Adventures among Books

A >> Andrew Lang >> Adventures among Books


Yet he, too, had his economies, which we resent. I do not mean his not
telling us what it was that Roger Chillingworth saw on Arthur
Dimmesdale's bare breast. To leave that vague is quite legitimate. But
what had Miriam and the spectre of the Catacombs done? Who was the
spectre? What did he want? To have told all this would have been better
than to fill the novel with padding about Rome, sculpture, and the Ethics
of Art. As the silly saying runs: "the people has a right to know" about
Miriam and her ghostly acquaintance. {10} But the "Marble Faun" is not
of Hawthorne's best period, beautiful as are a hundred passages in the
tale.

Beautiful passages are as common in his prose as gold in the richest
quartz. How excellent are his words on the first faint but certain
breath of Autumn in the air, felt, perhaps, early in July. "And then
came Autumn, with his immense burthen of apples, dropping them
continually from his overladen shoulders as he trudged along." Keats
might have written so of Autumn in the orchards--if Keats had been
writing prose.

There are geniuses more sunny, large, and glad than Hawthorne's, none
more original, more surefooted, in his own realm of moonlight and
twilight.




CHAPTER XI: THE PARADISE OF POETS


We were talking of Love, Constancy, the Ideal. "Who ever loved like the
poets?" cried Lady Violet Lebas, her pure, pale cheek flushing. "Ah, if
ever I am to love, he shall be a singer!"

"Tenors are popular, very," said Lord Walter.

"I mean a poet," she answered witheringly.

Near them stood Mr. Witham, the author of "Heart's Chords Tangled."

"Ah," said he, "that reminds me. I have been trying to catch it all the
morning. That reminds me of my dream."

"Tell us your dream," murmured Lady Violet Lebas, and he told it.

"It was through an unfortunate but pardonable blunder," said Mr. Witham,
"that I died, and reached the Paradise of Poets. I had, indeed,
published volumes of verse, but with the most blameless motives. Other
poets were continually sending me theirs, and, as I could not admire
them, and did not like to reply by critical remarks, I simply printed
some rhymes for the purpose of sending them to the gentlemen who favoured
me with theirs. I always wrote on the fly-leaf a quotation from the
'Iliad,' about giving copper in exchange for gold; and the few poets who
could read Greek were gratified, while the others, probably, thought a
compliment was intended. Nothing could be less culpable or pretentious,
but, through some mistake on the part of Charon, I was drafted off to the
Paradise of Poets.

"Outside the Golden Gate a number of Shadows were waiting, in different
attitudes of depression and languor. Bavius and Maevius were there,
still complaining of 'cliques,' railing at Horace for a mere rhymer of
society, and at Virgil as a plagiarist, 'Take away his cribs from Homer
and Apollonius Rhodius,' quoth honest Maevius, 'and what is there left of
him?' I also met a society of gentlemen, in Greek costume, of various
ages, from a half-naked minstrel with a tortoiseshell lyre in his hand to
an elegant of the age of Pericles. They all consorted together, talking
various dialects of Aeolic, Ionian, Attic Greek, and so forth, which were
plainly not intelligible to each other. I ventured to ask one of the
company who he was, but he, with a sweep of his hand, said, 'We are
Homer!' When I expressed my regret and surprise that the Golden Gate had
not yet opened for so distinguished, though collective, an artist, my
friend answered that, according to Fick, Peppmuller, and many other
learned men, they were Homer. 'But an impostor from Chios has got in
somehow,' he said; 'they don't pay the least attention to the Germans in
the Paradise of Poets.'

"At this moment the Golden Gates were thrown apart, and a fair lady, in
an early Italian costume, carrying a laurel in her hand, appeared at the
entrance. All the Shadows looked up with an air of weary expectation,
like people waiting for their turn in a doctor's consulting-room. She
beckoned to me, however, and I made haste to follow her. The words
'Charlatan!' 'You a poet!' in a variety of languages, greeted me by way
of farewell from the Shadows.

"'The renowned Laura, if I am not mistaken,' I ventured to remark,
recognising her, indeed, from the miniature in the Laurentian library at
Florence.

"She bowed, and I began to ask for her adorer, Petrarch.

"'Excuse me,' said Laura, as we glided down a mossy path, under the shade
of trees particularly dear to poets, 'excuse me, but the sonneteer of
whom you speak is one whose name I cannot bear to mention. His conduct
with Burns's Clarinda, his heartless infatuation for Stella--'

"'You astonish me,' I said. 'In the Paradise of Poets--'

"'They are poets still--incorrigible!' answered the lady; then slightly
raising her voice of silver, as a beautiful appearance in a toga drew
near, she cried '_Catullo mio_!'

"The greeting between these accomplished ghosts was too kindly to leave
room for doubt as to the ardour of their affections.

"'Will you, my Catullus,' murmured Laura, 'explain to this poet from the
land of fogs, any matters which, to him, may seem puzzling and unfamiliar
in our Paradise?'

"The Veronese, with a charming smile, took my hand, and led me to a
shadowy arbour, whence we enjoyed a prospect of many rivers and mountains
in the poets' heaven. Among these I recognised the triple crest of the
Eildons, Grongar Hill, Cithaeron and Etna; while the reed-fringed waters
of the Mincius flowed musically between the banks and braes o' bonny Doon
to join the Tweed. Blithe ghosts were wandering by, in all varieties of
apparel, and I distinctly observed Dante's Beatrice, leaning loving on
the arm of Sir Philip Sidney, while Dante was closely engaged in
conversation with the lost Lenore, celebrated by Mr. Edgar Allan Poe.

"'In what can my knowledge of the Paradise of Poets be serviceable to
you, sir?' said Catullus, as he flung himself at the feet of Laura, on
the velvet grass.

"'I am disinclined to seem impertinently curious,' I answered, 'but the
ladies in this fair, smiling country--have the gods made them poetical?'

"'Not generally,' replied Catullus. 'Indeed, if you would be well with
them, I may warn you never to mention poetry in their hearing. They
never cared for it while on earth, and in this place it is a topic which
the prudent carefully avoid among ladies. To tell the truth, they have
had to listen to far too much poetry, and too many discussions on the
caesura. There are, indeed, a few lady poets--very few. Sappho, for
example; indeed I cannot recall any other at this moment. The result is
that Phaon, of all the shadows here, is the most distinguished by the
fair. He was not a poet, you know; he got in on account of Sappho, who
adored him. They are estranged now, of course.'

"'You interest me deeply,' I answered. 'And now, will you kindly tell me
why these ladies are here, if they were not poets?'

"'The women that were our ideals while we dwelt on earth, the women we
loved but never won, or, at all events, never wedded, they for whom we
sighed while in the arms of a recognised and legitimate affection, have
been chosen by the Olympians to keep us company in Paradise!'

"'Then wherefore,' I interrupted, 'do I see Robert Burns loitering with
that lady in a ruff,--Cassandra, I make no doubt--Ronsard's Cassandra?
And why is the incomparable Clarinda inseparable from Petrarch; and Miss
Patty Blount, Pope's flame, from the Syrian Meleager, while _his_
Heliodore is manifestly devoted to Mr. Emerson, whom, by the way, I am
delighted, if rather surprised, to see here?'

"'Ah,' said Catullus, 'you are a new-comer among us. Poets will be
poets, and no sooner have they attained their desire, and dwelt in the
company of their earthly Ideals, than they feel strangely, yet
irresistibly drawn to Another. So it was in life, so it will ever be. No
Ideal can survive a daily companionship, and fortunate is the poet who
did not marry his first love!'

"'As far as that goes,' I answered, 'most of you were highly favoured;
indeed, I do not remember any poet whose Ideal was his wife, or whose
first love led him to the altar.'

"'I was not a marrying man myself,' answered the Veronese; 'few of us
were. Myself, Horace, Virgil--we were all bachelors.'

"'And Lesbia!'

"I said this in a low voice, for Laura was weaving bay into a chaplet,
and inattentive to our conversation.

"'Poor Lesbia!' said Catullus, with a suppressed sigh. 'How I misjudged
that girl! How cruel, how causeless were my reproaches,' and wildly
rending his curled locks and laurel crown, he fled into a thicket, whence
there soon arose the melancholy notes of the Ausonian lyre.'

"'He is incorrigible,' said Laura, very coldly; and she deliberately
began to tear and toss away the fragments of the chaplet she had been
weaving. 'I shall never break him of that habit of versifying. But they
are all alike.'

"'Is there nobody here,' said I, 'who is happy with his Ideal--nobody but
has exchanged Ideals with some other poet?'

"'There is one,' she said. 'He comes of a northern tribe; and in his
life-time he never rhymed upon his unattainable lady, or if rhyme he did,
the accents never carried her name to the ears of the vulgar. Look
there.'

"She pointed to the river at our feet, and I knew the mounted figure that
was riding the ford, with a green-mantled lady beside him like the Fairy
Queen.

"Surely I had read of her, and knew her--

"'She whose blue eyes their secret told,
Though shaded by her locks of gold.'

"'They are different; I know not why. They are constant,' said Laura,
and rising with an air of chagrin, she disappeared among the boughs of
the trees that bear her name.

"'Unhappy hearts of poets,' I mused. 'Light things and sacred they are,
but even in their Paradise, and among their chosen, with every wish
fulfilled, and united to their beloved, they cannot be at rest!'

"Thus moralising, I wended my way to a crag, whence there was a wide
prospect. Certain poets were standing there, looking down into an abyss,
and to them I joined myself.

"'Ah, I cannot bear it!' said a voice, and, as he turned away, his brow
already clearing, his pain already forgotten, I beheld the august form of
Shakespeare.

"Marking my curiosity before it was expressed, he answered the unuttered
question.

"'That is a sight for Pagans,' he said, 'and may give them pleasure. But
my Paradise were embittered if I had to watch the sorrows of others, and
their torments, however well deserved. The others are gazing on the
purgatory of critics and commentators.'

"He passed from me, and I joined the 'Ionian father of the rest'--Homer,
who, with a countenance of unspeakable majesty, was seated on a throne of
rock, between the Mantuan Virgil of the laurel crown, Hugo, Sophocles,
Milton, Lovelace, Tennyson, and Shelley.

"At their feet I beheld, in a vast and gloomy hall, many an honest
critic, many an erudite commentator, an army of reviewers. Some were
condemned to roll logs up insuperable heights, whence they descended
thundering to the plain. Others were set to impositions, and I
particularly observed that the Homeric commentators were obliged to write
out the 'Iliad' and 'Odyssey' in their complete shape, and were always
driven by fiends to the task when they prayed for the bare charity of
being permitted to leave out the 'interpolations.' Others, fearful to
narrate, were torn into as many fragments as they had made of these
immortal epics. Others, such as Aristarchus, were spitted on their own
critical signs of disapproval. Many reviewers were compelled to read the
books which they had criticised without perusal, and it was terrible to
watch the agonies of the worthy pressmen who were set to this unwonted
task. 'May we not be let off with the preface?' they cried in piteous
accents. 'May we not glance at the table of contents and be done with
it?' But the presiding demons (who had been Examiners in the bodily
life) drove them remorseless to their toils.

"Among the condemned I could not but witness, with sympathy, the
punishment reserved for translators. The translators of Virgil, in
particular, were a vast and motley assemblage of most respectable men.
Bishops were there, from Gawain Douglas downwards; Judges, in their
ermine; professors, clergymen, civil servants, writhing in all the
tortures that the blank verse, the anapaestic measure, the metre of the
'Lay of the Last Minstrel,' the heroic couplet and similar devices can
inflict. For all these men had loved Virgil, though not wisely: and now
their penance was to hear each other read their own translations."

"That must have been more than they could bear," said Lady Violet

"Yes," said Mr. Witham; "I should know, for down I fell into Tartarus
with a crash, and writhed among the Translators."

"Why?" asked Lady Violet.

"Because I have translated Theocritus!"

"Mr. Witham," said Lady Violet, "did you meet your ideal woman when you
were in the Paradise of Poets?"

"She yet walks this earth," said the bard, with a too significant bow.

Lady Violet turned coldly away.

* * *

Mr. Witham was never invited to the Blues again--the name of Lord Azure's
place in Kent.

The Poet is shut out of Paradise.




CHAPTER XII: PARIS AND HELEN


The first name in romance, the most ancient and the most enduring, is
that of Argive Helen. During three thousand years fair women have been
born, have lived, and been loved, "that there might be a song in the ears
of men of later time," but, compared to the renown of Helen, their glory
is dim. Cleopatra, who held the world's fate in her hands, and lay in
the arms of Caesar; Mary Stuart (_Maria Verticordia_), for whose sake, as
a northern novelist tells, peasants have lain awake, sorrowing that she
is dead; Agnes Sorel, Fair Rosamond, la belle Stuart, "the Pompadour and
the Parabere," can still enchant us from the page of history and
chronicle. "Zeus gave them beauty, which naturally rules even strength
itself," to quote the Greek orator on the mistress of them all, on her
who, having never lived, can never die, the Daughter of the Swan.

While Helen enjoys this immortality, and is the ideal of beauty upon
earth, it is curious to reflect on the _modernite_ of her story, the
oldest of the love stories of the world. In Homer we first meet her, the
fairest of women in the song of the greatest of poets. It might almost
seem as if Homer meant to justify, by his dealing with Helen, some of the
most recent theories of literary art. In the "Iliad" and "Odyssey" the
tale of Helen is without a beginning and without an end, like a frieze on
a Greek temple. She crosses the stage as a figure familiar to all, the
poet's audience clearly did not need to be told who Helen was, nor
anything about her youth.

The famous judgment of Paris, the beginning of evil to Achaeans and Ilian
men, is only mentioned once by Homer, late, and in a passage of doubtful
authenticity. Of her reconciliation to her wedded lord, Menelaus, not a
word is said; of her end we are told no more than that for her and him a
mansion in Elysium is prepared--

"Where falls not hail, or rain, or any snow."

We leave her happy in Argos, a smile on her lips, a gift in her hands, as
we met her in Troy, beautiful, adored despite her guilt, as sweet in her
repentance as in her unvexed Argive home. Women seldom mention her, in
the epic, but with horror and anger; men never address her but in gentle
courtesy. What is her secret? How did she leave her home with
Paris--beguiled by love, by magic, or driven by the implacable Aphrodite?
Homer is silent on all of these things; these things, doubtless, were
known by his audience. In his poem Helen moves as a thing of simple
grace, courtesy, and kindness, save when she rebels against her doom,
after seeing her lover fly from her husband's spear. Had we only Homer,
by far our earliest literary source, we should know little of the romance
of Helen; should only know that a lawless love brought ruin on Troy and
sorrow on the Achaeans; and this is thrown out, with no moral comment,
without praise or blame. The end, we learn, was peace, and beauty was
reconciled to life. There is no explanation, no _denouement_; and we
know how much _denouement_ and explanations hampered Scott and
Shakespeare. From these trammels Homer is free, as a god is free from
mortal limitations.

All this manner of telling a tale--a manner so ancient, so original--is
akin, in practice, to recent theories of what art should be, and what art
seldom is, perhaps never is, in modern hands.

Modern enough, again, is the choice of a married woman for the heroine of
the earliest love tale. Apollonius Rhodius sings (and no man has ever
sung so well) of a maiden's love; Virgil, of a widow's; Homer, of love
that has defied law, blindly obedient to destiny, which dominates even
Zeus. Once again, Helen is not a very young girl; ungallant
chronologists have attributed to her I know not what age. We think of
her as about the age of the Venus of Milo; in truth, she was "ageless and
immortal." Homer never describes her beauty; we only see it reflected in
the eyes of the old men, white and weak, thin-voiced as cicalas: but hers
is a loveliness "to turn an old man young." "It is no marvel," they say,
"that for her sake Trojans and Achaeans slay each other."

She was embroidering at a vast web, working in gold and scarlet the
sorrows that for her sake befell mankind, when they called her to the
walls to see Paris fight Menelaus, in the last year of the war. There
she stands, in raiment of silvery white, her heart yearning for her old
love and her own city. Already her thought is far from Paris. Was her
heart ever with Paris? That is her secret. A very old legend, mentioned
by the Bishop of Thessalonica, Eustathius, tells us that Paris magically
beguiled her, disguised in the form of Menelaus, her lord, as Uther
beguiled Ygerne. She sees the son of Priam play the dastard in the
fight; she turns in wrath on Aphrodite, who would lure her back to his
arms; but to his arms she must go, "for the daughter of Zeus was afraid."
Violence is put upon beauty; it is soiled, or seems soiled, in its way
through the world. Helen urges Paris again into the war. He has a heart
invincibly light and gay; shame does not weigh on him. "Not every man is
valiant every day," he says; yet once engaged in battle, he bears him
bravely, and his arrows rain death among the mail-clad Achaeans.

What Homer thinks of Paris we can only guess. His beauty is the bane of
Ilios; but Homer forgives so much to beauty. In the end of the "Iliad,"
Helen sings the immortal dirge over Hector, the stainless knight, "with
thy loving kindness and thy gentle speech."

In the "Odyssey," she is at home again, playing the gracious part of
hostess to Odysseus's wandering son, pouring into the bowl the magic herb
of Egypt, "which brings forgetfulness of sorrow." The wandering son of
Odysseus departs with a gift for his bride, "to wear upon the day of her
desire, a memorial of the hands of Helen," the beautiful hands, that in
Troy or Argos were never idle.

Of Helen, from Homer, we know no more. Grace, penitence in exile, peace
at home, these are the portion of her who set East and West at war and
ruined the city of Priam of the ashen spear. As in the strange legend
preserved by Servius, the commentator on Virgil, who tells us that Helen
wore a red "star-stone," whence fell gouts of blood that vanished ere
they touched her swan's neck; so all the blood shed for her sake leaves
Helen stainless. Of Homer's Helen we know no more.

The later Greek fancy, playing about this form of beauty, wove a myriad
of new fancies, or disinterred from legend old beliefs untouched by
Homer. Helen was the daughter of the Swan--that is, as was later
explained, of Zeus in the shape of a swan. Her loveliness, even in
childhood, plunged her in many adventures. Theseus carried her off; her
brothers rescued her. All the princes of Achaea competed for her hand,
having first taken an oath to avenge whomsoever she might choose for her
husband. The choice fell on the correct and honourable, but rather
inconspicuous, Menelaus, and they dwelt in Sparta, beside the Eurotas,
"in a hollow of the rifted hills." Then, from across the sea, came the
beautiful and fatal Paris, son of Priam, King of Troy. As a child, Paris
had been exposed on the mountains, because his mother dreamed that she
brought forth a firebrand. He was rescued and fostered by a shepherd; he
tended the flocks; he loved the daughter of a river god, OEnone. Then
came the naked Goddesses, to seek at the hand of the most beautiful of
mortals the prize of beauty. Aphrodite won the golden apple from the
queen of heaven, Hera, and from the Goddess of war and wisdom, Athena,
bribing the judge by the promise of the fairest wife in the world. No
incident is more frequently celebrated in poetry and art, to which it
lends such gracious opportunities. Paris was later recognised as of the
royal blood of Troy. He came to Lacedaemon on an embassy, he saw Helen,
and destiny had its way.

Concerning the details in this most ancient love-story, we learn nothing
from Homer, who merely makes Paris remind Helen of their bridal night in
the isle of Cranae. But from Homer we learn that Paris carried off not
only the wife of Menelaus, but many of his treasures. To the poet of the
"Iliad," the psychology of the wooing would have seemed a simple matter.
Like the later vase-painters, he would have shown us Paris beside Helen,
Aphrodite standing near, accompanied by the figure of Peitho--Persuasion.

Homer always escapes our psychological problems by throwing the weight of
our deeds and misdeeds on a God or a Goddess, or on destiny. To have
fled from her lord and her one child, Hermione, was not in keeping with
the character of Helen as Homer draws it. Her repentance is almost
Christian in its expression, and repentance indicates a consciousness of
sin and of shame, which Helen frequently professes. Thus she, at least,
does not, like Homer, in his chivalrous way, throw all the blame on the
Immortals and on destiny. The cheerful acquiescence of Helen in destiny
makes part of the comic element in _La Belle Helene_, but the mirth only
arises out of the incongruity between Parisian ideas and those of ancient
Greece.

Helen is freely and bitterly blamed in the "Odyssey" by Penelope, chiefly
because of the ruinous consequences which followed her flight. Still,
there is one passage, when Penelope prudently hesitates about recognising
her returned lord, which makes it just possible that a legend chronicled
by Eustathius was known to Homer,--namely, the tale already mentioned,
that Paris beguiled her in the shape of Menelaus. The incident is very
old, as in the story of Zeus and Amphitryon, and might be used whenever a
lady's character needed to be saved. But this anecdote, on the whole, is
inconsistent with the repentance of Helen, and is not in Homer's manner.

The early lyric poet, Stesichorus, is said to have written harshly
against Helen. She punished him by blindness, and he indited a palinode,
explaining that it was not she who went to Troy, but a woman fashioned in
her likeness, by Zeus, out of mist and light. The real Helen remained
safely and with honour in Egypt. Euripides has made this idea, which was
calculated to please him, the groundwork of his "Helena," but it never
had a strong hold on the Greek imagination. Modern fancy is pleased by
the picture of the cloud-bride in Troy, Greeks and Trojans dying for a
phantasm. "Shadows we are, and shadows we pursue."

Concerning the later feats, and the death of Paris, Homer says very
little. He slew Achilles by an arrow-shot in the Scaean gate, and
prophecy was fulfilled. He himself fell by another shaft, perhaps the
poisoned shaft of Philoctetes. In the fourth or fifth century of our era
a late poet, Quintus Smyrnaeus, described Paris's journey, in quest of a
healing spell, to the forsaken OEnone, and her refusal to aid him; her
death on his funeral pyre. Quintus is a poet of extraordinary merit for
his age, and scarcely deserves the reproach of laziness affixed on him by
Lord Tennyson.

On the whole, Homer seems to have a kind of half-contemptuous liking for
the beautiful Paris. Later art represents him as a bowman of girlish
charms, wearing a Phrygian cap. There is a late legend that he had a
son, Corythus, by OEnone, and that he killed the lad in a moment of
jealousy, finding him with Helen and failing to recognise him. On the
death of Paris, perhaps by virtue of the custom of the Levirate, Helen
became the wife of his brother, Deiphobus.

How her reconciliation with Menelaus was brought about we do not learn
from Homer, who, in the "Odyssey," accepts it as a fact. The earliest
traditional hint on the subject is given by the famous "Coffer of
Cypselus," a work of the seventh century, B.C., which Pausanias saw at
Olympia, in A.D. 174. Here, on a band of ivory, was represented, among
other scenes from the tale of Troy, Menelaus rushing, sword in hand, to
slay Helen. According to Stesichorus, the army was about to stone her
after the fall of Ilios, but relented, amazed by her beauty.