 | Pierre, or, The ambiguities |  |
VI.
When in his imaginative ruminating moods of early youth,
Pierre had christened the wonderful stone by the old resounding
name of Memnon, he had done so merely from certain associative
remembrances of that Egyptian marvel, of which all
Eastern travelers speak. And when the fugitive thought had
long ago entered him of desiring that same stone for his head-stone,
when he should be no more; then he had only yielded
to one of those innumerable fanciful notions, tinged with
dreamy painless melancholy, which are frequently suggested
to the mind of a poetic boy. But in after-times, when placed
in far different circumstances from those surrounding him at
the Meadows, Pierre pondered on the stone, and his young
thoughts concerning it, and, later, his desperate act in crawling
under it; then an immense significance came to him, and the
long-passed unconscious movements of his then youthful heart
seemed now prophetic to him, and allegorically verified by the
subsequent events.
For, not to speak of the other and subtler meanings which
lie crouching behind the colossal haunches of this stone, regarded
as the menacingly impending Terror Stone—hidden to
all the simple cottagers, but revealed to Pierre—consider its
aspects as the Memnon Stone. For Memnon was that dewey,
royal boy, son of Aurora, and born King of Egypt, who, with
enthusiastic rashness flinging himself on another's account into
a rightful quarrel, fought hand to hand with his overmatch,
and met his boyish and most dolorous death beneath the walls
of Troy. His wailing subjects built a monument in Egypt to
commemorate his untimely fate. Touched by the breath of
the bereaved Aurora, every sunrise that statue gave forth a
mournful broken sound, as of a harp-string suddenly sundered,
being too harshly wound.
Herein lies an unsummed world of grief. For in this plaintive
fable we find embodied the Hamletism of the antique
world; the Hamletism of three thousand years ago: “The
flower of virtue cropped by a too rare mischance.” And the
English Tragedy is but Egyptian Memnon, Montaignized and
modernized; for being but a mortal man Shakespeare had his
fathers too.
Now as the Memnon Statue survives down to this present
day, so does that nobly-striving but ever-shipwrecked character
in some royal youths (for both Memnon and Hamlet were the
sons of kings), of which that statue is the melancholy type.
But Memnon's sculptured woes did once melodiously resound;
now all is mute. Fit emblem that of old, poetry was a consecration
and an obsequy to all hapless modes of human life;
but in a bantering, barren, and prosaic, heartless age, Aurora's
music-moan is lost among our drifting sands, which whelm
alike the monument and the dirge.
| Pierre, or, The ambiguities | |