TREATETH OF MANY THINGS; BUT CHIEFLY OF BOOKS AND POETS.
Dreams, books, are each a world; and books, we know,
Are a substantial world, both pure and good.
WORDSWORTH.
There are times when this beautiful world seems to put on a mourning
garb, as if sympathizing, like a gentle mother, with the grief that
consumes us; when the trees shake their arms in mute sorrow, and scatter
their faded leaves like ashes on our heads; when the slow rains weep
down upon us, and the very clouds look cold above. Then, like Hamlet the
Dane, we take no pleasure in the life that weighs so wearily upon us,
and deem "this goodly frame, the earth, a sterile promonotory; this most
excellent canopy, the air, this brave, overhanging firmament, this
majestical roof fretted with golden fire, a foul and pestilent
congregation of vapors."
So it was with me, in the heavy time that followed my return to Paris. I
had lost everything in losing her I loved. I had no aim in life. No
occupation. No hope. No rest. The clouds had rolled between me and the
sun, and wrapped me in their cold shadows, and all was dark about me. I
felt that I could say with an old writer--"For the world, I count it,
not an inn, but an hospital; and a place, not to live, but to die in."
Week after week I lingered in Paris, hoping against hope, and always
seeking her. I had a haunting conviction that she was not far off, and
that, if I only had strength to persevere, I must find her. Possessed by
this fixed idea, I paced the sultry streets day after day throughout the
burning months of June and July; lingered at dusk and early morning
about the gardens of the Luxembourg, and such other quiet places as she
might frequent; and, heedless alike of fatigue, or heat, or tempest,
traversed the dusty city over and over again from barrier to barrier, in
every direction.
Could I but see her once more--once only! Could I but listen to her
sweet voice, even though it bade me an eternal farewell! Could I but lay
my lips for the last, last time upon her hand, and see the tender pity
in her eyes, and be comforted!
Seeking, waiting, sorrowing thus, I grew daily weaker and paler,
scarcely conscious of my own failing strength, and indifferent to all
things save one. In vain Dr. Chéron urged me to resume my studies. In
vain Müller, ever cheerful and active, came continually to my lodgings,
seeking to divert my thoughts into healthier channels. In vain I
received letter after letter from Oscar Dalrymple, imploring me to
follow him to Switzerland, where his wife had already joined him. I shut
my eyes to all alike. Study had grown hateful to me; Müller's
cheerfulness jarred upon me; Dalrymple was too happy for my
companionship. Liberty to pursue my weary search, peace to brood over my
sorrow, were all that I now asked. I had not yet arrived at that stage
when sympathy grows precious.
So weeks went by, and August came, and a slow conviction of the utter
hopelessness of my efforts dawned gradually upon me. She was really
gone. If she had been in Paris all this time pursuing her daily
avocations, I must surely have found her. Where should I seek her next?
What should I do with life, with time, with the future?
I resolved, at all events, to relinquish medicine at once, and for ever.
So I wrote a brief farewell to Dr. Chéron and another to Müller, and
without seeing either again, returned abruptly to England.
I will not dwell on this part of my story; enough that I settled my
affairs as quickly as might be, left an old servant in care of the
solitary house that had been my birthplace, and turned my back once more
on Saxonholme, perhaps for years--perhaps for ever; and in less than
three weeks was again on my way to the Continent.
The spirit of restlessness was now upon me. I had no home; I had no
peace; and in place of the sun there was darkness. So I went with the
thorns around my brow, and the shadow of the cross upon my breast. I
went to suffer--to endure,--if possible, to forget. Oh, the grief of
the soul which lives on in the night, and looks for no dawning! Oh, the
weary weight that presses down the tired eyelids, and yet leaves them
sleepless! Oh, the tide of alien faces, and the sickening remembrance of
one, too dear, which may never be looked upon again! I carried with me
the antidote to every pleasure. In the midst of crowds, I was alone. In
the midst of novelty, the one thought came, and made all stale to me.
Like Dr. Donne, I dwelt with the image of my dead self at my side.
Thus for many, many months we journeyed together---I and my sorrow--and
passed through fair and famous places, and saw the seasons change under
new skies. To the quaint old Flemish cities and the Gothic Rhine--to the
plains and passes of Spain--to the unfrequented valleys of the Tyrol and
the glacier-lands of Switzerland I went, but still found not the
forgetfulness I sought. As in Holbein's fresco the skeleton plays his
part in every scene, so my trouble stalked beside me, drank of my cup,
and sat grimly at my table. It was with me in Naples and among the
orange groves of Sorrento. It met me amid the ruins of the Roman Forum.
It travelled with me over the blue Mediterranean, and landed beside me
on the shores of the Cyclades. Go where I would, it possessed and
followed me, and brooded over my head, like the cloud that rested on
the ark.
Thinking over this period of my life, I seem to be turning the leaves of
a rich album, or wandering through a gallery of glowing landscapes, and
yet all the time to be dreaming. Faces grown familiar for a few days and
never seen after--pictures photographed upon the memory in all their
vividness--glimpses of cathedrals, of palaces, of ruins, of sunset and
storm, sea and shore, flit before me for a moment, and are gone like
phantasmagoria.
And like phantasmagoria they impressed me at the time. Nothing seemed
real to me. Startled, now and then, into admiration or wonder, my apathy
fell from me like a garment, and my heart throbbed again as of old. But
this was seldom--so seldom that I could almost count the times when it
befell me.
Thus it was that travelling did me no permanent good. It enlarged my
experience; it undoubtedly cultivated my taste; but it brought me
neither rest, nor sympathy, nor consolation. On the contrary, it widened
the gulf between me and my fellow-men. I formed no friendships. I kept
up no correspondence. A sojourner in hotels, I became more and more
withdrawn from all tender and social impulses, and almost forgot the
very name of home. So strong a hold did this morbid love of
self-isolation take upon me, that I left Florence on one occasion, after
a stay of only three days, because I had seen the names of a Saxonholme
family among the list of arrivals in the Giornale Toscano.
Three years went by thus--three springs--three vintages--three
winters--till, weary of wandering, I began to ask myself "what next?" My
old passion for books had, in the meantime, re-asserted itself, and I
longed once more for quiet. I knew not that my pilgrimage was hopeless.
I know that I loved her ever; that I could never forget her; that
although the first pangs were past, I yet must bear
"All the aching of heart, the restless, unsatisfied longing,
All the dull, deep pain, and constant anguish of patience!"
I reasoned with myself. I resolved to be stronger--at all events, to be
calmer. Exhausted and world-worn, I turned in thought to my native
village among the green hills, to my deserted home, and the great
solitary study with its busts and bookshelves, and its vista of
neglected garden. The rooms where my mother died; where my father wrote;
where, as a boy, I dreamed and studied, would at least have memories
for me.
Perhaps, silently underlying all these motives, I may at this time
already have begun to entertain one other project which was not so much
a motive as a hope--not so much a hope as a half-seen possibility. I had
written verses from time to time all my life long, and of late they had
come to me more abundantly than ever. They flowed in upon me at times
like an irresistible tide; at others they ebbed away for weeks, and
seemed as if gone for ever. It was a power over which I had no control,
and sought to have none. I never tried to make verses; but, when
the inspiration was upon me, I made them, as it were, in spite of
myself. My desk was full of them in time--sonnets, scraps of songs,
fragments of blank verse, attempts in all sorts of queer and rugged
metres--hexameters, pentameters, alcaics, and the like; with, here and
there, a dialogue out of an imaginary tragedy, or a translation from
some Italian or German poet. This taste grew by degrees, to be a rare
and subtle pleasure to me. My rhymes became my companions, and when the
interval of stagnation came, I was restless and lonely till it
passed away.
At length there came an hour (I was lying, I remember, on a ledge of
turf on a mountain-side, overlooking one of the Italian valleys of the
Alps), when I asked myself for the first time--
"Am I also a poet?"
I had never dreamed of it, never thought of it, never even hoped it,
till that moment. I had scribbled on, idly, carelessly, out of what
seemed a mere facile impulse, correcting nothing; seldom even reading
what I had written, after it was committed to paper. I had sometimes
been pleased with a melodious cadence or a happy image--sometimes amused
with my own flow of thought and readiness of versification; but that I,
simple Basil Arbuthnot, should be, after all, enriched with this
splendid gift of song--was it mad presumption, or were these things
proof? I knew not; but lying on the parched grass of the mountain-side,
I tried the question over in my mind, this way and that, till "my heart
beat in my brain," How should I come at the truth? How should I test
whether this opening Paradise was indeed Eden, or only the mirage of my
fancy--mere sunshine upon sand? We all write verses at some moment or
other in our lives, even the most prosaic amongst us--some because they
are happy; some because they are sad; some because the living fire of
youth impels them, and they must be up and doing, let the work be
what it may.
"Many fervent souls,
Strike rhyme on rhyme, who would strike steel on steel,
If steel had offer'd."
Was this case mine? Was I fancying myself a poet, only because I was an
idle man, and had lost the woman I loved? To answer these questions
myself was impossible. They could only be answered by the public voice,
and before I dared question that oracle I had much to do. I resolved to
discipline myself to the harness of rhythm. I resolved to go back to the
fathers of poetry--to graduate once again in Homer and Dante, Chaucer
and Shakespeare. I promised myself that, before I tried my wings in the
sun, I would be my own severest critic. Nay, more--that I would never
try them so long as it seemed possible a fall might come of it. Once
come to this determination, I felt happier and more hopeful than I had
felt for the last three years. I looked across the blue mists of the
valley below, and up to the aerial peaks which rose, faint, and far, and
glittering--mountain beyond mountain, range above range, as if painted
on the thin, transparent air--and it seemed to me that they stood by,
steadfast and silent, the witnesses of my resolve.
"I will be strong," I said. "I will be an idler and a dreamer no longer.
Books have been my world. I have taken all, and given nothing. Now I too
will work, and work to prove that I was not unworthy of her love."
Going down, by-and-by, into the valley as the shadows were lengthening,
I met a traveller with an open book in his hand. He was an
Englishman--small, sallow, wiry, and wore a gray, loose coat, with two
large pockets full of books. I had met him once before at Milan, and
again in a steamer on Lago Maggiore. He was always reading. He read in
the diligence--he read when he was walking--he read all through dinner
at the _tables-d'-hôte_. He had a mania for reading; and, might, in
fact, be said to be bound up in his own library.
Meeting thus on the mountain, we fell into conversation. He told me that
he was on his way to Geneva, that he detested continental life, and that
he was only waiting the arrival of certain letters before starting
for England.
"But," said I, "you do not, perhaps, give continental life a trial. You
are always absorbed in the pages of a book; and, as for the scenery, you
appear not to observe it."
"Deuce take the scenery!" he exclaimed, pettishly. "I never look at it.
All scenery's alike. Trees, mountains, water--water, mountains, trees;
the same thing over and over again, like the bits of colored glass in a
kaleidoscope. I read about the scenery, and that is quite enough
for me."
"But no book can paint an Italian lake or an Alpine sunset; and when one
is on the spot...."
"I beg your pardon," interrupted the traveller in gray. "Everything
is much pleasanter and more picturesque in books than in
reality--travelling especially. There are no bad smells in books. There
are no long bills in books. Above all, there are no mosquitoes.
Travelling is the greatest mistake in the world, and I am going home as
fast as I can."
"And henceforth, I suppose, your travels will be confined to your
library," I said, smiling.
"Exactly so. I may say, with Hazlitt, that 'food, warmth, sleep, and a
book,' are all I require. With those I may make the tour of the world,
and incur neither expense nor fatigue."
"Books, after all, are friends," I said, with a sigh.
"Sir," replied the traveller, waving his hand somewhat theatrically,
"books are our first real friends, and our last. I have no others. I
wish for no others. I rely upon no others. They are the only associates
upon whom a sensible man may depend. They are always wise, and they are
always witty. They never intrude upon us when we desire to be alone.
They never speak ill of us behind our backs. They are never capricious,
and never surly; neither are they, like some clever folks,
pertinaciously silent when we most wish them to shine. Did Shakespeare
ever refuse his best thoughts to us, or Montaigne decline to be
companionable? Did you ever find Molière dull? or Lamb prosy? or Scott
unentertaining?"
"You remind me," said I, laughing, "of the student in Chaucer, who
desired for his only pleasure and society,
"'---at his bedde's head
A'twenty bokes clothed in black and red,
Of Aristotle and his philosophy!'"
"Ay," replied my new acquaintance, "but he preferred them expressly to
'robes riche, or fidel or sautrie,' whereas, I prefer them to men and
women, and to Aristotle and his philosophy, into the bargain!"
"Your own philosophy, at least, is admirable," said I. "For many a
year--I might almost say for most years of my life--I have been a
disciple in the same school."
"Sir, you cannot belong to a better. Think of the convenience of always
carrying half a dozen intimate friends in your pocket! Good-afternoon."
We had now come to a point where two paths diverged, and the reading
traveller, always economical of time, opened his book where he had last
turned down the leaf, and disappeared round the corner.
I never saw him again; but his theory amused me, and, as trifles will
sometimes do even in the gravest matters, decided me. So the result of
all my hopes and reflections was, that I went back to England and to the
student life that had been the dream of my youth.