Part 13 (1/2)
”And we reign still!”
She turned, as she spoke, towards the western waters, where the sea-line of the aegean 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 n.o.blest 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 G.o.d-like life and G.o.dlike 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 Cithaeron and Mount Ida, and the sh.o.r.es 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 sh.o.r.e, 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 ma.s.s 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 gra.s.s of the Andes, or under the palms of the desert. It was a strange delusion to build shrines to the honour of G.o.d 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 G.o.ds; 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 a.s.s 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 G.o.ds, 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 grat.i.tude, 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.”