_THE TORCH-BEARERS—II_
THE BOOK OF EARTH
_WORKS OF ALFRED NOYES_
COLLECTED POEMS—_3 Vols._
THE LORD OF MISRULE
A BELGIAN CHRISTMAS EVE
THE WINE-PRESS
WALKING SHADOWS—_Prose_
TALES OF THE MERMAID TAVERN
SHERWOOD
THE ENCHANTED ISLAND AND OTHER POEMS
DRAKE: AN ENGLISH EPIC
POEMS
THE FLOWER OF OLD JAPAN
THE GOLDEN HYNDE
THE NEW MORNING
_The Torch-Bearers_—
WATCHERS OF THE SKY
THE BOOK OF EARTH
_THE TORCH-BEARERS—II_
THE BOOK OF
EARTH
BY
ALFRED NOYES
[Illustration]
NEW YORK
FREDERICK A. STOKES COMPANY
MCMXXV
_Copyright, 1925, by_
FREDERICK A. STOKES COMPANY
_All rights reserved, including that of translation
into foreign languages_
_Printed in the United States of America_
CONTENTS
PAGE
I—THE BOOK OF EARTH
I. THE GRAND CANYON 1
II. NIGHT AND THE ABYSS 11
III. THE WINGS 22
II—THE GREEKS
I. PYTHAGORAS
I. THE GOLDEN BROTHERHOOD 29
II. DEATH IN THE TEMPLE 37
II. ARISTOTLE
I. YOUTH AND THE SEA 50
II. THE EXILE 60
III—MOVING EASTWARD
I. FARABI AND AVICENNA 77
II. AVICENNA’S DREAM 85
IV—THE TORCH IN ITALY
LEONARDO DA VINCI
I. HILLS AND THE SEA 95
II. AT FLORENCE 110
V—IN FRANCE
JEAN GUETTARD
I. THE ROCK OF THE GOOD VIRGIN 125
II. MALESHERBES AND THE BLACK MILESTONES 137
III. THE SHADOW OF PASCAL 146
IV. AT PARIS 154
V. THE RETURN 164
VI—IN SWEDEN
LINNÆUS 169
VII—LAMARCK AND THE REVOLUTION
I. LAMARCK AND BUFFON 187
II. LAMARCK, LAVOISIER, AND NINETY-THREE 195
III. AN ENGLISH INTERLUDE: ERASMUS DARWIN 202
IV. LAMARCK AND CUVIER: THE _VERA CAUSA_ 209
VIII—IN GERMANY
GOETHE
I. THE DISCOVERER 215
II. THE PROPHET 226
IX—IN ENGLAND
DARWIN
I. CHANCE AND DESIGN 231
II. THE VOYAGE 242
III. THE TESTIMONY OF THE ROCKS 249
IV. THE PROTAGONISTS 273
V. THE _VERA CAUSA_ 311
X—EPILOGUE
EPILOGUE 325
I—THE BOOK OF EARTH
I
THE GRAND CANYON
Let the stars fade. Open the Book of Earth.
Out of the Painted Desert, in broad noon,
Walking through pine-clad bluffs, in an air like wine,
I came to the dreadful brink.
I saw, with a swimming brain, the solid earth
Splitting apart, into two hemispheres,
Cleft, as though by the axe of an angry god.
On the brink of the Grand Canyon,
Over that reeling gulf of amethyst shadows,
From the edge of one sundered hemisphere I looked down,
Down from abyss to abyss,
Into the dreadful heart of the old earth dreaming
Like a slaked furnace of her far beginnings,
The inhuman ages, alien as the moon,
Æons unborn, and the unimagined end.
There, on the terrible brink, against the sky,
I saw a black speck on a boulder jutting
Over a hundred forests that dropped and dropped
Down to a tangle of red precipitous gorges
That dropped again and dropped, endlessly down.
A mile away, or ten, on its jutting rock,
The black speck moved. In that dry diamond light
It seemed so near me that my hand could touch it.
It stirred like a midge, cleaning its wings in the sun.
All measure was lost. It broke—into five black dots.
I looked, through the glass, and saw that these were men.
Beyond them, round them, under them, swam the abyss
Endlessly on.
Far down, as a cloud sailed over,
A sun-shaft struck, between forests and sandstone cliffs,
Down, endlessly down, to the naked and dusky granite,
Crystalline granite that still seemed to glow
With smouldering colours of those buried fires
Which formed it, long ago, in earth’s deep womb.
And there, so far below that not a sound,
Even in that desert air, rose from its bed,
I saw the thin green thread of the Colorado,
The dragon of rivers, dwarfed to a vein of jade,
The Colorado that, out of the Rocky Mountains,
For fifteen hundred miles of glory and thunder,
Rolls to the broad Pacific.
From Flaming Gorge,
Through the Grand Canyon with its monstrous chain
Of subject canyons, the green river flows,
Linking them all together in one vast gulch,
But christening it, at each earth-cleaving turn,
With names like pictures, for six hundred miles:
_Black Canyon_, where it rushes in opal foam;
_Red Canyon_, where it sleeks to jade again
And slides through quartz, three thousand feet below;
_Split-Mountain Canyon_, with its cottonwood trees;
And, opening out of this, _Whirlpool Ravine_,
Where the wild rapids wash the gleaming walls
With rainbows, for nine miles of mist and fire;
_Kingfisher Canyon_, gorgeous as the plumes
Of its wingèd denizens, glistening with all hues;
_Glen Canyon_, where the Cave of Music rang
Long since, with the discoverers’ desert-song;
_Vermilion Cliffs_, like sunset clouds congealed
To solid crags; the _Valley of Surprise_
Where blind walls open, into a Titan pass;
_Labyrinth Canyon_, and the _Valley of Echoes_;
_Cataract Canyon_, rolling boulders down
In floods of emerald thunder; _Gunnison’s Valley_
Crossed, once, by the forgotten Spanish Trail;
Then, for a hundred miles, _Desolation Canyon_,
Savagely pinnacled, strange as the lost road
Of Death, cleaving a long deserted world;
_Gray Canyon_ next; then _Marble Canyon_, stained
With iron-rust above, but brightly veined
As Parian, where the wave had sculptured it;
Then deep _Still-water_.
And all these conjunct
In one huge chasm, were but the towering gates
And dim approaches to the august abyss
That opened here,—one sempiternal page
Baring those awful hieroglyphs of stone,
Seven systems, and seven ages, darkly scrolled
In the deep Book of Earth.
Across the gulf
I looked to that vast coast opposed, whose crests
Of raw rough amethyst, over the Canyon, flamed,
A league away, or ten. No eye could tell.
All measure was lost. The tallest pine was a feather
Under my feet, in that ocean of violet gloom.
Then, with a dizzying brain, I saw below me,
A little way out, a tiny shape, like a gnat
Flying and spinning,—now like a gilded grain
Of dust in a shaft of light, now sharp and black
Over a blood-red sandstone precipice.
“Look!”
The Indian guide thrust out a lean dark hand
That hid a hundred forests, and pointed to it,
Muttering low, “Big Eagle!”
All that day,
Riding along the brink, we found no end.
Still, on the right, the pageant of the Abyss
Unfolded. There gigantic walls of rock,
Sheer as the world’s end, seemed to float in air
Over the hollow of space, and change their forms
Like soft blue wood-smoke, with each change of light.
Here massed red boulders, over the Angel Trail
Darkened to thunder, or like a sunset burned.
Here, while the mind reeled from the imagined plunge,
Tall amethystine towers, dark Matterhorns,
Rose out of shadowy nothingness to crown
Their mighty heads with morning.
Here, wild crags
Black and abrupt, over the swimming dimness
Of coloured mist, and under the moving clouds,
Themselves appeared to move, stately and slow
As the moon moves, with an invisible pace,
Or darkling planets, quietly onward steal
Through their immense dominion.
There, far down,
A phantom sword, a search-beam of the sun,
Glanced upon purple pyramids, and set
One facet aflame in each, the rest in gloom;
While from their own deep chasms of shadow, that seemed
Small inch-wide rings of darkness round them, rose
Tabular foothills, mesas, hard and bright,
Bevelled and flat, like gems; or, softly bloomed
Like alabaster, stained with lucid wine;
Then slowly changed, under the changing clouds,
Where the light sharpened, into monstrous tombs
Of trap-rock, hornblende, greenstone and basalt.
There,—under isles of pine, washed round with mist,
Dark isles that seemed to sail through heaven, and cliffs
That towered like Teneriffe,—far, far below,
Striving to link those huge dissolving steeps,
Gigantic causeways drowned or swam in vain,
Column on column, arch on broken arch,
Groping and winding, like the foundered spans
Of lost Atlantis, under the weltering deep.
For, over them, the abysmal tides of air,
Inconstant as the colours of the sea,
From amethyst into wreathing opal flowed,
Ebbed into rose through grey, then melted all
In universal amethyst again.
There, wild cathedrals, with light-splintering spires,
Shone like a dream in the Eternal mind
And changed as earth and sea and heaven must change.
Over them soared a promontory, black
As night, but in the deepening gulf beyond,
Far down in that vast hollow of violet air,
Winding between the huge Plutonian walls,
The semblance of a ruined city lay.
Dungeons flung wide, and palaces brought low,
Altars and temples, wrecked and overthrown,
Gigantic stairs that climbed into the light
And found no hope, and ended in the void:
It burned and darkened, a city of porphyry,
Paved with obsidian, walled with serpentine,
Beautiful, desolate, stricken as by strange gods
Who, long ago, from cloudy summits, flung
Boulder on mountainous boulder of blood-red marl
Into a gulf so deep that, when they fell,
The soft wine-tinted mists closed over them
Like ocean, and the Indian heard no sound.
II
NIGHT AND THE ABYSS
A lonely cabin, like an eagle’s nest,
Lodged us that night upon the monstrous brink,
And roofed us from the burning desert stars;
But, on my couch of hemlock as I lay,
The Book of Earth still opened in my dreams.
Below me, only guessed by the slow sound
Of forests, through unfathomable gulfs
Of midnight, vaster, more mysterious now,
Breathed that invisible Presence of deep awe.
Through the wide open window, once, a moth
Beat its dark wings, and flew—out—over that,
Brave little fluttering atheist, unaware
Of aught beyond the reach of his antennæ,
Thinking his light quick thoughts; while, under him,
God opened His immeasurable Abyss.
All night I heard the insistent whisper rise:
_One page of Earth’s abysmal Book lies bare._
_Read—in its awful hieroglyphs of stone—_
_His own deep scripture. Is its music sealed?_
_Or is the inscrutable secret growing clearer?_
Then, like the night-wind, soughing through the pines,
Another voice replied, cold with despair:
_It opens, and it opens. By what Power?_
_A silent river, hastening to the sea,_
_Age after age, through crumbling desert rocks_
_Clove the dread chasm. Wild snows that had their birth_
_In Ocean-mists, and folded their white wings_
_Among far mountains, fed that sharp-edged stream._
_Ask Ocean whence it came. Ask Earth. Ask Heaven._
_I see the manifold instruments as they move,_
_Remote or near, with intricate inter-play;_
_But that which moves them, and determines all_
_Remains in darkness. Man must bow his head_
_Before the Inscrutable._
Then, far off, I heard,
As from a deeper gulf, the antiphonal voice:
_It opens, and it opens, and it opens,—_
_The abyss of Heaven, the rock-leaved Book of Earth,_
_And that Abyss as dreadful and profound_
_Locked in each atom._
_Under the high stars,_
_Man creeps, too infinitesimal to be scanned;_
_And, over all the worlds that dwindle away_
_Beyond the uttermost microscopic sight,_
_He towers—a god._
_Midway, between the height_
_That crushes, and the depth that flatters him,_
_He stands within the little ring of light_
_He calls his knowledge. Its horizon-line,_
_The frontier of the dark, was narrow, once;_
_And he could bear it. But the light is growing;_
_The ring is widening; and, with each increase,_
_The frontiers of the night are widening, too._
_They grow and grow. The very blaze of truth_
_That drives them back, enlarges the grim coasts_
_Of utter darkness._
_Man must bow his head_
_Before the Inscrutable._
Then, from far within,
The insistent whisper rose:
_Man is himself_
_The key to all he seeks._
_He is not exiled from this majesty,_
_But is himself a part of it. To know_
_Himself, and read this Book of Earth aright;_
_Flooding it as his ancient poets, once,_
_Illumed old legends with their inborn fire,_
_Were to discover music that out-soars_
_His plodding thought, and all his fables, too;_
_A song of truth that deepens, not destroys_
_The ethereal realm of wonder; and still lures_
_The spirit of man on more adventurous quests_
_Into the wildest mystery of all,_
_The miracle of reality, which he shares._
But O, what art could guide me through that maze?
What kingly shade unlock the music sealed
In that dread volume?
Sons of an earlier age,
Poet and painter stretched no guiding hand.
Even the gaunt spirit, whom the Mantuan led
Through the dark chasms and fiery clefts of pain,
Could set a bound to his own realms of night,
Enwall then round, build his own stairs to heaven,
And slept now, prisoned, in his own coiling towers....
Leonardo—found a shell among the hills,
A sea-shell, turned to stone, as at the gaze
Of his own cold Medusa. His dark eyes,
Hawk-swift to hunt the subtle lines of law
Through all the forms of beauty, on that wild height
Saw how the waves of a forgotten world
Had washed and sculptured every soaring crag,
Ere Italy was born. He stood alone,—
His rose-red cloak out-rippling on the breeze,—
A wondering sun-god. Through the mountain-peaks,
The rumour of a phantom ocean rolled.
It tossed a flying rainbow at his feet
And vanished....
Milton—walked in Paradise.
He saw the golden compasses of God
Turning through darkness to create the world.
He saw the creatures of a thousand æons
Rise, in six days, out of the mire and clay,
Pawing for freedom. With the great blind power
Of his own song, he riveted one more clasp,
Though wrought of fabulous gold, on that dark Book,
Not to be loosed for centuries.
Nearer yet,
Goethe, the torch of science in his own hand,
Poet and seeker, pressed into the dark,
Caught one mysterious gleam from flower and leaf,
And one from man’s own frame, of that which binds
All forms of life together. He turned aside
And lost it, saying, “I wait for light, more light.”
And these all towered among celestial glories,
And wore their legends like prophetic robes;
But who should teach me, in this deeper night,
The tale of this despised and wandering house,
Our lodge among the stars; the song of Earth;
Her birth in a mist of fire,—a ball of flame,
Slowly contracting, crusting, cracking and folding
Into deep valleys and mountains that still changed
And slowly rose and sank like age-long waves
On the dark ocean of ever-dissolving forms;
Earth, a magical globe, an elfin sphere,
Quietly turning through boundlessness,
Budding with miracles, burgeoning into life;
A murmuring forest of ferns, where the misty sun
Saw wingèd monsters fighting to bring forth men;
Earth, and her savage youth, her monstrous lusts,
Mastered and curbed, till these, too, pulsed into music,
And became for man the fountain of his own power;
Earth, on her shining way,
Coloured and warmed by the sun, and quietly spinning
Her towns and seas to shadow and light in turn;
Earth, by what brooding Power
Endowed at birth with those dread potencies
Which out of her teeming womb at last brought forth
Creatures that loved and sinned, laughed, wept and prayed,
Died, and returned to the unknown Power that made them;
Earth, and that tale of men, the kings of thought,
Who strove to read her secret in the rocks,
And turned, amid wild calumny and wrong,
The lucid sword-like search-beams of the mind
On the dark passion that through uncounted æons
Crept, fought, and climbed to the celestial gates,
Three gates in one, one heavenly gate in three,
Whose golden names are Beauty, Goodness, Truth.
Then, without sound, like an unspoken prayer,
The voice I heard upon the mountain height,
Out of a deeper gulf of midnight rose,
Within me, or without, invoking One
To whom this dust, not of itself, would pray:
Muse of the World, O terrible, beautiful Spirit,
Throned in pure light, since all the worlds obey
Thy golden law which, even here on earth,
Though followed blindly, leads to thy pure realm,
Couldst thou deliver me from this night at last,
Teach me the burning syllables of thy tongue
That I, even I, out of the mire and clay,
With face uplifted, and with arms upstretched
To the Eternal Sun of Truth, might raise
My song of adoration, not in vain.
Throned above Time, thou sawest when earth was born
In darkness, though none else was there to see;
For there was fury in the dark, and fire,
And power, and that creative pulse of thine,
The throb of music, the deep rhythmic throes
Of That which made and binds all worlds in one.
...
_In the beginning, God made heaven and earth._
One sentence burned upon the formless dark—
One sentence, and no more, from that high realm.
The long-sought consummation of all law,
Through all this manifold universe, might shine clear
In those eight words one day; not yet; not yet!
They would be larger, then;
Not the glib prelude to a lifeless creed,
But wide as the unbounded realms of thought,
The last great simplification of them all,
The single formula, like an infinite sphere
Enfolding Space and Time, atoms and suns,
With all the wild fantastic hosts of life
And all their generations, through all worlds,
In one pure phrase of music, like a star
Seen in a distant sky.
I could not reach it.
All night I waited for the word in vain.
III
THE WINGS
Night greyed, and up the immeasurable abyss,
Brimmed with a blacker night than ocean knew,
The dawn-wind, like a host of spirits, flowed,
Chanting those airy melodies which, long since,
The same wild breath, obeying the same law,
Taught the first pine-woods in the primal world.
_We are the voices._
_Could man only_
_Spell our tongue,_
_He might learn_
_The inscrutable secret_
_And grow young._
_Young as we are_
_Who, on shores_
_Unknown to man,_
_Long, long since,_
_In waves and woods_
_Our song began._
_Ere his footsteps_
_Printed earth,_
_Wild ferns and grass_
_Breathed it. No man_
_Heard that whispering_
_Spirit pass._
_Not one mortal_
_Lay and listened._
_There was none_
_Even to hear_
_The sea-wave crumbling_
_In the sun._
_None to hear_
_Our choral pine-woods_
_Chanting deep,_
_Even as now_
_Our solemn cadence_
_Haunts your sleep._
_Ear was none_
_To heed or hear_
_When earth was young._
_Even now_
_Man understands not_
_Our strange tongue._
There came a clearer rustle of nearer boughs.
A bird cried, once, a sharp ecstatic cry
As if it saw an angel.
He stood there
Against the window’s dusky square of sky,
Carrying the long curled crosier of a fern,
My singer of the woods, my Shadow-of-a-Leaf,
The invisible friend with whom I used to talk
In childhood, and that none but I could see,—
Shadow-of-a-Leaf, shy whisperer of the songs
That none could capture, and so few could hear;
A creature of the misty hills of home,
Quick as the thought that hides in the deep heart
When the loud world goes by; vivid to me
As flesh and blood, yet with an elfin strain
That set him free of earth, free to run wild
Through all the ethereal kingdoms of the mind,
His dark eyes fey with wonder at the world,
And that profoundest mystery of all,
The miracle of reality; clear, strange eyes,
Deep-sighted, joyous, touched with hidden tears.
Often he left me when I was not worthy;
And many a time I locked my heart against him,
Only to find him creeping in again
Like memory, or a wild vine through a window
When I most needed that still voice of his
Which never yet spoke louder than the breath
Of conscience in my soul. He would return
Quietly as the rustling of a bough
After the bird has flown; and, through a rift
Of evening sky, the shining eyes of a child,
The cold clear ripple of thrushes after rain,
The sound of a mountain-brook, or a breaking wave
Would teach my slumbering soul the ways of love.
He looked at me, more gently than of late,
And spoke (O, if this world had ears to hear
The sound of falling dew, the power that wrote
The Paradiso might recall that voice!)
_It is near daybreak. I am faithful still;_
_And I am here to answer all your need._
_The hills are old, but not so old as I;_
_The blackbird’s eyes are young, but not so young_
_As mine that know the wonder of their sight._
_Eagles have wings. Mine are too swift to see;_
_For while I stand and whisper at your side,_
_Time dwindles to a shadow...._
Like a mist
The world dissolved around us as he spoke.
I saw him standing dark against the sky.
I heard him, murmuring like a spirit in trance,—
_Dawn on Crotona, dawn without a cloud_....
Then, slowly emerging from that mist of dreams,
As at an incantation, a lost world
Arose, and shone before me in the dawn.
II—THE GREEKS
I
PYTHAGORAS
I. THE GOLDEN BROTHERHOOD
Dawn on Crotona, dawn without a cloud.
In the still garden that Pythagoras made,
The Temple of the Muses, firm as truth,
Lucid as beauty, the white marriage-song
Made visible, of beauty and truth in one,
Flushed with the deepening East.
It was no dream.
The thrush that with his long beak shook and beat
The dark striped snail-shell on the marble flags
Between the cool white columns told me this.
The birds among the silvery olives pealed
So many jargoning rivulet-throated bells
That in their golden clashings discord drowned,
And one wild harmony closed and crowned them all
And yet, as if the spread wings of a hawk
Froze in the sky above them, every note
Died on an instant.
Over the sparkling grass
The long dark shadows of ash and pine began
To shrink, as though the rising of the sun
Menaced, not only shadows, but the world.
A frightened bird flew, crying, and scattering dew
Blindly away; though, on this dawn of dawns,
Nothing had changed. The Golden Brotherhood stole
Up through the drifts of wet rose-laurel bloom
As on so many a dawn for many a year,
To make their morning vows.
They thronged the porch,
The lean athletes of truth, trained body and mind,
For their immortal trial. Among them towered
Milon, the soldier-wrestler. His brown limbs
Moved with the panther’s grace, the warrior’s pride;
Milon, who in the Olympic contests won
Crown after crown, but wore them on broad brows
Cut like fine steel for thought; and, in his eyes,
Carried the light of those deep distances
That challenge the spirit of man.
They entered in;
And, like the very Muses following them,
Theano, and her Golden Sisterhood,
First of that chosen womanhood, by the grace
Of whose heaven-walking souls the race ascends,
Passed through the shining porch.
It was no dream.
In the bright marble, under the sandalled feet,
And in the glimmering columns as they passed,
The reflex of their flowing vestments glowed
White, violet, saffron, like another dawn.
...
Before them, through the temple’s fragrant gloom,
The Muses, in their dim half-circle, towered;
And, in the midst, over the smouldering myrrh,
The form of Hestia.
In her mighty shadow,
Pythagoras, with a scroll in his right hand,
Arose and spoke.
“Our work is well-nigh done.
Our enemies are closing round us now.
I have given the sacred scrolls into the hands
Of Lysis; and, though all else be destroyed,
If but a Golden Verse or two live on
In other lands, and kindle other souls
To seek the law, our work is not in vain.
If it be death that comes to us, we shall lose
Nothing that could endure. It was not chance
That sent us on this pilgrimage through time,
But that which lives within us, the desire
Of gods, to know what once was dark in heaven.
Gods were not gods who, in eternal bliss,
Had never known this wonder—the deep joy
Of coming home. But we have purchased it,
And now return, enriched with memories
Of mortal love, terrestrial grief and pain,
Into our own lost realm.”
His dark eyes flashed.
He lifted his proud head as one who heard
Strains of immortal music even now.
He towered among the Muses in the dusk,
And then, as though he, too, were carved in stone,
And all their voices breathed through his own voice,
“Fear nothing now,” he said. “Our foes can steal
The burdens we lay down, but nothing more.
All that we are we keep. They strike at shadows
And cannot hurt us. Little as we may know,
We have learned at least to know the abiding Power
From these poor masks of clay. This dust, this flesh,
All that we see and touch, are shadows of it,
And hourly change and perish. Have we not seen
Cities and nations, all that is built of earth,
Fleeting into the darkness, like grey clouds,
And only one thing constant—the great law,
The eternal order of their march to death?
Have we not seen it written upon the hills?
The continents and seas do not endure.
They change their borders. Where the seas are now
Mountains will rise; and, where the land was, once,
The dark Atlantic ends the world for man.
But all these changes are not wrought by chance.
They follow a great order. It may be
That all things are repeated and reborn;
And, in their mighty periods, men return
And pass through their forgotten lives anew.
It may be; for, at times, the mind recalls—
Or half recalls—the turning of a road,
A statue on a hill, a passing face....
It may be; for our universe is bound
In rhythm; and the setting star will rise.
This many a cunning ballad-singer knows
Who haunts the mind of man with dark refrains;
Or those deep poets who foretell in verse
The restoration of the world’s great Year.
Time never fails. Not Tanais, or the Nile
Can flow for ever. They spring up and perish;
But, after many changes, it may be
These, too, return, with Egypt and her kings.”
He paused a moment; then compassion, grief,
Wonder and triumph, like one music, spoke
Farewell to shadows, from his own deep soul
Rapt, in pure vision, above the vanishing world:
“The torrents drag the rocks into the sea.
The great sea smiles, and overflows the land.
It hollows out the valleys and returns.
The sea has washed the shining rocks away
And cleft the headland with its golden fields
That once bound Sicily to her mother’s breast.
Pharos, that was an island, far from shore
When Homer sang, is wedded now and one
With Egypt. The wild height where Sappho stood,
The beautiful, white, immortal promontory,
Crowned with Apollo’s temple, long ago
The struggling seas have severed from the land.
And those fair Grecian cities, Helice
And Buris, wondering fishermen see, far down,
With snowy walls and columns all aslant,
Trembling under the unremembering wave.
The waters of Anigris, that were sweet
As love, are bitter as death. There was a time
When Etna did not burn. A time will come
When it will cease to burn; for all things change;
And mightier things by far have changed than these
In the slow lapse of never-ending time.
I have seen an anchor on the naked hills,
And ocean-shells among the mountain-tops.
Continents, oceans, all things pass away;
But One, One only; for the Eternal Mind
Enfolds all changes, and can never change.”
II. DEATH IN THE TEMPLE
Night on Crotona, night without a star.
I heard the mob, outside the Temple, roaring
_Death to Pythagoras! Death to those who know!_
Before the flushed white columns, in the glare
Of all those angry torches, Cylon stood
Wickedly smiling. “They have barred the doors.
Pythagoras and his forty chosen souls
Are all within. They are trapped, and they shall die.
It will be best to whet the people’s rage
Before we lay the axe, or set the torch
Against the Muses’ temple. One wild howl
Of ‘sacrilege’ may defeat us.”—This he called
“Faith in the people.”
He moistened his dry lips,
And raised his hand. The savage clamouring ceased.
One breathless moment, ere he spoke, he paused,
Gathering his thoughts. His thin white weasel face
Narrowed, his eyes contracted. In their pain
—Pain pitiable, a torment of the mind—
A bitter memory burned, of how he sued
To join that golden brotherhood in vain.
For when the Master saw him, he discerned
A spirit in darkness, violent, empty of thought,
But full of shallow vanity, cunning lies,
Intense ambition.
All now was turned to hate;
Hate the destroyer of men, the wrecker of cities,
The last disease of nations; hate, the fire
That eats away the heart; hate, the lean rat
That gnaws the brain, till even reason glares
Like madness through blind eyes; hate, the thin snake
That coils like whip-cord round the victim’s soul
And strangles it; hate, that slides up through his throat,
And with its flat and quivering head usurps
The function of his tongue,—to sting and sting,
Till all that poison which is now his life
Is drained, and he lies dead; hate, that still lives,
And for the power to strike and sting again,
May yet destroy this world.
So Cylon stood,
Quivering a moment, in the fiery glare,
Over the multitude.
Then, in his right hand,
He shook a roll of parchment over his head,
Crying, _The Master said it_!
At that word,
A snarl, as of a myriad-throated beast,
Broke out again, and deepened into a roar—
_Death to Pythagoras! Death to those who know!_
Cylon upheld his hand, as if to bless
A stormy sea with calm. The howling died
Into a deadly hush. With twisted lips
He spoke.
“This is their Scroll, the Sacred Word,
The Secret Doctrine of their Golden Order!
Hear it!”
Then, interweaving truth with lies,
Till even the truth struck like a venomed dart
Into his hearers’ minds, he read aloud
His cunningly chosen fragments.
At the end,
He tore the scroll, and trampled it underfoot.
“Ye have heard,” he said. “Ye are kin to all the beasts!
And, when ye die, your souls again inhabit
Bodies of beasts, wild beasts, and beasts of burden.
Even yet more loathsome—he that will not starve
His flesh, and tame himself and all mankind
To bear this golden yoke shall, after death,
Dwell in the flesh of swine. He that rejects
This wisdom shall, hereafter, seek the light
Through endless years, with toads, asps, creeping things.
Thus would they exile all our happier gods!
Away with Bacchus and his feasts of joy!
Back, Aphrodite, to your shameful foam!
Men must be tamed, like beasts.
The Master said it!
And wherefore? There are certain lordly souls
Who rise above the beasts, and talk with gods.
These are his Golden Brotherhood; these must rule!
Ye heard that verse from Homer—whom he loves—
Homer, the sycophant, who could call a prince
‘The shepherd of his people.’ What are ye,
Even in this life, then, but their bleating flocks?
_The Master said it!_
Homer—his demi-god,
Ye know his kind; ye know whence Homer sprang;
An old blind beggarman, singing for his food,
Through every city in Greece”—(This Cylon called
Honouring the people)—“already he is outworn,
Forgotten, without a word for this young age;
And great Pythagoras crowns him!
When they choose
Their Golden Brotherhood, they lay down their laws,
Declaring none may rule until he learn,
Prostrate himself in reverence to the dead,
And pass, through golden discipline, to power
Over himself and you; but—mark this well—
Under Pythagoras! Discipline! Ah, that path
Is narrow and difficult. Only three hundred souls,
Aristocrats of knowledge, have attained
This glory. It is against the people’s will
To know, or to acknowledge those that know,
Or let their knowledge lead them for one hour.
For see—see how the gods have driven them mad,
Even in their knowledge! In their own Sacred Scroll,
Pythagoras, who derives you from the beasts,
Affirms that earth, this earth beneath our feet,
Spins like a little planet round the sun!”
A brutal bellowing, as of Asian bulls,
Boomed from a thousand mouths. (This Cylon called
The laughter of the people and their gods.)
He raised his hand. It ceased.
“_This_ is their knowledge,
And _this_,” he cried, “their charter to obscure
What all men know, the natural face of things.
_This_ proves their right to rule us from above.
They meet here nightly. Nightly they conspire
Against your rights, your liberties, and mine.
Was it not they who, when the people rose
In Sybaris, housed her noble fugitives here?
And was it not Pythagoras who refused
To send them back to Sybaris and their death?
Was it not this that plunged us into war
With Sybaris; and, when victory crowned our arms,
Who but Pythagoras robbed us of its fruits?
We gathered booty, and he called it theft.
We burned their palaces, and he called it hate.
We avenged our sons. He called it butchery,
And said the wild beast wakes again in man.
What have we gained, then? Nothing but the pride
Of saving those Pythagoras wished to save;
Counting gold dross, and serving his pure gods.
_The Master said it._ What is your judgment, then?”
He stretched one hand, appealing to the crowd,
And one to the white still Temple.
“_Death! Death! Death!_”
Under the flaring torches, the long waves
Of tense hot faces opened a thousand mouths,
Little blue pits of shadow that raced along them,
And shook the red smoke with one volleying roar,—
_Death to Pythagoras! Death to those who know!_
...
But, in the Temple, through those massive walls,
While Cylon spoke, no whisper had been heard;
Only, at times, a murmur, when he paused,
As of a ninth wave breaking, far away.
The half-moon of the Muses, crowned with calm,
Towered through the dimness. Under their giant knees,
In their immortal shadow, those who knew
How little was their knowledge waited death
Proudly, around their Master. Robed in white,
Beautiful as Apollo in old age,
He stood amongst them, laying a gentle hand,
One last caress, upon that dearest head
Bowed there before him, his own daughter’s hair.
Then, tenderly, the god within him moved
His mortal lips; and, in the darkness there,
He spoke, as though the music of the spheres
Welled from his heart, to ease the hurts of death.
“Not tears, belovèd. Give it welcome, rather!
Soon, though they spared us, this blind flesh would fail.
They are saving us the weary mile or two
That end a dusty journey. The dull stains
Of travel; the soiled vesture; the sick heart
That hoped at every turning of the road
To see the Perfect City, and hoped in vain,
Shall grieve us now no more. Now, at the last,
After a stern novitiate, iron test,
And grinding failures, the great light draws near,
And we shall pass together, through the Veil.”
He bowed his head. It was their hour of prayer;
And, from among the Muses in the dark,
A woman’s voice, a voice in ecstasy,
As if a wound should bless the sword that made it,
Breathed through the night the music of their law:
_Close not thine eyes in sleep_
_Till thou hast searched thy memories of the day,_
_Graved in thy heart the vow thou didst not keep,_
_And called each wandering thought back to the way._
_Pray to the gods! Their aid,_
_Their aid alone can crown thy work aright;_
_Teach thee that song whereof all worlds were made;_
_Rend the last veil, and feed thine eyes with light._
_Naught shall deceive thee, then._
_All creatures of the sea and earth and air,_
_The circling stars, the warring tribes of men_
_Shall make one harmony, and thy soul shall hear._
_Out of this prison of clay_
_With lifted face, a mask of struggling fire,_
_With arms of flesh and bone stretched up to pray,_
_Dumb, thou shalt hear that Voice of thy desire._
_Thou that wast brought so low;_
_And through those lower lives hast risen again,_
_Kin to the beasts, with power at last to know_
_Thine own proud banishment and diviner pain;_
_Courage, O conquering soul!_
_For all the boundless night that whelms thee now,_
_Though worlds on worlds into that darkness roll,_
_The gods abide; and of their race art thou!_
There was a thunder of axes at the doors;
A glare as of a furnace; and the cry,
_Death to Pythagoras! Death to those who know!_
Then, over the streaming smoke and the wild light
That like a stormy sunset sank away
Into a darker night, the deeper mist
Rolled down, and of that death I knew no more.
II
ARISTOTLE
I. YOUTH AND THE SEA
The mists unfolded on a sparkling coast
Washed by a violet sea.
It was no dream.
The clustering irised bubbles in the foam,
The grinding stir as through the shining pebbles
The wave ran back; the little drifts of smoke
Where wet black rocks dried grey in the hot sun;
The pods of sea-weed, crackling underfoot,
All told me this.
My comrade at my side,
Moved like a shadow. I turned a promontory,
And like a memory of my own lost youth,
Shining and far, across the gulf I saw
Stagira, like a little city of snow,
Under the Thracian hills.
Nothing had changed.
I saw the City where that Greek was born
Who ranged all art, all life, and lit a fire
That shines yet, after twice a thousand years;
And strange, but strange as truth, it was to hear
No slightest change in that old rhythmic sound
Of waves against the shore.
Then, at my side,
My soul’s companion whispered, all unseen,
‘Two thousand years have hidden him from the world,
Robed him in grey and bearded him with eld,
Untrue to his warm life. There was a time
When he was young as truth is; and the sun
Browned his young body, danced in his young grey eyes;
And look—the time is now.’
There, as he spoke,
I saw among the rocks on my right hand,
Lying, face downward, over a deep rock-pool,
A youth, so still that, till a herring-gull swooped
And sheered away from him with a startled cry
And a wild flutter of its brown mottled wings,
I had not seen him.
Quietly we drew near,
As shadows may, unseen.
He pored intent
Upon a sea-anemone, like a flower
Opening its disk of blue and crimson rays
Under the lucid water.
He stretched his hand,
And with a sea-gull’s feather, touched its heart.
The bright disk shrank, and closed, as though a flower
Turned instantly to fruit, ripe, soft, and round
As the pursed lips of a sea-god hiding there.
They fastened, sucking, on the quill and held it.
Young Aristotle laughed. He rose to his feet.
“Come and see this!” he called.
Under the cliff
Nicomachus arose, and drawing his robe
More closely round him, crossed the slippery rocks
To join his son.
There, side by side, they crouched
Over the limpid pool,—the grey physician
And eager boy.
“See, how it grips the feather!
And grips the rock, too. Yet it has no roots.
Your sea-flowers turn to animals with mouths.
Take out the quill. Now it turns back again
Into a flower; look—look—what lovely colours,
What marvellous artistry.
This never was formed
By chance. It has an aim beyond this pool.
What does it mean? This unity of design?
This delicate scale of life that seems to ascend
Without a break, through all the forms of earth
From plants to men? The sea-sponge that I found
Grew like a blind rock-rooted clump of moss
Dilating in water, shrinking in the sun;
I know it for a strange sea-animal now,
Shaped like the brain of a man. Can it be true
That, as the poets fable in their songs
Of Aphrodite, life itself was born
Here, in the sea?”
Nicomachus looked at him.
“That’s a dark riddle, my son. You will not hear
An answer in the groves of Academe,
Not even from Plato. When you go to Athens
Next year, remember, among the loftiest flights
Of their philosophy, that the living truth
Is here on earth if we could only see it.
This, this at least, all true Asclepiads know.
Remember, always, in that battle of words,
The truth that father handed down to son
Through the long line of men that served their kind
From Æsculapius, father of us all,
To you his own descendant:—naught avails
In science, till the light you seize from heaven
Shines through the clear sharp fact beneath your feet.
This is the test of both—that, in their wedding,
The light that was a disembodied dream
Burns through the fact, and makes a lanthorn of it,
Transfigures it, confirms it, gives it new
And deeper meanings; and itself, in turn,
Is thereby seen more truly.
Use your eyes;
And you, or those that follow you, will outsoar
Pythagoras.
He believed the soul descends
From the pure realm of gods; is clothed with clay;
And, struggling upward through a myriad forms,
After a myriad lives and deaths, returns
Enriched with all those memories, lord of all
That knowledge, master of all those griefs and pains
As else it could not be, home to the gods,
Itself a god, prepared for the full bliss,
The living consummation of the whole.
Earth must be old, if all these things are true.
But take this tale and read it. If it seem
Only a tale, the light in it has turned
Dark facts to lanthorns for me. There are tales
More true than any fragment of the truth.
One of his homeless clan (who came to me
Dying), his last disciple’s wandering son,
Gave me the scroll. I give it now to you,—
The young swift-footed runner with the fire.
You’ll find strange thoughts; and, woven into the close,
His Golden Verses, with a thought more strange.”
Then, from his breast, the Asclepiad drew a scroll,
Smooth as old ivory, honey-stained by time,
A wand of whispering magic; and the boy
Seized it with brown young hands.
His father smiled
And turned away, between the shining pools
To seek Stagira. Under his sandalled feet
The sea-weeds crackled. His footsteps crunched away
Along the beach.
Upon a sun-warmed rock
The boy outspread the curled papyrus-roll,
Keeping each corner in place with a small grey stone.
There, while the white robe drifting down the coast
Grew smaller and smaller, till at last it seemed
A flake of vanishing foam, he lay full length,
Reading the tale.
The salt on his brown skin
Dried to a faint white powder in the sun.
Over him, growing bold, the peering gulls
Wheeled closer, as he lay there, tranced and still;
Till, through the tale, the golden verses breathed
Like a returning music, rhythmic tones
Changed by new voices, coloured by new minds,
Yet speaking still for one time-conquering soul,
As on the shore the wandering ripples changed
And tossed new spray-drops into the sparkling air,
Yet pulsed with the ancient breathing of the sea:
_Guard the immortal fire._
_Honour the glorious line of the great dead._
_To the new height let all thy soul aspire;_
_But let those memories be thy wine and bread._
_Quench not in any shrine_
_The smouldering storax. In no human heart_
_Quench what love kindled. Faintly though it shine,_
_Not till it wholly dies the gods depart._
_Truth has remembering eyes._
_The wind-blown throng will clamour at Falsehood’s gate._
_Has Falsehood triumphed? Let the world despise_
_Thy constant mind. Stand thou aside, and wait._
_Write not thy thoughts on snow._
_Grave them in rock to front the thundering sky._
_From Time’s proud feast, when it is time to go,_
_Take the dark road; bid one more world good-bye._
_The lie may steal an hour._
_The truth has living roots, and they strike deep._
_A moment’s glory kills the rootless flower,_
_While the true stem is gathering strength in sleep._
_Out of this earth, this dust,_
_Out of this flesh, this blood, this living tomb;_
_Out of these cosmic throes of wrath, and lust,_
_Breaks the lost splendour from the world’s blind womb._
_Courage, O conquering soul!_
_For all the boundless night that whelms thee now,_
_Though suns and stars into oblivion roll,_
_The gods abide, and of their race art thou._
II. THE EXILE
Time dwindled to a shadow. The grey mist,
Wreathed with old legends, drifted slowly away
From the clear hill-top, where the invisible wings
Had brought me through the years.
It was no dream,
Clearly, as in a picture, at my feet,
Among dark groves, the columned temples gleamed,
And I saw Athens, in the sunset, dying.
Dying; for though her shrines had not yet lost
One radiant grain of what lies crumbling now
Like a god’s bones upon the naked hills;
Though the whole city wound through gate on gate
Of visionary splendour to one height
Where, throned above this world, the Parthenon
Smiled at the thought of Time, her violet crown
Was woven of shadows from a darker realm,
And I saw Athens, dying.
From that hill—
The hill of Lycabettus—on our right
Eridanus flowed, Ilissus on the left,
Girdling the City like two coils of fire.
Then, as a spirit sees, I saw, unseen,
One standing near me on the bare hillside,
Still as a statue, gazing to the west;
So still that, till his lengthening shadow crept
Up to my feet, the wonder of the City
Withheld my gaze from something more august
In that one lonely presence.
Earth and sun,
On their great way, revealed him, with the touch
Of his long stealing shadow; yet it seemed
The power that cast it was no mortal power.
Fie towered against the dying gleams below
Like Truth in exile.
On him, too, at last
The doom had fallen. Clasping his grey robe
More closely round him, Aristotle looked
Long, long, at his proud City. She had lost
More glories in that sunset than she knew;
For, though the sun went down in kingly gold
To westward, on that darkening eastern hill,
The bearer of a more celestial fire
Now looked his last on Athens.
Changed, how changed,
Was this grey form from that immortal youth
Who read the Golden Verses by the sea.
His brow was furrowed now; and, on his face,
Life, with her sharp-edged tools of joy and pain,
Had deeply engraved a legend of her own.
There, as his lengthening shadow had drawn my gaze,
He seemed himself a shadow of vaster things,
A still dark portent of those moving worlds
Whose huge events, unseen and far away,
Had led him thither; and, as he once had shaped
Their course, now shaped his destiny and doom.
He had ranged all art, all science. He had shaped
Kingdoms and kings, by virtue of his part
In the one all-shaping Mind. Had he not lived,
The world that never knows its noblest powers
Had moved, with half mankind, another way.
There, looking backward, through his life, he knew
That, though the gods conceal their ways from men,
Yet in their great conjunctures there are gleams
That show them at their work. Theirs was the word,
Twenty years back, when Philip of Macedon
Summoned him, as the uncrowned king of thought,
To teach his eaglet how to use his wings.
For, by that thought, and by the disciplined power,
The sovran power of judgment, swift to seize
Causes, effects, and laws, and wield the blind
Unreasoning mass, he had wellnigh brought to birth
What Plato saw in vision—a State enthroned
Above the flux of time, Hellas at one,
A harmony of cities, each a chord
In an immortal song of Beauty and Truth,
Freedom and Law. His was the moving power,
Not wholly aware, that strove to an end unseen;
And in that power had Alexander reigned.
Autocrator of the Greek hegemony,
He had rolled all Asia back into the night.
Satraps of Persia, the proud kings of Tyre,
Nineveh, Babylon, Egypt, all bowed down;
And Alexander shaped the conquered world,
But Aristotle shaped the conqueror’s mind.
He had shaped that mind to ends not all its own.
His was the well-thumbed Odyssey that reposed
Under the conqueror’s pillow; his the love,
Fragrant with memories of the hills and sea,
That had rebuilt Stagira; his the voice
In the night-watches; his the harnessed thoughts
That, like immortal sentries, mounted guard
In the dark gates of that world-quelling mind.
His was the whisper, the dark vanishing hint,
The clue to the riddle of slowly emerging life
That, imaged in Egyptian granite, rose
Before the silent conqueror when he stared
At that strange shape, half human and half brute,
The Sphinx, who knew the secret of the world
And smiled at him, and all his victories,
Under the desert stars, while the deep night
Silently deepened round him.
Far away,
In Athens, towered the bearer of the fire.
His was the secret harmony of law
That, while the squadrons wheeled in ordered ranks,
Each finding its full life only in the whole,
Flashed light upon the cosmos; his the quest
That taught the conqueror how to honour truth
And led him, while he watered his proud steeds
In all the streams from Danube to the Nile,
To send another army through the wilds,
Ten thousand huntsmen, ranging hills and woods
At Aristotle’s hest, for birds and beasts;
So that the master-intellect might lay hold
Upon the ladder of life that mounts through Time,
From plants to beasts, and up, through man, to God.
So all the might of Macedon had been turned
To serve the truth, and to complete his work
At Athens, for the conquering age to come;
When Athens, like the very City of Truth,
Might shine upon all nations, and might wear,
On her clear brows, his glory as her own.
Then came a flying rumour through the night.
Earth’s overlord, the autocrator, his friend,
Alexander the Great had fallen in Babylon.
A little cup of poison, subtle drops
Of Lethe—in a cup of delicate gold,—
And the world’s victor slept, an iron sleep;
The conqueror, stricken in his conquered city,
Cold, in the purple of Babylon, lay dead:
And the slow tread of his armies as they passed,
Soldier by soldier, through that chamber of death,
To look their last upon his marble face,
Pulsed like a muffled drum across the world.
Had Aristotle’s cunning mixed the draught
That murdered tyranny? Let that whispered lie
Estrange the heart of Macedon.
There, in Athens,
It was enough, now that his friend lay dead,
To know that, as the body is rent away
From the immortal soul, his greatness now
Had lost its earthly stay. His mighty mind
Walked like a ghost in Athens. It was enough
To hint that he had taught his king too well;
Served him too well; and played the spy for him;
While, for main charge, since he had greatly loved
The mother who had borne him, since he had poured
His love out on her tomb, it would suffice
To snarl that rites like these were meant for gods
And that this man who had seen behind the world
The Mover of all things, the eternal God,
The supreme Good, by these fond rites of love,
Too simple and too great, too clear, too deep,
Had robbed the little sophists of their dues
And so blasphemed against their gods of clay.
...