At the same time, we should not be sorry to believe that, in the heat of writing, and out of the love, natural to all of us, of making facts conform to theory, we may have laid a thought too much of emphasis upon the alterations through which his mind has passed. His days, we suspect, have, after all, been pretty closely bound each to each by natural piety. We recall his fine saying about Renan, brought up in the Roman Church and dying an unbeliever, that he changed little. “He was like his native land, where clouds float across the sky, but the soil is of granite, and oaks are deeply rooted.”
Changed or unchanged, in his first manner or his second, Republican or Nationalist, socialist, anti-imperialist, “intellectual,” or what not, who will refuse to read a writer who can express himself after such a fashion?
VERBAL MAGIC
VERBAL MAGIC
A music-lover and devoted concert-goer of my acquaintance—“uninstructed, but sensitive,” to characterize him in his own words—is accustomed to say that he distinguishes several kinds of enjoyable music. One kind is interesting: here he puts the work of composers so unlike as Berlioz and Brahms. Another kind is exciting; under which head he ranks the greater part of Wagner and the Bach fugues! And still another kind is charming. Whenever he uses this last epithet, he adds an explanation, the word being now so worn by indiscriminate handling as hardly to pass by itself at its full face value. He means that the music thus described—heavenly music, he sometimes calls it (of which his typical example seems to be Schubert’s unfinished symphony)—has upon him an indescribable ravishing effect, as if it really and literally charmed him. Exactly why this should be, he does not profess to decide. All such compositions are highly melodious and in some good degree simple; but then there is plenty of other excellent music to which the same terms seem to be equally applicable, which nevertheless lays him under no such spell. “I don’t undertake to explain it,” he says; “so far as I am concerned, it is all a matter of feeling.”
Analogous to this is my own experience—and, I suppose, that of readers in general—with certain fragments of poetry, which have for me an ineffable and apparently inexhaustible charm. Other poetry is beautiful, enjoyable, stimulating, everything that poetry ought to be, except that it lacks this final something which, not to leave it absolutely without a name, we may call magic. Whatever it be called, it pertains not to any poet’s work as a whole, nor in strictness, I think, to any poem as a whole, but to single verses or couplets. And to draw the line still closer, verse of this magical quality—though here, to be sure, I may be disclosing nothing but my own intellectual limitations—is discoverable only in the work of a certain few poets.
The secret of the charm is past finding out: so I like to believe, at all events. Magic is magic; if it could be explained, it would be something else; to use the word is to confess the thing beyond us. Such verses were never written to order or by force of will, since genius and our old friend—or enemy—“an infinite capacity for taking pains,” so far from being one, are not even distantly related. The poet himself could never tell how such perfection was wrought or whence it came; nor is its natural history to be made out by any critic. The best we can do with it is to enjoy it, thankful to have our souls refreshed and our taste purified by its “heavenly alchemy;” as the best that our musical friend can do with the unfinished symphony is to surrender himself to its fascination, and be carried by it, as I have heard him more than once express himself, up to “heaven’s gate.”
And yet it is not in human nature to forego the asking of questions. The mind will have its inquisitive moods, and sometimes it loves to play, in a kind of make-believe, with mysteries which it has no thought of solving,—a harmless and perhaps not unprofitable exercise, if entered upon modestly and pursued without illusions. We may wonder over things that interest us, and even go so far as to talk about them, though we have no expectation of saying anything either new or final.
Take, then, the famous lines from Wordsworth’s “Solitary Reaper:”—
“Will no one tell me what she sings?—