A DAY THAT IS DEAD
I have been burning old letters to-night; their ashes are fluttering
in the chimney even now; and, alas! while they consume, fleeting and
perishable like the moments they record, “each dying ember” seems
to have “wrought its ghost” upon my heart. Oh! that we could either
completely remember or completely forget. Oh! that the image of
Mnemosyne would remain close enough for us to detect the flaws in her
imperishable marble, or that she would remove herself so far as to be
altogether out of sight. It is the golden haze of “middle distance”
that sheds on her this warm and tender light. She is all the more
attractive that we see her through a double veil of retrospection and
regret, none the less lovely because her beauty is dimmed and softened
in a mist of tears.
Letter after letter they have flared, and blackened, and shrivelled up.
There is an end of them—they are gone. Not a line of those different
handwritings shall I ever see again. The bold, familiar scrawl of the
tried friend and more than brother; why does he come back to me so
vividly to-night? The stout heart, the strong arm, the brave, kind
face, the frank and manly voice. We shall never tread the stubble nor
the heather side by side again; never more pull her up against the
stream, nor float idly down in the hot summer noons to catch the light
air off the water on our heated faces; to discourse, like David and
Jonathan, of all and everything nearest our hearts. Old friend! old
friend! wherever you are, if you have consciousness you must surely
sometimes think of _me_; I have not forgotten _you_. I cannot believe
you have forgotten me even _there_.
And the pains-taking, up-and-down-hill characters of the little
child—the little child for whom the angels came so soon, yet found
it ready to depart, whose fever-wasted lips formed none but words of
confidence and affection, whose blue eyes turned their last dim, dying
looks so fondly on the face it loved.
And there were letters harder to part with than these. Never mind, they
are burnt and done with; letters of which even the superscription once
made a kind heart leap with pleasure so intense it was almost pain;
letters crossed and re-crossed in delicate, orderly lines, bearing
the well-known cipher, breathing the well-known perfume, telling the
old, false tale in the old, false phrases, so trite and worn-out, yet
seeming always so fresh and new.
The hand that formed them has other tasks to occupy it now; the
heart from which they came is mute and cold. Hope withers, love
dies—times are altered. What would you have? It is a world of change.
Nevertheless this has been a disheartening job; it has put me in low
spirits; I must call “Bones” out of his cupboard to come and sit with
me.
“What is this charm,” I ask him, “that seems to belong so exclusively
to the past?—this ‘tender grace of a day that is dead’? and must
I look after it down the gulf into which it has dropped with such
irrepressible longing only because it will never come back to me?
Is a man the greater or wiser that he lived a hundred years ago or
a thousand? Are reputations, like wine, the mellower and the more
precious for mere age, even though they have been hid away in a cellar
all the time? Is a thing actually fairer and better because I have
almost forgotten how it looked when present, and shall never set eyes
on it again? I entertain the greatest aversion to Horace’s _laudator
temporis acti_, shall always set my face against the superstition that
‘there were giants in those days’; and yet wherever I went in the world
previous to my retirement here that I might live with you, I found the
strange maxim predominate, that everything was very much better before
it had been improved!
“If I entered a club and expressed my intention of going to the Opera,
for instance, whatever small spark of enthusiasm I could kindle was
submitted to a wet blanket on the spot. ‘Good heavens!’ would exclaim
some venerable philosopher of the Cynic and Epicurean schools, ‘there
_is_ no opera now, nor _ballet_ neither. My good sir, the thing is
done; it’s over. We haven’t an artist left. Ah! you should have seen
Taglioni dance; you should have heard Grisi sing; you should have lived
when Plancus was consul. In short, you should be as old as I am, and as
disgusted, and as gouty, and as disagreeable!’
“Or I walked into the smoking-room of that same resort, full of some
athletic gathering at Holland Park, some ’Varsity hurdle-race, some
trial of strength or skill amongst those lively boys, the subalterns of
the Household Brigade; and ere I could articulate ‘brandy and soda’ I
had Captain Barclay thrown body and bones in my face. ‘Walk, sir! You
talk of walking?’ (I didn’t, for there had been barely time to get a
word in edgeways, or my parable would have exhausted itself concerning
a running high leap.) ‘But there is nothing like a real pedestrian
left; they don’t breed ’em, sir, in these days: can’t grow them, and
don’t know how to train them if they could! Show me a fellow who would
make a match with Barclay to-day. Barclay, sir, if he were alive, would
walk all your best men down after he came in from shooting. Ask your
young friends which of ’em would like to drive the mail from London to
Edinburgh without a greatcoat! I don’t know what’s come to the present
generation. It must be the smoking, or the light claret, perhaps.
They’re done, they’re used up, they’re washed out. Why, they go to
covert by railway, and have their grouse driven to them on a hill! What
would old Sir Tatton or Osbaldeston say to such doings as these? I was
at Newmarket, I tell you, when the Squire rode his famous match—two
hundred miles in less than nine hours! I saw him get off old Tranby,
and I give you my honour the man looked fresher than the horse! Don’t
tell me. He was rubbed down by a couple of prize-fighters (there were
real bruisers in those days, and the best man used to win), dressed,
and came to dinner just as _you_ would after a five-mile walk. Pocket
Hercules, you call him—one in a thousand? There were hundreds of such
men in my day. Why, I recollect in Tom Smith’s time that I myself——’
“But at this point I used to make my escape, because there are two
subjects on which nobody is so brilliant as not to be prolix, so
dull as not to be enthusiastic—his doings in the saddle and his
adventures with the fair. To honour either of these triumphs he blows a
trumpet-note loud and long in proportion to the antiquity of the annals
it records. Why must you never again become possessed of such a hunter
as Tally-Ho? Did that abnormal animal really carry you as well as you
think, neither failing when the ground was deep nor wavering when the
fences were strong? Is it strictly true that no day was ever too long
for him? that he was always in the same field with the hounds? And
have not the rails he rose at, the ditches he covered so gallantly,
increased annually in height and depth and general impossibility ever
since that fatal morning when he broke his back, under the Coplow in a
two-foot drain?
“You can’t find such horses now? Perhaps you do not give them so
liberal a chance of proving their courage, speed, and endurance.
“On the other topic it is natural enough, I dare say, for you to ‘yarn’
with all the more freedom that there is no one left to contradict.
People used enormous coloured silk handkerchiefs in that remote period,
when you threw yours with such Oriental complacency, and the odalisques
who picked it up are probably to-day so old and stiff they could not
bend their backs to save their lives. But were they really as fond,
and fair, and faithful as they seem to you now? Had they no caprices
to chill, no whims to worry, no rivals on hand, to drive you mad? Like
the sea, those eyes that look so deep and blue at a distance, are green
and turbid and full of specks when you come quite close. Was it all
sunshine with Mary, all roses with Margaret, all summer with Jane? What
figures the modern women make of themselves, you say. How they offend
your eye, those bare cheek-bones, those clinging skirts, those hateful
_chignons_! Ah! the cheeks no longer hang out a danger-signal when you
approach; the skirts are no more lifted, ever such a little, to make
room for you in the corner of the sofa next the fire; and though you
might have had locks of hair enough once to have woven a parti-coloured
_chignon_ of your own, it would be hopeless now to beg as much as would
make a finger-ring for Queen Mab. What is it, I say, that causes us
to look with such deluded eyes on the past? Is it sorrow or malice,
disappointment or regret? Are our teeth still on edge with the sour
grapes we have eaten or forborne? Do we glower through the jaundiced
eyes of malevolence, or is our sight failing with the shades of a
coming night?”
Bones seldom delivers himself of his opinion in a hurry. “I think,”
he says very deliberately, “that this, like many other absurdities of
human nature, originates in that desire for the unattainable which is,
after all, the mainspring of effort, improvement, and approach towards
perfection. Man longs for the impossible, and what is so impossible as
the past? That which hath vanished becomes therefore valuable, that
which is hidden attractive, that which is distant desirable. There is
a strange lay still existing by an old Provençal troubadour, no small
favourite with iron-handed, lion-hearted King Richard, of which the
refrain, ‘_so far away_,’ expresses very touchingly the longing for the
absent, perhaps only _because_ absent, that is so painful, so human,
and so unwise. The whole story is wild and absurd to a degree, yet
not without a saddened interest, owing to the mournful refrain quoted
above. It is thus told in the notes to Warton’s _History of English
Poetry_:—
“‘Jeffrey Rudell, a famous troubadour of Provence, who is also
celebrated by Petrarch, had heard from the adventurers in the Crusades
the beauty of a Countess of Tripoli highly extolled. He became
enamoured from imagination, embarked for Tripoli, fell sick on the
voyage through the fever of expectation, and was brought on shore at
Tripoli, half-expiring. The countess, having received the news of the
arrival of this gallant stranger, hastened to the shore and took him by
the hand. He opened his eyes, and at once overpowered by his disease
and her kindness, had just time to say inarticulately that _having
seen her he died satisfied_. The countess made him a most splendid
funeral, and erected to his memory a tomb of porphyry inscribed with
an epitaph in Arabian verse. She commanded his sonnets to be richly
copied and illuminated with letters of gold, was seized with a profound
melancholy, and turned nun. I will endeavour to translate one of the
sonnets he made on his voyage, “Yret et dolent m’en partray,” etc. It
has some pathos and sentiment. “I should depart pensive but for this
love of mine _so far away_, for I know not what difficulties I may
have to encounter, my native land being _so far away_. Thou who hast
made all things and who formed this love of mine _so far away_, give
me strength of body, and then I may hope to see this love of mine _so
far away_. Surely my love must be founded on true merit, as I love one
_so far away_. If I am easy for a moment, yet I feel a thousand pains
for her who is _so far away_. No other love ever touched my heart than
this for her _so far away_. A fairer than she never touched any heart,
either so near or _so far away_.’”
“It is utter nonsense, I grant you, and the doings of this love-sick
idiot seem to have been in character with his stanzas, yet is there a
mournful pathos about that wailing _so far away_ which, well-worded,
well-set, and well-performed, would make the success of a drawing-room
song.
“If the Countess of Tripoli, who seems also to have owned a susceptible
temperament, had been his cousin and lived next door, he would probably
not have admired her the least, would certainly never have wooed her
in such wild and pathetic verse; but he gave her credit for all the
charms that constituted his own ideal of perfection, and sickened even
to death for the possession of his distant treasure, simply and solely
because it was _so far away_!
“What people all really love is a dream. The stronger the imagination
the more vivid the phantom that fills it; but on the other hand, the
waking is more sudden and more complete. If I were a woman instead
of a—a—specimen, I should beware how I set my heart upon a man of
imagination, a quality which the world is apt to call genius, with
as much good sense as there would be in confounding the sparks from a
blacksmith’s anvil with the blacksmith himself. Such a man takes the
first doll that flatters him, dresses her out in the fabrications of
his own fancy, falls down and worships, gets bored, and gets up, pulls
the tinsel off as quick as he put it on; being his own he thinks he may
do what he likes with it, and finds any other doll looks just as well
in the same light and decked with the same trappings. Narcissus is not
the only person who has fallen in love with the reflection, or what he
believed to be the reflection, of himself. Some get off with a ducking,
some are drowned in sad earnest for their pains.
“Nevertheless, as the French philosopher says, ‘There is nothing so
real as illusion.’ The day that is dead has for men a more actual,
a more tangible, a more vivid identity than the day that exists,
nay, than the day as yet unborn. One of the most characteristic and
inconvenient delusions of humanity is its incapacity for enjoyment
of the present. Life is a journey in which people are either looking
forward or looking back. Nobody has the wisdom to sit down for
half-an-hour in the shade listening to the birds overhead, examining
the flowers underfoot. It is always ‘How pleasant it was yesterday!
What fun we shall have to-morrow!’ Never ‘How happy we are to-day!’ And
yet what _is_ the past, when we think of it, but a dream vanished into
darkness—the future but an uncertain glimmer that may never brighten
into dawn?
“It is strange how much stronger in old age than in youth is the
tendency to live in the hereafter. Not the real hereafter of another
world, but the delusive hereafter of this. Tell a lad of eighteen that
he must wait a year or two for anything he desires very eagerly, and
he becomes utterly despondent of attaining his wish; but an old man of
seventy is perfectly ready to make arrangements or submit to sacrifices
for his personal benefit to be rewarded in ten years’ time or so, when
he persuades himself he will still be quite capable of enjoying life.
The people who purchase annuities, who plant trees, who breed horses
for their own riding are all past middle age. Perhaps they have seen
so many things brought about by waiting, more particularly when the
deferred hope had caused the sick heart’s desire to pass away, that
they have resolved for them also must be ‘a good time coming,’ if only
they will have patience and ‘wait a little longer.’ Perhaps they look
forward because they cannot bear to look back. Perhaps in such vague
anticipations they try to delude their own consciousness, and fancy
that by ignoring and refusing to see it they can escape the inevitable
change. After all, this is the healthiest and most invigorating
practice of the two. Something of courage seems wanting in man or beast
when either is continually looking back. To the philosopher ‘a day that
is dead’ has no value but for the lesson it affords; to the rest of
mankind it is inestimably precious for the unaccountable reason that
it can never come again.”
“Be it so,” I answered; “let me vote in the majority. I think with the
fools, I honestly confess, but I have also a theory of my own on this
subject, which I am quite prepared to hear ridiculed and despised. My
supposition is that ideas, feelings, delusions, name them how you will,
recur in cycles, although events and tangible bodies, such as we term
realities, must pass away. I cannot remember in my life any experience
that could properly be called a new sensation. When in a position of
which I had certainly no former knowledge I have always felt a vague,
dreamy consciousness that something of the same kind must have happened
to me before. Can it be that my soul has existed previously, long ere
it came to tenant this body that it is so soon about to quit? Can it be
that its immortality stretches both ways, as into the future so into
the past? May I not hope that in the infinity so fitly represented by
a circle, the past may become the future as the future most certainly
must become the past, and the day that is dead, to which I now look
back so mournfully, may rise again newer, fresher, brighter than ever
in the land of the morning beyond that narrow paltry gutter which we
call the grave?” I waited anxiously for his answer. There are some
things we would give anything to know, things on which certainty would
so completely alter all our ideas, our arrangements, our hopes, and our
regrets. Ignorant of the coast to which we are bound, its distance,
its climate, and its necessities, how can we tell what to pack up and
what to leave behind? To be sure, regarding things material, we are
spared all trouble of selection; but there is yet room for much anxiety
concerning the outfit of the soul. For the space of a minute he seemed
to ponder, and when he did speak, all he said was this—
“I know, but I must not tell,” preserving thereafter an inflexible
silence till it was time to go to bed.