sunset, fell through a great square window set in a stone building, and
striking across the sicklier rays of an oil lamp reached the opposing
wall within.
It was a wall of grey stone, dead and lustreless like the wall of a
prison-house, over whose surface a spider as colourless as itself
dragged slowly its crooked hairy limbs loaded with the moisture of the
place, which was an old tower, of which the country folk told strange
tales, where it stood among the rushes on the left bank of the stream.
A man watched the spider as it went.
It crept on its heavy way across the faint crimson reflection from the
glow of the sunken sun.
It was fat, well-nourished, lazy, content; its home of dusky silver hung
on high, where its pleasure lay in weaving, clinging, hoarding,
breeding. It lived in the dark; it had neither pity nor regret; it
troubled itself neither for the death it dealt to nourish itself, nor
for the light without, into which it never wandered; it spun and throve
and multiplied.
It was an emblem of the man who is wise in his generation; of the man
whom Cato the elder deemed divine; of the Majority and the Mediocrity
who rule over the earth and enjoy its fruits.
This man knew that it was wise; that those who were like to it were wise
also: wise with the holy wisdom which is honoured of other men.
He had been unwise--always; and therefore he stood watching the sun die,
with hunger in his soul, with famine in his body.
For many months he had been half famished, as were the wolves in his own
northern mountains in the winter solstice. For seven days he had only
been able to crush a crust of hard black bread between his teeth. For
twenty hours he had not done even so much as this. The trencher on his
tressel was empty; and he had not wherewithal to re-fill it.
He might have found some to fill it for him no doubt. He lived amidst
the poor, and the poor to the poor are good, though they are bad and
bitter to the rich. But he did not open either his lips or his hand. He
consumed his heart in silence; and his vitals preyed in anguish on
themselves without his yielding to their torments.
He was a madman; and Cato, who measured the godliness of man by what
they gained, would have held him accursed;--the madness that starves and
is silent for an idea is an insanity, scouted by the world and the gods.
For it is an insanity unfruitful; except to the future. And for the
future who cares,--save these madmen themselves?
He watched the spider as it went.
It could not speak to him as its fellow once spoke in the old Scottish
story. To hear as that captive heard, the hearer must have hope, and a
kingdom,--if only in dreams.
This man had no hope; he had a kingdom indeed, but it was not of earth;
and, in an hour of sheer cruel bodily pain, earth alone has dominion and
power and worth.
The spider crawled across the grey wall; across the glow from the
vanished sun; across a coil of a dead passion-vine, that strayed loose
through the floor; across the classic shapes of a great cartoon drawn in
chalks upon the dull rugged surface of stone.
Nothing arrested it; nothing retarded it, as nothing hastened it. It
moved slowly on; fat, lustreless, indolent, hueless; reached at length
its den, and there squatted aloft, loving the darkness; its young
swarming around, its prey held in its forceps, its nets cast about.
Through the open casement there came on the rising wind of the storm,
in the light of the last lingering sunbeam, a beautiful night-moth,
begotten by some cruel hot-house heat in the bosom of some frail exiled
tropical flower.
It swam in on trembling pinions, and alighted on the golden head of a
gathered crocus that lay dying on the stones--a moth that should have
been born to no world save that of the summer world of a Midsummer
Night's Dream.
A shape of Ariel and Oberon; slender, silver, purple, roseate,
lustrous-eyed, and gossamer-winged.
A creature of woodland waters, and blossoming forests; of the yellow
chalices of kingcups and the white breasts of river lilies, of moonbeams
that strayed through a summer world of shadows, and dew-drops that
glistened in the deep folded hearts of roses. A creature to brush the
dreaming eyes of a poet, to nestle on the bosom of a young girl
sleeping: to float earthwards on a falling star, to slumber on a lotus
leaf.
A creature that amidst the still soft hush of woods and waters still
tells, to those who listen, of the world when the world was young.
The moth flew on, and poised on the fading crocus leaves, which spread
out their pale gold on the level of the grey floor.
It was weary, and its delicate wings drooped; it was storm-tossed,
wind-beaten, drenched with mist and frozen with the cold; it belonged to
the moon, to the dew, to the lilies, to the forget-me-nots, and to the
night; and it found that the hard grip of winter had seized it whilst
yet it had thought that the stars and the summer were with it. It lived
before its time,--and it was like the human soul, which being born in
the darkness of the world dares to dream of light, and, wandering in
vain search of a sun that will never rise, falls and perishes in
wretchedness.
It was beautiful exceedingly, with the brilliant tropical beauty of a
life that is short-lived. It rested a moment on the stem of the pale
flower, then with its radiant eyes fastened on the point of light which
the lamp thrust upward, it flew on high; and, spreading out its
transparent wings and floating to the flame, kissed it, quivered once,
and died.
There fell among the dust and cinder of the lamp a little heap of
shrunken, fire-scorched, blackened ashes.
The wind whirled them upward from their rest, and drove them forth into
the night to mingle with the storm-scourged grasses, the pale dead
violets, the withered snow-flowers, with all things frost-touched and
forgotten.
The spider sat aloft, sucking the juices from the fettered flies,
teaching its spawn to prey and feed; content in squalor and in
plenitude; in sensual sloth, and in the increase of its body and its
hoard.
He watched them both: the success of the spider, the death of the moth;
trite as a fable; ever repeated as the tides of the sea; the two symbols
of humanity; of the life which fattens on greed and gain, and the life
which perishes of divine desire.
* * *
There were no rare birds, no birds of moor and mountain, in that
cultivated and populous district; but to her all the little home-bred
things of pasture and orchard were full of poetry and of character.
The robins, with that pretty air of boldness with which they veil their
real shyness and timidity; the strong and saucy sparrows, powerful by
the strength of all mediocrities and majorities; all the dainty families
of finches in their gay apparellings; the plain brown bird that filled
the night with music; the gorgeous oriole ruffling in gold, the gilded
princeling of them all; the little blue warblers, the violets of the
air; the kingfishers who had hovered so long over the forget-me-nots
upon the rivers that they had caught the colours of the flowers on their
wings; the bright blackcaps green as the leaves, with their yellow
waistcoats and velvet hoods, the innocent freebooters of the woodland
liberties: all these were her friends and lovers, various as any human
crowds of court or city.
She loved them; they and the fourfooted beasts were the sole things that
did not flee from her; and the woeful and mad slaughter of them by the
peasants was to her a grief passionate in its despair. She did not
reason on what she felt; but to her a bird slain was a trust betrayed,
an innocence defiled, a creature of heaven struck to earth.
Suddenly on the silence of the garden there was a little shrill sound of
pain; the birds flew high in air, screaming and startled; the leaves of
a bough of ivy shook as with a struggle.
She rose and looked; a line of twine was trembling against the foliage;
in its noosed end the throat of the mavis had been caught; it hung
trembling and clutching at the air convulsively with its little drawn-up
feet. It had flown into the trap as it had ended its joyous song and
soared up to join its brethren.
There were a score of such traps set in the miller's garden.
She unloosed the cord from about its tiny neck, set it free, and laid it
down upon the ivy. The succour came too late; the little gentle body was
already without breath; the feet had ceased to beat the air; the small
soft head had drooped feebly on one side; the lifeless eyes had started
from their sockets; the throat was without song for evermore.
"The earth would be good but for men," she thought, as she stood with
the little dead bird in her hand.
Its mate, which was poised on a rose bough, flew straight to it, and
curled round and round about the small slain body, and piteously
bewailed its fate, and mourned, refusing to be comforted, agitating the
air with trembling wings, and giving out vain cries of grief.
Vain; for the little joyous life was gone; the life that asked only of
God and Man a home in the green leaves; a drop of dew from the cup of a
rose; a bough to swing on in the sunlight; a summer day to celebrate in
song.
All the winter through, it had borne cold and hunger and pain without
lament; it had saved the soil from destroying larvæ, and purified the
trees from all foul germs; it had built its little home unaided, and had
fed its nestlings without alms; it had given its sweet song lavishly to
the winds, to the blossoms, to the empty air, to the deaf ears of men;
and now it lay dead in its innocence; trapped and slain because a human
greed begrudged it a berry worth the thousandth part of a copper coin.
Out from the porch of the mill-house Claudis Flamma came, with a knife
in his hand and a basket, to cut lilies for one of the choristers of the
cathedral, since the morrow would be the religious feast of the
Visitation of Mary.
He saw the dead thrush in her hand, and chuckled to himself as he went
by.
"The tenth bird trapped since sunrise," he said, thinking how shrewd and
how sure in their make were these traps of twine that he set in the
grass and the leaves.
She said nothing; but the darkness of disgust swept over her face, as he
came in sight in the distance.
She knelt down and scraped a hole in the earth; and laid moss in it, and
put the mavis softly on its green and fragrant bier, and covered it with
handfuls of fallen rose leaves, and with a sprig or two of thyme.
Around her head the widowed thrush flew ceaselessly, uttering sad
cries;--who now should wander with him through the sunlight?--who now
should rove with him above the blossoming fields?--who now should sit
with him beneath the boughs hearing the sweet rain fall between the
leaves?--who now should wake with him whilst yet the world was dark, to
feel the dawn break ere the east were red, and sing a welcome to the
unborn day?
* * *
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 harebell,
every bead of water that ripples in a brook--to these 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;
tyrant of direst destruction and bondsman of lowest captivity.
Hence, pity entered very little into his thoughts at any time; the
perpetual torture of life did indeed perplex him, as it perplexes every
thinking creature, with wonder at the universal bitterness that taints
all creation, at the universal death whereby all forms of life are
nurtured, at the universal anguish of all existence which daily and
nightly assails the unknown God in piteous protest at the inexorable
laws of inexplicable miseries and mysteries. But because such suffering
was thus universal, therefore he almost ceased to feel pity for it; of
the two he pitied the beasts far more than the human kind:--the horse
staggering beneath the lash in all the feebleness of hunger, lameness,
and old age; the ox bleeding from the goad on the hard furrows, or
stumbling through the hooting crowd, blind, footsore, and shivering, to
its last home in the slaughter-house; the dog, yielding up its noble
life inch by inch under the tortures of the knife, loyally licking the
hand of the vivisector while he drove his probe through its quivering
nerves; the unutterable hell in which all these gentle, kindly, and
long-suffering creatures dwelt for the pleasure or the vanity, the
avarice or the brutality of men,--these he pitied perpetually, with a
tenderness for them that was the softest thing in all his nature.
* * *
"There lived once in the East, a great king; he dwelt far away, amongst
the fragrant fields of roses, and in the light of suns that never set.
"He was young, he was beloved, he was fair of face and form; and the
people, as they hewed stone, or brought water, said amongst themselves,
'Verily, this man is as a god; he goes where he lists, and he lies still
or rises up as he pleases; and all fruits of all lands are culled for
him; and his nights are nights of gladness, and his days, when they
dawn, are all his to sleep through or spend as he wills.' But the people
were wrong. For this king was weary of his life.
"His buckler was sown with gems, but his heart beneath it was sore. For
he had been long bitterly harassed by foes who descended on him as
wolves from the hills in their hunger, and he had been long plagued with
heavy wars and with bad rice harvests, and with many troubles to his
nation that kept it very poor, and forbade him to finish the building of
new marble palaces, and the making of fresh gardens of delight, on which
his heart was set. So he, being weary of a barren land and of an empty
treasury, with all his might prayed to the gods that all he touched
might turn to gold, even as he had heard had happened to some magician
long before in other ages. And the gods gave him the thing he craved;
and his treasury overflowed. No king had ever been so rich, as this king
now became in the short space of a single summer-day.
"But it was bought with a price.
"When he stretched out his hand to gather the rose that blossomed in his
path, a golden flower scentless and stiff was all he grasped. When he
called to him the carrier-dove that sped with a scroll of love words
across the mountains, the bird sank on his breast a carven piece of
metal. When he was athirst and shouted to his cupbearer for drink, the
red wine ran a stream of molten gold. When he would fain have eaten, the
pulse and the pomegranate grew alike to gold between his teeth. And lo!
at eventide, when he sought the silent chambers of his harem, saying,
'Here at least shall I find rest,' and bent his steps to the couch
whereon his best-beloved slave was sleeping, a statue of gold was all he
drew into his eager arms, and cold shut lips of sculptured gold were all
that met his own.
"That night the great king slew himself, unable any more to bear this
agony; since all around him was desolation, even though all around him
was wealth.
"Now the world is too like that king, and in its greed of gold it will
barter its life away.
"Look you,--this thing is certain--I say that the world will perish,
even as that king perished, slain as he was slain, by the curse of its
own fulfilled desire.
"The future of the world is written. For God has granted their prayer to
men. He has made them rich, and their riches shall kill them.
"When all green places have been destroyed in the builder's lust of
gain:--when all the lands are but mountains of brick, and piles of wood
and iron:--when there is no moisture anywhere; and no rain ever
falls:--when the sky is a vault of smoke; and all the rivers reek with
poison:--when forest and stream, and moor and meadow, and all the old
green wayside beauty are things vanished and forgotten:--when every
gentle timid thing of brake and bush, of air and water, has been killed
because it robbed them of a berry or a fruit:--when the earth is one
vast city, whose young children behold neither the green of the field
nor the blue of the sky, and hear no song but the hiss of the steam, and
know no music but the roar of the furnace:--when the old sweet silence
of the country-side, and the old sweet sounds of waking birds, and the
old sweet fall of summer showers, and the grace of a hedgerow bough, and
the glow of the purple heather, and the note of the cuckoo and cushat,
and the freedom of waste and of woodland, are all things dead, and
remembered of no man:--then the world, like the Eastern king, will
perish miserably of famine and of drought, with gold in its stiffened
hands, and gold in its withered lips, and gold everywhere:--gold that
the people can neither eat nor drink, gold that cares nothing for them,
but mocks them horribly:--gold for which their fathers sold peace and
health, and holiness and liberty:--gold that is one vast grave."
* * *
The earth is crowded full with clay gods and false prophets, and fresh
legions for ever arriving to carry on the old strife for supremacy; and
if a man pass unknown all the time that his voice is audible, and his
hand visible, through the sound and smoke of the battle, he will dream
in vain of any remembrance when the gates of the grave shall have closed
on him and shut him for ever from sight.
When the world was in its youth, it had leisure to treasure its
recollections; even to pause and look back, and 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 a 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?
* * *
There is no more terrible woe upon earth than the woe of the stricken
brain, which remembers the days of its strength, the living light of its
reason, the sunrise of its proud intelligence, and knows that these have
passed away like a tale that is told; like a year that is spent; like an
arrow that is shot to the stars, and flies aloft, and falls in a swamp;
like a fruit that is too well loved of the sun, and so, over-soon ripe,
is dropped from the tree and forgot on the grasses, dead to all joys of
the dawn and the noon and the summer, but still alive to the sting of
the wasp, to the fret of the aphis, to the burn of the drought, to the
theft of the parasite.
She only dimly understood, and yet she was smitten with awe and
reverence at that endless grief which had no taint of cowardice upon it,
but was pure as the patriot's despair, impersonal as the prophet's
agony.
For the first time the intellect in her consciously awoke. For the first
time she heard a human mind find voice even in its stupor and its
wretchedness to cry aloud, in reproach to its unknown Creator:
"I am _yours_! Shall I perish with the body? Why have you ever bade me
desire the light and seek it, if for ever you must thrust me into the
darkness of negation? Shall I be Nothing?--like the muscle that rots,
like the bones that crumble, like the flesh that turns to ashes, and
blows in a film on the winds? Shall I die so? I?--the mind of a man, the
breath of a god?"
* * *
He could not bear to die without leaving behind his life some work the
world would cherish.
Call it folly, call it madness, it is both: the ivory Zeus that was to
give its sculptor immortality, lives but in tradition; the bronze
Athene, that was to guard the Piræus in eternal liberty, has long been
levelled with the dust; yet with every age the artist still gives life
for fame, still cries, "Let my body perish, but make my soul immortal!"
* * *
The spider had drawn his dusty trail across them; the rat had squatted
at their feet; the darkness of night had enshrouded and defaced them;
yet with the morning they arose, stainless, noble, undefiled.
Amongst them there was one colossal form, on which the sun poured with
its full radiance.
This was the form of a captive grinding at a millstone; the majestic,
symmetrical, supple form of a man who was also a god.
In his naked limbs there was a supreme power; in his glance there was a
divine command; his head was lifted as though no yoke could ever lie on
that proud neck; his foot seemed to spurn the earth as though no mortal
tie had ever bound him to the sod that human steps bestrode: yet at the
corn-mill he laboured, grinding wheat like the patient blinded oxen
that toiled beside him.
For it was the great Apollo in Pheræ.
The hand which awoke the music of the spheres had been blood-stained
with murder; the beauty which had the light and lustre of the sun had
been darkened with passion and with crime; the will which no other on
earth or in heaven could withstand had been bent under the chastisement
of Zeus.
He whose glance had made the black and barren slopes of Delos to laugh
with fruitfulness and gladness--he whose prophetic sight beheld all
things past, present, and to come, the fate of all unborn races, the
doom of all unspent ages--he, the Far-Striking King, laboured here
beneath the curse of crime, greatest of all the gods, and yet a slave.
In all the hills and vales of Greece his Io pæan sounded still.
Upon his holy mountains there still arose the smoke of fires of
sacrifice.
With dance and song the Delian maidens still hailed the divinity of
Lêtô's son.
The waves of the pure Ionian air still rang for ever with the name of
Delphinios.
At Pytho and at Clarus, in Lycia and in Phokis, his oracles still
breathed forth upon their fiat terror or hope into the lives of men; and
still in all the virgin forests of the world the wild beasts honoured
him wheresoever they wandered, and the lion and the boar came at his
bidding from the deserts to bend their free necks and their wills of
fire meekly to bear his yoke in Thessaly.
Yet he laboured here at the corn-mill of Admetus; and watching him at
his bondage there stood the slender, slight, wing-footed Hermes, with a
slow, mocking smile upon his knavish lips, and a jeering scorn in his
keen eyes, even as though he cried:
"O brother, who would be greater than I! For what hast thou bartered to
me the golden rod of thy wealth and thy dominion over the flocks and the
herds? For seven chords strung on a shell--for a melody not even thine
own! For a lyre outshone by my syrinx hast thou sold all thine empire to
me. Will human ears give heed to thy song now thy sceptre has passed to
my hands? Immortal music only is left thee, and the vision foreseeing
the future. O god! O hero! O fool! what shall these profit thee now?"
Thus to the artist by whom they had been begotten the dim white shapes
of the deities spoke. Thus he saw them, thus he heard, whilst the pale
and watery sunlight lit up the form of the toiler in Pheræ.
For even as it was with the divinity of Delos, so is it likewise with
the genius of a man, which, being born of a god, yet is bound as a slave
to the grindstone. Since even as Hermes mocked the Lord of the Unerring
Bow, so is genius mocked of the world, when it has bartered the herds,
and the grain, and the rod that metes wealth, for the seven chords that
no ear, dully mortal, can hear.
And as he looked upon this symbol of his life, the captivity and the
calamity, the strength and the slavery of his existence overcame him;
and for the first hour since he had been born of a woman Arslàn buried
his face in his hands and wept.
He could bend great thoughts to take the shapes that he chose, as the
chained god in Pheræ bound the strong kings of the desert and forest to
carry his yoke; yet, like the god, he likewise stood fettered to the
mill to grind for bread.
* * *