III.

The night had grown old unnoticed, and now in the first dim twilight of

coming dawn Aurelian and McCann were sitting on the wide terrace that

stretched along the south side of the great house, smoking lazily and

drinking the fine rare wines that Aurelian treasured as he treasured his

precious books. Not far away the nightingales were singing in the thick

wood; other sound there was none save the sweet rustle and stir of the

awakening trees under the first thin wind of morning.

At first McCann had raged inwardly at everything,--at the crowded

treasures of art that filled the castle-like house, at the dominant

luxury, at the opium, the wine, at all the unfamiliar splendour that

surrounded Aurelian. He sat now listening unappreciatively to Aurelian's

quiet voice discoursing lovingly of the Romanée Conti, which he himself

could not have told from Mâcon. "There are not two dozen of this vintage

in America outside of my own cellars," Aurelian had said, and the poor

agitator heard him miserably. He did remember, indeed, when a slim glass

of amber Madeira was placed on the Indian table by his side and its name

given him, that some one had once told him that Constitution Madeira was

last quoted in New York at seventy dollars a bottle, and so he drank his

glass with a kind of distant wonder, but without pleasure; he thought it

musty, he would have chosen Bass. Yet, even as he lay in the long Indian

chair, the subtle influence of Aurelian's Lattakhia and of his ancient

wine worked slowly in his system, and already he began to think with

something approaching tolerance of his pupil's apostasy. He lay full

length looking out over the carved balustrade through the silvery

jasmine flowers amid their black leaves, to where the sky of blazing

stars, already paling before the advancing day, ceased at the edge of

the dark hills; and as he lay thus dreamily, he even wondered if he had

realised all that there was in life, in his career of feverish action.

Aurelian tossed the glowing end of his cigarette out through the jasmine

leaves, watching it fall like a scarlet star. "Do you not see how it

is?" he said; "I know to the full the grotesque hideousness of life as

it is, and I long for revolution. But I have seen every man who is fired

with desire to bring the change yield to the baleful influence of that

which he would destroy until he has come to see no ideals save those of

materialism. His ideal of life is a socialistic ideal of a dead, gross,

physical ease and level uniformity; his ideal of government a democracy;

his ideal of industry State factories with gigantic steam-engines,--his

whole system but the present system with all its false ideals, deprived

of its individualism. I have lived beyond this, I can see the futility

of all these things. I believe only in art as the object of

production,--art which shall glorify that which we eat, that wherewith

we clothe ourselves, those things whereby we are sheltered; art which

shall be this and more,--the ultimate expression of all that is

spiritual, religious, and divine in the soul of man. I hate material

prosperity, I refuse to justify machinery, I cannot pardon public

opinion. I desire only absolute individuality and the triumph of

idealism. I detest the republic, and long for the monarchy again."

"Aurelian," said McCann, "will you tell me straight what you mean when

you say that, yet claim to be a socialist? I asked you once before that

empty-headed Rip Van Winkle called Strafford Wentworth in the other

room, and you made an evasive answer. Now, tell me, how do you reconcile

the two?"

"Because I believe that political socialism will destroy society and

clear the ground for a new life; because it will annihilate the

Republic, and make monarchial government possible."

"It will destroy neither, but reform them both."

"It cannot reform either, for the principles of each are false."

"What do you fancy those principles to be?"

"Liberty, Equality, Fraternity."

"Do you dare to call those principles false?"

"Liberty and equality false, fraternity impossible so long as the first

two pretend to exist."

McCann sat bolt upright. "Look here, Aurelian," he said seriously, "I

can't talk in this way, I am not that kind of man. What has come over

you? I left you a socialist, and I come back and find you an unreasoning

royalist, incapable of talking sense, putting your defenceless fancies

into the armour of paradox. What in the name of common-sense do you mean

by it?"

Aurelian turned his handsome head and looked at the red-bearded

agitator. "Malcolm," he said gently, "as you would say, we had best have

it out. I have changed, but not exactly in the way you think. As I say,

I am a socialist but also a royalist, as well as many other things you

would think equally bad. I have done a good deal of reading of late, a

good deal of thinking; so I have grown,--more than you, for you have

only acted. And just that, if you don't mind my saying so, is precisely

the trouble with most socialists. Look, this is the situation,"--he sat

up with almost animation in his face. "The world is in a bad way, never

worse; you taught me that, and the more I study life the more convinced

I am of its eternal truth. Reform must come if we are to save this

decrepit world from a vain repetition of history; that of course follows

from the other assumption. Thus far we walk together; but then arises

the question of means, and here we part, for you say reform may be won

by agitation, I say man is helpless at the present juncture and can only

wait."

"Men have not waited before; they have acted and have won."

"Yes, for it was dawn and not the eleventh hour."

"What do you make of the French Revolution?"

"A reform undertaken at the eleventh hour, and therefore merging within

three years into hideous deformity,--a reform that failed."

"You dare to say that it failed when it destroyed feudalism and the

rotten monarchial system?"

"Yes, for in their places it made possible capitalism and the French

Republic. Should your agitation succeed it would result in the French

Revolution over again, together with all its corollaries,--anarchy,

kakistocracy, a glorious tyranny on a false foundation, kakistocracy

again, and chaos: a counter revolution, again a kakistocracy, and

finally impotence, false and evil as the destroyed feudalism."

"You are the worst pessimist I ever saw!"

"Of course, for I am an optimist; and one can't be an optimist touching

the future without being a pessimist touching the present."

"But how can you be an optimist with regard to the future when you

condemn not only the present but every effort toward rebellion and

reform?"

"Because you are trying to turn back a tide that is almost at its full.

Have patience, and the ebb will come."

A great Persian greyhound, with white silky hair, paced solemnly down

the terrace and dropped its head on its master's knees, gazing at him

with soft eyes. Aurelian stroked its nose gently.

"Malcolm," he said, "if you persist you will fail, either broken by the

power you attack or through creating a condition more evil, more

intolerable still. There is a depth of fall below the point the

nineteenth century has now reached, and until that destiny is

accomplished, you are helpless."

"You break my heart, Aurelian," said McCann, sadly. "When I went away

you promised to fight with me in the battle for reform. I thought you

understood me, followed me. And now--you lapse into awful luxury and

vice,--opium and things. This is pretty bad, you force me to call you a

recreant; here on the very eve of battle you forsake the cause, you go

over to the enemy; and worse, you are a traitor, for you debauch my

men,--you have North now in there drugged with opium. Last of all, you

try to tempt me, you urge me to give up the fight; but I am not a

deserter."

"Malcolm, dear boy, I don't deserve quite all of that," said Aurelian,

gently. "Yes, I have deserted as you say, for I see more clearly than

you; the battle is already lost even before it is fought. I thought once

when you filled me with ardour of war that we could win. I see further

now. Dear Malcolm, you are waging war against the gods; you have

mistaken the light that is on the horizon; you have waked from sleep,

but the flush of light that is in your eyes is not the dawn,--it is

sunset. You taught me that we lived in another Renaissance; I know it

now to be another decadence, inevitable, implacable."

"You are wrong; the decadents have bedevilled you; they are but the

froth of the wave that has broken on the shore: the wave of the New Life

follows behind to sweep them into nothingness. Leave the simile: grant

for the moment that you are right: are you a coward to forsake a good

cause that may fail? Have you forgotten John Ball?"

"No, I have not forgotten John Ball, but I am not made of the stuff of

martyrs. Malcolm, I love life and love, and the beautiful things still

saved from the wreck of worlds. You would make me--an artist--forsake

it all, and go shoulder a rifle, or carry a red flag. I have a life

given me, let me live. I am not a fighter, let me be; let me live here

in this happy oasis in the desert of men. I can't help you, I can only

lay down my life on a barricade."

"That is brute selfishness!"

"No, it is reason. I know myself: I am of no use to you; I thought I

might be once, and I tried. Everything sickens me,--every detail of the

life that is now, the stock exchange and newspapers, alleged art and

trade, and the whole false principle that is under it all. I can't fight

them, the contest sickens me. It is all wrong, the principle of your

reform; you are wrong yourself. I can't have hope, and if I can't have

hope I can't fight. How can I fight for a reform that, if it were

carried, would only take the power out of the hands of a sordid gang of

capitalists and throw it into the hands of a sordid gang of emancipated

slaves? Life would be as hideous under their _régime_ as now. You would

change the ownership of cities, but you would not destroy them. You

would change the control of machinery, but you would not destroy it. You

would, in a word, glorify the machine, magnify the details, ignore the

soul of it all,--and the result? Stagnation. I have read your

Utopias,--they are hopelessly Philistine; their remedies are stimulants

that leave the disease untouched. Malcolm, you will fail, for you do not

see far enough. 'Ill would change be at whiles, were it not for the

change beyond the change.' They are the words of your own prophet; you

will, if you succeed, bring in the change, and it will be ill indeed. I

wait for 'the change beyond the change.'"

"I deny that the change that we shall bring will be ill; it will be the

next step beyond where we are now. There is no turning back: the law of

evolution drives us onward always; each new position won is nobler than

the last."

"Ah, that 'law of evolution'--I knew you would quote it to me sooner or

later. You hug the pleasant and cheerful theory to your hearts, and

twist history to fit its fancied laws. You cannot see that the law of

evolution works by a system of waves advancing and retreating; yet as

you say the tide goes forward always. Civilisations have risen and

fallen in the past as ours has risen and is falling now. Does not

history repeat itself? Can you not see that this is one of the periods

of decadence that alternate inevitably with the periods of advance? The

tide--

'W_as once too at the full, and round earth's shore_

L_ay like the folds of a bright girdle furled;_

B_ut now I only hear_

I_ts melancholy, long-withdrawing roar_

R_etreating to the breath_

O_f the night-wind, down the vast edges drear_

A_nd naked shingles of the world._'

"Yes, it is the decadence, the Roman decadence over again. Were Lucian

to come among us now he would be quite at ease--no, not that, for in one

thing we are utterly changed; so sordid is our decadence, so gross, so

contemptibly material, that we are denied the consolations of art

vouchsafed to his own land. Even in the days of her death Rome could

boast the splendour of a luxuriant literature, the glory of beauty of

environment, the supremacy of an art-appreciation that blinded men's

eyes to the shadow of the end. But for us, in the meanness of our fall,

we have no rags of art wherewith to cover our nakedness. Wagner is dead,

and Turner and Rossetti; Burne-Jones and Watts will go soon, and Pater

will follow Newman and Arnold. The night is at hand."

He lifted a small hammer and struck a velvet-voiced bell that stood on

the Arabian table of cedar inlaid with nacre and ivory. Murad came out

of the darkness, and at a gesture from Aurelian filled the great hookah

of jade and amber with the tobacco mingled with honey and opium and

cinnamon, placed a bright coal in the cup, and gave the curling stem

wound with gold thread to his master.

Malcolm watched it all as in a midsummer dream; for once he was

succumbing to the subtle influences that were seducing his yielding

senses. He could not reply to Aurelian, he lacked now even the desire.

The slow and musical voice, so delicately cadenced, had grown infinitely

pleasing to his unfamiliar ears, strangely fascinating in its mellow

charm. Wondering, he found himself yielding to it,--at first defiantly,

then sulkily, then with careless enjoyment, forgetful of everything

save his new delight in his strange surroundings.

The rose-water gurgled and sobbed in the jade hookah; thin lines of

odorous smoke rose sinuously to the silken awning that hung above the

terrace, dead in the hot August night. For a time neither spoke; then at

length Aurelian said, with a more sorrowful gravity than before,--

"Yes, the night is at hand, and the darkness at last will cover our

shame. It is better so. I thought once that through art we might work

revolution, and so win the world to clearness of sight again; that was

because I did not know the nature of art. Art is a result, not an

accident,--a result of conditions that no longer exist. We might as well

work for the restoration of chivalry, of the House of Stuart, of the

spirit of the Cinque-Cento, or any other equally desirable yet hopeless

thing. What we are, that our art is also. Every school of art, every

lecture on æsthetics, every art museum, is a waste and a vanity, their

influence is nothing. Art can never happen again; we who love it and

know it for what it is, the flowering of life, may only dream in the

past, building for ourselves a stately pleasure-house in Xanadu on the

banks of that river measureless to man that runs to a sunless sea.

"Individualism begot materialism, and materialism begot realism; and

realism is the antithesis of art.

"What else could have been? Art is a result,--and a cause; at once the

flower of life and the seed of the age to come. That age which through

its meanness and poverty is barren of blooms leaves no seed for its own

propagation. Good-night then to art; for the time its day is done.

Intelligence and erudition may create a creditable archæology, and a

blind generation may--nay, has--mistaken this for art. Well, its folly

is fond and pitiful.

"Do you not see, then, how the discovery of this thing must fill me with

that despair which kills all effort? You will say, 'Rise then, gird

thyself with the sword of scorn and invective, and strike with

exaltation at the false civilisation which is the death of art and of

all that is worthy in life.' Dear boy, our fathers in their fond,

visionary idealism made for all time such warfare of no avail. By

cunning schemes and crafty mechanism they, impelled by most honourable

motives, have woven a System which is now not alone the System of these

United States but of that Europe which we have dragged to our level; a

System which is now being accepted by that pure and happy civilisation,

the last to yield to our importunity, Japan, and being accepted to its

own damnation. And that System has made impossible forever any

successful result; for so dominant is it, so subtle in its influence, so

almighty in its power, that human strength is helpless before it.

Moreover, it will, through its infinite craft, seem to yield now and

then, yet only in form; for it will so debauch the reformers that they

will think now and again their cause is won, yet will it have lost

every element of desirability. Nevertheless 'the People' will shout with

acclamation, 'Victory! glorious victory! won through the strength of our

immortal and matchless institutions.' And all the while they are

shouting for the shadow of revolution, for the dead body from which the

soul has fled.

"'What is this System,' do you say? I will tell you; it is the system of

the nineteenth century, by which it will be known in the histories of

times to come, should time continue,--the great three-fold system of

Equality, The Freedom of the Press, and Public Opinion. You yourself do

them honour, for that you yourself have yielded to their evil influence;

until you have risen once for all superior to their plausible sophistry,

every thought you have, every act you are guilty of, will be tainted by

them and made of no avail. The whole world kneels before them now,

confessing their dominion. So long as this is so, so long will reform be

impossible.

"Democracy, Public Opinion, Freedom of the Press,--the idolatrous

tritheism of a corrupt generation. Through the Institution of Democracy

you have bound yourself with invincible chains to a political system

which is the government of the best, by the worst, for the few,--in

other words, the suppression of the intelligent few by the mob for the

bosses. By the Institution of Public Opinion you have made Democracy

permanent, preventing forever the rule of the 'saving remnant.' You

have founded your unholy inquisition for the suppression of the martyrs

to wisdom, and by your Institution of the Freedom of the Press you have

raised a tyranny, an irresponsible hierarchy of godless demagogues, an

impeccable final authority which will suppress, as it suppresses now,

all honourable freedom of thought. You have broken and destroyed the

power of the Church, and you are proud thereof; but beware! for in its

place you have builded a Power, more widespread, more overwhelming, more

irresistible. Though you crushed Democracy and discredited Public

Opinion, yet so long as the Freedom of the Press remained in existence,

Journalism would by its bull of deposition, its anathema of

excommunication, extinguish your labour in a breath.

"Here is your triple-headed Cerberus that bars your exit from this hades

you have made. Until he is slain you may never escape. Slain? You cannot

slay him; he is sheathed in an impenetrable hide, proof against all

assaults. Listen, only in one way may you pass by him. Wait! In a little

time his three horrid heads will growl with rising fury each to each,

over the enormous spoils of decaying life. Wait! and the growls will

grow fierce and more furious; and at last in mortal and horrible combat

the beast will strive with _itself_, spreading chaos and death around.

So will it disable itself; and when at last its triple head has

collapsed in ghastly exhaustion, then will the time have come: pile

upon it the hoary boulders of experience left by immemorial glaciers of

time; raise them into a mountain, and though, like imprisoned Titan, the

horrid beast bellows and thunders below, you may go forth fearlessly,

and on the dread ruin he has wrought build a new civilisation, a new

life."

Aurelian's ardent eyes gazed on the man before him through the writhing

smoke in the pallid dawn; his voice was like the voice of a velvet bell.

"Yes, it is the end of years; the era of action is over, night follows,

blotting from sight the shame of a wasted world; but through the mute,

unutterable night rises and brightens the splendour of the new day, the

new life. Action has striven and failed, and wreck and ruin are the

ending thereof; but across the desert of failure and despair bursts the

flame of the Dawn; the far-forgotten spirit of the world rises toward

dominion again,--the spirit of visions and dreams, the mighty Mother of

worlds and men, the Soul of the Eternal East."

Aurelian had risen and stood facing McCann, his white face lighted by a

flame of sudden vigour and inspiration; but even as he finished speaking

it changed. His eyes grew soft, and he smiled gently. "Malcolm," he

said, coming to the speechless agitator, and laying an arm lightly over

his broad shoulders, "Malcolm, I shall hardly forgive you this. You have

made me almost enthusiastic again; for a moment I could have believed

once more there was virtue in action; that has passed, and I am myself

again. And now, look!"

The sun rose, and its level river of light swept through the valley. A

mist like vaporous opals rose slowly from the winding river below them,

curling in the amber air and brushing itself in thin plumes over the

pale sky. Down from the terrace stretched the great garden, where

multitudinous lilies flashed in the first light with iridescent dew. A

splendid peacock swept flauntingly through the mazy walks and among the

white statues until it reached the central fountain, where it spread

itself in the sun. At the foot of the last terrace, where the marble

steps turned to serpentine in the still water, a small white boat with

prow of gilded fretwork lay motionless among the opening water-lilies

and the great blooms of the lotos. The breath of honeysuckle and jasmine

and day-lilies and tuberoses drifted slowly up in the first stirring

wind. The river-mist lifted, showing the golden meadows with the slim

elms here and there and the lofty hills fringed with dark forests

beyond.

"Malcolm," said Aurelian, "beyond those fortress hills lies

the world,--the nineteenth century, seething with impotent

tumult,--festering towns of shoe factories and cotton-mills, lying

tradesmen and legalised piracy; pork-packing, stock-brokers, quarrelling

and snarling sectaries, and railroads; politicians, mammonism, realism,

and newspapers. Within my walls, which are the century-living pines, is

the world of the past and of the future, of the fifteenth century and

of the twentieth century. Here have I gathered all my treasures of art

and letters; here may those I love find rest and refreshment when worn

out with hopeless lighting. Suffer me to live here and forget, or live

in a living dream of dreamless life. Against my hilly ramparts life may

beat in vain,--it cannot enter. Here I am a King; humour my fancy, and

give over your striving to make a poet into a warrior. There is other

work before me. Even as in the monasteries of the sixth century the wise

monks treasured the priceless records of a dead life until the night had

passed and the white day of mediævalism dawned on the world, so suffer

me to dream in my cloister through evil days; for the night has come

when man may no longer work."

* * * * *

Here ends the Gospel of Inaction called the Decadent, which is privately

issued for the Author by Copeland and Day, of Cornhill, Boston, in an

edition limited to one hundred and ten copies on this yellow French

handmade paper, and fifteen copies on thick Lalanne paper, which have

been printed during October and November, MDCCCXCIII by John Wilson and

Son, Cambridge, at the University Press. The Frontispiece and Initial

letters are designed by Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue and cut upon wood by

John Sample, Jr.

[Illustration]

Transcriber's Notes:

Page 1, changed "agressive" to "aggressive" and changed oe ligature to

"oe" in "foetid." (Ligature is retained in HTML edition).

Page 17, changed "Guatamala" to "Guatemala".