Chapter II: The Exile (1)

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.

...

Hurrying footsteps neared. He turned and saw
His young adopted son and Tyrtamus.
“Nicanor! Theophrastus!—nay, lift up
Your heads. You cannot bring me bitterer news
Than I foresaw. I must be brought to judgment.
But on what grounds?”—
“Dear father of us all——”
The youth, Nicanor, answered, “When the crowd
Grins in the very face of those who ask,
Or think, or dream that truth should be their guide;
Nay, grins at truth itself, as at a fool
Tricked in his grandsire’s rags, a rustic oaf,
A blundering country simpleton who gapes
At the great city’s reeling dance of lies,
How can the grounds be wanting?”
“The true grounds,”
His ‘Theophrastus’ muttered, “we know too well.
Eurymedon, and the rest, those gnat-like clans,
The sophists’ buzzing swarms, desire a change.
They hold with Heraclitus—all things change.”
His irony stung the youth. His grey eyes gleamed.
His voice grew harsh with anger. “Ay, all things change!
So justice and injustice, right and wrong,
Evil and good, must wear each other’s cloaks;
And, in that chaos, when all excellence
And honour are plucked down, and the clear truth
Trampled into the dirt, themselves may rise.
Athens is dying.”
“They speak truly enough
Of all that they can know,” the Master said.
“Change is the rhythm that draws this world along.
They see the change. Its law they cannot see.
But man who is mortal in this body of earth
Has also a part, by virtue of his reason,
In an enduring realm. Their prophet knew
And heard what sophists have no souls to hear,—
The Harmony that includes the pulse of change;
The divine Reason, past the flux of things;
The eternal Logos, ordering the whole world.”
And, as he spoke, I heard, through his own words,
Tones that were now a part of his own mind,
The murmur of that old legend which he read
So long ago, in boyhood, by the sea.
_Time never fails. Not Tanais or the Nile_
_Can flow for ever. All things pass away_
_But One, One only; for the eternal Mind_
_Enfolds all changes, and can never change._
Tyrtamus touched his arm. “Time presses now.
Come with us. All is ready. On the coast,
In a lonely creek, the quiet keel is rocking.
Three trusty sailors wait us, and at dawn
We, too, shall find new life in a new world
With all that could endure. The voyager knows
The blindness of the cities. Each believes
Its narrow wall the boundary of the world;
And when he puts to sea, their buzzing cries
Fade out behind him like a wrangle of bees.”—

“If I remain, what then?”—
The hill-top shone
In the last rays. Athens was growing dark.
Tyrtamus answered him. “A colder cup
Of hemlock, and the fate of Socrates.”
The Master looked at Athens. Far away
He traced the glimmering aisle of olive-trees
Where, for so long, with many a youthful friend
He had walked, and taught, and striven himself to learn.
Southward, below the Acropolis, he could see
The shadowy precincts of the Asclepiads,
Guarding their sacred spring, the natural fount,
Loved for his father’s memory.
Close beside,
The Dionysiac theatre, like a moon
Hewn from the marble of Hymettus, gleamed,
A silvery crescent, dying into a cloud.
There, though the shade of Sophocles had fled,
Long since, he heard even now in his deep soul
The stately chorus on a ghostly stage
Chanting the praise of thought that builds the city,
Hoists the strong sail to cross the hoary sea,
Ploughs the unwearied earth, yokes the wild steed
And the untamed mountain-bull; thought that contrives
Devices that can cure all ills but death:

_Of all strong things none is more strong than man;_
_Man that has learned to shield himself from cold_
_And the sharp rain; and turns his marvellous arts_
_Awhile to evil; and yet again, to good;_
_Man that is made all-glorious with his city_
_When he obeys the inviolable laws_
_Of earth and heaven; but when, in subtle pride,_
_He makes a friend of wrong, is driven astray_
_And broken apart, like dust before the wind._

All now, except the heights, had died away
Into the dark. Only the Parthenon raised
A brow like drifted snow against the west.
He watched it, melting into the flood of night
With all those memories.
Then he turned and said,
“If in a moment’s thoughtless greed I grasped
The prize that Athens offers me to-night,
She is not so rich but this might make her poor.
Death wears a gentle smile when we grow old;
And I could welcome it. But she shall not stain
Her hands a second time. Let Athens know
That Aristotle left her, not to save
His last few lingering days of life on earth
But to save Athens.
I have truly loved her,
Next to the sea-washed town where I was born,
Best of all cities built by men on earth.
But there’s another Athens, pure and white,
Where Plato walks, a City invisible,
Whereof this Athens is only a dim shadow;
And I shall not be exiled from that City.”

The hilltop darkened. The blind mist rolled down;
The voices died. I saw and heard no more.

III—MOVING EASTWARD

I

FARABI AND AVICENNA

_Grey mists enfolded Europe; and I heard_
_Sounds of bewildered warfare in the gloom._

_Yet, like a misty star, one lampad moved_
_Eastward, beyond the mountains where of old_
_Prometheus, in whose hand the fire first shone,_
_Was chained in agony. His undying ghost_
_Beheld the fire returning on its course_
_Unquenched, and smiled from his dark crag in peace,_
_Implacable peace, at heaven._
_Eastward, the fire_
_Followed the road Pythagoras trod, to meet_
_The great new morning._
_The grey mists dissolved._
_And was it I—or Shadow-of-a-Leaf—that saw_
_And heard, and lived through all he showed me then?_

I saw a desert blazing in the sun,
Tufts of tall palm; and then—that City of dreams.
As though an age went past me in an hour
I saw the silken Khalifs and their court
Flowing like orient clouds along the streets
Of Bagdad. In great Mahmoun’s train I saw
Nazzam, who from the Stagirite caught his fire.
Long had he pondered on the Eternal Power
Who, in the dark palm of His timeless hand
Rolls the whole cosmos like one gleaming pearl.
Had he not made, in one pure timeless thought,
All things at once, the last things with the first,
The first life with the last; so that mankind,
Through all its generations, co-exists
For His eternal eyes? Yet, from our own
Who in the time-sphere move, the Maker hides
The full revolving glory, and unfolds
The glimmering miracles of its loveliness
Each at its destined moment, one by one,
In an æonian pageant that returns
For ever to the night whence it began.
Thus Nazzam bowed before the inscrutable Power,
Yet found Him in his own time-conquering soul.

I saw the hundred scribes of El Mansour
Making their radiant versions from the Greek.
I saw Farabi, moving through the throng
Like a gaunt chieftain. His world-ranging eyes
Beheld the Cause of causes.
In his mind,
Lucid and deep, the reasoning of the Greeks
Flooded the world with new celestial light,
Golden interpretations that made clear
To mighty shades the thing they strove to say.

He carried on their fire, with five-score books
In Arabic, where the thoughts of Athens, fledged
With orient colours, towered to the pure realm
Of Plato; but, returning earthward still,
Would wheel around his Aristotle’s mind
Like doves around the cote where they were born.
Then the dark mists that round the vision flowed
Like incense-clouds, dividing scene from scene,
Rolled back from a wide prospect, and I saw,
As one that mounts upon an eagle’s wing,
A savage range of mountains, peaked with snow,
To northward.
They glowed faintly, for the day
Was ending, and the shadows of the rocks
Were stretched out to the very feet of night.
Yet, far away, to southward, I could see
The swollen Oxus, like a vanishing snake
That slid away in slippery streaks and gleams
Through his grey reed-beds to the setting sun.
Earthward we moved; and, in the tawny plain,
Before me, like a lanthorn of dark fire
Bokhara shone, a city of shadowy towers
Crimsoned with sunset. In its turreted walls
I saw eleven gates, and all were closed
Against the onrushing night.
Then, at my side,
My soul’s companion whispered, “You shall see
The Gates of Knowledge opening here anew.
Here Avicenna dwelt in his first youth.”

At once, as on the very wings of night,
We entered. In the rustling musky gloom
Of those hot streets, thousands of falcon eyes
Were round us; but our shadows passed unseen
Into the glimmering palace of the Prince
Whom Avicenna, when all others failed,
Restored to life, and claimed for all reward
Freedom to use the Sultan’s library,
The pride of El Mansour; a wasted joy
To the new Sultan. Radiances were there
Imprisoned like the innumerable slaves
Of one too wealthy even to know their names;
Beautiful Grecian captives, bought with gold
From tawny traffickers in the Ionian sea.
A shadow, with a shadow at my side,
I saw him reading there, intent and still,
Under a silver lamp; his dusky brow
Wreathed with white silk, a goblet close at hand
Brimmed with a subtle wine that could uncloud
The closing eyes of Sleep.
Along each wall
Great carven chests of fragrant cedar-wood
Released the imprisoned magic,—radiant scrolls,
Inscribed with wisdom’s earliest wonder-cry;
Dark lore; the secrets of the Asclepiads;
History wild as legend; legends true
As history, all being shadows of one light;
Philosophies of earth and heaven; and rhymes
That murmured still of their celestial springs.
He thrust his book aside, as in despair.
Our shadows followed him through the swarming streets
Into the glimmering mosque. I saw him bowed
Prostrate in prayer for light, light on a page
Of subtle-minded Greek which many a day
Had baffled him, when he sought therein the mind
Of his forerunner.
I saw him as he rose;
And, as by chance, at the outer gates he met
A wandering vendor of old tattered books
Who, for three dirhems, offered him a prize.
He bought it, out of gentle heart, and found
A wonder on every page,—Farabi’s work,
Flooding his Greek with light.
He could not see
What intricate law had swept it into his hand;
But, having more than knowledge, he returned
Through the dark gates of prayer; and, pouring out
His alms upon the poor, lifted his heart
In silent thanks to God.

II

AVICENNA’S DREAM

But all these books—for him—were living thoughts,
Clues to the darker Book of Nature’s law;
For, when he climbed, a goat-foot boy, in Spring
Up through the savage Hissar range, he saw
A hundred gorges thundering at his feet
With snow-fed cataracts; torrents whose fierce flight
Uprooted forests, tore great boulders down,
Ground the huge rocks together; and every year
Channelled raw gullies and swept old scars away;
So that the wildered eagle beating up
To seek his last year’s eyry, found that all
Was new and strange; and even the tuft of pines
That used to guide him to his last year’s nest
Had vanished from the crags he knew no more.

There, pondering on the changes of the world,
Young Avicenna, with a kinglier eye,
Saw in the lapse of ages the great hills
Melting away like waves; and, from the sea,
New lands arising; and the whole dark earth
Dissolving, and reshaping all its realms
Around him, like a dream.
Thus of his hills
And of their high snows flowing through his thoughts
Was born the tale that afterwards was told
By golden-tongued Kazwini, and wafted thence
Through many lands, from Tartary to Pameer.
For, cross-legged, in the shadow of a palm,
The hawk-eyed teller of tales, in years unborn
Holding his wild clan spell-bound, would intone
The deep melodious legend, flowing thus,
As all the world flows, through the eternal mind.

I came one day upon an ancient City.
I saw the long white crescent of its wall
Stained with thin peach-blood, blistered by the sun.

I saw beyond it, clustering in the sky,
Ethereal throngs of ivory minarets,
Tall slender towers, each crowned with one bright pearl.

It was no desert phantom; for it grew
And sharpened as I neared it, till I saw,
Under the slim carved windows in the towers,
The clean-cut shadows, forked and black and small
Like clinging swallows.
In the midst up-swam
The Sultan’s palace with its faint blue domes,
The moons of morning.
Wreaths of frankincense
Floated around me as I entered in.
A thousand thousand warrior faces thronged
The glimmering streets. Blood-rubies burned like stars
In shadowy silks and turbans of all hues.

The markets glowed with costly merchandise.
I saw proud stallions, pacing to and fro
Before the rulers of a hundred kings.
I saw, unrolled beneath the slender feet
Of slave-girls, white as April’s breathing snow,
Soft prayer-rugs of a subtler drift of bloom
Than flows with sunset over the blue and grey
And opal of the drifting desert sand.

Princes and thieves, philosophers and fools
Jostled together, among hot scents of musk.
Dark eyes were flashing. Blood throbbed darker yet.
Lean dusky fingers groped for hilts of jade.
Then, with a roll of drums, through Eastern gates,
Out of the dawn, and softer than its clouds,
Tall camels, long tumultuous caravans,
Like stately ships came slowly stepping in,
Loaded with shining plunder from Cathay.
I turned and asked my neighbour in the throng
Who built that city, and how long ago.
He stared at me in wonder. “It is old,
Older than any memory,” he replied.
“Nor can our fathers’ oldest legend tell
Who built so great a city.”
I went my way.
And in a thousand ages I returned,
And found not even a stone of that great City,
Not even a shadow of all that lust and pride.
But only an old peasant gathering herbs
Where once it stood, upon the naked plain.

“What wars destroyed it, and how long ago?”
I asked him. Slowly lifting his grey head,
He stared at me in wonder.
“This bleak land
Was always thus. Our bread was always black
And our wine harsh. It is a bitter wind
That scourges us. But where these nettles grew
Nettles have always grown. Nothing has changed
In mortal memory here.”
“Was there not, once,
A mighty City?” I said, “with shining streets,
Here, on this ground?” I spoke with bated breath.
He shook his head and smiled, the pitying smile
That wise men use to poets and to fools.—
“Our fathers never told us of that City.
Doubtless it was a dream.”
I went my way.
And in a thousand ages I returned;
And, where the plain was, I beheld the sea.
The sea-gulls mewed and pounced upon their prey.
The brown-legged fishermen crouched upon the shore,
Mending their tarry nets.
I asked how long
That country had been drowned beneath the waves.
They mocked at me. “His wits are drowned in wine.
Tides ebb and flow, and fishes leap ashore;
But all our harvest, since the first wind blew,
Swam in deep waters. Are not wrecks washed up
With coins that none can use, because they bear
The blind old images of forgotten kings?
The waves have shaped these cliffs, dug out these caves,
Rounded each agate on this battered beach.
How long? Ask earth, ask heaven. Nothing has changed.
The sea was always here.”—
I went my way.

And in a thousand ages I returned.
The sea had vanished. Where the ships had sailed
Warm vineyards basked, among the enfolding hills.
I saw, below me, on the winding road,
Two milk-white oxen, under a wooden yoke,
Drawing a waggon, loaded black with grapes.
Beside them walked a slim brown-ankled girl.
I stood beneath a shadowy wayside oak
To watch them. They drew near.
It was no dream.
Blood of the grape upon the wrinkled throats
And smoking flanks of the oxen told me this.
I saw the branching veins and satin skin
Twitch at the flickering touch of a fly. I saw
The knobs of brass that sheathed their curling horns,
The moist black muzzles.
Like many whose coats are white,
Their big dark eyes had mists of blue.
Their breath
Was meadows newly mown.
By all the gods
That ever wrung man’s heart out in the grave
I did not dream this life into the world.—
Blood of the grape upon the girl’s brown arms
And lean, young, bird-like fingers told me this.
Her smooth feet powdered by the warm grey dust;
The grape-stalk that she held in her white teeth;
Her mouth a redder rose than Omar knew;
Her eyes, dark pools where stars could shine by day;
These were no dream. And yet,—
“How long ago,”
I asked her, “did the bitter sea withdraw
Its foam from all your happy sun-burnt hills?”
She looked at me in fear. Then, with a smile,
She answered, “Nothing here has ever changed.
My father’s father, in his childhood, played
Among these vines. That oak-tree where you stand
Had lived a century, then. The parent oak
From which its acorn dropped had long been dead.
But hills are hills. I never saw the sea.
Nothing has ever changed.”
I went my way.
Last, in a thousand ages I returned,
And found, once more, a City, thronged and tall,
More rich, more marvellous even than the first;
A City of pride and lust and gold and grime,
A City of clustering domes and stately towers,
And temples where the great new gods might dwell.
But, turning to a citizen in the gates,
I asked who built it and how long ago.
He stared at me as wise men stare at fools;
Then, pitying the afflicted, he replied
Gently, as to a child:
“The City is old,
Older than all our histories. Its birth
Is lost among the impenetrable mists
That shroud the most remote antiquity.
None knows, nor can our oldest legends tell
Who built so great a City.”
I went my way.

IV—THE TORCH IN ITALY

LEONARDO DA VINCI

I

HILLS AND THE SEA

The mists rolled back. I saw the City of Flowers
Far down, upon the plain; and, on the slope
Beside us—we were shadows and unseen,—
Giulio, the painter, sketching rocks and trees.
We watched him working, till a pine-cone crackled
On the dark ridge beyond us, and we saw,
Descending from the summits like a god,
A deep-eyed stranger with a rose-red cloak
Fluttering against the blue of the distant hills.

He stood awhile, above a raw ravine,
Studying the furrows that the rains had made
Last winter. Then he searched among the rocks
As though for buried gold.
As he drew near
Giulio looked up and spoke, and he replied.
Their voices rose upon the mountain air
Like a deep river answering a brook,
While each pursued his work in his own way.

_Giulio._

What are you seeking? Something you have lost?

_The Stranger._

Something I hope to find.

_Giulio._

You dropped it here?
Was it of value? Not your purse, I hope.

_The Stranger._

More precious than my purse.

_Giulio._

Your lady’s ring?
A jewel, perhaps?

_The Stranger._

A jewel of a sort;
But it may take a thousand years to trace it
Back to its rightful owner.

_Giulio (laughing)._

O, you are bitten
By the prevailing fashion. Since the plough
Upturned those broken statues, all the world
Is relic-hunting; but, my friend, you’ll find
No Aphrodite here.

_The Stranger (picking up a fossil)._

And yet I think
It was the sea, from which she rose alive,
That shaped these rocks and left these twisted shells
Locked up, like stone in stone. They must have lived
Once, in the sea.

_Giulio._

Ah, now I understand.
You’re a philosopher,—one of those who tread
The dusty road to Nowhere, which they call
Science.

_The Stranger._

All roads to truth are one to me.

_Giulio._

Sir, you deceive yourself. Your road can lead
Only to error. The Adriatic lies
How many miles away? We stand up here
On these unchanging hills; and yet, to fit
Your theory, you would roll the seas above
The peaks of Monte Rosa.

_The Stranger._

But these shells?
How did they come here?

_Giulio._

Obviously enough,
The sea being where it is, it was the Flood
That left them here.

_The Stranger._

Then Noah must have dropped them
Out of his Ark. They never crept so far;
And Noah must have dumped his ballast, too,
Among our hills; for all those rippled rocks
Up yonder were composed of blue sea-clay.
I have found sea-weed in them, turned to stone,
The claws of crabs, the skeletons of fish.
Think you that, if your Adriatic lay
Where it now lies, its little sidling crabs
Could scuttle through the Deluge to the hills?
Your Deluge must have risen above the tops
Of all the mountains. If it rose so high,
Then it embraced the globe, and made our earth
One smooth blue round of water. When it sank
What chasm received those monstrous cataracts?
Or was the sun so hot it sucked them up
And turned them into a mist?
Is not that tale
A racial memory, lingering in our blood,
Of realms that now lie buried in the sea,
Or isles that heaved up shining from the deep
In old volcanic throes?

_Giulio._

I must confess
I always feel a pang, sir, when I see
A man of talent wasting his fine powers
On this blind road.

_The Stranger._

Show me a better way.

_Giulio._

The way of Art, sir.

_The Stranger._

Yes. That is a road
I have wished that I might travel. But are you sure
Our paths are not eventually the same?
Why have you climbed up here? To paint the truth,
As you perceive it, in those rocks and trees.
Suppose that, with your skill of hand, you saw
The truth more clearly, saw the lines of growth,
The bones and structure of the world you paint,
And the great rhythm of law that runs through all,
Might you not paint them better even than now?
Might you not even approach the final cause
Of all our art and science,—the pure truth
Which also is pure beauty?

_Giulio._

Genius leaps
Like lightning to that mark, sir, and can waive
These pains and labours.

_The Stranger._

O, I have no doubt
That you are right. I speak with diffidence,
And as a mere spectator; one who likes
To know, and seizes on this happy chance
Of learning what an artist really thinks.

_Giulio._

We artists, sir, are not concerned with laws,
Except to break them. Genius is a law
Unto itself.

_The Stranger._

And that is why you’ve made
Your wood-smoke blue against that shining cloud?
Against the darker background of the hill
It is blue in nature also; but it turns
To grey against the sky.

_Giulio._

I am not concerned
With trivial points.

_The Stranger._

But if they point to truth
Beyond themselves, and through that change of colour
Reveal its cause, and knit your scheme in law;
Nay, as a single point of light will speak
To seamen of the land that they desire,
Transfiguring all the darkness with one spark,
Would this be trivial? Sir, a touch will do it.
Lend me your brush a moment. Had you drawn
Your rocks here in the foreground, thus and thus,
Following the ribbed lines of those beds of clay
As the sea laid them, and the fire upheaved
And cracked them, you’ll forgive me if I say
That they’d not only indicate the law
Of their creation; but they’d look like rocks
Instead of——

_Giulio._

Pray don’t hesitate.

_The Stranger._

I speak
As a spectator only; but to me—
Sponges or clouds perhaps——

_Giulio._

We artists, sir,
Aim at this very effect. To us, the fact
Is nothing. There is a kingdom of the mind,
Where all things turn to dreams. Nothing is true
In that great kingdom; and our subtlest work
Is that which has no basis.

_The Stranger._

Then I fear
My thoughts are all astray; for I believed
That kingdom to be more substantial far
Than anything we see; and that the road
Into that kingdom is the road of law
Which we discover here,—the Word made Flesh.

_Giulio._

I do not understand you—quite. I fear
Yours is the popular view—that art requires
Purposes, meanings, even moralities
With which we artists, sir, are not concerned.

_The Stranger._

O, no. I merely inquire. I wish to hear
From one who knows. I am a little puzzled.
You have dismissed so much—this outer world
And all its laws; and now this other, too.
I am no moralist; but I must confess
That, in the greatest Art, I have always found
A certain probity, a certain splendour
Of inner and outer constancy to law.

_Giulio._

All genius is capricious. You’ll admit
That men who lived like beasts have painted well.

_The Stranger._

Yes; but not greatly, except when their own souls
Have gripped the beast within them by the throat,
And risen again to reassert the law.

_Giulio._

Art lives by its technique, a fact the herd
Will never understand. A noble soul
Is useless, if it cannot wield a brush.

_The Stranger._

May not technique include control and judgment?
Alone, they are not enough; but, for the heights,
More is required, not less. I’d even add
Some factors you despise.

_Giulio._

Your shells, for instance?
And that mysterious and invisible sea?

_The Stranger._

The sea whence Beauty rose.

_Giulio._

You have an eye
For Beauty, too. You are a lover of art
And you are rich. What opportunities
You throw away! Was it not you I saw
Yesterday, in the market-place at Florence,
Buying caged birds and tossing them into the air?

_The Stranger._

It may have been. I like to see them fly.
The structure of the wing,—I think that men
Will fly one day.

_Giulio._

It was not pity, then?

_The Stranger._

I’d not exclude it. As I said before,
I would include much.

_Giulio._

You were speaking, sir,
Of Art. There are so few, so very few
Who understand what Art is.

_The Stranger._

Fewer still
Who know the few to choose.

_Giulio._

Perhaps you’d care
To see some work of mine. I do not live
In Florence; but I’d like to set your feet
On the right way. We are a little group
Known to the few that know. You’d find our works
Far better worth your buying than caged birds.
Pray let me know your name, sir.

_The Stranger._

Leonardo.

II

AT FLORENCE

I saw the house at Florence, cool and white
With violet shadows, drowsing in the sun.
The fountain splashed and bubbled in the court.
Beside it, in a space of softened light,
Under a linen awning, ten feet high,
Roofing a half-enclosure, where three walls
Were tinted to a pine-wood’s blue-black shade,
I saw a woman seated on a throne,
And Leonardo, with his radiant eyes,
Glancing from his wet canvas to her face.

Her face was filled with music. Music swelled
Above them, from a gallery out of sight;
And as the soft pulsation of the strings
Died into infinite distances, he spoke.
His voice was more than music. It was thought
Ebbing and flowing, like a strange dark sea.

“Listen to me; for I have things to say
That I can only tell the world through you.
Were you not just a little afraid of me
At first? You know by popular report
I dabble in Black Arts, and so I would
To keep you here, an hour or two each day,
Until the mystery we have conjured up
Between us—there again, it came and went—
Smiles at the centuries in their masquerade
As you smiled, then, at me.
Not mockery—quite—
Not irony either; something we evoked
That seems to have caught the ironist off his guard,
And slyly observes the mocker’s naked heel.
So we’ll defend humanity, you and I,
Against the worst of tyrannies,—the blind sneer
Of intellectual pride. The subtle fool
And cunning sham at least shall meet one gaze
More subtle, more secure; not yours or mine,
But Nature’s own—that calm, inscrutable smile
Whereby each erring atomy is restored
To its true place, taught its true worth at last,
And heaven’s divine simplicity renewed.

Not yours or mine, Madonna. Could I trust
To brush and palette or my skill of hand
For this? Oh, no! We need Black Arts, I think,
Black Arts and incantations, or you’d grow
Weary of sitting here.
Last night I made
Five bubbles of glass—you blow them with a pipe
Over a flame,—and set them there to dance
Upon the fountain’s feathery crest of spray.
Piero thought it waste of time. He jeers
At these mechanical arts of mine. I watched
That dance and learned a little of the machine
We call the world. I left them leaping there
To catch your eyes this morning, and learned more.
So one thing leads to another. A device,
Mechanical as the spinning of the stars
In the Arch-Mechanic’s Cosmos, woke a gleam
Of wonder; and I lay these Black Arts bare
To make you wonder more.
Black Arts, Madonna;
For even such trifles may discover depths
Dark as the pit of death; as when I laid
Dice on a drum, and by their trembling showed
Where underneath our armoured city walls
The enemy dug his mines.
And now—you smile,
To think how wars are won.
Catgut and wood
Have served our wizardry. Yes; that’s why I set
Musicians in the gallery overhead,
To pluck their strings; and, while you listened, so
Painted the living spirit that they bound
With their bright spells before me, in your face.
Black Arts, Madonna, and cold-blooded, too.
O, sheer mechanical, playing upon your mind
And senses, as they too were instruments,
Or colours to be ground and mixed and used
For purposes that were not yours at all,
Until the living Power that uses me
Breathes on this fabric, also made by hands,
The inscrutable face that smiles all arts away.

How many tales I have told you sitting here
To make you see, according to my need,
The comedy of the world, its lights and shades:
The sensual feast; the mockery of renown;
Youth and his innocent boastings, unaware
How swiftly run the sands; Youth that believes
His own bright scorn for others’ aching faults
Has crowned him conqueror; Youth so nobly sure
That plans are all achievements; quite, quite sure
Of his own victory where all others failed;
Age, with blind eyes, or staring at defeat,
Dishonoured; Age, in honour, with a wreath
Of fading leaves in one old trembling hand,
And at his feet the dark all-gulfing grave;
Envy, the lean and wizened witch behind him,
Riding on death, like his own crooked shadow,
Snapping at heaven with one contemptuous hand,
As though she hated God; and, on her face,
A mask of fairness; Envy, with those barbs
Of wicked lightning darting from her flesh;
Envy, whose eyes the palm and olive wound;
Whose ears the laurel and myrtle pierce with pain;
A fiery serpent eating at her heart;
A quiver on her back with tongues for arrows.
Each of these pictures left its little shadow,
A little memory in your spellbound face,
And so your picture smiles at all of these,
And at one secret never breathed aloud,
Because I think we knew it all too well.

Once only, in a riddle, I made you smile
At our own secret also, when I said
‘If liberty be dear to you, Madonna,
Never discover that your painter’s face
Is Love’s dark prison.’
Sailing to the south
From our Cilicia, you and I have seen
Beautiful Cyprus, rising from the wave;
Cyprus, that island where Queen Venus reigned.
The blood of men was drawn to that rough coast
As tides, on other shores, obey the moon.
Glens of wild dittany, winding through the hills
From Paphos, her lost harbour, to the peak
Of old Olympus, where she tamed the gods,
Enticed how many a wanderer,
Odorous winds
Welcomed us, ruffling, crumpling the smooth brine
Into a sea of violets. We drew near.
We heard the muffled thunder of the surf!
What ships, what fleets, had broken among those rocks!
We saw a dreadful host of shattered hulls,
Great splintered masts, innumerable keels
With naked ribs, like skeletons of whales
All weltering there, half-buried in the sand.
The foam rushed through them. On their rotted prows
And weed-grown poops the sea-gulls perched and screamed;
And all around them with an eerie cry
An icy wind was blowing.
It would seem
Like the Last Judgment, should there ever be
A resurrection of the ships we saw
Lying there dead. These things we saw and live.
And now your picture smiles at all of these.
The secret still evades me everywhere;
And everywhere I feel it, close at hand.
Do you remember when Vesuvius flamed
And the earth shivered and cracked beneath our feet?
Ten villages were engulfed. I wandered out
Among the smoking fragments of earth’s crust
To see if, in that breaking-up of things,
Nature herself had now perhaps unsealed
Some of her hidden wonders.
On that day,
I found a monstrous cavern in the hills,
A rift so black and terrible that it dazed me.
I stood there, with my back bent to an arch,
My left hand clutching at my knee, my right
Shading contracted eyes. I strained to see
Into that blackness, till the strong desire
To know what marvellous thing might lurk within
Conquered my fear. I took a ball of thread
And tied one end to a lightning-blasted tree.
I made myself a torch of resinous pine
And entered, running the thread through my left hand,
On, on, into the entrails of the world.

O, not Odysseus, when his halting steps
Crept through that monstrous hollow to the dead,
Felt such a fearful loneliness as I;
For there were voices echoing through _his_ night,
And shadows of lost friends to welcome him;
But my fierce road to knowledge clove its way
Into a silence deeper than the grave,
Into a darkness where not even a ghost
Could stretch its hands out, even in farewell.
And all that I could see around me there
Was my own smoking torchlight, walls of rock
And awful rifts where other caverns yawned.
And all that I could hear was my own steps
Echoing through endless darkness, on and on.

My thread ran out. My torch was burning low,
When, through the darkness, I became aware
Of something darker, looming up in front;
Solid as rock, and yet more strange and wild
Than any shadow. My flesh and blood turned cold
Before that awful Presence in the dark.
I left the thread behind me, and crept on;
Held up the guttering torch; and there, O there,
I saw it, and I live.
A monstrous thing
With jaws that might have crushed a ship, and bones
That might upheave a mountain; a Minotaur,
A dreadful god of beasts, now turned to stone,
Like a great smoke-bleared idol. The wild light
Smeared it with blood; a thing that once had lived;
A thing that once might turn the sea to mist
With its huge flounderings, and would make a spoil
For kingdoms with the ships it drove ashore.
The torchlight flared against it, and went out;
And I groped back, in darkness....
And you smile.
O, what a marvel of enginery was there!
What giant thews and sinews once controlled
The enormous hinges of the rock-bound bones
I saw in my dark cavern. Yet it perished,
And all its monstrous race has perished, too.
Was it all waste? Did it prepare the way
For lordlier races? Even, perhaps, for men?

Only one life to track these wonders home,
So many roads to follow. Never the light
Till all be travelled.
We will not despise
Mechanical arts, Madonna, while we use
These marvellous living instruments of ours.
Rather we’ll seek to master for ourselves
The Master’s own devices. Birds can fly,
And so shall men, when they have learned the law
Revealed in every wing. Far off, I have seen
Men flying like eagles over the highest clouds;
Men that in ships like long grey swordfish glide
Under the sea; men that in distant lands
Will speak to men in Italy; men that bring
The distant near, and bind all worlds in one.
And yet—I shall not see it. I have explored
This human instrument, traced its delicate tree
Of nerves, discovering how the life-blood flows
Out of the heart, through every branching vein;
And how, in age, the thickening arteries close
And the red streams no longer feed this frame,
And the parched body starves at last and dies.

I have built bridges. Armies tread them now.
The rains will come. The torrents will roll down
And sweep them headlong to the sea, one day.
I have painted pictures. Let cicalas chirrup
Of their brief immortality. I know
How soon these colours fade.
And yet, and yet,
I do not think the Master of us all
Would set us in His outer courts at night
As the Magnificent, once, in the flush of wine,
Set Angelo, to flatter an idle whim
And sculpture him a godhead out of snow.

The work’s not wasted. In my youth I thought
That I was learning how to live, and now
I see that I was learning how to die.
Then comes the crowning wonder. We strip off
The scaffolding; for the law is learned at last;
And our reality, Parian then, not snow,
Dares the full sun of morning, fronts the gaze
Of its divine Pygmalion; lives and breathes;
And knows, then, why it passed through all those pains.

Now—the last touch of all! And, as this face
Begins to breathe against those ancient rocks,
Let music breathe these arts of mine away.”

Music awoke. It throbbed like hidden wings
Above them. Then a minstrel’s golden voice,
As from a distance, on those wings arose
And poured the Master’s passion into song:

_Burn, Phœnix, burn;_
_And, in thy burning, take_
_All that love taught me, all I strove to learn,_
_All that I made, and all I failed to make._

_If it be true_
_That from the fire thou rise_
_In splendour, as men say dead worlds renew_
_Their light from their own embers in the skies,_

_In thy fierce nest_
_I’d share that death with thee,_
_To make one shining feather on thy breast_
_Of all I am, and all I strove to be._

_The worthless bough_
_May kindle a rich coal;_
_And in our mingling ashes, how wilt thou_
_Know mine from thine, ere both reclothe thy soul?_

_Now—as thy wings_
_Arise from this proud fire,_
_My dust in thy assumption mounts and sings;_
_And, being a part of thee, I still aspire._

V—IN FRANCE

JEAN GUETTARD

I

THE ROCK OF THE GOOD VIRGIN

Who knows the name of Jean Guettard to-day?
I wrestled with oblivion all night long.
At times a curtain on a lighted stage
Would lift a moment, and fall back again.
Once, in the dark, a sunlit row of vines
Gleamed through grey mists on his invisible hill.
The mists rolled down. Then, like a miser, Night
Caught the brief glory in her blind cloak anew.
At dawn I heard the voice of Shadow-of-a-Leaf
Breathing a quiet song. It seemed remote
And yet was near, as when the listener’s heart
Fills a cold shell with its remembered waves.

“When I was young,” said Jean Guettard,
“My comrades and myself would hide
Beneath a tall and shadowy Rock
In summer, on the mountain-side.
The wind and rain had sculptured it—
Such tricks the rain and wind will play,—
To likeness of a Mother and Child;
But wind and rain,” said Jean Guettard,
“Have worn the rocks for many a day.”

“The peasants in that quiet valley,
Among their vineyards bending there,
Called it the Rock of the Good Virgin,
And breathed it many an evening prayer.
When I grew up I left my home
For dark Auvergne, to seek and know
How all this wondrous world was made;
And I have learned,” said Jean Guettard,
“How rains can beat, and winds can blow.”

“When I came home,” said Jean Guettard,
“Not fifty years had fleeted by.
I looked to see the Form I loved
With arms outstretched against the sky.
Flesh and blood as a wraith might go.
This, at least, was enduring stone.
I lifted heart and eyes aglow,
Over the vines,” said Jean Guettard....

“The rain had beaten, the wind had blown,
The hill was bare as the sky that day.
Mother and Child from the height had gone.
The wind and rain,” said Jean Guettard,
“Had crumbled even the Rock away.”

“Shadow-of-a-Leaf,” I whispered, for I saw
The crosier of a fern against the grey;
And, as the voice died, he stood dark before me.
“You sang as though you loved him. Let the mists
Unfold.”
He smiled. “See, first, that Rock,” he said,
“Dividing them.”
At once, through drifting wreaths
I saw a hill emerging, a green hill
Clothed with the dying rainbow of those tears
The mist had left there. From the rugged crest
Slowly the last thin veils dissolved away.
I saw the Rock upstanding on the height
So closely, and so near me, that I knew
Its kinship with the rocks of Fontainebleau;
The sandstone whose red grains for many an age
Had been laid down, under a vanished sea;
A Rock, upthrust from darkness into light,
By buried powers, as power upthrust it now
In the strong soul, with those remembering hills,
Till, graven by frost and beaten by wind and rain,
It slowly assumed the semblance of that Form
Of Love, the Mother, holding in her arms
The Child of Earth and Heaven; a shape of stone;
An image; but it was not made by hands.
Footsteps drew near. I heard an eager voice
Naming a flower in Latin.
Up they came—
Each with a bunch of wild flowers in his hand,—
A lean old man, with snowy wind-blown hair,
Panting a little; and, lightly at his side,
Offering a strong young arm, a sun-burnt boy,
Of eighteen years, with darkly shining eyes.
It was those eyes, deep, scornful, tender, gay,
Dark fires at which all falsehood must consume,
That told me who they were—the young Guettard,
And his old grandsire.
Under the Rock they stood.
“Good-bye. I’ll leave you here,” the old man said.
“We’ve had good luck. These are fine specimens.
The last, perhaps, that we shall find together;
For when you leave your home to-morrow, Jean,
I think you are going on a longer journey
Even than you know. Perhaps, when you are famous,
You will not be so proud as I should be,
Were I still living, to recall the days
When even I, the old apothecary,
Could teach you something.”
Jean caught a wrinkled hand,
Held it between his own, and laughed away
That shadow, but old Descurain looked at him,
Proudly and sadly. “It will not rest with you,
Or your affection, Jean. The world will see to it.
The world that knows as much of you and me,
As you and I of how that creeper grew
Around your bedroom window.”
As he spoke,
Along the lower slopes the mists began
To blow away like smoke. The patch of vines
Crept out again; and, far below I saw,
Sparkling with sun, the valley of the Juine,
The shining river, and the small clear town
Étampes, the grey old church, the clustering roofs,
The cobbled square, the gardens, wet and bright
With blots of colour.
“I have lived my life
Out of the world, down there,” Descurain said,
“Compounding simples out of herbs and flowers;
Reading my Virgil in the quiet evenings,
Alone, for all those years; and, then, with you.
_O fortunatos_—Do we ever know
Our happiness till we lose it? You’ll remember
Those Georgics—the great praise of Science, Jean!
And that immortal picture of the bees!
No doubt you have chosen rightly. For myself,
I know, at least, where healing dittany grows,
And where earth’s beauty hides in its dark heart
An anodyne, at last, for all our pain.
And one thing more I have learned, and see with awe
On every side, more clearly, that on earth
There’s not one stone, one leaf, one creeping thing,
No; nor one act or thought, but plays its part
In the universal drama.
You’ll look back
One day on this lost bee-like life of mine;
And find, perhaps, in its obscurest hour
And lowliest task, the moment when a light
Began to dawn upon a child’s dark mind.
The old pestle and mortar, and the shining jars,
The smell of the grey bunches of dried herbs,
The little bedroom over the market-square,
The thrifty little house where you were born,
The life that all earth’s great ones would despise—
All these, perhaps, were needed, as the hand
That led you, first, in childhood to the hills.
You’ll see strange links, threads of effect and cause,
In complicated patterns, growing clear
And binding all these memories, each to each,
And all in one; how one thing led to another,
My simples to your love of plants and flowers,
And this to your new interest in the haunts
That please them best—the kinds of earth, the rocks,
And minerals that determine where they grow,
Foster them, or reject them. You’ll discover
That all these indirections are not ruled
By chance, but by dark predetermined laws.
You’ll grope to find what Power, what Thought, what Will,
Determined them; till, after many a year,
At one swift clue, one new-found link, one touch,
They are flooded with a new transfiguring light,
Deep as the light our kneeling peasants know
When, dumbly, at the ringing of a bell
They adore the sacred elements; a light
That shows all Nature, of which your life is part,
Bound to that harmony which alone sets free;
And every grain of dust upon its way
As punctual to its purpose as a star.