THE children have come,--some thirty of them, pretty as English
children generally are, happy in the joy of the summer sunshine, and
the flower lawns, and the feast under cover of an awning suspended
between chestnut-trees, and carpeted with sward.
No doubt Kenelm held his own at the banquet, and did his best to
increase the general gayety, for whenever he spoke the children
listened eagerly, and when he had done they laughed mirthfully.
"The fair face I promised you," whispered Mrs. Braefield, "is not here
yet. I have a little note from the young lady to say that Mrs.
Cameron does not feel very well this morning, but hopes to recover
sufficiently to come later in the afternoon."
"And pray who is Mrs. Cameron?"
"Ah! I forgot that you are a stranger to the place. Mrs. Cameron is
the aunt with whom Lily resides. Is it not a pretty name, Lily?"
"Very! emblematic of a spinster that does not spin, with a white head
and a thin stalk."
"Then the name belies my Lily, as you will see."
The children now finished their feast, and betook themselves to
dancing in an alley smoothed for a croquet-ground, and to the sound of
a violin played by the old grandfather of one of the party. While
Mrs. Braefield was busying herself with forming the dance, Kenelm
seized the occasion to escape from a young nymph of the age of twelve
who had sat next him at the banquet, and taken so great a fancy to him
that he began to fear she would vow never to forsake his side, and
stole away undetected.
There are times when the mirth of others only saddens us, especially
the mirth of children with high spirits, that jar on our own quiet
mood. Gliding through a dense shrubbery, in which, though the lilacs
were faded, the laburnum still retained here and there the waning gold
of its clusters, Kenelm came into a recess which bounded his steps and
invited him to repose. It was a circle, so formed artificially by
slight trellises, to which clung parasite roses heavy with leaves and
flowers. In the midst played a tiny fountain with a silvery murmuring
sound; at the background, dominating the place, rose the crests of
stately trees, on which the sunlight shimmered, but which rampired out
all horizon beyond. Even as in life do the great dominant
passions--love, ambition, desire of power or gold or fame or
knowledge--form the proud background to the brief-lived flowerets of
our youth, lift our eyes beyond the smile of their bloom, catch the
glint of a loftier sunbeam, and yet, and yet, exclude our sight from
the lengths and the widths of the space which extends behind and
beyond them.
Kenelm threw himself on the turf beside the fountain. From afar came
the whoop and the laugh of the children in their sports or their
dance. At the distance their joy did not sadden him,--he marvelled
why; and thus, in musing revcry, thought to explain the why to
himself.
"The poet," so ran his lazy thinking, "has told us that 'distance
lends enchantment to the view,' and thus compares to the charm of
distance the illusion of hope. But the poet narrows the scope of his
own illustration. Distance lends enchantment to the ear as well as to
the sight; nor to these bodily senses alone. Memory no less than hope
owes its charm to 'the far away.'
"I cannot imagine myself again a child when I am in the midst of young
noisy children. But as their noise reaches me here, subdued and
mellowed, and knowing, thank Heaven, that the urchins are not within
reach of me, I could readily dream myself back into childhood, and
into sympathy with the lost playfields of school.
"So surely it must be with grief: how different the terrible agony for
a beloved one just gone from earth, to the soft regret for one who
disappeared into Heaven years ago! So with the art of poetry: how
imperatively, when it deals with the great emotions of tragedy, it
must remove the actors from us, in proportion as the emotions are to
elevate, and the tragedy is to please us by the tears it draws!
Imagine our shock if a poet were to place on the stage some wise
gentleman with whom we dined yesterday, and who was discovered to have
killed his father and married his mother. But when Oedipus commits
those unhappy mistakes nobody is shocked. Oxford in the nineteenth
century is a long way off from Thebes three thousand or four thousand
years ago.
"And," continued Kenelm, plunging deeper into the maze of metaphysical
criticism, "even where the poet deals with persons and things close
upon our daily sight,--if he would give them poetic charm he must
resort to a sort of moral or psychological distance; the nearer they
are to us in external circumstance, the farther they must be in some
internal peculiarities. Werter and Clarissa Harlowe are described as
contemporaries of their artistic creation, and with the minutest
details of apparent realism; yet they are at once removed from our
daily lives by their idiosyncrasies and their fates. We know that
while Werter and Clarissa are so near to us in much that we sympathize
with them as friends and kinsfolk, they are yet as much remote from us
in the poetic and idealized side of their natures as if they belonged
to the age of Homer; and this it is that invests with charm the very
pain which their fate inflicts on us. Thus, I suppose, it must be in
love. If the love we feel is to have the glamour of poetry, it must
be love for some one morally at a distance from our ordinary habitual
selves; in short, differing from us in attributes which, however near
we draw to the possessor, we can never approach, never blend, in
attributes of our own; so that there is something in the loved one
that always remains an ideal,--a mystery,--'a sun-bright summit
mingling with the sky'!"
Herewith the soliloquist's musings glided vaguely into mere revery.
He closed his eyes drowsily, not asleep, nor yet quite awake; as
sometimes in bright summer days when we recline on the grass we do
close our eyes, and yet dimly recognize a golden light bathing the
drowsy lids; and athwart that light images come and go like dreams,
though we know that we are not dreaming.