Part 6 (1/2)

But to thee, Theocritus, no twilight of the Hollow Land was dear, but the high suns of Sicily and the brown cheeks of the country maidens were happiness enough. For thee, therefore, methinks, surely is reserved an Elysium beneath the summer of a far-off system, with stars not ours and alien seasons. There, as Bion prayed, shall Spring, the thrice desirable, be with thee the whole year through, where there is neither frost, nor is the heat so heavy on men, but all is fruitful, and all sweet things blossom, and evenly meted are darkness and dawn. s.p.a.ce is wide, and there be many worlds, and suns enow, and the Sun-G.o.d surely has had a care of his own. Little didst thou need, in thy native land, the isle of the three capes, little didst thou need but sunlight on land and sea. Death can have shown thee naught dearer than the fragrant shadow of the pines, where the dry needles of the fir are strewn, or glades where feathered ferns make 'a couch more soft than Sleep.' The short gra.s.s of the cliffs, too, thou didst love, where thou wouldst lie, and watch, with the tunny watcher till the deep blue sea was broken by the burnished sides of the tunny shoal, and afoam with their gambols in the brine. There the Muses met thee, and the Nymphs, and there Apollo, remembering his old thraldom with Admetus, would lead once more a mortal's flocks, and listen and learn, Theocritus, while thou, like thine own Comatas, 'didst sweetly sing.'

There, methinks, I see thee as in thy happy days, 'reclined on deep beds of fragrant lentisk, lowly strewn, and rejoicing in new stript leaves of the vine, while far above thy head waved many a poplar, many an elm-tree, and close at hand the sacred waters sang from the mouth of the cavern of the nymphs.' And when night came, methinks thou wouldst flee from the merry company and the dancing girls, from the fading crowds of roses or white violets, from the cottabos, and the minstrelsy, and the Bibline wine, from these thou wouldst slip away into the summer night.

Then the beauty of life and of the summer would keep thee from thy couch, and wandering away from Syracuse by the sandhills and the sea, thou wouldst watch the low cabin, roofed with gra.s.s, where the fis.h.i.+ng-rods of reed were leaning against the door, while the Mediterranean floated up her waves, and filled the waste with sound.

There didst thou see thine ancient fishermen rising ere the dawn from their bed of dry sea-weed, and heardst them stirring, drowsy, among their fis.h.i.+ng gear, and heardst them tell their dreams.

Or again thou wouldst wander with dusty feet through the ways that the dust makes silent, while the breath of the kine, as they were driven forth with the morning, came fresh to thee, and the trailing dewy branch of honeysuckle struck sudden on thy cheek. Thou wouldst see the Dawn awake in rose and saffron across the waters, and Etna, grey and pale against the sky, and the setting crescent would dip strangely in the glow, on her way to the sea. Then, methinks, thou wouldst murmur, like thine own Simaetha, the love-lorn witch, 'Farewell, Selene, bright and fair; farewell, ye other stars, that follow the wheels of the quiet Night.' Nay, surely it was in such an hour that thou didst behold the girl as she burned the laurel leaves and the barley grain, and melted the waxen image, and called on Selene to bring her lover home. Even so, even now, in the islands of Greece, the setting Moon may listen to the prayers of maidens. 'Bright golden Moon, that now art near the waters, go thou and salute my lover, he that stole my love, and that kissed me, saying ”Never will I leave thee.” And lo, he hath left me as men leave a field reaped and gleaned, like a church where none cometh to pray, like a city desolate.'

So the girls still sing in Greece, for though the Temples have fallen, and the wandering shepherds sleep beneath the broken columns of the G.o.d's house in Selinus, yet these ancient fires burn still to the old divinities in the shrines of the hearths of the peasants. It is none of the new creeds that cry, in the dirge of the Sicilian shepherds of our time, 'Ah, light of mine eyes, what gift shall I send thee, what offering to the other world? The apple fadeth, the quince decayeth, and one by one they perish, the petals of the rose. I will send thee my tears shed on a napkin, and what though it burneth in the flame, if my tears reach thee at the last.'

Yes, little is altered, Theocritus, on these sh.o.r.es beneath the sun, where thou didst wear a tawny skin stripped from the roughest of he-goats, and about thy breast an old cloak buckled with a plaited belt. Thou wert happier there, in Sicily, methinks, and among vines and shadowy lime-trees of Cos, than in the dust, and heat, and noise of Alexandria. What love of fame, what l.u.s.t of gold tempted thee away from the red cliffs, and grey olives, and wells of black water wreathed with maidenhair?

The music of the rustic flute Kept not for long its happy country tone; Lost it too soon, and learned a stormy note Of men contention tost, of men who groan, Which tasked thy pipe too sore, and tired thy throat-- It failed, and thou wast mute!

What hadst _thou_ to make in cities, and what could Ptolemies and Princes give thee better than the goat-milk cheese and the Ptelean wine? Thy Muses were meant to be the delight of peaceful men, not of tyrants and wealthy merchants, to whom they vainly went on a begging errand. 'Who will open his door and gladly receive our Muses within his house, who is there that will not send them back again without a gift? And they with naked feet and looks askance come homewards, and sorely they upbraid me when they have gone on a vain journey, and listless again in the bottom of their empty coffer they dwell with heads bowed over their chilly knees, where is their drear abode, when portionless they return.' How far happier was the prisoned goat-herd, Comatas, in the fragrant cedar chest where the blunt-faced bees from the meadow fed him with food of tender flowers, because still the Muse dropped sweet nectar on his lips!

Thou didst leave the neat-herds and the kine, and the oaks of Himera, the galingale hummed over by the bees, and the pine that dropped her cones, and Amaryllis in her cave, and Bombyca with her feet of carven ivory. Thou soughtest the City, and strife with other singers, and the learned write still on thy quarrels with Apollonius and Callimachus, and Antagoras of Rhodes. So ancient are the hatreds of poets, envy, jealousy, and all unkindness.

Not to the wits of Courts couldst thou teach thy rural song, though all these centuries, more than two thousand years, they have laboured to vie with thee. There has come no new pastoral poet, though Virgil copied thee, and Pope, and Phillips, and all the buckram band of the teacup time; and all the modish swains of France have sung against thee, as the _son challenged Athene_. They never knew the shepherd's life, the long'

winter nights on dried heather by the fire, the long summer days, when over the dry gra.s.s all is quiet, and only the insects hum, and the shrunken burn whispers a silver tune. Swains in high-heeled shoon, and lace, shepherdesses in rouge and diamonds, the world is weary of all concerning them, save their images in porcelain, effigies how unlike the golden figures, dedicate to Aphrodite, of Bombyca and Battus. Somewhat, Theocritus, thou hast to answer for, thou that first of men brought the shepherd to Court, and made courtiers wild to go a Maying with the shepherds.

XIV. To Edgar Allan Poe.

Sir,--Your English readers, better acquainted with your poems and romances than with your criticisms, have long wondered at the indefatigable hatred which pursues your memory. You, who knew the men, will not marvel that certain microbes of letters, the survivors of your own generation, still hara.s.s your name with their malevolence, while old women twitter out their incredible and heeded slanders in the literary papers of New York. But their persistent animosity does not quite suffice to explain the dislike with which many American critics regard the greatest poet, perhaps the greatest literary genius, of their country. With a commendable patriotism, they are not apt to rate native merit too low; and you, I think, are the only example of an American prophet almost without honour in his own country.

The recent publication of a cold, careful, and in many respects admirable study of your career ('Edgar Allan Poe,' by George Woodberry: Houghton, Mifflin and Co., Boston) reminds English readers who have forgotten it, and teaches those who never knew it, that you were, unfortunately, a Reviewer. How unhappy were the necessities, how deplorable the vein, that compelled or seduced a man of your eminence into the dusty and stony ways of contemporary criticism! About the writers of his own generation a leader of that generation should hold his peace, he should neither praise nor blame nor defend his equals; he should not strike one blow at the buzzing ephemerae of letters. The breath of their life is in the columns of 'Literary Gossip;' and they should be allowed to perish with the weekly advertis.e.m.e.nts on which they pasture. Reviewing, of course, there must needs be; but great minds should only criticise the great who have pa.s.sed beyond the reach of eulogy or fault-finding.

Unhappily, taste and circ.u.mstances combined to make you a censor; you vexed a continent, and you are still unforgiven. What 'irritation of a sensitive nature, chafed by some indefinite sense of wrong,' drove you (in Mr. Longfellow's own words) to attack his pure and beneficent Muse we may never ascertain. But Mr. Longfellow forgave you easily; for pardon comes easily to the great. It was the smaller men, the Daweses, Griswolds, and the like, that knew not how to forget. 'The New Yorkers never forgave him,' says your latest biographer; and one scarcely marvels at the inveteracy of their malice. It was not individual vanity alone, but the whole literary cla.s.s that you a.s.sailed. 'As a literary people,' you wrote, 'we are one vast perambulating humbug.' After that declaration of war you died, and left your reputation to the vanities yet writhing beneath your scorn. They are writhing and writing still.

He who knows them need not linger over the attacks and defences of your personal character; he will not waste time on calumnies, tale-bearing, private letters, and all the noisome dust which takes so long in settling above your tomb.

For us it is enough to know that you were compelled to live by your pen, and that in an age when the author of 'To Helen' and' The Cask of Amontillado' was paid at the rate of a dollar a column. When such poverty was the mate of such pride as yours, a misery more deep than that of Burns, an agony longer than Chatterton's, were inevitable and a.s.sured. No man was less fortunate than you in the moment of his birth--_infelix opportunitate vitae_. Had you lived a generation later, honour, wealth, applause, success in Europe and at home, would all have been yours. Within thirty years so great a change has pa.s.sed over the profession of letters in America; and it is impossible to estimate the rewards which would have fallen to Edgar Poe, had chance made him the contemporary of Mark Twain and of 'Called Back.' It may be that your criticisms helped to bring in the new era, and to lift letters out of the reach of quite unlettered scribblers. Though not a scholar, at least you had a respect for scholars.h.i.+p. You might still marvel over such words as 'objectional' in the new biography of yourself, and might ask what is meant by such a sentence as 'his connection with it had inured to his own benefit by the frequent puffs of himself,' and so forth.

Best known in your own day as a critic, it is as a poet and a writer of short tales that you must live. But to discuss your few and elaborate poems is a waste of time, so completely does your own brief definition of poetry, 'the rhythmic creation of the beautiful,' exhaust your theory, and so perfectly is the theory ill.u.s.trated by the poems. Natural bent, and reaction against the example of Mr. Longfellow, combined to make you too intolerant of what you call the 'didactic' element in verse. Even if morality be not seven-eighths of our life (the exact proportion as at present estimated), there was a place even on the h.e.l.lenic Parna.s.sus for gnomic bards, and theirs in the nature of the case must always be the largest public.

'Music is the perfection of the soul or the idea of poetry,' so you wrote; 'the vagueness of exaltation aroused by a sweet air (which should be indefinite and never too strongly suggestive), is precisely what we should aim at in poetry.' You aimed at that mark, and struck it again and again, notably in 'Helen, thy beauty is to me,' in 'The Haunted Palace,' 'The Valley of Unrest,' and 'The City in the Sea.' But by some Nemesis which might, perhaps, have been foreseen, you are, to the world, the poet of one poem--'The Raven:' a piece in which the music is highly artificial, and the 'exaltation' (what there is of it) by no means particularly 'vague.' So a portion of the public know little of Sh.e.l.ley but the 'Skylark,' and those two incongruous birds, the lark and the raven, bear each of them a poet's name _vivu' per ora virum_. Your theory of poetry, if accepted, would make you (after the author of 'Kubla Khan') the foremost of the poets of the world; at no long distance would come Mr. William Morris as he was when he wrote 'Golden Wings,' 'The Blue Closet,' and 'The Sailing of the Sword;' and, close up, Mr. Lear, the author of 'The Yongi Bongi Bo,' and the lay of the 'Jumblies.'

On the other hand Homer would sink into the limbo to which you consigned Moliere. If we may judge a theory by its results, when compared with the deliberate verdict of the world, your aesthetic does not seem to hold water. The 'Odyssey' is not really inferior to 'Ulalume,' as it ought to be if your doctrine of poetry were correct, nor 'Le Festin de Pierre to 'Undine.' Yet you deserve the praise of having been constant, in your poetic practice, to your poetic principles--principles commonly deserted by poets who, like Wordsworth, have published their aesthetic system.

Your pieces are few; and Dr. Johnson would have called you, like Fielding, 'a barren rascal.' But how can a writer's verses be numerous if with him, as with you, 'poetry is not a pursuit but a pa.s.sion...

which cannot at will be excited with an eye to the paltry compensations or the more paltry commendations of mankind!' Of you it may be said, more truly than Sh.e.l.ley said it of himself, that 'to ask you for anything human, is like asking at a gin-shop for a leg of mutton.'

Humanity must always be, to the majority of men, the true stuff of poetry; and only a minority will thank you for that rare music which (like the strains of the fiddler in the story) is touched on a single string, and on an instrument fas.h.i.+oned from the spoils of the grave. You chose, or you were destined

To vary from the kindly race of men;

and the consequences, which wasted your life, pursue your reputation.

For your stories has been reserved a boundless popularity, and that highest success--the success of a perfectly sympathetic translation. By this time, of course, you have made the acquaintance of your translator, M. Charles Baudelaire, who so strenuously shared your views about Mr.