Confessions of a Book-Lover Part 4

The old wine filled him, and he saw, with eyes Anoint of Nature, fauns and dryads fair Unseen by others; to him maidenhair And waxen lilacs, and those birds that rise A-sudden from tall reeds at slight surprise, Brought charmed thoughts; and in earth everywhere He, like sad Jacques, found a music rare As that of Syrinx to old Grecians wise.

A pagan heart, a Christian soul had he: He followed Christ, yet for dead Pan he sighed, Till earth and heaven met within his breast; As if Theocritus in Sicily Had come upon the Figure crucified And lost his G.o.ds in deep, Christ given rest.

I found, too, satisfaction of the taste which Hamerton had corroborated, in Eugenie de Guerin's little sketches of outdoor scenery--sketches which always have a human interest. I had not yet begun to take any pleasure in Wordsworth; and, in fact, all the poets who seemed to be able to enjoy nature for itself--nature unrelieved or unimproved by human figures--had no attractions for me. And here the dear Edward Roth came in, and confirmed my taste. And there were heavy arguments with other clever Philadelphians, Doctor Nolan, the scientist who loved letters, and that amateur of literature, Charles Devenny.

As for Pope and his school, they seemed to represent an aspect of the world as unreal as the world of Watteau, and with much less excuse; but pictures of the kind I found in the "Journal" of Eugenie de Guerin had a living charm. At this time, I had not seen Matthew Arnold's paper on Maurice de Guerin, and I did not know that any appreciation of his sister had been written in English. I had seen a paragraph or two written by some third-rate person who objected to her piety as sentimental, and incomprehensible to the "Anglo-Saxon" world! That her piety should be sentimental, if Eugenie's sentiment can be characterized by that term, seemed to me to be questionable; and it was evident that any one who read French literature at all must be aware that there were hundreds of beautiful sentiments and phrases which the average "Anglo-Saxon" world found it impossible to comprehend.

The beloved home of Eugenie, La Cayla, was not a gay place. It was even more circ.u.mscribed than Miss Mitford's "Village"; but Eugenie, being less "Anglo-Saxon" than Miss Mitford, had more sentiment and a more sensitive perception of the meaning of nature--though, when it comes to sentimentalism, the English man or woman, who often masquerades under the shelter of "Anglo-Saxonism," is as sentimental as the most sentimental of sentimentalists. This is what I mean by the landscape charm of Eugenie de Guerin, and yet the picture in this case is not a landscape, but the interior of a room:

I was admiring just now a little landscape, presented by my room, as it was being illuminated with the rising sun. How pretty it was!

Never did I see a more beautiful effect of light on the paper, thrown through painted trees. It was diaphanous, transparent. It was almost wasted on my eyes; it ought to have been seen by a painter. And yet does not G.o.d create the beautiful for everybody?

All our birds were singing this morning while I was at my prayers.

This accompaniment pleases me, though it distracts me a little. I stop to listen; then I begin again, thinking that the birds and I are alike singing a hymn to G.o.d, and that, perhaps, those little creatures sing better than I. But the charm of prayer, the charm of communion with G.o.d, they cannot enjoy that; one must have a soul to feel it. This happiness that the birds have not is mine. It is sorrow. How little time is needed for that. The joy comes from the sun, the mild air, the song of birds, all delights to me; as well as from a letter of Mimi's (who is now at Gaillac), in which she tells me of Madame Vialar, who has seen thee, and of other cheerful things.

And again:

However, I had a delightful waking this morning. As I was opening my eyes a lovely moon faced my window, and shone into my bed, so brightly that at first I thought it was a lamp suspended to my shutter. It was very sweet and pretty to look at this white light, and so I contemplated, admired, watched it till it hid itself behind the shutter to peep out again, and then conceal itself like a child playing at hide-and-seek.

Emerson tried to teach us that there can be infinite beauties in a little s.p.a.ce--untold joys within a day--and he asks us to take short outlooks. Saint Teresa and Saint Francis de Sales were before him in this; but Eugenie de Guerin exemplifies its value much more than any other modern writer. Her soul was often sad, but it never ceased to find joy in the little happinesses of life. In our country, we are losing this faculty which the best of the later New Englanders tried to recover. It is a pity because it deprives us of the real _joie de vivre_ which is not dependent on ecstasies of restless emotions or violent amus.e.m.e.nts.

The devotion of Eugenie de Guerin to her brother resembles that of Madame de Sevigne for her daughter, the peerless Pauline. It was George Sand who discovered the genius of that brother, though her characterization of the qualities of his genius did not please the Christian soul of his sister. It was left to Sainte-Beuve to fix De Guerin's place in French literature; and I recall now that the reading of Sainte-Beuve led me to find the poems of David Gray, now probably forgotten, and to go back to Keats.

After Maurice de Guerin's "Le Centaure" I found Keats even less Greek than I thought he was, because he was less philosophical than De Guerin, and because he did not concern himself with the gravest questions of life; but, after all, Keats is the poet for the poets!

My dear friend, Edward Roth--whom James Huneker celebrates in his "Steeplejack"--named Spenser as "the poet of the poets"; but Spenser is too hard to read--even harder than Chaucer, and certainly more involved, while no poets that ever lived can make pictures so glowing, so full of a sensitive and exquisite light as Keats. Later, it seemed absurd for the French poets of a certain _genre_ to call themselves symbolists.

When Keats wrote, he saw and felt, and he saw because he felt. It was not necessary for him to search laboriously for the colour of a word.

The thing itself coloured the word--and Keats, working hard in a verbal laboratory, would have been an anomaly. It was not necessary for him to study carefully the music of his verse as Campion did or Coventry Patmore or as Sidney Lanier is supposed to have done--though one cannot have suspected that Sidney Lanier's elaborate laboratory was erected after his best verse had been written.

Maurice de Guerin, a very Christian soul, was probably disturbed in his religious sentiments by the defection of his old friend and director, Pere de Lamennais--the "M. Feli" of the little paradise of la Chenie. To the delight of some of the more independent and emanc.i.p.ated of the literary circle at Paris, which included George Sand, Maurice was becoming more pantheistic than Christian. He seemed to have tried to make for humanity an altar on which Christ and Nature might be almost equally adored, and this gave Eugenie great pain, although it did not change her love or make a rift in her belief in him.

De Guerin is a singing poet in a language which is used by few singing poets for serious themes. There are few lyric poems in French, like the "Chanson de Fortunio" of Alfred de Musset. It was not strange that the great Sainte-Beuve found the verse of De Guerin somewhat too unusual.

Sainte-Beuve calls it "the familiar Alexandrine reduced to a conversational tone, and taking all the little turns of an intimate talk." Eugenie complains that "it sings too much and does not talk enough." However, one of the most charming of literary essays, to which Matthew Arnold's seems almost "common," is that preceding Trebutien's "Journals, Letters, and Poems of Maurice de Guerin." It would be folly for me to try to permeate the mind of any other person with the atmosphere which still palpitates in me when I think of the first delight of reading at leisure the poems of Maurice and the letters of Eugenie. I might just as well attempt to make a young man of our time feel the thrill that came when we were young and first heard the most beautiful of all love songs--"Come into the Garden, Maud!"

One can hear the amazed laughter, the superior giggles that would arise from a group of Greenwich Villagers if they did me the honour to read this page; but the real Quartier Latin has better taste and is not so imitative--and paraphrases of this lovely lyric still find admirers in the gardens of the Luxembourg and on the heights of Montmartre.

Tennyson, like De Guerin, had bent the old cla.s.sic form to newer usage, and one can hardly help seeing, in spite of the fact that the admirers of Swinburne claim this laurel for him, that Tennyson discovered the secret of making lyrical verse musical while discarding rime. Both Maurice de Guerin and Tennyson, who have superficial characteristics in common, send us back to Theocritus, the most human, the most lyrical, the most unaffectedly pagan of all the poets who wrote before Pan said his despairing good-bye to all the Grecian Isles. But what a mixture is this!--Maurice and Eugenie de Guerin, Keats, Madame de Sevigne, Theocritus, and Tennyson, the Elizabethan Campion--and yet they are all related.

In fact, ladies and gentlemen, I have never read any good book that was not related intimately to at least a score of other books. It is true that in a measure a book gives to us what we take to it; and we can only take much out of it when we approach the group of ministering authors who alone make life both cheerful and endurable.

The received methods of "teaching" the cla.s.sics in what people call "the dead languages" nearly always weaken the faculties of the soul, while they may develop certain hidden abilities of the mind. This favourite process of pedagogues very often defeats itself. Mr. Edward Roth honestly believed that the Roman Empire had risen, declined, and fallen in order that the Latin language might live! The logical result of this teaching on the eager young mind, at once logical, ductile, and obstinate, was to induce it to discover something about the Roman Empire, in order that it might cease to yawn over the declensions, and to be bored by prosody; to discover why the glorious Empire had lived and died in order to produce an elaborate mound of charred bones! Mr.

Roth himself, though a cla.s.sicist of the cla.s.sicists, managed to make the Romans interesting in conversation; he always impressed one that the Roman baths, or the chariot races, or the banquets, which he admitted were full of colour and life, were by comparison faded and pale in the glow and aroma of the sentences invented by the Latins to describe them!

The impossibility of getting anything out of the study of Greek by hard work, sent me, after I had read Maurice de Guerin's "Centaure," to read joyously an edition of the "Idyls of Theocritus" in French. While browsing I found on the shelves of the Mercantile Library the novels of Tourgueneff in the same language. This delayed me a little. I found Theocritus and Bion and Moschus in the Bohn Edition, which I think has now become the beneficent "Everyman's Library." I revelled! The Mimes of Herondas had not yet been discovered, but some of the dialogues in these poems contained all the best of their essences. My friends among the hard workers at the "Cla.s.sics" scorned me. The elderly gentleman from Oxford who gave us lessons three or four times a week and held that, when we were able to translate at sight a certain page of Greek which he had composed himself from various great authors, that we were perfect, treated me as a pariah; but that made no difference. I continued, in merciful leisure, to saturate myself in the golden glow of the Sicilian poets. I tried hard to express my devotion to Theocritus by paraphrases, very slightly from the original Greek, mostly from the French, and partly from the Bohn Edition. I quote a result which Mr. Edmund Clarence Stedman said was too paraphrastic. It is from the "Cyclops":

Softer than lambs and whiter than the curds, O Galatea, swan-nymph of the sea!

Vain is my longing, worthless are my words; Why do you come in night's sweet dreams to me, And when I wake, swift leave me, as in fear The lambkin hastens when a wolf is near?

Why did my mother on a dark-bright day Bring you, for hyacinths, a-near my cave?

I was the guide, and through the tangled way I thoughtless led you; I am now your slave.

Peace left my soul when you knocked at my heart-- Come, Galatea, never to depart!

Though I am dark and ugly to the sight-- A Cyclops I, and stronger there are few-- Of you I dream through all the quick-paced night, And in the morn ten fawns I feed for you, And four young bears: O rise from grots below, Soft love and peace with me forever know!

Last night I dreamed that I, a monster gilled, Swam in the sea and saw you singing there: I gave you lilies and your grotto filled With the sweet odours of all flowers rare; I gave you apples, as I kissed your hand, And reddest poppies from my richest land.

Oh, brave the restless billows of your world: They toss and tremble; see my cypress-grove, And bending laurels, and the tendrils curled Of honeyed grapes, and a fresh treasure-trove In vine-crowned aetna, of pure-running rills!

O Galatea, kill the scorn that kills!

Softer than lambs and whiter than the curds, O Galatea, listen to my prayer: Come, come to land, and hear the song of birds; Rise, rise, from ocean-depths, as lily-fair As you are in my dreams! Come, then, O Sleep, For you alone can bring her from the deep.

And Galatea, in her cool, green waves, Plaits her long hair with purple flower-bells, And laughs and sings, while black-browed Cyclops raves And to the wind his love-lorn story tells: For well she knows that Cyclops will ere long Forget, as poets do, his pain in song.

No sensitive mind can dwell on Theocritus, even when interpreted in English prose, without feeling something of the joy of the old Syracusan in life. His human nature is of the kind that makes the nymphs and swains of Alexander Pope dull and artificial. There are flies in this delicious ointment, one must admit, touches of corruption which a degenerate paganism condoned and palliated, but we must remember, as an extenuation of the Greek att.i.tude, that the oracle of Delphi protested against them. The cyprus plains of Theocritus yet echo with the call of the cicada, and the anemones still bloom. The pipes of Pan are not all silent. The world would lose some of its beauty if Theocritus and the Sicilian poets did not entice us to hear their echoes.

But to how many links of a long chain does Maurice de Guerin lead us!

Here is another link--Jose de Heredia, and his jewelled and chiselled sonnets--the "Antique Medal" with its peerless sestette, which combines the essential meanings of Keats's "Ode to a Grecian Urn."

_Le temps pa.s.se. Tout meurt. Le marbre meme s'use.

Argrigente n'est plus qu'une ombre, et Syracuse Dort sous le bleu linceul de son ciel indulgent;_

_Et seul le dur metal que l'amour fit docile Garde encore en sa fleur, aux medailles d'argent, L'immortelle beaute des vierges de Sicile."_

A translation of which reads:

Time goes; all dies; marble itself decays; A shadow Agrigentum; Syracuse Sleeps, still in death, beneath her kind sky's shades; But the hard metal guards through all the days, Silver grown docile unto love's own use, The immortal beauty of Sicilian maids.

I always felt that Dante would have been less devoted to Virgil had he known Theocritus. The artificial Roman seems faded when one compares his rural elegies with the lovely pictures of the first of all the Syracusan poets. Horatius Flaccus had more of the quality of Theocritus than of Virgil; and though Virgil might have been a good guide for Dante in his sublime wanderings, he was a guide of the intellect rather than of the heart. It requires some courage, perhaps, to confess that one reads Theocritus in English rather than in Greek. The French rendering is too paraphrastic; but, although my cla.s.sical friends, or rather my friends _enrage_ of the "Cla.s.sics," honestly despise me for making this confession, I shamelessly enjoy Theocritus in the Bohn Edition, without even using it as a "crib" to the forgotten Greek text rather than begin a course of Grecian philology and to lose the perfume of the crushed thyme or the sight of the competing shepherds on the shrub-dotted prairie.

_Dante_

A constant reader is one who always returns to his first loves. He may find them changed because he has changed; but the soul of that reader is dead who never goes back to "Ivanhoe" to renew the thrill of the famous tournament or to discover whether Leather Stocking is the superman he once seemed to be. I find myself, in old age, divided between two conflicting opinions. "There is no leisure in this country," I am told.

"A great change has taken place. The motor car has destroyed the art of reading, and, as for the good old books--n.o.body reads them any more." On the other hand, I hear, "People do read, but they read only frivolous books which follow one another like the hot-cakes made at noon in the windows of Mr. Child's restaurants."

Personally, I cannot accept either opinion. In the first place, the winter is the time for reading--I recall Robert Underwood Johnson's "Winter Hour" when I think of this--and the motor car, especially in country places, does not function violently in the winter time. Many journeys from Boston, through New England, to the Middle West have taught me that folk are reading and discussing books more than ever.

Whatever may be said of the ma.s.s of American people, who are probably learning slowly what national culture means, there are at the top of this ma.s.s thousands of Americans who love good books, who possess good books, and who return each year to the loves of their youth.

The celebration of the sixth centenary of the death of Dante Alighieri proves this. It is true enough that Dante and Goethe and Milton are more talked about in English-speaking countries than read, and when the enthusiasm awakened in honour of the great Florentine reached its height, there were found many people in our country who were quite capable of asking why Dante should be read.

Looking back I found it easy to answer this question myself, for, perhaps, beginning with a little gentle aversion to the English rimed translations of the "Divine Comedy," my love for Dante has been a slow growth. The Dante specialists discourage us with their learning. There are few who, like Mr. Plimpton, can lucidly expose the foundations of the educations of Dante to us without frightening us by the sight of a wall of impregnable erudition. Naturally, one cannot approach Dante in order to begin an education in the Middle Ages and the Renascence which one never began in one's own time; but to be consoled by Dante it is not necessary to be erudite. In fact, to the mind bent on spiritual enlightenment, the notes of the erudite, above all, the conjectures of the erudite, are frequently wrong. Even Israel Gollancz, in his three valuable volumes in the Temple Edition, nods over his notes occasionally. And by the way, for all amateurs in the reading of the "Divine Comedy" nothing can be better than this Temple Edition, which contains the Italian on one page and a lucid prose translation into English on the next. As I grew older I grew more and more enamoured of Longfellow's Dantean Sonnets, but not of his translation, for all rime translations must be one half, at least, the author and the other half the translator. Gollancz is best for anybody who does not enjoy poetic _tours de force_.

In his note on the most popular lines in the "Divine Comedy,"

_Nessun maggior dolors, che ricordarsi del tempo felice nella miseria;_

Gollancz says:

Although these words are translated literally from Boethius, and although we know that Dante had made a special study of Boethius, yet we cannot well identify the _dottore_ with this philosopher: for how can we be expected to a.s.sume that Francesca was acquainted with these two facts? The reference is probably to Virgil, and to his position in Limbo.

Into this Limbo Christ descended fifty-two years after Virgil's death and drew certain souls up with him to Heaven. We are, however, by no means certain that Virgil was happier on earth than he was "upon the green enamel" (_verde smalto_) in this place of quiet leisure which was the vestibule to h.e.l.l, but not h.e.l.l itself, and which, to some chosen souls, had already been a vestibule to the Palace of the Beatific Vision. If Dante had been translated in the old days of rigid Calvinism in Scotland and New England, his tolerance of the pagans who found parts of h.e.l.l not entirely uncomfortable would have caused him to be looked on as a corruptor of the faith. But what would they have said to the "Paradiso" which I have always found more full of consolation than any sermon that was ever preached? Let us take the description of the Church Triumphant in Canto x.x.xII. How sweetly Dante disposes of the heresy that all children unbaptized by material water are doomed: