Thomas Wolfe - Thomas Wolfe - Of Time and the River, You Can't Go Home Again & Look Homeward, Angel

“And say, ‘Gene!” Sheba continued, bending forward with a fat hand gripped upon her knee. “Do you know that the greatest tribute to Shakespeare’s genius is from his hand?”

“Ah, I tell you, boy!” said Margaret, with darkened eyes. Her voice was husky. He was afraid she was going to weep.

“And yet the fools!” Sheba yelled. “The mean little two-by-two pusillanimous swill-drinking fools —”

“Whee!” gently Margaret moaned. John Dorsey turned his chalk-white face to the boy and whined with vacant appreciation, winking his head pertly. Ah absently!

“— for that’s all they are, have had the effrontery to suggest that he was jealous.”

“Pshaw!” said Margaret impatiently. “There’s nothing in that.”

“Why, they don’t know what they’re talking about!” Sheba turned a sudden grinning face upon him. “The little upstarts! It takes us to tell ’em, ‘Gene,” she said.

He began to slide floorwards out of the wicker chair. John Dorsey slapped his meaty thigh, and bent forward whining inchoately, drooling slightly at the mouth.

“The Lord a’ mercy!” he wheezed, gasping.

“I was talking to a feller the other day,” said Sheba, “a lawyer that you’d think might know a LITTLE something, and I used a quotation out of The Merchant of Venice that every schoolboy knows — ‘The quality of mercy is not strained.’ The man looked at me as if he thought I was crazy!”

“Great heavens!” said Margaret in a still voice.

“I said, ‘Look here, Mr. So-and-so, you may be a smart lawyer, you may have your million dollars that they say you have, but there are a lot of things you don’t know yet. There are a lot of things money can’t buy, my sonny, and one of them is the society of cult-shered men and women.’"

“Why, pshaw!” said Mr. Leonard. “What do these little whipper-snappers know about the things of the mind? You might as well expect some ignorant darky out in the fields to construe a passage in Homer.” He grasped a glass half full of clabber, on the table, and tilting it intently in his chalky fingers, spooned out a lumpy spilth of curds which he slid, quivering, into his mouth. “No, sir!” he laughed. “They may be Big Men on the tax collector’s books, but when they try to associate with educated men and women, as the feller says, ‘they — they —’” he began to whine, “‘why, they just ain’t nothin’.’”

“What shall it profit a man,” said Sheba, “if he gain the whole world, and lose —”

“Ah, Lord!” sighed Margaret, shaking her smoke-dark eyes. “I tell you!”

She told him. She told him of the Swan’s profound knowledge of the human heart, his universal and well-rounded characterization, his enormous humor.

“Fought a long hour by Shrewsbury clock!” She laughed. “The fat rascal! Imagine a man keeping the time!”

And, carefully: “It was the custom of the time, ‘Gene. As a matter of fact, when you read some of the plays of his contemporaries you see how much purer he is than they are.” But she avoided a word, a line, here and there. The slightly spotty Swan — muddied a little by custom. Then, too, the Bible.

The smoky candle-ends of time. Parnassus As Seen From Mount Sinai: Lecture with lantern-slides by Professor McTavish (D.D.) of Presbyterian College.

“And observe, Eugene,” she said, “he never made vice attractive.”

“Why didn’t he?” he asked. “There’s Falstaff.”

“Yes,” she replied, “and you know what happened to him, don’t you?”

“Why,” he considered, “he died!”

“You see, don’t you?” she concluded, with triumphant warning.

I see, don’t I? The wages of sin. What, by the way, are the wages of virtue? The good die young.

Boo-hoo! Boo-hoo! Boo-hoo!

I really feel so blue!

I was given to crime,

And cut off in my prime

When only eighty-two.

“Then, note,” she said, “how none of his characters stand still. You can see them grow, from first to last. No one is the same at the end as he was in the beginning.”

In the beginning was the word. I am Alpha and Omega. The growth of Lear. He grew old and mad. There’s growth for you.

This tin-currency of criticism she had picked up in a few courses at college, and in her reading. They were — are, perhaps, still — part of the glib jargon of pedants. But they did her no real injury. They were simply the things people said. She felt, guiltily, that she must trick out her teaching with these gauds: she was afraid that what she had to offer was not enough. What she had to offer was simply a feeling that was so profoundly right, so unerring, that she could no more utter great verse meanly than mean verse well. She was a voice that God seeks. She was the reed of demonic ecstasy. She was possessed, she knew not how, but she knew the moment of her possession. The singing tongues of all the world were wakened into life again under the incantation of her voice. She was inhabited. She was spent.

She passed through their barred and bolted boy-life with the direct stride of a spirit. She opened their hearts as if they had been lockets. They said: “Mrs. Leonard is sure a nice lady.”

He knew some of Ben Jonson’s poems, including the fine Hymn to Diana, “Queen and huntress, chaste and fair,” and the great tribute to Shakespeare which lifted his hair at

“ . . . But call forth thundering Æschylus,

Euripides and Sophocles to us.”—

and caught at his throat at:

“He was not for an age, but for all time!

And all the Muses still were in their prime . . .”

The elegy to little Salathiel Pavy, the child actor, was honey from the lion’s mouth. But it was too long.

Of Herrick, sealed of the tribe of Ben, he knew much more. The poetry sang itself. It was, he thought later, the most perfect and unfailing lyrical voice in the language — a clean, sweet, small, unfaltering note. It is done with the incomparable ease of an inspired child. The young men and women of our century have tried to recapture it, as they have tried to recapture Blake and, a little more successfully, Donne.

Here a little child I stand

Heaving up my either hand;

Cold as paddocks though they be,

Here I lift them up to Thee,

For a benison to fall

On our meat and on us all. Amen.

There was nothing beyond this — nothing that surpassed it in precision, delicacy, and wholeness.

Their names dropped musically like small fat bird-notes through the freckled sunlight of a young world: prophetically he brooded on the sweet lost bird-cries of their names, knowing they never would return. Herrick, Crashaw, Carew, Suckling, Campion, Lovelace, Dekker. O sweet content, O sweet, O sweet content!

He read shelves of novels: all of Thackeray, all the stories of Poe and Hawthorne, and Herman Melville’s Omoo and Typee, which he found at Gant’s. Of Moby Dick he had never heard. He read a half-dozen Coopers, all of Mark Twain, but failed to finish a single book of Howells or James.

He read a dozen of Scott, and liked best of all Quentin Durward, because the descriptions of food were as beautiful and appetizing as any he had ever read.

Eliza went to Florida again during his fourteenth year and left him to board with the Leonards. Helen was drifting, with crescent weariness and fear, through the cities of the East and Middle–West. She sang for several weeks in a small cabaret in Baltimore, she moved on to Philadelphia and thumped out popular tunes on a battered piano at the music counter of a five and ten cent store, with studious tongue out-thrust as she puzzled through new scores.

Gant wrote her faithfully twice a week — a blue but copious log of existence. Occasionally he enclosed small checks, which she saved, uncashed.