of England deferred his departure for a few days. One afternoon, just
before the leaves began to brown on the hills, there was a concert at
the garden of the Hotel Bellevue. The royal party attended. The yodling
was much praised, especially that of a good-looking young woman and her
escort, a very tall man of cadaverous aspect, his shanks like the wooden
stilts of the shepherds on the Bordeaux Landes. His face,
preternaturally emaciated and fatigued, opened to emit an amazing yodel.
When the _Schuhplattltanz_ was reached he surprised the audience by an
extraordinary exhibition. He threw his long legs about like billiard
cues, while his arms flapped as do windmills in a hard gale. He was
pointed out as a celebrity--once a monster Englishman, who had taken the
_Kur_; who was in love, but so poor that he could not marry. The girl
with him was certain to make a success in grand opera some day. Yes,
Marienbad was proud of Krayne. He was one of her show sons, a witness to
her curative powers. Proud also of the Bavarian Präger Sextette. Herr
Präger was reputed a rich man....
The night of that concert Marienbad saw the last of the Bavarian
sextette, which at midnight, joined by its old dancer with the tenor
voice, left in a third-class carriage for Vienna. Hugh Krayne, not
possessing enough to pay his passage, had not been invited; nor was he
informed of the sudden departure until a day later....
* * * * *
On the road to the Alm, of moonlight nights, toiling visitors catch
glimpses of a human, almost a skeleton, dressed in rags, his head bare
as his feet, about his neck a flaming crimson handkerchief. He is known
to Marienbäders as "The Man Who Stayed Too Long." He never addresses
passers-by; but as they lose sight of him they hear the woods resound
with his elegiac howl:--
_La la liriti! La la lirita! Hallali!_
X
THE THIRD KINGDOM
I
A DOUBTER
Brother Hyzlo sat in his cell and read. The gentle stillness of a rare
spring morning enveloped him with its benison. And the clear light fell
upon the large pages of a book in his hand,--the window through which it
streamed was the one link between the young recluse and the life of the
world. From it he could see the roofs of the city beneath him; when he
so wished, he might, without straining his gaze, distinguish the
Pantheon at the end of that triumphal avenue which spanned the Seine and
had once evoked for him visions of antique splendour. But Brother Hyzlo
no longer cared for mundane delights. His doubting soul was the
battle-field over which he ranged day and night searching for diabolic
opponents. Exterior existence had become for him a shadow; the only life
worth living was that of the spirit.
In his book that fresh spring morning he read as if in the flare of a
passing meteor these disquieting words:--
"How were it if, some day or night, a demon stole after thee into thy
most solitary solitude, and said to thee: 'This life, as thou livest it
now, and hast lived it, thou shalt have to live over again, and not once
but innumerable times; and there will be nothing new in it, but every
pain and every pleasure and every thought and sigh, and everything in
thy life, the great and the unspeakably petty alike, must come again to
thee, and all in the same series and succession; this spider, too, and
this moonlight betwixt the trees and this moment likewise and I myself.
The eternal sand-glass of time is always turned again, and thou with it,
thou atom of dust'? Wouldst thou not cast thyself down and with gnashing
of teeth curse the demon who thus spoke? Or, hast thou ever experienced
the tremendous moment in which thou wouldst answer him: 'Thou art a god
and never heard I anything more divine'?"
The book slipped from his hands. "Why not?" he murmured, "why not? There
is no such thing as chance. The law of probabilities is not a mere
fancy, but an austere need. Matter is ever in evolution. Energy alone is
indestructible. Radium has revealed this to us. In eternity when the
Infinite throws the dice, double-sixes are sure to come up more than
once. Miracles? But why miraculous? Infinity of necessity must repeat
itself, and then I, sitting here now, will sit here again, sit and doubt
the goodness of God, ay, doubt His existence.... How horrible!" He
paused in the whirl of his thoughts.
"Yet how beautiful, for if the eternal recurrence be truth, then must
the great drama of the Redemption be repeated. Then will our foes be
convinced of Christianity and its reality. But shall we be conscious in
that far-off time of our anterior existence? Ah! hideous, coiling doubt.
What a demon is this Nietzsche to set whirring in the brains of poor,
suffering humanity such torturing questions! Better, far better for the
world to live and not to think. Thought is a disease, a morbid secretion
of the brain-cells. Ah! materialist that I am, I can no longer think
without remembering the ideas of Cabanis, that gross atheist. Why am I
punished so? What crimes have I committed in a previous
existence--Karma, again!--that I must perforce study the writings of
impious men? Yet I submitted myself as a candidate for the task, to save
my brethren in Christ from soiling their hearts. Heaven preserve me from
the blight of spiritual pride, but I believe that I am now a scapegoat
for the offences of my fellow-monks, and, thus, may redeem my own
wretched soul. Ah! Nietzsche--Antichrist."
He arose and threw the volume across his cell. Then going to the window
regarded with humid gaze the world that sprawled below him in the
voluptuous sunshine. But so sternly was the inner eye fixed on the
things of the spirit that he soon turned away from the delectable
picture, and as he did so his glance rested upon a crucifix. He started,
his perturbed imagination again touched.
"What if Nietzsche were right? The first Christian, the only Christian,
died on the cross, he has said. What an arraignment of our precious
faith, Jesus Christ, our Lord God! What sweet names are Thine! How could
Nietzsche not feel the music of that Hebrew-Greek combination? Perhaps
he did; perhaps he masked a profound love behind his hatred. Jesus our
Lord! Hebrew-Greek. But why Greek? Why ...?" Another pause in this
sequestered chamber where the buzzing of an insect could assume a
thunderous roar. "The eternal return. Why should Christ return? Must the
earth be saved again and again and a billion times again? Awful thought
of a God descending to a horrible death to cleanse the nameless myriads
from sins which they seek ever as flies treacle. More ghastly still is
the thought that the atheist Scandinavian put into the mouth of his
Julian the Apostate: When our Christ is not saving this earth from
eternal damnation then he may be visiting remote planets or inaccessible
stars, where coloured double suns of blinding brilliancy revolve
terrifically in twin harness. There, too, are souls to be rescued. What
a grand idea! It is Ibsen's, as is the interpretation of the Third
Kingdom. It should have been Nietzsche's. Why this antinomianism? Why
this eternal conflict of evil and good, of night and day, of sweet and
sour, of God and devil, of Ormuzd and Ahriman?"
The exotic names transposed his thoughts to another avenue. If Christ is
to come again, and the holy word explicitly states that He will, why not
Buddha? Why not Brahma? Why not ...? Again a hiatus. This time something
snapped in his head. He sank back in his chair. Buddha! Was there ever a
Buddha? And if there was not, was there ever such a personality as
Christ's? Scholar that he was he knew that myth-building was a pastime
for the Asiatic imagination, great, impure, mysterious Asia--Asia the
mother of all religions, the cradle of the human race. To deny the
objective existence of Christ would set at rest all his doubts, one
overwhelming doubt swallowing the minor doubts. He had never speculated
at length upon the Christ legend, for did not Renan, yes, that silky
heretic, believe in the personality of Jesus, believe and lovingly
portray it? The Nietzsche doctrine of the eternal recurrence had so
worked upon his sensitive mental apparatus that he could have almost
denied the existence of Christ rather than deny that our universe
repeats itself infinitely. Eternity is a wheel, earthly events are the
spokes of this whirring wheel. It was the seeming waste of divine
material that shocked his nerves. One crucifixion--yes; but two or two
quintillions and infinitely more!
Brother Hyzlo stared at the crucifix. Was it only a symbol, as some
learned blasphemers averred? The human figure so painfully extended
upon it was a God, a God who descended from high heaven to become a
shield between the wrath of His Father and humanity. Why? Why should the
God who created us grow angry with our shortcomings? We are His
handiwork. Are we then to blame for our imperfections? Is not Jesus,
instead of a mediator, rather a votive offering to the wounded vanity of
the great Jehovah? Was not Prometheus--a light broke in upon Hyzlo.
Prometheus, a myth, Buddha a myth. All myths. There were other
virgin-born saviours. Krishna, Mithra, Buddha. Vishnu had not one but
nine incarnations. Christianity bears alarming resemblances to
Mithraism. Mithra, too, was born in a cave. The dates of Christ's birth
and death may be astronomical: the winter and vernal equinoxes. But the
conflict of the authorities regarding these dates is mortifying. The
four gospels are in reality four witnesses warring against each other.
They were selected haphazard at a human council. They were not composed
until the latter part of the second century, and the synoptic gospels
are compilations from unknown writers, while the fourth gospel is a much
later work. And how colourless, imitative, is the New when compared to
the Old Testament,--echoing with the antiphonal thunders of Jehovah and
his stern-mouthed Prophets! The passage in Josephus touching on Christ
is now known to have been interpolated. Authentic history does not
record the existence of Christ. Not one of His contemporaries mentions
him. That tremendous drama in Galilee was not even commented upon by the
Romans, a nation keen to notice any deviation from normal history. The
Jewish records are doubtful, written centuries after His supposed death.
And they are malicious. What cannot happen in two centuries? Hyzlo
reflected sadly upon Moslemism, upon Mormonism, upon the vagaries of a
strange American sect at whose head was said to be a female pope.
The similarity of circumstances in the lives of Buddha and Christ also
annoyed him. Both were born of virgins, both renounced the world, both
were saviours. There were the same temptations, the same happenings;
prophecies, miracles, celestial rejoicings, a false disciple, the seven
beatitudes--a reflection of the Oriental wisdom--an expiatory death and
resurrection. The entire machinery of the Christian church, its saints,
martyrs, festivals, ritual, and philosophies are borrowed from the
mythologies of the pagans. Sun-worship is the beginning of all
religions. To the genius of the epileptic Paul, or Saul,--founders of
religions are always epilepts,--a half Greek and disciple of the
Pharisee Gamaliel, who saw visions and put to the sword his enemies, to
Paul, called a saint, a man of overwhelming personal force, to this
cruel anarchist, relentless, half-mad fanatic and his theological
doctrines we owe the preservation and power of the Christian Church. At
first the Christians were the miserable offscourings of society, slaves,
criminals, and lunatics. They burrowed in the Catacombs, they fastened
themselves upon a decaying and magnificent civilization like the
parasites they were. A series of political catastrophes, a popular
uprising against the rotten emperors of decadent Rome, and the wide
growth of the socialist idea--these things and an unscrupulous man,
Constantine the Great, put the Christians firmly in the saddle. And soon
came cataracts of blood. If the tales of the imperial persecutions are
true, then hath Christianity been revenged a million fold; where her
skirt has trailed there has been the cruel stain of slaughter. It must
not be forgotten, too, that immorality of the grossest sort was promised
the deluded sectarians, compared with which the Mahometan paradise is
spiritual. And the end of the world was predicted at the end of every
century, and finally relegated to the millennial celebration of
Christianity's birth. When, in 1000 A.D., this catastrophe did
not occur, the faith received its first great shock.
He summoned to his memory a cloud of witnesses, all contradictory.
Josephus was barred. Philo Judæus, who was living near the centre of
things, an observer on the scent of the spiritual, a man acquainted with
the writings of Rabbi Hillel, and the father of Neoplatonism--never
mentions Jesus, nor does he speak of any religious uprising in Judea.
The passage in Virgil, which has through the doubtful testimony of
monkish writers been construed into a prophecy of a forthcoming Messiah,
Hyzlo, who was a scholar, knew to have been addressed to a son of
Virgil's intimate friend. Tacitus, too, has been interpolated. Seneca's
ideal man is not Jesus, for Jesus is Osiris, Horus, Krishna, Mithra,
Hercules, Adonis,--think of this beautiful young god's death!--Buddha.
Such a mock trial and death could not have taken place under the Roman
or Jewish laws. The sacraments derive from the Greeks, from the
Indians--the mysteries of Ceres and Bacchus, from the _Haoma_ sacrifice
of the Persians, originally Brahmanic. The Trinity, was it not a relic
of that ineradicable desire for polytheism implanted in the human bosom?
Was the crucifixion but a memory of those darker cults and blood
sacrifices of Asia, and also of the expiating goats sent out into the
wilderness? What became of that Hosanna-shouting crowd which welcomed
Christ on Palm Sunday? And there never were such places as Gethsemane
and Calvary. Alas! the Son of Man had indeed no spot to lay his head.
And why had He made no sign when on earth! Brother Hyzlo wept bitter
tears.
But he wiped them away as he considered the similarity of the massacre
of the Innocents in Judea and the massacre of the male children ordered
by the wicked Indian Rajah of Madura, who feared the Krishna, just
conceived by divine agency. Yes, the chronicles were full of these gods
born of virgins, of crucifixions,--he could remember sixteen,--of these
solar myths. He caught tripping in a thousand cases the translations of
our holy books. The Ox and Ass legend at the Nativity he realized was
the Pseudo-Matthew's description to Habakkuk of the literal presence:
"In the midst of two animals thou shalt be known;" which is a
mistranslated Hebrew text in the Prayer ascribed to Habakkuk. It got
into the Greek Septuagint version of the Prophet made by Egyptian Jews
before 150 B.C. It should read, "in the midst of the years,"
not "animals." "Ah!" cried Hyzlo, "in this as in important cardinal
doctrines have the faithful been the slaves of the learned and
unscrupulous pious forgers. Even the notorious Apollonius of Tyana
imitated the miracles of Christ--all of them. And what of that wicked
wizard, Simon Magus?"
The very repetition of these miracles in all races, at all epochs,
pointed to the doctrine of recurrence. But back of all the negations,
back of the inexpugnable proof that no such man or God as Christ
existed, or was known to his contemporaries, Jewish and Roman, there
must have been some legend which had crystallized into a mighty
religion. Was He an agitator who preferred His obscurity that His glory
might be all the greater? There _must_ have been a beginning to the
myth; behind the gospels--though they are obviously imitated from the
older testaments, imitated and diluted--were unknown writings; previous
to these there was word of mouth and--and ...?
The day had advanced, the sun was very warm. A shaft of light fell upon
the cold stone floor, and in its fiery particles darted myriads of
motes. Hyzlo followed their spiral flights, thinking all the while of
humanity which flashes from out the dark void, plays madly in the light,
only to vanish into the unknown night. His gaze was held by the
smoothness of the flagging at his feet. Then it became transformed into
marble, the walls of his cell widened, and he closed his eyes, so
blinding were the long ladders of light....
II
TWO DREAMERS
He opened them ... the harbour with its army of galleys and pleasure
craft lay in the burning sunshine, its surface a sapphire blue. Overhead
the sky echoed this tone, which modulated into deeper notes of purple on
the far-away hills whose tops were wreathed in mist. Under his sandalled
feet was marble, back of him were the gleaming spires and towers of the
great city, and at his left was a mountain of shining marble, the
Pharos.
"Alexandria?" he called out as he was jostled by a melon-seller, and
startled by the fluted invitations of a young girl--an antique statue
come to life.
"Of course it is Alexandria," replied a deep, harsh voice at his elbow.
He turned. It was his friend Philo.
"You have at last emerged from your day-dream, Hyzlo! I thought, as our
bark clove the water, that you were enjoying visions." And it seemed to
Hyzlo that he had just awakened from a bizarre dream of a monastic cell,
to more beautiful sights and shapes and sounds. The pair now traversed
the quay, past the signal masts, the fortified towers, pushing through
the throng of sailors, courtesans, philosophers, fruitsellers, soldiers,
beggars, and idle rich toward the spacious city. Past the palace to the
wall of the Canal, along the banks of the Royal Port, they finally
struck into a broad, deserted avenue. At its head was a garden wall.
Philo introduced himself and his companion through a low door and
presently they were both in an apartment full of parchments, glittering
brass and gold instruments all reposing on a wide, long table.
"Hyzlo," said the Jewish philosopher, in his slightly accented Greek, "I
have long promised you that I would reveal to you my secret, my life
work. I am downcast by sadness. Rome is full of warring cults, Greek,
African, Babylonian, Buddhistic; the writings of the great teachers, the
masters, Heraclitus, Zeno, Anaxagoras, Plato, Socrates, Epictetus,
Seneca, are overlaid with heretical emendations. The religion of my
fellow-countrymen is a fiery furnace, Jerusalem a den of warring
thieves. The rulers of earth are weary and turn a deaf ear on their
peoples. The time is ripe for revolt. Sick of the accursed luxury and
debauchery, fearful of the threatening barbarians from Asia and the
boreal regions, who are hemming the civilized world, waiting like
vultures for the first sign of weakness to destroy everything, the
slaves in revolt--all these impending terrors assure me that the end of
the old order is at hand. But what will become of the new if there is no
central belief to steady the ensanguined hands of furious mobs? For
years I have bethought me of a drama, a gigantic world-drama which shall
embody all the myths of mankind, all the noblest thoughts of the
philosophers. I shall take the Buddha myth, surely the supreme myth, and
transpose its characters to Jerusalem. A humble Jew shall be _my_
Buddha. He shall be my revenge on our conquerors; for my people have
been trampled upon by the insolent Romans, and who knows--a Jewish God,
a crucified God, may be worshipped in the stead of Jupiter and his vile
pantheon of gods and goddesses! _One_ God, the son of Jahveh who comes
upon earth to save mankind, is crucified and killed, is resurrected and
like Elijah is caught up to heaven in a fiery chariot. But you know the
usual style of these Asiatic legends! They are all alike; a virgin
birth, a miraculous life, and transfiguration. That sums up myths from
Adonis to Krishna, from Krishna to Buddha; though Monotheism comes from
the Hebrews, the Trinity from the Indians, and the _logos_ was
developed by Plato. Where I am original is that I make my hero a
Jew--the Jews are still half-cracked enough to believe in the coming of
a Messiah. And to compass a fine dramatic moment I have introduced an
incident I once witnessed in Alexandria at the landing of King Agrippa,
when the populace dressed up a vagabond named Karabas as a mock king and
stuck upon his head papyrus leaves for a crown, in his hand a reed for a
sceptre, and then saluted him as king. I shall make my Jew-God seized by
the Jews, his own blood and kin, given over to the Romans, mocked,
reviled, and set aside for some thief who shall be called Karabas. Then,
rejected, he shall be crucified, he a god born of a virgin, by the very
people who are looking for their Messiah. He is their Messiah; yet they
know it not. They shall never know it. That shall be their tragedy, the
tragedy of my race, which, notwithstanding the prophecies, turned its
back upon the Messiah because he came not clothed in the purple of
royalty. Is that not a magnificent idea for a drama?"
"Excellent," answered Hyzlo, in a critical tone; "but continue!"
"You seem without enthusiasm, Hyzlo. I tell you that Æschylus,
Sophocles, or Euripides never conceived a story more infinitely dramatic
or pathetic, or--thanks to my Hebraic blood--so suffused with tragic
irony. I shall make a very effective tableau at the death; on some
forbidding stony hill near Jerusalem I shall plant my crucified hero,
and near him a converted courtesan--ah! what a master of the theatre I
am!--in company with a handful of faithful disciples. The others have
run away to save their cowardly skins in the tumult. The mobs that
hailed him as King of the Jews now taunt him, after the manner of all
mobs. His early life I shall borrow outright from the Buddha legends. He
shall be born of a virgin; he shall live in the desert; as a child he
shall confute learned doctors in the temple; and later in the desert he
shall be tempted by a demon. All this is at hand. My chief point is the
philosophies in which I shall submerge my characters.
"My hero shall be the _logos_ of Heraclitus with the superadded
authority of the Hebrew high priest. You may recall the fact that I
greatly admire the Essenes and their system. My deity is a pure essence;
not Jehovah the protector or avenger. The _logos_, or mediator, I have
borrowed from the writings of the Greek philosophers. This _logos_
returns to the bosom of God after the sacrifice. Greek philosophy
combined with Hebraic moral principles! Ah! it is grand synthesis;
Seneca with his conception of a perfected humanity, Lucretius,
Manlius--who called, rightfully too, Epicurus a god--and Heraclitus with
the first idea of a _logos_: all these ancient ideas I have worked into
my romantic play, including the old cult of the Trinities; the
Buddhistic: Buddha, Dharma, and Saingha; the Chinese: Heaven, Earth,
and Emperor; the Babylonian: Ea, the father, Marduk, the son, and the
Fire God, Gibil, who is also the Paraclete. So my philosophy is merely a
continuation and modification of that taught by Heraclitus and Plato,
but with a Jewish background--for _mine_ is the only moral nation. The
wisdom of the Rabbis, their Monotheism and ethics, are all there." His
eyes were ablaze.
"You are very erudite, Philo Judæus!" exclaimed his listener; "but, tell
me, is there no actual foundation for your Jewish god?" Hyzlo eagerly
awaited a reply, though he could not account for this curiosity.