Sister Dolorosa, and Posthumous Fame
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"I could if they were as widely read as they should be." He appeared emboldened by his hearer's gentleness. "But, to confess the truth, I have not been accepted by my age. That, indeed, should give me no pain, since I have not written for it, but for the great future to which alone I look for my fame."
"Then why not look to it for your monument also?"
"Ah, sir!" he cried, "there are so many poets in the world that I might be entirely overlooked by posterity, did there not descend to it some sign that I was held in honour by my own generation."
"Have you never noticed," he continued, with more earnestness, "that when strangers visit a cemetery they pay no attention to the thousands of little head-stones that lie scattered close to the ground, but hunt out the highest monuments, to learn in whose honour they were erected? Have you never heard them exclaim: 'Yonder is a great monument! A great man must be buried there. Let us go and find out who he was and what he did to be so celebrated.' O sir, you and I know that this is a poor way of reasoning, since the greatest monuments are not always set over the greatest men. Still the custom has wrought its good effects, and splendid memorials do serve to make known in years to come those whom they commemorate, by inciting posterity to search for their actions or revive their thoughts. I warrant you the mere bust of Homer – "
"You are not mentioning yourself in the same breath with Homer, I hope," said Nicholas, with great good-humour.
"My poems are as dear to me as Homer's were to him," replied the poet, his eyes filling.
"What if you are forgotten? Is it not enough for the poet to have lived for the sake of beauty?"
"No!" he cried passionately. "What you say is a miserable error. For the very proof of the poet's vocation is in creating the beautiful. But how know he has created it? By his own mind? Alas, the poet's mind tells him only what is beautiful to him! It is by fame that he knows it – fame, the gratitude of men for the beauty he has revealed to them! What is so sweet, then, as the knowledge that fame has come to him already, or surely awaits him after he is dead?"
"We labour under some confusion of ideas, I fear," said Nicholas, "and, besides, are losing time. What kind of mon – "
"That I leave to you," interrupted the poet. "Only, I should like my monument to be beautiful. Ah, if you but knew how all through this poor life of mine I have loved the beautiful! Never, never have I drawn near it in any visible form without almost holding my breath as though I were looking deep, deep into God's opened eyes. But it was of the epitaph I wished to speak."
Hereupon, with a deeper flush, he drew from a large inside breast-pocket, that seemed to have been made for the purpose, a worn duodecimo volume, and fell to turning the much-fingered pages.
"This," he murmured fondly, without looking up, "is the complete collection of my poems."
"Indeed!" exclaimed Nicholas, with deep compassion.
"Yes, my complete collection. I have written a great deal more, and should have liked to publish all that I have written. But it was necessary to select, and I have included here only what it was intolerable to see wasted. There is nothing I value more than a group of elegiac poems, which every single member of my large family – who are fine critics – and all my friends, pronounce very beautiful. I think it would be a good idea to inscribe a selection from one on my monument, since those who read the selection would wish to read the entire poem, and those who read the entire poem would wish to read the entire collection. I shall now favour you with these elegies."
"I should be happy to hear them; but my time!" said Nicholas courteously. "The living are too impatient to wait on me; the dead too patient to be defrauded."
"Surely you would not refuse to hear one of them," exclaimed the poet, his eyes flashing.
"Read one, by all means." Nicholas seated himself on a monumental lamb.
The poet passed one hand gently across his forehead, as though to brush away the stroke of rudeness; then, fixing upon Nicholas a look of infinite remoteness, he read as follows: —
"He suffered, but he murmured not;To every storm he bared his breast;He asked but for the common lot —To be a man among the rest."Here lies he now – ""If you ask but for the common lot," interrupted Nicholas, "you should rest content to be forgotten."
But before the poet could reply, a loud knock caused him to flap the leaves of the "Complete Collection" together with one hand, while with the other he gathered the tails of his long coat about him, as though preparing to pass through some difficult aperture. The exaltation of his mood, however, still showed itself in the look and tone of proud condescension with which he said to Nicholas —
"Permit me to retire at once by some private passway."
Nicholas led him to a door in the rear of the shop, and there, with a smile and a tear, stood for a moment watching the precipitate figure of the retreating bard, who suddenly paused when disappearing and tore open the breast of his coat to assure himself that his beloved elegies were resting safe across his heart.
The second visitor was of another sort. He hobbled on a cork leg, but inexorably disciplined the fleshly one into old-time firmness and precision. A faded military cloak draped his stalwart figure. Part of one bushy grey eyebrow had been chipped away by the same sword-cut that left its scar across his battle-beaten face.
"I have come to speak with you about my monument," he said, in a gruff voice that seemed to issue from the mouth of a rusty cannon. "Those of my old comrades that did not fall at my side are dead. My wife died long ago, and my little children. I am old and forgotten. It is a time of peace. There's not a boy who will now listen to me while I tell of my campaigns. I live alone. Were I to die to-morrow my grave might not have so much as a head-stone. It might be taken for that of a coward. Make me a monument for a true soldier."
"Your grateful country will do that," said Nicholas.
"Ha!" exclaimed the veteran, whom the shock of battle had made deaf long ago.
"Your country," shouted Nicholas, close to his ear, "your country – will erect a monument – to your memory."
"My country!" The words were shot out with a reverberating, melancholy boom. "My country will do no such a thing. How many millions of soldiers have fallen on her battle-fields! Where are their monuments? They would make her one vast cemetery."
"But is it not enough for you to have been a true soldier? Why wish to be known and remembered for it?"
"I know I do not wish to be forgotten," he replied simply. "I know I take pleasure in the thought that long after I am forgotten there will be a tongue in my monument to cry out to every passing stranger, 'Here lies the body of a true soldier.' It is a great thing to be brave!"
"Is, then, this monument to be erected in honour of bravery, or of yourself?"
"There is no difference," said the veteran bluntly. "Bravery is myself."
"It is bravery," he continued, in husky tones, and with, a mist gathering in his eyes that made him wink as though he were trying to see through the smoke of battle – "it is bravery that I see most clearly in the character of God. What would become of us if He were a coward? I serve Him as my brave Commander; and though I am stationed far from Him and may be faint and sorely wounded, I know that He is somewhere on the battle-field, and that I shall see Him at last, approaching me as He moves up and down among the ranks."
"But you say that your country does not notice you – that you have no friends; do you, then, feel no resentment?"
"None, none," he answered quickly, though his head dropped on his bosom.
"And you wish to be remembered by a world that is willing to forget you?"
He lifted his head proudly. "There are many true men in the world," he said, "and it has much to think of. I owe it all I can give, all I can bequeath; and I can bequeath it nothing but the memory of a true man."
One day, not long after this, there came into the workshop of Nicholas a venerable man of the gravest, sweetest, and most scholarly aspect, who spoke not a word until he had led Nicholas to the front window and pointed a trembling finger at a distant church spire.
"You see yon spire?" he said. "It almost pierces the clouds. In the church beneath I have preached to men and women for nearly fifty years. Many that I have christened at the font I have married at the altar; many of these I have sprinkled with dust. What have I not done for them in sorrow and want! How have I not toiled to set them in the way of purer pleasures and to anchor their tempest-tossed hopes! And yet how soon they will forget me! Already many say I am too old to preach. Too old! I preach better than I ever did in my life. Yet it may be my lot to wander down into the deep valley, an idle shepherd with an idle crook. I have just come from the writing of my next sermon, in which I exhort my people to strive that their names be not written on earthly monuments or human hearts, but in the Book of Life. It is my sublimest theme. If I am ever eloquent, if I am ever persuasive, if I ever for one moment draw aside to spiritual eyes the veil that discloses the calm, enrapturing vistas of eternity, it is when I measure my finite strength against this mighty task. But why? Because they are the sermons of my own aspiration. I preach them to my own soul. Face to face with that naked soul I pen those sermons – pen them when all are asleep save the sleepless Eye that is upon me. Even in the light of that Eye do I recoil from the thought of being forgotten. How clearly I foresee it! Ashes to ashes, dust to dust! Where then will be my doctrines, my prayers, my sermons?"
"Is it not enough for you to have scattered your handful of good broadcast, to ripen as endlessly as the grass? What if they that gather know naught of him that sowed?"
"It is not enough. I should like the memory of me to live on and on in the world, inseparable from the good I may have done. What am I but the good that is in me? 'Tis this that links me to the infinite and the perfect. Does not the Perfect One wish His goodness to be associated with His name? No! No! I do not wish to be forgotten!"
"It is mere vanity."
"Not vanity," said the aged servitor meekly. "Wait until you are old, till the grave is at your helpless feet: it is the love of life."
But some years later there befell Nicholas an event that transcended all past experiences, and left its impress on his whole subsequent life.
II
The hour had passed when any one was likely to enter his shop. A few rays of pale sunlight, straggling in through crevices of the door, rested like a dying halo on the heads of the monumental figures grouped around. Shadows, creeping upward from the ground, shrouded all else in thin, penetrable half-gloom, through which the stark grey emblems of mortality sent forth more solemn suggestions. A sudden sense of the earthly tragedy overwhelmed him. The chisel and the hammer dropped from his hands, and, resting his head on the block he had been carving, he gave himself up to that mood of dim, distant reverie in which the soul seems to soar and float far above the shock and din of the world's disturbing nearness. On his all but oblivious ear, like the faint washings of some remote sea, beat the waves of the city's tide-driven life in the streets outside. The room itself seemed hushed to the awful stillness of the high aerial spaces. Then all at once this stillness was broken by a voice, low, clear, and tremulous, saying close to his ear —
"Are you the maker of gravestones?"
"That is my sad calling," he cried bitterly, starting up with instinctive forebodings.
He saw before him a veiled figure. To support herself, she rested one hand on the block he had been carving, while she pressed the other against her heart, as though to stifle pain.
"Whose monument is this?"
"A neglected poet's who died not long ago. Soon, perhaps, I shall be making one for an old soldier, and one for a holy man, whose soul, I hear, is about to be dismissed."
"Are not some monuments sadder to make than others?"
"Ay, truly."
"What is the saddest you ever made?"
"The saddest monument I ever made was one for a poor mother who had lost her only son. One day a woman came in who had no sooner entered than she sat down and gave way to a passionate outburst of grief.
"'My good woman,' I said, 'why do you weep so bitterly?'
"'Do not call me good,' she moaned, and hid her face.
"I then perceived her fallen character. When she recovered self-control she drew from her sinful bosom an old purse filled with coins of different values.
"'Why do you give me this?' I asked.
"'It is to pay for a monument for my son,' she said, and the storm of her grief swept over her again.
"I learned that for years she had toiled and starved to hoard up a sum with which to build a monument to his memory, for he had never failed of his duty to her after all others had cast her out. Certainly he had his reward, not in the monument, but in the repentance which came to her after his death. I have never seen such sorrow for evil as the memory of his love wrought in her. For herself she desired only that the spot where she should be buried might be unknown. This longing to be forgotten has led me to believe that none desire to be remembered for the evil that is in them, but only for some truth, or beauty, or goodness by which they have linked their individual lives to the general life of the race. Even the lying epitaphs in cemeteries prove how we would fain have the dead arrayed on the side of right in the thoughts of their survivors. This wretched mother and human outcast, believing herself to have lost everything that makes it well to be remembered, craved only the mercy of forgetfulness."
"And yet I think she died a Christian soul."
"You knew her, then?"
"I was with her in the last hours. She told me her story. She told me also of you, and that you would accept nothing for the monument you were at such care to make. It is perhaps for this reason that I have felt some desire to see you, and that I am here now to speak with you of – "
A shudder passed over her.
"After all, that was not a sad, but a joyous monument to fashion," she added abruptly.
"Ay, it was joyous. But to me the joyous and the sad are much allied in the things of this life."
"And yet there might be one monument wholly sad, might there not?"
"There might be, but I know not whose it would be."
"If she you love should die, would not hers be so?"
"Until I love, and she I love is dead, I cannot know," said Nicholas, smiling.
"What builds the most monuments?" she asked quickly, as though to retreat from her levity.
"Pride builds many – splendid ones. Gratitude builds some, forgiveness some, and pity some. But faith builds more than these, though often poor, humble ones; and love! – love builds more than all things else together."
"And what, of all things that monuments are built in memory of, is most loved and soonest forgotten?" she asked, with intensity.
"Nay, I cannot tell that."
"Is it not a beautiful woman? This, you say, is the monument of a poet. After the poet grows old, men love him for the songs he sang; they love the old soldier for the battles he fought, and the preacher for his remembered prayers. But a woman! Who loves her for the beauty she once possessed, or rather regards her not with the more distaste? Is there in history a figure so lonely and despised as that of the woman, who, once the most beautiful in the world, crept back into her native land a withered hag? Or, if a woman die while she is yet beautiful, how long is she remembered? Her beauty is like heat and light – powerful only for those who feel and see it."
But Nicholas had scarcely heard her. His eyes had become riveted upon her hand, which rested on the marble, as white as though grown out of it under the labours of his chisel.
"My lady," he said, with the deepest respect, "will you permit me to look at your hand? I have carved many a one in marble, and studied many a one in life; but never have I seen anything so beautiful as yours."
He took it with an artist's impetuosity and bent over it, laying its palm against one of his own and stroking it softly with the other. The blood leaped through his heart, and he suddenly lifted it to his lips.
"God only can make the hand beautiful," he said.
Displaced by her arm which he had upraised, the light fabric that had concealed her figure parted on her bosom and slipped to the ground. His eyes swept over the perfect shape that stood revealed. The veil still concealed her face. The strangely mingled emotions that had been deepening within him all this time now blended themselves in one irrepressible wish.
"Will you permit me to see your face?"
She drew quickly back. A subtle pain was in his voice as he cried —
"O my lady! I ask it as one who has pure eyes for the beautiful."
"My face belongs to my past. It has been my sorrow; it is nothing now."
"Only permit me to see it!"
"Is there no other face you would rather see?"
Who can fathom the motive of a woman's questions?
"None, none!"
She drew aside her veil, and her eyes rested quietly on his like a revelation. So young she was as hardly yet to be a woman, and her beauty had in it that seraphic purity and mysterious pathos which is never seen in a woman's face until the touch of another world has chastened her spirit into the resignation of a saint. The heart of Nicholas was wrung by the sight of it with a sudden sense of inconsolable loss and longing.
"O my lady!" he cried, sinking on one knee and touching his lips to her hand with greater gentleness. "Do you indeed think the beauty of a woman so soon forgotten? As long as I live, yours will be as fresh in my memory as it was the moment after I first saw it in its perfection and felt its power."
"Do not recall to me the sorrow of such thoughts." She touched her heart. "My heart is a tired hour-glass. Already the sands are wellnigh run through. Any hour it may stop, and then – out like a light! Shapeless ashes! I have loved life well, but not so well that I have not been able to prepare to leave it."
She spoke with the utmost simplicity and calmness, yet her eyes were turned with unspeakable sadness towards the shadowy recesses of the room, where from their pedestals the monumental figures looked down upon her as though they would have opened their marble lips and said, "Poor child! Poor child!"
"I have had my wish to see you and to see this place. Before long some one will come here to have you carve a monument to the most perishable of all things. Like the poor mother who had no wish to be remembered – "
Nicholas was moved to the deepest.
"I have but little skill," he said. "The great God did not bestow on me the genius of His favourite children of sculpture. But if so sad and sacred a charge should ever become mine, with His help I will rear such a monument to your memory that as long as it stands none who see it will ever be able to forget you. Year after year your memory shall grow as a legend of the beautiful."
When she was gone he sat self-forgetful until the darkness grew impenetrable. As he groped his way out at last along the thick guide-posts of death, her voice seemed to float towards him from every head-stone, her name to be written in every epitaph.
The next day a shadow brooded over the place. Day by day it deepened. He went out to seek intelligence of her. In the quarter of the city where she lived he discovered that her name had already become a nucleus around which were beginning to cluster many little legends of the beautiful. He had but to hear recitals of her deeds of kindness and mercy. For the chance of seeing her again he began to haunt the neighbourhood; then, having seen her, he would return to his shop the victim of more unavailing desire. All things combined to awake in him that passion of love whose roots are nourished in the soul's finest soil of pity and hopelessness. Once or twice, under some pretext, he made bold to accost her; and once, under the stress of his passion, he mutely lifted his eyes, confessing his love; but hers were turned aside.
Meantime he began to dream of the monument he chose to consider she had committed to his making. It should be the triumph of his art; but more, it would represent in stone the indissoluble union of his love with her memory. Through him alone would she enter upon her long after-life of saint-like reminiscence.
When the tidings of her death came, he soon sprang up from the prostration of his grief with a burning desire to consummate his beloved work.
"Year after year your memory shall grow as a legend of the beautiful."
These words now became the inspiration of his masterpiece. Day and night it took shape in the rolling chaos of his sorrow. What sculptor in the world ever espoused the execution of a work that lured more irresistibly from their hiding-places the shy and tender ministers of his genius? What one ever explored with greater boldness the utmost limits of artistic expression, or wrought in sterner defiance of the laws of our common forgetfulness?
III
One afternoon, when people thronged the great cemetery of the city, a strolling group were held fascinated by the unique loveliness of a newly created monument.
"Never," they exclaimed, "have we seen so exquisite a masterpiece. In whose honour is it erected?"
But when they drew nearer, they found carved on it simply a woman's name.
"Who was she?" they asked, puzzled and disappointed. "Is there no epitaph?"
"Ay," spoke up a young man lying on the grass and eagerly watching the spectators. "Ay, a very fitting epitaph."
"Where is it?"
"Carved on the heart of the monument!" he cried, in a tone of triumph.
"On the heart of the monument? Then we cannot see it."
"It is not meant to be seen."
"How do you know of it?"
"I made the monument."
"Then tell us what it is."
"It cannot be told. It is there only because it is unknown."
"Out on you! You play your pranks with the living and the dead."
"You will live to regret this day," said a thoughtful bystander. "You have tampered with the memory of the dead."
"Why, look you, good people," cried Nicholas, springing up and approaching his beautiful master-work. He rested one hand lovingly against it and glanced around him pale with repressed excitement, as though a long-looked-for moment had at length arrived. "I play no pranks with the living or the dead. Young as I am, I have fashioned many monuments, as this cemetery will testify. But I make no more. This is my last; and as it is the last, so it is the greatest. For I have fashioned it in such love and sorrow for her who lies beneath it as you can never know. If it is beautiful, it is yet an unworthy emblem of that brief and transporting beauty which was hers; and I have planted it here beside her grave, that as a delicate white flower it may exhale the perfume of her memory for centuries to come.
"Tell me," he went on, his lips trembling, his voice faltering with the burden of oppressive hope – "tell me, you who behold it now, do you not wed her memory deathlessly to it? To its fair shape, its native and unchanging purity?"
"Ay," they interrupted impatiently. "But the epitaph?"
"Ah!" he cried, with tenderer feeling, "beautiful as the monument is to the eye, it would be no fit emblem of her had it not something sacred hidden within. For she was not lovely to the sense alone, but had a perfect heart. So I have placed within the monument that which is its heart, and typifies hers. And, mark you!" he cried, in a voice of such awful warning that those standing nearest him instinctively shrank back, "the one is as inviolable as the other. No more could you rend the heart from the human bosom than this epitaph from the monument. My deep and lasting curse on him who attempts it! For I have so fitted the parts of the work together, that to disunite would be to break them in pieces; and the inscription is so fragile and delicately poised within, that so much as rudely to jar the monument would shiver it to atoms. It is put there to be inviolable. Seek to know it, you destroy it. This I but create after the plan of the Great Artist, who shows you only the fair outside of His masterpieces. What human eye ever looked into the mysterious heart of His beautiful – that heart which holds the secret of inexhaustible freshness and eternal power? Could this epitaph have been carved on the outside, you would have read it and forgotten it with natural satiety. But uncomprehended, what a spell I mark it exercises! You will – nay, you must– remember it for ever! You will speak of it to others. They will come. And thus in ever-widening circle will be borne afar the memory of her whose name is on it, the emblem of whose heart is hidden within. And what more fitting memorial could a man rear to a woman, the pure shell of whose beauty all can see, the secret of whose beautiful being no one ever comprehends?"