Part 6 (2/2)
into this also. And he notes and records sensations of the most evasive kind. The peculiar terror we feel, for instance, mixed with a sort of mad pity, when by chance we light upon some twisted root-trunk, to which the shadows have given outstretched arms. The vague feelings, too, so absolutely unaccountable, that the sight of a lonely gate, or weir, or park-railing, or sign-post, or ruined shed, or tumble-down sheep-fold, may suddenly arouse, when we feel that in some weird manner we are the accomplices of the Thing's tragedy, are feelings that d.i.c.kens alone among writers seems to understand.
A road with no people upon it, and the wind alone sobbing there; with blind eyes and wrinkled forehead; a pool by the edge of a wide marsh-land--like the marsh-land in ”Great Expectations”--with I know not what reflected in it, and waiting, always waiting, for something that does not come; a low, bent, knotted pine-tree, over which the ravens fly, one by one, shrieking; these are the things that to some people--to children, for instance--remain in the mind when all else of their country journey is forgotten.
There is no one but d.i.c.kens who has a style that can drag these things into light. His style shrieks sometimes like a ghoul tugging at the roots of a mandrake. At other times it wails like a lost soul. At other times it mutters, and whimpers, and pipes in its throat, like an old man blinking at the moon. At other times it roars and thunders like ten thousand drunken devils. At other times it breaks into wistful, tender, little-girl sobs--and catches the rhythm of poetry--as in the death of Nell. Sometimes a character in d.i.c.kens will say something so humorously pregnant, so directly from what we hear in street and tavern, that art itself ”gives up,” and applauds, speechless.
After all, it is meet and right that there should be one great author, undistracted by psychology--unseduced by eroticism. There remain a few quite important things to deal with, when these are removed!
Birth, for instance--the mystery of birth--and the mystery of death.
One never forgets death in reading d.i.c.kens. He has a thought, a pity, for those things that once were men and women, lying, with their six feet of earth upon them, in our English Churchyards, so horribly still, while the mask of their sorrow yields to the yet more terrible grin of our mortality's last jest.
And to the last he is--like all children--the lover of Players. Every poor dog of Public Entertainer, from the Barrel-Organ man to him who pulls the ropes for Punch and Judy, has his unqualified devotion. The modern Stage may see strange revolutions, some of them by no means suitable to children--but we need not be alarmed.
There will always remain the larger Stage, the stage of man's own Exits and Entrances; and there, at any rate, while d.i.c.kens is their ”Manager,” Pierrot may weep and dance, and Pierrette dance and weep, knowing that they will not be long without their audience, or long without their applause!
He was a vulgar writer. Why not? England would not be England--and what would London be?--if we didn't have a touch, a smack, a sprinkling of that ingredient!
He was a shameless sentimentalist. Why not? It is better to cry than to comb one's hair all day with an ivory comb.
He was a monstrous melodramatist. Why not? To be born is a melodrama. To play ”hide-and-seek” with Death is a melodrama.
And some have found melodramatic satisfaction in letting themselves be caught. All the World's a Puppet-Show, and if the Big Showman jerks his wires so extravagantly, why should not the Little Showman do the same?
GOETHE
As the enigmatic wisdom of Goethe been exhausted--after these years--and after the sudden transits across our sky of more flas.h.i.+ng meteors? Ah! I deem not yet. Still he holds the entrance to the mysterious Gate, over the portals of which is written, not ”Lasciate ogni speranza!” but ”Think of Living!” A thunder-rifted heart he bears, but victory, not defeat, looks forth from his wide, outward-gazing eyes! One hand holds the skull, engraved with all the secret symbols of man's ascent out of the bosom of Nature; engraved, yes!--by all the cunningest tools of Science and her unwearied research; but the other, raised aloft, n.o.ble and welcoming, carries the laurel crown of the triumph of Imagination!
So, between Truth and Poetry--”im ganzen guten, schonen,”--stands our Lord of Life!
Exhausted, the wisdom of Goethe? Ah, no!--hardly fathomed yet, in its uppermost levels! If it were really possible to put into words the whole complex world of impressions and visions, of secrets and methods, which that name suggests, one would be a wiser disciple than Eckermann. Fragment by fragment, morsel by morsel, the great Figure limns itself against the shadow of the years.
Is it too presumptuous a task to seek to evoke--taking first one impression of him and then another, first one reaction and then another--what this mysterious Name has come to mean for us? One hears the word ”cosmic” whispered. It is whispered too often in these days. But ”cosmic,” with its Whitmanesque, modern connotation, does not exactly fit Goethe. Goethe did not often abandon himself in Dionysian fury to the ultimate Elements. When he did--in his earlier youth--before the hardening process of his Italian Journey had sealed his protection from such romantic lapses--it was not quite in the strained, desperate, modern manner. One feels certain, thinking of what he was, at Frankfurt, at Leipsig, at Stra.s.sburg, at Weimar, that he always kept a clear, cool, Apollonian head, mad and amorous though his escapades may seem!
I do not fancy that ever once did Goethe really ”give himself away,”
or lose the foursquare solidity of his balance in any wild staggering to left or right. No; the Goethean temper, the Goethean att.i.tude, cannot be described as ”cosmic,” while that word implies a certain complete yielding to a vague earth-wors.h.i.+p. There was nothing vague about Goethe's _intimacy,_ if I may put it so, with the Earth.
He and It seemed destined to understand one another most _serenely,_ in a shrewd and deliberate conspiracy!
The Goethean att.i.tude to the Universe is too self-poised and self-centered to be adequately rendered by any word that suggests complete abandonment. It is too--what shall I say?--too sly and _demonic_--too much _inside_ the little secrets of the great Mother--to be summed up in a word that suggests a sort of t.i.tanic whirlwind of embraces. And yet, on the other hand, it is quite as easy to exaggerate the Olympian aspect of Goethe. When this is carried too far, something in him, something extraordinarily characteristic, evaporates, like a thin stream of Parna.s.sian smoke.
How shall I express what this is? Perhaps it is the _German_ in him.
For, in spite of all Nietzsche's Mediterraneanizing of this Superman, Goethe was profoundly and inveterately German. The Rhine-Maidens rocked him in his cradle and, though he might journey to Rome or Troy or Carthage, it was to the Rhine-Maidens that he returned. Yes, I do not think that those understand him best who keep bowing to the ground and muttering ”Olympian”!
Am I carrying this particular taper-light of discrimination too far when I say that there is, to the Celtic mind at least, something humorously naive and childlike in Goethe, mixed in, queerly enough, with all his rich, mellow, and even worldly, wisdom? One overtakes him, now and then, and catches him, as it were, off his guard, in little pathetic lapses into a curious simplicity--a simplicity grave-eyed, portentious and solemn--almost like that of some great Infant-Faun, trying very seriously to learn the difficult syllables of our human ”Categorical Imperative”! World-child, as he was, the magic of the universe pouring through him, one sometimes feels a strange, dim hope with regard to that dubious general Issue, when we find him so confident about the presence of the mysterious Being he wors.h.i.+pped; and so transparently certain of his personal survival after Death!
There is no one, except Leonardo Da Vinci, in the whole history of our Planet, who gives us quite that sense of a person possessed of some secret illumination not granted to the rest of the world. There is much rea.s.surance in this. More than has been, perhaps, realized.
For it is probable that ”in his caves of ice,” Leonardo also felt himself indestructible by the Arch-Enemy. One thinks of those Cabalistic words of old Glanville, ”Man does not yield himself to Death--save by the weakness of his mortal Will.”
Goethe collecting fossils and crystals and specimens of rock-strata; Goethe visiting Botanical Gardens and pondering on the Metamorphosis of Plants; Goethe climbing Stra.s.sburg Cathedral-Spire; Goethe meeting the Phantom of Himself as he returned from the arms of Frederika; Goethe ”experiencing the sensation” of crossing the ”Firing-Line”; Goethe ”announcing” to Eckermann that that worthy man had better avoid undertaking any ”great” literary work; Goethe sending Frau von Stein sausages from his breakfast-table; Goethe consoling himself in the Storm by observing his birth-star Lucifer, and thinking of the Lake of Galilee, are pictures of n.o.ble and humorous memory which reconcile one to the Comedy of Living!
How vividly returns to me--your pardon, reader!--the first time I read ”The Sorrows of Werter” in that little ”Three-penny” edition published by Messrs. Ca.s.sell! It was in a Barge, towed by three Horses, on the River, between Langport and Bridgewater, in the County of Somerset! The majority of the company were as rowdy a set of good-humored Bean-Feasters as ever drank thin beer in a ramshackle tavern. But there was one of them--this is twenty-five years ago, reader!--a girl as fragile as a peeled Willow-wand--and teased by the rude badinage of our companions we sheltered--as the friendly mists rose--under a great Tarpaulin at the barge's stern.
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