Part 8 (1/2)
His works were great, but they were such as the public mind deems impious. They unveiled human corruption too nakedly, and they shadowed forth visions too exalted, and satires too unsparing, for them to be acceptable to the mult.i.tude. They were compounded of an idealism clear and cold as crystal, and of a reality cruel and voluptuous as love. They were penetrated with an acrid satire and an intense despair: the world caring only for a honied falsehood and a gilded gloss in every art, would have none of them.
”See you--what he lacks is only the sinew that gold gives. What he has done is great. The world rightly seeing must fear it; and fear is the highest homage the world ever gives. But he is penniless; and he has many foes; and jealousy can with so much ease thrust aside the greatness which it fears into obscurity, when that greatness is marred by the failures and the feebleness of poverty. Genius scorns the power of gold: it is wrong; gold is the war-scythe on its chariot, which mows down the millions of its foes and gives free pa.s.sage to the sun-coursers with which it leaves those heavenly fields of light for the gross battle-fields of earth.”
It is true that the great artist is as a fallen G.o.d who remembers a time when worlds arose at his breath, and at his bidding the barren lands blossomed into fruitfulness; the sorcery of the thyrsus is still his, though weakened.
The powers of lost dominions haunt his memory; the remembered glory of an eternal sun is in his eyes, and makes the light of common day seem darkness; the heart sickness of a long exile weighs on him; incessantly he labours to overtake the mirage of a loveliness which fades as he pursues it. In the poetic creation by which the bondage of his material life is redeemed, he finds at once ecstasy and disgust, because he feels at once his strength and weakness. For him all things of earth and air, and sea and cloud, have beauty; and to his ear all voices of the forest land and water world are audible.
He is as a G.o.d, since he can call into palpable shape dreams born of impalpable thought; as a G.o.d, since he has known the truth divested of lies, and has stood face to face with it, and been not afraid; a G.o.d thus. But a cripple inasmuch as his hand can never fas.h.i.+on the shapes that his vision beholds; an alien because he has lost what he never will find upon earth; a beast, since ever and again his pa.s.sions will drag him to wallow in the filth of sensual indulgence; a slave, since oftentimes the divinity that is in him breaks and bends under the devilry that also is in him, and he obeys the instincts of vileness, and when he would fain bless the nations he curses them.
”I do not know,” she said, wearily afresh. ”Marcellin says that every G.o.d is deaf. He must be deaf--or very cruel. Look; everything lives in pain; and yet no G.o.d pities and makes an end of the earth. I would--if I were He. Look--at dawn, the other day, I was out in the wood. I came upon a little rabbit in a trap; a little, pretty, soft black-and-white thing, quite young. It was screaming in its horrible misery; it had been screaming all night. Its thighs were broken in the iron teeth; the trap held it tight; it could not escape, it could only scream--scream--scream. All in vain. When I had set it free it was mangled as if a wolf had gnawed it; the iron teeth had bitten through the fur, and the flesh, and the bone; it had lost so much blood, and it was in so much pain, that it could not live. I laid it down in the bracken, and put water to its mouth, and did what I could; but it was of no use. It had been too much hurt. It died as the sun rose; a little, harmless, shy, happy thing, you know, that never killed any creature, and only asked to nibble a leaf or two, or sleep in a little round hole, and run about merry and free. How can one care for a G.o.d since He lets these things be?”
Arslan smiled as he heard.
”Child,--men care for a G.o.d only as a G.o.d means a good to them. Men are heirs of heaven, they say; and, in right of their heritage, they make life h.e.l.l to every living thing that dares dispute the world with them.
You do not understand that,--tut! You are not human then. If you were human, you would begrudge a blade of gra.s.s to a rabbit, and arrogate to yourself a lease of immortality.”
”Of a winter night,” she said, slowly, ”I have heard old Pitchou read aloud to Flamma, and she reads of their G.o.d, the one they hang everywhere on the crosses here; and the story ran that the populace scourged and nailed to death the one whom they knew afterwards, when too late, to have been the great man that they looked for, and that, being bidden to make their choice of one to save, they chose to ransom and honour a thief: one called Barabbas. Is it true?--if the world's choice were wrong once, why not twice?”
Arslan smiled; the smile she knew so well, and which had no more warmth than the ice floes of his native seas.
”Why not twice? Why not a thousand times? A thief has the world's sympathies always. It is always the Barabbas--the trickster in talent, the forger of stolen wisdom, the bravo of political crime, the huckster of plundered thoughts, the charlatan of false art, whom the vox populi elects and sets free, and sends on his way rejoicing. 'Will ye have Christ or Barabbas?' Every generation is asked the same question, and every generation gives the same answer; and scourges the divinity out of its midst, and finds its idol in brute force and low greed.”
She only dimly comprehended, not well knowing why her words had thus roused him. She pondered awhile, then her face cleared.
”But the end?” she asked. ”The dead G.o.d is the G.o.d of all these people round us now, and they have built great places in His honour, and they bow when they pa.s.s His likeness in the highway or the market-place. But with Barabbas--what was the end? It seems that they loathe and despise him?”
Arslan laughed a little.
”His end? In Syria may be the vultures picked his bones, where they lay whitening on the plains--those times were primitive, the world was young. But in our day Barabbas lives and dies in honour, and has a tomb that stares all men in the face, setting forth his virtues, so that all who run may read. In our day Barabbas--the Barabbas of money-greeds and delicate cunning, and the theft which has risen to science, and the a.s.sa.s.sination that kills souls and not bodies, and the crime that deals moral death and not material death--our Barabbas, who is crowned Fraud in the place of mailed Force, lives always in purple and fine linen, and ends in the odours of sanct.i.ty with the prayers of priests over his corpse.”
He spoke with a certain fierce pa.s.sion that rose in him whenever he thought of that world which had rejected him, and had accepted so many others, weaker in brain and nerve, but stronger in one sense, because more dishonest; and as he spoke he went straight to a wall on his right, where a great sea of grey paper was stretched, untouched and ready to his hand.
She would have spoken, but he made a motion to silence.
”Hus.h.!.+ be quiet,” he said to her, almost harshly, ”I have thought of something.”
And he took the charcoal and swept rapidly with it over the dull blank surface till the vacancy glowed with life. A thought had kindled in him; a vision had arisen before him.
The scene around him vanished utterly from his sight. The grey stone walls, the square windows through which the fading sun-rays fell; the level pastures and sullen streams, and paled skies without, all faded away as though they had existed only in a dream.
All the empty s.p.a.ce about him became peopled with many human shapes that for him had breath and being, though no other eye could have beheld them. The old Syrian world of eighteen hundred years before arose and glowed before him. The things of his own life died away, and in their stead he saw the fierce flame of eastern suns, the gleaming range of marble palaces, the purple flush of pomegranate flowers, the deep colour of oriental robes, the soft silver of hills olive crested, the tumult of a city at high festival. And he could not rest until all he thus saw in his vision he had rendered as far as his hand could render it; and what he drew was this.
A great thirsty, heated, seething crowd; a crowd that had manhood and womanhood, age and infancy, youths and maidens within its ranks; a crowd in whose faces every animal l.u.s.t and every human pa.s.sion were let loose; a crowd on which a noon sun without shadow streamed; a sun which parched and festered and engendered all corruption in the land on which it looked. This crowd was in a city, a city on whose flat roofs the myrtle and the cistus bloomed; above whose walls the plumes of olives waved; upon whose distant slopes the darkling cedar groves rose straight against the sky, and on whose lofty temple plates of gold glistened against the s.h.i.+ning heavens. This crowd had scourges, and stones, and goads in their hands; and in their midst they led one clothed in white, whose head was thorn-crowned, and whose eyes were filled with a G.o.d's pity and a man's reproach; and him they stoned, and lashed, and hooted.