THE GARDENER'S STORY, CONTINUED
"The new superstition spread at first over Syria and Africa; it won over
the seaports where the filthy rabble swarm, and, penetrating into Italy,
infected at first the courtesans and the slaves, and then made rapid
progress among the middle classes of the towns. But for a long while the
country-side remained undisturbed. As in the past, the villagers
consecrated a pine tree to Diana, and sprinkled it every year with the
blood of a young boar; they propitiated their Lares with the sacrifice
of a sow, and offered to Bacchus--benefactor of mankind--a kid of
dazzling whiteness, or if they were too poor for this, at least they had
a little wine and a little flour from the vineyard and from the fields
for their household gods. We had taught them that it sufficed to
approach the altar with clean hands, and that the gods rejoiced over a
modest offering.
"Nevertheless, the reign of Iahveh proclaimed its advent in a hundred
places by its extravagances. The Christians burnt books, overthrew
temples, set fire to the towns, and carried on their ravages as far as
the deserts. There, thousands of unhappy beings, turning their fury
against themselves, lacerated their sides with points of steel. And from
the whole earth the sighs of voluntary victims rose up to God like songs
of praise.
"My shadowy retreat could not escape for long from the fury of their
madness.
"On the summit of the hill which overlooked the olive woods, brightened
daily with the sounds of my flute, had stood since the earliest days of
the Pax Romana, a small marble temple, round as the huts of our
forefathers. It had no walls, but on a base of seven steps, sixteen
columns rose in a circle with the acanthus on the capitals, bearing a
cupola of white tiles. This cupola sheltered a statue of Love fashioning
his bow, the work of an Athenian sculptor. The child seemed to breathe,
joy was welling from his lips, all his limbs were harmonious and
polished. I honoured this image of the most powerful of all the gods,
and I taught the villagers to bear to him as an offering a cup crowned
with verbena and filled with wine two summers old.
"One day, when seated as my custom was at the feet of the god, pondering
precepts and songs, an unknown man, wild-looking, with unkempt hair,
approached the temple, sprang at one bound up the marble steps, and with
savage glee exclaimed:
"'Die, poisoner of souls, and joy and beauty perish with you.' He spoke
thus, and drawing an axe from his girdle raised it against the god. I
stayed his arm, I threw him down, and trampled him under my feet.
"'Demon,' he cried desperately, 'suffer me to overturn this idol, and
you may slay me afterwards.'
"I heeded not his atrocious plea, but leaned with all my might on his
chest, which cracked under my knee, and, squeezing his throat with my
two hands, I strangled the impious one.
"While he lay there, with purple face and lolling tongue, at the feet of
the smiling god, I went to purify myself at the sacred stream. Then
leaving this land, now the prey of the Christian, I passed through Gaul
and gained the banks of the Saône, whither Dionysus had, in days gone
by, carried the vine. The god of the Christians had not yet been
proclaimed to this happy people. They worshipped for its beauty a leafy
beech-tree, whose honoured branches swept the ground, and they hung
fillets of wool thereon. They also worshipped a sacred stream and set up
images of clay in a dripping grotto. They made offering of little
cheeses and a bowl of milk to the Nymphs of the woods and mountains.
"But soon an apostle of sorrow was sent to them by the new God. He was
drier than a smoked fish. Although attenuated with fasting and watching,
he taught with unabated ardour all manner of gloomy mysteries. He loved
suffering, and thought it good; his anger fell upon all that was
beautiful, comely, and joyous. The sacred tree fell beneath his hatchet.
He hated the Nymphs, because they were beautiful, and he flung
imprecations at them when their shining limbs gleamed among the leaves
at evening, and he held my melodious flute in aversion. The poor wretch
thought that there were certain forms of words wherewith to put to
flight the deathless spirits that dwell in the cool groves, and in the
depths of the woods and on the tops of the mountains. He thought to
conquer us with a few drops of water over which he had pronounced
certain words and made certain gestures. The Nymphs, to avenge
themselves, appeared to him at nightfall and inflamed him with desire
which the foolish knave thought animal; then they fled, their laughter
scattered like grain over the fields, while their victim lay tossing
with burning limbs on his couch of leaves. Thus do the divine nymphs
laugh at exorcisers, and mock the wicked and their sordid chastity.
"The apostle did not do as much harm as he wished, because his teaching
was given to the simple souls living in obedience to Nature, and because
the mediocrity of most of mankind is such that they gain but little from
the principles inculcated in them. The little wood in which I dwelt
belonged to a Gaul of senatorial family, who retained some traces of
Latin elegance. He loved his young freed-woman and shared with her his
bed of broidered purple. His slaves cultivated his garden and his
vineyard; he was a poet and sang, in imitation of Ausonius, Venus
whipping her son with roses. Although a Christian, he offered me milk,
fruit, and vegetables as if I were the genius of the place. In return I
charmed his idle moments with the music of my flute, and I gave him
happy dreams. In fact, these peaceful Gauls knew very little of Iahveh
and his son.
"But now behold fires looming on the horizon, and ashes driven by the
wind fall within our forest glades. Peasants come driving a long file of
waggons along the roads or urging their flocks before them. Cries of
terror rise from the villages, 'The Burgundians are upon us!'
"Now one horseman is seen, lance in hand, clad in shining bronze, his
long red hair falling in two plaits on his shoulders. Then come two,
then twenty, then thousands, wild and blood-stained; old men and
children they put to the sword, ay, even aged grandams whose grey hairs
cleave to the soles of the slaughterer's boots, mingled with the brains
of babes new-born. My young Gaul and his young freed-woman stain with
their blood the couch broidered with narcissi. The barbarians burn the
basilicas to roast their oxen whole, shatter the amphoræ, and drain the
wine in the mud of the flooded cellars. Their women accompany them,
huddled, half naked, in their war chariots. When the Senate, the
dwellers in the cities, and the leaders of the churches had perished in
the flames, the Burgundians, soddened with wine, lay down to slumber
beneath the arcades of the Forum. Two weeks later one of them might have
been seen smiling in his shaggy beard at the little child whom, on the
threshold of their dwelling, his fair-haired spouse gathers in her arms;
while another, kindling the fire of his forge, hammers out his iron with
measured stroke; another sings beneath the oak tree to his assembled
comrades of the gods and heroes of his race; and yet others spread out
for sale stones fallen from Heaven, aurochs' horns, and amulets. And the
former inhabitants of the country, regaining courage little by little,
crept from the woods where they had fled for refuge, and returned to
rebuild their burnt-down cabins, plough their fields, and prune their
vines.
"Once more life resumed its normal course; but those times were the most
wretched that mankind had yet experienced. The barbarians swarmed over
the whole Empire. Their ways were uncouth, and as they nurtured feelings
of vengeance and greed, they firmly believed in the ransom of sin.
"The fable of Iahveh and his son pleased them, and they believed it all
the more easily in that it was taught them by the Romans whom they knew
to be wiser than themselves, and to whose arts and mode of life they
yielded secret admiration. Alas! the heritage of Greece and Rome had
fallen into the hands of fools. All knowledge was lost. In those days it
was held to be a great merit to sing among the choir, and those who
remembered a few sentences from the Bible passed for prodigious
geniuses. There were still poets as there were birds, but their verse
went lame in every foot. The ancient demons, the good genii of mankind,
shorn of their honours, driven forth, pursued, hunted down, remained
hidden in the woods. There, if they still showed themselves to men, they
adopted, to hold them in awe, a terrible face, a red, green, or black
skin, baleful eyes, an enormous mouth fringed with boars' teeth, horns,
a tail, and sometimes a human face on their bellies. The nymphs remained
fair, and the barbarians, ignorant of the winsome names they bore in
other days, called them fairies, and, imputing to them a capricious
character and puerile tastes, both feared and loved them.
"We had suffered a grievous fall, and our ranks were sadly thinned;
nevertheless we did not lose courage and, maintaining a laughing aspect
and a benevolent spirit, we were in those direful days the real friends
of mankind. Perceiving that the barbarians grew daily less sombre and
less ferocious, we lent ourselves to the task of conversing with them
under all sorts of disguises. We incited them, with a thousand
precautions, and by prudent circumlocutions, not to acknowledge the old
Iahveh as an infallible master, not blindly to obey his orders, and not
to fear his menaces. When need was, we had recourse to magic. We
exhorted them unceasingly to study nature and to strive to discover the
traces of ancient wisdom.
"These warriors from the North--rude though they were--were acquainted
with some mechanical arts. They thought they saw combats in the heavens;
the sound of the harp drew tears from their eyes; and perchance they had
souls capable of greater things than the degenerate Gauls and Romans
whose lands they had invaded. They knew not how to hew stone or to
polish marble; but they caused porphyry and columns to be brought from
Rome and from Ravenna; their chief men took for their seal a gem
engraved by a Greek in the days when Beauty reigned supreme. They raised
walls with bricks, cunningly arranged like ears of corn, and succeeded
in building quite pleasing-looking churches with cornices upheld by
consoles depicting grim faces, and heavy capitals whereon were
represented monsters devouring one another.
"We taught them letters and sciences. A mouthpiece of their god, one
Gerbert, took lessons in physics, arithmetic, and music with us, and it
was said that he had sold us his soul. Centuries passed, and man's ways
remained violent. It was a world given up to fire and blood. The
successors of the studious Gerbert, not content with the possession of
souls (the profits one gains thereby are lighter than air), wished to
possess bodies also. They pretended that their universal and
prescriptive monarchy was held from a fisherman on the lake of Tiberias.
One of them thought for a moment to prevail over the loutish Germanus,
successor to Augustus. But finally the spiritual had to come to terms
with the temporal, and the nations were torn between two opposing
masters.
"Nations took shape amid horrible tumult. On every side were wars,
famines, and internecine conflicts. Since they attributed the
innumerable ills that fell upon them to their God, they called him the
Most Good, not by way of irony, but because to them the best was he who
smote the hardest. In those days of violence, to give myself leisure for
study I adopted a _rôle_ which may surprise you, but which was
exceedingly wise.
"Between the Saône and the mountains of Charolais, where the cattle
pasture, there lies a wooded hill sloping gently down to fields watered
by a clear stream. There stood a monastery celebrated throughout the
Christian world. I hid my cloven feet under a robe and became a monk in
this Abbey, where I lived peacefully, sheltered from the men at arms who
to friend or foe alike showed themselves equally exacting. Man, who had
relapsed into childhood, had all his lessons to learn over again.
Brother Luke, whose cell was next to mine, studied the habits of animals
and taught us that the weasel conceives her young within her ear. I
culled simples in the fields wherewith to soothe the sick, who until
then were made by way of treatment to touch the relics of saints. In the
Abbey were several demons similar to myself whom I recognised by their
cloven feet and by their kindly speech. We joined forces in our
endeavours to polish the rough mind of the monks.
"While the little children played at hop-scotch under the Abbey walls
our friends the monks devoted themselves to another game equally
unprofitable, at which, nevertheless, I joined them, for one must kill
time,--that, when one comes to think of it, is the sole business of
life. Our game was a game of words which pleased our coarse yet subtle
minds, set school fulminating against school, and put all Christendom in
an uproar. We formed ourselves into two opposing camps. One camp
maintained that before there were apples there was the Apple; that
before there were popinjays there was the Popinjay; that before there
were lewd and greedy monks there was the Monk, Lewdness and Greed; that
before there were feet and before there were posteriors in this world
the kick in the posterior must have had existence for all eternity in
the bosom of God. The other camp replied that, on the contrary, apples
gave man the idea of the apple; popinjays the idea of the popinjay;
monks the idea of the monk, greed and lewdness, and that the kick in the
posterior existed only after having been duly given and received. The
players grew heated and came to fisticuffs. I was an adherent of the
second party, which satisfied my reason better, and which was, in fact,
condemned by the Council of Soissons.
"Meanwhile, not content with fighting among themselves, vassal against
suzerain, suzerain against vassal, the great lords took it into their
heads to go and fight in the East. They said, as well as I can remember,
that they were going to deliver the tomb of the son of God.
"They said so, but their adventurous and covetous spirit excited them to
go forth and seek lands, women, slaves, gold, myrrh, and incense. These
expeditions, need it be said, proved disastrous; but our thick-headed
compatriots brought back with them the knowledge of certain crafts and
oriental arts and a taste for luxury. Henceforth we had less difficulty
in making them work and in putting them in the way of inventions. We
built wonderfully beautiful churches, with daringly pierced arches,
lancet-shaped windows, high towers, thousands of pointed spires, which,
rising in the sky towards Iahveh, bore at one and the same time the
prayers of the humble and the threats of the proud, for it was all as
much our doing as the work of men's hands; and it was a strange sight to
see men and demons working together at a cathedral, each one sawing,
polishing, collecting stones, graving, on capital and on cornice,
nettles, thorns, thistles, wild parsley, and wild strawberry,--carving
faces of virgins and saints and weird figures of serpents, fishes with
asses' heads, apes scratching their buttocks; each one, in fact, putting
his own particular talent,--mocking, sublime, grotesque, modest, or
audacious,--into the work and making of it all a harmonious cacophony, a
rapturous anthem of joy and sorrow, a Babel of victory. At our
instigation the carvers, the gold-smiths, the enamellers, accomplished
marvels and all the sumptuary arts flourished at once; there were silks
at Lyons, tapestries at Arras, linen at Rheims, cloth at Rouen. The good
merchants rode on their palfreys to the fairs, bearing pieces of velvet
and brocade, embroideries, orfrays, jewels, vessels of silver, and
illuminated books. Strollers and players set up their trestles in the
churches and in the public squares, and represented, according to their
lights, simple chronicles of Heaven, Earth, and Hell. Women decked
themselves in splendid raiment and lisped of love.
"In the spring when the sky was blue, nobles and peasants were possessed
with the desire to make merry in the flower-strewn meadows. The fiddler
tuned his instrument, and ladies, knights and demoiselles, townsfolk,
villagers and maidens, holding hands, began the dance. But suddenly War,
Pestilence, and Famine entered the circle, and Death, tearing the violin
from the fiddler's hands, led the dance. Fire devoured village and
monastery. The men-at-arms hanged the peasants on the sign-posts at the
cross-roads when they were unable to pay ransom, and bound pregnant
women to tree-trunks, where at night the wolves came and devoured the
fruit within the womb. The poor people lost their senses. Sometimes,
peace being re-established, and good times come again, they were seized
with mad, unreasoning terror, abandoned their homes, and rushed hither
and thither in troops, half naked, tearing themselves with iron hooks,
and singing. I do not accuse Iahveh and his son of all this evil. Many
ill things occurred without him and even in spite of him. But where I
recognise the instigation of the All Good (as they called him) was in
the custom instituted by his pastors, and established throughout
Christendom, of burning, to the sound of bells and the singing of
psalms, both men and women who, taught by the demons, professed,
concerning this God, opinions of their own."