When you have read, you carry away with you a memory of the man himself;
it is as though you had touched a loyal hand, looked into brave eyes,
and made a noble friend; there is another bond on you thenceforward,
binding you to life and to the love of virtue.
*****
It is to some more specific memory that youth looks forward in its
vigils. Old kings are sometimes disinterred in all the emphasis of life,
the hands untainted by decay, the beard that had so often wagged in camp
or senate still spread upon the royal bosom; and in busts and pictures,
some similitude of the great and beautiful of former days is handed
down. In this way, public curiosity may be gratified, but hardly any
private aspiration after fame. It is not likely that posterity will fall
in love with us, but not impossible that it may respect or sympathise;
and so a man would rather leave behind him the portrait of his spirit
than a portrait of his face, FIGURA ANIMI MAGIS QUAM CORPORIS.
*****
The pleasure that we take in beautiful nature is essentially capricious.
It comes sometimes when we least look for it; and sometimes, when
we expect it most certainly, it leaves us to gape joylessly for days
together, in the very homeland of the beautiful. We may have passed a
place a thousand times and one; and on the thousand and second it will
be transfigured, and stand forth in a certain splendour of reality from
the dull circle of surroundings; so that we see it ‘with a child’s first
pleasure,’ as Wordsworth saw the daffodils by the lake-side.
*****
But every one sees the world in his own way. To some the glad moment may
have arrived on other provocations; and their recollection may be most
vivid of the stately gait of women carrying burthens on their heads; of
tropical effect, with caves and naked rock and sunlight; of the relief
of cypresses; of the troubled, busy-looking groups of sea-pines, that
seem always as if they were being wielded and swept together by a
whirlwind; of the air coming, laden with virginal perfumes, over the
myrtles and the scented underwoods; of the empurpled hills standing
up, solemn and sharp, out of the green-gold air of the east at evening.
There go many elements, without doubt, to the making of one such moment
of intense perception; and it is on the happy agreement of these many
elements, on the harmonious vibration of many nerves, that the whole
delight of the moment must depend.
*****
You should have heard him speak of what he loved; of the tent pitched
beside the talking water; of the stars overhead at night; of the blest
return of morning, the peep of day over the moors, the awaking birds
among the birches; how he abhorred the long winter shut in cities; and
with what delight, at the return of the spring, he once more pitched his
camp in the living out-of-doors.
*****
It was one of the best things I got from my education as an engineer:
of which, however, as a way of life, I wish to speak with sympathy. It
takes a man into the open air; it keeps him hanging about harbour-sides,
which is the richest form of idling; it carries him to wild islands; it
gives him a taste of the genial dangers of the sea; it supplies him with
dexterities to exercise; it makes demands upon his ingenuity; it will go
far to cure him of any taste (if ever he had one) for the miserable life
of cities. And when it has done so, it carries him back and shuts him
in an office! From the roaring skerry and the wet thwart of the tossing
boat, he passes to the stool and desk; and with a memory full of ships,
and seas, and perilous headlands, and the shining Pharos, he must apply
his long-sighted eyes to the pretty niceties of drawing, or measure his
inaccurate mind with several pages of consecutive figures. He is a wise
youth, to be sure, who can balance one part of genuine life against
two parts of drudgery between four walls, and for the sake of the one,
manfully accept the other.
*****
No one knows the stars who has not slept, as the French happily put
it, A LA BELLE ETOILE. He may know all their names and distances and
magnitudes, and yet be ignorant of what alone concerns mankind,--their
serene and gladsome influence on the mind. The greater part of poetry
is about the stars; and very justly, for they are themselves the most
classical of poets.
*****
He surprised himself by a sudden impulse to write poetry--he did so
sometimes, loose, galloping octosyllabics in the vein of Scott--and when
he had taken his place on a boulder, near some fairy falls, and shaded
by a whip of a tree that was already radiant with new leaves, it still
more surprised him that he should find nothing to write. His heart
perhaps beat in time to some vast indwelling rhythm of the universe.
*****
No man can find out the world, says Solomon, from beginning to end,
because the world is in his heart; and so it is impossible for any of
us to understand, from beginning to end, that agreement of harmonious
circumstances that creates in us the highest pleasure of admiration,
precisely because some of these circumstances are hidden from us for
ever in the constitution of our own bodies. After we have reckoned up
all that we can see or hear or feel, there still remains to be taken
into account some sensibility more delicate than usual in the nerves
affected, or some exquisite refinement in the architecture of the brain,
which is indeed to the sense of the beautiful as the eye or the ear
to the sense of hearing or sight. We admire splendid views and great
pictures; and yet what is truly admirable is rather the mind within
us, that gathers together these scattered details for its delight, and
snakes out of certain colours, certain distributions of graduated light
and darkness, that intelligible whole which alone we call a picture or
a view. Hazlitt, relating in one of his essays how he went on foot from
one great man’s house to another’s in search of works of art, begins
suddenly to triumph over these noble and wealthy owners, because he
was more capable of enjoying their costly possessions than they were;
because they had paid the money and he had received the pleasure. And
the occasion is a fair one for self-complacency. While the one man was
working to be able to buy the picture, the other was working to be able
to enjoy the picture. An inherited aptitude will have been diligently
improved in either case; only the one man has made for himself a
fortune, and the other has made for himself a living spirit. It is a
fair occasion for self-complacency, I repeat, when the event shows a man
to have chosen the better part, and laid out his life more wisely, in
the long-run, than those who have credit for most wisdom. And yet even
this is not a good unmixed; and like all other possessions, although in
a less degree, the possession of a brain that has been thus improved and
cultivated, and made into the prime organ of a man’s enjoyment, brings
with it certain inevitable cares and disappointments. The happiness of
such an one comes to depend greatly upon those fine shades of sensation
that heighten and harmonise the coarser elements of beauty. And thus
a degree of nervous prostration, that to other men would be hardly
disagreeable, is enough to overthrow for him the whole fabric of his
life, to take, except at rare moments, the edge off his pleasures, and
to meet him wherever he goes with failure, and the sense of want, and
disenchantment of the world and life.
*****