When on the following evening the tap was heard upon the shutters, and
it was answered by the white-haired old man, it was a haggard, unkempt,
wild-eyed figure that stood upon the threshold, trembling in every limb.
“Does he still live?” was the first question uttered, yet James Dodson
had hardly the power to frame it.
“He lives, and he awaits you,” said the old man.
The haggard figure on the threshold gave a groan of anguish.
“Is--is he still in his right mind?” asked the unhappy Dodson.
“The noble mind of Achilles was never so valiant,” said the old man,
“as now that the sands of life have so nearly run.”
Dodson reeled as he entered the shop.
“I’ve been praying all day that he would be taken,” he said hoarsely
in the ear of the old man. “You see, I’ve done my best--but--but I’m
no scholar. I--I’ve not had the education. I’ve got a chap I know
to give me a hand--he reviews novels for _The Talisman_. It was the
best I could do in the time. We’ve laid it in all we knew--better
than Shakespeare, better than Homer, better than the coves who did
the Bible--oh, I tell you we’ve not spared an ounce of the paint! But
you must read it quickly, because you know, although the sense is all
right--absolutely the greatest thing of its kind in the world, and so
on--it’s a bit weak in places, and the poor old boy is so bright these
days that he might find out what we’ve done--and if he should do that
he might understand it all--and--and--if--he--understood--it--all----”
Dodson covered his eyes with his hands. As for the last time he
tottered through the shop and crossed the threshold of the little room,
his powerful stunted frame seemed to be overborne.
The poet still kept his chair beside the bright hearth. The grey hue of
dissolution was already upon his cheeks. But to that friend who for the
last time encountered their gaze, it seemed that those orbs which so
long had been sightless, had in their last extremity been accorded the
power of vision.
The prey of pity and terror, Dodson averted his gaze helplessly.
“You have brought the verdict, faithful one?” said the poet; and the
young man understood, even in the pass to which he himself was come,
how greatly the noble voice transcended in its quality all that had
ever sounded in his ears.
“I have, old boy,” said Dodson defiantly, yet his own voice was like
the croak of a raven.
“Begin, O my father,” said the dying poet.
With an automatic obedience which neither sought to comprehend nor
to control, Dodson’s hands dived into the recesses of his overcoat.
Therefrom they produced a reporter’s notebook, half-full of a hasty and
clumsy pencil scrawl. This he gave to the old man.
“It begins here,” he said, indicating the place in an urgent whisper.
“It is not very clear, but I hadn’t much time. Can you make it out?
Read it as quickly as ever you can, and then perhaps he will not notice
that it is not all that it might be.”
“Begin, O my father!” said the gentle voice of the dying man.
Immediately the thin, high, quavering tones of the old man began to
read. At his first words the figure beside the hearth seemed to uplift
his head, and to strain all his senses; the glazed and sightless eyes
were enkindled; a strange rapture played about the parted lips.
Dodson listened in a kind of dull terror. He dared not look at the face
of the poet, nor yet at that of him who read. As he sat in impotence
midway between the two, with fire and ice in his veins, he could not
follow the words that proceeded from the old man’s lips.
At last it was borne in upon him that a miracle had been wrought. The
white-haired, feeble, half-blind old creature was not crooning his own
crude pencilled phrases, which he knew to be so inept that he felt them
to be a blasphemous mockery.
That which proceeded from the lips of this aged man was couched in
terms of wisdom and beauty. It began by setting forth briefly the place
of the world-poet in the hierarchy of mankind, which was consonant with
mankind’s own place in the hierarchy of nature. It indicated briefly
the scope and status of the world-poet; and in a short, powerful,
lucid argument it proceeded to add another to the group which time was
constantly conspiring to limit.
It indicated that which went to the making of a world-poet; a thousand
years of prayer and vigil; of unceasing strife against the things that
were. It indicated what the world-poet was in essence and in substance;
how he transcended all men in their several stations because he was as
they were themselves, yet by his power of vision rendered infinitely
more; how this divine manifestation of the truth that all the world
was kin, was a doctor, a lawyer, a soldier, a teacher, a statesman, a
tiller of the earth, a peruser of books.
It proceeded briefly to rehearse the theme of this the latest of the
world-poets in the order of his coming, who was yet destined to take
precedence of them all. Differentiating classic art from the romantic,
and claiming for the poet of the _Reconciliation_ the foremost place
in the nobler school, inasmuch that his poem is like a pool whose
depths are so measureless that its surface is tranquil, and yet so
clear that it becomes a mirror that faithfully reflects the features
of all that gaze therein, it recounted how the poem treats the life of
man in all its phases. The mighty theme commences with that unspeakable
suffering by which Man was taught to speak, that strange ascension
from the higher anthropoids to a partial rationalism, culminating in
that stage of “Reason” which offered the ill-starred creature Man, in
lieu of an ample garment for his solace, protection, and utility, a
kind of ridiculous swaddling-clothes, in which he could neither walk
nor yet inhabit himself with decency. It reveals Man, the Wayfarer,
ever straining after that which he knows not how to attain, until worn
out with the heat and dust and the bloody conflict of the battle, the
unhappy Warrior-traveller commits himself, a tired, baffled, war-worn
child of destiny, yet grateful in his weariness, to the arms of Earth,
his mother, again.
To the poet, Man’s terrestrial life, in the present stage of his
development, is a progress through an eternal forest; and it submits
itself to three phases--bewilderment, terror, pity. Through these he
conducts the Warrior-Soul ever seeking for “truth,” ever engaged in a
titanic struggle with his “reason”--that sword with which he wounds
himself because he comprehends not how to use it rightly--yet ever
seeking to reconcile the primal instinct of his own divinity with “the
facts of experience” which in vain he strives to overthrow.
He begins with Man’s childhood. When to the mocking amazement of Earth,
his primitive mother, the heroic but ill-starred Warrior has wrested
from Destiny the power of speech, of thought, of will to bear his head
erectly, he forsakes his half-brothers, the beasts of the field, and in
a spirit of wonder and inquiry fares forth until he comes to a great
city. In its purlieus he grows bewildered by the numberless things
he cannot understand, and by the reception of answers that he cannot
adjust to his partial development. Yet the Warrior is ever sustained
by the sense of his own prowess, and proud of that which it has already
achieved, he believes that when it can address its questions to the
Whole of that which lies before it, it will comprehend it all.
The second phase of the poem opens with the Warrior’s tragic discovery
that his innate sense of divinity is only comparative; that although he
is Man in relation to the Ape, in his relation to the universe he is no
more than Man-Ape gibbering upon the branches of the Eternal Forest;
and that the sense of his own divinity is founded upon his superiority
to the beasts of the field. In this tragic phase, the Warrior, overcome
by disillusionment, alternately hacks himself with his sword, and at
other times seeks to cast it away from him. Overcome by horror he
faints in his weakness by the wayside, yet awakens from his hideous
nightmare to find his body weltering in blood, and the sword, all
hacked and jagged, still in his hand.
The third phase is that in which the Warrior returns again to Earth,
his rude mother, whom an overweening exaltation in his prowess has
led him to forsake. Having returned to her as a babe, and lain at
suck at the brown breasts of the sweet savage, she caresses him and
croons her strange songs in his ears; and to give him pleasure and
sustenance--because the Warrior whom she has long mourned as lost has
ever been the favourite among all her children--she whispers to him as
he lies again in her bosom that he is indeed divine.
Girt by this forgiveness, and clad in the valour of his divinity once
again, a new and ampler strength is given to the Warrior’s right hand.
He learns for the first time in what manner to use his Sword. Yet
no sooner does he learn so to do than he understands how Earth, his
mother, has deceived him, in order that she may give pleasure to the
favourite among all her children, who has returned to lie at her brown
breasts. And the Warrior blesses her for the deception, as otherwise he
could never have received the strength in his right hand; and without
that strength he could not have learned to use the sword of his reason.
The poem closes in the exaltation of an infinite pity and tenderness,
for the Warrior, blind and spent and weak, with the Sword all broken
and jagged upon his knees, has had his inquiries answered, and ceasing
to struggle and to resent, in his concern for all his brothers who have
not yet learned to use their swords, he defends their amazing formulas
and shibboleths and extraordinary self-deceptions, whereby they seek to
acquire the strength so to do. And in a passage of tender irony that
has no parallel he entreats his poor brothers to continue to deceive
themselves; and the Warrior concludes with an invocation to Earth, his
mother, for her loving and wise deception, whereby the proudest of her
sons has come to lie at peace.
As the white-haired man continued to read the appreciation of the
poem, which he himself had wrought, thereby re-enacting the deception
of the Mother of the Warrior-Soul, he revealed to the dying poet how
his work in all the wonderful assemblance of its qualities surpassed
any other that had been given to the world. He appraised the metre
which only the highest inspiration would have dared to employ; he
appraised the miraculous blend of gravity, sonority, sweetness, purity;
the ever-gathering range and power of those mighty cadences, which
swept the whole gamut of the emotions as though they were the strings
of a lyre. He showed how the people of unborn ages would be able to
derive stimulus and sanction for their labours; how the poet’s divine
simplicity was such that he who ran might read; how the official
“souls” who infest the groves of Academe would be able to cherish it
for its “art”; how the humblest street-persons who walked the streets
of the great city would be able to cherish it for its truth. This
epic of Man the Warrior ever trampling the brakes of the Eternal
Forest, cutting out the path with the Sword in his right hand in the
fruitless search for that which will reconcile him to his partial
vision, with the nobly pitiful irony of its conclusion that in the
present stage of the Warrior’s development the reconciliation must be
sought by compromise--this epic had in its austere mingling together
of those elements of tragedy which purge man’s nature with the healing
and co-ordinating properties which reconcile diverse and conflicting
factors of experience with the primal belief of Man Himself, a
universal power which had been given to no other poet in the modern or
the ancient world. And the old man concluded with the prophecy that
when “Civilization” itself had sunk to a mere shibboleth of the remote
age of “Reason,” the half-divine, half-barbarous music of the unknown
poet of the _Reconciliation_, would prove the only _via media_ between
the epoch of ampler vision and that fantastic shadowography of the long
ago when Man seemed other than He was.
Throughout the reading of this appraisement of his labours, the
blind-eyed poet seemed to vibrate with every word that came upon his
ears. As each phrase uttered by that thin, high, quavering voice
addressed the entranced being of the poet, the frail and broken form
seemed to sway in unison therewith; and the secret and beautiful smile
lurking within the hollows of the cheeks seemed to illuminate even the
sightless eyes, so that poor Dodson, who sat listening faintly to the
old man’s words, was tortured continually by the illusion that the
sight had returned to the eyes of his dying friend.
As the old man, never failing to give expression to his own personal
vindication of that which the poet had wrought, won nearer and nearer
towards the end, the dying man was heard to murmur, “Courage, Achilles!
Courage, Achilles!” for he seemed almost to fear that consciousness
would forsake him before he could realize his own apotheosis to the
full.
When the old man in a kind of triumph and defiance had come to the
end of his task, the radiance upon the poet’s face was starlike in its
lustre.
“Oh, oh, he can see! he can see!” muttered Dodson, in a wild
consternation. “He has the sight in his eyes.”
The poet had stretched forth his weak left hand as though in quest of
something.
He shaped a phrase with his lips, which Dodson had not the power to
understand.
“What does he say?” cried Dodson wildly.
However, the white-haired man appeared to understand. He took from the
table not the carefully written pages from which he had been reading,
but the threepenny reporter’s notebook in which Dodson’s hastily
pencilled criticism had been scribbled. To Dodson’s profound wonder the
old man carried this over to where the poet lay and placed it in the
outstretched left hand. But the hand had not the power to hold it now.
The poet was heard to mutter some inaudible words.
The old man bore the somewhat unclean threepenny reporter’s notebook,
with its dilapidated green cover, to the lips of the poet, who pressed
them upon it with a half-joyful gesture. In the act he had ceased to
breathe.
It was left to poor Dodson to discover that the act of the divine
clemency had, after many days, been extended to the Warrior-Soul. The
old man was still holding the threepenny reporter’s notebook to the
lips of the mighty dead, when Dodson tore it from his hand. Clutching
it convulsively the young man ran forth of the room and headlong
through the shop. Bare-headed, wild-eyed he reached the frost-bound,
fog-engirdled darkness of the January streets. As he ran up one street
and down another, not knowing nor desiring to know whither he was
bound, yet with that in his clutch ever pressed to his own white lips,
he cried out, “Oh Luney, Luney, I wish now I had never known you!”