The light in the studio was growing dim. Goetze had risen to his feet
and was walking back and forth in front of the portraits. When he spoke
he seemed to have forgotten them, except as the representation of an
abstract principle; or, perhaps, he was thinking of his own nature, and
what his friend had said of it.
"Good and bad are relative terms only," he said, as one pronouncing a
text. Every man fulfills his purpose. I can put a stroke of paint on my
canvas, and you will call it white. I put another beside it, and by
contrast the first appears gray. Still another, and the second has
become gray, and the first still darker. And so on, until I have
reached the purest white we know. It is the same with humanity. Men are
only dark or light as they are contrasted with others; nor can they
avoid the place they occupy on God's canvas any more than my colors can
choose their places on mine. The world is a great picture. God is the
greatest of all artists. His is the master hand--the unerring touch that
lays on the lights, the half-tones and the shadows. Each fulfills its
purpose. Without the shadows there would be no lights.
"What is true of masses is likewise true of individuals," he continued,
after a moment's pause. "In a landscape, every blade of grass, every
pebble, has its light and its dark side. If you see only the light side
of an object, it is only because the shadow is turned from you. It is so
with men; one side is sun, the other shadow. Sometimes the light, only,
is presented to view, but the darker side is none the less there because
unseen. Nature is never unbalanced. Whatever of brightness there is
toward the sun there must be an equal amount of shadow opposing, with
all the intergradations between. If the light is dim the shadow is soft;
if the light is brilliant the shadow is black. Some of us are turned
white side to the world, some the reverse; some show the white and the
black alternately."
The man in the chair settled himself comfortably to listen. He liked
nothing better than to see the artist in his present mood, offering a
word now and then that was likely to draw out his peculiar ideas.
"You believe in fate, then, and the absence of moral freedom," he said
reflectively.
"I believe nothing. Belief is not the word. What is, is right. To assert
otherwise is an insult to the Supreme. He is all powerful, hence--wrong
cannot exist."
"I should be glad to hear your argument in support of that position."
"Argument! It is a self-evident truth! Argument is not necessary!
Argument is never necessary! If an assertion is not true no amount of
discussion will make it so, while the truth requires no support."
The other had lighted a pipe, and was smoking lazily.
"Well," he said, as the artist paused; "at least those who have crossed
over have solved the mystery."
"Oh, they have! And how do you know that anyone has crossed over? You do
not believe in the mortality nor the slumber of the soul; no more do I;
but time exists only with life. A man dies and in the same instant opens
his eyes upon eternity, and yet a million of years may have been swept
away in that instant. As a tired child you have fallen asleep. A moment
later you have been called by your mother to breakfast. And yet, in that
moment of dreamless sleep, the long winter night had passed. Adam, the
first man, closing his eyes in death; you and I, who will do the same
ten, twenty, forty years hence, and the generations who will follow us
for a million years, perhaps, will waken to eternity, if there be a
waking, in one and the same instant of time, without a knowledge of the
intervening years. There were no years. Eternity has no beginning, no
end, no measurement."
He paused a moment, then suddenly burst out again.
"Nothing in life is real--it is all a dream. You think your being is
reality and that you hear my voice speaking. I tell you it is but fancy.
We are the figures--the mimes in some vast hypnotic exhibition--the
shadows in some gigantic spirit's disordered dream. Hypnotism," he
continued, pursuing a line of thought which his impulsive words had
suggested, "has, in fact, proven that no one can distinguish the real
from the unreal. You remember, when we went to see Flint, the great
hypnotist, how his subjects passed from one condition to another and
took on any personality at the operator's will; capering and grimacing
about the stage with all the characteristics and even the facial
expression of monkeys, one minute, and simpering as silly school-girls
the next; and to them it was all real--as real as this room, these
bodies, these pictures are to us. I read some lines once that seemed to
express the idea:
"I sometimes think life but a dream
Of some great soul in some great sphere,
And what appear as truths but seem,
And what seem truths do but appear."
He repeated these words with slow earnestness, adding solemnly, "Who
knows? Who knows?"
The man who sat listening drew a long breath. He was a rich idler with a
good deal of worldly wisdom, but he loved and admired his erratic
friend. He felt that much of what he said was sophistry, wholly or in
part; but there was a charm about the earnest manner, the musical voice,
and the flashing brevity of statement, more pleasing to his ear than
sounder logic from a surer reasoner.
It was nearly dark now in the studio. The artist halted in his march,
and offered to light the gas.
"Not for the world, Julian; I am far too happy in the dark. I was just
thinking what a glorious agitator you would make; you would carry all
before you. I wonder you have never dabbled in politics or socialism.
Now I think of it, I have never heard you mention these things. I
suppose you belong to one or the other of the great parties, however."
"Politics? Party? Good heavens, no! I never meddle with such things; it
is one step lower than I have ever gone."
"But a man must stand somewhere. He that stands nowhere stands upon
nothing."
The artist paused before the open window and stood looking out upon the
dusk of the little scented garden. A faint reflected glimmer from some
far-away lamp dimly illuminated one side of his face, silhouetting his
striking profile sharply against a ground of blackness.
"If you mean," he began, slowly, "that I should have some opinions, then
I will tell you what they are.
"I believe neither in tariff nor trade. Currency nor coin. Traffic nor
toil. I believe in _nothing_--but the absolute freedom of every living
being. Freedom!--freedom from the curse of creeds, the blight of
bigotry, and the leprosy of the law. Freedom to go and to come, to live
and to die. Life without loathing, love without bondage. To live in some
sunlit valley, where the bud is ever bursting into flower, the flower
fading to fruit, and the fruit ripening to sustenance. The untouched
bosom of Nature would yield enough for her children had not the curse of
greed been implanted in their bosoms."
Goetze had turned away from the window and was again striding up and
down the floor in the dark.
"A beautiful poem, Julian," said the other, dreamily; "but a sort of
delightful barbarism, I'm afraid."
"Barbarism? No! A higher, purer intellectuality than we have ever yet
known--a civilization that knows not the curse of avarice nor the
miseries of crime--the weariness of wealth nor the pangs of poverty. The
garden of Eden is still about us, but we have torn up the flowers, and
desecrated it with the lust of gain. Man was never driven out of that
garden. Greed was planted in his heart and he destroyed it."
"Come," he continued, suddenly changing the subject, "I have made you
tired and hungry; let us go out, somewhere, to supper."
"Thanks," said the other, laughing; "I supposed a man in your condition
had no need of bodily sustenance. You are comfortably situated here,
Julian," he added, as they passed out into the street.
"Yes, it is quiet here--no bother with servants nor landladies. Once a
week my washerwoman comes and stays to put my establishment in order;
the rest of the time I am disturbed only by my sitters."
"You forget _me_."
"Yes, Harry," said the artist, taking his arm affectionately; "and by
you, of course."