“His Heart Is Old”32
Chrystoblepharos—Elikoblepharos—eyelids grace-kissed—the eyes of Leucothea—the dreaming marble head of the Capitoline Museum—the face of the girl-nurse of the wine-god, with a spray of wine-leaves filleting her sweet hair—that inexpressible, inexplicable, petrified dream of loveliness, which well enables us to comprehend old monkish tales regarding the infernal powers of enchantment possessed by the antique statues of those gods who Tertullian affirmed were demons. For in howsoever thoughtless a mood one may be when he first visits the archæological shrine in which the holiness of antique beauty reposes, the first glorious view of such a marble miracle compels the heart to slacken its motion in the awful wonder of that moment. One breathes low, as in sacred fear lest the vision might dissolve into nothingness—as though the witchery might be broken were living breath to touch with its warm moisture that wonderful marble cheek. Vainly may you strive to solve the secret of this magical art; the exquisite mystery is divine—human eye may never pierce it; one dare not laugh, dare not speak in its presence—that beauty imposes silence by its very sweetness; one may pray voicelessly, one does not smile in presence of the Superhuman. And when hours of mute marveling have passed, the wonder seems even newer than before. Shall we wonder that early Christian zealots should have dashed these miracles to pieces, maddened by the silent glamour of beauty that defied analysis and seemed, indeed, a creation of the Master-Magician himself?
And the Centauress, in cameo, kneeling to suckle her little one;—the supple nudity of exquisite ephebi turning in eternal dance about the circumference of wondrous vases;—gentle Psyche, butterfly-winged, weeping on a graven carnelian;—river-deities in relief eternally watching the noiseless flow of marble waves from urns that gurgle not;—joyous Tritons with knotty backs and seaweed twined among their locks;—luxurious symposia in sculpture, such as might have well suggested the Oriental fancy of petrified cities, with their innumerable pleasure-seekers suddenly turned to stone;—splendid processions of maidens to the shrine of the Maiden-Goddess, and Bacchantes leading tame panthers in the escort of the Rosy God: all these and countless other visions of the dead Greek world still haunted me, as I laid aside the beautiful and quaint volume of archæological learning that inspired them—bound in old fashion, and bearing the imprint of a firm that had ceased to exist ere the close of the French Revolution—a Rococo Winkelmann. And still they circled about me, with the last smoke-wreaths of the last evening pipe, on the moonlight balcony, among the shadows.
Then as I dreamed the beautiful dead world seemed to live again, in a luminous haze, in an Elysian glow. The processions of stone awoke from their sleep of two thousand years, and moved and chanted;—marble dreams became lithe flesh;—the phantom Arcadia was peopled with shapes of unclad beauty;—I saw eyelids as of Leucothea palpitating under the kisses of the Charities—the incarnate loveliness superhuman of a thousand god-like beings, known to us only by their shadows in stone;—and the efflorescent youth of that vanished nation, whose idols were Beauty and Joy—who laughed much and never wept—whose perfect faces were never clouded by the shadow of a grief, nor furrowed by the agony of thought, nor wrinkled by the bitterness of tears.
I found myself in the honeyed heart of that world, where all was youth and joy—where the very air seemed to thrill with new happiness in a paradise newly created—where innumerable flowers, of genera unknown in these later years, filled the valley with amorous odor of spring. But I sat among them with the thoughts of the Nineteenth Century, and the heart of the Nineteenth Century, and the garb of the Nineteenth Century, which is black as a garb of mourning for the dead. And they drew about me, seeing that I laughed not at all, nor smiled, nor spoke; and low-whispering to one another, they murmured with a silky murmur as of summer winds:
“His heart is old!”
And I pondered the words of the Ecclesiast: “Sorrow is better than laughter; for by the sadness of the countenance the heart is made better.... It is better to go to the house of mourning than to the house of feasting; and the day of one’s death is better than the day of one’s birth.” But I answered nothing; and they spake again, whispering, “His heart is old!” And one with sweet and silky-lidded eyes, lifted her voice and spake:
“O thou dreamer, wherefore evoke us, wherefore mourn us—seeing that there is no more joy in the world?
“Ours was a world of light and of laughter and of flowers, of loveliness and of love. Thine is smoke-darkened and sombre; there is no beauty unveiled; and men have forgotten how to laugh.
“Ye have increased wisdom unto sorrow, and sorrow unto infinite despair;—for there is now no Elysium—the vault of heaven has sunk back into immensity, and dissolved itself into nothingness; the boundaries of earth are set, and the earth itself resolved into a grain of dust, whirling in the vast white ring of innumerable suns and countless revolving worlds. Yet we were happier, believing the blossoming of stars to be only drops of milk from the perfect breast of a goddess.
“Nymphs haunted our springs; dryads slumbered in the waving shadows of our trees; zephyrs ethereal rode upon our summer winds; and great Pan played upon his pipe in the emerald gloom of our summer woods. Ye men of to-day have analyzed all substances, decomposed all elements, to discover the Undiscoverable, and ye have found it not. But in searching for the unsearchable, ye have lost joy.
“We loved the beauty of youth—the litheness of young limbs—the rosy dawn of maturity—the bloom of downy cheeks—the sweetness of eyes sweetened by vague desires of life’s spring—the marvelous thrill of a first kiss—the hunger of love which had only to announce itself to be appeased—and the glory of strength. But ye have sought the secret of the Universal life in charnel-houses—dismembering rottenness itself and prying open the jaws of Death to view the awful emptiness therein. Learning only enough to appall you, ye have found that science can teach you less of beauty than our forgotten gymnasiums; but in the mean time, ye have forgotten how to love.
“We gave to the bodies of our well-beloved the holy purification of fire; ye confide them to the flesh-eating earth, filling your cities with skeletons. For us Death was bodiless and terrible; for you she is visible and yet welcome;—for so weary have men become of life that her blackness seems to them beauty,—the beauty of a mistress, the universal Pasiphila, who alone can give consolation to hearts weary of life. So that ye have even forgotten how to die!
“And thou, O dreamer, thou knowest that there was no beginning and that there shall be no end; but thou dost also know that the dust beneath thy feet has lived and loved, that all which now lives once lived not, and that what is now lifeless will live again;—thou knowest that the substance of the sweetest lips has passed through myriad million transformations, that the light of the sweetest eyes will still pass through innumerable changes after the fires of the stars have burnt themselves out. In seeking the All-Soul, thou hast found it in thyself, and hast elevated thyself to deity, yet for thee are vows vain and oracles dumb. Hope is extinguished in everlasting night; thou mayst not claim even the consolation of prayer, for thou canst not pray to thyself. Like the Mephistopheles of thy poet, O dreamer of the Nineteenth Century, thou mayst sit between the Sphinx of the Past and the Sphinx of the Future, and question them, and open their lips of granite, and answer their mocking riddles. But thou mayst not forget how to weep, even though thy heart grow old.”...
But I could not weep!—And the phantoms, marveling, murmured with a strange murmur—“The heart of Medusa!”
MDCCCLIII33
Somebody I knew was there—a woman....
Heat, motionless and ponderous, as in some feverish colonial city rising from the venomous swamps of the Ivory Coast. The sky-blue seemed to bleach from the horizon’s furnace edges—even sounds were muffled and blunted by the heaviness of that air—vaguely, as to a dozing brain, came the passing reverberation of footsteps;—the river-current was noiseless and thick and lazy, like wax-made fluid.... Such were the days—and each day offered up a triple hecatomb to death—and the faces of all the dead were yellow as flame....
Never a drop of rain:—the thin clouds which made themselves visible of evenings only, flocking about the dying fires of the west, seemed to dwellers in the city troops of ghosts departing with the day, as in the fantastic myths of the South Pacific.
...I passed the outer iron gate—the warm seashells strewing the way broke under my feet with faint saline odors in the hot air:—I heard the iron tongue of a bell utter ONE, with the sinister vibration of a knell—signaling the eternal extinction of a life. Seven and seventy times that iron tongue had uttered its grim monosyllable since the last setting of the sun. The grizzled watcher of the inner gate extended his pallid palm for that eleemosynary contribution exacted from all visitors;—and it seemed to me that I beheld the gray Ferryman of Shadows himself, silently awaiting his obolus from me, also a Shadow. And as I glided into the world of agony beyond, the dead-bell moved its iron tongue again—once....
Vast bare gleaming corridors into which many doors exhaled odors of medicines and moans and sound of light footsteps hurrying—then I stood a moment all alone—a long moment that I repass sometimes in dreams. (Only that in dreams of the past there are no sounds—the dead are dumb; and the fondest may not retain the evanescent memory of a voice.) Then suddenly approached a swift step—so light, so light that it seemed the coming of a ghost; and I saw a slight figure black-robed from neck to feet, the fantastically winged cap of a Sister, and beneath the white cap a dark and beautiful face with very black eyes. Even then the iron bell spake again—once! I muttered—nay, I whispered, all fearful with the fearfulness of that place, the name of a ward and—the name of a Woman.
“Friend, friend! what do you want here?” murmured the Sister, who saw that the visitor was a stranger. Hers was the first voice I had heard in that place of death, and it seemed so sweet and clear—a musical vibration of youth and hope! And I answered, this time audibly. “You are not afraid?” she asked. “Come!”
Taking my hand, she led me thither—through spaces of sunlight and shadow, through broad and narrow ways, and between rows of beds white like rows of tombs. Her hand was cool and light as mist—as frost—as the guiding touch of that spirit might be whom the faithful of many creeds believe to lead their dead out of the darkness, into some vast new dawning beyond.... “You are not afraid?—not afraid?” the sweet voice asked again. And I suddenly became aware of the dead, lying between us, and the death-color in her face, like a flare of sunset....
Then for an instant everything became dark between me and the Sister standing upon the other side of the dead—and I was groping in that darkness blindly, until I felt a cool hand grasp mine, leading me silently somewhere—somewhere into the light. “Come! you have no claim here, friend! you cannot take her back from God!—let us leave her with Him!” And I obeyed all voicelessly. I felt her light, cool hand leading me again between the long ranks of white beds, and through the vast, bare corridors, and the shining lobbies, and by the doors of a hundred chambers of death.
Then at the summit of the great stairway, she turned her rich gaze into my eyes with a strange, sweet, silent sympathy, pressed my hand an instant, and was gone. I heard the whisper of her departing robe; I saw the noiseless fluttering of her white cap;—a great door opened very silently, closed inaudibly; and I was all alone.—(Some one told me, only a few days later, that the iron bell had also spoken for her, the little Sister of Charity—in the middle of the night—once!)
And I, standing alone upon the stairs, felt something unutterably strange within me—the influence of that last look, perhaps still vibrating, like an expiring sunbeam, a dying tone. Something in her eyes had rekindled into life something long burned out within my heart—the ashes of a Faith entombed as in a sepulchral urn.... Yet only a moment; and the phantom flame sank back into its ashes; and I was in the sunlight again, iron of purpose as Pharaoh after the death of his first-born. It was only a dead emotion, warmed to resurrection by the sunshine of a woman’s eyes.
...Nevertheless, I fancy that when the Ringer is preparing to ring for me—and the great darkness deepens all about me—when sounds sink to their whispers and questions must remain eternally unanswered—when memory is fading out into the infinite blackness, and those strange dreams that precurse the final dissolution marshal their illusions before me—I fancy that I might hear again the whisper of a black robe, and feel a hand, light as frost, held out to me with the sweet questioning—“Come! You are not afraid?”
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