At the end of the year James came home, more quiet and manly than he had ever been known before—so handsome with his sunburnt face, and his keen, dark eyes and glossy curls, that half the girls in the front gallery lost their hearts the first Sunday he appeared in church. He was tender as a woman to his mother, and followed her with his eyes, like a lover, wherever she went: he made due and manly acknowledgments to his father, but declared his fixed and settled intention to abide by the profession he had chosen; and he brought home all sorts of strange foreign gifts for every member of the household. Candace was glorified with a flaming red and yellow turban of Moorish stuff from Mogadore, together with a pair of gorgeous yellow morocco slippers with peaked toes, which, though there appeared no call to wear them in her common course of life, she would put on her fat feet, and contemplate with daily satisfaction. She became increasingly strengthened thereby in the conviction that the angels who had their hooks in Massa James’s jacket were already beginning to shorten the line.
CHAPTER VIII.
WHICH TREATS OF ROMANCE.
There is no word in the English language more unceremoniously and indefinitely kicked and cuffed about, by what are called sensible people, than the word romance. When Mr. Smith or Mr. Stubbs has brought every wheel of life into such range and order that it is one steady, daily grind—when they themselves have come into the habits and attitudes of the patient donkey, who steps round and round the endlessly turning wheel of some machinery—then they fancy that they have gotten ‘the victory that overcometh the world.’
All but this dead grind, and the dollars that come through the mill, is by them thrown into one waste ‘catch-all’ and labelled romance. Perhaps there was a time in Mr. Smith’s youth—he remembers it now—when he read poetry, when his cheek was wet with strange tears, when a little song, ground out by an organ-grinder in the street, had power to set his heart beating and bring a mist before his eyes. Ah, in those days he had a vision!—a pair of soft eyes stirred him strangely; a little weak hand was laid on his manhood, and it shook and trembled; and then came all the humility, the aspiration, the fear, the hope, the high desire, the troubling of the waters by the descending angel of love—and a little more and Mr. Smith might have become a man, instead of a banker! He thinks of it now, sometimes, as he looks across the fireplace after dinner and sees Mrs. Smith asleep, innocently shaking the bouquet of pink bows and Brussels lace that waves over her placid red countenance.
Mrs. Smith wasn’t his first love, nor, indeed, any love at all; but they agreed reasonably well. And as for poor Nellie—well, she is dead and buried—all that was stuff and romance. Mrs. Smith’s money set him up in business, and Mrs. Smith is a capital manager, and he thanks God that he isn’t romantic, and tells Smith Junior not to read poetry or novels, and to stick to realities.
‘This is the victory that overcometh the world,’—to learn to be fat and tranquil, to have warm fires and good dinners, to hang your hat on the same peg at the same hour every day, to sleep soundly all night, and never to trouble your head with a thought or imagining beyond.
But there are many people besides Mr. Smith who have gained this victory—who have strangled their higher nature and buried it, and built over its grave the structure of their life, the better to keep it down.
The fascinating Mrs. T., whose life is a whirl between ball and opera, point-lace, diamonds, and schemings of admiration for herself, and of establishments for her daughters—there was a time, if you will believe me, when that proud, worldly woman was so humbled, under the touch of some mighty power, that she actually thought herself capable of being a poor man’s wife. She thought she could live in a little, mean house, on no-matter-what-street, with one servant, and make her own bonnets, and mend her own clothes, and sweep the house Mondays, while Betty washed—all for what? All because she thought that there was a man so noble, so true, so good, so high-minded, that to live with him in poverty, to be guided by him in adversity, to lean on him in every rough place of life, was a something nobler, better, purer, more satisfying, than French laces, opera-boxes, and even Madame Roget’s best gowns.
Unfortunately, this was all romance—there was no such man. There was, indeed, a person of very common, self-interested aims and worldly nature, whom she had credited at sight with an unlimited draft on all her better nature; and when the hour of discovery came, she awoke from her dream with a start and a laugh, and ever since has despised aspiration, and been busy with the realities of life, and feeds poor little Mary Jane, who sits by her in the opera-box there, with all the fruit which she has picked from the bitter tree of knowledge. There is no end of the epigrams and witticisms which she can throw out, this elegant Mrs. T., on people who marry for love, lead prosy, worky lives, and put on their best cap with pink ribbons for Sunday. ‘Mary Jane shall never make a fool of herself;’ but, even as she speaks, poor Mary Jane’s heart is dying within her at the vanishing of a pair of whiskers from an opposite box, which whiskers the poor little fool has credited with a résumé drawn from her own imaginings of all that is grandest and most heroic, most worshipful in man. By-and-by, when Mrs. T. finds the glamour has fallen on her daughter, she wonders; she has ‘tried to keep novels out of the girl’s way—where did she get these notions?’
All prosaic, and all bitter, disenchanted people talk as if poets and novelists made romance. They do—just as much as craters make volcanoes—no more. What is romance? whence comes it? Plato spoke to the subject wisely, in his quaint way, some two thousand years ago, when he said, ‘Man’s soul, in a former state, was winged and soared among the gods; and so it comes to pass, that, in this life, when the soul, by the power of music or poetry, or the sight of beauty, hath her remembrance quickened, forthwith there is a struggling and a pricking pain as of wings trying to come forth—even as children in teething.’ And if an old heathen, two thousand years ago, discoursed thus gravely of the romantic part of our nature, whence comes it that in Christian lands we think in so pagan a way of it, and turn the whole care of it to ballad-makers, romancers, and opera-singers?
Let us look up in fear and reverence, and say, ‘God is the great maker of romance. He, from whose hand came man and woman—He, who strung the great harp of Existence with all its wild and wonderful and manifold chords, and attuned them to one another—He is the great Poet of life.’ Every impulse of beauty, of heroism, and every craving for purer love, fairer perfection, nobler type and style of being than that which closes like a prison-house around us, in the dim, daily walk of life, is God’s breath, God’s impulse, God’s reminder to the soul that there is something higher, sweeter, purer, yet to be attained.
Therefore, man or woman, when thy ideal is shattered—as shattered a thousand times it must be; when the vision fades, the rapture burns out, turn not away in scepticism and bitterness, saying, ‘There is nothing better for a man than that he should eat and drink,’ but rather cherish the revelations of those hours as prophecies and fore-shadowings of something real and possible, yet to be attained in the manhood of immortality. The scoffing spirit that laughs at romance, is an apple of the Devil’s own handing from the bitter tree of knowledge;—it opens the eyes only to see eternal nakedness.
If ever you have had a romantic, uncalculating friendship—a boundless worship and belief in some hero of your soul; if ever you have so loved, that all cold prudence, all selfish worldly considerations, have gone down like drift-wood before a river flooded with new rain from heaven, so that you even forgot yourself, and were ready to cast your whole being into the chasm of existence, as an offering before the feet of another, and all for nothing—if you awoke bitterly betrayed and deceived, still give thanks to God that you have had one glimpse of heaven. The door now shut will open again. Rejoice that the noblest capability of your eternal inheritance has been made known to you; treasure it, as the highest honour of your being, that ever you could so feel—that so divine a guest ever possessed your soul.
By such experiences are we taught the pathos, the sacredness of life; and if we use them wisely, our eyes will ever after be anointed to see what poems, what romances, what sublime tragedies