Melpomene

“ For on the stage's boarded scaffold here A world ideal opens to our eyes, Nothing is true and genuine save—a tear; Emotion on no dream of sense relies. The real Melpomene is still sincere, Naught as a fable merely she supplies— By truth profound to charm us is her care; The false one, truth pretends, but to ensnare. Now from the scene, art threatens to retire, Her kingdom wild maintains still phantasy; The stage she like the world would set on fire, The meanest and the noblest mingles she. The Frank alone 'tis art can now inspire, And yet her archetype can his ne'er be ”

“ But Miss Darling proved very poor company, and Jack Howard for once voted her tiresome.
"Stupid blind mole!" declared Dick to herself, as Philip made his bow and left her. "Can't he see how lovely Patricia has grown, that he must run after that pale Russian woman? Oh, what idiots men are!" and Miss Darling consoled herself by reducing poor Jack to the verge of despair by her sharp retorts and acrid replies.
Quite late in the evening, after the rehearsal was over, and the little theatre empty, Count Vladimir opened the double doors and stepped within Melpomene's deserted temple. ”

“ If to me any memory shall henceforth be dear, I will not mummy it in a visible memorial for every passing beggar's dust to gather on. Love's museum is vain and foolish as the Catacombs, where grinning apes and abject lizards are embalmed, as, forsooth, significant of some imagined charm. It speaks merely of decay and death, and nothing more; decay and death of endless innumerable generations; it makes of earth one mould. How can lifelessness be fit memorial of life?—So far, for mementoes of the sweetest. ”

“ Hark! as I look up into thy high secrecies, oh tree, the face, the face, peeps down on me!—"Art thou Pierre? Come to me"—oh, thou mysterious girl, what an ill-matched pendant thou, to that other countenance of sweet Lucy, which also hangs, and first did hang within my heart! Is grief a pendant then to pleasantness? Is grief a self-willed guest that will come in? Yet I have never known thee, Grief;—thou art a legend to me. I have known some fiery broils of glorious frenzy; I have oft tasted of revery; whence comes pensiveness; whence comes sadness ”

“ I have always believed, that as we approach the invisible world, its voice becomes more audible to us, and grief and pain are very eloquent interpreters between us and eternity—quite distinct from all corporeal suffering, even from all mental terror, is that deep and unutterable impression which is alike incommunicable and ineffaceable—it is as if heaven spoke to us alone, and told us to keep its secret, or divulge it on the condition of never being believed. Oh! Melmoth, do not give that fearful smile when I speak of heaven—soon I may be your only intercessor there. ”

“ How unfathomable those most wondrous eyes of supernatural light! In those charmed depths, Grief and Beauty plunged and dived together. So beautiful, so mystical, so bewilderingly alluring; speaking of a mournfulness infinitely sweeter and more attractive than all mirthfulness; that face of glorious suffering; that face of touching loveliness; that face was Pierre's own sister's; that face was Isabel's; that face Pierre had visibly seen; into those same supernatural eyes our Pierre had looked. ”

“ Is she comparing, in grief’s pathetic power of imagery, these decaying embers with the happy prospects, the abundant promise, which Death’s cold fingers have quenched? Ah! Christian has gone far back through the dim vistas of memory to a chamber of sorrow; a darkened room, where lies in its unconscious majesty the garment of mortality which a saint has laid aside. In imagination she weeps her tears all over again, but they are sweet and gentle now, for Time’s hand is kind, and there is healing in the touch of his rapid fingers ”

“ And Jarl loud called upon me to awake. Samoa marveled.
Still sped the days. And at length, my memory was restored. The thoughts of things broke over me like returning billows on a beach long bared. A rush, a foam of recollections!—Sweet Yillah gone, and I bereaved.
Another interval, and that mood was past. Misery became a memory. The keen pang a deep vibration. The remembrance seemed the thing remembered; though bowed with sadness. There are thoughts that lie and glitter deep: tearful pearls beneath life’s sea, that surges still, and rolls sunlit, whatever it may hide. ”

“ From sire to son, we go on multiplying corpses in ourselves; for all of which, are resurrections. Every thought's a soul of some past poet, hero, sage. We are fuller than a city. Woe it is, that reveals these things. He knows himself, and all that's in him, who knows adversity. To scale great heights, we must come out of lowermost depths. The way to heaven is through hell. We need fiery baptisms in the fiercest flames of our own bosoms. We must feel our hearts hot—hissing in us. ”

“ Her hair was black as night, her eyes a deep
Of melancholy mystery and dreams;
Her chiselled features had the striking charm
Of youthful beauty and a mind mature;
She was unlike the women of the vale,
A stranger whom the priest had never met;
And he espied her with a sense of fear.
Her sable garb and downcast mien betrayed
A state of grief, wherefore the kindly man,
Led by a heartfelt sympathy, did ask
What great bereavement weighed upon her soul,
To which she answered: “Sir, I sorrow not
For any one within this hallowed ground,
Nor elsewhere for the dead ”

“ In a dream, these events were revealed to Aleema the priest; who by a spell unlocking its pearly casket, took forth the bud, which now showed signs of opening in the reviving air, and bore faint shadowy revealings, as of the dawn behind crimson clouds. Suddenly expanding, the blossom exhaled away in perfumes; floating a rosy mist in the air. Condensing at last, there emerged from this mist the same radiant young Yillah as before; her locks all moist, and a rose- colored pearl on her bosom. Enshrined as a goddess, the wonderful child now tarried in the sacred temple of Apo, buried in a dell ”

“ Melmoth gazed on her as she stood. One generous, one human feeling, throbbed in his veins, and thrilled in his heart. He saw her in her beauty,—her devotedness,—her pure and perfect innocence,—her sole feeling for one who could not, by the fearful power of his unnatural existence, feel for mortal being. He turned aside, and did not weep; or if he did, wiped away his tears, as a fiend might do, with his burning talons, when he sees a new victim arrive for torture; and, repenting of his repentance, rends away the blot of compunction, and arms himself for his task of renewed infliction. ”

“ Maturin at length evolved the vivid horror-masterpiece of Melmoth, The Wanderer, (1820) in which the Gothic tale climbed to altitudes of sheer spiritual fright which it had never known before.
Melmoth is the tale of an Irish gentleman who, in the seventeenth century, obtained a preternaturally extended life from the Devil at the price of his soul. If he can persuade another to take the bargain off his hands, and assume his existing state, he can be saved; but this he can never manage to effect, no matter how assiduously he haunts those whom despair has made reckless and frantic. ”

“ In one of these latter moments, the anguish of which was increased beyond expression by a conviction that her hour of danger was not far distant, she exclaimed to Melmoth—“Take me—take me from this place! My existence is nothing—it is a vapour that soon must be exhaled—but my reason is threatened every moment! I cannot sustain the horrors to which I am exposed! All this day I have been dragged through rooms decorated for my impossible nuptials!—Oh, Melmoth, if you no longer love me, at least commiserate me! Save me from a situation of horror unspeakable!—have mercy on your child, if not on me! ”

“ Our thoughts are not our own. Whate'er it be, an honest thought must have some germ of truth. But we must set, as flows the general stream; I blindly follow, where I seem to lead; the crowd of pilgrims is so great, they see not there is none to guide.—It hinges upon this: Have we angelic spirits? But in vain, in vain, oh Oro! I essay to live out of this poor, blind body, fit dwelling for my sightless soul. Death, death:—blind, am I dead? for blindness seems a consciousness of death. ”

“ A memory luminous, angel-like, as are the imaginations which fill the mind of painters with shapes divine and visions of beauty, but such as had never entered the life or the thoughts of this man till now, when, in the sunset stillness of the lonely oratory at Monastica he saw ever before him, with the depths of an unspeakable compassion in her fathomless eyes, the face of the woman who had saved him. ”

“ His lungs collapsed; his eyeballs glared; for the sweet imagined form, so long buried alive in him, seemed now as gliding on him from the grave; and her light hair swept far adown her shroud.
Then, for the time, all minor things were whelmed in him; his mother, Isabel, the whole wide world; and one only thing remained to him;—this all-including query—Lucy or God?
But here we draw a vail. Some nameless struggles of the soul can not be painted, and some woes will not be told. Let the ambiguous procession of events reveal their own ambiguousness. ”

“ By the wax-lights that burned in her apartment, Melmoth could see her prostrate before the sacred image. He could see that devotion of the heart which made it throb almost visibly in the white and palpitating bosom—the clasped hands that seemed imploring aid against that rebellious heart, whose beatings they vainly struggled to repress; and then, locked and upraised, asked forgiveness from heaven for their fruitless opposition. He could see the wild but profound devotion with which she clung to the crucifix,—and he shuddered to behold it. ”

“ And how much better would such stirring monuments be; full of life and commotion; than hermit obelisks of Luxor, and idle towers of stone; which, useless to the world in themselves, vainly hope to eternize a name, by having it carved, solitary and alone, in their granite. Such monuments are cenotaphs indeed; founded far away from the true body of the fame of the hero; who, if he be truly a hero, must still be linked with the living interests of his race; for the true fame is something free, easy, social, and companionable. ”

“ But Memnon's sculptured woes did once melodiously resound; now all is mute. Fit emblem that of old, poetry was a consecration and an obsequy to all hapless modes of human life; but in a bantering, barren, and prosaic, heartless age, Aurora's music-moan is lost among our drifting sands, which whelm alike the monument and the dirge.
VII
As Pierre went on through the woods, all thoughts now left him but those investing Isabel. He strove to condense her mysterious haze into some definite and comprehensible shape. ”

“ Oh, I have marked what it is to be dead;—how shouting boys, of holidays, hide-and-seek among the tombs, which must hide all seekers at last."
"Clouds on clouds!" cried Media, "but away with them all! Why not leap your graves, while ye may? Time to die, when death comes, without dying by inches. 'Tis no death, to die; the only death is the fear of it. ”

“ He came to see me once every month or two; till at last he came not at all; and when I wept and asked for him, they said the word Dead to me. Then the bewilderings of the comings and the goings of the coffins at the large and populous house; these bewilderings came over me. What was it to be dead? What is it to be living? Wherein is the difference between the words Death and Life? Had I been ever dead? Was I living? Let me be still again. Do not speak to me.'
And the stepping on the floor above ”

“ The only other records we have of Melville’s boyhood and early youth are the scattered recollections preserved in his published works. Such, throughout his life, were the veering whims of his blood, that he recalled these earlier years with no unity of retrospect. The confessions of St. Augustine are a classical warning of the untrustworthiness of even the most conscientious memory. To call memory the mother of the Muses, is too frequently but a partial and euphemistic naming of her offspring. ”

“ Alas! my heart has never enveloped itself in mysteries—never has the light of its truth burst forth amid the thunderings and burnings in which you have issued the law of my destiny.”—“Will you then be mine, Isidora?”—“Consult my parents. Wed me by the rites, and in the face of the church, of which I am an unworthy member, and I will be yours for ever.”—“For ever!” repeated Melmoth; “well-spoken, my bride. You will then be mine for ever?—will you, Isidora?”—“Yes!—yes!—I have said so. ”

“ A narrow path, that seemed to wind round the edifice, conducted them to a front which overlooked an extensive cemetery, at the extremity of which Melmoth pointed out to her an indistinct object, which he said was the hermitage, and to which he would hasten to intreat the hermit, who was also a priest, to unite them. “May I not accompany you?” said Isidora, glancing round on the graves that were to be her companions in solitude.—“It is against his vow,” said Melmoth, “to admit a female into his presence, except when obliged by the course of his duties.” ”

“ But give me first another body! I long and long to die, to be rid of this dishonored cheek. Hung by the neck till thou be dead.—Not if I forestall you, though!—Oh now to live is death, and now to die is life; now, to my soul, were a sword my midwife!—Hark!—the hangman?—who comes?”
“Thy wife and cousin—so they say;—hope they may be; they may stay till twelve;” wheezingly answered a turnkey, pushing the tottering girls into the cell, and locking the door upon them.
“Ye two pale ghosts, were this the other world, ye were not welcome. Away!—Good Angel and Bad Angel both!—For Pierre is neuter now!” ”