Kringlish person to be seen about your premises? He hangeth his great
ruddy comfortable phiz out of your casements, and holdeth it sidewise
with a wink or a leer, having never yet found his rhyming way to
Norwich. We look on him as an officious rascal. He peereth where you
only, by privilege, have permission to enter. He hath the evil eye.
He thinketh himself a proper substitute for you, and King of the
Illuminari; he reproduceth your smile, and scattereth your largesses;
he maketh faces (we say it shudderingly) at your worshippers below.
Frequently hath he appropriated kisses that were blown to you
personally, or consigned to you for delivery, from one sweetheart to
another.
O Lady, O Light-dispenser, think, we hereby beseech you, of the
danger of his being taken for you! Picture the discomfiture of
your minstrel, who, intoning a rapturous recital of your charms,
and casting about for a sight of your delectable loveliness, is
confronted, instead, with that broad ingenuous vagabond! In some such
despairing rage as the minstrel's, must have been the inventor of the
German tongue, who discarded all other chances of observation after
once beholding this thing, ycleped your Man, and angrily insisted on
"Der Mond,"--the Moon, he--as the proper mode of speech. I cite you
this from old John Lyly: "There liveth none under the sunne that
know what to make of the man in the moon." We clamor at you from
the throats of the five races: Abolish him, or at least, depose the
present incumbent, and get you straightway some acceptable minion,
one of more chivalric habit, of more spare and ascetic exterior! Your
credit and our comfort demand it. "Pray you, remember."
What scenes, Cosmopolite, Circumnavigator, Universalist, have you
beheld: what joy, what plenty, what riot and desolation! You are the
arch-spectator. Death sees not half so widely. He lurketh like an
anxious thief in the crowd, seeking what he may take away. But your
bland leisurely eye looketh down disinterestedly on all. Caravans
rested thrice a thousand years ago beneath you in the desert;
Assyrian shepherds chanted to you with their long-hushed voices;
the south wind, while the infant world fell into its first slumber,
leaped up and played with you in Paradise. You have known the chaos
before man, and yet we saw you laugh upon last April's rain. Are
there none for whom you are lonely through the ages? Are there not
centuries of old delight in your memory, unequalled now? faces fairer
than the lilies, on whose repose you still yearn to shine? Do you
miss the smoke of altars? Have you forgotten the beginners of the
"star-ypointing pyramid"? Can you not tell us a tale of the Visigoth?
How sang Blondel against the prison door? How brawny was Bajazet? How
fair was Helen; Semiramis, how cruel? Moon! where be the treasures of
the doughty Kidd?
You, Cynthia and Hecate, sweet Lady of Ghosts and guardian of the
underworld, have been fed upon the homage of mortal lips: you have
had praises from the poets exquisite as calamus and myrrh. Many a
time have we rehearsed before you such as we recall, from the sigh of
Enobarbus:--
"O sovereign mistress of true melancholy!"
to the hymnal
"Orbèd maiden, with white fire laden,"
of the noble salutation of a mirthful-mournful spirit:
"Oh! thou art beautiful, howe'er it be,
Huntress or Dian, or whatever named;
And he the veriest pagan, that first framed
His silver idol, and ne'er worshipped thee."
Have we not sung oft that strophe of Ben Jonson's, full of
inexpressible music to our ear?
"Lay thy bow of pearl apart
And thy crystal shining quiver;
Give unto the flying hart
Space to breathe, how short soever,
Thou that mak'st a day of night,
Goddess excellently bright!"
and the beloved rhymeless cadence of old Jasper Fisher's drama,
beginning:--
"Thou queen of Heaven, commandress of the deep,
Lady of lakes, regent of woods and deer."
Sidney, Drummond, Milton, glorified your wanderings. And your truest
votary, one John Keats, spake out boldly that
----"the oldest shade midst oldest trees
Feels palpitations when thou lookest in."
You are an incorrigible charmer: but as he reports you likewise as
----"a relief
To the poor, patient oyster, where he sleeps
Within his pearly house,"
we infer, with pleasurable surprise, that you have set up as a
humanitarian.
Now, we venture to assert that you remember compliments meant to be
of the same Orphic strain, and inscribed to you, of which we are not
wholly guiltless. We have all but knelt to you, with the Libyan.
The primeval heathen has stirred within us. We have been under
the witchery of Isis. We aspire to be a Moonshee, rather than any
potentate of this universe. Have we not followed you, O "planet of
progression!" all our bright, volatile, restless, tide-like days? We
wound you not with the analytic eye, nor startle you with telescopes.
The scepticisms of astronomy enter not into our rubric. Are you not
comely? Do you not spiritualize the darkness with one touch of your
pale garment? Then what are they to us, your dimensions and your
distances? Gross vanity of knowledge! Mere abuse of privilege!
If we affect the abusive, shy of more ceremonious forms of address,
forgive us, Luna. We make recantation, and disown our banter. We
extend the hand of cordiality even to your month-old Man. How blithe
and beauteous he is! He is embodied Gentility. We bow to him as your
anointed Viceroy, your illustrious Nuncio. You know our immemorial
loyalty, nor shall our rogueries teach you so late to doubt it.
"_Da Lunæ propere novæ,
Da noctis mediæ, da, puer!_"
Forgive us, benignant, peaceful, affable, propitious Moon. Poet are
we not, nor lunatic, nor lover; "but that we love thee best, O Most
Best! believe it."
1885.
THE UNDER DOG
WHAT a pity a memoir cannot be written without regard to its alleged
incidents! Annalists are naturally the slaves of what happens; and
that glows between them and the eternal, like gorgeous-colored
minster glass, a spurious man-made heaven. A written Life may be
true to fact and false to law, even as a lived life may be so. It
is utterly impossible for the most philosophic among us to know, to
judge, or even to speculate, in behalf of any but himself. A word, a
risk, a blunder, the breadth of a hair, the difference betwixt the
two Kings of Brentford, lifts the obscure into apparent greatness, or
forbids the potentially greater to descend to that table-land where
there is no mist, where human senses come into play, and where he may
become a subject for the approbation of history. In whatsoever degree
a creature is burdened with conscience and stiffened with will, his
course must be continuously deflected by countless little secret
interior collisions and readjustments, which have final cumulative
influence on what we call his character and his achievement. The
means to this end are nowhere discoverable, unless in a perfect
autobiography, and under the eye of the perfect reader. Fate must
have her joke sometimes, as well as the least of us, and she suffers
cheap energy to fill the newspapers for a lustrum, and genius to
await identification at the morgue. These are truisms, but here is
truth: in nine hundred and ninety-nine instances out of a thousand,
it is folly to name any success or failure as such; for either is a
mystery, and the fairest evidences by which we can form an opinion of
it are altogether and irremediably fallacious.
Now, what has often used up and ended a man's vital force, is
some constraint much more significant than that of early death, a
constraint sought and willingly undergone. His own moral weakness
stopped Coleridge; but Erasmus might have uttered with Sidney:
"My life melts with too much thinking."
Socrates, it will be remembered, "corrupted the Athenian youth." Not
one of them he moulded or breathed upon, except the transient pupil
Alcibiades, turned his hand cordially to the practical, or ramped
in the civic china-shop. What ghost is it which certain minds see
upon the way, and which lessens their destined momentum? Something
extra-rational, we may be sure: something with an august enchantment.
They act under the impulse of an heroic fickleness, and forsake a
known and very good result for "the things that are more excellent."
The spectators can only wonder; the crucial third act has passed
swiftly and in silence behind the curtain, and the rest of the drama
sounds perverted and confused. A mere secular enthusiasm may have the
power to draw a career to itself, absorb and devour it, and keep it
shut forever from the chance of distinction in selfish and pleasant
ways. But what shall be said for those who have become impassioned of
the supernatural, beholding it in amaze, as Hubert the hunter beheld
the holy sign between the antlered brows in the Aquitanian forest:
a sight enough to stay them and carry them out of themselves, and
change what was their prospect, because "the former things are passed
away?" What of the allegiance to a cause, the espousal of hunger
and thirst, the wilderness, and the scaffold, in the hope, never
ultimately in vain, of awakening and bettering the world? "If the law
require you to be the agent of injustice to another," wrote Thoreau,
in his good manful essay on John Brown, "then I say to you, break
the law. Let your life be a friction to stop the machine." Even thus
have many gone under, of whom no audiences have heard, but whose love
and wisdom feed the race, century after century. In our reckoning of
the saints, we lose sight of half their meaning; for we cannot guess
accurately which of them has lost most, humanly and æsthetically,
nor how much any one individual has lost, by his chosen concentration
on matters in which there is no general competition, and where there
can be no established canons of criticism. Some saints, in a double
sense, follow their vocations; they attain their only legitimate
development in the cloister. But others are saints at a sacrifice.
An infinite number of men and women, painfully approximating moral
perfection, lose, either gradually, or at once and forever, in that
supreme compensation, their aptitude for common affairs. "_Ejiciebas
eas, et intrabas pro eis, omne voluptate dulcior_," says the son of
Monica's tears, himself gloriously stricken out from the pagan roll
of honor.
Such as these have outgrown their own existence; they become
impalpable to the general apprehension; they have sold the mess of
pottage again for the birthright of the sons of God. And God, in the
audacious old phrase, has "destroyed" them. What they bade fair to
be, or what they could have done, before they were crippled by vigils
and visions, rolls back into the impossible and the unimagined. We
have no clue to alienated souls: we can compute with those solely,
who, as we say, get along and amount to something; and we seldom
perceive what purely fortuitous reputations, what mere bright flotsam
and jetsam, accidentally uppermost, are those whom we set first in a
fixed place, and cry up as exemplars in art, trade, and policy. For
what might have been is not this crass world's concern: her absent
have no rights. The spiritual man is likely to be possessed of a
divine indolence; would he strive, he is hampered and thwarted by
the remembrance, or the forecast, of whiter ideals in Paradise. It
is sometimes urged as a reproach against the courteous Latin nations
that they lag behind in modern progressiveness; that they do not,
like the Border lads, "march forward in order." The reproach is, at
bottom, a delicate and exquisite compliment. With genius in their
blood, and beauty never far from their hand, what wonder if they
continue to be careless about rapid transit?
"I have seen higher, holier things than these,
And therefore must to these refuse my heart."
The endearing fable of elf-shot or bewitched children, little
goose-girls waylaid on the hillside by fairies in green and silver,
and enticed away, and set free after a while, though with the
dream and the blight ever upon them, is, like most fables, deep as
immortality. The mystic has already gone too far, and seen too much;
he is useless at the plough: he is, as it were, one citizen less.
The fine lines just quoted are from an expert in inaction, the poet
who, among all others with an equal equipment in English letters,
may be named pre-eminently as a failure: Arthur Hugh Clough. Let his
lovers proclaim as much with gentle irony. Most poets, it may be,
are heroes spoiled; they know somewhat of the unknown, and suffer
from it; the usual measure of their esoteric worth must still be the
measure of their mundane impracticability: like Hamlet, they have
seen spirits, and forswear deeds for phrases. Artists and thinkers,
in fact, must outwardly follow the profession of the queen bee, not
as yet with honor, nor by general request. But they are omens; they
are, let us hope, the type and the race, the segregated non-cohesive
thing, the protest which counts. The noblest of them is least in love
with civilization and its awards; but what they have not hoarded
for themselves, strangers hoard for them; and because success is
most truly to them a thing foregone, therefore they prevail forever.
If they have not "made a living," they have, in the opinion of a
young Governor of Massachusetts, a philosopher not of the Franklin
breed,--"made a life."
1893.
QUIET LONDON
IF one had to try his hand at the eternal parallel of London and
Paris (next weariest, in the scale of human comparisons, to that
between D----s and T----y), or, indeed, of London with any city of
known size, it might be said, in a word, that the chief variance
between them is a variance of sound: and that under this, and
expressed by it,--"alas, how told to them who felt it never?" as
Dante sighs over the abstruse sweetness of his lady,--is a profound
spiritual difference. Whatever tradition may say of
----"the chargeable noise of this great town,"
its instructed inhabitant knows it by strange whispers, meek
undertones. Conceive anything more diverting than that a monstrous
awe-engendering institution like the 'bus should be almost as deft
and as still as a humming-bird! Monosyllables, and pipe-smoke, and
sciential collecting of fares make up the rolling van masculine;
ever and anon the less certain step and the swish of a skirt on the
lurching stair, announce to the heroes of the serene height that
"Helen is come upon the wall to see."
With perfect skill, with masterful rapidity, the wheels slide over
surfaces smooth as an almond-shell, in a mere ballroom jingle and
rustle. Cabs are dragon-flies by day, and glowworms by night: they
dart, noiseless, from north to west. Even the tuft-footed dray-horses
vanish with such reverberation as might follow Cinderella's coach.
Exquisite voices of children, soft and shy, fall like the plash
of water on the open paths of the Parks. In the viscid openings
of alleys off the Strand, in the ancient astonishing tinkerdom
of Leather Lane, where villainous naphtha torches light up the
green lettuce on peddler's carts, the pawnbroker's golden balls
significant above, and a knot of Hogarth faces in the Saturday
evening flare,--there also, are the cockney gamins with honey-bright
hair: profiles which corroborate Millais' brush, and illustrate a
lovely phrase of Mistral in _Mirèio_, "couleur de joue;" flushed
little legs in ragged socks, which have piteously set out on the
dark thoroughfares of life; voices, above all, which have often a
low harp-like tone not to be heard elsewhere out of drawing-rooms.
It is as if tremendous London, her teeming thoughts troubling her,
said "Hush!" in the ear of all her own. Hyde Park orators are seldom
brawlers; immense crowds, out for sight-seeing, are controlled by the
gentlest of police, who say "Please," and are obeyed. Few stop to
salute or exchange a word at the shelters. This is no experimental
or villageous world: one man's affairs are in India, another's on
the deep sea, and a third's in a cradle three stories up. Sidneys
and pickpockets intermingle, each on a non-communicated errand. Here
whisks a Turk, in his extraordinary unnoticed dress; and yonder, a
sprout of a man who might have been bow-legged, had he any legs at
all: nothing new goes at its value, nothing strange begets comment.
The long-distance ironies, or intelligential buzz of street-life
in New York, where folk go two and two, are here foreign and
transatlantic indeed. The even pavements drink in all that might
mean concussion, the soft golden air deadens it, the preoccupied
seriousness of the human element contradicts and forbids it. An
awful, endearing, melancholy stillness broods over the red roofs of
High Holborn, and hangs, like a pale cloud, on the spires of the
Strand, and the yellow-lustred plane tree of Cheapside: gigantic
forces seem trooping by, like the boy-god Harpocrates, finger on lip.
The hushing rain, from a windless sky, falls in sheets of silver on
gray, gray on violet, violet on smouldering purple, and anon makes
whole what it had hardly riven: the veil spun of nameless analogic
tints, which brings up the perspective of every road, the tapestry
of sun-shot mist which Théophile Gautier admired once with all his
eye. The town wears the very color of silence. No one can say of S.
Paul's that it is a talking dome, despite the ironic accident of the
whispering gallery in the interior. Like Wordsworth upon Helvellyn,
in Haydon's odd memorable portrait, it sees with drooped eyes, and
exhorts with grand reticences and abstractions. Mighty stone broods
above, on either hand, its curiously beautiful draperies of soot
furled over the brow, in the posture of the speechless martyrs of
Attic tragedy. There is an alchemic atmosphere in London, which
interdicts one's perception of ugliness. At the angles of the
grimiest places, choked with trade, we stumble on little old bearded
graveyards, pools of ancestral sleep; or low-lying leafy gardens
where monks and guildsmen have had their dream: closes inexpressibly
pregnant with peace, the cæsural pauses of our loud to-day. Nothing
in the world is so remote, so pensive, so musty-fragrant of long
ago, as the antique City churches where the dead are the only
congregation; where the effigies of Rahere the founder, Sir Nicholas
Throgmorton, John Gower, and our old friend Stow are awake, in
their scattered neighborhoods, to make the responses; and where the
voices of the daily choir, disembodied by the unfilled space about,
breathe ghostly four-part Amens, to waver like bubbles up and down
the aisles. And to go thence into the highway creates no great
jar. The tide there is always at the flood, and frets not. The
perfectly ordered traffic, its want of blockade and altercation, the
sad-colored, civil-mannered throng, the dim light and the wet gleam,
make it as natural to be absent-minded at Charing Cross as in the
Abbey. Shelley must have found it so; else whence his simile,
"The City's voice itself is soft like Solitude's."
There is no congestion of the populace; yet the creeks and coves of
that ancient sea remain brimmed with mortality, hour after hour,
century after century, as if in subjection to a fixed moon. It is
the very poise of energy, the aggregation of so much force that
all force is at a standstill; the miraculous moment, indefinitely
prolonged, when achieved fruition becalms itself at the full, and
satiety hesitates to set in. A subdued mighty hum, as of "the loom
of time," London lacks not; but a crass explosion never breaks it.
The imponderable quiet of the vast capital completes her inscrutable
charm. She has the effect of a muted orchestra on ears driven mad
with the horrible din of new America. As still as her deep history
on library shelves, so still are her pace and her purpose to-day:
her grave passing, would, like Lincoln in camp, discourage applause.
Everywhere is the acoustically perfect standpoint. The cosmic
currents ripple audibly along.
"Therein I hear the Parcæ reel
The threads of life at the spinning-wheel,
The threads of life and power and pain."
Coal-smoke and river-fog are kind to the humanist. They build his
priory cell, where he can sit and work on his illuminations, and know
that he lays his colors true. "The man, sir, who is tired of London,"
said the great Doctor, in one of his profound generalities, "is tired
of life."
At certain hours, the City is tenantless, and sunrise or sunset,
touching the vidual tower of All Hallows Staining, gives it the
pearl and carmine tints of a shell. At such a time you may wander
in the very luxury of loneliness, from London Bridge to Lambeth,
watching the long yards swing at their moorings by the palace wall,
and Thames running tiger-coated to sea; and from the Gray's Inn limes
pass on to an unvisited and noble old bronze of an inconsiderable
Stuart, lustrous from the late shower, beyond whom are the
forgotten water-stairs of Whitehall, above whom is his own starlit
weather-vane, with "the Protestant wind still blowing." Where the
Boar's Head was, where the Roman Baths are, in strange exchanges of
chronology, where, in a twinkle, the merchants and journalists shall
be, are the depopulated presence-halls in which you are
"In dreams a king, but waking, no such matter."
All that was temporal in them has been swallowed by the wave of the
generations of men who are no more. Poet by poet, from the beginning,
has known the look of London's void heart at night, and has had,
next it, his keenest gust of sovereignty, on jealous marches when
his own footfall is soft as a forest creature's, for fear of man
and of mortal interruption. The living are gone for the moment:
the dead and their greatness are "nearer than hands and feet." The
divinest quality of this colossal calm, "mirk miles broad," is that,
to the sensitive mind, it is a magic glass for musings. In such a
mysterious private depth Narcissus saw himself, and died of his own
beauty. The few who have had eternity most in mind, have worshipped
London most; and their passion, read of in biographies, has expanded,
insensibly, the imagination of the many. The terror of the vast town
lies on any thoughtful spirit; but without some touch or other of
golden casuistry, of neo-Platonism, none can sincerely adore her. For
the adorable in her is man's old adoration itself, breathed forth and
crystallized. That indeed, is the everlasting delight: London has
nothing so simple in her bosom as instinctive charm. She is the dear
echo, the dear mirror, of humanity. The Charles Lamb who was wont to
relieve his tender overburdened spirit by a plunge in the surging
crowd, and who was not ashamed that he had wept there, "for fulness
of joy at so much life," might be the first to apply to the majestic
and bitter mother who bred him, the illumining line of Alfred de
Musset:
"_Car sa beauté pour nous, c'est notre amour pour elle._"
She gives us freedom, recollection, reverence; and we attribute to
her the sweetness of our own dispositions at her knee. Blessing us
with her silence, the glad incredible thing, she lets us believe we
have discovered it, as a fresh secret between lover and lover.
On Sundays, too, the dreary English Sundays of old complaint,
what idyllic opportunity wastes itself at the door! Hampstead and
Blackheath are efflorescent with the populace, but dark London wears
her troth-plight ring of meditation. Her church-bells, indeed,
speak: there is a new one at every turning, like the succession of
perfumes as you cross a conservatory, and felt as a discord no more
than these. Good to hear are the chimes of S. Giles Cripplegate, the
aged bells of S. Helen, with their grace-notes and falling thirds,
the great octave-clash of Wren's cathedral, which booms and sprays
like the sea on the chalk-cliffs almost within its sight. And the
ghosts are out again under the eaves of Little Britain and Soho.
It is usually on Sundays, or at night, that you may view the young
Cowley (curled up, among the geraniums, on the window-ledge of the
Elizabethan house next S. Dunstan's-in-the-West) reading Spenser,
his light bronze curls curtaining the folio page; and a figure of
uncontemporaneous look, coming heavily from the Temple gateway,
almost opposite, with a black band on his sleeve, is saying brokenly
to himself: "Poor Goldy was wild, very wild; but he is so no more."