“Do you believe in it?” we asked.
He smiled. “I think everyone has got his flame to cultivate. I think I have cultivated mine.”
Most truly, indeed, has he done so; and not only in the divine way of his art, for year by year the selflessness and the magnanimity of his character seem to deepen and extend; and so, too—inevitable tragedy of years—the sadness. Impossible for any perfectly noble mind not to gather melancholy as life goes on!—a melancholy culminating in his case with the burthen of agony which the present sufferings of his own race have laid upon his shoulders.
Therefore these memories of the days when he was as a young god, the days when a celebrated painter could find no truer way of expressing him than by flinging on the canvas the radiant vision of an Apollo, are poignant memories. We are glad that we should have them, yet they bring a stab of pain for that lost high spirit which life inevitably dashes.
With us all, the good ship Youth sets forth merrily with sails taut and pennons fluttering, filling to the wind and breasting the waves! We know that inevitably the storm winds must catch her; that she will be beaten by breakers; drawn out of her course by false currents; that if she become not a derelict, if she does not founder with all hands, she must—too often—cast much of her treasure overboard, furl her white wings, and come creeping into a cold harbour. Even those who, like our rare and wonderful friend, have gathered glory and dignity and power, as they plough a mighty course, have passed from under radiant skies into the gloom of the storm. A sombre thing, the human span, at the best, and most blest nowadays.
What can we say of the fair craft that founders almost as soon as launched? Ah! the young ghosts in that London drawing-room! The sound of the children’s voices yet ringing in our ears! There is “Mustard-Seed,” the splendid little fair boy, who had been the favourite of our Shakesperian revels nine years ago—not yet nineteen, not a month a soldier—shot through the head on that Flanders field, the graveyard of England’s choicest! And the little Scotch lad, who used to prance about in his black velvet suit, with cheeks that shamed the apple—no one knows where he lies to-day; only two or three saw him fall. And his graver, gentler brother—a prisoner, even as we write in the first agony of the grief which has befallen him in the loss of his life-companion!
And out of a merry group of Irish children, irresponsible, high-spirited, noisy, two brothers sleep in that alien earth—now for ever English—“where their young dust lies,” as the poet who wrote so prophetically of his own fate has beautifully said. And yet another is wounded, and another invalided; and the once merry sister, whose gallant husband was left wounded on the field and was missing long weeks, still mourns him as a prisoner.
Of the rest of the company, those companions of our daughter’s own unclouded childish days, some are widows; and some can scarce meet the morning for apprehension of its news, or return to their homes for fear of that orange envelope that may lie on the hall table, or sleep in the night for listening for the sound of the bell. And some are in the Dardanelles, under skies of brass, treading on earth of iron, and some are in those trenches, deep-dyed and battered a hundredfold. Two more brothers—the elder twenty and the younger nineteen—fell within a month of each other. A few are still on English soil, light-heartedly preparing for the great fray, straining like hounds at the leash, staring with bright, impatient eyes towards that goal with its unknown and terrible possibilities; cursing the slow flight of time. Of these one thinks, perhaps, with a heart more tightened than of all the rest!
The reaper has come forth to reap out of season, and the young corn is mown down in the green ear, and all the poppies and the pretty flowers go down with it.
Sitting in rooms which we had not revisited since before the war, these are sad thoughts that the crowded recollections bring.