REFLECTION.
Walter slept until nearly noon, then rose, very weary, but with a
gladness at his heart. On his table were spread such pages as must
please Lufa! His thoughts went back to the poem, but, to his uneasy
surprise, he found he did not recall it with any special pleasure. He
had had great delight in reading it, and in giving shape to his delight,
but he could not now think what kind of thing it was that had given him
such satisfaction. He had worked too long, he said to himself, and this
was the reaction; he was too tired to enjoy the memory of what he had so
heartily admired. Aesthetic judgment was so dependent on mood! He would
glance over what he had done, correct it a little, and inclose it for
the afternoon post, that it might appear in the next issue!
He drank the cup of cold tea by his bedside, sat down, and took up his
hurriedly written sheets. He found in them much that seemed good
work--of his own; and the passages quoted gave ostensible grounds for
the remarks made upon them; but somehow the whole affair seemed quite
different. The review would incline any lover of verse to read the book;
and the passages cited were preceded and followed by rich and praiseful
epithets; but neither quotations nor remarks moved in him any echo of
response. He gave the manuscript what correction it required, which was
not much, for Walter was an accurate as well as ready writer, laid it
aside, and took up the poem.
What could be the matter? There was nothing but embers where had been
glow and flame! Something must be amiss with him! He recalled an
occasion on which, feeling similarly with regard to certain poems till
then favorites, he was sorely troubled, but a serious attack of illness
very soon relieved his perplexity: something like it most surely be at
hand to account for the contradiction between Walter last night and
Walter this morning! Closer and closer he scanned what he read, peering
if he might to its very roots, in agonized endeavor to see what he had
seen as he wrote. But his critical consciousness neither acknowledged
what he had felt, nor would grant him in a condition of poetic collapse.
He read on and on; read the poem through; turned back, and read passage
after passage again; but without one individual approach to the revival
of former impression. “Commonplace! commonplace!” echoed in his inner
ear, as if whispered by some mocking spirit. He argued that he had often
found himself too fastidious. His demand for finish ruined many of his
verses, rubbing and melting and wearing them away, like frost and wind
and rain, till they were worthless! The predominance and overkeenness of
the critical had turned in him to disease! His eye was sharpened to see
the point of a needle, but a tree only as a blotted mass! A man’s mind
was meant to receive as a mirror, not to concentrate rays like a convex
lens! Was it not then likely that the first reading gave the true
impression of the ethereal, the vital, the flowing, the iridescent? Did
not the solitary and silent night brood like a hen on the nest of the
poet’s imaginings? Was it not the night that waked the soul? Did not the
commonplace vanish along with the “garish” day? How then could its light
afford the mood fit for judging a poem--the cold sick morning, when life
is but half worth living! Walter did not think how much champagne he had
taken, nor how much that might have to do with one judgment at night and
another in the morning. “Set one mood against another,” he said,
conscious all the time it was a piece of special pleading, “and the one
weighs as much as the other!” For it was horrible to him to think that
the morning was the clear-eyed, and that the praise he had lavished on
the book was but a vapor of the night. How was he to carry himself to
the lady of his love, who at most did not care half as much for him as
for her book?
How poetry could be such a passion with her when her own was but
mediocre, was a question Walter dared not shape--not, however, that he
saw the same question might be put with regard to himself: his own
poetry was neither strong nor fresh nor revealing. He had not noted that
an unpoetic person will occasionally go into a mild ecstasy over phrase
or passage or verse in which a poet may see little or nothing.
He came back to this:--his one hour had as good a claim to insight as
his other; if he saw the thing so once, why not say what he had seen?
Why should not the thing stand? His consciousness of the night before
had certainly been nearer that of a complete, capable being, than that
of to-day! He was in higher human condition then than now!
But there came another doubt: what was he to conclude concerning his
other numerous judgments passed irrevocably? Was he called and appointed
to influence the world’s opinion of the labor of hundreds according to
the mood he happened to be in, or the hour at which he read their
volumes? But if he must write another judgment of that poem in vellum
and gold, he must first pack his portmanteau! To write in her home as he
felt now, would be treachery!
Not confessing it, he was persuading himself to send on the review. Of
course, had he the writing of it now, he would not write a paper like
that! But the thing being written, it could claim as good a chance of
being right as another! Had it not been written as honestly as another
of to-day would be? Might it not be just as true? The laws of art are so
undefined!
Thus on and on went the windmill of heart and brain, until at last the
devil, or the devil’s shadow--that is, the bad part of the man
himself--got the better, and Walter, not being true, did a
lie--published the thing he would no longer have said. He thought he
worshiped the truth, but he did not. He knew that the truth was
everything, but a lie came that seemed better than the truth. In his
soul he knew he was not acting truly; that had he honestly loved the
truth, he would not have played hocus-pocus with metaphysics and logic,
but would have made haste to a manly conclusion. He took the package,
and on his way to the dining-room, dropped it into the post-box in the
hall.
During lunch he was rather silent and abstracted; the package was not
gone, and his conscience might yet command him to recall it! When the
hour was passed, and the paper beyond recovery, he felt easier, saying
to himself, what was done could not be undone; he would be more careful
another time. One comfort was, that at least he had done no injustice to
Lufa! He did not reflect that he had done her the greatest injustice in
helping her to believe that worthy which was not worthy, herself
worshipful who was not worshipful. He told her that he finished her
drama before going to bed, and was perfectly charmed with it. That it as
much exceeded his expectations then as it had fallen below them since,
he did not say.
In the evening he was not so bright as before. Lufa saw it and was
troubled. She feared he doubted the success of her poem. She led the
way, and found he avoided talking about it. She feared he was not so
well pleased with it as he had said. Walter asked if he might not read
from it in the drawing-room. She would not consent.
“None there are of our sort!” she said. “They think literature
foolishness. Even my mother, the best of mothers, doesn’t care about
poetry, can not tell one measure from another. Come and read a page or
two of it in the summer-house in the wilderness instead. I want to know
how it will sound in people’s ears.”
Walter was ready enough. He was fond of reading aloud, and believed he
could so read the poem that he need not say anything. And certainly, if
justice meant making the words express more than was in them, he did it
justice. But in truth the situation was sometimes touching; and the more
so to Walter that the hero was the lady’s inferior in birth, means, and
position--much more her inferior than Walter was Lufa’s. The lady alone
was on the side of the lowly born; father, mother, brothers, sisters,
uncles, aunts, and cousins to the remotest degree, against him even to
hatred. The general pathos of the idea disabled the criticism of the
audience, composed of the authoress and the reader, blinding perhaps
both to not a little that was neither brilliant nor poetic. The lady
wept at the sound of her own verses from the lips of one who was to her
in the position of the hero toward the heroine; and the lover, critic as
he was, could not but be touched when he saw her weep at passages
suggesting his relation to her; so that, when they found the hand of the
one resting in that of the other, it did not seem strange to either.
When suddenly the lady snatched hers away, it was only because a
mischievous little bird spying them, and hurrying away to tell, made a
great fluttering in the foliage. Then was Walter’s conscience not a
little consoled, for he was aware of a hearty love for the poem. Under
such conditions he could have gone on reading it all the night!