II
Lafcadio Hearn has been called a 'decadent'; the word does not signify, but if by it is meant, as sometimes seems to be, a humanist without physique, there is a considerable measure of truth in its application. If one symptom of decadence be the love of words for their own sake, it was, as we have seen, not lacking in his earlier work. There is, however, nothing more unjust to most human beings then the application to them of tags that have taken their color from trite literary usage and hasty popular association with a few notorious characters. This is especially true in Hearn's case. In 1885 he wrote to W. D. O'Connor: 'If my little scraggy hand tells you anything, you ought to recognize in it a very small, erratic, eccentric, irregular, impulsive, nervous disposition,—almost your antitype in everything except the love of the beautiful.' The advocatus diaboli himself could scarcely have done better. Erratic, eccentric, irregular, impulsive, nervous, Hearn undoubtedly was; and these qualities, enhanced as they were by self-pity, so far from being what the psychologists call 'independent variables,' were of the very essence of his faculty. 'Unless,' he writes, 'somebody does or says something horribly mean to me I can't do certain kinds of work'; and again: 'I have found that the possessor of pure horse-health never seems to have an idea of the "half-lights." It is impossible to see the psychical undercurrents of human existence without that self-separation from the purely physical part of being that severe sickness gives like a revelation.'
For all his fine Byronic swimming of straits and wide bays Hearn was never the possessor of 'pure horse-health,' and it is pretty clear that to his lack of it, to his trembling sense of the hard attrition of the world, we owe his marvelous mastery of the 'half-light.' Yet this was not so much 'morbidness' in our English sense, as morbidezza, the quality of mellow-tinted color and soft harmonies. Late in life he wrote, 'I like Kipling's morbidness, which is manly and full of enormous resolve and defiance in the truth of God and Hell and Nature,—but the other—no!' Of 'the other' there is little trace in his own latest work.
The chief morbid factor in Hearn's physical constitution was his vision. One eye was totally blind, the other had, it is said, but one twentieth of normal vision; but too much has been made of this as a qualification of his genius. His monocular vision gave him, of course, landscape 'flat,' without perspective and depth; but undoubtedly, like the half-closed eye of the painter, it gave him color in wonderful harmonious intensity, and who shall say that it was with a vividness beyond Nature? The tremendous cumulative rhapsody of blue at the beginning of his 'Two Years in the French West Indies' is said by those who best know the Southern seas not to exceed reality. And there is plenty of evidence that in his quick, comprehending glances through the single eyeglass that he habitually carried, he seized minute significant details of persons or objects which others missed. It has been said by one who should be qualified to know, that he saw his world as partially and obscurely as one who looks through the large end of an opera-glass; but the analogy is imperfect unless we remember that objects so seen are given not only with remoteness, but with rich color, and with a curious artistic composition like a Claude in miniature.
But after all it was the lens in the brain that counted with Hearn. As opposed to his vision, his visionary faculty was of the first order. From boyhood, 'ghostly' was his characteristic, as it finally came to be almost his trick word. He envisaged wraiths and vanished cities with a definition more like that of objective than of subjective sight. Only his skeptical intelligence kept him from being a thoroughgoing spirit-seer. Perhaps his most characteristic mood was that reflected in his impressive essay on 'Dust' in 'Gleanings from Buddha Fields'—'I have the double sensation of being myself a ghost and of being haunted,—haunted by the prodigious luminous spectre of the world.'
It is not necessary to go much further about to apprehend the inner nature of Lafcadio Hearn. In the same 'Dust' there is a 'lyrical' paragraph that conveys him very perfectly:—
'I confess that "my mind to me a kingdom is"—not! Rather it is a fantastical republic, daily troubled by more revolutions than ever occurred in South America; and the nominal government, supposed to be rational, declares that an eternity of such anarchy is not desirable. I have souls wanting to soar in air, and souls wanting to swim in water (sea-water, I think), and souls wanting to live in woods or on mountain tops.' And so on through a Homeric catalogue of his souls, till at the end he breaks out, 'I an individual,—an individual soul! Nay, I am a population,-a population unthinkable for multitude, even by groups of a thousand millions!'
Half-fantastic this passage may very well be, but none the less it is the faithful reflection of a temperament lacking the sane integrity of perfect health, a nature at odds with itself through many warring inheritances and subtle rebellions of the blood, yet mastered at the last in most of its human relations by a character essentially fine.
The final estimation of Hearn's work is impeded by its scattered bulk, but when in the fullness of time it is finally brought together in a collected edition it will be seen to stand very high in the second class of English prose, the class of the great prosateurs, Sir Thomas Browne, Thomas De Quincey, Walter Pater.
Had he lived longer his rank might have been higher still. He had outgrown his old decadent conception of style as separable from substance, as an end to be attained in itself, to be arrived at by miners' work in dictionaries and thesauri. His work never ceased to be conscious art, but in his very latest writing there is a perfect fusion of his vigorous imaginative thought in the melancholy music of his cadenced prose. Toward the end of his life he had dreams more ambitious even than the stylistic ambitions of his youth so amply realized. In 1895 he wrote, 'I really think I have stored away in me somewhere powers larger than any I have yet been able to use. Of course I don't mean that I have any hidden wisdom or anything of that sort, but I believe I have some power to reach the public emotionally if conditions allow.' Still later the project is explicitly stated: 'a single short, powerful philosophical story, of the most emotional and romantic sort.' 'I feel within me,' he writes, 'the sense of such a story—vaguely, like the sense of a perfume or the smell of a spring wind which you cannot define. But the chances are that a more powerful mind than mine will catch the inspiration first, as the highest peak most quickly takes the sun.'
Whether his imagination, with all its activity, had quite the creative, shaping energy ever to fulfill this dream, we shall never know. But it is certain at any rate that the last of his work, published posthumously, shows both a broadening and a deepening of what, despite the artifice of his method, we may justly call his inspiration. Had he lived to complete the imaginative autobiography of which fragments are printed in his 'Life and Letters,' it might have proved his masterpiece. The fragments have a sincere and haunting poignancy, and his prose was never more vivid and musical. For all that 'population' within him, his own intellectual and imaginative life had been marked by a unity that would doubtless have induced a corresponding unity in the book, with striking artistic results.
The integrity of Hearn's intellectual life consisted in his strangely single-hearted devotion to both artistic beauty and scientific truth. And precisely in this, I believe, lies the significance of his work. He was, in a certain sense, the most Lucretian of modern writers. It has been said that, as Spinoza was 'a man drunk with God,' so Lucretius was 'a man drunk with natural law.' Well, Hearn was a man drunk with Herbert Spencer, and in all save the accident of form he was the poet of Spencerian evolution. As Lucretius, preaching his tremendous doctrine of the monstrous, eternal rain of atoms through the world, wove into his great poem the beauty of the old mythology, the tragedy of passionate humanity, so Hearn, in his gentler fashion, steadily envisaged the horror that envelops the stupendous universe of modern science, and by evoking and reviving ancient myths and immemorial longings, cast over the darkness a ghostly light of vanished suns.
In the final paragraph of his 'Romance of the Milky Way,'—the River Celestial along which, in Japanese mythology, the spirits of the dead return to meet their loves beneath the moon,—we have the heart of Lafcadio Hearn:—
'Perhaps the legend of Tanabata, as it was understood by those old poets, can make but a faint appeal to Western minds. Nevertheless, in the silence of transparent nights, before the rising of the moon, the charm of the ancient tale sometimes descends upon me, out of the scintillant sky,—to make me forget the monstrous facts of science, and the stupendous horror of Space. Then I no longer behold the Milky Way as that awful Ring of the Cosmos, whose hundred million suns are powerless to lighten the Abyss, but as the very Amanagowa itself,—the River Celestial. I see the thrill of its shining stream, and the mists that hover along its verge, and the water-grasses that bend in the winds of autumn. White Orihim? I see at her starry loom, and the Ox that grazes on the farther shore; and I know that the falling dew is the spray from the Herdsman's oar. And the heaven seems very near and warm and human; and the silence about me is filled with the dream of a love unchanging, immortal,—forever yearning and forever young, and forever left unsatisfied by the paternal wisdom of the gods.'
If, as some hold, the problem of modern romantic literary art has been to portray the human spirit caught in a magic web of necessity, 'penetrating us with a network subtler than our subtlest nerves'; to marry strangeness with beauty; to accomplish all this in a style as express and gleaming as goldsmith's work; then few writers have solved it more brilliantly than Lafcadio Hearn.
[EPHEMERÆ.]
[FLORIDIAN REVERIES]
[TO THE FOUNTAIN OF YOUTH]
May 2, 188-
Across the Floridian barrens to the sea,-a long night and a longer day of steam-travel over light powdery soil, the tint of hour-glass sand, whose dust filters like a ruddy fog through the joints of the double-windows and tightly-fitting doors of the sleeping-car; furious travel through wildernesses of yellow pine, whose naked and mastlike stems forever twinklingly intercross before one's tired eyes with the rapidity of lightning. The smoke of the engine descends to mingle with the low hanging cloud of ruddy dust; the sun, which rose in advance of us, is now behind us, but there is yet no variation in the monotony of the woods. Sometimes the train halts at a rustic station,—buildings of painted pine relieved against the endless background of living trees; the smoke floats off slowly through the heavy afternoon; the red dust settles lazily; and one rushes to the platform to snatch a breath of purer air, and to peer expectantly westward. Still nothing;—only the colonnades of pine filing away eternally to right and left, and the lurid road stretching endlessly backward and onward with its two streaks of iron light converging toward either horizon,—and the voice of a bird in some green hiding-place, breaking the hot stillness with plaintive triple cry of 'Sweet!—sweet!—sweet!'—repeated over and over again at drowsy intervals. Never a variation in the frondescence, never a flower; the melancholy of the land has begun to weigh upon you like a pain. Our city minds, our city eyes, accustomed to the relief of contrast, are tormented by creations of such perpetual sameness, of such enormous monotony, of such never-varying beauty as Nature devises in her own solitudes. These shadowy infinitudes do not seem formed for the gaze of the nineteenth century; their boundless uniformity rather inspires dreams of those coniferous growths which burdened the land in ages preceding the apparition of man,—when there were yet neither blossoms nor perfumes, neither saccharine secretions nor succulent fruits,—ere even the hum of honey-loving insects was heard, or the beauty of butterflies had been formed, or the nations of the ants had yet begun to toil,—and all the earth was green.
Then a scream of steam, a mighty jolt; and the thunder-rattle recommences, and the train again begins to rock in mad storms of dust and smoke, and the red sun ignites a stupendous conflagration behind the pillars of the pines. At last, under the moon, there is another shriek of steam; the wheels slacken, rumble jerkingly, then roll slowly and silently, as if muffled, with occasional squeak, and pause with a final shock; while through hastily opened windows and doors, a strong cool air dashes in,—the breath of the great St. Johns River, sweetened by mingling with the mightier breath of the sea, and bearing with it scent of orange flowers and odors of magnolia.
And in the purple night, under the palpitation of stars, Jacksonville opens all her electric eyes.
May 4, 188-
Morning inundates the streets with its fluid gold; the trees drink in the brightness; the plate-glass of store-fronts flames like immense jewel-facets;—and what singular stores these are!—mostly curiosity shops! Here are dealers in strange flowers, flowers formed of iridescent fish-scales,—in jointed walking canes of shark's vertebræ,—in tropical shells, bearing paintings of sabals and cypresses upon their nacreous inner surface,—in splendid screens made of the spoils of white herons and sea-eagles,—in sea-beans and sea-porcupines and seaweed fans and polished shells of the sea-turtle, —in alligator-eggs and stuffed alligators, and live alligators in boxes,—in alligators' teeth, burnished and gold-mounted as brooches, as cuff-buttons, as necklace ornaments, as earrings. Atavism in the evolution of the lapidary's art,—an unconscious return of fashion to the savage bijou try of fossil races! After perhaps not less than half-a-million of years our boasted civilization finds æsthetic joy in the art of the Tertiary Epoch; and in the bud-smooth lobule of her dainty ear, the modern beauty does not hesitate to hang even such a decoration as that worn many thousand centuries ago by some primitive beauty,—tall daughters of mammoth-hunters and lion-slayers.
The breath of the sea quivers in the emerald of the trees, and, sea-like, the broad St. Johns washes the feet of the white town. In the shadow of the wharves the water is deeply green and glossy as the surface of a magnolia leaf; further out it brightens and changes to sky-color, and cools off into steel-tint near the opposite shore. Violet bands moving over the immense breadth of the flood betray the course of mysterious currents. A long promontory, piercing the miles of unruffled water, mirrors the golden-greens, and sap-greens, and sombre greens of its unbroken woods; but much further away, across the enormous curve, the forest lines, steeped in the infinite bath of azure light, turn blue. As through high gates of green, the eye looks up the vast turn into a cerulean world; and it is through these rich portals that you may sail into the region of legend and romance,—that you may reach those subterranean rivers, those marvelous volcanic springs haunted by dim traditions of the Fountain of Youth, and by the memory of the good gray knight who sought its waters in vain.
And though the days of faith be dead, men look for that Phantom-Fountain still. Yearly, from the gray cities of wintry lands thousands hasten to the eternal summer of this perfumed place, to find new life, new strength—to seek rejuvenescence in the balm of the undying groves, in the purity of rock-born springs, in the elixir-breath of this tropical Nature, herself eternally young with the luminous youth of the gods. And multitudes pass away again to duller lands, to darker skies, rejuvenated indeed,—the beauty with rose-bloom brightened, the toiler with force renewed,—feeling they have left behind them here something of their hearts, something of their souls, caught like Spanish moss on the spiked leaves of the palms, on the outstretched arms of the cedars.
Why River-worship should have held so large a place in the ancient religions of the world, I thought I could more fully comprehend on that aureate afternoon,—while our white steamer clove her way toward a long succession of purple promontories that changed to green at our approach, and the city was fading away behind us in smoke of gold. Blue miles of water to right and left; the azure enormity ever broadening and brightening before. Viewing the majesty of the flood, the immortal beauty of the domed forests crowning its banks, the day-magic of colors shifting and interblending through leagues of light, a sense of inexpressible reverence fills the mind of the observer,—a sense of the divinity of Nature, the holiness of beauty. These are the visions we must call celestial; this is the loveliness that is sacred, that is infinite,—the poetry of heaven. Through the splendor of blue there seemed to float to my memory as sounds float to the ear, some verses of an ancient Indian hymn, whereof the authorship has been ascribed even to the Spirit of the Universe: 'I am the sweetness of waters, the light of moon and sun, the perfume of earth, the splendor of fire.... I am the Soul in all that lives;—Time-without-end am I, and the life of things to be, the Spirit celestial and supreme, MOST ANCIENT AND MOST EXCELLENT OF POETS.'
The sun dropped through a lake of orange light, and there were lilac tints in the sky, and ghostly greens. Then the great indigo darkness came; stars sparkled out; the boat chanted her steam-song, slackened her speed before a yellow glimmering of lamps, and halted at the wharves of Palatka. Here we bade her farewell; too huge a craft she was for the pilgrimage we wished to make to the mysterious fountain. Slender and light the boat must be that makes the journey thither,—a voyage upon stranger waters than these: no giant stream like the St. Johns, but a dim river with an Indian name, a narrow river undulating through the forest like some slow serpent unrolling its hundred coils of green. And, as a greater serpent devours a lesser one, so the writhing Ocklawaha swallows the shining current that flows from the Silver Spring.
Seated that evening on a balcony that jutted out under the star-light, above the crests of palmettos, I pondered upon the legend of the Fountain. It was among the Bahamas that Juan Ponce de Leon first sought for the waters of youth,—striving to discover some island vapory and vague as Hesperus, and questioning curiously the Indians of the Archipelago. Then it was he heard of the mainland where 'the wished-for waters flowed as a river upon whose banks lived the rejuvenated races in serene idleness and untold luxuriance.' Was this a rumor of the spring with a silver name, whose waters indeed 'flow as a river'?—or was it an Indian tale of some other one of those many and wondrous Floridian sources whose unfathomed transparencies own the iridescent magnificence of jewel-fire? Or might not the valiant Spaniard have heard in his boyhood some Moorish story of that mystic fountain which the Prophet Khader alone of all God's creatures was permitted to find? And that Moslem tradition itself, had it not been brought to Islam by Arabian travelers to the further East,—as a bud from the marvelous garden of Hindoo myth,—a fairy-flower created by the poet-wizards of India,—a blossom of parable, perchance, called into being by the lips of Buddha? 'Not wholly thus,' deep scholars answer; 'for the legend of Gautama is only a poem evolved from ancient myths of the Sun-god; and the fable of the Fountain doubtless first sprang from the primitive belief that the Day-star, whose glory waned with evening, nightly renewed the strength of his splendor by bathing in the fountains of Ocean,—in the enchanted waters of the West.' Perhaps, perhaps!—But can we boldly aver that the beautiful myth is not more ancient still,—old as love,—old as the mourning for the dead,—old as the heart of man, and its dreams of the eternal, and its desires of the impossible?
May 5, 188-
From the deck of the slender Osceola, looking up the river, the eye can seldom see more than a hundred yards of the Ocklawaha at one time: so sudden and so multitudinous are the turns of the stream that the boat seems ever steering straight for land,—continually moving into fluvial recesses without an exit. But always as she seems about to touch the bank, a wooded point detaches itself from the masses of verdure,—a sharp curve betrays its secret,—a new vista terminating in new mysteries of green, opens its gates to our prow. Narrow and labyrinthine the river is, but so smooth that like a flood of quicksilver it repeats inversely all the intricacies of tangle-growths, all delicate details of leaf and blossom, all the bright variations of foliage-color. And gradually one discerns a law of system in those diversities of tint,—an ordination in the variety of tree-forms. Near the water the swamp-growth is dwarfed, tufted, irregular, but generally bright of hue; further back it rises to majestic maturity, offering a long succession of domes and cupolas of frondescence, alternated with fantastic minarets of cypress; behind all, the solid and savage forest towers like a battlement, turret above turret, crown above crown,—oak and ash, maple and pine. The dominant tone is the light green of the pines and the gum trees, and the younger ranks of cypress; but the elder cypress and the myrtles, and the younger ash, break through with darker masses of color. Singularly luminous greens also shine out at intervals in the wreathings of love-vines and in the bursts of sweet-bay. But whether radiant or sombre, the color is seen as through a gauze,—through the gray veil ubiquitously woven by the aerial moss that fringes every crest, that drools from every twig, that droops in myriad festoons, that streams in hoary cascades from every protruding bough. And mistletoe mingles with the moss, and air-plants nestle in the armpits of the cypresses, and orchids bloom on dead limbs; while, from the morass below, extraordinary parasitic things, full of snaky beauty, climb and twine and interwreathe, often to lose their strangling hold at last, and fall back in spiral coils.
Then also, to right and left, broad bands of translucent green begin to edge the river surface,—the nations of the water-lilies uprearing their perfumed heads,—some whiter than moon-light, some yellower than gold. All start and tremble at our passing, as though suddenly aroused from slumber; and I long watch them nodding in our wake, more and more drowsily, slowly settling down to dream again.
Rarely there comes a break in the solid leagues of forest-wall,—a deep space filled with celestial color, a golden green, the green of orange-groves,—making the wilder tints of nature turn spectral by contrast. These indeed are the veritable Gardens of Hesperides, and theirs the bright fruit of Greek legend,—those Apples of Gold the Demigod sought in mythic islands of the Western Sea,—that Hippomenes, hard-pressed in the race of love, cast before the flying feet of Atalanta. For the orange hath its mythology.
Little frogs, metallically bright as the lily-leaves on which they sit, chant in chorus; butterflies flutter on vermilion wing from bank to bank; sometimes the nose of an alligator furrows the river. The palmettos, heretofore rare, begin to multiply; they assemble in troops, in ranks, in legions. And other gracious forms appear,—true palms,—satin-skinned and wonderfully tall. They hold themselves aloof from the cypresses and the oaks; they don no draperies of moss—proudly majestic in the elegance of their naked beauty. They approach the flood, yet shrink from it with feminine timidity; if the treacherous soil yield beneath their feet, still, by some miracle of poise, they save themselves from fall. Then wonderful indeed is the suppleness of their curves; the neck of the ostrich, the body of the serpent, seem less lithely beautiful. Theirs is never the admirable but inflexible stature of the often to lose their strangling hold at last, and fall back in spiral coils.
Then also, to right and left, broad bands of translucent green begin to edge the river surface,—the nations of the water-lilies uprearing their perfumed heads,—some whiter than moon-light, some yellower than gold. All start and tremble at our passing, as though suddenly aroused from slumber; and I long watch them nodding in our wake, more and more drowsily, slowly settling down to dream again.
Rarely there comes a break in the solid leagues of forest-wall,—a deep space filled with celestial color, a golden green, the green of orange-groves,—making the wilder tints of nature turn spectral by contrast. These indeed are the veritable Gardens of Hesperides, and theirs the bright fruit of Greek legend,—those Apples of Gold the Demigod sought in mythic islands of the Western Sea,—that Hippomenes, hard-pressed in the race of love, cast before the flying feet of Atalanta. For the orange hath its mythology.
Little frogs, metallically bright as the lily-leaves on which they sit, chant in chorus; butterflies flutter on vermilion wing from bank to bank; sometimes the nose of an alligator furrows the river. The palmettos, heretofore rare, begin to multiply; they assemble in troops, in ranks, in legions. And other gracious forms appear,—true palms,—satin-skinned and wonderfully tall. They hold themselves aloof from the cypresses and the oaks; they don no draperies of moss—proudly majestic in the elegance of their naked beauty. They approach the flood, yet shrink from it with feminine timidity; if the treacherous soil yield beneath their feet, still, by some miracle of poise, they save themselves from fall. Then wonderful indeed is the suppleness of their curves; the neck of the ostrich, the body of the serpent, seem less lithely beautiful. Theirs is never the admirable but inflexible stature of the pine; the bodies of all are comely with indication; they balance as in a dance; they poise as in a ballet,—a fairy saraband of coryphineæ.
What wonder that the comeliness of the palm should have been by ancient faith deemed divine; that, among all trees of earth, this should have been chosen as the symbol of light, of victory, of riches, of generation! Sacred to the sun, and to the goddess NIKÉ (whose appellation was Dea Palmaris),—emblem of immortality for the Orphic poets,—blessed also by the Christ and by him selected even as the token of salvation,—ancient truly is the right of the palm to reverence as divinest of trees. Yet not less ancient its claim to pre-eminence of beauty. Arab and Greek and Hebrew poets discovered in its shapeliness the most puissant comparison for human grace; the soft name Thamar signifies a palm; the charm of woman has been likened to the pliant symmetry of the tree by the bard of the Odyssey, by the wild authors of the Moallakat, and by the singer of the Song of Songs.
Darkness comes without a moon; and the torch-fires of the Osceola are kindled to light our way through the wilderness. The night-journey becomes an astonishment, a revelation, an Apocalypse.
Under the factitious illumination the banks, the roots, the stems, the creepers, the burdened boughs, the waving mosses, turn white as dead silver against the background of black sky; it is a Doresque landscape, abnormally fantastic and wan. Close to shore the relief is weirdly sharp; beyond, the heights of swamp forest rise dim and gray into the night, like shapes of vapor. There are no greens visible under this unearthly radiance; all is frosty-white or phantom gray; we seem to voyage not through a living forest, but through a world of ghosts. Forms grotesque as fetishes loom up on all sides; the cypresses in their tatters throng whitely to the black the night, while the woods ever display new terrors, new extravaganzas of ghastliness. As a traveler belated, who sings loudly in the darkness to give himself courage, the Osceola opens her iron throat, and shouts with all her voice of steam. And the deep forest laughs in scorn, and hurls back the shout with a thousand mockeries of echo,—a thousand phantom thunders; and the bitter triple cry of anguish follows us still over the sable flood.
But the Fountain of Youth is not now far away; midnight is past; the trees lock arms overhead; and we glide through the Cypress Gates.
Lulled by the monotonous throbbing of the machinery,—the systole and diastole of the steamer's heart,—I sank to sleep and dreamed; but the spectra of the woods filled all my dreams. It seemed to me that I was floating,—lying as in a canoe, and all alone,—down some dark and noiseless current,—between forests endless and vast,—under an unearthly light. White mosses drooped to sweep my face; phantoms of cypress put forth long hands to seize. Again I saw the writhing and the nodding of the palms: they elongated their bodies like serpents; they undulated quiveringly, as cobras before the snake-charmer. And all the moss-hung shapes of fear took life, and moved like living things,—slowly and monstrously, as polyps move. Then the vision changed and magnified; the river broadened Amazonianly; the forests became colossal,—preternatural,—world-shadowing at last,—meeting even over the miles of waters; and the sabals towered to the stars. And still I drifted with the mighty stream, feeling less than an insect in those ever-growing enormities; and a thin Voice like a wind came weirdly questioning: 'Ha! thou dreamer of dreams!—hast ever dreamed aught like unto this?—This is the Architecture of God!'
May 6, 188-
How divine the coming of the morning,—the coming of the Sun,—exorcising the shadowy terrors of the night with infinite restoration of color! I look upon the woods, and they are not the same: the palms have vanished; the cypresses have fled away; trees young and comely and brightly green replace them. A hand is laid upon my shoulder,—the hand of the gray Captain: 'Go forward, and see what you have never seen before.' Even as he speaks, our boat, turning sharply, steams out of the green water into—what can I call it?—a flood of fluid crystal,—a river of molten diamond,—a current of liquid light?
'It will be like this for eight miles,' observed the Captain. Eight miles!—eight miles of magic,—eight miles of glory! O the unspeakable beauty of it! It might be fifty feet in depth at times; yet every pebble, every vein of the water-grass blades, every atom of sparkling sand, is clearly visible as though viewed through sun-filled air; and but for the iridescent myriads of darting fish, the scintillations of jewel-color, we might well fancy our vessel floating low in air, like a balloon whose buoyancy is feeble. Water-grasses and slippery moss carpet much of the channel with a dark verdure that absorbs the light; the fish and the tortoises seem to avoid those sandy reaches left naked to the sun, as if fearful the great radiance would betray them, or as though unable to endure the force of the beams descending undimmed through all the translucent fathoms of the stream. It has no mystery this laughing torrent, save the mystery of its subterranean birth; it doffs all veils of shadow; the woods gradually withdraw from its banks; and the fires of the Southern sun affect not the delicious frigidity of its waves. Almost irresistible its fascination to the swimmer; one envies the fishes that shoot by like flashes of opal, even the reptiles that flee before the prow; a promise of strange joy? of electrical caress, seems to smile from those luminous deeps,—like the witchery of a Naiad, the blandishment of an Undine.
And so we float at last into a great basin, dark with the darkness of profundities unfathomed by the sun;—the secret sources of the spring, the place of its mystic fountain-birth, and the end of our pilgrimage. Down, down, deep, there is a mighty quivering visible; but the surface remains unmoved; the giant gush expends its strength far beneath us. From what unilluminated caverns,—what subterranean lakes,—burst this prodigious flow? Go ask the gnomes! Man may never answer. This is the visible beginning indeed; but of the invisible beginning who may speak?—not even the eye of the Sun hath discerned it; the light of the universe hath never shone upon it.—Earth reveals much to the magicians of science; but the dim secret of her abysses she keeps forever.
[A TROPICAL INTERMEZZO]
The broken memory of a tale told in the last hours of a summer's night to the old Mexican priest by a dying wanderer from the Spanish Americas. Much the father marvelled at the quaintness of the accent of the man? which was the quaintness of dead centuries...
Now the land of which I tell thee is a low land, where all things seem to have remained unchanged since the beginning of the world,—a winterless land where winds are warm and weak, so that the leaves are not moved by them,—a beshadowed land that ever seemeth to mourn with a great mourning. For it is one mighty wold, and the trees there be all hung with drooping plants and drooling vines, and dribbling mossy things that pend queerly from the uppermost branchings even to the crankling roots. And there be birds in that wold which do sing only when the moon shineth full,—and they have voices, like to monks,—and measured is their singing, and solemn, and of vasty sound,—and they are not at all afraid. But when the sun shineth there prevaileth such quiet as if some mighty witchcraft weighed upon the place; and all things drowse in the great green silence.
Now on the night of which I tell thee, we had camped there; and it seemed to me that we might in sooth have voyaged beyond the boundaries of the world; for even the heavens were changed above us, and the stars were not the same; and I could not sleep for thinking of the strangeness of the land and of the sky. And about the third watch I rose and went out under those stars, and looked at them, and listened to the psalmody of the wonderful birds chanting in the night like friars. Then a curious desire to wander alone into the deep woods came upon me.—En chica hora Dios obra!—In that time I feared neither man nor devil; and our commander held me the most desperate in that desperate band; and I strode out of the camp without thought of peril. The grizzled sentry desired to question me;—I cursed him and passed on.
And I was far away from the camp when the night grew pale, and the fire of the great strange Cross of stars, about which I have told thee, faded out, and I watched the edge of the East glow ruddy and ruddier with the redness of iron in a smithy; until the sun rose up, yellow like an orange is, with palm-leaves sharply limned against his face. Then I heard the Spanish trumpets sounding their call through the morning; but I did not desire to return. Whether it was the perfume of the flowers, or the odors of unknown spice-trees or some enchantment in the air, I could not tell thee; but I do remember that, as I wandered on, a sudden resolve came to me never to rejoin those comrades of mine. And a stranger feeling grew upon me like a weakness of heart,—like a great sorrow for I knew not what; and the fierceness of the life that I had lived passed away from me, and I was even as one about to weep. Wild doves whirred down from the trees to perch on my casque and armored shoulders; and I wondered that they suffered me to touch them with my hands, and were in no wise afraid.
So day broadened and brightened above me; and it came to pass that I found myself following a path where the trunks of prodigious trees filed away like lines of pillars, reaching out of sight,—and their branches made groinings like work of arches above me, so that it was like a monstrous church; and the air was heavy with a perfume like incense. All about me blazed those birds which are not bigger than bees, but do seem to have been made by God out of all manner of jewels and colored fire; also there were apes in multitude, and reptiles beyond reckoning, and singing insects, and talking birds. Then I asked myself whether I were not in one of those lands old Moors in Spain told of,—lands near the sinking of the sun, where fountains of magical water are. And fancy begetting fancy, it came to pass that I found me dreaming of that which Juan Ponce de Leon sought.
Thus dreaming as I went on, it appeared to me that the green dimnesses deepened, and the forest became loftier. And the trees now looked older than the deluge; and the stems of the things that coiled and climbed about them were enormous and gray; and the tatters of the pendent mosses were blanched as with the hoariness of ages beyond reckoning. Again I heard the trumpet sounding,—but so far off that the echo was not louder than the droning of the great flies; and I was gladdened by the fancy that it would soon have no power to reach mine ears.
And all suddenly I found myself within a vast clear space,—ringed about by palms so lofty that their tops appeared to touch the sky, and their shadows darkened all within the circle of them. And there was a great silence awhile, broken only by the whispering of waters. My feet made no sound, so thick was the moss I trod upon; and from the circle of the palms on every side the ground sloped down to a great basin of shimmering water. So clear it was that I could perceive sparkles of gold in the sands below; and the water seemed forced upward in a mighty underflow from the centre of the basin, where there was a deep, dark place. And into the bright basin there trickled streamlets also from beneath the roots of the immense trees; and I became aware of a great subterrene murmuring, as if those waters—which are beneath the earth—were all seeking to burst their way up to the sun.
Then, being foredone with heat and weariness, I doffed my armor and my apparel and plunged into the pool of the fountain. And I discovered that the brightness of the water had deluded me; for so deep was it that by diving I could not reach the bottom. Neither was the fountain tepid as are the slow river currents of that strange land, but of a pleasant frigidness,—like those waters that leap among the rocks of Castile. And I felt a new strength and a puissant joy, as one having long traveled with burning feet through some fevered and fiery land feeleth new life when the freshness of sea-winds striketh against his face, and the jocund brawling of the great billows smiteth his ears through the silence of desolation. And the joyousness I knew as a boy seemed to flame through all my blood again,—so that I sported in the luminous ripples and laughed aloud, and uttered shouts of glee; and high above me in the ancient trees wonderful birds mocked my shoutings and answered my laughter hoarsely, as with human voices. And when I provoked them further, they did imitate my speech till it seemed that a thousand echoes repeated me. And, having left the fount, no hunger nor weariness weighed upon me,—but I yielded unto a feeling of delicious drowsihead, and laid me down upon the moss to sleep as deeply as an infant sleepeth.
Now, when I opened mine eyes again, I wondered greatly to behold a woman bending over me,—and presently I wondered even much more, for never until then had it been given me to look upon aught so comely. Begirdled with flowers she was, but all ungarmented,—and lithe to see as the rib of a palmleaf is,—and so aureate of color that she seemed as one created of living gold. And her hair was long and sable as wing-feathers of ravens are, with shifting gleams of blue,—and was interwoven with curious white blossoms. And her eyes, for color like to her hair, I could never describe for thee,—that large they were, and limpid, and lustrous, and sweet-lidded! So gracious her stature and so wonderful the lissomeness of her, that, for the first time, I verily knew fear,—deeming it never possible that earthly being might be so goodly to the sight. Nor did the awe that was upon me pass away until I had seen her smile,—having dared to speak to her in my own tongue, which she understood not at all. But when I had made certain signs she brought me fruits fragrant and golden as her own skin; and as she bent over me again our lips met, and with the strange joy of it I felt even as one about to die,—for her mouth was—
['Nay, my son,' said the priest, preventing him, 'dwell not upon such things. Already the hand of death is on thee; waste not these priceless moments in speech of vanity,—rather confess thee speedily that I may absolve thee from thy grievous sin.']
So be it, padre mio, I will speak to thee only of that which a confessor should know. But I may surely tell thee those were the happiest of my years; for in that low dim land even Earth and Heaven seemed to kiss; and never did other mortal feel the joy I knew of, love that wearies never and youth that passeth never away. Verily, it was the Eden-garden, the Paradise of Eve. Fruits succulent and perfume were our food,—the moss, springy and ever cool, formed our bed, made odorous with flowers; and for night-lamps we prisoned those wondrous flies that sparkle through darkness like falling stars. Never a cloud or tempest,—no fierce rain nor parching heat, but spring everlasting, filled with scent of undying flowers, and perpetual laughter of waters, and piping of silver-throated birds. Rarely did we wander far from that murmuring hollow. My cuirass, and casque, and good sword of Seville, I allowed to rust away; my garments fell into dust; but neither weapon nor garment were needed where all was drowsy joy and unchanging warmth. Once she whispered to me in my own tongue, which she had learned with marvelous ease, though I, indeed, never could acquire hers: 'Dost know, Querido mio, here one may never grow old?' Then only I spake to her about that fountain which Juan Ponce de Leon sought, and told her the marvels related of it, and questioned her curiously about it. But she smiled, and pressed her pliant golden fingers upon my lips, and would not suffer me to ask more,—neither could I at any time after find heart to beseech her further regarding matters she was not fain to converse of.
Yet ever and anon she bade me well beware that I should not trust myself to stray alone into the deep dimness beyond the dale of the fountains: 'Lest the Shadows lay hold upon thee,' she said. And I laughed low at her words, never discerning that the Shadows whereof she spake were those that Age and Death cast athwart the sunshine of the world.
['Nay, nay, my son,' again spoke the priest; 'tell me not of Shadows, but of thy great sins only; for the night waneth, and thine hour is not far off.']
Be not fearful, father; I may not die before I have told thee all.... I have spoken of our happiness; now must I tell thee of our torment—the strangest thing of all? Dost remember what I related to thee about the sound of the trumpet summoning me? Now was it not a ghostly thing that I should hear every midnight that same summons,—not faintly as before, but loud and long—once? Night after night, ever at the same hour, and ever with the same sonority, even when lying in her arms, I heard it—as a voice of brass, rolling through the world. And whensoever that cursed sound came to us, she trembled in the darkness, and linked her arms more tightly about me, and wept, and would not be comforted till I had many times promised that I should not forsake her. And through all those years I heard that trumpet-call—years, said I?—nay, centuries (since in that place there is not any time nor any age)—I heard it through long centuries after all my comrades had been laid within their graves.
[And the stranger gazed with strange inquiry into the priest's face; but he crossed himself silently, and spoke no word.]
And nightly I strove to shut out the sound from my ears and could not; and nightly the torment of hearing it ever increased like a torment of hell—ay de mit nightly, for uncounted generations of years! So that in time a great fury would seize me whenever the cursed echoes came; and, one dark hour, when she seemed to hear it not, and slept deeply, I sought my rusted blade, and betook me toward the sound,—beyond the dale of fountains—into the further dimness of swaying mosses,—whither, meseems, the low land trendeth southward and toward those wan wastes which are not land nor water, yet which do quake to a great and constant roaring as of waves in wrath.
[A moment the voice of the aged man failed him, and his frame quivered as in the beginning of agony.]
Now I feel, padre, that but little time is allotted me to speak. I may never recount to thee my wanderings, and they, indeed, are of small moment.—Enough to tell thee that I never again could find the path to the fountains and to her, so that she became lost to me. And when I found myself again among men, lo! the whole world was changed, and the Spaniards I met spake not the tongue of my time, and they mocked the quaintness of my ways and jibed at the fashion of my speech. And my tale I dared tell to none, through fear of being confined with madmen, save to thee alone, and for this purpose only I summoned thee. Surely had I lived much in this new age of thine men must have deemed me bereft of reason, seeing that my words and ways were not like unto theirs; but I have passed my years in the morasses of unknown tropics, with the python and the cayman,—and in the dark remoteness of forests inhabited by monstrous things,—and in forgotten ruins of dead Indian cities,—and by shores of strange rivers that have no names,—until my hair whitened and my limbs were withered and my great strength was utterly spent in looking for her.
'Verily, my son,' spake the confessor, 'any save a priest might well deem thee mad,—though thy speech and thy story be not of to-day. Yet I do believe thy tale. Awesome it is and strange; but the traditions of the Holy Church contain things that are not less strange: witness the legend of the Blessed Seven of Ephesus, whose lives were three hundred and sixty years preserved that the heresy concerning the resurrection of the flesh might be confounded forever. Even in some such way hath the Lord preserved thee through the centuries for this thine hour of repentance. Commend, therefore, thy soul to God, repentingly, and banish utterly from thee that evil spirit who still tempts thee in the semblance of woman.'
'Repent!' wonderingly spake the wanderer, whose great black eyes flamed up again as with the fires of his youth; 'I do not repent, I shall never repent,—nor did I summon thee hither that thou shouldst seek to stir me to any repentance.—Nay! more than mine own soul I love her,—unutterably, unswervingly, everlastingly! Aye! greater a thousand fold is my love of her than is thy hope of heaven, thy dread of death, thy fear of hell.—Repent—beyond all time shall I love her, through eternity of eternities,—aye! as thou wouldst say, even por los siglos de los siglos.'
Kneeling devoutly, the confessor covered his face with his hands, and prayed even as he had never prayed before. When he lifted his eyes again, lo! the soul had passed away unshriven;—but there was such a smile upon the dead face that the priest marveled, and murmured, with his lips: 'Surely he hath found Her at last!'—Faintly, with the coming of the dawn, a warm south wind moved the curtains, and bare into the chamber rich scent of magnolia and of jessamine and of those fair blossoms whose odor evoketh beloved memory of long-dead bridal-mornings,—until it seemed that a weird sweet Presence invisible had entered, all silently, and stood there even as a Watcher standeth. And all the East brightened;—and, touched by the yellow magic of the sun, the vapors above the place of his rising formed themselves into a Fountain of Gold.
[A NAME IN THE PLAZA]
June 3, 18—
I
Sometimes, in that Gloaming that divides deep sleep from the awakening,—when out of the world of wavering memories the first thin fancies begin to soar, like neuroptera, rising on diaphanous wing from a waste of marsh-grasses,—there suddenly comes an old, old longing that stings thought into nervous activity with a sharp pain. The impression in the first moment of wakefulness might be likened to a sense of nostalgia,—but the nostalgia which is rather a world-sickness than a homesickness; there is something in it also resembling the vain regret for what has been left perhaps twenty-years' journey behind us, and has now become a tropical remembrance because we have traveled so far toward the Northern Circle of life. Yet the longing I refer to is more puissant and more subtle than these definable feelings are;—it has almost the force of an impulse; it has no real affinity with the recognizable Past; its visions are archipelagoes which never loomed for us over the heaving of any remembered seas; it is like an unutterable wish to flee away from the Present into the Unknown,—a beautiful unknown, radiant with impossible luminosities of azure and sun-gold! I do not know how to account for this impulse,—unless as an unexplained Something in Man corresponding to the instinct of migration in lower forms of life—especially in those happy winged creatures privileged to follow the perfumed Summer round about the world. And I think it comes to us usually either with the first lukewarm burst of spring, or with the windy glories of autumn. Nevertheless, in the morning it came, out of season, and remained with me, while I watched from the balcony birds and ships alike fleeting tropicward with many-colored wings outspread, and thought of a tame crane at home,—with one wing hopelessly maimed,—that used to cry out bitterly to processions of his wild kindred sailing above the city roofs on their way to other skies.
Why these longings for lands in which we shall never be?—why this desire for that azure into which we cannot soar?—whence our mysterious love for that tumultuous deep into whose emerald secrets we may never peer?—Can it be that through countless epochs of the immemorial phylogenesis of man,—through all those myriad changes suggested by the prenatal evolution of the human heart,—through all the slow marvelous transition from fish to mammal,—there have actually persisted impulses, desires, sensations, whereof the enigma may be fully interpreted by some new science only,—a future science of psychical dysteleology?...
So musing, I found my way to the Plaza.
Has it not often seemed to you that the more antiquated and the more unfamiliar an object or a place is, the more it appears at first sight to live,—to possess a sort of inner being, a fetish-spirit, a soul? I thought that morning the ancient Plaza had such a soul, and that it spoke to me in its mysterious dumb way, as if saying: 'Come look at me, because I am very, very old;—but do not look at the sulphur fountain which the Americans have made, nor at the monument they have built; for those are not of the centuries to which I belong.'
So I entered, and idled awhile among the palms that threw spidery shadows under the noon-light; and I deciphered the old inscription upon the coquina pillar:—'PLAZA DE LA CONSTITUCION...;'—paying little heed to the song of the artesian spring, and scarcely vouchsafing a furtive glance to the newer monument, which I saw was not artistic, not imposing, but naïve and almost cumbrous. Suddenly my indifferent eye noted a graven word which revealed that the newer structure had been erected by Love, and for Love's sake only. And then, all unexpectedly, the very artlessness of the monument touched me as with a voiceless reproach,—touched me like the artlessness of a face in tears: so much of tender pain revealed itself through the simplicity of the chiseled words, OUR DEAD,—through the commonplaceness of the inscription, 'Erected by the Ladies' Memorial Association.' Then I walked around the monument, perusing on each of its white faces the roll-call of the dead,—sons, brothers, lovers,—the names of your darlings, gentle women of Saint Augustine! I read them every one; carefully spelling out many a Spanish name of Andalusian origin: sonorous appellations holding in their syllables etymological suggestions of Arabian ancestry—names swarthy and beautiful as an Oriental face might be. And all the while, —dominating the perfume of blossoms, and the keen sweet scent of aromatic grasses,—the sulphureous smell of the Volcanic spring came to me grimly through the warm aureate air,—like an odor of battles!
There was a name upon that white stone which affected me in a singular way,—a name that by contrast with those dark Spanish ones seemed fair, blonde as gold! In someplace—at some time, I had known that name.—But where?—but when?
Even as a perfume may create for us the spectre of a vanished day, or as a melody may suddenly evoke for us the forgotten tone of some dear voice,—so may the sound or sight of a name momentarily revive for us all the faded colors of some memory-portrait so beautiful, so beloved, that we had become afraid to look at it, and had permitted innumerable spiders of Monotony to weave their tintless gauze before its face. But we have had experiences which are now so long dead and so profoundly sepultured in the Cemetery of Recollection that no mnemonic necromancy can lend them recognizable outline; they have become totally spiritualized, and reveal themselves only as faint wind-stirrings in the atmosphere of Thought.
Surely the experience connected in some vague way with that blonde name must have belonged to these:—the memory had been; for I knew the presence of its ghost; but viewless it obstinately remained.
It pursued me through the amber afternoon. By some inexplicable mental process I discovered that it had been also associated with an idea of death, a melancholy fancy, at the time, that I had heard or had seen it before.—But when?—but where did I first learn that name? ... Night came, but brought with it no answer to the enigma.
I watched the moon,—a new moon, yellow and curved like a young banana,—droop over the dreaming sea: there were sparklings like effervescence through the archway of stars,—perhaps the molecular motion of some Astral Thought. Then seemed to fall upon the world a hush like the hush of sanctuaries,—like that Silence of Secrets told of in the Bhagavad-Gita: the peace of the Immensities. In such hours fancies come to us like gusts of seawind,—as vast and pure; nay, sometimes vaster,—measureless like the interspaces between sun and sun. For it is only in these voiceless moments that the heavens speak to us,—telling of mysteries beyond the luminous signaling of astral deep unto astral deep, beyond the furthest burning of constellations; mysteries that shall still be mysteries when our day-star shall have yielded up his ghost of flame.—The death of a man; the death of a sun:—is the awful Universe affected any more by the last than by the first?
And with this question, the question of the morning returned, enigmatic as before,—bringing to me the indescribable, creeping, electrical sensation that we are said to feel especially when some heedless foot is treading the place of our future grave.
It was late when I sought sleep that night—my last Floridian night.
And I dreamed strange dreams.
First, I dreamed of a plant,—a plant with sombre cordiform leaves,—that bent away from the light toward me, and followed me persistently when I retreated from it; crawling like a pet reptile to get in front of me, and then rising up slowly, very slowly; stretching out to me, as with dumb affection, two helpless arms—two long leafy stems tipped with blood-colored flowers.
Then it seemed to me that I stood in a place of burial, and that, in some inexplicable way, I could observe the processes of that dark alchemy by which flesh is transmuted into leaf and fruit,—by which blood is transformed into blossom, as in the old Greek myths, and into the living substance also of those creatures, gem-winged, jewel-eyed, that feed upon the juices, the honey, and the fruit of graveyard flora. Then suddenly the mystery of the blonde name again came before me—this time upon a graven square of marble; and in a little while I thought I knew the story of the dead; for this impossible and nameless legend shaped itself in my sleep.
[VULTUR AURA]
June 2, 188-
... San Juan de los Pinos:—'Saint John of the Pines,' That was the name of the ancient fort. And in those days the names of the bastions also were names of the Evangelists and the Apostles.
There is a ghostliness in the name! Why Saint John of the pines? Was this low shore beshadowed in the sixteenth century by pines tremendous, immemorial, more ancient than man,—through whose colossal aisles the sea-gusts spake with utterance vague and vast as the Wind of the Spirit? Did the roar of the far-off reef, the mutterings of the mighty woods, evoke for Spanish piety dim fancies of the Voices of Patmos, of the Thunders and the Trumpetings?
It was a timber stronghold only,—that forgotten fort, thus placed beneath the protection of weird Saint John,—a rampart-work of pine. Then were discovered the virtues of the coquina,—that wonderful shell-rock which seems marble half formed, half crystallized, under the pressure of shallow seas; and out of it was Fort San Marco built,—very solidly, very mathematically, very slowly,—by the labor of more than a century and the expenditure of thirty millions of good Spanish dollars. Two hundred and fifty years ago they began to build it; to-day it stands well-nigh as strong as in the time when Oglethorpe's English cannon played on it in vain. Now the profane Americano, who putteth no trust in saints, but in his own strength only, calleth it Fort Marion; and the lizards dwell in it; and the spider weaves her tapestries above its chapel-altar; and the dust is deep in the holy-water fonts, where Catholic swordsmen once dipped their sinewy hands. But over the great sally-port you may still discern the Arms of Spain,—the Crown, the Shield, the triple turrets of Castile, the rampant Lions of Leon, and, encircling these, the sculptured Order of the Fleece of Gold. Salty winds have chapped the relief;—the fingers of the rain have worn it down as the smooth face of a coin is worn;—the wings of Time have brushed away the edges of the tablet,—and besmirched the Fleece of Gold,—and obliterated, as in irony, the title of the King, and the beginning of the solemn inscription,—REYNANDO EN ESPANA. The REY is gone forever!—syllable and potentate! Underneath the pendant Lamb,—now black,—there are dark stains of drippings,—as of blood streaming over the stone. Nothing could be more grotesquely realistic than the sculptured helplessness of that Lamb; yet we may well doubt if he who chiseled it was moved by any spirit of sardonic symbolism,—any memory of those Argonauts of the sixteenth century, who found a new Colchis in the West, and a new Fleece, whereof the shearing yielded in less than one generation three hundred tons of gold.
Now the moat is haunted by lizards and lovers only; and there are buzzards upon the sentry towers; and there are bats in the barbican:—it is just sixty-five years since the last Spanish trooper tramped out of the sally-port, never to come back. But squamated as the structure is, the dignity of it imposes awe,—the antiquated vastness of it compels respect for the vanished grandeur of Spain; the majesty of its desolation is unspeakable.—I think one feels it most on wild days, when the mighty drum-roll of the breakers is sounded from the harbor bar, and the winds of the Atlantic blow their mad clarions in the barbican, and all the white cavalry of Ocean charge the long coral coast.
... A Shadow descends the counterscarp of the sea-battery,—passes the covered way,—crosses the ditch,—mounts the scarp,—vanishes beyond the bastions. A moment more and it reappears,—still coming from the sea; it is moving in circles with a swift swimming motion, as of an opaqueness floating vaguely in the humors of the eye. Now it is only a passing fleck, a shapeless blot; now it is the phantom of a boat.
Look up, into the brightness,—into the violet blaze!—behold him hovering in the splendor of heaven, sailing before the sun, that Kharkas, 'dwelling in decay,'—whom the Parsee reveres. (For't is written that even the flitting of his shadow over the faces of the dead driveth out the unclean spirit that entereth into corpses.) 'From the height of his highest flight he discerneth if there be upon the ground a morsel of flesh not bigger than a hand; and for his comfort the odor of musk hath been created underneath his wing,'—How magnificent his soaring!—yet the vast pinions never beat; they veer only with his wheeling,—sometimes presenting to the meridian their whole black banner-breadth,—sometimes offering only the sabre-curves of their edges. He seems to float by volition alone,—to swim the deeps of day without effort. Higher and higher he mounts into the abyss of light; now he seems to hang beside the sun!—now he is only a whirling speck!—now he is gone!—My field-glass brings him again into view for a moment—sailing, circling, spiring by turns; but once more he dwindles into a mote, not bigger than a tiny flake of soot, which rises up, up, up, and vanishes away at last into luminous eternities unfathomable. Yet from those invisible heights his eye still scans the face of the land and the features of men—that wondrous eye far reaching as a beam of daylight. 'There is a path,' saith Job, 'which no fowl knoweth, and which the eye of the vulture hath not seen—But that path lies not open to the gaze of the sun; for whatsoever earthly thing the day-star hath looked upon, that thing the ken of the vulture also hath discerned. Rightly, therefore, hath the eye of the vulture been mythologically likened unto the eye of deities and of demons. Was not the sacred symbol of Isis, the Impenetrably Veiled,—Isis, mother of Gods, 'Eye of the Sun,' who by the quivering of her feathers createth light, who by the beating of her wings createth spirit,—a Golden Vulture, the saving emblem hung about the throat of the dead? And the vultures of the Vedic prayer to Indra, all-seeing demons; great sun-vultures of the Sanscrit epic, demi-gods. By vision alone it was given the bird Gatayus to know the past, the present, and that which was to come; for, encompassing the world in his flight, all things were discerned by his gaze.
O ghoul of the empyrean, well doth thy brother, the Shadow-caster of deserts, know the time of the going and the coming of the caravans; and he maketh likewise each year the pilgrimage to the tomb of the Prophet!—Thy cousins sit upon the Towers of Silence; and the charnel-pits of the dakhmas have no secrets for them! From the eternal silences of heaven,—from the heights that are echoless and never reached by human cry,—progenitors of thine have watched the faces of the continents wrinkle in the revolution of centuries; they have looked down upon the migrations of races; they have witnessed the growth and the extinction of nations; they have read the crimson history of a hundred thousand wars.
Another shadow crosses my feet—and yet another passes; the orbits of their circlings intercross. Hanging above the dark fort, those black silhouettes cutting sharply athwart the azure seem grimly appropriate to this desolation. Doubtless the birds have haunted the coast for centuries. The Spaniard, who gave many a rich feast of eyes and hearts, has passed away;—the Vulture remains, and waits. For what?—is it for some vomit of the spuming sea,—some putrefaction of the buzzing shambles?—or does he, indeed, still hope, even after the passing of three hundred years, for the return of Menendez?
[CREOLE PAPERS]
[QUAINT NEW ORLEANS AND ITS HABITANTS]
[I. FRENCH-TOWN]
Old New Orleans proper (French-Town, as it is termed by steamboatmen; Le Carré, as its own inhabitants call it) is principally, though not wholly, comprised in the great quadrilateral bounded by Canal, Esplanade, Rampart, and Old Levee streets. Where the horse-cars now run upon those thoroughfares formerly stood the bastioned walls of the colonial city, encircled by a deep moat. Double rows of trees now mark the old rampart lines upon three sides of the quadrilateral, and birds sing in their branches at just the height where brazen cannon once showed their black throats, where Swiss or Spanish sentries paced to and fro against the sky. Within the Carr? the streets are serried, solid, and picturesque. Memories of aristocratic wealth still endure in certain vast mansions, broad-balconied and deep-courted, now mostly converted into hotels or lodging-houses, half the year void of guests; but the majority of the dwellings are rather curious than splendid. Nearly all the larger ones are built in the form of an L, the lower line of the letter representing the street front, the upper line a shallow but lofty wing reaching far back from the main building at right angles, and flanked by an enormous green or brown cistern as by a round tower. A really imposing archway often pierces the street façade—giving carriageway into the deep court—much like those quaint archways characteristic of old London taverns. Such a building often possesses three sets of stairways—invariably two—one for the main edifice, one for the wing. But these immense winter residences, once sheltering a population of servants and clients large as that comprised in the Roman familia, are now for the most part in a state of decay. There is much crumbling of wood-work, looseness of jointing, ulcerous exposure of the brick skeleton where plaster has rotted away in patches from piazza pillars and from the ribs of archways. Grass struggles up between the flagging; microscopic fungi patch the wall surfaces with sickly green. The semi-tropical forces of nature in the South are mighty to destroy the work of man. Dismally romantic is the Greek front upon Toulouse Street, in rear of the old Hôtel Saint Louis, and once famous as 'The Planters' Bank.' Through cracks in the high board fence erected about its desolation one may see the weeds squeezing their way through the joints of its broad stone steps, the green creepers wriggling round its columns, and bushes actually growing from the angles of its pediment—a vegetation planted, doubtless, by birds. This ruin has a veritable classic dignity—a melancholy that is antique. Sorrowful likewise are the voiceless courts of the once beautiful French hotel, with their void galleries above and dried-up fountains below. Millions upon millions have changed hands within that building; princely revels were held there of old by the feudal lords of Louisiana; the splendors of the past linger in the tarnished gilding and dying colors of the lofty apartments, and in the decorations of the porcelain dome frescoed by Casanova.
Many of the French and Spanish dwellings are as full of architectural mysteries and surprises as the Castle of Otranto—corridors that serpentine, stairways that leap from building to building, cabinets masked in the recesses of dormer-windows, curious covered bridges worthy of Venice. Looking up or down one of these streets, the eye is astonished by the long patch-work of colors motley as Joseph's coat, ultimately fading off into grayish-blues where the vista meets the horizon. Under the golden glow of the sun these tints take delightful warmth; there are chrome and gamboge yellows, deep-sea greens, ashen pinks, brick reds, chocolates, azures, blazing whites, all trimmed with the intenser green of iron balconies and the antiquated window-shutters folded back against the wall. The old French Opera-house I have seen painted in a peculiarly pleasing hue, to which a summer sun would lend the mellowness of antique marble. It was a ripe-ivorine tint, with just the faintest conceivable flush of pink; it was a warm and human color—it was the color of creole flesh!
Speaking of it recalls the curious statement of divers writers to the effect that the skin of the West Indian creole feels cooler than that of a European or American from the Northern States. The same is true of the Louisiana creole; the vigorous European or Northerner who touches a creole hand during the burning hours of a July or August day has reason to be surprised at its coolness—such a coolness as tropical fruits retain even under the perpendicular fires of an equatorial sun.
[II. THE CREOLES]
When an educated resident of New Orleans speaks of the creoles he must be understood as referring to the descendants of the early Latin colonists, the posterity of those French and Spanish settlers who founded or ruled Louisiana. The diminutive criollo, derived from the Spanish criar, 'to beget,' primarily signified the colonial-born child of European blood, as distinguished from the offspring of the Conquistadores by slave women, whether Indian or African. Nothing could be more etymologically antithetical, therefore, than the phrase 'colored creoles,' although it has obtained considerable currency as a convenient term to distinguish those colored people who can claim a partly Latin origin, from the plainer 'American' colored folk who have neither French nor Spanish blood in their veins, and to whom the creole dialect is supremely unintelligible. Among the colored population of lighter tint, moreover, the characteristics of the Latin blood show themselves so strongly that the popular use of the term distinguishing them from ordinary types of mulatto, quadroon, quinteroon, or octoroon appears justifiable.
What old Bryan Edwards, in his excellent but obsolete 'History of the British West Indies;' wrote concerning the creoles of the Antilles, largely applies to the creoles of Louisiana likewise, especially in relation to their physical characteristics. In whatever part of the civilized Temperate Zone pronounced, the very word 'creole' conveys to the hearer fancies tropical as the poetry of Baudelaire; to the imagination of well-informed readers the creole invariably appears as a person of European blood corporeally and morally modified by the influences of a torrid climate. Whether we hear of the English creoles of the West Indian, East Indian, or West African colonies, the French creoles of Algeria, Martinique, or Senegal, or the Dutch creoles of Malabar, the name invariably provokes fancies of burning suns, of monstrous vegetation, of nights lighted by the Southern Cross. In New Orleans we are only at the Gate of the Tropics; sometimes our orange-trees shiver in frosty winds, our rare palms droop in January colds. But the climate is torrid enough nevertheless to have produced marked physical changes in the native white population of Louisiana during the lapse of generations. It has modified the osteogeny of the true creoles almost as remarkably as in Martinique or Trinidad; it has greatly deepened the eye-sockets to shelter the sight from the furnace glow of summer heat; it has made limbs suppler, extremities more delicate; and to these changes wrought in the body's framework is wholly attributable that languid and singular grace which distinguishes the Louisianaise among her fairer American sisters. Creole eyes—the eyes that tantalized Gottschalk into the musical utterances of Ojos Criollos—are large, luminous, liquidly black, deeply fringed, and their darkness is strangely augmented by the uncommon depth of the orbit. The pilose system—to use anatomical phraseology—-is richly developed; the women have magnificent hair, and creole beards and mustaches are usually very handsome. Formerly the Louisiana creoles excelled in exercises demanding grace and quickness of eye; they were fine dancers and famous swordsmen—indeed, the art of fencing is not yet lost among them. The beauty of the women is peculiar; they possess a sveltesse—a slender elegance that is very fascinating; but to Northerners they seem fragile of physique, more delicate than they really are. A rosy face, a bright, fresh complexion, is rarely seen among them; they have an ivorine tint, a convalescent pallor, that contrasts oddly with the fire of their dark pupils and the lustrous blackness of their hair. When the tint is darker,—a Spanish swarthiness,—the effect is less strange. Creole blondes are few.
The creole temperament is one of great nervous sensibility; phlegmatic characters are anomalies; a disposition to violent extremes of anger or affection is often masked by an exterior appearance of listless indifference. The climate itself (nine months of summer heat, three of snowless chill, long periods of heavy calm, broken by storms of extraordinary and splendid violence—a climate enervating, fitful, luxuriant) has reflected its characteristics in the native population. The mind develops precociously, blossoms richly. There are few educated creoles who cannot speak two or three languages well; many speak more; and the writer has known one who was almost a Mezzofanti. Love of the mother-country is not dead among the creoles, and their attachment to ancient French customs has but little abated. Their home life has scarcely changed during a century, although they are becoming less socially exclusive. Nevertheless, the Northern stranger invited to visit the home of a creole family may even now consider himself the subject of a rare compliment. Such a visit, however, will scarcely be made within the limits of the old colonial city, for the creoles are no longer there. They have moved away to newer districts north and south—away from the decaying streets and the crumbling cemeteries—out to quiet suburbs where the air is sweet with breath of jasmine flowers and orange-blossoms, out to dreamy Bayou Saint Jean, where clusters of white-pillared cottages slumber in green. They have mostly abandoned the Carré to the European Latins—French emigrants from the Mediterranean coasts, Italians, Sicilians, Spaniards, Greeks; to the population of the French Market, the venders of fruits and meats; to the keepers of what Sala called 'absurd little shops'; and especially to the French-speaking element of color, which still clings to the ruined Past with something of the strange affection that erst subsisted between master and slave.
How long will even that ruined Past endure? The somnolent quiet of the old streets is being already broken by the energetic bustle of American commerce; the Northern Thor is already threatening the picturesque town with iconoclastic hammer. Colossal capital advances menacingly from the southern side, showing the sheet-lightning of its gold. One huge firm has already devoured a whole square, and extended itself into four streets at once, cruciform-wise, like a Greek basilica. Even the old Napoleon First furniture sets, the massive four-pillared beds, the ponderous cabinets curiously carved, the luxuriant fauteuils, the triple-footed tables,—all these solid household gods which stood upon eagle feet of gilded brass,—are being bought up by shrewd speculators and sent North, to fetch prices which no one here would dream of paying. Perhaps the antique life will make its last rally about the old Place d'Armes (Plaza de Armas,) in the vicinity of the quaint cathedral, under the shadow of those towers whose bells for a hundred years have rung diurnally for the repose of the soul of Don André Almonaster Roxas, Knight of the Royal and Distinguished Spanish Order of Charles III., Regidor and Alferez-Real of His Most Catholic Majesty. So long as the iron tongues of those bells can speak, so long as the iron heart of the great tower-clock shall beat, something of the old life and the old faith must live in the creole quarter. Long after most of the quaint architecture shall have disappeared I fancy those two massive Spanish edifices, the old Cabildo and Casa Curial, will still remain standing upon either side of the cathedral, like grim soldiery guarding a commissary of the Holy Inquisition. The Spaniard builded well: after the lapse of nearly a hundred years, those rugged edifices testify grandly to the solid Roman character of their creators. The plaster may peel from the stout pillars of their arcades; but dilapidation only adds nobility to their quaintness; they are dignified by the scars of their battle with Time; they are imposing without loftiness; they are superb without artifice—deep-shouldered, thick-set, broad-backed, firm upon their feet, like veteran troops, like the splendid Spanish infantry of three hundred years ago.
[CREOLE WOMEN IN THE FRENCH WEST INDIES]
I
Although it is generally well known that the condition of woman in most Latin countries is one of comparative seclusion,—totally different from that existence of large freedom she enjoys in English or American communities, some romantic misconception prevails regarding her life in the Latin tropics. Fiction, painting, and poetry have combined to create a false ideal of that life,—to make the word 'creole' suggest many happy, dreamy, luminous things. Not altogether are the artists and romance-writers at fault, nevertheless: their purpose has been only to reflect something of nature's magic in the zones of eternal summer; and no art and no words could transcend the splendor that was their inspiration. He who has once seen tropic nature under a tropic sun has received a revelation: there will come to him, if he has a heart, with a new strange meaning,—also eternal and true,—the words of John,—voiced perpetually from the purple peaks, and the undying woods, and sapphire glory of sea and sky:—'This is the message which we announce unto you, that God is LIGHT!'
Light!—no one dwelling in the cities of the North may ever imagine the possibilities of light and of color in the equatorial world. And he who has once known them must continue forever enchanted,—must feel, after departure from them, like an exile from Paradise. The poetry of the tropics is born of such regret. Romance and song are essentially imaginative; and that which surpasses and satiates imagination does not directly stimulate their production: it is only as an exile that the creole becomes a poet, when he remembers the charm of his country without the pains of its daily life. There is no more touching incident, perhaps, in literary history, than the fate of Léonard, the poet of Guadeloupe. His youth had been mostly spent abroad in struggles to obtain the means of returning to his native island. Succeeding after intense strain, he returned to find himself only a victim of the revolution of 1789,—threatened with death if he persisted in remaining. His friends hurried him on board a vessel; but, although he had been already wounded and pursued by an assassin, he could not nerve himself to go. Again and again he left the ship, and only with the greatest difficulty could he be persuaded at last to remain on board. But nostalgia had brought him to the condition of a dying man before his arrival in France. At Nantes he tried to reëmbark, hoping at least to die in his beloved island; but he expired before the ship could sail.
Tropical nature is indeed an enchantress; but she does more than bewitch, she transforms body and soul. She satisfies the senses, and numbs the aspirations; she lulls the higher faculties to sleep while gratifying, as nowhere else, the physical wants of life. It has been often said that human happiness has a certain fixed measure in all conditions of existence: the quality may vary, the capacity for each individual remains the same. Such a belief would seem to have its confirmation in the conditions of tropical society. The pleasures of intellectual life become almost impossible in a climate where the least mental effort provokes drowsiness, and the middle of each day is devoted to sleep; nor can the dazzling spectacle of tropical vegetation under tropical skies wholly compensate the enervating effect of an atmosphere hot and heavy as the air of a Turkish bath. Social existence, so circumstanced, becomes of necessity both indolent and provincial; and the enchantment of the tropics should prove irresistible only to strangers able and willing to dream life away, and to abandon all gifts of civilization so hardly earned by Northern struggle. And one must know this, to guess how far from enviable is the life of white women even in the English tropics, where there is at least an effort to maintain the social customs of the mother country. But in the old Latin colonies of the Pacific and the West Indies, woman's life has always been narrowed by formal customs which no American or English girl could well resign herself to endure.