The Book-Bills of Narcissus / An Account Rendered by Richard Le Gallienne

by Richard Le Gallienne

'We but level that lift
To pass and continue beyond.'

But an individuality must 'crystallise out' somewhere, and its final value will not so much depend on the number of states it has passed through, as how it has lived each on the way, with what depth of conviction and force of sincerity. For a modern young man to thus experience all round, and pass, and continue beyond where such great ones as St. Bernard, Pascal, and Swedenborg, have anchored their starry souls to shine thence upon men for all time, is no uncommon thing. It is more the rule than the exception: but one would hardly say that in going further they have gone higher, or ended greater. The footpath of pioneer individualism must inevitably become the highway of the race. Every American is not a Columbus.

There are two ways in which we may live our spiritual progress: as critics, or poets. Most men live theirs in that critical attitude which refuses to commit itself, which tastes all, but enjoys none; but the greatest in that earnest, final, rooted, creative, fashion which is the way of the poets. The one is as a man who spends his days passing from place to place in search of a dwelling to his mind, but dies at last in an inn, having known nought of the settled peace of a home; but the other, howsoever often he has to change his quarters, for howsoever short a time he may remain in any one of his resting-places, makes of each a home, with roots that shoot in a night to the foundations of the world, and blossomed branches that mingle with the stars.

Criticism is a good thing, but poetry is a better. Indeed, criticism properly is not; it is but a process to an end. We could really do without it much better than we imagine: for, after all, the question is not so much how we live, but do we live? Who would not a hundred times rather be a fruitful Parsee than a barren philosophe? Yes, all lies, of course, in original greatness of soul; and there is really no state of mind which is not like Hamlet's pipe—if we but know the 'touch of it,' 'it will discourse most eloquent music.'

Now, it was that great sincerity in Narcissus that has always made us take him so seriously. And here I would remark in parenthesis, that trivial surface insincerities, such as we have had glimpses of in his dealings, do not affect such a great organic sincerity as I am speaking of. They are excrescences, which the great central health will sooner or later clear away. It was because he never held an opinion to which he was not, when called upon, practically faithful; never dreamed a dream without at once setting about its translation into daylight; never professed a creed for a week without some essay after the realisation of its new ideal; it was because he had the power and the courage to glow mightily, and to some purpose; because his life had a fiery centre, which his eyes were not afraid of revealing—that I speak of his great sincerity, a great capacity for intense life. Shallow patterers of divine creeds were, therefore, most abhorrent to him. 'You must excuse me, sir,' I remember his once saying to such a one, 'but what are you doing with cigarette and salutaris? If I held such a belief as yours, I would stand sandalled, with a rope round my waist, before to-morrow.'

One quaint instance of this earnest attitude in all things occurs to me out of his schooldays. He was a Divine Right man, a fiery Jacobite, in those days; and, probably not without some absurd unconfessed dream in his heart that it might somehow help the dead old cause, he one afternoon fluttered the Hanoverian hearts—all the men we meet in street and mart are Hanoverians, of course—of our little literary club by solemnly rising 'to give notice' that at the following meeting he would read a paper to prove that 'the House of Hanover has no right to the English throne.' Great was the excitement through the fortnight intervening, extending even to the masters; and the meeting was a full one, and no little stormy.

Narcissus rose with the air of a condemned Strafford, and with all his boyish armoury of eloquence and scorn fought over again the long-lost battle, hiss and groan falling unheeded into the stream of his young voice. But vain, vain! hard is the Hanoverian heart in boy, as in man, and all your glowing periods were in vain—vain as, your peroration told us, 'was the blood of gallant hearts shed on Culloden's field.' Poor N., you had but one timorous supporter, even me, so early your fidus Achates—but one against so many. Yet were you crestfallen? Galileo with his 'E pur si muove,' Disraeli with his 'The time will come,' wore such a mien as yours, as we turned from that well-foughten field. Yes! and you loved to take in earnest vague Hanoverian threats of possible arrest for your baby-treason, and, for some time, I know, you never passed a policeman without a dignified tremor, as of one who might at any moment find a lodging in the Tower.

But the most serious of all N.'s 'mad' enthusiasms was that of which the Reader has already received some hint, in the few paragraphs of his own confessions above, that which 'had almost sent him to the Himalayas.'

It belongs to natures like his always through life to cherish a half belief in their old fairy tales, and a longing, however late in the day, to prove them true at last. To many such the revelations with which Madame Blavatsky, as with some mystic trumpet, startled the Western world some years ago, must have come with most passionate appeal; and to Narcissus they came like a love arisen from the dead. Long before, he had 'supped full' of all the necromantic excitements that poet or romancer could give. Guy Mannering had introduced him to Lilly; Lytton and Hawthorne had sent him searching in many a musty folio for Elixir Vitas and the Stone. Like Scythrop, in 'Nightmare Abbey,' he had for a long period slept with horrid mysteries beneath his pillow. But suddenly his interest had faded: these phantoms fled before a rationalistic cock-crow, and Eugenius Philalethes and Robert Fludd went with Mejnour and Zanoni into a twilight forgetfulness. There was no hand to show the hidden way to the land that might be, and there were hands beckoning and voices calling him along the highway to the land that is. So, dream-light passing, he must, perforce, reconcile himself to daylight, with its dusty beam and its narrow horizons.

Judge, then, with what a leaping heart he chanced on some newspaper gossip concerning the sibyl, for it was so that he first stumbled across her mission. Ironical, indeed, that the so impossible 'key' to the mystery should come by the hand of 'our own correspondent'; but so it was, and that paragraph sold no small quantity of 'occult' literature for the next twelve months. Mr. Sinnett, doorkeeper in the house of Blavatsky, who, as a precaution against the vision of Bluebeards that the word Oriental is apt to conjure up in Western minds, is always dressed in the latest mode, and, so to say, offers his cigar-case along with some horrid mystery—it was to his prospectus of the new gospel, his really delightful pages, that Narcissus first applied. Then he entered within the gloomier Egyptian portals of the Isis itself, and from thence—well, in brief, he went in for a course of Redway, and little that figured in that gentleman's thrilling announcements was long in reaching his hands.