Page images
PDF
EPUB

tints are gone, as if the autumnal rains had washed them out. Orange, yellow and scarlet, all are changed to one melancholy russet hues The birds, too, have taken wing, and have left their roofless dwellings. Not the whistle of a robin, not the twitter of an eavesdropping swallow, not the carol of one sweet, familiar voice. All gone. Only the dis

Serene, I fold my hands and wait,
Nor care for wind nor tide nor sea:
I rave no more 'gainst time or fate,
For, lo! my own shall come to me.

I stay my haste, I make delays:
For what avails this eager pace?
I stand amid the eternal ways,
And what is mine shall know my face.

T is not possible to have the
true pictures or statues of
Cyrus, Alexander, Cæsar,
no, nor of the kings or great
personages of much later
years; for the originals can not last, and
the copies can not but leese of the life
and truth. But the images of men's wits
and knowledges remain in books, ex-
empted from the
wrong of time, and
capable of perpet-
ual renovation
Neither are they
fitly to be called
images, because
they generate still,
and cast their seeds
in the minds of
others, provoking
and causing infinite
actions and opin-
ions in succeeding
ages: so that, if the
invention of the
ship was thought
so noble, which car-
rieth riches and
commodities from
place to place, and
consociateth the
most remote
regions in partici-
pation of their
fruits, how much
more are letters to
be magnified,
which as ships,
pass through the
vast sea of time,
and make ages so
distant to participate of the wisdom,
illuminations, and inventions the one of
the other?-Francis Bacon.

Asleep, awake, by night or day,
The friends I seek are seeking me;
No wind can drive my bark astray,
Nor change the tide of destiny.

What matter if I stand alone?
I wait with joy the coming years:
My heart shall reap where it has sown,
And garner up the fruit of tears.

The waters know their own, and draw
The brook that springs in yonder heights.
So flows the good with equal law
Unto the soul of pure delights.

The stars come nightly to the sky,
The tidal wave unto the sea;
Nor time nor space, nor deep nor high,
Can keep my own away from me.
“Waiting,” by John Burroughs

IT is the Indian summer. The rising

sun blazes through the misty air like a conflagration. A yellowish, smoky haze fills the atmosphere, and a filmy mist lies like a silver lining on the sky. The wind is soft and low. It wafts to us the odor of forest leaves, that hang wilted on the dripping branches, or drop into the stream. Their gorgeous

mal cawing of a crow, as he sits and curses that the harvest is over; or the chit-chat of an idle squirrel, the noisy denizen of a hollow tree, the mendicant friar of a large parish, the absolute monarch of a dozen acorns. -Longfellow.

WHAT moods,

what passions, what nights of despair and gathering storms of anger, what sudden cruelties and amazing tendernesses are buried and hidden and implied in every love story! What a waste is there of exquisite things! So each spring sees a million glorious beginnings, a sunlit heaven in every opening leaf, warm perfection in every stirring egg, hope and fear and beauty beyond computation in every forest tree; and in the autumn before the snows come they have all gone-of all that incalculable abundance of life, of all that hope and adventure, excitement and deliciousness, there is scarcely more to be found than a soiled twig, a dirty seed, a dead leaf, black mould, or a rotting feather. -H. G. Wells.

Speech is the index of the mind.-Seneca.

War

I do abhor;

And yet how sweet

tuppence worth of social position, piety, comfort, and domestic affection, of which he, too, is often ironically defrauded by Fate.-George Bernard Shaw.

I

HE tradition of the stage is
a tradition of villains and
heroes. Shakespeare was a
devout believer in the exis-
tence of the true villain-the
man whose terrible secret is that his
fundamental moral impulses are by some
freak of nature inverted, so that not only
are love, pity, and honor loathsome to
him, and the affec-
tation of them
which society im-
poses on him a con-
stant source of dis-
gust, but cruelty,
destruction, and
perfidy are his
most luxurious
passions. This is a
totally different
phenomenon from
the survivals of the
ape and tiger in the
normal man. The
average normal
man is covetous,
lazy, selfish; but he
is not malevolent,
nor capable of say-
ing to himself,
"Evil: be thou my
good." He only
does wrong as a
means to an end,
which he always
represents to him-
self as a right end.
The case is exactly
reversed with a
villain; and it is my

The sound along the marching street
Of drum or fife, and I forget
Broken old mothers, and the whole
Dark butchering without a soul.

....

WAS passing along the street when a beggar, a decrepit old man, stopped me. ¶ Swollen, tearful eyes, blue lips, bristling rags, unclean sores. Oh, how horribly had poverty gnawed that unhappy being! He stretched out to me a red, bloated, dirty hand. . He moaned, he bellowed for help. I began to rummage in all my pockets. . Neither purse, nor watch, nor even handkerchief did I find... I had taken nothing with me.

Without a soul-save this bright treat
Of heady music, sweet as hell;
And even my peace-abiding feet
Go marching with the marching street,
For yonder goes the fife,

And what care I for human Life!
The tears fill my astonished eyes,
And my full heart is like to break,
And yet it is embannered lies,
A dream those drummers make.

Oh, it is wickedness to clothe
Yon hideous, grinning thing that stalks
Hidden in music like a queen
That in a garden of glory walks,

Till good men love the thing they loathe;
Art, thou hast many infamies,
But not an infamy like this.

And the beggar still waited...and extended his hand, which swayed and trembled feebly. Bewildered,confused, I shook that dirty, tremulous hand heartily.... "Blame me not, brother; I have nothing, brother." The beggar man fixed his swollen eyes upon me; his blue lips smiled and in his turn he pressed my cold fingers. "Never mind, brother," he mumbled. "Thanks for this also, brother. This also is an alms, brother."

O, snap the fife and still the drum,
And show the monster as she is.

"The Illusions of War,” by Richard Le Gallienne

melancholy duty to add that we sometimes find it hard to avoid a cynical suspicion that the balance of social advantage is on the side of gifted villainy, since we see the able villain, Mephistopheles-like, doing a huge amount of good in order to win the power to do a little daring evil, out of which he is as likely as not to be cheated in the end; whilst your normal respectable man will countenance, connive at, and grovel his way through all sorts of meanness, baseness, servility, and cruel indifference to suffering in order to enjoy a miserable

[blocks in formation]

O make my readers realize what a philosopher is, I can only say that I am a philosopher. If you ask incredulously, "How, then, are your articles so interesting?” I reply that there is nothing so interesting as philosophy, provided its materials are not spurious.

For instance, take my own materials— humanity and the fine arts. Any studious, timorously ambitious bookworm can run away from the world with a few shelves full of history, essays, descriptions, and criticisms, and, having pieced an illusory humanity and art out of the effects produced by his library upon his imagination, build some silly systematization of his worthless ideas over the abyss of his own nescience. Such a philosopher is as dull and dry as you please; it is he who brings his profession into disrepute, especially when he talks much about art, and so persuades people to read him. Without having looked at more than fifty pictures in his life, or made up his mind on the smallest point about one of the fifty, he will audaciously take it upon himself to explain the development of painting from Zeuxis and Apelles to Raphael and Michelangelo 90 90

As to the way he will go on about music, of which he always has an awe-stricken conceit, it spoils my temper to think of it, especially when one remembers that musical composition is taught (a monstrous pretension) in this country by people who read scores, and never by any chance listen to performances. Now, the right way to go to workstrange as it may appear-is to look at pictures until you have acquired the power of seeing them. If you look at several thousand good pictures every year, and form some sort of practical judgment about every one of themwere it only that it is not worth troubling over-then at the end of five years or so you will, if you have a wise eye, be able to see what is actually in a picture, and not what you think is in it. Similarly, if you listen critically to music every day for a number of years, you will, if you

have a wise ear, acquire the power of hearing music. And so on with all the arts

When we come to humanity it is still the same: only by intercourse with men and women can we learn anything about it. This involves an active life, not a contemplative one; for, unless you do something in the world, you can have no real business to transact with men; and unless you love and are loved, you can have no intimate relations with them. And you must transact business, wirepull politics, discuss religion, give and receive hate, love, and friendship with all sorts of people before you can acquire the sense of humanity.

If you are to acquire the sense sufficiently to be a philosopher, you must do all these things unconditionally. You must not say that you will be a gentleman and limit your intercourse to this class or that class; or that you will be a virtuous person and generalize about the affections from a single instance-unless, indeed, you have the rare happiness to stumble at first upon an all-enlightening instance. You must have no convictions, because as Nietzsche puts it, convictions are prisons." Thus, I blush to add, you can not be a philosopher and a good man, though you may be a philosopher and a great one.

[ocr errors]

You will say, perhaps, that if this be so, there should be no philosophers; and perhaps you are right; but though I make you this handsome concession, I do not defer to you to the extent of ceasing to exist.

After all, if you insist on the hangman, whose pursuits are far from elevating, you may very well tolerate the philosopher, even if philosophy involves philandering; or, to put it another way, if, in spite of your hangman, you tolerate murder within the sphere of war, it may be necessary to tolerate comparatively venial irregularities within the sphere of philosophy IO

It is the price of progress; and, after all, it is the philosopher, and not you, who will burn for it.

-George Bernard Shaw.

[merged small][merged small][merged small][ocr errors]

Several thousand years pass by like one minute. And the Finsteraarhorn rumbles in reply: "Dense clouds veil the earth .. Wait!"

More thousands of years elapse, as it were one minute.

"Well, what now?"inquires the Jungfrau. "Now I can see; down yonder, below, everything is still the same: partycolored, tiny. The waters gleam blue; the forests are black; heaps of stones piled up shine gray. Around them small beetles are still bustling,-thou knowest, those two-legged beetles who have as yet been unable to defile either thou or me.” Men?"

[ocr errors]
[ocr errors][merged small][ocr errors][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small]
[blocks in formation]

E said, "I see." And they said: "He's crazy; crucify him." He still said: "I see." And they said: "He 's an extremist." And they tolerated him. And he continued to say: “ I see.” And they said: "He's eccentric." And they rather liked him, but smiled at him. And he stubbornly said again: "I see." And they said: "There's something in what he says.' ." And they gave him half an ear. But he said as if he'd never said it before: "I see. ." And at last they were awake; and they gathered about him and built a temple in his name. And yet he only said: "I see." And they wanted to do something for him. "What can we do to express to you our regret?" He only smiled. He touched them with the ends of his fingers and kissed them. What could they do for him?" Nothing more than you have done," he answered. And what was that? they wanted to know. "You see," he said, "that's reward enough; you see, you see."—"The Prophet," by Horace Traubel.

EMBRANDT belongs to the breed

terity. His place is with the Michelangelos, the Shakespeares, the Beethovens. An artistic Prometheus, he stole the celestial fire, and with it put life into what was inert, and expressed the immaterial and evasive sides of nature in his breathing forms.-Emile Michel.

TEP by step my investigation of blindness led me into the industrial world. And what a world it is! I must face unflinchingly a world of facts a world of misery and degradation, of blindness, crookedness, and sin, a world struggling against the elements, against the unknown, against itself. How reconcile this world

of fact with the bright world of my imagining? My darkness had been filled with the light of intelligence, and, behold, the outer day-lit world was stumbling and groping in social blindness. At first I was most unhappy; but deeper study restored my confidence By learning the sufferings and burdens of men, I became aware as never before of the lifepower that has sur

HERE has arisen in society a figure

which is certainly the most mournful, and in some respects the most awful, upon which the eye of the moralist can dwell. That unhappy being whose very name is a shame to speak; who counterfeits with a cold heart the transports of affection, and submits herself as the passive instrument of lust; who is scorned

Life! we've been long together
Through pleasant and through
cloudy weather;

'T is hard to part when friends
are dear-

Perhaps 't will cost a sigh, a
tear;

Then steal away, give little
warning,

Choose thine own time;
Say not Good-Night—but in
some brighter clime
Bid me Good-Morning.

"Life," by Anna Letitia Barbauld

vived the forces of darkness-the power which, though never completely victorious, is continuously conquering. The very fact that we are still here carrying on the contest against the hosts of annihilation proves that on the whole the battle has gone for humanity. The world's great heart has proved equal to the prodigious undertaking which God set it. Rebuffed, but always persevering; self-reproached, but ever regaining faith; undaunted, tenacious, the heart of man labors towards immeasurably distant goals. Discouraged not by difficulties without, or the anguish of ages within, the heart listens to a secret voice that whispers: "Be not dismayed; in the future lies the Promised Land."

-Helen Keller.

Man is the merriest species of the creation; all above or below him are serious. -Addison.

and insulted as the vilest of her sex and doomed, for the most part, to disease and abject wretchedness and an early death, appears in every age as the perpetual symbol of the degradation and sinfulness of man se

Herself the supreme type of vice, she is ultimately the most efficient guardian of virtue.

But for her, the unchallenged purity of countless happy homes would bepolluted, and not a few who, in the pride of their untempted chastity, think of her with an indignant shudder, would have known the agony of remorse and despair.

On that one degraded and ignoble form are concentrated the passions that might have filled the world with shame. She remains, while creeds and civilizations rise and fall, the eternal priestess of humanity, blasted for the sins of the people.-William E. H. Lecky.

[blocks in formation]
« PreviousContinue »