Life Without and Life Within; or, Reviews, Narratives, Essays, and Poems.
narrative, in the deep tones of cold anguish, she cries,--
Immortals, you who through your bright days
Live in bliss, throned on clouds ever renewed,
Only for this have you all these years
Kept me separate from men, and so near yourselves,
Given me the child-like employment to cherish the fires on your altars,
That my soul might, in like pious clearness,
Be ever aspiring towards your abodes,
That only later and deeper I might feel
The anguish and horror that have darkened my house.
O Stranger,
Speak to me of the unhappy one, tell me of Orestes.
ORESTES.
O, might I speak of his death!
Vehement flew up from the reeking blood
His Mother's Soul!
And called to the ancient daughters of Night,
Let not the parricide escape;
Pursue that man of crime; he is yours!
They obey, their hollow eyes
Darting about with vulture eagerness;
They stir themselves in their black dens,
From corners their companions
Doubt and Remorse steal out to join them.
Before them roll the mists of Acheron;
In its cloudy volumes rolls
The eternal contemplation of the irrevocable
Permitted now in their love of ruin they tread
The beautiful fields of a God-planted earth,
From which they had long been banished by an early curse,
Their swift feet follow the fugitive,
They pause never except to gather more power to dismay.
IPHIGENIA.
Unhappy man, thou art in like manner tortured,
And feelest truly what he, the poor fugitive, suffers!
ORESTES.
What sayest thou? what meanest by "like manner"?
IPHIGENIA.
Thee, too, the weight of a fratricide crushes to earth; the tale
I had from thy younger brother.
ORESTES.
I cannot suffer that thou, great soul,
Shouldst be deceived by a false tale;
A web of lies let stranger weave for stranger
Subtle with many thoughts, accustomed to craft,
Guarding his feet against a trap.
But between us
Be Truth;--
I am Orestes,--and this guilty head
Bent downward to the grave seeks death;
In any shape were he welcome.
Whoever thou art, I wish thou mightst be saved,
Thou and my friend; for myself I wish it not.
Thou seem'st against thy will here to remain;
Invent a way to fly and leave me here.
Like all pure productions of genius, this may be injured by the
slightest change, and I dare not flatter myself that the English words
give an idea of the heroic dignity expressed in the cadence of the
original, by the words
"Twischen uns
Seg Wahrheit!
Ich bin Orest!"
where the Greek seems to fold his robe around him in the full strength
of classic manhood, prepared for worst and best, not like a cold Stoic,
but a hero, who can feel all, know all, and endure all. The name of two
syllables in the German is much more forcible for the pause, than the
three-syllable Orestes.
"Between us
Be Truth,"
is fine to my ear, on which our word Truth also pauses with a large
dignity.
The scenes go on more and more full of breathing beauty. The lovely joy
of Iphigenia, the meditative softness with which the religiously
educated mind perpetually draws the inference from the most agitating
events, impress us more and more. At last the hour of trial comes. She
is to keep off Thoas by a cunningly devised tale, while her brother and
Pylades contrive their escape. Orestes has received to his heart the
sister long lost, divinely restored, and in the embrace the curse falls
from him, he is well, and Pylades more than happy. The ship waits to
carry her to the palace home she is to free from a century's weight of
pollution; and already the blue heavens of her adored Greece gleam
before her fancy.
But, O, the step before all this can be obtained;--to deceive Thoas, a
savage and a tyrant indeed, but long her protector,--in his barbarous
fashion, her benefactor! How can she buy life, happiness, or even the
safety of those dear ones at such a price?
"Woe,
O Woe upon the lie! It frees not the breast,
Like the true-spoken word; it comforts not, but tortures
Him who devised it, and returns,
An arrow once let fly, God-repelled, back,
On the bosom of the Archer!"
O, must I then resign the silent hope
Which gave a beauty to my loneliness?
Must the curse dwell forever, and our race
Never be raised to life by a new blessing?
All things decay, the fairest bliss is transient,
The powers most full of life grow faint at last;
And shall a curse alone boast an incessant life?
Then have I idly hoped that here kept pure,
So strangely severed from my kindred's lot,
I was designed to come at the right moment,
And with pure hand and heart to expiate
The many sins that stain my native home.
To lie, to steal the sacred image!
Olympians, let not these vulture talons
Seize on the tender breast. O, save me,
And save your image in my soul!
Within my ears resounds the ancient lay,--
I had forgotten it, and would so gladly,--
The lay of the Parcae, which they awful sung;
As Tantalus fell from his golden seat
They suffered with the noble friend. Wrathful
Was their heart, and fearful was the song.
In our childhood the nurse was wont to sing it
To me, and my brother and sister. I marked it well.
Then follows the sublime song of the Parcae, well known through
translations.
But Iphigenia is not a victim of fate, for she listens steadfastly to
the god in her breast. Her lips are incapable of subterfuge. She obeys
her own heart, tells all to the king, calls up his better nature, wins,
hallows, and purifies all around her, till the heaven-prepared way is
cleared by the obedient child of heaven, and the great trespass of
Tantalus cancelled by a woman's reliance on the voice of her innocent
soul.
If it be not possible to enhance the beauty with which such ideal
figures as the Iphigenia and the Antigone appeared to the Greek mind,
yet Goethe has unfolded a part of the life of this being, unknown
elsewhere in the records of literature. The character of the priestess,
the full beauty of virgin womanhood, solitary, but tender, wise and
innocent, sensitive and self-collected, sweet as spring, dignified as
becomes the chosen servant of God, each gesture and word of deep and
delicate significance,--where else is such a picture to be found?
It was not the courtier, nor the man of the world, nor the connoisseur,
nor the friend of Mephistopheles, nor Wilhelm the Master, nor Egmont the
generous, free liver, that saw Iphigenia in the world of spirits, but
Goethe, in his first-born glory; G[o]ethe, the poet; Goethe,
designed to be the brightest star in a new constellation. Let us not, in
surveying his works and life, abide with him too much in the suburbs and
outskirts of himself. Let us enter into his higher tendency, thank him
for such angels as Iphigenia, whose simple truth mocks at all his wise
"Beschrankungen," and hope the hour when, girt about with many such, he
will confess, contrary to his opinion, given in his latest days, that it
is well worth while to live seventy years, if only to find that they are
nothing in the sight of God.
THOMAS HOOD.
Now almost the last light has gone out of the galaxy that made the first
thirty years of this age so bright. And the dynasty that now reigns over
the world of wit and poetry is poor and pale, indeed, in comparison.
We are anxious to pour due libations to the departed; we need not
economize our wine; it will not be so often needed now.
Hood has closed the most fatiguing career in the world--that of a
professed wit; and we may say with deeper feeling than of others who
shuffle off the load of care, May he rest in peace! The fatigues of a
conqueror, a missionary preacher, even of an active philanthropist, like
Howard, are nothing to those of a professed wit. Bad enough is it when
he is only a man of society, by whom every one expects to be enlivened
and relieved; who can never talk gravely in a corner, without those
around observing that he must have heard some bad news to be so out of
spirits; who can never make a simple remark, while eating a peaceful
dinner, without the table being set in a roar of laughter, as when
Sheridan, on such an occasion, opened his lips for the first time to say
that "he liked currant jelly." For these unhappy men there are no
intervals of social repose, no long silences fed by the mere feeling of
sympathy or gently entertained by observation, no warm quietude in the
mild liveries of green or brown, for the world has made up its mind that
motley is their only wear, and teases them to jingle their bells
forever.
But far worse is it when the professed wit is also by profession a
writer, and finds himself obliged to coin for bread those jokes which,
in the frolic exuberance of youth, he so easily coined for fun. We can
conceive of no existence more cruel, so tormenting, and at the same time
so dull. We hear that Hood was forever behindhand with his promises to
publishers; no wonder! But when we hear that he, in consequence, lost a
great part of the gains of his hard life, and was, as a result, harassed
by other cares, we cannot mourn to lose him, if,
"After life's fitful fever, he sleeps well;"
or if, as our deeper knowledge leads us to hope, he is now engaged in a
better life, where his fancies shall take their natural place, and
flicker like light on the surface of a profound and full stream flowing
betwixt rich and peaceful shores, such as, no less than the drawbacks
upon his earthly existence, are indicated in the following
SONNET.
The curse of Adam, the old curse of all,
Though I inherit in this feverish life
Of worldly toil, vain wishes, and hard strife,
And fruitless thought in care's eternal thrall,
Yet more sweet honey than of bitter gall
I taste through thee, my Eva, my sweet wife.
Then what was Man's lost Paradise? how rife
Of bliss, since love is with him in his fall!
Such as our own pure passion still might frame
Of this fair earth and its delightful bowers,
If no fell sorrow, like the serpent, came
To trail its venom o'er the sweetest flowers;
But, O! as many and such tears are ours
As only should be shed for guilt and shame.
In Hood, as in all true wits, the smile lightens on the verge of a tear.
True wit and humor show that exquisite sensibility to the relations of
life, that fine perception as to slight tokens of its fearful, hopeless
mysteries, which imply pathos to a still higher degree than mirth.
Hood knew and welcomed the dower which nature gave him at his birth,
when he wrote thus:--
All things are touched with melancholy
Born of the secret soul's mistrust,
To feel her fair ethereal wings
Weighed down with vile, degraded dust.
Even the bright extremes of joy
Bring on conclusions of disgust,
Like the sweet blossoms of the May,
Whose fragrance ends in must.
O, give her, then, her tribute just,
Her sighs and tears and musings holy;
There is no music in the life
That sounds with idiot laughter solely;
There's not a string attuned to mirth,
But has its chord in melancholy.
Hood was true to this vow of acceptance. He vowed to accept willingly
the pains as well as joys of life for what they could teach. Therefore,
years expanded and enlarged his sympathies, and gave to his lightest