I am not sure that this imagery can appeal to you as it was intended to appeal to the Western reader, because it partly depends for effect upon the knowledgeof the old fairy-tale pictures. In Western ghost stories and fairy stories, goblins and other phantoms are usually represented in long robes with hoods over their faces, and very big, wicked eyes. That is why the poet speaks so often of the hoods and the eyeballs. The meaning is that, in this world, just so soon as you begin to suspect and to be afraid, everything really becomes to you terrible—even as in the old fairy-tales a tree was only a tree to the sight of a brave man, but to the cowardly man its roots became feet and its branches horrible arms and claws, and its crest a goblin face.
Then follows a wonderful description of wood life—the life of insect, reptile, bird and little animals—the poet taking care to show how each and all of these represent something of human life and moral truth. But it is one of the most difficult poems in English literature to read; and I shall not try to quote much from it. Enough to say that the same lesson is taught all the way through the poem, the lesson of what Nature means. She must not be thought of as a cruel Sphinx: she is cruel only if you imagine her to be cruel. Nature will always be what you think her to be. Think of her as beautiful and good; then she will be good and beautiful for you. Think of her as cruel; then she will be cruel to you. Do not think of her as pleasure; if you do, she will give you pleasure, but she will destroy you at the same time. She is the spirit and law of Eternal Struggle; and it is thus only that you should think of her, as a divinity desiring you to be brave, active, generous, ambitious. Above all things, you must not hate. Hate Nature, and you are instantly destroyed.You must not allow even a thought of hate to enter your mind.
Hate, the shadow of a grain;You are lost in Westermain:Earthward swoops a vulture sunNighted upon carrion:Straightway venom winecups shoutAs to One whose eyes are out:Flowers along the reeling floorDrip henbane and hellebore;Beauty, of her tresses shorn,Shrieks as nature's maniac:Hideousness on hoof and hornTumbles, yapping in her track:Haggard Wisdom, stately once,Leers fantastical and trips.. . . . . . .Imp that dances, imp that flits,Imp o' the demon-growing girl,Maddest! whirl with imp o' the pitsRound you, and with them you whirlFast where pours the fountain—routOut of Him whose eyes are out.
The foregoing must seem to you very difficult verse; and it is really very difficult for the best English readers. But at the same time it is very powerful; and I think that you ought to have at least one example of the difficult side of Meredith. This is a picture—a horrible picture, such as old artists used to make in the fifteenth or sixteenth century to illustrate the temptations of a saint by devils, or the terrors of a sinner about to die, and surrounded by ghastly visions. Reallyif you hate Nature, the universe will at once for you become what it seemed to the superstitious of the past ages and to the disordered fancies of insane fanatics. The very sun itself will no longer appear as a glorious star, but as a creature of prey, devouring the dead. Perhaps the poet here wishes also to teach us that we must not think too much about the ugly side of death as an appearance—the corruption, the worms, the darkness of the grave. To think about those things, as the monks of the Middle Ages did, is to hate Nature. Everything seems foul to the man whose imagination is foul. Everything which should be nourishing becomes poison, everything which should seem beautiful becomes hideous. The reference to "One whose eyes are out," is, you know, a reference to the old fashioned pictures of death, as a goblin skeleton, seeing without eyes. In some frightful pictures death was represented also as an eyeless corpse, out of which all kinds of goblins, demons, and bad dreams were swarming, like maggots. Of course such are the pictures referred to here by the poet. Believe in goblins and devils, and you will see them; believe that all men are wicked, and you will find them wicked; believe that Nature is evil, and Nature will certainly destroy you, just as the demons in the mediæval story tore to pieces the magician who had not learned the secret of making them obey.
Very much more easy to understand are the stanzas upon "Earth and Man." These attempt to explain the real problem of man's existence. The poet represents the earth as a person, a mother, a nurse. But this mother, this nurse, this divine person is not able to doeverything for man. She can give him life; she can feed him; but she cannot help him otherwise, except upon the strange condition that he helps himself. She makes him and embraces him, but that is all. Otherwise he must make his own future, his own happiness or misery.
For he is in the listsContentious with the elements, whose dowerFirst sprang him; for swift vultures to devourIf he desists.His breath of instant thirstIs warning of a creature matched with strife,To meet it as a bride, or let fall lifeOn life's accursed.
That is, man in this world is like an athlete, or a warrior in the lists—in the place of contests. With what must he contend? First of all, he must contend with the very elements of nature, with the very same forces which brought him into being, or as the poet says "sprang him." And if he hesitates to fight with those forces, then quickly the vultures of death seize upon him. The condition of his existence is struggle. Even the first cry of the child, the cry of thirst for the mother's milk, signifies that man is born to desire and to toil and to contend. He must either meet the duty of struggle as gladly as he would meet a bride, or he must acknowledge himself unfit to live, and cursed by his own mother, Nature. Nature is not to be thought of as a mother that pets her child and weeps over its small sorrows; no, she is a good mother, butvery rough, and she loves only the child that fights and conquers.
She has no pity upon him except as he fights and wins. She cannot do certain things for him; she cannot develop his mind—he must do that for himself. She makes him do it by pain, by terror, by punishing him fearfully for his mistakes. By the consequence of mistakes only does she teach him. She urges him forward by hunger and by fear, but there is no mercy for him if he blunders. I want you to remember that the poet is not speaking of the separate individual man, but of mankind and of the history of the human race. According to modern science, man was at the beginning nothing more than an animal; he has become what he is through knowledge of suffering, and the poet describes his sufferings in the beginning:
By hunger sharply spedTo grasp at weapons ere he learns their use,In each new ring he bears a giant's thews,An infant's head.And ever that old taskOf reading what he is and whence he came,Whither to go, finds wilder letters flameAcross her mask.
That is to say, man first is impelled by hunger to use weapons, in order to kill animals, and these weapons he at first must use very clumsily. You must understand the word "ring" to mean an age or cycle. The poet wishes to say that through many past ages in succession, man had the strength of a giant, but his brain,his mind, was feeble and foolish like that of a little child—not even a child in the common meaning of the word, for the poet uses the term "infant," signifying a child before it has yet learned how to speak. It is supposed that primitive man had no developed languages. But, as time goes on, man learns how to express thought by speech, and presently he begins to think about himself—to wonder what he is, where he came from, and where he is going. Then he invents religious theories to account for his origin. But the mystery always remains. There are ancient stories about a magical writing. When you looked at this writing, at first it seemed to be in one language, and to have one meaning, but when you looked at it a second time, the letters and the meaning had changed, and every succeeding time that you looked at it, again it changed. Like this magical writing is the mystery of Nature, of the Universe; so that poet represents Nature as wearing a mask upon which such ever-changing characters appear in letters of fire. No matter how much we learn or theorise, the infinite riddle cannot be read. And one factor of this terrible riddle is Death. Death of all things most puzzles and terrifies man. He sometimes suspects that Nature herself is Death, and purely evil. He began by worshipping her through fear, but his worship did not change his destiny in the least.
The thing that shudders mostWithin him is the burden of his cry.Seen of his dread, she is to his blank eyeThe eyeless Ghost.. . . . . . .Once worshipped Prime of Powers,She still was the Implacable; as a beast,She struck him down and dragged him from the feastShe crowned with flowers.. . . . . . .He may entreat, aspire,He may despair, and she has never heed.She drinking his warm sweat will soothe his need,Not his desire.She prompts him to rejoice,Yet scares him on the threshold with the shroud.He deems her cherishing of her best-endowedA wanton's choice.
If man thought of the spirit of Nature as the cruel spirit of death and destruction, surely he had reason to do so in the time of his primitive ignorance. Pleasure seemed to him of Nature—offered to him by Nature, and yet to indulge it often brought upon him destruction. Joy seemed to him natural, yet whenever he most rejoiced, the shadow of death would appear somewhere near him. Always this Nature seemed to be putting out temptations to joy and pleasure, only as a bird hunter scatters food on the ground to attract birds into his snare. And again this Nature would never listen to man's prayer. He found out that by working hard he could obtain food enough to live upon; thus Nature seemed to allow him the right of life, or as the poet says, "to soothe his needs"; but never would she grant him his "desire," his prayer for supernatural help. When it came to the matterof help, he found out that he must help himself. But why was it, again, that the wicked and the cruel were permitted to succeed and to become prosperous, while the good and the gentle perished from the face of the earth? To ancient mankind this was indeed a most terrible problem, a problem which has not been perfectly solved even at this day. Was Nature a wanton—that is, a wicked woman, preferring the evil characters, the murderer, the thief, the robber, to the upright and just? Such was the question which millions of men must have asked themselves in the past. Evidently the poet does not think so; he calls the successful, "the best endowed." What does this mean? It means that the choice of Nature in her favours, however immoral that choice may seem to us, is really a choice of the best, according to her judgment. You may say, if you like, that these or those successful men are bad, that they have broken all moral rules, that they have sinned against all the ethics of society, that they are scoundrels who ought to be in prison. But Nature says, "No, those are my best children. You may not like them, and doubtless they are not good to your thinking, but they are very much more clever and much stronger than you. I want my children to be cunning and to be strong." Are we to suppose, therefore, that Nature wishes to cultivate only wicked cunning and brutal strength? No, but cunning and strength are the foundations upon which intellect and moral power are eventually built. It is like the statement of Herbert Spencer, that the first thing necessary for success in life is "to be a good animal." If you can be both a good animal and amoral and kind person, so much the better. But while the development is going on, the chances always are that Nature will favour the animal man at the expense of the moral man who has no strength and no cleverness. For those who have neither strength nor cunning must disappear from the face of the earth. Nature does not want to help weakness; she prefers strong wickedness to helpless goodness. And if we reflect upon this, we shall find that the whole tendency is not to evil but to good. It is by considering the past history of man that we can learn how much he has gained through this cruel policy of Nature.
. . . Thereof he has foundFirm roadway between lustfulness and pain;Has half transferred the battle to his brain,From bloody ground;He will not read her good,Or wise, but with the passion Self obscures;Through that old devil of the thousand lures,Through that dense hood:Through terror, through distrust;The greed to touch, to view, to have, to live;Through all that makes of him a sensitiveAbhorring dust.
Which means that, if we will really think about the matter from an evolutional standpoint, we shall find that it has been through the destruction of the weak that mankind has become strong. At first he knew only desire, like an animal; his wants were only likethose of an animal. But gradually nobler desires came to him, because they were forced upon him by his constant struggle against death. He learns that one must be able to control one's desire as well as to fight against other enemies. From the day man discovered that the greatest enemy was Self, he became a higher being, he was no longer a mere animal. When the poet speaks of him as "transferring the battle to his brain from bloody ground," he means that the struggle of existence to-day has become a battle of minds, instead of being, as it used to be, a trial of mere physical strength. We must every one of us fight, but the fight is now intellectual. Notwithstanding this progress, we are still very stupid, for we try to explain the laws of the Universe according to our little feeble conceptions of moral law. Or, as the poet says, we insist on thinking about Nature "with the passion Self obscures"—with that selfishness in our hearts which judges everything to be bad that gives us pain. Until we can get rid of that selfishness, we shall never understand Nature.
Now the question is, shall we ever be able to understand Nature? I shall let the poet answer that question in his own way. It is an optimistic way, and it has the great merit of being quite different from anything else written upon the subject by any English poet.
But that the senses stillUsurp the station of their issue mind,He would have burst the chrysalis of the blind:As yet he will;As yet he will, she prays,Yet will when his distempered devil of Self;—The glutton for her fruits, the wily elfIn shifting rays;—That captain of the scorned;The coveter of life in soul and shell,The fratricide, the thief, the infidel,The hoofed and horned;—He singularly doomedTo what he execrates and writhes to shun;—WHEN FIRE HAS PASSED HIM VAPOUR TO THE SUN,AND SUN RELUMED.
Here we might well imagine that we were listening to a Buddhist, not to an English poet, for the thought is altogether the thought of an Oriental philosopher, though it happens also to be in accord with the philosophy of Western science. The lines which I put in capital letters seem to me the most remarkable and the most profound that any Western poet has yet written about the future of mankind. Let us loosely paraphrase the verses quoted:
The end to which the senses of man have been created is the making of Mind. If man were not blinded and deceived by his senses, he would know what Nature is, because the divine sight, perhaps the infinite vision, would be opened to him. But the time will come when he shall be able to know and to see.
What time?
The time when the selfishness of man shall have ceased, when he shall no longer think of life as givento him only for the pursuit of pleasure; when he shall have learned that he must not desire to live too much, and that the body is only the shell of the mind; when crime and cruelty shall have become impossible—when this world shall have come to an end.
But when the world shall have come to an end, will there still be man? Yes, in the poet's faith; for man is part of the eternal, and the destruction of the universe cannot affect his destiny. It is not, however, when this world shall have come to an end that man will know. The earth will go back to the sun, out of which it came, and the sun itself will burn out into ashes, and the universe will disappear, and there will thereafter be another universe, with other suns and worlds, and only then, after passing through the fires of the sun, perhaps of many suns, will man obtain the supreme knowledge. Never in this world can he become wise enough and good enough to be perfectly happy. But in some future universe, under the light of some sun not yet existing, he may become an almost perfect being.
It may seem strange to you to hear such a prediction from an English poet, though the thought of the poem is very ancient in Indian philosophy. Yet Meredith did not reach this thought through the study of any Oriental teaching. He obtained it from the evolutional philosophy of the present century, adding, indeed, a little fancy of his own, but nothing at all in antagonism to the opinions of science, so far as fact is concerned.
What is the teaching of science in regard to the future and the past of the present universe? It is thatin the course of enormous periods of time this universe passes away into a nebulous condition, and out of that condition is reformed again. Mathematically it has been calculated that the forces regulating the universe must have in the past formed the same kind of universes millions of times, and will do the same thing in the future, millions of times. Every modern astronomer recognizes the studies upon which these calculations are based. It is certainly curious that when science tells us how the universe with its hundreds of millions of suns, and its trillions of worlds, regularly evolves and devolves alternately--it is curious, I repeat, that this science is telling us the very same thing that Indian philosophers were teaching thousands of years ago, before there was any science. They taught that all worlds appear and disappear by turns in the infinite void, and they compared these worlds to the shadows of the dream of a god. When the Supreme awakens from his sleep, then all the worlds disappear, because they were only the shapes of his dream. Herbert Spencer would not go quite so far as that. But he would confirm Indian philosophy as to the apparition and disparition of the universes. There is another point upon which any Western man of science would also confirm the Oriental teaching--that the essence of life does not cease and cannot cease with the destruction of our world. Only the form dies. The forces that make life cannot die; they are the same forces that spin the suns. Remember that I am not talking about a soul or a ghost or anything of that kind; I am saying only that it is quite scientific to believe that all the life which has been in this world willbe again in some future world, lighted by another sun. Meredith suggests perhaps more than this—only suggests. Take his poem, however, as it stands, and you will find it a very noble utterance of optimism, inspiring ideas astonishingly like the ideas of Eastern metaphysicians.
I am going to conclude this lecture upon Meredith with one more example of his philosophy of social life. It is a poem treating especially of the questions of love and marriage, and it shows us how he looks at matters which are much closer to us than problems about suns and souls and universes.
The name of the poem is "The Three Singers to Young Blood"—that is to say, the three voices of the world that speak to youth. In order to understand this composition rightly, you must first know that in Western countries generally and in England particularly, the most important action of a man's early life is marriage. A man's marriage is likely to decide, not only his future happiness or misery, but his social position, his success in his profession, his ultimate place even in politics, if he happens to enter the service of the state. I am speaking of marriage among the upper classes, the educated classes, the professional classes. Among the working people, the tradesmen and mechanics, most of whom marry quite young, marriage has not very much social significance. But among the moneyed classes it is all important, and a mistake in choosing a wife may ruin the whole career of the most; gifted and clever man. This is what Meredith has in mind, when he speaks of the three voices that address youth. The first voice, simplyurges the young man to seek happiness by making a home for himself. The second voice is that of society, of worldly wisdom and calculating selfishness. The third voice is the voice of reckless passion, caring nothing about consequences. Which of the three shall the young man listen to? Let us hear the first voice.
As the birds do, so do we,Bill our mate, and choose our tree.Swift to building work addressed,Any straw will help a nest.Mates are warm, and this is truth,Glad the young that come of youth.They have bloom i' the blood and sapChilling at no thunder-clap.Man and woman on the thorn,Trust not Earth, and have her scorn.They who in her lead confide,Wither me if they spread not wide!Look for aid to little things,You will get them quick as wings,Thick as feathers; would you feed,Take the leap that springs the need.
In other words, the advice of this first voice is, Do not be afraid. Choose your companion as the bird does; make a home for yourself; do not be afraid to try, simply because you have no money. Do not wait to become rich. If you know how to be contented with little, you will find that you can make a small home very easily. A wife makes life more comfortable, and the children of young parents are the strongest and the happiest. Such children are healthy, and theygrow up brave and energetic. You must confide in Nature. Men and women who are afraid to trust to Nature, because they happen to be poor, lose all chance of ever finding real happiness. Nature turns from them in scorn. But those who trust to Nature—how they increase and multiply and prosper! Do not wait for somebody to help you. Watch for opportunities; and you will find them, quickly, and in multitude. If you want anything in this world, do not wait for it to come to you; spring for it, as the bird springs from the tree to seize its food.
There is nothing very bad about this advice, though it is opposed to the rules of social success. The majority of young people act pretty much in the way indicated, and it is interesting to observe in this connection that both Mr. Galton and Mr. Spencer have declared that if it were required to act otherwise, the consequences would be very unfortunate for the nation. It is not from cautious and long delayed marriages that a nation multiplies; on the contrary, it is from improvident marriages by young people. Yet there is something to be said on the other side of the question. No doubt a great deal of unhappiness might be avoided if young men and women were somewhat less rash than they now are about entering into marriage.
But let us listen to the second voice. Each of the three speaks in exactly the same number of lines—sixteen.
Contemplate the rutted road;Life is both a lure and goad.Each to hold in measure just,Trample appetite to dust.Mark the fool and wanton spin:Keep to harness as a skin.Ere you follow nature's lead,Of her powers in you have heed;Else a shiverer you will findYou have challenged humankind.Mates are chosen marketwise:Coolest bargainer best buys.Leap not, nor let leap the heart:Trot your track, and drag your cart.So your end may be in wool,Honoured, and with manger full.
This is the voice of worldly wisdom, of hard selfishness, and, I am sorry to say, of cunning hypocrisy; but it sounds very sensible indeed, and thousands of very successful men act upon the principles here laid down. Let us paraphrase:
Take a good look at the road of life—see how rough it is! Understand that there are two opposite principles of life; there are things that attract to danger, and there are powers that compel a man to make the greatest effort of which his strength is capable. Consider all pleasure as dangerous; if you want to be safe and sure, kill your passions, and master all your desires. Observe how hard foolish people and sensual people find life. Wrap yourself up in self-control, keep always on your guard against pleasure, keep on distrust as a suit of armour—no, rather as a skin, never to be taken off. Before you allow yourself to follow any natural impulse, remember how dangerous natural impulses are. Beware of Nature! Otherwise you willsoon find out, with trembling, that the whole world is against you, that human experience is against you, that you have become an enemy of society. And as for a wife, remember that you should choose a wife exactly as you would buy a horse, or as you would make any business purchase. In business bargaining, it is the man who keeps his temper the longest and conceals his feelings the most cunningly, that gets the best article.. Never allow an impulse to guide you. Never follow the guidance of your heart. Life is hard, make up your mind to go steadily forward and bear your burden, and if you will do this while you are young, you will become comfortably rich when you get old, and will have the respect of society and the enjoyment of everything good in this world. I have said that this advice is very immoral, although it is in one way very sensible.
I say that it is immoral only for this reason, that it tells people to act sensibly, not for the love of what is good and true, but merely for the sake of personal advantages. I cannot believe that a man is good who lives virtuously only because he finds virtue a profitable business. All this is pure selfishness, but there is no doubt that a great many successful men live and act exactly according to these principles. Now let us consider the third voice, the voice of mere passion, esthetic passion, which is especially strong with generous minds. It is not usually the dullard nor the hypocrite nor the egotist who goes to his ruin by following the impulses of such a passion as that here described. It is rather the man of the type of Byron, or still more of the type of Shelley. It is against danger of this voice that the artist and the poet must especially be on guard.
O the rosy light! it fleets,Dearer dying than all sweets.That is life: it waves and goes;Solely in that cherished RosePalpitates, or else 'tis death.Call it love with all thy breath.Love! it lingers: Love! it nears:Love! O Love! the Rose appears,Blushful, magic, reddening air.Now the choice is on thee: dare!Mortal seems the touch, but makesImmortal the hand that takes.Feel what sea within thee shamesOf its force all other claims,Drowns them. Clasp! the world will beHeavenly Rose to swelling sea.
This will need a good deal of explanation, though I am sure that you can feel the general meaning without any explanation. The poet is making a reference to the rose of the alchemist's dream—the strange old fairy-tale of the Rosicrucians. It was believed in the Middle Ages and even later, that an Elixir of Life might be formed by chemistry—that is to say, a magical drink that would make old men young again, or prolong life through hundreds of years. It was said that whenever this wonderful drink was made in a laboratory, there would appear in the liquid the ghostly image of a luminous Rose. It would take much too long to go into the history of this curious and very poetical fancy. Suffice to say that the poet here uses the symbol of the rose of the alchemist to signify life itself—the essence of youth, and the essenceof passion and the worship of beauty. Now we can attempt to paraphrase:
How wondrous beauty is! How wondrous life and love! Yet quickly these must pass away. Of what worth is life without love? Better to love and die quickly. The desire of the lover is, in its way, a desire for sacrifice; he is willing to give his life a thousand times over for the being he adores. He thinks that love is life, that there is nothing else worth existing for. His passion gives new and strange colour to all his thoughts, new intensity to all his senses; the world becomes more beautiful for him. Even as if the colour of the sunlight were changed, so do all things appear changed to the vision of the man who is then bewitched. But, even during the bewitchment, he is faintly conscious of duty, of right and wrong, of a voice within him warning against dangers. He knows, he fears, but he will not heed. He reasons against his conscience. Is not this attraction really divine? She is only a woman, yet merely to touch her hand gives a shock, as of something supernatural. Then the very strength of passion itself makes it seem more natural. The poet compares it to a sea—the tide of impulse could not be better described, because of its depth and force. And always the urging of this passion is "Take her! Do not care! That will be heaven for you!"
The last stanza has a strange splendour, as well as a strange power; reckless passion has never been more wonderfully described in sixteen lines. And to which of the three voices does the poet give preference? Not to any of them. He says that all of them are deficient in true wisdom. The first he calls "liquid"—meaningsweet, like the cry of a dove. But that does not mean that it is altogether commendable. The second voice he calls a "caw"—meaning that it is dismal and harsh, like the cry of a black crow. As for the last, he says only that it is "the cry that knows not law!" By this he means that which suffers no restraint, and which therefore is incomparably dangerous. Yet I suppose that it is better than the caw. What the poet thinks is that the three different voices united together, so that each makes harmony with the others, so that the good which is in each could make accord—would be "music of the sun!"
Hark to the three. Chimed they in one,Life were music of the sun.Liquid first, and then the caw,Then the cry that knows not law.
This utterance is not nearly so common-place as we might think at first reading. There is a great deal of deep philosophy in it. Meredith means that all our impulses, all our passions, all our selfishness, and even our revolts against law, have their value in the eternal order of things. In a perfect man all these emotions and sentiments would still exist, but they would exist only in such form that they would beautifully counterbalance each other. But there is no such thing as human perfection, and the individual is therefore very likely to be dominated by selfishness if he acts cautiously, and dominated by passion when he acts without judgment.
I think I have quoted enough of Meredith to giveyou some notion of his particular quality. At all events I hope that you may become interested in him. He is especially the poet of scholars; the poet of men of culture. Only a man of culture can really like him—just as only a man long accustomed to good living can appreciate the best kinds of wine. Give fine wine to a poor man accustomed only to drink coarse spirits, and he will not care about it. So the common reader cannot care about Meredith. He is what we call a "test-poet"—your culture, your capacity to think and feel, is tested by your ability to like such a poet. The question, "Do you like Meredith?" is now in English and even in French literary circles, a test. But remember that Meredith has great faults. If he did not have, he would rank at the very top of the Victorian poets. But he has the fault of obscurity, like Browning, he often tortures language into the most amazing forms, and he is about the most difficult of all English poets to read. His early work is much better than his later in this respect. But the difficulty of Meredith is not only a difficulty of language. No one can understand him who does not also understand the philosophical thought of the second half of the nineteenth century. He is especially the poet of a particular time, and for that reason it is very much to be regretted that he is less clear than almost any literary artist of his period.
I have spoken to you a great deal about the poetry of George Meredith, but I have not yet found an opportunity to tell you about his having written what I believe to be one of the greatest fables—certainly the greatest fable imagined during the nineteenth century. I imagine also that this fable will live, will even become a great classic,—after all his novels have been forgotten. For his novels, great as they are, deal almost entirely with contemporary pictures of highly complicated English and Italian aristocratic society. They picture the mental and moral fashions of a generation, and all such fashions quickly change. But the great fable pictures something which is, which has been, and which always will be in human nature; it touches the key of eternal things, just as his poetry does—perhaps even better; for some of his poetry is terribly obscure. Mr. Gosse has written a charming essay upon the fable of which I am going to speak to you; but neither Mr. Gosse nor anybody else has ever attempted to explain it. If the book is less well known, less widely appreciated than it deserves, the fact is partly owing to the want of critical interpretation. Even to Mr. Gosse the book makes its appeal chiefly as a unique piece of literary art. But how many people in conservative England either care for literary art in itself, or arecapable of estimating it? So long as people think that such or such a book is only a fairy tale, they do not trouble themselves much to read it. But prove to them that the fairy tale is the emblem of a great moral fact, then it is different. The wonderful stories of Andersen owe their popularity as much to the fact that they teach moral fact, as to the fact that they please children.
Meredith's book was not written to please children; there is perhaps too much love-making in it for that. I do not even know whether it was written for a particular purpose; I am inclined to think that there was no particular purpose. Books written with a purpose generally fail. Great moral stories are stories that have been written for art's sake. Meredith took for model the manner of the Arabian story tellers. The language, the comparisons, the poetry, the whole structure of his story is in the style of the Arabian Nights. But as Mr. Gosse observes, the Arabian Nights seem to us cold and pale beside it. You can not find in the Arabian Nights a single page to compare with certain pages of "The Shaving of Shagpat"; and this is all the more extraordinary because the English book is written in a tone of extravagant humour. You feel that the author is playing with the subject, as a juggler plays with half a dozen balls at the same time, never letting one of them fall. And yet he has done much better than the Orientals who took their subject seriously. Even the title, the names of places or of persons, are jokes,—though they look very much like Arabian or Persian names. "Shagpat" is only the abbreviation of "shaggy pate," "pate" being an old English word for head—so that the name means a very hairy and rough lookinghead. When you begin to see jokes of this kind even in the names, you may be inclined to think that the book is trifling. I thought so myself before reading it; but now that I have read it at least half a dozen times, and hope to read it many times more, I can assure you that it is one of the most delightful books ever written, and that it can not fail to please you. With this introduction, I shall now begin to say something about the story itself, the fantastic plot of it.
Who is Shagpat? Shagpat is a clothing merchant and the favourite of a king. Shagpat wears his hair very long, contrary to the custom of Mohammedan countries, where all men shave their heads, with the exception of one tuft on the top of the head, by which tuft, after death, the true believer is to be lifted up by angels, and carried into Paradise. Mohammedans are as careful about this tuft as the Chinese are careful about their queues. How comes it that in a Mohammedan city a true believer should thus wear his hair long? It is because in his head there has been planted one magical hair taken out of the head of a Djinn or Genie; and this hair, called the Identical, has the power to make all men worship the person on whose head it grows. Therefore it is that the king reverences this clothing merchant, and that all the people bow down before him. Also an order is given that all men in that country must wear their hair long in the same manner, and that no barbers are to be allowed to exercise their trade in any of the cities.
A barber, not knowing these regulations,—a barber of the name of Shibli Bagarag—comes to the principal city and actually proposes to shave Shagpat. Heis at once seized by slaves, severely beaten, and banished from the city. But outside the city he meets a horrible old woman, so ugly that it pains him to look at her; and she tells him that she can make his fortune for him if he will promise to marry her. Although he is in a very unhappy condition, the idea of marrying so hideous a woman terrifies him; nevertheless he plucks up courage and promises. She asks him then to kiss her. He has to shut his eyes before he can do that, but after he has done it she suddenly becomes young and handsome. She is the daughter of the chief minister of the king, and she is ugly only because of an enchantment cast upon her. This enchantment has been caused by the power of Shagpat, who desired to marry her. For her own sake and for the sake of the country and for the sake of all the people, she says that it is necessary that the head of Shagpat should be shaved. But to shave Shagpat requires extraordinary powers—magical powers. For the magical hair in that man's head cannot be cut by any ordinary instrument. If approached with a knife or a razor, this hair suddenly develops tremendous power as of an electric shock, hurling far away all who approach it. It is only a hair to all appearances at ordinary times, but at extraordinary times it becomes luminous, and stands up like a pillar of fire reaching to the stars. And the daughter of the minister tells Bagarag that if he has courage she can teach him the magic that shall help him to cut that hair,—to shave the shaggy pate of Shagpat.
I have gone into details this far only to give you a general idea of the plan of the story. The greater part of the book deals with the obstacles and dangers ofShagpat, and recounts, in the most wonderful way, the struggle between the powers of magic used on both sides. For Shagpat is defended against barbers by evil spirits who use black magic; while Bagarag is assisted by his wife, and her knowledge of white magic. In his embraces she has become the most beautiful woman in the world, and the more he loves her the more beautiful she becomes. But he is given to understand that he must lose her if his courage fails in the fight against Shagpat. To tell you here how his courage is tested, and how he triumphs over all tests, would only spoil your pleasure in the story when you come to read it. Here I shall only say that the grandest chapter in the part of the book recounting Bagarag's adventures is the chapter on the Sword of Aklis, the magical sword with which the head of Shagpat at last, is shaved. The imagining of this sword is one of the most wonderful things in any literature; for all the ancient descriptions of magical swords are dull and uninteresting compared with the description of the sword of Aklis. It can only be looked at by very strong eyes, so bright it is; it can be used as a bridge from earth to sky; it can be made so long that in order to use it one must look through a telescope; it can be made lighter than a moon beam, or so heavy that no strength could lift it. I want to quote to you a few sentences of the description of the sword, because this description is very beautiful, and it will give you a good idea of Meredith's coloured prose style. The passages which I am going to read describe the first appearance of the sword to Bagarag, after he has washed his eyes with magical water:
His sight was strengthened to mark the glory of the Sword, where it hangs in slings, a little way from the wall. ... Lo! the length of it was as the length of crimson across the sea when the sun is sideways on the wave, and it seemed full a mile long, the whole blade sheening like an arrested lightning from the end to the hilt; the hilt two large live serpents twined together, with eyes like sombre jewels, and sparkling spotted skins, points of fire in their folds, and reflections of the emerald and topaz and ruby stones, studded in the blood-stained haft. Then the seven young men, sons of Aklis, said to Shibli Bagarag,... "Grasp the handle of the sword!"Now, he beheld the sword and the ripples of violet heat that were breathing down it, and those two venomous serpents twining together, and the size of it, its ponderousness; and to essay lifting it appeared to him a madness, but he concealed his thought, and ...went forward to it boldly, and piercing his right arm between the twists of the serpents, grasped the jewelled haft. Surely, the sword moved from the slings as if a giant had swayed it! But what amazed him was the marvel of the blade, for its sharpness was such that nothing stood in its way, and it slipped through everything, as we pass through still water,—the stone columns, blocks of granite by the walls, the walls of earth, and the thick solidity of the ground beneath his feet. They bade him say to the Sword, "Sleep!" and it was no longer than a knife in the girdle. Likewise, they bade him hiss on the heads of the serpents, and say, "Wake!" and while he held it lengthwise it shot lengthening out.
His sight was strengthened to mark the glory of the Sword, where it hangs in slings, a little way from the wall. ... Lo! the length of it was as the length of crimson across the sea when the sun is sideways on the wave, and it seemed full a mile long, the whole blade sheening like an arrested lightning from the end to the hilt; the hilt two large live serpents twined together, with eyes like sombre jewels, and sparkling spotted skins, points of fire in their folds, and reflections of the emerald and topaz and ruby stones, studded in the blood-stained haft. Then the seven young men, sons of Aklis, said to Shibli Bagarag,... "Grasp the handle of the sword!"Now, he beheld the sword and the ripples of violet heat that were breathing down it, and those two venomous serpents twining together, and the size of it, its ponderousness; and to essay lifting it appeared to him a madness, but he concealed his thought, and ...went forward to it boldly, and piercing his right arm between the twists of the serpents, grasped the jewelled haft. Surely, the sword moved from the slings as if a giant had swayed it! But what amazed him was the marvel of the blade, for its sharpness was such that nothing stood in its way, and it slipped through everything, as we pass through still water,—the stone columns, blocks of granite by the walls, the walls of earth, and the thick solidity of the ground beneath his feet. They bade him say to the Sword, "Sleep!" and it was no longer than a knife in the girdle. Likewise, they bade him hiss on the heads of the serpents, and say, "Wake!" and while he held it lengthwise it shot lengthening out.
In fact, it lengthens across the world, if the owner so desires, to kill an enemy thousands of miles away. With this wonderful sword at last Shagpat is shaved.But notwithstanding the power of thousands of good spirits who help the work, and the white magic of the beautiful Noorna, the shaving is an awfully difficult thing to do. The chapter describing it reads as magnificently as the description of the Judgment Day, and you will wonder at the splendour of it.
What does all this mean, you may well ask. What is the magical hair? What is the sword? What is every impossible thing recounted in this romance? Really the author himself gives us the clue, and therefore his meaning ought to have been long ago clearly perceived. At the end of the story is this clue, furnished by the words—
The Sons of Aklis were now released from the toil of sharpening of the sword a half-cycle of years, to wander in delight on the fair surface of the flowery earth, breathing its roses, wooing its brides; for the mastery of an event lasteth among men the space of one cycle of years, and after that a fresh illusion springeth to befool mankind, and the Seven must expend the concluding half-cycle in preparing the edge of the Sword for a new mastery.
The Sons of Aklis were now released from the toil of sharpening of the sword a half-cycle of years, to wander in delight on the fair surface of the flowery earth, breathing its roses, wooing its brides; for the mastery of an event lasteth among men the space of one cycle of years, and after that a fresh illusion springeth to befool mankind, and the Seven must expend the concluding half-cycle in preparing the edge of the Sword for a new mastery.
From this it is quite evident to anybody who has read the book that the sword of Aklis is the sword of science,—the power of exact scientific knowledge, wielded against error, superstition, humbug, and convention of every injurious kind.
Do not, however, imagine that this bit of interpretation interprets all the story; you must read it more than once, and think about it a great deal, in order toperceive the application of its thousand incidents to real human nature.
When Bagarag first, in his ignorance, offers to shave Shagpat, he has no idea whatever of the powers arrayed against him. What he wants is not at all in itself wrong; on the contrary it is in itself quite right. But what is quite right in one set of social conditions may seem to be quite wrong in another. Therefore the poor fellow is astonished to discover that the whole nation is against him, that the king is particularly offended with him, that all public opinion condemns him, would refuse him even the right to live in its midst. Is not Bagarag really the discoverer, the scientific man, the philosopher with a great desire to benefit other men, discovering that his kind wish arouses against him the laws of' the government, the anger of religions, and all the prejudice of public opinion? Bagarag is the reformer who is not allowed to reform anything,—threatened with death if he persists. Reformers must be men of courage, and Bagarag has courage. But courage is not enough to sustain the purpose of the philosopher, the reformer, the man with new ethical or other truth to tell mankind. Much more than courage is wanted—power. How is power to come? You remember about the horrible old woman who asks Bagarag to kiss her, and when he kisses her she becomes young and divinely beautiful. We may suppose that Noorna really represents Science. Scientific study seems very ugly, very difficult, very repellent at first sight, but if you have the courage and the capacity to master it, if you can bravely kiss it, as Bagarag kissed the old woman, itbecomes the most delightful mistress; nor is that all—it finds strange powers and forces for you. It can find for you even a sword of Aklis.
Now certain subjects are supposed to be beneath the dignity of literary art; and some of the subjects in this extraordinary book might appear to you too trivial for genius to busy itself with. The use of a barber as hero is not at all inartistic; it is in strict accordance with the methods of the Arabian story-tellers to make barbers, fishermen, water-carriers, and other men of humble occupations, the leading characters in a tale. But that the whole plot of the narrative should turn upon the difficulty of cutting one hair; and that this single hair should be given so great an importance in the history—this might very well seem to you beneath the dignity of art—that is, until you read the book. Yet the manner in which the fancy is worked out thoroughly excuses such triviality. The symbol of the hair is excellent. What is of less seeming importance than a hair? What is so frail and light and worthless as a hair? Now to many reformers and teachers the errors, social, moral, or religious, which they wish to destroy really appear to have less value, less resistance than a hair. But, as a great scientific teacher observed a few years ago, no man is able to conceive the strength in error, the force of error, the power of prejudice, until he has tried to attack it. Then all at once the illusion, the lie, that seems frail as a hair, and even of less worth, suddenly reveals itself as a terrible thing, reaching from Earth to Sky, radiating electricity and lightning in every direction. Observe in the course of modern European history what an enormous effort has been requiredto destroy even very evident errors, injustices, or illusions. Think of the hundreds of years of sturdy endeavour which we needed before even a partial degree of religious freedom could be obtained. Think of the astonishing fact that one hundred years ago the man risked his life who found the courage to say that witchcraft was an illusion. One might mention thousands of illustrations of the same truth. No intellectual progress can be effected within conservative countries by mere discovery, mere revelation of facts, nor by logic, nor by eloquence, nor even by individual courage. The discovery is ridiculed; the facts are denied; the logic is attacked; the eloquence is met by greater eloquence on the side of untruth; the individual courage is astounded, if not defeated, by the armies of the enemies summoned against it. Progress, educational or otherwise, means hard fighting, not for one lifetime only but for generations. You are well aware how many generations have elapsed since the educational system of the Middle Ages was acknowledged by all men of real intelligence as inadequate to produce great results. One would have thought that the mediæval fetish would have been thrown away in the nineteenth century, at least. But it is positively true that in most English speaking universities, even at the present time, a great deal of the machinery of mediæval education remains, and there is scarcely any hope of having it removed even within another hundred years. If you asked the wise men of those universities what is the use of preserving certain forms of study and certain formalities of practice that can only serve to increase the obstacles to educational progress, they would answer you truthfully that it is of no useat all, but they would also tell you something about the difficulty that would attend any attempted change; and you would be astonished to learn the extent and the immensity of those difficulties.
Now you will perceive that the single hair in our study actually represents, perhaps, better than any more important object could do, the real story of any social illusion, any great popular error. The error seems so utterly absurd that you cannot understand how any man in his senses can believe it, and yet men quite as intelligent as yourselves, perhaps even more so, speak of it with respect. They speak of it with respect simply because they perceive better than you do what enormous power would be needed to destroy it. It appears to you something so light that even a breath would blow it away forever, or the touch of pain break it so easily that the breaking could not even be felt. You think of wisdom crushing it as an elephant might crush a fly, without knowing that the fly was there. But when you come to put forth your strength against this error, this gossamer of illusion, you will find that you might as well try to move a mountain with your hand. You must have help: you must have friends to furnish you with the sword of Aklis. Even with that mighty sword the cutting of the hair will prove no easy job.
Afterwards what happens? Why, exactly the same thing that happens before. Men think that because the world has made one step forward in their time, all illusions are presently going to fade away. This is the greatest of social mistakes that a human being can possibly make. The great sea of error immediately closesagain behind the forms that find strength to break out of it. It is just the same as before. One illusion may indeed be eventually destroyed, but another illusion quickly forms behind it. The real truth is that wisdom will be reached when human individuals as well as human society shall have become infinitely more perfect than they now are; and such perfection can scarcely be brought about before another million of years at least.
These are the main truths symbolised in this wonderful story. But while you are reading the "Shaving of Shagpat," you need not consider the moral meanings at all. You will think of them better after the reading. Indeed, I imagine that the story will so interest you that you will not be able to think of anything else until you have reached the end of it. Then you find yourself sorry that it is not just a little bit longer.
Among the minor poets of the Victorian period, Robert Buchanan cannot be passed over unnoticed. A contemporary of all the great singers, he seems to have been always a little isolated; I mean that he formed no strong literary friendships within the great circle. Most great poets must live to a certain extent in solitude; the man who can at once mix freely in society and find time for the production of masterpieces is a rare phenomenon. George Meredith is said to be such a person. But Tennyson, Rossetti, Swinburne, Browning, Fitzgerald, were all very reserved and retired men, though they had little circles of their own, and a certain common sympathy. The case of Buchanan is different. His aloofness from the rest has been, not the result of any literary desire for quiet, but the result, on the contrary, of a strong spirit of opposition. Not only did he have no real sympathy with the great poets, but he represented in himself the very prejudices against which they had to contend. Hard headed Scotchman as he was, he manifested in his attitude to his brother poets a good deal of the peculiar, harsh conservatism of which Scotchmen seemed to be particularly capable. And he did himself immense injury in his younger days by an anonymous attack upon the morals, or rather upon the moral tone, of such poets as Rossetti and Swinburne.Swinburne's reply to this attack was terrible and withering. That of Rossetti was very mild and gentle, but so effective that English literary circles almost unanimously condemned Buchanan, and attributed his attack to mere jealousy. I think the attack was less due to jealousy than to character, to prejudice, to the harshness of a mind insensible to particular forms of beauty. And for more than twenty years Buchanan has suffered extremely from the results of his own action. Thousands of people have ignored him and his books simply because it was remembered that he gave wanton pain to Rossetti, a poet much too sensitive to endure unjust criticism. I suppose that for many years to come Buchanan will still be remembered in this light, notwithstanding that he tried at a later day to make honourable amends to the memory of Rossetti, by dedicating to him, with a beautiful sonnet of apology, the definitive edition of his own works.
But the time has now passed when Buchanan can be treated as an indifferent figure in English literature. In spite of all disadvantages he has been a successful poet, a successful novelist, and a very considerable influence in the literature of criticism. Besides, he has written at least one poem that will probably live as long as the English language, and he has an originality quite apart and quite extraordinary, though weaker than the originality of the greater singers of his time. As to his personal history, little need to be said. He was educated at Glasgow University, and his literary efforts have always been somewhat coloured by Scotch sentiment, in spite of his long life in literary London.
Three volumes represent his poetical production. Inthese are contained a remarkable variety of poems—narrative, mystical, fantastic, classical, romantic, ranging from the simplest form of ballad to the complex form of the sonnet and the ode. The narrative poems would, I think, interest you least; they are gloomy studies of human suffering, physical and moral, among the poor, and are not so good as the work of Crabbe in the same direction. The mystical poems, on the contrary, are of a very curious kind; for Buchanan actually made a religious philosophy of his own, and put it into the form of verse. It is a Christian mysticism, an extremely liberal Unitarianism forming the basis of it; but the author's notions about the perpetual order of things are all his own. He has, moreover, put these queer fancies into a form of verse imitating the ancient Celtic poetry. We shall afterward briefly consider the mystical poetry. But the great production of Buchanan is a simple ballad, which you find very properly placed at the beginning of his collected poems. This is a beautiful and extraordinary thing, quite in accordance with the poet's peculiar views of Christianity. It is called "The Ballad of Judas Iscariot." If you know only this composition, you will know all that it is absolutely necessary to know of Robert Buchanan. It is by this poem that his place is marked in nineteenth century literature.
Before we turn to the poem itself, I must explain to you something of the legend of Judas Iscariot. You know, of course, that Judas was the disciple of Christ who betrayed his master. He betrayed him for thirty pieces of silver, according to the tradition; and he betrayed him with a kiss, for he said to the soldiers whomhe was guiding, "The man whom I shall kiss is the man you want." So Judas went up to Christ, and kissed his face; and then the soldiers seized Christ. From this has come the proverbial phrase common to so many Western languages, a "Judas-kiss." Afterwards Judas, being seized with remorse, is said to have hanged himself; and there the Scriptural story ends. But in Church legends the fate of Judas continued to be discussed in the Middle Ages. As he was the betrayer of; a person whom the Church considered to be God, it was deemed that he was necessarily the greatest of all traitors; and as he had indirectly helped to bring about the death of God, he was condemned as the greatest of all murderers. It was said that in hell the very lowest place was given to Judas, and that his tortures exceeded all other tortures. But once every year, it was said, Judas could leave hell, and go out to cool himself upon the ice of the Northern seas. That is the legend of the Middle Ages.
Now Robert Buchanan perceived that the Church legends of the punishment of Judas might be strongly questioned from a moral point of view. Revenge is indeed in the spirit of the Old Testament; but revenge is not exactly in the spirit of the teaching of Christ. The true question as to the fate of Judas ought to be answered by supposing what Christ himself would have wished in the matter. Would Christ have wished to see his betrayer burning for ever in the fires of hell? Or would he have shown to him some of that spirit manifested in his teachings, "Do good unto them that hate you; forgive your enemies"? As a result of thinking about the matter, Buchanan produced his ballad. Allthat could be said against it from a religious point of view is that the spirit of it is even more Christian than Christianity itself. From the poetical point of view we must acknowledge it to be one of the grandest ballads produced in the whole period of Victorian literature. You will not find so exquisite a finish here as in some of the ballads of Rossetti; but you will find a weirdness and a beauty and an emotional power that make up for slenderness in workmanship.
In order to understand the beginning of the ballad clearly, you should know the particulars about another superstition concerning Judas. It is said that all the elements refused to suffer the body to be committed to them; fire would not burn it; water would not let it sink to rest; every time it was buried, the earth would spew it out again. Man could not bury that body, so the ghosts endeavoured to get rid of it. The Field of Blood referred to in the ballad is the Aceldama of Scriptural legend, the place where Judas hanged himself.
'Twas the body of Judas IscariotLay in the Field of Blood;'Twas the soul of Judas IscariotBeside the body stood.Black was the earth by night,And black was the sky;Black, black were the broken clouds,Though the red Moon went by.. . . . . .Then the soul of Judas IscariotDid make a gentle moan—"I will bury underneath the groundMy flesh and blood and bone.. . . . . ."The stones of the field are sharp as steel,And hard and bold, God wot;And I must bear my body henceUntil I find a spot!"'Twas the soul of Judas IscariotSo grim, and gaunt, and grey,Raised the body of Judas IscariotAnd carried it away.And as he bare it from the fieldIts touch was cold as ice,And the ivory teeth within the jawRattled aloud, like dice.
The use of the word "ivory" here has a double function; dice are usually made of ivory; and the suggestion of whiteness heightens the weird effect.
As the soul of Judas IscariotCarried its load with pain,The Eye of Heaven, like a lanthorn's eye,Opened and shut again.Half he walk'd, and half he seemedLifted on the cold wind;He did not turn, for chilly handsWere pushing from behind.The first place that he came untoIt was the open wold,And underneath were pricky whins,And a wind that blew so cold.The next place that he came untoIt was a stagnant pool,And when he threw the body inIt floated light as wool.He drew the body on his back,And it was dripping chill,And the next place he came untoWas a Cross upon a hill.A Cross upon the windy hill,And a Cross on either side,Three skeletons that swing thereon,Who had been crucified.And on the middle cross-bar satA white Dove slumbering;Dim it sat in the dim light,With its head beneath its wing.And underneath the middle CrossA grave yawned wide and vast,But the soul of Judas IscariotShiver'd, and glided past.
We are not told what this hill was, but every reader knows that Calvary is meant, and the skeletons upon the crosses are those of Christ and the two thieves crucified with him. The ghostly hand had pushed Judas to the place of all places where he would have wished not to go. We need not mind the traditional discrepancysuggested by the three skeletons; as a matter of fact, the bodies of malefactors were not commonly left upon the crosses long enough to become skeletons, and of course the legend is that Christ's body was on the cross only for a short time. But we may suppose that the whole description is of a phantasm, purposely shaped to stir the remorse of Judas. The white dove sleeping upon the middle cross suggests the soul of Christ, and the great grave made below might have been prepared out of mercy for the body of Judas. If the dove had awoke and spoken to him, would it not have said, "You can put your body here, in my grave; nobody will torment you"? But the soul of Judas cannot even think of daring to approach the place of the crucifixion.
The fourth place that he came unto,It was the Brig of Dread,And the great torrents rushing downWere deep, and swift, and red.He dared not fling the body inFor fear of faces dim,And arms were waved in the wild waterTo thrust it back to him.
There is here a poetical effect borrowed from sources having nothing to do with the Judas tradition. In old Northern folklore there is the legend of a River of Blood, in which all the blood ever shed in this world continues to flow; and there is a reference to this river in the old Scotch ballad of "Thomas the Rhymer."
It was mirk, mirk night, and there was nae light,And they waded in red blude up to the knee,For a' the blude that's shed on earth,Rins through the springs o' that countrie.
Judas leaves the dreadful bridge and continues his wanderings over the mountain, through woods and through great desolate plains:
For months and years, in grief and tears,He walked the silent night;Then the soul of Judas IscariotPerceived a far-off light.A far-off light across the waste,As dim as dim might be,That came and went like a lighthouse gleamOn a black night at sea.'Twas the soul of Judas IscariotCrawled to the distant gleam;And the rain came down, and the rain was blownAgainst him with a scream.. . . . . . . . .'Twas the soul of Judas Iscariot,Strange, and sad, and tall,Stood all alone at dead of nightBefore a lighted hall.And the wold was white with snow,And his foot-marks black and damp,And the ghost of the silver Moon arose,Holding her yellow lamp.And the icicles were on the eaves.And the walls were deep with white,And the shadows of the guests withinPassed on the window light.The shadows of the wedding guestsDid strangely come and go,And the body of Judas IscariotLay stretch'd along the snow.
But only the body. The soul which has carried it does not lie down, but runs round and round the lighted hall, where the wedding guests are assembled. What wedding? What guests? This is the mystical banquet told of in the parable of the New Testament; the bridegroom is Christ himself; the guests are the twelve disciples, or rather, the eleven, Judas himself having been once the twelfth. And the guests see the soul of Judas looking in at the window.
'Twas the Bridegroom sat at the table-head,And the lights burned bright and clear—"Oh, who is that," the Bridegroom said,"Whose weary feet I hear?"'Twas one look'd from the lighted hall,And answered soft and slow,"It is a wolf runs up and downWith a black track in the snow."The Bridegroom in his robe of whiteSat at the table-head—"Oh, who is that who moans without?"The blessed Bridegroom said.'Twas one looked from the lighted hall,And answered fierce and low,"'Tis the soul of Judas IscariotGliding to and fro."'Twas the soul of Judas IscariotDid hush itself and stand,And saw the Bridegroom at the doorWith a light in his hand.The Bridegroom stood in the open door,And he was clad in white,And far within the Lord's SupperWas spread so long and bright.The Bridegroom shaded his eyes and looked,And his face was bright to see—"What dost thou here at the Lord's SupperWith thy body's sins?" said he.'Twas the soul of Judas Iscariot,Stood black, and sad, and bare—"I have wandered many nights and days;There is no light elsewhere."'Twas the wedding guests cried out within,And their eyes were fierce and bright—"Scourge the soul of Judas IscariotAway into the night!"The Bridegroom stood in the open doorAnd he waved hands still and slow,And the third time that he waved his handsThe air was thick with snow.And of every flake of falling snow,Before it touched the ground,There came a dove, and a thousand dovesMade sweet sound.'Twas the body of Judas IscariotFloated away full fleet,And the wings of the doves that bare it offWere like its winding-sheet.'Twas the Bridegroom stood at the open door,And beckon'd, smiling sweet;'Twas the soul of Judas IscariotStole in, and fell at his feet."The Holy Supper is spread within,And the many candles shine,And I have waited long for theeBefore I poured the wine!"
It would have been better, I think, to finish the ballad at this stanza; there is one more, but it does not add at all to the effect of what goes before. When the doves, emblems of divine love, have carried away the sinful body, and the Master comes to the soul, smiling and saying: "I have been waiting for you a long time, waiting for your coming before I poured the wine"—there is nothing more to be said. We do not want to hear any more; we know that the Eleven had again become Twelve; we do not require to be told that the wine is poured out, or that Judas repents his fault. The startling and beautiful thing is the loving call and thewelcome to the Divine Supper. You will find the whole of this poem in the "Victorian Anthology," but I should advise any person who might think of making a Japanese translation to drop the final stanza and to leave out a few of the others, if his judgment agrees with mine.