Heart of Man by George Edward Woodberry
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George Edward Woodberry >> Heart of Man
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We spoke of some illustrations of this, the scene before us lending
atmosphere and suggestion to the talk, and enforcing it like nature's
comment. "But," I continued, "what I had in mind to say was concerning
our dead selves. The old phrase, _life is a continual dying_, is true,
and, once gone life is death; and sometimes so much of it has been
gathered to the past, such definite portions of it are laid away, that
we can look, if we will, in the lake of memory on the faces of the dead
selves which once we were." Instinctively we looked on the mystic
glamour in the low valley, as on that Lake of the Dead Souls I spoke of.
I went on after the natural pause,--I could not help it,--"'I was a
different man, then,' we say, with a touch of sadness, perhaps, but
often with better thoughts, and always with a feeling of mystery. How
old is the youth before he is aware of the fading away of vitality out
of early beliefs? and then he feels the quick passing of the enthusiasms
of opening life, as one cause after another, one hero, one poet,
disclosing the great interests of life, in turn engages his heart. As
time goes on, and life comes out in its true perspective, one thing with
another, and he discovers the incompleteness of single elements of
ardour in the whole of life, and also the defects of wisdom, art, and
action in those books and men that had won his full confidence and what
he called perfect allegiance, there comes often a moment of pause, as if
this growth had in it some thing irrational and derogatory. The thinkers
whose words of light and leading were the precious truth itself, the
poets he idolized, the elders he trusted, fall away, and others stand in
their places, who better appeal to his older mind, his finer impulses,
his sounder judgment; and what true validity can these last have in the
end? After a decade he can almost see his youth as something dead, his
early manhood as something that will die. The poet, especially, who
gives expression to himself, and puts his life at its period into a
book, feels, as each work drops from his hand, that it is a portion of a
self that is dead, though it was life in the making; and so with the
embodiments of life in action, the man looks back on past greatness,
past romance; for all life, working itself out--desire into
achievement--dies to the man. Vital life lies always before. It is a
strange thought that only by the death of what we now are, can we enter
into our own hopes and victories; that it is by the slaying of the self
which now is that the higher self takes life; that it is through such
self-destruction that we live. The intermediate state seems a waste, and
the knowledge that it is intermediate seems to impair its value; but
this is the way ordained by which we must live, and such is life's magic
that in each stage, from childhood to age, it is lived with trustfulness
in itself. It is needful only, however much we outlive, to live more and
better, and through all to remain true to the high causes, the faithful
loves, the sacred impulses, that have given our imperfect life of the
past whatever of nobility it may have; so shall death forever open into
life. But," I ended, lifting my moist eyes toward the sweep of the dark
slopes, "the wind blows, and leaves the mystic to inquire whence and
whither, the wild shrub blossoms and only the poet is troubled to excuse
its beauty, and happy is he who can live without too much thought of
life."
The sheen of the river had died out, and the creek was only a common
stream lit with the high moon, and bordered far off to the west with the
low indistinguishable country. We drove in silence down the valley along
that shelf of road under the land. The broken bluffs on the left rose
into immense slopes of rolling prairie, and magnified by the night
atmosphere into majesty, heavy with deep darkness in their folds, stood
massive and vast in the dusk moonlight, like a sea. Then fell on me and
grew with strange insistence the sense of this everlasting mounded power
of the earth, like the rise and subsidence of ocean in an element of
slower and more awful might. The solid waste began to loom and lift,
almost with the blind internal strength of the whirl of the planet
through space. Deeper into the shadow we plunged with every echoing
tread of the hoofs. The lair of some mysterious presence was about
us,--unshaped, unrealized, as in some place of antique awe before the
time of temples or of gods. It seemed a corporal thing. If I stretched
out my hand I should touch it like the ground. It came out from all the
black rifts, it rolled from the moonlit distinct heights, it filled the
chill air,--it was an envelopment--it would be an engulfment--horse and
man we were sinking in it. Then it was--most in all my days--that I felt
dense mystery overwhelming me. "O infinite earth," I thought, "our
unknowing mother, our unknowing grave!"--"What is it?" he said, feeling
my wrist straighten where it lay on his shoulder, and the tremor and the
hand seeking him. Was it a premonition? "Nothing," I answered, and did
not tell him; but he began to cheer me with lighter talk, and win me
back to the levels of life, and under his sensitive and loving ways, the
excitement of the ride died out, and an hour later, after midnight, we
drove into the silent town. We put the ponies up, praising them with
hand and voice; and then he took both my hands in his and said, "The
truest thing you ever said was what you wrote me, 'We live each others'
lives.'" That was his thanks.
O brave and tender heart, now long lapped under the green fold of that
far prairie in his niche of earth! How often I see him as in our first
days,--the boy of seventeen summers, lying on his elbows over his
Thackeray, reading by the pictures, and laughing to himself hour after
hour; and many a prairie adventure, many happy days and fortunate
moments come back, with the strength and bloom of youth, as I recall the
manly figure, the sensitive and eager face, and all his resolute ways.
Who of us knows what he is to another? He could not know how much his
life entered into mine, and still enters. But he is dead; and I have set
down these weak and stammering words of the life we began together, not
for the strong and sure, but for those who, though true hearts, find it
hard to lay hold of truth, and doubt themselves, in the hope that some
younger comrade of life, though unknown, may make them of avail and find
in them the dark leading of a hand.
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