I
‘WILL you permit me, Aherne,’ I said, ‘to ask you a question, which I
have wanted to ask you for years, and have not asked because we have
grown nearly strangers? Why did you refuse the berretta, and almost
at the last moment? When you and I lived together, you cared neither
for wine, women, nor money, and had thoughts for nothing but theology
and mysticism.’ I had watched through dinner for a moment to put my
question, and ventured now, because he had thrown off a little of
the reserve and indifference which, ever since his last return from
Italy, had taken the place of our once close friendship. He had just
questioned me, too, about certain private and almost sacred things, and
my frankness had earned, I thought, a like frankness from him.
When I began to speak he was lifting to his lips a glass of that old
wine which he could choose so well and valued so little; and while
I spoke, he set it slowly and meditatively upon the table and held
it there, its deep red light dyeing his long delicate fingers. The
impression of his face and form, as they were then, is still vivid
with me, and is inseparable from another and fanciful impression:
the impression of a man holding a flame in his naked hand. He was to
me, at that moment, the supreme type of our race, which, when it has
risen above, or is sunken below, the formalisms of half-education and
the rationalisms of conventional affirmation and denial, turns away,
unless my hopes for the world and for the Church have made me blind,
from practicable desires and intuitions towards desires so unbounded
that no human vessel can contain them, intuitions so immaterial that
their sudden and far-off fire leaves heavy darkness about hand and
foot. He had the nature, which is half monk, half soldier of fortune,
and must needs turn action into dreaming, and dreaming into action;
and for such there is no order, no finality, no contentment in this
world. When he and I had been students in Paris, we had belonged to a
little group which devoted itself to speculations about alchemy and
mysticism. More orthodox in most of his beliefs than Michael Robartes,
he had surpassed him in a fanciful hatred of all life, and this hatred
had found expression in the curious paradox--half borrowed from some
fanatical monk, half invented by himself--that the beautiful arts were
sent into the world to overthrow nations, and finally life herself, by
sowing everywhere unlimited desires, like torches thrown into a burning
city. This idea was not at the time, I believe, more than a paradox,
a plume of the pride of youth; and it was only after his return to
Ireland that he endured the fermentation of belief which is coming upon
our people with the reawakening of their imaginative life.
Presently he stood up, saying: ‘Come, and I will show you, for you at
any rate will understand,’ and taking candles from the table, he lit
the way into the long paved passage that led to his private chapel. We
passed between the portraits of the Jesuits and priests--some of no
little fame--his family had given to the Church; and engravings and
photographs of pictures that had especially moved him; and the few
paintings his small fortune, eked out by an almost penurious abstinence
from the things most men desire, had enabled him to buy in his travels.
The pictures that I knew best, for they had hung there longest,
whether reproductions or originals, were of the Sienese School, which
he had studied for a long time, claiming that it alone of the schools
of the world pictured not the world but what is revealed to saints in
their dreams and visions. The Sienese alone among Italians, he would
say, could not or would not represent the pride of life, the pleasure
in swift movement or sustaining strength, or voluptuous flesh. They
were so little interested in these things that there often seemed to
be no human body at all under the robe of the saint, but they could
represent by a bowed head, or uplifted face, man’s reverence before
Eternity as no others could, and they were at their happiest when
mankind had dwindled to a little group silhouetted upon a golden abyss,
as if they saw the world habitually from far off. When I had praised
some school that had dipped deeper into life, he would profess to
discover a more intense emotion than life knew in those dark outlines.
‘Put, even Francesca, who felt the supernatural as deeply,’ he would
say, ‘beside the work of Siena, and one finds a faint impurity in his
awe, a touch of ghostly terror, where love and humbleness had best
been all.’ He had often told me of his hope that by filling his mind
with those holy pictures he would help himself to attain at last to
vision and ecstasy, and of his disappointment at never getting more
than dreams of a curious and broken beauty. But of late he had added
pictures of a different kind, French symbolistic pictures which he had
bought for a few pounds from little-known painters, English and French
pictures of the School of the English Pre-Raphaelites; and now he stood
for a moment and said, ‘I have changed my taste. I am fascinated a
little against my will by these faces, where I find the pallor of souls
trembling between the excitement of the flesh and the excitement of the
spirit, and by landscapes that are created by heightening the obscurity
and disorder of nature. These landscapes do not stir the imagination
to the energies of sanctity but as to orgaic dancing and prophetic
frenzy.’ I saw with some resentment new images where the old ones had
often made that long gray, dim, empty, echoing passage become to my
eyes a vestibule of Eternity.
Almost every detail of the chapel, which we entered by a narrow Gothic
door, whose threshold had been worn smooth by the secret worshippers of
the penal times, was vivid in my memory; for it was in this chapel that
I had first, and when but a boy, been moved by the mediævalism which
is now, I think, the governing influence in my life. The only thing
that seemed new was a square bronze box which stood upon the altar
before the six unlighted candles and the ebony crucifix, and was like
those made in ancient times of more precious substances to hold the
sacred books. Aherne made me sit down on an oak bench, and having bowed
very low before the crucifix, took the bronze box from the altar, and
sat down beside me with the box upon his knees.
‘You will perhaps have forgotten,’ he said, ‘most of what you have
read about Joachim of Flora, for he is little more than a name to even
the well read. He was an abbot in Cortale in the twelfth century,
and is best known for his prophecy, in a book called _Expositio in
Apocalypsin_, that the Kingdom of the Father was passed, the Kingdom
of the Son passing, the Kingdom of the Spirit yet to come. The
Kingdom of the Spirit was to be a complete triumph of the Spirit, the
_spiritualis intelligentia_ he called it, over the dead letter. He
had many followers among the more extreme Franciscans, and these were
accused of possessing a secret book of his called the _Liber Inducens
in Evangelium Æternum_. Again and again groups of visionaries were
accused of possessing this terrible book, in which the freedom of the
Renaissance lay hidden, until at last Pope Alexander IV. had it found
and cast into the flames. I have here the greatest treasure the world
contains. I have a copy of that book; and see what great artists have
made the robes in which it is wrapped. The greater portion of the book
itself is illuminated in the Byzantine style, which so few care for
to-day, but which moves me because these tall, emaciated angels and
saints seem to have less relation to the world about us than to an
abstract pattern of flowing lines, that suggest an imagination absorbed
in the contemplation of Eternity. Even if you do not care for so formal
an art, you cannot help seeing that work where there is so much gold,
and of that purple colour which has gold dissolved in it, was valued at
a great price in its day. But it was only at the Renaissance the labour
was spent upon it which has made it the priceless thing it is. The
wooden boards of the cover show by the astrological allegories painted
upon them, as by the style of painting itself, some craftsman of the
school of Francesco Cossi of Ferrara, but the gold clasps and hinges
are known to be the work of Benvenuto Cellini, who made likewise the
bronze box and covered it with gods and demons, whose eyes are closed,
to signify an absorption in the inner light.
I took the book in my hands and began turning over the gilded,
many-coloured pages, holding it close to the candle to discover the
texture of the paper.
‘Where did you get this amazing book?’ I said. ‘If genuine, and I
cannot judge by this light, you have discovered one of the most
precious things in the world.’
‘It is certainly genuine,’ he replied. ‘When the original was
destroyed, one copy alone remained, and was in the hands of a
lute-player of Florence, and from him it passed to his son, and so
from generation to generation until it came to the lute-player who
was father to Benvenuto Cellini, and from Benvenuto Cellini to that
Cardinal of Ferrara who released him from prison, and from him to
a natural son, so from generation to generation, the story of its
wandering passing on with it, until it came into the possession of
the family of Aretino, and to Giulio Aretino, an artist and worker in
metals, and student of the kabalistic heresies of Pico della Mirandola.
He spent many nights with me at Rome, discussing philosophy; and at
last I won his confidence so perfectly that he showed me this, his
greatest treasure; and, finding how much I valued it, and feeling that
he himself was growing old and beyond the help of its teaching, he sold
it to me for no great sum, considering its great preciousness.’
‘What is the doctrine?’ I said. ‘Some mediæval straw-splitting about
the nature of the Trinity, which is only useful to-day to show how many
things are unimportant to us, which once shook the world?’
‘I could never make you understand,’ he said, with a sigh, ‘that
nothing is unimportant in belief, but even you will admit that this
book goes to the heart. Do you see the tables on which the commandments
were written in Latin?’ I looked to the end of the room, opposite to
the altar, and saw that the two marble tablets were gone, and that
two large empty tablets of ivory, like large copies of the little
tablets we set over our desks, had taken their place. ‘It has swept
the commandments of the Father away,’ he went on, ‘and displaced the
commandments of the Son by the commandments of the Holy Spirit. The
first book is called _Fractura Tabularum_. In the first chapter it
mentions the names of the great artists who made them graven things
and the likeness of many things, and adored them and served them; and
the second the names of the great wits who took the name of the Lord
their God in vain; and that long third chapter, set with the emblems
of sanctified faces, and having wings upon its borders, is the praise
of breakers of the seventh day and wasters of the six days, who yet
lived comely and pleasant days. Those two chapters tell of men and
women who railed upon their parents, remembering that their god was
older than the god of their parents; and that which has the sword of
Michael for an emblem commends the kings that wrought secret murder and
so won for their people a peace that was _amore somnoque gravata et
vestibus versicoloribus_, heavy with love and sleep and many-coloured
raiment; and that with the pale star at the closing has the lives of
the noble youths who loved the wives of others and were transformed
into memories, which have transformed many poorer hearts into sweet
flames; and that with the winged head is the history of the robbers who
lived upon the sea or in the desert, lives which it compares to the
twittering of the string of a bow, _nervi stridentis instar_; and those
two last, that are fire and gold, are devoted to the satirists who bore
false witness against their neighbours and yet illustrated eternal
wrath, and to those that have coveted more than other men the house of
God, and all things that are His, which no man has seen and handled,
except in madness and in dreams.
‘The second book is called _Lex Secreta_, and describes the true
inspiration of action, the only Eternal Evangel; and ends with a
vision, which he saw among the mountains of La Sila, of his disciples
sitting throned in the blue deep of the air, and laughing aloud, with
a laughter that was like the rustling of the wings of Time: _Cœlis in
cœruleis ridentes sedebant discipuli mei super thronos: talis erat
risus, qualis temporis pennati susurrus._’
‘I know little of Joachim of Flora,’ I said, ‘except that Dante set him
in Paradise among the great doctors. If he held a heresy so singular, I
cannot understand how no rumours of it came to the ears of Dante; and
Dante made no peace with the enemies of the Church.’
‘Joachim of Flora acknowledged openly the authority of the Church, and
even asked that all his published writings, and those to be published
by his desire after his death, should be submitted to the censorship of
the Pope. He considered that those whose work was to live and not to
reveal were children and that the Pope was their Father; but he taught
in secret that certain others, and in always increasing numbers, were
elected, not to live, but to reveal that hidden substance of God which
is colour and music and softness and a sweet odour; and that these
have no father but the Holy Spirit. Just as poets and painters and
musicians labour at their works, building them with lawless and lawful
things alike, so long as they embody the beauty that is beyond the
grave, these children of the Holy Spirit labour at their moments with
eyes upon the shining substance on which Time has heaped the refuse of
creation; for the world only exists to be a tale in the ears of coming
generations; and terror and content, birth and death, love and hatred,
and the fruit of the Tree, are but instruments for that supreme art
which is to win us from life and gather us into eternity like doves
into their dove-cots.
‘I shall go away in a little while and travel into many lands, that I
may know all accidents and destinies, and when I return, will write
my secret law upon those ivory tablets, just as poets and romance
writers have written the principles of their art in prefaces; and when
I know what principle of life, discoverable at first by imagination
and instinct, I am to express, I will gather my pupils that they may
discover their law in the study of my law, as poets and painters
discover their own art of expression by the study of some Master. I
know nothing certain as yet but this--I am to become completely alive,
that is, completely passionate, for beauty is only another name for
perfect passion. I shall create a world where the whole lives of men
shall be articulated and simplified as if seventy years were but one
moment, or as they were the leaping of a fish or the opening of a
flower.’
He was pacing up and down, and I listened to the fervour of his words
and watched the excitement of his gestures with not a little concern.
I had been accustomed to welcome the most singular speculations, and
had always found them as harmless as the Persian cat who half closes
her meditative eyes and stretches out her long claws before my fire.
But now I would battle in the interests of orthodoxy, even of the
commonplace: and yet could find nothing better to say than: ‘It is
not necessary to judge everyone by the law, for we have also Christ’s
commandment of love.’
He turned and said, looking at me with shining eyes: ‘Jonathan Swift
made a soul for the gentlemen of this city by hating his neighbour as
himself.’
‘At any rate, you cannot deny that to teach so dangerous a doctrine is
to accept a terrible responsibility.’
‘Leonardo da Vinci,’ he replied, ‘has this noble sentence: “The hope
and desire of returning home to one’s former state is like the moth’s
desire for the light; and the man who with constant longing awaits
each new month and new year, deeming that the things he longs for are
ever too late in coming, does not perceive that he is longing for his
own destruction.” How, then, can the pathway which will lead us into
the heart of God be other than dangerous? Why should you, who are no
materialist, cherish the continuity and order of the world as those do
who have only the world? You do not value the writers who will express
nothing unless their reason understands how it will make what is called
the right more easy; why, then, will you deny a like freedom to the
supreme art, the art which is the foundation of all arts? Yes, I shall
send out of this chapel saints, lovers, rebels and prophets: souls who
will surround themselves with peace, as with a nest made with grass;
and others over whom I shall weep. The dust shall fall for many years
over this little box; and then I shall open it; and the tumults, which
are, perhaps, the flames of the last day, shall come from under the
lid.’
I did not reason with him that night, because his excitement was great
and I feared to make him angry; and when I called at his house a few
days later, he was gone and his house was locked up and empty. I have
deeply regretted my failure both to combat his heresy and to test the
genuineness of his strange book. Since my conversion I have indeed done
penance for an error which I was only able to measure after some years.