Rose Leaf and Apple Leaf Part 1

Rose Leaf and Apple Leaf.

by Rennell Rodd.

L'ENVOI

Mongst the many young men in England who are seeking along with me to continue and to perfect the English Renaissance--_jeunes guerriers du drapeau romantique_, as Gautier would have called us--there is none whose love of art is more flawless and fervent, whose artistic sense of beauty is more subtle and more delicate--none, indeed, who is dearer to myself--than the young poet whose verses I have brought with me to America; verses full of sweet sadness, and yet full of joy; for the most joyous poet is not he who sows the desolate highways of this world with the barren seed of laughter, but he who makes his sorrow most musical, this indeed being the meaning of joy in art--that incommunicable element of artistic delight which, in poetry, for instance, comes from what Keats called the "sensuous life of verse," the element of song in the singing, made so pleasurable to us by that wonder of motion which often has its origin in mere musical impulse, and in painting is to be sought for, from the subject never, but from the pictorial charm only--the scheme and symphony of the colour, the satisfying beauty of the design: so that the ultimate expression of our artistic movement in painting has been, not in the spiritual visions of the pre-Raphaelites, for all their marvel of Greek legend and their mystery of Italian song, but in the work of such men as Whistler and Albert Moore, who have raised design and colour to the ideal level of poetry and music. For the quality of their exquisite painting comes from the mere inventive and creative handling of lime and colour, from a certain form and choice of beautiful workmanship, which, rejecting all literary reminiscence and all metaphysical idea, is in itself entirely satisfying to the aesthetic sense--is, as the Greeks would say, an end in itself; the effect of their work being like the effect given to us by music; for music is the art in which form and matter are always one--the art whose subject cannot be separated from the method of its expression; the art which most completely realises for us the artistic ideal, and is the condition to which all the other arts are constantly aspiring.

Now, this increased sense of the absolutely satisfying value of beautiful workmanship, this recognition of the primary importance of the sensuous element in art, this love of art for art's sake, is the point in which we of the younger school have made a departure from the teaching of Mr. Ruskin,--a departure definite and different and decisive.

Master indeed of the knowledge of all n.o.ble living and of the wisdom of all spiritual things will he be to us ever, seeing that it was he who by the magic of his presence and the music of his lips taught us at Oxford that enthusiasm for beauty which is the secret of h.e.l.lenism, and that desire for creation which is the secret of life, and filled some of us, at least, with the lofty and pa.s.sionate ambition to go forth into far and fair lands with some message for the nations and some mission for the world, and yet in his art criticism, his estimate of the joyous element of art, his whole method of approaching art, we are no longer with him; for the keystone to his aesthetic system is ethical always. He would judge of a picture by the amount of n.o.ble moral ideas it expresses; but to us the channels by which all n.o.ble work in painting can touch, and does touch, the soul are not those of truths of life or metaphysical truths. To him perfection of workmanship seems but the symbol of pride, and incompleteness of technical resource the image of an imagination too limitless to find within the limits of form its complete expression, or of a love too simple not to stammer in its tale.

But to us the rule of art is not the rule of morals. In an ethical system, indeed, of any gentle mercy good intentions will, one is fain to fancy, have their recognition; but of those that would enter the serene House of Beauty the question that we ask is not what they had ever meant to do, but what they have done. Their pathetic intentions are of no value to us, but their realised creations only. _Pour moi je prefere les poetes qui font des vers, les medecins qui sachent guerir, les peintres qui sachent peindre._

Nor, in looking at a work of art, should we be dreaming of what it symbolises, but rather loving it for what it is. Indeed, the transcendental spirit is alien to the spirit of art. The metaphysical mind of Asia may create for itself the monstrous and many-breasted idol, but to the Greek, pure artist, that work is most instinct with spiritual life which conforms most closely to the perfect facts of physical life also. Nor, in its primary aspect, has a painting, for instance, any more spiritual message or meaning for us than a blue tile from the wall of Damascus, or a Hitzen vase. It is a beautifully-coloured surface, nothing more, and affects us by no suggestion stolen from philosophy, no pathos pilfered from literature, no feeling filched from a poet, but by its own incommunicable artistic essence--by that selection of truth which we call style, and that relation of values which is the draughtsmanship of painting, by the whole quality of the workmanship, the arabesque of the design, the splendour of the colour, for these things are enough to stir the most divine and remote of the chords which make music in our soul, and colour, indeed, is of itself a mystical presence on things, and tone a kind of sentiment.

This, then--the new departure of our younger school--is the chief characteristic of Mr. Rennell Rodd's poetry; for, while there is much in his work that may interest the intellect, much that will excite the emotions, and many cadenced chords of sweet and simple sentiment--for to those who love Art for its own sake all other things are added--yet the effect which they preeminently seek to produce is purely an artistic one. Such a poem as "The Sea-King's Grave," with all its majesty of melody as sonorous and as strong as the sea by whose pine-fringed sh.o.r.es it was thus n.o.bly conceived and n.o.bly fashioned; or the little poem that follows it, whose cunning workmanship, wrought with such an artistic sense of limitation, one might liken to the rare chasing of the mirror that is its motive; or "In a Church," pale flower of one of those exquisite moments when all things except the moment itself seem so curiously real, and when the old memories of forgotten days are touched and made tender, and the familiar place grows fervent and solemn suddenly with a vision of the undying beauty of the G.o.ds that died; or the scene in "Chartres Cathedral," sombre silence brooding on vault and arch, silent people kneeling on the dust of the desolate pavement as the young priest lifts Lord Christ's body in a crystal star, and then the sudden beams of scarlet light that break through the blazoned window and smite on the carven screen, and sudden organ peals of mighty music rolling and echoing from choir to canopy, and from spire to shaft, and over all the clear glad voice of a singing boy, affecting one as a thing oversweet, and striking just the right artistic keynote for one's emotions; or "At Lanuvium", through the music of whose lines one seems to hear again the murmur of the Mantuan bees straying down from their own green valleys and inland streams to find what honeyed amber the sea-flowers might be hiding; or the poem written "In the Coliseum,"

which gives one the same artistic joy that one gets watching a handicraftsman at his work, a goldsmith hammering out his gold into those thin plates as delicate as the petals of a yellow rose, or drawing it out into the long wires like tangled sunbeams, so perfect and precious is the mere handling of it; or the little lyric interludes that break in here and there like the singing of a thrush, and are as swift and as sure as the beating of a bird's wing, as light and bright as the apple-blossoms that flutter fitfully down to the orchard gra.s.s after a spring shower, and look the lovelier for the rain's tears lying on their dainty veinings of pink and pearl; or the sonnets--for Mr. Rodd is one of those _qui sonnent le sonnet_, as the Ronsardists used to say--that one called "On the Border Hills," with its fiery wonder of imagination and the strange beauty of its eighth line; or the one which tells of the sorrow of the great king for the little dead child,--well, all these poems aim, as I said, at producing a purely artistic effect, and have the rare and exquisite quality that belongs to work of that kind; and I feel that the entire subordination in our aesthetic movement of all merely emotional and intellectual motives to the vital informing poetic principle is the surest sign of our strength.

But it is not enough that a work of art should conform to the aesthetic demands of the age: there should be also about it, if it is to give us any permanent delight, the impress of a distinct individuality. Whatever work we have in the nineteenth century must rest on the two poles of personality and perfection. And so in this little volume, by separating the earlier and more simple work from the work that is later and stronger and possesses increased technical power and more artistic vision, one might weave these disconnected poems, these stray and scattered threads, into one fiery-coloured strand of life, noting first a boy's mere gladness of being young, with all its simple joy in field and flower, in sunlight and in song, and then the bitterness of sudden sorrow at the ending by Death of one of the brief and beautiful friendships of one's youth, with all those unanswered longings and questionings unsatisfied by which we vex, so uselessly, the marble face of death; the artistic contrast between the discontented incompleteness of the spirit and the complete perfection of the style that expresses it forming the chief element of the aesthetic charm of these particular poems;--and then the birth of Love, and all the wonder and the fear and the perilous delight of one on whose boyish brows the little wings of love have beaten for the first time; and the love-songs, so dainty and delicate, little swallow-flights of music, and full of such fragrance and freedom that they might all be sung in the open air and across moving water; and then autumn, coming with its quireless woods and odorous decay and ruined loveliness, Love lying dead; and the sense of the mere pity of it.

One might stop there, for from a young poet one should ask for no deeper chords of life than those that love and friendship make eternal for us; and the best poems in this volume belong clearly to a later time, a time when these real experiences become absorbed and gathered up into a form which seems from such real experiences to be the most alien and the most remote; when the simple expression of joy or sorrow suffices no longer, and lives rather in the stateliness of the cadenced metre, in the music and colour of the linked words, than in any direct utterance; lives, one might say, in the perfection of the form more than in the pathos of the feeling. And yet, after the broken music of love and the burial of love in the autumn woods, we can trace that wandering among strange people, and in lands unknown to us, by which we try so pathetically to heal the hurts of the life we know, and that pure and pa.s.sionate devotion to Art which one gets when the harsh reality of life has too suddenly wounded one, and is with discontent or sorrow marring one's youth, just as often, I think, as one gets it from any natural joy of living; and that curious intensity of vision by which, in moments of over-mastering sadness and despair ungovernable, artistic things will live in one's memory with a vivid realism caught from the life which they help one to forget--an old gray tomb in Flanders with a strange legend on it, making one think how, perhaps, pa.s.sion does live on after death, a necklace of blue and amber beads and a broken mirror found in a girl's grave at Rome, a marble image of a boy habited like Eros, and with the pathetic tradition of a great king's sorrow lingering about it like a purple shadow,--over all these the tired spirit broods with that calm and certain joy that one gets when one has found something that the ages never dull and the world cannot harm; and with it comes that desire of Greek things which is often an artistic method of expressing one's desire for perfection; and that longing for the old dead days which is so modern, so incomplete, so touching, being, in a way, the inverted torch of Hope, which burns the hand it should guide; and for many things a little sadness, and for all things a great love; and lastly, in the pine-wood by the sea, once more the quick and vital pulse of joyous youth leaping and laughing in every line, the frank and fearless freedom of wave and wind waking into fire life's burnt-out ashes and into song the silent lips of pain,--how clearly one seems to see it all, the long colonnade of pines with sea and sky peeping in here and there like a flitting of silver; the open place in the green deep heart of the wood with the little moss-grown altar to the old Italian G.o.d in it; and the flowers all about, cyclamen in the shadowy places, and the stars of the white narcissus lying like snowflakes over the gra.s.s, where the quick, bright-eyed lizard starts by the stone, and the snake lies coiled lazily in the sun on the hot sand, and overhead the gossamer floats from the branches like thin tremulous threads of gold,--the scene is so perfect for its motive, for surely here, if anywhere, the real gladness of life might be revealed to one's youth--the gladness that comes, not from the rejection, but from the absorption, of all pa.s.sion, and is like that serene calm that dwells in the faces of the Greek statues, and which despair and sorrow cannot disturb, but intensify only.

In some such way as this we could gather up these strewn and scattered petals of song into one perfect rose of life, and yet, perhaps, in so doing, we might be missing the true quality of the poems; one's real life is so often the life that one does not lead; and beautiful poems, like threads of beautiful silks, may be woven into many patterns and to suit many designs, all wonderful and all different: and romantic poetry, too, is essentially the poetry of impressions, being like that latest school of painting, the school of Whistler and Albert Moore, in its choice of situation as opposed to subject; in its dealing with the exceptions rather than with the types of life; in its brief intensity; in what one might call its fiery-coloured momentariness, it being indeed the momentary situations of life, the momentary aspects of nature, which poetry and painting now seek to render for us. Sincerity and constancy will the artist, indeed, have always; but sincerity in art is merely that plastic perfection of execution without which a poem or a painting, however n.o.ble its sentiment or human its origin, is but wasted and unreal work, and the constancy of the artist cannot be to any definite rule or system of living, but to that principle of beauty only through which the inconstant shadows of his life are in their most fleeting moment arrested and made permanent. He will not, for instance, in intellectual matters, acquiesce in that facile orthodoxy of our day which is so reasonable and so artistically uninteresting, nor yet will he desire that fiery faith of the antique time which, while it intensified, yet limited, the vision, still less will he allow the calm of his culture to be marred by the discordant despair of doubt or the sadness of a sterile skepticism; for the Valley Perilous, where ignorant armies clash by night, is no resting-place meet for her to whom the G.o.ds have a.s.signed the clear upland, the serene height, and the sunlit air,--rather will he be always curiously testing new forms of belief, tinging his nature with the sentiment that still lingers about some beautiful creeds, and searching for experience itself, and not for the fruits of experience, when he has got its secret, he will leave without regret much that was once very precious to him. "I am always insincere,"

says Emerson somewhere, "as knowing that there are other moods:" "_Les emotions_," wrote Theophile Gautier once in a review of a.r.s.ene Houssaye, "_Les emotions ne se ressemblent pas, mais etre emu--voila l'important_".

Now, this is the secret of the art of the modern romantic school, and gives one the right keynote for its apprehension; but the real quality of all work which, like Mr. Rodd's, aims, as I said, at a purely artistic effect, cannot be described in terms of intellectual criticism; it is too intangible for that. One can perhaps convey it best in terms of the other arts, and by reference to them; and, indeed, some of these poems are as iridescent and as exquisite as a lovely fragment of Venetian gla.s.s; others as delicate in perfect workmanship and as simple in natural motive as an etching by Whistler is, or one of those beautiful little Greek figures which in the olive woods round Tanagra men can still find, with the faint gilding and the fading crimson not yet fled from hair and lips and raiment; and many of them seem like one of Corot's twilights just pa.s.sing into music, for not merely in visible colour, but in sentiment also--which is the colour of poetry--may there be a kind of tone.

But I think that the best likeness to the quality of this young poet's work I ever saw was in the landscape by the Loire. We were staying once, he and I, at Amboise, that little village with its gray-slate roofs and steep streets and gaunt grim gateway, where the quiet cottages nestle like white pigeons into the sombre clefts of the great bastioned rock, and the stately Renaissance houses stand silent and apart--very desolate now, but with some memory of the old days still lingering about the delicately-twisted pillars, and the carved doorways, with their grotesque animals, and laughing masks, and quaint heraldic devices, all reminding one of a people who could not think life real till they had made it fantastic. And above the village, and beyond the bend of the river, we used to go in the afternoon, and sketch from one of the big barges that bring the wine in autumn and the wood in winter down to the sea, or lie in the long gra.s.s and make plans _pour la gloire, et pour ennuyer les philistins_, or wander along the low sedgy banks, "matching our reeds in sportive rivalry," as comrades used in the old Sicilian days; and the land was an ordinary land enough, and bare too when one thought of Italy, and how the oleanders were robing the hillsides by Genoa in scarlet, and the cyclamen filling with its purple every valley from Florence to Rome; for there was not much real beauty, perhaps, in it, only long white dusty roads, and straight rows of formal poplars; but now and then some little breaking gleam of broken light would lend to the gray field and the silent barn a secret and a mystery that were hardly their own, would transfigure for one exquisite moment the peasants pa.s.sing down through the vineyard, or the shepherd watching on the hill, would tip the willows with silver, and touch the river into gold; and the wonder of the effect, with the strange simplicity of the material, always seemed to me to be a little like the quality of these the verses of my friend.

OSCAR WILDE.

ROSE LEAF AND APPLE LEAF

FROM THE HILL OF GARDENS

The outline of a shadowy city spread Between the garden and the distant hill-- And o'er yon dome the flame-ring lingers still, Set like the glory on an angel's head: The light fades quivering into evening blue Behind the pine-tops on Ianiculum; The swallow whispered to the swallow "come!"

And took the sunset on her wings, and flew.

One rift of cloud the wind caught up suspending A ruby path between the earth and sky; Those shreds of gold are angel wings ascending From where the sorrows of our singers lie; They have not found those wandering spirits yet, But seek for ever in the red sunset.

Pa.s.s upward angel wings! Seek not for these, They sit not in the cypress-planted graves; Their spirits wander over moonlit waves, And sing in all the singing of the seas; And by green places in the spring-tide showers, And in the re-awakening of flowers.

Some pearl-lipped sh.e.l.l still dewy with sea foam Bear back to whisper where their feet have trod; They are the earth's for evermore; fly home!

And lay a daisy at the feet of G.o.d.

IN THE COLISEUM

Night wanes; I sit in the ruin alone; Beneath, the shadow of arches falls From the dim outline of the broken walls; And the half-light steals o'er the age-worn stone From a midway arch where the moon looks through, A silver shield in the deep, deep blue.

This is the hour of ghosts that rise; --Line on line of the noiseless dead-- The clouds above are their awning spread; Look into the shadow with moon-dazed eyes, You will see the writhing of limbs in pain, And the whole red tragedy over again.

The ghostly galleys ride out and meet, The Caesar sits in his golden chair, His fingers toy with his women's hair, The water is blood-red under his feet,-- Till the owl's long cry dies down with the night, And one star waits for the dawning light.

ROME, 1881.

THE SEA-KING'S GRAVE

High over the wild sea-border, on the furthest downs to the west, Is the green grave-mound of the Norseman, with the yew-tree grove on its crest.

And I heard in the winds his story, as they leapt up salt from the wave, And tore at the creaking branches that grow from the sea-king's grave.

Some son of the old-world Vikings, the wild sea-wandering lords, Who sailed in a snake-prowed galley, with a terror of twenty swords.

From the fiords of the sunless winter, they came on an icy blast, Till over the whole world's sea-board the shadow of Odin pa.s.sed, Till they sped to the inland waters and under the South-land skies, And stared on the puny princes, with their blue victorious eyes.

And they said he was old and royal, and a warrior all his days, But the king who had slain his brother lived yet in the island ways.

And he came from a hundred battles, and died in his last wild quest, For he said, "I will have my vengeance, and then I will take my rest."

He had pa.s.sed on his homeward journey, and the king of the isles was dead; He had drunken the draught of triumph, and his cup was the isle-king's head; And he spoke of the song and feasting, and the gladness of things to be, And three days over the waters they rowed on a waveless sea.

Till a small cloud rose to the sh.o.r.eward, and a gust broke out of the cloud, And the spray beat over the rowers, and the murmur of winds was loud, With the voice of the far-off thunders, till the shuddering air grew warm, And the day was as dark as at even, and the wild G.o.d rode on the storm.

But the old man laughed in the thunder as he set his casque on his brow, And he waved his sword in the lightnings and clung to the painted prow.

And the shaft of the storm-G.o.d's quiver, flashed out from the flame-flushed skies, Rang down on his war-worn harness, and gleamed in his fiery eyes.

And his mail and his crested helmet, and his hair, and his beard burned red; And they said, "It is Odin calls;" and he fell, and they found him dead.

So here, in his war-guise armoured, they laid him down to his rest, In his casque with the rein-deer antlers, and the long grey beard on his breast: His bier was the spoil of the islands, with a sail for a shroud beneath, And an oar of his blood-red galley, and his battle brand in the sheath; And they buried his bow beside him, and planted the grove of yew, For the grave of a mighty archer, one tree for each of his crew; Where the flowerless cliffs are sheerest, where the sea-birds circle and swarm, And the rocks are at war with the waters, with their jagged grey teeth in the storm; And the huge Atlantic billows sweep in, and the mists enclose The hill with the gra.s.s-grown mound where the Norseman's yew-tree grows.

A ROMAN MIRROR

They found it in her hollow marble bed, There where the numberless dead cities sleep, They found it lying where the spade struck deep, A broken mirror by a maiden dead.

These things--the beads she wore about her throat Alternate blue and amber all untied, A lamp to light her way, and on one side The toll men pay to that strange ferry-boat.

No trace to-day of what in her was fair!

Only the record of long years grown green Upon the mirror's l.u.s.treless dead sheen, Grown dim at last, when all else withered there.

Dead, broken, l.u.s.treless! It keeps for me One picture of that immemorial land, For oft as I have held thee in my hand The dull bronze brightens, and I dream to see