The Wanderer, when Keyork Arabian had left him, had intended to revisit
Unorna without delay, but he had not proceeded far in the direction of
her house when he turned out of his way and entered a deserted street
which led towards the river. He walked slowly, drawing his furs closely
about him, for it was very cold.
He found himself in one of those moments of life in which the
presentiment of evil almost paralyses the mind’s power of making
any decision. In general, a presentiment is but the result upon the
consciousness of conscious or unconscious fear. This fear is very often
the natural consequence of the reaction which, in melancholy natures,
comes almost inevitably after a sudden and unexpected satisfaction
or after a period in which the hopes of the individual have been
momentarily raised by some unforeseen circumstance. It is by no means
certain that hope is of itself a good thing. The wise and mournful
soul prefers the blessedness of that non-expectancy which shall not be
disappointed, to the exhilarating pleasures of an anticipation which may
prove empty. In this matter lies one of the great differences between
the normal moral state of the heathen and that of the Christian. The
Greek hoped for all things in this world and for nothing in the next;
the Christian, on the contrary, looks for a happiness to come hereafter,
while fundamentally denying the reality of any earthly joy whatsoever
in the present. Man, however, is so constituted as to find it almost
impossible to put faith in either bliss alone, without helping his
belief by borrowing some little refreshment from the hope of the other.
The wisest of the Greeks believed the soul to be immortal; the sternest
of Christians cannot forget that once or twice in his life he had been
contemptibly happy, and condemns himself for secretly wishing that he
might be as happy again before all is over. Faith is the evidence of
things unseen, but hope is the unreasoning belief that unseen things may
soon become evident. The definition of faith puts earthly disappointment
out of the question; that of hope introduces it into human affairs as a
constant and imminent probability.
The development of psychologic research in our day has proved beyond
a doubt that individuals of a certain disposition may be conscious of
events actually occurring, or which have recently occurred, at a great
distance; but it has not shown satisfactorily that things yet to happen
are foreshadowed by that restless condition of the sensibilities which
we call presentiment. We may, and perhaps must, admit that all that is
or has been produces a real and perceptible impression upon all else
that is. But there is as yet no good reason for believing that an
impression of what shall be can be conveyed by anticipation--without
reasoning--to the mind of man.
But though the realisation of a presentiment may be as doubtful as any
event depending upon chance alone, yet the immense influence which a
mere presentiment may exercise is too well known to be denied. The human
intelligence has a strong tendency to believe in its own reasonings,
of which, indeed, the results are often more accurate and reliable than
those reached by the physical perceptions alone. The problems which can
be correctly solved by inspection are few indeed compared with those
which fall within the province of logic. Man trusts to his reason, and
then often confounds the impressions produced by his passions with the
results gained by semi-conscious deduction. His love, his hate, his
anger create fears, and these supply him with presentiments which he is
inclined to accept as so many well-reasoned grounds of action. If he is
often deceived, he becomes aware of his mistake, and, going to the other
extreme, considers a presentiment as a sort of warning that the contrary
of what he expects will take place; if he chances to be often right he
grows superstitious.
The lonely man who was pacing the icy pavement of the deserted street on
that bitter winter’s day felt the difficulty very keenly. He would not
yield and he could not advance. His heart was filled with forebodings
which his wisdom bade him treat with indifference, while his passion
gave them new weight and new horror with every minute that passed.
He had seen with his eyes and heard with his ears. Beatrice had been
before him, and her voice had reached him among the voices of thousands,
but now, since the hours has passed and he had not found her, it was as
though he had been near her in a dream, and the strong certainty took
hold of him that she was dead and that he had looked upon her wraith in
the shadowy church.
He was a strong man, not accustomed to distrust his senses, and his
reason opposed itself instantly to the suggestion of the supernatural.
He had many times, on entering a new city, felt himself suddenly elated
by the irresistible belief that his search was at an end, and that
within a few hours he must inevitably find her whom he had sought so
long. Often as he passed through the gates of some vast burying-place,
he had almost hesitated to walk through the silent ways, feeling all at
once convinced that upon the very first headstone he was about to
see the name that was ever in his heart. But the expectation of
final defeat, like the anticipation of final success, had been always
deceived. Neither living nor dead had he found her.
Two common, reasonable possibilities lay before him, and two only. He
had either seen Beatrice, or he had not. If she had really been in the
Teyn Kirche, she was in the city and not far from him. If she had not
been there, he had been deceived by an accidental but extraordinary
likeness. Within the logical concatenation of cause and effect there was
no room for any other supposition, and it followed that his course was
perfectly clear. He must continue his search until he should find the
person he had seen, and the result would be conclusive, for he would
again see the same face and hear the same voice. Reason told him that he
had in all likelihood been mistaken after all. Reason reminded him that
the church had been dark, the multitude of worshippers closely
crowded together, the voices that sang almost innumerable and wholly
undistinguishable from each other. Reason showed him a throng of
possibilities, all pointing to an error of his perceptions and all in
direct contradiction with the one fact which his loving instinct held
for true.
The fear of evil, the presentiment of death, defied logic and put its
own construction and interpretation upon the strange event. He neither
believed, nor desired to believe, in a supernatural visitation, yet
the inexplicable certainty of having seen a ghostly vision overwhelmed
reason and all her arguments. Beatrice was dead. Her spirit had passed
in that solemn hour when the Wanderer had stood in the dusky church; he
had looked upon her shadowy wraith, and had heard the echo of a voice
from beyond the stars, whose crystal tones already swelled the diviner
harmony of an angelic strain.
The impression was so strong at first as to be but one step removed from
conviction. The shadow of a great mourning fell upon him, of a grief
too terrible for words, too solemn for tears, too strong to find any
expression save in death itself. He walked heavily, bending his head,
his eyes half closed as though in bodily pain, the icy pavement rang
like iron under his tread, the frozen air pierced through him, as his
sorrow pierced his heart, the gloom of the fast-sinking winter’s day
deepened as the darkness in his own soul. He, who was always alone, knew
at last what loneliness could mean. While she had lived she had been
with him always, a living, breathing woman, visible to his inner eyes,
speaking to his inward hearing, waking in his sleepless love. He had
sought her with restless haste and untiring strength through the length
and breadth of the whole world, but yet she had never left him, he had
never been separated from her for one moment, never, in the years of his
wandering, had he entered the temple of his heart without finding her
in its most holy place. Men had told him that she was dead, but he had
looked within himself and had seen that she was still alive; the dread
of reading her sacred name carved upon the stone that covered her
resting-place, had chilled him and made his sight tremble, but he had
entered the shrine of his soul and had found her again, untouched by
death, unchanged by years, living, loved, and loving. But now, when
he shut out the dismal street from view, and went to the sanctuary and
kneeled upon the threshold, he saw but a dim vision, as of something
lying upon an altar in the dark, something shrouded in white, something
shapely and yet shapeless, something that had been and was not any more.
He reached the end of the street, but he felt a reluctance to leave
it, and turned back again, walking still more slowly and heavily than
before. So far as any outward object or circumstance could be said to be
in harmony with his mood, the dismal lane, the failing light, the bitter
air, were at that moment sympathetic to him. The tomb itself is not more
sepulchral than certain streets and places in Prague on a dark
winter’s afternoon. In the certainty that the last and the greatest of
misfortunes had befallen him, the Wanderer turned back into the gloomy
by-way as the pale, wreathing ghosts, fearful of the sharp daylight
and the distant voices of men, sink back at dawn into the graves out
of which they have slowly risen to the outer air in the silence of the
night.
Death, the arch-steward of eternity, walks the bounds of man’s entailed
estate, and the headstones of men’s graves are landmarks in the great
possession committed to his stewardship, enclosing within their narrow
ring the wretched plot of land which makes up all of life’s inheritance.
From ever to always the generations of men do bondsmen’s service in that
single field, to plough it and sow it, and harrow it and water it, to
lay the sickle to the ripe corn if so be that their serfdom falls in the
years of plenty and the ear is full, to eat the bread of tears, if
their season of servitude be required of them in a time of scarcity and
famine. Bondsmen of death, from birth, they are sent forth out of the
sublime silence of the pathless forest which hems in the open glebe
land of the present and which is eternity, past and to come; bondsmen
of death, from youth to age, they join in the labour of the field,
they plough, they sow, they reap, perhaps, tears they shed many, and of
laughter there is also a little amongst them; bondsmen of death, to the
last, they are taken in the end, when they have served their tale of
years, many or few, and they are led from furrow and grass land, willing
or unwilling, mercifully or cruelly, to the uttermost boundary, and they
are thrust out quickly into the darkness whence they came. For their
place is already filled, and the new husbandmen, their children, have in
their turn come into the field, to eat of the fruit they sowed, to sow
in turn a seed of which they themselves shall not see the harvest, whose
sheaves others shall bind, whose ears others shall thresh, and of whose
corn others shall make bread after them. With our eyes we may yet see
the graves of two hundred generations of men, whose tombs serve but to
mark that boundary more clearly, whose fierce warfare, when they fought
against the master, could not drive back that limit by a handbreadth,
whose uncomplaining labour, when they accepted their lot patiently,
earned them not one scant foot of soil wherewith to broaden their
inheritance as reward for their submission; and of them all, neither
man nor woman was ever forgotten in the day of reckoning, nor was one
suffered to linger in the light. Death will bury a thousand generations
more, in graves as deep, strengthening year by year the strong chain of
his grim landmarks. He will remember us every one when the time comes;
to some of us he will vouchsafe a peaceful end, but some shall pass
away in mortal agony, and some shall be dragged unconscious to the other
side; but all must go. Some shall not see him till he is at hand, and
some shall dream of him in year-long dreams of horror, to be taken
unawares at the last. He will remember us every one and will come to us,
and the place of our rest shall be marked for centuries, for years, or
for seconds, for each a stone, or a few green sods laid upon a mound
beneath the sky, or the ripple on a changing wave when the loaded sack
has slipped from the smooth plank, and the sound of a dull splash has
died away in the wind. There be strong men, as well as weak, who shudder
and grow cold when they think of that yet undated day which must close
with its black letter their calendar of joy and sorrow; there are
weaklings, as well as giants, who fear death for those they love,
but who fear not anything else at all. The master treats courage and
cowardice alike; Achilles and Thersites must alike perish, and none will
be so bold as to say that he can tell the dust of the misshapen varlet
from the ashes of the swift-footed destroyer, whose hair was once so
bright, whose eyes were so fierce, whose mighty heart was so slothless,
so wrathful, so inexorable and so brave.
The Wanderer was of those who dread nothing save for the one
dearly-beloved object, but who, when that fear is once roused by a real
or an imaginary danger, can suffer in one short moment the agony which
should be distributed through a whole lifetime. The magnitude of his
passion could lend to the least thought or presentiment connected with
it the force of a fact and the overwhelming weight of a real calamity.
In order to feel any great or noble passion a man must have an
imagination both great and sensitive in at least one direction. The
execution of a rare melody demands as a prime condition an instrument
of wide compass and delicate construction, and one of even more rich and
varied capabilities is needed to render those grand harmonies which are
woven in the modulation of sonorous chords. A skilful hand may draw a
scale from wooden blocks set upon ropes of straw, but the great musician
must hold the violin, or must feel the keys of the organ under his
fingers and the responsive pedals at his feet, before he can expect to
interpret fittingly the immortal thought of the composer. The strings
must vibrate in perfect tune, the priceless wood must be seasoned and
penetrated with the melodies of years, and scores of years, the latent
music must be already trembling to be free, before the hand that draws
the bow can command the ears and hearts of those who hear. So, too,
love, the chief musician of this world, must find an instrument worthy
of his touch before he can show all his power, and make heart and soul
ring with the lofty strains of a sublime passion. Not every one knows
what love means; few indeed know all that love can mean. There is no
more equality among men than there is likeness between them, and no two
are alike. The many have little, the few have much. To the many is given
the faint perception of higher things, which is either the vestige, or
the promise, of a nobler development, past or yet to come. As through a
veil they see the line of beauty which it is not theirs to trace; as
in a dream they hear the succession of sweet tones which they can
themselves never bring together, though their half-grown instinct feels
a vague satisfaction in the sequence; as from another world, they listen
to the poet’s song, wondering, admiring, but powerless over the great
instrument of human speech, from whose 15,000 keys their touch can
draw but the dull, tuneless prose of daily question and answer; as in a
mirage of things unreal, they see the great deeds that are done in
their time for love or hate, for race or country, for ambition and for
vengeance, but though they see the result, and know the motive, the
inward meaning and spirit of it all escapes them. It is theirs to be,
and existence is in itself their all. To think, to create, to act, to
feel can be only for the few. To one is given the transcendent genius
that turns the very stones along life’s road to precious gems of
thought; whose gift it is to find speech in dumb things and eloquence in
the ideal half of the living world; to whom sorrow is a melody and joy
sweet music; to whom the humblest effort of a humble life can furnish
an immortal lyric, and in whom one thought of the Divine can inspire a
sublime hymn. Another stoops and takes a handful of clay from the earth,
and with the pressure of his fingers moulds it to the reality of an
unreal image seen in dreams; or, standing before the vast, rough
block of marble, he sees within the mass the perfection of a faultless
form--he lays the chisel to the stone, the mallet strikes the steel, one
by one the shapeless fragments fly from the shapely limbs, the
matchless curves are uncovered, the breathing mouth smiles through the
petrifaction of a thousand ages, the shroud of stone falls from
the godlike brow, and the Hermes of Olympia stands forth in all his
deathless beauty. Another is born to the heritage of this world’s power,
fore-destined to rule and fated to destroy; the naked sword of destiny
lies in his cradle; the axe of a king-maker awaits the awakening of his
strength; the sceptre of supreme empire hangs within his reach. Unknown,
he dreams and broods over the future; unheeded, he begins to move among
his fellows; a smile, half of encouragement, half of indifference,
greets his first effort; he advances a little farther, and thoughtful
men look grave, another step, and suddenly all mankind cries out and
faces him and would beat him back; but it is too late; one struggle
more, and the hush of a great and unknown fear falls on the wrangling
nations; they are silent, and the world is his. He is the man who
is already thinking when others have scarcely begun to feel; who is
creating before the thoughts of his rivals have reached any conclusion;
who acts suddenly, terribly and irresistibly, before their creations
have received life. And yet, the greatest and the richest inheritance of
all is not his, for it has fallen to another, to the man of heart, and
it is the inheritance of the kingdom of love.
In all ages the reason of the world has been at the mercy of brute
force. The reign of law has never had more than a passing reality, and
never can have more than that so long as man is human. The individual
intellect and the aggregate intelligence of nations and races have alike
perished in the struggles of mankind, to revive again, indeed, but as
surely to be again put to the edge of the sword. Here and there great
thoughts and great masterpieces have survived the martyrdom of a
thinker, the extinction of a school, the death of a poet, the wreck of a
high civilisation. Socrates is murdered with the creed of immortality on
his very lips; hardly had he spoken the wonderful words recorded in the
_Phaedo_ when the fatal poison sent its deathly chill through his limbs;
the Greeks are gone, yet the Hermes of Olympia remains, mutilated and
maimed, indeed, but faultless still, and still supreme. The very name
of Homer is grown wellnigh as mythic as his blindness. There are those
to-day who, standing by the grave of William Shakespeare, say boldly
that he was not the creator of the works that bear his name. And still,
through the centuries, Achilles wanders lonely by the shore of the
sounding sea; Paris loves, and Helen is false; Ajax raves, and Odysseus
steers his sinking ship through the raging storm. Still, Hamlet the
Avenger swears, hesitates, kills at last, and then himself is slain;
Romeo sighs in the ivory moonlight, and love-bound Juliet hears the
triumphant lark carolling his ringing hymn high in the cool morning
air, and says it is the nightingale--Immortals all, the marble god, the
Greek, the Dane, the love-sick boy, the maiden foredoomed to death. But
how short is the roll-call of these deathless ones! Through what raging
floods of destruction have they lived, through what tempests have they
been tossed, upon what inhospitable shores have they been cast up by
the changing tides of time! Since they were called to life by the
great, half-nameless departed, how often has their very existence been
forgotten by all but a score in tens of millions? Has it been given to
those embodied thoughts of transcendent genius to ride in the whirlwind
of men’s passions or to direct the stormy warfare of half frantic
nations? Since they were born in all their bright perfection, to live
on in unchanging beauty, violence has ruled the world; many a time since
then the sword has mown down its harvest of thinkers, many a time has
the iron harrow of war torn up and scarred the face of the earth. Athens
still stands in broken loveliness, and the Tiber still rolls its tawny
waters heavily through Rome; but Rome and Athens are to-day but places
of departed spirits; they are no longer the seats of life, their broken
hearts are petrified. All men may see the ports through which the
blood flowed to the throbbing centre, the traces of the mighty arteries
through which it was driven to the ends of the earth. But the blood is
dried up, the hearts are broken, and though in their stony ruins those
dead world-hearts be grander and more enduring than any which in our
time are whole and beating, yet neither their endurance nor their
grandeur have saved them from man, the destroyer, nor was the beauty
of their thoughts or the thoughtfully-devised machinery of their
civilisation a shield against a few score thousand rough-hammered
blades, wielded by rough-hewn mortals who recked neither of intellect
nor of civilisation, nor yet of beauty, being but very human men, full
of terribly strong and human passions. Look where you will, throughout
the length and breadth of all that was the world five thousand, or five
hundred years ago; everywhere passion has swept thought before it, and
belief, reason. And we, too, with our reason and our thoughts, shall be
swept from existence and the memory of it. Is this the age of reason,
and is this the reign of law? In the midst of this civilisation of ours
three millions of men lie down nightly by their arms, men trained to
handle rifle and sword, taught to destroy and to do nothing else; and
nearly as many more wait but a summons to leave their homes and join the
ranks. And often it is said that we are on the eve of a universal war.
At the command of a few individuals, at the touch of a few wires, more
than five millions of men in the very prime and glory of strength,
armed as men never were armed since time began, will arise and will kill
civilisation and thought, as both the one and the other have been slain
before by fewer hands and less deadly weapons. Is this reason, or is
this law? Passion rules the world, and rules alone. And passion is
neither of the head, nor of the hand, but of the heart. Passion cares
nothing for the mind. Love, hate, ambition, anger, avarice, either
make a slave of intelligence to serve their impulses, or break down its
impotent opposition with the unanswerable argument of brute force, and
tear it to pieces with iron hands.
Love is the first, the greatest, the gentlest, the most cruel, the most
irresistible of passions. In his least form he is mighty. A little love
has destroyed many a great friendship. The merest outward semblance of
love has made such havoc as no intellect could repair. The reality has
made heroes and martyrs, traitors and murderers, whose names will not
be forgotten, for glory or for shame. Helen is not the only woman whose
smile has kindled the beacon of a ten years’ war, nor Antony the only
man who has lost the world for a caress. It may be that the Helen who
shall work our destruction is even now twisting and braiding her golden
hair; it may be that the new Antony, who is to lose this same old world
again, already stands upon the steps of Cleopatra’s throne. Love’s day
is not over yet, nor has man outgrown the love of woman.
But the power to love greatly is a gift, differing much in kind, though
little in degree, from the inspiration of the poet, the genius of the
artist, or the unerring instinct and eagle’s glance of the conqueror;
for conqueror, artist and poet are moved by passion and not by reason,
which is but their servant in so far as it can be commanded to move
others, and their deadliest enemy when it would move themselves. Let the
passion and the instrument but meet, being suited to each other, and all
else must go down before them. Few, indeed, are they to whom is given
that rich inheritance, and they themselves alone know all their wealth,
and all their misery, all the boundless possibilities of happiness that
are theirs, and all the dangers and the terrors that beset their path.
He who has won woman in the face of daring rivals, of enormous odds, of
gigantic obstacles, knows what love means; he who has lost her, having
loved her, alone has measured with his own soul the bitterness of
earthly sorrow, the depth of total loneliness, the breadth of the
wilderness of despair. And he who has sorrowed long, who has long been
alone, but who has watched the small, twinkling ray still burning upon
the distant border of his desert--the faint glimmer of a single star
that was still above the horizon of despair--he only can tell what utter
darkness can be upon the face of the earth when that last star has
set for ever. With it are gone suddenly the very quarters and cardinal
points of life’s chart, there is no longer any right hand or any left,
any north or south, any rising of the sun or any going down, any forward
or backward direction in his path, any heaven above, or any hell below.
The world has stood still and there is no life in the thick, black
stillness. Death himself is dead, and one living man is forgotten
behind, to mourn him as a lost friend, to pray that some new destroyer,
more sure of hand than death himself, may come striding through the
awful silence to make an end at last of the tormented spirit, to bear it
swiftly to the place where that last star ceased to shine, and to let it
down into the restful depths of an unremembering eternity. But into
that place, which is the soul of man, no destroyer can penetrate; that
solitary life neither the sword, nor pestilence, nor age, nor eternity
can extinguish; that immortal memory no night can obscure. There was a
beginning indeed, but end there can be none.
Such a man was the Wanderer, as he paced the deserted street in the
cruel, gloomy cold of the late day. Between his sight and the star of
his own hope an impenetrable shadow had arisen, so that he saw it no
more. The memory of Beatrice was more than ever distinct to his inner
sense, but the sudden presentiment of her death, real in its working as
any certainty, had taken the reality of her from the ground on which he
stood. For that one link had still been between them. Somewhere, near
or far, during all these years, she, too, had trodden the earth with
her light footsteps, the same universal mother earth on which they both
moved and lived. The very world was hers, since she was touching it,
and to touch it in his turn was to feel her presence. For who could
tell what hidden currents ran in the secret depths, or what mysterious
interchange of sympathy might not be maintained through them? The air
itself was hers, since she was somewhere breathing it; the stars, for
she looked on them; the sun, for it warmed her; the cold of winter,
for it chilled her too; the breezes of spring, for they fanned her pale
cheek and cooled her dark brow. All had been hers, and at the thought
that she had passed away, a cry of universal mourning broke from the
world she had left behind, and darkness descended upon all things, as a
funeral pall.
Cold and dim and sad the ancient city had seemed before, but it was a
thousandfold more melancholy now, more black, more saturated with the
gloom of ages. From time to time the Wanderer raised his heavy lids,
scarcely seeing what was before him, conscious of nothing but the horror
which had so suddenly embraced his whole existence. Then, all at once,
he was face to face with some one. A woman stood still in the way, a
woman wrapped in rich furs, her features covered by a dark veil which
could not hide the unequal fire of the unlike eyes so keenly fixed on
his.
“Have you found her?” asked the soft voice.
“She is dead,” answered the Wanderer, growing very white.