holiday, three villageous women were seen to bear down upon him, as
he was calmly inspecting the outposts of their property, laden with
weapons (_timor arma ministrat!_) no less classic than a pail, a
broom, and an axe. Not Swift's self could have added to the look of
withering comment with which he turned and confronted his assailants:
a single glance which dispersed the troops, and held in itself the
eloquence of an Aristophaneian comedy. Eternal warfare lay between
him and the man who had peevishly flapped that haughty nose with a
glove, before his first birthday-anniversary, and revenge boiled in
his eye, long after, at sight of a citizen who had once addressed
to him a word unheard in good society. A loud tone, a practical
joke, a teasing reminder of a bygone fault, disconcerted him wholly.
Sensitive and conservative of mood, my Fine Gentleman could never
forget a rudeness, nor account satisfactorily for such a thing as a
condescension. All his culture and his thinking had not taught him
to allow for the divers conditions and dispositions of mankind. To
the last he looked for courtesy, for intelligence, and, alas, for
fashionable clothes, in his ideal. For the Fine Gentleman was a
snob. Hunger and nakedness, even honest labor, had for him no occult
charm. Throughout his youth, he courted patrician acquaintances, and
on the very highway ached to make worse rags yet of the floating
rags of a beggar's coat; but the experience of friendship with a
kindly butcher-lad made inroads upon his exclusiveness; and I know
that, had he outlived his years, there would have been one more
convert democrat. His own personal appearance was of the nicest; by
scrupulous superintendence of his laundry, chiefly by night, he kept
himself immaculate and imposing. His colors were those of the fallen
leaves and the snow; the November auburn falling away on either side
from the magnificent brow and eyes, and from the neck in its triple
white fold: a head to remind you of Raleigh in his ruff.
He must have been patriotic, for he revelled in the horns, gunpowder,
rockets, and smoke of the Fourth of July. Archery and rifle-practice
seemed to strike him as uncommonly pleasant devices to kill time.
In all games which had noise and motion, he took the same strong
vicarious interest. He had heard much music, and learned something of
it; he was once known to hum over an august recitative of the late
Herr Wagner. Singular to relate, he had an insuperable objection to
books, and protested often against the continued use of the pen by
one he would fain esteem. Yet he seemed greatly to relish the recital
of a tribute of personal verse from a United States Senator, and the
still more elaborate lines of a delightful professional satirist.
His health, aside from his great size, his spirit and nervous vigor,
was never steady nor sound. Every chapter of the Fine Gentleman's
biography is crammed with events, perils, excitements, catastrophes,
and blunders, due in great part, by a scientific verdict, to this
tremendous vitality balancing on too narrow a base. With years, there
began to come the "philosophic mind." His sweetness and submission
grew with his strength; never was there a sinner so tender of
conscience, so affected by remonstrance, so fruitful, after, in
the good works of amended ways. New virtues seemed to shoot on all
sides, and the old ones abided and flourished. He had never tried
to deceive, nor to shirk, nor to rebel, nor to take what was not
his, nor to appear other than he was. In the country town where he
had many a frolic, and where he lies buried, he found congenial
circumstances. There were no gardens there, no timid neighbors; he
had opportunity, being allowed to inspect everything that stirred
in air, or upon the earth, or in the waters under, for the pursuit
of natural history, which was his passion; he ate what he pleased,
he lorded it as he liked, he shifted his responsibilities, he won
endless flattery from the inhabitants. His frank acknowledgment of
all this was unique. On his return, while his escort was still in the
room, the Fine Gentleman was asked whether he would rather remain
now at home, or spend a week longer in the fascinating precincts
of Cambrook. He arose briskly, bestowed on the questioner, whom he
professed to adore, his warmest embrace (a thing unusual with him),
and immediately, pulling his escort by the sleeve, placed himself
at the door-knob which led into the more immoral world. His last
accomplishment was to acquire an accurate sense of time, to make his
quarter-hour calls, his half-hour walks, when sent out alone: "as
wise as a Christian," an honest acquaintance was wont to say of him,
perhaps on the suspicion that the Fine Gentleman, after he reached
his majority, was a free-thinker.
He was in his perfect prime when a slight seeming disgrace fell upon
him, though an incident never clearly understood. His believers
believed in him still; but, for the need of quiet and impartial
adjustment of matters, persuaded him to stay an indefinite while in
the beloved farming district where many of his earlier vacations
were spent. So that, after all his tender rearing, he was at last
abroad and divorced: with a mist, such as we recognized immortals
call sin, upon his spirit, and, because of that, a scruple and a
doubt upon mine, answerable for much of what he was. Before the
eventual proof came that he was clear of blame, there were thoughts
even of an imperative parting, and a reaching for the rectification
towards the Happy Hunting-Grounds, where, at an era's end, we could
be joyous together; and where under the old guiding then never
unskilful, the old sympathy then never erring, the Fine Gentleman
could be to his virtue's full, and in no misapprehending air, his
innocent, upright, loving self again. But instantly, as if to wipe
out forever that possible evil of which men could dream him guilty,
came the moving and memorable end. Amid the tears of a whole town,
and the thanksgiving of some for a greater grief averted, very
quietly and consciously, under the most painful conditions, the Fine
Gentleman laid down his life for a little child's sake. The fifth
act of his tragedy had a sort of drastic consistency, to those who
knew him; it was in line with his odd, inborn, unconventional ways:
the fate one would have chosen for him, and the fittest with which
to associate his soldierly memory. In exile and cashiered, he had
overturned his defamers at a stroke.
It is not too proud a sentence to write over him, that this world,
for the most part, was jealous of his nobility. Human society was
some sort of huge jest to him; he did not always do his best there,
as if the second-best were the shrewder policy, and the neater
adaptation to the codes of honor he found established. His main
concern was certainly the study of mankind, and he stood to it, a
free and unbookish philosopher, looking on and not partaking, with
his reticent tongue, his singularly soft footfall, his "eye like a
wild Indian's, but cordial and full of smothered glee." To his own
race he must be an epic figure and a precedent, and to ours something
not undeserving of applause.
"Go seek that hapless tomb, which if ye hap to find,
Salute the stones that keep the bones that held so good a mind."
Such are the only annals of the Fine Gentleman, a Saint Bernard dog,
faithful and forgotten, who bore a great Bostonian's name nearly five
years without a stain, and who is, to one or two of us, not alone a
friend lost, but an ideal set up: Perseus become a star.
1889.
IRISH
THEY say the Celt is passing away,
"Encompassed all his hours
By fearfullest powers
Inflexible to him."
For he represents yesterday, and its ideals: legendry, ritual, the
heroic and indignant joy of life, belong to him; and he can establish
no manner of connection with modern science and the subjugating of
the material universe; with the spirit of to-day and to-morrow. Of
all Celtic countries, Ireland has the richest background; with so
varied and exciting a past, it may well be that she has difficulty in
concentrating herself on the new, and hangs to her own consistencies
in a world of compromise. Every one save herself has forgotten what
she was, and how her precedents, rather than any outer consideration,
must still govern her, and keep her antagonist and unreconciled. It
is not to be modified, this pauper's pride of blood. She says to
the powers, in charming futile bravado, what a Howard once said to
a Spencer: "My ancestors were plotting treason, while yours were
keeping sheep!" The word warms her heart like wine. "_Le moyen
âge énorme et délicat_," in Verlaine's beautiful colors, seems a
phrase made for Irish mediævalism. It was the watershed of European
knowledge and moral culture: the watershed truly, which, sending
streams down and out and far away, can never call them back. It gave
Scotland her "naked knee" and her kingly line; it gave England its
Christian creed; it gave modern France and Spain the noble enrichment
of its banished and stainless gentry, its Jacobite Wild Geese. It has
been in America, from the Revolution on, an influence incalculable.
It won the perfect understanding sympathy of De Beaumont, Renan and
Matthew Arnold: men of antipodal judgments. It has an intangible
throne in every mind which loves scholarship, and imaginings more
beautiful than any folk-lore in the world. "See you this skull?"
Lucan makes Mercury say to Menippus, in the shades: "this is Helen."
Great is the gulf between happy Innisfail, sovereign and wise, with
her own laws, language, sports, and dress, and this wrecked Ireland
we know: a country of untended flax-fields, unworked marble-quarries,
silent mills on river-banks, little collapsing baronies whose
landlords are absent and cold, and a capital whose lordly houses are
given over, since the Union, to neglect and decay.
Yet of her glory there are glorious witnesses. Her rough and winding
historic roads are open all along. The country is full of ruins
and traditions and snatches of strange song, to "tease us out of
thought." A gander off on a holiday, with his white spouse and
their pretty brood, lifts his paternal hiss at the passer-by from a
Druid's altar; and where young lambs lie, in a windy spring, to lee
of their mothers, is a magnificent doorway, Lombardic, Romanesque,
or Hiberno-Saxon, arch in arch, with its broken inscription, an
_Orate_ for immemorial kings. At well-sides are yet seen ablutions
and prayers, and May-Day offerings of corn and wool, even as they
were "before the advent of the Desii into the County Waterford." By
a waterfall, plunging under cleanest ivy and long grass, is a cross
with circled centre and intricate Byzantine ornament, displaying
David with his harp, or Peter with his keys, set up by a monastic
hand twelve hundred years ago. Forty feet away, is something dearer
to the archæologist: a kitchen of the primeval hunters, its wall and
hearth and calcined lime-stones bedded among laughing bluebells.
A brook's freshet, any March, may bring ashore a strange staff or
necklace; a rock is overturned under a yew-tree, and discloses
horns and knives elder than Clontarf. But yesterday, in a Carlow
garden adjoining the ruins of a Butler fortress, put up at the time
when Richard the Lionheart was looking with tears of envy over the
walls of Jerusalem, closed urns were found in vaults, each with its
shining dust: a tenantry long anterior to Christianity, and conscious
perhaps, of Christian goings-on overhead, when The MacMorrough
Kavanagh was pressed to dine with the Warden of the Black Castle, and
slain among his followers at the pouring of the wine. There can be
no other country so fatal to the antiquarian: for zest and labor are
superfluous, and a long course of incomparable luck must drive him,
for very satiety, from the field.
Venerable Ireland has failed, as the world reckons failure. She
cannot take prettily to her rôle of subjugated province. Abominably
misruled, without a senate, without commerce, she has fallen back
into the sullen interior life, into the deep night of reverie.
From that brooding dark she has let leap no modern flame supremely
great. For the great artist is not Irish, as yet, though with warm
exaggerations, uncritical enthusiasms, affectionate encouragements,
her own exalt her own. As Goldsmith accused Dr. Johnson of doing,
she lets her little fishes talk like whales. And this, of course,
tends to no good: it only blunts the ideals of the populace, lowers
the mark of achievement, and makes it difficult indeed for the
true prince to be recognized in the hubbub of mistaken acclaim.
The constituency of Aneurin and Ossian lacks a single sovereign
poet: a lack apparent enough to all but itself. Verse, from of old,
is pervasive as dew or showers: but nowhere is it in process of
crystallization. The persecution of age-long ignorance, imposed upon
a most intellectual people, is a miasmatic cloud not yet altogether
withdrawn. Only in the best is Ireland perfect: in heroes and in
saints. In life, if not in art, we can sometimes do away with
economy, restraint, equipoise. We can hardly judge the epic figures
of antiquity: but from Columba to "J.K.L.," from Hugh O'Neill and
Sarsfield to Emmet and Lord Edward Fitzgerald, runs an endearing
family likeness: scorn, pity, sweetness, disinterestedness, honor,
power, brave ill luck, in them all. Most of these are rebels; their
names are under the baffling shadow of exile and the scaffold, and,
alas, count for naught save in their mother's memory.
"Where be thy gods, O Israel?" The gibe comes with ill grace from the
English. England has, by the world's corroboration, her divine sons,
whose names are in benediction. But she has also a Sahara spectacle
of the most stolid, empty folk in the universe: the sapless,
rootless, flowerless millions who pay, as it were, for Shakespeare
and Shelley, for Turner and Purcell, for Newton and Darwin. Easy,
is it not, for the superlative quality to form and act, in fullest
power here and there, in a nation where no smallest grain of it is
ever wasted on the common mortal? But Ireland reeks with genius
impartially distributed. It is infectious; every one suffers from it,
in its various stages and manifestations. "The superior race" makes
the superior individual impossible. There is no situation open to
him; he is notoriously superfluous: a coal brought to Newcastle. It
is his lot to awake contradiction, and to be made to feel that he has
no nominating committee behind him. He may be a great man in theory:
but where every other man is demonstrably quite as great as he, he
may be excused if he fails to move mountains. Eccentricity is in
your Irishman's blood; and organization he hates and fears, perhaps
through a dim consciousness that in organizations mental activities
must be left to the leaders. If Celticism, with its insuperable
charm, has never led the world in trade or war, can never so lead
it, the cause is only that the units, which can hardly be said to
compose it, use their brains with unhallowed persistence. The most
dashing spirited troops in Europe, the Irish are natural critics even
of authority. Their successes are everywhere spasmodic: they juggle
with success, they do not woo it to wife. In a career dramatically
checkered, it happens that their onset wins Fontenoy, and that their
advice forfeits Culloden.
It has been well said that the cultured classes are everywhere
much the same, and that the true range of observation lies among
the lowly and the poor. Now, no peasantry in the world furnishes
such marked examples as does the Irish, of original speculation,
accessibility to ideas. Threadbare old farmers and peddlers keep
you in amused astonishment, and in an attitude of impious doubt
towards the ascendancy of the trained thinker. You fall, nay, you
run into cordial agreement with the suggestion of Tom Jones to the
Ensign, "that it is as possible for a man to know something without
having been at school, as it is to have been at school and to know
nothing!" To handle the inscrutable Celt on his own acres is to
learn, or at least to apprehend, the secret of a live resistance,
incredibly prolonged, to a power almost wearied out with maintaining
mastery. The sense of equity, the sense of humor itself, in the
humblest and silentest Irishman, is armor enough against fate. He,
the law-breaker, has compensations which the law-makers wot not of,
in his own ethic subtleties. His soul swells big with dreams. In
his native village, he is rated sympathetically by the dream's size
and duration, rather than, as in grosser communities, by the deed.
The man is a trafficker in visions; he becomes a cryptic mystery to
his wife. She admires him for his madness, and has heard of fairy
influences: "_satis est_, it suffices," as old Burton oracularly
says. Ah, well, the poor devil is with Fergus in his woodland car,
when the rent comes due, and the crops are rotting in the rain!
He has no turn for temporalities, no ambition to rise; yet in a
pictorial sense, by the grace of God, or the witchcraft of the soil,
he walks unique and illustrious. It is a memorable sight, this
monstrous average and aggregate of whim. Nowhere the lonely planetary
effulgence: everywhere the jovial defiant twinkle of little stars!
According to Emerson's sweet prediction,--
"As half-gods go,
The gods arrive."
But in Ireland no clever half-god ever gets up to go, for the sake of
any sequel.
Niecks, the biographer of Chopin, noting the extreme nationalism of
Chopin's genius, would have us mark that the same force of patriotism
in an Italian, Frenchman, German, or Englishman, could not have
promoted a similar result. Poland is a realm, he tells us, where
racial traits remain intact, and uninfluenced from without: she is
more esoterical than any state can be which is on the highway of
Continental progress, in touch with to-morrow; and therefore her
expression in the arts is sure to be more individual, distinct, and
striking. Ireland is such another spiritually isolated country.
Her best utterance, or her least, is alike betrayingly hers, to be
scented among a thousand. And this homogeneity, in her case, is quite
unaccountable, unless we accept as its explanation, the magnetic and
absorbent quality in the strange isle itself, which has blended
a dozen alien strains in one, and made of Scythian, Erse, Norse,
Iberian, the Norman, the Dane, the English of the Pale, the Huguenot,
and the horde of Elizabethan and Cromwellian settlers, something
"more Irish than the Irish." And in Poland, again, the aristocracy,
though malcontent and impoverished, for honor's sake, maintains
its own traditions in its own station, as the feudal vassals
maintain theirs. But the genuine Irish gentry is extinct, or utterly
transformed, on its ancient acres. The original peasant stock has all
but perished from famines and immigrations. Most significant of all,
what remains of the two, blends as in no other European territory.
The peasants were long ago driven from the estate of free clansmen;
the gentry, who would neither conform nor flee, were crushed into
the estate of peasants, by the penal laws of the Protestant victor,
which made education treason; by the most hateful code, as Lord Chief
Justice Coleridge named it, framed since the beginning of the world:
and one class impacted on the other, as mortar among stones, became
indistinguishable in a generation. Time, which was expected to bring
about No Ireland, has in reality engendered a national life more
intense than ever. The physical strength, the patience and passion,
of the common people; the grace, loyalty, and play of thought of
gentlemen, have in that national life come together. Unique patrician
wit, delicacy of feeling, knightly courtesy, have run out of their
allotted conduits, and they color the speech of beggars. Distinction
of all sorts sprouts in the unlikeliest places. Violent Erin produces
ever and anon the gentlest philosopher; recluse Erin sends forth the
consummate cosmopolitan; hunted and jealous Erin holds up on its top
stalk the open lily of liberality,
----"courteous, facile, sweet,
Hating that solemn vice of greatness, pride."
Ireland is at work in every department of every civilization: it is
a seed-shedding, an aroma, intangible as April. No pioneer post,
no remote wave, no human enterprise from Algiers to Peru, but can
answer for it, ill or well. Yet none know whether Ireland itself
is at this hour a mere menace of terrible import, like Samson, or
ready, another Odysseus, to throw off disguises, and draw, at home,
"in Tara's halls," the once familiar bow. Its own future, in its own
altered valleys, is hidden. The tragic cloud hangs there. Foreboding,
unrest, are stamped on the very water and sky, and on proud sensitive
faces. It was on a day in spring, in sight of Wicklow headlands,
the Golden Spears of long ago;--a day when primroses and celandine
and prodigal furze splashed the hillsides, down to the rocks where
fishers sat mending nets, and stitching tawny sails; when there
was a sense of overhanging heights, and green inlands, and ruined
abbeys whose stone warriors sleep in hearing of the surf, and of huge
cromlech, fairy rath, and embattled wall, long and low, looking sadly
down; when the shadows in that cold enchanted air at sea, fringing
every sapphire bay, chased from silver through carmine to purple,
and back again;--on such a day of caprice and romance, the true
day of the Gael, a woman beautiful as the young Deirdre said to a
stranger, walking the cliff-path at her side: "No: we have never been
conquered: we are unconquerable. But we are without hope."
1889.
AN OPEN LETTER TO THE MOON
"TO THE CELESTIAL AND MY SOUL'S IDOL, THE MOST
BEAUTIFIED":--
IT might appear to us an imperative, though agreeable duty, most high
and serene Madame, to waft towards you, occasionally, a transcript
of our humble doings on this nether planet, were we not sure, in
the matter of friendly understanding, that we opened correspondence
long ago. You were one of our earliest familiars. You stood in
that same office to our fathers and mothers, back to your sometime
contemporary, Adam of the Garden; and while we are worried into
acquiescence with the inevitable design of age, we are more pleased
than envious to discover that you grow never old to the outward eye,
and that you appear the same "lovesome ladie bright," as when we
first stared at you from a babe's pillow. You are acquainted, not by
hearsay, but by actual evidence, with the family history, having seen
what sort of figure our ancestors cut, and being infinitely better
aware of the peculiarities of the genealogical shrub than we can ever
be. Therefore we make no reference to a matter so devoid of novelty.
But we do mean to free our minds frankly on the subject of your
Ladyship's own behavior. We take this resolve to be no breach of that
exalted courtesy which befits us, no less than you, in your skyey
station.
We have in part, lost our ancient respect for you: a sorry fact to
chronicle. There were once various statements floating about our
cradle, complimentary to your supposed virtues. You were Phoebe,
twin to Phoebus: a queen, having a separate establishment, coming
into a deserted court by night, and kindling it into more than
daytime revelry. You were an enchantress, the tutelary divinity of
water-sprites and greensward fairies. Your presence was indispensable
for felicitous dreams. To be moonstruck, then, meant to be charmed
inexpressibly, to be lifted off our feet.
Now, we allow that you have suffered by misrepresentation, or
else are we right in detecting your arts; for, by all your starry
handmaidens, you are not what we took you to be! We are informed (our
quondam faith in you beshrews the day we learned to read!) that you
are a timid dependent only of the sun, afraid to show yourself while
he is on his peregrinations; that you slyly steal the garb of his
splendor as he lays it aside, and blaze forthwith in your borrowed
finery. That you are no friend to innocent goblins, but abettor to
housebreakers; conspirator in many direful deeds, attending base
nocturnal councils, and tacitly arraigning yourself against the law.
"Let us be Diana's foresters, gentlemen of the shade, ... governed,
as the sea is, by our noble and chaste mistress, the moon, under
whose countenance we--steal." That your gossip is the ominous owl,
and not Titania. Your inconstancy, to come on delicate ground,
shineth above your other characteristics. Since we have seen your
color come and go, we surmise that there is no dearth of intrigue
and repartee up there; and in a red or a grey veil, you masquerade
periodically, at unseasonable hours. Of painting your complexion we
are disposed to acquit you; yet it is a severe blow to us to learn,
from the most trustworthy sources, that you wax.
Selene, Artemis! you are worldly beyond worldlings. We hear that you
have quarters, and that you jingle them triumphantly in the ears of
Orion, who is nobody but a poor hunter. Beware of the exasperation
of the lower classes! whose awakening is what we call below a French
Revolution. Who, indeed, that hath a mote in his eye, cannot still
discern a huge beam in yours? Have you no resident missionary?
for you persist in obstinate schisms, and flaunt that exploded
Orientalism, the crescent, in the teeth of Christendom. You are much
more distant and reserved, O beguiler! than you pretend. Your temper
is said to be volcanic.