The Book-Bills of Narcissus Part 3

And then the ranks form in line, and once more the sound, the ecstatic sound it had seemed but a short time before, of girls marching--but no!--no!--there is no Alice.

In sick despair Narcissus stalked that Amazonian battalion, crouching behind hedges, dropping into by-lanes, lurking in coppices,--he held his breath as they pa.s.sed two and two within a yard of him. Two followed two, but still no Alice!

Narcissus lay in wait, dinnerless, all that afternoon; he walked about that dreary house like a patrol, till at last he was observed of the inmates, and knots of girls gathered at the windows--alas! only to giggle at his forlorn and desperate appearance.

Still there was no Alice ... and then it began to rain, and he became aware how hungry he was. So he returned to his inn with a sad heart.

And all the time poor little Alice lay in bed with a sore throat, oblivious of those pa.s.sionate boyish eyes that, you would have thought, must have pierced the very walls of her seclusion.

And, after all, it was not her voice Narcissus had heard in the church.

It was but the still sweeter voice of his own heart.

CHAPTER VI

THE SIBYLLINE BOOKS

I hope it will be allowed to me that I treat the Reader with all respectful courtesy, and that I am well bred enough to a.s.sume him familiar with all manner of exquisite experience, though in my heart I may be no less convinced that he has probably gone through life with nothing worth calling experience whatsoever. It is our jaunty modern fashion, and I follow it so far as I am able. I take for granted, for instance, that every man has at one time or another--in his salad days, you know, before he was embarked in his particular provision business--had foolish yearnings towards poesy. I respect the mythical dreams of his 'young days'; I a.s.sume that he has been really in love; but, pray press me not too curiously as to whether I believe it all, as to whether I really imagine that his youth knew other dreams than those of the foolish young 'masherdom' one meets in the train every morning, or that he has married a wife for other than purely 'masculine' reasons.

These matters I do not mind leaving in the form of a postulate--let them be granted: but that every man has at one time or another had the craze for saving the world I will not a.s.sume. Narcissus took it very early, and though he has been silent concerning his mission for some time, and when last we heard of it had considerably modified his propaganda, he still cherishes it somewhere in secret, I have little doubt; and one may not be surprised, one of these days, to find it again bursting out 'into sudden flame.'

His spiritual experience has probably been the deepest and keenest of his life. I do not propose to trace his evolution from Anabaptism to Agnosticism. The steps of such development are comparatively familiar; they have been traced by greater pens than mine. The 'means' may vary, but the process is uniform.

Whether a man deserts the ancestral Brahminism that has so long been 'good enough for his parents,' and listens to the voice of the Buddhist missionary, or joins Lucian in the seat of the scornful, shrugging at augur and philosopher alike; whether it is Voltaire, or Tom Paine, or Thomas Carlyle, or Walt Whitman, or a Socialist tract, that is the emanc.i.p.ator, the emanc.i.p.ation is all one.

The seed that is to rend the rock comes in all manner of odd, and often unremembered, ways; but somehow, it is there; rains and dews unnoticed feed it; and surely, one day the rock is rent, the light is pouring in, and we are free! It is often a matter of anguish that, strive as we may, it is impossible to remember what helping hand it was that sowed for us.

Our fickle memory seems to convict us of ingrat.i.tude, and yet we know how far that sin is from us; and how, if those sowers could but be revealed to us, we would fall upon their necks, or at their feet.

I talked of this one day with Narcissus, and some time after he sent me a few notes headed 'Spiritual Pastors,' in which he had striven to follow the beautiful example set by Marcus Aurelius, in the anxiously loving acknowledgment with which he opens his meditations. I know he regarded it as miserably inefficient; but as it does actually indicate some of the more individual side of his experience, and is, moreover, characteristic in its style, I shall copy a few pa.s.sages from it here:--

'To some person or persons unknown exceeding grat.i.tude for the suggestion, in some dim talk, antenatal it would almost seem, that Roman Catholics might, after all, be "saved." Blessed fecundating suggestion, that was the earliest loophole!

'To my father I owe a mind that, once set on a clue, must follow it, if need be, to the nethermost darkness, though he has chosen to restrict the operation of his own within certain limits; and to my mother a natural leaning to the transcendental side of an alternative, which has saved me so many a time when reason had thrown me into the abyss. But one's greatest debt to a good mother must be simply--herself.

'To the Rev. Father Ignatius for his earnest preaching, which might almost have made me a monk, had not Thomas Carlyle and his _Heroes_, especially the lecture on Mahomet, given me to understand the true significance of a Messiah.

'To Bulwer for his _Zanoni_, which first gave me a hint of the possible natural "supernatural," and thus for ever saved me from dogmatising in negatives against the transcendental.

'To Sir Edwin Arnold for his _Light of Asia,_ also to Mr. Sinnett for his _Esoteric Buddhism,_ books which, coming to me about the same time, together with some others like them, first gave some occupation to an "unchartered freedom," gained in many forgotten steps, in the form of a faith which transfigured my life for many months into the most beautiful enthusiasm a man could know,--and which had almost sent me to the Himalayas!

'That it did not quite achieve that, though much of the light it gave me still remains, I owe to R.M., who, with no dialectic, but with one bald question, and the reading of one poem, robbed me of my fairy palace of Oriental speculation in the twinkling of an eye. Why it went I have never really quite known; but surely, it was gone, and the wind and the bare star-light were alone in its place.

'Dear Mac., I have not seen you for ever so long, and surely you have forgotten how that night, long ago, you asked with such a strange, almost childlike, simplicity: "_Is_ there a soul?" But I have not forgotten, nor how I made no answer at all, but only staggered, and how, with your strange, dreamy voice, you chanted for comfort:--

'"This hot, hard flame with which our bodies burn Will make some meadow blaze with daffodil; Ay! and those argent b.r.e.a.s.t.s of thine will turn To water-lilies; the brown fields men till Will be more fruitful for our love to-night: Nothing is lost in Nature; all things live in Death's despite.

'"So when men bury us beneath the yew Thy crimson-stained mouth a rose will be, And thy soft eyes lush blue-bells dimmed with dew; And when the white narcissus wantonly Kisses the wind, its playmate, some faint joy Will thrill our dust, and we will be again fond maid and boy.

'"... How my heart leaps up To think of that grand living after death In beast and bird and flower, when this cup, Being filled too full of spirit, bursts for breath, And with the pale leaves of some autumn day, The soul, earth's earliest conqueror, becomes earth's last great prey.

'"O think of it! We shall inform ourselves Into all sensuous life; the goat-foot faun, The centaur, or the merry, bright-eyed elves That leave they: dancing rings to spite the dawn Upon the meadows, shall not be more near Than you and I to Nature's mysteries, for we shall hear

'"The thrush's heart beat, and the daisies grow, And the wan snowdrop sighing for the sun On sunless days in winter; we shall know By whom the silver gossamer is spun, Who paints the diapered fritillaries, On what wide wings from shivering pine to pine the eagle flies.

'"We shall be notes in that great symphony Whose cadence circles through the rhythmic spheres, And all the live world's throbbing heart shall be One with our heart; the stealthy, creeping years Have lost their terrors now; we shall not die-- The universe itself shall be our Immortality!"

Have you forgotten how you chanted these, and told me they were Oscar Wilde's. You had set my feet firmly on earth for the first time, there was great darkness with me for many weeks, but, as it lifted, the earth seemed greener than ever of old, the sunshine a goodlier thing, and verily a blessedness indeed to draw the breath of life. I had learnt "the value and significance of flesh"; I no longer scorned a carnal diet, and once again I turned my eyes on the damsels in the street.

'But an influence soon came to me that kept me from going all the way with you, and taught me to say, "I know not," where you would say, "It is not." Blessings on thee who didst throw a rainbow, that may mean a promise, across the void, that awoke the old instinct of faith within me, and has left me "an Agnostic with a faith," quite content with "the brown earth," if that be all, but with the added significance a mystery gives to living;--thou who first didst teach me Love's lore aright, to thee do I owe this thing.

'To J.A.W. I owe the first great knowledge of that other love between man and man, which Whitman has since taught us to call "the dear love of comrades"; and to him I owe that I never burned those early rhymes, or broke my little reed--an unequivocal service to me, whatever the public, should it be consulted, may think.

'To a dear sister I owe that still more exquisite and subtle comradeship which can only exist between man and woman, but from which the more disturbing elements of s.e.x must be absent. And here, let me also thank G.o.d that I was brought up in quite a garden of good sisters.

'To Messrs. C. and W., Solicitors and Notaries, I owe, albeit I will say no thanks to them, the opportunity of that hardly learned good which dwells for those who can wrest it in a hateful taskwork, that faculty of "detachment" which Marcus Aurelius learnt so long ago, by means of which the soul may withdraw, into an inaccessible garden, and sing while the head bends above a ledger; or, in other words, the faculty of dreaming with one side of the brain, while calculating with the other. Mrs.

Browning's great _Aurora Leigh_ helped me more to the attainment of that than any book I know.

'In their office, too, among many other great things, I learnt that a man may be a good fellow and hate poetry--possibility undreamed of by sentimental youth; also that Messrs. Ba.s.s and Cope are not unworthy of their great reputation; and I had various nonsense knocked out of me, though they never succeeded in persuading me in that little matter of the "ambrosial curls."

'Through Samuel Dale I first came to understand how "whatever is" _can_ be "best," and also won a faith in G.o.d which I rather caught by infection than gained by any process of his reasoning. Of all else I owe to Samuel, how write? He knows.

'To a certain friend, mentioned last because he is not least, I owe: the sum of ten pounds, and a loving companionship, up hill and down dale, for which again I have no words and no--sovereigns.'

When I first read through these, I was somewhat surprised at the omission of all reference to books which I know marked most striking periods in Narcissus' spiritual life: _Sartor Resartus_, Th.o.r.eau's _Walden_, for example, Mr. Pater's _Marius the Epicurean_, and Browning's _Dramatis Personae_. As I reflected, however, I came to the conclusion that such omission was but justice to his own individuality, for none of these books had created an _initiative_ in Narcissus'

thought, but rather come, as, after all, I suppose they come to most of us, as great confirming expressions of states of mind at which he had already arrived, though, as it were, but by moonlight. In them was the sunrise bringing all into clear sight and sure knowledge.

It would seem, indeed, that the growth of the soul in the higher spirits of our race is a.n.a.logous to the growth of a child in the womb, in this respect: that in each case the whole gamut of earlier types is run through, before the ultimate form is attained in which it is decreed that the particular vital energy shall culminate. And, as in the physical world the various 'halts,' so to say, of the progress are ill.u.s.trated by the co-existence and continual succession of those earlier types; so in the world of mind, at every point of spiritual evolution, a man may meet with an historical individuality who is a concrete embodiment of the particular state to which he has just attained. This, of course, was what Goethe meant when he referred to mysticism as being a frame of mind which one could experience all round and then leave behind. To quote Whitman, in another connection:--

'We but level that lift To pa.s.s and continue beyond.'

But an individuality must 'crystallise out' somewhere, and its final value will not so much depend on the number of states it has pa.s.sed through, as how it has lived each on the way, with what depth of conviction and force of sincerity. For a modern young man to thus experience all round, and pa.s.s, and continue beyond where such great ones as St. Bernard, Pascal, and Swedenborg, have anch.o.r.ed their starry souls to shine thence upon men for all time, is no uncommon thing. It is more the rule than the exception: but one would hardly say that in going further they have gone higher, or ended greater. The footpath of pioneer individualism must inevitably become the highway of the race. Every American is not a Columbus.

There are two ways in which we may live our spiritual progress: as critics, or poets. Most men live theirs in that critical att.i.tude which refuses to commit itself, which tastes all, but enjoys none; but the greatest in that earnest, final, rooted, creative, fashion which is the way of the poets. The one is as a man who spends his days pa.s.sing from place to place in search of a dwelling to his mind, but dies at last in an inn, having known nought of the settled peace of a home; but the other, howsoever often he has to change his quarters, for howsoever short a time he may remain in any one of his resting-places, makes of each a home, with roots that shoot in a night to the foundations of the world, and blossomed branches that mingle with the stars.

Criticism is a good thing, but poetry is a better. Indeed, criticism properly _is_ not; it is but a process to an end. We could really do without it much better than we imagine: for, after all, the question is not so much _how_ we live, but _do_ we live? Who would not a hundred times rather be a fruitful Pa.r.s.ee than a barren _philosophe_? Yes, all lies, of course, in original greatness of soul; and there is really no state of mind which is not like Hamlet's pipe--if we but know the 'touch of it,' 'it will discourse most eloquent music.'

Now, it was that great sincerity in Narcissus that has always made us take him so seriously. And here I would remark in parenthesis, that trivial surface insincerities, such as we have had glimpses of in his dealings, do not affect such a great organic sincerity as I am speaking of. They are excrescences, which the great central health will sooner or later clear away. It was because he never held an opinion to which he was not, when called upon, practically faithful; never dreamed a dream without at once setting about its translation into daylight; never professed a creed for a week without some essay after the realisation of its new ideal; it was because he had the power and the courage to glow mightily, and to some purpose; because his life had a fiery centre, which his eyes were not afraid of revealing--that I speak of his great sincerity, a great capacity for intense life. Shallow patterers of divine creeds were, therefore, most abhorrent to him. 'You must excuse me, sir,' I remember his once saying to such a one, 'but what are you doing with cigarette and salutaris? If I held such a belief as yours, I would stand sandalled, with a rope round my waist, before to-morrow.'

One quaint instance of this earnest att.i.tude in all things occurs to me out of his schooldays. He was a Divine Right man, a fiery Jacobite, in those days; and, probably not without some absurd unconfessed dream in his heart that it might somehow help the dead old cause, he one afternoon fluttered the Hanoverian hearts--all the men we meet in street and mart are Hanoverians, of course--of our little literary club by solemnly rising 'to give notice' that at the following meeting he would read a paper to prove that 'the House of Hanover has no right to the English throne.' Great was the excitement through the fortnight intervening, extending even to the masters; and the meeting was a full one, and no little stormy.

Narcissus rose with the air of a condemned Strafford, and with all his boyish armoury of eloquence and scorn fought over again the long-lost battle, hiss and groan falling unheeded into the stream of his young voice. But vain, vain! hard is the Hanoverian heart in boy, as in man, and all your glowing periods were in vain--vain as, your peroration told us, 'was the blood of gallant hearts shed on Culloden's field.' Poor N., you had but one timorous supporter, even me, so early your _fidus Achates_--but one against so many. Yet were you crestfallen? Galileo with his 'E pur si muove,' Disraeli with his 'The time will come,' wore such a mien as yours, as we turned from that well-foughten field. Yes!