The Ways of Pleasantness

There be myriad hopes for all the myriad minds.
— EURIPIDES’Bacchantes.

A FLAMING shaft of light fell through the west window on the starry flowers and opening buds of masses of fieldaster; fell, flushing the quiet corner where the Diadumenus of Polycletus stood, calm in repose after toil, among the works of poets, artists, sages that, living, saw him bind upon his head the diadem of victory. It touched the open book over which an aged figure bent in scholarly absorption. He raised his eyes, surprised to see warm color where only sombre gray had been, and went slowly to the window. The sun was setting behind angry clouds heaped against the horizon, and through a rift shone infinite depths of lucid color, hue over hue. Over everything lay a tint of rose, rose in the very shadows on the grass, rose in the little pools that the over-fed earth could not drink in, rose on the dying heads of bloom that clung to the bushes of hydrangea, rose on the faces of the children who romped in the brimming lane. As he looked, his pallid face flushed too with rose. But a moment, and it died away from cloud and tree and open sky, and it was autumn, — by the fallen leaves that already lay thick upon the grass, by the keen touch in the clear air, by the purple mist that was rolling up from the distant valley. Kore, gathering flowers in a meadow of soft grass, roses, and crocus and fair violets and flags and hyacinths, the golden-haired goddess of summer has become Persephone, the sombre-hooded goddess of death. And it was autumn in his heart; it was not with him as with those merry shrill-voiced children, careless alike of glow and of eclipse.

“Grant them with feet so light to pass through life!” he murmured, and turned slowly back to his text. A sudden wave of weariness came over him. The quiet room, that had been filled with calm as of a cloistered court through whose pillared archways the clamor of the street comes softened, seemed to him now a place of deadening quiet cut off from living issues. On the narrow pathways of the ancient world he had found peace—peace that gives riches. But was not the tranquillity of his scholarly habit the selfish detachment of the shirker? Should not his strength have gone to help rear the temple of the world’s growing righteousness? And around him, as with tangible presences, pressed the struggling figures of a groaning world, banishing the images of that serene antiquity.

In the fast-waning light, his glance fell where, above the beloved books, Apollo gazed in godlike calm on his neighbor, the Hebrew prophet, bowed under the fierce anger of the Lord. And a fancy seized him that he strove to make clear to himself, those two ideal figures coming to typify for him two permanent human types. Apollo whose cithera sounds sweetly beneath the golden quill as he goes, wrapped round in golden haze, amid the glitter of dancing feet, and the pleasant sound of pipes — eternally a youth, what shall his joyous perfection know of brooding sorrow? And that other on whom Apollo looks so uncomprehendingly — his eyes are a fountain of tears because his people “have forsaken the fountain of living waters and hewed them out cisterns, broken cisterns, that can hold no water,” and his soul, filled with the beauty of righteousness, turns from the beauty of perfected human powers.

He smiled to think that so fantastical a mood could come to him because a starry-eyed youth had sat with him an hour, a young man whose childhood he had watched among flowers and animals and all care-free things. Now he too had seen the face of the WorldSorrow where “she waits for all men born,” and had gone with joy to meet that pensive figure, with the faith of youth, that the lever of his boundless sympathy should lift her burden. — Ah, those divine far-off days of his own youth when he had walked bare-headed on fair spring evenings beneath the flowering maples, dreaming of a world made better for his presence. He remembered the scene in Paradise Lost, when, to God’s plea for a ransom for man’s fate, the answer came: “On me let thine anger fall. . . . On me let Death wreak all his rage.”

With a thrill he reflected that every lofty-souled youth is a savior of the world, and would take unto his breast with joy the darts of hate and suffering if so he might do service in his death. And the tragedy of man became to him infinitely greater than that of the Miltonic figure who died with the foreknowledge of the efficacy of his sacrifice, that

The great tragedy is to see the glorious vision fade, to wear out body and mind and soul to serve a mankind that does not want one’s service, to see new heights open beyond one’s reach, heights unscalable because one’s aspiration has found bounds and there will be “never glad confident morning again.”

In his room at college there had hung over his table, as a motto, “Justice is like the Kingdom of God — it is not without us as a fact, it is within us as a great yearning.” In those days of great yearning for the Kingdom of God, he had felt that the service of all great souls together forever should establish it at last as a fact without us; that though it were not upon any to finish the work, yet none was free to withdraw his hand. Now he knew that the work could never be finished, but that it was the eternal mission of youth never to let that yearning die.

He remembered now with a smile of tolerance, both for her and for himself, his contempt for the doctrine preached and followed by the most inspiring figure he had ever known — a woman who believed in the uplifting of the world and the accomplishment of its destiny through the conscious perfection of each individual; who believed that, besides the world of doing, there is also a world of being, of becoming perfectly whatever thing Nature had intended each to be. In those days he had seen only the selfish side of such a doctrine, had thought that the bearing of each others’ burdens, the lessening of material suffering, the sowing widecast of the seeds of sympathy and love, was the only object of human existence. When he had read in the Memorabilia, “The best man is he who most tries to perfect himself, and the happiest man is he who most feels that he is perfecting himself,” he had felt that if that apotheosis of selfishness was the highest point that could be reached by the greatest sage of the Hellenic world, he would have none of it. The greatness of our modern world seemed to him to lie in this, that economic science was fixing and making practicable those maxims of mutual help that are the basis of every system of moral philosophy. He could have no patience with the sentiment, “C’est le bonheur des hommes quand ils pensent juste.” Who could find happiness in the beauty of right thinking with the cry of the children in his ears?

In the ceiling of the little room where he had spent his boyhood, amid the scrolls and arabesques of the fashion then in vogue, there was moulded in relief a head. The winter sun used to creep in upon him as he sat thrilling at Diomedes, when before him the helmeted Trojans fell, and darkness veiled their eyes, and their arms resounded upon them; weeping with Andromache when the noble soul of crest-tossing Hector left his limbs, bewailing its destiny, relinquishing vigor and youth. The glory that was Greece brooded over him in that quiet room, and the Gnidian Venus was not more lovely to her creator than that plaster head to his eager soul. From the straight brow and placid mouth the beauty of Minerva shone upon him, — the divinity of wisdom. Later at school his reading of the Homeric lines had brought the crashing tumult of battle into the droning class, heavy with syntax, and the kindly tutor had quietly said, “Once in a lifetime there comes a boy who feels Greek like that.” He was one of those on whom detail and incident flashed sharply, and so his interpretations had all the vigor of a creative impulse, for did he not give back life again to those long dead? Yet he had fought as a temptation these things that, were taking him from the useful things, the practical things, the things that should make men happier and better. He had denied the need to know what Zeno taught in Elea, denied the right to lose one’s self in scholastic speculation about that which is, and that which is not. With the over-emphatic dogmatism of insistent youth he had put away — from a world that needed action, not thinking—those serene lovers of ideas, those thinkers to whom ideas were as palpable objects to be handled like the demonstrable symbols of mathematics. Not theories of æsthetics with the philosophers, that men may think beautifully, but theories of prosperity with the economists,that men may act justly.

One day he had paused to weigh the words of Sir Thomas Browne, the wise, the genial: “There are infirmities not only of body but of soul, and fortunes which do require the merciful hand of our abilities. It is no greater charity to clothe his body than to apparel the nakedness of his soul. . . . To this (as calling myself a scholar) I am obliged by the duty of my condition. I make not therefore my head a grave, but a treasury, of knowledge. I intend no monopoly, but a community in learning. I study not for my own sake only, but for theirs that study not for themselves.” By an inexplicable association there had flashed to him—to abide with him ever after — the significance of the scene in Socrates’ school-room, where the slave of Meno, though ignorant of geometry, proves by constructing a square that what we call learning is in fact reminiscence; that innate opinions, stirred up by a process of questioning, develop the order of conscious reasoning. Truly, he had thought, we take out of life and its expression in literature exactly what we bring. In this very real sense we learn nothing, but merely recover out of ourselves, through our own gradual conquering of new heights, with everopening broader vistas, what is in us to apprehend. What then could be the best service except to bring to its perfection whatever is hidden in the mind and heart? The world needs many kinds of service, and there is also a niche for such as he, with his wistful humanist consciousness of so much to know. Each gift is its own justification — its denial, the unpardonable sin. Happiness, then, would be the beneficent use of consciously developed powers. Everything can be brought from without, — all things that feed and clothe and warm, — but Thought, “sophia,” Wisdom, — that is a thing that must grow up in her own temple, guarded and untouched. Sore need there is today of priests that shall keep pure and bright the fires of her altars.

He was often told by Apostles of the Useful, whose sons should know no dead languages, no dead philosophies, that it was commonly known that the middle classes to-day “lived” better than did the nobles of Elizabeth’s time. Undoubtedly, more people had reached the point of doing nothing more hours of the day. But was it otium cum dignitate? Was it not rather leisure with great weariness, with greater and greater leaning on the pleasure that comes from without, with ever-weakening reliance on the infinite pleasures of right thinking? In a moment of weariness at the end of a long life a sage had found true wisdom in keeping the heart and soul aloof from over-subtle wits, but there was little danger that the practical modern world would court unwisdom by excessive cultivation of the powers of speculation.

He had long since ceased questioning the practical value of his work, but now he drew out and reread a letter from a man come to great honor in a distant land.

“Whatever I have been able to do has been to satisfy your hope of me. To all who came to you, you gave one serene standpoint, that by reducing to intelligible form the infinite number of impressions that crowd in upon us from the world of thought and feeling, we might reach Cosmos in the old sense, beautiful order — order that is the mother of effective work. So that, diverse as be our fields in the world’s work, I am only following the light you gave me, without losing myself on the bypaths of useless and self-conscious questioning.”

A crackle of flames, a glow on wall and ceiling from the lighted fire. The imprisoned sweetness of the logs gave its pungent perfume to increase the joy of his mood. His hand sought one of the old favorites. All the peace of the myriads that had found happiness in those pages came over him.

“So I, and Eucritus, and the fair Amyntichus, turned aside into the house of Phrasidamus, and lay down with delight in beds of sweet tamarisk and fresh cuttings from the vines, strewed on the ground. Many poplars and elm-trees were waving over our heads, and not far off the running of the sacred water from the cave of the nymphs warbled to us; in the shimmering branches the sun-burnt grasshoppers were busy with their talk, and from afar the little owl cried softly out of the tangled thorns of the blackberry; the larks were singing and the hedgebirds, and the turtle-dove moaned; the bees flew round and round the fountains, murmuring softly; the scent of late summer and of the fall of the year was everywhere; the pears fell from the trees at our feet, and apples in number rolled down at our sides, and the young plum-trees were bent to the earth with the weight of their fruit. The wax, four years old, was loosed from the heads of the wine-jars. O nymphs of Castalia, who dwell on the steeps of Parnassus, tell me, I pray, was it a draught like this that the aged Chiron placed before Hercules, in the stony cave of Pholus? Was it nectar like this that made the mighty shepherd on Anapus’s shore, Polyphemus, who flung rocks upon Ulysses’ ships, dance among his sheepfolds? Such a cup ye poured out on the altar of Demeter, who presides over the threshingfloor. May it be mine, once more, to dig my big winnowing-fan through her heaps of corn; and may I see her smile upon me, holding poppies and handfuls of corn in her two hands!”

So many with such joy had trod that path. What should he do but follow?