“Yes,” said the professor, “it is a grand mission, I grant you, but it is not such a rare one as you make it out, Mlle. Aline. There are more poets in the world than those who write poetry; few of us have the gift of being poets in language, but we may all be poets in action if we will; we may live out our lives in poems.”
“If we had the fashioning of our lives, no doubt we might,” asserted Aline ironically; “but they are most of them so shabby that I defy Homer himself to manufacture an epic or an idyl out of them.”
“You are mistaken. There is no life too shabby to be a poem,” said M. Dalibouze; “it is true, we can't fashion our lives as you say, but we can color them, we can harmonize them; but we must begin by believing this, and by getting our elements under command; we must sort them and arrange them, just as Mme. la Générale is doing with the shreds and silks for the tapestry, and then go on patiently working out the pattern leaf by leaf; by-and-by when the web gets tangled as it is sure to do with the best workers, instead of pulling angrily at it, or cutting it with the sharp scissors of revolt, we must call up a soft breeze from the land of souls where the spirit of the true poet dwells, and bid it blow over it, and then let us listen, and we shall hear the spirit-wind draw tones of music out of our tangled web, like the breeze sweeping the strings of an Æolian harp. It is our own fault, or perhaps oftener our own misfortune, if our lives look shabby to us; we consider them piecemeal instead of looking at them as a whole.”
“But how can we look at them as a whole?” said Aline. “We don't even know that they ever will develop into a whole. How many of us remain on the easel a sort of washed-in sketch to the end? It seems to me we are pretty much like apples in an orchard; some drop off in the flower, some when they are grown to little green balls, hard and sour and good for nothing; it is only a little of the tree that comes to maturity.”
“And is there not abundance of poetry in every phase of the apple's life, no matter when it falls?” said M. Dalibouze. “How many poems has the blight of the starry blossom given birth to? And the little green [pg 074] ball, who will count the odes that the school-boy has sung to it, not in good hexameters perhaps, but in sound, heart poetry, full of zest and the gusto of youth, when all bitters are sweet? O mon Dieu! when I think of the days when a bright-green apple was like honey in my mouth, I could be a poet myself! No paté de foie gras ever tasted half so sweet as that forbidden fruit of my school-days!”
“Good for the forbidden fruit!” said Aline, amused at the professor's sentiment over the reminiscence; “but that is only one view of the question: if the apples could speak, they would give us another.”
“Would they?” said M. Dalibouze. “I'm not sure of that. If the apples discuss the point at all, believe me, they are agreed that whatever befalls them is the very best thing that could. We have no evidence of any created thing, vegetable, mineral, or animal, grumbling at its lot; that is reserved to man, discontent is man's prerogative, he quarrels with himself, with his destiny, his neighbors, everything by turns. If we could but do like the apples, blossom, and grow, and fall, early or late, just as the wind and the gardener wished, we should be happy. Fancy an apple quarrelling with the sun in spring for not warming him as he does in August! It would be no more preposterous than it is for men to quarrel with their circumstances. The fruit of our lives have their seasons like the fruit of our gardens; the winter and snows and the sharp winds are just as necessary to both as the fire of the summer heat; all growth is gradual, and we must accept the process through which we are brought to maturity, just as the apples do. It is not the same for all of us; some are ripened under the warm vibrating sun, others resist it, and, like certain winter fruit, require the cold twilight days to mellow them. But it matters little what the process is, it is sure to be the right one if we wait for it and accept it.”
“I wonder what stage of it I am in at the present moment,” said Aline. “I can't say the sun has had much to do with it; the winds and the rain have been the busiest agents in my garden so far.”
“Patience, mademoiselle!” said M. Dalibouze. “The sun will come in his own good time.”
“You answer for that?”