"Well, guv'ner, I dessay I might do at a pinch," he replied; and I tried to slap his face, but missed it, and received such a tremendous box on the ear that I was giddy for a second or two, and when I recovered I found him still grinning at me. I tried to hit him again and again, but always missed; and at last, without doing me any particular damage, he laid me flat three times running onto the very heap where I had flung the drover, the crowd applauding madly. Dazed, hatless, and panting, and covered with filth, I stared at him in hopeless impotence. He put out his hand, and said, "You're all right, ain't yer, guv'ner? I 'ope I 'aven't 'urt yer! My name's Tom Sayers. If you'd a 'it me, I should 'a' gone down like a ninepin, and I ain't so sure as I should ever 'ave got up again."
He was to become the most famous fighting-man in England!
I wrung his hand and thanked him, and offered him a sovereign, which he refused; and then he led me into a room in a public-house close by, where he washed and brushed me down, and insisted on treating me to a glass of brandy-and-water.
I have had a fondness for fighting-men ever since, and a respect for the noble science I had never felt before. He was many inches shorter than I, and did not look at all the Hercules he was.
He told me I was the strongest built man for a youngster that he had ever seen, barring that I was "rather leggy." I do not know if he was sincere or not, but no possible compliment could have pleased me more. Such is the vanity of youth.
And here, although it savors somewhat of vaingloriousness, I cannot resist the temptation of relating another adventure of the same kind, but in which I showed to greater advantage.
It was on a boxing-day (oddly enough), and I was returning with Lintot and one of his boys from a walk in the Highgate Fields. As we plodded our dirty way homeward through the Caledonian Road we were stopped by a crowd outside a public-house. A gigantic drayman (they always seem bigger than they really are) was squaring up to a poor drunken lout of a navvy not half his size, who had been put up to fight him, and who was quite incapable of even an attempt it self-defence; he could scarcely lift his arms, I thought at first it was only horse-play; and as little Joe Lintot wanted to see, I put him up on my shoulder, just as the drayman, who had been drinking, but was not drunk, and had a most fiendishly brutal face, struck the poor tipsy wretch with all his might between the eyes, and felled him (it was like pole-axing a bullock), to the delight of the crowd.
Little Joe, a very gentle and sensitive boy, began to cry; and his father, who had the pluck of a bull-terrier, wanted to interfere, in spite of his diminutive stature. I was also beside myself with indignation, and pulling off my coat and hat, which I gave to Lintot, made my way to the drayman, who was offering to fight any three men in the crowd, an offer that met with no response.
"Now, then, you cowardly skunk!" I said, tucking up my shirt-sleeves; "stand up, and I will knock every tooth down your ugly throat."
His face went the colors of a mottled Stilton cheese, and he asked what I meddled with him for. A ring formed itself, and I felt the sympathy of the crowdwithme this time—a very agreeable sensation!
"Now, then, up with your arms! I'm going to kill you!"
"I ain't going to fight you, mister; I ain't going to fightnobody.Just you let me alone!"
[Illustration:]
"Oh yes, you are, or you're going on your marrow-bones to be pardon for being a brutal, cowardly skunk"; and I gave him a slap on the face that rang like a pistol-shot—a most finished, satisfactory, and successful slap this time. My finger-tips tingle at the bare remembrance.
He tried to escape, but was held opposite to me. He began to snivel and whimper, and said he had never meddled with me, and asked what should I meddle with him for?
"Then down on your knees—quick—this instant!" and I made as if I were going to begin serious business at once, and no mistake.
So down he plumped on his knees, and there he actually fainted from sheer excess of emotion.
As I was helped on with my coat, I tasted, for once in my life the sweets of popularity, and knew what it was to be the idol of a mob.
Little Joey Lintot and his brothers and sisters, who had never held me in any particular regard before that I knew of, worshipped me from that day forward.
And I should be insincere if I did not confess that on that one occasion I was rather pleased with myself, although the very moment I stood opposite the huge, hulking, beer-sodden brute (who had looked so formidable from afar) I felt, with a not unpleasant sense of relief, that he did not stand a chance. He was only big, and even at that I beat him.
The real honors of the day belonged to Lintot, who, I am convinced, was ready to act the David to that Goliath. He had the real stomach for fighting, which I lacked, as very tall men are often said to do.
And that, perhaps, is why I have made so much of my not very wonderful prowess on that occasion; not, indeed, that I am physically a coward—at least, I do not think so. If I thought I were I should avow it with no more shame than I should avow that I had a bad digestion, or a weak heart, which makes cowards of us all.
It is that I hate a row, and violence, and bloodshed, even from a nose—any nose, either my own or my neighbor's.
* * * * *
There are slums at the east end of London that many fashionable people know something of by this time; I got to know them by heart. In addition to the charm of the mere slum, there was the eternal fascination of the seafaring element; of Jack ashore—a lovable creature who touches nothing but what he adorns it in his own peculiar fashion.
I constantly haunted the docks, where the smell of tar and the sight of ropes and masts filled me with unutterable longings for the sea—for distant lands—for anywhere but where it was my fate to be.
I talked to ship captains and mates and sailors, and heard many marvellous tales, as the reader may well believe, and framed for myself visions of cloudless skies, and sapphire seas, and coral reefs, and groves of spice, and dusky youths in painted plumage roving, and friendly isles where a lovely half-clad, barefooted Neuha would wave her torch, and lead me, her Torquil, by the hand through caverns of bliss!
Especially did I haunt a wharf by London Bridge, from whence two steamers—theSeineand theDolphin, I believe—started on alternate days for Boulogne-sur-Mer.
I used to watch the happy passengers bound for France, some of them, in their holiday spirits, already fraternizing together on the sunny deck, and fussing with camp-stools and magazines and novels and bottles of bitter beer, or retiring before the funnel to smoke the pipe of peace.
[Illustration: THE BOULOGNE STEAMER.]
The sound of the boiler getting up steam—what delicious music it was! Would it ever get up steam for me? The very smell of the cabin, the very feel of the brass gangway and the brass-bound, oil-clothed steps were delightful; and down-stairs, on the snowy cloth, were the cold beef and ham, the beautiful fresh mustard, the bottles of pale ale and stout. Oh, happy travellers, who could afford all this, and France into the bargain!
Soon would a large white awning make the after-deck a paradise, from which, by-and-by, to watch the quickly gliding panorama of the Thames. The bell would sound for non-passengers like me to go ashore—"Que diable allait-il faire dans cette galère!" as Uncle Ibbetson would have said. The steamer, disengaging itself from the wharf with a pleasant yoho-ing of manly throats and a slow, intermittent plashing of the paddle-wheels, would carefully pick its sunny, eastward way among the small craft of the river, while a few handkerchiefs were waved in a friendly, make-believe farewell—auf wiedersehen!
Oh, to stand by that unseasonably sou'-westered man at the wheel, and watch St. Paul's and London Bridge and the Tower of London fade out of sight—never, never to see them again. Noauf wiedersehenfor me!
Sometimes I would turn my footsteps westward and fill my hungry, jealous eyes with a sight of the gay summer procession in Hyde Park, or listen to the band in Kensington Gardens, and see beautiful, welldressed women, and hear their sweet, refined voices and happy laughter; and a longing would come into my heart more passionate than my longing for the sea and France and distant lands, and quite as unutterable. I would even forget Neuha and her torch.
After this it was a dreary downfall to go and dine for tenpence all by myself, and finish up with a book at my solitary lodgings in Pentonville. The book would not let itself be read; it sulked and had to be laid down, for "beautiful woman! beautiful girl!" spelled themselves between me and the printed page. Translate me those words into French, O ye who can even render Shakespeare into French Alexandrines—"Belle femme? Belle fille?" Ha! ha!
If you want to get as near it as you can, you will have to write, "Belle Anglaise," or "Belle Américaine;" only then will you be understood, even in France!
Ah! elle était bien belle, Madame Seraskier!
At other times, more happily inspired, I would slake my thirst for nature by long walks into the country. Hampstead was my Passy—the Leg-of-Mutton Pond my Mare d'Auteuil; Richmond was my St. Cloud, with Kew Gardens for a Bois de Boulogne; and Hampton Court made a very fair Versailles—how incomparably fairer, even a pupil of Lintot's should know.
And after such healthy fatigue and fragrant impressions the tenpenny dinner had a better taste, the little front parlor in Pentonville was more like a home, the book more like a friend.
For I read all I could get in English or French.
[Illustration]
Novels, travels, history, poetry, science—everything came as grist to that most melancholy mill, my mind.
I tried to write; I tried to draw; I tried to make myself an inner life apart from the sordid, commonplace ugliness of my outer one—a private oasis of my own; and to raise myself a little, if only mentally, above the circumstances in which it had pleased the Fates to place me.[A]
[Footnote A:Note—It Is with great reluctance that I now come to my cousin's account of deplorable opinions he held, at that period of his life, on the most important subject that can ever engross the mind of man. I have left outmuch, but I feel that in suppressing it altogether, I should rob his sad story of all its moral significance; for it cannot be doubted that most of his unhappiness is attributable to the defective religious training of his childhood, and that his parents (otherwise the best and kindest people I have ever known) incurred a terrible responsibility when they determined to leave him "unbiased," as he calls it, at that tender and susceptible age when the mind is "Wax to receive, marble to retain." Madge Plunket.]
* * * * *
It goes without saying that, like many thoughtful youths of a melancholy temperament, impecunious and discontented with their lot, and much given to the smoking of strong tobacco (on an empty stomach), I continuously brooded on the problems of existence—free-will and determinism, the whence and why and whither of man, the origin of evil, the immortality of the soul, the futility of life, etc., and made myself very miserable over such questions.
Often the inquisitive passer-by, had he peeped through the blinds of No.—Wharton Street, Pentonville, late at night, would have been rewarded by the touching spectacle of a huge, rawboned ex-private in her Majesty's Life Guards, with his head bowed over the black and yellow key-board of a venerable square piano-forte (on which he could not play), dropping the bitter tear of loneliness andWeltschmertzcombined.
[Illustration]
It never once occurred to me to seek relief in the bosom of any Church.
Some types are born and not made. I was a born "infidel;" if ever there was a congenital agnostic, one agnostically constituted from his very birth, it was I. Not that I had ever heard such an expression as agnosticism; it is an invention of late years….
"J'avais fait de la prose toute ma vie sans le savoir!"
But almost the first conscious dislike I can remember was for the black figure of the priest, and there were several of these figures in Passy.
Monsieur le Major called themmaîtres corbeaux, and seemed to hold them in light esteem. Dr. Seraskier hated them; his gentle Catholic wife had grown to distrust them. My loving, heretic mother loved them not; my father, a Catholic born and bred, had an equal aversion. They had persecuted his gods—the thinkers, philosophers, and scientific discoverers—Galileo, Bruno, Copernicus; and brought to his mind the cruelties of the Holy Inquisition, the Massacre of St. Bartholomew; and I always pictured them as burning little heretics alive if they had their will—Eton jackets, white chimney-pot hats, and all!
I have no doubt they were in reality the best and kindest of men.
The parson (and parsons were not lacking in Pentonville) was not so insidiously repellent as the blue-cheeked, blue-chinned Passy priest; but he was by no means to me a picturesque or sympathetic apparition, with his weddedness, his whiskers, his black trousers, his frock-coat, his tall hat, his little white tie, his consciousness of being a "gentleman" by profession. Most unattractive, also, were the cheap, brand-new churches wherein he spoke the word to his dreary-looking, Sunday-clad flock, with scarcely one of whom his wife would have sat down to dinner—especially if she had been chosen from among them.
[Illustration: SUNDAY IN PENTONVILLE.]
To watch that flock pouring in of a Sunday morning, or afternoon, or evening, at the summons of those bells, and pouring out again after the long service, and banal, perfunctory sermon, was depressing. Weekdays, in Pentonville, were depressing enough; but Sundays were depressing beyond words, though nobody seemed to think so but myself. Early training had acclimatized them.
I have outlived those physical antipathies of my salad days; even the sight of an Anglican bishop is no longer displeasing to me, on the contrary; and I could absolutely rejoice in the beauty of a cardinal.
Indeed, I am now friends with both a parson and a priest, and do not know which of the two I love and respect the most. They ought to hate me, but they do not; they pity me too much, I suppose. I am too negative to rouse in either the deep theological hate; and all the little hate that the practice of love and charity has left in their kind hearts is reserved for each other—an unquenchable hate in which they seem to glory, and which rages all the more that it has to be concealed. It saddens me to think that I am a bone of contention between them.
And yet, for all my unbelief, the Bible was my favorite book, and the Psalms my adoration; and most truly can I affirm that my mental attitude has ever been one of reverence and humility.
But every argument that has ever been advanced against Christianity (and I think I know them all by this time) had risen spontaneously and unprompted within me, and they have all seemed to me unanswerable, and indeed, as yet, unanswered. Nor had any creed of which I ever heard appeared to me either credible or attractive or even sensible, but for the central figure of the Deity—a Deity that in no case could ever be mine.
The awe-inspiring and unalterable conception that had wrought itself into my consciousness, whether I would or no, was that of a Being infinitely more abstract, remote, and inaccessible than any the genius of mankind has ever evolved after its own image and out of the needs of its own heart—inscrutable, unthinkable, unspeakable; above all human passions, beyond the reach of any human appeal; One upon whose attributes it was futile to speculate—One whose name wasIt, notHe.
The thought of total annihilation was uncongenial, but had no terror.
Even as a child I had shrewdly suspected that hell was no more than a vulgar threat for naughty little boys and girls, and heaven than a vulgar bribe, from the casual way in which either was meted out to me as my probable portion, by servants and such people, according to the way I behaved. Such things were never mentioned to me by either my father or mother, or M. le Major, or the Seraskiers—the only people in whom I trusted.
But for the bias against the priest, I was left unbiassed at that tender and susceptible age. I had learned my catechism and read my Bible, and used to say the Lord's Prayer as I went to bed, and "God bless papa and mamma" and the rest, in the usual perfunctory manner.
Never a word against religion was said in my hearing by those few on whom I had pinned my childish faith; on the other hand, no such importance was attached to it, apparently, as was attached to the virtues of truthfulness, courage, generosity, self-denial, politeness, and especially consideration for others, high or low, human and animal alike.
I imagine that my parents must have compromised the matter between them, and settled that I should work out all the graver problems of existence for myself, when I came to a thinking age, out of my own conscience, and such knowledge of life as I should acquire, and such help as they would no doubt have given me, according to their lights, had they survived.
I did so, and made myself a code of morals to live by, in which religion had but a small part.
For me there was but one sin, and that was cruelty, because I hated it; though Nature, for inscrutable purposes of her own, almost teaches it as a virtue. All sins that did not include cruelty were merely sins against health, or taste, or common-sense, or public expediency.
Free-will was impossible. We could onlyseemto will freely, and that only within the limits of a small triangle, whose sides were heredity, education, and circumstance—a little geometrical arrangement of my own, of which I felt not a little proud, although it does not quite go on all-fours—perhaps because it is only a triangle.
That is, we could will fast enough—toofast; but could not willhowto will—fortunately, for we were not fit as yet, and for a long time to come, to be trusted, constituted as we are!
Even the characters of a novel must act according to the nature, training, and motives their creator the novelist has supplied them with, or we put the novel down and read something else; for human nature must be consistent with itself in fiction as well as in fact. Even in its madness there must be a method, so how could the will be free?
To pray for any personal boon or remission of evil—to bend the knee, or lift one's voice in praise or thanksgiving for any earthly good that had befallen one, either through inheritance, or chance, or one's own successful endeavor—was in my eyes simply futile; but, putting its futility aside, it was an act of servile presumption, of wheedling impertinence, not without suspicion of a lively sense of favors to come.
It seemed to me as though the Jews—a superstitious and business-like people, who know what they want and do not care how they get it—must have taught us to pray like that.
It was not the sweet, simple child innocently beseeching that to-morrow might be fine for its holiday, or that Santa Claus would be generous; it was the cunning trader, fawning, flattering, propitiating, bribing with fulsome, sycophantic praise (an insult in itself), as well as burnt-offerings, working for his own success here and hereafter, and his enemy's confounding.
It was the grovelling of the dog, without the dog's single-hearted love, stronger than even its fear or its sense of self-interest.
What an attitude for one whom God had made after His own image—even towards his Maker!
* * * * *
The only permissible prayer was a prayer for courage or resignation; for that was a prayer turned inward, an appeal to what is best in ourselves—our honor, our stoicism, our self-respect.
And for a small detail, grace before and after meals seemed to me especially self-complacent and iniquitous, when there were so many with scarcely ever a meal to say grace for. The only decent and proper grace was to give half of one's meal away—not, indeed, that I was in the habit of doing so! But at least I had the grace to reproach myself for my want of charity, and that was my only grace.
* * * * *
Fortunately, since we had no free-will of our own, the tendency that impelled us was upward, like the sparks, and bore us with it willy-nilly—the good and the bad, and the worst and the best.
By seeing this clearly, and laying it well to heart, the motive was supplied to us for doing all we could in furtherance of that upward tendency—pour aider le bon Dieu—that we might rise the faster and reach Him the sooner, if He were! And when once the human will has been set going, like a rocket or a clock or a steam-engine, and in the right direction, what can it not achieve?
We should in time control circumstance instead of being controlled thereby; education would day by day become more adapted to one consistent end; and, finally, conscience-stricken, we should guide heredity with our own hands instead of leaving it to blind chance; unless, indeed, a well-instructed paternal government wisely took the reins, and only sanctioned the union of people who were thoroughly in love with each other, after due and careful elimination of the unfit.
Thus, cruelty should at least be put into harness, and none of its valuable energy wasted on wanton experiments, as it is by Nature.
And thus, as the boy is father to the man, should the human race one day be father to—what?
That is just where my speculations would arrest themselves; that was theX of a sum in rule of three, not to be worked out by Peter Ibbetson,Architect and Surveyor, Wharton Street, Pentonville.
As the orang-outang is to Shakespeare, so is Shakespeare to … X?
As the female chimpanzee is to the Venus of Milo, so is the Venus ofMilo to … X?
Finally, multiply these two X's by each other, and try to conceive the result!
* * * * *
Such was, crudely, the simple creed I held at this time; and, such as it was, I had worked it all out for myself, with no help from outside—a poor thing, but mine own; or, as I expressed it in the words of De Musset, "Mon verre n'est pas grand—mais je bois dans mon verre."
For though such ideas were in the air, like wholesome clouds, they had not yet condensed themselves into printed words for the million. People did not dare to write about these things, as they do at present, in popular novels and cheap magazines, that all who run may read, and learn to think a little for themselves, and honestly say what they think, without having to dread a howl of execration, clerical and lay.
And it was not only that I thought like this and could not think otherwise; it was that I felt like this and could not feel otherwise; and I should have appeared to myself as wicked, weak, and base had I ever evendesiredto think or feel otherwise, however personally despairing of this life—a traitor to what I jealously guarded as my best instincts.
And yet to me the faith of others, if but unaggressive, humble, and sincere, had often seemed touching and pathetic, and sometimes even beautiful, as childish things seem sometimes beautiful, even in those who are no longer children, and should have put them away. It had caused many heroic lives, and rendered many obscure lives blameless and happy; and then its fervor and passion seemed to burn with a lasting flame.
At brief moments now and then, and especially in the young, unfaith can be as fervent and as passionate as faith, and just as narrow and unreasonable, asIfound; but alas! its flame was intermittent, and its light was not a kindly light.
It had no food for babes; it could not comfort the sick or sorry, nor resolve into submissive harmony the inner discords of the soul; nor compensate us for our own failures and shortcomings, nor make up to us in any way for the success and prosperity of others who did not choose to think as we did.
It was without balm for wounded pride, or stay for weak despondency, or consolation for bereavement; its steep and rugged thoroughfares led to no promised land of beatitude, and there were no soft resting-places by the way.
Its only weapon was steadfastness; its only shield, endurance; its earthly hope, the common weal; its earthly prize, the opening of all roads to knowledge, and the release from a craven inheritance of fear; its final guerdon—sleep? Who knows?
Sleep was not bad.
So that simple, sincere, humble, devout, earnest, fervent, passionate, and over-conscientious young unbelievers like myself had to be very strong and brave and self-reliant (which I was not), and very much in love with what they conceived to be the naked Truth (a figure of doubtful personal attractions at first sight), to tread the ways of life with that unvarying cheerfulness, confidence, and serenity which the believer claims as his own special and particular appanage.
So much for my profession of unfaith, shared (had I but known it) by many much older and wiser and better educated than I, and only reached by them after great sacrifice of long-cherished illusions, and terrible pangs of soul-questioning—a struggle and a wrench that I was spared through my kind parents' thoughtfulness when I was a little boy.
* * * * *
It thus behooved me to make the most of this life; since, for all I knew, or believed, or even hoped to the contrary, to-morrow we must die.
Not, indeed, that I might eat and drink and be merry; heredity and education had not inclined me that way, I suppose, and circumstances did not allow it; but that I might try and live up to the best ideal I could frame out of my own conscience and the past teaching of mankind. And man, whose conception of the Infinite and divine has been so inadequate, has furnished us with such human examples (ancient and modern, Hebrew, Pagan, Buddhist, Christian, Agnostic, and what not) as the best of us can only hope to follow at a distance.
I would sometimes go to my morning's work, my heart elate with lofty hope and high resolve.
How easy and simple it seemed to lead a life without fear, or reproach, or self-seeking, or any sordid hope of personal reward, either here or hereafter!—a life of stoical endurance, invincible patience and meekness, indomitable cheerfulness and self-denial!
After all, it was only for another forty or fifty years at the most, and what was that? And after that—que sçais-je?
The thought was inspiring indeed!
By luncheon-time (and luncheon consisted of an Abernethy biscuit and a glass of water, and several pipes of shag tobacco, cheap and rank) some subtle change would come over the spirit of my dream.
Other people did not have high resolves. Some people had very bad tempers, and rubbed one very much the wrong way.
What a hideous place was Pentonville to slave away one's life in! …
What a grind it was to be forever making designs for little new shops inRosoman Street, and not making them well, it seemed! …
Why should a squinting, pock-marked, bowlegged, hunch-backed little Judkins (a sight to make a recruiting-sergeant shudder) forever taunt one with having enlisted as a private soldier? …
And then why should one be sneeringly told to "hit a fellow one's own size," merely because, provoked beyond endurance, one just grabbed him by the slack of his trousers and gently shook him out of them onto the floor, terrified but quite unhurt? …
And so on, and so on; constant little pin-pricks, sordid humiliations, ugliness, meannesses, and dirt, that called forth in resistance all that was lowest and least commendable in one's self.
One has attuned one's nerves to the leading of a forlorn hope, and a gnat gets into one's eye, or a little cinder grit, and there it sticks; and there is no question of leading any forlorn hope, after all, and never will be; allthatwas in the imagination only: it is always gnats and cinder grits, gnats and cinder grits.
By the evening I had ignominiously broken down, and was plunged in the depths of an exasperated pessimism too deep even for tears, and would have believed myself the meanest and most miserable of mankind, but that everybody else, without exception, was even meaner and miserabler than myself.
They could still eat and drink and be merry. I could not, and did not even want to.
* * * * *
And so on, day after day, week after week, for months and years….
Thus I grew weary in time of my palling individuality, ever the same through all these uncontrollable variations of mood.
Oh, that alternate ebb and flow of the spirits! It is a disease, and, what is most distressing, it is no real change; it is more sickeningly monotonous than absolute stagnation itself. And from that dreary seesaw I could never escape, except through the gates of dreamless sleep, the death in life; for even in our dreams we are still ourselves. There was no rest!
I loathed the very sight of myself in the shop-windows as I went by; and yet I always looked for it there, in the forlorn hope of at least finding some alteration, even for the worse. I passionately longed to be somebody else; and yet I never met anybody else I could have borne to be for a moment.
And then the loneliness of us!
Each separate unit of our helpless race is inexorably bounded by the inner surface of his own mental periphery, a jointless armor in which there is no weak place, never a fault, never a single gap of egress for ourselves, of ingress for the nearest and dearest of our fellow-units. At only five points can we just touch each other, and all that is—and that only by the function of our poor senses—from the outside. In vain we rack them that we may get a little closer to the best beloved and most implicitly trusted; ever in vain, from the cradle to the grave.
Why should so fantastic a thought have persecuted me so cruelly? I knew nobody with whom I should have felt such a transfusion of soul even tolerable for a second. I cannot tell! But it was like a gadfly which drove me to fatigue my body that I should have by day the stolid peace of mind that comes of healthy physical exhaustion; that I should sleep at night the dreamless sleep—the death in life!
"Of such materials wretched men are made!" Especially wretched young men; and the wretcheder one is, the more one smokes; and the more one smokes, the wretcheder one gets—a vicious circle!
Such was my case. I grew to long for the hour of my release (as I expressed it pathetically to myself), and caressed the idea of suicide. I even composed for myself a little rhymed epitaph in French which I thought very neat—
Je n'étais point. Je fus.Je ne suis plus.
* * * * *
Oh, to perish in some noble cause—to die saving another's life, even another's worthless life, to which he clung!
I remember formulating this wish, in all sincerity, one moonlit night as I walked up Frith Street, Soho. I came upon a little group of excited people gathered together at the foot of a house built over a shop. From a broken window-pane on the second floor an ominous cloud of smoke rose like a column into the windless sky. An ordinary ladder was placed against the house, which, they said, was densely inhabited; but no fire-engine or fire-escape had arrived as yet, and it appeared useless to try and rouse the inmates by kicking and beating at the door any longer.
A brave man was wanted—a very brave man, who would climb the ladder, and make his way into the house through the broken window. Here was a forlorn hope to lead at last!
Such a man was found. To my lasting shame and contrition, it was not I.
He was short and thick and middle-aged, and had a very jolly red face and immense whiskers—quite a common sort of man, who seemed by no means tired of life.
His heroism was wasted, as it happened; for the house was an empty one, as we all heard, to our immense relief, before he had managed to force a passage into the burning room. His whiskers were not even singed!
Nevertheless, I slunk home, and gave up all thoughts of self-destruction—even in a noble cause; and there, in penance, I somewhat hastily committed to flame the plodding labor of many midnights—an elaborate copy in pen and ink, line for line, of Retel's immortal wood-engraving "Der Tod als Freund," which Mrs. Lintot had been kind enough to lend me—and under which I had written, in beautiful black Gothic letters and red capitals (and without the slightest sense of either humor or irreverence), the following poem, which had cost me infinite pains:
F, i, fi—n, i, ni!Bon dieu Père, j'ai fini…Vous qui m'avez lant puni,Dans ma triste vie,Pour tant d'horribles forfaitsQue je ne commis jamaisLaissez-moi jouir en paixDe mon agonie!
Les faveurs que je Vous dois,Je les compte sur mes doigts:Tout infirme que je sois,Ça se fait bien vite!Prenez patience, et comptezTous mes maux—puis computezToutes Vos sévérités—Vous me tiendrez quitte!
Né pour souffrir, et souffrant—Bas, honni, bête, ignorant,Vieux, laid, chétif—et mourantDans mon trou sans plainte,Je suis aussi sans désirAutre que d'en bien finir—Sans regret, sans repentir—Sans espoir ni crainte!
Père inflexible et jaloux,Votre Fils est mort pour nous!Aussi, je reste envers VousSi bien sans rancune,Que je voudrais, sans façon,Faire, au seuil de ma prison,Quelque petite oraison …Je n'en sais pas une!
J'entends sonner l'AngélusQui rassemble Vos Elus:Pour moi, du bercail exclus.C'est la mort qui sonne!Prier ne profite rien …Pardonner est le seul bien:C'est le Vôtre, et c'est le mien:Moi, je Vous pardonne!
Soyez d'un égard pareil!S'il est quelque vrai sommeilSans ni rêve, ni réveil,Ouvrez-m'en la porte—Faites que l'immense OubliCouvre, sous un dernier pli,Dans mon corps enséveli,Ma conscience morte!
Oh me duffer! What a hopeless failure was I in all things, little and big.
[Illustration]
I had no friends but the Lintots and their friends. "Les amis de nos amis sont nos amis!"
My cousin Alfred had gone into the army, like his father before him. My cousin Charlie had gone into the Church, and we had drifted completely apart. My grandmother was dead. My Aunt Plunket, a great invalid, lived in Florence. Her daughter, Madge, was in India, happily married to a young soldier who is now a most distinguished general.
The Lintots held their heads high as representatives of a liberal profession, and an old Pentonville family. People were generally exclusive in those days—an exclusiveness that was chiefly kept up by the ladies. There were charmed circles even in Pentonville.
Among the most exclusive were the Lintots. Let us hope, in common justice, that those they excluded were at least able to exclude others.
I have eaten their bread and salt, and it would ill become me to deny that their circle was charming as well as charmed. But I had no gift for making friends, although I was often attracted by people the very opposite of myself; especially by little, clever, quick, but not too familiar men; but even if they were disposed to make advances, a miserable shyness and stiffness of manner on my part, that I could not help, would raise a barrier of ice between us.
They were most hospitable people, these good Lintots, and had many friends, and gave many parties, which my miserable shyness prevented me from enjoying to the full. They were both too stiff and too free.
In the drawing-room, Mrs. Lintot and one or two other ladies, severely dressed, would play the severest music in a manner that did not mitigate its severity. They were merciless! It was nearly always Bach, or Hummel, or Scarlatti, each of whom, they would say, could write both like an artist and a gentleman—a very rare but indispensable combination, it seemed.
Other ladies, young and middle-aged, and a few dumb-struck youths like myself, would be suffered to listen, but never to retaliate—never to play or sing back again.
If one ventured to ask for a song without words by Mendelssohn—or a song with words, even by Schubert, even with German words—one was rebuked and made to blush for the crime of musical frivolity.
Meanwhile, in Lintot's office (built by himself in the back garden), grave men and true, pending the supper hour, would smoke and sip spirits-and-water, and talk shop; formally at first, and with much politeness. But gradually, feeling their way, as it were, they would relax into social unbuttonment, and drop the "Mister" before each other's names (to be resumed next morning), and indulge in lively professional chaff, which would soon become personal and free and boisterous—a good-humored kind of warfare in which I did not shine, for lack of quickness and repartee. For instance, they would ask one whether one would rather be a bigger fool than one looked, or look a bigger fool than one was; and whichever way one answered the question, the retort would be that "that was impossible!" amid roars of laughter from all but one.
[Illustration]
So that I would take a middle course, and spend most of the evening on the stairs and in the hall, and study (with an absorbing interest much too well feigned to look natural) the photographs of famous cathedrals and public buildings till supper came; when, by assiduously attending on the ladies, I would cause my miserable existence to be remembered, and forgiven; and soon forgotten again, I fear.
I hope I shall not be considered an overweening coxcomb for saying that, on the whole, I found more favor with the ladies than with the gentlemen; especially at supper-time.
After supper there would be a change—for the better, some thought. Lintot, emboldened by good-cheer and good-fellowship, would become unduly, immensely, uproariously funny, in spite of his wife. He had a genuine gift of buffoonery. His friends would whisper to each other that Lintot was "on," and encourage him. Bach and Hummel and Scarlatti were put on the shelf, and the young people would have a good time. There were comic songs and negro melodies, with a chorus all round. Lintot would sing "Vilikins and his Dinah," in the manner of Mr. Robson, so well that even Mrs. Lintot's stern mask would relax into indulgent smiles. It was irresistible. And when the party broke up, we could all (thanks to our host) honestly thank our hostess "for a very pleasant evening," and cheerfully, yet almost regretfully, wish her good-night.
It is good to laugh sometimes—wisely if one can; if not,quocumque modo! There are seasons when even "the crackling of thorns under a pot" has its uses. It seems to warm the pot—all the pots—and all the emptiness thereof, if they be empty.
* * * * *
Once, indeed, I actually made a friend, but he did not last me very long.
It happened thus: Mrs. Lintot gave a grander party than usual. One of the invited was Mr. Moses Lyon, the great picture-dealer—a client of Lintot's; and he brought with him young Raphael Merridew, the already famous painter, the most attractive youth I had ever seen. Small and slight, but beautifully made, and dressed in the extreme of fashion, with a handsome face, bright and polite manners, and an irresistible voice, he became his laurels well; he would have been sufficiently dazzling without them. Never had those hospitable doors in Myddelton Square been opened to so brilliant a guest.
I was introduced to him, and he discovered that the bridge of my nose was just suited for the face of the sun-god in his picture of "The Sun-god and the Dawn-maiden," and begged I would favor him with a sitting or two.
Proud indeed was I to accede to such a request, and I gave him many sittings. I used to rise at dawn to sit, before my work at Lintot's began; and to sit again as soon as I could be spared.
It seems I not only had the nose and brow of a sun-god (who is not supposed to be a very intellectual person), but also his arms and his torso; and sat for these, too. I have been vain of myself ever since.
During these sittings, which he made delightful, I grew to love him asDavid loved Jonathan.
We settled that we would go to the Derby together in a hansom. I engaged the smartest hansom in London days beforehand. On the great Wednesday morning I was punctual with it at his door in Charlotte Street. There was another hansom there already—a smarter hansom still than mine, for it was a private one—and he came down and told me he had altered his mind, and was going with Lyon, who had asked him the evening before.
"One of the first picture-dealers in London, my dear fellow. Hang it all, you know, I couldn't refuse—awfully sorry!"
So I drove to the Derby in solitary splendor, but the bright weather, the humors of the road, all the gay scenes were thrown away upon me, such was the bitterness of my heart.
[Illustration]
In the early afternoon I saw Merridew lunching on the top of a drag, among some men of smart and aristocratic appearance. He seemed to be the life of the party, and gave me a good-humored nod as I passed. I soon found Lyon sitting disconsolate in his hansom, scowling and solitary; he invited me to lunch with him, and disembosomed himself of a load of bitterness as intense as mine (which I kept to myself). The shrewd Hebrew tradesman was sunk in the warm-hearted, injured friend. Merridew had left Lyon for the Earl of Chiselhurst, just as he had left me for Lyon.
That was a dull Derby for us both!
A few days later I met Merridew, radiant as ever. All he said was:
"Awful shame of me to drop old Lyon for Chiselhurst, eh? But an earl, my dear fellow! Hang it all, you know! Poor old Mo had to get back in his hansom all by himself, but he's bought the 'Sun-god' all the same."
Merridew soon dropped me altogether, to my great sorrow, for I forgave him his Derby desertion as quickly as Lyon did, and would have forgiven him anything. He was one of those for whom allowances are always being made, and with a good grace.
He died before he was thirty, poor boy! but his fame will never die. The "Sun-god" (even with the bridge of that nose which had been so wofully put out of joint) is enough by itself to place him among the immortals. Lyon sold it to Lord Chiselhurst for three thousand pounds—it had cost him five hundred. It is now in the National Gallery.
[Illustration]
Poetical justice was satisfied!
* * * * *
Nor was I more fortunate in love than in friendship.
All the exclusiveness in the world cannot exclude good and beautiful maidens, and these were not lacking, even in Pentonville.
There is always one maiden much more beautiful and good than all the others—like Esmeralda among the ladies of the Hôtel de Gondelaurier. There was such a maiden in Pentonville, or rather Clerkenwell, close by. But her station was so humble (like Esmeralda's) that even the least exclusive would have drawn the line ather!She was one of a large family, and they sold tripe and pig's feet, and food for cats and dogs, in a very small shop opposite the western wall of the Middlesex House of Detention. She was the eldest, and the busy, responsible one at this poor counter. She was one of Nature's ladies, one of Nature's goddesses—a queen! Of that I felt sure every time I passed her shop, and shyly met her kind, frank, uncoquettish gaze. A time was approaching when I should have to overcome my shyness, and tell her that she of all women was the woman for me, and that it was indispensable, absolutely indispensable, that we two should be made one—immediately! at once! forever!
But before I could bring myself to this she married somebody else, and we had never exchanged a single word!
If she is alive now she is an old woman—a good and beautiful old woman, I feel sure, wherever she is, and whatever her rank in life. If she should read this book, which is not very likely, may she accept this small tribute from an unknown admirer; for whom, so many years ago, she beautified and made poetical the hideous street that still bounds the Middlesex House of Detention on its western side; and may she try to think not the less of it because since then its writer has been on the wrong side of that long, blank wall, of that dreary portal where the agonized stone face looks down on the desolate slum:
"Per me si va tra la perduta gente…!"
After this disappointment I got myself a big dog (like Byron, Bismarck, and Wagner), but not in the spirit of emulation. Indeed, I had never heard of either Bismarck or Wagner in those days, or their dogs, and I had lost my passion for Byron and any wish to emulate him in any way; it was simply for the want of something to be fond of, and that would be sure to love me back again.
He was not a big dog when I bought him, but just a little ball of orange-tawny fluff that I could carry with one arm. He cost me all the money I had saved up for a holiday trip to Passy. I had seen his father, a champion St. Bernard, at a dog-show, and felt that life would be well worth living with such a companion; buthisprice was five hundred guineas. When I saw the irresistible son, just six weeks old, and heard that he was only one-fiftieth of his sire's value, I felt Passy must wait, and became his possessor.
[Illustration: PORTHOS AND HIS ATTENDANT SQUIRE.]
I gave him of the best that money could buy—real milk at fivepence a quart, three quarts a day, I combed his fluff every morning, and washed him three times a week, and killed all his fleas one by one—a labour of love. I weighed him every Saturday, and found he increased at the rate of six to nine weekly; and his power of affection increased as the square of his weight. I christened him Porthos, because he was so big and fat and jolly; but in his noble puppy face and his beautiful pathetic eyes I already foresaw for his middle age that distinguished and melancholy grandeur which characterized the sublime Athos, Comte de la Fère.
He was a joy. It was good to go to sleep at night and know he would be there in the morning. Whenever we took our walks abroad, everybody turned round to look at him and admire, and to ask if he was good-tempered, and what his particular breed was, and what I fed him on. He became a monster in size—a beautiful, playful, gracefully galumphing, and most affectionate monster, and I, his happy Frankenstein, congratulated myself on the possession of a treasure that would last twelve years at least, or even fourteen, with the care I meant to take of him. But he died of distemper when he was eleven months old.
I do not know if little dogs cause as large griefs when they die as big ones; but I settled there should be no more dogs—big or little—for me.
* * * * *
After this I took to writing verses and sending them to magazines, where they never appeared. They were generally about my being reminded, by a tune, of things that had happened a long time ago: my poetic, like my artistic vein, was limited.
Here are the last I made, thirty years back. My only excuse for giving them is that they are sosingularly prophetic.
The reminding tune (an old French chime which my father used to sing) is very simple and touching; and the old French words run thus:
"Orléans, Beaugency!Notre Dame de Cléry!Vendôme! Vendôme!Quel chagrin, quel ennuiDe compter toute la nuitLes heures—Les heures!"
That is all. They are supposed to be sung by a mediaeval prisoner who cannot sleep; and who, to beguile the tediousness of his insomnia, sets any words that come into his head to the tune of the chime which marks the hours from a neighboring belfry. I tried to fancy that his name was Pasquier de la Marière, and that he was my ancestor.
_There is an old French air,A little song of loneliness and grief—Simple as nature, sweet beyond compare—And sad—past all belief!
Nameless is he that wroteThe melody—but this I opine:Whoever made the words was some remoteFrench ancestor of mine.
I know the dungeion deepWhere long he lay—and why he lay therein;And all his anguish, that he could not sleepFor conscience of a sin._
I see his cold, hard bed;I hear the chimes that jingled in his earsAs he pressed nightly, with that wakeful head,A pillow wet with tears.
Oh, restless little chime!It never changed—but rang its roundelayFor each dark hour of that unhappy timeThat sighed itself away.
And ever, more and more,Its burden grew of his lost self a part—And mingled with his memories, and woreIts way into his heart.
And there it wove the nameOf many a town he loved, for one dear sake,Into its web of music; thus he cameHis little song to make.
Of all that ever heardAnd loved it for its sweetness, none but IDivined the clew that, as a hidden word,The notes doth underlie.
That wail from lips long deadHas found its echo in this breast alone!Only to me, by blood-remembrance led,Is that wild story known!
And though 'tis mine, by rightOf treasure-trove, to rifle and lay bare—A heritage of sorrow and delightThe world would gladly share—
Yet must I not unfoldFor evermore, nor whisper late or soon,The secret that a few slight bars thus holdImprisoned in a tune.
For when that little songGoes ringing in my head, I know that he,My luckless lone forefather, dust so long,Relives his life in me!
I sent them to ——'s Magazine, with the six French lines on at the which they were founded at the top. ——'sMagazinepublished only the six French lines—the only lines in my handwriting that ever got into print. And they date from the fifteenth century!
Thus was my little song lost to the world, and for a time to me. But long, long afterwards, I found it again, where Mr. Longfellow once found a song ofhis: "in the heart of a friend"—surely the sweetest bourne that can ever be for any song!
Little did I foresee that a day was not far off when real blood remembrance would carry me—but that is to come.
* * * * *
Poetry, friendship and love having failed, I sought for consolation in art, and frequented the National Gallery, Marlborough House (where the Vernon collection was), the British Museum, the Royal Academy, and other exhibitions.
I prostrated myself before Titian, Rembrandt, Velasquez, Veronese, Da Vinci, Botticelli, Signorelli—the older the better; and tried my best to honestly feel the greatness I knew and know to be there; but for want of proper training I was unable to reach those heights, and, like most outsiders, admired them for the wrong things, for the very beauties they lack—such transcendent, ineffable beauties of feature, form, and expression as an outsider always looks for in an old master, and often persuades himself he finds there—and oftener still,pretendshe does!
I was far more sincerely moved (although I did not dare to say so) by some works of our own time—for instance, by the "Vale of Rest," the "Autumn Leaves," "The Huguenot" of young Mr. Millais—just as I found such poems asMaudandIn Memoriam, by Mr. Alfred Tennyson, infinitely more precious and dear to me than Milton'sParadise Lostand Spenser'sFaerie Queene.
Indeed, I was hopelessly modern in those days—quite an every-day young man; the names I held in the warmest and deepest regard were those of then living men and women. Darwin, Browning, and George Eliot did not, it is true, exist for me as yet; but Tennyson, Thackeray, Dickens, Millais, John Leech, George Sand, Balzac, the old Dumas, Victor Hugo, and Alfred de Musset!
I have never beheld them in the flesh; but, like all the world, I know their outer aspect well, and could stand a pretty stiff examination in most they have ever written, drawn, or painted.
Other stars of magnitude have risen since, but of the old galaxy four at least still shine out of the past with their ancient lustre undimmed in my eyes—Thackeray; dear John Leech, who still has power to make me laugh as I like to laugh; and for the two others it is plain that the Queen, the world, and I are of a like mind as to their deserts, for one of them is now an ornament to the British peerage, the other a baronet and a millionaire; only I would have made dukes of them straight off, with precedence over the Archbishop of Canterbury, if they would care to have it so.
It is with a full but humble heart that I thus venture to record my long indebtedness, and pay this poor tribute, still fresh from the days of my unquestioning hero-worship. It will serve, at least, to show my reader (should I ever have one sufficiently interested to care) in what mental latitudes and longitudes I dwelt, who was destined to such singular experience—a kind of reference, so to speak—that he may be able to place me at a glance, according to the estimation in which he holds these famous and perhaps deathless names.
It will be admitted, at least, that my tastes were normal, and shared by a large majority—the tastes of an every-day young man at that particular period of the nineteenth century—one much given to athletics and cold tubs, and light reading and cheap tobacco, and endowed with the usual discontent; the last person for whom or from whom or by whom to expect anything out of the common.
* * * * *
But the splendor of the Elgin Marbles! I understood that at once—perhaps because there is not so much to understand. Mere physically beautiful people appeal to us all, whether they be in flesh or marble.
By some strange intuition, or natural instinct, Iknewthat people ought to be built like that, before I had ever seen a single statue in that wondrous room. I had divined them—so completely did they realize an aesthetic ideal I had always felt.
I had often, as I walked the London streets, peopled an imaginary world of my own with a few hundreds of such beings, made flesh and blood, and pictured them as a kind of beneficent aristocracy seven feet high, with minds and manners to match their physique, and set above the rest of the world for its good; for I found it necessary (so that my dream should have a point) to provide them with a foil in the shape of millions of such people as we meet every day. I was egotistic and self-seeking enough, it is true, to enroll myself among the former, and had chosen for my particular use and wear just such a frame as that of the Theseus, with, of course, the nose and hands and feet (of which time has bereft him) restored, and all mutilations made good.
And for my mistress and companion I had duly selected no less a person than the Venus of Milo (no longer armless), of which Lintot possessed a plaster-cast, and whose beauties I had foreseen before I ever beheld them with the bodily eye.
"Monsieur n'est pas dégoûté!" as Ibbetson would have remarked.
But most of all did I pant for the music which is divine.
Alas, that concerts and operas and oratorios should not be as free to the impecunious as the National Gallery and the British Museum—a privilege which is not abused!
Impecunious as I was, I sometimes had pence enough to satisfy this craving, and discovered in time such realms of joy as I had never dreamed of; such monarchs as Mozart, Handel, and Beethoven, and others, of whom my father knew apparently so little; and yet they were more potent enchanters than Grétry, Hérold, and Boieldieu, whose music he sang so well.
I discovered, moreover, that they could do more than charm—they could drive my weary self out of my weary soul, and for a space fill that weary soul with courage, resignation, and hope. No Titian, no Shakespeare, no Phidias could ever accomplish that—not even Mr. William Makepeace Thackeray or Mr. Alfred Tennyson.
My sweetest recollections of this period of my life (indeed, the only sweet recollections) are of the music I heard, and the places where I heard it; it was an enchantment! With what vividness I can recall it all! The eager anticipation for days; the careful selection, beforehand, from such anembarras de richessesas was duly advertised; then the long waiting in the street, at the doors reserved for those whose portion is to be the gallery. The hard-won seat aloft is reached at last, after a selfish but good-humored struggle up the long stone staircase (one is sorry for the weak, but a famished ear has no conscience). The gay and splendid house is crammed; the huge chandelier is a golden blaze; the delight of expectation is in the air, and also the scent of gas, and peppermint, and orange-peel, and music-loving humanity, whom I have discovered to be of sweeter fragrance than the common herd.
[Illustration]
The orchestra fills, one by one; instruments tune up—a familiar cacophony, sweet with seductive promise. The conductor takes his seat—applause—a hush—three taps—the baton waves once, twice, thrice—the eternal fountain of magic is let loose, and at the very first jet
"The cares that infest the day Shall fold their tents, like the Arabs, And as silently steal away."
Then lo! the curtain rises, and straightway we are in Seville—Seville, after Pentonville! Count Alma-viva, lordly, gallant, and gay beneath his disguise, twangs his guitar, and what sounds issue from it! For every instrument that was ever invented is in that guitar—the whole orchestra!
"Ecco ridente il cielo….," so sings he (with the most beautiful male voice of his time) under Rosina's balcony; and soon Rosina's voice (the most beautiful female voice of hers) is heard behind her curtains—so girlish, so innocent, so young and light-hearted, that the eyes fill with involuntary tears.
Thus encouraged, he warbles that his name is Lindoro, that he would fain espouse her; that he is not rich in the goods of this world, but gifted with an inordinate, inexhaustible capacity for love (just like Peter Ibbetson); and vows that he will always warble to her, in this wise, from dawn till when daylight sinks behind the mountain. But what matter the words?
"Go on, my love, go on,like this!" warbles back Rosina—and no wonder—till the dull, despondent, commonplace heart of Peter Ibbetson has room for nothing else but sunny hope and love and joy! And yet it is all mere sound—impossible, unnatural, unreal nonsense!
Or else, in a square building, decent and well-lighted enough, but not otherwise remarkable—the very chapel of music—four business-like gentlemen, in modern attire and spectacles, take their places on an unpretentious platform amid refined applause; and soon the still air vibrates to the trembling of sixteen strings—only that and nothing more!
But in that is all Beethoven, or Schubert, or Schumann has got to say to us for the moment, and what a say it is! And with what consummate precision and perfection it is said—with what a mathematical certainty, and yet with what suavity, dignity, grace, and distinction!
They are the four greatest players in the world, perhaps; but they forget themselves, and we forget them (as it is their wish we should), in the master whose work they interpret so reverently, that we may yearn with his mighty desire and thrill with his rapture and triumph, or ache with his heavenly pain and submit with his divine resignation.
Not all the words in all the tongues that ever were—dovetail them, rhyme them, alliterate them, torture them as you will—can ever pierce to the uttermost depths of the soul of man, and let in a glimpse of the Infinite, as do the inarticulate tremblings of those sixteen strings.
Ah, songs without words are the best!
Then a gypsy-like little individual, wiry and unkempt, who looks as if he had spent his life listening to the voices of the night in Heaven knows what Lithuanian forests, with wolves and wild-boars for his familiars, and the wind in the trees for his teacher, seats himself at the great brass-bound oaken Broadwood piano-forte. And under his phenomenal fingers, a haunting, tender, world-sorrow, full of questionings—a dark mystery of moonless, starlit nature—exhales itself in nocturnes, in impromptus, in preludes—in mere waltzes and mazourkas even! But waltzes and mazourkas such as the most frivolous would never dream of dancing to. A capricious, charming sorrow—not too deep for tears, if one be at all inclined to shed them—so delicate, so fresh, and yet so distinguished, so ethereally civilized and worldly and well-bred that it has crystallized itself into a drawing-room ecstasy, to last forever. It seems as though what was death (or rather euthanasia) to him who felt it, is play for us—surely an immortal sorrow whose recital will never, never pall—the sorrow of Chopin.
Though why Chopin should have been so sorry we cannot even guess; for mere sorrow's sake, perhaps; the very luxury of woe—the real sorrow which has no real cause (like mine in those days); and that is the best and cheapest kind of sorrow to make music of, after all!
And this great little gypsy pianist, who plays his Chopin so well; evidently he has not spent his life in Lithuanian forests, but hard at the key-board, night and day; and he has had a better master than the wind in the trees—namely, Chopin himself (for it is printed in the programme). It was his father and mother before him, and theirs, who heard the voices of the night; but he remembers it all, and puts it all into his master's music, and makes us remember it, too.
Or else behold the chorus, rising tier upon tier, and culminating in the giant organ. But their thunder is just hushed.
Some Liliputian figure, male or female, as the case may be, rises on its little legs amid the great Liliputian throng, and through the sacred stillness there peals forth a perfect voice (by no means Liliputian). It bids us "Rest in the Lord," or else it tells us that "He was despised and rejected of men"; but, again, what matter the words? They are almost a hinderance, beautiful though they be.
The hardened soul melts at the tones of the singer, at the unspeakable pathos of the sounds that cannot lie; one almost believes—one believes at least in the belief of others. At last one understands, and is purged of intolerance and cynical contempt, and would kneel with the rest, in sheer human sympathy!
Oh, wretched outsider that one is (if it all be true)—one whose heart, so hopelessly impervious to the written word, so helplessly callous to the spoken message, can be reached only by the organized vibrations of a trained larynx, a metal pipe, a reed, a fiddle-string—by invisible, impalpable, incomprehensible little air-waves in mathematical combination, that beat against a tiny drum at the back of one's ear. And these mathematical combinations and the laws that govern them have existed forever, before Moses, before Pan, long before either a larynx or a tympanum had been evolved. They are absolute!
Oh, mystery of mysteries!
Euterpe, Muse of Muses, what a personage hast thou become since first thou sattest for thy likeness (with that ridiculous lyre in thy untaught hands) to some Greek who could carve so much better than thou couldst play!
Four strings; but not the fingerable strings of Stradivarius. Nay, I beg thy pardon—five; for thy scale was pentatonic, I believe. Orpheus himself had no better, it is true. It was with just such an instrument that he all but charmed his Eurydice out of Hades. But, alas, she went back; on second thoughts, she liked Hades best!
Couldst thou fire and madden and wring the heart, and then melt and console and charm it into the peace that passeth all understanding, with those poor five rudimentary notes, and naught between?
Couldst thou, out of those five sounds of fixed, unalterable pitch, make, not a sixth sound, but a star?