"A LITTLE FIRE BURNS UP A GREAT DEAL OF CORN."--OLD PROVERB.
Guy Darrell resumed the thread of solitary life at Fawley with a calm
which was deeper in its gloom than it had been before. The experiment of
return to the social world had failed. The resolutions which had induced
the experiment were finally renounced. Five years nearer to death, and
the last hope that had flitted across the narrowing passage to the grave,
fallen like a faithless torch from his own hand, and trodden out by his
own foot.
It was peculiarly in the nature of Darrell to connect his objects with
posterity--to regard eminence in the Present but as a beacon-height from
which to pass on to the Future the name he had taken from the Past. All
his early ambition, sacrificing pleasure to toil, had placed its goal at
a distance, remote from the huzzas of bystanders; and Ambition halted
now, baffled and despairing. Childless, his line would perish with
himself--himself, who had so vaunted its restoration in the land! His
genius was childless also--it would leave behind it no offspring of the
brain. By toil he had amassed ample wealth; by talent he had achieved a
splendid reputation. But the reputation was as perishable as the wealth.
Let a half-century pass over his tomb, and nothing would be left to speak
of the successful lawyer the applauded orator, save traditional
anecdotes, a laudatory notice in contemporaneous memoirs--perhaps, at
most, quotations of eloquent sentences lavished on forgotten cases and
obsolete debates--shreds and fragments of a great intellect, which
another half-century would sink without a bubble into the depths of Time.
He had enacted no laws--he had administered no state--he had composed no
books. Like the figure on a clock, which adorns the case and has no
connection with the movement, he, so prominent an or nament to time, had
no part in its works. Removed, the eye would miss him for a while; but a
nation's literature or history was the same, whether with him or without.
Some with a tithe of his abilities have the luck to fasten their names to
things that endure; they have been responsible for measures they did not
not invent, and which, for good or evil, influence long generations.
They have written volumes out of which a couplet of verse, a period in
prose, may cling to the rock of ages, as a shell that survives a deluge.
But the orator, whose effects are immediate--who enthralls his audience
in proportion as he nicks the hour--who, were he speaking like Burke
what, apart from the subject-matter, closet students would praise, must,
like Burke, thin his audience, and exchange present oratorical success
for ultimate intellectual renown--a man, in short, whose oratory is
emphatically that of the DEBATER is, like an actor, rewarded with a loud
applause and a complete oblivion. Waife on the village stage might win
applause no less loud, followed by oblivion not more complete.
Darrell was not blind to the brevity of his fame. In his previous
seclusion he had been resigned to that conviction--now it saddened him.
Then, unconfessed by himself, the idea that he might yet reappear in
active life, and do something which the world would not willingly let
die, had softened the face of that tranquil Nature from which he must
soon now pass out of reach and sight. On the tree of Time he was a leaf
already sear upon the bough--not an inscription graven into the rind.
Ever slow to yield to weak regrets--ever seeking to combat his own
enemies within--Darrell said to himself one night, while Fairthorn's
flute was breathing an air of romance through the melancholy walls: "Is
it too late yet to employ this still busy brain upon works that will live
when I am dust, and make Posterity supply the heir that fails to my
house?"
He shut himself up with immortal authors--he meditated on the choice of a
theme; his knowledge was wide, his taste refined;--words!--he could not
want words! Why should he not write? Alas; why indeed?--He who has
never been a writer in his youth, can no more be a writer in his age than
he can be a painter--a musician. What! not write a book! Oh, yes--as he
may paint a picture or set a song. But a writer, in the emphatic sense
of the word--a writer as Darrell was an orator--oh, no! And, least of
all, will he be a writer if he has been an orator by impulse and habit--
an orator too happily gifted to require, and too laboriously occupied to
resort to, the tedious aids of written preparation--an orator as modern
life forms orators--not, of course, an orator like those of the classic
world, who elaborated sentences before delivery, and who, after delivery,
polished each extemporaneous interlude into rhetorical exactitude and
musical perfection. And how narrow the range of compositions to a man
burdened already by a grave reputation! He cannot have the self-
abandonment--he cannot venture the headlong charge--with which Youth
flings the reins to genius, and dashes into the ranks of Fame. Few and
austere his themes--fastidious and hesitating his taste. Restricted are
the movements of him who walks for the first time into the Forum of
Letters with the purple hem on his senatorial toga. Guy Darrell, at his
age, entering among authors as a novice!--he, the great lawyer, to whom
attorneys would have sent no briefs had he been suspected of coquetting
with a muse,--he, the great orator who had electrified audiences in
proportion to the sudden effects which distinguish oral inspiration from
written eloquence--he achieve now, in an art which his whole life had
neglected, any success commensurate to his contemporaneous repute;--how
unlikely! But a success which should outlive that repute, win the
"everlasting inheritance" which could alone have nerved him to adequate
effort--how impossible! He could not himself comprehend why, never at a
loss for language felicitously opposite or richly ornate when it had but
to flow from his thought to his tongue, nor wanting ease, even eloquence,
in epistolary correspondence confidentially familiar--he should find
words fail ideas, and ideas fail words, the moment his pen became a wand
that conjured up the Ghost of the dread Public! The more copious his
thoughts, the more embarrassing their selection; the more exquisite his
perception of excellence in others, the more timidly frigid his efforts
at faultless style. It would be the same with the most skilful author,
if the Ghost of the Public had not long since ceased to haunt him. While
he writes, the true author's solitude is absolute or peopled at his will.
But take an audience from an orator, what is he? He commands the living
public--the Ghost of the Public awes himself.
"Surely once," sighed Darrell, as he gave his blurred pages to the
flames--" surely once I had some pittance of the author's talent, and
have spent it upon lawsuits!"
The author's talent, no doubt, Guy Darrell once had--the author's
temperament never. What is the author's temperament? Too long a task to
define. But without it a man may write a clever book, a useful book, a
book that may live a year, ten years, fifty years. He will not stand out
to distant ages a representative of the age that rather lived in him than
he in it. The author's temperament is that which makes him an integral,
earnest, original unity, distinct from all before and all that may
succeed him. And as a Father of the Church has said that the
consciousness of individual being is the sign of immortality, not granted
to the inferior creatures--so it is in this individual temperament one
and indivisible, and in the intense conviction of it, more than in all
the works it may throw off, that the author becomes immortal. Nay, his
works may perish like those of Orpheus or Pythagoras; but he himself, in
his name, in the footprint of his being, remains, like Orpheus or
Pythagoras, undestroyed, indestructible.
Resigning literature, the Solitary returned to Science. There he was
more at home. He had cultivated science, in his dazzling academical
career, with ardour and success; he had renewed the study, on his first
retirement to Fawley, as a distraction from tormenting memories or
unextin guished passions. He now for the first time regarded the
absorbing abstruse occupation as a possible source of fame. To be one in
the starry procession of those sons of light who have solved a new law in
the statute-book of heaven! Surely a grand ambition, not unbecoming to
his years and station, and pleasant in its labours to a man who loved
Nature's outward scenery with poetic passion, and had studied her inward
mysteries with a sage's minute research. Science needs not the author's
art--she rejects its gracess--he recoils with a shudder from its fancies.
But Science requires in the mind of the discoverer a limpid calm. The
lightnings that reveal Diespiter must flash in serene skies. No clouds
store that thunder
"Quo bruta tellus, et vaga flumina,
Quo Styx, et invisi horrida Taenari
Sedes, Atlanteusque finis
Concutitur!"
So long as you take science only as a distraction, science will not lead
you to discovery. And from some cause or other, Guy Darrell was more
unquiet and perturbed in his present than in his past seclusion. Science
this time failed even to distract. In the midst of august meditations--
of close experiment--some haunting angry thought from the far world
passed with rude shadow between Intellect and Truth--the heart eclipsed
the mind. The fact is, that Darrell's genius was essentially formed for
Action. His was the true orator's temperament, with the qualities that
belong to it--the grasp of affairs--the comprehension of men and states
--the constructive, administrative faculties. In such career, and in
such career alone, could he have developed all his powers, and achieved
an imperishable name. Gradually as science lost its interest, he
retreated from all his former occupations, and would wander for long
hours over the wild unpopulated landscapes round him. As if it were his
object to fatigue the body, and in that fatigue tire out the restless
brain, he would make his gun the excuse for rambles from sunrise to
twilight over the manors he had purchased years ago, lying many miles off
from Fawley. There are times when a man who has passed his life in
cultivating his mind finds that the more he can make the physical
existence predominate, the more he can lower himself to the rude vigour
of the gamekeeper, or his day-labourer--why, the more he can harden his
nerves to support the weight of his reflections.
In these rambles he was not always alone. Fairthorn contrived to
insinuate himself much more than formerly into his master's habitual
companionship. The faithful fellow had missed Darrell so sorely in that
long unbroken absence of five years, that on recovering him, Fairthorn
seemed resolved to make up for lost time. Departing from his own habits,
he would, therefore, lie in wait for Guy Darrell--creeping out of a
bramble or bush, like a familiar sprite; and was no longer to be awed
away by a curt syllable or a contracted brow. And Darrell, at first
submitting reluctantly, and out of compassionate kindness to the flute-
player's obtrusive society, became by degrees to welcome and relax in it.
Fairthorn knew the great secrets of his life. To Fairthorn alone on all
earth could he speak with out reserve of one name and of one sorrow.
Speaking to Fairthorn was like talking to himself, or to his pointers, or
to his favourite doe, upon which last he bestowed a new collar, with an
inscription that implied more of the true cause that had driven him a
second time to the shades of Fawley than he would have let out to Alban
Morley or even to Lionel Haughton. Alban was too old for that confidence
--Lionel much too young. But the Musician, like Art itself, was of no
age; and if ever the gloomy master unbent his outward moodiness and
secret spleen in any approach to gaiety, it was in a sort of saturnine
playfulness to this grotesque, grown-up infant. They cheered each other,
and they teased each other. Stalking side by side over the ridged
fallows, Darrell would sometimes pour forth his whole soul, as a poet
does to his muse; and at Fairthorn's abrupt interruption or rejoinder,
turn round on him with fierce objurgation or withering sarcasm, or what
the flute-player abhorred more than all else, a truculent quotation from
Horace, which drove Fairthorn away into some vanishing covert or hollow,
out of which Darrell had to entice him, sure that, in return, Fairthorn
would take a sly occasion to send into his side a vindictive prickle.
But as the two came home in the starlight, the dogs dead beat and poor
Fairthorn too,--ten to one but what the musician was leaning all his
weight on his master's nervous arm, and Darrell was looking with tender
kindness in the face of the SOMEONE left to lean upon him still.
One evening, as they were sitting together in the library, the two
hermits, each in his corner, and after a long silence, the flute-player
said abruptly
"I have been thinking--"
"Thinking!" quoth Darrell, with his mechanical irony; "I am sorry for
you. Try not to do so again."
FAIRTHORN.--"Your poor dear father--"
DARRELL (wincing, startled, and expectant of a prickle).--"Eh? my
father--"
FAIRTHORN.--"Was a great antiquary. How it would have pleased him could
he have left a fine collection of antiquities as an heirloom to the
nation!--his name thus preserved for ages, and connected with the studies
of his life. There are the Elgin Marbles. The parson was talking to me
yesterday of a new Vernon Gallery; why not in the British Museum an
everlasting Darrell room? Plenty to stock it mouldering yonder in the
chambers which you will never finish."
"My dear Dick," Said Darrell, starting up, "give me your hand. What a
brilliant thought! I could do nothing else to preserve my dear father's
name. Eureka! You are right. Set the carpenters at work to-morrow.
Remove the boards; open the chambers; we will inspect their stores, and
select what would worthily furnish 'A Darrell Room.' Perish Guy Darrell
the lawyer! Philip Darrell the antiquary at least shall live!"
It is marvellous with what charm Fairthorn's lucky idea seized upon
Darrell's mind. The whole of the next day he spent in the forlorn
skeleton of the unfinished mansion slowly decaying beside his small and
homely dwelling. The pictures, many of which were the rarest originals
in early Flemish and Italian art, were dusted with tender care, and hung
from hasty nails upon the bare ghastly walls. Delicate ivory carvings,
wrought by the matchless hand of Cellini-early Florentine bronzes,
priceless specimens of Raffaele ware and Venetian glass--the precious
trifles, in short, which the collector of mediaeval curiosities amasses
for his heirs to disperse amongst the palaces of kings and the cabinets
of nations--were dragged again to unfamiliar light. The invaded
sepulchral building seemed a very Pompeii of the /Cinque Cento/.
To examine, arrange, methodise, select for national purposes, such
miscellaneous treasures would be the work of weeks. For easier access,
Darrell caused a slight hasty passage to be thrown over the gap between
the two edifices. It ran from the room nicked into the gables of the old
house, which, originally fitted up for scientific studies, now became his
habitual apartment, into the largest of the uncompleted chambers which
had been designed for the grand reception-gallery of the new building.
Into the pompous gallery thus made contiguous to his monk-like cell, he
gradually gathered the choicest specimens of his collection. The damps
were expelled by fires on grateless hearthstones; sunshine admitted from
windows now for the first time exchanging boards for glass; rough iron
sconces, made at the nearest forge, were thrust into the walls, and
sometimes lighted at night-Darrell and Fairthorn walking arm-in-arm along
the unpolished floors, in company with Holbein's Nobles, Perugino's
Virgins. Some of that highbred company displaced and banished the next
day, as repeated inspection made the taste more rigidly exclusive.
Darrell had found object, amusement, occupation--frivolous if Compared
with those lenses, and glasses, and algebraical scrawls which had once
whiled lonely hours in the attic-room hard by; but not frivolous even to
the judgment of the austerest sage, if that sage had not reasoned away
his heart. For here it was not Darrell's taste that was delighted; it
was Darrell's heart that, ever hungry, had found food. His heart was
connecting those long-neglected memorials of an ambition baffled and
relinquished--here with a nation, there with his father's grave! How his
eyes sparkled! how his lip smiled! Nobody would have guessed it--none of
us know each other; least of all do we know the interior being of those
whom we estimate by public repute;--but what a world of simple, fond
affection lay coiled and wasted in that proud man's solitary breast!