No More Learning

I repeated to myself
the ninth key of Basilius Valentinus, in which he compares the fire
of the last day to the fire of the alchemist, and the world to the
alchemist's furnace, and would have us know that all must be dissolved
before the divine substance, material gold or immaterial ecstasy,
awake. I had dissolved indeed the mortal world and lived amid immortal
essences, but had obtained no miraculous ecstasy. As I thought of these
things, I drew aside the curtains and looked out into the darkness, and
it seemed to my troubled fancy that all those little points of light
filling the sky were the furnaces of innumerable divine alchemists, who
labour continually, turning lead into gold, weariness into ecstasy,
bodies into souls, the darkness into God; and at their perfect labour
my mortality grew heavy, and I cried out, as so many dreamers and men
of letters in our age have cried, for the birth of that elaborate
spiritual beauty which could alone uplift souls weighted with so many
dreams.


II

My reverie was broken by a loud knocking at the door, and I wondered
the more at this because I had no visitors, and had bid my servants
do all things silently, lest they broke the dream of my inner life.
Feeling a little curious, I resolved to go to the door myself, and,
taking one of the silver candlesticks from the mantlepiece, began to
descend the stairs. The servants appeared to be out, for though the
sound poured through every corner and crevice of the house there was
no stir in the lower rooms. I remembered that because my needs were so
few, my part in life so little, they had begun to come and go as they
would, often leaving me alone for hours. The emptiness and silence
of a world from which I had driven everything but dreams suddenly
overwhelmed me, and I shuddered as I drew the bolt. I found before me
Michael Robartes, whom I had not seen for years, and whose wild red
hair, fierce eyes, sensitive, tremulous lips and rough clothes made
him look now, just as they used to do fifteen years before, something
between a debauchee, a saint, and a peasant. He had recently come to
Ireland, he said, and wished to see me on a matter of importance;
indeed, the only matter of importance for him and for me. His voice
brought up before me our student years in Paris, and remembering the
magnetic power he had once possessed over me, a little fear mingled
with much annoyance at this irrelevant intrusion, as I led the way up
the wide staircase, where Swift had passed joking and railing, and
Curran telling stories and quoting Greek, in simpler days, before
men's minds, subtilized and complicated by the romantic movement in
art and literature, began to tremble on the verge of some unimagined
revelation. I felt that my hand shook, and saw that the light of the
candle wavered and quivered more than it need have upon the Maenads on
the old French panels, making them look like the first beings slowly
shaping in the formless and void darkness. When the door had closed,
and the peacock curtain, glimmering like many-coloured flame, fell
between us and the world, I felt, in a way I could not understand,
that some singular and unexpected thing was about to happen. I went
over to the mantlepiece, and finding that a little chainless bronze
censer, set, upon the outside, with pieces of painted china by Orazio
Fontana, which I had filled with antique amulets, had fallen upon its
side and poured out its contents, I began to gather the amulets into
the bowl, partly to collect my thoughts and partly with that habitual
reverence which seemed to me the due of things so long connected with
secret hopes and fears. 'I see,' said Michael Robartes, 'that you are
still fond of incense, and I can show you an incense more precious than
any you have ever seen,' and as he spoke he took the censer out of my
hand and put the amulets in a little heap between the _athanor_ and the
_alembic_. I sat down, and he sat down at the side of the fire, and sat
there for awhile looking into the fire, and holding the censer in his
hand. 'I have come to ask you something,' he said, 'and the incense
will fill the room, and our thoughts, with its sweet odour while we
are talking. I got it from an old man in Syria, who said it was made
from flowers, of one kind with the flowers that laid their heavy purple
petals upon the hands and upon the hair and upon the feet of Christ in
the Garden of Gethsemane, and folded Him in their heavy breath, until
He cried against the cross and his destiny. ' He shook some dust into
the censer out of a small silk bag, and set the censer upon the floor
and lit the dust which sent up a blue stream of smoke, that spread
out over the ceiling, and flowed downwards again until it was like
Milton's banyan tree. It filled me, as incense often does, with a faint
sleepiness, so that I started when he said, 'I have come to ask you
that question which I asked you in Paris, and which you left Paris
rather than answer. '

He had turned his eyes towards me, and I saw them glitter in the
firelight, and through the incense, as I replied: 'You mean, will I
become an initiate of your Order of the Alchemical Rose? I would not
consent in Paris, when I was full of unsatisfied desire, and now that I
have at last fashioned my life according to my desire, am I likely to
consent? '

'You have changed greatly since then,' he answered. 'I have read your
books, and now I see you among all these images, and I understand
you better than you do yourself, for I have been with many and many
dreamers at the same cross-ways. You have shut away the world and
gathered the gods about you, and if you do not throw yourself at their
feet, you will be always full of lassitude, and of wavering purpose,
for a man must forget he is miserable in the bustle and noise of the
multitude in this world and in time; or seek a mystical union with
the multitude who govern this world and time. ' And then he murmured
something I could not hear, and as though to someone I could not see.

For a moment the room appeared to darken, as it used to do when he was
about to perform some singular experiment, and in the darkness the
peacocks upon the doors seemed to glow with a more intense colour. I
cast off the illusion, which was, I believe, merely caused by memory,
and by the twilight of incense, for I would not acknowledge that he
could overcome my now mature intellect; and I said: 'Even if I grant
that I need a spiritual belief and some form of worship, why should I
go to Eleusis and not to Calvary? ' He leaned forward and began speaking
with a slightly rhythmical intonation, and as he spoke I had to
struggle again with the shadow, as of some older night than the night
of the sun, which began to dim the light of the candles and to blot out
the little gleams upon the corner of picture-frames and on the bronze
divinities, and to turn the blue of the incense to a heavy purple;
while it left the peacocks to glimmer and glow as though each separate
colour were a living spirit. I had fallen into a profound dream-like
reverie in which I heard him speaking as at a distance. 'And yet there
is no one who communes with only one god,' he was saying, 'and the
more a man lives in imagination and in a refined understanding, the
more gods does he meet with and talk with, and the more does he come
under the power of Roland, who sounded in the Valley of Roncesvalles
the last trumpet of the body's will and pleasure; and of Hamlet, who
saw them perishing away, and sighed; and of Faust, who looked for
them up and down the world and could not find them; and under the
power of all those countless divinities who have taken upon themselves
spiritual bodies in the minds of the modern poets and romance writers,
and under the power of the old divinities, who since the Renaissance
have won everything of their ancient worship except the sacrifice of
birds and fishes, the fragrance of garlands and the smoke of incense.
The many think humanity made these divinities, and that it can unmake
them again; but we who have seen them pass in rattling harness, and
in soft robes, and heard them speak with articulate voices while we
lay in deathlike trance, know that they are always making and unmaking
humanity, which is indeed but the trembling of their lips. '

He had stood up and begun to walk to and fro, and had become in my
waking dream a shuttle weaving an immense purple web whose folds had
begun to fill the room. The room seemed to have become inexplicably
silent, as though all but the web and the weaving were at an end in
the world. 'They have come to us; they have come to us,' the voice
began again; 'all that have ever been in your reverie, all that you
have met with in books. There is Lear, his head still wet with the
thunder-storm, and he laughs because you thought yourself an existence
who are but a shadow, and him a shadow who is an eternal god; and
there is Beatrice, with her lips half parted in a smile, as though all
the stars were about to pass away in a sigh of love; and there is the
mother of the God of humility who cast so great a spell over men that
they have tried to unpeople their hearts that he might reign alone, but
she holds in her hand the rose whose every petal is a god; and there,
O swiftly she comes! is Aphrodite under a twilight falling from the
wings of numberless sparrows, and about her feet are the grey and white
doves. ' In the midst of my dream I saw him hold out his left arm and
pass his right hand over it as though he stroked the wings of doves. I
made a violent effort which seemed almost to tear me in two, and said
with forced determination: 'You would sweep me away into an indefinite
world which fills me with terror; and yet a man is a great man just in
so far as he can make his mind reflect everything with indifferent
precision like a mirror. ' I seemed to be perfectly master of myself,
and went on, but more rapidly: 'I command you to leave me at once,
for your ideas and phantasies are but the illusions that creep like
maggots into civilizations when they begin to decline, and into minds
when they begin to decay. ' I had grown suddenly angry, and seizing the
_alembic_ from the table, was about to rise and strike him with it,
when the peacocks on the door behind him appeared to grow immense; and
then the _alembic_ fell from my fingers and I was drowned in a tide
of green and blue and bronze feathers, and as I struggled hopelessly
I heard a distant voice saying: 'Our master Avicenna has written that
all life proceeds out of corruption. ' The glittering feathers had now
covered me completely, and I knew that I had struggled for hundreds of
years, and was conquered at last. I was sinking into the depth when
the green and blue and bronze that seemed to fill the world became a
sea of flame and swept me away, and as I was swirled along I heard
a voice over my head cry, 'The mirror is broken in two pieces,' and
another voice answer, 'The mirror is broken in four pieces,' and a more
distant voice cry with an exultant cry, 'The mirror is broken into
numberless pieces'; and then a multitude of pale hands were reaching
towards me, and strange gentle faces bending above me, and half wailing
and half caressing voices uttering words that were forgotten the moment
they were spoken. I was being lifted out of the tide of flame, and
felt my memories, my hopes, my thoughts, my will, everything I held
to be myself, melting away; then I seemed to rise through numberless
companies of beings who were, I understood, in some way more certain
than thought, each wrapped in his eternal moment, in the perfect
lifting of an arm, in a little circlet of rhythmical words, in dreaming
with dim eyes and half-closed eyelids. And then I passed beyond these
forms, which were so beautiful they had almost ceased to be, and,
having endured strange moods, melancholy, as it seemed, with the weight
of many worlds, I passed into that Death which is Beauty herself, and
into that Loneliness which all the multitudes desire without ceasing.
All things that had ever lived seemed to come and dwell in my heart,
and I in theirs; and I had never again known mortality or tears, had I
not suddenly fallen from the certainty of vision into the uncertainty
of dream, and become a drop of molten gold falling with immense
rapidity, through a night elaborate with stars, and all about me a
melancholy exultant wailing. I fell and fell and fell, and then the
wailing was but the wailing of the wind in the chimney, and I awoke
to find myself leaning upon the table and supporting my head with my
hands. I saw the _alembic_ swaying from side to side in the distant
corner it had rolled to, and Michael Robartes watching me and waiting.
'I will go wherever you will,' I said, 'and do whatever you bid me, for
I have been with eternal things. ' 'I knew,' he replied, 'you must need
answer as you have answered, when I heard the storm begin. You must
come to a great distance, for we were commanded to build our temple
between the pure multitude by the waves and the impure multitude of
men. '


III

I did not speak as we drove through the deserted streets, for my mind
was curiously empty of familiar thoughts and experiences; it seemed
to have been plucked out of the definite world and cast naked upon
a shoreless sea. There were moments when the vision appeared on the
point of returning, and I would half-remember, with an ecstasy of joy
or sorrow, crimes and heroisms, fortunes and misfortunes; or begin to
contemplate, with a sudden leaping of the heart, hopes and terrors,
desires and ambitions, alien to my orderly and careful life; and then
I would awake shuddering at the thought that some great imponderable
being had swept through my mind. It was indeed days before this feeling
passed perfectly away, and even now, when I have sought refuge in the
only definite faith, I feel a great tolerance for those people with
incoherent personalities, who gather in the chapels and meeting-places
of certain obscure sects, because I also have felt fixed habits and
principles dissolving before a power, which was _hysterica passio_
or sheer madness, if you will, but was so powerful in its melancholy
exultation that I tremble lest it wake again and drive me from my
new-found peace.

When we came in the grey light to the great half-empty terminus, it
seemed to me I was so changed that I was no more, as man is, a moment
shuddering at eternity, but eternity weeping and laughing over a
moment; and when we had started and Michael Robartes had fallen asleep,
as he soon did, his sleeping face, in which there was no sign of all
that had so shaken me and that now kept me wakeful, was to my excited
mind more like a mask than a face. The fancy possessed me that the man
behind it had dissolved away like salt in water, and that it laughed
and sighed, appealed and denounced at the bidding of beings greater or
less than man. 'This is not Michael Robartes at all: Michael Robartes
is dead; dead for ten, for twenty years perhaps,' I kept repeating to
myself. I fell at last into a feverish sleep, waking up from time to
time when we rushed past some little town, its slated roofs shining
with wet, or still lake gleaming in the cold morning light. I had been
too preoccupied to ask where we were going, or to notice what tickets
Michael Robartes had taken, but I knew now from the direction of the
sun that we were going westward; and presently I knew also, by the way
in which the trees had grown into the semblance of tattered beggars
flying with bent heads towards the east, that we were approaching the
western coast. Then immediately I saw the sea between the low hills
upon the left, its dull grey broken into white patches and lines.

When we left the train we had still, I found, some way to go, and
set out, buttoning our coats about us, for the wind was bitter and
violent. Michael Robartes was silent, seeming anxious to leave me to
my thoughts; and as we walked between the sea and the rocky side of a
great promontory, I realized with a new perfection what a shock had
been given to all my habits of thought and of feelings, if indeed some
mysterious change had not taken place in the substance of my mind, for
the grey waves, plumed with scudding foam, had grown part of a teeming,
fantastic inner life; and when Michael Robartes pointed to a square
ancient-looking house, with a much smaller and newer building under its
lee, set out on the very end of a dilapidated and almost deserted pier,
and said it was the Temple of the Alchemical Rose, I was possessed with
the phantasy that the sea, which kept covering it with showers of white
foam, was claiming it as part of some indefinite and passionate life,
which had begun to war upon our orderly and careful days, and was about
to plunge the world into a night as obscure as that which followed
the downfall of the classical world. One part of my mind mocked this
phantastic terror, but the other, the part that still lay half plunged
in vision, listened to the clash of unknown armies, and shuddered at
unimaginable fanaticisms, that hung in those grey leaping waves.

We had gone but a few paces along the pier when we came upon an old
man, who was evidently a watchman, for he sat in an overset barrel,
close to a place where masons had been lately working upon a break in
the pier, and had in front of him a fire such as one sees slung under
tinkers' carts. I saw that he was also a voteen, as the peasants say,
for there was a rosary hanging from a nail on the rim of the barrel,
and as I saw I shuddered, and I did not know why I shuddered. We had
passed him a few yards when I heard him cry in Gaelic, 'Idolaters,
idolaters, go down to Hell with your witches and your devils; go down
to Hell that the herrings may come again into the bay'; and for some
moments I could hear him half screaming and half muttering behind us.
'Are you not afraid,' I said, 'that these wild fishing people may do
some desperate thing against you? '

'I and mine,' he answered, 'are long past human hurt or help, being
incorporate with immortal spirits, and when we die it shall be the
consummation of the supreme work. A time will come for these people
also, and they will sacrifice a mullet to Artemis, or some other
fish to some new divinity, unless indeed their own divinities, the
Dagda, with his overflowing cauldron, Lug, with his spear dipped in
poppy-juice lest it rush forth hot for battle, Aengus, with the three
birds on his shoulder, Bodb and his red swineherd, and all the heroic
children of Dana, set up once more their temples of grey stone. Their
reign has never ceased, but only waned in power a little, for the Sidhe
still pass in every wind, and dance and play at hurley, and fight their
sudden battles in every hollow and on every hill; but they cannot build
their temples again till there have been martyrdoms and victories, and
perhaps even that long-foretold battle in the Valley of the Black Pig. '

Keeping close to the wall that went about the pier on the seaward side,
to escape the driving foam and the wind, which threatened every moment
to lift us off our feet, we made our way in silence to the door of the
square building. Michael Robartes opened it with a key, on which I
saw the rust of many salt winds, and led me along a bare passage and
up an uncarpeted stair to a little room surrounded with bookshelves.
A meal would be brought, but only of fruit, for I must submit to a
tempered fast before the ceremony, he explained, and with it a book on
the doctrine and method of the Order, over which I was to spend what
remained of the winter daylight. He then left me, promising to return
an hour before the ceremony. I began searching among the bookshelves,
and found one of the most exhaustive alchemical libraries I have ever
seen. There were the works of Morienus, who hid his immortal body
under a shirt of hair-cloth; of Avicenna, who was a drunkard and yet
controlled numberless legions of spirits; of Alfarabi, who put so many
spirits into his lute that he could make men laugh, or weep, or fall in
deadly trance as he would; of Lully, who transformed himself into the
likeness of a red cock; of Flamel, who with his wife Parnella achieved
the elixir many hundreds of years ago, and is fabled to live still in
Arabia among the Dervishes; and of many of less fame. There were very
few mystics but alchemical mystics, and because, I had little doubt, of
the devotion to one god of the greater number and of the limited sense
of beauty, which Robartes would hold an inevitable consequence; but I
did notice a complete set of facsimiles of the prophetical writings of
William Blake, and probably because of the multitudes that thronged his
illumination and were 'like the gay fishes on the wave when the moon
sucks up the dew. ' I noted also many poets and prose writers of every
age, but only those who were a little weary of life, as indeed the
greatest have been everywhere, and who cast their imagination to us, as
a something they needed no longer now that they were going up in their
fiery chariots.

Presently I heard a tap at the door, and a woman came in and laid a
little fruit upon the table. I judged that she had once been handsome,
but her cheeks were hollowed by what I would have held, had I seen her
anywhere else, an excitement of the flesh and a thirst for pleasure,
instead of which it doubtless was an excitement of the imagination and
a thirst for beauty. I asked her some question concerning the ceremony,
but getting no answer except a shake of the head, saw that I must await
initiation in silence. When I had eaten, she came again, and having
laid a curiously wrought bronze box on the table, lighted the candles,
and took away the plates and the remnants. So soon as I was alone,
I turned to the box, and found that the peacocks of Hera spread out
their tails over the sides and lid, against a background, on which were
wrought great stars, as though to affirm that the heavens were a part
of their glory. In the box was a book bound in vellum, and having upon
the vellum and in very delicate colours, and in gold, the alchemical
rose with many spears thrusting against it, but in vain, as was shown
by the shattered points of those nearest to the petals. The book was
written upon vellum, and in beautiful clear letters, interspersed
with symbolical pictures and illuminations, after the manner of the
_Splendor Solis_.

The first chapter described how six students, of Celtic descent,
gave themselves separately to the study of alchemy, and solved, one
the mystery of the Pelican, another the mystery of the green Dragon,
another the mystery of the Eagle, another that of Salt and Mercury.
What seemed a succession of accidents, but was, the book declared,
the contrivance of preternatural powers, brought them together in the
garden of an inn in the South of France, and while they talked together
the thought came to them that alchemy was the gradual distillation of
the contents of the soul, until they were ready to put off the mortal
and put on the immortal. An owl passed, rustling among the vine-leaves
overhead, and then an old woman came, leaning upon a stick, and,
sitting close to them, took up the thought where they had dropped it.
Having expounded the whole principle of spiritual alchemy, and bid
them found the Order of the Alchemical Rose, she passed from among
them, and when they would have followed was nowhere to be seen. They
formed themselves into an Order, holding their goods and making their
researches in common, and, as they became perfect in the alchemical
doctrine, apparitions came and went among them, and taught them more
and more marvellous mysteries. The book then went on to expound so
much of these as the neophyte was permitted to know, dealing at the
outset and at considerable length with the independent reality of our
thoughts, which was, it declared, the doctrine from which all true
doctrines rose. If you imagine, it said, the semblance of a living
being, it is at once possessed by a wandering soul, and goes hither
and hither working good or evil, until the moment of its death has
come; and gave many examples, received, it said, from many gods. Eros
had taught them how to fashion forms in which a divine soul could
dwell, and whisper what they would into sleeping minds; and Ate, forms
from which demonic beings could pour madness, or unquiet dreams, into
sleeping blood; and Hermes, that if you powerfully imagined a hound at
your bedside it would keep watch there until you woke, and drive away
all but the mightiest demons, but that if your imagination was weakly,
the hound would be weakly also, and the demons prevail, and the hound
soon die; and Aphrodite, that if you made, by a strong imagining, a
dove crowned with silver and bad it flutter over your head, its soft
cooing would make sweet dreams of immortal love gather and brood
over mortal sleep; and all divinities alike had revealed with many
warnings and lamentations that all minds are continually giving birth
to such beings, and sending them forth to work health or disease, joy
or madness. If you would give forms to the evil powers, it went on,
you were to make them ugly, thrusting out a lip, with the thirsts of
life, or breaking the proportions of a body with the burdens of life;
but the divine powers would only appear in beautiful shapes, which
are but, as it were, shapes trembling out of existence, folding up
into a timeless ecstasy, drifting with half-shut eyes, into a sleepy
stillness. The bodiless souls who descended into these forms were what
men call the moods; and worked all great changes in the world; for just
as the magician or the artist could call them when he would, so they
could call out of the mind of the magician or the artist, or if they
were demons, out of the mind of the mad or the ignoble, what shape
they would, and through its voice and its gestures pour themselves
out upon the world. In this way all great events were accomplished; a
mood, a divinity, or a demon, first descending like a faint sigh into
men's minds and then changing their thoughts and their actions until
hair that was yellow had grown black, or hair that was black had grown
yellow, and empires moved their border, as though they were but drifts
of leaves. The rest of the book contained symbols of form, and sound,
and colour, and their attribution to divinities and demons, so that the
initiate might fashion a shape for any divinity or any demon, and be as
powerful as Avicenna among those who live under the roots of tears and
of laughter.


IV

A couple of hours after sunset Michael Robartes returned and told me
that I would have to learn the steps of an exceedingly antique dance,
because before my initiation could be perfected I had to join three
times in a magical dance, for rhythm was the wheel of Eternity, on
which alone the transient and accidental could be broken, and the
spirit set free. I found that the steps, which were simple enough,
resembled certain antique Greek dances, and having been a good dancer
in my youth and the master of many curious Gaelic steps, I soon had
them in my memory. He then robed me and himself in a costume which
suggested by its shape both Greece and Egypt, but by its crimson colour
a more passionate life than theirs; and having put into my hands a
little chainless censer of bronze, wrought into the likeness of a rose,
by some modern craftsman, he told me to open a small door opposite
to the door by which I had entered. I put my hand to the handle,
but the moment I did so the fumes of the incense, helped perhaps by
his mysterious glamour, made me fall again into a dream, in which I
seemed to be a mask, lying on the counter of a little Eastern shop.
Many persons, with eyes so bright and still that I knew them for more
than human, came in and tried me on their faces, but at last flung
me into a corner with a little laughter; but all this passed in a
moment, for when I awoke my hand was still upon the handle. I opened
the door, and found myself in a marvellous passage, along whose sides
were many divinities wrought in a mosaic, not less beautiful than the
mosaic in the Baptistery at Ravenna, but of a less severe beauty;
the predominant colour of each divinity, which was surely a symbolic
colour, being repeated in the lamps that hung from the ceiling, a
curiously-scented lamp before every divinity. I passed on, marvelling
exceedingly how these enthusiasts could have created all this beauty in
so remote a place, and half persuaded to believe in a material alchemy,
by the sight of so much hidden wealth; the censer filling the air, as I
passed, with smoke of ever-changing colour.

I stopped before a door, on whose bronze panels were wrought great
waves in whose shadow were faint suggestions of terrible faces. Those
beyond it seemed to have heard our steps, for a voice cried: 'Is the
work of the Incorruptible Fire at an end? ' and immediately Michael
Robartes answered: 'The perfect gold has come from the _athanor_. ' The
door swung open, and we were in a great circular room, and among men
and women who were dancing slowly in crimson robes. Upon the ceiling
was an immense rose wrought in mosaic; and about the walls, also in
mosaic, was a battle of gods and angels, the gods glimmering like
rubies and sapphires, and the angels of the one greyness, because, as
Michael Robartes whispered, they had renounced their divinity, and
turned from the unfolding of their separate hearts, out of love for a
God of humility and sorrow. Pillars supported the roof and made a kind
of circular cloister, each pillar being a column of confused shapes,
divinities, it seemed, of the wind, who rose as in a whirling dance
of more than human vehemence, and playing upon pipes and cymbals; and
from among these shapes were thrust out hands, and in these hands were
censers. I was bid place my censer also in a hand and take my place
and dance, and as I turned from the pillars towards the dancers, I
saw that the floor was of a green stone, and that a pale Christ on a
pale cross was wrought in the midst. I asked Robartes the meaning of
this, and was told that they desired 'To trouble His unity with their
multitudinous feet. ' The dance wound in and out, tracing upon the floor
the shapes of petals that copied the petals in the rose overhead, and
to the sound of hidden instruments which were perhaps of an antique
pattern, for I have never heard the like; and every moment the dance
was more passionate, until all the winds of the world seemed to have
awakened under our feet. After a little I had grown weary, and stood
under a pillar watching the coming and going of those flame-like
figures; until gradually I sank into a half-dream, from which I was
awakened by seeing the petals of the great rose, which had no longer
the look of mosaic, falling slowly through the incense-heavy air,
and, as they fell, shaping into the likeness of living beings of an
extraordinary beauty. Still faint and cloud-like, they began to dance,
and as they danced took a more and more definite shape, so that I was
able to distinguish beautiful Grecian faces and august Egyptian faces,
and now and again to name a divinity by the staff in his hand or by a
bird fluttering over his head; and soon every mortal foot danced by the
white foot of an immortal; and in the troubled eyes that looked into
untroubled shadowy eyes, I saw the brightness of uttermost desire as
though they had found at length, after unreckonable wandering, the lost
love of their youth. Sometimes, but only for a moment, I saw a faint
solitary figure with a veiled face, and carrying a faint torch, flit
among the dancers, but like a dream within a dream, like a shadow of
a shadow, and I knew by an understanding born from a deeper fountain
than thought, that it was Eros himself, and that his face was veiled
because no man or woman from the beginning of the world has ever known
what love is, or looked into his eyes, for Eros alone of divinities
is altogether a spirit, and hides in passions not of his essence if he
would commune with a mortal heart. So that if a man love nobly he knows
love through infinite pity, unspeakable trust, unending sympathy; and
if ignobly through vehement jealousy, sudden hatred, and unappeasable
desire; but unveiled love he never knows. While I thought these things,
a voice cried to me from the crimson figures: 'Into the dance! there
is none that can be spared out of the dance; into the dance! into the
dance! that the gods may make them bodies out of the substance of our
hearts'; and before I could answer, a mysterious wave of passion, that
seemed like the soul of the dance moving within our souls, took hold of
me, and I was swept, neither consenting nor refusing, into the midst. I
was dancing with an immortal august woman, who had black lilies in her
hair, and her dreamy gesture seemed laden with a wisdom more profound
than the darkness that is between star and star, and with a love like
the love that breathed upon the waters; and as we danced on and on,
the incense drifted over us and round us, covering us away as in the
heart of the world, and ages seemed to pass, and tempests to awake and
perish in the folds of our robes and in her heavy hair.

Suddenly I remembered that her eyelids had never quivered, and that her
lilies had not dropped a black petal, or shaken from their places, and
understood with a great horror that I danced with one who was more or
less than human, and who was drinking up my soul as an ox drinks up a
wayside pool; and I fell, and darkness passed over me.


V

I awoke suddenly as though something had awakened me, and saw that I
was lying on a roughly painted floor, and that on the ceiling, which
was at no great distance, was a roughly painted rose, and about me on
the walls half-finished paintings. The pillars and the censers had
gone; and near me a score of sleepers lay wrapped in disordered robes,
their upturned faces looking to my imagination like hollow masks; and
a chill dawn was shining down upon them from a long window I had not
noticed before; and outside the sea roared. I saw Michael Robartes
lying at a little distance and beside him an overset bowl of wrought
bronze which looked as though it had once held incense. As I sat thus,
I heard a sudden tumult of angry men and women's voices mix with the
roaring of the sea; and leaping to my feet, I went quickly to Michael
Robartes, and tried to shake him out of his sleep. I then seized him
by the shoulder and tried to lift him, but he fell backwards, and
sighed faintly; and the voices became louder and angrier; and there
was a sound of heavy blows upon the door, which opened on to the pier.
Suddenly I heard a sound of rending wood, and I knew it had begun to
give, and I ran to the door of the room. I pushed it open and came out
upon a passage whose bare boards clattered under my feet, and found
in the passage another door which led into an empty kitchen; and as I
passed through the door I heard two crashes in quick succession, and
knew by the sudden noise of feet and the shouts that the door which
opened on to the pier had fallen inwards. I ran from the kitchen and
out into a small yard, and from this down some steps which descended
the seaward and sloping side of the pier, and from the steps clambered
along the water's edge, with the angry voices ringing in my ears. This
part of the pier had been but lately refaced with blocks of granite,
so that it was almost clear of seaweed; but when I came to the old
part, I found it so slippery with green weed that I had to climb up
on to the roadway. I looked towards the Temple of the Alchemical Rose,
where the fishermen and the women were still shouting, but somewhat
more faintly, and saw that there was no one about the door or upon the
pier; but as I looked, a little crowd hurried out of the door and began
gathering large stones from where they were heaped up in readiness for
the next time a storm shattered the pier, when they would be laid under
blocks of granite. While I stood watching the crowd, an old man, who
was, I think, the voteen, pointed to me, and screamed out something,
and the crowd whitened, for all the faces had turned towards me. I ran,
and it was well for me that pullers of the oar are poorer men with
their feet than with their arms and their bodies; and yet while I ran I
scarcely heard the following feet or the angry voices, for many voices
of exultation and lamentation, which were forgotten as a dream is
forgotten the moment they were heard, seemed to be ringing in the air
over my head.

There are moments even now when I seem to hear those voices of
exultation and lamentation, and when the indefinite world, which has
but half lost its mastery over my heart and my intellect, seems about
to claim a perfect mastery; but I carry the rosary about my neck, and
when I hear, or seem to hear them, I press it to my heart and say: 'He
whose name is Legion is at our doors deceiving our intellects with
subtlety and flattering our hearts with beauty, and we have no trust
but in Thee'; and then the war that rages within me at other times is
still, and I am at peace.




THE TABLES OF THE LAW


I

'WILL you permit me, Aherne,' I said, 'to ask you a question, which I
have wanted to ask you for years, and have not asked because we have
grown nearly strangers? Why did you refuse the berretta, and almost
at the last moment? When you and I lived together, you cared neither
for wine, women, nor money, and had thoughts for nothing but theology
and mysticism. ' I had watched through dinner for a moment to put my
question, and ventured now, because he had thrown off a little of
the reserve and indifference which, ever since his last return from
Italy, had taken the place of our once close friendship. He had just
questioned me, too, about certain private and almost sacred things, and
my frankness had earned, I thought, a like frankness from him.

When I began to speak he was lifting to his lips a glass of that old
wine which he could choose so well and valued so little; and while
I spoke, he set it slowly and meditatively upon the table and held
it there, its deep red light dyeing his long delicate fingers. The
impression of his face and form, as they were then, is still vivid
with me, and is inseparable from another and fanciful impression:
the impression of a man holding a flame in his naked hand. He was to
me, at that moment, the supreme type of our race, which, when it has
risen above, or is sunken below, the formalisms of half-education and
the rationalisms of conventional affirmation and denial, turns away,
unless my hopes for the world and for the Church have made me blind,
from practicable desires and intuitions towards desires so unbounded
that no human vessel can contain them, intuitions so immaterial that
their sudden and far-off fire leaves heavy darkness about hand and
foot. He had the nature, which is half monk, half soldier of fortune,
and must needs turn action into dreaming, and dreaming into action;
and for such there is no order, no finality, no contentment in this
world. When he and I had been students in Paris, we had belonged to a
little group which devoted itself to speculations about alchemy and
mysticism. More orthodox in most of his beliefs than Michael Robartes,
he had surpassed him in a fanciful hatred of all life, and this hatred
had found expression in the curious paradox--half borrowed from some
fanatical monk, half invented by himself--that the beautiful arts were
sent into the world to overthrow nations, and finally life herself, by
sowing everywhere unlimited desires, like torches thrown into a burning
city. This idea was not at the time, I believe, more than a paradox,
a plume of the pride of youth; and it was only after his return to
Ireland that he endured the fermentation of belief which is coming upon
our people with the reawakening of their imaginative life.

Presently he stood up, saying: 'Come, and I will show you, for you at
any rate will understand,' and taking candles from the table, he lit
the way into the long paved passage that led to his private chapel. We
passed between the portraits of the Jesuits and priests--some of no
little fame--his family had given to the Church; and engravings and
photographs of pictures that had especially moved him; and the few
paintings his small fortune, eked out by an almost penurious abstinence
from the things most men desire, had enabled him to buy in his travels.
The pictures that I knew best, for they had hung there longest,
whether reproductions or originals, were of the Sienese School, which
he had studied for a long time, claiming that it alone of the schools
of the world pictured not the world but what is revealed to saints in
their dreams and visions. The Sienese alone among Italians, he would
say, could not or would not represent the pride of life, the pleasure
in swift movement or sustaining strength, or voluptuous flesh. They
were so little interested in these things that there often seemed to
be no human body at all under the robe of the saint, but they could
represent by a bowed head, or uplifted face, man's reverence before
Eternity as no others could, and they were at their happiest when
mankind had dwindled to a little group silhouetted upon a golden abyss,
as if they saw the world habitually from far off. When I had praised
some school that had dipped deeper into life, he would profess to
discover a more intense emotion than life knew in those dark outlines.
'Put, even Francesca, who felt the supernatural as deeply,' he would
say, 'beside the work of Siena, and one finds a faint impurity in his
awe, a touch of ghostly terror, where love and humbleness had best
been all. ' He had often told me of his hope that by filling his mind
with those holy pictures he would help himself to attain at last to
vision and ecstasy, and of his disappointment at never getting more
than dreams of a curious and broken beauty. But of late he had added
pictures of a different kind, French symbolistic pictures which he had
bought for a few pounds from little-known painters, English and French
pictures of the School of the English Pre-Raphaelites; and now he stood
for a moment and said, 'I have changed my taste. I am fascinated a
little against my will by these faces, where I find the pallor of souls
trembling between the excitement of the flesh and the excitement of the
spirit, and by landscapes that are created by heightening the obscurity
and disorder of nature. These landscapes do not stir the imagination
to the energies of sanctity but as to orgaic dancing and prophetic
frenzy. ' I saw with some resentment new images where the old ones had
often made that long gray, dim, empty, echoing passage become to my
eyes a vestibule of Eternity.

Almost every detail of the chapel, which we entered by a narrow Gothic
door, whose threshold had been worn smooth by the secret worshippers of
the penal times, was vivid in my memory; for it was in this chapel that
I had first, and when but a boy, been moved by the mediaevalism which
is now, I think, the governing influence in my life. The only thing
that seemed new was a square bronze box which stood upon the altar
before the six unlighted candles and the ebony crucifix, and was like
those made in ancient times of more precious substances to hold the
sacred books. Aherne made me sit down on an oak bench, and having bowed
very low before the crucifix, took the bronze box from the altar, and
sat down beside me with the box upon his knees.

'You will perhaps have forgotten,' he said, 'most of what you have
read about Joachim of Flora, for he is little more than a name to even
the well read. He was an abbot in Cortale in the twelfth century,
and is best known for his prophecy, in a book called _Expositio in
Apocalypsin_, that the Kingdom of the Father was passed, the Kingdom
of the Son passing, the Kingdom of the Spirit yet to come. The
Kingdom of the Spirit was to be a complete triumph of the Spirit, the
_spiritualis intelligentia_ he called it, over the dead letter. He
had many followers among the more extreme Franciscans, and these were
accused of possessing a secret book of his called the _Liber Inducens
in Evangelium AEternum_. Again and again groups of visionaries were
accused of possessing this terrible book, in which the freedom of the
Renaissance lay hidden, until at last Pope Alexander IV. had it found
and cast into the flames. I have here the greatest treasure the world
contains. I have a copy of that book; and see what great artists have
made the robes in which it is wrapped. The greater portion of the book
itself is illuminated in the Byzantine style, which so few care for
to-day, but which moves me because these tall, emaciated angels and
saints seem to have less relation to the world about us than to an
abstract pattern of flowing lines, that suggest an imagination absorbed
in the contemplation of Eternity. Even if you do not care for so formal
an art, you cannot help seeing that work where there is so much gold,
and of that purple colour which has gold dissolved in it, was valued at
a great price in its day. But it was only at the Renaissance the labour
was spent upon it which has made it the priceless thing it is. The
wooden boards of the cover show by the astrological allegories painted
upon them, as by the style of painting itself, some craftsman of the
school of Francesco Cossi of Ferrara, but the gold clasps and hinges
are known to be the work of Benvenuto Cellini, who made likewise the
bronze box and covered it with gods and demons, whose eyes are closed,
to signify an absorption in the inner light.

I took the book in my hands and began turning over the gilded,
many-coloured pages, holding it close to the candle to discover the
texture of the paper.

'Where did you get this amazing book? ' I said. 'If genuine, and I
cannot judge by this light, you have discovered one of the most
precious things in the world. '

'It is certainly genuine,' he replied. 'When the original was
destroyed, one copy alone remained, and was in the hands of a
lute-player of Florence, and from him it passed to his son, and so
from generation to generation until it came to the lute-player who
was father to Benvenuto Cellini, and from Benvenuto Cellini to that
Cardinal of Ferrara who released him from prison, and from him to
a natural son, so from generation to generation, the story of its
wandering passing on with it, until it came into the possession of
the family of Aretino, and to Giulio Aretino, an artist and worker in
metals, and student of the kabalistic heresies of Pico della Mirandola.
He spent many nights with me at Rome, discussing philosophy; and at
last I won his confidence so perfectly that he showed me this, his
greatest treasure; and, finding how much I valued it, and feeling that
he himself was growing old and beyond the help of its teaching, he sold
it to me for no great sum, considering its great preciousness. '

'What is the doctrine? ' I said. 'Some mediaeval straw-splitting about
the nature of the Trinity, which is only useful to-day to show how many
things are unimportant to us, which once shook the world? '

'I could never make you understand,' he said, with a sigh, 'that
nothing is unimportant in belief, but even you will admit that this
book goes to the heart. Do you see the tables on which the commandments
were written in Latin? ' I looked to the end of the room, opposite to
the altar, and saw that the two marble tablets were gone, and that
two large empty tablets of ivory, like large copies of the little
tablets we set over our desks, had taken their place. 'It has swept
the commandments of the Father away,' he went on, 'and displaced the
commandments of the Son by the commandments of the Holy Spirit. The
first book is called _Fractura Tabularum_. In the first chapter it
mentions the names of the great artists who made them graven things
and the likeness of many things, and adored them and served them; and
the second the names of the great wits who took the name of the Lord
their God in vain; and that long third chapter, set with the emblems
of sanctified faces, and having wings upon its borders, is the praise
of breakers of the seventh day and wasters of the six days, who yet
lived comely and pleasant days. Those two chapters tell of men and
women who railed upon their parents, remembering that their god was
older than the god of their parents; and that which has the sword of
Michael for an emblem commends the kings that wrought secret murder and
so won for their people a peace that was _amore somnoque gravata et
vestibus versicoloribus_, heavy with love and sleep and many-coloured
raiment; and that with the pale star at the closing has the lives of
the noble youths who loved the wives of others and were transformed
into memories, which have transformed many poorer hearts into sweet
flames; and that with the winged head is the history of the robbers who
lived upon the sea or in the desert, lives which it compares to the
twittering of the string of a bow, _nervi stridentis instar_; and those
two last, that are fire and gold, are devoted to the satirists who bore
false witness against their neighbours and yet illustrated eternal
wrath, and to those that have coveted more than other men the house of
God, and all things that are His, which no man has seen and handled,
except in madness and in dreams.

'The second book is called _Lex Secreta_, and describes the true
inspiration of action, the only Eternal Evangel; and ends with a
vision, which he saw among the mountains of La Sila, of his disciples
sitting throned in the blue deep of the air, and laughing aloud, with
a laughter that was like the rustling of the wings of Time: _Coelis in
coeruleis ridentes sedebant discipuli mei super thronos: talis erat
risus, qualis temporis pennati susurrus. _'

'I know little of Joachim of Flora,' I said, 'except that Dante set him
in Paradise among the great doctors. If he held a heresy so singular, I
cannot understand how no rumours of it came to the ears of Dante; and
Dante made no peace with the enemies of the Church. '

'Joachim of Flora acknowledged openly the authority of the Church, and
even asked that all his published writings, and those to be published
by his desire after his death, should be submitted to the censorship of
the Pope. He considered that those whose work was to live and not to
reveal were children and that the Pope was their Father; but he taught
in secret that certain others, and in always increasing numbers, were
elected, not to live, but to reveal that hidden substance of God which
is colour and music and softness and a sweet odour; and that these
have no father but the Holy Spirit. Just as poets and painters and
musicians labour at their works, building them with lawless and lawful
things alike, so long as they embody the beauty that is beyond the
grave, these children of the Holy Spirit labour at their moments with
eyes upon the shining substance on which Time has heaped the refuse of
creation; for the world only exists to be a tale in the ears of coming
generations; and terror and content, birth and death, love and hatred,
and the fruit of the Tree, are but instruments for that supreme art
which is to win us from life and gather us into eternity like doves
into their dove-cots.

'I shall go away in a little while and travel into many lands, that I
may know all accidents and destinies, and when I return, will write
my secret law upon those ivory tablets, just as poets and romance
writers have written the principles of their art in prefaces; and when
I know what principle of life, discoverable at first by imagination
and instinct, I am to express, I will gather my pupils that they may
discover their law in the study of my law, as poets and painters
discover their own art of expression by the study of some Master. I
know nothing certain as yet but this--I am to become completely alive,
that is, completely passionate, for beauty is only another name for
perfect passion.
I shall create a world where the whole lives of men
shall be articulated and simplified as if seventy years were but one
moment, or as they were the leaping of a fish or the opening of a
flower. '

He was pacing up and down, and I listened to the fervour of his words
and watched the excitement of his gestures with not a little concern.
I had been accustomed to welcome the most singular speculations, and
had always found them as harmless as the Persian cat who half closes
her meditative eyes and stretches out her long claws before my fire.
But now I would battle in the interests of orthodoxy, even of the
commonplace: and yet could find nothing better to say than: 'It is
not necessary to judge everyone by the law, for we have also Christ's
commandment of love. '

He turned and said, looking at me with shining eyes: 'Jonathan Swift
made a soul for the gentlemen of this city by hating his neighbour as
himself. '

'At any rate, you cannot deny that to teach so dangerous a doctrine is
to accept a terrible responsibility. '

'Leonardo da Vinci,' he replied, 'has this noble sentence: "The hope
and desire of returning home to one's former state is like the moth's
desire for the light; and the man who with constant longing awaits
each new month and new year, deeming that the things he longs for are
ever too late in coming, does not perceive that he is longing for his
own destruction. " How, then, can the pathway which will lead us into
the heart of God be other than dangerous? Why should you, who are no
materialist, cherish the continuity and order of the world as those do
who have only the world? You do not value the writers who will express
nothing unless their reason understands how it will make what is called
the right more easy; why, then, will you deny a like freedom to the
supreme art, the art which is the foundation of all arts? Yes, I shall
send out of this chapel saints, lovers, rebels and prophets: souls who
will surround themselves with peace, as with a nest made with grass;
and others over whom I shall weep. The dust shall fall for many years
over this little box; and then I shall open it; and the tumults, which
are, perhaps, the flames of the last day, shall come from under the
lid. '

I did not reason with him that night, because his excitement was great
and I feared to make him angry; and when I called at his house a few
days later, he was gone and his house was locked up and empty. I have
deeply regretted my failure both to combat his heresy and to test the
genuineness of his strange book. Since my conversion I have indeed done
penance for an error which I was only able to measure after some years.


II

I was walking along one of the Dublin quays, on the side nearest the
river, about ten years after our conversation, stopping from time
to time to turn over the books upon an old bookstall, and thinking,
curiously enough, of the terrible destiny of Michael Robartes, and his
brotherhood; when I saw a tall and bent man walking slowly along the
other side of the quay. I recognized, with a start, in a lifeless mask
with dim eyes, the once resolute and delicate face of Owen Aherne. I
crossed the quay quickly, but had not gone many yards before he turned
away, as though he had seen me, and hurried down a side street; I
followed, but only to lose him among the intricate streets on the north
side of the river. During the next few weeks I inquired of everybody
who had once known him, but he had made himself known to nobody; and I
knocked, without result, at the door of his old house; and had nearly
persuaded myself that I was mistaken, when I saw him again in a narrow
street behind the Four Courts, and followed him to the door of his
house.

I laid my hand on his arm; he turned quite without surprise; and indeed
it is possible that to him, whose inner life had soaked up the outer
life, a parting of years was a parting from forenoon to afternoon.
He stood holding the door half open, as though he would keep me from
entering; and would perhaps have parted from me without further words
had I not said: 'Owen Aherne, you trusted me once, will you not trust
me again, and tell me what has come of the ideas we discussed in this
house ten years ago? --but perhaps you have already forgotten them. '

'You have a right to hear,' he said, 'for since I have told you the
ideas, I should tell you the extreme danger they contain, or rather the
boundless wickedness they contain; but when you have heard this we must
part, and part for ever, because I am lost, and must be hidden! '

I followed him through the paved passage, and saw that its corners were
choked, and the pictures gray, with dust and cobwebs; and that the
dust and cobwebs which covered the ruby and sapphire of the saints on
the window had made it very dim. He pointed to where the ivory tablets
glimmered faintly in the dimness, and I saw that they were covered with
small writing, and went up to them and began to read the writing. It
was in Latin, and was an elaborate casuistry, illustrated with many
examples, but whether from his own life or from the lives of others
I do not know. I had read but a few sentences when I imagined that a
faint perfume had begun to fill the room, and turning round asked Owen
Aherne if he were lighting the incense.

'No,' he replied, and pointed where the thurible lay rusty and empty on
one of the benches; as he spoke the faint perfume seemed to vanish, and
I was persuaded I had imagined it.

'Has the philosophy of the _Liber Inducens in Evangelium AEternum_ made
you very unhappy? ' I said.

'At first I was full of happiness,' he replied, 'for I felt a divine
ecstasy, an immortal fire in every passion, in every hope, in every
desire, in every dream; and I saw, in the shadows under leaves, in the
hollow waters, in the eyes of men and women, its image, as in a mirror;
and it was as though I was about to touch the Heart of God. Then all
changed and I was full of misery, and I said to myself that I was
caught in the glittering folds of an enormous serpent, and was falling
with him through a fathomless abyss, and that henceforth the glittering
folds were my world; and in my misery it was revealed to me that man
can only come to that Heart through the sense of separation from it
which we call sin, and I understood that I could not sin, because I
had discovered the law of my being, and could only express or fail to
express my being, and I understood that God has made a simple and an
arbitrary law that we may sin and repent! '

He had sat down on one of the wooden benches and now became silent, his
bowed head and hanging arms and listless body having more of dejection
than any image I have met with in life or in any art. I went and stood
leaning against the altar, and watched him, not knowing what I should
say; and I noticed his black closely-buttoned coat, his short hair,
and shaven head, which preserved a memory of his priestly ambition,
and understood how Catholicism had seized him in the midst of the
vertigo he called philosophy; and I noticed his lightless eyes and his
earth-coloured complexion, and understood how she had failed to do more
than hold him on the margin: and I was full of an anguish of pity.

'It may be,' he went on, 'that the angels whose hearts are shadows of
the Divine Heart, and whose bodies are made of the Divine Intellect,
may come to where their longing is always by a thirst for the divine
ecstasy, the immortal fire, that is in passion, in hope, in desire, in
dreams; but we whose hearts perish every moment, and whose bodies melt
away like a sigh, must bow and obey! '

I went nearer to him and said: 'Prayer and repentance will make you
like other men. '

'No, no,' he said, 'I am not among those for whom Christ died, and this
is why I must be hidden. I have a leprosy that even eternity cannot
cure. I have seen the whole, and how can I come again to believe that a
part is the whole? I have lost my soul because I have looked out of the
eyes of the angels. '

Suddenly I saw, or imagined that I saw, the room darken, and faint
figures robed in purple, and lifting faint torches with arms that
gleamed like silver, bending, above Owen Aherne; and I saw, or
imagined that I saw, drops, as of burning gum, fall from the torches,
and a heavy purple smoke, as of incense, come pouring from the flames
and sweeping about us. Owen Aherne, more happy than I who have been
half initiated into the Order of the Alchemical Rose, and protected
perhaps by his great piety, had sunk again into dejection and
listlessness, and saw none of these things; but my knees shook under
me, for the purple-robed figures were less faint every moment, and now
I could hear the hissing of the gum in the torches. They did not appear
to see me, for their eyes were upon Owen Aherne; now and again I could
hear them sigh as though with sorrow for his sorrow, and presently I
heard words which I could not understand except that they were words of
sorrow, and sweet as though immortal was talking to immortal. Then one
of them waved her torch, and all the torches waved, and for a moment it
was as though some great bird made of flames had fluttered its plumage,
and a voice cried as from far up in the air: 'He has charged even his
angels with folly, and they also bow and obey; but let your heart
mingle with our hearts, which are wrought of divine ecstasy, and your
body with our bodies, which are wrought of divine intellect. ' And at
that cry I understood that the Order of the Alchemical Rose was not of
this earth, and that it was still seeking over this earth for whatever
souls it could gather within its glittering net; and when all the faces
turned towards me, and I saw the mild eyes and the unshaken eyelids, I
was full of terror, and thought they were about to fling their torches
upon me, so that all I held dear, all that bound me to spiritual and
social order, would be burnt up, and my soul left naked and shivering
among the winds that blow from beyond this world and from beyond the
stars; and then a faint voice cried, 'Why do you fly from our torches
that were made out of the trees under which Christ wept in the Garden
of Gethsemane? Why do you fly from our torches that were made out of
sweet wood, after it had perished from the world and come to us who
made it of old times with our breath? '

It was not until the door of the house had closed behind my flight, and
the noise of the street was breaking on my ears, that I came back to
myself and to a little of my courage; and I have never dared to pass
the house of Owen Aherne from that day, even though I believe him to
have been driven into some distant country by the spirits whose name is
legion, and whose throne is in the indefinite abyss, and whom he obeys
and cannot see.




THE ADORATION OF THE MAGI


I WAS sitting reading late into the night a little after my last
meeting with Aherne, when I heard a light knocking on my front door. I
found upon the doorstep three very old men with stout sticks in their
hands, who said they had been told I should be up and about, and that
they were to tell me important things. I brought them into my study,
and when the peacock curtains had closed behind us, I set their chairs
for them close to the fire, for I saw that the frost was on their
great-coats of frieze and upon the long beards that flowed almost to
their waists. They took off their great-coats, and leaned over the
fire warming their hands, and I saw that their clothes had much of the
country of our time, but a little also, as it seemed to me, of the town
life of a more courtly time. When they had warmed themselves--and they
warmed themselves, I thought, less because of the cold of the night
than because of a pleasure in warmth for the sake of warmth--they
turned towards me, so that the light of the lamp fell full upon their
weather-beaten faces, and told the story I am about to tell. Now one
talked and now another, and they often interrupted one another, with
a desire, like that of countrymen, when they tell a story, to leave
no detail untold. When they had finished they made me take notes of
whatever conversation they had quoted, so that I might have the exact
words, and got up to go. When I asked them where they were going, and
what they were doing, and by what names I should call them, they would
tell me nothing, except that they had been commanded to travel over
Ireland continually, and upon foot and at night, that they might live
close to the stones and the trees and at the hours when the immortals
are awake.

I have let some years go by before writing out this story, for I am
always in dread of the illusions which come of that inquietude of the
veil of the Temple, which M. Mallarme considers a characteristic of our
times; and only write it now because I have grown to believe that there
is no dangerous idea which does not become less dangerous when written
out in sincere and careful English.

The three old men were three brothers, who had lived in one of the
western islands from their early manhood, and had cared all their lives
for nothing except for those classical writers and old Gaelic writers
who expounded an heroic and simple life; night after night in winter,
Gaelic story-tellers would chant old poems to them over the poteen; and
night after night in summer, when the Gaelic story-tellers were at work
in the fields or away at the fishing, they would read to one another
Virgil and Homer, for they would not enjoy in solitude, but as the
ancients enjoyed. At last a man, who told them he was Michael Robartes,
came to them in a fishing-boat, like St. Brandan drawn by some vision
and called by some voice; and spoke of the coming again of the gods
and the ancient things; and their hearts, which had never endured the
body and pressure of our time, but only of distant times, found nothing
unlikely in anything he told them, but accepted all simply and were
happy. Years passed, and one day, when the oldest of the old men, who
travelled in his youth and thought sometimes of other lands, looked
out on the grey waters, on which the people see the dim outline of the
Islands of the Young--the Happy Islands where the Gaelic heroes live
the lives of Homer's Phaeacians--a voice came out of the air over the
waters and told him of the death of Michael Robartes. They were still
mourning when the next oldest of the old men fell asleep while reading
out the Fifth Eclogue of Virgil, and a strange voice spoke through him,
and bid them set out for Paris, where a woman lay dying, who would
reveal to them the secret names of the gods, which can be perfectly
spoken only when the mind is steeped in certain colours and certain
sounds and certain odours; but at whose perfect speaking the immortals
cease to be cries and shadows, and walk and talk with one like men and
women.

They left their island, at first much troubled at all they saw in the
world, and came to Paris, and there the youngest met a person in a
dream, who told him they were to wander about at hazard until those who
had been guiding their footsteps had brought them to a street and a
house, whose likeness was shown him in the dream. They wandered hither
and thither for many days, but one morning they came into some narrow
and shabby streets, on the south of the Seine, where women with pale
faces and untidy hair looked at them out of the windows; and just as
they were about to turn back because Wisdom could not have alighted in
so foolish a neighbourhood, they came to the street and the house of
the dream. The oldest of the old men, who still remembered some of the
modern languages he had known in his youth, went up to the door and
knocked, but when he had knocked, the next in age to him said it was
not a good house, and could not be the house they were looking for, and
urged him to ask for some one that they knew was not there and go away.
The door was opened by an old over-dressed woman, who said, 'O, you are
her three kinsmen from Ireland. She has been expecting you all day. '
The old men looked at one another and followed her upstairs, passing
doors from which pale and untidy women thrust out their heads, and into
a room where a beautiful woman lay asleep in a bed, with another woman
sitting by her.

The old woman said: 'Yes, they have come at last; now she will be able
to die in peace,' and went out.

'We have been deceived by devils,' said one of the old men, 'for the
immortals would not speak through a woman like this. '

'Yes,' said another, 'we have been deceived by devils, and we must go
away quickly. '

'Yes,' said the third, 'we have been deceived by devils, but let us
kneel down for a little, for we are by the deathbed of one that has
been beautiful. ' They knelt down, and the woman who sat by the bed, and
seemed to be overcome with fear and awe, lowered her head. They watched
for a little the face upon the pillow and wondered at its look, as of
unquenchable desire, and at the porcelain-like refinement of the vessel
in which so malevolent a flame had burned.

Suddenly the second oldest of them crowed like a cock, and until the
room seemed to shake with the crowing. The woman in the bed still
slept on in her death-like sleep, but the woman who sat by her head
crossed herself and grew pale, and the youngest of the old men cried
out: 'A devil has gone into him, and we must begone or it will go into
us also. ' Before they could rise from their knees, a resonant chanting
voice came from the lips that had crowed and said: 'I am not a devil,
but I am Hermes the Shepherd of the Dead, and I run upon the errands of
the gods, and you have heard my sign, that has been my sign from the
old days. Bow down before her from whose lips the secret names of the
immortals, and of the things near their hearts, are about to come, that
the immortals may come again into the world. Bow down, and understand
that when they are about to overthrow the things that are to-day and
bring the things that were yesterday, they have no one to help them,
but one whom the things that are to-day have cast out. Bow down and
very low, for they have chosen for their priestess this woman in whose
heart all follies have gathered, and in whose body all desires have
awaked; this woman who has been driven out of Time and has lain upon
the bosom of Eternity. After you have bowed down the old things shall
be again, and another Argo shall carry heroes over sea, and another
Achilles beleaguer another Troy. '

The voice ended with a sigh, and immediately the old man awoke out of
sleep, and said: 'Has a voice spoken through me, as it did when I fell
asleep over my Virgil, or have I only been asleep? '

The oldest of them said: 'A voice has spoken through you. Where has
your soul been while the voice was speaking through you? '

'I do not know where my soul has been, but I dreamed I was under the
roof of a manger, and I looked down and I saw an ox and an ass; and I
saw a red cock perching on the hay-rack; and a woman hugging a child;
and three old men, in armour studded with rubies, kneeling with their
heads bowed very low in front of the woman and the child. While I was
looking the cock crowed and a man with wings on his heels swept up
through the air, and as he passed me, cried out: "Foolish old men, you
had once all the wisdom of the stars. " I do not understand my dream or
what it would have us do, but you who have heard the voice out of the
wisdom of my sleep know what we have to do. '

Then the oldest of the old men told him they were to take the
parchments they had brought with them out of their pockets and spread
them on the ground. When they had spread them on the ground, they took
out of their pockets their pens, made of three feathers, which had
fallen from the wing of the old eagle that is believed to have talked
of wisdom with St. Patrick.

'He meant, I think,' said the youngest, as he put their ink-bottles
by the side of the rolls of parchment, 'that when people are good the
world likes them and takes possession of them, and so eternity comes
through people who are not good or who have been forgotten. Perhaps
Christianity was good and the world liked it, so now it is going away
and the immortals are beginning to awake. '

'What you say has no wisdom,' said the oldest, 'because if there are
many immortals, there cannot be only one immortal. '

Then the woman in the bed sat up and looked about her with wild eyes;
and the oldest of the old men said: 'Lady, we have come to write down
the secret names,' and at his words a look of great joy came into her
face. Presently she began to speak slowly, and yet eagerly, as though
she knew she had but a little while to live, and in the Gaelic of their
own country; and she spoke to them many secret powerful names, and of
the colours, and odours, and weapons, and instruments of music and
instruments of handicraft belonging to the owners of those names; but
most about the Sidhe of Ireland and of their love for the Cauldron, and
the Whetstone, and the Sword, and the Spear. Then she tossed feebly
for a while and moaned, and when she spoke again it was in so faint a
murmur that the woman who sat by the bed leaned down to listen, and
while she was listening the spirit went out of the body.

Then the oldest of the old men said in French to the woman who was
still bending over the bed: 'There must have been yet one name which
she had not given us, for she murmured a name while the spirit was
going out of the body,' and the woman said, 'She was but murmuring
over the name of a symbolist painter she was fond of. He used to go to
something he called the Black Mass, and it was he who taught her to see
visions and to hear voices. She met him for the first time a few months
ago, and we have had no peace from that day because of her talk about
visions and about voices. Why! It was only last night that I dreamed I
saw a man with a red beard and red hair, and dressed in red, standing
by my bedside. He held a rose in one hand, and tore it in pieces with
the other hand, and the petals drifted about the room, and became
beautiful people who began to dance slowly. When I woke up I was all in
a heat with terror. '

This is all the old men told me, and when I think of their speech and
of their silence, of their coming and of their going, I am almost
persuaded that had I gone out of the house after they had gone out of
it, I should have found no footsteps on the snow. They may, for all I
or any man can say, have been themselves immortals: immortal demons,
come to put an untrue story into my mind for some purpose I do not
understand. Whatever they were, I have turned into a pathway which
will lead me from them and from the Order of the Alchemical Rose. I
no longer live an elaborate and haughty life, but seek to lose myself
among the prayers and the sorrows of the multitude. I pray best in poor
chapels, where the frieze coats brush by me as I kneel, and when I pray
against the demons I repeat a prayer which was made I know not how many
centuries ago to help some poor Gaelic man or woman who had suffered
with a suffering like mine.

_Seacht b-paidreacha fo seacht
Chuir Muire faoi n-a Mac,
Chuir Brighid faoi n-a brat,
Chuir Dia faoi n-a neart,
Eidir sinn 'san Sluagh Sidhe,
Eidir sinn 'san Sluagh Gaoith. _

Seven paters seven times,
Send Mary by her Son,
Send Bridget by her mantle,
Send God by His strength,
Between us and the faery host,
Between us and the demons of the air.




JOHN SHERMAN

AND

DHOYA:

TWO EARLY STORIES


_Republished by kind permission of Mr. T. Fisher Unwin. _


Having been persuaded somewhat against my judgment to include these
early stories, I have read them for the first time these many years.
They have come to interest me very deeply; for I am something of an
astrologer, and can see in them a young man--was I twenty-three? and
we Irish ripen slowly--born when the Water-Carrier was on the horizon,
at pains to overcome Saturn in Saturn's hour, just as I can see in
much that follows his struggle with the still all-too-unconquered
Moon, and at last, as I think, the summons of the prouder Sun. Sligo,
where I had lived as a child and spent some months or weeks of every
year till long after, is Ballah, and Pool Dhoya is at the river mouth
there, and he who gave me all of Sherman that was not born at the
rising of the Water-Carrier has still the bronze upon his face, and is
at this moment, it may be, in his walled garden, wondering, as he did
twenty years ago, whether he will ever mend the broken glass of the
conservatory, where I am not too young to recollect the vine-trees and
grapes that did not ripen.

W. B. YEATS.

_November 14th, 1907. _




JOHN SHERMAN


FIRST PART

JOHN SHERMAN LEAVES BALLAH


I

IN the west of Ireland, on the 9th of December, in the town of Ballah,
in the Imperial Hotel there was a single guest, clerical and youthful.
With the exception of a stray commercial traveller, who stopped once
for a night, there had been nobody for a whole month but this guest,
and now he was thinking of going away. The town, full enough in summer
of trout and salmon fishers, slept all winter like the bears.

On the evening of the 9th of December, in the coffee-room of the
Imperial Hotel, there was nobody but this guest. The guest was
irritated. It had rained all day, and now that it was clearing up night
had almost fallen. He had packed his portmanteau; his stockings, his
clothes-brush, his razor, his dress shoes were each in their corner,
and now he had nothing to do. He had tried the paper that was lying on
the table. He did not agree with its politics.

The waiter was playing an accordion in a little room over the stairs.
The guest's irritation increased, for the more he thought about it
the more he perceived that the accordion was badly played. There was
a piano in the coffee-room; he sat down at it and played the tune
correctly, as loudly as possible. The waiter took no notice. He did not
know that he was being played for. He was wholly absorbed in his own
playing, and besides he was old, obstinate, and deaf. The guest could
stand it no longer. He rang for the waiter, and then, remembering that
he did not need anything, went out before he came.

He went through Martin's Street and Peter's Lane, and turned down by
the burnt house at the corner of the fish-market, picking his way
towards the bridge. The town was dripping, but the rain was almost
over. The large drops fell seldomer and seldomer into the puddles. It
was the hour of ducks. Three or four had squeezed themselves under a
gate, and were now splashing about in the gutter of the main street.
There was scarcely anyone abroad. Once or twice a countryman went by
in yellow gaiters covered with mud and looked at the guest. Once an
old woman with a basket of clothes, recognizing the Protestant curate's
_locum tenens_, made a low curtsey.

The clouds gradually drifted away, the twilight deepened and the stars
came out. The guest, having bought some cigarettes, had spread his
waterproof on the parapet of the bridge and was now leaning his elbows
upon it, looking at the river and feeling at last quite tranquil.
His meditations, he repeated, to himself, were plated with silver by
the stars. The water slid noiselessly, and one or two of the larger
stars made little roadways of fire into the darkness. The light from a
distant casement made also its roadway. Once or twice a fish leaped.
Along the banks were the vague shadows of houses, seeming like phantoms
gathering to drink.

Yes; he felt now quite contented with the world. Amidst his enjoyment
of the shadows and the river--a veritable festival of silence--was
mixed pleasantly the knowledge that, as he leant there with the light
of a neighbouring gas-jet flickering faintly on his refined form and
nervous face and glancing from the little medal of some Anglican order
that hung upon his watch-guard, he must have seemed--if there had been
any to witness--a being of a different kind to the inhabitants--at once
rough and conventional--of this half-deserted town. Between these two
feelings the unworldly and the worldly tossed a leaping wave of perfect
enjoyment. How pleasantly conscious of his own identity it made him
when he thought how he and not those whose birthright it was, felt most
the beauty of these shadows and this river! For him who had read much,
seen operas and plays, known religious experiences, and written verse
to a waterfall in Switzerland, and not for those who dwelt upon its
borders for their whole lives, did this river raise a tumult of images
and wonders. What meaning it had for them he could not imagine. Some
meaning surely it must have!

As he gazed out into the darkness, spinning a web of thoughts from
himself to the river, from the river to himself, he saw, with a corner
of his eye, a spot of red light moving in the air at the other end of
the bridge. He turned towards it. It came closer and closer, there
appearing behind it the while a man and a cigar. The man carried in one
hand a mass of fishing-line covered with hooks, and in the other a tin
porringer full of bait.

'Good evening, Howard. '

'Good evening,' answered the guest, taking his elbows off the parapet
and looking in a preoccupied way at the man with the hooks. It was only
gradually he remembered that he was in Ballah among the barbarians, for
his mind had strayed from the last evening flies, making circles on
the water beneath, to the devil's song against 'the little spirits' in
_Mefistofele_. Looking down at the stone parapet he considered a moment
and then burst out--

'Sherman, how do you stand this place--you who have thoughts above mere
eating and sleeping and are not always grinding at the stubble mill?
Here everybody lives in the eighteenth century--the squalid century.
Well, I am going to-morrow, you know. Thank Heaven, I am done with your
grey streets and grey minds! The curate must come home, sick or well.
I have a religious essay to write, and besides I should die. Think of
that old fellow at the corner there, our most important parishioner.
There are no more hairs on his head than thoughts in his skull. To
merely look at him is to rob life of its dignity. Then there is nothing
in the shops but school-books and Sunday-school prizes. Excellent, no
doubt, for anyone who has not had to read as many as I have. Such a
choir! such rain! '

'You need some occupation peculiar to the place,' said the other,
baiting his hooks with worms out of the little porringer. 'I catch
eels. You should set some night-lines too. You bait them with worms in
this way, and put them among the weeds at the edge of the river. In the
morning you find an eel or two, if you have good fortune, turning round
and round and making the weeds sway. I shall catch a great many after
this rain. '

'What a suggestion! Do you mean to stay here,' said Howard, 'till your
mind rots like our most important parishioner's? '

'No, no! To be quite frank with you,' replied the other, 'I have some
good looks and shall try to turn them to account by going away from
here pretty soon and trying to persuade some girl with money to fall in
love with me. I shall not be altogether a bad match, you see, because
after she has made me a little prosperous my uncle will die and make
me much more so. I wish to be able always to remain a lounger. Yes, I
shall marry money. My mother has set her heart on it, and I am not,
you see, the kind of person who falls in love inconveniently. For the
present--'

'You are vegetating,' interrupted the other.

'No, I am seeing the world. In your big towns a man finds his minority
and knows nothing outside its border. He knows only the people like
himself. But here one chats with the whole world in a day's walk, for
every man one meets is a class. The knowledge I am picking up may be
useful to me when I enter the great cities and their ignorance. But I
have lines to set.