MY STUDY FIRE MY STUDY FIRE, SECOND SERIES UNDER THE TREES AND ELSEWHERE SHORT STORIES IN LITERATURE ESSAYS IN LITERARY INTERPRETATION ESSAYS ON NATURE AND CULTURE BOOKS AND CULTURE ESSAYS ON WORK AND CULTURE THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT NORSE STORIES WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE FOREST OF ARDEN CHILD OF NATURE WORKS AND DAYS PARABLES OF LIFE MY STUDY FIRE. ILLUSTRATED UNDER THE TREES. Illustrated " The Goddess moving across the fields IKlAIM10ILTrOM-. , WiaDCKI , ir.-IMIA©0IE WOTM ©1 <£©&&■?!) ©MS BY CHARUgS-B/MONTT© DODD, MEAD A COPYRIGHT 1903 i.nmi|y][J THE LIBRARY OF CONORESS, I wo Copies Received OCT 14 1903 Cup>hfcin fc.ntr> Put a+>~(q ot CLASS CL. XXc. No "7 D H- 4 t> COPY 3. JAMES LANE ALLEN ABLE OF CONTENTS PAGE THE PIPES OF THE FAUN ...... 13 THE LYRE OF APOLLO 51 THE SICKLE OF DEMETER 85 POSTLUDE 115 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS BY WILL-H-LOW " The Goddess moving across the fields "... Frontispiece ' The boy raised the pipes to his lips " . . Facing page 40 - The Lyre of Apollo 54 Without, the stillness of the winter night " . .124 THE PIPES OF THE FAUN IN ARCADT h V rl ^ UCT,, Mm THE tenderest green was on the foliage, the whitest clouds were in the sky, and the showers were so sudden that the birds were hardly dry of one wetting before there came another. These swift dashes of rain seemed to fall out of the clear blue, so mysteriously did the light clouds dissolve into the depths of heaven after every rush of pattering drops in the woods. It was the first spring day. The season had come shyly up from the south, as if half afraid to trust its sensitive growths to the harsh airs and rough [15] .J*. caresses of the northern winds. And sky and woods wore their happiest smiles for the laggard season, and were bent on the gayest revels, now that the guest had come. The last traces of the snow had hardly vanished and there were damp, cool places in the shadow of rocks, where winter still waited to be driven out by those search- ing fingers of light which leave no hidden leaf or buried root un- touched. The woods that morn- ing were like an empty stage upon which the curtain has been rolled up. There were no moving figures, but there were murmurs of sound, mysterious noises, stirrings of things out of sight, which made one aware [16] ^^^^^8 SBSI t,a «| ^^^^& ^^^^^^^^^^^^^& ^s£««s<£?'T^ : " ^ ^"^St^as jjpsfgjp that the play was about to begin. There were signs of impatience in the great, silent theatre, as if the first lines had been already delayed too long. The sky and the earth were getting more intimate every hour ; secret forces, mysterious in- fluences, were moving in the depths of air, and over the surface of the world there played a subtle and elusive softness, the first faint breath of summer, the softest sigh of returning life. Last year's leaves lay dull red in the hollow between the low hills, and the black trunks of oaks made the light, slender clusters of white birches stand out with bright dis- tinctness on the slopes. The green on the birches was so delicate that, m [17] rP m^ w*\ BJ^ n m& mm |ffe TjtlSILai^ Ray"'"*" "^ up Bllii51i f^J-, looking from a little distance, it seemed more like a shading than a colour ; but the clean blue of the sky, blurred at times by slowly passing clouds dark with rain, or of such whiteness that they seemed to be erasing every trace of the momentary blackness, confirmed the faint evidence that spring had come. ir \'i [18] II SO, at least, thought the Faun, sitting at ease with his back against an oak, his pipe in his hand and his eye wandering curi- ously through the open spaces of the wood. So entirely at home was he that solitude or society was alike to him, and the speech of men or of animals equally plain. There were hints of wildness about him ; for he was brother to the folk in fur and feather that lived in the wood, although the light in his eye and the pipe in his hand showed that he had travelled far from the old instincts without having lost them. There were hints of human fellowship in his air of seeing the [ 21] world as well as being a part of it ; although the absence of all thought about himself, all ques- tioning of the sky and earth, made one aware that if he held converse with men he talked also with the creatures that slept in the fields and hid in the woods. He was stretched at ease in a world about which he had never taken thought, being born into it after the manner of the creatures that live in free and joyous use of the things of Nature without any thought of Nature herself. In him, however, the instinctive joy in life had become articulate ; he spake for the strange and wild instincts of his kind, although he could not speak of them. In his careless, [22] s unconscious, unthinking life all the instincts and appetites and activi- ties of the living things that were fed and housed by Nature played freely, joyfully, without conscious- ness. He had, however, the gift of speech ; and the silent, secretive, sensuous world became articulate on his lips and he was the inter- preter of that world to men. Idle, smiling, content alike with the sun and the cloud, the Faun was so much a part of the streaming life about him that he did not see its beauty or feel its mystery ; he was without apprehension or curiosity ; he had no tasks or duties ; there was no law for him save obedience to his own nature, which was sim- ple, sensuous, without thought or [23] ii in iii care or obligation. When he put his pipes to his lips and blew a few clear notes there were no echoes of human emotion or experience in them ; they might have rained down from the clouds with the song of the skylark, which has the quality of the solitude of the upper air in it, or they might have been borne gently in from a distance, like the tones of the waterfall over the hill. And yet there was something in them which no bird or animal nor any stirring of water or air could have put there ; a sense of the mounting life of the world, growing and straining and rushing on to fruition ; the stir and murmur and hum of bird and branch and bee ; the simple animal joy of sharing [24] wv m Jf^Shn the gift of life with all creatures, without a hint of its uses, its mean- ing, its end, it was the song of life when it knows that it is life and all the instincts, passions, and de- sires awake and fulfil themselves. [25] Ill T iHESE notes, clear, soli- tary, penetrating, came like an invitation to the boy who had entered the wood with- out thought or care or desire, save to feel the warmth of the sun and to take what the day offered him. He had never heard such sounds before, but they seemed so much a part of the place and the time that he accepted them as if they were human speech. The Faun himself, visible now through the light growth of the birch trees, brought no surprise ; he, too, be- longed to the hour and the scene. Instead of shyness a sense of fel- lowship grew on the boy as he came [29] nearer the pipe and the strange fig- ure which held it. The Faun did not cease his fitful, vagrant music ; he, too, seemed to accept the boy as of a piece with the season. There was a deeper kinship be- tween the two than appeared at the moment. Each had a past strangely different from the other ; the roots of the boy's nature reach- ing back through long generations of thinking, questioning, responsible creatures like himself; the roots of the Faun's nature deep in the un- recorded experience of thousands of generations of living things that know all the ways of the wood and field and stream and air, but had never thought, questioned or had m. The Faun duty upon [30] N3S xm m s- had climbed to the point where all this vast, confused, instinctive life had become conscious that it lived ; the boy had gone far on into a world in which instinct had be- come intelligence, passion weakness or power, appetite and desire mas- ter or servant. On that spring morning, however, they stood on the same plane of being ; for the Faun was happy in the sense of life and the boy was just awaken- ing to the desire of the eye and the joy of the muscles and the bliss of the perfect body in the world which plays upon it as the wind on the harp. He did not know what stirred within him, but he felt as if he had come to his own at last. [31] Br ft The notes of the pipe floated through the wood and were sent back in echoes from the hillside, with bird-notes intermingled, and the soft murmurs of tree tops gently swayed, and the faint tones of water falling from rock to rock hidden by a press of ferns and softened by mosses. The boy threw himself at the Faun's feet and listened ; and as he listened the whole world seemed to come to life about him and move together in sheer delight in the cherishing of the sun and the caressing of the clouds. The woods were full of nesting birds ; through the trees delicate patterings of feet were heard, as if the creatures who lived in the coverts and hidden places were abroad without fear. [32] \t mmf>f^ - ,-■/ The boy seemed to hear a low, far, continuous murmur as of grow- ing things in the ground shyly reaching slender tendrils up for the touch of the sun which was to lift them out of the darkness of birth into the bright mystery of life, as of tiny leaves slowly unfolding on innumerable branches. The whole world seemed to be moving in a vast beginning of things ; creeping, shining, expand- ing, climbing in universal warmth and light. Nothing seemed com- plete, everything was prophetic ; the tide was beginning to ripple in from the fathomless deeps of being ; its ultimate sweep and vol- ume, foaming in the vast channels through the mountains and tossing [ 3 ] [33] its crested waves to the summits, was still far off in the summer to which all things moved, but of which there was neither thought nor care on that first day of spring. It was the stir of life which the boy heard, and the frank, free, un- questioning joy in it which made riot in the mind of the Faun ; the mystery and wonder of it were far from the thought of these two creatures of the season, the Faun who had come up the long ascent of animal life, and the boy who stood for a moment with the Faun at the place where joy in the sense of life is at the full. The ways of these two creatures met for one hour that morning in early April, [34] IV IV TO the merry piping of the Faun the boy laughed gleefully ; here .was the wild playmate who could take him deeper into the woods than he had ever ventured and show him the shy creatures who were always eluding his eager search. And the Faun, who was nearer his brothers of the wood than his brothers of the thatched roof and the vine trained against the wall, saw in the boy a fellow of his own mind ; to whom the wind was a challenge to kindred fleetness and the notes of the birds floating down the mountain side invitations to adventure and action. [39] iiiiu4 The boy might have been twelve or thirteen ; the Faun seemed to be of no age ; he had never thought and time had left no trace on his brow or in his eye ; he might have been born with Nature, or he might have come with the spring. To-day the boy was his fellow ; next spring he would be so far away from him that the sounds of the pipes might never reach him again. Of this gulf to widen between them the Faun knew nothing ; it was the kinship of boy with boy that prompted him to hold out the pipes to the sensitive hand which showed the vast divergence of his- tory between the two. The boy raised the pipes to his lips and blew loudly through the rude joint- [40] V m % >M-^^ ;M mmm fflM ill! mm " The boy raised the pipes to his lips Wi ure of reeds, and then hung on the far- travelling sounds which he had set loose. There was a strange compelling power in them as they seemed to penetrate further and further into the wood, and seizing the hand of the Faun the two ran together up the wooded hill and over its crest into a world of which the boy had only dreamed before. He had seen the world a thou- sand times before, but now it flowed in upon him through all the chan- nels of his senses ; a rushing, sing- ing, tumultuous tide swept him along, and with the jubilant stream the joy of life flooded his mind and heart. A wild exultation seized him, swept him out of himself, and carried him on with the power [41] fa U^V ^•/■i TO b*0$rf.m and sweep of a resistless torrent. He ran, shouted, laughed as if some hidden and inarticulate force within him had suddenly broken bounds. He was fellow with the bird that sang on the bough and comrade with the shy creatures who had never suffered his approach before. If he had known what was hap- pening within him he would have understood the ancient frenzy of the Bacchic worshippers ; the sur- render to the spell of the life of the world, rising out of deep springs in the heart of things, calling with the potency of ancient witcheries to his instincts, taking possession of his quickening senses, and mount- ing with intoxicating glow to his imagination. [ 42 J V THE pipe of the Faun drew his feet far into the secret places of the woods, and with every step he seemed to be breaking some imprisonment, find- ing some new liberty. The Faun could have told him much of that ancient world which was old before man began to look, to wonder, to comprehend ; but the wild music of those few notes, so inarticulate but so full of the unspoken life of hidden and fugitive things, spoke to his senses as no words of human speech could have spoken. They were full of echoes of a dateless past, of which no memory remained save that which was deposited in [45] *k M instinct and habit ; the earliest and oldest form of memory. He was recovering the lost possession of his race ; the primitive experiences that lay behind its childhood and made a deep, rich, warm soil for its ancient divinations and for those dreams of an older world which haunt it and are always luring its poets to the secret homes of that beauty which embosoms the youth of men, and fills them with infinite longing and regret when spring comes flooding up the shores of being after the long silence and desolation. In that far-off world the Faun still lived, and when he blew on the reeds its echoes set the very heart of the boy vibrating with a [46] &s.-o--^S1_ ~ 2= **- "$■- mmrJm 2/ ^e^r-l- feTS"? >r joy whose sources were far beyond his ken. Through the soft splen- dour of the spring day, so tender with the fertility of immemorial years, so overflowing with the glad- ness of the births that were to be, the boy ran, without thought or care ; every sense flooded with the young beauty and joy of the sea- son ; his feet caught in the rhythm | of unfolding life, his imagination aflame with a thousand elusive in- tonations of pleasure, a thousand salutations from trees and birds and restless creatures keeping time and tune with the rhythm of the creative hour in wood and field and sky. In later days, when the spell had dissolved, what he saw on that day [47] CMA lay like a golden mist behind him, and what he heard lingered in faint, inarticulate echoes that set his pulses beating ; but he recalled no definite glimpses and remem- bered no articulate words ; he only knew that he had entered into the joy of life, and had been given the freedom of the world. Never again did he hear a song in the woods without pausing in hushed silence because he stood on the verge of an older world ; never again did he catch a sudden glimpse of the trunks of trees black against a dull red background of oak leaves or a wintry sky without a throbbing of the heart, which made him aware that he was in the presence of the oldest mysteries. [48] y '*4 A c ^ When night fell and a low mur- mur of innumerable creatures, shel- tering in familiar places, filled the woods, the boy looked in vain for the Faun ; but far off he heard the wild notes, softened by the hush of the hour, like the sounds of dreams dreamed when the world was young. ^^^ [49] THE LYRE OF APOLLO ■', i r:;. IT was mid-June and the world was in flower. The delicate promise of April, when the pipes of the Faun echoed in the depths of woods faintly touched with the tenderest green, was ful- filled in a mass and ripeness of foliage which had parted with none of its freshness, but had become like a sea of moving and whisper- ing greenness. The delicious heat of the early summer evoked a vagrant and elusive fragrance from the young grasses starred with flowers. The morning songs, which made the break of day throb with an ecstasy of melody, were caught up again and again through the [53] l/llj Mill] ill ml long, tranquil hours by careless singers, happy in some hidden place in the meadows or sheltered within the edges of the wood ; and with these sudden bursts of hidden music, there came the cool breath of the dawn into the sultry noon. The world was folded in a dream of heat ; not arid, blasting, palpitating ; but caressing, vitalising, liberating. The earth, loved of the sun, was no longer coy and half afraid ; she had given herself wholly, and in the glad surrender the beauty that lay hidden in her heart had clothed her like a garment. In the fulfilment of her life a sudden bliss had dis- solved her passionless coldness into the life-giving warmth of universal fertility. I The Lyre of Apollo So deep was the current of life which flowed through the world and so full and sweeping the tide, that the youth, whom it seemed to overtake in the heart of the pines, was half intoxicated by the delicious draughts held to his lips, and was in an ecstasy of wonder and mystery and joy. He had known the world well since that early spring morn- ing years before when he had come upon the Faun, and the two had gone together, eager feet keeping time to the vagrant music of the pipes, to the secret places where the wild things live and are not afraid. From that hour in his boy- hood he had known bird and beast so well that he came and went among them even as one of them, [55] \KftiH --;?< & and his voice brought no terror and his shadow no sudden fear as he wandered, glad and friendly, through the heart of the forest. For half a decade he had had the freedom of the field and the wood, and had lived like a child of nature in the joy and strength of the life that is one with the health and beauty of the hills and stars. Again and again he had seemed to hear, borne on the air of some still afternoon, the faint music of the pipes of the Faun, but he had never again met that ancient dweller in the woods face to face. Nor had he needed to ; for the fresh delight, the instinctive joy in the life of things, the free play of muscle, the complete surrender to the sight or [56] 7^.-\ , &s ^//smPlw,: %£i &>] sound or pleasure of the moment, had been his in full measure ; and he had lived the life of the senses in glad unconsciousness. And the years had gone by and left no mark on him, save the hardening of muscle, the filling out of limb, the waxing strength, the growing exhilaration of youth and freedom and infinite capacity for action and pleasure swiftly coming to clear consciousness. O'-JT* - ~- % S$^-**2s V-k&cv^ i. II 6 ^ II THROUGH the long years of boyhood Nature lay mirrored in his senses without blur or mist, and the images of her manifold wonder and beauty had sunk into the depths of his being. He had lived in the moving world that lay about him, stirred into incessant action by its constant appeal to his energy, caught up and carried forward for days together in a joyful rush of play ; led hither and thither in endless quest of little mysteries of sight and sound that teased and baffled him ; absorbed into complete self-forgetfulness by the vast continent where his lot was cast, which called him with a [61] fix ' 'O thousand voices to exploration and discovery. Of late, however, there had come a touch of pain in his careless joy ; a sense of mystery which disturbed and perplexed him ; a consciousness of something strange and alien to the wild, free life he had been liv- ing. He no longer felt at home in the woods, and it seemed to him as if the old intimacy with the creatures that lived there had been chilled. He was no longer free-minded and free-hearted. He had lived until this hour in the world without him ; now the world within was rising into view ; he was coming to the knowledge of him- self. And that knowledge was "fraught with pain, as is all knowl- [62] i3*f ~fym w. X- >r edge that penetrates to a man's soul and becomes part of him. As a child he had known only one world ; now another world was rising into view, vexed with mists, obscured by shadows ; a strange, mysterious, un- discovered country, full of enchant- ments, but elusive and baffling. The world he knew seemed to contradict and fall apart from the world which was slowly disclosing itself to him, like a planet wheeling out of storm and mist into an ordered sphere. Every morning brought him the joy of discovery and the pain of "moving about in worlds not realised." The old order of his life had suddenly vanished ; the sense of familiarity, of intimate living, of home-keeping and home- rs ] Ill Ill IN such a mood, exhilarated and depressed, full of mounting life, but with the touch of pain on his spirit, the youth had found the murmur of the pines soothing and restful ; like a cool hand laid on a hot forehead. Again and again, in these confused and perplexing months, he had fled to their silence and shade as to a re- treat in the heart of old and dear things. As he came across the fields on this radiant morning all the springs of joy were once more rising in him ; the young summer touched him through every sense, and his soul rushed out to meet her in a [67] "l" iii/iil passion of devotion and self-sur- render. The pain was stilled, the sense of loneliness had vanished ; and in their place had come a sud- den consciousness of new intimacies forming themselves with incredible swiftness, a deep sense of a unity between his spirit and the heart of things of which the old familiarity had been but a faint prophecy. Over the undiscovered country of his own soul the mists were melt- ing, the clouds rolling up into the blue and dissolving in infinite depths of tenderest sky, mountain ranges were defining their outlines against the sky, and the " light that never was on sea or land " was swiftly unveiling a harmony and unity of world with world which [68] was itself a new and higher beauty than had dawned before on the vision of youth. The stillness of the summer lay in the heart of the wood, and only the gentle swaying and whispering of the pines, caressed by the light- est of moving airs, made one aware that something stirred in the vast and shining silence of the sky. It seemed to the youth, when he had entered the inner sanctuary of the wood, as if the spirit of things were touching invisible chords so softly that they vibrated almost without sound. He recalled the pipes of the Faun, so clear, piercing, dis- tinct, tuned to the simplest pleas- ures of the senses, with the feeling that he had heard them echoing [69] ^ ;/- Mm, WMW: JMi& w^ mb4> through the wood in some other life ; so remote, detached and alien were they to the richer mood, the deeper emotion, the mounting pas- sion, of the time and place. He heard them as one hears a clear, far cry which lies in the ear, but calls to nothing in one's spirit and sets no echoes flying in one's soul. m IV ]A ND while he hung upon the / ^ silence, with the faint, 1 m shrill notes of the pipes making old music in his memory, suddenly, as from some deeper re- treat, some more ancient sanctuary, there rose upon the hushed air a melody that laid a finger on his lips and a hand on his heart and flooded the innermost recesses of his being. Stricken with sudden silence, mute under the spell of a music which left no thought unspoken and no experience unexpressed, he hung on the thrilling notes as if all the won- der and beauty and mystery of the world and the soul had found speech at last, and out of the innermost [73] 3E _