“I wonder when we shall meet again?”
“Oh, very soon, I dare say,” he rejoined. “The world is a wonderfully small place, after all, as men find when they jostle up against each other unexpectedly in the most unlikely corners of far countries. You may, if you choose, correspond with me, and that is a privilege I accord to few, I assure you!” He smiled, and then went on in a more serious tone, “You are, of course, welcome at our monastery whenever you wish to come, but, take my advice, do not wilfully step out of the sphere in which you are placed. Live IN society, it needs men of your stamp and intellectual calibre; show it a high and consistent example — let no eccentricity mar your daily actions — work at your destiny steadily, cheerfully, serenely, and leave the rest to God, and — the angels!”
There was a slight, tender inflection in his voice as he spoke the last words, — and Alwyn gave him a quick, searching glance. But his blue, penetrating eyes were calm and steadfast, full of their usual luminous softness and pathos, and there was nothing expressed in them but the gentlest friendliness.
“Well! I’m glad I may write to you, at any rate,” said Alwyn at last, reluctantly releasing his hand. “It is possible I may not remain long in London; I want to finish my poem, and it gets on too slowly in the tumult of daily life in town.”
“Then will you go abroad again?” inquired Heliobas.
“Perhaps. I may. Bonn, where I was once a student for a time. It is a peaceful, sleepy little place, — I shall probably complete my work easily there. Moreover, it will be like going back to a bit of my youth. I remember I first began to entertain all my dreams of poesy at Bonn.”
“Inspired by the Seven Mountains and the Drachenfels!” laughed Heliobas. “No wonder you recalled the lost ‘Sah-luma’ period in the sight of the entrancing Rhine! Ah, Sir Poet, you have had your fill of fame! and I fear the plaudits of London will never be like those of Al-Kyris! No monarchs will honor you now, but rather despise! for the kings and queens of this age prefer financiers to Laureates! Now, wherever you wander, let me hear of your well-being and progress in contentment; when you write, address to our Dariel retreat, for though on my return from Mexico I shall probably visit Lemnos, my letters will always be forwarded. Adieu!”
“Adieu!” and their eyes met. A grave sweet smile brightened the
Chaldean’s handsome features.
“God remain with you, my friend!” he said, in a low, thrillingly earnest tone. “Believe me, you are elected to a strangely happy fate! — far happier than you at present know!”
With these words he turned and was gone, — lost to sight in the surging throng of passers-by. Alwyn looked eagerly after him, but saw him no more. His tall figure had vanished as utterly as any of the phantom shapes in Al-Kyris, only that, far from being spectre-like, he had seemed more actually a living personality than any of the people in the streets who were hurrying to and fro on their various errands of business or pleasure.
That same night when Alwyn related his day’s adventure to Villiers, who heard it with the most absorbed interest, he was describing the effect of Sarasate’s violin-playing, when all at once he was seized by the same curious, overpowering impression of white, lofty arches, stained windows, and jewel-like glimmerings of color, and he suddenly stopped short in the midst of his narrative.
“What’s the matter?” asked Villiers, astonished. “Go on! — you were saying,—”
“That Sarasate is one of the divinest of God’s wandering melodies,” went on Alwyn, slowly and with a faint smile. “And that though, as a rule, musicians are forgotten when their music ceases, this Andalusian Orpheus in Thrace will be remembered long after his violin is laid aside, and he himself has journeyed to a sunnier land than Spain! But I am not master of my thoughts to-night, Villiers; my Chaldean friend has perhaps mesmerized me — who knows! and I have an odd fancy upon me. I should like to spend an hour in some great and beautiful cathedral, and see the light of the rising sun flashing through the stained windows across the altar!”
“Poet and dreamer!” laughed Villiers. “You can’t gratify that whim in London; there’s no ‘great and beautiful’ edifice of the kind here, — only the unfinished Oratory, Westminster Abbey, broken up into ugly pews and vile monuments, and the repellently grimy St. Paul’s — so go to bed, old boy, and indulge yourself in some more ‘visions,’ for I assure you you’ll never find any reality come up to your ideal of things in general.”
“No?” and Alwyn smiled. “Strange that I see it in quite the reverse way! It seems to me, no ideal will ever come up to the splendor of reality!”
“But remember,” said Villiers quickly, “YOUR reality is heaven, — a ‘reality’ that is every one else’s myth!”
“True! terribly true!”.. and Alwyn’s eyes darkened sorrowfully. “Yet the world’s myth is the only Eternal Real, and for the shadows of this present Seeming we barter our immortal Substance!”
CHAPTER XXXIX.
BY THE RHINE.
In the two or three weeks that followed his meeting with Heliobas, Alwyn made up his mind to leave London for a while. He was tired and restless, — tired of the routine society more or less imposed upon him, — restless because he had come to a standstill in his work — an invisible barrier, over which his creative fancy was unable to take its usual sweeping flight. He had an idea of seeking some quiet spot among mountains, as far remote as possible from the travelling world of men, — a peaceful place, where, with the majestic silence of Nature all about him, he might plead in lover-like retirement with his refractory Muse, and strive to coax her into a sweeter and more indulgent humor. It was not that thoughts were lacking to him, — what he complained of was the monotony of language and the difficulty of finding new, true, and choice forms of expression. A great thought leaps into the brain like a lightning flash; there it is, an indescribable mystery, warming the soul and pervading the intellect, but the proper expression of that thought is a matter of the deepest anxiety to the true poet, who, if he be worthy of his vocation, is bound not only to proclaim it to the world CLEARLY, but also clad in such a perfection of wording that it shall chime on men’s ears with a musical sound as of purest golden bells. There are very few faultless examples of this felicitous utterance in English or in any literature, so few, indeed, that they could almost all be included in one newspaper column of ordinary print. Keats’s exquisite line:
“AEea’s Isle was wondering at the moon”..
in which the word “wondering” paints a whole landscape of dreamy enchantment, and the couplet in the “Ode to a Nightingale,” that speaks with a delicious vagueness of
“Magic casements opening on the foam
Of perilous seas in faery lands forlorn,” —
are absolutely unique and unrivalled, as is the exquisite alliteration taken from a poet of our own day:
“The holy lark,
With fire from heaven and sunlight on his wing,
Who wakes the world with witcheries of the dark,
Renewed in rapture in the reddening air!”
Again from the same:
“The chords of the lute are entranced
With the weight of the wonder of things”;
and
“his skyward notes Have drenched the summer with the dews of song! …”
this last line being certainly one of the most suggestive and beautiful in all poetical literature. Such expressions have the intrinsic quality of COMPLETENESS, — once said, we feel that they can never be said again; — they belong to the centuries, rather than the seasons, and any imitation of them we immediately and instinctively resent as an outrage.
And Theos Alwyn was essentially, and above all things, faithful to the lofty purpose of his calling, — he dealt with his art reverently, and not in rough haste and scrambling carelessness, — if he worked out any idea in rhyme, the idea was distinct and the rhyme was perfect, — he was not content, like Browning, to jumble together such hideous and ludicrous combinations as “high;
— Humph!” and “triumph,” — moreover, he knew that what he had to tell his public must be told comprehensively, yet grandly, with all the authority and persuasiveness of incisive rhetoric, yet also with all the sweetness and fascination of a passioned love-song. Occupied with such work as this, London, with its myriad mad noises and vulgar distractions, became impossible to him, — and Villiers, his fidus Achates, who had read portions of his great poem and was impatient to see it finished, knowing, as he did, what an enormous sensation it would create when published, warmly seconded his own desire to gain a couple of months complete seclusion and tranquillity.
He left town, therefore, about the middle of May and started across the Channel, resolving to make for Switzerland by the leisurely and delightful way of the Rhine, in order to visit Bonn, the scene of his old student days. What days they had been! — days of dreaming, more than action, for he had always regarded learning as a pastime rather than a drudgery, and so had easily distanced his comrades in the race for knowledge. While they were flirting with the Lischen or Gretchen of the hour, he had willingly absorbed himself in study — thus he had attained the head of his classes with scarce an effort, and, in fact, had often found time hanging heavily on his hands for want of something more to do. He had astonished the university professors — but he had not astonished himself, inasmuch as no special branch of learning presented any difficulties to him, and the more he mastered the more dissatisfied he became. It had seemed such a little thing to win the honors of scholarship! for at that time his ambition was always climbing up the apparently inaccessible heights of fame, — fame, that he then imagined was the greatest glory any human being could aspire to. He smiled as he recollected this, and thought how changed he was since then! What a difference between the former discontented mutability of his nature, and the deep, unswerving calm of patience that characterized it now! Learning and scholarship? these were the mere child’s alphabet of things, — and fame was a passing breath that ruffled for one brief moment the on-rushing flood of time — a bubble blown in the air to break into nothingness. Thus much wisdom he had acquired, — and what more? A great deal more! he had won the difficult comprehension of HIMSELF; he had grasped the priceless knowledge that man has no enemy save THAT WHICH IS WITHIN HIM, and that the pride of a rebellious Will is the parent Sin from which all others are generated. The old Scriptural saying is true for all time, that through pride the angels fell; and it is only through humility that they will ever rise again. Pride! the proud Will that is left FREE by Divine Law, to work for itself and answer for itself, and wreak upon its own head the punishment of its own errors, — the Will that once voluntarily crushed down, in the dust at the Cross of Christ, with these words truly drawn from the depths of penitence, “Lord, not as I will, but as Thou wilt!” is straightway lifted up from its humiliation, a supreme, stately Force, resistless, miraculous, world-commanding; — smoothing the way for all greatness and all goodness, and guiding the happy Soul from joy to joy, from glory to glory, till Heaven itself is reached and the perfection of all love and life begins. For true humility is not slavish, as some people imagine, but rather royal, since, while acknowledging the supremacy of God, it claims close kindred with Him, and is at once invested with all the diviner virtues. Fame and wealth, the two perishable prizes for which men struggle with one another in ceaseless and cruel combat, bring no absolute satisfaction in the end — they are toys that please for a time and then grow wearisome. But the conquering of Self is a battle in which each fresh victory bestows a deeper content, a larger happiness, a more perfect peace, — and neither poverty, sickness, nor misfortune can quench the courage, or abate the ardor, of the warrior who is absorbed in a crusade against his own worser passions. Egotism is the vice of this age, — the maxim of modern society is “each man for himself, and no one for his neighbor” — and in such a state of things, when personal interest or advantage is the chief boon desired, we cannot look for honesty in either religion, politics, or commerce. Nor can we expect any grand work to be done in art or literature. When pictures are painted and books are written for money only, — when laborers take no pleasure in labor save for the wage it brings, — when no real enthusiasm is shown in anything except the accumulation of wealth, — and when all the finer sentiments and nobler instincts of men are made subject to Mammon worship, is any one so mad and blind as to think that good can come of it? Nothing but evil upon evil can accrue from such a system, — and those who have prophetic eyes to see through the veil of events can perceive, even now, the not far distant end — namely, the ruin of the country that has permitted itself to degenerate into a mere nation of shopkeepers, — and something worse than ruin, — degradation!
It was past eight in the evening when Alwyn, after having spent a couple of days in bright little Brussels, arrived at Cologne. Most travelers know to their cost how noisy, narrow, and unattractive are the streets of this ancient Colonia Agrippina of the Romans, — how persistent and wearying is the rattle of the vehicles over the rough, cobbly stones — how irritating to the nerves is the incessant shrieking whistle and clank of the Rhine steamboats as they glide in, or glide out, from the cheerless and dirty pier. But at night, when these unpleasant sounds have partially subsided, and the lights twinkle in the shop-windows, and the majestic mass of the Cathedral casts its broad shadow on the moonlit Dom-Platz, and a few soldiers, with clanking swords and glittering spurs, come marching out from some dark stone archway, and the green gleam of the river sparkles along in luminous ripples, — then it is that a something weird and mystical creeps over the town, and the glamour of ancient historical memories begins to cling about its irregular buildings, — one thinks of the legendary Three Kings, and believes in them, too, — of St. Ursula and her company of virgins; of Marie de Medicis dying alone in that tumbled-down house in the Stern-gasse, — of Rubens, who, it is said, here first saw the light of this world, — of an angry Satan flinging his Teufelstein from the Seven Mountains in an impotent attempt to destroy the Dom; and gradually, the indestructible romantic spell of the Rhine steals into the spirit of common things that were unlovely by day, and makes the old city beautiful under the sacred glory of the stars.
Alwyn dined at his hotel, and then, finding it still too early to retire to rest, strolled slowly across the Platz, looking up at the sublime God’s Temple above him, the stately Cathedral, with its wondrously delicate carvings and flying buttresses, on which the moonlight glittered like little points of pale flame. He knew it of old; many and many a time had he taken train from Bonn, for the sole pleasure of spending an hour in gazing on that splendid “sermon in stone,” — one of the grandest testimonies in the world of man’s instinctive desire to acknowledge and honor, by his noblest design and work, the unseen but felt majesty of the Creator. He had a great longing to enter it now, and ascended the steps with that intention; but, much to his vexation, the doors were shut. He walked from the side to the principal entrance; that superb western frontage which is so cruelly blocked in by a dwarfish street of the commonest shops and meanest houses, — and found that also closed against him. Disappointed and sorry, he went back again to the side of the colossal structure, and stood on the top of the steps, close to the central barred doors, studying the sculptured saints in the niches, and feeling a sudden, singular impression of extreme LONELINESS, — a sense of being shut out, as it were, from some high festival in which he would gladly have taken part.
Not a cloud was in the sky, … the evening was one of the most absolute calm, and a delicious warmth pervaded the air, — the warmth of a fully declared and balmy spring. The Platz was almost deserted, — only a few persons crossed it now and then, like flitting shadows, — and somewhere down in one of the opposite streets a long way off, there was a sound of men’s voices singing a part-song. Presently, however, this distant music ceased, and a deep silence followed. Alwyn still remained in the sombre shade of the cathedral archway, arguing with himself against the foolish and unaccountable depression that
had seized him, and watching the brilliant May moon soar up higher and higher in the heavens; when, — all at once, the throbbing murmur of the great organ inside the Dom startled him from pensive dreaminess into swift attention. He listened, — the rich, round notes thundered through the stillness with forceful and majestic harmony; anon, wierd tones, like the passionate lament of Sarasate’s “Zigeunerweisen” floated around and above him: then, a silvery chorus of young voices broke forth in solemn unison:
“Kyrie Eleison! Christe Eleison! Kyrie Eleison!”
A faint cold tremor crept through his veins, — his heart beat violently, — again he vainly strove to open the great door. Was there a choir practising inside at this hour of the night? Surely not! Then, — from whence had this music its origin? Stooping, he bent his ear to the crevice of the closed portal, — but, as suddenly as they had begun, the harmonies ceased; and all was once more profoundly still.
Drawing a long, deep breath, he stood for a moment amazed and lost in thought — these sounds, he felt sure, were not of earth but of heaven! they had the same ringing sweetness as those he had heard on the Field of Ardath! What might they mean to him, here and now? Quick as a flash the answer came — DEATH! God had taken pity upon his solitary earth wanderings, — and the prayers of Edris had shortened his world-exile and probation! He was to die! and that solemn singing was the warning, — or the promise, — of his approaching end!
Yes! it must be so, he decided, as, with a strange, half-sad peace at his heart, he quietly descended the steps of the Dom,-he would perhaps be permitted to finish the work he was at present doing, — and then, — then, the poet-pen would be laid aside forever, chains would be undone, and he would be set at liberty! Such was his fixed idea. Was he glad of the prospect, he asked himself? Yes, and No! For himself he was glad; but in these latter days he had come to understand the thousand wordless wants and aspirations of mankind, — wants and aspirations to which only the Poet can give fitting speech; he had begun to see how much can be done to cheer and raise and ennoble the world by even ONE true, brave, earnest, and unselfish worker, — and he had attained to such a height in sympathetic comprehension of the difficulties and drawbacks of others, that he had ceased to consider himself at all in the question, either with regard to the Present or the immortal Future, — he was, without knowing it, in the simple, unconsciously perfect attitude of a Soul that is absolutely at one with God, and that thus, in involuntary God-likeness, is only happy in the engendering of happiness. He believed that, with the Divine help, he could do a lasting good for his fellow-men, — and to this cause he was willing to sacrifice everything that pertained to his own mere personal advantage. But now, — now, — or so he imagined, — he was not to be allowed to pursue his labors of love, — his trial was to end suddenly, — and he, so long banished from his higher heritage, was to be restored to it without delay, — restored and drawn back to the land of perfect loveliness where Edris, his Angel, waited for him, his saint, his queen, his bride!
Delphi Collected Works of Marie Corelli (Illustrated) (Delphi Series Eight Book 22) Page 200
