Part 7

Ireland is at work in every department of every civilization: it is a seed-shedding, an aroma, intangible as April. No pioneer post, no remote wave, no human enterprise from Algiers to Peru, but can answer for it, ill or well. Yet none know whether Ireland itself is at this hour a mere menace of terrible import, like Samson, or ready, another Odysseus, to throw off disguises, and draw, at home, "in Tara's halls," the once familiar bow. Its own future, in its own altered valleys, is hidden. The tragic cloud hangs there. Foreboding, unrest, are stamped on the very water and sky, and on proud sensitive faces. It was on a day in spring, in sight of Wicklow headlands, the Golden Spears of long ago;--a day when primroses and celandine and prodigal furze splashed the hillsides, down to the rocks where fishers sat mending nets, and stitching tawny sails; when there was a sense of overhanging heights, and green inlands, and ruined abbeys whose stone warriors sleep in hearing of the surf, and of huge cromlech, fairy rath, and embattled wall, long and low, looking sadly down; when the shadows in that cold enchanted air at sea, fringing every sapphire bay, chased from silver through carmine to purple, and back again;--on such a day of caprice and romance, the true day of the Gael, a woman beautiful as the young Deirdre said to a stranger, walking the cliff-path at her side: "No: we have never been conquered: we are unconquerable. But we are without hope."

1889.

AN OPEN LETTER TO THE MOON

"TO THE CELESTIAL AND MY SOUL'S IDOL, THE MOST BEAUTIFIED":--

IT might appear to us an imperative, though agreeable duty, most high and serene Madame, to waft towards you, occasionally, a transcript of our humble doings on this nether planet, were we not sure, in the matter of friendly understanding, that we opened correspondence long ago. You were one of our earliest familiars. You stood in that same office to our fathers and mothers, back to your sometime contemporary, Adam of the Garden; and while we are worried into acquiescence with the inevitable design of age, we are more pleased than envious to discover that you grow never old to the outward eye, and that you appear the same "lovesome ladie bright," as when we first stared at you from a babe's pillow. You are acquainted, not by hearsay, but by actual evidence, with the family history, having seen what sort of figure our ancestors cut, and being infinitely better aware of the peculiarities of the genealogical shrub than we can ever be. Therefore we make no reference to a matter so devoid of novelty. But we do mean to free our minds frankly on the subject of your Ladyship's own behavior. We take this resolve to be no breach of that exalted courtesy which befits us, no less than you, in your skyey station.

We have in part, lost our ancient respect for you: a sorry fact to chronicle. There were once various statements floating about our cradle, complimentary to your supposed virtues. You were Phoebe, twin to Phoebus: a queen, having a separate establishment, coming into a deserted court by night, and kindling it into more than daytime revelry. You were an enchantress, the tutelary divinity of water-sprites and greensward fairies. Your presence was indispensable for felicitous dreams. To be moonstruck, then, meant to be charmed inexpressibly, to be lifted off our feet.

Now, we allow that you have suffered by misrepresentation, or else are we right in detecting your arts; for, by all your starry handmaidens, you are not what we took you to be! We are informed (our quondam faith in you beshrews the day we learned to read!) that you are a timid dependent only of the sun, afraid to show yourself while he is on his peregrinations; that you slyly steal the garb of his splendor as he lays it aside, and blaze forthwith in your borrowed finery. That you are no friend to innocent goblins, but abettor to housebreakers; conspirator in many direful deeds, attending base nocturnal councils, and tacitly arraigning yourself against the law. "Let us be Diana's foresters, gentlemen of the shade, ... governed, as the sea is, by our noble and chaste mistress, the moon, under whose countenance we--steal." That your gossip is the ominous owl, and not Titania. Your inconstancy, to come on delicate ground, shineth above your other characteristics. Since we have seen your color come and go, we surmise that there is no dearth of intrigue and repartee up there; and in a red or a grey veil, you masquerade periodically, at unseasonable hours. Of painting your complexion we are disposed to acquit you; yet it is a severe blow to us to learn, from the most trustworthy sources, that you wax.

Selene, Artemis! you are worldly beyond worldlings. We hear that you have quarters, and that you jingle them triumphantly in the ears of Orion, who is nobody but a poor hunter. Beware of the exasperation of the lower classes! whose awakening is what we call below a French Revolution. Who, indeed, that hath a mote in his eye, cannot still discern a huge beam in yours? Have you no resident missionary? for you persist in obstinate schisms, and flaunt that exploded Orientalism, the crescent, in the teeth of Christendom. You are much more distant and reserved, O beguiler! than you pretend. Your temper is said to be volcanic.

You that were Diana! who is the Falstaffian, Toby Belchian, Kriss Kringlish person to be seen about your premises? He hangeth his great ruddy comfortable phiz out of your casements, and holdeth it sidewise with a wink or a leer, having never yet found his rhyming way to Norwich. We look on him as an officious rascal. He peereth where you only, by privilege, have permission to enter. He hath the evil eye. He thinketh himself a proper substitute for you, and King of the Illuminari; he reproduceth your smile, and scattereth your largesses; he maketh faces (we say it shudderingly) at your worshippers below. Frequently hath he appropriated kisses that were blown to you personally, or consigned to you for delivery, from one sweetheart to another.

O Lady, O Light-dispenser, think, we hereby beseech you, of the danger of his being taken for you! Picture the discomfiture of your minstrel, who, intoning a rapturous recital of your charms, and casting about for a sight of your delectable loveliness, is confronted, instead, with that broad ingenuous vagabond! In some such despairing rage as the minstrel's, must have been the inventor of the German tongue, who discarded all other chances of observation after once beholding this thing, ycleped your Man, and angrily insisted on "Der Mond,"--the Moon, he--as the proper mode of speech. I cite you this from old John Lyly: "There liveth none under the sunne that know what to make of the man in the moon." We clamor at you from the throats of the five races: Abolish him, or at least, depose the present incumbent, and get you straightway some acceptable minion, one of more chivalric habit, of more spare and ascetic exterior! Your credit and our comfort demand it. "Pray you, remember."

What scenes, Cosmopolite, Circumnavigator, Universalist, have you beheld: what joy, what plenty, what riot and desolation! You are the arch-spectator. Death sees not half so widely. He lurketh like an anxious thief in the crowd, seeking what he may take away. But your bland leisurely eye looketh down disinterestedly on all. Caravans rested thrice a thousand years ago beneath you in the desert; Assyrian shepherds chanted to you with their long-hushed voices; the south wind, while the infant world fell into its first slumber, leaped up and played with you in Paradise. You have known the chaos before man, and yet we saw you laugh upon last April's rain. Are there none for whom you are lonely through the ages? Are there not centuries of old delight in your memory, unequalled now? faces fairer than the lilies, on whose repose you still yearn to shine? Do you miss the smoke of altars? Have you forgotten the beginners of the "star-ypointing pyramid"? Can you not tell us a tale of the Visigoth? How sang Blondel against the prison door? How brawny was Bajazet? How fair was Helen; Semiramis, how cruel? Moon! where be the treasures of the doughty Kidd?

You, Cynthia and Hecate, sweet Lady of Ghosts and guardian of the underworld, have been fed upon the homage of mortal lips: you have had praises from the poets exquisite as calamus and myrrh. Many a time have we rehearsed before you such as we recall, from the sigh of Enobarbus:--

"O sovereign mistress of true melancholy!"

to the hymnal

"Orbèd maiden, with white fire laden,"

of the noble salutation of a mirthful-mournful spirit:

"Oh! thou art beautiful, howe'er it be, Huntress or Dian, or whatever named; And he the veriest pagan, that first framed His silver idol, and ne'er worshipped thee."

Have we not sung oft that strophe of Ben Jonson's, full of inexpressible music to our ear?

"Lay thy bow of pearl apart And thy crystal shining quiver; Give unto the flying hart Space to breathe, how short soever, Thou that mak'st a day of night, Goddess excellently bright!"

and the beloved rhymeless cadence of old Jasper Fisher's drama, beginning:--

"Thou queen of Heaven, commandress of the deep, Lady of lakes, regent of woods and deer."

Sidney, Drummond, Milton, glorified your wanderings. And your truest votary, one John Keats, spake out boldly that

----"the oldest shade midst oldest trees Feels palpitations when thou lookest in."

You are an incorrigible charmer: but as he reports you likewise as

----"a relief To the poor, patient oyster, where he sleeps Within his pearly house,"

we infer, with pleasurable surprise, that you have set up as a humanitarian.

Now, we venture to assert that you remember compliments meant to be of the same Orphic strain, and inscribed to you, of which we are not wholly guiltless. We have all but knelt to you, with the Libyan. The primeval heathen has stirred within us. We have been under the witchery of Isis. We aspire to be a Moonshee, rather than any potentate of this universe. Have we not followed you, O "planet of progression!" all our bright, volatile, restless, tide-like days? We wound you not with the analytic eye, nor startle you with telescopes. The scepticisms of astronomy enter not into our rubric. Are you not comely? Do you not spiritualize the darkness with one touch of your pale garment? Then what are they to us, your dimensions and your distances? Gross vanity of knowledge! Mere abuse of privilege!

If we affect the abusive, shy of more ceremonious forms of address, forgive us, Luna. We make recantation, and disown our banter. We extend the hand of cordiality even to your month-old Man. How blithe and beauteous he is! He is embodied Gentility. We bow to him as your anointed Viceroy, your illustrious Nuncio. You know our immemorial loyalty, nor shall our rogueries teach you so late to doubt it.

"_Da Lunæ propere novæ, Da noctis mediæ, da, puer!_"

Forgive us, benignant, peaceful, affable, propitious Moon. Poet are we not, nor lunatic, nor lover; "but that we love thee best, O Most Best! believe it."

1885.

THE UNDER DOG

WHAT a pity a memoir cannot be written without regard to its alleged incidents! Annalists are naturally the slaves of what happens; and that glows between them and the eternal, like gorgeous-colored minster glass, a spurious man-made heaven. A written Life may be true to fact and false to law, even as a lived life may be so. It is utterly impossible for the most philosophic among us to know, to judge, or even to speculate, in behalf of any but himself. A word, a risk, a blunder, the breadth of a hair, the difference betwixt the two Kings of Brentford, lifts the obscure into apparent greatness, or forbids the potentially greater to descend to that table-land where there is no mist, where human senses come into play, and where he may become a subject for the approbation of history. In whatsoever degree a creature is burdened with conscience and stiffened with will, his course must be continuously deflected by countless little secret interior collisions and readjustments, which have final cumulative influence on what we call his character and his achievement. The means to this end are nowhere discoverable, unless in a perfect autobiography, and under the eye of the perfect reader. Fate must have her joke sometimes, as well as the least of us, and she suffers cheap energy to fill the newspapers for a lustrum, and genius to await identification at the morgue. These are truisms, but here is truth: in nine hundred and ninety-nine instances out of a thousand, it is folly to name any success or failure as such; for either is a mystery, and the fairest evidences by which we can form an opinion of it are altogether and irremediably fallacious.

Now, what has often used up and ended a man's vital force, is some constraint much more significant than that of early death, a constraint sought and willingly undergone. His own moral weakness stopped Coleridge; but Erasmus might have uttered with Sidney:

"My life melts with too much thinking."

Socrates, it will be remembered, "corrupted the Athenian youth." Not one of them he moulded or breathed upon, except the transient pupil Alcibiades, turned his hand cordially to the practical, or ramped in the civic china-shop. What ghost is it which certain minds see upon the way, and which lessens their destined momentum? Something extra-rational, we may be sure: something with an august enchantment. They act under the impulse of an heroic fickleness, and forsake a known and very good result for "the things that are more excellent." The spectators can only wonder; the crucial third act has passed swiftly and in silence behind the curtain, and the rest of the drama sounds perverted and confused. A mere secular enthusiasm may have the power to draw a career to itself, absorb and devour it, and keep it shut forever from the chance of distinction in selfish and pleasant ways. But what shall be said for those who have become impassioned of the supernatural, beholding it in amaze, as Hubert the hunter beheld the holy sign between the antlered brows in the Aquitanian forest: a sight enough to stay them and carry them out of themselves, and change what was their prospect, because "the former things are passed away?" What of the allegiance to a cause, the espousal of hunger and thirst, the wilderness, and the scaffold, in the hope, never ultimately in vain, of awakening and bettering the world? "If the law require you to be the agent of injustice to another," wrote Thoreau, in his good manful essay on John Brown, "then I say to you, break the law. Let your life be a friction to stop the machine." Even thus have many gone under, of whom no audiences have heard, but whose love and wisdom feed the race, century after century. In our reckoning of the saints, we lose sight of half their meaning; for we cannot guess accurately which of them has lost most, humanly and æsthetically, nor how much any one individual has lost, by his chosen concentration on matters in which there is no general competition, and where there can be no established canons of criticism. Some saints, in a double sense, follow their vocations; they attain their only legitimate development in the cloister. But others are saints at a sacrifice. An infinite number of men and women, painfully approximating moral perfection, lose, either gradually, or at once and forever, in that supreme compensation, their aptitude for common affairs. "_Ejiciebas eas, et intrabas pro eis, omne voluptate dulcior_," says the son of Monica's tears, himself gloriously stricken out from the pagan roll of honor.

Such as these have outgrown their own existence; they become impalpable to the general apprehension; they have sold the mess of pottage again for the birthright of the sons of God. And God, in the audacious old phrase, has "destroyed" them. What they bade fair to be, or what they could have done, before they were crippled by vigils and visions, rolls back into the impossible and the unimagined. We have no clue to alienated souls: we can compute with those solely, who, as we say, get along and amount to something; and we seldom perceive what purely fortuitous reputations, what mere bright flotsam and jetsam, accidentally uppermost, are those whom we set first in a fixed place, and cry up as exemplars in art, trade, and policy. For what might have been is not this crass world's concern: her absent have no rights. The spiritual man is likely to be possessed of a divine indolence; would he strive, he is hampered and thwarted by the remembrance, or the forecast, of whiter ideals in Paradise. It is sometimes urged as a reproach against the courteous Latin nations that they lag behind in modern progressiveness; that they do not, like the Border lads, "march forward in order." The reproach is, at bottom, a delicate and exquisite compliment. With genius in their blood, and beauty never far from their hand, what wonder if they continue to be careless about rapid transit?

"I have seen higher, holier things than these, And therefore must to these refuse my heart."

The endearing fable of elf-shot or bewitched children, little goose-girls waylaid on the hillside by fairies in green and silver, and enticed away, and set free after a while, though with the dream and the blight ever upon them, is, like most fables, deep as immortality. The mystic has already gone too far, and seen too much; he is useless at the plough: he is, as it were, one citizen less. The fine lines just quoted are from an expert in inaction, the poet who, among all others with an equal equipment in English letters, may be named pre-eminently as a failure: Arthur Hugh Clough. Let his lovers proclaim as much with gentle irony. Most poets, it may be, are heroes spoiled; they know somewhat of the unknown, and suffer from it; the usual measure of their esoteric worth must still be the measure of their mundane impracticability: like Hamlet, they have seen spirits, and forswear deeds for phrases. Artists and thinkers, in fact, must outwardly follow the profession of the queen bee, not as yet with honor, nor by general request. But they are omens; they are, let us hope, the type and the race, the segregated non-cohesive thing, the protest which counts. The noblest of them is least in love with civilization and its awards; but what they have not hoarded for themselves, strangers hoard for them; and because success is most truly to them a thing foregone, therefore they prevail forever. If they have not "made a living," they have, in the opinion of a young Governor of Massachusetts, a philosopher not of the Franklin breed,--"made a life."

1893.

QUIET LONDON

IF one had to try his hand at the eternal parallel of London and Paris (next weariest, in the scale of human comparisons, to that between D----s and T----y), or, indeed, of London with any city of known size, it might be said, in a word, that the chief variance between them is a variance of sound: and that under this, and expressed by it,--"alas, how told to them who felt it never?" as Dante sighs over the abstruse sweetness of his lady,--is a profound spiritual difference. Whatever tradition may say of

----"the chargeable noise of this great town,"

its instructed inhabitant knows it by strange whispers, meek undertones. Conceive anything more diverting than that a monstrous awe-engendering institution like the 'bus should be almost as deft and as still as a humming-bird! Monosyllables, and pipe-smoke, and sciential collecting of fares make up the rolling van masculine; ever and anon the less certain step and the swish of a skirt on the lurching stair, announce to the heroes of the serene height that

"Helen is come upon the wall to see."