You don't pretend this is true?
I won't tell you whether this is true, or an allegory, or just
nonsense.--Next, I am going to read you a strange document that came
into my hands. It was written by a certain Hollander who became the god
Mercury in 1912. Will you listen?
Has it anything to do with the Cabala?
Yes. And with you. For I sometimes think that you are the new god
Mercury. Take some of that claret and listen quietly.
I was born in a Dutch parsonage in 1885. I was the despair of my home
and the terror of the village, a little liar and thief in the full
enjoyment of my health and wit. My real life began one morning of my
twenty-seventh year when I experienced the first of a series of violent
pains in the center of my head. This was my deification. Some untender
hand was emptying the cup of my skull of its silly gray brains and
filling it with the divine gas of instinct. My body too had its part; in
this; each miscropic cell had to be transformed; I was not to fall sick
or grow old or die, save when I chose. As historian of the gods I have
to keep record of an accident whereby, through some monstrosity in
spiritual law, an Apollo of the 17th Century failed to completely deify:
one arm remained corruptible.
It was then that I discovered the first great attribute of our nature,
namely that to wish for a thing is to command it. It does not suddenly
fall into your hand or descend in a rosy mist upon your carpet. But
circumstances start a discreet ballet about you and the desired thing
comes your way through the neatest possible imitation of natural law and
probability. Scientists will tell you that they have never seen the
sequence of cause and effect interrupted at the instance of prayer or of
divine reward or retribution. Do they think, the fools, that their
powers of observation are cleverer than the devices of a god? The poor
laws of cause and effect are so often set aside that they may be said to
be the merest approximations. I am not merely a god but a planet and I
speak of things I know. So I stole my mother's savings from under her
pillow and went to Paris.
But it is at Rome that we were last worshipped under our own names, and
it is thither that we are irresistibly called. During the journey I
gradually discovered further traits of my new being. I woke up mornings
to discover that bits of information had been deposited in my mind
overnight, the enviable knowledge for instance, that I had the power of
'sinning' without remorse. I entered the Porta del Popolo one midnight
in June, 1912. I ran the length of the Corso, lept the fence that
surrounds the Forum, and flung myself upon the ruins of my temple. All
night in the fine rain I tore my clothes in joy and anguish, while up
the valley came an interminable and ghostly procession singing my hymns
and hiding me in a tower of incense. With the coming of dawn my
worshipers vanished and wings no longer fluttered at my heels. I climbed
out of the sunken ruins and went out into the misty streets in search of
some coffee.
Godlike I never reflect; all my actions arrive of themselves. If I pause
to think I fall into error. During the next year I made a great deal of
money on the races at Parioli. I speculated in motion pictures and
African wheat. I went into journalism and the misrepresentations I sowed
will have deferred Europe's recovery from the War many scores of years.
I love discord among gods and men. I have always been happy. I am the
happiest of the gods.
I had been called to Rome to serve as the gods' messenger and secretary,
but more than a year had passed before I recognized even one. The Church
of Santa Maria sopra Minerva is built over an ancient temple to that
goddess and there one day I found her. So impatient was I to discover
the others that I disobeyed the laws of my nature and went hunting for
them. I spent hours hanging about the station in search of newly arrived
divinities. One night I strode the platform waiting for the Paris
Express. I was trembling with premonition. I had donned a silk hat and
its complements, a coral camellia, and a little blonde moustache. Plumed
with blue smoke and uttering splendid cries the train rushed into the
station. The travelers descended from their compartments into a sea of
_fachini_ and relatives. I bowed to a Scandinavian diplomat and a
Wagnerian prima donna. They returned my greeting hesitantly; a glance
into their eyes showed me that they were brilliant but not supernatural.
There was no incipient Bacchus among the Oxford students on vacation;
the Belgian nuns on pilgrimage discovered me no Vesta. I scanned faces
for half an hour until the length of pavement was deserted and a long
line of old women with pails appeared. I stopped by the engine to ask a
guard if another section of the train was to follow. I turned
to see a strange face looking at me from the small window of the
locomotive--mis-shapen, black with coal-dust, gleaming with perspiration
and content, and grinning from ear to ear, was Vulcan.
Here Miss Grier raised her head: There follow fifty pages describing his
encounters with the others. Have you anything to say? Do you recognize
anything?
But, Miss Grier, I've had no headaches! I don't receive what I want!
No?
What am I to understand? You've made it twice as confused. Explain some
more.
He goes on to say that the gods were afraid of being laughed at for what
they had lost. Flight, for instance, and invisibility, and omniscience
and freedom from care. People would forget that they still had a few
enviable powers: their strange elation; their command over matter; their
ability to live or die when they chose and to live beyond good and evil.
And so on.
What became of him?
Finally he decided to die, as they all do. All gods and heroes are by
nature the enemies of Christianity--a faith trailing its aspirations and
remorses and in whose presence every man is a failure. Only a broken
will can enter the Kingdom of Heaven. Finally tired out with the cult of
themselves they give in. They go over. They renounce themselves.
I was astonished at the desolation in her voice. It held me back from
eagerly demanding of her the application to the Cabala of all these
principles. We went in to the next room where her musicians were waiting
to offer us some English madrigals. The applications still occur to me,
especially when I am depressed. They give in. They go over.
On the night that my steamer left the bay of Naples I lay sleepless in
my deck-chair until morning. Why was I not more reluctant at leaving
Europe? How could I lie there repeating the Aeneid and longing for the
shelf of Manhattan? It was Virgil's sea that we were crossing; the very
stars were his: Arcturus and the showery Hyades, the two Bears and Orion
in his harness of gold. All these passed before me in a cloudless sky
and in the water, murmuring before a light wind, the sliding
constellations were brokenly reflected.
Mercury is not only the messenger of the gods; he is the conductor of
the dead as well. If in the least part his powers had fallen to me I
should be able to invoke spirits. Perhaps Virgil could read my mood for
me, and raising my two palms I said in a low voice (not loud enough to
reach the open port-holes behind me):
Prince of poets, Virgil, one of your guests and the last of barbarians
invokes you.
For an instant I thought I saw the shimmer of a robe and the reflection
of the starlight on the shiny side of a laurel leaf. I pressed my
advantage:
_O anima cortese mantovana_, greatest of all Romans, out of the eternity
of that limbo to which the Florentine, perhaps wrongly, consigned you,
grant me a crumb of time.
Now indeed the shade stood in mid-air just above the hand-rail. The
stars were glittering and the water was glittering, and the great shade,
picked out in sparks, was glittering furiously. But the image must
become clearer. There was one title that might avail more with him than
those of poet or Roman.
Oh, greatest spirit of the ancient world and prophet of the new, by that
fortunate guess wherein you foretold the coming of Him who will admit
you to His mountain, thou first Christian in Europe, speak to me!
Now indeed the gracious spirit became completely visible with pulsations
of light, half silver and half gold, and spoke:
Be brief, importunate barbarian. Except for this last salutation wherein
you have touched my only pride, I would not delay here. Detain me not
from the absorbing games of my peers. Erasmus is in debate with Plato,
and Augustine has descended from the hill and sits among us, though the
air is gray Be brief, I pray you and give heed to your Latin.
At this I realized that I had no definite question to put to my guest.
In order to mark time and prolong so uncommon an interview, I engaged
him in conversation:
Was I then right, Master, in assuming that Dante was hot completely in
God's confidence?
Indignation infused a saffron stain into the noble figure in
silver-gold: Where, where is he, that soul of vinegar, that chose to
assign the souls of the dead more harshly than God? Tell him that though
a pagan I too shall see bliss. It is nothing that I must first pay the
penalty of ten thousand years. Behold this moment I exhibit the sin of
anger; where is _he_ in pain for the sin of pride?
I was a little shocked to discover that neither genius nor death removed
us beyond the temptation to asperity, but said: Master, have you met the
poets of the English tongue that have come into your groves?
Let us be brief, my friend.--One came that had been formerly blind and
did me much honor. He spoke a noble Latin. Those that stood by assured
me that in his lines mine were not seldom reflected.
Milton was indeed your son....
But before him came another, greater than he, a writer of pieces for a
theatre. He was proud and troubled and strode among us unseeing. He made
me no salutation. Vanity no longer exists among us, but it is sweet to
exchange greetings among the poets.
He knew but little Latin, Master, and perhaps had never read your page.
Moreover in life he was neither the enemy nor advocate of grace and
being arrived in your region his whole mind may well have been consumed
with anxiety as to his eternal residence. Is he among you still?
He sits apart, his hand over his eyes, and only raises his head when, in
the long green evenings, Casella sings to us, or when on the wind there
drifts from Purgatory the chorus that one Palestrina prepares.
Master, I have just spent a year in the city that was your whole life.
Am I wrong to leave it?
Let us be brief. This world where Time is, troubles me. My heart has
almost started beating again,--what horror! Know, importunate barbarian,
that I spent my whole lifetime under a great delusion,--that Rome and
the house of Augustus were eternal. Nothing is eternal save Heaven.
Romes existed before Rome and when Rome will be a waste there will be
Romes after her. Seek out some city that is young. The secret is to make
a city, not to rest in it. When you have found one, drink in the
illusion that she too is eternal. Nay, I have heard of your city. Its
foundations have knocked upon our roof and the towers have cast a shadow
across the sandals of the angels. Rome too was great. Oh, in the pride
of your city, and when she too begins to produce great men, do not
forget mine. When shall I erase from my heart this love of her. I cannot
enter Zion until I have forgotten Rome.--Dismiss me now, my friend, I
pray thee. These vain emotions have shaken me.... (Suddenly the poet
became aware of the Mediterranean:) Oh, beautiful are these waters.
Behold! For many years I have almost forgotten the world. Beautiful!
Beautiful!--But no! what horror, what pain! Are you still alive? Alive?
How can you endure it? All your thoughts are guesses, all your body is
shaken with breath, all your senses are infirm, and your mind ever full
of the fumes of one passion or another. Oh, what misery to be a man.
Hurry and die!
Farewell, Virgil!
The shimmering ghost faded before the stars, and the engines beneath me
pounded eagerly towards the new world and the last and greatest of all
cities.