the waggoner will chant to the corn that grows upon either side of him.
As the miller's mules cross the bridge, the lad as he cracks his whip
will hum to the blowing alders. In the red clover, the labourers will
whet their scythes to a trick of melody. In the quiet evenings a Kyrie
Eleison will rise from the thick leaves that hide a village chapel. On
the hills the goatherd, high in air amongst the arbutus branches, will
scatter on the lonely mountain-side stanzas of purest rhythm. By the
sea-shore, where Shelley died, the fisherman, rough and salt and
weather-worn, will string notes of sweetest measure under the
tamarisk-tree on his mandoline. But the poetry and the music float on
the air like the leaves of roses that blossom in a solitude, and drift
away to die upon the breeze; there is no one to notice the fragrance,
there is no one to gather the leaves.
* * *
But then life does not count by years. Some suffer a lifetime in a day,
and so grow old between the rising and the setting of a sun.
* * *
But he was not obstinate. He only stretched towards the light he saw, as
the plant in the cellar will stretch through the bars.
Tens of millions of little peasants come to the birth, and grow up and
become men, and do the daily bidding of the world, and work and die, and
have no more of soul or Godhead in them than the grains of sand. But
here and there, with no lot different from his fellows, one is born to
dream and muse and struggle to the sun of higher desires, and the world
calls such a one Burns, or Haydn, or Giotto, or Shakespeare, or whatever
name the fierce light of fame may burn upon and make irridescent.
* * *
The mighty lives have passed away into silence, leaving no likeness to
them on earth; but if you would still hold communion with them, even
better than to go to written score or printed book or painted panel or
chiselled marble or cloistered gloom is it to stray into one of these
old quiet gardens, where for hundreds of years the stone naiad has
leaned over the fountain, and the golden lizard hidden under the fallen
caryatide, and sit quite still, and let the stones tell you what they
remember, and the leaves say what the sun once saw; and then the shades
of the great dead will come to you. Only you must love them truly, else
you will see them never.
* * *
"How he loves that thing already--as he never will love me," thought
Bruno, looking down at him in the starlight, with that dull sense of
hopeless rivalry and alien inferiority which the self-absorption of
genius inflicts innocently and unconsciously on the human affections
that cling to it, and which later on love avenges upon it in the same
manner.
* * *
Who can look at the old maps in Herodotus or Xenophon, without a wish
that the charm of those unknown limits and those untraversed seas was
ours?--without an irresistible sense that to have sailed away, in
vaguest hazard, into the endless mystery of the utterly unknown, must
have had a sweetness and a greatness in it that is never to be extracted
from the "tour of the world in ninety days."
* * *
Fair faiths are the blossoms of life. When the faith drops, spring is
over.
* * *
In the country of Virgil, life remains pastoral still. The
field-labourer of northern counties may be but a hapless hind, hedging
and ditching dolefully, or at least serving a steam-beast with oil and
fire, but in the land of the Georgics there is the poetry of agriculture
still.
* * *
The fatal desire of fame, which is to art the corroding element, as the
desire of the senses is to love--bearing with it the seeds of satiety
and mortality--had entered into him without his knowing what it was that
ailed him.
* * *
Genius lives in isolation, and suffers from it. But perhaps it creates
it. The breath of its lips is like ether; purer than the air around it,
it changes the air for others into ice.
* * *
Conscience and genius--the instinct of the heart, and the desire of the
mind--the voice that warns and the voice that ordains: when these are in
conflict, it is bitter for life in which they are at war; most bitter of
all when that life is in its opening youth, and sure of everything, and
yet sure of nothing.
* * *
Between them there was that bottomless chasm of mental difference,
across which mutual affection can throw a rope-chain of habit and
forbearance for the summer days, but which no power on earth can ever
bridge over with that iron of sympathy which stands throughout all
storms.
* * *
When the heart is fullest of pain, and the mouth purest with truth,
there is a cruel destiny in things, which often makes the words worst
chosen and surest to defeat the end they seek.
* * *
There is a chord in every human heart that has a sigh in it if touched
aright. When the artist finds the key-note which that chord will answer
to--in the dullest as in the highest--then he is great.
* * *
Life without a central purpose around which it can revolve, is like a
star that has fallen out of its orbit. With a great affection or a great
aim gone, the practical life may go on loosely, indifferently,
mechanically, but it takes no grip on outer things, it has no vital
interest, it gravitates to nothing.
* * *
Fame has only the span of a day, they say. But to live in the hearts of
the people--that is worth something.
* * *
Keep young. Keep innocent. Innocence does not come back: and repentance
is a poor thing beside it.
* * *
The chimes of the monastery were ringing out for the first mass; deep
bells of sweet tone, that came down the river like a benediction on the
day. Signa kneeled down on the grass.
"Did you pray for the holy men?" Bruno asked him when they rose, and
they went on under the tall green quivering trees.
"No," said Signa under his breath. "I prayed for the devil."
"For him?" echoed Bruno aghast; "what are you about, child? Are you
possessed? Do you know what the good priests would say?"
"I prayed for him," said Signa. "It is he who wants it. To be wicked
_there_ where God is, and the sun, and the bells"----
"But he is the foe of God. It is horrible to pray for him."
"No," said Signa, sturdily. "God says we are to forgive our enemies, and
help them. I only asked Him to begin with His."
Bruno was silent.
_TRICOTRIN._
At every point where her eyes glanced there was a picture of exquisite
colour, and light, and variety.
But the scene in its loveliness was so old to her, so familiar, that it
was scarcely lovely, only monotonous. With all a child's usual ignorant
impatience of the joys of the present--joys so little valued at the
time, so futilely regretted in the after-years--she was heedless of the
hour's pleasure, she was longing for what had not come.
* * *
On the whole, the Waif fared better, having fallen to the hands of a
vagabond philosopher, than if she had drifted to those of a respected
philanthropist. The latter would have had her glistening hair shorn
short, as a crown with which that immortal and inconsistent socialist
Nature had no justification in crowning a foundling, and, in his desire
to make her fully expiate the lawless crime of entering the world
without purse or passport, would have left her no choice, as she grew
into womanhood, save that between sinning and starving. The former bade
the long fair tresses float on the air, sunny rebels against bondage,
and saw no reason why the childhood of the castaway should not have its
share of childish joyousness as well as the childhood prince-begotten
and palace-cradled; holding that the fresh life just budded on earth
was as free from all soil, no matter whence it came, as is the brook of
pure rivulet water, no matter whether it spring from classic lake or
from darksome cavern.
* * *
The desire to be "great" possessed her. When that insatiate passion
enters a living soul, be it the soul of a woman-child dreaming of a
coquette's conquests, or a crowned hero craving for a new world, it
becomes blind to all else. Moral death falls on it; and any sin looks
sweet that takes it nearer to its goal. It is a passion that generates
at once all the loftiest and all the vilest things, which between them
ennoble and corrupt the world--even as heat generates at once the
harvest and the maggot, the purpling vine and the lice that devour it.
It is a passion without which the world would decay in darkness, as it
would do without heat, yet to which, as to heat, all its filthiest
corruption is due.
* * *
A woman's fair repute is like a blue harebell--a touch can wither it.
* * *
Viva had gained the "great world;" and because she had gained it all the
old things of her lost past grew unalterably sweet to her now that they
no longer could be called hers. The brown, kind, homely, tender face of
grand'mère; the gambols of white and frolicsome Bébé; the woods where,
with every spring, she had filled her arms with sheaves of delicate
primroses; the quaint little room with its strings of melons and sweet
herbs, its glittering brass and pewter, its wood-fire with the soup-pot
simmering above the flame; the glad free days in the vineyard and on
the river, with the winds blowing fragrance from over the clover and
flax, and the acacias and lindens; nay, even the old, quiet, sleepy
hours within the convent-walls, lying on the lush unshaven grass, while
the drowsy bells rang to vespers or compline,--all became suddenly
precious and dear to her when once she knew that they had drifted away
from her for evermore.
* * *
Then he bent his head, letting her desire be his law; and that music,
which had given its hymn for the vintage-feast of the Loire, and which
had brought back the steps of the suicide from the river-brink in the
darkness of the Paris night, which sovereigns could not command and
which held peasants entranced by its spell, thrilled through the
stillness of the chamber.
Human in its sadness, more than human in its eloquence, now melancholy
as the Miserere that sighs through the gloom of a cathedral at midnight,
now rich as the glory of the afterglow in Egypt, a poem beyond words, a
prayer grand as that which seems to breathe from the hush of mountain
solitudes when the eternal snows are lighted by the rising of the
sun--the melody of the violin filled the silence of the closing day.
The melancholy, ever latent in the vivid natures of men of genius, is
betrayed and finds voice in their Art. Goethe laughs with the riotous
revellers, and rejoices with the summer of the vines, and loves the glad
abandonment of woman's soft embraces, and with his last words prays for
Light. But the profound sadness of the great and many-sided master-mind
thrills through and breaks out in the intense humanity, the passionate
despair of Faust; the melancholy and the yearning of the soul are there.
With Tricotrin they were uttered in his music.
* * *
"Let me be but amused! Let me only laugh if I die!" cries the world in
every age. It has so much of grief and tragedy in its own realities, it
has so many bitter tears to shed in its solitude, it has such weariness
of labour without end, it has such infinitude of woe to regard in its
prisons, in its homes, in its battlefields, in its harlotries, in its
avarices, in its famines; it is so heart-sick of them all, that it would
fain be lulled to forgetfulness of its own terrors; it asks only to
laugh for awhile, even if it laugh but at shadows.
"The world is vain, frivolous, reckless of that which is earnest; it is
a courtesan who thinks only of pleasure, of adornment, of gewgaws, of
the toys of the hour!" is the reproach which its satirists in every age
hoot at it.
Alas! it is a courtesan who, having sold herself to evil, strives to
forget her vile bargain; who, having washed her cheeks white with
saltest tears, strives to believe that the paint calls the true colour
back; who, having been face to face for so long with blackest guilt,
keenest hunger, dreadest woe, strives to lose their ghosts, that
incessantly follow her, in the tumult of her own thoughtless laughter.
"Let me be but amused!"--the cry is the aching cry of a world that is
overborne with pain, and with longing for the golden years of its youth;
that cry is never louder than when the world is most conscious of its
own infamy.
In the Roman Empire, in the Byzantine Empire, in the Second Empire of
Napoleonic France, the world, reeking with corruption, staggering under
the burden of tyrannies, and delivered over to the dominion of lust, has
shrieked loudest in its blindness of suffering, "Let me only laugh if I
die!"
* * *
Not as others! Why, my Waif? Is your foot less swift, your limb less
strong, your face less fair than theirs? Does the sun shine less often,
have the flowers less fragrance, does sleep come less sweetly to you
than to them? Nature has been very good, very generous to you, Viva. Be
content with her gifts. What you lack is only a thing of man's
invention--a quibble, a bauble, a Pharisee's phylactery. Look at the
river-lilies that drift yonder--how white they are, how their leaves
enclose and caress them, how the water buoys them up and plays with
them! Well, are they not better off than the poor rare flowers that live
painfully in hothouse air, and are labelled, and matted, and given long
names by men's petty precise laws? You are like the river-lilies. O
child, do not pine for the glass house that would ennoble you, only to
force you and kill you?
* * *
Wrong to be proud, you ask? No. But then the pride must be of a right
fashion. It must be the pride which says, "Let me not envy, for that
were meanness. Let me not covet, for that were akin to theft. Let me not
repine, for that were weakness." It must be the pride which says, "I can
be sufficient for myself. My life makes my nobility; and I need no
accident of rank, because I have a stainless honour." It must be pride
too proud to let an aged woman work where youthful limbs can help her;
too proud to trample basely on what lies low already; too proud to be a
coward, and shrink from following conscience in the confession of known
error; too proud to despise the withered toil-worn hands of the poor and
old, and be vilely forgetful that those hands succoured you in your
utmost need of helpless infancy!
* * *
Philosophy, Viva, is the pomegranate of life, ever cool and most
fragrant, and the deeper you cut in it the richer only will the core
grow. Power is the Dead-Sea apple, golden and fair to sight while the
hand strives to reach it, dry grey ashes between dry fevered lips when
once it is grasped and eaten!
* * *
Pleasure is but labour to those who do not know also that labour in its
turn is pleasure.
* * *
Happy! As a mollusc is happy so long as the sea sweeps prey into its
jaws; what does the mollusc care how many lives have been shipwrecked so
long as the tide wafts it worms? She has killed her conscience, Viva;
there is no murder more awful. It is to slay what touch of God we have
in us!
* * *
Have I been cruel, my child? Your fever of discontent needed a sharp
cure. Life lies before you, Viva, and you alone can mould it for
yourself. Sin and anguish fill nine-tenths of the world: to one soul
that basks in light, a thousand perish in darkness; I dare not let you
go on longer in your dangerous belief that the world is one wide
paradise, and that the high-road of its joys is the path of reckless
selfishness. Can you not think that there are lots worse than that of a
guiltless child who is well loved and well guarded, and has all her
future still before her?
* * *
It rests with you to live your life nobly or vilely. We have not our
choice to be rich or poor, to be happy or unhappy, to be in health or in
sickness; but we have our choice to be worthy or worthless. No
antagonist can kill our soul in us; that can perish only from its own
suicide. Ever remember that.
* * *
But they are hollow inside, you still urge? fie, for shame! What a plea
that is! Have you the face to make it? If you have, let me bargain with
you.
When all the love that is fair and false goes begging for believers, and
all the passion that is a sham fails to find one fool to buy it; when
all the priests and politicians clap in vain together the brazen cymbals
of their tongues, because their listeners will not hearken to brass
clangour, nor accept it for the music of the spheres; when all the
creeds, that feast and fatten upon the cowardice and selfishness of men,
are driven out of hearth and home, and mart and temple, as impostors
that put on the white beard of reverence and righteousness to pass
current a cheater's coin; when all the kings that promise peace while
they swell their armouries and armies; when all the statesmen that
chatter of the people's weal as they steal up to the locked casket where
coronets are kept; when all the men who talk of "glory," and prate of an
"idea" that they may stretch their nation's boundary, and filch their
neighbour's province--when all these are no longer in the land, and no
more looked on with favour, then I will believe your cry that you hate
the toys which are hollow.
* * *
Can an ignorant or an untrained brain follow the theory of light, or the
metamorphosis of plants? Yet it may rejoice in the rays of a summer sun,
in the scent of a nest of wild-flowers. So may it do in my music. Shall
I ask higher payment than the God of the sun and the violets asks for
Himself?
* * *
Once there were three handmaidens of Krishna's; invisible, of course, to
the world of men. They begged of Krishna, one day, to test their wisdom,
and Krishna gave them three drops of dew. It was in the season of
drought,--and he bade them go and bestow them where each deemed best in
the world.
Now one flew earthward, and saw a king's fountain leaping and shining in
the sun; the people died of thirst, and the fields and the plains were
cracked with heat, but the king's fountain was still fed and played on.
So she thought, "Surely, my dew will best fall where such glorious water
dances?" and she shook the drop into the torrent.
The second hovered over the sea, and saw the Indian oysters lying under
the waves, among the sea-weed and the coral. Then she thought, "A
rain-drop that falls in an oyster's shell becomes a pearl; it may bring
riches untold to man, and shine in the diadem of a monarch. Surely it is
best bestowed where it will change to a jewel?"--and she shook the dew
into the open mouth of a shell.
The third had scarcely hovered a moment over the parched white lands,
ere she beheld a little, helpless brown bird dying of thirst upon the
sand, its bright eyes glazed, its life going out in torture. Then she
thought, "Surely my gift will be best given in succour to the first and
lowliest thing I see in pain?"--and she shook the dew-drop down into the
silent throat of the bird, that fluttered, and arose, and was
strengthened.
Then Krishna said that she alone had bestowed her power wisely; and he
bade her take the tidings of rain to the aching earth, and the earth
rejoiced exceedingly. Genius is the morning dew that keeps the world
from perishing in drought. Can you read my parable?
* * *
To die when life can be lived no longer with honour is greatness indeed;
but to die because life galls and wearies and is hard to pursue--there
is no greatness in that? It is the suicide's plea for his own self-pity.
You live under tyranny, corruption, dynastic lies hard to bear, despotic
enemies hard to bear, I know. But you forget--what all followers of your
creed ever forget--that without corruption, untruth, weakness, ignorance
in a nation itself, such things could not be in its rulers. Men can
bridle the ass and can drive the sheep; but who can drive the eagle or
bridle the lion? A people that was strong and pure no despot could yoke
to his vices.
* * *
No matter! He must have _race_ in him. Heraldry may lie; but voices do
not. Low people make money, drive in state, throng to palaces, receive
kings at their tables by the force of gold; but their antecedents always
croak out in their voices. They either screech or purr; they have no
clear modulations; besides, their women always stumble over their train,
and their men bow worse than their servants.
* * *
Ere long he drew near a street which in the late night was still
partially filled with vehicles and with foot-passengers, hurrying
through the now fast-falling snow, and over the slippery icy pavements.
In one spot a crowd had gathered--of artisans, women, soldiers, and
idlers, under the light of a gas-lamp. In the midst of the throng some
gendarmes had seized a young girl, accused by one of the bystanders of
having stolen a broad silver piece from his pocket.
She offered no resistance; she stood like a stricken thing, speechless
and motionless, as the men roughly laid hands on her.
Tricotrin crossed over the road, and with difficulty made his way into
the throng of blouses and looked at her. Degraded she was, but scarcely
above a child's years; and her features had a look as if innocence were
in some sort still there, and sin still loathed in her soul. As he drew
near he heard her mutter,
"Mother, mother! She will die of hunger!--it was for her, only for her!"
He stooped in the snow, and letting fall, unperceived, a five-franc
piece, picked it up again.
"Here is some silver," he said, turning to the infuriated owner, a
lemonade-seller, who could ill afford to lose it now that it was winter,
and people were too cold for lemonade, and who seized it with rapturous
delight.
"That is it, monsieur, that is it. Holy Jesus! how can I thank you? Ah,
if I had convicted the poor creature--and all in error!--I should never
have forgiven myself! Messieurs les gendarmes, let her go! It was my
mistake. My silver piece was in the snow!"
The gendarmes reluctantly let quit their prey: they muttered, they
hesitated, they gripped her arms tighter, and murmured of the
prison-cell.
"Let her go," said Tricotrin quietly: and in a little while they did
so,--the girl stood bareheaded and motionless in the snow like a
frost-bound creature.
Soon the crowd dispersed: nothing can be still long in Paris, and since
there had been no theft there was no interest! they were soon left
almost alone, none were within hearing.
Then he stooped to her: she had never taken off him the wild, senseless,
incredulous gaze of her great eyes.
"Were you guilty?" he asked her.
She caught his hands, she tried to bless him and to thank him, and broke
down in hysterical sobs.
"I took it--yes! What would you have? I took it for my mother. She is
old, and blind, and without food. It is for her that I came on the
streets; but she does not know it, it would kill her to know; she thinks
my money honest; and she is so proud and glad with it! That was the
first thing I _stole_! O God! are you an angel? If they had put me in
prison my mother would have starved!"
He looked on her gently, and with a pity that fell upon her heart like
balm.
"I saw it was your first theft. Hardened robbers do not wear your
stricken face," he said softly, as he slipped two coins into her hand.
"Ah, child! let your mother die rather than allow her to eat the bread
of your dishonour: which choice between the twain do you not think a
mother would make? And know your trade she must, soon or late. Sin no
more, were it only for that love you bear her."
* * *
Their lives had drifted asunder, as two boats drift north and south on a
river, the distance betwixt them growing longer and longer with each
beat of the oars and each sigh of the tide. And for the lives that part
thus, there is no reunion. One floats out to the open and sunlit sea;
and one passes away to the grave of the stream. Meet again on the river
they cannot.
* * *
"They shudder when they read of the Huns and the Ostrogoths pouring down
into Rome," he mused, as he passed toward the pandemonium. "They keep a
horde as savage, imprisoned in their midst, buried in the very core of
their capitals, side by side with their churches and palaces, and never
remember the earthquake that would whelm them if once the pent volcano
burst, if once the black mass covered below took flame and broke to the
surface! Statesmen multiply their prisons, and strengthen their laws
against the crime that is done--and they never take the canker out of
the bud, they never save the young child from pollution. Their political
economy never studies prevention; it never cleanses the sewers, it only
curses the fever-stricken!"
* * *
"What avail?" he thought. "What avail to strive to bring men nearer to
the right? They love their darkness best--why not leave them to it? Age
after age the few cast away their lives striving to raise and to ransom
the many. What use? Juvenal scourged Rome, and the same vices that his
stripes lashed then, laugh triumphant in Paris to-day! The satirist, and
the poet, and the prophet strain their voices in vain as the crowds rush
on; they are drowned in the chorus of mad sins and sweet falsehoods! O
God! the waste of hope, the waste of travail, the waste of pure desire,
the waste of high ambitions!--nothing endures but the wellspring of lies
that ever rises afresh, and the bay-tree of sin that is green, and
stately, and deathless!"
* * *