From: The Dial, Vol. III, No. I (July 1842)
Author:
Published: E. P. Peabody 1842 Boston
FROM THE MS. SYMPHONY OF DOLON.
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THE FIRST DOLON.
DOLON, wont to be much in the air, in the fields and woods, beneath the sky, the clouds, the branches and leaves, and in the mists, those clouds of earth, almost lived in nature, like a sea-fairy in the ocean, everywhere in which it is at home, and has a place where it may be as if it sought it by roaming;—the gurgle-reserved silent meadows of high green waving grass, the atmosphere and air-like water, the rocks over which the waves oscillated reflected sunniness, like shadows on the country landscape of clouds passing overhead, the rocks ivied over with seaweed and vines and grass, like ruins of the sea-ages, the woods and caves of tree-coral, as if petrified forests of an ancient race of human fishes, and the coral edifice-like places with interwoven open intricate roofs, like the pinewoods, and near the surface, which was like the high heaven of the sea-earth, where seemed to be sky and clouds, which were outwardly only reflected to the sight of men, though to men it seems as if the light in the ocean must be air-like, or grave moon-light, for even the sunlit noon surface is like a bright day moonlight. Dolon had always been in Nature, unspecially nod really as if in his proper place. Nature is not primarily a sentiment to children; sentiment may be a feeling in it, but it is place and not sentiment which leads them to it. A child will act from the fulness of its affections and feelings as if from consciousness, but these are the spirit which thus affect him, and he acts from them as facts which buoy him up and float him; not as sentiment which is need of the fact, and makes him a seeker, as men, who away from their home, or outwardly related to their sphere, feel that which develops in them sentiment and aspiration, but does not put them in the natural position of the sentiment, and the sentiment thus acts, out of its place, from depths which the surface in its hurried action, is as if dissevered from. Children do all in the fact, as a mermaid may joy and frolic in the water which it is alway in, and as one who is out in the night may see shooting stars; the direct act is as if extra, while the regular course goes on, an exuberance of the real from the real. A child’s whole person, as well as nature, (of which Dolon was an ideal-like though most natural exemplification, for the most natural is the most ideal and common,) shows that its proper sphere is Nature; out of Nature it is more of an individuality, like a king in un-state relations, than of an individual thing in life which individualizes by giving all things a place in it, and leaving them to their life in their own places like passengers in a vessel; a flower in the house is a flower in form, but in nature the form is the flower, the flower in lite, and the flower is by its life rather than by that which is a form called self which Life has taken, as a boat is not a boat till it is launched. Life is the unpersonalizer of persons, the unifier of individuals, as playing is of a stage-company; the relation of things to things, and a rotatory circle like the earth, which, by moving on its axis, faces all parts of the infinite space around it. Dolon, restrained in the house, would seek nature like a caged bird the air. Those deep, heaven-like eyes required the broad and high beautiful realities of nature, if only for freedom, and space, and color,—which is somewhat of a good substitute for nature in houses, especially if of forms, as in carpets. The individual things of nature are related to man, as well as man is to man; and man must be with stars, and trees, and grasses, as he must with man, to be at ease. Life lives in her forms, and is evolved from them, like rays of light from the sun, and we truly live only in her atmosphere; individualities are thus universalized, as if in the whole they neutralized each, and kept each other in active relation to her, like spans of horses; for, left to itself, the vital becomes a centred isolation in the individual, like water in anything whose pores are closed; as if individuality was only a form which Life, like Genius, had taken, and which has no life in itself, but by being in life; and out of it, it ceases to be, like rays of light separated from the sun. All things in nature are centred to face each other, and the relation, represented to men by influence, is sure, however they may be as persons; the sea and the sky face, and the mutual relation goes on, though the sea tosses about, and the sky is covered with clouds; men receive influence from Nature, though they never look at her or think of her, and are busy in some mechanical labor, if only they be in her. There is as it were a quiet inward depth and gentle positiveness-like reserve, in men who live in the air; they have not the prominence and selfness of those who live in the house, and Nature is around them mighty and absolute as a Monarch, and gentle, quiet, and familiar-like, like a great family dog lying by the doorsteps in the yard, where the children are playing and the men are working. Children are troublesome or noisy, and often restless, within the house and in their present mode of life; for they are shut out from their life-place; the life which would be developed as unobviously and quietly as fruit grows, gives them an excitement or uneasiness of which activity is the effect. Nature is their play-ground and place, and their activity is modified from its original spirit of gentleness and unity, by its being without the Nature which acts on them, as the moon on the tides, and in which they are Beings in Life, and not, as in the house, beings who, the only Being, (like Noblemen from the city Court alone in the country places,) are not only free, but at needs to be Persons, for they are living things, and life is not around them to meet life, and they create a life for themselves out of their own life, like sailors at sea forming their cabin into a homelike room out of such materials as they have,—or like parrots who encaged and taken from their native clime and woods, talk with the men instead of singing with their mates. Children in the house are as if obtrusive, and men interfere with men; that which in the air and great natural house would be harmony, is a noise in the small artificial house, as even music makes a noise if confined; in Nature all sounds harmonize and blend; and children are more sociable with man by not being given to themselves in Nature, in which fact they recognise the greatness of man, as if next representative to Nature and theirself. A child is not so inquisitive and talkative in Nature; life answers there for itself, and all else, all outwardly seen, is Mystery, and inspires no questions, but a quiet, subdued wonder, like an under-current of comprehension in the mind’s state of worship; and a child’s looking is unoutward, as if the child saw by its personal power of motion; as if it could fly around like a bird up among stars, but the Being abode fast, and as the child-person remained there, took its own time, and the child instinctively acknowledges its reality by making no subject-personal of aught, and only gratifying his impulses. He talks and prates as he goes along in the horseman’s arms, as if he were the horseman; but even the horseman will have no cause to find fault with him, for any want of a deep down practical quiet realizing of his dependence and happiness expressed gratitude. The infinite senses of man which are adapted to this infinite-like finite, great Nature, are disused and closed by his present life, and his nature becomes estranged from it, and he is as if a stranger in it, and when in it, its beauty comes to him rather through sight and feeling than unity. Deep and great is the soul’s long denied appetite; it is as if faint to Joss of consciousness, and slow is the reformation of the soul’s form. Man in Nature is in an infinity; though there seems a limit, the difference is real between the effect as a reality and appearance; the horizon-enclosed lake will not answer for the ocean, though to the sight it is as large; there is a depth below the earth as well as above it, and the ground is as a solid-floored tree-top, like those which the birds alight on, though merely as tops the shrubs would answer as well. Men have made substitutes for the great Natural Building which is God’s theatre and concert room, and though we can see and hear them wherever they are, neither they nor the music are as if they were on his stage, where living is the acting, and where voices rise in infinite fading cadences, like ripples disappearing as they go over the surface of the water like a sail. Men hear their own voices now like finished echoes, and they can seldom get beyond themselves; for they carry their own limit about with them, from which they rebound, like waves in an enclosed place upon themselves; and all life radiates, and returns nor lingers. The purest holy incense rising from the altar will form a cloud in the roof of the greatest Cathedral, and smoke the pictures of Raphael and Guido on the walls.
When a little boy, Dolon loved to hear fairy stories, though he heard them as one hears music which is an atmosphere to the ear as air is to the lungs, and does not require listening, the sounds creating feelings which are in their kind and place what the blood is in its kind and place; and he sat much on the ground in the woods, as if a fairy land, and fairies were all around him, and he felt and seemed as if he saw them. He was a beautiful boy, with long auburn-brown hair, a fair and delicate complexion, light blue eyes, and eyelids which at the side-view lay gently-heavily folded over his eyes, as if the eyes were homes, like heaven air, for two little heavenly fairies, like a spring-fountain in the fresh meadows for little fishes, and the lids were curtains which opened them to the world and covered them from mortal sight, like a cave opening into a forest, and the eyes seemed inlets into the boy’s being, and one could find him there as Dolon found fairies, and men find God, in the air, which was so like his eyes, only they were like a soul which had taken the eye for a form. We do not see the expression in eyes, when we look at them for it a second time; for when we first look, the spiritual in the eye suggests a form to us, and then we look as on a form for the type of the form that it created within us, and spirit is not to be bodily seen.
At length, his father said he must go to a regular school, and that it would not do for Dolon to be growing up so visionary and romantic. He did not see that the so-called visionary was as real to the inner sense, as the so-called real is to the outward sense; that Poetry is a fertility of humanity, and the real life of the deep and substantial part of man, in which also great experience goes on, even like that which a life in the world would give, only it is deeper and more individual within the man; and that the outward is not for the individual as an outward person, but as an inward related soul, whose human feelings and life are expressed by poetry. Men’s relations to Nature are closed by their coming between the realities of soul and Nature; their life is erected into a sense, and is not diffused around, like the ocean with its great proportionate surface. Human nature, if left to itself, will be full of life, like the great) western forests and standing water, and Poetry is the physical inworld of the spiritual nature, with its life developed in forms; forms are not mere forms continent of life, but forms which are formed life. Dolon’s living relation to things answered at school for activity and readiness in the usual course of systematic learning; for life is ready and willing to meet all that comes before it, and his teacher saw he learned in this spirit of life, by the natural way of the correspondence of means to ends, and that if lessons were given him he so earnestly, singly, and simply, and unconsciously made his own use of them, that he allowed him to learn after his own natural manner, and felt towards him as what he was and not as what, canon judged, he outwardly did; and his mother liked to have him free, and sent him to school only half of the day, so that he had all the rest for the air and fields and woods. His father wanted him to learn more decidedly, but always saw that Dolon had better be left to himself, at least for the present, and he had a quiet unconscious pride in his son, and felt he did not know how to manage such a being, who was so positive by being himself, though so gentle, and whose only resistance to formal elementary study was an indifference, an unrealizing, as of objects by a blind man, as one placed in a relation by a master of ceremonies, but for what depended upon something to be developed or completed, like children who are being collected in a room and position by the elder sisters of their child-host, who smile in their silent designs which are not to be told till all is ready to begin, as if in the humor of mystery. Life is life’s teacher, and children deal only with life; all that they make is an imitation of life, and knowledge, as imparted by the present old method, is the only positive thing to them in all nature; all things are to them by being towards them; they do not know and use means, but go along enjoying all, like one on a beautiful road on his way to a place which he does not keep in mind; nature carries them and leaves them free to look and feel as they please, like an infant unconsciously borne in the nurse’s arms to a family friend.
At school, Dolon loved to hear about the classic Mythology, (of which the teacher talked and read to him,) as before he had about the fairies. The sky and earth were full of undefined God-Beings, at the same time that there was a history in the theogony, and much which gave local significances and associations, and humanized natural objects, the stars, the pine trees, the reeds, the laurel, and so forth; and the Gods being more human and heroic, and more spiritually expressive, answered his advance in life. There is less intellectualness in the relations of youth than of men to the imaginary, for it is more as to the real, and they experience as if from the real; the beautiful is not music and sympathy to them, but has its natural, physical-like effect; the thing which is beautiful acts as a thing upon the child, and Being answers Being rather than looks at each other, and. each feels the other as what they internally are. Genius is matured youth living with life within it, which before was out of it or with it. It is as if nature was continented within it, and lived through its own life, as before it lived in the general life. All forms are facts to youth, and recognised by them as beings, not as persons; the sunshine reflects itself in their eyes, and all things are true to them by the realizing of their natures; the cause is known and believed through its effect.
Dolon loved to go and sit on a large rock within a wood which bordered on an old potatoe moss-hilled field, separated from the house by a large hay-field. The woods sloped down from the rock toward the western and southern sky, and Dolon came and sat here, almost regularly, every pleasant late afternoon and early evening. Underneath a part of the rock which was separated from the part on which he sat by an imperfect ravine, was a small cave within a cleft.
Dolon had often heard sounds like footsteps on the dirty leaves among the bushes around the rock, as of a person moving stationarily about, but he never saw any one, and thought the sound was of some animal. One afternoon, sitting in the sunset upon the rock, he rose and raised his eyes up to a pine tree which overhung one end of the rock; seated on branches near the top, in an opening of branches which had been broken off, or interlashed aside, was a man earnestly and inwardly, as if in contemplation, looking down on Dolon. It was as if Dolon had been moved to rise by something, which was himself’ without any thought or consciousness of his; their souls faced by their faces; each involuntarily started at first, but the man continued to look as unconsciously as if he thought he was invisible, and Dolon’s combined surprise and wonder was lost in the innocence and simplicity of the reality. The man was dressed in a crimson tunic over a white dress, with a fillet on his head, and the golden light of the setting sun shone on a strong profile, and heightened the effect of his dress in the dark tree, and the pale shade of the other half of his face gave a mysterious effect to his whole form. Just at this time, Dolon’s attention was diverted by the voices of his father and mother approaching the rock with some company, and on immediately looking up to the man again, he saw he was hastily descending and in an instant disappeared behind the edge of the rock; Dolon hastened to the edge to see him, but it was sloping and slippery with dead pine-leaves, and when he got there, the man was with self-possessed eagerness hastening into the bushes. The people had reached the rock, and Dolon asked if they had seen the man, and when they inquired about him, told them what he had seen. The women affrightedly exclaimed, “oh that must be the man”; and proposed to instantly return home. Dolon, gently amazed, asked if they knew who he was, and his mother said, there was a crazy man about, who believed in all the Greek and Roman Gods and Goddesses, and that it was thought he carried out the whole worship and made sacrifices, for sheep and calves had been found killed, bedecked with flowers before stone-piled altars; and said, that she was afraid to have Dolon go about so alone in the woods. ‘Oh how beautiful,’ said Dolon, ‘I wish I could see him and talk with him.’ One of the company said, that he had been a great scholar, and living so in the old Greek literature had turned his head, and that he was of a most respectable family, and had been a remarkably pure and earnest character, and did not seem crazy, except in this belief of his, yet was decidedly so, and all his family thought so, he was so sincere and earnest in his belief, but they never thought he would so carry it out, or they would have confined him before he left home.
Dolon was in a retired state, as if thinking or lost, but a youth’s reflection is the person in a passive relation to his nature, as if the personality had aerially vanished, unseen, like the raising of an eyelid, and the Being had incarnated itself in human form, like the soul of man in Jesus, and had become the person. Men in absence of mind are somewhat youthlike, though their Being-Nature is less free and full and formed than in youth, and they are as if their personality were folded aside, and they were quietly getting at their Being, while a youth is freshly individual, and his Being comes out as if his nature, and personality disappears, as a soul from the body at death. The youth instinctively, unconsciously, waits before his Being for his nature to act through it, and the Being not merely assists him, but comes beside him and spiritually over him, like one who answers the call or want of a child by going to it and doing all for it.
Dolon went home with the others, and was serious all the evening. Youth’s seriousness is a state of himself, and not as a man’s, himself in a state; his nature is affected as is the temperature of water by the condition of the sky, but its form remains a form, and its relations continue in all its parts, though all are modified yet in equal proportion, and it recedes together and in order, like a highly disciplined army. The youth neither introverts or extraverts, but is as he is affected.
Dolon continued in this state, and was all the three next days in Nature, and toward the sunset, sat as usual upon the rock, and they were the nights of the new moon. Something had met him which required the conformation of his nature to meet, and which in men would have given need of a high consciousness, as the sleeper in the dark, awaked by something which has touched him, or is near him, cannot sleep again till he ascertains it, and he looks about in the dark with eyes which, though open, cannot see till they are used to the darkness. The crazy man as a fact, combined with Dolon’s condition from the general experience of his humanity, of which this event was crisis-like, bad made this impression on him as if his nature was related to them as to things which, as inner principles, acted upon it; and this was the first intellectual development of a youth who had lived in Nature, and been a Being of Nature, but whose relations also comprehended men as they are, as, his parents, the school, and this crazy man, and whose nature partook of this modified humanity, though it so naturalized it by being a form of it, such as it was, as if a primitive condition, like air and water, which remain elements, though their essences are in different proportions from those of the optimum, and a lake enclosing hills, rocks, and cataracts; whereas men are forms of the original humanity which has become incomplete nod disharmonized by the disproportionate development of parts, like a full-formed tree whose sap ceases to equally circulate. It was a relation of his nature, not of his intellect, which looks out of one’s nature as from an observatory; its consciousness was in the relation of his Being to the Nature which thus was around him, as a blind man’s sense is in his feelings. As a person, Dolon had a kind of instinctive, quiet consciousness, as if God had put into his soul a celestial flower-plant on which were heavenly little fairies, and the consciousness was a feeling of an experience, like natural effects, going on within him; the life lives within him, and he neither sees, orders, or interferes with it. He did not think, though it was as if thoughts were taking forms within him, and taking their place as forms in the fresh spiritual inworld of his humanity. He was quiet and passive, and himself, as though there was an opening in the state of his humanity, and the forms there were shone upon by the sky, but the opening was of his own nature, like the cleft in a rock, and though the forms rose near the surface, did not rise beyond a level with himself, like stars brightly appearing in heaven. He was in Nature, and at unity with it, though he was as if there was something instinctively engaging him, like a child keeping by its mother’s side, with its hand in hers, while it has a certain care of doing or seeing something, it has not defined to itself what.
The experience going on within him was as if Poetry which he heard, and was quietly and really related to, as to a tale which a child realizes, (so far as it does realize, the effect upon him taking care of itself;) and what in men would be thought and consciousness, was in Dolon the Poet, whose effect, however, was deeper by being within him, and being him. Thought and consciousness may be conditions of the Being in a certain state, to which the Person is passive, having a life towards the life which thus outwardly comes to him. His being was, unconsciously, before the Great Mystery of Nature, the Universe, Truth, Man, God. It was acting below an instinctive sense of his childhood’s relation to nature in his fairy faith, and his life,—(and for the first time he felt his fairy relation had gone;) of the Mythologies which had been faiths to men somewhat like his fairy faith, and of their bearing on Nature; of this Nature with its self-derived-like life, and its invisible, unformed, in effect unreal God or Gods; of the crazy man’s belief in that which had been ages before a belief, and of the difference between his outward and inward relation to it, in which Dolon acknowledged the sanity and insanity of the man, at the same time; of the difference between this man’s and his own relation to the Mythology; of belief and its subjects, and of faith.
While all this experience was taking place, Dolon had the self-possession and patience and repose, the being of Life. Even a child’s plaintiveness is sometimes tragically serene and possessed.
As Dolon sat on the rock in the bright soft moonlight, on the evening of the third day, his face as it were transfigured, he thought he heard a sound, like the voice of a man engaged in. low prayer and invocation; but as he listened, it stopped, and the trees were murmuring in the gentle night-breeze, and he did not know that the crazy man, who had been fasting all day as before a great sacrifice, was performing an ante-sacrificial service in the cave below.—Presently he heard a rustling on the dry-leaved ground, and there was a bowing of the trees as of an audience gathered to welcome. There was a sound behind him of something ascending the rock, and looking, he saw just rising from the rock, in the face of the moon, the man, whom he instantly recognised as if he knew, dressed in a surplice-like robe, gathered in at the waist by a white tasseled girdle, and a wreath of laurel and wild lilies of the valley on his left arm. A repose was on his spiritual expressive face, but there was a character in it which showed it was not primitive, soul’s repose. Their faces faced, but he did not look at Dolon as before, though the same expression was in reserve in his face, but as one who was earnestly, reverently, and composedly, to do something. He took the wreath from his arm, and approaching, laid his hand on Dolon’s head, on which he put the wreath, looking earnestly up to heaven, and taking a sacrificial knife from his girdle, plunged it in Dolon’s breast. For a moment, as if looking from an absent sense, he bent over the body, which had fallen backwards on the rock and lay facing heaven, and then with his hands clasped on his breast, slowly and solemnly descended, and threw himself prostrate before the rock as before an altar.
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