III

It seems likely that the new criticism must more and more take into account these delicate and psychological reckonings; but meanwhile how shall we, the unelect, seeking unacademically among the lives of the great, become aware of these subtle influences which forever haunt the characters and the works of great men? How shall we put ourselves sensitively in touch with that which is so essentially characteristic; with those mysterious influences of personality which, working together, make, for instance, a poem of Arnold's a poem of Arnold's unmistakably, and a painting of Raphael's so much his own that we are wont to speak of it as 'a Raphael'?

Again I turn to Horatio. There must first of all be in us, I believe, a deep love of the men whom we would know—'O my sweet lord!' There must be on our part all that loyal and watchful friendship which would make any hearsay or report concerning them a matter of interest to us; further, there must be that full intimate companionship to be had, not by hearsay at all, but only by living day after day with these men and their works; and lastly, there must be in us a sensitiveness to spiritual and haunting presences in their lives—a patient and sensitive watching as it were upon the battlements of Elsinore.

If we turn from Leonardo, as Pater presents him to us, to another notable and equally strong type—to Isaiah; if we ignore all those facts usually insisted upon in biography; if we dismiss as less important the kings and rulers of his age and the dramatic yet negligible circumstances of his times; and if we give our attention rather to the subtle predilections and preoccupations of this great mind, we find Isaiah visited again and again, haunted unceasingly it would seem, by certain effects and meanings, and lovelinesses and memories of light.

Again and again we see him sensitive to its manifestations. Here and there throughout his writings we find him noting and delighting in its return, greeting it with relief and rejoicing, as after a long night's watching; calling to his people passionately to arise and waken from the darkness of their sins, holding up his own streaming torch, as it were, across their night, in shining prophecy of the better luminary already on the way, which was to be the light of the world.

'Arise! Shine!' he cries, 'for thy light is come and the glory of the Lord is risen upon thee.... The People that walked in darkness have seen a great light; they that dwell in the land of the shadow of death, upon them hath the light shined.... Then shall thy light break forth as the morning.... And the Gentiles shall come to thy light, and kings to the brightness of thy rising.... The Lord shall be to thee an everlasting light, and thy God thy glory.... The sun shall no more go down, neither shall thy moon withdraw herself.'

His mention also of trees and their boughs and roots and branches is even more frequent still. Here, likewise, 'two ideas' seem 'especially fixed in him as reflexes of things that touched his brain in childhood beyond the measure of other impressions.'

When we study Dante carefully and watch with him also, we find him to have been, hardly less than Isaiah, haunted by the same loveliness, the beauty and meaning of light. For him not less, light would seem to have had a most insistent and spiritual appeal. Far too many to quote are his innumerable exact and sensitive descriptions of it, his careful and repeated observations of its gradations and delicate alterations. Memorably, too, he has it in mind in speaking of Saint Francis of Assisi, that sun of righteousness risen out of the mediæval night. 'Call it not Assisi,' he cries; 'if you would truthfully name it, call it the East because of the sun that rose there.'

Likewise, one who watches patiently and devotedly with Homer cannot but become sensible at last how his mind entertains constantly the thought and moving beauty of the various air. Perpetually, it must have been, he was haunted by the freshness and loveliness of it as it moved across the Ægean and the windy isles of Greece. Pure and awful, in the semblance of the blue-eyed Athena, it was the air which passed among his Greek hosts at eventide, or went stirringly among the serried ranks, reviving with a touch the old spirit in them; or in the tent of Achilles took him by the yellow hair, and directed him, a spirit and a presence.

Again and again throughout the Iliad and the Odyssey, the sensitive and watchful will note this persistency and preoccupation, this recurrent observation of the air in its manifold behaviors, as of something dear or memorable, from the swirling, snatching Harpies to the clean-breathed morning; from the sullen sultriness of Achilles's wrath—a stubborn heat that will not stir—to the swift flight of windy arrows cleansing the banquet-hall of Ithaca. So too, that divinity to whom he paid his most constant homage was Athena, goddess of knowledge and of the air, who exquisitely typified, not alone wisdom, but, as almost one with wisdom, the most moving and yielding of the elements.

How well by these things have we come to know Homer—who yet know not by seven chances even so much as the city of his birth! The bare facts of biography seem poor when compared with these preferences, these preoccupations and predilections of the very man himself.

So, too, though we knew little else about him, it were possible to take the full measure of St. Francis of Assisi by his haunting persistent love of brotherhood. Nothing else in all his deeds and words is half so strong. One even comes to believe that his devotion to his beloved Lady Poverty was—doubtless unknown to himself—rendered solely because it made him one of a larger fraternity and brother to a greater number of men. The fire that burned and seared him was his brother, even as was the beneficent luminary that warmed him. From his triumphant salutation to his radiant 'brother the sun,' on down to the delicate and gentle admonishings of his 'little brothers' the birds and fishes, the thought of an unlimited and unfettered fraternity perpetually dominates his loving spirit.

In like manner I have noted in my many readings of Matthew Arnold that his mind seems to have responded with a peculiar sensitiveness, and been often subject to the sound and meaning of moving waters, and to the high destiny of stars. It would seem that 'the unplumbed, salt, estranging sea' came in time to have a definite power over him in the ordering of his images and even in the determining of his philosophies; that rivers flowing silver under the sun, or, unguessed, in subterranean chambers, became to him interpretative of life itself, and their course and channel and ultimate end a promise to his soul. It is not alone in his poetry that one finds the 'incognizable sea,' and hears so frequently of its coasts and beaches and sands and watery wastes and isles; of voyages and charts; the 'swinging waters and the clustered pier'; the ebbing and flowing of tides; and the still stars: one comes upon these in his prose not less, very especially and memorably in his Study of Poetry.

It may be argued that these might be mere favorite figures and symbols; but it is hardly thinkable, after a careful study of them, that they are not rather haunting influences and impressions having long a familiar access to the chambers of his mind, now taking him with his forsaken Merman,—

Down, down, down!
Down to the depths of the sea!

or with the Neckan beside the green Baltic, pointing out the sounding deeps, and the starry poles, and interpreting life's meanings by them.

So too,—to pass but lightly from one to another,—we can hardly read Chaucer devotedly without at length becoming aware how this poet seems to have been haunted by the idea of the freshness and loveliness of the day's awaking; his very heroes and heroines again and again seeming to partake of it, and to be like dawn themselves upon the hills.

Up rose the sun and up rose Emilie.

The 'yonge squire' too, of 'twenty yere of age':—

Embrouded was he, as it were a mede
All full of fresshe floures, white and red.
Singing he was, or floyting all the day.
He was as fresshe as is the moneth of May.

In his most delicate descriptions one feels the presence as of a breaking light, and the birds seem forever to sing in his green coverts.

It is the dawn and early morning of the year not less which is dear to him—and which he has chosen, perhaps by an election not wholly his own, as the season in which to order and assemble his famous pilgrimage.

When that Aprille with his schowres swoote
The drought of Marche hath pierced to the roote
. . . . . . . . . .
Then longen folke to gon on pilgrimages.

And so, out into the dawn of the year they go, making an immortal morning of it.