pinch of oatmeal. It is the law of necessity, the balance of economy;
human fuel must be used up that the machine of the world may spin on;
but it is not, perhaps, marvellous that the living fuel is sometimes
unreconciled to that symmetrical rule of waste and repair, of consumer
and consumed.
* * *
It is many centuries since Caius Gracchus called the mercantile classes
to aid the people against the patricians, and found too late that they
were deadlier oppressors than all the optimates; but the error still
goes on, and the moneymakers churn it into gold, as they churned it then
into the Asiatic revenues and the senatorial amulets.
* * *
The love of a people is the most sublime crown that can rest on the brow
of any man, but the love of a mob is a mongrel that fawns and slavers
one moment, to rend and tear the next.
_FOLLE-FARINE._
In this old-world district, amidst the pastures and corn-lands of
Normandy, superstition had taken a hold which the passage of centuries
and the advent of revolution had done very little to lessen. Few of the
people could read, and fewer still could write. They knew nothing but
what their priests and politicians told them to believe. They went to
their beds with the poultry, and rose as the cock crew: they went to
mass, as their ducks to the osier and weed ponds; and to the
conscription as their lambs to the slaughter. They understood that there
was a world beyond them, but they remembered it only as the best market
for their fruit, their fowls, their lace, their skins. Their brains were
as dim as were their oil-lit streets at night; though their lives were
content and mirthful, and for the most part pious. They went out into
the summer meadows chanting aves, in seasons of drought to pray for rain
on their parching orchards, in the same credulity with which they groped
through the winter-fog bearing torches, and chanting dirges to gain a
blessing at seed-time on their bleak, black fallows.
The beauty and the faith of the old mediæval life were with them still;
and with its beauty and its faith were its bigotry and cruelty likewise.
They led simple and contented lives; for the most part honest, and
amongst themselves cheerful and kindly: preserving much grace of colour,
of costume, of idiosyncrasy, because apart from the hueless communism
and characterless monotony of modern cities.
But they believed in sorcery and in devilry: they were brutal to their
beasts, and could be as brutal to their foes: they were steeped in
legend and tradition from their cradles; and all the darkest
superstitions of dead ages still found home and treasury in their hearts
and at their hearths.
They had always been a religious people in this birth country of the
Flamma race: the strong poetic reverence of their forefathers, which had
symbolised itself in the carving of every lintel, corbel or buttress in
their streets, and the fashion of every spire on which a weather-vane
could gleam against the sun, was still in their blood; the poetry had
departed, but the bigotry remained.
* * *
"The earth and the air are good," she thought, as she lay there watching
the dark leaves sway in the foam and the wind, and the bright-bosomed
birds float from blossom to blossom. For there was latent in her, all
untaught, that old pantheistic instinct of the divine age, when the
world was young, to behold a sentient consciousness in every leaf
unfolded to the light; to see a soul in every created thing the day
shines on; to feel the presence of an eternal life in every breeze that
moves, in every grass that grows; in every flame that lifts itself to
heaven; in every bell that vibrates on the air; in every moth that soars
to reach the stars.
Pantheism is the religion of the poet; and nature had made her a poet,
though man as yet had but made of her an outcast, a slave, and a beast
of burden.
"The earth and the air are good," she thought, watching the sun-rays
pierce the purple hearts of a passion-flower, the shadows move across
the deep brown water, the radiant butterfly alight upon a lily, the
scarlet-throated birds dart in and out through the yellow feathery
blossoms of the limes.
* * *
When a man clings to life for life's sake, because it is fair and sweet,
and good in the sight and the senses, there may be weakness in his
shudder at its threatening loss. But when a man is loth to lose life
although it be hard, and joyless, and barren of all delights, because
this life gives him power to accomplish things greater than he, which
yet without him must perish, there is the strength in him, as there is
the agony of Prometheus.
With him it must die also: that deep dim greatness within him, which
moves him, despite himself; that nameless unspeakable force which
compels him to create and to achieve; that vision by which he beholds
worlds beyond him not seen by his fellows.
Weary of life he may be; of life material, and full of subtlety; of
passion, of pleasure, of pain; of the kisses that burn, of the laugh
that rings hollow, of the honey that so soon turns to gall, of the
sickly fatigues, and the tired, cloyed hunger, that are the portion of
men upon earth. Weary of these he may be; but still if the gods have
breathed on him, and made him mad with the madness that men have called
genius, there will be that in him greater than himself, which he
knows,--and cannot know without some fierce wrench and pang,--will be
numbed and made impotent, and drift away, lost for evermore, into that
eternal night, which is all that men behold of death.
* * *
The grass of the Holy River gathers perfume from the marvellous suns,
and the moonless nights, and the gorgeous bloom of the east, from the
aromatic breath of the leopard, and the perfume of the fallen
pomegranate, and the sacred oil that floats in the lamps, and the caress
of the girl-bather's feet, and the myrrh-dropping unguents that glide
from the maiden's bare limbs in the moonlight,--the grass holds and
feeds on them all. But not till the grass has been torn from the roots,
and been crushed, and been bruised and destroyed, can the full odours
exhale of all it has tasted and treasured.
Even thus the imagination of man may be great, but it can never be at
its greatest until one serpent, with merciless fangs, has bitten it
through and through, and impregnated it with passion and with
poison,--that one deathless serpent which is memory.
* * *
And, indeed, to those who are alive to the nameless, universal, Eternal
Soul which breathes in all the grasses of the fields, and beams in the
eyes of all creatures of earth and air, and throbs in the living light
of palpitating stars, and thrills through the young sap of forest trees,
and stirs in the strange loves of wind-borne plants, and hums in every
song of the bee, and burns in every quiver of the flame, and peoples
with sentient myriads every drop of dew that gathers on a hare-bell,
every bead of water that ripples in a brook--to them the mortal life of
man can seem but little, save at once the fiercest and the feeblest
thing that does exist; at once the most cruel and the most impotent;
tyrants of direst destruction, and bondsmen of lowest captivity.
* * *
The earth has always most charm, and least pain, to the poet or the
artist when men are hidden away under their roofs. Then they do not
break its calm with either their mirth or their brutality; then the vile
and revolting coarseness of their works, that blot it with so much
deformity, is softened and obscured in the purple breaths of shadow, and
the dim tender gleam of stars.
* * *
When the world was in its youth, it had leisure to treasure its
recollections; even to pause and look back; to see what flower of a fair
thought, what fruit of a noble art, it might have overlooked or left
down-trodden. But now it is so old, and is so tired; it is purblind, and
heavy of foot; it does not notice what it destroys; it desires rest and
can find none; nothing can matter greatly to it; its dead are so many
that it cannot count them; and being thus worn and dulled with age, and
suffocated under the weight of its innumerable memories, it is very slow
to be moved, and swift--terribly swift--to forget.
Why should it not be?
It has known the best, it has known the worst that ever can befall it.
And the prayer that to the heart of man seems so freshly born from his
own desire, what is it on the weary ear of the world, save the same old,
old cry which it has heard through all the ages, empty as the sound of
the wind, and for ever--for ever--unanswered?
* * *
For there is nothing so cruel in life as a Faith;--the Faith, whatever
its name may be, that draws a man on all his years through on one narrow
path, by one tremulous light, and then at the last, with a laugh--drowns
him.
* * *
I think I see!--the great God walked by the edge of the river, and he
mused on a gift to give man, on a joy that should be a joy on the earth
for ever; and he passed by the lily white as snow, by the thyme that fed
the bees, by the gold heart in the arum flower, by the orange flame of
the tall sandrush, by all the great water-blossoms which the sun kissed
and the swallows loved, and he came to the one little reed pierced with
the snake's-tongues, and all alone amidst millions. Then he took it up,
and cut it to the root, and killed it; killed it as a reed--but breathed
into it a song audible and beautiful to all the ears of men. Was that
death to the reed?--or life? Would a thousand summers of life by the
waterside have been worth that one thrill of song when a god first spoke
through it?
* * *
It is odd that you should live in a palace, and he should want for
bread; but then he can create things, and you can only buy them. So it
is even, perhaps.
* * *
A word that needs compelling is broken by the heart before the lips give
it. It is to plant a tree without a root to put faith in a man that
needs a bond.
* * *
"You are glad since you sing!" said the old man to her as she passed him
again on her homeward way and paused again beside him.
"The birds in cages sing," she answered him, "but think you they are
glad?"
"Are they not?"
She sat down a moment beside him, on the bank which was soft with moss,
and odorous with wild flowers curling up the stems of the poplars and
straying over into the corn beyond.
"Are they? Look. Yesterday I passed a cottage, it is on the Great South
Road; far away from here. The house was empty; the people no doubt were
gone to labour in the fields; there was a wicker cage hanging to the
wall, and in the cage there was a blackbird. The sun beat on his head;
his square of sod was a dry clod of bare earth; the heat had dried every
drop of water in his pan; and yet the bird was singing. Singing how? In
torment, beating his breast against the bars till the blood started,
crying to the skies to have mercy on him and to let the rain fall. His
song was shrill; it had a scream in it; still he sang. Do you say the
merle was glad?"
"What did you do?" asked the old man, still breaking his stones with a
monotonous rise and fall of his hammer.
"I took the cage down and opened the door."
"And he?"
"He shot up in the air first, then dropped down amidst the grasses,
where a little brook which the drought had not dried was still running;
and he bathed and drank, and bathed again, seeming mad with the joy of
the water. When I lost him from sight he was swaying among the leaves on
a bough over the river; but then he was silent."
"And what do you mean by that?"
Her eyes clouded; she was mute. She vaguely knew the meaning it bore to
herself, but it was beyond her to express it. All things of nature had
voices and parables for her, because her fancy was vivid, and her mind
was still too dark, and too profoundly ignorant, for her to be able to
shape her thoughts into metaphor or deduction. The bird had spoken to
her; by his silence as by his song; but what he had uttered she could
not well utter again. Save indeed that song was not gladness, and
neither was silence pain.
* * *
"The future?" she said at last, "that means something that one has not,
and that is to come--is it so?" "Something that one never has, and that
never comes," muttered the old man, wearily cracking the flints in two;
"something that one possesses in one's sleep, and that is farther off
each time that one awakes; and yet a thing that one sees always, sees
even when one lies a dying they say--for men are fools."
* * *
In one of the most fertile and most fair districts of northern France
there was a little Norman town, very, very old, and beautiful
exceedingly by reason of its ancient streets, its high peaked roofs, its
marvellous galleries and carvings, its exquisite greys and browns, its
silence and its colour, and its rich still life.
Its centre was a great cathedral, noble as York or Chartres; a
cathedral, whose spire shot to the clouds, and whose innumerable towers
and pinnacles were all pierced to the day, so that the blue sky shone
and the birds of the air flew all through them. A slow brown river,
broad enough for market boats and for corn barges, stole through the
place to the sea, lapping as it went the wooden piles of the houses, and
reflecting the quaint shapes of the carvings, the hues of the signs and
the draperies, the dark spaces of the dormer windows, the bright heads
of some casement-cluster of carnations, the laughing face of a girl
leaning out to smile on her lover.
All around it lay the deep grass unshaven, the leagues on leagues of
fruitful orchards, the low blue hills tenderly interlacing one another,
the fields of colza, where the white head-dress of the women-workers
flashed in the sun like a silvery pigeon's wing. To the west there were
the deep green woods, and the wide plains golden with gorse of Arthur's
and of Merlin's lands; and beyond, to the northward, was the dim
stretch of the ocean breaking on a yellow shore, whither the river ran,
and whither led straight shady roads, hidden with linden and with poplar
trees, and marked ever and anon by a wayside wooden Christ, or by a
little murmuring well crowned with a crucifix.
A beautiful, old, shadowy, ancient place: picturesque everywhere; often
silent, with a sweet sad silence that was chiefly broken by the sound of
bells or the chaunting of choristers. A place of the Middle Ages still.
With lanterns swinging on cords from house to house as the only light;
with wondrous scroll-works and quaint signs at the doors of all its
traders; with monks' cowls and golden croziers and white-robed acolytes
in its streets; with the subtle smoke of incense coming out from the
cathedral door to mingle with the odours of the fruits and flowers in
the market-place; with great flat-bottomed boats drifting down the river
under the leaning eaves of its dwellings; and with the galleries of its
opposing houses touching so nearly that a girl leaning in one could
stretch a Provence rose or toss an Easter egg across to her neighbour in
the other.
Doubtless there were often squalor, poverty, dust, filth, and
uncomeliness within these old and beautiful homes. Doubtless often the
dwellers therein were housed like cattle and slept like pigs, and looked
but once out to the woods and waters of the landscapes round for one
hundred times that they looked at their hidden silver in an old delf
jug, or at their tawdry coloured prints of St. Victorian or St. Scævola.
But yet much of the beauty and the nobility of the old, simple, restful,
rich-hued life of the past still abode there, and remained with them. In
the straight, lithe form of their maidens, untrammelled by modern garb,
and moving with the free majestic grace of forest does. In the vast,
dim, sculptured chambers, where the grandam span by the wood fire, and
the little children played in the shadows, and the lovers whispered in
the embrasured window. In the broad market-place, where the mules
cropped the clover, and the tawny awnings caught the sunlight, and the
white caps of the girls framed faces fitted for the pencils of missal
painters, and the flush of colour from mellow wall-fruits and
grape-clusters glanced amidst the shelter of deepest, freshest green. In
the perpetual presence of their cathedral, which, through sun and storm,
through frost and summer, through noon and midnight, stood there amidst
them, and watched the galled oxen tread their painful way, and the
scourged mules droop their humble heads, and the helpless, harmless
flocks go forth to the slaughter, and the old weary lives of the men and
women pass through hunger and cold to the grave, and the sun and the
moon rise and set, and the flowers and the children blossom and fade,
and the endless years come and go, bringing peace, bringing war;
bringing harvest, bringing famine; bringing life, bringing death; and,
beholding these, still said to the multitude in its terrible irony, "Lo!
your God is Love."
This little town lay far from the great Paris highway and all greatly
frequented tracks. It was but a short distance from the coast, but near
no harbour of greater extent than such as some small fishing village had
made in the rocks for the trawlers. Few strangers ever came to it,
except some wandering painters or antiquaries. It sent its apples and
eggs, its poultry and honey, its colza and corn to the use of the great
cities; but it was rarely that any of its own people went thither.
Now and then some one of the oval-faced, blue-eyed, lithe-limbed maidens
of its little homely households would sigh and flush and grow restless,
and murmur of Paris; and would steal out in the break of a warm grey
morning whilst only the birds were still waking; and would patter away
in her wooden shoes over the broad, white, southern road, with a stick
over her shoulder, and a bundle of all her worldly goods upon the stick.
And she would look back often, often, as she went; and when all was lost
in the blue haze of distance save the lofty spire which she still saw
through her tears, she would say in her heart, with her lips parched and
trembling, "I will come back again. I will come back again."
But none such ever did come back.
They came back no more than did the white sweet sheaves of the lilies
which the women gathered and sent to be bought and sold in the city--to
gleam one faint summer night in a gilded balcony, and to be flung out
the next morning, withered and dead.
One amongst the few who had thus gone whither the lilies went, and of
whom the people would still talk as their mules paced homewards through
the lanes at twilight, had been Reine Flamma, the daughter of the miller
of Yprés.
* * *
"There are only two trades in a city," said the actors to her, with a
smile as bitter as her own, "only two trades--to buy souls and to sell
them. What business have you here, who do neither the one nor the
other?"
There was music still in this trampled reed of the river, into which the
gods had once bidden the stray winds and the wandering waters breathe
their melody; but there, in the press, the buyers and sellers only saw
in it a frail thing of the sand and the stream, only made to be woven
for barter, or bind together the sheaves of the roses of pleasure.
* * *
Art was to him as mother, brethren, mistress, offspring, religion--all
that other men hold dear. He had none of these, he desired none of them;
and his genius sufficed to him in their stead.
It was an intense and reckless egotism, made alike cruel and sublime by
its intensity and purity, like the egotism of a mother in her child. To
it, as the mother to her child, he would have sacrificed every living
creature; but to it also, like her, he would have sacrificed his very
existence as unhesitatingly. But it was an egotism which, though
merciless in its tyranny, was as pure as snow in its impersonality; it
was untainted by any grain of avarice, of vanity, of selfish desire; it
was independent of all sympathy; it was simply and intensely the passion
for immortality:--that sublime selfishness, that superb madness, of all
great minds.
Art had taken him for its own, as Demeter, in the days of her
desolation, took the child Demophoon to nurture him as her own on the
food of gods, and to plunge him through the flames of a fire that would
give him immortal life. As the pusillanimous and sordid fears of the
mortal mother lost to the child for evermore the possession of Olympian
joys and of perpetual youth, so did the craven and earthly cares of
bodily needs hold the artist back from the radiance of the life of the
soul, and drag him from the purifying fires. Yet he had not been utterly
discouraged; he strove against the Metanira of circumstance; he did his
best to struggle free from the mortal bonds that bound him; and, as the
child Demophoon mourned for the great goddess that had nurtured him,
refusing to be comforted, so did he turn from the base consolations of
the senses and the appetites, and beheld ever before his sight the
ineffable majesty of that Mater Dolorosa who once and for ever had
anointed him as her own.
* * *
Men did not believe in him; what he wrought saddened and terrified them;
they turned aside to those who fed them on simpler and on sweeter food.
His works were great, but they were such as the public mind deems
impious. They unveiled human corruption too nakedly, and they shadowed
forth visions too exalted, and satires too unsparing, for them to be
acceptable to the multitude. They were compounded of an idealism clear
and cold as crystal, and of a reality cruel and voluptuous as love. They
were penetrated with an acrid satire and an intense despair: the world
caring only for a honied falsehood and a gilded gloss in every art,
would have none of them.
* * *
"See you--what he lacks is only the sinew that gold gives. What he has
done is great. The world rightly seeing must fear it; and fear is the
highest homage the world ever gives. But he is penniless; and he has
many foes; and jealousy can with so much ease thrust aside the greatness
which it fears into obscurity, when that greatness is marred by the
failures and the feebleness of poverty. Genius scorns the power of gold:
it is wrong; gold is the war-scythe on its chariot, which mows down the
millions of its foes and gives free passage to the sun-coursers with
which it leaves those heavenly fields of light for the gross
battle-fields of earth."
* * *
It is true that the great artist is as a fallen god who remembers a time
when worlds arose at his breath, and at his bidding the barren lands
blossomed into fruitfulness; the sorcery of the thyrsus is still his,
though weakened.
The powers of lost dominions haunt his memory; the remembered glory of
an eternal sun is in his eyes, and makes the light of common day seem
darkness; the heart sickness of a long exile weighs on him; incessantly
he labours to overtake the mirage of a loveliness which fades as he
pursues it. In the poetic creation by which the bondage of his material
life is redeemed, he finds at once ecstasy and disgust, because he feels
at once his strength and weakness. For him all things of earth and air,
and sea and cloud, have beauty; and to his ear all voices of the forest
land and water world are audible.
He is as a god, since he can call into palpable shape dreams born of
impalpable thought; as a god, since he has known the truth divested of
lies, and has stood face to face with it, and been not afraid; a god
thus. But a cripple inasmuch as his hand can never fashion the shapes
that his vision beholds; an alien because he has lost what he never will
find upon earth; a beast, since ever and again his passions will drag
him to wallow in the filth of sensual indulgence; a slave, since
oftentimes the divinity that is in him breaks and bends under the
devilry that also is in him, and he obeys the instincts of vileness, and
when he would fain bless the nations he curses them.
* * *