Part 6

He had every opportunity, during his babyhood and later, of gratifying his abnormal love of travel; he managed to see more of city life than was good for him, thanks to many impish subterfuges. His golden curiosity covered everything mundane, and he continued his private studies in topography until he was kidnapped, and restored by the police: an abject, shamefaced little tourist, heavy with conscience, irresponsive to any welcomes, who sidled into his abandoned residence, and forswore from that day his unholy peregrinations. But he had a roaming housemate, and grew to be supremely happy, journeying under guidance.

His temper, at the beginning, was none of the best, and took hard to the idea of moral governance; he overcame obstacles after the fashion of a catapult. His sense of humor was always grim: he had a smile, wide and significant, like a kobold's; but a mere snicker, or a wink, was foreign to his nature. With certain people he was sheer clown; yet he discriminated, and never wore his habitual air of swaggering consequence before any save those he was pleased to consider his inferiors. The sagacious and protective instincts were strong in him. For children he had the most marked indulgence and affection, an inexhaustible gentleness, as if he found the only statecraft he could respect among them. For their delight he made himself into a horse, and rode many a screaming elf astride of his back for a half-mile through the meadow, before coming to the heart of the business, which was to sit or kneel suddenly, and cast poor Mazeppa yards away in the wet grass: a proceeding hailed with shouts of acclaim from the accompanying crowd of playfellows. And again, in winter, he became an otter, and placing himself upon his worthy back at the summit of a hill, rolled repeatedly to the bottom, drenched in snow, and buried under a coasting avalanche of boys.

He never found time, in so short a life, to love many. Outside his own household and his charming cat, he was very loyal to one lady whose conversation was pleasingly ironical, and to one gentleman whose character was said to resemble his own. Several others were acceptable, but for these two visitors he had the voice and gesture of joyful greeting. He had so arrant an individuality that folk loved or hated him. One could not look with indifference on that assertive splendid bearing, or on the mighty muscles as of a Norse ship. A civil address from you made him your liegeman. But the merest disregard or slight, no less than open hostility, sealed him your foe. And there were no stages of vacillation. A grudge stood a grudge, and a fondness a fondness. He was a famous retaliator; none ever knew him to ride first into the lists. Battle he loved, but he had a gentlemanly dislike of "scenes": when a crisis came, he preferred to box or wrestle; and what he preferred he could do, for no opponent ever left a scar upon him. A rival less in size, or impudent solely, he took by the nape of the neck and tossed over the nearest fence, resuming his walk with composure. Training and education helped him to the pacific solving of many problems. His good dispositions, all but established, were once badly shaken by a country sojourn; for he had been taught there a bit of cabalistic boys' Latin whose slightest whisper would send him tiptoeing to every window in the house, scanning the horizon for a likely enemy, with a rapture worthy of another cause.

He was rich in enemies, most of them of the gentler sex. Upon a civic holiday, three villageous women were seen to bear down upon him, as he was calmly inspecting the outposts of their property, laden with weapons (_timor arma ministrat!_) no less classic than a pail, a broom, and an axe. Not Swift's self could have added to the look of withering comment with which he turned and confronted his assailants: a single glance which dispersed the troops, and held in itself the eloquence of an Aristophaneian comedy. Eternal warfare lay between him and the man who had peevishly flapped that haughty nose with a glove, before his first birthday-anniversary, and revenge boiled in his eye, long after, at sight of a citizen who had once addressed to him a word unheard in good society. A loud tone, a practical joke, a teasing reminder of a bygone fault, disconcerted him wholly. Sensitive and conservative of mood, my Fine Gentleman could never forget a rudeness, nor account satisfactorily for such a thing as a condescension. All his culture and his thinking had not taught him to allow for the divers conditions and dispositions of mankind. To the last he looked for courtesy, for intelligence, and, alas, for fashionable clothes, in his ideal. For the Fine Gentleman was a snob. Hunger and nakedness, even honest labor, had for him no occult charm. Throughout his youth, he courted patrician acquaintances, and on the very highway ached to make worse rags yet of the floating rags of a beggar's coat; but the experience of friendship with a kindly butcher-lad made inroads upon his exclusiveness; and I know that, had he outlived his years, there would have been one more convert democrat. His own personal appearance was of the nicest; by scrupulous superintendence of his laundry, chiefly by night, he kept himself immaculate and imposing. His colors were those of the fallen leaves and the snow; the November auburn falling away on either side from the magnificent brow and eyes, and from the neck in its triple white fold: a head to remind you of Raleigh in his ruff.

He must have been patriotic, for he revelled in the horns, gunpowder, rockets, and smoke of the Fourth of July. Archery and rifle-practice seemed to strike him as uncommonly pleasant devices to kill time. In all games which had noise and motion, he took the same strong vicarious interest. He had heard much music, and learned something of it; he was once known to hum over an august recitative of the late Herr Wagner. Singular to relate, he had an insuperable objection to books, and protested often against the continued use of the pen by one he would fain esteem. Yet he seemed greatly to relish the recital of a tribute of personal verse from a United States Senator, and the still more elaborate lines of a delightful professional satirist.

His health, aside from his great size, his spirit and nervous vigor, was never steady nor sound. Every chapter of the Fine Gentleman's biography is crammed with events, perils, excitements, catastrophes, and blunders, due in great part, by a scientific verdict, to this tremendous vitality balancing on too narrow a base. With years, there began to come the "philosophic mind." His sweetness and submission grew with his strength; never was there a sinner so tender of conscience, so affected by remonstrance, so fruitful, after, in the good works of amended ways. New virtues seemed to shoot on all sides, and the old ones abided and flourished. He had never tried to deceive, nor to shirk, nor to rebel, nor to take what was not his, nor to appear other than he was. In the country town where he had many a frolic, and where he lies buried, he found congenial circumstances. There were no gardens there, no timid neighbors; he had opportunity, being allowed to inspect everything that stirred in air, or upon the earth, or in the waters under, for the pursuit of natural history, which was his passion; he ate what he pleased, he lorded it as he liked, he shifted his responsibilities, he won endless flattery from the inhabitants. His frank acknowledgment of all this was unique. On his return, while his escort was still in the room, the Fine Gentleman was asked whether he would rather remain now at home, or spend a week longer in the fascinating precincts of Cambrook. He arose briskly, bestowed on the questioner, whom he professed to adore, his warmest embrace (a thing unusual with him), and immediately, pulling his escort by the sleeve, placed himself at the door-knob which led into the more immoral world. His last accomplishment was to acquire an accurate sense of time, to make his quarter-hour calls, his half-hour walks, when sent out alone: "as wise as a Christian," an honest acquaintance was wont to say of him, perhaps on the suspicion that the Fine Gentleman, after he reached his majority, was a free-thinker.

He was in his perfect prime when a slight seeming disgrace fell upon him, though an incident never clearly understood. His believers believed in him still; but, for the need of quiet and impartial adjustment of matters, persuaded him to stay an indefinite while in the beloved farming district where many of his earlier vacations were spent. So that, after all his tender rearing, he was at last abroad and divorced: with a mist, such as we recognized immortals call sin, upon his spirit, and, because of that, a scruple and a doubt upon mine, answerable for much of what he was. Before the eventual proof came that he was clear of blame, there were thoughts even of an imperative parting, and a reaching for the rectification towards the Happy Hunting-Grounds, where, at an era's end, we could be joyous together; and where under the old guiding then never unskilful, the old sympathy then never erring, the Fine Gentleman could be to his virtue's full, and in no misapprehending air, his innocent, upright, loving self again. But instantly, as if to wipe out forever that possible evil of which men could dream him guilty, came the moving and memorable end. Amid the tears of a whole town, and the thanksgiving of some for a greater grief averted, very quietly and consciously, under the most painful conditions, the Fine Gentleman laid down his life for a little child's sake. The fifth act of his tragedy had a sort of drastic consistency, to those who knew him; it was in line with his odd, inborn, unconventional ways: the fate one would have chosen for him, and the fittest with which to associate his soldierly memory. In exile and cashiered, he had overturned his defamers at a stroke.

It is not too proud a sentence to write over him, that this world, for the most part, was jealous of his nobility. Human society was some sort of huge jest to him; he did not always do his best there, as if the second-best were the shrewder policy, and the neater adaptation to the codes of honor he found established. His main concern was certainly the study of mankind, and he stood to it, a free and unbookish philosopher, looking on and not partaking, with his reticent tongue, his singularly soft footfall, his "eye like a wild Indian's, but cordial and full of smothered glee." To his own race he must be an epic figure and a precedent, and to ours something not undeserving of applause.

"Go seek that hapless tomb, which if ye hap to find, Salute the stones that keep the bones that held so good a mind."

Such are the only annals of the Fine Gentleman, a Saint Bernard dog, faithful and forgotten, who bore a great Bostonian's name nearly five years without a stain, and who is, to one or two of us, not alone a friend lost, but an ideal set up: Perseus become a star.

1889.

IRISH

THEY say the Celt is passing away,

"Encompassed all his hours By fearfullest powers Inflexible to him."

For he represents yesterday, and its ideals: legendry, ritual, the heroic and indignant joy of life, belong to him; and he can establish no manner of connection with modern science and the subjugating of the material universe; with the spirit of to-day and to-morrow. Of all Celtic countries, Ireland has the richest background; with so varied and exciting a past, it may well be that she has difficulty in concentrating herself on the new, and hangs to her own consistencies in a world of compromise. Every one save herself has forgotten what she was, and how her precedents, rather than any outer consideration, must still govern her, and keep her antagonist and unreconciled. It is not to be modified, this pauper's pride of blood. She says to the powers, in charming futile bravado, what a Howard once said to a Spencer: "My ancestors were plotting treason, while yours were keeping sheep!" The word warms her heart like wine. "_Le moyen âge énorme et délicat_," in Verlaine's beautiful colors, seems a phrase made for Irish mediævalism. It was the watershed of European knowledge and moral culture: the watershed truly, which, sending streams down and out and far away, can never call them back. It gave Scotland her "naked knee" and her kingly line; it gave England its Christian creed; it gave modern France and Spain the noble enrichment of its banished and stainless gentry, its Jacobite Wild Geese. It has been in America, from the Revolution on, an influence incalculable. It won the perfect understanding sympathy of De Beaumont, Renan and Matthew Arnold: men of antipodal judgments. It has an intangible throne in every mind which loves scholarship, and imaginings more beautiful than any folk-lore in the world. "See you this skull?" Lucan makes Mercury say to Menippus, in the shades: "this is Helen." Great is the gulf between happy Innisfail, sovereign and wise, with her own laws, language, sports, and dress, and this wrecked Ireland we know: a country of untended flax-fields, unworked marble-quarries, silent mills on river-banks, little collapsing baronies whose landlords are absent and cold, and a capital whose lordly houses are given over, since the Union, to neglect and decay.

Yet of her glory there are glorious witnesses. Her rough and winding historic roads are open all along. The country is full of ruins and traditions and snatches of strange song, to "tease us out of thought." A gander off on a holiday, with his white spouse and their pretty brood, lifts his paternal hiss at the passer-by from a Druid's altar; and where young lambs lie, in a windy spring, to lee of their mothers, is a magnificent doorway, Lombardic, Romanesque, or Hiberno-Saxon, arch in arch, with its broken inscription, an _Orate_ for immemorial kings. At well-sides are yet seen ablutions and prayers, and May-Day offerings of corn and wool, even as they were "before the advent of the Desii into the County Waterford." By a waterfall, plunging under cleanest ivy and long grass, is a cross with circled centre and intricate Byzantine ornament, displaying David with his harp, or Peter with his keys, set up by a monastic hand twelve hundred years ago. Forty feet away, is something dearer to the archæologist: a kitchen of the primeval hunters, its wall and hearth and calcined lime-stones bedded among laughing bluebells. A brook's freshet, any March, may bring ashore a strange staff or necklace; a rock is overturned under a yew-tree, and discloses horns and knives elder than Clontarf. But yesterday, in a Carlow garden adjoining the ruins of a Butler fortress, put up at the time when Richard the Lionheart was looking with tears of envy over the walls of Jerusalem, closed urns were found in vaults, each with its shining dust: a tenantry long anterior to Christianity, and conscious perhaps, of Christian goings-on overhead, when The MacMorrough Kavanagh was pressed to dine with the Warden of the Black Castle, and slain among his followers at the pouring of the wine. There can be no other country so fatal to the antiquarian: for zest and labor are superfluous, and a long course of incomparable luck must drive him, for very satiety, from the field.

Venerable Ireland has failed, as the world reckons failure. She cannot take prettily to her rôle of subjugated province. Abominably misruled, without a senate, without commerce, she has fallen back into the sullen interior life, into the deep night of reverie. From that brooding dark she has let leap no modern flame supremely great. For the great artist is not Irish, as yet, though with warm exaggerations, uncritical enthusiasms, affectionate encouragements, her own exalt her own. As Goldsmith accused Dr. Johnson of doing, she lets her little fishes talk like whales. And this, of course, tends to no good: it only blunts the ideals of the populace, lowers the mark of achievement, and makes it difficult indeed for the true prince to be recognized in the hubbub of mistaken acclaim. The constituency of Aneurin and Ossian lacks a single sovereign poet: a lack apparent enough to all but itself. Verse, from of old, is pervasive as dew or showers: but nowhere is it in process of crystallization. The persecution of age-long ignorance, imposed upon a most intellectual people, is a miasmatic cloud not yet altogether withdrawn. Only in the best is Ireland perfect: in heroes and in saints. In life, if not in art, we can sometimes do away with economy, restraint, equipoise. We can hardly judge the epic figures of antiquity: but from Columba to "J.K.L.," from Hugh O'Neill and Sarsfield to Emmet and Lord Edward Fitzgerald, runs an endearing family likeness: scorn, pity, sweetness, disinterestedness, honor, power, brave ill luck, in them all. Most of these are rebels; their names are under the baffling shadow of exile and the scaffold, and, alas, count for naught save in their mother's memory.

"Where be thy gods, O Israel?" The gibe comes with ill grace from the English. England has, by the world's corroboration, her divine sons, whose names are in benediction. But she has also a Sahara spectacle of the most stolid, empty folk in the universe: the sapless, rootless, flowerless millions who pay, as it were, for Shakespeare and Shelley, for Turner and Purcell, for Newton and Darwin. Easy, is it not, for the superlative quality to form and act, in fullest power here and there, in a nation where no smallest grain of it is ever wasted on the common mortal? But Ireland reeks with genius impartially distributed. It is infectious; every one suffers from it, in its various stages and manifestations. "The superior race" makes the superior individual impossible. There is no situation open to him; he is notoriously superfluous: a coal brought to Newcastle. It is his lot to awake contradiction, and to be made to feel that he has no nominating committee behind him. He may be a great man in theory: but where every other man is demonstrably quite as great as he, he may be excused if he fails to move mountains. Eccentricity is in your Irishman's blood; and organization he hates and fears, perhaps through a dim consciousness that in organizations mental activities must be left to the leaders. If Celticism, with its insuperable charm, has never led the world in trade or war, can never so lead it, the cause is only that the units, which can hardly be said to compose it, use their brains with unhallowed persistence. The most dashing spirited troops in Europe, the Irish are natural critics even of authority. Their successes are everywhere spasmodic: they juggle with success, they do not woo it to wife. In a career dramatically checkered, it happens that their onset wins Fontenoy, and that their advice forfeits Culloden.

It has been well said that the cultured classes are everywhere much the same, and that the true range of observation lies among the lowly and the poor. Now, no peasantry in the world furnishes such marked examples as does the Irish, of original speculation, accessibility to ideas. Threadbare old farmers and peddlers keep you in amused astonishment, and in an attitude of impious doubt towards the ascendancy of the trained thinker. You fall, nay, you run into cordial agreement with the suggestion of Tom Jones to the Ensign, "that it is as possible for a man to know something without having been at school, as it is to have been at school and to know nothing!" To handle the inscrutable Celt on his own acres is to learn, or at least to apprehend, the secret of a live resistance, incredibly prolonged, to a power almost wearied out with maintaining mastery. The sense of equity, the sense of humor itself, in the humblest and silentest Irishman, is armor enough against fate. He, the law-breaker, has compensations which the law-makers wot not of, in his own ethic subtleties. His soul swells big with dreams. In his native village, he is rated sympathetically by the dream's size and duration, rather than, as in grosser communities, by the deed. The man is a trafficker in visions; he becomes a cryptic mystery to his wife. She admires him for his madness, and has heard of fairy influences: "_satis est_, it suffices," as old Burton oracularly says. Ah, well, the poor devil is with Fergus in his woodland car, when the rent comes due, and the crops are rotting in the rain! He has no turn for temporalities, no ambition to rise; yet in a pictorial sense, by the grace of God, or the witchcraft of the soil, he walks unique and illustrious. It is a memorable sight, this monstrous average and aggregate of whim. Nowhere the lonely planetary effulgence: everywhere the jovial defiant twinkle of little stars! According to Emerson's sweet prediction,--

"As half-gods go, The gods arrive."

But in Ireland no clever half-god ever gets up to go, for the sake of any sequel.

Niecks, the biographer of Chopin, noting the extreme nationalism of Chopin's genius, would have us mark that the same force of patriotism in an Italian, Frenchman, German, or Englishman, could not have promoted a similar result. Poland is a realm, he tells us, where racial traits remain intact, and uninfluenced from without: she is more esoterical than any state can be which is on the highway of Continental progress, in touch with to-morrow; and therefore her expression in the arts is sure to be more individual, distinct, and striking. Ireland is such another spiritually isolated country. Her best utterance, or her least, is alike betrayingly hers, to be scented among a thousand. And this homogeneity, in her case, is quite unaccountable, unless we accept as its explanation, the magnetic and absorbent quality in the strange isle itself, which has blended a dozen alien strains in one, and made of Scythian, Erse, Norse, Iberian, the Norman, the Dane, the English of the Pale, the Huguenot, and the horde of Elizabethan and Cromwellian settlers, something "more Irish than the Irish." And in Poland, again, the aristocracy, though malcontent and impoverished, for honor's sake, maintains its own traditions in its own station, as the feudal vassals maintain theirs. But the genuine Irish gentry is extinct, or utterly transformed, on its ancient acres. The original peasant stock has all but perished from famines and immigrations. Most significant of all, what remains of the two, blends as in no other European territory. The peasants were long ago driven from the estate of free clansmen; the gentry, who would neither conform nor flee, were crushed into the estate of peasants, by the penal laws of the Protestant victor, which made education treason; by the most hateful code, as Lord Chief Justice Coleridge named it, framed since the beginning of the world: and one class impacted on the other, as mortar among stones, became indistinguishable in a generation. Time, which was expected to bring about No Ireland, has in reality engendered a national life more intense than ever. The physical strength, the patience and passion, of the common people; the grace, loyalty, and play of thought of gentlemen, have in that national life come together. Unique patrician wit, delicacy of feeling, knightly courtesy, have run out of their allotted conduits, and they color the speech of beggars. Distinction of all sorts sprouts in the unlikeliest places. Violent Erin produces ever and anon the gentlest philosopher; recluse Erin sends forth the consummate cosmopolitan; hunted and jealous Erin holds up on its top stalk the open lily of liberality,

----"courteous, facile, sweet, Hating that solemn vice of greatness, pride."