Books and Habits, from the Lectures of Lafcadio Hearn Part 10

Thus watch one who, in the world, Both lives and likes life's way, Nor wishes the wings unfurled That sleep in the worm, they say?

But sometimes when the weather Is blue, and warm waves tempt To free oneself of tether, And try a life exempt

From worldly noise and dust, In the sphere which overbrims With pa.s.sion and thought,--why, just Unable to fly, one swims!

This is better understood by paraphrase: "I wonder if the soul of a certain person, who lately died, slipped so gently out of the hard sheath of the perishable body--I wonder if she does not look down from her home in the sky upon me, just as that little b.u.t.terfly is doing at this moment.

And I wonder if she laughs at the clumsiness of this poor swimmer, who finds it so much labour even to move through the water, while she can move through whatever she pleases by the simple act of wishing. And this man, strangely enough, does not want to die, and to become a ghost. He likes to live very much; he does not yet desire those soul-wings which are supposed to be growing within the sh.e.l.l of his body, just as the wings of the b.u.t.terfly begin to grow in the chrysalis. He does not want to die at all.

But sometimes he wants to get away from the struggle and the dust of the city, and to be alone with nature; and then, in order to be perfectly alone, he swims. He would like to fly much better; but he can not.

However, swimming is very much like flying, only the element of water is thicker than air."

However, more than the poet's words is suggested here. We are really told that what a fine mind desires is spiritual life, pure intellectual life--free from all the trammels of bodily necessity. Is not the swimmer really a symbol of the superior mind in its present condition? Your best swimmer can not live under the water, neither can he rise into the beautiful blue air. He can only keep his head in the air; his body must remain in the grosser element. Well, a great thinker and poet is ever thus--floating between the universe of spirit and the universe of matter.

By his mind he belongs to the region of pure mind,--the ethereal state; but the hard necessity of living keeps him down in the world of sense and grossness and struggle. On the other hand the b.u.t.terfly, freely moving in a finer element, better represents the state of spirit or soul.

What is the use of being dissatisfied with nature? The best we can do is to enjoy in the imagination those things which it is not possible for us to enjoy in fact.

Emanc.i.p.ate through pa.s.sion And thought, with sea for sky, We subst.i.tute, in a fashion, For heaven--poetry:

Which sea, to all intent, Gives flesh such noon-disport, As a finer element Affords the spirit-sort.

Now you see where the poet's vision of a beautiful b.u.t.terfly has been leading his imagination. The nearest approach which we can make to the act of flying, in the body, is the act of swimming. The nearest approach that we can make to the heavenly condition, mentally, is in poetry. Poetry, imagination, the pleasure of emotional expression--these represent our nearest approach to paradise. Poetry is the sea in which the soul of man can swim even as b.u.t.terflies can swim in the air, or happy ghosts swim in the finer element of the infinite ether. The last three stanzas of the poem are very suggestive:

And meantime, yonder streak Meets the horizon's verge; That is the land, to seek If we tire or dread the surge:

Land the solid and safe-- To welcome again (confess!) When, high and dry, we chafe The body, and don the dress.

Does she look, pity, wonder At one who mimics flight, Swims--heaven above, sea under, Yet always earth in sight?

"Streak," meaning an indistinct line, here refers to the coast far away, as it appears to the swimmer. It is just such a word as a good j.a.panese painter ought to appreciate in such a relation. In suggesting that the swimmer is glad to return to sh.o.r.e again and get warm, the poet is telling us that however much we may talk about the happiness of spirits in heaven--however much we may praise heaven in poetry--the truth is that we are very fond of this world, we like comfort, we like company, we like human love and human pleasures. There is a good deal of nonsense in pretending that we think heaven is a better place than the world to which we belong. Perhaps it is a better place, but, as a matter of fact, we do not know anything about it; and we should be frightened if we could go beyond a certain distance from the real world which we do know. As he tells us this, the poet begins again to think about the spirit of the dead woman. Is she happy? Is she looking at him--and pitying him as he swims, taking good care not to go too far away from the land? Or is she laughing at him, because in his secret thoughts he confesses that he likes to live--that he does not want to become a pure ghost at the present time?

Evidently a b.u.t.terfly was quite enough, not only to make Browning's mind think very seriously, but to make that mind teach us the truth and seriousness which may attach to very small things--incidents, happenings of daily life, in any hour and place. I believe that is the greatest English poem we have on the subject of the b.u.t.terfly.

The idea that a b.u.t.terfly might be, not merely the symbol of the soul, but in very fact the spirit of a dead person, is somewhat foreign to English thought; and whatever exists in poetry on the subject must necessarily be quite new. The idea of a relation between insects, birds, or other living creatures, and the spirits of the dead, is enormously old in Oriental literature;--we find it in Sanskrit texts thousands of years ago. But the Western mind has not been accustomed to think of spiritual life as outside of man; and much of natural poetry has consequently remained undeveloped in Western countries. A strange little poem, "The White Moth," is an exception to the general rule that I have indicated; but I am almost certain that its author, A.T. Quiller-Couch, must have read Oriental books, or obtained his fancy from some Eastern source. As the knowledge of Indian literature becomes more general in England, we may expect to find poetry much influenced by Oriental ideas. At the present time, such a composition as this is quite a strange anomaly.

_If a leaf rustled, she would start: And yet she died, a year ago.

How had so frail a thing the heart To journey where she trembled so?

And do they turn and turn in fright, Those little feet, in so much night?_

The light above the poet's head Streamed on the page and on the cloth, And twice and thrice there buffeted On the black pane a white-winged moth: 'Twas Annie's soul that beat outside, And "Open, open, open!" cried:

"I could not find the way to G.o.d; There were too many flaming suns For signposts, and the fearful road Led over wastes where millions Of tangled comets hissed and burned-- I was bewildered and I turned.

"Oh, it was easy then! I knew Your window and no star beside.

Look up and take me back to you!"

--He rose and thrust the window wide.

'Twas but because his brain was hot With rhyming; for he heard her not.

But poets polishing a phrase Show anger over trivial things; And as she blundered in the blaze Towards him, on ecstatic wings, He raised a hand and smote her dead; Then wrote "_That I had died instead!_"

The lover, or bereaved husband, is writing a poem of which a part is given in the first stanza--which is therefore put in italics. The action proper begins with the second stanza. The soul of the dead woman taps at the window in the shape of a night-b.u.t.terfly or moth--imagining, perhaps, that she has still a voice and can make herself heard by the man that she loves. She tells the story of her wandering in s.p.a.ce--privileged to pa.s.s to heaven, yet afraid of the journey. Now the subject of the poem which the lover happens to be writing inside the room is a memory of the dead woman--mourning for her, describing her in exquisite ways. He can not hear her at all; he does not hear even the beating of the little wings at the window, but he stands up and opens the window--because he happens to feel hot and tired. The moth thinks that he has heard her, that he knows; and she flies toward him in great delight. But he, thinking that it is only a troublesome insect, kills her with a blow of his hand; and then sits down to continue his poem with the words, "Oh, how I wish I could have died instead of that dear woman!" Altogether this is a queer poem in English literature, and I believe almost alone of its kind. But it is queer only because of its rarity of subject. As for construction, it is very good indeed.

I do not know that it is necessary to quote any more poems upon b.u.t.terflies or moths. There are several others; but the workmanship and the thought are not good enough or original enough to justify their use here as cla.s.s texts. So I shall now turn to the subject of dragon-flies.

Here we must again be very brief. References to dragon-flies are common throughout English poetry, but the references signify little more than a mere colourless mention of the pa.s.sing of the insect. However, it so happens that the finest modern lines of pure description written about any insect, are about dragon-flies. And they also happen to be by Tennyson.

Naturalists and men of science have greatly praised these lines, because of their truth to nature and the accuracy of observation which they show.

You will find them in the poem ent.i.tled "The Two Voices."

To-day I saw the dragon-fly Come from the wells where he did lie.

An inner impulse rent the veil Of his old husk; from head to tail Came out clear plates of sapphire mail.

He dried his wings; like gauze they grew; Thro' crofts and pastures wet with dew A living rush of light he flew.

There are very few real poems, however, upon the dragon-fly in English, and considering the extraordinary beauty and grace of the insect, this may appear strange to you. But I think that you can explain the strangeness at a later time. The silence of English poets on the subject of insects as compared with j.a.panese poets is due to general causes that we shall consider at the close of the lecture.

Common flies could scarcely seem to be a subject for poetry--disgusting and annoying creatures as they are. But there are more poems about the house-fly than about the dragon-fly. Last year I quoted for you a remarkable and rather mystical composition by the poet Blake about accidentally killing a fly. Blake represents his own thoughts about the brevity of human life which had been aroused by the incident. It is charming little poem; but it does not describe the fly at all. I shall not quote it here again, because we shall have many other things to talk about; but I shall give you the text of a famous little composition by Oldys on the same topic. It has almost the simplicity of Blake,--and certainly something of the same kind of philosophy.

Busy, curious, thirsty fly, Drink with me and drink as I; Freely welcome to my cup, Couldst thou sip and sip it up: Make the most of life you may, Life is short and wears away.

Both alike are mine and thine Hastening quick to their decline: Thine's a summer, mine's no more, Though repeated to threescore.

Threescore summers, when they're gone, Will appear as short as one!

The suggestion is that, after all, time is only a very relative affair in the cosmic order of things. The life of the man of sixty years is not much longer than the life of the insect which lives but a few hours, days, or months. Had Oldys, who belongs to the eighteenth century, lived in our own time, he might have been able to write something very much more curious on this subject. It is now known that time, to the mind of an insect, must appear immensely longer than it appears to the mind of a man. It has been calculated that a mosquito or a gnat moves its wings between four and five hundred times a second. Now the scientific dissection of such an insect, under the microscope, justifies the opinion that the insect must be conscious of each beat of the wings--just as a man feels that he lifts his arm or bends his head every time that the action is performed. A man can not even imagine the consciousness of so short an interval of time as the five-hundredth part of one second. But insect consciousness can be aware of such intervals; and a single day of life might well appear to the gnat as long as the period of a month to a man. Indeed, we have reason to suppose that to even the shortest-lived insect life does not appear short at all; and that the ephemeral may actually, so far as felling is concerned, live as long as a man--although its birth and death does occur between the rising and the setting of the sun.

We might suppose that bees would form a favourite subject of poetry, especially in countries where agriculture is practised upon such a scale as in England. But such is not really the case. Nearly every English poet makes some reference to bees, as Tennyson does in the famous couplet--

The moan of doves in immemorial elms, And murmuring of innumerable bees.

But the only really remarkable poem addressed to a bee is by the American philosopher Emerson. The poem in question can not be compared as to mere workmanship with some others which I have cited; but as to thinking, it is very interesting, and you must remember that the philosopher who writes poetry should be judged for his thought rather than for the measure of his verse. The whole is not equally good, nor is it short enough to quote entire; I shall only give the best parts.

Burly, dozing humble-bee, Where thou art is clime for me.

Zigzag steerer, desert cheerer, Let me chase thy waving lines; Keep me nearer, me thy hearer, Singing over shrubs and vines.

Insect lover of the sun, Joy of thy dominion!

Sailor of the atmosphere; Swimmer through the waves of air; Voyager of light and noon; Epicurean of June; Wait, I prithee, till I come Within earshot of thy hum,-- All without is martyrdom.

Thou, in sunny solitudes, Rover of the underwoods, The green silence dost displace With thy mellow, breezy ba.s.s.

Aught unsavory or unclean Hath my insect never seen;

Wiser far than human seer, Yellow-breeched philosopher!

Seeing only what is fair, Sipping only what is sweet, Thou dost mock at fate and care, Leave the chaff, and take the wheat.