IN WHICH THE NAME OF A GREAT POET IS CRIED OUT IN A SOLITARY PLACE
As I once more shouldered my pack and went my way, the character of the
country side began to change, and, from a semi-pastoral heathiness and
furziness, took on a wildness of aspect, which if indeed melodramatic
was melodrama carried to the point of genius.
It was a scene for which the nineteenth century has no worthy use. It
finds ignoble occupation as a gaping-ground for the vacuous
tourist,--somewhat as Heine might have imagined Pan carrying the
gentleman's luggage from the coach to the hotel. It suffers teetotal
picnic-parties to encamp amid its savage hollows, and it humbly allows
itself to be painted by the worst artists. Like a lion in a menagerie,
it is a survival of the extinct chaos entrapped and exhibited amid the
smug parks and well-rolled downs of England.
I came upon it by a winding ledge of road, which clung to the bare side
of the hill like the battlements of some huge castle. Some two hundred
feet below, a brawling upland stream stood for the moat, and for the
enemy there was on the opposite side of the valley a great green
company of trees, settled like a cloud slope upon slope, making all
haste to cross the river and ascend the heights where I stood. Some
intrepid larches waved green pennons in the very midst of the turbulent
water, here and there a veteran lay with his many-summered head abased
in the rocky course of the stream, and here was a young foolhardy beech
that had climbed within a dozen yards of the rampart. All was wild and
solitary, and one might have declared it a scene untrodden by the foot
of man, but for the telegraph posts and small piles of broken "macadam"
at punctual intervals, and the ginger-beer bottles and paper bags of
local confectioners that lent an air of civilisation to the road.
It was a place to quote Alastor in, and nothing but a bad memory
prevented my affrighting the oaks and rills with declamation. As it
was, I could only recall the lines
"The Poet wandering on, through Arabie
And Persia, and the wild Carmanian waste,
And o'er the aerial mountains which pour down
Indus and Oxus from their icy caves--"
and that other passage beginning
"At length upon the lone Chorasmian shore
He paused--"
This last I mouthed, loving the taste of its thunder; mouthed thrice,
as though it were an incantation,--and, indeed, from what immediately
followed, it might reasonably have seemed so.
"At length upon the lone Chorasmian shore
He paused--"
I mouthed for the fourth time. And lo! advancing to me eagerly along
the causeway seemed the very sprite of Alastor himself! There was a
star upon his forehead, and around his young face there glowed an
aureole of gold and roses--to speak figuratively, for the star upon his
brow was hope, and the gold and roses encircling his head, a miniature
rainbow, were youth and health. His longish golden hair had no doubt
its share in the effect, as likewise the soft yellow silk tie that
fluttered like a flame in the speed of his going. His blue eyes were
tragically fresh and clear,--as though they had as yet been little
used. There were little wings of haste upon his feet, and he came
straight to me, with the air of the Angel Gabriel about to make his
divine announcement. For a moment I thought that he was an apparition
of prophecy charged to announce the maiden of the Lord for whom I was
seeking. However, his brief flushed question was not of these things.
He desired first to ask the time of day, and next--here, after a bump
to the earth, one's thoughts ballooned again heavenwards--"had I seen a
green copy of Shelley lying anywhere along the road?"
Nothing so good had happened to me, I replied--but I believed that I
had seen a copy of Alastor! For a moment my meaning was lost on him;
then he flushed and smiled, thanked me and was off again, saying that
he must find his Shelley, as he wouldn't lose it for the world!
He had presently disappeared as suddenly as he had come, but he had
left me a companion, a radiant reverberant name; and for some little
space the name of Shelley clashed silvery music among the hills.
Its seven letters seemed to hang right across the clouds like the Seven
Stars, an apocalyptic constellation, a veritable sky sign; and again
the name was an angel standing with a silver trumpet, and again it was
a song. The heavens opened, and across the blue rift it hung in a
glory of celestial fire, while from behind and above the clouds came a
warbling as of innumerable larks.
How strange was this miracle of fame, I pondered, this strange
apotheosis by which a mere private name becomes a public symbol!
Shelley was once a private person whose name had no more universal
meaning than my own, and so were Byron and Cromwell and Shakespeare;
yet now their names are facts as stubborn as the Rocky Mountains, or
the National Gallery, or the circulation of the blood. From their
original inch or so of private handwriting they have spread and spread
out across the world, and now whole generations of men find
intellectual accommodation within them,--drinking fountains and other
public institutions are erected upon them; yea, Carlyle has become a
Chelsea swimming-bath, and "Highland Mary" is sold for whiskey, while
Mr. Gladstone is to be met everywhere in the form of a bag.
Does Mr. Gladstone, I wonder, instruct his valet "to pack his
Gladstone"? How strange it must seem! Try it yourself some day and
its effect on your servant. Ask him, for example, to "pack your ----"
and see how he'll stare.
Coming nearer and nearer to earth, I wondered if Colonel Boycott ever
uses the word "boycott," and how strange it must have seemed to the
late MacAdam to walk for miles and miles upon his own name, like a
carpet spread out before him.
Then I once more rebounded heavenwards, at the vision of the eager
dreamy lad whose question had set going all this odd clockwork of
association. He wouldn't lose his Shelley for the world! How like
twenty! And how many things that he wouldn't lose for the world will he
have to give up before he is thirty, I reflected sententiously,--give
up at last, maybe, with a stony indifference, as men on a sinking ship
take no thought of the gold and specie in the hold.
And then, all of a sudden, a little way up the ferny grassy hillside, I
caught sight of the end of a book half hidden among the ferns. I
climbed up to it. Of course it was that very green Shelley which the
young stranger wouldn't lose for the world.