Atlantic Classics Volume Ii Part 16

Embrouded was he, as it were a mede All full of fresshe floures, white and red.

Singing he was, or floyting all the day.

He was as fresshe as is the moneth of May.

In his most delicate descriptions one feels the presence as of a breaking light, and the birds seem forever to sing in his green coverts.

It is the dawn and early morning of the year not less which is dear to him--and which he has chosen, perhaps by an election not wholly his own, as the season in which to order and a.s.semble his famous pilgrimage.

When that Aprille with his schowres swoote The drought of Marche hath pierced to the roote

Then longen folke to gon on pilgrimages.

And so, out into the dawn of the year they go, making an immortal morning of it.

IV

Two more lives suggest themselves as especially rich in the testimony they bring of haunting influences which permanently moulded them--those of Keats and Rossetti.

It is well known how completely the early life of Rossetti came under the influence of the Florence of the Middle Ages, and how from the very beginning there fell athwart his life and across his very name the shadow of her greatest son. It is doubtful whether we gain as much knowledge of him by a study of the modern times in which he lived, as by turning our attention to the history and ideals of the Florence of the time of Dante and Lorenzo de' Medici.

'It has been said,' writes Pater, 'that all the great Florentines were preoccupied with death. _Outre-tombe! Outre-tombe!_ is the burden of their thoughts, from Dante to Savonarola. Even the gay and licentious Boccaccio gives a keener edge to his stories by putting them in the mouths of a party of people who had taken refuge from the danger of death by plague, in a country house. It was to this inherited sentiment, this practical decision that to be preoccupied with the thought of death was in itself dignifying and a note of high quality, that the seriousness of the great Florentines of the fifteenth century was partly due; and it was reinforced in them by the actual sorrows of their times.'

A careful study of Rossetti reveals him also, like them, early and profoundly preoccupied with death. The richly lighted chambers of his mind are in their dark moments visited repeatedly by its pity and its melancholy. s.p.a.ce does not admit of citing here the many evidences; but if ever a mind was visited, preoccupied, and at last mastered by a strong idea, a dominant persuasion, the mind of Dante Gabriel Rossetti was so haunted--so dominated--by the idea of death.

When we turn to Keats's life and writings, they offer examples hardly less notable. For as Rossetti was haunted by the idea of death, so Keats would seem from the first to have been preoccupied by the idea of beauty. By his own memorable confession he had wors.h.i.+ped the spirit of it in all things; he has not the slightest feeling of humility, he says, toward anything in existence with three exceptions only: The Eternal Being, the Memory of Great Men, and the Principle of Beauty.

There is further and ample evidence throughout his writings that he was perpetually possessed by certain definite forms of beauty: by the beauty of mead and moon, the wash of waters at their priestly task, the splendor of the night's starred face; but very especially and more often, it would seem, was he haunted by that most intimate and tangible of all lovelinesses--the loveliness of flowers.

There is constant reference to them, a constant recurring delight in them. Their influence again and again visited him and pervaded his most delicate observations. The memory of flowers again and again laid a detaining hand upon him, and must have ministered to him unrecorded in how many a night hour, mindful, reminiscential, with what gentle ministerings!

They bloom in his lines everywhere, familiar as the name of the beloved on the lips. It will be recalled that they stand among those things of beauty which he names with so much devotion as 'joys forever'; 'daffodils, with the green world they live in' shedding an ethereal sunlight across the more sombre beauty of 'the dooms we have imagined for the mighty dead.'

So, too, 'hushed cool rooted flowers, fragrant-eyed,' touch his memory with an ever-freshening sensibility. The greatest pleasure he has experienced in life, he tells us, is in watching the growth of flowers; and to him--as Hazlitt recalls--Hebrew poetry was faulty because it made so little mention of them; and for the converse reason, it would seem likely, Chaucer and Spenser were forever his delight.

What he specially longs for now, he writes,--he has been ill, and is within a year of his death,--is 'the simple flowers of Spring.'

In the same letter we get a glimpse of certain early personal a.s.sociations not fully followed, which would seem to lend an added loveliness to flowers which he had always found in themselves so lovely.

'How astonis.h.i.+ngly,' he writes, ' ...does the chance of leaving the world impress a sense of its natural beauties upon us! Like poor Falstaff, though I do not "babble," I think of green fields; I muse with the greatest affection on every flower I have known from my infancy--their shapes and colors are as new to me as if I had just created them with a superhuman fancy. It is because they are connected with the most thoughtless and happiest moments of our lives. I have seen foreign flowers in hothouses, of the most beautiful nature, but I do not care a straw for them. The simple flowers of our Spring are what I want to see again!'

He did see them once again, and then no more.

In the account of his drive to Rome, he who reads sympathetically must enjoy most, it seems to me, as doubtless Keats did, the autumn flowers which Severn gathered for him by the way and put into his remembering hand.

Lying quiet at the last, as Severn tells us, with his hand clasped on the white carnelian f.a.n.n.y Brawne had given him, when all other presences seemed to have departed from him,--Love and Ambition having for the last time visited him,--and when life itself, with her hand already on the latch, stood ready to depart, there lingered yet awhile beside him that old sense of loveliness that had so often, even from earliest infancy, visited and haunted his spirit--the loveliness and friendliness of flowers. Already, in some vision of his spirit, he was laid down in their green world he knew so well and loved. 'I feel,' he said, 'the flowers growing over me.'

V

The observations I have suggested are here touched on but lightly, and in pa.s.sing. I have made no profound study of them, or of the infinitely subtle psychology which, without doubt, underlies such hauntings of the spirit. I have but known these men from childhood and from early youth: have watched with them in many watchings. If there be one boast left me when I also shall go down into the darkness to which they have so long lent splendor, it may well be that these I have loved and have cherished with a whole heart, and would have served them if I could, than Horatio not less eager: 'Here, sweet lord, at your service.'

But be all that as it may, I am yet persuaded that it is by some such means as I have here touched on that all biography of the better sort must in time be written. Turn where we will among the great, we find facts of date and birth and schooling and death and all outward circ.u.mstance to have been the lesser factors. All these Time at last--the only lastingly considerable biographer--rejects and throws away. That which Time retains as precious and imperishable is rather some fine essence of the spirit, some essential personality built up and moulded by preferences, predilections, and prepossessions of a most highly spiritual order. The loves, the desires, the dear delights of men; the returning dreams, the recurrent longings that will not be gainsaid; the dead and long-lost dreamings that revisit the glimpses of our moon--these are indeed the spirits of us, and our immortalities.

Nor is it only as aids to a more just a.n.a.lysis of the great that these infinitely subtle influences may be considered. _Plus on connait de langues plus on est de personnes_. If the knowledge of another language gives one another life, as it were,--makes of one yet another person,--what may not be said to be added unto us by the knowledge--not the mere speculation, but the intimate knowledge--of another soul, and that soul one of the great ones of the earth?

This can be had only by an intimate companions.h.i.+p, not with the mere flagrant facts, but with the spiritual visitings, the dear desires and predilections, which haunt all rich lives significantly, perpetually, even as they haunt life itself.

For life is but an infinitely ancient abode, haunted by recurring presences surpa.s.singly spiritual; as he knows who has seen death pa.s.s in and out of the ancient chambers in the night watches, or who has heard the autumn rains how reminiscent in patient woodlands, or who has been aware of lovely springs long-gone keeping tryst at certain seasons with the evening star in the twilight, or has felt them stealing back, ghostly and exquisite, when the April crescent hangs thoughtful and remote above dark apple-boughs.

In life as in lives, the presences move dark and dread or s.h.i.+ning and lovely; and in the lives of the great as in life itself the s.h.i.+ning and lovely would seem to be the more constant visitants. It is not to be forgotten that, though Banquo knocks his fearful summons, and the murdered Dane speaks with hollow mouthings, yet drifting forms dance no less gayly and delicately on midsummer nights in woodsy hollows by the moon.

It is noteworthy and remarkable that even those among the great whose lives have been sombre with tragedy have been visited--indeed they often more than others--by recurring influences of a most haunting beauty, like Beethoven, who with ears dull yet heard high symphonies, and Milton, who with sight closed to all outward loveliness saw yet in the darkened chambers a vision as of squadrons of bright-harnessed angels ranged in order serviceable, and knew the pastures and the silent woods to be full of sweet voices and light steps:--

Oh, friend, I hear the tread of nimble feet, Hasting this way!

It is of all such haunting and recurrent presences, be they dread or lovely, that he who most knows life is most aware, and that he who would know the lives of great men must be most sensitively observant.

These are the things that must be watched for faithfully and with a whole heart and a single devotion: 'Here, sweet lord, at your service!'

Leaving all prejudice or interest of our own, it is for us, in studying the lives of great men, to make their affair ours as wholly as may be; and to forget ourselves in a knowledge so much more dearly to be desired.

And by no means, I believe, may this be done so surely as by a patient study of those high elections, those persistent hauntings of mind and spirit which have influenced and, it may be, in so large a measure directed the lives of all great men; giving their mind its bent, their personality its leanings; often guiding, it must be, their motives, and suggesting their high behaviors; laying upon them, as the ghost upon Hamlet, purposes and duties thence never to be avoided, inevitably to be discharged; lending to their speech its lovely and broidered figures, or to the work of the hand its so memorable distinctions, and to all their activities that which we call 'characteristic'--something particularly and peculiarly their own; some chosen and essential and precious manner of expression which, mortal though they be, lives on, surviving them; and which is not to be found elsewhere in its kind or measure throughout all the rich and inexhaustible ages.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

The Acropolis and Golgotha

By Anne C. E. Allinson

The following letters contain a true record of a mind's journey.

ATHENS, _May 1, 1914_.

MY DEAR FRIEND:--

We drove in from Eleusis this afternoon, once more breathlessly watching the Acropolis offer its white and golden marbles to adornment by the setting sun. Our Greek winter is drawing to an end and this was our good-bye visit to the Mysteries. How clear and lucid the beauty of the place seemed to-day, from the brightness of the sea and the firm modeling of the mountains to the bloom of the placated earth! Demeter and Persephone were evidently together in safety, the mystery of the unseen forgotten in the palpable joy of life restored.

On our way back we stopped, of course, at the Convent of Daphne, to make ourselves tea in the sunlit courtyard, and to take one more look at the Byzantine mosaics. I confess that this time they seemed to me quaint bits of the wreckage of mediaevalism cast upon the sh.o.r.e of h.e.l.lenism.

If the mediaeval part of Christianity is as inextricable as you say it is, then I will grant you that 'Christian thought' is an outworn system compared with the immortal mind of Greece. As we crossed the bridge over the Cephisus, the Parthenon, which is far more mutilated than the little convent, once more sent abroad from broken colonnades and crumbling pediments the impression that some perennial spirit and undying vitality had, indeed, as Plutarch once suggested, mingled in its very composition. The Shrine of Wisdom seemed to take up and weld together all the mysticism and all the rationalism of the world.

Was it really ten years ago that I wrote to you after such another journey along the Sacred Way? And ten more still since I last saw you at the little station of Eleusis? You were going back to Patras to take s.h.i.+p for Italy, and we--and those others--had ended an afternoon spent among the ruins by speculating on

those great nights of Demeter, Mystical, holy.

I remember how sure you were that the wilder ideas in the Mysteries, which allowed for the redeeming death of G.o.ds and over-stated immortality, were but vagrants in the ordered area of Greek reason and sanity. Somebody older and wiser than I began to appeal to Plato on behalf of Greek transcendentalism, but you retorted that he was only the most disorderly vagabond of them all. Then your train clattered into the toy station, and you held my hand for a moment and said with a kind smile, '_Au revoir, pet.i.te savante, icibas_.'