Atlantic Classics Volume Ii Part 15

Certain biographical facts are, it would seem, expected and provided.

These facts the average biographer sets out in a perfectly conventional order, somewhat as the host of the conventional inn--I hope I may be forgiven the comparison--sets out the usual _table d'hote_ in certain courses time-honored and antic.i.p.ated. If the biographer is a well-known man,--if this be at the sign of Chesterton, or Colvin, or Birrell, or Gosse,--then there will be added, without extra cost, the sprightly light wine of easy style.

In a well-known biography of Hawthorne we have for chapter t.i.tles the following: 'Early Years'; 'Early Manhood'; 'Early Writings'; 'Brook Farm and Concord'; 'The Three American Novels'; 'England and Italy'; 'Last Years.'

In an equally well-known life of Keats,--and in lieu of something better it is perhaps the least unsatisfactory of them all,--we have, among other page and chapter headings: 'Leigh Hunt'; 'Determination to Publish'; 'Poems of 1817'; 'Margate'; 'Winter at Hampstead'; 'Doubts of Success'; 'Northern Tour'; 'Absorption in Love and Poetry'; 'Haydon and Money Difficulties'; 'The Odes'; 'The Plays'; 'Recast of Hyperion'; 'Last Days and Death.' It is true that there comes a whole chapter at the very last, under the promising t.i.tle, 'Character and Genius'; but reading it hopefully, one finds but talk of 'self-control,' 'sweetness of disposition' 'sympathy,' 'good sense,' 'honor,' 'manliness'--with a somewhat hackneyed reference to the Greek purity and the mediaeval richness of imagery which characterize Keat's poetry, and a few words concerning his influence on a later age.

Now, considering the vivid and marvelous personality of the man, if these be not the bare bones and laboratory skeletons of biography, then I do not know bare bones or skeletons when I have sight of them.

No one questions that these are helpful if one is studying anatomy; that they may even be admitted as necessary to an understanding of that timely temple of abode in which the fiery spirit for a while took up its residence; but to call this a 'life' of the man, which gives so little knowledge of his spirit's habits of living!

If I turn to a little volume of Sh.e.l.ley on my table, where only eighteen small pages out of five hundred and ninety-two are devoted, as it happens, to the same subject, and only at that to the closing incident of Keats's career,--his untimely death,--I find him spoken of in somewhat more adequate fashion.

I shall not quote the words metred out in verse, as they stand in the volume, but shall ask to be allowed to set them down as if they were mere running prose, as follows:--

For he is gone where all things wise and fair descend.

So much for the sense of shining and resplendent peace that comes with the going of so large a spirit! But let us read on. It is Urania now who is addressed concerning the poet:--

Thy youngest dearest one has perished; thy extreme hope, the loveliest and the last. The bloom whose petals, nipt before they blew, died in the promise of the fruit, is waste; the broken lily lies--the storm is overpast. The quick Dreams, the pa.s.sion-winged ministers of thought, who were his flocks, whom near the living streams of his young spirit he fed, and whom he taught the love which was its music, wander not, wander no more.... And one with trembling hand clasps his cold head, and fans him with her moonlight wings, and cries: 'Our love, our hope, our sorrow is not dead; see on the silken fringe of his faint eyes, like dew upon a sleeping flower, there lies a tear some Dream has loosened from his brain.' ... And others came,--Desires and Adorations, Winged Persuasions, and Veiled Destinies, Splendors and Glooms and glimmering Incarnations of hopes and fears and twilight Phantasies ... all he had loved and moulded into thought from shape, and hue and odor and sweet sound, lamented Adonas.... He is made one with Nature; there is heard his voice in all her music, from the moan of thunder to the song of night's sweet bird; he is a presence to be felt and known in darkness and in light, from herb and stone, spreading itself where'er that Power may move which has withdrawn his being to its own; ... he is a portion of the loveliness which once he made more lovely; ... he is gathered to the kings of thoughts who waged contention with their times' decay, and of the past are all that cannot pa.s.s away.

And this further, this little bit about the poet's grave:--

Here pause, these graves are all too young as yet, to have outgrown the sorrow which consigned its charge to each; and if the seal is set, here, on one fountain of a mourning mind, break it not thou!... From the world's bitter wind seek shelter in the shadows of the tomb. What Adonas is, why fear we to become?

It will be objected that this is not biography at all, but poetry, and very famous poetry at that. I am aware, full aware of it. I have only to remark that, since there is a beating upon the gates and the starved people demand bread and there is none, 'Why then, let them eat cake!'

There is perhaps more pure essence of biography in lines like these, which purport not to be biography at all, than in any pompous three-volume 'Life,' which comes decked in scarlet, and heralded by the trumpet-blasts of publishers well versed in the psychology of advertising.

Or take all these supreme lines away and leave me but that one by the same hand, 'The soul of Adonas like a star,' and I am not sure that I am not richer by that, than by many biographical chapters.

II

It has always seemed to me that the best possible biographer, even including the immortal Boswell, would have been Horatio. Ophelia might have been better still had she kept her poor senses. Even having lost them, she seems to do no less than draw back a shimmering veil from the soul and life of Hamlet in the few remarks she makes concerning him: 'Where is the beauteous majesty of Denmark?'

Horatio, never having dreamed, certainly, of writing an account of Hamlet's life at all, yet seems to set forth in his few words more of Hamlet than is to be found in all the commentaries. What is there not revealed in his 'Here, sweet lord, at your service,' and his 'O my dear lord!'

There is further evidence of his qualification, of course, in Hamlet's unforgettable words concerning him:--

'Horatio, thou art e'en as just a man As e'r my conversation coped withal.'

and at the very last,--

'Horatio, I am dead, Thou livest; report me and my cause aright To the unsatisfied.'

But that which fits Horatio more than all, it seems to me, to bring report to others concerning the life, the motives and character of his 'sweet lord,' is that he had long been aware of those fearful and familiar hauntings of his lord's mind--hauntings which, for the purposes of the play, must be dramatized into the very form of a ghost, but which were in reality something far subtler still, and less bodied. It was of these delicate and awful visitings that Horatio was, more than the rest, aware and sensitively expectant.

It is such an eagerness, such an expectancy, and such an ability as well, I take it, that are needed by him who would understand the life of any great man and would hope to interpret it to others. He who would give us an adequate study of any life whatsoever must, it would seem, reckon on and investigate those subtle hauntings of mind and spirit of which the biographers have as yet, apparently, taken so little account, having left such investigations to be followed, and that only along somewhat morbid lines, by the psychiatrists and psycho-a.n.a.lysts.

For these, it is true, have recognized clearly that there are such hauntings, though they do not call them such. It is recognized by them that there is frequently an unconscious retention by the mind, and a repression within the unconscious self, of former striking and formative experiences. Freud and his followers tell us that an unpleasant or shocking experience, long dead to the conscious memory, may nevertheless return to haunt and newly shock and distress us when consciousness sleeps. In dreams it is, they tell us, that morbid fears or hateful repressions or unlawful desires of all kinds return to move where they will, unhindered and invulnerable. In whatever scientific or psychologic terms we speak of these things, it all sounds very ghostlike, and the more so when one recalls that these haunting manifestations vanish at the awaking to consciousness, as ghosts at the crowing of the c.o.c.k; then, be it ghost or old repression, 'the extravagant and erring spirit hies to his confines' once more.

The avowed task of the Freud school is the antic.i.p.ation, the expectation, and at last the careful a.n.a.lysis of these morbid hauntings, these repressions and forbidden desires. It is the self-appointed task of the psycho-a.n.a.lyst to watch for these things, to recognize them, speak with them, and examine into their meanings and purposes, as Hamlet with the ghost of his father on the battlements of Elsinore. All this has been looked upon--rightly, no doubt--as epoch-making in the history of psychology, and more especially as it applies to the study and treatment of nervous and mental disorders.

But to deal only with the morbid hauntings of the mind is to look upon the gloom and night of things only. For, by the same token, it would seem there must be other presences not morbid; other haunting influences, not dreadful, but lovely. There must be without doubt many an exquisite or startling experience or impression, long since pa.s.sed over into the world of our dead memories--perhaps the frail beauty of flower or leaf, some unearthly delicacy of laced moonlight on the floor of the forest, the s.p.a.ciousness of dawn, the beauty of women, the kindly clinging touch of hands--some impression which found in us, in early youth it may be, a congenial abode, and returning to us again and again (never in the full daylight of consciousness, but in a dim and twilight fashion, in some delicate haunting form 'as the air invulnerable'), obtains at last a ghostly possession of some chamber of the mind, holds from there a kind of subtle occupancy of our thoughts, in time a sort of dominion over our personalities, and even at last, it must be, exerts a definite influence upon our characters.

For it is precisely the exact and delicate response to such subtle visitings, whether it be a visiting of fear and dread or of beauty and delight, which, expressing itself in the individual's manner of living and taste for life, we call personality; which, manifesting itself in his art, we call style; which, exhibiting itself in his purpose and action, we call character.

It is in this sense, then, that the lives of all of us, and very especially the lives of the great, may, without fantastical imagery, be said to be haunted. And if this be true, then it is obvious that, without reference to such hauntings, no so-called 'lives' or biographies of great men can be complete.

III

It seems likely that the new criticism must more and more take into account these delicate and psychological reckonings; but meanwhile how shall we, the unelect, seeking unacademically among the lives of the great, become aware of these subtle influences which forever haunt the characters and the works of great men? How shall we put ourselves sensitively in touch with that which is so essentially characteristic; with those mysterious influences of personality which, working together, make, for instance, a poem of Arnold's a poem of Arnold's unmistakably, and a painting of Raphael's so much his own that we are wont to speak of it as 'a Raphael'?

Again I turn to Horatio. There must first of all be in us, I believe, a deep love of the men whom we would know--'O my sweet lord!' There must be on our part all that loyal and watchful friendship which would make any hearsay or report concerning them a matter of interest to us; further, there must be that full intimate companionship to be had, not by hearsay at all, but only by living day after day with these men and their works; and lastly, there must be in us a sensitiveness to spiritual and haunting presences in their lives--a patient and sensitive watching as it were upon the battlements of Elsinore.

If we turn from Leonardo, as Pater presents him to us, to another notable and equally strong type--to Isaiah; if we ignore all those facts usually insisted upon in biography; if we dismiss as less important the kings and rulers of his age and the dramatic yet negligible circ.u.mstances of his times; and if we give our attention rather to the subtle predilections and preoccupations of this great mind, we find Isaiah visited again and again, haunted unceasingly it would seem, by certain effects and meanings, and lovelinesses and memories of light.

Again and again we see him sensitive to its manifestations. Here and there throughout his writings we find him noting and delighting in its return, greeting it with relief and rejoicing, as after a long night's watching; calling to his people pa.s.sionately to arise and waken from the darkness of their sins, holding up his own streaming torch, as it were, across their night, in shining prophecy of the better luminary already on the way, which was to be the light of the world.

'Arise! Shine!' he cries, 'for thy light is come and the glory of the Lord is risen upon thee.... The People that walked in darkness have seen a great light; they that dwell in the land of the shadow of death, upon them hath the light shined.... Then shall thy light break forth as the morning.... And the Gentiles shall come to thy light, and kings to the brightness of thy rising.... The Lord shall be to thee an everlasting light, and thy G.o.d thy glory.... The sun shall no more go down, neither shall thy moon withdraw herself.'

His mention also of trees and their boughs and roots and branches is even more frequent still. Here, likewise, 'two ideas' seem 'especially fixed in him as reflexes of things that touched his brain in childhood beyond the measure of other impressions.'

When we study Dante carefully and watch with him also, we find him to have been, hardly less than Isaiah, haunted by the same loveliness, the beauty and meaning of light. For him not less, light would seem to have had a most insistent and spiritual appeal. Far too many to quote are his innumerable exact and sensitive descriptions of it, his careful and repeated observations of its gradations and delicate alterations.

Memorably, too, he has it in mind in speaking of Saint Francis of a.s.sisi, that sun of righteousness risen out of the mediaeval night. 'Call it not a.s.sisi,' he cries; 'if you would truthfully name it, call it the East because of the sun that rose there.'

Likewise, one who watches patiently and devotedly with Homer cannot but become sensible at last how his mind entertains constantly the thought and moving beauty of the various air. Perpetually, it must have been, he was haunted by the freshness and loveliness of it as it moved across the aegean and the windy isles of Greece. Pure and awful, in the semblance of the blue-eyed Athena, it was the air which pa.s.sed among his Greek hosts at eventide, or went stirringly among the serried ranks, reviving with a touch the old spirit in them; or in the tent of Achilles took him by the yellow hair, and directed him, a spirit and a presence.

Again and again throughout the Iliad and the Odyssey, the sensitive and watchful will note this persistency and preoccupation, this recurrent observation of the air in its manifold behaviors, as of something dear or memorable, from the swirling, s.n.a.t.c.hing Harpies to the clean-breathed morning; from the sullen sultriness of Achilles's wrath--a stubborn heat that will not stir--to the swift flight of windy arrows cleansing the banquet-hall of Ithaca. So too, that divinity to whom he paid his most constant homage was Athena, G.o.ddess of knowledge and of the air, who exquisitely typified, not alone wisdom, but, as almost one with wisdom, the most moving and yielding of the elements.

How well by these things have we come to know Homer--who yet know not by seven chances even so much as the city of his birth! The bare facts of biography seem poor when compared with these preferences, these preoccupations and predilections of the very man himself.

So, too, though we knew little else about him, it were possible to take the full measure of St. Francis of a.s.sisi by his haunting persistent love of brotherhood. Nothing else in all his deeds and words is half so strong. One even comes to believe that his devotion to his beloved Lady Poverty was--doubtless unknown to himself--rendered solely because it made him one of a larger fraternity and brother to a greater number of men. The fire that burned and seared him was his brother, even as was the beneficent luminary that warmed him. From his triumphant salutation to his radiant 'brother the sun,' on down to the delicate and gentle admonishings of his 'little brothers' the birds and fishes, the thought of an unlimited and unfettered fraternity perpetually dominates his loving spirit.

In like manner I have noted in my many readings of Matthew Arnold that his mind seems to have responded with a peculiar sensitiveness, and been often subject to the sound and meaning of moving waters, and to the high destiny of stars. It would seem that 'the unplumbed, salt, estranging sea' came in time to have a definite power over him in the ordering of his images and even in the determining of his philosophies; that rivers flowing silver under the sun, or, unguessed, in subterranean chambers, became to him interpretative of life itself, and their course and channel and ultimate end a promise to his soul. It is not alone in his poetry that one finds the 'incognizable sea,' and hears so frequently of its coasts and beaches and sands and watery wastes and isles; of voyages and charts; the 'swinging waters and the cl.u.s.tered pier'; the ebbing and flowing of tides; and the still stars: one comes upon these in his prose not less, very especially and memorably in his _Study of Poetry_.

It may be argued that these might be mere favorite figures and symbols; but it is hardly thinkable, after a careful study of them, that they are not rather haunting influences and impressions having long a familiar access to the chambers of his mind, now taking him with his forsaken Merman,--

Down, down, down!

Down to the depths of the sea!

or with the Neckan beside the green Baltic, pointing out the sounding deeps, and the starry poles, and interpreting life's meanings by them.

So too,--to pa.s.s but lightly from one to another,--we can hardly read Chaucer devotedly without at length becoming aware how this poet seems to have been haunted by the idea of the freshness and loveliness of the day's awaking; his very heroes and heroines again and again seeming to partake of it, and to be like dawn themselves upon the hills.

Up rose the sun and up rose Emilie.

The 'yonge squire' too, of 'twenty yere of age':--