_IMAGINATIVE REPRESENTATIONS_
All poems might be called "imaginative representations." But the class
of poems in Browning's work to which I give that name stands apart. It
includes such poems as _Cleon, Caliban on Setebos, Fra Lippo Lippi_, the
_Epistle of Karshish_, and they isolate themselves, not only in
Browning's poetry, but in English poetry. They have some resemblance in
aim and method to the monologues of Tennyson, such as the _Northern
Farmer_ or _Rizpah_, but their aim is much wider than Tennyson's, and
their method far more elaborate and complex.
What do they represent? To answer this is to define within what limits I
give them the name of "imaginative representations." They are not only
separate studies of individual men as they breathed and spoke; face,
form, tricks of body recorded; intelligence, character, temper of mind,
spiritual aspiration made clear--Tennyson did that; they are also
studies of these individual men--Cleon, Karshish and the rest--as
general types, representative images, of the age in which they lived; or
of the school of art to which they belonged; or of the crisis in
theology, religion, art, or the social movement which took place while
the men they paint were alive, and which these men led, on formed, or
followed. That is their main element, and it defines them.
They are not dramatic. Their action and ideas are confined to one
person, and their circumstance and scenery to one time and place. But
Browning, unlike Tennyson, filled the background of the stage on which
he placed his single figure with a multitude of objects, or animals, or
natural scenery, or figures standing round or in motion; and these give
additional vitality and interest to the representation. Again, they are
short, as short as a soliloquy or a letter or a conversation in a
street. Shortness belongs to this form of poetic work--a form to which
Browning gave a singular intensity. It follows that they must not be
argumentative beyond what is fitting. Nor ought they to glide into the
support of a thesis, or into didactic addresses, as _Bishop Blougram_
and _Mr. Sludge_ do. These might be called treatises, and are apart from
the kind of poem of which I speak. They begin, indeed, within its
limits, but they soon transgress those limits; and are more properly
classed with poems which, also representative, have not the brevity, the
scenery, the lucidity, the objective representation, the concentration
of the age into one man's mind, which mark out these poems from the
rest, and isolate them into a class of their own.
The voice we hear in them is rarely the voice of Browning; nor is the
mind of their personages his mind, save so far as he is their creator.
There are a few exceptions to this, but, on the whole, Browning has, in
writing these poems, stripped himself of his own personality. He had, by
creative power, made these men; cast them off from himself, and put them
into their own age. They talk their minds out in character with their
age. Browning seems to watch them, and to wonder how they got out of his
hands and became men. That is the impression they make, and it
predicates a singular power of imagination. Like the Prometheus of
Goethe, the poet sits apart, moulding men and then endowing them with
life. But he cannot tell, any more than Prometheus, what they will say
and do after he has made them. He does tell, of course, but that is not
our impression. Our impression is that they live and talk of their own
accord, so vitally at home they are in the country, the scenery, and the
thinking of the place and time in which he has imagined them.
Great knowledge seems required for this, and Browning had indeed an
extensive knowledge not so much of the historical facts, as of the
tendencies of thought which worked in the times wherein he placed his
men. But the chief knowledge he had, through his curious reading, was of
a multitude of small intimate details of the customs, clothing,
architecture, dress, popular talk and scenery of the towns and country
of Italy from the thirteenth century up to modern times. To every one of
these details--such as are found in _Sordello_, in _Fra Lippo Lippi_, in
the _Bishop orders his Tomb at St. Praxed's Church_--his vivid and
grasping imagination gave an uncommon reality.
But even without great knowledge such poems may be written, if the poet
have imagination, and the power to execute in metrical words what has
been imagined. _Theology in the Island_ and the prologue to a _Death in
the Desert_ are examples of this. Browning knew nothing of that island
in the undiscovered seas where Prosper dwelt, but he made all the
scenery of it and all its animal life, and he re-created Caliban. He had
never seen the cave in the desert where he placed John to die, nor the
sweep of rocky hills and sand around it, nor the Bactrian waiting with
the camels. Other poets, of course, have seen unknown lands and alien
folks, but he has seen them more vividly, more briefly, more forcibly.
His imagination was objective enough.
But it was as subjective as it was objective. He saw the soul of Fra
Lippo Lippi and the soul of his time as vividly as he saw the streets of
Florence at night, the watch, the laughing girls, and the palace of the
Medici round the corner. It was a remarkable combination, and it is by
this combination of the subjective and objective imagination that he
draws into some dim approach to Shakespeare; and nowhere closer than in
these poems.
Again, not only the main character of each of these poems, but all the
figures introduced (sometimes only in a single line) to fill up the
background, are sketched with as true and vigorous a pencil as the main
figure; are never out of place or harmony with the whole, and are justly
subordinated. The young men who stand round the Bishop's bed when he
orders his tomb, the watchmen in _Fra Lippo Lippi_, the group of St.
John's disciples, are as alive, and as much in tune with the whole, as
the servants and tenants of Justice Shallow. Again, it is not only the
lesser figures, but the scenery of these poems which is worth our study.
That also is closely fitted to the main subject. The imagination paints
it for that, and nothing else. It would not fit any other subject. For
imagination, working at white heat, cannot do what is out of harmony; no
more than a great musician can introduce a false chord. All goes
together in these poems--scenery, characters, time, place and action.
Then, also, the extent of their range is remarkable. Their subjects
begin with savage man making his god out of himself. They pass through
Greek mythology to early Christian times; from Artemis and Pan to St.
John dying in the desert. Then, still in the same period, while Paul was
yet alive, he paints another aspect of the time in Cleon the rich
artist, the friend of kings, who had reached the top of life, included
all the arts in himself, yet dimly craved for more than earth could
give. From these times the poems pass on to the early and late
Renaissance, and from that to the struggle for freedom in Italy, and
from that to modern life in Europe. This great range illustrates the
penetration and the versatility of his genius. He could place us with
ease and truth at Corinth, Athens or Rome, in Paris, Vienna or London;
and wherever we go with him we are at home.
One word more must be said about the way a great number of these poems
arose. They leaped up in his imagination full-clad and finished at a
single touch from the outside. _Caliban upon Setebos_ took its rise from
a text in the Bible which darted into his mind as he read the _Tempest_.
_Cleon_ arose as he read that verse in St. Paul's speech at Athens, "As
certain also of your own poets have said." I fancy that _An Epistle of
Karshish_ was born one day when he read those two stanzas in _In
Memoriam_ about Lazarus, and imagined how the subject would come to him.
_Fra Lippo Lippi_ slipped into his mind one day at the Belle Arti at
Florence as he stood before the picture described in the poem, and
walked afterwards at night through the streets of Florence. These fine
things are born in a moment, and come into our world from poet, painter,
and musician, full-grown; built, like Aladdin's palace, with all their
jewels, in a single night. They are inexplicable by any scientific
explanation, as inexplicable as genius itself. When have the
hereditarians explained Shakespeare, Mozart, Turner? When has the
science of the world explained the birth of a lyric of Burns, a song of
Beethoven's, or a drawing of Raffaelle? Let these gentlemen veil their
eyes, and confess their inability to explain the facts. For it is fact
they touch. "Full fathom five thy father lies"--that song of Shakespeare
exists. The overture to Don Giovanni is a reality. We can see the
Bacchus and Ariadne at the National Gallery and the Theseus at the
Museum. These are facts; but they are a million million miles beyond the
grasp of any science. Nay, the very smallest things of their kind, the
slightest water-colour sketch of Turner, a half-finished clay sketch of
Donatello, the little song done in the corner of a provincial paper by a
working clerk in a true poetic hour, are not to be fathomed by the most
far-descending plummet of the scientific understanding. These things are
in that superphysical world into which, however closely he saw and
dealt with his characters in the world of the senses, the conscience, or
the understanding, Browning led them all at last.
The first of these poems is _Natural Theology on the Island; or, Caliban
upon Setebos_. Caliban, with the instincts and intelligence of an early
savage, has, in an hour of holiday, set himself to conceive what
Setebos, his mother's god, is like in character. He talks out the
question with himself, and because he is in a vague fear lest Setebos,
hearing him soliloquise about him, should feel insulted and swing a
thunder-bolt at him, he not only hides himself in the earth, but speaks
in the third person, as if it was not he that spoke; hoping in that
fashion to trick his God.
Browning, conceiving in himself the mind and temper of an honest,
earthly, imaginative savage--who is developed far enough to build
nature-myths in their coarse early forms--architectures the character of
Setebos out of the habits, caprices, fancies, likes and dislikes, and
thoughts of Caliban; and an excellent piece of penetrative imagination
it is. Browning has done nothing better, though he has done as well.
But Browning's Caliban is not a single personage. No one savage, at no
one time, would have all these thoughts of his God. He is the
representative of what has been thought, during centuries, by many
thousands of men; the concentration into one mind of the ground-thoughts
of early theology. At one point, as if Browning wished to sketch the
beginning of a new theological period, Caliban represents a more
advanced thought than savage man conceives. This is Caliban's
imagination of a higher being than Setebos who is the capricious creator
and power of the earth--of the "Quiet," who is master of Setebos and
whose temper is quite different; who also made the stars, things which
Caliban, with a touch of Browning's subtle thought, separates from the
sun and moon and earth. It is plain from this, and from the whole
argument which is admirably conducted, that Caliban is an intellectual
personage, too long neglected; and Prospero, could he have understood
his nature, would have enjoyed his conversation. Renan agreed with
Browning in this estimate of his intelligence, and made him the
foundation of a philosophical play.
There is some slight reason for this in Shakespeare's invention. He
lifts Caliban in intellect, even in feeling, far above Trinculo,
Stephano, the Boatswain and the rest of the common men. The objection,
however, has been made that Browning makes him too intelligent. The
answer is that Browning is not drawing Caliban only, but embodying in an
imagined personage the thoughts about God likely to be invented by early
man during thousands of years--and this accounts for the insequences in
Caliban's thinking. They are not the thoughts of one but of several men.
Yet a certain poetic unity is given to them by the unity of place. The
continual introduction of the landscape to be seen from his refuge knits
the discursive thinking of the savage into a kind of unity. We watch him
lying in the thick water-slime of the hollow, his head on the rim of it
propped by his hands, under the cave's mouth, hidden by the gadding
gourds and vines; looking out to sea and watching the wild animals that
pass him by--and out of this place he does not stir.
In Shakespeare's _Tempest_ Caliban is the gross, brutal element of the
earth and is opposed to Ariel, the light, swift, fine element of the
air. Caliban curses Prospero with the evils of the earth, with the
wicked dew of the fen and the red plague of the sea-marsh. Browning's
Caliban does not curse at all. When he is not angered, or in a caprice,
he is a good-natured creature, full of animal enjoyment. He loves to lie
in the cool slush, like a lias-lizard, shivering with earthy pleasure
when his spine is tickled by the small eft-things that course along it,
Run in and out each arm, and make him laugh.
The poem is full of these good, close, vivid realisations of the brown
prolific earth.
Browning had his own sympathy with Caliban Nor does Shakespeare make him
altogether brutish. He has been so educated by his close contact with
nature that his imagination has been kindled. His very cursing is
imaginative:
As wicked dew as e'er my mother brushed
With raven's feather from unwholesome fen
Drop on you both; a south-west blow on you
And blister you all o'er.
Stephano and Trinculo, vulgar products of civilisation, could never have
said that. Moreover, Shakespeare's Caliban, like Browning's, has the
poetry of the earth-man in him. When Ariel plays, Trinculo and Stephano
think it must be the devil, and Trinculo is afraid: but Caliban loves
and enjoys the music for itself:
Be not afear'd; the isle is full of noises,
Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not.
Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments
Will hum about mine ears, and sometimes voices
That, if I then had waked after long sleep.
Will make me sleep again.
Stephano answers, like a modern millionaire:
This will prove a brave kingdom for me, where I shall have
my music for nothing.
Browning's Caliban is also something of a poet, and loves the Nature of
whom he is a child. We are not surprised when he
looks out o'er yon sea which sunbeams cross
And recross till they weave a spider web
(Meshes of fire some great fish breaks at times)
though the phrase is full of a poet's imagination, for so the living
earth would see and feel the sea. It belongs also to Caliban's nearness
to the earth that he should have the keenest of eyes for animals, and
that poetic pleasure in watching their life which, having seen them
vividly, could describe them vividly. I quote one example from the poem;
there are many others:
'Thinketh, He made thereat the sun, this isle,
Trees and the fowls here, beast and creeping thing.
Yon otter, sleek-wet, black, lithe as a leech;
Yon auk, one fire-eye in a ball of foam,
That floats and feeds; a certain badger brown
He hath watched hunt with that slant white-wedge eye
By moonlight; and the pie with the long tongue
That pricks deep into oakwarts for a worm,
And says a plain word when she finds her prize,
But will not eat the ants; the ants themselves
That build a wall of seeds and settled stalks
About their hole--
There are two more remarks to make about this poem. First, that
Browning makes Caliban create a dramatic world in which Miranda, Ariel,
and he himself play their parts, and in which he assumes the part of
Prosper. That is, Caliban invents a new world out of the persons he
knows, but different from them, and a second self outside himself. No
lower animal has ever conceived of such a creation. Secondly, Browning
makes Caliban, in order to exercise his wit and his sense of what is
beautiful, fall to making something--a bird, an insect, or a building
which he ornaments, which satisfies him for a time, and which he then
destroys to make a better. This is art in its beginning; and the highest
animal we know of is incapable of it. We know that the men of the caves
were capable of it. When they made a drawing, a piece of carving, they
were unsatisfied until they had made a better. When they made a story
out of what they knew and saw, they went on to make more. Creation,
invention, art--this, independent entirely of the religious desire,
makes the infinite gulf which divides man from the highest animals.
I do not mean, in this book, to speak of the theology of Caliban, though
the part of the poem which concerns the origin of sacrifice is well
worth our attention. But the poem may be recommended to those
theological persons who say there is no God; and to that large class of
professional theologians, whose idea of a capricious, jealous,
suddenly-angered God, without any conscience except his sense of power
to do as he pleases, is quite in harmony with Caliban's idea of Setebos.
The next of these "imaginative representations" is the poem called
_Cleon_. Cleon is a rich and famous artist of the Grecian isles, alive
while St. Paul was still making his missionary journeys, just at the
time when the Græco-Roman culture had attained a height of refinement,
but had lost originating power; when it thought it had mastered all the
means for a perfect life, but was, in reality, trembling in a deep
dissatisfaction on the edge of its first descent into exhaustion. Then,
as everything good had been done in the art of the past, cultivated men
began to ask "Was there anything worth doing?" "Was life itself worth
living?"; questions never asked by those who are living. Or "What is
life in its perfection, and when shall we have it?"; a question also not
asked by those who live in the morning of a new æra, when the world--as
in Elizabeth's days, as in 1789, as perhaps it may be in a few years--is
born afresh; but which is asked continually in the years when a great
movement of life has passed its culminating point and has begun to
decline. Again and again the world has heard these questions; in Cleon's
time, and when the Renaissance had spent its force, and at the end of
the reign of Louis XIV., and before Elizabeth's reign had closed, and
about 1820 in England, and of late years also in our society. This is
the temper and the time that Browning embodies in Cleon, who is the
incarnation of a culture which is already feeling that life is going out
of it.
Protus, the king, has written to him, and the poem is Cleon's answer to
the king. Browning takes care, as usual, to have his background of
scenery quite clear and fair. It is a courtyard to Cleon's house in one
of the sprinkled isles--
Lily on lily, that o'erlace the sea,
And laugh their pride when the light wave lisps "Greece."
I quote it; it marks the man and the age of luxurious culture.
They give thy letter to me, even now;
I read and seem as if I heard thee speak.
The master of thy galley still unlades
Gift after gift; they block my court at last
And pile themselves along its portico
Royal with sunset, like a thought of thee;
And one white she-slave from the group dispersed
Of black and white slaves (like the chequer work
Pavement, at once my nation's work and gift,
Now covered with this settle-down of doves),
One lyric woman, in her crocus vest
Woven of sea-wools, with her two white hands
Commends to me the strainer and the cup
Thy lip hath bettered ere it blesses mine.
But he is more than luxurious. He desires the highest life, and he
praises the king because he has acknowledged by his gifts the joy that
Art gives to life; and most of all he praises him, because he too
aspires, building a mighty tower, not that men may look at it, but that
he may gaze from its height on the sun, and think what higher he may
attain. The tower is the symbol of the cry of the king's soul.
Then he answers the king's letter. "It is true, O king, I am poet,
sculptor, painter, architect, philosopher, musician; all arts are mine.
Have I done as well as the great men of old? No, but I have combined
their excellences into one man, into myself.
"I have not chanted verse like Homer, no--
Nor swept string like Terpander--no--nor carved
And painted men like Phidias and his friend:
I am not great as they are, point by point.
But I have entered into sympathy
With these four, running these into one soul,
Who, separate, ignored each other's art.
Say, is it nothing that I know them all?
"This, since the best in each art has already been done, was the only
progress possible, and I have made it. It is not unworthy, king!
"Well, now thou askest, if having done this, 'I have not attained the
very crown of life; if I cannot now comfortably and fearlessly meet
death?' 'I, Cleon, leave,' thou sayest, 'my life behind me in my poems,
my pictures; I am immortal in my work. What more can life desire?'"
It is the question so many are asking now, and it is the answer now
given. What better immortality than in one's work left behind to move in
men? What more than this can life desire? But Cleon does not agree with
that. "If thou, O king, with the light now in thee, hadst looked at
creation before man appeared, thou wouldst have said, 'All is perfect so
far.' But questioned if anything more perfect in joy might be, thou
wouldst have said, 'Yes; a being may be made, unlike these who do not
know the joy they have, who shall be conscious of himself, and know that
he is happy. Then his life will be satisfied with daily joy.'" O king,
thou wouldst have answered foolishly. The higher the soul climbs in joy
the more it sees of joy, and when it sees the most, it perishes. Vast
capabilities of joy open round it; it craves for all it presages; desire
for more deepening with every attainment. And then the body intervenes.
Age, sickness, decay, forbid attainment. Life is inadequate to joy. What
have the gods done? It cannot be their malice, no, nor carelessness;
but--to let us see oceans of joy, and only give us power to hold a
cupful--is that to live? It is misery, and the more of joy my artist
nature makes me capable of feeling, the deeper my misery.
"But then, O king, thou sayest 'that I leave behind me works that will
live; works, too, which paint the joy of life.' Yes, but to show what
the joy of life is, is not to have it. If I carve the young Phoebus, am
I therefore young? I can write odes of the delight of love, but grown
too grey to be beloved, can I have its delight? That fair slave of
yours, and the rower with the muscles all a ripple on his back who
lowers the sail in the bay, can write no love odes nor can they paint
the joy of love; but they can have it--not I."
The knowledge, he thinks, of what joy is, of all that life can give,
which increases in the artist as his feebleness increases, makes his
fate the deadlier. What is it to him that his works live? He does not
live. The hand of death grapples the throat of life at the moment when
he sees most clearly its infinite possibilities. Decay paralyses his
hand when he knows best how to use his tools. It is accomplished
wretchedness.
I quote his outburst. It is in the soul of thousands who have no hope of
a life to come.
"But," sayest thou--(and I marvel, I repeat,
To find thee trip on such a mere word) "what
Thou writest, paintest, stays; that does not die:
Sappho survives, because we sing her songs,
And Æschylus, because we read his plays!"
Why, if they live still, let them come and take
Thy slave in my despite, drink from thy cup,
Speak in my place! "Thou diest while I survive?"--
Say rather that my fate is deadlier still,
In this, that every day my sense of joy
Grows more acute, my soul (intensified
By power and insight) more enlarged, more keen;
While every day my hairs fall more and more,
My hand shakes, and the heavy years increase--
The horror quickening still from year to year,
The consummation coming past escape
When I shall know most, and yet least enjoy--
When all my works wherein I prove my worth,
Being present still to mock me in men's mouths,
Alive still, in the praise of such as thou,
I, I the feeling, thinking, acting man,
The man who loved his life so overmuch,
Sleep in my urn. It is so horrible
I dare at times imagine to my need
Some future state revealed to us by Zeus,
Unlimited in capability
For joy, as this is in desire of joy,
--To seek which the joy-hunger forces us:
That, stung by straitness of our life, made strait
On purpose to make prized the life at large--
Freed by the throbbing impulse we call death,
We burst there as the worm into the fly.
Who, while a worm still, wants his wings. But no!
Zeus has not yet revealed it; and alas,
He must have done so, were it possible!
This is one only of Browning's statements of what he held to be the
fierce necessity for another life. Without it, nothing is left for
humanity, having arrived at full culture, knowledge, at educated love of
beauty, at finished morality and unselfishness--nothing in the end but
Cleon's cry--sorrowful, somewhat stern, yet gentle--to Protus,
Live long and happy, and in that thought die,
Glad for what was. Farewell.
But for those who are not Cleon and Protus, not kings in comfort or
poets in luxury, who have had no gladness, what end--what is to be said
of them? I will not stay to speak of _A Death in the Desert_, which is
another of these poems, because the most part of it is concerned with
questions of modern theology. St. John awakes into clear consciousness
just before his death in the cave where he lies tended by a few
disciples. He foresees some of the doubts of this century and meets them
as he can. The bulk of this poem, very interesting in its way, is
Browning's exposition of his own belief, not an imaginative
representation of what St. John actually would have said. It does not
therefore come into my subject. What does come into it is the
extraordinary naturalness and vitality of the description given by
John's disciple of the place where they were, and the fate of his
companions. This is invented in Browning's most excellent way. It could
not be better done.
The next poem is the _Epistle of Karshish, the Arab Physician_, to his
master, concerning his strange medical experience. The time is just
before the last siege of Jerusalem, and Karshish, journeying through
Jericho, and up the pass, stays for a few days at Bethany and meets
Lazarus. His case amazes him, and though he thinks his interest in it
unworthy of a man of science in comparison with the new herbs and new
diseases he has discovered, yet he is carried away by it and gives a
full account of it to his master.
I do not think that Browning ever wrote a poem the writing of which he
more enjoyed. The creation of Karshish suited his humour and his quaint
play with recondite knowledge. He describes the physician till we see
him alive and thinking, in body and soul. The creation of Lazarus is
even a higher example of the imaginative power of Browning; and that it
is shaped for us through the mind of Karshish, and in tune with it,
makes the imaginative effort the more remarkable. Then the problem--how
to express the condition of a man's body and soul, who, having for three
days according to the story as Browning conceives it lived consciously
in the eternal and perfect world, has come back to dwell in this
world--was so difficult and so involved in metaphysical strangenesses,
that it delighted him.
Of course, he carefully prepares his scenery to give a true semblance to
the whole. Karshish comes up the flinty pass from Jericho; he is
attacked by thieves twice and beaten, and the wild beasts endanger his
path;
A black lynx snarled and pricked a tufted ear,
Lust of my blood inflamed his yellow balls;
I cried and threw my staff and he was gone,
and then, at the end of the pass, he met Lazarus. See how vividly the
scenery is realised--
I crossed a ridge of short, sharp, broken hills
Like an old lion's cheek-teeth. Out there came
A moon made like a face with certain spots,
Multiform, manifold and menacing:
Then a wind rose behind me. So we met
In this old sleepy town at unaware
The man and I.
And the weird evening, Karshish thinks, had something to do with the
strange impression the man has made on him. Then we are placed in the
dreamy village of Bethany. We hear of its elders, its diseases, its
flowers, its herbs and gums, of the insects which may help medicine--
There is a spider here
Weaves no web, watches on the ledge of tombs,
Sprinkled with mottles on an ash-grey back;
and then, how the countryside is all on fire with news of Vespasian
marching into Judæa. So we have the place, the village, the hills, the
animals, and the time, all clear, and half of the character of Karshish.
The inner character of the man emerges as clearly when he comes to deal
with Lazarus. This is not a case of the body, he thinks, but of the
soul. "The Syrian," he tells his master, "has had catalepsy, and a
learned leech of his nation, slain soon afterwards, healed him and
brought him back to life after three days. He says he was dead, and made
alive again, but that is his madness; though the man seems sane enough.
At any rate, his disease has disappeared, he is as well as you and I.
But the mind and soul of the man, that is the strange matter, and in
that he is entirely unlike other men. Whatever he has gone through has
rebathed him as in clear water of another life, and penetrated his whole
being. He views the world like a child, he scarcely listens to what goes
on about him, yet he is no fool. If one could fancy a man endowed with
perfect knowledge beyond the fleshly faculty, and while he has this
heaven in him forced to live on earth, such a man is he. His heart and
brain move there, his feet stay here. He has lost all sense of our
values of things. Vespasian besieging Jerusalem and a mule passing with
gourds awaken the same interest. But speak of some little fact, little
as we think, and he stands astonished with its prodigious import. If his
child sicken to death it does not seem to matter to him, but a gesture,
a glance from the child, starts him into an agony of fear and anger, as
if the child were undoing the universe. He lives like one between two
regions, one of distracting glory, of which he is conscious but must not
enter yet; and the other into which he has been exiled back again--and
between this region where his soul moves and the earth where his body
is, there is so little harmony of thought or feeling that he cannot
undertake any human activity, nor unite the demands of the two worlds.
He knows that what ought to be cannot be in the world he has returned
to, so that his life is perplexed; but in this incessant perplexity he
falls back on prone submission to the heavenly will. The time will come
when death will restore his being to equilibrium; but now he is out of
harmony, for the soul knows more than the body and the body clouds the
soul."
"I probed this seeming indifference. 'Beast, to be so still and careless
when Rome is at the gates of thy town.' He merely looked with his large
eyes at me. Yet the man is not apathetic, but loves old and young, the
very brutes and birds and flowers of the field. His only impatience is
with wrongdoing, but he curbs that impatience."
At last Karshish tells, with many apologies for his foolishness, the
strangest thing of all. Lazarus thinks that his curer was God himself
who came and dwelt in flesh among those he had made, and went in and out
among them healing and teaching, and then died. "It is strange, but why
write of trivial matters when things of price call every moment for
remark? Forget it, my master, pardon me and farewell."
Then comes the postscript, that impression which, in spite of all his
knowledge, is left in Karshish's mind--
The very God! think, Abib; dost thou think?
So, the All-Great were the All-Loving too--
So, through the thunder comes a human voice
Saying: "O heart I made, a heart beats here!
Face, my hands fashioned, see it in myself!
Thou hast no power, nor may'st conceive of mine,
But love I gave thee, with myself to love,
And thou must love me who have died for thee!"--
The madman saith He said so; it is strange.
* * * * *