Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida

by Ouida · English · Gutenberg #22019 · 800,920 chars · public domain (US)

The Project Gutenberg eBook of Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.

Title: Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida

Author: Ouida

Compiler: F. Sydney Morris

Release date: July 8, 2007 [eBook #22019]
Most recently updated: January 2, 2021

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/22019

Credits: Produced by Charles Aldarondo, Janet Blenkinship, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WISDOM, WIT, AND PATHOS OF OUIDA ***

Produced by Charles Aldarondo, Janet Blenkinship, and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net

WISDOM, WIT, AND PATHOS

OUIDA.

WISDOM, WIT, AND PATHOS

_SELECTED FROM THE WORKS_

OUIDA

BY F. SYDNEY MORRIS

PHILADELPHIA

J. B. LIPPINCOTT & CO.

1884

CONTENTS.

_SELECTIONS FROM_--

PAGE

ARIADNE 1

CHANDOS 32

FOLLE-FARINE 48

IDALIA 97

A VILLAGE COMMUNE 106

PUCK 115

TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES 158

FAME 177

MOTHS 182, 354

IN A WINTER CITY 189

A LEAF IN THE STORM 205

A DOG OF FLANDERS 209

A BRANCH OF LILAC 216

SIGNA 220

TRICOTRIN 264

A PROVENCE ROSE 288

PIPISTRELLO 291

HELD IN BONDAGE 294

PASCARÈL 296

IN MAREMMA 335

UNDER TWO FLAGS 363

STRATHMORE 417

FRIENDSHIP 427

WANDA 452

_ARIADNE._

One grows to love the Roman fountains as sea-born men the sea. Go where
you will there is the water; whether it foams by Trevi, where the green
moss grows in it like ocean weed about the feet of the ocean god, or
whether it rushes reddened by the evening light, from the mouth of an
old lion that once saw Cleopatra; whether it leaps high in air, trying
to reach the gold cross on St. Peter's or pours its triple cascade over
the Pauline granite; whether it spouts out of a great barrel in a wall
in old Trastevere, or throws up into the air a gossamer as fine as
Arachne's web in a green garden way where the lizards run, or in a
crowded corner where the fruit-sellers sit against the wall;--in all its
shapes one grows to love the water that fills Rome with an unchanging
melody all through the year.

* * *

And indeed I do believe all things and all traditions. History is like
that old stag that Charles of France found out hunting in the woods
once, with the bronze collar round its neck on which was written, "Cæsar
mihi hoc donavit." How one's fancy loves to linger about that old stag,
and what a crowd of mighty shades come thronging at the very thought of
him! How wonderful it is to think of--that quiet grey beast leading his
lovely life under the shadows of the woods, with his hinds and their
fawns about him, whilst Cæsar after Cæsar fell and generation on
generation passed away and perished! But the sciolist taps you on the
arm. "Deer average fifty years of life; it was some mere court trick of
course--how easy to have such a collar made!" Well, what have we gained?
The stag was better than the sciolist.

* * *

Life costs but little on these sunny, silent shores; four walls of loose
stones, a roof of furze and brambles, a fare of fish and fruit and
millet-bread, a fire of driftwood easily gathered--and all is told. For
a feast pluck the violet cactus; for a holiday push the old red boat to
sea, and set the brown sail square against the sun--nothing can be
cheaper, perhaps few things can be better.

To feel the western breezes blow over that sapphire sea, laden with the
fragrance of a score of blossoming isles. To lie under the hollow rocks,
where centuries before the fisher folk put up that painted tablet to the
dear Madonna, for all poor shipwrecked souls. To climb the high hills
through the tangle of myrtle and tamarisk, and the tufted rosemary, with
the kids bleating above upon some unseen height. To watch the soft night
close in, and the warning lights shine out over shoals and sunken rocks,
and the moon hang low and golden in the blue dusk at the end there under
the arch of the boughs. To spend long hours in the cool, fresh, break of
day, drifting with the tide, and leaping with bare free limbs into the
waves, and lying outstretched upon them, glancing down to the depths
below, where silvery fish are gliding and coral branches are growing,
and pink shells are floating like rose-leaves, five fathoms low and
more. Oh! a good life, and none better, abroad in the winds and weather,
as Nature meant that every living thing should be, only, alas, the
devil put it into the mind of man to build cities! A good life for the
soul and the body: and from it this sea-born Joy came to seek the
Ghetto!

* * *

With a visible and physical ill one can deal; one can thrust a knife
into a man at need, one can give a woman money for bread or masses, one
can run for medicine or a priest. But for a creature with a face like
Ariadnê's, who had believed in the old gods and found them fables, who
had sought for the old altars and found them ruins, who had dreamed of
Imperial Rome and found the Ghetto--for such a sorrow as this, what
could one do?

* * *

Some said I might have been a learned man, had I taken more pains. But I
think it was only their kindness. I have that twist in my brain, which
is the curse of my countrymen--a sort of devilish quickness at doing
well, that prevents us ever doing best; just the same sort of thing that
makes our goatherds rhyme perfect sonnets, and keeps them dunces before
the alphabet.

* * *

If our beloved Leopardi, instead of bemoaning his fate in his despair
and sickening of his narrow home, had tried to see how many fair strange
things there lay at his house door, had tried to care for the troubles
of the men that hung the nets on the trees, and the innocent woes of the
girl that carried the grass to the cow, and the obscure martyrdom of
maternity and widowhood that the old woman had gone through who sat
spinning on the top of the stairs, he would have found that his little
borgo that he hated so for its dulness had all the comedies and
tragedies of life lying under the sound of its tolling bells. He would
not have been less sorrowful, for the greater the soul the sadder it is
for the unutterable waste, the unending pain of life. But he would never
have been dull: he would never have despised, and despising missed, the
stories and the poems that were round him in the millet fields and the
olive orchards. There is only one lamp which we can carry in our hand,
and which will burn through the darkest night, and make the light of a
home for us in a desert place: it is sympathy with everything that
breathes.

* * *

Into other lands I wandered, then, and sought full half the world. When
one wants but little, and has a useful tongue, and knows how to be merry
with the young folk, and sorrowful with the old, and can take the fair
weather with the foul, and wear one's philosophy like an easy boot,
treading with it on no man's toe, and no dog's tail; why, if one be of
this sort, I say, one is, in a great manner, independent of fortune; and
the very little that one needs one can usually obtain. Many years I
strayed about, seeing many cities and many minds, like Odysseus; being
no saint, but, at the same time, being no thief and no liar.

* * *

Art was dear to me. Wandering through many lands, I had come to know the
charm of quiet cloisters; the delight of a strange, rare volume; the
interest of a quaint bit of pottery; the unutterable loveliness of some
perfect painter's vision, making a glory in some dusky, world-forgotten
church: and so my life was full of gladness here in Rome, where the
ass's hoof ringing on a stone may show you that Vitruvius was right,
where you had doubted him; or the sun shining down upon a cabbage
garden, or a coppersmith's shreds of metal, may gleam on a signet ring
of the Flavian women, or a broken vase that may have served vile Tullia
for drink.

* * *

Art is, after nature, the only consolation that one has at all for
living.

* * *

I have been all my life blown on by all sorts of weather, and I know
there is nothing so good as the sun and the wind for driving ill-nature
and selfishness out of one.

* * *

Anything in the open air is always well; it is because men now-a-days
shut themselves up so much in rooms and pen themselves in stifling
styes, where never the wind comes or the clouds are looked at, that
puling discontent and plague-struck envy are the note of all modern
politics and philosophies. The open air breeds Leonidas, the factory
room Felix Pyat.

* * *

I lit my pipe. A pipe is a pocket philosopher, a truer one than
Socrates. For it never asks questions. Socrates must have been very
tiresome when one thinks of it.

* * *

I have had some skill in managing the minds of crowds; it is a mere
knack, like any other; it belongs to no particular character or culture.
Arnold of Brescia had it, and so had Masaniello. Lamartine had it, and
so had Jack Cade.

* * *

It is of use to have a reputation for queerness; it gains one many
solitary moments of peace.

* * *

Ersilia was a good soul, and full of kindliness; but charity is a flower
not naturally of earthly growth, and it needs manuring with a promise of
profit.

* * *

The soul of the poet is like a mirror of an astrologer: it bears the
reflection of the past and of the future, and can show the secrets of
men and gods; but all the same it is dimmed by the breath of those who
stand by and gaze into it.

* * *

"You are not unhappy now?" I said to her in farewell.

She looked at me with a smile.

"You have given me hope; and I am in Rome, and I am young."

She was right. Rome may be only a ruin, and Hope but another name for
deception and disappointment; but Youth is supreme happiness in itself,
because all possibilities lie in it, and nothing in it is as yet
irrevocable.

* * *

There never was an Æneas; there never was a Numa; well, what the better
are we? We only lose the Trojan ship gliding into Tiber's mouth, when
the woodland thickets that bloomed by Ostia were reddening with the
first warmth of the day's sun; we only lose the Sabine lover going by
the Sacred Way at night, and sweet Egeria weeping in the woods of Nemi;
and are--by their loss--how much the poorer!

Perhaps all these things never were.

The little stone of truth, rolling through the many ages of the world,
has gathered and grown grey with the thick mosses of romance and
superstition. But tradition must always have that little stone of truth
as its kernel; and perhaps he who rejects all, is likelier to be wrong
than even foolish folk like myself who love to believe all, and who
tread the new paths, thinking ever of the ancient stories.

* * *

There can be hardly any life more lovely upon earth than that of a young
student of art in Rome. With the morning, to rise to the sound of
countless bells and of innumerable streams, and see the silver lines of
the snow new fallen on the mountains against the deep rose of the dawn,
and the shadows of the night steal away softly from off the city,
releasing, one by one, dome and spire, and cupola and roof, till all the
wide white wonder of the place discloses itself under the broad
brightness of full day; to go down into the dark cool streets, with the
pigeons fluttering in the fountains, and the sounds of the morning
chants coming from many a church door and convent window, and little
scholars and singing children going by with white clothes on, or scarlet
robes, as though walking forth from the canvas of Botticelli or
Garofalo; to eat frugally, sitting close by some shop of flowers and
birds, and watching all the while the humours and the pageants of the
streets by quaint corners, rich with sculptures of the Renaissance, and
spanned by arches of architects that builded for Agrippa, under grated
windows with arms of Frangipanni or Colonna, and pillars that
Apollodorus raised; to go into the great courts of palaces, murmurous
with the fall of water, and fresh with green leaves and golden fruit,
that rob the colossal statues of their gloom and gauntness, and thence
into the vast chambers where the greatest dreams that men have ever had,
are written on panel and on canvas, and the immensity and the silence of
them all are beautiful and eloquent with dead men's legacies to the
living, where the Hours and the Seasons frolic beside the Maries at the
Sepulchre, and Adonis bares his lovely limbs, in nowise ashamed because
S. Jerome and S. Mark are there; to study and muse, and wonder and be
still, and be full of the peace which passes all understanding, because
the earth is lovely as Adonis is, and life is yet unspent; to come out
of the sacred light, half golden, and half dusky, and full of many
blended colours, where the marbles and the pictures live, sole dwellers
in the deserted dwellings of princes; to come out where the oranges are
all aglow in the sunshine, and the red camellias are pushing against the
hoary head of the old stone Hermes, and to go down the width of the
mighty steps into the gay piazza, alive with bells tolling, and crowds
laughing, and drums abeat, and the flutter of carnival banners in the
wind; and to get away from it all with a full heart, and ascend to see
the sun set from the terrace of the Medici, or the Pamfili, or the
Borghese woods, and watch the flame-like clouds stream homewards behind
S. Peter's, and the pines of Monte Mario grow black against the west,
till the pale green of evening spreads itself above them, and the stars
arise; and then, with a prayer--be your faith what it will--a prayer to
the Unknown God, to go down again through the violet-scented air and the
dreamful twilight, and so, with unspeakable thankfulness, simply because
you live, and this is Rome--so homeward.

* * *

The strong instinctive veracity in her weighed the measure of her days,
and gave them their right name. She was content, her life was full of
the sweetness and strength of the arts, and of the peace of noble
occupation and endeavour. But some true instinct in her taught her that
this is peace, but is not more than peace. Happiness comes but from the
beating of one heart upon another.

* * *

There was a high wall near, covered with peach-trees, and topped with
wistaria and valerian, and the handsome wild caperplant; and against the
wall stood rows of tall golden sunflowers late in their blooming; the
sun they seldom could see for the wall, and it was pathetic always to
me, as the day wore on, to watch the poor stately amber heads turn
straining to greet their god, and only meeting the stones and the
cobwebs, and the peach-leaves of their inexorable barrier.

They were so like us!--straining after the light, and only finding
bricks and gossamer and wasps'-nests! But the sunflowers never made
mistakes as we do: they never took the broken edge of a glass bottle or
the glimmer of a stable lanthorn for the glory of Helios, and comforted
themselves with it--as we can do.

* * *

Dear, where we love much we always forgive, because we ourselves are
nothing, and what we love is all.

* * *

There is something in the silence of an empty room that sometimes has a
terrible eloquence: it is like the look of coming death in the eyes of a
dumb animal; it beggars words and makes them needless.

* * *

When you have said to yourself that you will kill any one, the world
only seems to hold yourself and him, and God--who will see the justice
done.

* * *

What is it that love does to a woman?--without it she only sleeps; with
it, alone, she lives.

* * *

A great love is an absolute isolation, and an absolute absorption.
Nothing lives or moves or breathes, save one life: for one life alone
the sun rises and sets, the seasons revolve, the clouds bear rain, and
the stars ride on high; the multitudes around cease to exist, or seem
but ghostly shades; of all the sounds of earth there is but one voice
audible; all past ages have been but the herald of one soul; all
eternity can be but its heritage alone.

* * *

Is Nature kind or cruel? Who can tell?

The cyclone comes, or the earthquake; the great wave rises and swallows
the cities and the villages, and goes back whence it came; the earth
yawns, and devours the pretty towns and the sleeping children, the
gardens where the lovers were sitting, and the churches where women
prayed, and then the morass dries up and the gulf unites again. Men
build afresh, and the grass grows, and the trees, and all the flowering
seasons come back as of old. But the dead are dead: nothing changes
that!

As it is with the earth, so it is with our life; our own poor, short,
little life, that is all we can really call our own.

Calamities shatter, and despair engulfs it; and yet after a time the
chasm seems to close; the storm wave seems to roll back; the leaves and
the grass return; and we make new dwellings. That is, the daily ways of
living are resumed, and the common tricks of our speech and act are as
they used to be before disaster came upon us. Then wise people say, he
or she has "got over it." Alas, alas! the drowned children will not come
back to us; the love that was struck down, the prayer that was silenced,
the altar that was ruined, the garden that was ravished, they are all
gone for ever,--for ever, for ever! Yet we live; because grief does not
always kill, and often does not speak.

* * *

I crept through the myrtles downward, away from the house where the
statue lay shattered. The earliest of the nightingales of the year was
beginning her lay in some leafy covert hard by, but never would he hear
music in their piping again; never, never: any more than I should hear
the song of the Faun in the fountain.

For the song that we hear with our ears is only the song that is sung in
our hearts.

And his heart, I knew, would be for ever empty and silent, like a temple
that has been burned with fire, and left standing, pitiful and terrible,
in mockery of a lost religion, and of a forsaken god.

* * *

Men and women, losing the thing they love, lose much, but the artist
loses far more; for him are slaughtered all the children of his dreams,
and from him are driven all the fair companions of his solitude.

* * *

Love art alone, forsaking all other loves, and she will make you happy,
with a happiness that shall defy the seasons and the sorrows of time,
the pains of the vulgar and the changes of fortune, and be with you day
and night, a light that is never dim. But mingle with it any human
love--and art will look for ever at you with the eyes of Christ when he
looked at the faithless follower as the cock crew.

* * *

And, indeed, there are always the poor: the vast throngs born century
after century, only to know the pangs of life and of death, and nothing
more. Methinks that human life is, after all, but like a human body,
with a fair and smiling face, but all the limbs ulcered and cramped and
racked with pain. No surgery of statecraft has ever known how to keep
the fair head erect, yet give the trunk and the limbs health.

* * *

For in a great love there is a self-sustaining strength by which it
lives, deprived of everything, as there are plants that live upon our
barren ruins burned by the sun, and parched and shelterless, yet ever
lifting green leaves to the light.

* * *

And indeed after all there is nothing more cruel than the impotence of
genius to hold and keep those commonest joys and mere natural affections
which dullards and worse than dullards rejoice in at their pleasure; the
common human things, whose loss makes the great possessions of its
imperial powers all valueless and vain as harps unstrung, or as lutes
that are broken.

* * *

"This world of our own immediate day is weak and weary, because it is no
longer young; yet it possesses one noble attribute--it has an acute and
almost universal sympathy, which does indeed often degenerate into a
false and illogical sentiment, yet serves to redeem an age of egotism.
We have escaped both the gem-like hardness of the Pagan, and the
narrowing selfishness of the Christian and the Israelite. We are sick
for the woe of creation, and we wonder why such woe is ours, and why it
is entailed on the innocent dumb beasts, that perish in millions for us,
unpitied, day and night. Rome had no altar to Pity: it is the one God
that we own. When that pity in us for all things is perfected, perhaps
we shall have reached a religion of sympathy that will be purer than any
religion the world has yet seen, and more productive. 'Save my country!'
cried the Pagan to his deities. 'Save my soul!' cries the Christian at
his altars. We, who are without a god, murmur to the great unknown
forces of Nature: 'Let me save others some little portion of this pain
entailed on all simple and guileless things, that are forced to live,
without any fault of their own at their birth, or any will of their own
in their begetting.'"

* * *

How should we have great Art in our day? We have no faith. Belief of
some sort is the lifeblood of Art. When Athene and Zeus ceased to excite
any veneration in the minds of men, sculpture and architecture both lost
their greatness. When the Madonna and her son lost that mystery and
divinity, which for the simple minds of the early painters they
possessed, the soul went out of canvas and of wood. When we carve a
Venus now, she is but a light woman; when we paint a Jesus now, it is
but a little suckling, or a sorrowful prisoner. We want a great
inspiration. We ought to find it in the things that are really
beautiful, but we are not sure enough, perhaps, what is so. What does
dominate us is a passion for nature; for the sea, for the sky, for the
mountain, for the forest, for the evening storm, for the break of day.
Perhaps when we are thoroughly steeped in this we shall reach greatness
once more. But the artificiality of all modern life is against it; so is
its cynicism. Sadness and sarcasm make a great Lucretius as a great
Juvenal, and scorn makes a strong Aristophanes; but they do not make a
Praxiteles and an Apelles; they do not even make a Raffaelle, or a
Flaxman.

Art, if it be anything, is the perpetual uplifting of what is beautiful
in the sight of the multitudes--the perpetual adoration of that
loveliness, material and moral, which men in the haste and the greed of
their lives are everlastingly forgetting: unless it be that it is empty
and useless as a child's reed-pipe when the reed is snapt and the
child's breath spent. Genius is obligation.

* * *

"No woman, I think, ever loved you as this woman does, whom you have
left as I would not leave a dog," said Maryx, and something of his old
ardent eloquence returned to him, and his voice rose and rang clearer as
the courage in him consummated the self-sacrifice that he had set
himself for her sake. "Have you ever thought what you have done? When
you have killed Art in an artist, you have done the cruellest murder
that earth can behold. Other and weaker natures than hers might forget,
but she never. Her fame will be short-lived as that rose, for she sees
but your face, and the world will tire of that, but she will not. She
can dream no more. She can only remember. Do you know what that is to
the artist?--it is to be blind and to weary the world; the world that
has no more pity than you have! You think her consoled because her
genius has not left her: are you a poet and yet do not know that genius
is only a power to suffer more and to remember longer?--nothing else.
You say to yourself that she will have fame, that will beguile her as
the god came to Ariadnê; perhaps; but across that fame, let it become
what it may, there will settle for ever the shadow of the world's
dishonour; it will be for ever poisoned, and cursed, and embittered by
the scorn of fools, and the reproach of women, since by you they have
been given their lashes of nettles, and by you have been given their
by-word to hoot. She will walk in the light of triumph, you say, and
therefore you have not hurt her; do you not see that the fiercer that
light may beat on her, the sharper will the eyes of the world search out
the brand with which you have burned her. For when do men forgive force
in the woman? and when do women ever forgive the woman's greatness? and
when does every cur fail to snarl at the life that is higher than its
fellows? It is by the very genius in her that you have had such power to
wound, such power to blight and to destroy. By so long as her name shall
be spoken, so long will the wrong you have done her cling round it, to
make it meet for reproach. A mere woman dies, and her woe and her shame
die with her, and the earth covers her and them; but such shelter is
denied for ever to the woman who has genius and fame; long after she is
dead she will lie out on common soil, naked and unhouselled, for all the
winds to blow on her and all the carrion birds to tear."

* * *

"No, no. That is accursed! To touch Art without a right to touch it,
merely as a means to find bread--you are too honest to think of such a
thing. Unless Art be adored for its own sake and purely, it must be
left alone. Philip of Macedon had every free man's child taught Art! I
would have every boy and girl taught its sacredness; so, we might in
time get back some accuracy of taste in the public, some
conscientiousness of production in the artist. If artistic creation be
not a joy, an imperious necessity, an instinct of all the forces of the
mind, let the boy go and plough, and the girl go and spin."

* * *

Maybe you turn your back on happiness. I have heard that wise people
often do that. They look up so at the sun and the stars, that they set
their foot on the lark that would have sung to them and woke them
brightly in the morning--and kill it.

* * *

Landscape painting is the only original form of painting that modern
times can boast. It has not exhausted itself yet; it is capable of
infinite development. Ruysdael, Rembrandt, and the rest, did great
scenes, it is true, but it has been left to our painters to put soul
into the sunshine of a cornfield, and suggest a whole life of labour in
a dull evening sky hanging over a brown ploughed upland, with the horses
going tired homewards, and one grey figure trudging after them, to the
hut on the edge of the moor. Of course the modern fancy of making nature
answer to all human moods, like an Eölian harp, is morbid and
exaggerated, but it has a beauty in it, and a certain truth. Our
tenderer souls take refuge in the country now, as they used to do in the
cloister.

* * *

I think if people oftener saw the break of day they would vow oftener to
keep that dawning day holy, and would not so often let its fair hours
drift away with nothing done that were not best left undone.

* * *

We are the sons of our Time: it is not for us to slay our mother. Let us
cover her dishonour if we see it, lest we should provoke the Erinyes.

* * *

How one loves Canova the man, and how one execrates Canova the artist!
Surely never was a great repute achieved by so false a talent and so
perfect a character. One would think he had been born and bred in
Versailles instead of Treviso. He is called a naturalist! Look at his
Graces! He is always Coysevax and Coustou at heart. Never purely
classic, never frankly modern. Louis XIV. would have loved him better
than Bernini.

* * *

If Alexander had believed himself a bubble of gas instead of the son of
a god, he would not have changed the face of the world. Negation cannot
be the parent of heroism, though it will produce an indifference that
counterfeits it not ill, since Petronius died quite as serenely as ever
did the martyrs of the Church.

* * *

Genius cannot escape the taint of its time more than a child the
influence of its begetting. Augustus could have Horace and Ovid; he
could never have had Homer and Milton.

* * *

I do not think with you. Talent takes the mark of its generation; genius
stamps its time with its own impression. Virgil had the sentiment of an
united Italy.

* * *

Tell her that past she thinks so great was only very like the Serapis
which men worshipped so many ages in Theophilis, and which, when the
soldiers struck it down at last, proved itself only a hollow Colossus
with a colony of rats in its head that scampered right and left.

* * *

Falconet struck the death-note of the plastic arts when he said, "Our
marbles have _almost_ colour." That is just where we err. We are
incessantly striving to make Sculpture at once a romance-writer and a
painter, and of course she loses all dignity and does but seem the jay
in borrowed plumes of sable. Conceits are altogether out of keeping with
marble. They suit a cabinet painting or a piece of china. Bernini was
the first to show the disease when he veiled the head of his Nile to
indicate that the source was unknown.

* * *

Whosoever has any sort of fame has lighted a beacon that is always
shining upon him, and can never more return into the cool twilight of
privacy even when most he wishes. It is of these retributions--some call
them compensations--of which life is full.

* * *

Men have forgotten the virile Pyrrhic dance, and have become incapable
of the grace of the Ionian; their only dance is a Danse Macabre, and
they are always hand in hand with a skeleton.

* * *

By night Rome is still a city for the gods; the shadows veil its wounds,
the lustre silvers all its stones; its silence is haunted as no other
silence is; if you have faith, there where the dark gloss of the laurel
brushes the marble as in Agrippa's time, you will see the Immortals
passing by chained with dead leaves and weeping.

* * *

A great love is an absolute isolation and an absolute absorption.
Nothing lives or moves or breathes save one life; for one life alone the
sun rises and sets, the seasons revolve, the clouds bear rain, and the
stars ride on high; the multitudes around cease to exist, or seem but
ghostly shades; of all the sounds of earth there is but one voice
audible; all past ages have been but the herald of one soul; all
eternity can be but its heritage alone.

* * *

Perhaps she was right: for a few hours of joy one owes the debt of
years, and should give a pardon wide and deep as the deep sea.

This Love which she had made in his likeness, the tyrant and compeller
of the world, was to her as the angel which brings perfect dreams and
lets the tired sleeper visit heaven.

* * *

"And when the ship sails away without you?" I said brutally, and
laughing still, because the mention of the schooner had broken the bonds
of the silence that had held me against my will half paralysed, and I
seemed to be again upon the Tyrrhene shore, seeing the white sail fade
against the sky.

"And when that ship sails without you? The day will come. It always
comes. You are my Ariadnê; yet you forget Naxos! Oh, the day will come!
you will kiss the feet of your idol then, and they will not stay; they
will go away, away, away, and they will not tarry for your prayers or
your tears--ay, it is always so. Two love, and one tires. And you know
nothing of that; you who would have love immortal."

And I laughed again, for it seemed to me so horrible, and I was half
mad.

No doubt it would have been kinder had I struck my knife down into her
breast with her words unspoken.

All shade of colour forsook her face; only the soft azure of the veins
remained, and changed to an ashen grey. She shook with a sudden shiver
from head to foot as the name she hated, the name of Ariadnê, fell upon
her ear. The icebolt had fallen in her paradise. A scared and terrible
fear dilated her eyes, that opened wide in the amaze of some suddenly
stricken creature.

"And when he leaves you?" I said, with cruel iteration. "Do you remember
what you told me once of the woman by the marshes by the sea, who had
nothing left by which to remember love save wounds that never healed?
That is all his love will leave you by-and-by."

"Ah, never!"

She spoke rather to herself than me. The terror was fading out of her
eyes, the blood returning to her face; she was in the sweet bewildered
trance of that blind faith which goes wherever it is led, and never asks
the end nor dreads the fate. Her love was deathless: how could she know
that his was mortal?

"You are cruel," she said, with her mouth quivering, but the old, soft,
grand courage in her eyes. "We are together for ever; he has said so.
But even if--if--I only remembered him by wounds, what would that change
in me? He would _have_ loved me. If he would wish to wound me, so he
should. I am his own as the dogs are. Think!--he looked at me, and all
the world grew beautiful; he touched me, and I was happy--I, who never
had been happy in my life. You look at me strangely; you speak harshly.
Why? I used to think, surely you would be glad----"

I gripped my knife and cursed him in my soul.

How could one say to her the thing that he had made her in man's and
woman's sight?

"I thought you would be glad," she said, wistfully, "and I would have
told you long ago--myself. I do not know why you should look so. Perhaps
you are angered because I seemed ungrateful to you and Maryx. Perhaps I
was so. I have no thought--only of him. What he wished, that I did. Even
Rome itself was for me nothing, and the gods--there is only one for me;
and he is with me always. And I think the serpents and the apes are gone
for ever from the tree, and he only hears the nightingales--now. He
tells me so often. Very often. Do you remember I used to dream of
greatness for myself--ah, what does it matter! I want nothing now. When
he looks at me--the gods themselves could give me nothing more."

And the sweet tranquil radiance came back into her eyes, and her
thoughts wandered into the memories of this perfect passion which
possessed her, and she forgot that I was there.

My throat was choking; my eyes felt blind; my tongue clove to my mouth.
I, who knew what that end would be as surely as I knew the day then
shining would sink into the earth, I was dumb, like a brute beast--I,
who had gone to take his life.

Before this love which knew nothing of the laws of mankind, how poor and
trite and trivial looked those laws! What could I dare to say to her of
shame? Ah! if it had only been for any other's sake! But he,--perhaps he
did not lie to her; perhaps he did only hear the nightingales with her
beside him; but how soon their song would pall upon his ear, how soon
would he sigh for the poisonous kiss of the serpents! I knew! I knew!

I stood heart-broken in the warm light that was falling through the
casement and streaming towards her face. What could I say to her? Men
harder and sterner and surer in every way of their own judgment than I
was of mine no doubt would have shaken her with harsh hands from that
dream in which she had wandered to her own destruction.

No doubt a sterner moralist than I would have had no pity, and would
have hurled on her all the weight of those bitter truths of which she
was so ignorant; would have shown her that pit of earthly scorn upon
whose brink she stood; would have torn down all that perfect, credulous
faith of hers, which could have no longer life nor any more lasting root
than the flowering creeper born of a summer's sun, and gorgeous as the
sunset's hues, and clinging about a ruin-mantling decay. Oh yes, no
doubt. But I am only weak, and of little wisdom, and never certain that
the laws and ways of the world are just, and never capable of long
giving pain to any harmless creature, least of all to her.

She seemed to rouse herself with effort to remember I was there, and
turned on me her eyes that were suffused and dreamful with happiness,
like a young child's with sleep.

"I must have seemed so thankless to you: you were so very good to me,"
she said, with that serious sweetness of her rare smile that I had used
to watch for, as an old dog watches for his young owner's--an old dog
that is used to be forgotten, but does not himself forget, though he is
old. "I must have seemed so thankless; but he bade me be silent, and I
have no law but him. After that night when we walked in Nero's fields,
and I went home and learned he loved me;--do you not see I forgot that
there was any one in all the world except himself and me? It must always
be so--at least, so I think. Oh, how true that poem was! Do you
remember how he read it that night after Mozart amongst the roses by the
fire? What use was endless life and all the lore of the spirits and
seers to Sospitra? I was like Sospitra, till he came; always thinking of
the stars and the heavens in the desert all alone, and always wishing
for life eternal, when it is only life _together_ that is worth a wish
or a prayer. But why do you look at me so? Perhaps you do not
understand. Perhaps I am selfish."

This was all that it seemed to her--that I did not understand. Could she
see the tears of blood that welled up in my eyes? Could she see the
blank despair that blinded my sight? Could she see the frozen hand that
I felt clutching at my heart and benumbing it? I did not understand;
that was all that it seemed to her.

She was my Ariadnê, born again to suffer the same fate. I saw the
future: she could not. I knew that he would leave her as surely as the
night succeeds the day. I knew that his passion--if passion, indeed, it
were, and not only the mere common vanity of subjugation and
possession--would pall on him and fade out little by little, as the
stars fade out of the grey morning skies. I knew, but I had not the
courage to tell her.

Men were faithful only to the faithless. But what could she know of
this?

"Thinking of the stars and of the heavens in the desert all alone! Yes!"
I cried; and the bonds of my silence were unloosed, and the words rushed
from my lips like a torrent from between the hills.

"Yes; and never to see the stars any more, and to lose for ever the
peace of the desert--that, you think, is gain! Oh, my dear! what can I
say to you? What can I say? You will not believe if I tell you. I shall
seem a liar and a prophet of false woe. I shall curse when I would
bless. What can I say to you? Athene watched over you. You were of those
who dwell alone, but whom the gods are with. You had the clue and the
sword, and they are nothing to you; you lose them both at his word, at
the mere breath of his lips, and know no god but his idle law, that
shifts as the winds of the sea. And you count that gain? Oh, just
Heaven! Oh, my dear, my heart is broken; how can I tell you? One man
loved you who was great and good, to whom you were a sacred thing, who
would have lifted you up in heaven, and never have touched too roughly a
single hair of your head; and you saw him no more than the very earth
that you trod; he was less to you than the marbles he wrought in; and he
suffers: and what do you care? You have had the greatest wrong that a
woman can have, and you think it the greatest good, the sweetest gift!
He has torn your whole life down as a cruel hand tears a rose in the
morning light, and you rejoice! For what do you know? He will kill your
soul, and still you will kiss his hand. Some women are so. When he
leaves you, what will you do? For you there will only be death. The weak
are consoled, but the strong never. What will you do? What will you do?
You are like a child that culls flowers at the edge of a snake's
breeding-pit. He waked you--yes!--to send you in a deeper sleep, blind
and dumb to everything but his will. Nay, nay! that is not your fault.
Love does not come at will; and of goodness it is not born, nor of
gratitude, nor of any right or reason on the earth. Only that you should
have had no thought of us--no thought at all--only of him by whom your
ruin comes; that seems hard! Ay, it is hard. You stood just so in my
dream, and you hesitated between the flower of passion and the flower of
death. Ah, well might Love laugh. They grow on the same bough; Love
knows that. Oh, my dear, my dear, I come too late! Look! he has done
worse than murder, for that only kills the body; but he has killed the
soul in you. He will crush out all that came to you from heaven; all
your mind and your hopes and your dreams, and all the mystery in you,
that we poor half-dumb fools call genius, and that made the common
daylight above you full of all beautiful shapes and visions that our
duller eyes could not see as you went. He has done worse than murder,
and I came to take his life. Ay, I would slay him now as I would
strangle the snake in my path. And even for this I come too late. I
cannot do you even this poor last service. To strike him dead would only
be to strike you too. I come too late! Take my knife, lest I should see
him--take it. Till he leaves you I will wait."

I drew the fine, thin blade across my knee and broke it in two pieces,
and threw the two halves at her feet.

Then I turned without looking once at her, and went away.

I do not know how the day waned and passed; the skies seemed red with
fire, and the canals with blood. I do not know how I found my road over
the marble floors and out into the air. I only remember that I felt my
way feebly with my hands, as though the golden sunlight were all
darkness, and that I groped my way down the steps and out under an angle
of the masonry, staring stupidly upon the gliding waters.

I do not know whether a minute had gone by or many hours, when some
shivering sense of sound made me look up at the casement above, a high,
vast casement fretted with dusky gold and many colours, and all kinds of
sculptured stone. The sun was making a glory as of jewels on its painted
panes. Some of them were open; I could see within the chamber Hilarion's
fair and delicate head, and his face drooped with a soft smile. I could
see her, with all her loveliness, melting, as it were, into his embrace,
and see her mouth meet his.

If I had not broken the steel!----

I rose from the stones and cursed them, and departed from the place as
the moon rose.

* * *

He was silent; the moonlight poured down between us white and wide;
there lay a little dead bird on the stones, I remember, a redbreast,
stiff and cold. The people traffic in such things here, in the square of
Agrippa; it had fallen, doubtless, off some market stall.

Poor little robin! All the innocent sweet woodland singing-life of it
was over, over in agony, and not a soul in all the wide earth was the
better for its pain; not even the huckster who had missed making his
copper coin by it. Woe is me; the sorrow of the world is great.

I pointed to it where it lay, poor little soft huddled heap of bright
feathers; there is no sadder sight than a dead bird, for what lovelier
life can there be than a bird's life, free in the sun and the rain, in
the blossom and foliage?

"Make the little cold throat sing at sunrise," I said to him. "When you
can do that, then think to undo what you have done."

"She will forget:--"

"You know she never will forget. There is your crime."

"She will have her art----"

"Will the dead bird sing?"

* * *

Here, if anywhere in the "divine city of the Vatican"--for in truth a
city and divine it is, and well has it been called so--here, if
anywhere, will wake the soul of the artist; here, where the very
pavement bears the story of Odysseus, and each passage-way is a Via
Sacra, and every stone is old with years whose tale is told by hundreds
or by thousands, and the wounded Adonis can be adored beside the tempted
Christ of Sistine, and the serious beauty of the Erythean Sibyl lives
beside the laughing grace of ivy-crowned Thalia, and the Jupiter
Maximus frowns on the mortals made of earth's dust, and the Jehovah who
has called forth woman meets the first smile of Eve. A Divine City
indeed, holding in its innumerable chambers and its courts of granite
and of porphyry all that man has ever dreamed of, in his hope and in his
terror, of the Unknown God.

* * *

The days of joyous, foolish mumming came--the carnival mumming that as a
boy I had loved so well, and that, ever since I had come and stitched
under my Apollo and Crispin, I had never been loth to meddle and mix in,
going mad with my lit taper, like the rest, and my whistle of the
Befana, and all the salt and sport of a war of wits such as old Rome has
always heard in midwinter since the seven nights of the Saturnalia.

Dear Lord! to think that twice a thousand years ago and more, along
these banks of Tiber, and down in the Velabrum and up the Sacred Way,
men and women and children were leaping, and dancing, and shouting, and
electing their festal king, and exchanging their new-year gifts of wax
candles and little clay figures: and that now-a-days we are doing just
the same thing in the same season, in the same places, only with all the
real faunic joyfulness gone out of it with the old slain Saturn, and a
great deal of empty and luxurious show come in instead! It makes one
sad, mankind looks such a fool.

Better be Heine's fool on the seashore, who asks the winds their
"wherefore" and their "whence." You remember Heine's poem--that one in
the "North Sea" series, that speaks of the man by the shore, and asks
what is Man, and what shall become of him, and who lives on high in the
stars? and tells how the waves keep on murmuring and the winds rising,
the clouds scudding before the breeze, and the planets shining so cold
and so far, and how on the shore a fool waits for an answer, and waits
in vain. It is a terrible poem, and terrible because it is true.

Every one of us stands on the brink of the endless sea that is Time and
is Death; and all the blind, beautiful, mute, majestic forces of
creation move around us and yet tell us nothing.

It is wonderful that, with this awful mystery always about us, we can go
on on our little lives as cheerfully as we do; that on the edge of that
mystical shore we yet can think so much about the crab in the
lobster-pot, the eel in the sand, the sail in the distance, the child's
face at home.

Well, no doubt it is heaven's mercy that we can do so; it saves from
madness such thinking souls as are amongst us.

* * *

"My dear, of love there is very little in the world. There are many
things that take its likeness: fierce unstable passions and poor
egotisms of all sorts, vanities too, and many other follies--Apatê and
Philotês in a thousand masquerading characters that gain great Love
discredit. The loves of men, and women too, my dear, are hardly better
very often than Minos' love for Skylla; you remember how he threw her
down from the stern of his vessel when he had made the use of her he
wished, and she had cut the curls of Nisias. A great love does not of
necessity imply a great intelligence, but it must spring out of a great
nature, that is certain; and where the heart has spent itself in much
base petty commerce, it has no deep treasury of gold on which to draw;
it is bankrupt from its very over-trading. A noble passion is very rare;
believe me; as rare as any other very noble thing."

* * *

"Do you call him a poet because he has the trick of a sonorous cadence
and of words that fall with the measure of music, so that youths and
maidens recite them for the vain charm of their mere empty sound? It is
a lie--it is a blasphemy. A poet! A poet suffers for the meanest thing
that lives; the feeblest creature dead in the dust is pain to him; his
joy and his sorrow alike outweigh tenfold the joys and the sorrows of
men; he looks on the world as Christ looked on Jerusalem, and weeps; he
loves, and all heaven and all hell are in his love; he is faithful unto
death, because fidelity alone can give to love the grandeur and the
promise of eternity; he is like the martyrs of the church who lay upon
the wheel with their limbs racked, yet held the roses of Paradise in
their hands and heard the angels in the air. That is a poet; that is
what Dante was, and Shelley and Milton and Petrarca. But this man? this
singer of the senses, whose sole lament is that the appetites of the
body are too soon exhausted; this languid and curious analysist who
rends the soul aside with merciless cruelty, and puts away the quivering
nerves with cold indifference, once he has seen their secrets?--this a
poet? Then so was Nero harping! Accursed be the book and all the
polished vileness that his verses ever palmed off on men by their mere
tricks of sound. This a poet! As soon are the swine that rout the
garbage, the lions of the Apocalypse by the throne of God!"

* * *

The glad water sparkles and ripples everywhere; above the broad porphyry
basins butterflies of every colour flutter, and swallows fly; lovers and
children swing balls of flowers, made as only our Romans know how to
make them; the wide lawns under the deep-shadowed avenues are full of
blossoms; the air is full of fragrance; the palms rise against a
cloudless sky; the nights are lustrous; in the cool of the great
galleries the statues seem to smile: so spring had been to me always;
but now the season was without joy, and the scent of the flowers on the
wind hurt me as it smote my nostrils.

For a great darkness seemed always between me and the sun, and I
wondered that the birds could sing, and the children run amongst the
blossoms--the world being so vile.

* * *

Women hope that the dead love may revive; but men know that of all dead
things none are so past recall as a dead passion.

The courtesan may scourge it with a whip of nettles back into life; but
the innocent woman may wet it for ever with her tears, she will find no
resurrection.

* * *

Art is an angel of God, but when Love has entered the soul, the angel
unfolds its plumes and takes flight, and the wind of its wings withers
as it passes. He whom it has left misses the angel at his ear, but he is
alone for ever. Sometimes it will seem to him then that it had been no
angel ever, but a fiend that lied, making him waste his years in a
barren toil, and his nights in a joyless passion; for there are two
things beside which all Art is but a mockery and a curse: they are a
child that is dying and a love that is lost.

* * *

The little garden of the Rospigliosi seems to have all mediæval Rome
shut in it, as you go up the winding stairs with all their lichens and
water-plants and broken marbles, into the garden itself, with its smooth
emerald turf and spreading magnolias, and broad fish-ponds, and orange
and citron trees, and the frescoed building at the end where Guido's
Aurora floats in unchanging youth, and the buoyant Hours run before the
sun.

Myself I own I care not very much for that Aurora; she is no incarnation
of the morning, and though she floats wonderfully and does truly seem to
move, yet is she in nowise ethereal nor suggestive of the dawn either of
day or life. When he painted her, he must have been in love with some
lusty taverner's buxom wife busked in her holiday attire.

But whatever one may think of the famed Aurora, of the loveliness of her
quiet garden home, safe in the shelter of the stately palace walls,
there can be no question; the little place is beautiful, and sitting in
its solitude with the brown magnolia fruit falling on the grass, and the
blackbirds pecking between the primroses, all the courtly and superb
pageant of the dead ages will come trooping by you, and you will fancy
that the boy Metastasio is reciting strophes under yonder Spanish
chestnut-tree, and cardinals, and nobles, and gracious ladies, and
pretty pages are all listening, leaning against the stone rail of the
central water.

For this is the especial charm and sorcery of Rome, that, sitting idly
in her beautiful garden-ways, you can turn over a score of centuries and
summon all their pomp and pain before you, as easily as little children
can turn over the pages of a coloured picture-book until their eyes are
dazzled.

_CHANDOS._

It is so easy for the preacher, when he has entered the days of
darkness, to tell us to find no flavour in the golden fruit, no music in
the song of the charmer, no spell in eyes that look love, no delirium in
the soft dreams of the lotus--so easy when these things are dead and
barren for himself, to say they are forbidden! But men must be far more
or far less than mortal ere they can blind their eyes, and dull their
senses, and forswear their nature, and obey the dreariness of the
commandment; and there is little need to force the sackcloth and the
serge upon us. The roses wither long before the wassail is over, and
there is no magic that will make them bloom again, for there is none
that renews us--youth. The Helots had their one short, joyous festival
in their long year of labour; life may leave us ours. It will be surely
to us, long before its close, a harder tyrant and a more remorseless
taskmaster than ever was the Lacedemonian to his bond-slaves,--bidding
us make bricks without straw, breaking the bowed back, and leaving us as
our sole chance of freedom the hour when we shall turn our faces to the
wall--and die.

* * *

Society, that smooth and sparkling sea, is excessively difficult to
navigate; its surf looks no more than champagne foam, but a thousand
quicksands and shoals lie beneath: there are breakers ahead for more
than half the dainty pleasure-boats that skim their hour upon it; and
the foundered lie by millions, forgotten, five fathoms deep below. The
only safe ballast upon it is gold dust; and if stress of weather come on
you, it will swallow you without remorse. Trevenna had none of this
ballast; he had come out to sea in as ticklish a cockle-shell as might
be; he might go down any moment, and he carried no commission, being a
sort of nameless, unchartered rover: yet float he did, securely.

* * *

Corals, pink and delicate, rivet continents together; ivy tendrils, that
a child may break, bold Norman walls with bonds of iron; a little ring,
a toy of gold, a jeweller's bagatelle, forges chains heavier than the
galley-slave's: so a woman's look may fetter a lifetime.

* * *

He had passed through life having escaped singularly all the shadows
that lie on it for most men; and he had, far more than most, what may be
termed the faculty for happiness--a gift, in any temperament, whose
wisdom and whose beauty the world too little recognises.

* * *

A temperament that is _never_ earnest is at times well-nigh as wearisome
as a temperament that is never gay; there comes a time when, if you can
never touch to any depth, the ceaseless froth and brightness of the
surface will create a certain sense of impatience, a certain sense of
want.

* * *

A straw misplaced will make us enemies; a millstone of benefits hung
about his neck may fail to anchor down by us a single friend. We may
lavish what we will--kindly thought, loyal service, untiring aid, and
generous deed--and they are all but as oil to the burning, as fuel to
the flame, when spent upon those who are jealous of us.

* * *

Truth is a rough, honest, helter-skelter terrier, that none like to see
brought into their drawing-rooms, throwing over all their dainty little
ornaments, upsetting their choicest Dresden, that nobody guessed was
cracked till it fell with the mended side uppermost, and keeping every
one in incessant tremor lest the next snap should be at their braids or
their boots, of which neither the varnish nor the luxuriance will stand
rough usage.

* * *

When will men learn to know that the power of genius, and the human
shell in which it chances to be harboured, are as distinct as is the
diamond from the quartz-bed in which they find it?

* * *

Had he embraced dishonour, and accepted the rescue that a lie would have
lent him, this misery in its greatest share had never been upon him. He
would have come hither with riches about him, and the loveliness he had
worshipped would have been his own beyond the touch of any rival's hand.
Choosing to cleave to the old creeds of his race, and passing, without a
backward glance, into the paths of honour and of justice, it was thus
with him now. Verily, virtue must be her own reward, as in the Socratic
creed; for she will bring no other dower than peace of conscience in her
gift to whosoever weds her. "I have loved justice, and fled from
iniquity; wherefore here I die in exile," said Hildebrand upon his
death-bed. They will be the closing words of most lives that have
followed truth.

* * *

There are liberties sweeter than love; there are goals higher than
happiness.

Some memory of them stirred in him there, with the noiseless flow of the
lingering water at his feet, and above the quiet of the stars; the
thoughts of his youth came back to him, and his heart ached with their
longing.

Out of the salt depths of their calamity men had gathered the heroisms
of their future; out of the desert of their exile they had learned the
power to return as conquerors. The greater things within him awakened
from their lethargy; the innate strength so long untried, so long lulled
to dreamy indolence and rest, uncoiled from its prostration; the force
that would resist and, it might be, survive, slowly came upon him, with
the taunts of his foe. It was possible that there was that still in him
which might be grander and truer to the ambitions of his imaginative
childhood under adversity, than in the voluptuous sweetness of his rich
and careless life. It was possible, if--if he could once meet the fate
he shuddered from, once look at the bitterness of the life that waited
for him, and enter on its desolate and arid waste without going back to
the closed gates of his forfeited paradise to stretch his limbs within
their shadow once more ere he died.

There is more courage needed oftentimes to accept the onward flow of
existence, bitter as the waters of Marah, black and narrow as the
channel of Jordan, than there is ever needed to bow down the neck to the
sweep of the death-angel's sword.

* * *

He accepted the desolation of his life, for the sake of all beyond life,
greater than life, which looked down on him from the silence of the
night.

* * *

It was sunset in Venice,--that supreme moment when the magical flush of
light transfigures all, and wanderers whose eyes have long ached with
the greyness and the glare of northward cities gaze and think themselves
in heaven. The still waters of the lagunes, the marbles and the porphyry
and the jasper of the mighty palaces, the soft grey of the ruins all
covered with clinging green and the glowing blossoms of creepers, the
hidden antique nooks where some woman's head leaned out of an arched
casement, like a dream of the Dandolo time when the Adriatic swarmed
with the returning galleys laden with Byzantine spoil, the dim, mystic,
majestic walls that towered above the gliding surface of the eternal
water, once alive with flowers, and music, and the gleam of golden
tresses, and the laughter of careless revellers in the Venice of
Goldoni, in the Venice of the Past;--everywhere the sunset glowed with
the marvel of its colour, with the wonder of its warmth.

Then a moment, and it was gone. Night fell with the hushed shadowy
stillness that belongs to Venice alone; and in the place of the riot and
luxuriance of colour there was the tremulous darkness of the young
night, with the beat of an oar on the water, the scent of unclosing
carnation-buds, the white gleam of moonlight, and the odour of
lilies-of-the-valley blossoming in the dark archway of some mosaic-lined
window.

* * *

The ruin that had stripped him of all else taught him to fathom the
depths of his own attainments. He had in him the gifts of a Goethe; but
it was only under adversity that these reached their stature and bore
their fruit.

* * *

The words were true. The bread of bitterness is the food on which men
grow to their fullest stature; the waters of bitterness are the
debatable ford through which they reach the shores of wisdom; the ashes
boldly grasped and eaten without faltering are the price that must be
paid for the golden fruit of knowledge. The swimmer cannot tell his
strength till he has gone through the wild force of opposing waves; the
great man cannot tell the might of his hand and the power of his
resistance till he has wrestled with the angel of adversity, and held it
close till it has blessed him.

* * *

The artist was true to his genius; he knew it a greater gift than
happiness; and as his hands wandered by instinct over the familiar
notes, the power of his kingdom came to him, the passion of his mistress
was on him, and the grandeur of the melody swelled out to mingle with
the night, divine as consolation, supreme as victory.

* * *

The man who puts chains on another's limbs is only one shade worse than
he who puts fetters on another's free thoughts and on another's free
conscience.

* * *

One fetter of tradition loosened, one web of superstition broken, one
ray of light let in on darkness, one principle of liberty secured, are
worth the living for, he mused. Fame!--it is the flower of a day, that
dies when the next sun rises. But to do something, however little, to
free men from their chains, to aid something, however faintly, the
rights of reason and of truth, to be unvanquished through all and
against all, these may bring one nearer the pure ambitions of youth.

Happiness dies as age comes to us; it sets for ever, with the suns of
early years: yet perhaps we may keep a higher thing beside which it
holds but a brief loyalty, if to ourselves we can rest true, if for the
liberty of the world we can do anything.

* * *

Do not believe that happiness makes us selfish; it is a treason to the
sweetest gift of life. It is when it has deserted us that it grows hard
to keep all the better things in us from dying in the blight.

* * *

"Coleridge cried, 'O God, how glorious it is to live!' Renan asks, 'O
God, when will it be worth while to live?' In nature we echo the poet;
in the world we echo the thinker."

* * *

"Yet you are greater than you were then," he said, slowly. "I know it,--I
who am but a wine-cup rioter and love nothing but my summer-day fooling.
You are greater; but the harvest you sow will only be reaped over your
grave."

"I should be content could I believe it would be reaped then."

"Be content then. You may be so."

"God knows! Do you not think Marsy and Delisle de Sales and Linguet
believed, as they suffered in their dungeons for mere truth of speech,
that the remembrance of future generations would solace them? Bichât
gave himself to premature death for science' sake; does the world once
in a year speak his name? Yet how near those men are to us, to be
forgotten! A century, and history will scarce chronicle them."

"Then why give the wealth of your intellect to men?"

"Are there not higher things than present reward and the mere talk of
tongues? The _monstrari digito_ were scarce a lofty goal. We may love
Truth and strive to serve her, disregarding what she brings us. Those
who need a bribe from her are not her true believers."

Philippe d'Orvâle tossed his silvery hair from his eyes,--eyes of such
sunny lustre still.

"Ay! And those who held that sublime code of yours, that cleaving to
truth for truth's sake, where are they? How have they fared in every
climate and in every age? Stoned, crucified, burned, fettered, broken on
the vast black granite mass of the blind multitude's brutality, of the
priesthood's curse and craft!"

"True! Yet if through us, ever so slightly, the bondage of the creeds'
traditions be loosened from the lives they stifle, and those
multitudes--so weary, so feverish, so much more to be pitied than
condemned--become less blind, less brute, the sacrifice is not in vain."

"In your sense, no. But the world reels back again into darkness as soon
as a hand has lifted it for a while into light. Men hold themselves
purified, civilised; a year of war,--and lust and bloodthirst rage
untamed in all their barbarism; a taste of slaughter,--and they are
wolves again! There was truth in the old feudal saying, 'Oignez vilain,
il vous poindra; poignez vilain, il vous oindra.' Beat the multitudes
you talk of with a despot's sword, and they will lick your feet; touch
them with a Christ-like pity, and they will nail you to the cross."

There was terrible truth in the words: this man of princely blood, who
disdained all sceptres and wanted nothing of the world, could look
through and through it with his bold sunlit eyes, and see its
rottenness to the core.

Chandos sighed as he heard.

"You are right,--only too right. Yet even while they crouch to the
tyrant's sabre, how bitterly they need release! even while they crucify
their teachers and their saviours, how little they know what they do!
They may forsake themselves; but they should not be forsaken."

Philippe d'Orvâle looked on him with a light soft as woman's tears in
his eyes, and dashed his hand down on the alabaster.

"Chandos, you live twenty centuries too late. You would have been
crowned in Athens, and throned in Asia. But here, as a saving grace,
they will call you--'mad!'"

"Well, if they do? The title has its honours. It was hooted against
Solon and Socrates."

* * *

"I would do all in the world to please _you_, monseigneur," he answered,
sadly; "but I cannot change my nature. The little aziola loves the
shade, and shrinks from noise and glare and all the ways of men; I am
like it. You cannot make the aziola a bird for sunlight; you cannot make
me as others are."

Chandos looked down on him with an almost tender compassion. To him,
whose years were so rich in every pleasure and every delight that men
can enjoy, the loneliness and pain of Lulli's life, divorced from all
the living world, made it a marvel profoundly melancholy, profoundly
formed to claim the utmost gentleness and sympathy.

"I would not have you as others are, Lulli," he said, softly. "If in all
the selfishness and pleasures of our world there were not some here and
there to give their lives to high thoughts and to unselfish things, as
you give yours, we should soon, I fear, forget that such existed. But
for such recluse's devotion to an art as yours, the classics would have
perished; without the cloister-penmen, the laws of science would never
have broken the bondage of tradition."

Lulli looked up eagerly; then his head drooped again with the
inexpressible weariness of that vain longing which "toils to reach the
stars."

"Ah, what is the best that I reach?--the breath of the wind which
passes, and sighs, and is heard no more."

* * *

"How crabbed a scroll!" he went on, throwing himself down a moment on
the thyme and grass. "The characters must baffle even you; the years
that have yellowed the vellum have altered the fashion. Whose is it?"

"An old Elizabethan musician's," answered Lulli, as he looked up. "Yes;
the years take all,--our youth, our work, our life, even our graves."

Something in his Provençal cadence gave a rhythm to his simplest speech:
the words fell sadly on his listener's ear, though on the sensuous
luxuriance of his own existence no shadow ever rested, no skeleton ever
crouched.

"Yes: the years take all," he said, with a certain sadness on him. "How
many unperfected resolves, unachieved careers, unaccomplished ambitions,
immatured discoveries, perish under the rapidity of time, as unripe
fruits fall before their season! Bichât died at thirty-one:--if he had
lived, his name would now have outshone Aristotle's."

"We live too little time to do anything even for the art we give our
life to," murmured Lulli. "When we die, our work dies with us: our
better self must perish with our bodies; the first change of fashion
will sweep it into oblivion."

"Yet something may last of it," suggested Chandos, while his hand
wandered among the blue bells of the curling hyacinths. "Because few
save scholars read the '_Defensio Populi_' now, the work it did for free
thought cannot die. None the less does the cathedral enrich Cologne
because the name of the man who begot its beauty has passed unrecorded.
None the less is the world aided by the effort of every true and daring
mind because the thinker himself has been crushed down in the rush of
unthinking crowds."

"No, if _it_ could live!" murmured Lulli, softly, with a musing pain in
the broken words. "But look! the scroll was as dear to its writer as his
score to Beethoven,--the child of his love, cradled in his thoughts
night and day, cherished as never mother cherished her first-born,
beloved as wife or mistress, son or daughter, never were. Perhaps he
denied himself much to give his time more to his labour; and when he
died, lonely and in want, because he had pursued that for which men
called him a dreamer, his latest thought was of the work which never
could speak to others as it spoke to him, which he must die and leave,
in anguish that none ever felt to sever from a human thing. Yet what
remains of his love and his toil? It is gone, as a laugh or a sob dies
off the ear, leaving no echo behind. His name signed here tells nothing
to the men for whom he laboured, adds nothing to the art for which he
lived. As it is with him, so will it be with me."

His voice, that had risen in sudden and untutored eloquence, sank
suddenly into the sadness and the weariness of the man whose highest joy
is but relief from pain; and in it was a keener pang still,--the grief
of one who strives for what incessantly escapes him.

"Wait," said Chandos, gently. "Are we sure that nothing lives of the
music you mourn? It may live on the lips of the people, in those
Old-World songs whose cause we cannot trace, yet which come sweet and
fresh transmitted to every generation. How often we hear some nameless
melody echo down a country-side! the singers cannot tell you whence it
came; they only know their mothers sang it by their cradles, and they
will sing it by their children's. But in the past the song had its birth
in genius."

Guido Lulli bent his head.

"True: such an immortality were all-sufficient: we could well afford to
have our names forgotten----"

* * *

"Let that fellow alone, Cos," laughed Chandos, to avert the stormy
element which seemed to threaten the serenity of his breakfast-party.
"Trevenna will beat us all with his tongue, if we tempt him to try
conclusions. He should be a Chancellor of the Exchequer or a Cheap John;
I am not quite clear which as yet."

"Identically the same things!" cried Trevenna. "The only difference is
the scale they are on; one talks from the bench, and the other from the
benches; one cheapens tins, and the other cheapens taxes; one has a
salve for an incurable disease, and the other a salve for the national
debt; one rounds his periods to put off a watch that won't go, and the
other to cover a deficit that won't close; but they radically drive the
same trade, and both are successful if the spavined mare trots out
looking sound, and the people pay up. 'Look what I save you,' cry Cheap
John and Chancellor; and while they shout their economics, they pocket
their shillings. Ah, if I were sure I could bamboozle a village, I
should know I was qualified to make up a Budget."

* * *

"Most impudent of men! When will you learn the first lesson of society,
and decently and discreetly _apprendre à vous effacer_?"

"_A m'effacer_? The advice Lady Harriet Vandeleur gave Cecil. Very good
for mediocre people, I dare say; but it wouldn't suit _me_. There are
some people, you know, that won't iron down for the hardest rollers.
_M'effacer_? No! I'd rather any day be an ill-bred originality than a
well-bred nonentity."

"Then you succeed perfectly in being what you wish! Don't you know,
monsieur, that to set yourself against conventionalities is like talking
too loud?--an impertinence and an under-breeding that society resents by
exclusion."

"Yes, I know it. But a duke may bawl, and nobody shuts out _him_; a
prince might hop on one leg, and everybody would begin to hop too. Now,
what the ducal lungs and the princely legs might do with impunity, I
declare I've a right to do, if I like."

"_Bécasse_! no one can declare his rights till he can do much more,
and--purchase them. Have a million, and we may perhaps give you a little
license to be unlike other persons: without the million it is an
ill-bred _gaucherie_."

"Ah, I know! Only a nobleman may be original; a poor penniless wretch
upon town must be humbly and insignificantly commonplace. What a pity
for the success of the aristocratic monopolists that nature puts clever
fellows and fools just in the reverse order! But then nature's a
shocking socialist."

"And so are you."

Trevenna laughed.

"Hush, madame. Pray don't destroy me with such a whisper."

* * *

Talent wears well; genius wears itself out; talent drives a brougham in
fact, genius a sun-chariot in fancy; talent keeps to earth and fattens
there, genius soars to the empyrean, to get picked by every kite that
flies; talent is the part and the venison, genius the seltzer and
souffle of life. The man who has talent sails successfully on the top of
the wave; the man with genius beats himself to pieces, fifty to one, on
the first rock he meets.

* * *

One innocent may be wrongly suspected until he is made the thing that
the libel called him.

* * *

Men shut out happiness from their schemes for the world's happiness.
They might as well try to bring flowers to bloom without the sun.

* * *

The most dastardly sin on earth is the desertion of the fallen.

* * *

Let the world abandon you, but to yourself be true.

* * *

The bread of bitterness is the food on which men grow to their fullest
stature.

* * *

Youth without faith is a day without sun.

* * *

I detest posterity--every king hates his heir.

* * *

Scandals are like dandelion seeds; they are arrow-headed and stick when
they fall, and bring forth and multiply fourfold.

* * *

The puff perfect is the puff personal--adroitly masked.

* * *

I wear the Bonnet Rouge discreetly weighed down with a fine tassel of
British prudence.

* * *

He was a master of the great art of banter. It is a marvellous force; it
kills sanctity, unveils sophistry, travesties wisdom, cuts through the
finest shield, and turns the noblest impulses to hopeless ridicule.

* * *

Immortality is dull work--a hideous statue that gets black as soot in no
time; funeral sermons that make you out a vial of revelations and
discuss the probabilities of your being in the realms of Satan; a bust
that slants you off at the shoulders and sticks you up on a bracket; a
tombstone for the canes of the curious to poke at; an occasional
attention in the way of withered immortelles or biographical
Billingsgate, and a partial preservation shared in common with mummies,
auks' eggs, snakes in bottles, and deformities in spirits of
wine:--that's posthumous fame. I must say I don't see much fun in it.

* * *

It were hard not to be wrong in philosophies when the body starves on a
pinch of oatmeal. It is the law of necessity, the balance of economy;
human fuel must be used up that the machine of the world may spin on;
but it is not, perhaps, marvellous that the living fuel is sometimes
unreconciled to that symmetrical rule of waste and repair, of consumer
and consumed.

* * *

It is many centuries since Caius Gracchus called the mercantile classes
to aid the people against the patricians, and found too late that they
were deadlier oppressors than all the optimates; but the error still
goes on, and the moneymakers churn it into gold, as they churned it then
into the Asiatic revenues and the senatorial amulets.

* * *

The love of a people is the most sublime crown that can rest on the brow
of any man, but the love of a mob is a mongrel that fawns and slavers
one moment, to rend and tear the next.

_FOLLE-FARINE._

In this old-world district, amidst the pastures and corn-lands of
Normandy, superstition had taken a hold which the passage of centuries
and the advent of revolution had done very little to lessen. Few of the
people could read, and fewer still could write. They knew nothing but
what their priests and politicians told them to believe. They went to
their beds with the poultry, and rose as the cock crew: they went to
mass, as their ducks to the osier and weed ponds; and to the
conscription as their lambs to the slaughter. They understood that there
was a world beyond them, but they remembered it only as the best market
for their fruit, their fowls, their lace, their skins. Their brains were
as dim as were their oil-lit streets at night; though their lives were
content and mirthful, and for the most part pious. They went out into
the summer meadows chanting aves, in seasons of drought to pray for rain
on their parching orchards, in the same credulity with which they groped
through the winter-fog bearing torches, and chanting dirges to gain a
blessing at seed-time on their bleak, black fallows.

The beauty and the faith of the old mediæval life were with them still;
and with its beauty and its faith were its bigotry and cruelty likewise.

They led simple and contented lives; for the most part honest, and
amongst themselves cheerful and kindly: preserving much grace of colour,
of costume, of idiosyncrasy, because apart from the hueless communism
and characterless monotony of modern cities.

But they believed in sorcery and in devilry: they were brutal to their
beasts, and could be as brutal to their foes: they were steeped in
legend and tradition from their cradles; and all the darkest
superstitions of dead ages still found home and treasury in their hearts
and at their hearths.

They had always been a religious people in this birth country of the
Flamma race: the strong poetic reverence of their forefathers, which had
symbolised itself in the carving of every lintel, corbel or buttress in
their streets, and the fashion of every spire on which a weather-vane
could gleam against the sun, was still in their blood; the poetry had
departed, but the bigotry remained.

* * *

"The earth and the air are good," she thought, as she lay there watching
the dark leaves sway in the foam and the wind, and the bright-bosomed
birds float from blossom to blossom. For there was latent in her, all
untaught, that old pantheistic instinct of the divine age, when the
world was young, to behold a sentient consciousness in every leaf
unfolded to the light; to see a soul in every created thing the day
shines on; to feel the presence of an eternal life in every breeze that
moves, in every grass that grows; in every flame that lifts itself to
heaven; in every bell that vibrates on the air; in every moth that soars
to reach the stars.

Pantheism is the religion of the poet; and nature had made her a poet,
though man as yet had but made of her an outcast, a slave, and a beast
of burden.

"The earth and the air are good," she thought, watching the sun-rays
pierce the purple hearts of a passion-flower, the shadows move across
the deep brown water, the radiant butterfly alight upon a lily, the
scarlet-throated birds dart in and out through the yellow feathery
blossoms of the limes.

* * *

When a man clings to life for life's sake, because it is fair and sweet,
and good in the sight and the senses, there may be weakness in his
shudder at its threatening loss. But when a man is loth to lose life
although it be hard, and joyless, and barren of all delights, because
this life gives him power to accomplish things greater than he, which
yet without him must perish, there is the strength in him, as there is
the agony of Prometheus.

With him it must die also: that deep dim greatness within him, which
moves him, despite himself; that nameless unspeakable force which
compels him to create and to achieve; that vision by which he beholds
worlds beyond him not seen by his fellows.

Weary of life he may be; of life material, and full of subtlety; of
passion, of pleasure, of pain; of the kisses that burn, of the laugh
that rings hollow, of the honey that so soon turns to gall, of the
sickly fatigues, and the tired, cloyed hunger, that are the portion of
men upon earth. Weary of these he may be; but still if the gods have
breathed on him, and made him mad with the madness that men have called
genius, there will be that in him greater than himself, which he
knows,--and cannot know without some fierce wrench and pang,--will be
numbed and made impotent, and drift away, lost for evermore, into that
eternal night, which is all that men behold of death.

* * *

The grass of the Holy River gathers perfume from the marvellous suns,
and the moonless nights, and the gorgeous bloom of the east, from the
aromatic breath of the leopard, and the perfume of the fallen
pomegranate, and the sacred oil that floats in the lamps, and the caress
of the girl-bather's feet, and the myrrh-dropping unguents that glide
from the maiden's bare limbs in the moonlight,--the grass holds and
feeds on them all. But not till the grass has been torn from the roots,
and been crushed, and been bruised and destroyed, can the full odours
exhale of all it has tasted and treasured.

Even thus the imagination of man may be great, but it can never be at
its greatest until one serpent, with merciless fangs, has bitten it
through and through, and impregnated it with passion and with
poison,--that one deathless serpent which is memory.

* * *

And, indeed, to those who are alive to the nameless, universal, Eternal
Soul which breathes in all the grasses of the fields, and beams in the
eyes of all creatures of earth and air, and throbs in the living light
of palpitating stars, and thrills through the young sap of forest trees,
and stirs in the strange loves of wind-borne plants, and hums in every
song of the bee, and burns in every quiver of the flame, and peoples
with sentient myriads every drop of dew that gathers on a hare-bell,
every bead of water that ripples in a brook--to them the mortal life of
man can seem but little, save at once the fiercest and the feeblest
thing that does exist; at once the most cruel and the most impotent;
tyrants of direst destruction, and bondsmen of lowest captivity.

* * *

The earth has always most charm, and least pain, to the poet or the
artist when men are hidden away under their roofs. Then they do not
break its calm with either their mirth or their brutality; then the vile
and revolting coarseness of their works, that blot it with so much
deformity, is softened and obscured in the purple breaths of shadow, and
the dim tender gleam of stars.

* * *

When the world was in its youth, it had leisure to treasure its
recollections; even to pause and look back; to see what flower of a fair
thought, what fruit of a noble art, it might have overlooked or left
down-trodden. But now it is so old, and is so tired; it is purblind, and
heavy of foot; it does not notice what it destroys; it desires rest and
can find none; nothing can matter greatly to it; its dead are so many
that it cannot count them; and being thus worn and dulled with age, and
suffocated under the weight of its innumerable memories, it is very slow
to be moved, and swift--terribly swift--to forget.

Why should it not be?

It has known the best, it has known the worst that ever can befall it.

And the prayer that to the heart of man seems so freshly born from his
own desire, what is it on the weary ear of the world, save the same old,
old cry which it has heard through all the ages, empty as the sound of
the wind, and for ever--for ever--unanswered?

* * *

For there is nothing so cruel in life as a Faith;--the Faith, whatever
its name may be, that draws a man on all his years through on one narrow
path, by one tremulous light, and then at the last, with a laugh--drowns
him.

* * *

I think I see!--the great God walked by the edge of the river, and he
mused on a gift to give man, on a joy that should be a joy on the earth
for ever; and he passed by the lily white as snow, by the thyme that fed
the bees, by the gold heart in the arum flower, by the orange flame of
the tall sandrush, by all the great water-blossoms which the sun kissed
and the swallows loved, and he came to the one little reed pierced with
the snake's-tongues, and all alone amidst millions. Then he took it up,
and cut it to the root, and killed it; killed it as a reed--but breathed
into it a song audible and beautiful to all the ears of men. Was that
death to the reed?--or life? Would a thousand summers of life by the
waterside have been worth that one thrill of song when a god first spoke
through it?

* * *

It is odd that you should live in a palace, and he should want for
bread; but then he can create things, and you can only buy them. So it
is even, perhaps.

* * *

A word that needs compelling is broken by the heart before the lips give
it. It is to plant a tree without a root to put faith in a man that
needs a bond.

* * *

"You are glad since you sing!" said the old man to her as she passed him
again on her homeward way and paused again beside him.

"The birds in cages sing," she answered him, "but think you they are
glad?"

"Are they not?"

She sat down a moment beside him, on the bank which was soft with moss,
and odorous with wild flowers curling up the stems of the poplars and
straying over into the corn beyond.

"Are they? Look. Yesterday I passed a cottage, it is on the Great South
Road; far away from here. The house was empty; the people no doubt were
gone to labour in the fields; there was a wicker cage hanging to the
wall, and in the cage there was a blackbird. The sun beat on his head;
his square of sod was a dry clod of bare earth; the heat had dried every
drop of water in his pan; and yet the bird was singing. Singing how? In
torment, beating his breast against the bars till the blood started,
crying to the skies to have mercy on him and to let the rain fall. His
song was shrill; it had a scream in it; still he sang. Do you say the
merle was glad?"

"What did you do?" asked the old man, still breaking his stones with a
monotonous rise and fall of his hammer.

"I took the cage down and opened the door."

"And he?"

"He shot up in the air first, then dropped down amidst the grasses,
where a little brook which the drought had not dried was still running;
and he bathed and drank, and bathed again, seeming mad with the joy of
the water. When I lost him from sight he was swaying among the leaves on
a bough over the river; but then he was silent."

"And what do you mean by that?"

Her eyes clouded; she was mute. She vaguely knew the meaning it bore to
herself, but it was beyond her to express it. All things of nature had
voices and parables for her, because her fancy was vivid, and her mind
was still too dark, and too profoundly ignorant, for her to be able to
shape her thoughts into metaphor or deduction. The bird had spoken to
her; by his silence as by his song; but what he had uttered she could
not well utter again. Save indeed that song was not gladness, and
neither was silence pain.

* * *

"The future?" she said at last, "that means something that one has not,
and that is to come--is it so?" "Something that one never has, and that
never comes," muttered the old man, wearily cracking the flints in two;
"something that one possesses in one's sleep, and that is farther off
each time that one awakes; and yet a thing that one sees always, sees
even when one lies a dying they say--for men are fools."

* * *

In one of the most fertile and most fair districts of northern France
there was a little Norman town, very, very old, and beautiful
exceedingly by reason of its ancient streets, its high peaked roofs, its
marvellous galleries and carvings, its exquisite greys and browns, its
silence and its colour, and its rich still life.

Its centre was a great cathedral, noble as York or Chartres; a
cathedral, whose spire shot to the clouds, and whose innumerable towers
and pinnacles were all pierced to the day, so that the blue sky shone
and the birds of the air flew all through them. A slow brown river,
broad enough for market boats and for corn barges, stole through the
place to the sea, lapping as it went the wooden piles of the houses, and
reflecting the quaint shapes of the carvings, the hues of the signs and
the draperies, the dark spaces of the dormer windows, the bright heads
of some casement-cluster of carnations, the laughing face of a girl
leaning out to smile on her lover.

All around it lay the deep grass unshaven, the leagues on leagues of
fruitful orchards, the low blue hills tenderly interlacing one another,
the fields of colza, where the white head-dress of the women-workers
flashed in the sun like a silvery pigeon's wing. To the west there were
the deep green woods, and the wide plains golden with gorse of Arthur's
and of Merlin's lands; and beyond, to the northward, was the dim
stretch of the ocean breaking on a yellow shore, whither the river ran,
and whither led straight shady roads, hidden with linden and with poplar
trees, and marked ever and anon by a wayside wooden Christ, or by a
little murmuring well crowned with a crucifix.

A beautiful, old, shadowy, ancient place: picturesque everywhere; often
silent, with a sweet sad silence that was chiefly broken by the sound of
bells or the chaunting of choristers. A place of the Middle Ages still.
With lanterns swinging on cords from house to house as the only light;
with wondrous scroll-works and quaint signs at the doors of all its
traders; with monks' cowls and golden croziers and white-robed acolytes
in its streets; with the subtle smoke of incense coming out from the
cathedral door to mingle with the odours of the fruits and flowers in
the market-place; with great flat-bottomed boats drifting down the river
under the leaning eaves of its dwellings; and with the galleries of its
opposing houses touching so nearly that a girl leaning in one could
stretch a Provence rose or toss an Easter egg across to her neighbour in
the other.

Doubtless there were often squalor, poverty, dust, filth, and
uncomeliness within these old and beautiful homes. Doubtless often the
dwellers therein were housed like cattle and slept like pigs, and looked
but once out to the woods and waters of the landscapes round for one
hundred times that they looked at their hidden silver in an old delf
jug, or at their tawdry coloured prints of St. Victorian or St. Scævola.

But yet much of the beauty and the nobility of the old, simple, restful,
rich-hued life of the past still abode there, and remained with them. In
the straight, lithe form of their maidens, untrammelled by modern garb,
and moving with the free majestic grace of forest does. In the vast,
dim, sculptured chambers, where the grandam span by the wood fire, and
the little children played in the shadows, and the lovers whispered in
the embrasured window. In the broad market-place, where the mules
cropped the clover, and the tawny awnings caught the sunlight, and the
white caps of the girls framed faces fitted for the pencils of missal
painters, and the flush of colour from mellow wall-fruits and
grape-clusters glanced amidst the shelter of deepest, freshest green. In
the perpetual presence of their cathedral, which, through sun and storm,
through frost and summer, through noon and midnight, stood there amidst
them, and watched the galled oxen tread their painful way, and the
scourged mules droop their humble heads, and the helpless, harmless
flocks go forth to the slaughter, and the old weary lives of the men and
women pass through hunger and cold to the grave, and the sun and the
moon rise and set, and the flowers and the children blossom and fade,
and the endless years come and go, bringing peace, bringing war;
bringing harvest, bringing famine; bringing life, bringing death; and,
beholding these, still said to the multitude in its terrible irony, "Lo!
your God is Love."

This little town lay far from the great Paris highway and all greatly
frequented tracks. It was but a short distance from the coast, but near
no harbour of greater extent than such as some small fishing village had
made in the rocks for the trawlers. Few strangers ever came to it,
except some wandering painters or antiquaries. It sent its apples and
eggs, its poultry and honey, its colza and corn to the use of the great
cities; but it was rarely that any of its own people went thither.

Now and then some one of the oval-faced, blue-eyed, lithe-limbed maidens
of its little homely households would sigh and flush and grow restless,
and murmur of Paris; and would steal out in the break of a warm grey
morning whilst only the birds were still waking; and would patter away
in her wooden shoes over the broad, white, southern road, with a stick
over her shoulder, and a bundle of all her worldly goods upon the stick.
And she would look back often, often, as she went; and when all was lost
in the blue haze of distance save the lofty spire which she still saw
through her tears, she would say in her heart, with her lips parched and
trembling, "I will come back again. I will come back again."

But none such ever did come back.

They came back no more than did the white sweet sheaves of the lilies
which the women gathered and sent to be bought and sold in the city--to
gleam one faint summer night in a gilded balcony, and to be flung out
the next morning, withered and dead.

One amongst the few who had thus gone whither the lilies went, and of
whom the people would still talk as their mules paced homewards through
the lanes at twilight, had been Reine Flamma, the daughter of the miller
of Yprés.

* * *

"There are only two trades in a city," said the actors to her, with a
smile as bitter as her own, "only two trades--to buy souls and to sell
them. What business have you here, who do neither the one nor the
other?"

There was music still in this trampled reed of the river, into which the
gods had once bidden the stray winds and the wandering waters breathe
their melody; but there, in the press, the buyers and sellers only saw
in it a frail thing of the sand and the stream, only made to be woven
for barter, or bind together the sheaves of the roses of pleasure.

* * *

Art was to him as mother, brethren, mistress, offspring, religion--all
that other men hold dear. He had none of these, he desired none of them;
and his genius sufficed to him in their stead.

It was an intense and reckless egotism, made alike cruel and sublime by
its intensity and purity, like the egotism of a mother in her child. To
it, as the mother to her child, he would have sacrificed every living
creature; but to it also, like her, he would have sacrificed his very
existence as unhesitatingly. But it was an egotism which, though
merciless in its tyranny, was as pure as snow in its impersonality; it
was untainted by any grain of avarice, of vanity, of selfish desire; it
was independent of all sympathy; it was simply and intensely the passion
for immortality:--that sublime selfishness, that superb madness, of all
great minds.

Art had taken him for its own, as Demeter, in the days of her
desolation, took the child Demophoon to nurture him as her own on the
food of gods, and to plunge him through the flames of a fire that would
give him immortal life. As the pusillanimous and sordid fears of the
mortal mother lost to the child for evermore the possession of Olympian
joys and of perpetual youth, so did the craven and earthly cares of
bodily needs hold the artist back from the radiance of the life of the
soul, and drag him from the purifying fires. Yet he had not been utterly
discouraged; he strove against the Metanira of circumstance; he did his
best to struggle free from the mortal bonds that bound him; and, as the
child Demophoon mourned for the great goddess that had nurtured him,
refusing to be comforted, so did he turn from the base consolations of
the senses and the appetites, and beheld ever before his sight the
ineffable majesty of that Mater Dolorosa who once and for ever had
anointed him as her own.

* * *

Men did not believe in him; what he wrought saddened and terrified them;
they turned aside to those who fed them on simpler and on sweeter food.

His works were great, but they were such as the public mind deems
impious. They unveiled human corruption too nakedly, and they shadowed
forth visions too exalted, and satires too unsparing, for them to be
acceptable to the multitude. They were compounded of an idealism clear
and cold as crystal, and of a reality cruel and voluptuous as love. They
were penetrated with an acrid satire and an intense despair: the world
caring only for a honied falsehood and a gilded gloss in every art,
would have none of them.

* * *

"See you--what he lacks is only the sinew that gold gives. What he has
done is great. The world rightly seeing must fear it; and fear is the
highest homage the world ever gives. But he is penniless; and he has
many foes; and jealousy can with so much ease thrust aside the greatness
which it fears into obscurity, when that greatness is marred by the
failures and the feebleness of poverty. Genius scorns the power of gold:
it is wrong; gold is the war-scythe on its chariot, which mows down the
millions of its foes and gives free passage to the sun-coursers with
which it leaves those heavenly fields of light for the gross
battle-fields of earth."

* * *

It is true that the great artist is as a fallen god who remembers a time
when worlds arose at his breath, and at his bidding the barren lands
blossomed into fruitfulness; the sorcery of the thyrsus is still his,
though weakened.

The powers of lost dominions haunt his memory; the remembered glory of
an eternal sun is in his eyes, and makes the light of common day seem
darkness; the heart sickness of a long exile weighs on him; incessantly
he labours to overtake the mirage of a loveliness which fades as he
pursues it. In the poetic creation by which the bondage of his material
life is redeemed, he finds at once ecstasy and disgust, because he feels
at once his strength and weakness. For him all things of earth and air,
and sea and cloud, have beauty; and to his ear all voices of the forest
land and water world are audible.

He is as a god, since he can call into palpable shape dreams born of
impalpable thought; as a god, since he has known the truth divested of
lies, and has stood face to face with it, and been not afraid; a god
thus. But a cripple inasmuch as his hand can never fashion the shapes
that his vision beholds; an alien because he has lost what he never will
find upon earth; a beast, since ever and again his passions will drag
him to wallow in the filth of sensual indulgence; a slave, since
oftentimes the divinity that is in him breaks and bends under the
devilry that also is in him, and he obeys the instincts of vileness, and
when he would fain bless the nations he curses them.

* * *

"I do not know," she said, wearily afresh. "Marcellin says that every
God is deaf. He must be deaf--or very cruel. Look; everything lives in
pain; and yet no God pities and makes an end of the earth. I would--if I
were He. Look--at dawn, the other day, I was out in the wood. I came
upon a little rabbit in a trap; a little, pretty, soft black-and-white
thing, quite young. It was screaming in its horrible misery; it
had been screaming all night. Its thighs were broken in the iron teeth;
the trap held it tight; it could not escape, it could only
scream--scream--scream. All in vain. When I had set it free it was
mangled as if a wolf had gnawed it; the iron teeth had bitten through
the fur, and the flesh, and the bone; it had lost so much blood, and it
was in so much pain, that it could not live. I laid it down in the
bracken, and put water to its mouth, and did what I could; but it was of
no use. It had been too much hurt. It died as the sun rose; a little,
harmless, shy, happy thing, you know, that never killed any creature,
and only asked to nibble a leaf or two, or sleep in a little round hole,
and run about merry and free. How can one care for a God since He lets
these things be?"

Arslàn smiled as he heard.

"Child,--men care for a god only as a god means a good to them. Men are
heirs of heaven, they say; and, in right of their heritage, they make
life hell to every living thing that dares dispute the world with them.
You do not understand that,--tut! You are not human then. If you were
human, you would begrudge a blade of grass to a rabbit, and arrogate to
yourself a lease of immortality."

* * *

"Of a winter night," she said, slowly, "I have heard old Pitchou read
aloud to Flamma, and she reads of their God, the one they hang
everywhere on the crosses here; and the story ran that the populace
scourged and nailed to death the one whom they knew afterwards, when too
late, to have been the great man that they looked for, and that, being
bidden to make their choice of one to save, they chose to ransom and
honour a thief: one called Barabbas. Is it true?--if the world's choice
were wrong once, why not twice?"

Arslàn smiled; the smile she knew so well, and which had no more warmth
than the ice floes of his native seas.

"Why not twice? Why not a thousand times? A thief has the world's
sympathies always. It is always the Barabbas--the trickster in talent,
the forger of stolen wisdom, the bravo of political crime, the huckster
of plundered thoughts, the charlatan of false art, whom the vox populi
elects and sets free, and sends on his way rejoicing. 'Will ye have
Christ or Barabbas?' Every generation is asked the same question, and
every generation gives the same answer; and scourges the divinity out of
its midst, and finds its idol in brute force and low greed."

She only dimly comprehended, not well knowing why her words had thus
roused him. She pondered awhile, then her face cleared.

"But the end?" she asked. "The dead God is the God of all these people
round us now, and they have built great places in His honour, and they
bow when they pass His likeness in the highway or the market-place. But
with Barabbas--what was the end? It seems that they loathe and despise
him?"

Arslàn laughed a little.

"His end? In Syria may be the vultures picked his bones, where they lay
whitening on the plains--those times were primitive, the world was
young. But in our day Barabbas lives and dies in honour, and has a tomb
that stares all men in the face, setting forth his virtues, so that all
who run may read. In our day Barabbas--the Barabbas of money-greeds and
delicate cunning, and the theft which has risen to science, and the
assassination that kills souls and not bodies, and the crime that deals
moral death and not material death--our Barabbas, who is crowned Fraud
in the place of mailed Force, lives always in purple and fine linen, and
ends in the odours of sanctity with the prayers of priests over his
corpse."

He spoke with a certain fierce passion that rose in him whenever he
thought of that world which had rejected him, and had accepted so many
others, weaker in brain and nerve, but stronger in one sense, because
more dishonest; and as he spoke he went straight to a wall on his right,
where a great sea of grey paper was stretched, untouched and ready to
his hand.

She would have spoken, but he made a motion to silence.

"Hush! be quiet," he said to her, almost harshly, "I have thought of
something."

And he took the charcoal and swept rapidly with it over the dull blank
surface till the vacancy glowed with life. A thought had kindled in him;
a vision had arisen before him.

The scene around him vanished utterly from his sight. The grey stone
walls, the square windows through which the fading sun-rays fell; the
level pastures and sullen streams, and paled skies without, all faded
away as though they had existed only in a dream.

All the empty space about him became peopled with many human shapes that
for him had breath and being, though no other eye could have beheld
them. The old Syrian world of eighteen hundred years before arose and
glowed before him. The things of his own life died away, and in their
stead he saw the fierce flame of eastern suns, the gleaming range of
marble palaces, the purple flush of pomegranate flowers, the deep colour
of oriental robes, the soft silver of hills olive crested, the tumult of
a city at high festival. And he could not rest until all he thus saw in
his vision he had rendered as far as his hand could render it; and what
he drew was this.

A great thirsty, heated, seething crowd; a crowd that had manhood and
womanhood, age and infancy, youths and maidens within its ranks; a crowd
in whose faces every animal lust and every human passion were let loose;
a crowd on which a noon sun without shadow streamed; a sun which parched
and festered and engendered all corruption in the land on which it
looked. This crowd was in a city, a city on whose flat roofs the myrtle
and the cistus bloomed; above whose walls the plumes of olives waved;
upon whose distant slopes the darkling cedar groves rose straight
against the sky, and on whose lofty temple plates of gold glistened
against the shining heavens. This crowd had scourges, and stones, and
goads in their hands; and in their midst they led one clothed in white,
whose head was thorn-crowned, and whose eyes were filled with a god's
pity and a man's reproach; and him they stoned, and lashed, and hooted.

And triumphant in the throng, whose choice he was, seated aloft upon
men's shoulders, with a purple robe thrown on his shoulders, there sat a
brawny, grinning, bloated, jibbering thing, with curled lips and savage
eyes, and satyr's leer: the creature of greed, of lust, of obscenity, of
brutality, of avarice, of desire. This thing the people followed,
rejoicing exceedingly, content in the guide whom they had chosen,
victorious in the fiend for whom they spurned a deity; crying, with wide
open throats and brazen lungs,--"Barabbas!"

There was not a form in all this close-packed throng which had not a
terrible irony in it, which was not in itself a symbol of some appetite
or of some vice, for which women and men abjure the godhead in them.

A gorged drunkard lay asleep with his amphora broken beneath him, the
stream of the purple wine lapped eagerly by ragged children. A
money-changer had left the receipt of custom, eager to watch and shout,
and a thief clutched both hands full of the forsaken coins and fled.

A miser had dropped a bag of gold, and stopped to catch at all the
rolling pieces, regardless in his greed how the crowd trampled and trod
on him. A mother chid and struck her little brown curly child, because
he stretched his arms and turned his face towards the thorn-crowned
captive.

A priest of the temple, with a blood-stained knife thrust in his girdle,
dragged beside him, by the throat, a little tender lamb doomed for the
sacrifice.

A dancing woman with jewels in her ears, and half naked to the waist,
sounding the brazen cymbals above her head, drew a score of youths after
her in Barabbas' train.

On one of the flat roof tops, reclining on purple and fine linen,
looking down on the street below from the thick foliage of her citron
boughs and her red Syrian roses, was an Egyptian wanton; and leaning
beside her, tossing golden apples in her bosom, was a young centurion of
the Roman guard, languid and laughing, with his fair chest bare to the
heat, and his armour flung in a pile beside him.

And thus, in like manner, every figure bore its parable; and above all
was the hard, hot, cruel, cloudless sky of blue, without one faintest
mist to break its horrible serenity, whilst high in the azure ether and
against the sun, an eagle and a vulture fought, locked close, and
tearing at each other's breasts.

Six nights this conception occupied him. His days were not his own, he
spent them in a rough mechanical labour which his strength executed
while his mind was far away from it; but the nights were all his, and at
the end of the sixth night the thing arose, perfect as far as his hand
could perfect it; begotten by a chance and ignorant word as have been
many of the greatest works the world has seen;--oaks sprung from the
acorn that a careless child has let fall.

When he had finished it his arm dropped to his side, he stood
motionless; the red glow of the dawn lighting the depths of his
sleepless eyes.

* * *

It was a level green silent country which was round her, with little
loveliness and little colour; but as she went she laughed incessantly
in the delirious gladness of her liberty.

She tossed her head back to watch the flight of a single swallow; she
caught a handful of green leaves and buried her face in them. She
listened in a very agony of memory to the rippling moisture of a little
brook. She followed with her eyes the sweeping vapours of the
rain-clouds, and when a west wind rose and blew a cluster of loose apple
blossoms between her eyes--she could no longer bear the passionate pain
of all the long-lost sweetness, but flinging herself downward, sobbed
with the ecstasy of an exile's memories.

The hell in which she had dwelt had denied them to her for so long.

"Ah God!" she thought, "I know now--one cannot be utterly wretched
whilst one has still the air and the light and the winds of the sky."

And she arose, calmer, and went on her way; wondering, even in that
hour, why men and women trod the daily measures of their lives with
their eyes downward and their ears choked with the dust; hearkening so
little to the sound of the breeze in the grasses, looking so little to
the passage of the clouds against the sun.

* * *

The ground ascended as it stretched seaward, but on it there were only
wide dull fields of colza or of grass lying, sickly and burning, under
the fire of the late afternoon sun.

The slope was too gradual to break their monotony.

Above them was the cloudless weary blue; below them was the faint
parched green; other colour there was none; one little dusky panting
bird flew by pursued by a kite; that was the only change.

She asked him no questions; she walked mutely and patiently by his side;
she hated the dull heat, the colourless waste, the hard scorch of the
air, the dreary changelessness of the scene. But she did not say so. He
had chosen to come to them.

A league onward the fields were merged into a heath, uncultivated and
covered with short prickly furze; on the brown earth between the stunted
bushes a few goats were cropping the burnt-up grasses. Here the slope
grew sharper, and the earth seemed to rise up between the sky and them,
steep and barren as a house-roof.

Once he asked her--

"Are you tired?"

She shook her head.

Her feet ached, and her heart throbbed; her limbs were heavy like lead
in the heat and the toil. But she did not tell him so. She would have
dropped dead from exhaustion rather than have confessed to him any
weakness.

He took the denial as it was given, and pressed onward up the ascent.

The sun was slanting towards the west; the skies seemed like brass; the
air was sharp, yet scorching; the dull brown earth still rose up before
them like a wall; they climbed it slowly and painfully, their hands and
their teeth filled with its dust, which drifted in a cloud before them.
He bade her close her eyes, and she obeyed him. He stretched his arm out
and drew her after him up the ascent, which was slippery from drought
and prickly from the stunted growth of furze.

On the summit he stood still and released her.

"Now look."

She opened her eyes with the startled, half-questioning stare of one
led out from utter darkness into a full and sudden light.

Then, with a great cry, she sank down on the rock, trembling, weeping,
laughing, stretching out her arms to the new glory that met her sight,
dumb with its grandeur, delirious with its delight.

For what she saw was the sea.

Before her dazzled sight all its beauty stretched, the blueness of the
waters meeting the blueness of the skies; radiant with all the marvels
of its countless hues; softly stirred by a low wind that sighed across
it; bathed in a glow of gold that streamed on it from the westward;
rolling from north to south in slow, sonorous measure, filling the
silent air with the ceaseless melody of its wondrous voice.

The lustre of the sunset beamed upon it; the cool fresh smell of its
waters shot like new life through all the scorch and stupor of the day;
its white foam curled and broke on the brown curving rocks and wooded
inlets of the shores; innumerable birds, that gleamed like silver,
floated or flew above its surface; all was still, still as death, save
only for the endless movement of those white swift wings and the murmur
of the waves, in which all meaner and harsher sounds of earth seemed
lost and hushed to slumber and to silence.

The sea alone reigned, as it reigned in the young years of the earth
when men were not; as, may be, it will be its turn to reign again in the
years to come, when men and all their works shall have passed away and
be no more seen nor any more remembered.

Arslàn watched her in silence.

He was glad that it should awe and move her thus. The sea was the only
thing for which he cared, or which had any power over him. In the
northern winters of his youth he had known the ocean, in one wild
night's work, undo all that men had done to check and rule it, and
burst through all the barriers that they had raised against it, and
throw down the stones of the altar and quench the fires of the hearth,
and sweep through the fold and the byre, and flood the cradle of the
child and the grave of the grandsire.

He had seen its storms wash away at one blow the corn harvests of years,
and gather in the sheep from the hills, and take the life of the
shepherd with the life of the flock. He had seen it claim lovers locked
in each other's arms, and toss the fair curls of the first-born as it
tossed the riband weeds of its deeps. And he had felt small pity; it had
rather given him a certain sense of rejoicing and triumph to see the
water laugh to scorn those who were so wise in their own conceit, and
bind beneath its chains those who held themselves masters over all
beasts of the field and birds of the air.

Other men dreaded the sea and cursed it; but he in his way loved it
almost with passion, and could he have chosen the manner of his death
would have desired that it should be by the sea and through the sea; a
death cold and serene and dreamily voluptuous: a death on which no woman
should look and in which no man should have share.

He watched her now for some time without speaking. When the first
paroxysm of her emotion had exhausted itself, she stood motionless, her
figure like a statue of bronze against the sun, her head sunk upon her
breast, her arms outstretched as though beseeching that wondrous
brightness which she saw to take her to itself and make her one with it.
Her whole attitude expressed an unutterable worship. She was like one
who for the first time hears of God.

"What is it you feel?" he asked her suddenly. He knew without asking;
but he had made it his custom to dissect all her joys and sufferings
with little heed whether he thus added to either.

At the sound of his voice she started, and a shiver shook her as she
answered him slowly, without withdrawing her gaze from the waters.

"It has been there always--always--so near me?"

"Before the land, the sea was."

"And I never knew!"--

Her head drooped on her breast; great tears rolled silently down her
cheeks; her arms fell to her sides; she shivered again and sighed. She
knew all that she had lost--this is the greatest grief that life holds.

"You never knew," he made answer. "There was only a sand-hill between
you and all this glory; but the sand-hill was enough. Many people never
climb theirs all their lives long."

The words and their meaning escaped her.

She had for once no remembrance of him, nor any other sense save of this
surpassing wonder that had thus burst on her--this miracle that had been
near her for so long, yet of which she had never in all her visions
dreamed.

She was quite silent; sunk there on her knees, motionless, and gazing
straight, with eyes unblenching, at the light.

There was no sound near them, nor was there anything in sight except
where above against the deepest azure of the sky two curlews were
circling around each other, and in the distance a single ship was
gliding, with sails silvered by the sun. All signs of human life lay far
behind; severed from them by those steep scorched slopes swept only by
the plovers and the bees. And all the while she looked slow tears
gathered in her eyes and fell, and the loud hard beating of her heart
was audible in the hushed stillness of the upper air.

He waited awhile: then he spoke to her.

"Since it pains you, come away."

A great sob shuddered through her.

"Give me that pain," she muttered, "sooner than any joy. Pain? pain?--it
is life, heaven--liberty!"

For suddenly those words which she had heard spoken around her, and
which had been to her like the mutterings of the deaf and the dumb,
became real to her with thousand meanings.

The seagulls were lost in the heights of the air; the ship sailed on
into the light till the last gleam of its canvas vanished; the sun sank
westward lower and lower till it glowed in a globe of flame upon the
edge of the water: she never moved; standing there on the summit of the
cliff, with her head drooped upon her breast, her form thrown out dark
and motionless against the gold of the western sky, on her face still
that look of one who worships with intense honour and passionate faith
an unknown God.

The sun sank entirely, leaving only a trail of flame across the heavens;
the waters grew grey and purple in the shadows; one boat, black against
the crimson reflections of the west, swept on swiftly with the
in-rushing tide; the wind rose and blew long curls of seaweed on the
rocks; the shores of the bay were dimmed in a heavy mist, through which
the lights of the little hamlets dimly glowed, and the distant voices of
fishermen calling to each other as they drew in their deep-sea nets came
faint and weirdlike.

* * *

What she wanted was to live. Live as the great moor bird did that she
had seen float one day over these pale, pure, blue skies, with its
mighty wings outstretched in the calm grey weather; which came none knew
whence, and which went none knew whither; which poised silent and
stirless against the clouds; then called with a sweet wild love-note to
its mate, and waited for him as he sailed in from the misty shadows
where the sea lay; and with him rose yet higher and higher in the air;
and passed westward, cleaving the fields of light, and so vanished;--a
queen of the wind, a daughter of the sun; a creature of freedom, of
victory, of tireless movement, and of boundless space, a thing of heaven
and of liberty.

* * *

In the springtime of the year three gods watched by the river.

The golden flowers of the willows blew in the low winds; the waters came
and went; the moon rose full and cold over a silvery stream; the reeds
sighed in the silence.

Two winters had drifted by and one hot drowsy summer since their creator
had forsaken them, and all the white still shapes upon the walls already
had been slain by the cold breath of Time. The green weeds waved in the
empty casements; the chance-sown seeds of thistles and of bell-flowers
were taking leaf between the square stones of the paven places; on the
deserted threshold lichens and brambles climbed together; the filmy ooze
of a rank vegetation stole over the loveliness of Persephone and
devoured one by one the divine offspring of Zeus; about the feet of the
bound sun king in Pheroe and over the calm serene mockery of Hermes'
smile the grey nets of the spiders' webs had been woven to and fro,
across and across, with the lacing of a million threads, as Fate weaves
round the limbs and covers the eyes of mortals as they stumble blindly
from their birthplace to their grave. All things, the damp and the dust,
the frost and the scorch, the newts and the rats, the fret of the
flooded waters, and the stealing sure inroad of the mosses that
everywhere grew from the dews and the fogs, had taken and eaten, in
hunger or sport, or had touched, and thieved from, then left, gangrened
and ruined.

The three gods alone remained; who being the sons of eternal night, are
unharmed, unaltered, by any passage of the years of earth. The only gods
who never bend beneath the yoke of years; but unblenchingly behold the
nations wither as uncounted leaves, and the lands and the seas change
their places, and the cities and the empires pass away as a tale that is
told; and the deities that are worshipped in the temples alter in name
and attributes and cultus, at the wanton will of the age which begot
them.

In the still, cold, moonlit air their shadows stood together. Hand in
hand; looking outward through the white night-mists. Other gods perished
with the faith of each age as it changed; other gods lived by the breath
of men's lips, the tears of prayer, the smoke of sacrifice. But
they,--their empire was the universe.

In every young soul that leaps into the light of life rejoicing blindly,
Oneiros has dominion; and he alone. In every creature that breathes,
from the conqueror resting on a field of blood to the nest bird cradled
in its bed of leaves, Hypnos holds a sovereignty which nothing mortal
can long resist and live. And Thanatos,--to him belongs every created
thing, past, present, and to come; beneath his feet all generations lie;
and in the hollow of his hand he holds the worlds; though the earth be
tenantless, and the heavens sunless, and the planets shrivel in their
courses, and the universe be shrouded in an endless night, yet through
the eternal desolation Thanatos still will reign, and through the
eternal darkness, through the immeasurable solitudes, he alone will
wander, and he still behold his work.

Deathless as themselves their shadows stood; and the worm and the lizard
and the newt left them alone and dared not wind about their calm clear
brows, and dared not steal to touch the roses at their lips, knowing
that ere the birth of the worlds these were, and when the worlds shall
have perished these still will reign on:--the slow, sure, soundless,
changeless ministers of an eternal rest, of an eternal oblivion.

A late light strayed in from the grey skies, pale as the primrose
flowers that grew amongst the reeds upon the shore; and found its way to
them, trembling; and shone in the far-seeing depths of their
unfathomable eyes.

The eyes which spake and said:

"Sleep, dreams, and death:--we are the only gods that answer prayer."

* * *

Night had come; a dark night of earliest spring. The wild day had sobbed
itself to sleep after a restless life with fitful breath of storm and
many sighs of shuddering breezes.

The sun had sunk, leaving long tracks of blood-red light across one-half
the heavens.

There was a sharp crisp coldness as of lingering frost in the gloom and
the dulness. Heavy clouds, as yet unbroken, hung over the cathedral and
the clustering roofs around it in dark and starless splendour.

Over the great still plains which stretched eastward and southward,
black with the furrows of the scarce-budded corn, the wind blew hard;
blowing the river and the many streamlets spreading from it into foam;
driving the wintry leaves which still strewed the earth thickly, hither
and thither in legions; breaking boughs that had weathered the winter
hurricanes, and scattering the tender blossoms of the snowdrops and the
earliest crocuses in all the little moss-grown garden ways.

The smell of wet grass, of the wood-born violets, of trees whose new
life was waking in their veins, of damp earths turned freshly upwards by
the plough, were all blown together by the riotous breezes.

Now and then a light gleamed through the gloom where a little peasant
boy lighted home with a torch some old priest on his mule, or a boat
went down the waters with a lamp hung at its prow. For it grew dark
early, and people used to the river read a threat of a flood on its
face.

A dim glow from the west, which was still tinged with the fire of the
sunset, fell through a great square window set in a stone building, and
striking across the sicklier rays of an oil lamp reached the opposing
wall within.

It was a wall of grey stone, dead and lustreless like the wall of a
prison-house, over whose surface a spider as colourless as itself
dragged slowly its crooked hairy limbs loaded with the moisture of the
place, which was an old tower, of which the country folk told strange
tales, where it stood among the rushes on the left bank of the stream.

A man watched the spider as it went.

It crept on its heavy way across the faint crimson reflection from the
glow of the sunken sun.

It was fat, well-nourished, lazy, content; its home of dusky silver hung
on high, where its pleasure lay in weaving, clinging, hoarding,
breeding. It lived in the dark; it had neither pity nor regret; it
troubled itself neither for the death it dealt to nourish itself, nor
for the light without, into which it never wandered; it spun and throve
and multiplied.

It was an emblem of the man who is wise in his generation; of the man
whom Cato the elder deemed divine; of the Majority and the Mediocrity
who rule over the earth and enjoy its fruits.

This man knew that it was wise; that those who were like to it were wise
also: wise with the holy wisdom which is honoured of other men.

He had been unwise--always; and therefore he stood watching the sun die,
with hunger in his soul, with famine in his body.

For many months he had been half famished, as were the wolves in his own
northern mountains in the winter solstice. For seven days he had only
been able to crush a crust of hard black bread between his teeth. For
twenty hours he had not done even so much as this. The trencher on his
tressel was empty; and he had not wherewithal to re-fill it.

He might have found some to fill it for him no doubt. He lived amidst
the poor, and the poor to the poor are good, though they are bad and
bitter to the rich. But he did not open either his lips or his hand. He
consumed his heart in silence; and his vitals preyed in anguish on
themselves without his yielding to their torments.

He was a madman; and Cato, who measured the godliness of man by what
they gained, would have held him accursed;--the madness that starves and
is silent for an idea is an insanity, scouted by the world and the gods.
For it is an insanity unfruitful; except to the future. And for the
future who cares,--save these madmen themselves?

He watched the spider as it went.

It could not speak to him as its fellow once spoke in the old Scottish
story. To hear as that captive heard, the hearer must have hope, and a
kingdom,--if only in dreams.

This man had no hope; he had a kingdom indeed, but it was not of earth;
and, in an hour of sheer cruel bodily pain, earth alone has dominion and
power and worth.

The spider crawled across the grey wall; across the glow from the
vanished sun; across a coil of a dead passion-vine, that strayed loose
through the floor; across the classic shapes of a great cartoon drawn in
chalks upon the dull rugged surface of stone.

Nothing arrested it; nothing retarded it, as nothing hastened it. It
moved slowly on; fat, lustreless, indolent, hueless; reached at length
its den, and there squatted aloft, loving the darkness; its young
swarming around, its prey held in its forceps, its nets cast about.

Through the open casement there came on the rising wind of the storm,
in the light of the last lingering sunbeam, a beautiful night-moth,
begotten by some cruel hot-house heat in the bosom of some frail exiled
tropical flower.

It swam in on trembling pinions, and alighted on the golden head of a
gathered crocus that lay dying on the stones--a moth that should have
been born to no world save that of the summer world of a Midsummer
Night's Dream.

A shape of Ariel and Oberon; slender, silver, purple, roseate,
lustrous-eyed, and gossamer-winged.

A creature of woodland waters, and blossoming forests; of the yellow
chalices of kingcups and the white breasts of river lilies, of moonbeams
that strayed through a summer world of shadows, and dew-drops that
glistened in the deep folded hearts of roses. A creature to brush the
dreaming eyes of a poet, to nestle on the bosom of a young girl
sleeping: to float earthwards on a falling star, to slumber on a lotus
leaf.

A creature that amidst the still soft hush of woods and waters still
tells, to those who listen, of the world when the world was young.

The moth flew on, and poised on the fading crocus leaves, which spread
out their pale gold on the level of the grey floor.

It was weary, and its delicate wings drooped; it was storm-tossed,
wind-beaten, drenched with mist and frozen with the cold; it belonged to
the moon, to the dew, to the lilies, to the forget-me-nots, and to the
night; and it found that the hard grip of winter had seized it whilst
yet it had thought that the stars and the summer were with it. It lived
before its time,--and it was like the human soul, which being born in
the darkness of the world dares to dream of light, and, wandering in
vain search of a sun that will never rise, falls and perishes in
wretchedness.

It was beautiful exceedingly, with the brilliant tropical beauty of a
life that is short-lived. It rested a moment on the stem of the pale
flower, then with its radiant eyes fastened on the point of light which
the lamp thrust upward, it flew on high; and, spreading out its
transparent wings and floating to the flame, kissed it, quivered once,
and died.

There fell among the dust and cinder of the lamp a little heap of
shrunken, fire-scorched, blackened ashes.

The wind whirled them upward from their rest, and drove them forth into
the night to mingle with the storm-scourged grasses, the pale dead
violets, the withered snow-flowers, with all things frost-touched and
forgotten.

The spider sat aloft, sucking the juices from the fettered flies,
teaching its spawn to prey and feed; content in squalor and in
plenitude; in sensual sloth, and in the increase of its body and its
hoard.

He watched them both: the success of the spider, the death of the moth;
trite as a fable; ever repeated as the tides of the sea; the two symbols
of humanity; of the life which fattens on greed and gain, and the life
which perishes of divine desire.

* * *

There were no rare birds, no birds of moor and mountain, in that
cultivated and populous district; but to her all the little home-bred
things of pasture and orchard were full of poetry and of character.

The robins, with that pretty air of boldness with which they veil their
real shyness and timidity; the strong and saucy sparrows, powerful by
the strength of all mediocrities and majorities; all the dainty families
of finches in their gay apparellings; the plain brown bird that filled
the night with music; the gorgeous oriole ruffling in gold, the gilded
princeling of them all; the little blue warblers, the violets of the
air; the kingfishers who had hovered so long over the forget-me-nots
upon the rivers that they had caught the colours of the flowers on their
wings; the bright blackcaps green as the leaves, with their yellow
waistcoats and velvet hoods, the innocent freebooters of the woodland
liberties: all these were her friends and lovers, various as any human
crowds of court or city.

She loved them; they and the fourfooted beasts were the sole things that
did not flee from her; and the woeful and mad slaughter of them by the
peasants was to her a grief passionate in its despair. She did not
reason on what she felt; but to her a bird slain was a trust betrayed,
an innocence defiled, a creature of heaven struck to earth.

Suddenly on the silence of the garden there was a little shrill sound of
pain; the birds flew high in air, screaming and startled; the leaves of
a bough of ivy shook as with a struggle.

She rose and looked; a line of twine was trembling against the foliage;
in its noosed end the throat of the mavis had been caught; it hung
trembling and clutching at the air convulsively with its little drawn-up
feet. It had flown into the trap as it had ended its joyous song and
soared up to join its brethren.

There were a score of such traps set in the miller's garden.

She unloosed the cord from about its tiny neck, set it free, and laid it
down upon the ivy. The succour came too late; the little gentle body was
already without breath; the feet had ceased to beat the air; the small
soft head had drooped feebly on one side; the lifeless eyes had started
from their sockets; the throat was without song for evermore.

"The earth would be good but for men," she thought, as she stood with
the little dead bird in her hand.

Its mate, which was poised on a rose bough, flew straight to it, and
curled round and round about the small slain body, and piteously
bewailed its fate, and mourned, refusing to be comforted, agitating the
air with trembling wings, and giving out vain cries of grief.

Vain; for the little joyous life was gone; the life that asked only of
God and Man a home in the green leaves; a drop of dew from the cup of a
rose; a bough to swing on in the sunlight; a summer day to celebrate in
song.

All the winter through, it had borne cold and hunger and pain without
lament; it had saved the soil from destroying larvæ, and purified the
trees from all foul germs; it had built its little home unaided, and had
fed its nestlings without alms; it had given its sweet song lavishly to
the winds, to the blossoms, to the empty air, to the deaf ears of men;
and now it lay dead in its innocence; trapped and slain because a human
greed begrudged it a berry worth the thousandth part of a copper coin.

Out from the porch of the mill-house Claudis Flamma came, with a knife
in his hand and a basket, to cut lilies for one of the choristers of the
cathedral, since the morrow would be the religious feast of the
Visitation of Mary.

He saw the dead thrush in her hand, and chuckled to himself as he went
by.

"The tenth bird trapped since sunrise," he said, thinking how shrewd and
how sure in their make were these traps of twine that he set in the
grass and the leaves.

She said nothing; but the darkness of disgust swept over her face, as he
came in sight in the distance.

She knelt down and scraped a hole in the earth; and laid moss in it, and
put the mavis softly on its green and fragrant bier, and covered it with
handfuls of fallen rose leaves, and with a sprig or two of thyme.

Around her head the widowed thrush flew ceaselessly, uttering sad
cries;--who now should wander with him through the sunlight?--who now
should rove with him above the blossoming fields?--who now should sit
with him beneath the boughs hearing the sweet rain fall between the
leaves?--who now should wake with him whilst yet the world was dark, to
feel the dawn break ere the east were red, and sing a welcome to the
unborn day?

* * *

And, indeed, to those who are alive to the nameless, universal, eternal
soul which breathes in all the grasses of the fields, and beams in the
eyes of all creatures of earth and air, and throbs in the living light
of palpitating stars, and thrills through the young sap of forest trees,
and stirs in the strange loves of wind-borne plants, and hums in every
song of the bee, and burns in every quiver of the flame, and peoples
with sentient myriads every drop of dew that gathers on a harebell,
every bead of water that ripples in a brook--to these the mortal life of
man can seem but little, save at once the fiercest and the feeblest
thing that does exist; at once the most cruel and the most impotent;
tyrant of direst destruction and bondsman of lowest captivity.

Hence, pity entered very little into his thoughts at any time; the
perpetual torture of life did indeed perplex him, as it perplexes every
thinking creature, with wonder at the universal bitterness that taints
all creation, at the universal death whereby all forms of life are
nurtured, at the universal anguish of all existence which daily and
nightly assails the unknown God in piteous protest at the inexorable
laws of inexplicable miseries and mysteries. But because such suffering
was thus universal, therefore he almost ceased to feel pity for it; of
the two he pitied the beasts far more than the human kind:--the horse
staggering beneath the lash in all the feebleness of hunger, lameness,
and old age; the ox bleeding from the goad on the hard furrows, or
stumbling through the hooting crowd, blind, footsore, and shivering, to
its last home in the slaughter-house; the dog, yielding up its noble
life inch by inch under the tortures of the knife, loyally licking the
hand of the vivisector while he drove his probe through its quivering
nerves; the unutterable hell in which all these gentle, kindly, and
long-suffering creatures dwelt for the pleasure or the vanity, the
avarice or the brutality of men,--these he pitied perpetually, with a
tenderness for them that was the softest thing in all his nature.

* * *

"There lived once in the East, a great king; he dwelt far away, amongst
the fragrant fields of roses, and in the light of suns that never set.

"He was young, he was beloved, he was fair of face and form; and the
people, as they hewed stone, or brought water, said amongst themselves,
'Verily, this man is as a god; he goes where he lists, and he lies still
or rises up as he pleases; and all fruits of all lands are culled for
him; and his nights are nights of gladness, and his days, when they
dawn, are all his to sleep through or spend as he wills.' But the people
were wrong. For this king was weary of his life.

"His buckler was sown with gems, but his heart beneath it was sore. For
he had been long bitterly harassed by foes who descended on him as
wolves from the hills in their hunger, and he had been long plagued with
heavy wars and with bad rice harvests, and with many troubles to his
nation that kept it very poor, and forbade him to finish the building of
new marble palaces, and the making of fresh gardens of delight, on which
his heart was set. So he, being weary of a barren land and of an empty
treasury, with all his might prayed to the gods that all he touched
might turn to gold, even as he had heard had happened to some magician
long before in other ages. And the gods gave him the thing he craved;
and his treasury overflowed. No king had ever been so rich, as this king
now became in the short space of a single summer-day.

"But it was bought with a price.

"When he stretched out his hand to gather the rose that blossomed in his
path, a golden flower scentless and stiff was all he grasped. When he
called to him the carrier-dove that sped with a scroll of love words
across the mountains, the bird sank on his breast a carven piece of
metal. When he was athirst and shouted to his cupbearer for drink, the
red wine ran a stream of molten gold. When he would fain have eaten, the
pulse and the pomegranate grew alike to gold between his teeth. And lo!
at eventide, when he sought the silent chambers of his harem, saying,
'Here at least shall I find rest,' and bent his steps to the couch
whereon his best-beloved slave was sleeping, a statue of gold was all he
drew into his eager arms, and cold shut lips of sculptured gold were all
that met his own.

"That night the great king slew himself, unable any more to bear this
agony; since all around him was desolation, even though all around him
was wealth.

"Now the world is too like that king, and in its greed of gold it will
barter its life away.

"Look you,--this thing is certain--I say that the world will perish,
even as that king perished, slain as he was slain, by the curse of its
own fulfilled desire.

"The future of the world is written. For God has granted their prayer to
men. He has made them rich, and their riches shall kill them.

"When all green places have been destroyed in the builder's lust of
gain:--when all the lands are but mountains of brick, and piles of wood
and iron:--when there is no moisture anywhere; and no rain ever
falls:--when the sky is a vault of smoke; and all the rivers reek with
poison:--when forest and stream, and moor and meadow, and all the old
green wayside beauty are things vanished and forgotten:--when every
gentle timid thing of brake and bush, of air and water, has been killed
because it robbed them of a berry or a fruit:--when the earth is one
vast city, whose young children behold neither the green of the field
nor the blue of the sky, and hear no song but the hiss of the steam, and
know no music but the roar of the furnace:--when the old sweet silence
of the country-side, and the old sweet sounds of waking birds, and the
old sweet fall of summer showers, and the grace of a hedgerow bough, and
the glow of the purple heather, and the note of the cuckoo and cushat,
and the freedom of waste and of woodland, are all things dead, and
remembered of no man:--then the world, like the Eastern king, will
perish miserably of famine and of drought, with gold in its stiffened
hands, and gold in its withered lips, and gold everywhere:--gold that
the people can neither eat nor drink, gold that cares nothing for them,
but mocks them horribly:--gold for which their fathers sold peace and
health, and holiness and liberty:--gold that is one vast grave."

* * *

The earth is crowded full with clay gods and false prophets, and fresh
legions for ever arriving to carry on the old strife for supremacy; and
if a man pass unknown all the time that his voice is audible, and his
hand visible, through the sound and smoke of the battle, he will dream
in vain of any remembrance when the gates of the grave shall have closed
on him and shut him for ever from sight.

When the world was in its youth, it had leisure to treasure its
recollections; even to pause and look back, and to see what flower of a
fair thought, what fruit of a noble art it might have overlooked or left
down-trodden.

But now it is so old, and is so tired; it is purblind and heavy of foot;
it does not notice what it destroys; it desires rest, and can find none;
nothing can matter greatly to it; its dead are so many that it cannot
count them; and being thus worn and dulled with age, and suffocated
under the weight of its innumerable memories, it is very slow to be
moved, and swift--terribly swift--to forget.

Why should it not be?

It has known the best, it has known the worst, that ever can befall it.

And the prayer that to the heart of a man seems so freshly born from his
own desire, what is it on the weary ear of the world, save the same old
old cry which it has heard through all the ages, empty as the sound of
the wind, and for ever--for ever--unanswered?

* * *

There is no more terrible woe upon earth than the woe of the stricken
brain, which remembers the days of its strength, the living light of its
reason, the sunrise of its proud intelligence, and knows that these have
passed away like a tale that is told; like a year that is spent; like an
arrow that is shot to the stars, and flies aloft, and falls in a swamp;
like a fruit that is too well loved of the sun, and so, over-soon ripe,
is dropped from the tree and forgot on the grasses, dead to all joys of
the dawn and the noon and the summer, but still alive to the sting of
the wasp, to the fret of the aphis, to the burn of the drought, to the
theft of the parasite.

She only dimly understood, and yet she was smitten with awe and
reverence at that endless grief which had no taint of cowardice upon it,
but was pure as the patriot's despair, impersonal as the prophet's
agony.

For the first time the intellect in her consciously awoke. For the first
time she heard a human mind find voice even in its stupor and its
wretchedness to cry aloud, in reproach to its unknown Creator:

"I am _yours_! Shall I perish with the body? Why have you ever bade me
desire the light and seek it, if for ever you must thrust me into the
darkness of negation? Shall I be Nothing?--like the muscle that rots,
like the bones that crumble, like the flesh that turns to ashes, and
blows in a film on the winds? Shall I die so? I?--the mind of a man, the
breath of a god?"

* * *

He could not bear to die without leaving behind his life some work the
world would cherish.

Call it folly, call it madness, it is both: the ivory Zeus that was to
give its sculptor immortality, lives but in tradition; the bronze
Athene, that was to guard the Piræus in eternal liberty, has long been
levelled with the dust; yet with every age the artist still gives life
for fame, still cries, "Let my body perish, but make my soul immortal!"

* * *

The spider had drawn his dusty trail across them; the rat had squatted
at their feet; the darkness of night had enshrouded and defaced them;
yet with the morning they arose, stainless, noble, undefiled.

Amongst them there was one colossal form, on which the sun poured with
its full radiance.

This was the form of a captive grinding at a millstone; the majestic,
symmetrical, supple form of a man who was also a god.

In his naked limbs there was a supreme power; in his glance there was a
divine command; his head was lifted as though no yoke could ever lie on
that proud neck; his foot seemed to spurn the earth as though no mortal
tie had ever bound him to the sod that human steps bestrode: yet at the
corn-mill he laboured, grinding wheat like the patient blinded oxen
that toiled beside him.

For it was the great Apollo in Pheræ.

The hand which awoke the music of the spheres had been blood-stained
with murder; the beauty which had the light and lustre of the sun had
been darkened with passion and with crime; the will which no other on
earth or in heaven could withstand had been bent under the chastisement
of Zeus.

He whose glance had made the black and barren slopes of Delos to laugh
with fruitfulness and gladness--he whose prophetic sight beheld all
things past, present, and to come, the fate of all unborn races, the
doom of all unspent ages--he, the Far-Striking King, laboured here
beneath the curse of crime, greatest of all the gods, and yet a slave.

In all the hills and vales of Greece his Io pæan sounded still.

Upon his holy mountains there still arose the smoke of fires of
sacrifice.

With dance and song the Delian maidens still hailed the divinity of
Lêtô's son.

The waves of the pure Ionian air still rang for ever with the name of
Delphinios.

At Pytho and at Clarus, in Lycia and in Phokis, his oracles still
breathed forth upon their fiat terror or hope into the lives of men; and
still in all the virgin forests of the world the wild beasts honoured
him wheresoever they wandered, and the lion and the boar came at his
bidding from the deserts to bend their free necks and their wills of
fire meekly to bear his yoke in Thessaly.

Yet he laboured here at the corn-mill of Admetus; and watching him at
his bondage there stood the slender, slight, wing-footed Hermes, with a
slow, mocking smile upon his knavish lips, and a jeering scorn in his
keen eyes, even as though he cried:

"O brother, who would be greater than I! For what hast thou bartered to
me the golden rod of thy wealth and thy dominion over the flocks and the
herds? For seven chords strung on a shell--for a melody not even thine
own! For a lyre outshone by my syrinx hast thou sold all thine empire to
me. Will human ears give heed to thy song now thy sceptre has passed to
my hands? Immortal music only is left thee, and the vision foreseeing
the future. O god! O hero! O fool! what shall these profit thee now?"

Thus to the artist by whom they had been begotten the dim white shapes
of the deities spoke. Thus he saw them, thus he heard, whilst the pale
and watery sunlight lit up the form of the toiler in Pheræ.

For even as it was with the divinity of Delos, so is it likewise with
the genius of a man, which, being born of a god, yet is bound as a slave
to the grindstone. Since even as Hermes mocked the Lord of the Unerring
Bow, so is genius mocked of the world, when it has bartered the herds,
and the grain, and the rod that metes wealth, for the seven chords that
no ear, dully mortal, can hear.

And as he looked upon this symbol of his life, the captivity and the
calamity, the strength and the slavery of his existence overcame him;
and for the first hour since he had been born of a woman Arslàn buried
his face in his hands and wept.

He could bend great thoughts to take the shapes that he chose, as the
chained god in Pheræ bound the strong kings of the desert and forest to
carry his yoke; yet, like the god, he likewise stood fettered to the
mill to grind for bread.

* * *

One evening, a little later, he met her in the fields on the same spot
where Marcellin first had seen her as a child amongst the scarlet blaze
of the poppies.

The lands were all yellow with saffron and emerald with the young corn;
she balanced on her head a great brass jar; the red girdle glowed about
her waist as she moved: the wind stirred the folds of her garments; her
feet were buried in the shining grass; clouds tawny and purple were
behind her; she looked like some Moorish phantom seen in a dream under a
sky of Spain.

He paused and gazed at her with eyes half content, half cold.

She was of a beauty so uncommon, so strange, and all that was his for
his art:--a great artist, whether in words, in melody, or in colour, is
always cruel, or at the least seems so, for all things that live under
the sun are to him created only to minister to his one inexorable
passion.

Art is so vast, and human life is so little. It is to him only supremely
just that the insect of an hour should be sacrificed to the infinite and
eternal truth which must endure until the heavens themselves shall
wither as a scroll that is held in a flame. It might have seemed to
Arslàn base to turn her ignorance, and submission to his will, for the
gratification of his amorous passions; but to make these serve the art
to which he had himself abandoned every earthly good was in his sight
justified, as the death agonies of the youth whom they decked with roses
and slew in sacrifice to the sun, were in the sight of the Mexican
nation.

The youth whom the Mexicans slew, on the high hill of the city, with his
face to the west, was always the choicest and the noblest of all the
opening flower of their manhood: for it was his fate to be called to
enter into the realms of eternal light, and to dwell face to face with
the unbearable brightness without whose rays the universe would have
perished frozen in perpetual night. So the artist, who is true to his
art, regards every human sacrifice that he renders up to it; how can he
feel pity for a thing which perishes to feed a flame that he deems the
life of the world?

The steel that he draws out from the severed heart of his victim he is
ready to plunge into his own vitals: no other religion can vaunt as much
of its priests.

"What are you thinking of to-night?" he asked her where she came through
the fields by the course of a little flower-sown brook, fringed with
tall bulrushes and waving willow-stems.

She lifted her eyelids with a dreamy and wistful regard.

"I was thinking--I wonder what the reed felt that you told me of--the
one reed that a god chose from all its millions by the waterside and cut
down to make into a flute."

"Ah?--you see there are no reeds that make music now-a-days; the reeds
are only good to be woven into kreels for the fruits and the fish of the
market."

"That is not the fault of the reeds?"

"Not that I know; it is the fault of men, most likely, who find the
chink of coin in barter sweeter music than the song of the syrinx. But
what do you think the reed felt then?--pain to be so sharply severed
from its fellows?"

"No--or the god would not have chosen it."

"What then?"

A troubled sigh parted her lips; these old fables were fairest truths to
her, and gave a grace to every humblest thing that the sun shone on, or
the waters begat from their foam, or the winds blew with their breath
into the little life of a day.

"I was trying to think. But I cannot be sure. These reeds have
forgotten. They have lost their soul. They want nothing but to feed
among the sand and the mud, and grow in millions together, and shelter
the toads and the newts,--there is not a note of music in them
all--except when the wind rises and makes them sigh, and then they
remember that long, long-ago the breath of a great god was in them."

Arslàn looked at her where she stood; her eyes resting on the reeds, and
the brook at her feet; the crimson heat of the evening all about her, on
the brazen amphora, on the red girdle on her loins, on the thoughtful
parted lips, on the proud bent brows above which a golden butterfly
floated as above the brows of Psyche.

He smiled; the smile that was so cold to her.

"Look: away over the fields, there comes a peasant with a sickle; he
comes to mow down the reeds to make a bed for his cattle. If he heard
you, he would think you mad."

"They have thought me many things worse. What matter?"

"Nothing at all;--that I know. But you seem to envy that reed--so long
ago--that was chosen?"

"Who would not?"

"Are you so sure? The life of the reed was always pleasant;--dancing
there in the light, playing with the shadows, blowing in the winds; with
the cool waters all about it all day long, and the yellow daffodils and
the blue bell-flowers for its brethren."

"Nay;--how do you know?"

Her voice was low, and thrilled with a curious eager pain.

"How do you know?" she murmured. "Rather,--it was born in the sands,
amongst the stones, of the chance winds, of the stray germs,--no one
asking, no one heeding, brought by a sunbeam, spat out by a toad--no one
caring where it dropped. Rather,--it grew there by the river, and such
millions of reeds grew with it, that neither waters nor winds could
care for a thing so common and worthless, but the very snakes twisting
in and out despised it, and thrust the arrows of their tongues through
it in scorn. And then--I think I see!--the great god walked by the edge
of the river, and he mused on a gift to give man, on a joy that should
be a joy on the earth for ever; and he passed by the lily white as snow,
by the thyme that fed the bees, by the gold heart in the arum flower, by
the orange flame of the tall sandrush, by all the great water-blossoms
which the sun kissed, and the swallows loved, and he came to the one
little reed pierced with the snakes' tongues, and all alone amidst
millions. Then he took it up, and cut it to the root, and killed
it;--killed it as a reed,--but breathed into it a song audible and
beautiful to all the ears of men. Was that death to the reed?--or life?
Would a thousand summers of life by the waterside have been worth that
one thrill of song when a god first spoke through it?"

Her face lightened with a radiance to which the passion of her words was
pale and poor; the vibrations of her voice grew sonorous and changing as
the sounds of music itself; her eyes beamed through unshed tears as
planets through the rain.

* * *

Of all the forms with which he had peopled its loneliness, these had the
most profound influence on her in their fair, passionless, majestic
beauty, in which it seemed to her that the man who had forgotten them
had repeated his own likeness. For they were all alike, yet unlike; of
the same form and feature, yet different even in their strong
resemblance, like elder and younger brethren who hold a close
companionship. For Hypnos was still but a boy with his blue-veined
eyelids closed, and his mouth rosy and parted like that of a slumbering
child, and above his golden head a star rose in the purple night.
Oneiros standing next was a youth whose eyes smiled as though they
beheld visions that were welcome to him; in his hand, amongst the white
roses, he held a black wand of sorcery, and around his bended head there
hovered a dim silvery nimbus. Thanatos alone was a man fully grown; and
on his calm and colourless face there were blended an unutterable
sadness, and an unspeakable peace; his eyes were fathomless,
far-reaching, heavy laden with thought, as though they had seen at once
the heights of heaven and the depths of hell; and he, having thus seen,
and knowing all things, had learned that there was but one good possible
in all the universe,--that one gift which his touch gave, and which men
in their blindness shuddered from and cursed. And above him and around
him there was a great darkness.

So the gods stood, and so they spoke, even to her; they seemed to her as
brethren, masters, friends--these three immortals who looked down on her
in their mute majesty.

They are the gods of the poor, of the wretched, of the outcast, of the
proscribed,--they are the gods who respect not persons nor palaces,--who
stay with the exile and flee from the king,--who leave the tyrant of a
world to writhe in torment, and call a smile beautiful as the morning on
the face of a beggar child,--who turn from the purple beds where wealth
and lust and brutal power lie, and fill with purest visions the darkest
hours of the loneliest nights, for genius and youth,--they are the gods
of consolation and of compensation,--the gods of the exile, of the
orphan, of the outcast, of the poet, of the prophet, of all whose bodies
ache with the infinite pangs of famine, and whose hearts ache with the
infinite woes of the world, of all who hunger with the body or the
soul.

* * *

It became mid-April. It was market-day for all the country lying round
that wondrous cathedral-spire, which shot into the air far-reaching and
ethereal, like some fountain whose column of water had been arrested
aloft and changed to ice.

The old quiet town was busy, with a rich sunshine shed upon it, in which
the first yellow butterflies of the year had begun to dance.

It was high noon, and the highest tide of the market.

Flower-girls, fruit-girls, egg-sellers, poultry-hucksters, crowds of
women, old and young, had jolted in on their docile asses, throned on
their sheepskin saddles; and now, chattering and chaffering, drove fast
their trade. On the steps of the cathedral boys with birds'-nests,
knife-grinders making their little wheels fly, cobblers hammering, with
boards across their knees, travelling pedlars with knapsacks full of
toys and mirrors, and holy images, and strings of beads, sat side by
side in amicable competition.

Here and there a priest passed, with his black robe and broad hat, like
a dusky mushroom amongst a bed of many-hued gillyflowers. Here and there
a soldier, all colour and glitter, showed like a gaudy red tulip in
bloom amidst tufts of thyme.

The old wrinkled leathern awnings of the market-stalls glowed like
copper in the brightness of noon. The red tiles of the houses edging the
great square were gilded with yellow houseleeks. The little children ran
hither and thither with big bunches of primroses or sheaves of blue
wood-hyacinths, singing. The red and blue serges of the young girls'
bodices were like the gay hues of the anemones in their baskets. The
brown faces of the old dames under the white roofing of their headgear
were like the russet faces of the home-kept apples which they had
garnered through all the winter.

Everywhere in the shade of the flapping leather, and the darkness of
the wooden porches, there were the tender blossoms of the field and
forest, of the hedge and garden. The azure of the hyacinths, the pale
saffron of the primroses, the cool hues of the meadow daffodils, the
ruby eyes of the cultured jonquils, gleamed amongst wet rushes, grey
herbs, and freshly budded leafage. Plovers' eggs nestled in moss-lined
baskets; sheaves of velvet-coated wallflowers poured fragrance on the
air; great plumes of lilac nodded on the wind, and amber feathers of
laburnum waved above the homelier masses of mint and marjoram, and sage
and chervil.

_IDALIA._

Whatever fate rose for them with the dawn, this night at least was
theirs: there is no love like that which lives victorious even beneath
the shadow of death: there is no joy like that which finds its paradise
even amid the cruelty of pain, the fierce long struggle of despair.

Never is the voluptuous glory of the sun so deep, so rich, as when its
last excess of light burns above the purple edge of the tempest-cloud
that soars upward to cover and devour it.

* * *

"And we reign still!"

She turned, as she spoke, towards the western waters, where the sea-line
of the Ægean lay, while in her eyes came the look of a royal pride and
of a deathless love.

"Greece cannot die. No matter what the land be now, Greece--_our_
Greece--must live for ever. Her language lives; the children of Europe
learn it, even if they halt it in imperfect numbers. The greater the
scholar, the humbler he still bends to learn the words of wisdom from
her school. The poet comes to her for all his fairest myths, his noblest
mysteries, his greatest masters. The sculptor looks at the broken
fragments of her statues, and throws aside his calliope in despair
before those matchless wrecks. From her soldiers learn how to die, and
nations how to conquer and to keep their liberties. No deed of heroism
is done but, to crown it, it is named parallel to hers. They write of
love, and who forgets the Lesbian? They dream of freedom, and to reach
it they remember Salamis. They talk of progress, and while they talk
they sigh for all that they have lost in Academus. They seek truth, and
while they seek, wearily long, as little children, to hear the golden
speech of Socrates, that slave, and fisherman, and sailor, and
stonemason, and date-seller were all once free to hear in her Agora. But
for the light that shone from Greece in the breaking of the Renaissance,
Europe would have perished in its Gothic darkness. They call her dead:
she can never die while her life, her soul, her genius breathe fire into
the new nations, and give their youth all of greatness and of grace that
they can claim. Greece dead! She reigns in every poem written, in every
art pursued, in every beauty treasured, in every liberty won, in every
god-like life and godlike death, in your fresh lands, which, but for
her, would be barbarian now."

Where she stood, with her eyes turned westward to the far-off snows of
Cithæron and Mount Ida, and the shores which the bronze spear of Pallas
Athene once guarded through the night and day, the dark light in her
eyes deepened, and the flush of a superb pride was on her brow--it
seemed Aspasia who lived again, and who remembered Pericles.

* * *

The chant of the Imaum rang up from the shore, deep and sonorous,
calling on the Faithful to prayer, an hour before midnight. She listened
dreamily to the echoes that seemed to linger among the dark foliage.

"I like those national calls to prayer," she said, as she leaned over
the parapet, while the fire-flies glittered among the mass of leaves as
the diamond sprays glistened in her hair. "The Ave Maria, the Vespers,
the Imaum's chant, the salutation of the dawn or of the night, the hymn
before sleep, or before the sun;--you have none of those in your chill
islands? You have only weary rituals, and stuccoed churches, where the
'Pharisees for a pretence make long prayers!' As if _that_ was not the
best--the only--temple!"

She glanced upward at the star-studded sky, and on her face was that
graver and gentler look which had come there when she sang.

"I have held it so many a time," he answered her, lying awake at night
among the long grass of the Andes, or under the palms of the desert. It
was a strange delusion to build shrines to the honour of God while there
are still his own--the forests and the mountains.

* * *

"It was a fair heritage to lose through a feeble vanity--that beautiful
Constantinople!" she said musingly. "The East and the West--what an
empire! More than Alexander ever grasped at--what might not have been
done with it? Asian faith and Oriental sublimity, with Roman power and
Gothic force; if there had been a hand strong enough to weld all these
together, what a world there might have been!"

"But to have done that would have been to attain the Impossible," he
answered her. "Oil and flame, old and new, living and dying, tradition
and scepticism, iconoclast and idolater, you cannot unite and harmonise
these antagonisms?"

She gave a sign of dissent.

"The prophet or the hero unites all antagonisms, because he binds them
all to his own genius. The Byzantine empire had none such; the nearest
was Julian, but he believed less in himself than in the gods; the
nearest after him was Belisarius--the fool of a courtesan, and he was
but a good soldier; he was no teacher, no liberator, no leader for the
nations. John Vatices came too late. A man must be his own convert
before he can convert others. Zoroaster, Christ, Mahommed, Cromwell,
Napoleon, believed intensely in their own missions; hence their
influence on the peoples. How can we tell what Byzantium might have
become under one mighty hand? It was torn in pieces among courtesans,
and parasites, and Christian fanatics, and Houmousians and
Houmoiousians! I have the blood of the Commneni in me. I think of it
with shame when I remember what they might have been."

"You come from the Roman Emperors?"

"The Roman Emperors?" she repeated. "When the name was a travesty, an
ignominy, a reproach! When Barbarians thronged the Forum, and the
representative of Galilee fishermen claimed power in the Capitol? Yes; I
descend, they say, from the Commneni; but I am far prouder that, on the
other hand, I come from pure Athenians. I belong to two buried worlds.
But the stone throne of the Areopagus was greater than the gold one of
Manuel."

* * *

"That animal life is to be envied perhaps," she said.

"Their pride is centred in a silver hairpin; their conscience is
committed to a priest; their credulity is contented with tradition;
their days are all the same, from the rising of one sun to another; they
do not love, they do not hate; they are like the ass that they drive,
follow one patient routine, and only take care for their food. Perhaps
they are to be envied!"

"You would not lose 'those thoughts that wander through eternity,' to
gain in exchange the peace from ignorance of the peasant or the
dullard?"

She turned her face to him, with its most beautiful smile on her lips
and in her eyes.

"No, I would not: you are right. Better to know the secrets of the gods,
even though with pain, than to lead the dull, brute life, though
painless. It is only in our dark hours that we would sell our souls for
a dreamless ease."

"Dark hours! _You_ should not know them. Ah, if you would but trust me
with some confidence! if there were but some way in which I could serve
you!"

Her eyes met his with gratitude, even while she gave him a gesture of
silence. She thought how little could the bold, straight stroke of this
man's frank chivalry cut through the innumerable and intricate chains
that entangled her own life. The knightly Excalibur could do nothing to
sever the filmy but insoluble meshes of secret intrigues.

"It is a saint's-day: I had forgotten it," she said to turn his words
from herself, while the bell of the campanile still swung through the
air. "I am a pagan, you see: I do not fancy that you care much for
creeds yourself."

"Creeds? I wish there were no such word. It has only been a rallying-cry
for war, an excuse for the bigot to burn his neighbour."

"No. Long ago, under the Andes, Nezahualcoytl held the same faith that
Socrates had vainly taught in the Agora; and Zengis Khan knew the truth
of theism like Plato; yet the world has never generally learnt it. It is
the religion of nature--of reason. But the faith is too simple and too
sublime for the multitude. The mass of minds needs a religion of
mythics, legend, symbolism, and fear. What is impalpable escapes it; and
it must give an outward and visible shape to its belief, as it gives in
its art a human form to its deity. Come, since we agree in our creed, I
will take you to my temple--a temple not made by hands."

* * *

"I never had a fair field!"--it may be sometimes a coward's apology; but
it is many a time the epitome of a great, cramped, tortured, wasted
life, which strove like a caged eagle to get free, and never could beat
down the bars of the den that circumstances and prejudice had forged.
The world sees the few who do reach freedom, and, watching their bold
upright flight, says rashly, "will can work all things." But they who
perish by the thousand, the fettered eagles who never see the sun; who
pant in darkness, and wear their breasts bare beating on the iron that
will never yield; who know their strength, yet cannot break their
prison; who feel their wings, yet never can soar up to meet the sweet
wild western winds of liberty; who lie at last beaten, and hopeless, and
blind, with only strength enough to long for death to come and quench
all sense and thought in its annihilation,--who thinks of them--who
counts them?

* * *

The earliest dawn had broken eastward, where the mountains
stretched--the dawn of a southern summer, that almost touches the sunset
of the past night--but under the dense shadows of the old woods that had
sheltered the mystic rites of Gnostics and echoed with the Latin hymns
to Pan, no light wandered. There was only a dim silvery haze that seemed
to float over the whiteness of the tall-stemmed arum lilies and the
foam-bells of the water that here and there glimmered under the rank
vegetation, where it had broken from its hidden channels up to air and
space. Not a sound disturbed the intense stillness; that the night waned
and the world wakened, brought no change to the solitudes that men had
forgotten, and only memories of dead-deserted gods still haunted in the
places of their lost temples, whose columns were now the sea-pines'
stems, and on whose fallen altars and whose shattered sculptures the
lizard made her shelter and the wind-sown grasses seeded and took root.
Of the once graceful marble beauty and the incense-steeped stones of
sacrifice nothing remained but moss-grown shapeless fragments, buried
beneath a pall of leaves by twice a thousand autumns. Yet the ancient
sanctity still rested on the nameless, pathless woods; the breath of an
earlier time, of a younger season of the earth, seemed to lie yet upon
the untroubled forest ways; the whisper of the unseen waters had a
dream-like, unreal cadence; in the deep shade, in the warm fragrance and
the heavy gloom, there was a voluptuous yet mournful charm--the world
seemed so far, the stars shone so near; there were the sweetness of rest
and the oblivion of passion.

* * *

Death is not ours to deal. And were it ours, should we give him the
nameless mystic mercy which all men live to crave--give it as the
chastisement of crime? Death! It is rest to the aged, it is oblivion to
the atheist, it is immortality to the poet! It is a vast, dim,
exhaustless pity to all the world. And would you summon it as your
hardest cruelty to sin?

They were silent; she stirred their souls--she had not bound their
passions.

"A traitor merits death," they muttered.

"Merits it! Not so. The martyr, the liberator, the seeker of truth, may
deserve its peace; how has the traitor won them? You deem yourselves
just; your justice errs. If you would give him justice, make him live.
Live to know fear lest every wind among the leaves may whisper of his
secret; live to feel the look of a young child's eyes a shame to him;
live to envy every peasant whose bread has not been bought with tainted
coin; live to hear ever in his path the stealing step of haunting
retribution; live to see his brethren pass by him as a thing accurst;
live to listen in his age to white-haired men, who once had been his
comrades, tell to the youth about them the unforgotten story of his
shame. Make him live thus if you would have justice."

They answered nothing; a shudder ran through them as they heard.

"And--if you have as I--a deliverance that forbids you even so much
harshness, still let him live, and bury his transgression in your
hearts. Say to him as I say, 'Your sin was great, go forth and sin no
more.'"

* * *

"One is not an assassin!"

"Since when have you discovered that?"

The flush grew darker on Count Conrad's forehead; he moved restlessly
under the irony, and drank down a draught of red fiery Roussillon
without tasting it more than if it had been water. Then he laughed; the
same careless musical laughter with which he had made the requiem over a
violet--a laugh which belonged at once to the most careless and the most
evil side of his character.

"Since sophism came in, which was with Monsieur Cain, when he asked, 'Am
I my brother's keeper?' It was ingenious that reply; creditable to a
beginner, without social advantages. 'An assassin!' Take the word boldly
by the beard, and look at it. What is there objectionable?"

"Nothing--except to the assassinated."

"It has had an apotheosis ever since the world began," pursued Phaulcon,
unheeding, in his bright vivacity. "Who are celebrated in Scripture?
Judith, Samuel, David, Moses, Joab. Who is a patriot? Brutus. Who is an
immortal? Harmodius and Aristogiton. Who is a philosopher? Cicero, while
he murmurs '_Vixerunt!_' after slaying Lentulus. Who is a hero? Marius,
who nails the senators' heads to the rostræ. Who is a martyr? Charles,
who murders Strafford. What is religion? Christianity, that has burnt
and slain millions. Who is a priest? Calvin, who destroys Servetus; or
Pole, who kills Latimer, which you like. Who is a saint? George of
Cappadocia, who slaughters right and left. Who is a ruler? Sulla, who
slays Ofella. Who is a queen? Christina, who stabs Monaldeschi;
Catherine, who strangles Peter; Isabella, who slays Moors and Jews by
the thousand. Murderers all! Assassination has always been deified; and
before it is objected to, the world must change its creeds, its
celebrities, and its chronicles. 'Monsieur, you are an assassin,' says
an impolite world. 'Messieurs,' says the polite logician, 'I found my
warrant in your Bible, and my precedent in your Brutus. What you deify
in Aristogiton and Jael you mustn't damn in Ankarström and me.' Voilà!
What could the world say?"

"That you would outwit Belial with words, and beguile Beelzebub out of
his kingdom with sophistry."

_A VILLAGE COMMUNE._

Power is sweet, and when you are a little clerk you love its sweetness
quite as much as if you were an emperor, and maybe you love it a good
deal more.

* * *

He saw no reason why he should not become a deputy, and even a minister
before he died, and indeed there was no reason whatever. He was only a
clerk at fifty pounds a year; but he had a soul above all scruples, and
a heart as hard as a millstone.

* * *

He was only a clerk indeed, at a slender salary, and ate his friends'
tomatoes publicly in the little back room of the caffè; but he had the
soul of a statesman. When a donkey kicks, beat it; when it dies, skin
it; so only will it profit you; that was his opinion, and the public was
the donkey of Messer Nellemane.

* * *

Pippo and Viola feared everything, yet knew not what they feared; it is
a ghostly burden of dread, that which the honest poor carry with them
all through their toiling hungry days, the vague oppressive dread of
this law which is always acting the spy on them, always dogging their
steps, always emptying their pockets. The poor can understand criminal
law, and its justice and its necessity easily enough, and respect its
severities; but they cannot understand the petty tyrannies of civil law;
and it wears their lives out, and breaks their spirits. When it does not
break their spirits it curdles their blood and they become socialists,
nihilists, internationalists, anything that will promise them riddance
of their spectre and give them vengeance. We in Italy are all of us
afraid of socialism, we who have anything to lose; and yet we let the
syndics, and their secretaries, conciliators, and chancellors sow it
broadcast in dragon's teeth of petty injustices and petty cruelties,
that soon or late will spring up armed men, hydra-headed and torch in
hand!

* * *

The law should be a majesty, solemn, awful, unerring: just, as man hopes
that God is just; and from its throne it should stretch out a mighty
hand to seize and grasp the guilty, and the guilty only. But when the
law is only a petty, meddlesome, cruel, greedy spy, mingling in every
household act and peering in at every window pane, then the poor who are
guiltless would be justified if they spat in its face, and called it by
its right name, a foul extortion.

* * *

The Italian tongue chatters like a magpie's; if they did not let the
steam off thus they would be less easily ruled than they are; but no
great talker ever did any great thing yet, in this world.

* * *

A retentive memory is of great use to a man, no doubt; but the talent of
oblivion is on the whole more useful.

* * *

Sarta Rosalia is in a lovely pastoral country; the country that seems to
thrill with Theocritus' singing, as it throbs with the little tamborine
of the cicala; a country running over with beautiful greenery, and with
climbing creepers hanging everywhere, from the vine on the maples to the
china-rose hedges, and with the deep-blue shadows, and the sun-flushed
whiteness of the distant mountains lending to it in the golden distance
that solemnity and ethereal charm which, without mountains somewhere
within sight, no country ever has. But since the advent of "freedom" it
is scarred and wounded; great scar-patches stretch here and there where
woods have been felled by the avarice illumined in the souls of
landowners; hundreds and thousands of bare poles stand stark and stiff
against the river light which have been glorious pyramids of leaf
shedding welcome shadows on the river path; and many a bold round hill
like the _ballons_ of the Vosges, once rich of grass as they, now shorn
of wood, and even of undergrowth, lift a bare stony front to the lovely
sunlight, and never more will root of tree, or seed of flower or of
fern, find bed there.

Such is Progress.

* * *

For the first time his _liberi pensieri_ were distasteful to him and
unsatisfactory; for atheism makes a curse a mere rattle of dry peas in a
fool's bladder, as it makes a blessing a mere flutter of a breath.
Messer Nellemane for the first time felt that the old religion has its
advantages over agnosticism; it gave you a hell for your rivals and your
enemies!

* * *

He had never heard of Virgil and of Theocritus--but it hurt him to have
these sylvan pictures spoiled; these pictures which are the same as
those they saw and sang; the threshing barns with the piles of golden
grain, and the flails flying to merry voices; the young horses trampling
the wheat loose from its husk with bounding limbs and tossing manes; the
great arched doorways, with the maidens sitting in a circle breaking the
maize from its withered leaves, and telling old-world stories, and
singing sweet _fiorellini_ all the while; the hanging fields broken up
in hill and vale with the dun-coloured oxen pushing their patient way
through labyrinths of vine boughs, and clouds of silvery olive leaf: the
bright laborious day, with the sun-rays turning the sickle to a
semi-circlet of silver, as the mice ran, and the crickets shouted, and
the larks soared on high: the merry supper when the day was done, with
the thrill and thrum of the mandolini, and the glisten of the unhoused
fire-flies, whose sanctuary had been broken when the bearded barley and
the amber corn fell prone: all these things rose to his memory: they had
made his youth and manhood glad and full of colour; they were here still
for his sons a little while, but when his sons should be all grown men,
then those things would have ceased to be, and even their very memory
would have perished, most likely, while the smoke of the accursed
engines would have sullied the pure blue sky, and the stench of their
foul vapours would have poisoned the golden air.

He roused himself and said wearily to Pippo,

"There is a tale I have heard somewhere of a man who sold his birthright
for gold, and when the gold was in his hands, then it changed to
withered leaves and brown moss: I was thinking, eh? that the world is
much like that man!"

* * *

When all your politics and policies are summed up in the one intention
to do well for yourself, great simplicity is given to your theories, if
not to your practice.

* * *

The ministerialists ... made florid and beautiful speeches full of
sesquipedalian phrases in which they spoke about the place of Italy
among the great powers, the dangers of jealousy and invasion from other
nations, the magnificence of the future, the blessings of education, the
delights of liberty, the wickedness of the opposition, the sovereign
rights of the people; and said it all so magnificently and so
bewilderingly that the people never remembered till it was too late that
they had said nothing about opposing the cow-tax--or indeed any taxes at
all, but listened and gaped, and shouted, and clapped; and being told
that they could sit at a European Congress to decide the fate of Epirus,
were for the moment oblivious that they had bad bread, dear wine, scant
meat, an army of conscripts, and a bureaucracy that devoured them as
maggots a cheese. What is political eloquence for, if not to make the
people forget such things as these?

* * *

To sell your grapes to foreigners and have none at all at home is a
spirited commerce, and fine free trade; that the poor souls around are
all poisoned with cheap chemicals in the absence of wine, is only an
evidence of all that science can do.

* * *

It is the noblest natures that tyranny drives to frenzy.

* * *

The bureaucratic mind, all the world over, believes the squeak of the
official penny whistle to be as the trump of archangels and the voice of
Sinai. That all the people do not fall down prostrate at the squeak is,
to this order of mind, the one unmentionable sin.

* * *

It is not true that no Italian ever tells the truth, as commentators on
the country say, but it is sadly true that when one does he suffers for
it.

* * *

A day in prison to a free-born son of the soil, used to work with the
broad bright sky alone above his head, is more agony than a year of it
is to a cramped city-worker used only to the twilight of a machine-room
or a workshop, only to an air full of smuts and smoke, and the stench of
acids, and the dust of filed steel or sifted coal. The sufferings of the
two cannot be compared, and one among many of the injustices the law,
all over the world, commits, is that it never takes into consideration
what a man's past has been. There are those to whom a prison is as hell;
there are those to whom it is something better than the life they led.

* * *

She was an old woman, and had been bred up in the old faiths; faiths
that were not clear indeed to her nor ever reasoned on, but yet gave her
consolation, and a great, if a vague hope. Now that we tell the poor
there is no such hope, that when they have worked and starved long
enough, then they will perish altogether, like bits of candle that have
burnt themselves out, that they are mere machines made of carbon and
hydrogen, which, when they have had due friction, will then crumble back
into the dust; now that we tell them all this, and call this the spread
of education, will they be as patient?

* * *

Take hope from the heart of man, and you make him a beast of prey.

* * *

One of the cruellest sins of any state, in giving petty and tyrannous
authority into petty and tyrannous hands, is that it thus brings into
hatred and disgust the true and high authority of moral law.

* * *

In these modern times of cowardice, when great ministers dare not say
the thing they think, and high magistrates stoop to execute decrees they
abhor, it is scarcely to be hoped for that moral courage will be a plant
of very sturdy growth in the souls of carpenters, and coopers, and
bakers, and plumbers, and day-labourers, who toil for scarce a shilling
a day.

* * *

He had been wronged, and a great wrong is to the nature as a cancer is
to the body; there is no health.

* * *

A just chastisement may benefit a man, though it seldom does, but an
unjust one changes all his blood to gall.

* * *

In these days, Christian Europe decides that not only the poor man lying
by the wayside, but also the Samaritan who helps him, are sinners
against political economy, and its law forbids what its religion orders:
people must settle the contradiction as they deem best; they generally
are content to settle it by buttoning up their pockets, and passing by,
on the other side.

* * *

In this lovely land that brims over with flowers like a cup over-filled,
where the sun is as a magician for ever changing with a wand of gold all
common things to paradise; where every wind shakes out the fragrance of
a world of fruit and flower commingled; where, for so little, the lute
sounds and the song arises; here, misery looks more sad than it does in
sadder climes, where it is like a home-born thing, and not an alien
tyrant as it is here.

* * *

You cannot cage a field bird when it is old; it dies for want of flight,
of air, of change, of freedom. No use will be the stored grain of your
cages; better for the bird a berry here and there, and peace of gentle
death at last amidst the golden gorse or blush of hawthorn buds.

* * *

"What is England?"

"It is a place where the poor souls have no wine of their own, I think;
and they make cannons and cheese. You see their people over here now
and then. They carry red Bibles, and they go about with their mouths
open to catch flies, and they run into all the little old dusty places;
you must have seen them."

"And why do we want to have anything to do with them?"

"They will come in ships and fire at us, if we are not bigger and
stronger than they. We must build iron houses that float, and go on the
sea and meet them."

_PUCK._

"Animalism," forsooth!--a more unfair word don't exist. When we animals
never drink only just enough to satisfy thirst, never eat except when we
have genuine appetites, never indulge in any sort of debauch, and never
strain excess till we sink into the slough of satiety, shall "animalism"
be a word to designate all that men and women dare to do? "Animalism!"
You ought to blush for such a libel on our innocent and reasonable lives
when you regard your own! You men who scorch your throats with alcohols,
and kill your lives with absinthe; and squander your gold in the
Kursaal, and the Cecle, and the Arlington; and have thirty services at
your dinner betwixt soup and the "chasse;" and cannot spend a summer
afternoon in comfort unless you be drinking deep the intoxication of
hazard in your debts and your bets on the Heath or the Downs, at
Hurlingham or at Tattersalls' Rooms. You women, who sell your souls for
bits of stones dug from the bowels of the earth; who stake your honour
for a length of lace two centuries old; who replace the bloom your
passions have banished with the red of poisoned pigments; who wreathe
your aching heads with purchased tresses torn from prisons, and
madhouses, and coffins; who spend your lives in one incessant struggle,
first the rivalry of vanity and then the rivalry of ambition; who deck
out greed, and selfishness, and worship of station or gold, as "love,"
and then wonder that your hapless dupes, seizing the idol that you offer
them as worthy of their worship, fling it from them with a curse,
finding it dumb, and deaf, and merciless, a thing of wood and stone.

"Animalism," forsooth! God knows it would be well for you, here and
hereafter, men and women both, were you only patient, continent, and
singleminded, only faithful, gentle, and long-suffering, as are the
brutes that you mock, and misuse, and vilify in the supreme blindness of
your egregious vanity!

* * *

I was horribly cold and hungry; and this is a combination which kills
sentiment in bigger people than myself. The emotions, like a hothouse
flower or a sea-dianthus, wither curiously when aired in an east wind,
or kept some hours waiting for dinner.

* * *

In truth, too, despite all the fine chances that you certainly give your
peasants to make thorough beasts of themselves, they are your real
aristocrats, and have the only really good manners in your country. In
an old north-country dame, who lives on five shillings a week, in a
cottage like a dream of Teniers' or Van Tol's, I have seen a fine
courtesy, a simple desire to lay her best at her guest's disposal, a
perfect composure, and a freedom from all effort, that were in their way
the perfection of breeding. I have seen these often in the peasantry, in
the poor. It is your middle classes, with their incessant flutter, and
bluster, and twitter, and twaddle; with their perpetual strain after
effect; with their deathless desire to get one rung of the ladder higher
than they ever can get; with their preposterous affectations, their
pedantic unrealities, their morbid dread of remark, their everlasting
imitations, their superficial education, their monotonous commonplaces,
and their nervous deference to opinion;--it is your middle classes that
have utterly destroyed good manners, and have made the prevalent mode of
the day a union of boorishness and servility, of effervescence and of
apathy--a court suit, as it were, worn with muddy boots and a hempen
shirt.

* * *

I think Fanfreluche spoke with reason. Coincidence is a god that greatly
influences mortal affairs. He is not a cross-tempered deity either,
always; and when you beat your poor fetish for what seems to you an
untoward accident, you may do wrong; he may have benefited you far more
than you wot.

* * *

Now I believe that when a woman's own fair skin is called rouge, and her
own old lace is called imitation, she must in some way or other have
roused sharply the conscience or the envy of her sisters who sit in
judgment.

* * *

I canna go to church. Look'ee,--they's allus a readin' o' cusses, and
damnin', and hell fire, and the like; and I canna stomach it. What for
shall they go and say as all the poor old wimmin i' tha parish is gone
to the deil 'cause they picks up a stick or tew i' hedge, or likes to
mumble a charm or tew o'er their churnin'? Them old wimmin be rare an'
good i' ither things. When I broke my ankle three years agone, old Dame
Stuckley kem o'er, i' tha hail and the snaw, a matter of five mile and
more, and she turned o' eighty; and she nursed me, and tidied the
place, and did all as was wanted to be done, 'cause Avice was away,
working somewhere's; and she'd never let me gie her aught for it. And I
heard ta passon tell her as she were sold to hell, 'cause the old soul
have a bit of belief like in witch-stones, and allus sets one aside her
spinnin' jenny, so that the thrid shanna knot nor break. Ta passon he
said, God cud mak tha thrid run smooth, or knot it, just as He chose,
and 'twas wicked to think she could cross His will. And the old dame,
she said, Weel, sir, I dinna b'lieve tha Almighty would ever spite a
poor old crittur like me, don't 'ee think it? But if we're no to help
oursells i' this world, what for have He gied us the trouble o' tha
thrid to spin? and why no han't He made tha shirts, an' tha sheets, an'
tha hose grow theersells? And ta passon niver answered her that, he only
said she was fractious and blas-_phe_-mous. Now she warn't, she spoke i'
all innocence, and she mint what she said--she mint it. Passons niver
can answer ye plain, right-down, nataral questions like this'n, and
that's why I wunna ga ta tha church.

* * *

Dinna ye meddle, Tam; it's niver no good a threshin' other folk's corn;
ye allays gits the flail agin i' yer own eye somehow.

* * *

The flowers hang in the sunshine, and blow in the breeze, free to the
wasp as to the bee. The bee chooses to make his store of honey, that is
sweet, and fragrant, and life-giving; the wasp chooses to make his from
the same blossoms, but of a matter hard, and bitter, and useless. Shall
we pity the wasp because, of his selfish passions, he selects the
portion that shall be luscious only to his own lips, and spends his
hours only in the thrusting-in of his sting? Is not such pity--wasted
upon the wasp--an insult to the bee who toils so wearily to gather in
for others; and who, because he stings not man, is by man maltreated?
Now it seems to me, if I read them aright, that vicious women, and women
that are of honesty and honour, are much akin to the wasp and to the
bee.

* * *

My dear, a gentleman may forget his appointments, his love vows, and his
political pledges; he may forget the nonsense he talked, the dances he
engaged for, the women that worried him, the electors that bullied him,
the wife that married him, and he may be a gentleman still; but there
are two things he must never forget, for no gentleman ever does--and
they are, to pay a debt that is a debt of honour, and to keep a promise
to a creature that can't force him to keep it.

* * *

A genius? You must mistake. I have always heard that a genius is
something that they beat to death first with sticks and stones, and set
up on a great rock to worship afterwards. Now they make her very happy
whilst she is alive. She cannot possibly be a genius.

* * *

I learned many wondrous things betwixt Epsom and Ascot. A brief space,
indeed, yet one that to me seemed longer than the whole of my previous
life, so crowded was it every hour with new and marvellous experiences.
Worldly experiences, I mean. Intellectually, I am not sure that I
acquired much.

Indeed, to a little brain teeming with memories of the Théâtres
Beaumarchais, Voltaire, Molière, Feuillet, Sardou, Sandeau, &c., which
I had heard read so continually at the Dower-House amongst the Fens, the
views of dramatic literature held at the Coronet appeared of the most
extraordinary character. They certainly had one merit--simplicity.

The verb "to steal" was the only one that a successful dramatic author
appeared to be required to conjugate.

For your music steal from the music-halls; for your costumes steal from
_Le Follet_; for your ideas steal from anybody that happens to carry
such a thing about him; for your play, in its entirety, steal the plot,
the characters, the romance, the speeches, and the wit, if it have any,
of some attractive novel; and when you have made up your parcel of
thefts, tie it together with some string of stage directions, herald it
as entirely original, give a very good supper to your friends on the
pr

Showing first 200,000 characters. Full text: gutenberg.org/ebooks/22019