Some one whom I could court With no great change of manner, Still holding reason"s fort, While waving fancy"s banner!"
All of which things made a subtle change in his att.i.tude to Corydon, whom he still met occasionally. Corydon was now a young lady, beautiful, even stately, with an indescribable atmosphere of gentleness and purity about her. All things unclean shrunk from her presence; and so in times of distress he liked to be with her. He would drop vague hints as to sufferings and temptations, and told her that she seemed like a "G.o.ddess" to him.
Corydon received this with some awe, but with more perplexity. She could not understand why anyone should struggle so much, or why a youth should take such a sombre view of things. But she was perfectly willing to seem like a "G.o.ddess" to anyone, and she was glad if that helped him. She was touched when he read her a poem of his own, a poem which he held very precious. He called it
"A song of the young-eyed Cherubim In the days of the making of man."
And in it he had set forth the view of life that had come to him--
"The quest of the spirit"s gain-- Lured by the graces of pleasure, And lashed by the furies of pain.
Thy weakness shall sigh for an Eden, But the sword shall flame at the gate; For far is the home of thy vision And strong is the hand of thy fate!"
Section 13. Though Thyrsis had no time to realize it, it was in this long and bitter struggle that he won whatever power he had in his future life. It was here that he learned "to hold his will above him as his law", and to defy the world for the sake of his ideal. And then, too, this toil was the key that opened to him the treasure-house of a new art--which was music.
Until he was nearly out of college Thyrsis had scarcely heard any music at all. Church-hymns he had learned, and a few songs in school. But now in poetry and other books he met with references to composers, and to the meaning of great music; and the things that were described there were the things he loved, and he began to feel a great eagerness to get at them. As a first step he bought a mandolin, and set to work to teach himself to play, a task at which he wrought with great diligence. At the same time a friend had bought a guitar, and the two set to work to play duets. The first preliminary was the getting of the instruments in tune; and not knowing that the mandolin is an octave higher than the guitar, they spent a great deal of time and broke a great many guitar-strings.
As the next step, Thyrsis went to hear a great pianist, and sat perplexed and wondering. There was a girl next to him who sobbed, and Thyrsis watched her as he might have watched a house on fire. Only once the pianist pleased _him_--when he played a pretty little piece called somebody"s "impromptu", in which he got a gleam of a "tune." Poor Thyrsis went and got that piece, and took it home to study it, with the help of the mandolin; but, alas, in the maze of notes he could not even find the "tune."
But if he could not understand the music, he could read books about it; he read a whole library--criticism of music, a.n.a.lysis of music, histories of music, composers of music; and so gradually he learned the difference between a sarabande and a symphony, and began to get some idea of what he went out for to hear. At first, at the concerts, all he could think of was to crane his neck and recognize the different instruments; he heard whole symphonies, while doing nothing but watching for the "movements," and making sure he hadn"t skipped any. One heartless composer ran two movements into one, and so Thyrsis" concert came out one piece short at the end, and he sat gazing about him in consternation when the audience rose to go. Afterwards he read long dissertations about each symphony before he went, and he would note down the important points and watch for them. The critic would expatiate upon "the long-drawn dissonance _forte_, that marks the close of the working-out portion"; and Thyrsis would watch for that long-drawn dissonance, and be wondering if it was never coming--when suddenly the whole symphony would come to an end! Or he would read about a "quaint capering measure led off by the ba.s.soons," or a "frantic sweep of the violins over a trombone melody," and he would watch for these events with eyes and ears alert, and if he found them--_eureka_!
But such things could not last forever; for Thyrsis had a heart full of eagerness and love, and of such is the soul of music. And just then was a time when he was sick and worn--when it seemed to him that the burden of his life was more than he could bear. He was haunted by the thought that he would lose his long battle, that he would go under and go down; and then it was that chance took him to a concert which closed with the great "C-Minor Symphony."
Thyrsis had read a life of Beethoven, and he knew that here was one of the hero-souls--a man who had grappled with the fiends, and pa.s.sed through the valley of death. And now he read accounts of this t.i.tan symphony, and learned that it was a battle of the human spirit with despair. He read Beethoven"s words about the opening theme--"So knocks fate upon the door!" And a fierce and overwhelming longing possessed him to get at the soul of that symphony.
He went to the concert, and heard nothing of the rest of the music, but sat like a man in a dream; and when the time came for the symphony, he was trembling with excitement. There was a long silence; and then suddenly came the first theme--those fearful hammer-strokes that cannot be thought without a shudder. They beat upon Thyrsis" very heart-strings, and he sat appalled; and straight out he went upon the tide of that mighty music-pa.s.sion--without knowing it, without knowing how. He forgot that he was trying to understand a symphony; he forgot where he was, and what he was; he only knew that gigantic phantoms surged within him, that his soul was a hundred times itself. He never guessed that an orchestra was playing a second theme; he only knew that he saw a light gleam out of the storm, that he heard a voice, pitiful, fearful, beautiful beyond utterance, crying out to the furies for mercy; and that then the storm closed over it with a roar. Again and again it rose; Thyrsis did not know that this was the "working-out portion" that had forever been his bane. He only knew that it struggled and fought his fight, that it pleaded and sobbed, and rose higher and higher, and began to rejoice--and that then came the great black phantom-shape sweeping over it; and the iron hammer-strokes of Fate beat down upon it, crushed it and trampled it into annihilation. Again and again this happened, while Thyrsis sat clutching the seat, and shaking with wonder and excitement. Never in his experience had there been anything so vast, so awful; it was more than he could bear, and when the first movement came to an end--when the soul"s last hope was dead--he got up and rushed out. People who pa.s.sed him on the streets must have thought that he was crazy; and afterwards, that day and forever, he lived all his soul"s life in music.
As a result of this Thyrsis paid all his bank-account for a violin, and went to see a teacher.
"You are too old," the teacher said.
But Thyrsis answered, "I will work as no one ever worked before."
"We all do that," replied the other, with a smile. And so they began.
And so all day long, with fingers raw, and arms and back shuddering with exhaustion, Thyrsis sat and practiced, the spirit of Music beckoning him on. It was in a boarding-house, and there was a nervous old man in the next room, and in the end Thyrsis had to move. By the time he went away to the country, he was able to play a melody in tune; and then he would take some one that had fascinated him, and practice it and practice it night and day. He would take his fiddle every morning at eight and stride out into the forest, and there he would stay all day with the squirrels. They told him once how a new arrival, driving over in the hotel "bus at early dawn, had pa.s.sed an old Italian woman toiling up a hill and singing for dear life the "Tannhauser March." It chanced that the new arrival was a musician, and he leaned out and asked the old woman where she had learned it. And this was her explanation;
"Dey ees a crazy feller in de woods--he play it all day for tree weeks!"
Section 14. By this time Thyrsis had finished at college, pa.s.sing comfortably near the bottom of his cla.s.s, and had betaken himself to a university as a graduate student. He was duly registered for a lot of courses, and spent his time when he should have been at the lectures, sitting in a vacant cla.s.s-room reading the book that had fascinated him last. His note-book began at that time to show two volumes a day on an average, and once or twice he stopped at night to wonder how it had actually been possible for him to read poetry fourteen hours a day for a whole week and not be tired.
He taught himself German, and that led to another great discovery--he made the acquaintance of Goethe. The power of that mighty spirit took hold of him, so that he prayed to him when he was lonely, and kept the photograph of the young poet in his pocket, to gaze at it as at a lover.
The great eyes came to haunt him so that one night he awoke crying out, because he had dreamed he was going to meet Goethe.
In the catalog of the university there were listed a number of courses in "rhetoric and English composition". They were for the purpose of teaching one how to write, and the catalog set forth convincingly the methods whereby this was done. Thyrsis wished to know all there was to know about writing, and so ne enrolled himself for an advanced course, and went for an hour every day and listened to expositions of the elements of sentence-structure by Prof. Osborne, author of "American Prose Writers" and "The Science of Rhetoric". The professor would give him a theme, and bid him bring in a five-hundred word composition.
Perhaps it was that Thyrsis was lacking in the play-spirit; at any rate he could not write convincingly on the subject of "The Duty of the College Man to Support Athletics." He struggled for a month against his own impotence, and then went to see his instructor.
"I think," he said, "I shall have to drop Course A."
The professor gazed over his spectacles at him.
"Why?"
"I don"t think I am getting any good out of it."
"But how can you tell what good you are getting?"
"I don"t seem to feel that I am," said Thyrsis, deprecatingly.
"It is not to be supposed that you would feel it," said the other--"not at this early stage. You must wait."
"But I don"t like the method, sir."
"What"s wrong with the method?"
Thyrsis was embarra.s.sed. He was not sure, he said; but he did not think that writing could be taught. Anyway, one had first to have something worth saying--
"Are you laboring under the delusion that you know anything about writing?" demanded the professor. (He had written across Thyrsis" last composition the words, "Feeble and trivial".)
"Why, no," began the boy.
"Because if you are, let me disabuse your mind at once. There is no one in the cla.s.s who knows less about writing than yourself."
"I think," said Thyrsis, "it"s because I can"t bring myself to write in cold blood. I have to be interested. I"m sure that is the trouble."
"I"m sure," said the other, "that the trouble is that you think you know too much."
"I"m sorry, sir," said Thyrsis, humbly. "I"ve tried my best---"
"It is my business to teach students to write. I"ve given my life to that, and I think I know something about it. But you think you know more than I do. That"s all."
And so they parted. Thyrsis kept a vivid recollection of this interview, for the reason that at a later stage of his career he came into contact with Prof. Osborne again, and got another glimpse of the authoritarian att.i.tude towards the art of letters.
Section 15. Thyrsis had not many friends at college, and none at all at the university. He had no time to make any; and besides, there was a certain facetious senior who had caught him hurrying through the corridors one day, declaring in excitement that--
"Banners yellow, glorious, golden, On its roof did float and flow!"
But he had long ago ceased to hope for a friend, or to care what anybody thought about him; it was clear to him by this time that he had made himself into a poet, and was doomed to be unhappy. His mother had given up all hope of seeing him a bishop, and they had compromised upon a judgeship; but here at the university there was a law-school, and he met the students, and saw that this, too, could not be. These "lawyers" were not seeking knowledge for the love of it--they were studying a trade, by which they could rise in the world. They were not going out to do battle for truth and justice--they were perfecting themselves in cunning, so that they might be of help in money-disputes; they were sharpening their wits, to make them useful tools for the opening of treasure-chests. And this att.i.tude to life was written all over their personalities; they seemed to Thyrsis a coa.r.s.e and roistering crew, and he shrunk from them in repugnance.
He went his own impetuous way. He stayed at the university until he had taught himself French and Italian, as well as German, and had read all the best literature in those languages. And likewise he heard all the best music, and went about full of it day and night. By this time he had definitely beaten his devils, and had come to be master of himself; and though n.o.body guessed anything about it, there was a new marvel going on within him--he had, in a spiritual sense, become pregnant.
There were many signs by which this state might have been known. He went quite alone, and spoke to no man; he was self-absorbed, and walked about with his eyes fixed on vacancy; he was savage when disturbed, and guarded his time unscrupulously. He had given up the very last of the formalities of life--he no longer attended any lectures, or wore cuffs, and he would not talk at meal-times. He took long walks at impossible hours, and he was fond of a certain high hill where the storms blew.
These things had been going on for a year; and now the book that had been coming to ripeness in his mind was ready to be born.
It had its origin in the reading of history, and the fronting of old tyranny in its cruel forms. Thyrsis had come to hate Christianity for many things by that time, but most of all he hated it because it taught the b.a.s.t.a.r.d virtue of Obedience. Thyrsis obeyed no man--he lived his life; and the fiery ardor with which he lived it was taking form in his mind as a personality. He was dreaming a hero who should be _Resistance_ incarnate; the pa.s.sionate a.s.sertion of man"s right and of man"s defiance.
It was in the days of ferocity in Italy, the days of the despot and the bravo; and Thyrsis" hero was a minstrel, a mighty musician whose soul was free. And he sung in the despot"s hall, and wooed the despot"s daughter. This was the minstrel of "Zulieka"---
"His ladder of song was slight, But it reached to her window"s height; Each verse so frail was the silken rail, From which her soul took flight."