Chapter III: Part 3

Imagining nothing idler than words in the face of grave events, he condoles and congratulates with the genteelest air in the world. In short, while there is anything expected of him, while there are spectators to be fooled, the stratagems of the fellow prove inexhaustible. It is only when he is quite alone that he drops his jaw, and stretches his legs; then, heigho! arises like a smoke, and envelops him becomingly, the beautiful native well-bred torpidity of the gods, of poetic boredom, of "the Oxford manner."

"How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable!"

sighed Hamlet of this mortal outlook. As it came from him in the beginning, that plaint, in its sincerity, can come only from the man of culture, who feels about him vast mental spaces and depths, and to whom the face of creation is but comparative and symbolic. Nor will he breathe it in the common ear, where it may woo misapprehensions, and breed ignorant rebellion. The unlettered must ever love or hate what is nearest him, and, for lack of perspective, think his own fist the size of the sun. The social prizes, which, with mellowed observers, rank as twelfth or thirteenth in order of desirability, such as wealth and a foothold in affairs, seem to him first and sole; and to them he clings like a barnacle. But to our _indifférent_, nothing is so vulgar as close suction. He will never tighten his fingers on loaned opportunity; he is a gentleman, the hero of the habitually relaxed grasp. A light unprejudiced hold on his profits strikes him as decent and comely, though his true artistic pleasure is still in "fallings from us, vanishings." It costs him little to loose and to forego, to unlace his tentacles, and from the many who push hard behind, to retire, as it were, on a never-guessed-at competency, "richer than untempted kings." He would not be a life-prisoner, in ever so charming a bower. While the tranquil Sabine Farm is his delight, well he knows that on the dark trail ahead of him, even Sabine Farms are not sequacious. Thus he learns betimes to play the guest under his own cedars, and, with disciplinary intent, goes often from them; and, hearing his heart-strings snap the third night he is away, rejoices that he is again a freedman. Where his foot is planted (though it root not anywhere), he calls that spot home. No Unitarian in locality, it follows that he is the best of travellers, tangential merely, and pleased with each new vista of the human Past. He sometimes wishes his understanding less, that he might itch deliciously with a prejudice. With cosmic congruities, great and general forces, he keeps, all along, a tacit understanding, such as one has with beloved relatives at a distance; and his finger, airily inserted in his outer pocket, is really upon the pulse of eternity. His vocation, however, is to bury himself in the minor and immediate task; and from his intent manner, he gets confounded, promptly and permanently, with the victims of commercial ambition.

The true use of the much-praised Lucius Cary, Viscount Falkland, has hardly been apprehended: he is simply the patron saint of _indifférents_. From first to last, almost alone in that discordant time, he seems to have heard far-off resolving harmonies, and to have been rapt away with foreknowledge. Battle, to which all knights were bred, was penitential to him. It was but a childish means: and to what end? He meanwhile,--and no man carried his will in better abeyance to the scheme of the universe,--wanted no diligence in camp or council. Cares sat handsomely on him who cared not at all, who won small comfort from the cause which his conscience finally espoused. He labored to be a doer, to stand well with observers; and none save his intimate friends read his agitation and profound weariness. "I am so much taken notice of," he writes, "for an impatient desire for peace, that it is necessary I should likewise make it appear how it is not out of fear for the utmost hazard of war." And so, driven from the ardor he had to the simulation of the ardor he lacked, loyally daring, a sacrifice to one of two transient opinions, and inly impartial as a star, Lord Falkland fell: the young never-to-be-forgotten martyr of Newbury field. The imminent deed he made a work of art; and the station of the moment the only post of honor. Life and death may be all one to such a man: but he will at least take the noblest pains to discriminate between Tweedledum and Tweedledee, if he has to write a book about the variations of their antennæ. And like the Carolian exemplar is the disciple. The _indifférent_ is a good thinker, or a good fighter. He is no "immartial minion," as dear old Chapman suffers Hector to call Tydides. Nevertheless, his sign-manual is content with humble and stagnant conditions. Talk of scaling the Himalayas of life affects him, very palpably, as "tall talk." He deals not with things, but with the impressions and analogies of things. The material counts for nothing with him: he has moulted it away. Not so sure of the identity of the higher course of action as he is of his consecrating dispositions, he feels that he may make heaven again, out of sundries, as he goes. Shall not a beggarly duty, discharged with perfect temper, land him in "the out-courts of Glory," quite as successfully as a grand Sunday-school excursion to front the cruel Paynim foe? He thinks so. Experts have thought so before him. Francis Drake, with the national alarum instant in his ears, desired first to win at bowls, on the Devon sward, "and afterwards to settle with the Don." No one will claim a buccaneering hero for an _indifférent_, however. The Jesuit novices were ball-playing almost at that very time, three hundred years ago, when some too speculative companion, figuring the end of the world in a few moments (with just leisure enough, between, to be shriven in chapel, according to his own thrifty mind), asked Louis of Gonzaga what he, on his part, should do in the precious interval. "I should go on with the game," said the most innocent and most ascetic youth among them. But to cite the behavior of any of the saints is to step over the playful line allotted. Indifference of the mundane brand is not to be confounded with their detachment, which is emancipation wrought in the soul, and the ineffable efflorescence of the Christian spirit. Like most supernatural virtues, it has a laic shadow; the counsel to abstain, and to be unsolicitous, is one not only of perfection, but also of polity. A very little non-adhesion to common affairs, a little reserve of unconcern, and the gay spirit of sacrifice, provide the moral immunity which is the only real estate. The _indifférent_ believes in storms: since tales of shipwreck encompass him. But once among his own kind, he wonders that folk should be circumvented by merely extraneous powers! His favorite catch, woven in among escaped dangers, rises through the roughest weather, and daunts it:

"Now strike your sailes, ye jolly mariners,
For we be come into a quiet rode."

No slave to any vicissitude, his imagination is, on the contrary, the cheerful obstinate tyrant of all that is. He lives, as Keats once said of himself, "in a thousand worlds," withdrawing at will from one to another, often curtailing his circumference to enlarge his liberty. His universe is a universe of balls, like those which the cunning Oriental carvers make out of ivory; each entire surface perforated with the same delicate pattern, each moving prettily and inextricably within the other, and all but the outer one impossible to handle. In some such innermost asylum the right sort of devil-may-care sits smiling, while we rage or weep.

1894.

ON A PLEASING ENCOUNTER WITH A PICKPOCKET

I WAS in town the other evening, walking by myself, at my usual rapid pace, and ruminating, in all likelihood, on the military affairs of the Scythians, when, at a lonely street corner not adorned by a gas-lamp, I suddenly felt a delicate stir in my upper pocket. There is a sort of mechanical intelligence in a well-drilled and well-treated body, which can act, in an emergency, without orders from headquarters. My mind, certainly, was a thousand years away, and is at best drowsy and indifferent. It had besides, no experience, nor even hearsay, which would have directed it what to do at this thrilling little crisis. Before it was aware what had happened, and in the beat of a swallow's wing, my fingers had brushed the flying thief, my eyes saw him, and my legs (retired race-horses, but still great at a spurt) flew madly after him. I protest that from the first, though I knew he had under his wicked thumb the hard-earned wealth of a notoriously poor poet (let the double-faced phrase, which I did not mean to write, stand there, under my hand, to all posterity), yet I never felt one yearning towards it, nor conceived the hope of revenge. No: I was fired by the exquisite dramatic situation; I felt my blood up, like a charger

"that sees
The battle over distances."

I was in for the chase in the keen winter air, with the moon just rising over the city roofs, as rapturously as if I were a very young dog again. My able bandit, clearly viewed the instant of his assault, was a tiger-lily of the genus "tough": short, pallid, sullen, with coat-collar up and hat-brim down, and a general air of mute and violent executive ability. My business in devoting this chapter to reminiscences of my only enemy, is to relate frankly what were my contemporaneous sensations. As I wheeled about, neatly losing the chance of confronting him, and favored with a hasty survey, in the dark, of his strategic mouth and chin, the one sentiment in me, if translated into English, would have uttered itself in this wise: "After years of dulness and decorum, O soul, here is some one come to play with thee; here is Fun, sent of the immortal gods!"

This divine emissary, it was evident, had studied his ground, and awaited no activity on the part of the preoccupied victim, in a hostile and unfamiliar neighborhood. He suffered a shock when, remembering my ancient prowess in the fields of E----, I took up a gallop within an inch of his nimble heels. Silently, as he ran, he lifted his right arm. We were soon in the blackness of an empty lot across the road, among coal-sheds and broken tins, with the far lights of the thoroughfare full in our faces. Quick as kobolds summoned up from earth, air, and nowhere, four fellows, about twenty years old, swarmed at my side, as like the first in every detail as foresight and art could make them; and these darting, dodging, criss-crossing, quadrilling, and incessantly interchanging as they advanced, covering the expert one's flight, and multiplying his identity, shot separately down a labyrinth of narrow alleys, leaving me confused and checkmated, after a brief and unequal game, but overcome, nay, transported with admiration and unholy sympathy! It was the prettiest trick imaginable.

It was near Christmas; and, brought to bay, and still alone, I conjured up a vision of a roaring cellar-fire, and the snow whistling at the bulkhead, as the elect press in, with great slapping of hands and stamping of shoes, to a superfine night-long and month-long bowl of grog, MY grog, dealt out by Master Villon, with an ironic toast to the generous founder. I might have followed the trail, as I was neither breathless nor afraid, but it struck me that the sweet symmetry of the thing ought not to be spoiled; that I was serving a new use and approximating a new experience; that it would be a stroke of genius, in short, almost equal to the king pickpocket's own, to make love to the inevitable. Whereupon, bolstered against an aged fence, I laughed the laugh of Dr. Johnson, "heard, in the silence of the night, from Fleet Ditch to Temple Bar." I thought of the good greenbacks won by my siren singing in the _Hodgepodge Monthly_; I thought of my family, who would harbor in their memories the inexplicable date when the munificent church-mouse waxed stingy. I thought even of the commandment broken and of the social pact defied, gave my collapsed pocket a friendly dig, and laughed again. The police arrived, with queries, and ineffective note-books. I went home, a shorn lamb, conscious of my exalted financial standing; for had I not been robbed? All the way I walked with Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, who came to mind promptly as my corporeal blessings departed. He intoned no requiem for the lost, but poured a known philosophy, in which I had now taken my degree, into my liberal ear:--

"Why shouldst thou vex thyself, that never willingly vexed anybody?"

"A man has but two concerns in life: to be honorable in what he does, and resigned under what happens to him."

"If any one misconduct himself towards thee, what is that to thee? The deed is his; and therefore let him look to it."

"Welcome everything that happens as necessary and familiar."

Marry, a glow of honest self-satisfaction is cheaply traded for a wad of current specie, and an inkling into the ways of a bold and thirsty world. Methinks I have "arrived"; I have attained a courteous composure proof against mortal hurricanes. Life is no longer a rude and trivial comedy with the Beautifully Bulldozed, who feels able to warm to his own catastrophe, and even to cry, "Pray, madam, don't mention it," to an apologizing lady in a gig, who drives over him and kills him, and does so, moreover, in the most bungling manner in the world.

1892.

REMINISCENCES OF A FINE GENTLEMAN

MY friend was of illustrious ancestry. While so many trace their life-stream to pirates or usurpers who shed their brothers' blood to possess their brothers' power, it is a distinction worth recording, that this Fine Gentleman was descended from a princely person in Switzerland who saved some sixty lives, and whose ancient portrait is loaded, like a French marshal's, with the ribbons and medals of recognition. Though of foreign origin, he did an American thing at my introduction to him: he shook hands. I dropped the white pebble of the Cretans to mark the day he arrived. It is needless to say I loved and understood him,--blond, aggressive, wilful, from the first. He had then, despite his extreme youth, the air of a fighting aristocrat, a taking swashbuckler attitude, as he stood at the open door: the look of one who has character, and a defined part to play, and whose career can never reach a common nor ignoble end. Comely in the full sense he was not; but impressive he was, despite the precocious leanness and alertness which come of too rapid growth.

He had every opportunity, during his babyhood and later, of gratifying his abnormal love of travel; he managed to see more of city life than was good for him, thanks to many impish subterfuges. His golden curiosity covered everything mundane, and he continued his private studies in topography until he was kidnapped, and restored by the police: an abject, shamefaced little tourist, heavy with conscience, irresponsive to any welcomes, who sidled into his abandoned residence, and forswore from that day his unholy peregrinations. But he had a roaming housemate, and grew to be supremely happy, journeying under guidance.

His temper, at the beginning, was none of the best, and took hard to the idea of moral governance; he overcame obstacles after the fashion of a catapult. His sense of humor was always grim: he had a smile, wide and significant, like a kobold's; but a mere snicker, or a wink, was foreign to his nature. With certain people he was sheer clown; yet he discriminated, and never wore his habitual air of swaggering consequence before any save those he was pleased to consider his inferiors. The sagacious and protective instincts were strong in him. For children he had the most marked indulgence and affection, an inexhaustible gentleness, as if he found the only statecraft he could respect among them. For their delight he made himself into a horse, and rode many a screaming elf astride of his back for a half-mile through the meadow, before coming to the heart of the business, which was to sit or kneel suddenly, and cast poor Mazeppa yards away in the wet grass: a proceeding hailed with shouts of acclaim from the accompanying crowd of playfellows. And again, in winter, he became an otter, and placing himself upon his worthy back at the summit of a hill, rolled repeatedly to the bottom, drenched in snow, and buried under a coasting avalanche of boys.

He never found time, in so short a life, to love many. Outside his own household and his charming cat, he was very loyal to one lady whose conversation was pleasingly ironical, and to one gentleman whose character was said to resemble his own. Several others were acceptable, but for these two visitors he had the voice and gesture of joyful greeting. He had so arrant an individuality that folk loved or hated him. One could not look with indifference on that assertive splendid bearing, or on the mighty muscles as of a Norse ship. A civil address from you made him your liegeman. But the merest disregard or slight, no less than open hostility, sealed him your foe. And there were no stages of vacillation. A grudge stood a grudge, and a fondness a fondness. He was a famous retaliator; none ever knew him to ride first into the lists. Battle he loved, but he had a gentlemanly dislike of "scenes": when a crisis came, he preferred to box or wrestle; and what he preferred he could do, for no opponent ever left a scar upon him. A rival less in size, or impudent solely, he took by the nape of the neck and tossed over the nearest fence, resuming his walk with composure. Training and education helped him to the pacific solving of many problems. His good dispositions, all but established, were once badly shaken by a country sojourn; for he had been taught there a bit of cabalistic boys' Latin whose slightest whisper would send him tiptoeing to every window in the house, scanning the horizon for a likely enemy, with a rapture worthy of another cause.

He was rich in enemies, most of them of the gentler sex. Upon a civic holiday, three villageous women were seen to bear down upon him, as he was calmly inspecting the outposts of their property, laden with weapons (_timor arma ministrat!_) no less classic than a pail, a broom, and an axe. Not Swift's self could have added to the look of withering comment with which he turned and confronted his assailants: a single glance which dispersed the troops, and held in itself the eloquence of an Aristophaneian comedy. Eternal warfare lay between him and the man who had peevishly flapped that haughty nose with a glove, before his first birthday-anniversary, and revenge boiled in his eye, long after, at sight of a citizen who had once addressed to him a word unheard in good society. A loud tone, a practical joke, a teasing reminder of a bygone fault, disconcerted him wholly. Sensitive and conservative of mood, my Fine Gentleman could never forget a rudeness, nor account satisfactorily for such a thing as a condescension. All his culture and his thinking had not taught him to allow for the divers conditions and dispositions of mankind. To the last he looked for courtesy, for intelligence, and, alas, for fashionable clothes, in his ideal. For the Fine Gentleman was a snob. Hunger and nakedness, even honest labor, had for him no occult charm. Throughout his youth, he courted patrician acquaintances, and on the very highway ached to make worse rags yet of the floating rags of a beggar's coat; but the experience of friendship with a kindly butcher-lad made inroads upon his exclusiveness; and I know that, had he outlived his years, there would have been one more convert democrat. His own personal appearance was of the nicest; by scrupulous superintendence of his laundry, chiefly by night, he kept himself immaculate and imposing. His colors were those of the fallen leaves and the snow; the November auburn falling away on either side from the magnificent brow and eyes, and from the neck in its triple white fold: a head to remind you of Raleigh in his ruff.

He must have been patriotic, for he revelled in the horns, gunpowder, rockets, and smoke of the Fourth of July. Archery and rifle-practice seemed to strike him as uncommonly pleasant devices to kill time. In all games which had noise and motion, he took the same strong vicarious interest. He had heard much music, and learned something of it; he was once known to hum over an august recitative of the late Herr Wagner. Singular to relate, he had an insuperable objection to books, and protested often against the continued use of the pen by one he would fain esteem. Yet he seemed greatly to relish the recital of a tribute of personal verse from a United States Senator, and the still more elaborate lines of a delightful professional satirist.

His health, aside from his great size, his spirit and nervous vigor, was never steady nor sound. Every chapter of the Fine Gentleman's biography is crammed with events, perils, excitements, catastrophes, and blunders, due in great part, by a scientific verdict, to this tremendous vitality balancing on too narrow a base. With years, there began to come the "philosophic mind." His sweetness and submission grew with his strength; never was there a sinner so tender of conscience, so affected by remonstrance, so fruitful, after, in the good works of amended ways. New virtues seemed to shoot on all sides, and the old ones abided and flourished. He had never tried to deceive, nor to shirk, nor to rebel, nor to take what was not his, nor to appear other than he was. In the country town where he had many a frolic, and where he lies buried, he found congenial circumstances. There were no gardens there, no timid neighbors; he had opportunity, being allowed to inspect everything that stirred in air, or upon the earth, or in the waters under, for the pursuit of natural history, which was his passion; he ate what he pleased, he lorded it as he liked, he shifted his responsibilities, he won endless flattery from the inhabitants. His frank acknowledgment of all this was unique. On his return, while his escort was still in the room, the Fine Gentleman was asked whether he would rather remain now at home, or spend a week longer in the fascinating precincts of Cambrook. He arose briskly, bestowed on the questioner, whom he professed to adore, his warmest embrace (a thing unusual with him), and immediately, pulling his escort by the sleeve, placed himself at the door-knob which led into the more immoral world. His last accomplishment was to acquire an accurate sense of time, to make his quarter-hour calls, his half-hour walks, when sent out alone: "as wise as a Christian," an honest acquaintance was wont to say of him, perhaps on the suspicion that the Fine Gentleman, after he reached his majority, was a free-thinker.

He was in his perfect prime when a slight seeming disgrace fell upon him, though an incident never clearly understood. His believers believed in him still; but, for the need of quiet and impartial adjustment of matters, persuaded him to stay an indefinite while in the beloved farming district where many of his earlier vacations were spent. So that, after all his tender rearing, he was at last abroad and divorced: with a mist, such as we recognized immortals call sin, upon his spirit, and, because of that, a scruple and a doubt upon mine, answerable for much of what he was. Before the eventual proof came that he was clear of blame, there were thoughts even of an imperative parting, and a reaching for the rectification towards the Happy Hunting-Grounds, where, at an era's end, we could be joyous together; and where under the old guiding then never unskilful, the old sympathy then never erring, the Fine Gentleman could be to his virtue's full, and in no misapprehending air, his innocent, upright, loving self again. But instantly, as if to wipe out forever that possible evil of which men could dream him guilty, came the moving and memorable end. Amid the tears of a whole town, and the thanksgiving of some for a greater grief averted, very quietly and consciously, under the most painful conditions, the Fine Gentleman laid down his life for a little child's sake. The fifth act of his tragedy had a sort of drastic consistency, to those who knew him; it was in line with his odd, inborn, unconventional ways: the fate one would have chosen for him, and the fittest with which to associate his soldierly memory. In exile and cashiered, he had overturned his defamers at a stroke.

It is not too proud a sentence to write over him, that this world, for the most part, was jealous of his nobility. Human society was some sort of huge jest to him; he did not always do his best there, as if the second-best were the shrewder policy, and the neater adaptation to the codes of honor he found established. His main concern was certainly the study of mankind, and he stood to it, a free and unbookish philosopher, looking on and not partaking, with his reticent tongue, his singularly soft footfall, his "eye like a wild Indian's, but cordial and full of smothered glee." To his own race he must be an epic figure and a precedent, and to ours something not undeserving of applause.

"Go seek that hapless tomb, which if ye hap to find,
Salute the stones that keep the bones that held so good a mind."

Such are the only annals of the Fine Gentleman, a Saint Bernard dog, faithful and forgotten, who bore a great Bostonian's name nearly five years without a stain, and who is, to one or two of us, not alone a friend lost, but an ideal set up: Perseus become a star.

1889.

IRISH

THEY say the Celt is passing away,

"Encompassed all his hours
By fearfullest powers
Inflexible to him."

For he represents yesterday, and its ideals: legendry, ritual, the heroic and indignant joy of life, belong to him; and he can establish no manner of connection with modern science and the subjugating of the material universe; with the spirit of to-day and to-morrow. Of all Celtic countries, Ireland has the richest background; with so varied and exciting a past, it may well be that she has difficulty in concentrating herself on the new, and hangs to her own consistencies in a world of compromise. Every one save herself has forgotten what she was, and how her precedents, rather than any outer consideration, must still govern her, and keep her antagonist and unreconciled. It is not to be modified, this pauper's pride of blood. She says to the powers, in charming futile bravado, what a Howard once said to a Spencer: "My ancestors were plotting treason, while yours were keeping sheep!" The word warms her heart like wine. "_Le moyen âge énorme et délicat_," in Verlaine's beautiful colors, seems a phrase made for Irish mediævalism. It was the watershed of European knowledge and moral culture: the watershed truly, which, sending streams down and out and far away, can never call them back. It gave Scotland her "naked knee" and her kingly line; it gave England its Christian creed; it gave modern France and Spain the noble enrichment of its banished and stainless gentry, its Jacobite Wild Geese. It has been in America, from the Revolution on, an influence incalculable. It won the perfect understanding sympathy of De Beaumont, Renan and Matthew Arnold: men of antipodal judgments. It has an intangible throne in every mind which loves scholarship, and imaginings more beautiful than any folk-lore in the world. "See you this skull?" Lucan makes Mercury say to Menippus, in the shades: "this is Helen." Great is the gulf between happy Innisfail, sovereign and wise, with her own laws, language, sports, and dress, and this wrecked Ireland we know: a country of untended flax-fields, unworked marble-quarries, silent mills on river-banks, little collapsing baronies whose landlords are absent and cold, and a capital whose lordly houses are given over, since the Union, to neglect and decay.

Yet of her glory there are glorious witnesses. Her rough and winding historic roads are open all along. The country is full of ruins and traditions and snatches of strange song, to "tease us out of thought." A gander off on a holiday, with his white spouse and their pretty brood, lifts his paternal hiss at the passer-by from a Druid's altar; and where young lambs lie, in a windy spring, to lee of their mothers, is a magnificent doorway, Lombardic, Romanesque, or Hiberno-Saxon, arch in arch, with its broken inscription, an _Orate_ for immemorial kings. At well-sides are yet seen ablutions and prayers, and May-Day offerings of corn and wool, even as they were "before the advent of the Desii into the County Waterford." By a waterfall, plunging under cleanest ivy and long grass, is a cross with circled centre and intricate Byzantine ornament, displaying David with his harp, or Peter with his keys, set up by a monastic hand twelve hundred years ago. Forty feet away, is something dearer to the archæologist: a kitchen of the primeval hunters, its wall and hearth and calcined lime-stones bedded among laughing bluebells. A brook's freshet, any March, may bring ashore a strange staff or necklace; a rock is overturned under a yew-tree, and discloses horns and knives elder than Clontarf. But yesterday, in a Carlow garden adjoining the ruins of a Butler fortress, put up at the time when Richard the Lionheart was looking with tears of envy over the walls of Jerusalem, closed urns were found in vaults, each with its shining dust: a tenantry long anterior to Christianity, and conscious perhaps, of Christian goings-on overhead, when The MacMorrough Kavanagh was pressed to dine with the Warden of the Black Castle, and slain among his followers at the pouring of the wine. There can be no other country so fatal to the antiquarian: for zest and labor are superfluous, and a long course of incomparable luck must drive him, for very satiety, from the field.

Venerable Ireland has failed, as the world reckons failure. She cannot take prettily to her rôle of subjugated province. Abominably misruled, without a senate, without commerce, she has fallen back into the sullen interior life, into the deep night of reverie. From that brooding dark she has let leap no modern flame supremely great. For the great artist is not Irish, as yet, though with warm exaggerations, uncritical enthusiasms, affectionate encouragements, her own exalt her own. As Goldsmith accused Dr. Johnson of doing, she lets her little fishes talk like whales. And this, of course, tends to no good: it only blunts the ideals of the populace, lowers the mark of achievement, and makes it difficult indeed for the true prince to be recognized in the hubbub of mistaken acclaim. The constituency of Aneurin and Ossian lacks a single sovereign poet: a lack apparent enough to all but itself. Verse, from of old, is pervasive as dew or showers: but nowhere is it in process of crystallization. The persecution of age-long ignorance, imposed upon a most intellectual people, is a miasmatic cloud not yet altogether withdrawn. Only in the best is Ireland perfect: in heroes and in saints. In life, if not in art, we can sometimes do away with economy, restraint, equipoise. We can hardly judge the epic figures of antiquity: but from Columba to "J.K.L.," from Hugh O'Neill and Sarsfield to Emmet and Lord Edward Fitzgerald, runs an endearing family likeness: scorn, pity, sweetness, disinterestedness, honor, power, brave ill luck, in them all. Most of these are rebels; their names are under the baffling shadow of exile and the scaffold, and, alas, count for naught save in their mother's memory.

"Where be thy gods, O Israel?" The gibe comes with ill grace from the English. England has, by the world's corroboration, her divine sons, whose names are in benediction. But she has also a Sahara spectacle of the most stolid, empty folk in the universe: the sapless, rootless, flowerless millions who pay, as it were, for Shakespeare and Shelley, for Turner and Purcell, for Newton and Darwin. Easy, is it not, for the superlative quality to form and act, in fullest power here and there, in a nation where no smallest grain of it is ever wasted on the common mortal? But Ireland reeks with genius impartially distributed. It is infectious; every one suffers from it, in its various stages and manifestations. "The superior race" makes the superior individual impossible. There is no situation open to him; he is notoriously superfluous: a coal brought to Newcastle. It is his lot to awake contradiction, and to be made to feel that he has no nominating committee behind him. He may be a great man in theory: but where every other man is demonstrably quite as great as he, he may be excused if he fails to move mountains. Eccentricity is in your Irishman's blood; and organization he hates and fears, perhaps through a dim consciousness that in organizations mental activities must be left to the leaders. If Celticism, with its insuperable charm, has never led the world in trade or war, can never so lead it, the cause is only that the units, which can hardly be said to compose it, use their brains with unhallowed persistence. The most dashing spirited troops in Europe, the Irish are natural critics even of authority. Their successes are everywhere spasmodic: they juggle with success, they do not woo it to wife. In a career dramatically checkered, it happens that their onset wins Fontenoy, and that their advice forfeits Culloden.

It has been well said that the cultured classes are everywhere much the same, and that the true range of observation lies among the lowly and the poor. Now, no peasantry in the world furnishes such marked examples as does the Irish, of original speculation, accessibility to ideas. Threadbare old farmers and peddlers keep you in amused astonishment, and in an attitude of impious doubt towards the ascendancy of the trained thinker. You fall, nay, you run into cordial agreement with the suggestion of Tom Jones to the Ensign, "that it is as possible for a man to know something without having been at school, as it is to have been at school and to know nothing!" To handle the inscrutable Celt on his own acres is to learn, or at least to apprehend, the secret of a live resistance, incredibly prolonged, to a power almost wearied out with maintaining mastery. The sense of equity, the sense of humor itself, in the humblest and silentest Irishman, is armor enough against fate. He, the law-breaker, has compensations which the law-makers wot not of, in his own ethic subtleties. His soul swells big with dreams. In his native village, he is rated sympathetically by the dream's size and duration, rather than, as in grosser communities, by the deed. The man is a trafficker in visions; he becomes a cryptic mystery to his wife. She admires him for his madness, and has heard of fairy influences: "_satis est_, it suffices," as old Burton oracularly says. Ah, well, the poor devil is with Fergus in his woodland car, when the rent comes due, and the crops are rotting in the rain! He has no turn for temporalities, no ambition to rise; yet in a pictorial sense, by the grace of God, or the witchcraft of the soil, he walks unique and illustrious. It is a memorable sight, this monstrous average and aggregate of whim. Nowhere the lonely planetary effulgence: everywhere the jovial defiant twinkle of little stars! According to Emerson's sweet prediction,--

"As half-gods go,
The gods arrive."

But in Ireland no clever half-god ever gets up to go, for the sake of any sequel.

Niecks, the biographer of Chopin, noting the extreme nationalism of Chopin's genius, would have us mark that the same force of patriotism in an Italian, Frenchman, German, or Englishman, could not have promoted a similar result. Poland is a realm, he tells us, where racial traits remain intact, and uninfluenced from without: she is more esoterical than any state can be which is on the highway of Continental progress, in touch with to-morrow; and therefore her expression in the arts is sure to be more individual, distinct, and striking. Ireland is such another spiritually isolated country. Her best utterance, or her least, is alike betrayingly hers, to be scented among a thousand. And this homogeneity, in her case, is quite unaccountable, unless we accept as its explanation, the magnetic and absorbent quality in the strange isle itself, which has blended a dozen alien strains in one, and made of Scythian, Erse, Norse, Iberian, the Norman, the Dane, the English of the Pale, the Huguenot, and the horde of Elizabethan and Cromwellian settlers, something "more Irish than the Irish." And in Poland, again, the aristocracy, though malcontent and impoverished, for honor's sake, maintains its own traditions in its own station, as the feudal vassals maintain theirs. But the genuine Irish gentry is extinct, or utterly transformed, on its ancient acres. The original peasant stock has all but perished from famines and immigrations. Most significant of all, what remains of the two, blends as in no other European territory. The peasants were long ago driven from the estate of free clansmen; the gentry, who would neither conform nor flee, were crushed into the estate of peasants, by the penal laws of the Protestant victor, which made education treason; by the most hateful code, as Lord Chief Justice Coleridge named it, framed since the beginning of the world: and one class impacted on the other, as mortar among stones, became indistinguishable in a generation. Time, which was expected to bring about No Ireland, has in reality engendered a national life more intense than ever. The physical strength, the patience and passion, of the common people; the grace, loyalty, and play of thought of gentlemen, have in that national life come together. Unique patrician wit, delicacy of feeling, knightly courtesy, have run out of their allotted conduits, and they color the speech of beggars. Distinction of all sorts sprouts in the unlikeliest places. Violent Erin produces ever and anon the gentlest philosopher; recluse Erin sends forth the consummate cosmopolitan; hunted and jealous Erin holds up on its top stalk the open lily of liberality,

----"courteous, facile, sweet,
Hating that solemn vice of greatness, pride."

Ireland is at work in every department of every civilization: it is a seed-shedding, an aroma, intangible as April. No pioneer post, no remote wave, no human enterprise from Algiers to Peru, but can answer for it, ill or well. Yet none know whether Ireland itself is at this hour a mere menace of terrible import, like Samson, or ready, another Odysseus, to throw off disguises, and draw, at home, "in Tara's halls," the once familiar bow. Its own future, in its own altered valleys, is hidden. The tragic cloud hangs there. Foreboding, unrest, are stamped on the very water and sky, and on proud sensitive faces. It was on a day in spring, in sight of Wicklow headlands, the Golden Spears of long ago;--a day when primroses and celandine and prodigal furze splashed the hillsides, down to the rocks where fishers sat mending nets, and stitching tawny sails; when there was a sense of overhanging heights, and green inlands, and ruined abbeys whose stone warriors sleep in hearing of the surf, and of huge cromlech, fairy rath, and embattled wall, long and low, looking sadly down; when the shadows in that cold enchanted air at sea, fringing every sapphire bay, chased from silver through carmine to purple, and back again;--on such a day of caprice and romance, the true day of the Gael, a woman beautiful as the young Deirdre said to a stranger, walking the cliff-path at her side: "No: we have never been conquered: we are unconquerable. But we are without hope."

1889.

AN OPEN LETTER TO THE MOON

"TO THE CELESTIAL AND MY SOUL'S IDOL, THE MOST
BEAUTIFIED":--

IT might appear to us an imperative, though agreeable duty, most high and serene Madame, to waft towards you, occasionally, a transcript of our humble doings on this nether planet, were we not sure, in the matter of friendly understanding, that we opened correspondence long ago. You were one of our earliest familiars. You stood in that same office to our fathers and mothers, back to your sometime contemporary, Adam of the Garden; and while we are worried into acquiescence with the inevitable design of age, we are more pleased than envious to discover that you grow never old to the outward eye, and that you appear the same "lovesome ladie bright," as when we first stared at you from a babe's pillow. You are acquainted, not by hearsay, but by actual evidence, with the family history, having seen what sort of figure our ancestors cut, and being infinitely better aware of the peculiarities of the genealogical shrub than we can ever be. Therefore we make no reference to a matter so devoid of novelty. But we do mean to free our minds frankly on the subject of your Ladyship's own behavior. We take this resolve to be no breach of that exalted courtesy which befits us, no less than you, in your skyey station.

We have in part, lost our ancient respect for you: a sorry fact to chronicle. There were once various statements floating about our cradle, complimentary to your supposed virtues. You were Phoebe, twin to Phoebus: a queen, having a separate establishment, coming into a deserted court by night, and kindling it into more than daytime revelry. You were an enchantress, the tutelary divinity of water-sprites and greensward fairies. Your presence was indispensable for felicitous dreams. To be moonstruck, then, meant to be charmed inexpressibly, to be lifted off our feet.

Now, we allow that you have suffered by misrepresentation, or else are we right in detecting your arts; for, by all your starry handmaidens, you are not what we took you to be! We are informed (our quondam faith in you beshrews the day we learned to read!) that you are a timid dependent only of the sun, afraid to show yourself while he is on his peregrinations; that you slyly steal the garb of his splendor as he lays it aside, and blaze forthwith in your borrowed finery. That you are no friend to innocent goblins, but abettor to housebreakers; conspirator in many direful deeds, attending base nocturnal councils, and tacitly arraigning yourself against the law. "Let us be Diana's foresters, gentlemen of the shade, ... governed, as the sea is, by our noble and chaste mistress, the moon, under whose countenance we--steal." That your gossip is the ominous owl, and not Titania. Your inconstancy, to come on delicate ground, shineth above your other characteristics. Since we have seen your color come and go, we surmise that there is no dearth of intrigue and repartee up there; and in a red or a grey veil, you masquerade periodically, at unseasonable hours. Of painting your complexion we are disposed to acquit you; yet it is a severe blow to us to learn, from the most trustworthy sources, that you wax.

Selene, Artemis! you are worldly beyond worldlings. We hear that you have quarters, and that you jingle them triumphantly in the ears of Orion, who is nobody but a poor hunter. Beware of the exasperation of the lower classes! whose awakening is what we call below a French Revolution. Who, indeed, that hath a mote in his eye, cannot still discern a huge beam in yours? Have you no resident missionary? for you persist in obstinate schisms, and flaunt that exploded Orientalism, the crescent, in the teeth of Christendom. You are much more distant and reserved, O beguiler! than you pretend. Your temper is said to be volcanic.

You that were Diana! who is the Falstaffian, Toby Belchian, Kriss Kringlish person to be seen about your premises? He hangeth his great ruddy comfortable phiz out of your casements, and holdeth it sidewise with a wink or a leer, having never yet found his rhyming way to Norwich. We look on him as an officious rascal. He peereth where you only, by privilege, have permission to enter. He hath the evil eye. He thinketh himself a proper substitute for you, and King of the Illuminari; he reproduceth your smile, and scattereth your largesses; he maketh faces (we say it shudderingly) at your worshippers below. Frequently hath he appropriated kisses that were blown to you personally, or consigned to you for delivery, from one sweetheart to another.

O Lady, O Light-dispenser, think, we hereby beseech you, of the danger of his being taken for you! Picture the discomfiture of your minstrel, who, intoning a rapturous recital of your charms, and casting about for a sight of your delectable loveliness, is confronted, instead, with that broad ingenuous vagabond! In some such despairing rage as the minstrel's, must have been the inventor of the German tongue, who discarded all other chances of observation after once beholding this thing, ycleped your Man, and angrily insisted on "Der Mond,"--the Moon, he--as the proper mode of speech. I cite you this from old John Lyly: "There liveth none under the sunne that know what to make of the man in the moon." We clamor at you from the throats of the five races: Abolish him, or at least, depose the present incumbent, and get you straightway some acceptable minion, one of more chivalric habit, of more spare and ascetic exterior! Your credit and our comfort demand it. "Pray you, remember."

What scenes, Cosmopolite, Circumnavigator, Universalist, have you beheld: what joy, what plenty, what riot and desolation! You are the arch-spectator. Death sees not half so widely. He lurketh like an anxious thief in the crowd, seeking what he may take away. But your bland leisurely eye looketh down disinterestedly on all. Caravans rested thrice a thousand years ago beneath you in the desert; Assyrian shepherds chanted to you with their long-hushed voices; the south wind, while the infant world fell into its first slumber, leaped up and played with you in Paradise. You have known the chaos before man, and yet we saw you laugh upon last April's rain. Are there none for whom you are lonely through the ages? Are there not centuries of old delight in your memory, unequalled now? faces fairer than the lilies, on whose repose you still yearn to shine? Do you miss the smoke of altars? Have you forgotten the beginners of the "star-ypointing pyramid"? Can you not tell us a tale of the Visigoth? How sang Blondel against the prison door? How brawny was Bajazet? How fair was Helen; Semiramis, how cruel? Moon! where be the treasures of the doughty Kidd?

You, Cynthia and Hecate, sweet Lady of Ghosts and guardian of the underworld, have been fed upon the homage of mortal lips: you have had praises from the poets exquisite as calamus and myrrh. Many a time have we rehearsed before you such as we recall, from the sigh of Enobarbus:--

"O sovereign mistress of true melancholy!"

to the hymnal

"Orbèd maiden, with white fire laden,"

of the noble salutation of a mirthful-mournful spirit:

"Oh! thou art beautiful, howe'er it be,
Huntress or Dian, or whatever named;
And he the veriest pagan, that first framed
His silver idol, and ne'er worshipped thee."

Have we not sung oft that strophe of Ben Jonson's, full of inexpressible music to our ear?

"Lay thy bow of pearl apart
And thy crystal shining quiver;
Give unto the flying hart
Space to breathe, how short soever,
Thou that mak'st a day of night,
Goddess excellently bright!"

and the beloved rhymeless cadence of old Jasper Fisher's drama, beginning:--

"Thou queen of Heaven, commandress of the deep,
Lady of lakes, regent of woods and deer."

Sidney, Drummond, Milton, glorified your wanderings. And your truest votary, one John Keats, spake out boldly that

----"the oldest shade midst oldest trees
Feels palpitations when thou lookest in."

You are an incorrigible charmer: but as he reports you likewise as

----"a relief
To the poor, patient oyster, where he sleeps
Within his pearly house,"

we infer, with pleasurable surprise, that you have set up as a humanitarian.

Now, we venture to assert that you remember compliments meant to be of the same Orphic strain, and inscribed to you, of which we are not wholly guiltless. We have all but knelt to you, with the Libyan. The primeval heathen has stirred within us. We have been under the witchery of Isis. We aspire to be a Moonshee, rather than any potentate of this universe. Have we not followed you, O "planet of progression!" all our bright, volatile, restless, tide-like days? We wound you not with the analytic eye, nor startle you with telescopes. The scepticisms of astronomy enter not into our rubric. Are you not comely? Do you not spiritualize the darkness with one touch of your pale garment? Then what are they to us, your dimensions and your distances? Gross vanity of knowledge! Mere abuse of privilege!

If we affect the abusive, shy of more ceremonious forms of address, forgive us, Luna. We make recantation, and disown our banter. We extend the hand of cordiality even to your month-old Man. How blithe and beauteous he is! He is embodied Gentility. We bow to him as your anointed Viceroy, your illustrious Nuncio. You know our immemorial loyalty, nor shall our rogueries teach you so late to doubt it.

"_Da Lunæ propere novæ,
Da noctis mediæ, da, puer!_"

Forgive us, benignant, peaceful, affable, propitious Moon. Poet are we not, nor lunatic, nor lover; "but that we love thee best, O Most Best! believe it."

1885.

THE UNDER DOG

WHAT a pity a memoir cannot be written without regard to its alleged incidents! Annalists are naturally the slaves of what happens; and that glows between them and the eternal, like gorgeous-colored minster glass, a spurious man-made heaven. A written Life may be true to fact and false to law, even as a lived life may be so. It is utterly impossible for the most philosophic among us to know, to judge, or even to speculate, in behalf of any but himself. A word, a risk, a blunder, the breadth of a hair, the difference betwixt the two Kings of Brentford, lifts the obscure into apparent greatness, or forbids the potentially greater to descend to that table-land where there is no mist, where human senses come into play, and where he may become a subject for the approbation of history. In whatsoever degree a creature is burdened with conscience and stiffened with will, his course must be continuously deflected by countless little secret interior collisions and readjustments, which have final cumulative influence on what we call his character and his achievement. The means to this end are nowhere discoverable, unless in a perfect autobiography, and under the eye of the perfect reader. Fate must have her joke sometimes, as well as the least of us, and she suffers cheap energy to fill the newspapers for a lustrum, and genius to await identification at the morgue. These are truisms, but here is truth: in nine hundred and ninety-nine instances out of a thousand, it is folly to name any success or failure as such; for either is a mystery, and the fairest evidences by which we can form an opinion of it are altogether and irremediably fallacious.

Now, what has often used up and ended a man's vital force, is some constraint much more significant than that of early death, a constraint sought and willingly undergone. His own moral weakness stopped Coleridge; but Erasmus might have uttered with Sidney:

"My life melts with too much thinking."