Part 13 (2/2)
The artist paints again: and the landscape is in nothing changed. It might have been a reprint rather than a repainting. A morning land, where beauty and bounty courted like man and maid. No tints were lost.
The sunlight was unfailing, and roses cl.u.s.tered with their spendthrift grace and loveliness; and the woman, looking at her lover, wondered why he painted the same landscape twice, but, waiting, saw the artist paint two figures, a man and woman at life's prime. She sees they are the youth and maid of the first picture, only older--and what besides?
Then they were a promise, a possibility, now they are--what are they?
They are the same; they are not the same. She is disappointed in them; not because their beauty has faded, but that their look has changed.
Their faces are not haggard, nor cut with strange arabesques of pain and care, nor are they craven or vicious; but the artist speeds his hand as if at play, while every touch is bringing the faces out until they obliterate the former beauty utterly. The landscape is still dewy fresh and fair--the faces have no hint of morning in them. Faces, not bad, but lacking tenderness; expression, self-sufficient; eyes, frosty cold; and the woman's eyes light on the children, playing beside the white farmhouse, and in them is no inexpressible tenderness of mother-love, mute, like a caress; prosperous faces the world has gone quite well with, that is plain, but faces having no beckoning in them, no tender invitation, like a sweet voice, saying, ”Enter and welcome.”
And she who looked at the pictures sobbed, scarcely knowing why, only the man and woman sorely disappointed her when they had grown to maturity; poetry and welcome and promise had faded from them as tints fade from a withered flower. So much was promised--so little was fulfilled.
Meantime, while these lovers sit on the hillside, and the artist has been talking in pictures as the clouds do, the sun has sloped far toward setting. The west is aflame, like a burning palace; the crows are flapping tired wings toward their nests; the swallows are sporting in the air, as children do in surf of the blue seas; smoke from the farm chimneys visible begins to lie level across the sky, and stays like a cloud at anchor. But the artist's hand is busy with another picture.
And the landscape is the same. Mayhap he is not versatile; and, think again, mayhap he has purpose in his reduplication. Like wise men, let us wait and see. A springtime-land as of old, and two figures; and the woman he loves watches, while her breathing is strangely like a sob.
Now the figures are a man and a woman, stooped and gray. ”Age,” she says, ”you paint age now, and age--is not beautiful;” and he, answering with neither lips nor eyes, paints swiftly on. The man is aged and leaning on a staff. His strength is gone. His staff is not for ornament, but need. The woman is wrinkled, and her hair is snowy white; and the girl at the artist's side tries vainly to suppress a sob. She, too, will soon be gray, and she loves not age and decrepitude; and the face in the picture is faded, no rose-tints in the cheeks. So old and weak--old age is very pitiful. But the picture is not finished yet. Wait! Wait a little, and give the artist time. It is not evening yet. Sunset lingers a little for him. His hand runs now like a hurrying tide. He is painting faces. Why linger over the face of age? If it were youth--but age? But he touches these aged faces lovingly, as a son might caress his aged father and mother with hand and with kiss; and beneath his touch the aged faces grow warm and tender, pa.s.sing sweet. To look at them was rest. Their eyes were tender and brave. You remember they were old and feeble folk--young once, but long ago; but how n.o.ble the old man's face, scarred though it is with saber cut! To see him makes you valiant; and to see him longer, makes you valiant for goodness, which is best of all.
And the woman's face is lit with G.o.d's calm and G.o.d's comfort. A smile is in her eyes, and a smile lies, like sunlight, across her lips. Her hair is the silver frame that hems some precious picture in. She is a benediction, blessed as the restful night to weary toilers on a burning day. And the artist, with a touch quick as a happy thought, outlined a shadow, clad in tatters, and a child clad in tatters at her side; and the girl, leaning over the painting, thought the chief shadow was Death. But the artist hasted; and on a sudden, wings sprung from the shoulders of tattered mother and child, and they two lifted up their hands; the woman, lifting her hands above the dear forms of old age, spread them out in blessing, and the little child lifted her hands, clasped as in prayer; and these angels were Poverty, praying for and blessing the man and woman who had been their help.
And the artist lover, under the first picture, in quaint letters, such as monks in remote ages used, wrote this legend, ”To-morrow;” and the woman, taking the pencil, wrote in her sweet girlish hand, ”Youth is Very Beautiful.” The artist took back his pencil, and under the second picture scrolled, ”These Loved Themselves Better Than They Loved Others;” and the woman wrote, ”Their To-morrow was Failure.” Under the third picture the artist wrote, ”These Loved G.o.d Best and Their Neighbors as Themselves;” and the woman took the pencil from his hand and wrote, ”Old Age is Very Beautiful--More Beautiful Than Youth,” and a tear fell and blotted some of the words, as a drop of rain makes a blurred spot on a dusty pane. And the lover said, ”Serving others is better than serving ourselves;” and the girl's sweet voice answering, like an echo, ”Serving others is better than serving ourselves.”
And the sun had set. The glow from the sky was fading, as embers on a hearth, pale to gray ashes; and an owl called from an elm-tree on the hillside, while these two arose, with faces like the morning, and, taking the pictures, walked slowly as lovers will; and so, fading into the deepening twilight, I heard her saying, ”Serving others is life at its best,” and him replying, ”Jesus said, 'The poor ye have always with you;'” and their footsteps and voices died away together in the gloaming; and a whip-poor-will called often and plaintively from the woodland across the field.
XI
The Gentleman in Literature
Humor is half pathos and more. This sword has two edges. On the one, s.h.i.+ning like burnished silver, you may see smiles reflected as from a mirror; on the other, tears stand thick, like dews on flowers at early morning of the later spring. Humor is a dual faculty, as much misconceived by those who listen as by those who speak. We do not always have wit to know the scope of what we do. Thoughts of childhood, says the poet, are long, long thoughts; but who supposes childhood knows they are? Nor is this altogether a fault. To feel the sublime sequence of all we did would burden us as Atlas was burdened by holding up the sky. Life might easily come to be sober to somberness, which is a thing unwholesome and undesirable. Sunlight must have its way. Darkness must not trespa.s.s too far; and every morning says to every night, ”Thus far, but no farther.”
To many readers, Don Quixote seems fantastic, and Cervantes a laughter-monger. Cervantes had suffered much. His life reads like a novelist's tale. He belonged to the era of Spenser and Shakespeare; of Philip II and William the Silent; of Leicester and Don John of Austria; of The Great Armada and the Spanish Inquisition; of Lope de Vega and Cervantes--for he was, in the Hispanian peninsula, his own greatest contemporary--and to this hour this battle-scarred soldier of fortune stands the tallest figure of Spanish literature. His was a lettered rearing, and a young manhood spent as a common soldier. At Lepanto he lost hand and arm. In five long, weary, and bitter years of slavery among Algerine pirates, he held up his head, being a man; plotted escape in dreams and waking; fought for freedom as a pinioned eagle might; was at last rescued by the Society for the Redemption of Slaves; sailed home from slavery to penury; came perilously near the age of threescore, poverty-stricken and unknown, when, like a sun which leaps from sunrise to noon at a single bound, this maimed soldier sprang mid-sky, impossible to be ignored or forgotten, and disclosed himself, the marked Spaniard of his era; and on the same day of 1616, Cervantes and Shakespeare stopped their life in an unfinished line, and not a man since then has been able to fill out the broken meaning. This man had not wine, but tears to drink. Yet he jests, and the world laughs with him; though we feel sure that while his age and after ages laugh and applaud, Miguel Cervantes sits with laughter all faded from his face, and the white look of pain settled about his lips, while tears ”rise in the heart and gather to the eyes.” Tears sometimes make laughter and jest the wilder. Men and women laugh to keep their hearts from breaking.
Cervantes has ostensibly drawn a picture of a madman, and in fact has painted a gentleman. What his intent was, who can be so bold as to say? What part of his purpose was, we know. He would excoriate a false and flippant chivalry. Contemporaneous chivalry he knew well; for he had been a common soldier, wounded and distressed. He had seen what a poor triviality that once n.o.ble thing had grown to be.
Inst.i.tutions become effete. Age is apt to sap the strength of movements as of men. Feudalism and the Crusades had commissioned the knight-errant; and now, when law began to hold sword for itself, the self-const.i.tuted legal force--knight-errantry--was no longer needed.
But to know when an inst.i.tution has served its purpose is little less than genius. Some things can be laughed down which can not be argued down. A jest is not infrequently more potent than any syllogism. Some things must be laughed away, other things must be wept away; so that humor and pathos are to be ranked among the mighty agents for reform.
And one purpose Cervantes had was to laugh a tawdry knight-errantry off the stage. In long years of soldiery, I doubt not he had grown to hate this empty boast, and his nursed wrath now breaks out like a volcano.
This was his apparent purpose--but who can say this was all his purpose? ”King Lear” has a double action. Mayhap, Don Quixote has a double meaning. We are always attaching meanings to works of genius.
But you can not tie any writer's utterance down to some poor alt.i.tude.
Great utterances have at least a half-infinite application. Tennyson felt this, saying--as we read in his son's biography of him--regarding explanations of his ”Idyls of the King:” ”I hate to be tied down to 'this means that,' because the thought within the image is much more than any one interpretation;” and, ”Poetry is like shot-silk, with many glancing colors. Every reader will find his own interpretation according to his ability, and according to his sympathy, with the poet.” What is true of poetry is true of all imaginative literature.
An author may not have a.n.a.lyzed his own motive in its entirety. In any case, we may hold to this, Don Quixote was a gentleman, and is the first gentleman whose portrait is given us in literature. We have laughed at Don Quixote, but we have learned to love him. The ”knight of the rueful countenance,” as we see him now, is not himself a jest, but one of literature's most n.o.ble figures; and we love him because we must. Was it mere chance that in drawing this don, Cervantes clothed him with all n.o.bilities, and shows him--living and dying--good, courageous, pure; in short, a man? This scarcely seems a happening.
Seas have subtle undercurrents. I venture, Don Quixote has the same, and marks the appearance of a gentleman in literature, since which day that person has been a recurring, enn.o.bling presence on the pages of fiction and poetry.
A gentleman is a comparatively recent creation in life, as in letters.
Christ was the foremost and first gentleman. After him all gentility patterns. With the law of the imagination we are familiar, which is this: Imagination deals only with materials supplied by the senses.
<script>