I thought the hero found hanging upon some oak of Dodona an ancient mask,
where perhaps there lingered something of Egypt, and that he changed it to
his fancy, touching it a little here and there, gilding the eyebrows or
putting a gilt line where the cheekbone comes; that when at last he
looked out of its eyes he knew another's breath came and went within his
breath upon the carven lips, and that his eyes were upon the instant fixed
upon a visionary world: how else could the god have come to us in the
forest? The good, unlearned books say that He who keeps the distant stars
within His fold comes without intermediary, but Plutarch's precepts and
the experience of old women in Soho, ministering their witchcraft to
servant girls at a shilling apiece, will have it that a strange living man
may win for Daemon an illustrious dead man; but now I add another thought:
the Daemon comes not as like to like but seeking its own opposite, for man
and Daemon feed the hunger in one another's hearts. Because the ghost is
simple, the man heterogeneous and confused, they are but knit together
when the man has found a mask whose lineaments permit the expression of
all the man most lacks, and it may be dreads, and of that only.
The more insatiable in all desire, the more resolute to refuse deception
or an easy victory, the more close will be the bond, the more violent and
definite the antipathy.