An Unpublished Author

HAPPY is he that hath ancestors and knows them ! The love and reverence of ancestors, to us hardly less than to Rome, is yet a religion, though pius is no longer the title of him who cherishes his aged father and family Lares and Penates. Some glory in their ancestors, because they fought on the right side at Senlac, wore plumes and resplendent armor under the Plantagenets, won chivalrous duels under gentle King Jamie, and gave port wine and viands to poets when George was king. Some, in the rich melancholy of youth, find pleasure by counting those of their forefathers who died while their hair was auburn, their voices flawless. Others hoard miniatures of handsome faces, — oval saintly faces of women, with hair folded like doves’ wings over their brows, — or jocund faces framed in the stock severe, that contemplated a peace deemed primeval, in their fragrant wooded acres and pools haunted by “swan and shadow.” Another class in the poverty and humble station of the old people have a flattering goad to honors. For my part, I confess a devotion to my forefathers who have been unlucky in life or death; but most of all to Ivor, fair-haired, smiling, from whose lips flowed so musically the voweled Cymric. Like a bard, he could build a ship and sail it; fashion and string a harp, — but melody for the harp, alas, was lacking. He spent an exuberant boyhood in elaborating gorgeous imageries, and died before they could be disciplined by verse. All his life he was a dreamer. Let me recount one dream, full of symbols ; for

In sleep he built a great ship. The masts rose out of sight in the thick autumnal air; he could hardly see the streamers that filliped the tackling ; and her colored sides were ready to gleam in the flood. It was the work of a long day, so that his slumber after it was profound. On the morrow he was awakened by thoughts of sailing alone beyond “ the limits of the morn,” when lo ! he found that he had built her on the mountain crest, — the sea and the cry of sailors were afar off.

His letters are preserved, and, being not learned in faces, I value them above his picture, with blue eyes guarded by dreamful eyelids, the wavering mouth ever framing an amiable phrase (for friendship had for him the perfume of rose and spices), and the overflowing curls of the color of ripened wheat. The letters give, not indeed a vulgar fulllength portrait, but an animated bust of the man. Nothing of similar bulk lays the man himself open like the intimacies of impassioned correspondence. Selfrevelation is their purpose, and how much truer the result than most autobiography so called. There is nothing that your letter-writer will exclude ; his vocabulary will be quite unfettered. And then, too, the handwriting. It is true that his was a caligraphy as terrible as ever beatific printer changed into decent type ; but is the printer indeed beatific ? “Did you,” writes he himself, “ ever consider how much of l’homme même goes into an author’s handwriting, how much is abstracted by that plaguy modernism — printing ? Take, for example, the wine-bibber who sits down to write verses. Splendid visions he has ; chance words of his are divine ; but on the chill day following how little that is divine and bacchic remains, if the memorial scrawl is lost and only a fair copy lives. It would scarce be worse if a painter bade his lackey put in such or such a line.” The companionable seclusion of letter-making yields a confidence that in cheek by jowl conversation may vanish.

Though of consistent outward luck, within he was agitated, ridden (for instance) at his narrow inland home with a fatigue de l’intérieur only remediable by the feel and sight of the ocean, where prospects are boundless,

fretted by a fever, as he put it himself, such as in the grave might urge one upward to one gust of earth and sea. Bred without religious teaching, he had no terrors concerning deity and that undiscovered country, but, content with the certitude of a vague immortality, such as ofttimes was clearly promised him, when so firmly knit to the powers and thrones of nature was his soul that no complete separation from them seemed possible after that: he experienced the “ embryon felicities and fruitions of doubtful faces ” given by the voices of friends, caresses of love, stray kindnesses to strangers, and the taste of wine and fruit.

Side by side, and subtly entangled with his dreaming, was his love of books. Even as word-pictures, by-vistas discovered by some opulent expression, or the vague splendor with which authors were invested by a friend’s narration of their story, were the material of his first dreams ; so he brought to bear upon his reading the puissance of dreams past, thus supplying what was demanded by pages where more was meant than met the eye, when with Crusoe he was thrilled by footprints on the pathless beach ; with Fitz-James he rose and fell in combat with Roderick Dhu ; with explorers he wetted the snow with the blood of polar bears, or was drowsed under the paws of lions, and tasted the bitter pleasures of savannas lonelier than the heavens. For readers must be divided into two classes. One modestly prepares a blank sheet of his mind for the reception of what the writer offers, whether that be a picture in line and mass, or the close characters of thought. Such a one is the philosophic reader. With premiss and conclusion he deals like a compositor. But not therefore is his mind a ream of other men’s thoughts. The proof sheet (to continue the metaphor) has to go up for correction; which done, he proceeds to criticism. Far different are those of the other class. In such a mind there is no blank sheet; but not less modestly, though quite otherwise, is it prepared. It is in fact like a pool that stands in the heart of a venerable and storied forest. The shadows of blossom and bough and foliage; the clasped wings of the sitting turtle-doves ; the blue sky, “ fretted with golden fire,” or swept by hurrying fleeces; all is reflected there, and with an awful profundity deeper even than the heaven above. Looking quietly over the bank you espy the shadows of unaccountable shapes escaping through the forest. But now and then a puff of the tired wind reaches the smooth waters. Then the ripples cast lines, like the footprints of the sea, upon the bottom ; the shadows are shaken and severed ; a child’s reedleaf pinnaces leave harbor for the open water. Like that is the effect of reading upon this mind. He gives as much as he receives. He gives more ; he gives all, because only by reason of what was there before receives he anything.

His disquietude might partly be traced to authorship, though he had no desire of publicity, and wrote to please himself first of all; which was as well, for his exaggerated subjectivity would have found intelligent readers only in a kindred few. After many transitions, — from hypersaxonism to hyperlatinism, — from the feverish composition of a too passionate interest to the toilsome architecture of phrase and phrase, — he set up, as the god of his idolatry and the ideal of achievement, a style that should be as lacework ; if you took out a fragment anywhere, it had needs be beautiful, and every word have an individual value; of all men Sir Thomas Browne seemed worthiest of admiration. His work was to be all gold. An aim perhaps the less inexcusable that his subject matter was most often descriptive. But though sensitive, he lacked sense ; to put the fact as he put it himself in jingling verse, he was a man

Yet once he showed good sense in following Coleridge’s exhortation to would-be authors : he entered the Church. Consequently his account of some pleasures of writing is in places delicious. He chose the library, he said, of a wealthy friend as his study, a place where manuscripts long ago thumbed by astrologer or alchemist lay in a sort of purgatory of dust and quiet, —

But that dust was sacred ; he never stirred it, though he was occasionally asked if he fed on it. And yet he showed many points of likeness to those alchemists, and was full as unreasonable as they. Thus he loved to recall how Leonardo, moving half contemptuously among the jetsam of a passing age, anticipating the boldest advances of the age by which it was followed, notwithstanding was allured by it, and charmed into a stagnancy and indecision from which he never altogether escaped. Ivor was never weary of proving how much the religions of the day were benightmared by the divinities whose funeral they had attended with curses, and how existent superstitions often prevailed over them in the sincere moments of most pious minds, especially in a land such as Wales, where free play was still possible for the powers of nature. And I preserve a fragment of his, in which he expresses this attitude by a dance of Pan and the river goddesses, in an old priory at midnight. Even in his boyhood, he planned a mad crusade on behalf of the worship of nature, as against what he then called the indoor religion current.

On a hard, angular chair — which he said gave him visions of the Empyrean like a martyr on the wheel — in that library, he used to write. Of course the whole skeleton of the piece was ready beforehand in his mind: but there was a catch in his breath when he saw the white paper ; his brain throbbed, and the silence became full of voices. He had to clothe the skeleton with the flesh of fair living words, and at the thought was confused by fancies. “ On a dans la tête toutes sortes de floraisons printanières qui ne durent plus que les lilas, qu’une nuit flétrit, mais qui sentent si bon ! ” Up rose the shadow of all that was most delightful in the past or alluring in the future. Choicest phrases and words from the best loved authors fluttered round. Sweetest experiences were lived again. Everything trivial or tedious was banished successfully. He heard the lovenames of Wales uttered by musical voices — Eluned and Bronwen and Olwen. He saw again the fairest landscapes, and remembered evenings when Hesperus for a time shone so brightly that you could write a lyric by help of her light; remembered caracoling birches on a flat windy country of burnt-up furze ; a silver heaven at sunset, inlaid with ebony branches ; the white sparks of sunlit rain sliding on the fir tree needles, coming and going on the restless branches as the light changed —like stars in a turbulent sky ; or the green alder shadow at the borders of the swift river Loughor. . . . Then he wrote. But it was not always that the fervor and radiance of such visions entered into the slowly wrought sentences. He feared he had begun writing too early, when passion commanded art — a reversal of the rule. The plain ink was not enough for him ; he wanted to dip his pen in the light of sunset, in the blue haze that haunts distant hills. Here is a fragment: —

“ The chestnut blossom is raining steadily and noiselessly down upon a path whose naked pebbles receive mosaic of emerald light from the interlacing boughs. At intervals, once or twice an hour, the wings of a lonely swallow pass that way; when alone the shower stirs from its perpendicular fall. Cool and moist, the perfumed air flows, without lifting the most nervous leaf or letting fall a suspended bead of the night’s rain from a honeysuckle bud. In an indefinite sky of gray, through which one ponderous cloud billows into sight and is lost again, no sun shines : yet there is light — I know not whence ; for a pellet of brass indoors beams so as to be extinguished in its own fire. There is no song in wood or sky. Some one of summer’s wandering voices — cuckoo or bulfinch or willow wren — might be singing, but unheard, at least unrealized. . . . From the dead-nettle spires, with dull green leaves stained by purple and becoming more and more purple toward the crest, which is of a sombre uniform purple, — to the elms reposing at the horizon, all things have bowed the head, hushed, settled into a perfect sleep. But those elms are just visible ; no more. The path has no sooner emerged from one shade than another succeeds, and so, on and on, the eye wins no broad dominion. ... It is a land that uses a soft compulsion upon the passer-by, a compulsion to meditation, which is necessary before he is attached to a scene rather featureless and expressionless, to a land that hence owes much of its power to a mood of generous reverie which it bestows. And yet it is a land that gives, that gives much. Companionable it is, reassuring to the solitary ; he very soon has a feeling of security there. . . . The cool-leaved wood ! The limitless, unoccupied fields of marsh marigold, so lovely when the evening rain slowly falls, dimming, and almost putting out, the lustrous bloom ! . . . Gold of the microscopic willows under foot! Leagues of lonely grass, where the herds tread the daisies and spare them yet! — the daisies rising up after a hoof falls upon them. And ever at the horizon companies of lazy cloud ! ... At last in the sweet rain, or rather the promise of rain at this warm, skyless close of the day, the trees, far off in an indolent upand-down landscape, stand as if disengaged from the world, in a reticent and pensive repose.”

He died at twenty-three, but finished nothing after nineteen.

Edward Thomas.