steeples, exploding in the sunlight with the brilliance of rockets.
Every clock-tower drips a tune. The people are merry-making, for
this is the King's Birthday and the mails parade this afternoon.
"Messrs. Vidler and Parrat request the pleasure of Mr. Chaplin's
company on Thursday the twenty-eighth of May, to a cold collation at
three o'clock and to see the Procession of the Mails."
What a magnificent spectacle! A coil of coaches progressing round
and round Lincoln's Inn Fields. Sun-mottled harness, gold and
scarlet guards, horns throwing off sprays of light and music.
Liverpool, Manchester--blacks and greys; Bristol, Devonport--satin
bays; Holyhead--chestnuts; Halifax--roans, blue-specked, rose-specked
... On their box-seat thrones sit the mighty coachmen, twisting their
horses this way and that with a turn of the wrist. These are the
spokes of a wheeling sun, these are the rays of London's aureole.
This is her star-fire, reduced by a prism to separate sparks. Cheer,
good people! Chuck up your hats, and buy violets to pin in your
coats. You shall see it all to-night, when the King's arms shine in
lamps from every house-front, and the mails, done parading, crack
their whips and depart. England forever! Hurrah!
England forever--going to the Prize Fight on Copthorne Common.
England forever, with a blue coat and scarlet lining hanging over the
back of the tilbury. England driving a gig and one horse; England
set up with a curricle and two. England in donkey-carts and coaches.
England swearing, pushing, drinking, happy, off to see the "Game
Chicken" punch the "Nonpareil's" face to a black-and-blue jelly.
Good old England, drunk as a lord, cursing the turn-pike men. Your
hedges will be a nest of broken bottles before night, and clouds of
dust will quench the perfume of your flowers. I bet you three bulls
to a tanner you can't smell a rose for a week.
They've got the soldiers out farther along. "Damn the soldiers!
Drive through them, Watson." A fine, manly business; are we slaves?
"Britons never--never--" Waves lap the shores of England, waves like
watchdogs growling; and long hedges bind her like a bundle. Sit
safe, England, trussed and knotted; while your strings hold, all will
be well.
But in the distance there is a puff of steam. Just a puff, but it
will do. Post-boys, coachmen, guards, chaises, melt like meadow rime
before the sun.
You spun your webs over England, hedge to hedge. You kept England
bound together by your spinning wheels. But it is gone. They have
driven a wedge of iron into your heart. They have dried up the sea,
and made pathways in the swimming air. They have tapped the barrels
in your cellars and your throats are parched and bleeding. But still
the hedges blow for the Spring, and dusty soldiers smell your roses
as they tramp to Aldershot or Dorchester.
England forever! Star-pointed and shining. Flinging her hedges out
and asunder to embrace the world.
THE BRONZE HORSES
_ELEMENTS_
_Earth, Air, Water, and Fire! Earth beneath, Air encompassing, Water
within its boundaries. But Fire is nothing, comes from nothing, goes
nowhither. Fire leaps forth and dies, yet is everything sprung out
of Fire._
_The flame grows and drops away, and where it stood is vapour, and
where was the vapour is swift revolution, and where was the
revolution is spinning resistance, and where the resistance endured
is crystallization. Fire melts, and the absence of Fire cools and
freezes. So are metals fused in twisted flames and take on a form
other than that they have known, and this new form shall be to them
rebirth and making. For in it they will stand upon the Earth, and in
it they will defy the Air, and in it they will suffer the Water._
_But Fire, coming again, the substance changes and is transformed.
Therefore are things known only between burning and burning. The
quickly consumed more swiftly vanish, yet all must feel the heat of
the flame which waits in obscurity, knowing its own time and what
work it has to do._
ROME
The blue sky of Italy; the blue sky of Rome. Sunlight pouring white
and clear from the wide-stretched sky. Sunlight sliding softly over
white marble, lying in jasmine circles before cool porticoes,
striking sharply upon roofs and domes, recoiling before straight
façades of grey granite, foiled and beaten by the deep halls of
temples.
Sunlight on tiles and tufa, sunlight on basalt and porphyry. The sky
stripes Rome with sun and shadow; strips of yellow, strips of blue,
pepper-dots of purple and orange. It whip-lashes the four great
horses of gilded bronze, harnessed to the bronze _quadriga_ on the
Arch of Nero, and they trot slowly forward without moving. The
horses tread the marbles of Rome beneath their feet. Their golden
flanks quiver in the sunlight. One foot paws the air. A step, and
they will lance into the air, Pegasus-like, stepping the wind. But
they do not take the step. They wait--poised, treading Rome as they
trod Alexandria, as they trod the narrow Island of Cos. The spokes
of the _quadriga_ wheels flash, but they do not turn. They burn like
day-stars above the Arch of Nero. The horses poise over Rome, a
constellation of morning, triumphant above Emperors, proud,
indifferent, enduring, relentlessly spurning the hot dust of Rome.
Hot dust clouds up about them, but not one particle sticks to their
gilded manes. Dust is nothing, a mere smoke of disappearing hours.
Slowly they trot forward without moving, and time passes and passes
them, brushing along their sides like wind.
People go and come in the streets of Rome, shuffling over the basalt
paving-stones in their high latcheted sandals. White and purple,
like the white sun and the purple shadows, the senators pass,
followed by a crowd of slaves. Waves of brown-coated populace efface
themselves before a litter, carried by eight Cappadocians in
light-red tunics; as it moves along, there is the flicker of a violet
_stola_ and the blowing edge of a palla of sky-white blue. A lady,
going to the bath to lie for an hour in the crimson and wine-red
reflections of a marble chamber, to glide over a floor of green and
white stones into a Carraran basin, where the green and blue water
will cover her rose and blue-veined flesh with a slipping veil. Aqua
Claudia, Aqua Virgo, Aqua Marcia, drawn from the hills to lie against
a woman's body. Her breasts round hollows for themselves in the
sky-green water, her fingers sift the pale water and drop it from her
as a lark drops notes backwards into the sky. The lady lies against
the lipping water, supine and indolent, a pomegranate, a
passion-flower, a silver-flamed lily, lapped, slapped, lulled, by the
ripples which stir under her faintly moving hands.
Later, beneath a painting of twelve dancing girls upon a gold ground,
the slaves will anoint her with cassia, or nakte, or spikenard, or
balsam, and she will go home in the swaying litter to eat the tongues
of red flamingoes, and drink honey-wine flavoured with far-smelling
mint.
Legionaries ravish Egypt for her entertainment; they bring her roses
from Alexandria at a cost of thirty thousand pounds. Yet she would
rather be at Baiae, one is so restricted in one's pleasures in Rome!
The games are not until next week, and her favourite gladiator,
Naxos, is in training just now, therefore time drags. The lady lags
over her quail and peacocks' eggs. How dull it is. White, and blue,
and stupid. Rome!
Smoke flutters and veers from the top of the Temple of Vesta. Altar
smoke winding up to the gilded horses as they tread above Rome.
Below--laughing, jangling, pushing and rushing. Two carts are jammed
at a street corner, and the oaths of the drivers mingle, and snap,
and corrode, like hot fused metal, one against another. They hiss
and sputter, making a confused chord through which the squeal of a
derrick winding up a granite slab pierces, shrill and nervous, a
sharp boring sound, shoring through the wide, white light of the
Roman sky. People are selling things: matches, broken glass, peas,
sausages, cakes. A string of donkeys, with panniers loaded with red
asparagus and pale-green rue, minces past the derrick, the donkeys
squeeze, one by one, with little patting feet, between the derrick
and the choked crossing. "Hey! Gallus, have you heard that Cæsar
has paid a million _sestertii_ for a Murrhine vase. It is green and
white, flaked like a Spring onion, and has the head of Minerva cut in
it, sharp as a signet." "And who has a better right indeed, now that
Titus has conquered Judea. He will be here next week, they say, and
then we shall have a triumph worth looking at." "Famous indeed! We
need something. It's been abominably monotonous lately. Why, there
was not enough blood spilled in the games last week to give one the
least appetite. I'm damned stale, for one."
Still, over Rome, the white sun sails the blue, stretching sky,
casting orange and purple striæ down upon the marble city, cool and
majestic, between cool hills, white and omnipotent, dying of languor,
amusing herself for a moment with the little boats floating up the
Tiber bringing the good grain of Carthage, then relaxed and falling
as water falls, dropping into the bath. Weak as water; without
contour as water; colourless as water; Rome bathes, and relaxes, and
melts. Fluid and fluctuating, a liquid city pouring itself back into
the streams of the earth. And above, on the Arch of Nero, hard,
metallic, firm, cold, and permanent, the bronze horses trot slowly,
not moving, and the moon casts the fine-edged shadow of them down
upon the paving-stones.
Hills of the city: Pincian, Esquiline, Cælian, Aventine, the crimson
tip of the sun burns against you, and you start into sudden clearness
and glow red, red-gold, saffron, gradually diminishing to an outline
of blue. The sun mounts over Rome, and the Arch of Augustus glitters
like a cleft pomegranate; the Temples of Julius Cæsar, Castor, and
Saturn, turn carbuncle, and rose, and diamond. Columns divide into
double edges of flash and shadow; domes glare, inverted beryls
hanging over arrested scintillations. The fountains flake and fringe
with the scatter of the sun. The mosaic floors of _atriums_ are no
longer stone, but variegated fire; higher, on the walls, the pictures
painted in the white earth of Melos, the red earth of Sinope, the
yellow ochre of Attica, erupt into flame. The legs of satyrs jerk
with desire, the dancers whirl in torch-bright involutions. Grapes
split and burst, spurting spots and sparks of sun.
It is morning in Rome, and the bronze horses on the Arch of Nero trot
quietly forward without moving, but no one can see them, they are
only a dazzle, a shock of stronger light against the white-blue sky.
Morning in Rome; and the whole city foams out to meet it, seething,
simmering, surging, seeping. All between the Janiculum and the
Palatine is undulating with people. Scarlet, violet, and purple
togas pattern the mass of black and brown. Murex-dyed silk dresses
flow beside raw woollen fabrics. The altars smoke incense, the
bridges shake under the caking mass of sight-seers. "Titus! Titus!
_Io triumphe!_" Even now the troops are collected near the Temple of
Apollo, outside the gates, waiting for the signal to march. In the
parching Roman morning, the hot dust rises and clouds over the
city--an aureole of triumph. The horses on the Arch of Nero paw the
golden dust, but it passes, passes, brushing along their burnished
sides like wind.
What is that sound? The marble city shivers to the treading of feet.
Cæsar's legions marching, foot--foot--hundreds, thousands of feet.
They beat the ground, rounding each step double.
Coming--coming--cohort after cohort, with brazen trumpets marking the
time. One--two--one--two--laurel-crowned each one of you,
cactus-fibred, harsh as sand grinding the rocks of a treeless land,
rough and salt as a Dead Sea wind, only the fallen are left behind.
Blood-red plumes, jarring to the footfalls; they have passed through
the gate, they are in the walls of the mother city, of marble Rome.
Their tunics are purple embroidered with gold, their armour clanks as
they walk, the cold steel of their swords is chill in the sun, each
is a hero, one by one, endless companies, the soldiers come. Back to
Rome with a victor's spoils, with a victor's wreath on every head,
and Judah broken is dead, dead! "_Io triumphe!_" The shout knocks
and breaks upon the spears of the legionaries.
The God of the Jews is overborne, he has failed his people. See the
stuffs from the Syrian looms, and the vestments of many-colours, they
were taken from the great Temple at Jerusalem. And the watching
crowds split their voices acclaiming the divine triumph. Mars, and
Juno, and Minerva, and the rest, those gods are the best who bring
victory! And the beasts they have over there! Is that a crocodile?
And that bird with a tail as long as a banner, what do you call that?
Look at the elephants, and the dromedaries! They are harnessed in
jewels. Oh! Oh! The beautiful sight! Here come the prisoners,
dirty creatures. "That's a good-looking girl there. I have rather a
fancy for a Jewess. I'll get her, by Bacchus, if I have to mortgage
my farm. A man too, of course, to keep the breed going; it will be a
good investment, although, to be sure, I want the girl myself.
Castor and Pollux, did you see that picture! Ten men disembowelled
on the steps of the altar. That is better than a gladiator show any
day. I wish I had been there. Simon, oh, Simon! Spit at him,
Lucullus. Thumbs down for Simon! Fancy getting him alive, I wonder
he didn't kill himself first like Cleopatra. This is a glorious day,
I haven't had such fun in years."
The bronze horses tread quietly above the triumphing multitudes.
They too have been spoils of war, yet they stand here on the Arch of
Nero dominating Rome. Time passes--passes--but the horses, calm and
contained, move forward, dividing one minute from another and leaving
each behind.
You should be still now, Roman populace. These are the decorations
of the Penetralia, the holy Sanctuary which your soldiers have
profaned. But the people jeer and scoff, and comment on the queer
articles carried on the heads of the soldiers. Tragedy indeed! They
see no tragedy, only an immense spectacle, unique and satisfying.
The crowd clears its throat and spits and shouts "_Io triumphe! Io
triumphe!_" against the cracking blare of brazen trumpets.
Slowly they come, the symbols of a beaten religion: the Golden Table
for the Shew-Bread, the Silver Trumpets that sounded the Jubilee, the
Seven-Branched Candlestick, the very Tables of the Law which Moses
brought down from Mount Sinai. Can Jupiter conquer these? Slowly
they pass, glinting in the sunlight, staring in the light of day,
mocked and exhibited. Lord God of Hosts, fall upon these people,
send your thunders upon them, hurl the lightnings of your wrath
against this multitude, raze their marble city so that not one stone
remain standing. But the sun shines unclouded, and the holy vessels
pass onward through the Campus Martius, through the Circus Flaminius,
up the Via Sacra to the Capitol, and then... The bronze horses look
into the brilliant sky, they trot slowly without moving, they advance
slowly, one foot raised. There is always another step--one, and
another. How many does not matter, so that each is taken.
The _spolia opima_ have passed. The crowd holds its breath and
quivers. Everyone is tiptoed up to see above his neighbour; they
sway and brace themselves in their serried ranks. Away, over the
heads, silver eagles glitter, each one marking the passage of a
legion. The "Victorious Legion" goes by, the "Indomitable Legion,"
the "Spanish Legion," and those with a crested lark on their helmets,
and that other whose centurions are almost smothered under the
shining reflections of the medallions fastened to their armour.
Cohort after cohort, legion on the heels of legion, the glistening
greaves rise and flash and drop and pale, scaling from sparkle to
dullness in a series of rhythmic angles, constantly repeated. They
swing to the tones of straight brass trumpets, they jut out and fall
at the call of spiral bugles. Above them, the pointed shields move
evenly, right to left--right to left. The horses curvet and prance,
and shiver back, checked, on their haunches; the javelins of the
horsemen are so many broad-ended sticks of flame.
Those are the eagles of the Imperial Guard, and behind are two golden
chariots. "_Io triumphe!_" The roar drowns the trumpets and bugles,
the clatter of the horses' hoofs is a mere rattle of sand ricocheting
against the voice of welcoming Rome. The Emperor Vespasian rides in
one chariot, in the other stands Titus. Titus, who has subdued
Judea, who has humbled Jehovah, and brought the sacred vessels of the
Lord God of Hosts back with him as a worthy offering to the people of
Rome. Cheer, therefore, good people, you have the Throne of Heaven
to recline upon; you are possessed of the awful majesty of the God of
the Jews; beneath your feet are spread the emblems of the Most High;
and your hands are made free of the sacred instruments of Salvation.
What god is that who falls before pikes and spears! Here is another
god, his face and hands stained with vermilion, after the manner of
the Capitoline Jupiter. His car is of ivory and gold, green plumes
nod over the heads of his horses, the military bracelets on his arms
seem like circling serpents of bitter flame. The milk-white horses
draw him slowly to the Capitol, step by step, along the Via
Triumphalis, and step by step the old golden horses on the Arch of
Nero tread down the hours of the lapsing day.
That night, forty elephants bearing candelabra light up the ranges of
pillars supporting the triple portico of the Capitol. Forty
illuminated elephants--and the light of their candles is reflected in
the polished sides of the great horses, above, on the Arch of Nero,
slowly trotting forward, stationary yet moving, in the soft night
which hangs over Rome.
_PAVANNE TO A BRASS ORCHESTRA_
_Water falls from the sky, and green-fanged lightning mouths the
heavens. The Earth rolls upon itself, incessantly creating morning
and evening. The moon calls to the waters, swinging them forward and
back, and the sun draws closer and as rhythmically recedes, advancing
in the pattern of an ancient dance, making a figure of leaves and
aridness. Harmony of chords and pauses, fugue of returning balances,
canon and canon repeating the theme of Earth, Air, and Water._
_A single cymbal-crash of Fire, and for an instant the concerted
music ceases. But it resumes--Earth, Air, and Water, and out of it
rise the metals, unconsumed. Brazen cymbals, trumpets of silver,
bells of bronze. They mock at fire. They burn upon themselves and
retain their entities. Not yet the flame which shall destroy them.
They shall know all flames but one. They shall be polished and
corroded, yet shall they persist and play the music which accompanies
the strange ceremonious dance of the sun._
CONSTANTINOPLE
Empire of the East! Byzantium! Constantinople! The Golden City of
the World. A crystal fixed in aquamarines; a jewel-box set down in a
seaside garden. All the seas are as blue as Spring lupins, and there
are so many seas. Look where you please, forward, back, or down,
there is water. The deep blue water of crisp ripples, the long light
shimmer of flat undulations, the white glare, smoothing into purple,
of a sun-struck ebb. The Bosphorus winds North to the Black Sea.
The Golden Horn curves into the Sweet Waters. The edge of the city
swerves away from the Sea of Marmora. Aquamarines, did I say?
Sapphires, beryls, lapis-lazuli, amethysts, and felspar. Whatever
stones there are, bluer than gentians, bluer than cornflowers, bluer
than asters, bluer than periwinkles. So blue that the city must be
golden to complement the water. A geld city, shimmering and
simmering, starting up like mica from the green of lemon trees, and
olives, and cypresses.
Gold! Gold! Walls and columns covered with gold. Domes of churches
resplendent with gold. Innumerable statues of "bronze fairer than
pure gold," and courts paved with golden tiles. Beyond the white and
rose-coloured walls of Saint Sophia, the city rounds for fourteen
great miles; fourteen miles of onychite, and porphyry, and marble;
fourteen miles of colonnades, and baths, and porticoes; fourteen
miles of gay, garish, gaudy, glaring gold. Why, even the Imperial
_triremes_ in the harbour have gold embroidered gonfalons, and the
dolphins, ruffling out of the water between them, catch the colour
and dive, each a sharp cutting disk-edge of yellow flame.
It is the same up above, where statues spark like stars jutted from a
mid-day sky. There are golden Emperors at every crossing, and golden
Virgins crowding every church-front. And, in the centre of the great
Hippodrome, facing the _triremes_ and the leaping dolphins, is a fine
chariot of Corinthian brass. Four horses harnessed to a gilded
_quadriga_. The horses pace evenly forward, in a moment they will be
trampling upon space, facing out to sea on the currents of the
morning breeze. But their heads are arched and checked, gracefully
they pause, one leg uplifted, seized and baffled by the arrested
movement. They are the horses of Constantine, brought from Rome, so
people say, buzzing in the Augustaion. "Fine horses, hey?" "A good
breed, Persia from the look of them, though they're a bit thick in
the barrel for the horses they bring us from there." "They bring us
their worst, most likely." "Oh, I don't know, we buy pretty well.
Why, only the other day I gave a mint of money for a cargo of
Egyptian maize." "Lucky dog, you'll make on that, with all the
harvest here ruined by the locusts."
It is a pretty little wind which plays along the sides of the gilded
horses, a coquettish little sea wind, blowing and listing and finally
dropping away altogether and going to sleep in a plane-tree behind
the Hippodrome.
Constantinople is a yellow honey-comb, with fat bees buzzing in all
its many-sided cells. Bees come over the flower-blue seas; bees
humming from the Steppes of Tartary, from the long line of Nile-fed
Egypt. Tush! What would you! Where there is gold there are always
men about it; to steal it, to guard it, to sit and rot under its
lotus-shining brilliance. The very army is woven of threads drawn
from the edges of the world. Byzantines are merchantmen, they roll
and flounder in the midst of gold coins, they tumble and wallow in
money-baths, they sit and chuckle under a continuous money-spray.
And ringed about them is the army, paid to shovel back the scattering
gold pieces: Dalmatians with swords and arrows; Macedonians with
silver belts and gilt shields; Scholarii, clad in rose-coloured
tunics; Varangians, shouldering double battle-axes. When they walk,
the rattle of them can be heard pattering back from every wall and
doorway. It clacks and cracks even in the Copper Market, above the
clang of cooking pots and the wrangling whine of Jewish traders.
Constantinople chatters, buzzes, screams, growls, howls, squeals,
snorts, brays, croaks, screeches, crows, neighs, gabbles, purrs,
hisses, brawls, roars, shouts, mutters, calls, in every sort of
crochet and demi-semi-quaver, wavering up in a great contrapuntal
murmur--adagio, maestoso, capriccioso, scherzo, staccato, crescendo,
vivace, veloce, brio--brio--brio!! A racket of dissonance, a hubbub
of harmony. Chords? Discords? Answer: Byzantium!
People pluck the strings of rebecks and psalteries; they shock the
cords of lyres; they batter tin drums, and shatter the guts of
kettle-drums when the Emperor goes to Saint Sophia to worship at an
altar of precious stones fused into a bed of gold and silver, and, as
he walks up the nave between the columns of green granite, and the
columns of porphyry, under the golden lily on the Octagonal Tower,
the bells pour their notes over the roofs, spilling them in single
jets down on each side of the wide roofs. Drip--drip--drip--out of
their hearts of beaten bronze, slipping and drowning in the noise of
the crowds clustered below.