Part 7 (1/2)
Come unto these yellow sands, And then take hands; Curtsied when you have, and kiss'd The wild waves whist, Foot it featly here and there; And, sweet sprites, the burden bear.
One winter evening, some time after the memorable year of our first visit to the Forest of Arden, Rosalind and I were planning a return to that enchanting place, and in the glow of the fire on the hearth were picturing to ourselves the delights that would be ours again, when the clang of the knocker suddenly recalled us from our dreams. Hospitably inclined, as I trust and believe we are, at that moment an interruption seemed like an intrusion. But our momentary annoyance was speedily dispelled when the library door opened, and, with the freedom which belongs to old friends.h.i.+p, the Poet entered unannounced. No one could have been more welcome on that wintry night than this genial and human soul, bound to us by many ties of familiar a.s.sociation as well as by frequent neighbourliness in the woods of Arden. It had happened again and again that we had found ourselves together in the recesses of the Forest, and enchanting beyond all speech had been those days and nights of mingled talk and dreams.
The Poet is one of the friends whose coming is peculiarly welcome because it always harmonises with the mood of the moment, and no speech is needed to bring us into agreement. Rosalind took the visitor into our plan at once, and urged him to go with us on this mysterious journey; whereupon he told us that, by one of those delightful coincidences which are always happening to people of kindred tastes and aims, this very errand had brought him to our door. The time had come, he said, when he could no longer resist the longing for Arden! We all smiled at that sudden outburst; how well we knew what it meant! After months of going our ways dutifully in the dust and heat of the world, the longing for Arden would on the instant become irresistible. Come what might, the hunger for perfect comprehension and fellows.h.i.+p, the thirst for the beauty and repose of the deep woods, must be satisfied, and forsaking whatever was in hand we fled incontinently across the invisible boundaries into that other and diviner country. No sooner had the Poet made his confession than we hastened to make ours, and, without further consideration, we resolved the very next day to shake the dust from our feet and escape into Arden. This question settled, a great gaiety seized us, and we began to plan new journeys for the years to come; journeys which had this peculiar charm--that they belonged to a few kindred spirits; the world knows nothing of them, and when some obscure reference brings them to mind, smiles its sceptical smile, and goes on with its money-getting. Rosalind drew from its hiding-place the chart of this world of the imagination which we were given to studying on long winter evenings, and of which only a few copies exist.
These charts are among the few things not to be had for money; if they fall into alien hands they are incomprehensible. It is true of them, as of the books which describe the Forest of Arden, that they have a kind of second meaning, only to be discerned by those whose eyes detect the deeper things of life. It is another peculiarity of these charts that while science has indirectly done not a little for their completeness, the work of preparing them has fallen entirely into the hands of the poets; not, of course, the writers of verse alone, but those who have had the vision of the great world as it lies in the imagination, and who have heard that deep and incommunicable music which sings at the heart of it.
Rosalind spread this chart on the table, and we drew our chairs around it, noting now one and now another of the famous places of which all men have heard, but which to most men are mere figments of dreams.
Here, for instance, in a certain lat.i.tude plainly marked on the margin, is that calm sweet land of the Phaeacians where reigns Alcinous the great-souled king, and the white-armed Nausicaa sings after her bath on the river's brink:
Without the palace court and near the gate A s.p.a.cious garden of four acres lay; A hedge inclosed it round, and lofty trees Flourished in generous growth within--the pear And the pomegranate, and the apple tree With its fair fruitage, and the luscious fig, And olive always green. The fruit they bear Falls not, nor ever fails in winter time Nor summer, but is yielded all the year.
The ever-blowing west wind causes some To swell and some to ripen; pear succeeds To pear; to apple, apple, grape to grape, Fig ripens after fig.
Here, as Rosalind moves her finger, lies the valley of Avalon, whither Arthur went to heal his overmastering sorrow, and where the air is always sweet with the smell of apple blossoms. In this deep wood lives Merlin, still weaving, as of old, the magic spells. There is the castle of the Grail, and as our eyes fall on it, suddenly there comes a hush, and we seem to hear the sublime antiphony, choir answering choir in heavenly melody, as Parsifal raises the cup, and the light from above smites it into sudden glory. We are travelling eastward, touching here and there those names which belong only to the greatest poetry, when Rosalind's finger--the index of our wanderings--suddenly pauses and rests on an island, not large, as it lies amid that silent sea, but wonderful above all islands to which thought has ever wandered or where imagination has ever made its home. Under the light of the lamp, with Rosalind's face bending over it, no island ever slept in a deeper calm than this little circle of land about which the greatest of the poets once evoked the most marvellous of tempests. Rosalind's finger does not move from that magical point, and, peering on the chart, our eyes suddenly meet, and a single thought is in them all.
Why not postpone Arden for the moment and explore the isle of Miranda's morning beauty and Prospero's magical wisdom?
”Why not?” says Rosalind, speaking aloud, and instead of answering her question the Poet and I are wondering why we have never gone before.
Straightway we fall to studying the map more closely; we note the lat.i.tude and longitude; it is but a little way from the mainland where stretches the green expanse of the Forest of Arden. We might have gone long ago if we had been a little more adventurous; at least we think we might at the first blush; but when we talk it over, as we proceed to do when Rosalind has rolled up the chart and put it in its place, we are not quite so sure about it. It is one of the singular things about this kind of journeying that one learns how to travel and where to go only by personal observation. Before we went to Arden, for instance, we had no clear knowledge of any of these countries; we had often heard of them; their names were often on our lips; but they were not real to us. That happy day when Arden ceased to be a dream to us was the beginning of a rapid growth of knowledge concerning these invisible countries; one by one they seemed to rise within the circle of our expanding experience until we became aware that we were masters of a new kind of geography. That delightful discovery was not many years behind us, but this new knowledge had already become so much a part of our lives that we often confused it with the knowledge of commoner things.
That night, before we parted, our plans were completed; on the morrow, when night came, the fire on the hearth would be unlighted, for we should be on Prospero's island.
II
O, rejoice Beyond a common joy; and set it down With gold on lasting pillars: in one voyage Did Claribel her husband find at Tunis; And Ferdinand, her brother, found a wife Where he himself was lost; Prospero, his dukedom, In a poor isle; and all of us, ourselves, Where no man was his own.
”Honest Gonzalo never spoke truer word,” said the Poet, answering Rosalind, who had been quoting the old counsellor's summing up of the common good fortune on the island when Prospero dispelled his enchantments and the s.h.i.+pwrecked company found themselves saved as by miracle. It was our first evening on the island; one of those memorable nights when all things seem born anew into some larger heritage of beauty. The moon hung low over the quiet sea, sleeping now under the spell of the summer night, as if no storm had ever vexed it.
So silent, so hushed was it that but for the soft ripple on the sand we should have thought it calmed in eternal repose. Far off along the horizon the stars hung motionless as the sea; overhead they shone out of the measureless depths of s.p.a.ce with a soft and solemn splendour.
Not a branch moved on the great trees behind us, folded now in the universal mystery of the night. The little stretch of beach, over whose yellow sands the song of the invisible Ariel once floated, lay in the soft light fit for the feet of fairies, or the gentle advance and retreat of the sea. The very air, suffused through all that vast immensity with a mysterious light, seemed like a dream of peace.
In such a place, at such an hour, one shrinks from speech as from the word that breaks the spell. When one is so much a part of the sublime order of things that the universal movement of force that streams through all things embraces and thrills him with the consciousness of common fellows.h.i.+p, how vain is all human utterance! The greatest of poems, the sublime harmony in which all things are folded, has never been spoken, and never will be. No lyre in any human hand will ever make those divine chords audible. The poets hear them, know them, live by them; but no verse contains them. So much a part of that wondrous night were we that any speech would have seemed like a severance of things that were one; all the deep meaning of the hour was clear to us because we were included in it. How long we sat in that silence I do not know; we had forgotten the world out of which we had escaped, and the route by which we came; we knew only that an infinite sea of beauty and wonder rippled on the beach at our feet, and that over us the heavens were as a delicate veil, beyond which diviner loveliness seemed waiting on the verge of birth.
It was Rosalind who spoke at last, and spoke in words which flashed the human truth of the hour into our thoughts. On this island we had found ourselves; so often lost, at times so long forgotten, in the busy world that lay afar off. And then we fell a-talking of the island and of all the kindred places where men have found homes for their souls; sweet and fragrant retreats whence the noise of strife and toil died into a faint murmur, or was lost in some vast silence. At Milan, Prospero found the cares of state so irksome, the joy of ”secret studies” so alluring, that, despairing of harmonising things so alien, he took refuge with his books, and found his ”library was dukedom large enough.” But the problem was not solved by this surrender; out of the library, as out of the dukedom, he was set adrift, homeless and friendless, until he set foot on the island where he was to rule with no divided sway. Here was his true home; here the spirits of the air and the powers of the earth were his ministers; here his word seemed part of the elemental order; he spoke and it was done, for the winds and the sea obeyed him. And when, in the working out of destiny which he himself directed, he returns to the dukedom from which he had been thrust out, he is no longer the Prospero of ineffective days.
Henceforth he will rule Milan as he rules the quiet dukedom of his books; he has become a master of life and time, and his sovereignty will never again be disputed.
Prospero did not find the island; he created it. It was the necessity of his life that he should fas.h.i.+on this bit of territory out of the great sea, that here his soul might learn its strength and win its freedom; that here, far from dukedom and courtiers, he might discover that a great soul creates its own world and lives its own life. Milan may cast him out, as did Florence another of his kind, but this human rejection will but bring him into that empire which no enmity may touch, in the calm of whose divinely ordered government treasons are unknown. No man finds himself until he has created a world for his own soul; a world apart from care and weakness and the confusions of strife, in which the faiths that inspire him and the ideals that lead him are the great and lasting verities. To this world-building all the great poetic minds are driven; within this invisible empire alone can they reconcile the life that surrounds them with the life that floats like a dream before them. No great mind is ever at rest until in some way the Real and the Ideal are found to be one. Literature is full of these beautiful homes of the soul, reared without the sound of chisel or hammer by the magic of the Imagination--divinest of the faculties, since it is the only one which creates. The other faculties observe, record, compare, combine; the imagination alone uses the brush, the chisel, or the pen!
If one were to record these kingdoms of the mind, how long and luminous would be the catalogue! The golden age and the fabled Atlantis of the elder poets; the ”Republic” of the broad-browed Athenian; the secret gardens, impregnable castles, sweet and inaccessible retreats of the mediaeval fancy; the Paradise of Dante; the enchanting world through which the Fairy Queen moves; the ”Utopia” of the n.o.ble More; the Forest of Arden--what visions of peace, what glimpses of beauty, accompany every name! To all these worlds of supernal loveliness there is a single key; fortunate among men are they who hold it!
III
Be not afraid; the isle is full of noises, Sounds and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not.
Sometimes a thousand tw.a.n.ging instruments Will hum about mine ears; and sometimes voices, That, if I then had waked after long sleep, Will make me sleep again; and then, in dreaming, The clouds methought would open, and show riches Ready to drop upon me, that, when I waked, I cried to dream again.
When the sun rose the next morning, we rose with it, eager to explore our little world about which the sea never ceased to sing its mighty hymn of solitude and mystery. There was something impressive in the consciousness of our isolation; between us and any noise of human occupation the waters were stretched as a barrier against which all sound died into silence. There was something enchanting in the beauty and strangeness of this tiny continent, unreported by any geography, unmarked on any chart save that which a few possess as a kind of sacred heritage, untravelled as yet by our eager feet. There was something thrilling in the a.s.sociations that touched the island with such a light as never fell from sun or star. With beating hearts we set out on that wondrous exploration. Who does not remember the thrill of the first discovery of a new world; that joy of the soul in possession of a great new truth which pa.s.ses all speech? There are hours in this troubled life when the mists are lifted and float away like faint clouds against the blue, and the great world lies like a splendid vision before us, and ”the immeasurable heavens break open to the highest,” and in a sudden rift of human limitation the whole sublime order opens before us, sings to us out of the fathomless depths of its harmony, thrills us with a sudden sense of G.o.d and of the undiscovered range and splendour of our lives; and when they have pa.s.sed, these hours remain with us in the afterglow of clearer vision and deeper faith. Such hours are the peculiar joy of those who hold the key of the Imagination in their grasp and are able to unlock the gate of dreams, or make themselves the companion of the great explorers in the realms of truth and beauty.