We were speaking at Club of O’Reilly, just after the shock of his sudden death had come upon us, and J., who had received a letter from the poet which must have been written on the very eve of his (heath, impulsively showed its closing passage. because it seemed like a message straight from the man, summing his worldly experience. “My experience of life, he wrote, makes me sure of one truth, which I do not try to cx- plain: that the sweetest happiness we ever know, the very wine of human life, comes not from love, but from sacrifice, from the effort to make others happy. This is as true to me as that my flesh will burn if I touch red-hot metal.” The hastiest survey of O’Reillys life shows that this was no emotional expression of the moment, but a doctrine testified to by numberhess acts of devotion. We begged J. to let us see more of hiis letters; for the friendliness [572] of the man could not fail to make the notes which he flung off in the midst of a busy life carry the impression of his eager personality, his vivid realization of passionate dreams, his chivalric devotion to ideals. Out of a number of notes J. read these passages, hesitating for a moment over the more direct attacks which the writer made, but brave ly risking our uplifted eyebrows:
“Sympathy is a balm, even for acute pain. The mourner takes part of the pain. ‘So are we bound by gold chains’, not only ‘to the feet of God’, but to each other.
“And yet your letter makes me smile. Puritan you, with your condemnation of the great old art-loving, human, music-breathing, color-raising, spiritual, mystical, symbolical Catholic Church! ... [A] great, loving, generous heart will never find peace and com fort and field of labor except within her unstatistical, sun-like, benevolent motherhood. J., I am a Catholic just as I am a dweller on the planet, and a lover of yellow sunlight, and flowers in the grass, and the sound of birds. Man never made anything so like God’s work as the magnificent, sacrificial, devotional faith of the hoary but young Catholic Church. There is no other church; they are all just way-stations.
“Your M.s and S.s and C.s and B.s are playing at belief, and polishing the outer brass-work of faith. Child, child, there are scales on your eyes and a crust on your sympathetic springs, the scales and crusts of inheritance. Puritan you! poor rich Puritan! I wish I could go and preach to you in your home, with its pagan and diseased Burne-Joneses and Rossettis. You to love Burne-Jones, you, natural as the wind from the pine woods of your own Wisconsin! You don’t love that sort of thing, J.: you love Indian men and women and children, and woodsmen handsome and brown and strong; and big scarlets of autumn hills; the sea, and shoreless lakes as awful as seas ; and closer still, strong, brave, great-hearted men and women, lovers of justice and doers of good to the poor and the criminal ... Life henceforth shall be a rich harvest, if you simplify it and make it eariiest. But for Gods sake, J., and your own, search till you find a field of unconventional work; nothing else has peace in it; all else is for effect, and not for itself, art, not natural. You must idealize. The world is not taught or trained by ideals, but by precept and precedence, - more’s the pity. We are all crusted over with conventions, customs, false tastes and false fears. The soul, the sentiment, is within, like the milk in a cocoanut: the shell of habit must be riven, the husk cut and torn, before it can be reached. But it is there. Humanity is never fiendish: it loves and sympathizes only with the good and true. ...
“About growth I am not sure: I grow rapidly toward complete dislike of the thing called Society, but this must be moral rather than mental development. Society is a barren humbug, fruitful only of thistles and wormwood. Home life is the sweetest and noblest in enjoyment and production. ... How much peace can you get out of small things? There is a peace from the duty of doing which fine natures know, but it is thin food for the soul. I wish you had something to do that would take all the earnestness in you to do well. You could be splendidly happy then.
“... To return to A. I think you are wrong in thinking some one unhappiness has changed him. He was born changed, as you will allow me to say. He is unhappy and unhopeful for the best of reasons, because he is unhealthful, over-developed; he has gone by a generation beyond the great heart-beat of mankind. His culture theory is not a hope, but a resort, an excuse.
“True culture is the culture of [573] strength, not of weakness. Who cares to bridle and teach the incomplete, the effete, the thin blooded and boned? Do not be deceived. Put your ear down to the rich earth, and listen to the vast, gurgling blood of Humanity, and learn whither it strives to flow, and what and where are its barriers. This is the culture worth getting, the culture that wins the love and shout of millions instead of the gush and drivel of tens. Love and hope and strength and good are all in the crowd, J., and not in the diluted blood of ~esthetic critics. A.s poetry will die before he dies. He could not, I believe, comprehend such noble poems as Emerson’s Problem or Each and All. He is an interesting, good, and, so far as intellect goes, an able man. But he is not a great man, and he is, I believe, a most unhealthy influence, because he directs the mind to artificial resources. Time strength of a man is in his sym pathies: it is outside himself, as heat is outside fire, the aroma outside the flower. A man without sympathies for all that is rude, undeveloped, upheaving. struggling, suffering, man-making, as well as for what has been shaken to the top and is out of the pressure, is not a full, and must be an unhappy man. He is an Australian flower, either over or under developed, scentless, selfish as a living fire without heat for the cold hands of children.
.........
“Nearly all good women grow by time into a kind of nobility or instinctive greatness of soul. But few women grow great in youth. Greatness is individuality, the opposite of the conventional.”
[Apropos Insects] - “When one reflects upon the manner in which man sweeps out of existence those insects which are noxious or unpleasant to him, and when one perceives that he thinks himself perfectly justified in his careless slaughter, because these animals are of low and he is of high estate in the order of creation, one is forced to give thought to the fact that the insects are themselves wholly unconscious of the nature and extent of their offenses against their superior. It is true that it seems as if mosquitoes and flies know the evil they do, and take pleasure therein, but still I maintain that this seeming does not image the verity as to their consciousness.
“Doubtless a fly plays upon the bald surface of an elderly gentlemans head in all innocence, as a child runs about the barren sides of a volcanic mountain. Nor is it likely that, after thus merrily disporting himself, the fly any more comprehends why he should be summarily crushed to death beneath a folded newspaper than the aforesaid infant sees any appropriateness in tIme sudden descent of a lava stream, which puts an end forever to his mirthful movements. As for the creatures that swarm upon the territories men themselves wish to occupy, such as army worms and potato bugs, how is it possible they should refer the doom by which they are often overtaken to the agency of human beings, or know that that doom is drawn upon them by mischief which they do in their instinctive search for the necessities of their petty baneful life? This wide separation between time effect and its cause, rendering it impossible for time baser intelligence to perceive any connection between the two or the reasons which justify either, brings to me at times a question which, I confess, I do not willingly entertain. When we mundane folk are blown away by cyclones, swallowed up in earthquakes, stifled with hot ashes by volcanoes, or smitten by strange diseases that seem to be borne abroad on the winds of an unpitying heaven, may it be that we unconsciously have been playing the part of pestilent insects in the universe, and have put ourselves disagreeably in the way of greater beings, who have unceremoniously brushed us aside? And are these beings so much [574] greater than we, that they have not needed to excuse themselves for dealing out our destruction any more than we needed balm for a prick to our consciences when we burned the nests of the caterpillars that devastated our beloved apple orchards? It is a ghastly conception to us - but it may be that a view of the relation of man and the caterpillar would be ghastly - to the caterpillar, if once he apprehended it.
“Froude, in The Nemesis of Faith, that tabooed work of his youth, suggests a still sadder explanation of life, sadder because there is in it less notion of service done to the higher existence by the suffering and ruin of the lower. Ay, he says, after celebrating the virtues of men who dare to follow the divine prompting, “but for these, these few martyred heroes, it might be, after all, that the earth was but a huge loss-and-profit ledger book, or a toy machine some great angel had invented for the amusement of his nursery; and the storm and the sunshine but the tears and the smiles of laughter in which he and his baby cherubs dressed their faces.”
“A gentler fancy came, many years ago, from the lips of a friend of mine. We were sailing in a little boat over the lovely waters of Plymouth Bay, which take upon themselves the colors of the rainbow and the opal when the tide retires to the ocean, and permits the sands and seaweeds of the bottom to glisten through the shallow, half-transparent element above. We neared the green shores of an historic island. A little child stood by the landing and danced in the sunshine, shouting and clapping her tiny hands in a wild glee that had its source in same pure recess in her own heart. My friend watched her, and a yearning wistfulness crept into his gaze. “Do we look cunning like that to God?” he said. “Is all our goodness and all our wickedness, in Gods eyes, like the goodness and the naughtiness of little children, something rather pretty, something to be tender over, and something to amuse him?”
“I was young myself then, and I pondered over his meaning, puzzled and surprised by this un-Puritanic view of the relations of the Creator to the created. It hinted of an affectionateness of attitude which, whimsical as it appears now that much time has passed, and some matters of thought have taken on new phases in my mind, does not wholly distinguish itself from the loftier vision of God which enabled Whittier to say, as he contemplated the mysteries of life and death:
‘And so beside the silent sea,
I wait the muffled oar;
No harm from Him can come to me,
On ocean or on shore.’
[Substitutes wanted] - “I can forgive the audacity in that remark of the Contributors friend, but I lift up my voice to inquire if, for ordinary use, some will not supply substitutes for those greatly overworked words “cunning” and “nice”. It seems a pity to add to the agitation of the times, with all the weighty and perplexing questions before the public, higher education, the ballot for woman, temperance legislation, labor reforms, and the Indian problem, but somebody must attend to this subject, and give us some other words wherewith we may appropriately describe a year-old baby that isn’t handsome, but is more than interesting, a puppy, or a donkey. There must be something to take the place of “cunning”. I’d rather have it than the ballot. I think the difficulty must have occurred to that popular bachelor divine who was wont, when confronted with his neighbor’s baby, to exclaim, “Well, that is a baby!” but he evaded the difficulty. Even his profuse vocabulary could not stand the draft after the fifth year of his pastorate. (p.575. End.)
Note: The ensuing article is a review of “Books of the Month”, leading off alphabetically with “Art”, commences: “Art. The Portfolio (Macmillan) for June has a noble portrait of Cardinal Manning, etched by G. W. Read from Mr. Watt’s
painting. Mr. Hamerton concludes a brief note on the picture with the words, Although he lives in a Protestant country, his position is at the same time influential and agreeable, which is good evidence of the extremely tolerant spirit now prevalent in England, a spirit that certainly never prevailed in Rome so long as it remained under Papal domination. The hand as well as the face indicates the casuist. There is an illustrated article on the Wight and the Solent Sea [... &c.]
|