Chapter IV: Part 4

Amongst them there was one colossal form, on which the sun poured with its full radiance.

This was the form of a captive grinding at a millstone; the majestic, symmetrical, supple form of a man who was also a god.

In his naked limbs there was a supreme power; in his glance there was a divine command; his head was lifted as though no yoke could ever lie on that proud neck; his foot seemed to spurn the earth as though no mortal tie had ever bound him to the sod that human steps bestrode: yet at the corn-mill he laboured, grinding wheat like the patient blinded oxen that toiled beside him.

For it was the great Apollo in Pheræ.

The hand which awoke the music of the spheres had been blood-stained with murder; the beauty which had the light and lustre of the sun had been darkened with passion and with crime; the will which no other on earth or in heaven could withstand had been bent under the chastisement of Zeus.

He whose glance had made the black and barren slopes of Delos to laugh with fruitfulness and gladness--he whose prophetic sight beheld all things past, present, and to come, the fate of all unborn races, the doom of all unspent ages--he, the Far-Striking King, laboured here beneath the curse of crime, greatest of all the gods, and yet a slave.

In all the hills and vales of Greece his Io pæan sounded still.

Upon his holy mountains there still arose the smoke of fires of sacrifice.

With dance and song the Delian maidens still hailed the divinity of Lêtô's son.

The waves of the pure Ionian air still rang for ever with the name of Delphinios.

At Pytho and at Clarus, in Lycia and in Phokis, his oracles still breathed forth upon their fiat terror or hope into the lives of men; and still in all the virgin forests of the world the wild beasts honoured him wheresoever they wandered, and the lion and the boar came at his bidding from the deserts to bend their free necks and their wills of fire meekly to bear his yoke in Thessaly.

Yet he laboured here at the corn-mill of Admetus; and watching him at his bondage there stood the slender, slight, wing-footed Hermes, with a slow, mocking smile upon his knavish lips, and a jeering scorn in his keen eyes, even as though he cried:

"O brother, who would be greater than I! For what hast thou bartered to me the golden rod of thy wealth and thy dominion over the flocks and the herds? For seven chords strung on a shell--for a melody not even thine own! For a lyre outshone by my syrinx hast thou sold all thine empire to me. Will human ears give heed to thy song now thy sceptre has passed to my hands? Immortal music only is left thee, and the vision foreseeing the future. O god! O hero! O fool! what shall these profit thee now?"

Thus to the artist by whom they had been begotten the dim white shapes of the deities spoke. Thus he saw them, thus he heard, whilst the pale and watery sunlight lit up the form of the toiler in Pheræ.

For even as it was with the divinity of Delos, so is it likewise with the genius of a man, which, being born of a god, yet is bound as a slave to the grindstone. Since even as Hermes mocked the Lord of the Unerring Bow, so is genius mocked of the world, when it has bartered the herds, and the grain, and the rod that metes wealth, for the seven chords that no ear, dully mortal, can hear.

And as he looked upon this symbol of his life, the captivity and the calamity, the strength and the slavery of his existence overcame him; and for the first hour since he had been born of a woman Arslàn buried his face in his hands and wept.

He could bend great thoughts to take the shapes that he chose, as the chained god in Pheræ bound the strong kings of the desert and forest to carry his yoke; yet, like the god, he likewise stood fettered to the mill to grind for bread.

* * *

One evening, a little later, he met her in the fields on the same spot where Marcellin first had seen her as a child amongst the scarlet blaze of the poppies.

The lands were all yellow with saffron and emerald with the young corn; she balanced on her head a great brass jar; the red girdle glowed about her waist as she moved: the wind stirred the folds of her garments; her feet were buried in the shining grass; clouds tawny and purple were behind her; she looked like some Moorish phantom seen in a dream under a sky of Spain.

He paused and gazed at her with eyes half content, half cold.

She was of a beauty so uncommon, so strange, and all that was his for his art:--a great artist, whether in words, in melody, or in colour, is always cruel, or at the least seems so, for all things that live under the sun are to him created only to minister to his one inexorable passion.

Art is so vast, and human life is so little. It is to him only supremely just that the insect of an hour should be sacrificed to the infinite and eternal truth which must endure until the heavens themselves shall wither as a scroll that is held in a flame. It might have seemed to Arslàn base to turn her ignorance, and submission to his will, for the gratification of his amorous passions; but to make these serve the art to which he had himself abandoned every earthly good was in his sight justified, as the death agonies of the youth whom they decked with roses and slew in sacrifice to the sun, were in the sight of the Mexican nation.

The youth whom the Mexicans slew, on the high hill of the city, with his face to the west, was always the choicest and the noblest of all the opening flower of their manhood: for it was his fate to be called to enter into the realms of eternal light, and to dwell face to face with the unbearable brightness without whose rays the universe would have perished frozen in perpetual night. So the artist, who is true to his art, regards every human sacrifice that he renders up to it; how can he feel pity for a thing which perishes to feed a flame that he deems the life of the world?

The steel that he draws out from the severed heart of his victim he is ready to plunge into his own vitals: no other religion can vaunt as much of its priests.

"What are you thinking of to-night?" he asked her where she came through the fields by the course of a little flower-sown brook, fringed with tall bulrushes and waving willow-stems.

She lifted her eyelids with a dreamy and wistful regard.

"I was thinking--I wonder what the reed felt that you told me of--the one reed that a god chose from all its millions by the waterside and cut down to make into a flute."

"Ah?--you see there are no reeds that make music now-a-days; the reeds are only good to be woven into kreels for the fruits and the fish of the market."

"That is not the fault of the reeds?"

"Not that I know; it is the fault of men, most likely, who find the chink of coin in barter sweeter music than the song of the syrinx. But what do you think the reed felt then?--pain to be so sharply severed from its fellows?"

"No--or the god would not have chosen it."

"What then?"

A troubled sigh parted her lips; these old fables were fairest truths to her, and gave a grace to every humblest thing that the sun shone on, or the waters begat from their foam, or the winds blew with their breath into the little life of a day.

"I was trying to think. But I cannot be sure. These reeds have forgotten. They have lost their soul. They want nothing but to feed among the sand and the mud, and grow in millions together, and shelter the toads and the newts,--there is not a note of music in them all--except when the wind rises and makes them sigh, and then they remember that long, long-ago the breath of a great god was in them."

Arslàn looked at her where she stood; her eyes resting on the reeds, and the brook at her feet; the crimson heat of the evening all about her, on the brazen amphora, on the red girdle on her loins, on the thoughtful parted lips, on the proud bent brows above which a golden butterfly floated as above the brows of Psyche.

He smiled; the smile that was so cold to her.

"Look: away over the fields, there comes a peasant with a sickle; he comes to mow down the reeds to make a bed for his cattle. If he heard you, he would think you mad."

"They have thought me many things worse. What matter?"

"Nothing at all;--that I know. But you seem to envy that reed--so long ago--that was chosen?"

"Who would not?"

"Are you so sure? The life of the reed was always pleasant;--dancing there in the light, playing with the shadows, blowing in the winds; with the cool waters all about it all day long, and the yellow daffodils and the blue bell-flowers for its brethren."

"Nay;--how do you know?"

Her voice was low, and thrilled with a curious eager pain.

"How do you know?" she murmured. "Rather,--it was born in the sands, amongst the stones, of the chance winds, of the stray germs,--no one asking, no one heeding, brought by a sunbeam, spat out by a toad--no one caring where it dropped. Rather,--it grew there by the river, and such millions of reeds grew with it, that neither waters nor winds could care for a thing so common and worthless, but the very snakes twisting in and out despised it, and thrust the arrows of their tongues through it in scorn. And then--I think I see!--the great god walked by the edge of the river, and he mused on a gift to give man, on a joy that should be a joy on the earth for ever; and he passed by the lily white as snow, by the thyme that fed the bees, by the gold heart in the arum flower, by the orange flame of the tall sandrush, by all the great water-blossoms which the sun kissed, and the swallows loved, and he came to the one little reed pierced with the snakes' tongues, and all alone amidst millions. Then he took it up, and cut it to the root, and killed it;--killed it as a reed,--but breathed into it a song audible and beautiful to all the ears of men. Was that death to the reed?--or life? Would a thousand summers of life by the waterside have been worth that one thrill of song when a god first spoke through it?"

Her face lightened with a radiance to which the passion of her words was pale and poor; the vibrations of her voice grew sonorous and changing as the sounds of music itself; her eyes beamed through unshed tears as planets through the rain.

* * *

Of all the forms with which he had peopled its loneliness, these had the most profound influence on her in their fair, passionless, majestic beauty, in which it seemed to her that the man who had forgotten them had repeated his own likeness. For they were all alike, yet unlike; of the same form and feature, yet different even in their strong resemblance, like elder and younger brethren who hold a close companionship. For Hypnos was still but a boy with his blue-veined eyelids closed, and his mouth rosy and parted like that of a slumbering child, and above his golden head a star rose in the purple night. Oneiros standing next was a youth whose eyes smiled as though they beheld visions that were welcome to him; in his hand, amongst the white roses, he held a black wand of sorcery, and around his bended head there hovered a dim silvery nimbus. Thanatos alone was a man fully grown; and on his calm and colourless face there were blended an unutterable sadness, and an unspeakable peace; his eyes were fathomless, far-reaching, heavy laden with thought, as though they had seen at once the heights of heaven and the depths of hell; and he, having thus seen, and knowing all things, had learned that there was but one good possible in all the universe,--that one gift which his touch gave, and which men in their blindness shuddered from and cursed. And above him and around him there was a great darkness.

So the gods stood, and so they spoke, even to her; they seemed to her as brethren, masters, friends--these three immortals who looked down on her in their mute majesty.

They are the gods of the poor, of the wretched, of the outcast, of the proscribed,--they are the gods who respect not persons nor palaces,--who stay with the exile and flee from the king,--who leave the tyrant of a world to writhe in torment, and call a smile beautiful as the morning on the face of a beggar child,--who turn from the purple beds where wealth and lust and brutal power lie, and fill with purest visions the darkest hours of the loneliest nights, for genius and youth,--they are the gods of consolation and of compensation,--the gods of the exile, of the orphan, of the outcast, of the poet, of the prophet, of all whose bodies ache with the infinite pangs of famine, and whose hearts ache with the infinite woes of the world, of all who hunger with the body or the soul.

* * *

It became mid-April. It was market-day for all the country lying round that wondrous cathedral-spire, which shot into the air far-reaching and ethereal, like some fountain whose column of water had been arrested aloft and changed to ice.

The old quiet town was busy, with a rich sunshine shed upon it, in which the first yellow butterflies of the year had begun to dance.

It was high noon, and the highest tide of the market.

Flower-girls, fruit-girls, egg-sellers, poultry-hucksters, crowds of women, old and young, had jolted in on their docile asses, throned on their sheepskin saddles; and now, chattering and chaffering, drove fast their trade. On the steps of the cathedral boys with birds'-nests, knife-grinders making their little wheels fly, cobblers hammering, with boards across their knees, travelling pedlars with knapsacks full of toys and mirrors, and holy images, and strings of beads, sat side by side in amicable competition.

Here and there a priest passed, with his black robe and broad hat, like a dusky mushroom amongst a bed of many-hued gillyflowers. Here and there a soldier, all colour and glitter, showed like a gaudy red tulip in bloom amidst tufts of thyme.

The old wrinkled leathern awnings of the market-stalls glowed like copper in the brightness of noon. The red tiles of the houses edging the great square were gilded with yellow houseleeks. The little children ran hither and thither with big bunches of primroses or sheaves of blue wood-hyacinths, singing. The red and blue serges of the young girls' bodices were like the gay hues of the anemones in their baskets. The brown faces of the old dames under the white roofing of their headgear were like the russet faces of the home-kept apples which they had garnered through all the winter.

Everywhere in the shade of the flapping leather, and the darkness of the wooden porches, there were the tender blossoms of the field and forest, of the hedge and garden. The azure of the hyacinths, the pale saffron of the primroses, the cool hues of the meadow daffodils, the ruby eyes of the cultured jonquils, gleamed amongst wet rushes, grey herbs, and freshly budded leafage. Plovers' eggs nestled in moss-lined baskets; sheaves of velvet-coated wallflowers poured fragrance on the air; great plumes of lilac nodded on the wind, and amber feathers of laburnum waved above the homelier masses of mint and marjoram, and sage and chervil.

_IDALIA._

Whatever fate rose for them with the dawn, this night at least was theirs: there is no love like that which lives victorious even beneath the shadow of death: there is no joy like that which finds its paradise even amid the cruelty of pain, the fierce long struggle of despair.

Never is the voluptuous glory of the sun so deep, so rich, as when its last excess of light burns above the purple edge of the tempest-cloud that soars upward to cover and devour it.

* * *

"And we reign still!"

She turned, as she spoke, towards the western waters, where the sea-line of the Ægean lay, while in her eyes came the look of a royal pride and of a deathless love.

"Greece cannot die. No matter what the land be now, Greece--_our_ Greece--must live for ever. Her language lives; the children of Europe learn it, even if they halt it in imperfect numbers. The greater the scholar, the humbler he still bends to learn the words of wisdom from her school. The poet comes to her for all his fairest myths, his noblest mysteries, his greatest masters. The sculptor looks at the broken fragments of her statues, and throws aside his calliope in despair before those matchless wrecks. From her soldiers learn how to die, and nations how to conquer and to keep their liberties. No deed of heroism is done but, to crown it, it is named parallel to hers. They write of love, and who forgets the Lesbian? They dream of freedom, and to reach it they remember Salamis. They talk of progress, and while they talk they sigh for all that they have lost in Academus. They seek truth, and while they seek, wearily long, as little children, to hear the golden speech of Socrates, that slave, and fisherman, and sailor, and stonemason, and date-seller were all once free to hear in her Agora. But for the light that shone from Greece in the breaking of the Renaissance, Europe would have perished in its Gothic darkness. They call her dead: she can never die while her life, her soul, her genius breathe fire into the new nations, and give their youth all of greatness and of grace that they can claim. Greece dead! She reigns in every poem written, in every art pursued, in every beauty treasured, in every liberty won, in every god-like life and godlike death, in your fresh lands, which, but for her, would be barbarian now."

Where she stood, with her eyes turned westward to the far-off snows of Cithæron and Mount Ida, and the shores which the bronze spear of Pallas Athene once guarded through the night and day, the dark light in her eyes deepened, and the flush of a superb pride was on her brow--it seemed Aspasia who lived again, and who remembered Pericles.

* * *

The chant of the Imaum rang up from the shore, deep and sonorous, calling on the Faithful to prayer, an hour before midnight. She listened dreamily to the echoes that seemed to linger among the dark foliage.

"I like those national calls to prayer," she said, as she leaned over the parapet, while the fire-flies glittered among the mass of leaves as the diamond sprays glistened in her hair. "The Ave Maria, the Vespers, the Imaum's chant, the salutation of the dawn or of the night, the hymn before sleep, or before the sun;--you have none of those in your chill islands? You have only weary rituals, and stuccoed churches, where the 'Pharisees for a pretence make long prayers!' As if _that_ was not the best--the only--temple!"

She glanced upward at the star-studded sky, and on her face was that graver and gentler look which had come there when she sang.

"I have held it so many a time," he answered her, lying awake at night among the long grass of the Andes, or under the palms of the desert. It was a strange delusion to build shrines to the honour of God while there are still his own--the forests and the mountains.

* * *

"It was a fair heritage to lose through a feeble vanity--that beautiful Constantinople!" she said musingly. "The East and the West--what an empire! More than Alexander ever grasped at--what might not have been done with it? Asian faith and Oriental sublimity, with Roman power and Gothic force; if there had been a hand strong enough to weld all these together, what a world there might have been!"

"But to have done that would have been to attain the Impossible," he answered her. "Oil and flame, old and new, living and dying, tradition and scepticism, iconoclast and idolater, you cannot unite and harmonise these antagonisms?"

She gave a sign of dissent.

"The prophet or the hero unites all antagonisms, because he binds them all to his own genius. The Byzantine empire had none such; the nearest was Julian, but he believed less in himself than in the gods; the nearest after him was Belisarius--the fool of a courtesan, and he was but a good soldier; he was no teacher, no liberator, no leader for the nations. John Vatices came too late. A man must be his own convert before he can convert others. Zoroaster, Christ, Mahommed, Cromwell, Napoleon, believed intensely in their own missions; hence their influence on the peoples. How can we tell what Byzantium might have become under one mighty hand? It was torn in pieces among courtesans, and parasites, and Christian fanatics, and Houmousians and Houmoiousians! I have the blood of the Commneni in me. I think of it with shame when I remember what they might have been."

"You come from the Roman Emperors?"

"The Roman Emperors?" she repeated. "When the name was a travesty, an ignominy, a reproach! When Barbarians thronged the Forum, and the representative of Galilee fishermen claimed power in the Capitol? Yes; I descend, they say, from the Commneni; but I am far prouder that, on the other hand, I come from pure Athenians. I belong to two buried worlds. But the stone throne of the Areopagus was greater than the gold one of Manuel."

* * *

"That animal life is to be envied perhaps," she said.

"Their pride is centred in a silver hairpin; their conscience is committed to a priest; their credulity is contented with tradition; their days are all the same, from the rising of one sun to another; they do not love, they do not hate; they are like the ass that they drive, follow one patient routine, and only take care for their food. Perhaps they are to be envied!"

"You would not lose 'those thoughts that wander through eternity,' to gain in exchange the peace from ignorance of the peasant or the dullard?"

She turned her face to him, with its most beautiful smile on her lips and in her eyes.

"No, I would not: you are right. Better to know the secrets of the gods, even though with pain, than to lead the dull, brute life, though painless. It is only in our dark hours that we would sell our souls for a dreamless ease."

"Dark hours! _You_ should not know them. Ah, if you would but trust me with some confidence! if there were but some way in which I could serve you!"

Her eyes met his with gratitude, even while she gave him a gesture of silence. She thought how little could the bold, straight stroke of this man's frank chivalry cut through the innumerable and intricate chains that entangled her own life. The knightly Excalibur could do nothing to sever the filmy but insoluble meshes of secret intrigues.

"It is a saint's-day: I had forgotten it," she said to turn his words from herself, while the bell of the campanile still swung through the air. "I am a pagan, you see: I do not fancy that you care much for creeds yourself."

"Creeds? I wish there were no such word. It has only been a rallying-cry for war, an excuse for the bigot to burn his neighbour."

"No. Long ago, under the Andes, Nezahualcoytl held the same faith that Socrates had vainly taught in the Agora; and Zengis Khan knew the truth of theism like Plato; yet the world has never generally learnt it. It is the religion of nature--of reason. But the faith is too simple and too sublime for the multitude. The mass of minds needs a religion of mythics, legend, symbolism, and fear. What is impalpable escapes it; and it must give an outward and visible shape to its belief, as it gives in its art a human form to its deity. Come, since we agree in our creed, I will take you to my temple--a temple not made by hands."

* * *

"I never had a fair field!"--it may be sometimes a coward's apology; but it is many a time the epitome of a great, cramped, tortured, wasted life, which strove like a caged eagle to get free, and never could beat down the bars of the den that circumstances and prejudice had forged. The world sees the few who do reach freedom, and, watching their bold upright flight, says rashly, "will can work all things." But they who perish by the thousand, the fettered eagles who never see the sun; who pant in darkness, and wear their breasts bare beating on the iron that will never yield; who know their strength, yet cannot break their prison; who feel their wings, yet never can soar up to meet the sweet wild western winds of liberty; who lie at last beaten, and hopeless, and blind, with only strength enough to long for death to come and quench all sense and thought in its annihilation,--who thinks of them--who counts them?

* * *

The earliest dawn had broken eastward, where the mountains stretched--the dawn of a southern summer, that almost touches the sunset of the past night--but under the dense shadows of the old woods that had sheltered the mystic rites of Gnostics and echoed with the Latin hymns to Pan, no light wandered. There was only a dim silvery haze that seemed to float over the whiteness of the tall-stemmed arum lilies and the foam-bells of the water that here and there glimmered under the rank vegetation, where it had broken from its hidden channels up to air and space. Not a sound disturbed the intense stillness; that the night waned and the world wakened, brought no change to the solitudes that men had forgotten, and only memories of dead-deserted gods still haunted in the places of their lost temples, whose columns were now the sea-pines' stems, and on whose fallen altars and whose shattered sculptures the lizard made her shelter and the wind-sown grasses seeded and took root. Of the once graceful marble beauty and the incense-steeped stones of sacrifice nothing remained but moss-grown shapeless fragments, buried beneath a pall of leaves by twice a thousand autumns. Yet the ancient sanctity still rested on the nameless, pathless woods; the breath of an earlier time, of a younger season of the earth, seemed to lie yet upon the untroubled forest ways; the whisper of the unseen waters had a dream-like, unreal cadence; in the deep shade, in the warm fragrance and the heavy gloom, there was a voluptuous yet mournful charm--the world seemed so far, the stars shone so near; there were the sweetness of rest and the oblivion of passion.

* * *

Death is not ours to deal. And were it ours, should we give him the nameless mystic mercy which all men live to crave--give it as the chastisement of crime? Death! It is rest to the aged, it is oblivion to the atheist, it is immortality to the poet! It is a vast, dim, exhaustless pity to all the world. And would you summon it as your hardest cruelty to sin?

They were silent; she stirred their souls--she had not bound their passions.

"A traitor merits death," they muttered.

"Merits it! Not so. The martyr, the liberator, the seeker of truth, may deserve its peace; how has the traitor won them? You deem yourselves just; your justice errs. If you would give him justice, make him live. Live to know fear lest every wind among the leaves may whisper of his secret; live to feel the look of a young child's eyes a shame to him; live to envy every peasant whose bread has not been bought with tainted coin; live to hear ever in his path the stealing step of haunting retribution; live to see his brethren pass by him as a thing accurst; live to listen in his age to white-haired men, who once had been his comrades, tell to the youth about them the unforgotten story of his shame. Make him live thus if you would have justice."

They answered nothing; a shudder ran through them as they heard.

"And--if you have as I--a deliverance that forbids you even so much harshness, still let him live, and bury his transgression in your hearts. Say to him as I say, 'Your sin was great, go forth and sin no more.'"

* * *

"One is not an assassin!"

"Since when have you discovered that?"

The flush grew darker on Count Conrad's forehead; he moved restlessly under the irony, and drank down a draught of red fiery Roussillon without tasting it more than if it had been water. Then he laughed; the same careless musical laughter with which he had made the requiem over a violet--a laugh which belonged at once to the most careless and the most evil side of his character.

"Since sophism came in, which was with Monsieur Cain, when he asked, 'Am I my brother's keeper?' It was ingenious that reply; creditable to a beginner, without social advantages. 'An assassin!' Take the word boldly by the beard, and look at it. What is there objectionable?"

"Nothing--except to the assassinated."

"It has had an apotheosis ever since the world began," pursued Phaulcon, unheeding, in his bright vivacity. "Who are celebrated in Scripture? Judith, Samuel, David, Moses, Joab. Who is a patriot? Brutus. Who is an immortal? Harmodius and Aristogiton. Who is a philosopher? Cicero, while he murmurs '_Vixerunt!_' after slaying Lentulus. Who is a hero? Marius, who nails the senators' heads to the rostræ. Who is a martyr? Charles, who murders Strafford. What is religion? Christianity, that has burnt and slain millions. Who is a priest? Calvin, who destroys Servetus; or Pole, who kills Latimer, which you like. Who is a saint? George of Cappadocia, who slaughters right and left. Who is a ruler? Sulla, who slays Ofella. Who is a queen? Christina, who stabs Monaldeschi; Catherine, who strangles Peter; Isabella, who slays Moors and Jews by the thousand. Murderers all! Assassination has always been deified; and before it is objected to, the world must change its creeds, its celebrities, and its chronicles. 'Monsieur, you are an assassin,' says an impolite world. 'Messieurs,' says the polite logician, 'I found my warrant in your Bible, and my precedent in your Brutus. What you deify in Aristogiton and Jael you mustn't damn in Ankarström and me.' Voilà! What could the world say?"

"That you would outwit Belial with words, and beguile Beelzebub out of his kingdom with sophistry."

_A VILLAGE COMMUNE._

Power is sweet, and when you are a little clerk you love its sweetness quite as much as if you were an emperor, and maybe you love it a good deal more.

* * *

He saw no reason why he should not become a deputy, and even a minister before he died, and indeed there was no reason whatever. He was only a clerk at fifty pounds a year; but he had a soul above all scruples, and a heart as hard as a millstone.

* * *

He was only a clerk indeed, at a slender salary, and ate his friends' tomatoes publicly in the little back room of the caffè; but he had the soul of a statesman. When a donkey kicks, beat it; when it dies, skin it; so only will it profit you; that was his opinion, and the public was the donkey of Messer Nellemane.

* * *

Pippo and Viola feared everything, yet knew not what they feared; it is a ghostly burden of dread, that which the honest poor carry with them all through their toiling hungry days, the vague oppressive dread of this law which is always acting the spy on them, always dogging their steps, always emptying their pockets. The poor can understand criminal law, and its justice and its necessity easily enough, and respect its severities; but they cannot understand the petty tyrannies of civil law; and it wears their lives out, and breaks their spirits. When it does not break their spirits it curdles their blood and they become socialists, nihilists, internationalists, anything that will promise them riddance of their spectre and give them vengeance. We in Italy are all of us afraid of socialism, we who have anything to lose; and yet we let the syndics, and their secretaries, conciliators, and chancellors sow it broadcast in dragon's teeth of petty injustices and petty cruelties, that soon or late will spring up armed men, hydra-headed and torch in hand!

* * *

The law should be a majesty, solemn, awful, unerring: just, as man hopes that God is just; and from its throne it should stretch out a mighty hand to seize and grasp the guilty, and the guilty only. But when the law is only a petty, meddlesome, cruel, greedy spy, mingling in every household act and peering in at every window pane, then the poor who are guiltless would be justified if they spat in its face, and called it by its right name, a foul extortion.

* * *

The Italian tongue chatters like a magpie's; if they did not let the steam off thus they would be less easily ruled than they are; but no great talker ever did any great thing yet, in this world.

* * *

A retentive memory is of great use to a man, no doubt; but the talent of oblivion is on the whole more useful.

* * *

Sarta Rosalia is in a lovely pastoral country; the country that seems to thrill with Theocritus' singing, as it throbs with the little tamborine of the cicala; a country running over with beautiful greenery, and with climbing creepers hanging everywhere, from the vine on the maples to the china-rose hedges, and with the deep-blue shadows, and the sun-flushed whiteness of the distant mountains lending to it in the golden distance that solemnity and ethereal charm which, without mountains somewhere within sight, no country ever has. But since the advent of "freedom" it is scarred and wounded; great scar-patches stretch here and there where woods have been felled by the avarice illumined in the souls of landowners; hundreds and thousands of bare poles stand stark and stiff against the river light which have been glorious pyramids of leaf shedding welcome shadows on the river path; and many a bold round hill like the _ballons_ of the Vosges, once rich of grass as they, now shorn of wood, and even of undergrowth, lift a bare stony front to the lovely sunlight, and never more will root of tree, or seed of flower or of fern, find bed there.

Such is Progress.

* * *

For the first time his _liberi pensieri_ were distasteful to him and unsatisfactory; for atheism makes a curse a mere rattle of dry peas in a fool's bladder, as it makes a blessing a mere flutter of a breath. Messer Nellemane for the first time felt that the old religion has its advantages over agnosticism; it gave you a hell for your rivals and your enemies!

* * *

He had never heard of Virgil and of Theocritus--but it hurt him to have these sylvan pictures spoiled; these pictures which are the same as those they saw and sang; the threshing barns with the piles of golden grain, and the flails flying to merry voices; the young horses trampling the wheat loose from its husk with bounding limbs and tossing manes; the great arched doorways, with the maidens sitting in a circle breaking the maize from its withered leaves, and telling old-world stories, and singing sweet _fiorellini_ all the while; the hanging fields broken up in hill and vale with the dun-coloured oxen pushing their patient way through labyrinths of vine boughs, and clouds of silvery olive leaf: the bright laborious day, with the sun-rays turning the sickle to a semi-circlet of silver, as the mice ran, and the crickets shouted, and the larks soared on high: the merry supper when the day was done, with the thrill and thrum of the mandolini, and the glisten of the unhoused fire-flies, whose sanctuary had been broken when the bearded barley and the amber corn fell prone: all these things rose to his memory: they had made his youth and manhood glad and full of colour; they were here still for his sons a little while, but when his sons should be all grown men, then those things would have ceased to be, and even their very memory would have perished, most likely, while the smoke of the accursed engines would have sullied the pure blue sky, and the stench of their foul vapours would have poisoned the golden air.

He roused himself and said wearily to Pippo,

"There is a tale I have heard somewhere of a man who sold his birthright for gold, and when the gold was in his hands, then it changed to withered leaves and brown moss: I was thinking, eh? that the world is much like that man!"

* * *

When all your politics and policies are summed up in the one intention to do well for yourself, great simplicity is given to your theories, if not to your practice.

* * *

The ministerialists ... made florid and beautiful speeches full of sesquipedalian phrases in which they spoke about the place of Italy among the great powers, the dangers of jealousy and invasion from other nations, the magnificence of the future, the blessings of education, the delights of liberty, the wickedness of the opposition, the sovereign rights of the people; and said it all so magnificently and so bewilderingly that the people never remembered till it was too late that they had said nothing about opposing the cow-tax--or indeed any taxes at all, but listened and gaped, and shouted, and clapped; and being told that they could sit at a European Congress to decide the fate of Epirus, were for the moment oblivious that they had bad bread, dear wine, scant meat, an army of conscripts, and a bureaucracy that devoured them as maggots a cheese. What is political eloquence for, if not to make the people forget such things as these?

* * *

To sell your grapes to foreigners and have none at all at home is a spirited commerce, and fine free trade; that the poor souls around are all poisoned with cheap chemicals in the absence of wine, is only an evidence of all that science can do.

* * *

It is the noblest natures that tyranny drives to frenzy.

* * *

The bureaucratic mind, all the world over, believes the squeak of the official penny whistle to be as the trump of archangels and the voice of Sinai. That all the people do not fall down prostrate at the squeak is, to this order of mind, the one unmentionable sin.

* * *

It is not true that no Italian ever tells the truth, as commentators on the country say, but it is sadly true that when one does he suffers for it.

* * *

A day in prison to a free-born son of the soil, used to work with the broad bright sky alone above his head, is more agony than a year of it is to a cramped city-worker used only to the twilight of a machine-room or a workshop, only to an air full of smuts and smoke, and the stench of acids, and the dust of filed steel or sifted coal. The sufferings of the two cannot be compared, and one among many of the injustices the law, all over the world, commits, is that it never takes into consideration what a man's past has been. There are those to whom a prison is as hell; there are those to whom it is something better than the life they led.

* * *

She was an old woman, and had been bred up in the old faiths; faiths that were not clear indeed to her nor ever reasoned on, but yet gave her consolation, and a great, if a vague hope. Now that we tell the poor there is no such hope, that when they have worked and starved long enough, then they will perish altogether, like bits of candle that have burnt themselves out, that they are mere machines made of carbon and hydrogen, which, when they have had due friction, will then crumble back into the dust; now that we tell them all this, and call this the spread of education, will they be as patient?

* * *

Take hope from the heart of man, and you make him a beast of prey.

* * *

One of the cruellest sins of any state, in giving petty and tyrannous authority into petty and tyrannous hands, is that it thus brings into hatred and disgust the true and high authority of moral law.

* * *

In these modern times of cowardice, when great ministers dare not say the thing they think, and high magistrates stoop to execute decrees they abhor, it is scarcely to be hoped for that moral courage will be a plant of very sturdy growth in the souls of carpenters, and coopers, and bakers, and plumbers, and day-labourers, who toil for scarce a shilling a day.

* * *

He had been wronged, and a great wrong is to the nature as a cancer is to the body; there is no health.

* * *

A just chastisement may benefit a man, though it seldom does, but an unjust one changes all his blood to gall.

* * *

In these days, Christian Europe decides that not only the poor man lying by the wayside, but also the Samaritan who helps him, are sinners against political economy, and its law forbids what its religion orders: people must settle the contradiction as they deem best; they generally are content to settle it by buttoning up their pockets, and passing by, on the other side.

* * *

In this lovely land that brims over with flowers like a cup over-filled, where the sun is as a magician for ever changing with a wand of gold all common things to paradise; where every wind shakes out the fragrance of a world of fruit and flower commingled; where, for so little, the lute sounds and the song arises; here, misery looks more sad than it does in sadder climes, where it is like a home-born thing, and not an alien tyrant as it is here.

* * *

You cannot cage a field bird when it is old; it dies for want of flight, of air, of change, of freedom. No use will be the stored grain of your cages; better for the bird a berry here and there, and peace of gentle death at last amidst the golden gorse or blush of hawthorn buds.

* * *

"What is England?"

"It is a place where the poor souls have no wine of their own, I think; and they make cannons and cheese. You see their people over here now and then. They carry red Bibles, and they go about with their mouths open to catch flies, and they run into all the little old dusty places; you must have seen them."

"And why do we want to have anything to do with them?"

"They will come in ships and fire at us, if we are not bigger and stronger than they. We must build iron houses that float, and go on the sea and meet them."

_PUCK._

"Animalism," forsooth!--a more unfair word don't exist. When we animals never drink only just enough to satisfy thirst, never eat except when we have genuine appetites, never indulge in any sort of debauch, and never strain excess till we sink into the slough of satiety, shall "animalism" be a word to designate all that men and women dare to do? "Animalism!" You ought to blush for such a libel on our innocent and reasonable lives when you regard your own! You men who scorch your throats with alcohols, and kill your lives with absinthe; and squander your gold in the Kursaal, and the Cecle, and the Arlington; and have thirty services at your dinner betwixt soup and the "chasse;" and cannot spend a summer afternoon in comfort unless you be drinking deep the intoxication of hazard in your debts and your bets on the Heath or the Downs, at Hurlingham or at Tattersalls' Rooms. You women, who sell your souls for bits of stones dug from the bowels of the earth; who stake your honour for a length of lace two centuries old; who replace the bloom your passions have banished with the red of poisoned pigments; who wreathe your aching heads with purchased tresses torn from prisons, and madhouses, and coffins; who spend your lives in one incessant struggle, first the rivalry of vanity and then the rivalry of ambition; who deck out greed, and selfishness, and worship of station or gold, as "love," and then wonder that your hapless dupes, seizing the idol that you offer them as worthy of their worship, fling it from them with a curse, finding it dumb, and deaf, and merciless, a thing of wood and stone.

"Animalism," forsooth! God knows it would be well for you, here and hereafter, men and women both, were you only patient, continent, and singleminded, only faithful, gentle, and long-suffering, as are the brutes that you mock, and misuse, and vilify in the supreme blindness of your egregious vanity!

* * *

I was horribly cold and hungry; and this is a combination which kills sentiment in bigger people than myself. The emotions, like a hothouse flower or a sea-dianthus, wither curiously when aired in an east wind, or kept some hours waiting for dinner.

* * *

In truth, too, despite all the fine chances that you certainly give your peasants to make thorough beasts of themselves, they are your real aristocrats, and have the only really good manners in your country. In an old north-country dame, who lives on five shillings a week, in a cottage like a dream of Teniers' or Van Tol's, I have seen a fine courtesy, a simple desire to lay her best at her guest's disposal, a perfect composure, and a freedom from all effort, that were in their way the perfection of breeding. I have seen these often in the peasantry, in the poor. It is your middle classes, with their incessant flutter, and bluster, and twitter, and twaddle; with their perpetual strain after effect; with their deathless desire to get one rung of the ladder higher than they ever can get; with their preposterous affectations, their pedantic unrealities, their morbid dread of remark, their everlasting imitations, their superficial education, their monotonous commonplaces, and their nervous deference to opinion;--it is your middle classes that have utterly destroyed good manners, and have made the prevalent mode of the day a union of boorishness and servility, of effervescence and of apathy--a court suit, as it were, worn with muddy boots and a hempen shirt.

* * *

I think Fanfreluche spoke with reason. Coincidence is a god that greatly influences mortal affairs. He is not a cross-tempered deity either, always; and when you beat your poor fetish for what seems to you an untoward accident, you may do wrong; he may have benefited you far more than you wot.

* * *

Now I believe that when a woman's own fair skin is called rouge, and her own old lace is called imitation, she must in some way or other have roused sharply the conscience or the envy of her sisters who sit in judgment.

* * *

I canna go to church. Look'ee,--they's allus a readin' o' cusses, and damnin', and hell fire, and the like; and I canna stomach it. What for shall they go and say as all the poor old wimmin i' tha parish is gone to the deil 'cause they picks up a stick or tew i' hedge, or likes to mumble a charm or tew o'er their churnin'? Them old wimmin be rare an' good i' ither things. When I broke my ankle three years agone, old Dame Stuckley kem o'er, i' tha hail and the snaw, a matter of five mile and more, and she turned o' eighty; and she nursed me, and tidied the place, and did all as was wanted to be done, 'cause Avice was away, working somewhere's; and she'd never let me gie her aught for it. And I heard ta passon tell her as she were sold to hell, 'cause the old soul have a bit of belief like in witch-stones, and allus sets one aside her spinnin' jenny, so that the thrid shanna knot nor break. Ta passon he said, God cud mak tha thrid run smooth, or knot it, just as He chose, and 'twas wicked to think she could cross His will. And the old dame, she said, Weel, sir, I dinna b'lieve tha Almighty would ever spite a poor old crittur like me, don't 'ee think it? But if we're no to help oursells i' this world, what for have He gied us the trouble o' tha thrid to spin? and why no han't He made tha shirts, an' tha sheets, an' tha hose grow theersells? And ta passon niver answered her that, he only said she was fractious and blas-_phe_-mous. Now she warn't, she spoke i' all innocence, and she mint what she said--she mint it. Passons niver can answer ye plain, right-down, nataral questions like this'n, and that's why I wunna ga ta tha church.

* * *

Dinna ye meddle, Tam; it's niver no good a threshin' other folk's corn; ye allays gits the flail agin i' yer own eye somehow.

* * *

The flowers hang in the sunshine, and blow in the breeze, free to the wasp as to the bee. The bee chooses to make his store of honey, that is sweet, and fragrant, and life-giving; the wasp chooses to make his from the same blossoms, but of a matter hard, and bitter, and useless. Shall we pity the wasp because, of his selfish passions, he selects the portion that shall be luscious only to his own lips, and spends his hours only in the thrusting-in of his sting? Is not such pity--wasted upon the wasp--an insult to the bee who toils so wearily to gather in for others; and who, because he stings not man, is by man maltreated? Now it seems to me, if I read them aright, that vicious women, and women that are of honesty and honour, are much akin to the wasp and to the bee.

* * *

My dear, a gentleman may forget his appointments, his love vows, and his political pledges; he may forget the nonsense he talked, the dances he engaged for, the women that worried him, the electors that bullied him, the wife that married him, and he may be a gentleman still; but there are two things he must never forget, for no gentleman ever does--and they are, to pay a debt that is a debt of honour, and to keep a promise to a creature that can't force him to keep it.

* * *

A genius? You must mistake. I have always heard that a genius is something that they beat to death first with sticks and stones, and set up on a great rock to worship afterwards. Now they make her very happy whilst she is alive. She cannot possibly be a genius.

* * *

I learned many wondrous things betwixt Epsom and Ascot. A brief space, indeed, yet one that to me seemed longer than the whole of my previous life, so crowded was it every hour with new and marvellous experiences. Worldly experiences, I mean. Intellectually, I am not sure that I acquired much.

Indeed, to a little brain teeming with memories of the Théâtres Beaumarchais, Voltaire, Molière, Feuillet, Sardou, Sandeau, &c., which I had heard read so continually at the Dower-House amongst the Fens, the views of dramatic literature held at the Coronet appeared of the most extraordinary character. They certainly had one merit--simplicity.

The verb "to steal" was the only one that a successful dramatic author appeared to be required to conjugate.