'How many queens have ruled and passedSince first we met;How thick and fastThe letters used to come at first,How thin at last;Then ceased, and winter for a space!Until another handBrought spring into the land,And went the seasons' pace.'
That Miller's Daughter, although 'so dear, so dear,' why, of course, she was not that maid: but again the silver halo has grown about her; again Narcissus asks himself, 'Did she live, or did I dream?'; again she comes to him at whiles, wafted on that strange incense, and clothed about in that mystical lustre of pearl.
Doubtless, she lives in that fabled country still: but Narcissus has grown sadly wise since then, and he goes on pilgrimage no more.
AN IDYLL OF ALICE SUNSHINE, WHICH REALLY BELONGS TO THE LAST CHAPTER
AN IDYLL OF ALICE SUNSHINE, WHICH REALLY BELONGS TO THE LAST CHAPTER
If the Reader has heard enough of the amourettes of the young gentleman upon whose memoirs I am engaged, let him skip this chapter and pass to the graver chapters beyond. My one aim is the Reader's pleasure, and I carry my solicitude so far that if he finds his happiness to lie outside these pages altogether, has no choice among these various chapters, but prefers none to any, I am quite content. Such a spirit of self-abnegation, the Reader must admit, is true love.
Perhaps it was an early unconscious birth-impulse of the true love some day to be born in his heart, that caused Narcissus to make a confession to his Miller's Daughter, on one of their pretty decorative evenings, when they sat together at the fireside, while the scent of the climbing roses, and the light of the climbing moon, came in at the window.
The immediate effect of the confession was—no wonder—to draw tears. And how beautiful she looked in tears! Who would dive for pearls when the pearl-fisheries of a woman's eyes are his to rifle?
Beautiful, beautiful tears, flow on—no dull, leaden rain, no mere monotonous deluge, but a living, singing fountain, crowned with such rainbows as hang roses and stars in the fine mist of samite waterfalls, irradiated by gleaming shafts of lovely anger and scorn.
Like Northern Lights on autumn evenings, the maiden's eyes pierced Narcissus through and through with many-coloured spears. There was thunder, too; the earth shook—just a little: but soon Narcissus saw the white dove of peace flying to him through the glancing showers. For all her sorrow, his was the peace of confession. His little lie had been acknowledged, his treason self-betrayed.
And it was this.
I have hinted that Narcissus, like the Catholic Church, worshipped many saints. At this time, one of them, by a thrilling coincidence, chanced to have her shrine at a boarding-school, some fifteen miles or so from the mill-pond on whose banks the Miller's Daughter had drawn into her lovely face so much of the beauty of the world. Alice Sunshine, shall we call her, was perhaps more of a cherub than a saint; a rosy, laughing, plump little arrangement of sunshiny pink and white flesh, with blue eyes and golden hair. Alice was not overburdened with intellectuality, and, like others of her sex, her heart was nothing like so soft as her bosom. Narcissus had first been in love with her sister; but he and the sister—a budding woman of the world—had soon agreed that they were not born for each other, and Narcissus had made the transfer of his tragic passion with inexpensive informality. As the late Anthony Trollope would finish one novel to-night, and begin another to-morrow morning, so would Narcissus be off with the old love this Sunday, and visibly on with the new the next.
Dear little plump, vegetable-marrow Alice! Will Narcissus ever forget that Sunday night when the church, having at last released its weary worshippers, he stole, not as aforetime to the soft side of Emily, but to the still softer side of the little bewildered Alice. For, though Alice had worshipped him all the time, and certainly during the whole of the service, she had never dared to hope that he would pass her dashing, dark-eyed sister to loveher—little, blonde, phlegmatic, blue-eyed Alice.
But Apollo was bent on the capture of his Daphne. Truth to say, it was but the work of a moment. The golden arrow was in her heart, the wound kissed whole again, and the new heaven and the new earth all arranged for, in hardly longer time than it takes to tell.
In youth the mystery of woman is still so fresh and new, that to make a fuss about a particular woman seems like looking a gift-horse of the gods in the mouth. The light on the face of womanhood in general is so bewilderingly beautiful that the young man literally cannot tell one woman from another. They are all equally wonderful. Masculine observation leads one to suppose that woman's first vision of man similarly precludes discrimination.
Ah me! it is easy to laugh to-day, but it was heart—bleeding tragedy when those powers that oughtn't to be decreed Alice's exile to a boarding-school in some central Africa of the midland counties.
The hemorrhage of those two young hearts! But, for a time, each plastered the other's wounds with letters—dear letters—letters every post. For the postal authorities made no objection to Narcissus corresponding with two or more maidens at once. And it is only fair to Alice to say, that she knew as little of the Miller's Daughter as the Miller's Daughter knew of her.
So, when Narcissus was recitingEndymionto his Miller's Maid, it was not without a minor chord plaining through the major harmonies of the present happiness; the sense that Alice was but fifteen miles away—so near she could almost hear him if he called—only fifteen miles away, and it was a long three months since they had met.
It now becomes necessary to admit a prosaic fact hitherto concealed from the Reader. Narcissus rode a bicycle. It was, I must confess, a rather 'modern' thing to do. But surely the flashing airy wheel is the most poetical mode of locomotion yet invented, and one looks more like a fairy prince than ever in knickerbockers. Whenever Narcissus turned his gleaming spokes along some mapped, but none the less mysterious, county—road, he thought of Lohengrin in his barge drawn by white swans to his mystic tryst; he thought of the seven-leagued boots, the flying carpet, the wishing-cap, and the wooden Pegasus,—so called because it mounted into the clouds on the turning of a peg. As he passed along by mead and glade, his wheel sang to him, and he sang to his wheel. It was a daisied, daisied world.
There were buttercups and violets in it too as he sped along in the early morning of an unforgotten Easter Sunday, drawn, so he had shamelessly told his Miller's Daughter, by antiquarian passion to visit the famous old parish church near which Alice was at school. Antiquarian passion! Well, certainly it is an antiquarian passion now.
But then—how his heart beat! how his eyes shone as with burning kohl! That there was anything to be ashamed of in this stolen ride never even occurred to him. And perhaps there was little wrong in it, after all. Perhaps, when the secrets of all hearts are revealed, it will come out that the Miller's Daughter took the opportunity to meet Narcissus' understudy,—who can tell?
But the wonderful fresh morning-scented air was a delicious fact beyond dispute. That was sincere. Ah, there used to be real mornings then!—not merely interrupted nights.
And it was the Easter-morning of romance. There was a sweet passionate Sabbath-feeling everywhere. Sabbath-bells, and Sabbath-birds, and Sabbath-flowers. There was even a feeling of restful Sabbath-cheer about the old inn, where, at last, entering with much awe the village where Alice nightly slept—clothed in white samite, mystic, wonderful,—Narcissus provided for the demands of romance by a hearty country breakfast. A manna of blessing seemed to lie thick upon every thing. The very ham and eggs seemed as if they had been blessed by the Pope.
It was yet an hour to church-time, an hour usually one of spiteful alacrity; but this morning, it seemed, in defiance of the clock, cruelly unpunctual. After breakfast, Narcissus strolled about the town, and inquired the way to Miss Curlpaper's school. It stood outside the little town. It was pointed out to him in the distance, across billowy clouds of pear and apple-blossom, making the hollow in which the town nestled seem a vast pot-pourri jar, overflowing with newly gathered rose-leaves.
Had the Miller's Daughter been able to watch his movements, she would have remarked that his antiquarian ardour drew him not to the church, but to a sombre many-windowed house upon the hill.
Narcissus reconnoitred the prison-like edifice from behind a hedge, then summoned courage to walk past with slow nonchalance. All was as dead and dull as though Alice was not there. Yet somewhere within those prison-walls her young beauty was dressing itself to meet the spring. Perhaps, in delicious linen, soft and white, she was dashing cool water about her rosebud face, or, flushed with exhilaration, was pinning up the golden fleeces of her hair. Perhaps she was eating wonderful bacon and eggs! Could she be thinking of him? She little knew how near he was to her. He had not written of his coming. Letters at Miss Curlpaper's had to pass an inspection much more rigorous than the Customs, but still smuggling was not unknown. For success, however, carefully laid plans and regular dates were necessary, and Narcissus' visit had fallen between the dates.
No! there was no sign of her. She was as invisible as the moon at mid-day. And there were the church-bells beginning to call her: 'Alice, Alice, put on your things!'
'Alice, Alice, put on your things!The birds are calling, the church bell rings;The sun is shining, and I am here,Waiting—and waiting—for you, my dear.Alice, Alice, doff your gown of night,Draw on your bodice as lilies white,Draw on your petticoats, clasp your stays,—Oh! Alice, Alice, those milky ways!Alice, Alice, how long you are!The hour is late and the church is far;Slowly, more slowly, the church bell rings—Alice, Alice, put on your things!'
Really it was not in Narcissus' plans to wait at the school till Alice appeared. The Misses Curlpaper were terrible unknown quantities to him. For a girl to have a boy hanging about the premises was a capital crime, he knew. Boys are to girls' schools what Anarchists are to public buildings. They come under the Explosives Acts. It was not, indeed, within the range of his hope that he might be able to speak to Alice. A look, a long, immortal, all-expressive look, was all he had travelled fifteen miles to give and win. For that he would have travelled fifteen hundred.
His idea was to sit right in front of the nave, where Alice could not miss seeing him—where others could see him too in his pretty close-fitting suit of Lincoln green. So down through the lanes he went, among the pear and apple orchards, from out whose blossom the clanging tower of the old church jutted sheer, like some Bass Rock amid rosy clustering billows. Their love had been closely associated from its beginning with the sacred things of the church, so regular had been their attendance, not only on Sundays, but at week-night services. To Alice and Narcissus there were two Sabbaths in the week, Sunday and Wednesday. I suppose they were far from being the only young people interested in their particular form of church-work. Leander met Hero, it will be remembered, on the way to church, and the Reader may recall Marlowe's beautiful description of her dress upon that fatal morning:
'The outside of her garments were of lawn,The lining purple silk, with gilt stars drawn;Her wide sleeves green, and bordered with a grove,Where Venus in her naked glory stroveTo please the careless and disdainful eyesOf proud Adonis, that before her lies;Her kirtle blue, whereon was many a stain,Made with the blood of wretched lovers slain....'
Alice wore pretty dresses too, if less elaborate; and, despite its change of name, was not the church where she and Narcissus met, as the church wherein Hero and Leander first looked upon each other, the Temple of Love? Certainly the country church to which Narcissus self-consciously passed through groups of Sunday-clothed villagers, was decked as for no Christian festival this Sabbath morning. The garlands that twined about the old Norman columns, the clumps of primroses and violets that sprung at their feet, as at the roots of gigantic beeches, the branches of palm and black-thorn that transformed the chancel to a bower: probably for more than knew it, these symbols of the joy and beauty of earth had simpler, more instinctive, meanings than those of any arbitrary creed. For others in the church besides Narcissus, no doubt, they spoke of young love, the bloom and the fragrance thereof, of mating birds and pairing men and maids, of the eternal principle of loveliness, which, in spite of winter and of wrong, brings flowers and faces to bless and beautify this church of the world.
As Narcissus sat in his front row, his eyes drawn up in a prayer to the painted glories of the great east window, his whole soul lifted up on the wings of colour, scent, and sound—the whole sacred house had but one meaning: just his love for Alice. Nothing in the world was too holy to image that. The windows, the music, the flowers, all were metaphors of her: and, as the organ swirled his soul along in the rapids of its passionate, prayerful sound, it seemed to him that Alice and he already stood at the gate of Heaven!
Presently, across his mingled sensations came a measured tramp as of boy-soldiers marching in line. You have heard it! You havelistenedfor it!! It was the dear, unmistakable sound of a girls' school on the march. Quickly it came nearer, it was in the porch—it was in the church! Narcissus gave a swift glance round. He dare not give a real searching look yet. His heart beat too fast, his cheek burned too red. But he saw it was a detachment of girls—it certainly was Alice's school.
Then came the white-robed choristers, and the white-haired priests:If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us; but, if we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.
DEARLY BELOVED BRETHREN....
DEARLY BELOVED BRETHREN....
His heart swelled with a sobbing exaltation of worship such as he had not known for years. You could hardly have believed that a little apple-dumpling of a pink and white girl was the real inspirer of that look in his young face that made old ladies, even more than young ones, gaze at him, and remark afterwards on the strange boy with the lovely spiritual expression.
But, all the time, Narcissus felt that Alice's great eyes were on him, glowing with glad surprise. The service proceeded, but yet he forbore to seek her. He took a delight in husbanding his coming joy. He would not crudely snatch it. It would be all the sweeter for waiting. And the fire in Alice's eyes would all the time be growing softer and softer. He nearly looked as he thought of that. And surely that was her dear voice calling to him in the secret language of the psalm. He sang back to her with a wild rapture. Thus the morning stars sang together, he thought.
And when the prayers laid lovely hands across the eyes of the worshippers, still he sought not Alice, but prayed for her as perhaps only a boy can: O Lord God, be good to Alice—already she is one of thy angels. May her life be filled with light and joy! And if in the time to come I am worthy of being ever by her side, may we live our lives together, high and pure and holy as always in thy sight! Lord, thou knowest how pure is my love; how I worship her as I worship the holy angels themselves. But whatsoever is imperfect perfect by the inspiration of thy Holy Spirit....
So prayed the soul of the boy for the soul of the girl, and his eyes filled with tears as he prayed; the cup of the wonder and holiness of the world ran over.
Already, it seemed, that Alice and he lay clasped together in the arms of God.
So Narcissus prayed and sang his love in terms of an alien creed. He sang of the love of Christ, he thought but of the love of Alice; and still he refrained from plucking that wonderful passion-flower of her glance.
At length he had waited the whole service through; and, with the last hallowed vibrations of the benediction, he turned his eyes, brimful of love-light, greedily, eagerly, fearful lest one single ray should be wasted on intermediate and irrelevant worshippers.
Wonderful eyes of love!—but alas! where is their Alice? Wildly they glance along the rosy ranks of chubby girlhood, but where is their Alice?
And then the ranks form in line, and once more the sound, the ecstatic sound it had seemed but a short time before, of girls marching—but no!—no!—there is no Alice.
In sick despair Narcissus stalked that Amazonian battalion, crouching behind hedges, dropping into by-lanes, lurking in coppices,—he held his breath as they passed two and two within a yard of him. Two followed two, but still no Alice!
Narcissus lay in wait, dinnerless, all that afternoon; he walked about that dreary house like a patrol, till at last he was observed of the inmates, and knots of girls gathered at the windows—alas! only to giggle at his forlorn and desperate appearance.
Still there was no Alice ... and then it began to rain, and he became aware how hungry he was. So he returned to his inn with a sad heart.
And all the time poor little Alice lay in bed with a sore throat, oblivious of those passionate boyish eyes that, you would have thought, must have pierced the very walls of her seclusion.
And, after all, it was not her voice Narcissus had heard in the church. It was but the still sweeter voice of his own heart.
THE SIBYLLINE BOOKS
THE SIBYLLINE BOOKS
I hope it will be allowed to me that I treat the Reader with all respectful courtesy, and that I am well bred enough to assume him familiar with all manner of exquisite experience, though in my heart I may be no less convinced that he has probably gone through life with nothing worth calling experience whatsoever. It is our jaunty modern fashion, and I follow it so far as I am able. I take for granted, for instance, that every man has at one time or another—in his salad days, you know, before he was embarked in his particular provision business—had foolish yearnings towards poesy. I respect the mythical dreams of his 'young days'; I assume that he has been really in love; but, pray press me not too curiously as to whether I believe it all, as to whether I really imagine that his youth knew other dreams than those of the foolish young 'masherdom' one meets in the train every morning, or that he has married a wife for other than purely 'masculine' reasons.
These matters I do not mind leaving in the form of a postulate—let them be granted: but that every man has at one time or another had the craze for saving the world I will not assume. Narcissus took it very early, and though he has been silent concerning his mission for some time, and when last we heard of it had considerably modified his propaganda, he still cherishes it somewhere in secret, I have little doubt; and one may not be surprised, one of these days, to find it again bursting out 'into sudden flame.'
His spiritual experience has probably been the deepest and keenest of his life. I do not propose to trace his evolution from Anabaptism to Agnosticism. The steps of such development are comparatively familiar; they have been traced by greater pens than mine. The 'means' may vary, but the process is uniform.
Whether a man deserts the ancestral Brahminism that has so long been 'good enough for his parents,' and listens to the voice of the Buddhist missionary, or joins Lucian in the seat of the scornful, shrugging at augur and philosopher alike; whether it is Voltaire, or Tom Paine, or Thomas Carlyle, or Walt Whitman, or a Socialist tract, that is the emancipator, the emancipation is all one.
The seed that is to rend the rock comes in all manner of odd, and often unremembered, ways; but somehow, it is there; rains and dews unnoticed feed it; and surely, one day the rock is rent, the light is pouring in, and we are free! It is often a matter of anguish that, strive as we may, it is impossible to remember what helping hand it was that sowed for us. Our fickle memory seems to convict us of ingratitude, and yet we know how far that sin is from us; and how, if those sowers could but be revealed to us, we would fall upon their necks, or at their feet.
I talked of this one day with Narcissus, and some time after he sent me a few notes headed 'Spiritual Pastors,' in which he had striven to follow the beautiful example set by Marcus Aurelius, in the anxiously loving acknowledgment with which he opens his meditations. I know he regarded it as miserably inefficient; but as it does actually indicate some of the more individual side of his experience, and is, moreover, characteristic in its style, I shall copy a few passages from it here:—
'To some person or persons unknown exceeding gratitude for the suggestion, in some dim talk, antenatal it would almost seem, that Roman Catholics might, after all, be "saved." Blessed fecundating suggestion, that was the earliest loophole!
'To my father I owe a mind that, once set on a clue, must follow it, if need be, to the nethermost darkness, though he has chosen to restrict the operation of his own within certain limits; and to my mother a natural leaning to the transcendental side of an alternative, which has saved me so many a time when reason had thrown me into the abyss. But one's greatest debt to a good mother must be simply—herself.
'To the Rev. Father Ignatius for his earnest preaching, which might almost have made me a monk, had not Thomas Carlyle and hisHeroes, especially the lecture on Mahomet, given me to understand the true significance of a Messiah.
'To Bulwer for hisZanoni, which first gave me a hint of the possible natural "supernatural," and thus for ever saved me from dogmatising in negatives against the transcendental.
'To Sir Edwin Arnold for hisLight of Asia,also to Mr. Sinnett for hisEsoteric Buddhism,books which, coming to me about the same time, together with some others like them, first gave some occupation to an "unchartered freedom," gained in many forgotten steps, in the form of a faith which transfigured my life for many months into the most beautiful enthusiasm a man could know,—and which had almost sent me to the Himalayas!
'That it did not quite achieve that, though much of the light it gave me still remains, I owe to R.M., who, with no dialectic, but with one bald question, and the reading of one poem, robbed me of my fairy palace of Oriental speculation in the twinkling of an eye. Why it went I have never really quite known; but surely, it was gone, and the wind and the bare star-light were alone in its place.
'Dear Mac., I have not seen you for ever so long, and surely you have forgotten how that night, long ago, you asked with such a strange, almost childlike, simplicity: "Isthere a soul?" But I have not forgotten, nor how I made no answer at all, but only staggered, and how, with your strange, dreamy voice, you chanted for comfort:—
'"This hot, hard flame with which our bodies burnWill make some meadow blaze with daffodil;Ay! and those argent breasts of thine will turnTo water-lilies; the brown fields men tillWill be more fruitful for our love to-night:Nothing is lost in Nature; all things live in Death's despite.
'"So when men bury us beneath the yewThy crimson-stained mouth a rose will be,And thy soft eyes lush blue-bells dimmed with dew;And when the white narcissus wantonlyKisses the wind, its playmate, some faint joyWill thrill our dust, and we will be again fond maid and boy.'"... How my heart leaps upTo think of that grand living after deathIn beast and bird and flower, when this cup,Being filled too full of spirit, bursts for breath,And with the pale leaves of some autumn day,The soul, earth's earliest conqueror, becomes earth's last great prey.'"O think of it! We shall inform ourselvesInto all sensuous life; the goat-foot faun,The centaur, or the merry, bright-eyed elvesThat leave they: dancing rings to spite the dawnUpon the meadows, shall not be more nearThan you and I to Nature's mysteries, for we shall hear'"The thrush's heart beat, and the daisies grow,And the wan snowdrop sighing for the sunOn sunless days in winter; we shall knowBy whom the silver gossamer is spun,Who paints the diapered fritillaries,On what wide wings from shivering pine to pine the eagle flies.
'"We shall be notes in that great symphonyWhose cadence circles through the rhythmic spheres,And all the live world's throbbing heart shall beOne with our heart; the stealthy, creeping yearsHave lost their terrors now; we shall not die—The universe itself shall be our Immortality!"
Have you forgotten how you chanted these, and told me they were Oscar Wilde's. You had set my feet firmly on earth for the first time, there was great darkness with me for many weeks, but, as it lifted, the earth seemed greener than ever of old, the sunshine a goodlier thing, and verily a blessedness indeed to draw the breath of life. I had learnt "the value and significance of flesh"; I no longer scorned a carnal diet, and once again I turned my eyes on the damsels in the street.
'But an influence soon came to me that kept me from going all the way with you, and taught me to say, "I know not," where you would say, "It is not." Blessings on thee who didst throw a rainbow, that may mean a promise, across the void, that awoke the old instinct of faith within me, and has left me "an Agnostic with a faith," quite content with "the brown earth," if that be all, but with the added significance a mystery gives to living;—thou who first didst teach me Love's lore aright, to thee do I owe this thing.
'To J.A.W. I owe the first great knowledge of that other love between man and man, which Whitman has since taught us to call "the dear love of comrades"; and to him I owe that I never burned those early rhymes, or broke my little reed—an unequivocal service to me, whatever the public, should it be consulted, may think.
'To a dear sister I owe that still more exquisite and subtle comradeship which can only exist between man and woman, but from which the more disturbing elements of sex must be absent. And here, let me also thank God that I was brought up in quite a garden of good sisters.
'To Messrs. C. and W., Solicitors and Notaries, I owe, albeit I will say no thanks to them, the opportunity of that hardly learned good which dwells for those who can wrest it in a hateful taskwork, that faculty of "detachment" which Marcus Aurelius learnt so long ago, by means of which the soul may withdraw, into an inaccessible garden, and sing while the head bends above a ledger; or, in other words, the faculty of dreaming with one side of the brain, while calculating with the other. Mrs. Browning's greatAurora Leighhelped me more to the attainment of that than any book I know.
'In their office, too, among many other great things, I learnt that a man may be a good fellow and hate poetry—possibility undreamed of by sentimental youth; also that Messrs. Bass and Cope are not unworthy of their great reputation; and I had various nonsense knocked out of me, though they never succeeded in persuading me in that little matter of the "ambrosial curls."
'Through Samuel Dale I first came to understand how "whatever is"canbe "best," and also won a faith in God which I rather caught by infection than gained by any process of his reasoning. Of all else I owe to Samuel, how write? He knows.
'To a certain friend, mentioned last because he is not least, I owe: the sum of ten pounds, and a loving companionship, up hill and down dale, for which again I have no words and no—sovereigns.'
When I first read through these, I was somewhat surprised at the omission of all reference to books which I know marked most striking periods in Narcissus' spiritual life:Sartor Resartus, Thoreau'sWalden, for example, Mr. Pater'sMarius the Epicurean, and Browning'sDramatis Personae. As I reflected, however, I came to the conclusion that such omission was but justice to his own individuality, for none of these books had created aninitiativein Narcissus' thought, but rather come, as, after all, I suppose they come to most of us, as great confirming expressions of states of mind at which he had already arrived, though, as it were, but by moonlight. In them was the sunrise bringing all into clear sight and sure knowledge.
It would seem, indeed, that the growth of the soul in the higher spirits of our race is analogous to the growth of a child in the womb, in this respect: that in each case the whole gamut of earlier types is run through, before the ultimate form is attained in which it is decreed that the particular vital energy shall culminate. And, as in the physical world the various 'halts,' so to say, of the progress are illustrated by the co-existence and continual succession of those earlier types; so in the world of mind, at every point of spiritual evolution, a man may meet with an historical individuality who is a concrete embodiment of the particular state to which he has just attained. This, of course, was what Goethe meant when he referred to mysticism as being a frame of mind which one could experience all round and then leave behind. To quote Whitman, in another connection:—
'We but level that liftTo pass and continue beyond.'
But an individuality must 'crystallise out' somewhere, and its final value will not so much depend on the number of states it has passed through, as how it has lived each on the way, with what depth of conviction and force of sincerity. For a modern young man to thus experience all round, and pass, and continue beyond where such great ones as St. Bernard, Pascal, and Swedenborg, have anchored their starry souls to shine thence upon men for all time, is no uncommon thing. It is more the rule than the exception: but one would hardly say that in going further they have gone higher, or ended greater. The footpath of pioneer individualism must inevitably become the highway of the race. Every American is not a Columbus.
There are two ways in which we may live our spiritual progress: as critics, or poets. Most men live theirs in that critical attitude which refuses to commit itself, which tastes all, but enjoys none; but the greatest in that earnest, final, rooted, creative, fashion which is the way of the poets. The one is as a man who spends his days passing from place to place in search of a dwelling to his mind, but dies at last in an inn, having known nought of the settled peace of a home; but the other, howsoever often he has to change his quarters, for howsoever short a time he may remain in any one of his resting-places, makes of each a home, with roots that shoot in a night to the foundations of the world, and blossomed branches that mingle with the stars.
Criticism is a good thing, but poetry is a better. Indeed, criticism properlyisnot; it is but a process to an end. We could really do without it much better than we imagine: for, after all, the question is not so muchhowwe live, butdowe live? Who would not a hundred times rather be a fruitful Parsee than a barrenphilosophe? Yes, all lies, of course, in original greatness of soul; and there is really no state of mind which is not like Hamlet's pipe—if we but know the 'touch of it,' 'it will discourse most eloquent music.'
Now, it was that great sincerity in Narcissus that has always made us take him so seriously. And here I would remark in parenthesis, that trivial surface insincerities, such as we have had glimpses of in his dealings, do not affect such a great organic sincerity as I am speaking of. They are excrescences, which the great central health will sooner or later clear away. It was because he never held an opinion to which he was not, when called upon, practically faithful; never dreamed a dream without at once setting about its translation into daylight; never professed a creed for a week without some essay after the realisation of its new ideal; it was because he had the power and the courage to glow mightily, and to some purpose; because his life had a fiery centre, which his eyes were not afraid of revealing—that I speak of his great sincerity, a great capacity for intense life. Shallow patterers of divine creeds were, therefore, most abhorrent to him. 'You must excuse me, sir,' I remember his once saying to such a one, 'but what are you doing with cigarette and salutaris? If I held such a belief as yours, I would stand sandalled, with a rope round my waist, before to-morrow.'
One quaint instance of this earnest attitude in all things occurs to me out of his schooldays. He was a Divine Right man, a fiery Jacobite, in those days; and, probably not without some absurd unconfessed dream in his heart that it might somehow help the dead old cause, he one afternoon fluttered the Hanoverian hearts—all the men we meet in street and mart are Hanoverians, of course—of our little literary club by solemnly rising 'to give notice' that at the following meeting he would read a paper to prove that 'the House of Hanover has no right to the English throne.' Great was the excitement through the fortnight intervening, extending even to the masters; and the meeting was a full one, and no little stormy.
Narcissus rose with the air of a condemned Strafford, and with all his boyish armoury of eloquence and scorn fought over again the long-lost battle, hiss and groan falling unheeded into the stream of his young voice. But vain, vain! hard is the Hanoverian heart in boy, as in man, and all your glowing periods were in vain—vain as, your peroration told us, 'was the blood of gallant hearts shed on Culloden's field.' Poor N., you had but one timorous supporter, even me, so early yourfidus Achates—but one against so many. Yet were you crestfallen? Galileo with his 'E pur si muove,' Disraeli with his 'The time will come,' wore such a mien as yours, as we turned from that well-foughten field. Yes! and you loved to take in earnest vague Hanoverian threats of possible arrest for your baby-treason, and, for some time, I know, you never passed a policeman without a dignified tremor, as of one who might at any moment find a lodging in the Tower.
But the most serious of all N.'s 'mad' enthusiasms was that of which the Reader has already received some hint, in the few paragraphs of his own confessions above, that which 'had almost sent him to the Himalayas.'
It belongs to natures like his always through life to cherish a half belief in their old fairy tales, and a longing, however late in the day, to prove them true at last. To many such the revelations with which Madame Blavatsky, as with some mystic trumpet, startled the Western world some years ago, must have come with most passionate appeal; and to Narcissus they came like a love arisen from the dead. Long before, he had 'supped full' of all the necromantic excitements that poet or romancer could give. Guy Mannering had introduced him to Lilly; Lytton and Hawthorne had sent him searching in many a musty folio for Elixir Vitas and the Stone. Like Scythrop, in 'Nightmare Abbey,' he had for a long period slept with horrid mysteries beneath his pillow. But suddenly his interest had faded: these phantoms fled before a rationalistic cock-crow, and Eugenius Philalethes and Robert Fludd went with Mejnour and Zanoni into a twilight forgetfulness. There was no hand to show the hidden way to the land that might be, and there were hands beckoning and voices calling him along the highway to the land that is. So, dream-light passing, he must, perforce, reconcile himself to daylight, with its dusty beam and its narrow horizons.
Judge, then, with what a leaping heart he chanced on some newspaper gossip concerning the sibyl, for it was so that he first stumbled across her mission. Ironical, indeed, that the so impossible 'key' to the mystery should come by the hand of 'our own correspondent'; but so it was, and that paragraph sold no small quantity of 'occult' literature for the next twelve months. Mr. Sinnett, doorkeeper in the house of Blavatsky, who, as a precaution against the vision of Bluebeards that the word Oriental is apt to conjure up in Western minds, is always dressed in the latest mode, and, so to say, offers his cigar-case along with some horrid mystery—it was to his prospectus of the new gospel, his really delightful pages, that Narcissus first applied. Then he entered within the gloomier Egyptian portals of theIsisitself, and from thence—well, in brief, he went in for a course of Redway, and little that figured in that gentleman's thrilling announcements was long in reaching his hands.
At last a day came when his eye fell upon a notice, couched in suitably mysterious terms, to the effect that really earnest seekers after divine truth might, after necessary probation, etc., join a brotherhood of such—which, it was darkly hinted, could give more than it dared promise. Up to this point Narcissus had been indecisive. He was, remember, quite in earnest, and to actually accept this new evangel meant to him—well, as he said, nothing less in the end than the Himalayas. Pending his decision, however, he had gradually developed a certain austerity, and experimented in vegetarianism; and though he was, oddly enough, free of amorous bond that might have held him to earth, yet he had grown to love it rather rootedly since the earlier days when he was a 'seeker.' Moreover, though he read much of 'The Path,' no actual Mejnour had yet been revealed to set his feet therein. But with this paragraph all indecision soon came to an end. He felt there a clear call, to neglect which would be to have seen the light and not to have followed it, ever for him the most tragic error to be made in life. His natural predisposition towards it was too great for him to do other than trust this new revelation; and now he must gird himself for 'the sacrifice which truth always demands.'
But, sacrifice! of what and for what? An undefined social warmth he was beginning to feel in the world, some meretricious ambition, and a great friendship—to which in the long run would he not be all the truer by the great new power he was to win? If hand might no longer spring to hand, and friendship vie in little daily acts of brotherhood, might he not, afar on his mountain-top, keep loving watch with clearer eyes upon the dear life he had left behind, and be its vigilant fate? Surely! and there was nothing worth in life that would not gain by such a devotion. All life's good was of the spirit, and to give that a clearer shining, even in one soul, must help the rest. For if its light, shining, as now, through the grimy horn-lantern of the body, in narrow lanes and along the miasmatic flats of the world, even so helped men, how much more must it, rising above that earthly fume, in a hidden corner no longer, but in the open heaven, a star above the city. Sacrifice! yes, it was just such a tug as a man in the dark warmth of morning sleep feels it to leave the pillow. The mountain-tops of morning gleam cold and bare: but O! when, staff in hand, he is out amid the dew, the larks rising like fountains above him, the gorse bright as a golden fleece on the hill-side, and all the world a shining singing vision, what thought of the lost warmth then? What warmth were not well lost for this keen exhilarated sense in every nerve, in limb, in eye, in brain? What potion has sleep like this crystalline air it almost takes one's breath to drink, of such a maddening chastity is its grot-cool sparkle? What intoxication can she give us for this larger better rapture? So did Narcissus, an old Son of the Morning, figure to himself the struggle, and pronounce 'the world well lost.'
But I feel as I write how little I can give the Reader of all the 'splendid purpose in his eyes' as he made this resolve. Perhaps I am the less able to do so as—let me confess—I also shared his dream. One could hardly come near him without, in some measure, doing that at all times; though with me it could only be a dream, for I was not free. I had Scriptural example to plead 'Therefore I cannot come,' though in any case I fear I should have held back, for I had no such creative instinct for realisation as Narcissus, and have, I fear, dreamed many a dream I had not the courage even to think of clothing in flesh and blood; like, may I say, the many who are poets for all save song—poets in chrysalis, all those who dream of what some do, and make the audience of those great articulate ones. But there were one or two trifling doubts to set at rest before final decision. The Reader has greatly misconceived Narcissus if he has deemed him one of those simple souls whom any quack can gull, and the good faith of this mysterious fraternity was a difficult point to settle. A tentative application through the address given, an appropriatenom de mystère, had introduced the ugly detail of preliminary expenses. Divine truth has to pay its postage, its rent, its taxes, and so on; and the 'guru' feeds not on air—although, of course, being a 'guru,' he comes as near it as the flesh will allow: therefore, and surely, Reader, a guinea per annum is, after all, reasonable enough. Suspect as much as one will, but how gainsay? Also, before the applicant could be admitted to noviciate even, his horoscope must be cast, and—well, the poor astrologer also needed bread and—no! not butter—five shillings for all his calculations, circles, and significations—well, that again was only reasonable. H'm, ye-e-s, but it was dubious; and, mad as we were, I don't think we ever got outside that dubiety, but made up our minds, like other converts, to gulp the primary postulate, and pay the twenty-six shillings. From the first, however, Narcissus had never actually entrusted all his spiritual venture in this particular craft: he saw the truth independent of them, not they alone held her for him, though she might hold them, and they might be that one of the many avenues for which he had waited to lead him nearer to her heart. That was all. His belief in the new illumination neither stood nor fell with them, though his ardour for it culminated in the experience. One must take the most doubtful experiment seriously if we are in earnest for results.
So next came the sacred name of 'the Order,' which, Reader, I cannot tell thee, as I have never known it, Narcissus being bound by horrid oaths to whisper it to no man, and to burn at midnight the paper which gave it to his eyes. From this time, also, we could exchange no deep confidences of the kind at all, for the various MSS. by means of which he was to begin his excursions into Urania, and which his 'guru' sent from time to time—at first, it must be admitted, with a diligent frequency—were secret too. So several months went by, and my knowledge of his 'chela-ship' was confined to what I could notice, and such trifling harmless gossip as 'Heard from "guru" this morning,' 'Copying an old MS. last night,' and so on. What I could notice was truly, as Lamb would say, 'great mastery,' for lo! Narcissus, whose eyes had never missed a maiden since he could walk, and lay in wait to wrest his tribute of glance and blush from every one that passed, lo! he had changed all that, and Saint Anthony in an old master looks not more resolutely 'the other way' than he, his very thoughts crushing his flesh with invisible pincers. No more softly-scented missives lie upon his desk a-mornings; and, instead of blowing out the candle to dream of Daffodilia, he opens his eyes in the dark to defy—the Dweller on the Threshold, if haply he should indeed already confront him.
One thrilling piece of news in regard to the latter he was unable to conceal. He read it out to me one flushed morning:—
'I—have—seen—him—and—am—his—master,'
wrote the 'guru,' in answer to his neophyte's half fearful question. Fitly underlined and sufficiently spaced, it was a statement calculated to awe, if only by its mendacity. I wonder if that chapter of Bulwer's would impress one now as it used to do then. It were better, perhaps, not to try.
The next news of these mysteries was the conclusion of them. When so darkly esoteric a body begins to issue an extremely catchpenny 'organ,' with advertisements of theosophic 'developers,' magic mirrors, and mesmeric discs, and also advertises large copies of the dread symbol of the Order, 'suitable for framing,' at five shillings plain and seven and sixpence coloured, it is, of course, impossible to take it seriously, except in view of a police-court process, and one is evidently in the hands of very poor bunglers indeed. Such was the new departure in propaganda instituted by a little magazine, mean in appearance, as the mouthpieces of all despised 'isms' seem to be, with the first number of which, need one say, ended Narcissus' ascent of 'The Path.' I don't think he was deeply sad at being disillusionised. Unconsciously a broader philosophy had slowly been undermining his position, and all was ready for the fall. It cost no such struggle to return to the world as it had taken to leave it, for the poet had overgrown the philosopher, and the open mystery of the common day was already exercising an appeal beyond that of any melodramatic 'arcana.' Of course the period left its mark upon him, but it is most conspicuous upon his bookshelves.