Now he is circular,
Gnawing his tail, like the Greek symbol,
Suggesting infinite meanings
Unto the mind of a modern
Crammed with the olden mythologies.
Now, uncoiled in the sunlight,
He stretches himself out at full length
In all his undulate longitude.
His body is a constellation of mounds,
Artfully imitative,
From the fatal tail to the more fatal head.
Overgrown they are with grass,
Short, green grass, thick and velvety,
Like well cared-for lawns,
With strange, wild flowers glittering,
Made up of alien mould
Brought hither from distant regions.
Curiously I have considered them,
Many a time in the summer,
Lying beside them under the flaming sky,
Smoking an old tobacco pipe,
Made by one of these moundsmen.
Who in his time had smoked it,
Perchance over the council fire,
Or in the dark woods where he had gone a-hunting;
In war time—in peaceful evenings,
With his squaw by his side,
And his brood of dusky papposins
Playing about in the twilight
Under the awful star-shadows.
It seemed that I was very close to him, at such times;
And that his thick-ribbed lips,
—Gone to dust for unknown centuries—
Had met mine inscrutably,
By a magic hid in the pipestem,
Making me his familiar and hail fellow.
Almost I felt his breath,
And the muffled sound of his heart-beats;
Almost I grasped his hand,
And shook the antediluvian,
With a shake of grimmest fellowship
Trying to cozen him of his grim secret.
But sudden the gusty wind came,
Laughing away the illusion,
And I was alone in the desert.
If he could only wake up now,
And confront me—that ancient salvage!
Resurgated, with his faculties
All quick about him, and his memories,
What an unheard-of powwow
Could I report to you, O friends of mine!
Who look for some revelation,
Some hint of the strange apocalypse,
Which the wit of this man, living
So near to the prime of the morning,
So near to the gates of the azure,
The awful gates of the Unseen—
Whence all that is seen proceeded—
Hath wrought in this new-found country!
I wonder if he would remember
Anything about the Land of the Immortals.
Something he would surely find
In the deeps of his consciousness
To wake up a dim reminiscence.
Dreamy shadows might haunt him,
Shadows of beautiful faces, and of terrible;
Large, lustrous eyes, full of celestial meanings,
Looking up at him, beseeching him,
From unfathomable abysses,
With glances which were a language.
The finalest secrets and mysteries,
Behind every sight, and sound, and color,
Behind all motions, and harmonies,
Which floated round about him,
Archetypes of the phenomenal!
Or, it might be, that coming suddenly in his mind
Upon some dark veil, as of Isis,
He lifts it with a key-thought,
Or the sudden memory of an arcane sign,
And beholds the gardens of Living Light,
The starry platform, palaces, and thrones—
The vast colossi, the intelligences
Moving to and fro over the flaming causeways
Of the kingdoms beyond the gates—
The infinite arches
And the stately pillars,
Upbuilt with sapphire suns
And illuminated with emerald and ruby stars,
Making cathedrals of immensity
For the everlasting worship without words.
All, or some, of the wondrous, impenetrable picture-land:
The crimson seas,
Flashing in uncreated light,
Crowded with galleons
On a mission to ports where dwell the old gods
And the mighty intellects of the Immortals.
The ceaseless occupations,
The language and the lore;
The arts, and thoughts, the music, and the instruments;
The beauty and the divine glory of the faces,
And how the Immortals love,
Whether they wed like Adamites,
Or are too happy to wed,
Living in single blessedness!
Well, I know it is rubbish,
The veriest star-dust of fancy,
To think of such a thing as this
Being a memorial heirloom of the fore-world,
Such rude effigies of men,
Such clodbrains, as these poor mound builders!
Their souls never had any priority in the life of them;
No background of eternity
Over which they had traversed
From eon to eon,
Sun-system to sun-system,
Planets and stars under them,
Planets and stars over them;
Now dwelling on immeasurable plains of azure
Bigger than space,
Dazzling with the super-tropical brightness
Of passionate flowers without a name,
In all the romance of color and beauty—
Now, in the cities celestial,
Where they made their acquaintances
With other souls, which had never been incarnated,
But were getting themselves ready
By an intuitive obedience
To a well-understood authority,
Which had never spoken,
To take upon themselves the living form
Of some red-browed, fire-eyed Mars-man,
Some pale-faced, languishing son
Of the Phalic planet Venus,
Or wherever else it might be,
In what remote star soever
Quivering on shadowy battlements.
Along the lines of the wilderness,
Of worlds beyond worlds,
These souls were to try their fortunes.
Surely, no experience of this sort
Ever happened unto them,
Although one would like to invest them
With the glory of it, for the sake of the soul.
But they were, to speak truth of them,
A sort of journeyman work,
Not a Phidian statuary,
But a first cast of man,
A rude draft of him;
Huge gulfs, as of dismal Tartarus,
Separating him from the high-born Caucasian.
He, a mere Mongolian,
As good, perhaps, in his faculties,
As any Jap. or Chinaman—
But not of the full-orbed brain,
Star-blown, and harmonious
With all sweet voices as of flutes in him,
And viols, bassoons, and organs;
Capable of the depths and circumferences of thought,
Of sphynxine entertainments,
And the dramas of life and death.
A plain fellow, and a practical,
With picture in him and symbol,
And thus not altogether clay-made,
But touched with the fire of the rainbow,
And the finger of the first light,
Waiting for the second and the third light,
Expectant through the ages,
And disappointed;
Never receiving more,
But going down, at last, a dark man,
And a lonely, through the dark galleries
Of death, and behind the curtain
Where all is light.
I like to think of him, and see his works:
I like to read him in his mounds,
And think I can make out a good deal of his history.
He was a half-dumb man,
Very sorrowful to see,
But brave, nevertheless, and bravely
Struggling to fling out his thoughts,
In a kind of dumb speech;
Struggling, indeed, after poetry
Dædalian forms, and eloquence;
Ambitious of distinguishing himself
In the presence of wolves and bisons
And all organic creatures;
Of making his claim good
Against these, his urgent disputants,
That he was lord of the planet.
If he could not write books,
He could scrawl the earth with his record:
He could make hieroglyphs,
Constellations of mounds and animals,
Effigies of unnamable things,
Monsters, and hybrids unnatural,
Bred of grotesque fancies; and man-forms.
These last, none of your pigmies
A span long in the womb,
And six feet, at full growth, out of it—
But bigger in chest and paunch,
In the girth of his muscular shackle-bones,
Round his colossal shoulders,
Round his Memnonian countenance,
Over the dome of his skull-crypts—
From crown to foot of his body—
Than grimmest of old Welsh giants,
Grimmest of Araby ogres!
Many a time talking with gray hunters,
Who leaned on their rifles against a tree,
And made the bright landscape
And the golden morning fuller of gold and brightness
By the contrast of their furrowed faces,
Their shaggy eyebrows,
And the gay humor laughing in their eyes,
Their unkempt locks, their powder horns, and buskins,
And the wild attire, in general, of their persons—
Many a time have I heard them
Tell of these man-effigies
Lying prone on the floors of the prairie.
And, in my whim for correspondence,
And perpetual seeking after identities,
I have likened them to the stone sculptures, in cathedrals,
Cut by pious hands out of black marble,
Memorial resemblances of holy abbots,
Of Christian knights, founders of religious houses,
Of good lords of fair manors,
Who left largess to these houses,
Beneficed the arched wine-cellars
With yearly butts of canary,
Or, during their lifetime,
Beautified the west front with stately windows
Of colored glass, emblazoned with Scripture stories,
The sunlight in shadowy reflections painting the figures
With blue and gold and crimson
Upon the cold slabs of the pavement.
These effigies, stiff, formal,
Rudely fashioned, and of poor art,
All of them lying, black and stark,
Like a corpse-pageantry visioned in some monk's dream,
Lying thus, in the transepts,
On the cold, gray floor of the cathedral.
A curious conceit, truly!
But the prairie is also consecrated,
And quite as sacred I think it
As Rome's most holy of holies.
It blossoms and runs over with religion.
These meek and beautiful flowers!
What sweet thoughts and divine prayers are in them!
These song birds! what anthems of praise
Gush out of their ecstatic throats!
I pray you, also, tell me,
What floors, sacred to what dead,
Can compare with the elaborate mosaic work
Of this wide, vast, outstretching floor of grass?
As good a place, I take it,
For the mound builder to make his man-effigies
Out of the mould in,
As the cathedral is, for its artists
To make man-effigies out of the black marble!
And the thought, too, is the same!
The thought of the primeval savage of the stone era,
Roaming about in these wilds,
Before the beautiful Christ
Made the soul more beautiful,
Revealed the terror of its divine forces,
Announced its immortality,
And was nailed on a tree for His goodness!
While the monk, therefore, lay yet in the pagan brain,
And' Time had not so much as thought
Of sowing the seed for his coming—
While his glorious cathedral, which, as we now know it,
Is an epic poem built in immortal stone,
Had no archetype except in the dreams of God,
Dim hints of it, lying like hopeless runes
In the forest trees and arches,
Its ornamentations in the snow drifts, and the summer leaves and flowers—
No doubt, the mound-builder's man, put in effigy on the prairie,
Had been a benefactor, in his way and time;
Or, a great warrior; or learned teacher
Of things symbolized in certain mound-groups,
And which, from their arrangement,
Appertain, it would seem, to mysteries,
And ghostly communications.
They thought to keep green his memory,
The worship of him and his good deeds,
Unto the end of time,
Throughout all generations.
The holy men, born of Christ,
All Christendom but the development of him,
And all the world his debtor;
Even God owing him more largely
Than He has thought fit to pay back,
Taking the immense credit
Of nigh two thousand years!
These holy men, so born and cultured,
Could think of no way wiser,
Of no securer method
Of preserving the memory of their saints,
And of those who did good to them,
Than this rude, monumental way of the savage.
So singular is man,
So old-fashioned his thinkings,
So wonderful and similar his sympathies!
Everywhere the same, with a difference;
Cast in the same moulds,
Of the same animal wants, and common mind,
Of the same passions and vices,
Hating, loving, killing, lying—
A vast electrical chain
Running through tradition, and auroral history,
Up through the twilights,
And blazing noons,
Through vanishing and returning twilights,
Through azure nights of stars—
Epochs of civilization—
Unto the calmer glory,
Unto the settled days,
Unto the noble men—
Nunc formosissimus annus!
Thus do I, flinging curiously the webs of fancy
Athwart the time-gulfs, and the ages,
Reconcile, after a kind, the primitive savage of America
With the wonderful genealogies—
Upsprung from the vital sap
Of the great life-tree, Igdrasil!
Thick and populous nations
Heavily bending its branches,
Each in its autumn time of one or two thousand years,
Like ripe fruits, fully developed and perfected,
From the germ whence they proceeded;
Nourished by strong saps of vitality,
By the red, rich blood of matured centuries,
By passionate Semitic sunlights;
Beautiful as the golden apples of the Hesperides!
Radiating, also, a divine beauty,
The flower-blossom and the aroma,
The final music, of a ripe humanity,
Whereof each particular nation
Was in its way and turn
The form and the expression,
Grand autumns were some of them!
Grand and beautiful, like that of Greece,
Whose glorious consummation always reminds me
Of moving statues, music, and richest painting and architecture:
Her landscapes shimmering in golden fire-mists,
Which hang over the wondrously colored woods,
In a dreamy haze of splendor;
Revealing arched avenues, and tiny glades,
Cool, quiet spots, and dim recesses,
Green swards, and floral fairy lands,
Sweeping to the hilltops;
Illuminating the rivers in their gladsome course,
And the yellow shadows of the rolling marshes,
And the cattle of the farmer as they stand knee-deep
Switching their tails by the shore;
Lighting up the singing faces,
The sweet, laughing, singing faces,
Of the merry, playful brooks,
Now running away over shallows,
Now into gurgling eddies;
Now under fallen trees,
Past beaver dams long deserted;
Now under shady banks,
Lost in the tangled wood-growths;
Quivering now with, their laughter,
Out in the open meadow,
Flowing, singing and laughing,
Over the weeds and rushes,
Flowing and singing forever!
Plastic and beautiful, and running over
With Schiller's 'play impulse,' was the genius of Greece,
Of which her institutions and civility were the embodiment.
Other autumn times of the nations
Were calm and peaceful,
Symbolized above, as fruit on the branches
Of the life-tree, Igdrasil!
And when their time came,
They dropped down silently,
Like apples from their boughs on the autumn grass;
Silently dropped down, on moonlight plains,
In the presence of the great company of the stars,
And the flaming constellations,
Which evermore keep solemn watch over their graves.
Others were blown off suddenly,
And prematurely—all the elements enraged against them;
And others, like the Dead Sea fruit,
Were rotten at the heart before their prime!
The old mound builder stands at the base of the tree,
At the base of the wonderful tree Igdrasil,
And the mighty branches thereof,
Which hang over his head in flame-shadows,
Germinated, and blossomed with nations,
In other lands, in another hemisphere
Far away, over the measureless brine,
From the mother earth where he was planted,
Where he grew and flourished,
And solved the riddle of life,
And tried death,
And the riddle beyond death.
He thought this passionate America,
With its vast results of physical life,
Its beautiful and sublime portraitures,
Its far-sweeping prairies, rolling in grassy waves
Like the green billows of an inland sea—
Its blue-robed mountains
Piercing the bluer heavens with their peaks—
Its rivers, lakes, and forests—
A roomy, and grand-enough earth to inhabit,
Without thought of anything beyond it.
And yet he is related to all
That was, and is, and shall be!
That idea which was clothed in his flesh
Is fleshed in I know not how many
Infinite forms and varieties,
In every part of the earth,
In this day of my generation.
But the flesh is a little different,
And here and there the organism a nobler one,
And the idea bigger, broader, deeper,
Of a more divine quality and diapason.
He is included in us, as the lesser in the greater;
All our enactments are repetitions of his;
Enlarged and adorned;
And we pass through all his phases,
Some time or other, in our beginnings—
Through his, and an infinity of larger ones—
And we have the same inevitable endings.
УНИВЕРСАЛЬНЫЙ ЯЗЫК:
ЕГО ВОЗМОЖНОСТЬ, НАУЧНАЯ НЕОБХОДИМОСТЬ И СООТВЕТСТВУЮЩИЕ ХАРАКТЕРИСТИКИ
Идея о возможности и желательности универсального языка, научно построенного; общей формы речи для всех наций человечества ради исправления путаницы и великого зла Вавилона — не нова. Ей увлекался знаменитый Лейбниц. Она, как мы полагаем, упоминалась среди замыслов лорда Монбоддо. Епископ Уилкинс посвятил годы труда выполнению этой задачи и полагал, что справился с ней. Он опубликовал результаты своих трудов в тяжеловесных томах, которые остались лежать мертвым грузом на полках антикваров или любителей редких книг. Молодой дворянин из нашего города, обладавший редким гением по фамилии Фэрбэнк, трагически погибший несколько лет назад, усердно трудился над той же целью. Недавно в Испании было организовано общество ученых людей с центральным штабом в Барселоне, посвященное той же работе. Вероятно, предпринимались и многочисленные другие попытки. Во всех этих попытках, проектах и трудах замысел никогда не выходил за рамки изобретательства. Усилие сводилось лишь к тому, чтобы сконструировать новую форму речи и убедить человечество принять ее — задача геркулесова и безнадежная по своим масштабам и невыполнимости; но тем не менее она направлена на удовлетворение одной из величайших потребностей человеческого совершенствования. Существование не менее чем двух-трех тысяч различных языков и идиотов на поверхности нашей планеты в нынешнюю эпоху сообщений с помощью железных дорог и пароходов представляет собой, очевидно, одно из самых серьезных препятствий на пути к тому объединению человечества, которое, с другой стороны, столь многие сопутствующие признаки предвещают.
Другой и отличный взгляд на перспективу единства речи для человечества проистекает из растущего народного впечатления, что все существующие языки в конечном итоге и довольно быстро будут переплавлены в один посредством самого тепла и трения нашего интенсивного современного международного общения. Каждая национальность начинает выдвигать свои претензии в качестве подходящей и вероятной матрицы для нового агломерата или филологического конгломерата, появления которого смутно ожидают. Англичане настаивают на коммерческом превосходстве своего языка; французы — на разговорном и придворном характере своего; немцы — на присущей немецкому языку энергии и философской приспособляемости; испанцы — на широком территориальном распространении и звучной эвфонии этого идиота; и так же поступают другие национальности.
И изобретение, являющееся гением приспособления, и объединяющее влияние самого общения могут занять свое подобающее место в качестве вспомогательных средств при реконструкции человеческой речи в соответствии с требованиями новой эры, занимающейся над миром; но существует другой, гораздо более фундаментальный и важный элемент, который может, и, пожалуй, можно сказать, должен выйти на сцену и войти в решение. Это элемент положительного научного открытия в языковой сфере. Может обнаружиться, что каждый элементарный звук человеческого голоса изначально наделен самой природой первобытным значением; что небольшая совокупность этих значений представляет собой именно ту горсть первоначальных категорий всякой мысли и всякого бытия, которую философы, от Аристотеля до Канта, столь усердно и мучительно искали. Зародыш этой идеи зарождался и смутно боролся в сознании покойного выдающегося филолога доктора Чарльза Крейтсера, бывшего профессора языков в Университете Виргинии и автора многочисленных ценных статей в «Циклопедии» Аплтона; несомненно, самого образованного человека, которого несчастная Венгрия дала нашему американскому сообществу ученых мужей. Этот элемент открытия может в конце концов занять лидирующее положение и неизмеримо превзойти по значимости два других фактора, уже упомянутых как участвующие в решении вопроса о планетарном языке. Идея о том, что нормальный язык человечества должен стать предметом открытия, подобно тому как нормальная музыка человечества уже стала им, безусловно, не лишена внутренней вероятности. Произошло инстинктивное и спонтанное развитие музыки задолго до того времени, как наука рефлексивно воздействовала на ее элементы и воссоздала ее в соответствии с открытыми таким образом музыкальными законами. Почему мы не можем, почему мы даже не должны ожидать по аналогии, что то же самое произойдет и с речью?