lo, it is because his station implies a disregard of what we call
the essential. The only elegant, gratifying exit of such a one is in
artillery-smoke. A boy reads of Winkelried and d'Assas with a thrill
of satisfaction. Hesitation, often most meritorious, is unforgivable
in those who have espoused a duty and a risk. Courage is the most
ordinary of our virtues: it ought to win no great plaudits; but for
one who withholds it, and "dares not put it to the touch," we have
tremendous vituperations. In short, that man makes but a poor show
thenceforward among his fellows, who having had an eligible chance
to set up as a haloed ghost, evades it, and forgets the serviceable
maxim of Marcus Aurelius, that "part of the business of life is to
lose it handsomely." Of like mind was Musonius Rufus, the teacher of
Epictetus: "Take the first chance of dying nobly, lest, soon after,
dying indeed come to thee, but noble dying nevermore." Once in a
while, such counsels stir a fellow-mortal beyond reason, and persuade
him "for a small flash of honor to cast away himself." And if so, it
proves that at last the right perception and application of what we
are has dawned upon him.
Though we get into this world by no request of our own, we have
a great will to stay in it: our main desire, despite a thousand
buffets of the wind, is to hang on to the branch. The very
suicide-elect, away from spectators, oftenest splashes back to the
wharf. Death is the one visitor from whom we scurry like so many
children, and terrors thrice his size we face with impunity at every
turn. The real hurt and end-all may be in the shape of a fall, a
fire, a gossamer-slight misunderstanding. Or "the catastrophe is a
nuptial," as Don Adriano says in the comedy. But we can breast out
all such venial calamities, so that we are safe from that which
heals them. We have, too, an unconscious compassion for the men of
antiquity. Few, if it came to the point, would change day for day,
and be Alexander, on the magnificent consideration that, although
Alexander was an incomparable lion, Alexander is dead. Herrick's
ingenuous verse floats into memory:
"I joy to see
Myself alive: this age best pleaseth me."
Superfluous adorners of the nineteenth century, we have no enthusiasm
to be what our doom makes us, mere gradators, little mounting
buttresses of a coral-reef, atoms atop of several layers, and
presently buried under several more. We would strut, live insects for
ever, working and waltzing over our progenitors' bones. Seventy-five
flushing years are no boon to us, if at that tender period's end,
we must be pushed aside from the wheel of the universe, and swept
up like so much dust and chaff. Nor does it help us, when it comes
to the inevitable deposal, to recall that while there were as yet
no operas, menus, nor puns, one Methusalem and his folk had nine
lazy centuries of it, and that their polar day, which was our proper
heritage, vanished with them, and beggared the almanac. Appreciation
of life is a modern art: it seems vexing enough that just in inverse
proportion to the growing capacity of ladies and gentlemen, is the
ever-diminishing room allotted wherein to exhibit it to "the scoffing
stars." Time has stolen from us our decades sacred to truancy and the
circus, to adventure and loafing. Where is the age apiece in which to
explode shams, to do vast deeds, to generalize, to learn a hawk from
a hernshaw, to be good--O to be good! an hour before bedtime? Evening
for us should be a dogma _in abstracto_; seas and suns should
change; horizons should stretch incalculably, cities bulge over their
boundaries, deserts thicken with carriages, polite society increase
and abound in caves and balloons, and in starlit tavern doorways
on Matterhorn top: and still, crowded and jostled by less favored
humanity, elbowing it through extinct and unborn multitudes, we would
live, live! and there should be no turf broken save by the plough,
and no urns except for roses.
It demonstrates what an amusing great babe a man is, that his love
of life is usually equivalent to love of duration of life. To be
ninety, we take to mean that one has had ninety years' worth out
of the venture: a calculation born of the hoodwinking calendar,
and of a piece with Dogberry's deductions. But this estimable
existence of ours is measured by depths and not by lengths; it is
not uncommon for those who have compassed its greatest reach to be
translated young, and wept over by perspicuous orators. And the smug
person who expires "full of years," and empty, forsooth, of all
things else, whose life is indeed covered, in several senses, by a
life-insurance, is thought to be the enviable and successful citizen.
It is quite as well that the gods have allowed us no vote concerning
our own fates: it would be too hard a riddle to guess whether it
is a dignified thing to continue, or when it is a profitable hour
to cease. A greedy soul, desiring to live, reaps his wish, like
Endymion, between moonrise and dawn, and gapes, yet unaware, for a
bank-account and octogenarianism. Why wouldst thou grow up, sirrah?
"To be a philosopher? a madman. An alchemist? a beggar. A poet?
_esurit_: an hungry jack." Mere possibility of further sensation
is a curious object of worship and desire. It has no meaning, save
in relation to its starry betters in whose courts it is a slave,
for whose good it may become a victim. A lover protesting to his
lady that she is dearer than his life, is paying her, did he but
consider it, a tricksy trivial compliment: as if he had said that she
was more precious than a prejudice, adorable beyond a speculation.
On the negative side only, in the subjective application, life is
dear. Certainly, one can conceive of no more monstrous wrong to a
breathing man than to announce his demise. Swift's mortuary joke on
Partridge is the supreme joke. A report that you are extinct damages
your reputation beyond repair. We may picture a vision of wrath
bursting into the editor's office: "I am told that yesterday you had
my name, sir, in your column of Deaths. I demand contradiction." Unto
whom the editor: "_The Evening Bugaboo_ never contradicts itself. But
I will, with pleasure, put you in, to-night, under the heading of
Births." Some considerations are to the complainant a fiery phooka:
strive as he will to adjust them, he gets thrown, and bruises his
bones.
Life is legal tender, and individual character stamps its value. We
are from a thousand mints, and all genuine; despite our infinitely
diverse appraisements, we "make change" for one another. So many
ideals planted are worth the great gold of Socrates; so many impious
laws broken are worth John Brown. We may give ourselves in ha'pence
fees for horses, social vogue, tobacco, books, a journey; or be
lavished at once for some good outranking them all. And of the two
dangers of hoarding and spending, the former seems a thousand times
more imminent and appalling. Our moralists, who have done away with
duels, and taught us the high science of solidarity, have deflected
us from our collateral relative, the knight-errant, who seemed to
go about seeking that which might devour him. But there are times
when a prince is called suddenly to his coronation, and must throw
largesses as he rides; when the commonest workaday life hears a
summons, and wins the inalienable right to spill itself on the
highway, among the crowd. We make a miserable noisy farcical entry,
one by one, on the terrene stage; it is a last dramatic decency that
we shall learn to bow ourselves out with gallantry, be it even among
the drugs and pillows of a too frequent lot. But the enviable end is
the other: some situations have inherent dignity, and exist already
in the play. Death in battle is (for the commissioned officer) a
gracefully effective mode of extinction; so is any execution for
principle's sake. The men who fill the historic imagination are the
men who strove and failed, and put into port at Traitors' Gate.
The political scaffold, in fact, is an artistic creation. When a
scholar looks up, the first eyes he meets are the eyes of those who
stand there, in cheerful acquiescence, "alive, alert, immortal."
"An axe," says Bishop Jeremy Taylor, "is a much less affliction
than a strangury." While the headsman awaited on every original
inspiration, under "hateful Henry" as under Nero, life certainly had
a romance and gusto unknown to modern spirits. The rich possibilities
of any career got, at some time, congested tragically into this.
How readily any one might see that, and welcome the folly and
ignominy which drove him to an illustrious early grave! Raleigh, at
the last, kissed the yet bloodless blade "which ends this strange
eventful history," saying: "'Tis a sharp medicine, but a cure for
all diseases." Disguised and hunted, Campion of S. John's, following
his duty, steals along the Harrow Road, by Tyburn tree, and passing
it, in a sort of awful love-longing, and as if greeting the promised
and foreordained, smilingly raises his hat. Not by grace only are
men "so in love with death," but by habit, by humor, and through
economic effort. Logic as well as faith understands the evangel:
"Whoso loseth his life shall find it." The hero can await, without
a flutter, the disarming of his hand and hope; for he can never be
stolen upon unawares. His prayer has always been for
"Life that dares send
A challenge to its end,
And when it comes, say, 'Welcome, friend!'"
He must cease _en gentilhomme_, as he has heretofore continued. To
have Azrael catch him by the leg, like a scampering spider, is not
agreeable to his ideas of etiquette. At any age, after any fashion,
it is only the hero who dies; the rest of us are killed off. He
resembles Cartright's "virtuous young gentlewoman":
"Others are dragged away, or must be driven;
She only saw her time, and stepped to Heaven."
We act out to its close our parable of the great babe, who has
clutched his little treasure long and guardedly, unwilling to share
it, and from whom, for discipline's sake, it must needs be taken. But
the martyr-mind, in conscious disposal, is like the young Perseus,
bargaining with Pallas Athene for a brief existence and glory. The
soul meets its final opportunity, as at a masked ball; if it cannot
stand and salute, to what end were its fair faculties given? Or, we
are all pedestrians in a city, hurrying towards our own firesides,
eager, preoccupied, mundane. Perhaps at the turn of a steep street,
there is the beauty of sunset, "brightsome Apollo in his richest
pomp," the galleons of cloud-land in full sail, every scarlet pennon
flying. One or two pause, as if from a sharp call or reminder, and
beholding such a revelation, forget the walk and the goal, and are
rapt into infinitude. _Immortalitas adest!_ Now, most of us crawl
home to decease respectably of "a surfeit of lampreys." We keep the
names, however, of those who seem to make their exit to the sound
of spiritual trumpets, and who fling our to-morrow's innocent gauds
away, to clothe themselves with inexhaustible felicity.
1887.
A BITTER COMPLAINT OF THE UNGENTLE READER
AN editor, a person of authority and supposed discretion, requested
a friend of mine, the other day, to write an essay with this weird
title: "How to Read a Book of Poems so as to Get the Most Good out
of It." My friend, "more than usual calm," politely excused himself,
suffering the while from suppressed oratory. He felt that the
diabolic suggestion, made in all
"Conscience and tendre herte,"
amounted to a horrible implied doubt concerning the lucidity of
himself and other minor bards, publishing to-day and to-morrow. They
have become difficult to read, only because a too educational world
of readers is determined to find them so. Now, eating is to eat,
with variations in haste, order, quantity, quality, and nocturnal
visions: with results, in short; but eating is to eat. Even thus, as
it would appear to a plain mind, reading is to read. Can it be that
any two or two thousand can wish to be preached at, in order that
they may masticate a page correctly, in squads? that they may never
forget, like Mr. Gladstone's progeny, to apportion thirty-two bites
to every stanza, with the blessing before, and the grace after? No
full-grown citizen is under compulsion to read; if he do so at all,
let him do it individually, by instinct and favor, for wantonness,
for private adventure's sake: and incidental profit be hanged,
drawn and quartered! To enter a library honorably, is not to go
clam-digging after useful information, nor even after emotions. The
income to be secured from any book stands in exact disproportion to
the purpose, as it were, of forcing the testator's hand: a moral very
finely pointed in _The Taming of the Shrew_, and again in _Aurora
Leigh_. To read well is to make an impalpable snatch at whatever item
takes your eye, and run. The schoolmaster has a contradictory theory.
He would have us in a chronic agony of inquisitiveness, and with
minds gluttonously receptive, not of the little we need (which it is
the ideal end and aim of a university education, according to Newman,
to perceive and to assimilate) but of the much not meant for us.
Wherefore to the schoolmaster there may be chanted softly in chorus:
_Ah, mon père, ce que vous dites là est du dernier bourgeois_. The
Muse is dying nowadays of over-interpretation. Too many shepherd
swains are trying to Get the Most Good out of her. When Caius
Scriblerius prints his lyric about the light of Amatoria's eyes,
which disperses his melancholy moods, the average public, at least in
Boston, cares nothing for it, until somebody in lack of employment
discovers that as Saint Patrick's snakes were heathen rites, and as
Beatrice Portinari was a system of philosophy, so Amatoria's eyes
personify the sun-myth. And Caius shoots into his eleventh edition.
Mr. Browning, perhaps, will continue to bear this sort of enlargement
and interfusion; indeed, nothing proves his calibre quite so happily
as the fact that his capacious phantasmal figure, swollen with the
gas of much comment and expounding, has a fair and manly look, and
can still carry off, as we say, its deplorable circumference. But
at the present hour, there is nothing strange in imagining less
opaque subjects being hauled in for their share of dissection before
Browning societies. Picture, for instance, a conclave sitting from
four to six over the sensations of Mrs. Boffkin,
"Waiting for the Sleary babies to develop Sleary's fits."
(For Mr. Kipling must be a stumbling-block unto some, as unto many
a scandal.) Is there no fun left in Israel? Have we to endure, for
our sins, that a super-civilization insists on being vaccinated by
the poor little poets, who have brought, alas, no instrument but
their lyre? Can we no longer sing, without the constraint of doling
out separately to the hearer, what rhetoric is in us, what theory
of vowel color, what origin and sequences, what occult because
non-existent symbolism? without setting up for oracles of dark
import, and posing romantically as "greater than we know"? To what a
pass has the ascendant New England readeress brought the harmless
babes of Apollo! She seeks to master all that is, and to raise a
complacent creation out of its lowland wisdom to her mountainous
folly's level; she touches nothing that she does not adorn--with a
problem; she approves of music and pictures whose reasonableness is
believed to be not apparent to the common herd; she sheds scholastic
blight upon "dear Matt Prior's easy jingle," and unriddles for you
the theological applications of
"Says gorging Jack to guzzling Jimmy:
'I am extremely hungaree.'"
She is forever waking the wrong passenger: forever falling upon
the merely beautiful, and exacting of it what it was never born to
yield. The arts have a racial shyness: the upshot of this scrutiny
of their innocent faces is that they will be fain to get into a hole
and hide away for good. We lay it all to the ladies; for the old lazy
unprovincialized world of men was never so astute and excruciating.
There were no convenings for the purpose of illuminating the text
of Dr. John Donne, although the provocation was unique. Poets were
let alone, once upon a time; and all they did for their own pleasure
and sowed broadcast for the pleasure of others, failed not, somehow,
to fulfil itself from the beginning unto the end. What is meant for
literature now, begotten in simpleness and bred in delight, arises as
a quarrel between producer and consumer,
"And thereof come in the end despondency and madness."
The man's attitude, even yet, towards a book of poetry which is
tough to him, is to drop it, even as the gods would have him do; the
woman's is to smother it in a sauce of spurious explanation, and gulp
it down.
In a sophisticating age, it is the nature of poets to remain young.
Their buyers are always one remove nearer to the sick end of the
century, and being themselves tainted with a sense of the importance
of the scientific, are in so much disqualified to judge of the
miracle, the phenomenon, which poetry is. To whomever has an idle
and a fresh heart, there is great encouragement in the poetic
outlook. The one harassing dread is that modern readers may scorch
that hopeful field. They refuse to take us for what we are: they
are of one blood with the mediæval Nominalists, who regarded not
the existence of the thing, but the name by which they denoted it.
They make our small gift futile, and their own palates a torment.
We solemnly pronounce our wares, such as they be, handsomer in the
swallowing than in the chewing: alas, so far, it is our fate to be
chewed. Who can help applying to an adult magazine constituency which
yearns to be told How to Read a Book of Poems, the "so help me God"
of dear Sir Thomas More? "So help me God, and none otherwise but as I
verily think, that many a man buyeth Hell with so much pain, he might
have Heaven with less than the one-half."
1894.
ANIMUM NON COELUM
HORACE was not often wrong, in his habitual beautiful utterance of
commonplace; but was he not altogether wrong when he gave us the
maxim that the traveller may change the sky over him, but not the
mind within him? that the mood, the personal condition, is not to be
driven forth by any new sea or land, but must cling to a man in his
flight, like the pollen under a bee's wing? Sick souls started out
from the Rome of Augustus, with intent to court adventure and drown
care, even as they do now from Memphremagog and Kalamazoo, U.S.A.
These Horace noted, and discouraged with one of his best fatalisms.
Human trouble, nevertheless, has for its sign-manual a packed valise
and a steamer-ticket. Broken hearts pay most of the bills at European
hotels. For they know, better than the wounded in body, that the
one august inevitable relief, the wizard pill against stagnation,
is, was, shall ever be, "strange countries for to see." In the long
run, self cannot withstand the overwhelming spectacle of other faces,
and the vista of other days than ours. Unrest, however caused, must
melt away insensibly in the glow of old art, and before the thought,
widening the breast, in cities or on the Alpine slopes, of what
has been. The tourist, be he of right mettle, falls in love with
the world, and with the Will which sustains it. As much solace or
exhilaration as comes into the eye and ear, so much evil, in the form
of sadness, rebellion, ignorance, passes out from us, as breathed
breath into the purer air. Boast as we may, we are not, immigrating,
what we were, emigrating. We come away bewitched from the great
playhouse of our forefathers; no thorn in the flesh seems so poignant
now as it was, in that remembrance. Time, master-workman that he is,
annuls and softens grief, and allows joy to sink in and spread. What
we alter, surely, is not the same dumb blue ether overhead, but the
little carnal roof and heaven domed between that and us. Travel,
to the cheerful, is cheerful business; to the overcast nature it
is something better. Upon the smoky and clouded ceiling of his own
consciousness, darkened once despite him, but perhaps kept wilfully
dark since, "for very wantonness," travel lays her cunning finger.
Sudden frescos begin, unawares, to gleam and flush there, in gold
and olive and rose, as if Fra Angelico had been set loose with his
palette in a sequestered cloister. Your Horace, be it known, was a
home-keeper, and, as Stevenson claimed that dogs avoid doing, "talks
big of what does not concern him."
There is but one thing which can honorably draw the heart out of an
American in Europe. He has wrought for himself the white ideal of
government; he belongs to a growing, not a decaying society; there
is much without, upon which he looks with wonder and even with pity;
for he is, as the monkish chroniclers would say, _filius hujus
sæculi_, a child of to-day and to-morrow. In "that state of life to
which it has pleased God to call" him, he should be the proclaimed
brother of mankind, and the outrider of civilization; he has an
heroic post and outlook, and these bring their responsibilities: why
should he, how can he, forego them for the accidental pleasure to be
had in alien capitals? But one thing he sees far away which he can
never live to call his, in the west; he cannot transfer hither the
yesterday of his own race, the dark charm of London, the glamour of
Paris, the majesty and melancholy of Rome. If he has a nature which
looks deep and walks slowly, he shall not pass the image of any old
kingdom unbeguiled; either to his living senses, or to his distant
and hopeless meditations, that world beyond wide waters will seem to
him the fairest of created things, like the unbought lamp worth all
that Aladdin ever cherished in his narrow youth. For yesterday is
ours also, to have and to hold, though it be an oak which grows not
within our own garden walls, and is to be reached only by a going
forth, and a wrenching of the heart-strings. And that which makes
the worthy pilgrim into an exile and a cosmopolite is no vanity, no
ambition, no mere restless energy: it is truly the love of man which
calleth over seas, and from towers a great way off. His shrine is
some common and unregarded place, a mediæval stair, it may be, worn
hollow as a gourd by the long procession of mortality. That concave
stone touches him, and makes his blood tingle: it has magic in it, of
itself, without a record; for it speaks of the transit of human worth
and human vices, both of which Dante makes his Ulysses long for, and
seek to understand. It is our sunken footfall, ages ere we were born,
while we were on forgotten errands, nursing irrecoverable thoughts.
To have marked it, with perhaps the largest emotion of our lives, is
to walk Broadway or a Texan tow-path humbler and better ever after.
Who is to be blamed if he do indeed go "abroad," or stay abroad, so
strangely finding there, rather than here, the soul's peace? for the
soul has rights which may cancel even the duties of the ballot. Of
what avail is Americanism, unless it earn for a man the freedom of
rival cities, wrap him in a good dream, taking rancor from him, and
put him in harmony with all master events gone by? The young Republic
has children who come into the field of historic Christendom, to
bathe themselves in the dignity and roominess of life, and to walk
gladly among the evergreen traditions, which surge like tall June
grass about their knees. What they never had, natural piety teaches
them to desire and to worship, and their happy Parthian faces are
bright with the setting sun. There are hundreds such, and blessed are
they; for they move meanwhile under an innocent spell, and ignobler
visions cannot touch them. It is their vocation to make a thronged
spiritual solitude of their own. Under the self-same night of stars,
they are changed: they have found other minds, more reverent, more
chastened, more sensitized. Because they are converts, they cannot
always be judged fairly. You shall meet them in summertime at Bruges
and Nuremberg, and in the transept of Westminster Abbey, elbowed by
pilgrims of another clay, but ever rapt and mute: "whether in the
body, or out of the body, I know not; God knoweth."
1894.
THE PRECEPT OF PEACE