Books and Habits, from the Lectures of Lafcadio Hearn Part 18

With lattice opened wide I stand To watch their eager flight; With broken jesses in my hand I muse on their delight.

And oh! if one with sullied plume Should droop in mid career, My love makes signals,--"There is room, O bleeding wanderer, here."

This comparison of the educator to a falconer, and of the students to young hawks eager to break their jesses seems to an Englishman particularly happy in reference to Eton, from which so many youths pa.s.s into the ranks of the army and navy. The line about bowing, smirking and glozing, refers to the comparative insincerity of the higher society into which so many of the scholars must eventually pa.s.s. "Smirking" suggests insincere smiles, "glozing" implies tolerating or lightly pa.s.sing over faults or wrongs or serious matters that should not be considered lightly.

Society is essentially insincere and artificial in all countries, but especially so in England. The old Eton master thinks, however, that he knows the moral character of the boys, the strong principles which make its foundation, and he trusts that they will be able in a general way to do only what is right, in spite of conventions and humbug.

As I told you before, we know very little about the personal life of Cory, who must have been a very reserved man; but a poet puts his heart into his verses as a general rule, and there are many little poems in this book that suggest to us an unhappy love episode. These are extremely pretty and touching, the writer in most cases confessing himself unworthy of the person who charmed him; but the finest thing of the kind is a composition which he suggestively ent.i.tled "A Fable"--that is to say, a fable in the Greek sense, an emblem or symbol of truth.

An eager girl, whose father buys Some ruined thane's forsaken hall, Explores the new domain and tries Before the rest to view it all.

I think you have often noted the fact here related; when a family moves to a new house, it is the child, or the youngest daughter, who is the first to explore all the secrets of the new residence, and whose young eyes discover things which the older folks had not noticed.

Alone she lifts the latch, and glides, Through many a sadly curtained room, As daylight through the doorway slides And struggles with the m.u.f.fled gloom.

With mimicries of dance she wakes The lordly gallery's silent floor, And climbing up on tiptoe, makes The old-world mirror smile once more.

With tankards dry she chills her lips, With yellowing laces veils the head, And leaps in pride of owners.h.i.+p Upon the faded marriage bed.

A harp in some dark nook she sees Long left a prey to heat and frost, She smites it; can such tinklings please?

Is not all worth, all beauty, lost?

Ah, who'd have thought such sweetness clung To loose neglected strings like those?

They answered to whate'er was sung, And sounded as a lady chose.

Her pitying finger hurried by Each vacant s.p.a.ce, each slackened chord; Nor would her wayward zeal let die The music-spirit she restored.

The fas.h.i.+on quaint, the timeworn flaws, The narrow range, the doubtful tone, All was excused awhile, because It seemed a creature of her own.

Perfection tires; the new in old, The mended wrecks that need her skill, Amuse her. If the truth be told, She loves the triumph of her will.

With this, she dares herself persuade, She'll be for many a month content, Quite sure no d.u.c.h.ess ever played Upon a sweeter instrument.

And thus in sooth she can beguile Girlhood's romantic hours, but soon She yields to taste and mood and style, A siren of the gay saloon.

And wonders how she once could like Those drooping wires, those failing notes, And leaves her toy for bats to strike Amongst the cobwebs and the motes.

But enter in, thou freezing wind, And snap the harp-strings, one by one; It was a maiden blithe and kind: They felt her touch; their task is done.

In this charming little study we know that the harp described is not a harp; it is the loving heart of an old man, at least of a man beyond the usual age of lovers. He has described and perhaps adored some beautiful person who seemed to care for him, and who played upon his heart, with her whims, caresses, smiles, much as one would play upon the strings of a harp. She did not mean to be cruel at all, nor even insincere. It is even probable that she really in those times thought that she loved the man, and under the charms of the girl the man became a different being; the old-fas.h.i.+oned mind brightened, the old-fas.h.i.+oned heart exposed its hidden treasures of tenderness and wisdom and sympathy. Very much like playing upon a long forgotten instrument, was the relation between the maiden and the man--not only because he resembled such an instrument in the fact of belonging emotionally and intellectually to another generation, but also because his was a heart whose true music had long been silent, unheard by the world. Undoubtedly the maiden meant no harm, but she caused a great deal of pain, for at a later day, becoming a great lady of society, she forgot all about this old friends.h.i.+p, or perhaps wondered why she ever wasted her time in talking to such a strange old-fas.h.i.+oned professor. Then the affectionate heart is condemned to silence again, to silence and oblivion, like the harp thrown away in some garret to be covered with cobwebs and visited only by bats. "Is it not time," the old man thinks, "that the strings should be broken, the strings of the heart? Let the cold wind of death now come and snap them." Yet, after all, why should he complain? Did he not have the beautiful experience of loving, and was she not in that time at least well worthy of the love that she called forth like music?

There are several other poems referring to what would seem to be the same experience, and all are beautiful, but one seems to me n.o.bler than the rest, expressing as it does a generous resignation. It is called "Deteriora," a Latin word signifying lesser, inferior, or deteriorated things--not easy to translate. Nor would you find the poem easy to understand, referring as it does to conditions of society foreign to anything in j.a.panese experience. But some verses which I may quote you will like.

If fate and nature screen from me The sovran front I bowed before, And set the glorious creature free, Whom I would clasp, detain, adore,-- If I forego that strange delight, Must all be lost? Not quite, not quite.

_Die, Little Love, without complaint, Whom honour standeth by to shrive: a.s.soiled from all selfish taint, Die, Love, whom Friends.h.i.+p will survive.

Not hate nor folly gave thee birth; And briefness does but raise thy worth._

This is the same thought which Tennyson expressed in his famous lines,

'Tis better to have loved and lost Than never to have loved at all.

But it is still more finely expressed to meet a particular personal mood.

One must not think the world lost because a woman has been lost, he says, and such a love is not a thing for any man to be ashamed of, in spite of the fact that it has been disappointed. It was honourable, unselfish, not inspired by any pa.s.sion or any folly, and the very brevity of the experience only serves to make it more precious. Observe the use of the words "shrive" and "a.s.soiled." These refer to the old religious custom of confession; to "shrive" signifies to forgive, to free from sin, as a priest is supposed to do, and "a.s.soiled" means "purified."

If this was a personal experience, it must have been an experience of advanced life. Elsewhere the story of a boyish love is told very prettily, under the t.i.tle of "Two Fragments of Childhood." This is the first fragment:

When these locks were yellow as gold, When past days were easily told, Well I knew the voice of the sea, Once he spake as a friend to me.

Thunder-rollings carelessly heard, Once that poor little heart they stirred, Why, Oh, why?

Memory, memory!

She that I wished to be with was by.

Sick was I in those misanthrope days Of soft caresses, womanly ways; Once that maid on the stair I met Lip on brow she suddenly set.

Then flushed up my chivalrous blood, Like Swiss streams in a mid-summer flood.

Then, Oh, then, Imogen, Imogen!

Hadst thou a lover, whose years were ten.

This is evidently the charming memory of a little sick boy sent to the seaside for his health, according to the English custom, and unhappy there, unable to play about like stronger children, and obliged to remain under the constant care of nurses and female relatives. But in the same house there is another family with a beautiful young daughter, probably sixteen or eighteen years old. The little boy wishes, wishes so much that the beautiful lady would speak to him and play with him, but he is shy, afraid to approach her--only looks at her with great admiring loving eyes.

But one day she meets him on the stairs, and stoops down and kisses him on the forehead. Then he is in Heaven. Afterward no doubt she played with him, and they walked up and down by the sh.o.r.e of the sea together, and now, though an old man, whenever he hears the roar of the sea he remembers the beautiful lady who played with him and caressed him, when he was a little sick child. How much he loved her! But she was a woman, and he was only ten years old. The reference to "chivalrous blood" signifies just this, that at the moment when she kissed him he would have given his life for her, would have dared anything or done anything to show his devotion to her. No prettier memory of a child could be told.

We can learn a good deal about even the shyest of the poets through a close understanding of his poetry. From the foregoing we know that Cory must have been a sickly child; and from other poems referring to school life we can not escape the supposition that he was not a strong lad. In one of his verses he speaks of being unable to join in the hearty play of his comrades; and in the poem which touches on the life of the mature man we find him acknowledging that he believed his life a failure--a failure through want of strength. I am going to quote this poem for other reasons.

It is a beautiful address either to some favourite student or to a beloved son--it is impossible to decide which. But that does not matter. The t.i.tle is "A New Year's Day."

Our planet runs through liquid s.p.a.ce, And sweeps us with her in the race; And wrinkles gather on my face, And Hebe bloom on thine: Our sun with his encircling spheres Around the central sun careers; And unto thee with mustering years Come hopes which I resign.

'Twere sweet for me to keep thee still Reclining halfway up the hill; But time will not obey the will, And onward thou must climb: 'Twere sweet to pause on this descent, To wait for thee and pitch my tent, But march I must with shoulders bent, Yet further from my prime.

_I shall not tread thy battlefield, Nor see the blazon on thy s.h.i.+eld; Take thou the sword I could not wield, And leave me, and forget.

Be fairer, braver, more admired; So win what feeble hearts desired; Then leave thine arms, when thou art tired, To some one n.o.bler yet._

How beautiful this is, and how profoundly sad!

I shall return to the personal poetry of Cory later on, but I want now to give you some examples of his Greek work. Perhaps the best of this is little more than a rendering of Greek into English; some of the work is pure translation. But it is the translation of a very great master, the perfect rendering of Greek feeling as well as of Greek thought. Here is an example of pure translation:

They told me, Herac.l.i.tus, they told me you were dead, They brought me bitter news to hear and bitter tears to shed.

I wept, as I remembered, how often you and I Had tired the sun with talking and sent him down the sky.

And now that thou art lying, my dear old Carian guest, A handful of grey ashes, long, long ago at rest, Still are thy pleasant voices, thy nightingales, awake; For Death, he taketh all away, but them he cannot take.

What are "thy pleasant voices, thy nightingales"? They are the songs which the dear dead poet made, still sung in his native country, though his body was burned to ashes long ago--has been changed into a mere handful of grey ashes, which, doubtless, have been placed in an urn, as is done with such ashes to-day in j.a.pan. Death takes away all things from man, but not his poems, his songs, the beautiful thoughts which he puts into musical verse.

These will always be heard like nightingales. The fourth line in the first stanza contains an idiom which may not be familiar to you. It means only that the two friends talked all day until the sun set in the West, and still talked on after that. Tennyson has used the same Greek thought in a verse of his poem, "A Dream of Fair Women," where Cleopatra says,

"We drank the Libyan sun to sleep."

The Greek author of the above poem was the great poet Callimachus, and the English translator does not think it necessary even to give the name, as he wrote only for folk well acquainted with the cla.s.sics. He has another short translation which he accompanies with the original Greek text; it is very pretty, but of an entirely different kind, a kind that may remind you of some j.a.panese poems. It is only about a cicada and a peasant girl, and perhaps it is twenty-four or twenty-five hundred years old.

A dry cicale chirps to a la.s.s making hay, "Why creak'st thou, t.i.thonus?" quoth she. "I don't play; It doubles my toil, your importunate lay, I've earned a sweet pillow, lo! Hesper is nigh; I clasp a good wisp and in fragrance I lie; But thou art unwearied, and empty, and dry."

How very human this little thing is--how actually it brings before us the figure of the girl, who must have become dust some time between two and three thousand years ago! She is working hard in the field, and the constant singing of the insect prompts her to make a comical protest. "Oh, t.i.thonus, what are you making that creaking noise for? You old dry thing, I have no time to play with you, or to idle in any way, but you do nothing but complain. Why don't you work, as I do? Soon I shall have leave to sleep, because I have worked well. There is the evening star, and I shall have a good bed of hay, sweet-smelling fresh hay, to lie upon. How well I shall sleep. But you, you idle noisy thing, you do not deserve to sleep.

You have done nothing to tire you. And you are empty, dry and thirsty.