'IN VISHNU-LAND WHAT AVATAR?'
'If I love you for a year I shall love you for ever,' Narcissus had said
to his Thirteenth Maid. He did love her so long, and yet he has gone
away. Do you remember your _Les Misérables_, that early chapter where
Valjean robs the child of his florin so soon after that great
illuminating change of heart and mind had come to him? Well, still more
important, do you remember the clue Hugo gives us to aberration? There
is comfort and strength for so many a heart-breaking failure there. It
was the old impetus, we are told, that was as yet too strong for the new
control; the old instinct, too dark for the new light in the brain. It
takes every vessel some time to answer to its helm; with us, human
vessels, years, maybe. Have you never suddenly become sensitive of a
gracious touch in the air, and pondered it, to recognise that in some
half-unconscious act you had that moment been answering for the first
time the helm of an almost forgotten resolution? Ah me, blessed is it to
see the prow strongly sweeping up against the sky at last!
'Send not a poet to London,' said Heine, and it was a true word. At
least, send him not till his thews are laced and his bones set. He may
miss somewhat, of course; there is no gain without a loss. He may be in
ignorance of the last _nuance_, and if he deserves fame he must gain it
unaided of the vulgar notoriety which, if he have a friend or two in the
new journalism, they will be so eager to bestow; but he will have kept
his soul intact, which, after all, is the main matter. It is sweet,
doubtless, to be one of those same mushroom-men, sweet to be placarded
as 'the new' this or that, to step for a day into the triumphal car of
newspaper renown, drawn by teams of willing paragraph-men--who, does it
never strike you? are but doing it all for hire, and earning their bread
by their bent necks. Yet for those to whom it is denied there is solid
comfort; for it is not fame, and, worse still, it is not life, 'tis but
to be 'a Bourbon in a crown of straws.'
If one could only take poor foolish Cockneydom right away outside this
poor vainglorious city, and show them how the stars are smiling to
themselves above it, nudging each other, so to say, at the silly lights
that ape their shining--for such a little while!
Yes, that is one danger of the poet in London, that he should come to
think himself 'somebody'; though, doubtless, in proportion as he is a
poet, the other danger will be the greater, that he should deem himself
'nobody.' Modest by nature, credulous of appearances, the noisy
pretensions of the hundred and one small celebrities, and the din of
their retainers this side and that, in comparison with his own
unattended course, what wonder if his heart sinks and he gives up the
game; how shall his little pipe, though it be of silver, hope to be
heard in this land of bassoons? To take London seriously is death both
to man and artist. Narcissus had sufficient success there to make this a
temptation, and he fell. He lost his hold of the great things of life,
he forgot the stars, he forgot his love, and what wonder that his art
sickened also. For a few months life was but a feverish clutch after
varied sensation, especially the dear tickle of applause; he caught the
facile atheistic flippancy of that poor creature, the 'modern young
man,' all-knowing and all-foolish, and he came very near losing his soul
in the nightmare. But he had too much ballast in him to go quite under,
and at last strength came, and he shook the weakness from him. Yet the
fall had been too far and too cruel for him to be happy again soon. He
had gone forth so confident in his new strength of manly love; and to
fall so, and almost without an effort! Who has not called upon the
mountains to cover him in such an hour of awakening, and who will
wonder that Narcissus dared not look upon the face of Hesper till
solitude had washed him clean, and bathed him in its healing oil? I
alone bade him good-bye. It was in this room wherein I am writing, the
study we had taken together, where still his books look down at me from
the shelves, and all the memorials of his young life remain. O _can_ it
have been but 'a phantom of false morning'? A Milton snatched up at the
last moment was the one book he took with him.
From that night until this he has made but one sign--a little note which
Hesper has shown me, a sob and a cry to which even a love that had been
more deeply wronged could never have turned a deaf ear. Surely not
Hesper, for she has long forgiven him, knowing his weakness for what it
was. She and I sometimes sit here together in the evenings and talk of
him; and every echo in the corridor sets us listening, for he may be at
the other side of the world, or but the other side of the street--we
know so little of his fate. Where he is we know not; but if he still
lives, _what_ he is we have the assurance of faith. This time he has not
failed, we know. But why delay so long?
_November_ 1889--_May_ 1890. _November_ 1894.
THE END