrow is better than
laughter; for by the sadness of the countenance the heart is made
better.... It is better to go to the house of mourning than to the
house of feasting; and the day of one's death is better than the day of
one's birth." But I answered nothing; and they spake again, whispering,
_"His heart is old!_" And one with sweet and silky-lidded eyes, lifted
her voice and spake:
"O thou dreamer, wherefore evoke us, wherefore mourn us--seeing that
there is no more joy in the world?
"Ours was a world of light and of laughter and of flowers, of
loveliness and of love. Thine is smoke-darkened and sombre; there is no
beauty unveiled; and men have forgotten how to laugh.
"Ye have increased wisdom unto sorrow, and sorrow unto infinite
despair;--for there is now no Elysium--the vault of heaven has sunk
back into immensity, and dissolved itself into nothingness; the
boundaries of earth are set, and the earth itself resolved into a
grain of dust, whirling in the vast white ring of innumerable suns
and countless revolving worlds. Yet we were happier, believing the
blossoming of stars to be only drops of milk from the perfect breast of
a goddess.
"Nymphs haunted our springs; dryads slumbered in the waving shadows of
our trees; zephyrs ethereal rode upon our summer winds; and great Pan
played upon his pipe in the emerald gloom of our summer woods. Ye men
of to-day have analyzed all substances, decomposed all elements, to
discover the Undiscoverable, and ye have found it not. But in searching
for the unsearchable, ye have lost joy.
"We loved the beauty of youth--the litheness of young limbs--the rosy
dawn of maturity--the bloom of downy cheeks--the sweetness of eyes
sweetened by vague desires of life's spring--the marvelous thrill of a
first kiss--the hunger of love which had only to announce itself to be
appeased--and the glory of strength. But ye have sought the secret of
the Universal life in charnel-houses--dismembering rottenness itself
and prying open the jaws of Death to view the awful emptiness therein.
Learning only enough to appall you, ye have found that science can
teach you less of beauty than our forgotten gymnasiums; but in the mean
time, ye have forgotten how to love.
"We gave to the bodies of our well-beloved the holy purification of
fire; ye confide them to the flesh-eating earth, filling your cities
with skeletons. For us Death was bodiless and terrible; for you she is
visible and yet welcome;--for so weary have men become of life that
her blackness seems to them beauty,--the beauty of a mistress, the
universal Pasiphila, who alone can give consolation to hearts weary of
life. So that ye have even forgotten how to die!
"And thou, O dreamer, thou knowest that there was no beginning and that
there shall be no end; but thou dost also know that the dust beneath
thy feet has lived and loved, that all which now lives once lived not,
and that what is now lifeless will live again;--thou knowest that
the substance of the sweetest lips has passed through myriad million
transformations, that the light of the sweetest eyes will still pass
through innumerable changes after the fires of the stars have burnt
themselves out. In seeking the All-Soul, thou hast found it in thyself,
and hast elevated thyself to deity, yet for thee are vows vain and
oracles dumb. Hope is extinguished in everlasting night; thou mayst
not claim even the consolation of prayer, for thou canst not pray
to thyself. Like the Mephistopheles of thy poet, O dreamer of the
Nineteenth Century, thou mayst sit between the Sphinx of the Past and
the Sphinx of the Future, and question them, and open their lips of
granite, and answer their mocking riddles. But thou mayst not forget
how to weep, even though thy heart grow old."...
But I could not weep!--And the phantoms, marveling, murmured with a
strange murmur--"The heart of Medusa!"