be some soul-subduing foretaste of what his Weltschmerz,1 and in which the concentrated last tears might be. sorrow of the world seemed suddenly to lie And the sense of security could hardly have heavy upon him. A book lay in an old bookbeen deeper, the quiet of the child's soul being case, of which he cared to remember one pie one with the quiet of its home, a place "in-ture-a woman sitting, with hands bound beclosed" and "sealed." But upon this assured hind her, the dress, the cap, the hair, folded place, upon the child's assured soul which with a simplicity which touched him strangely, resembled it, there came floating in from the as if not by her own hands, but with some larger world without, as at windows left ajar | ambiguous care at the hands of others-Queen! unknowingly, or over the high garden walls, two streams of impressions, the sentiments of beauty and pain-recognitions of the visible, tangible, audible loveliness of things, as a very real and somewhat tyrannous element in them -and of the sorrow of the world, of grown people and children and animals, as a thing not to be put by in them. From this point he could trace two predominant processes of mental change in him—the growth of an almost diseased sensibility to the spectacle of suffering, and, parallel with this, the rapid growth of a certain capacity of fascination by bright colour and choice form-the sweet curvings, for instance, of the lips of those who seemed to him comely persons, modulated in such delicate unison to the things they said or sang,-marking early the activity in him of a more than customary sensuousness, "the lust of the eye,' as the Preacher says,* which might lead him, one day, how far! Could he have foreseen the weariness of the way! In music sometimes the two sorts of impressions came together, and he would weep, to the surprise of older people. Tears of joy too the child knew, also to older people's surprise; real tears, once, of relief from long-strung, childish expectation, when he found returned at evening, with new roses in her cheeks, the little sister who had been to a place where there was a wood, and brought back for him a treasure of fallen acorns, and black crow's feathers, and his peace at finding her again near him mingled all night with some intimate sense of the distant forest, the rumour of its breezes, with the glossy blackbirds aslant and the branches lifted in them, and of the perfect nicety of the little cups that fell. So those two elementary apprehensions of the tenderness and of the colour in things grew apace in him, and were seen by him afterwards to send their roots back into the beginnings of life. Let me note first some of the occasions of his recognition of the element of pain in things-incidents, now and again, which seemed suddenly to awake in him the whole force of that sentiment which Goethe has called the *The Preacher is Ecclesiastes, but the phrase "lust of the eyes" is in I John, ii, 16. Marie Antoinette, on her way to execution—we all remember David's drawing, meant merely to make her ridiculous. The face that had been so high had learned to be mute and resistless; but out of its very resistlessness, seemed now to call on men to have pity, and forbear; and he took note of that, as he closed the book, as a thing to look at again, if he should at any time find himself tempted to be cruel. Again, he would never quite forget the appeal in the small sister's face, in the garden under the lilacs, terrified at a spider lighted on her sleeve. He could trace back to the look then noted a certain mercy he conceived always for people in fear, even of little things, which seemed to make him, though but for a moment, capable of almost any sacrifice of himself. Impressible, susceptible persons, indeed, who had had their sorrows, lived about him; and this sensibility was due in part to the tacit influence of their presence, enforcing upon him habitually the fact that there are those who pass their days, as a matter of course, in a sort of "going quietly." Most poignantly of all he could recall, in unfading minutest circumstance, the cry on the stair, sounding bitterly through the house, and struck into his soul for ever, of an aged woman, his father's sister, come now to announce his death in distant India; how it seemed to make the aged woman like a child again; and, he knew not why, but this fancy was full of pity to him. There were the little sorrows of the dumb animals too-of the white angora, with a dark tail like an ermine's, and a face like a flower, who fell into a lingering sickness, and became quite delicately buman in its valetudinarianism, and came to have a hundred different expressions of voice-how it grew worse and worse, till it began to feel the light too much for it, and at last, after one wild morning of pain, the little soul flickered away from the body, quite worn to death already, and now but feebly retaining it. So he wanted another pet; and as 'there were starlings about the place, which could be taught 1 world-sorrow 2 Jacques Louis David, court-painter to Louis XVI. and to Napoleon. with the remembered presence of the red flowers, and their perfume in the darkness about him; and the longing for some undivined, entire possession of them was the beginning of a revelation to him, growing ever clearer, with the coming of the gracious summer guise of fields and trees and persons in each succeeding year, of a certain, at times seemingly exclusive, predominance in his interests, of beautiful physical things, a kind of tyranny of the senses over to speak, one of them was caught, and he meant In later years he came upon philosophies which occupied him much in the estimate of the proportion of the sensuous and the ideal eleI have remarked how, in the process of our ments in human knowledge, the relative parts brain-building, as the house of thought in which they bear in it; and, in his intellectual scheme, we live gets itself together, like some airy was led to assign very little to the abstract bird's-nest of floating thistle-down and chance thought, and much to its sensible vehicle or straws, compact at last, little accidents have occasion. Such metaphysical speculation did. their consequence; and thus it happened that, but reinforce what was instinctive in his way as he walked one evening, a garden gate, of receiving the world, and for him, everywhere, usually closed, stood open; and lo! within, a that sensible vehicle or occasion became, pergreat red hawthorn in full flower, embossing haps only too surely, the necessary concomitant heavily the bleached and twisted trunk and of any perception of things, real enough to be branches, so aged that there were but few green of any weight or reckoning, in his house of leaves thereon-a plumage of tender, crimson thought. There were times when he could fire out of the heart of the dry wood. The think of the necessity he was under of associatperfume of the tree had now and again reached ing all thoughts to touch and sight, as a symhim, in the currents of the wind, over the wall, pathetic link between himself and actual, feeland he had wondered what might be behind it, ing, living objects; a protest in favour of real and was now allowed to fill his arms with the men and women against mere gray, unreal abflowers-flowers enough for all the old blue-stractions; and he remembered gratefully how china pots along the chimney-piece, making the Christian religion, hardly less than the fête in the children's room. Was it some religion of the ancient Greeks, translating so periodic moment in the expansion of soul within much of its spiritual verity into things that may him, or mere trick of heat in the heavily-laden be seen, condescends in part to sanction this summer air? But the beauty of the thing infirmity, if so it be, of our human existence, struck home to him feverishly; and in dreams wherein the world of sense is so much with us,1 all night he loitered along a magic roadway of and welcomed this thought as a kind of keeper crimson flowers, which seemed to open ruddily and sentinel over his soul therein. But cerin thick, fresh masses about his feet, and fill tainly, he came more and more to be unable to softly all the little hollows in the banks on care for, or think of soul but as in an actual either side. Always afterwards, summer by body, or of any world but that wherein are summer, as the flowers came on, the blossom of water and trees, and where men and women the red hawthorn still seemed to him absolutely look, so or so, and press actual hands. It was the reddest of all things; and the goodly crim. the trick even his pity learned, fastening those son, still alive in the works of old Venetian who suffered in anywise to his affections by a masters or old Flemish tapestries, called out kind of sensible attachments. He would think always from afar the recollection of the flame of Julian, fallen into incurable sickness, as in those perishing little petals, as it pulsed spoiled in the sweet blossom of his skin like gradually out of them, kept long in the drawers pale amber, and his honey-like hair; of Cecil, of an old cabinet. Also then, for the first time, early dead, as cut off from the lilies, from he seemed to experience a passionateness in his golden summer days, from women's voices; and relation to fair outward objects, an inexplicable then what comforted him a little was the excitement in their presence, which disturbed thought of the turning of the child's flesh to im, and from which he half longed to be free. violets in the turf above him. And thinking of 1 touch of regret or desire mingled all night 1 See Wordsworth's sonnet, p. 427. mere frail retiring of all things, great or little, away from one, into a level distance? the very poor, it was not the things which most | the touch of the wistful bystander, impressed men care most for that he yearned to give how deeply on one! or would it be, perhaps, a them; but fairer roses, perhaps, and power to taste quite as they will, at their ease and not task-burdened, a certain desirable, clear light in the new morning, through which sometimes he had noticed them, quite unconscious of it, on their way to their early toil. For with this desire of physical beauty mingled itself early the fear of death-the fear of death intensified by the desire of beauty. Hitherto he had never gazed upon dead faces, So he yielded himself to these things, to be as sometimes, afterwards, at the Morgue in played upon by them like a musical instrument, Paris, or in that fair cemetery at Munich, and began to note with deepening watchfulness, where all the dead must go and lie in state but always with some puzzled, unutterable long- before burial, behind glass windows, among the ing in his enjoyment, the phases of the seasons flowers and incense and holy candles-the aged and of the growing or waning day, down even clergy with their sacred ornaments, the young to the shadowy changes wrought on bare wall men in their dancing-shoes and spotless white or ceiling-the light cast up from the snow, linen-after which visits, those waxen, resistbringing out their darkest angles; the brown less faces would always live with him for many light in the cloud, which meant rain; that days, making the broadest sunshine sickly. The almost too austere clearness, in the protracted child had heard indeed of the death of his light of the lengthening day, before warm father, and how, in the Indian station, a fever weather began, as if it lingered but to make a had taken him, so that though not in action he severer workday, with the school-books opened had yet died as a soldier; and hearing of the earlier and later; that beam of June sunshine, "resurrection of the just,'' he could think of at last, as he lay awake before the time, a way him as still abroad in the world, somehow, for of gold-dust across the darkness; all the hum- his protection-a grand, though perhaps rather ming, the freshness, the perfume of the garden terrible figure, in beautiful soldier's things, seemed to lie upon it-and coming in one after- like the figure in the picture of Joshua's Vision noon in September, along the red gravel walk, in the Bible2—and of that, round which the to look for a basket of yellow crab-apples left mourners moved so softly, and afterwards with in the cool, old parlour, he remembered it the such solemn singing, as but a worn-out garment more, and how the colours struck upon him, left at a deserted lodging. So it was, until on because a wasp on one bitten apple stung him, a summer day he walked with his mother and he felt the passion of sudden, severe pain. through a fair churchyard. In a bright dress For this too brought its curious reflexions; and, he rambled among the graves, in the gay in relief from it, he would wonder over it- weather, and so came, in one corner, upon an how it had then been with him-puzzled at the open grave for a child-a dark space on the depth of the charm or spell over him, which lay, brilliant grass-the black mould lying heaped for a little while at least, in the mere absence up round it, weighing down the little jewelled of pain; once, especially, when an older boy branches of the dwarf rosebushes in flower. taught him to make flowers of sealing-wax, and And therewith came, full-grown, never wholly he had burnt his hand badly at the lighted to leave him, with the certainty that even chiltaper, and been unable to sleep. He remem-dren do sometimes die, the physical horror of bered that also afterwards, as a sort of typical death, with its wholly selfish recoil from the thing a white vision of heat about him, cling-association of lower forms of life, and the ing closely, through the languid scent of the suffocating weight above. No benign, grave ointments put upon the place to make it well. figure in beautiful soldier's things any longer Also, as he felt this pressure upon him of abroad in the world for his protection! only a the sensible world, then, as often afterwards, few poor, piteous bones; and above them, posthere would come another sort of curious ques- sibly, a certain sort of figure he hoped not to tioning how the last impressions of eye and ear see. For sitting one day in the garden below might happen to him, how they would find him an open window, he heard people talking, and -the scent of the last flower, the soft yellow could not but listen, how, in a sleepless hour, a ness of the last morning, the last recognition of sick woman had seen one of the dead sitting some object of affection, hand or voice; it could beside her, come to call her hence; and from not be but that the latest look of the eyes, the broken talk evolved with much clearness the before their final closing, would be strangely notion that not all those dead people had really vivid; one would go with the hot tears, the cry, | 1 Luke, xlv, 14. 2 Joshua, v, 13. departed to the churchyard, nor were quite so motionless as they looked, but led a secret, halffugitive life in their old homes, quite free by night, though sometimes visible in the day, dodging from room to room, with no great goodwill towards those who shared the place with them. All night the figure sat beside him in the reveries of his broken sleep, and was not quite gone in the morning-an odd, irreconcilable new member of the household, making the sweet familiar chambers unfriendly and suspect by its uncertain presence. He could have hated the dead he had pitied so, for being thus. Afterwards he came to think of those poor, home-returning ghosts, which all men have fancied to themselves-the revenants-pathetically, as crying, or beating with vain hands at the doors, as the wind came, their cries distinguishable in it as a wilder inner note. But, always making death more unfamiliar still, that old experience would ever, from time to time, return to him; even in the living he sometimes caught its likeness; at any time or place, in a moment, the faint atmosphere of the chamber of death would be breathed around him, and the image with the bound chin, the quaint smile, the straight, stiff feet, shed itself across the air upon the bright carpet, amid the gayest company, or happiest communing with himself. To most children the sombre questionings to which impressions like these attach themselves, if they come at all, are actually suggested by religious books, which therefore they often regard with much secret distaste, and dismiss, as far as possible, from their habitual thoughts as a too depressing element in life. To Florian such impressions, these misgivings as to the ultimate tendency of the years, of the relationship between life and death, had been suggested spontaneously in the natural course of his mental growth by a strong innate sense for the soberer tones in things, further strengthened by actual circumstances; and religious sentiment, that system of biblical ideas in which he had been brought up, presented itself to him as a thing that might soften and dignify, and light up as with a "lively hope,''s a melancholy already deeply settled in him. So he yielded himself easily to religious impressions, and with a kind of mystical appetite for sacred things; the more as they came to him through a saintly person who loved him tenderly, and believed that this early preoccupation with them already marked the child out for a saint. He began to love, for their own sakes, church lights, holy days, all that 3 I Peter, i, 3. belonged to the comely order of the sanctuary, the secrets of its white linen, and holy vessels, and fonts of pure water; and its hieratic purity and simplicity became the type of something he desired always to have about him in actual life. He pored over the pictures in religious books, and knew by heart the exact mode in which the wrestling angel grasped Jacob, how Jacob looked in his mysterious sleep, how the bells and pomegranates were attached to the hem of Aaron's vestment, sounding sweetly as he glided over the turf of the holy place. His way of conceiving religion came then to be in effect what it ever afterwards remained—a sacred history indeed, but still more a sacred ideal, a transcendent version or representation, under intenser and more expressive light and shade, of human life and its familiar or exceptional incidents, birth, death, marriage, youth, age, tears, joy, rest, sleep, waking—a mirror, towards which men might turn away their eyes from vanity and dullness, and see themselves therein as angels, with their daily meat and drink, even, become a kind of sacred transaction-a complementary strain or burden, applied to our every-day existence, whereby the stray snatches of music in it re-set themselves, and fall into the scheme of some higher and more consistent harmony. A place adumbrated itself in his thoughts, wherein those sacred personalities, which are. at once the reflex and the pattern of our nobler phases of life, housed themselves; and this region in his intellectual scheme all subsequent experience did but tend still further to realise and define. Some ideal, hieratic persons he would always need to occupy it and keep a warmth there. And he could hardly understand those who felt no such need at all, finding themselves quite happy without such heavenly companionship, and sacred double of their life, beside them. Thus a constant substitution of the typical for the actual took place in his thoughts. Angels might be met by the way, under English elm or beech-tree; mere messengers seemed like angels, bound on celestial errands; a deep mysticity brooded over real meetings and partings; marriages were made in heaven; and deaths also, with hands of angels thereupon, to bear soul and body quietly asunder, each to its appointed rest. All the acts and accidents of daily life borrowed a sacred colour and significance; the very colours of things became themselves weighty with meanings like the sacred stuffs of Moses' tabernacle, full of 4 Genesis. xxxii, 24: xxviii, 11; Exodus, xxviii, 33-35. 5 Exodus, xxvi. yet, as blance. (1850-1894) EL DORADO* · penitence or peace. Sentiment, congruous in ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON the first instance only with those divine transactions, the deep, effusive unction of the House of Bethany, was assumed as the due attitude for the reception of our every-day existence; It seems as if a great deal were attainable and for a time he walked through the world in a world where there are so many marriages in a sustained, not unpleasurable awe, gener- and decisive battles, and where we all, at cerated by the habitual recognition, beside every tain hours of the day, and with great gusto circumstance and event of life, of its celestial and despatch, stow a portion of victuals finally correspondent. and irretrievably into the bag which contains Sensibility-the desire of physical beauty-us. And it would seem also, on a hasty view, a strange biblical awe, which made any refer- that the attainment of as much as possible was ence to the unseen act on him like solemn the one goal of man's contentious life. And music-these qualities the child took away with regards the spirit, this is but a semhim, when, at about the age of twelve years, he left the old house, and was taken to live in another place. He had never left home before, and, anticipating much from this change, had long dreamed over it, jealously counting the days till the time fixed for departure should come; had been a little careless about others even, in his strong desire for it-when Lewis fell sick, for instance, and they must wait still two days longer. At last the morning came, very fine; and all things the very pavement with its dust, at the roadside-seemed to have a white, pearl-like lustre in them. They were to travel by a favourite road on which he had often walked a certain distance, and on one of those two prisoner days, when Lewis was sick, had walked farther than ever before, in his great desire to reach the new place. They had started and gone a little way when a pet bird was found to have been left behind, and must even now-so it presented itself to him -have already all the appealing fierceness and wild self-pity at heart of one left by others to perish of hunger in a closed house; and he returned to fetch it, himself in hardly less stormy distress. But as he passed in search of it from room to room, lying so pale, with a look of meekness in their denudation, and at last through that little, stripped white room, the aspect of the place touched him like the face of one dead; and a clinging back towards it came over him, so intense that he knew it would last long, and spoiling all his pleasure in the realisation of a thing so eagerly anticipated. And so, with the bird found, but himself in an agony of home-sickness, thus capriciously sprung up within him, he was driven quickly away, far into the rural distance, so fondly speculated on, of that favourite countryroad. 6 The house of Simon the leper, where the woman poured the box of ointment on Jesus' head-a "deep, effusive unction." See Matthew, xxvi, 7 We live in an ascending scale when we live happily, one thing leading to another in an endless series. There is always a new horizon for onward-looking men,1 and although we dwell on a small planet, immersed in petty business and not enduring beyond a brief period of years, we are so constituted that our hopes are inaccessible, like stars, and the term of hoping is prolonged until the term of life. To be truly happy is a question of how we begin and not of how we end, of what we want and not of what we have. An aspiration is a joy forever,2 a possession as solid as a landed estate, a fortune which we can never exhaust and which gives us year by year a revenue of pleasurable activity. To have many of these is to be spiritually rich. Life is only a very dull and ill-directed theatre unless we have some interests in the piece; and to those who have neither art nor science, the world is a mere arrangement of colours, or a rough footway where they may very well break their shins. It is in virtue of his own desires and curiosities that any man continues to exist with even patience, that he is charmed by the look of things and people, .and that he wakens every morning with a renewed appetite for work and pleasure. Desire and curiosity are the two eyes through which he sees the world in the most enchanted colours: it is they that make women beautiful or fossils interesting: and the man may squander his estate and come to beggary, but if he keeps these two amulets he is still rich in the possibilities of pleasure. Suppose he 1 Cp. Tennyson's famous figure, Ulysses, 19-21. 2 Echoed from Keats's Endymion, 1. Spanish: The Gilded, or Golden. The name was originally given to a fabulous king of a wealthy city supposed to exist somewhere in South America, the object of much search in the 16th century. It was later applied to the city, and has now become a name for the object of any visionary quest. The essay is from Virginibus Puerisque, 1881, and is reprinted, along with the selections that follow, by permission of Messrs. Charles Scribner's Sons, who hold the copyright. |