WHICH TREATS OF ROMANCE.
THERE is no word in the English language more unceremoniously and
indefinitely kicked and cuffed about, by what are called sensible
people, than the word _romance_. When Mr. Smith or Mr. Stubbs has
brought every wheel of life into such range and order that it is one
steady, daily grind,—when they themselves have come into the habits
and attitudes of the patient donkey, who steps round and round the
endlessly turning wheel of some machinery—then they fancy that they
have gotten ‘the victory that overcometh the world.’
All but this dead grind, and the dollars that come through the mill,
is by them thrown into one waste ‘catch-all’ and labelled _romance_.
Perhaps there was a time in Mr. Smith’s youth,—he remembers it
now,—when he read poetry, when his cheek was wet with strange tears,
when a little song, ground out by an organ-grinder in the street, had
power to set his heart beating and bring a mist before his eyes. Ah, in
those days he had a vision!—a pair of soft eyes stirred him strangely;
a little weak hand was laid on his manhood, and it shook and trembled;
and then came all the humility, the aspiration, the fear, the hope, the
high desire, the troubling of the waters by the descending angel of
love,—and a little more and Mr. Smith might have become a man, instead
of a banker! He thinks of it now, sometimes, as he looks across the
fireplace after dinner and sees Mrs. Smith asleep, innocently shaking
the bouquet of pink bows and Brussels lace that waves over her placid
red countenance.
Mrs. Smith wasn’t his first love, nor, indeed, any love at all; but
they agreed reasonably well. And as for poor Nellie,—well, she is dead
and buried,—all that was stuff and romance. Mrs. Smith’s money set him
up in business, and Mrs. Smith is a capital manager, and he thanks God
that he isn’t romantic, and tells Smith Junior not to read poetry or
novels, and to stick to realities.
‘This is the victory that overcometh the world,’—to learn to be fat and
tranquil, to have warm fires and good dinners, to hang your hat on the
same peg at the same hour every day, to sleep soundly all night, and
never to trouble your head with a thought or imagining beyond.
But there are many people besides Mr. Smith who have gained this
victory,—who have strangled their higher nature and buried it, and
built over its grave the structure of their life, the better to keep it
down.
The fascinating Mrs. T., whose life is a whirl between ball and opera,
point-lace, diamonds, and schemings of admiration for herself, and
of establishments for her daughters,—there was a time, if you will
believe me, when that proud, worldly woman was so humbled, under the
touch of some mighty power, that she actually thought herself capable
of being a poor man’s wife. She thought she could live in a little,
mean house, on no-matter-what-street, with one servant, and make her
own bonnets, and mend her own clothes, and sweep the house Mondays,
while Betty washed,—all for what? All because she thought that there
was a man so noble, so true, so good, so high-minded, that to live with
him in poverty, to be guided by him in adversity, to lean on him in
every rough place of life, was a something nobler, better, purer, more
satisfying, than French laces, opera-boxes, and even Madame Roget’s
best gowns.
Unfortunately, this was all romance,—there was no such man. There was,
indeed, a person of very common, self-interested aims and worldly
nature, whom she had credited at sight with an unlimited draft on all
her better nature; and when the hour of discovery came, she awoke
from her dream with a start and a laugh, and ever since has despised
aspiration, and been busy with the _realities_ of life, and feeds poor
little Mary Jane, who sits by her in the opera-box there, with all the
fruit which she has picked from the bitter tree of knowledge. There
is no end of the epigrams and witticisms which she can throw out, this
elegant Mrs. T., on people who marry for love, lead prosy, worky lives,
and put on their best cap with pink ribbons for Sunday. ‘Mary Jane
shall never make a fool of herself;’ but, even as she speaks, poor Mary
Jane’s heart is dying within her at the vanishing of a pair of whiskers
from an opposite box, which whiskers the poor little fool has credited
with a _résumé_ drawn from her own imaginings of all that is grandest
and most heroic, most worshipful in man. By-and-by, when Mrs. T. finds
the glamour has fallen on her daughter, she wonders; she has ‘tried to
keep novels out of the girl’s way,—where did she get these notions?’
All prosaic, and all bitter, disenchanted people talk as if poets
and novelists _made_ romance. They do—just as much as craters make
volcanoes,—no more. What is romance? whence comes it? Plato spoke to
the subject wisely, in his quaint way, some two thousand years ago,
when he said, ‘Man’s soul, in a former state, was winged and soared
among the gods; and so it comes to pass, that, in this life, when the
soul, by the power of music or poetry, or the sight of beauty, hath her
remembrance quickened, forthwith there is a struggling and a pricking
pain as of wings trying to come forth,—even as children in teething.’
And if an old heathen, two thousand years ago, discoursed thus gravely
of the romantic part of our nature, whence comes it that in Christian
lands we think in so pagan a way of it, and turn the whole care of it
to ballad-makers, romancers, and opera-singers?
Let us look up in fear and reverence, and say, ‘GOD is the great maker
of romance. HE, from whose hand came man and woman,—HE, who strung the
great harp of Existence with all its wild and wonderful and manifold
chords, and attuned them to one another,—HE is the great Poet of life.’
Every impulse of beauty, of heroism, and every craving for purer love,
fairer perfection, nobler type and style of being than that which
closes like a prison-house around us, in the dim, daily walk of life,
is God’s breath, God’s impulse, God’s reminder to the soul that there
is something higher, sweeter, purer, yet to be attained.
Therefore, man or woman, when thy ideal is shattered—as shattered a
thousand times it must be; when the vision fades, the rapture burns
out, turn not away in scepticism and bitterness, saying, ‘There is
nothing better for a man than that he should eat and drink,’ but
rather cherish the revelations of those hours as prophecies and
fore-shadowings of something real and possible, yet to be attained
in the manhood of immortality. The scoffing spirit that laughs at
romance, is an apple of the Devil’s own handing from the bitter tree of
knowledge;—it opens the eyes only to see eternal nakedness.
If ever you have had a romantic, uncalculating friendship—a boundless
worship and belief in some hero of your soul; if ever you have so
loved, that all cold prudence, all selfish worldly considerations, have
gone down like drift-wood before a river flooded with new rain from
heaven, so that you even forgot yourself, and were ready to cast your
whole being into the chasm of existence, as an offering before the
feet of another, and all for nothing,—if you awoke bitterly betrayed
and deceived, still give thanks to God that you have had one glimpse
of heaven. The door now shut will open again. Rejoice that the noblest
capability of your eternal inheritance has been made known to you;
treasure it, as the highest honour of your being, that ever you could
so feel,—that so divine a guest ever possessed your soul.
By such experiences are we taught the pathos, the sacredness of life;
and if we use them wisely, our eyes will ever after be anointed to see
what poems, what romances, what sublime tragedies lie around us in the
daily walk of life, ‘written not with ink, but in fleshly tables of the
heart.’ The dullest street of the most prosaic town has matter in it
for more smiles, more tears, more intense excitement, than ever were
written in story or sung in poem; the reality is there, of which the
romancer is the second-hand recorder.
So much of a plea we put in boldly, because we foresee grave heads
beginning to shake over our history, and doubts rising in reverend and
discreet minds whether this history is going to prove anything but a
love-story, after all.
We do assure you, right reverend Sir, and you, most discreet Madam,
that it is not going to prove anything else; and you will find, if
you will follow us, that there is as much romance burning under the
snow-banks of cold Puritan preciseness as if Dr. H. had been brought up
to attend operas instead of metaphysical preaching; and Mary had been
nourished on Byron’s poetry instead of ‘Edwards on the Affections.’
The innocent credulities, the subtle deceptions, that were quietly at
work under the grave, white curls of the Doctor’s wig, were exactly of
the kind which have beguiled man in all ages, when near the sovereign
presence of her who is born for his destiny;—and as for Mary, what did
it avail her that she could say the Assembly’s Catechism from end to
end without tripping, and that every habit of her life beat time to
practical realities, steadily as the parlour clock? The wildest Italian
singer or dancer, nursed on nothing but excitement from her cradle,
never was more thoroughly possessed by the awful and solemn mystery of
woman’s life, than this Puritan girl.
It is quite true, that, the next morning after James’s departure,
she rose as usual in the dim gray, and was to be seen opening the
kitchen-door just at the moment when the birds were giving the first
little drowsy stir and chirp,—and that she went on setting the
breakfast-table for the two hired men, who were bound to the fields
with the oxen,—and that then she went on skimming cream for the
butter, and getting ready to churn, and making up biscuit for the
Doctor’s breakfast, when he and they should sit down together at a
somewhat later hour; and as she moved about, doing all these things,
she sung various scraps of old psalm-tunes; and the good Doctor, who
was then busy with his early exercises of devotion, listened, as he
heard the voice, now here, now there, and thought about angels and
the Millennium. Solemnly and tenderly there floated in at his open
study-window, through the breezy lilacs, mixed with low of kine, and
bleat of sheep, and hum of early wakening life, the little silvery
ripples of that singing, somewhat mournful in its cadence, as if a
gentle soul were striving to hush itself to rest. The words were those
of the rough old version of the psalms then in use:—
‘Truly my waiting soul relies
In silence God upon:
Because from him there doth arise
All my salvation.’
And then came the busy patter of the little footsteps without, the
moving of chairs, the clink of plates, as busy hands were arranging
the table; and then again there was a pause, and he thought she seemed
to come near to the open window of the adjoining room, for the voice
floated in clearer and sadder:—
‘O God, to me be merciful,
Be merciful to me!
Because my soul for shelter safe,
Betakes itself to thee.
‘Yea, in the shadow of thy wings
My refuge have I placed,
Until these sore calamities
Shall quite be overpast.’
The tone of life in New England, so habitually earnest and solemn,
breathed itself in the grave and plaintive melodies of the tunes then
sung in the churches; and so these words, though in the saddest minor
key, did not suggest to the listening ear of the auditor anything more
than that pensive religious calm in which he delighted to repose. A
contrast indeed they were, in their melancholy earnestness, to the
exuberant carollings of a robin, who, apparently attracted by them,
perched himself hard by in the lilacs, and struck up such a merry
_roulade_ as quite diverted the attention of the fair singer; in fact,
the intoxication breathed in the strain of this little messenger, whom
God had feathered and winged and filled to the throat with ignorant
joy, came in singular contrast with the sadder notes breathed by that
creature of so much higher mould and fairer clay,—that creature born
for an immortal life.
But the good Doctor was inly pleased when she sung; and when she
stopped, looked up from his Bible wistfully, as missing something, he
knew not what; for he scarce thought how pleasant the little voice
was, or knew he had been listening to it,—and yet he was in a manner
enchanted by it, so thankful and happy that he exclaimed with fervour,
‘The lines are fallen unto me in pleasant places; yea, I have a goodly
heritage.’
So went the world with him, full of joy and praise, because the voice
and the presence wherein lay his unsuspected life, were securely
near,—so certainly and constantly a part of his daily walk, that he had
not even the trouble to wish for them. But in that other heart how was
it?—how with the sweet saint that was talking to herself in psalms and
hymns and spiritual songs?
The good child had remembered her mother’s parting words the night
before,—‘Put your mind upon your duties,’—and had begun her first
conscious exercise of thought with a prayer that grace might be given
her to do it. But even as she spoke, mingling and interweaving with
that golden thread of prayer was another consciousness, a life in
another soul, as she prayed that the grace of God might overshadow him,
shield him from temptation, and lead him up to heaven; and this prayer
so got the start of the other, that, ere she was aware, she had quite
forgotten self, and was feeling, living, thinking in that other life.
The first discovery she made, when she looked out into the fragrant
orchard, whose perfumes steamed in at her window, and listened to the
first chirping of birds among the old apple-trees, was one that has
astonished many a person before her;—it was this: she found that all
that had made life interesting to her was suddenly gone. She herself
had not known that, for the month past, since James came from sea,
she had been living in an enchanted land; that Newport harbour, and
every rock and stone, and every mat of yellow seaweed on the shore,
that the two-mile road between the cottage and the white house of
Zebedee Marvyn, every mullein-stalk, every juniper-tree, had all had a
light and a charm which were suddenly gone. There had not been an hour
in the day for the last four weeks that had not had its unsuspected
interest,—because he was at the White House; because, possibly, he
might be going by, or coming in: nay, even in church, when she stood
up to sing, and thought she was thinking only of God, had she not been
conscious of that tenor voice that poured itself out by her side? and
though afraid to turn her head that way, had she not felt that he was
there every moment?—heard every word of the sermon and prayer for him?
The very vigilant care which her mother had taken to prevent private
interviews had only served to increase the interest by throwing over it
the veil of constraint and mystery. Silent looks, involuntary starts,
things indicated, not expressed—these are the most dangerous, the most
seductive aliment of thought to a delicate and sensitive nature. If
things were said out, they might not be said wisely,—they might repel
by their freedom, or disturb by their unfitness; but what is only
looked is sent into the soul through the imagination, which makes of it
all that the ideal faculties desire.
In a refined and exalted nature it is very seldom that the feeling of
love, when once thoroughly aroused, bears any sort of relation to the
reality of the object. It is commonly an enkindling of the whole power
of the soul’s love for whatever she considers highest and fairest;
it is, in fact, the love of something divine and unearthly, which,
by a sort of illusion, connects itself with a personality. Properly
speaking, there is but One true, eternal Object of all that the mind
conceives in this trance of its exaltation. Disenchantment must come,
of course; and in a love which terminates in happy marriage there is
a tender and gracious process, by which, without shock or violence,
the ideal is gradually sunk in the real, which, though found faulty
and earthly, is still ever tenderly remembered as it seemed under the
morning light of that enchantment.
What Mary loved so passionately, that which came between her and God
in every prayer, was not the gay, young, dashing sailor,—sudden in
anger, imprudent of speech, and, though generous in heart, yet worldly
in plans and schemings,—but her own ideal of a grand and noble man,
such a man as she thought he might become. He stood glorified before
her—an image of the strength that overcomes things physical; of the
power of command which controls men and circumstances; of the courage
which disdains fear; of the honour which cannot lie; of constancy which
knows no shadow of turning; of tenderness which protects the weak;
and, lastly, of religious loyalty, which should lay the golden crown
of its perfected manhood at the feet of a Sovereign Lord and Redeemer.
This was the man she loved; and with this regal mantle of glories she
invested the person called James Marvyn: and all that she saw and felt
to be wanting, she prayed for with the faith of a believing woman.
Nor was she wrong; for, as to every leaf and every flower there is an
ideal to which the growth of the plant is constantly urging, so is
there an ideal to every human being,—a perfect form in which it might
appear, were every defect removed and every characteristic excellence
stimulated to the highest point. Once, in an age, God sends to some
of us a friend who loves in us, _not_ a false imagining, an unreal
character, but, looking through all the rubbish of our imperfections,
loves in us the divine ideal of our nature,—loves, not the man that
we are, but the angel that we may be. Such friends seem inspired by
a divine gift of prophecy,—like the mother of St. Augustine, who, in
the midst of the wayward, reckless youth of her son, beheld him in a
vision, standing, clothed in white, a ministering priest at the right
hand of God—as he has stood for long ages since. Could a mysterious
foresight unveil to us this resurrection form of the friends with whom
we daily walk, compassed about with mortal infirmity, we should follow
them with faith and reverence through all the disguises of human faults
and weaknesses, ‘waiting for the manifestation of the sons of God.’
But these wonderful soul-friends, to whom God grants such perception,
are the exceptions in life; yet, sometimes are we blessed with one who
sees through us, as Michel Angelo saw through a block of marble when he
attacked it in a divine fervour, declaring that an angel was imprisoned
within it: and it is often the resolute and delicate hand of such a
friend that sets the angel free.
There be soul-artists, who go through this world, looking among
their fellows with reverence, as one looks amid the dust and rubbish
of old shops for hidden works of Titian and Leonardo; and, finding
them, however cracked or torn, or painted over with tawdry daubs
of pretenders, immediately recognise the divine original, and set
themselves to cleanse and restore. Such be God’s real priests, whose
ordination and anointing are from the Holy Spirit; and he who hath not
this enthusiasm is not ordained of God, though whole synods of bishops
laid hands on him.
Many such priests there be among women; for to this silent ministry
their nature calls them, endowed, as it is, with fineness of fibre and
a subtile keenness of perception outrunning slow-footed reason,—and she
of whom we write was one of these.
At this very moment, while the crimson wings of morning were casting
delicate reflections on tree, and bush, and rock, they were also
reddening innumerable waves round a ship that sailed alone, with a wide
horizon stretching like an eternity around it; and in the advancing
morning stood a young man, thoughtfully looking off into the ocean,
with a book in his hand—James Marvyn,—as truly and heartily a creature
of this material world as Mary was of the invisible and heavenly.
There are some who seem made to _live_,—life is such a joy to them;
their senses are so fully _en rapport_ with all outward things; the
world is so keenly appreciable, so much a part of themselves; they
are so conscious of power and victory in the government and control
of material things, that the moral and invisible life often seems to
hang tremulous and unreal in their minds, like the pale, faded moon in
the light of a gorgeous sunrise. When brought face to face with the
great truths of the invisible world, they stand related to the higher
wisdom much like the gorgeous, gay Alcibiades to the divine Socrates,
or like the young man in Holy Writ to Him for whose appearing Socrates
longed;—they gaze, imperfectly comprehending, and at the call of
ambition or riches turn away sorrowing.
So it was with James: in full tide of worldly energy and ambition there
had been forming over his mind that hard crust—that scepticism of the
spiritual and exalted which men of the world delight to call practical
sense. He had been suddenly arrested and humbled by the revelation
of a nature so much nobler than his own that he seemed worthless in
his own eyes: he had asked for love; but when _such_ love unveiled
itself, he felt like the disciple of old in the view of a diviner
tenderness,—‘Depart from me, for I am a sinful man.’
But it is not often that all the current of a life is reversed in one
hour: and now, as James stood on the ship’s deck, with life passing
around him, and everything drawing upon the strings of old habits,
Mary and her religion recurred to his mind, as some fair, sweet,
inexplicable vision. Where she stood he saw; but how _he_ was ever to
get there seemed as incomprehensible as how a mortal man should pillow
his form on sunset clouds.
He held the little Bible in his hand as if it were some amulet charmed
by the touch of a superior being; but when he strove to read it, his
thoughts wandered, and he shut it, troubled and unsatisfied. Yet there
were within him yearnings and cravings, wants never felt before, the
beginning of that trouble which must ever precede the soul’s rise to a
higher plan of being.
There we leave him. We have shown you now our three different
characters, each one in its separate sphere, feeling the force of that
strongest and holiest power with which it has pleased our great Author
to glorify this mortal life.