Adventures Among Books

Finally Julio unburies Agathè: —

“Thou must go,My sweet betrothed, with me, but not below,Where there is darkness, dream, and solitude,But where is light, and life, and one to broodAbove thee, till thou wakest. Ha, I fearThou wilt not wake for ever, sleeping here,Where there are none but the winds to visit thee.And Convent fathers, and a choristryOf sisters saying Hush! But I will singRare songs to thy pure spirit, wanderingDown on the dews to hear me; I will tuneThe instrument of the ethereal moon,And all the choir of stars, to rise and fallIn harmony and beauty musical.”

Is this not melodious madness, and is this picture of the distraught priest, setting forth to sail the seas with his dead lady, not an invention that Nanteuil might have illustrated, and the clan of Bousingots approved?

The Second Chimera opens nobly: —

“A curse! a curse! 8 the beautiful pale wingOf a sea-bird was worn with wandering,And, on a sunny rock beside the shore,It stood, the golden waters gazing o’er;And they were nearing a brown amber flowOf weeds, that glittered gloriously below!”

Julio appears with Agathè in his arms, and what ensues is excellent of its kind: —

“He dropt upon a rock, and by him placed,Over a bed of sea-pinks growing waste,The silent ladye, and he mutter’d wild,Strange words about a mother and no child.“And I shall wed thee, Agathè! althoughOurs be no God-blest bridal – even so!”And from the sand he took a silver shell,That had been wasted by the fall and swellOf many a moon-borne tide into a ring —A rude, rude ring; it was a snow-white thing,Where a lone hermit limpet slept and diedIn ages far away. ‘Thou art a bride,Sweet Agathè! Wake up; we must not linger!’He press’d the ring upon her chilly finger,And to the sea-bird on its sunny stoneShouted, ‘Pale priest that liest all aloneUpon thy ocean altar, rise, awayTo our glad bridal!’ and its wings of grayAll lazily it spread, and hover’d byWith a wild shriek – a melancholy cry!Then, swooping slowly o’er the heaving breastOf the blue ocean, vanished in the west.”

Julio sang a mad song of a mad priest to a dead maid: —

“A rosary of stars, love! a prayer as we glide,And a whisper on the wind, and a murmur on the tide,And we’ll say a fair adieu to the flowers that are seen,With shells of silver sown in radiancy between.“A rosary of stars, love! the purest they shall be,Like spirits of pale pearls in the bosom of the sea;Now help thee, 9 Virgin Mother, with a blessing as we go,Upon the laughing waters that are wandering below.”

One can readily believe that Poe admired this musical sad song, if, indeed, he ever saw the poem.

One may give too many extracts, and there is scant room for the extraordinary witchery of the midnight sea and sky, where the dead and the distraught drift wandering,

“And the great ocean, like the holy hall,Where slept a Seraph host maritimal,Was gorgeous with wings of diamond” —

it was a sea

“Of radiant and moon-breasted emerald.”

There follows another song —

“’Tis light to love thee living, girl, when hope is full and fair,In the springtide of thy beauty, when there is no sorrow thereNo sorrow on thy brow, and no shadow on thy heart,When, like a floating sea-bird, bright and beautiful thou art“But when the brow is blighted, like a star at morning tideAnd faded is the crimson blush upon the cheek beside,It is to love as seldom love the brightest and the best,When our love lies like a dew upon the one that is at rest.”

We ought to distrust our own admiration of what is rare, odd, novel to us, found by us in a sense, and especially one must distrust one’s liking for the verses of a Tweedside angler, of a poet whose forebears lie in the green kirkyard of Yarrow. But, allowing for all this, I cannot but think these very musical, accomplished, and, in their place, appropriate verses, to have been written by a boy of twenty. Nor is it a common imagination, though busy in this vulgar field of horrors, that lifts the pallid bride to look upon the mirror of the sea —

“And bids her gaze into the startled sea,And says, ‘Thine image, from eternity,Hath come to meet thee, ladye!’ and anonHe bade the cold corse kiss the shadowy oneThat shook amid the waters.”

The picture of the madness of thirst, allied to the disease of the brain, is extremely powerful, the delirious monk tells the salt sea waves

“That ye have power, and passion, and a soundAs of the flying of an angel roundThe mighty world; that ye are one with time!”

Here, I can’t but think, is imagination.

Mr. Aytoun, however, noted none of those passages, nor that where, in tempest and thunder, a shipwrecked sailor swims to the strange boat, sees the Living Love and the Dead, and falls back into the trough of the wave. But even the friendly pencil of Bon Gaultier approves the passage where an isle rises above the sea, and the boat is lightly stranded on the shore of pure and silver shells. The horrors of corruption, in the Third Chimera, may be left unquoted, Aytoun parodies —

“The chalk, the chalk, the cheese, the cheese, the cheeses,And straightway dropped he down upon his kneeses.”

Julio comes back to reason, hates the dreadful bride, and feeds on limpets, “by the mass, he feasteth well!”

There was a holy hermit on the isle,

“I ween like other hermits, so was he.”

He is Agathè’s father, and he has retired to an eligible island where he may repent his cruelty to his daughter. Julio tells his tale, and goes mad again. The apostrophe to Lunacy which follows is marked “Beautiful” by Aytoun, and is in the spirit of Charles Lamb’s remark that madness has pleasures unknown to the sane.

“Thou art, thou art alone,A pure, pure being, but the God on highIs with thee ever as thou goest by.”

Julio watches again beside the Dead, till morning comes, bringing

“A murmur far and far, of those that stirredWithin the great encampment of the sea.”

The tide sweeps the mad and the dead down the shores. “He perished in a dream.” As for the Hermit, he buried them, not knowing who they were, but on a later day found and recognised the golden cross of Agathè,

“For long ago he gave that blessed crossTo his fair girl, and knew the relic still.”

So the Hermit died of remorse, and one cannot say, with Walton, “and I hope the reader is sorry.”

The “other poems” are vague memories of Shelley, or anticipations of Poe. One of them is curiously styled “Her, a Statue,” and contains a passage that reminds us of a rubaiyat of Omar’s,

“She might seeA love-wing’d Seraph glide in glory by,Striking the tent of its mortality.“But that is but a tent wherein may restA Sultan to the realm of Death addrest;The Sultan rises, and the dark FerráshStrikes, and prepares it for another guest.”

Most akin to Poe is the “Hymn to Orion,”

“Dost thou, in thy vigil, hailArcturus on his chariot pale,Leading him with a fiery flight —Over the hollow hill of night?”

This, then, is a hasty sketch, and incomplete, of a book which, perhaps, is only a curiosity, but which, I venture to think, gave promise of a poet. Where is the lad of twenty who has written as well to-day – nay, where is the mature person of forty? There was a wind of poetry abroad in 1830, blowing over the barricades of Paris, breathing by the sedges of Cam, stirring the heather on the hills of Yarrow. Hugo, Mr. Browning, Lord Tennyson, caught the breeze in their sails, and were borne adown the Tigris of romance. But the breath that stirred the loch where Tom Stoddart lay and mused in his boat, soon became to him merely the curl on the waters of lone St. Mary’s or Loch Skene, and he began casting over the great uneducated trout of a happier time, forgetful of the Muse. He wrote another piece, with a sonorous and delightful title, “Ajalon of the Winds.” Where is “Ajalon of the Winds”? Miss Stoddart knows nothing of it, but I fancy that the thrice-loathed Betty could have told a tale.

MALIM CONVIVIS QVAM PLACVISSE COQVIS.

We need not, perhaps, regret that Mr. Stoddart withdrew from the struggles and competitions of poetic literature. No very high place, no very glorious crown, one fancies, would have been his. His would have been anxiety, doubt of self, disappointment, or, if he succeeded, the hatred, and envyings, and lies which even then dogged the steps of the victor. It was better to be quiet and go a-fishing.

“Sorrow, sorrow speed awayTo our angler’s quiet mound,With the old pilgrim, twilight gray,Enter through the holy ground;There he sleeps whose heart is twinedWith wild stream and wandering burn,Wooer of the western windWatcher of the April morn!”

CHAPTER VIII: THE CONFESSIONS OF SAINT AUGUSTINE

My copy of the Confessions is a dark little book, “a size uncumbersome to the nicest hand,” in the format of an Elzevir, bound in black morocco, and adorned with “blind-tooled,” that is ungilt, skulls and crossbones. It has lost the title-page with the date, but retains the frontispiece, engraved by Huret. Saint Augustine, in his mitre and other episcopal array, with a quill in his hand, sits under a flood of inspiring sunshine. The dumpy book has been much read, was at some time the property of Mr. John Philips, and bears one touching manuscript note, of which more hereafter. It is, I presume, a copy of the translation by Sir Toby Matthew. The author of the Preface declares, with truth, that the translator “hath consulted so closely and earnestly with the saint that he seemeth to have lighted his torch att his fire, and to speak in the best and most significant English, what and how he would have done had he understood our language.”

There can be no better English version of this famous book, in which Saint Augustine tells the story of his eager and passionate youth – a youth tossed about by the contending tides of Love, human and divine. Reading it to-day, with a mundane curiosity, we may half regret the space which he gives to theological metaphysics, and his brief tantalising glimpses of what most interests us now – the common life of men when the Church was becoming mistress of the world, when the old Religions were dying of allegory and moral interpretations and occult dreams. But, even so, Saint Augustine’s interest in himself, in the very obscure origins of each human existence, in the psychology of infancy and youth, in school disputes, and magical pretensions; his ardent affections, his exultations, and his faults, make his memoirs immortal among the unveilings of the spirit. He has studied babies, that he may know his dark beginnings, and the seeds of grace and of evil. “Then, by degrees, I began to find where I was; and I had certain desires to declare my will to those by whom it might be executed. But I could not do it… therefore would I be tossing my arms, and sending out certain cryes… and when they obeyed me not.. I would fall into a rage, and that not against such as were my subjects or servants, but against my Elders and my betters, and I would revenge myself upon them by crying.” He has observed that infants “begin to laugh, first sleeping, and then shortly waking;” a curious note, but he does not ask wherefore the sense of humour, or the expression of it, comes to children first in their slumber. Of what do babies dream? And what do the nested swallows chirrup to each other in their sleep?

“Such have I understood that such infants are as I could know, and such have I been told that I was by them who brought me up, though even they may rather be accounted not to know, than to know these things.” One thing he knows, “that even infancy is subject to sin.” From the womb we are touched with evil. “Myselfe have seene and observed some little child, who could not speake; and yet he was all in an envious kind of wrath, looking pale with a bitter countenance upon his foster-brother.” In an envious kind of wrath! Is it not the motive of half our politics, and too much of our criticism? Such is man’s inborn nature, not to be cured by laws or reforms, not to be washed out of his veins, though “blood be shed like rain, and tears like a mist.” For “an infant cannot endure a companion to feed with him in a fountain of milk which is richly abounding and overflowing, although that companion be wholly destitute, and can take no other food but that.” This is the Original Sin, inherited, innate, unacquired; for this are “babes span-long” to suffer, as the famous or infamous preacher declared. “Where, or at what time, was I ever innocent?” he cries, and hears no answer from “the dark backward and abysm” of the pre-natal life.

Then the Saint describes a child’s learning to speak; how he amasses verbal tokens of things, “having tamed, and, as it were, broken my mouth to the pronouncing of them.” “And so I began to launch out more deeply into the tempestuous traffique and society of mankind.” Tempestuous enough he found or made it – this child of a Pagan father and a Christian saint, Monica, the saint of Motherhood. The past generations had “chalked out certain laborious ways of learning,” and, perhaps, Saint Augustine never forgave the flogging pedagogue – the plagosus Orbilius of his boyhood. Long before his day he had found out that the sorrows of children, and their joys, are no less serious than the sorrows of mature age. “Is there, Lord, any man of so great a mind that he can think lightly of those racks, and hooks, and other torments, for the avoiding whereof men pray unto Thee with great fear from one end of the world to the other, as that he can make sport at such as doe most sharply inflict these things upon them, as our parents laughed at the torments which we children susteyned at our master’s hands?” Can we suppose that Monica laughed, or was it only the heathen father who approved of “roughing it?” “Being yet a childe, I began to beg Thy ayde and succour; and I did loosen the knots of my tongue in praying Thee; and I begged, being yet a little one, with no little devotion, that I might not be beaten at the schoole.” One is reminded of Tom Tulliver, who gave up even praying that he might learn one part of his work: “Please make Mr. – say that I am not to do mathematics.”

The Saint admits that he lacked neither memory nor wit, “but he took delight in playing.” “The plays and toys of men are called business, yet, when children fall unto them, the same men punish them.” Yet the schoolmaster was “more fed upon by rage,” if beaten in any little question of learning, than the boy; “if in any match at Ball I had been maistered by one of my playfellows.” He “aspired proudly to be victorious in the matches which he made,” and I seriously regret to say that he would buy a match, and pay his opponent to lose when he could not win fairly. He liked romances also, “to have myne eares scratched with lying fables” – a “lazy, idle boy,” like him who dallied with Rebecca and Rowena in the holidays of Charter House.

Saint Augustine, like Sir Walter Scott at the University of Edinburgh, was “The Greek Dunce.” Both of these great men, to their sorrow and loss, absolutely and totally declined to learn Greek. “But what the reason was why I hated the Greeke language, while I was taught it, being a child, I do not yet understand.” The Saint was far from being alone in that distaste, and he who writes loathed Greek like poison – till he came to Homer. Latin the Saint loved, except “when reading, writing, and casting of accounts was taught in Latin, which I held not for lesse paynefull or penal than the very Greeke. I wept for Dido’s death, who made herselfe away with the sword,” he declares, “and even so, the saying that two and two makes foure was an ungrateful song in mine ears; whereas the wooden horse full of armed men, the burning of Troy, and the very Ghost of Creusa, was a most delightful spectacle of vanity.”

In short, the Saint was a regular Boy – a high-spirited, clever, sportive, and wilful creature. He was as fond as most boys of the mythical tales, “and for that I was accounted to be a towardly boy.” Meanwhile he does not record that Monica disliked his learning the foolish dear old heathen fables – “that flood of hell!”

Boyhood gave place to youth, and, allowing for the vanity of self-accusation, there can be little doubt that the youth of Saint Augustine was une jeunesse orageuse. “And what was that wherein I took delight but to love and to be beloved.” There was ever much sentiment and affection in his amours, but his soul “could not distinguish the beauty of chast love from the muddy darkness of lust. Streams of them did confusedly boyl in me” – in his African veins. “With a restless kind of weariness” he pursued that Other Self of the Platonic dream, neglecting the Love of God:

“Oh, how late art thou come, O my Joy!”

The course of his education – for the Bar, as we should say – carried him from home to Carthage, where he rapidly forgot the pure counsels of his mother “as old wife’s consailes.” “And we delighted in doing ill, not only for the pleasure of the fact, but even for the affection of prayse.” Even Monica, it seems, justified the saying:

“Every woman is at heart a Rake.”

Marriage would have been his making, Saint Augustine says, “but she desired not even that so very much, lest the cloggs of a wife might have hindered her hopes of me.. In the meantime the reins were loosed to me beyond reason.” Yet the sin which he regrets most bitterly was nothing more dreadful than the robbery of an orchard! Pears he had in plenty, none the less he went, with a band of roisterers, and pillaged another man’s pear tree. “I loved the sin, not that which I obtained by the same, but I loved the sin itself.” There lay the sting of it! They were not even unusually excellent pears. “A Peare tree ther was, neere our vineyard, heavy loaden with fruite, which tempted not greatly either the sight or tast. To the shaking and robbing thereof, certaine most wicked youthes (whereof I was one) went late at night. We carried away huge burthens of fruit from thence, not for our owne eating, but to be cast before the hoggs.”

Oh, moonlit night of Africa, and orchard by these wild seabanks where once Dido stood; oh, laughter of boys among the shaken leaves, and sound of falling fruit; how do you live alone out of so many nights that no man remembers? For Carthage is destroyed, indeed, and forsaken of the sea, yet that one hour of summer is to be unforgotten while man has memory of the story of his past.

Nothing of this, to be sure, is in the mind of the Saint, but a long remorse for this great sin, which he earnestly analyses. Nor is he so penitent but that he is clear-sighted, and finds the spring of his mis-doing in the Sense of Humour! “It was a delight and laughter which tickled us, even at the very hart, to find that we were upon the point of deceiving them who feared no such thing from us, and who, if they had known it, would earnestly have procured the contrary.”

Saint Augustine admits that he lived with a fast set, as people say now – “the Depravers” or “Destroyers”; though he loved them little, “whose actions I ever did abhor, that is, their Destruction of others, amongst whom I yet lived with a kind of shameless bashfulness.” In short, the “Hell-Fire Club” of that day numbered a reluctant Saint among its members! It was no Christian gospel, but the Hortensius of Cicero which won him from this perilous society. “It altered my affection, and made me address my prayers to Thee, O Lord, and gave me other desires and purposes than I had before. All vain hopes did instantly grow base in myne eyes, and I did, with an incredible heat of hart, aspire towards the Immortality of Wisdom.” Thus it was really “Saint Tully,” and not the mystic call of Tolle! Lege! that “converted” Augustine, diverting the current of his life into the channel of Righteousness. “How was I kindled then, oh, my God, with a desire to fly from earthly things towards Thee.”

There now remained only the choice of a Road. Saint Augustine dates his own conversion from the day of his turning to the strait Christian orthodoxy. Even the Platonic writings, had he known Greek, would not have satisfied his desire. “For where was that Charity that buildeth upon the foundation of Humility, which is Christ Jesus?.. These pages” (of the Platonists) “carried not in them this countenance of piety – the tears of confession, and that sacrifice of Thine which is an afflicted spirit, a contrite and humbled heart, the salvation of Thy people, the Spouse, the City, the pledge of Thy Holy Spirit, the Cup of our Redemption. No man doth there thus express himself. Shall not my soul be subject to God, for of Him is my salvation? For He is my God, and my salvation, my protectour; I shall never be moved. No man doth there once call and say to him: ‘Come unto me all you that labour.’”

The heathen doctors had not the grace which Saint Augustine instinctively knew he lacked – the grace of Humility, nor the Comfort that is not from within but from without. To these he aspired; let us follow him on the path by which he came within their influence; but let us not forget that the guide on the way to the City was kind, clever, wordy, vain old Marcus Tullius Cicero. It is to the City that all our faces should be set, if we knew what belongs to our peace; thither we cast fond, hopeless, backward glances, even if we be of those whom Tertullian calls “Saint Satan’s Penitents.” Here, in Augustine, we meet a man who found the path – one of the few who have found it, of the few who have won that Love which is our only rest. It may be worth while to follow him to the journey’s end.

The treatise of Cicero, then, inflamed Augustine “to the loving and seeking and finding and holding and inseparably embracing of wisdom itself, wheresoever it was.” Yet, when he looked for wisdom in the Christian Scriptures, all the literary man, the rhetorician in him, was repelled by the simplicity of the style. Without going further than Mr. Pater’s book, “Marius, the Epicurean,” and his account of Apuleius, an English reader may learn what kind of style a learned African of that date found not too simple. But Cicero, rather than Apuleius, was Augustine’s ideal; that verbose and sonorous eloquence captivated him, as it did the early scholars when learning revived. Augustine had dallied a little with the sect of the Manichees, which appears to have grieved his mother more than his wild life.

But she was comforted by a vision, when she found herself in a wood, and met “a glorious young man,” who informed her that “where she was there should her son be also.” Curious it is to think that this very semblance of a glorious young man haunts the magical dreams of heathen Red Indians, advising them where they shall find game, and was beheld in such ecstasies by John Tanner, a white man who lived with the Indians, and adopted their religion. The Greeks would have called this appearance Hermes, even in this guise Odysseus met him in the oak wood of Circe’s Isle. But Augustine was not yet in his mother’s faith; he still taught and studied rhetoric, contending for its prizes, but declining to be aided by a certain wizard of his acquaintance. He had entered as a competitor for a “Tragicall poeme,” but was too sportsmanlike to seek victory by art necromantic. Yet he followed after Astrologers, because they used no sacrifices, and did not pretend to consult spirits. Even the derision of his dear friend Nebridius could not then move him from those absurd speculations. His friend died, and “his whole heart was darkened;” “mine eyes would be looking for him in all places, but they found him not, and I hated all things because they told me no news of him.” He fell into an extreme weariness of life, and no less fear of death. He lived but by halves; having lost dimidium animae suae, and yet dreaded death, “Lest he might chance to have wholy dyed whome I extremely loved.” So he returned to Carthage for change, and sought pleasure in other friendships; but “Blessed is the man that loves Thee and his friend in Thee and his enemy for Thee. For he only never loseth a dear friend to whom all men are dear, for His sake, who is never lost.”

Here, on the margin of the old book, beside these thoughts, so beautiful if so helpless, like all words, to console, some reader long dead has written: —

“Pray for your poor servant, J. M.”

And again,

“Pray for your poor friend.”

Doubtless, some Catholic reader, himself bereaved, is imploring the prayers of a dear friend dead; and sure we need their petitions more than they need ours, who have left this world of temptation, and are at peace.

After this loss Saint Augustine went to Rome, his ambition urging him, perhaps, but more his disgust with the violent and riotous life of students in Carthage. To leave his mother was difficult, but “I lyed to my mother, yea, such a mother, and so escaped from her.” And now he had a dangerous sickness, and afterwards betook himself to converse with the orthodox, for example at Milan with Saint Ambrose. In Milan his mother would willingly have continued in the African ritual – a Pagan survival – carrying wine and food to the graves of the dead; but this Saint Ambrose forbade, and she obeyed him for him “she did extremely affect for the regard of my spirituall good.”