CHAPTER LXXVIII
Wherein our Hero scatters some Pages of the Indifferent Wisdom of the Ages to the even more Indifferent Gulls
Wherein our Hero scatters some Pages of the Indifferent Wisdom of the Ages to the even more Indifferent Gulls
Inthe black night, Noll stood on the bridge at the end of the Boule Miche. The cathedral loomed sombrely amid the darkness.
But the darkness was resonant with the promise of a mighty music.
The youth had awakened.
A load was fallen from him.
The mists were rising from his soul. He stooped in his eagerness and peered at the years.
He began to see the Reality of things. He was filled with a strange excitement. He went back in fancy, and picked up the thread of the unravelling of life where it had dropped from his fingers in his eagerness to follow Schopenhauer’s inert nerveless guidance.
The scowling genius of the German had nearly found the truth—that a mighty desire for life was at the core of all existence. And here had slipped the mighty intellect; and the crabbed hands, groping in the half-darkness, missing the little, had missed the all, since that which stirs at the heart of all things is not a will to live, but life—life with an overwhelming urging to fulfil its fullest self. Nay, urging so overwhelming that, to know the fullest life, it lightly takes the risks of death in the achieving.
The bitter lips, not given to understatements, had yet understated the whole case. He of the surly shoulders had gone before the youth, beckoning him, until they were stepping along the hard stony ways of unhandsome half-truths that wounded the feet, and straying in the dirty alleys where the refuse is shot, their attention fixed on the cruelties, seeing only the shabby side of life. And, for solace, the worthy German could point but to two ways out of the shabbiness of his destiny—art and asceticism.
But this was not life at all.
The youth awaked to find the highway of life to be clean and healthy and glorious and beautiful. He stepped back upon it. Up aloft and afar and hard by, the world sang with the joy of life; and the motherhood of the world held out immaculate arms to him. He stood at gaze with life, and he saw that it was notmisery; nay, so far from being compact of misery, life lay before him unutterably sweet, thrillingly magnificent; so pleasant that we do not notice the delight of sheer living until misery knocks at our doors to say the order of our career is broken.
Life is to be lived, not baulked—otherwise we give the godhood within us the lie.
There is no virtue in a doleful countenance, nor aught more sacred in solemnity than in delight.
For Joy is serious as sorrow; comedy serious as Tragedy; life serious as Death.
It came to the youth, standing there in the reek of the night, that he was on the brink of manhood; he faced the prospect; and the whisper of the Masterfolk came to him where he stood.
His intellect and his emotions were in a strange thrill—leaping with a new and pulsing energy. Dawning manhood plucked at his sleeve, pointing to life, staring inquisitive glances, rousing him with restless innuendo—took him by the shoulder and said: “Awake, thou hast done with drifting, thou must live, and guide thy life, and choose thy ways.”
He began to regard life as a drama in which he was now a player, an important player. He was no longer of the audience—he was compelled on to the stage. He suddenly became aware of this. No matter how ill-dressed for the part, no matter how slip-shod, no matter how stammering his tongue, how dull his art, how ill-prepared to speak his lines, he must answer the call, must play that part. He roused to the fear that he did not know his part—did not know his cues, did not know even what was expected of him. He must search out the book of the play. What a strange tragi-comedy it was!
Tshah! pessimism’s refuges from life were but coward’s shrinkings from the exultant thunders of the universe.
Life is life, whether it be lived in the full, with the full breath of the heavens in the nostrils, and facing the dangers foot to foot and striving and overcoming, or whether its energy be spent in a vast labour to avoid it through exquisite evasions. Life cannot be avoided, whether a man take all the risks and fall in the risk, or, like the contemplative Grey, stand midst the whispering grasses of a graveyard and sigh the years away.
The august and splendid old cathedral loomed out of the murk.
And yonder towers that thus rose above the flood! The medieval church that builded them had founded itself on this pessimistic denial of the fulness of life: contemning, spurning the present; yearning for a vague, fantastic immortality. Its litanies, its prayers, its services sounded the misery of life. To the medieval churches this strenuous world was to produce for its highest ideal the barren man and woman, scowling on life in a narrow cell, shutting out the splendour of living, denying it wholly, apologizing to its God that others dared to live the life He had given, praying passionately that the sin of this life that God had given might be taken upon their own poor shoulders! The free air of heaven, and love, and the joy of life, were things to belooked upon askance and with caution, as a part of God’s bungling; yet so vast their faith they chanted their misereres all unwitting of the thing they said, all unwitting of the fear lest the future life, to which yearned their distorted hopes, might not be as sorry a world of blunders as that which they branded with their disapproval as God’s failure in this present seeming!
And where does the medieval church stand?
The master peoples pass its gates.
They preached the humble and the lowly; they preached the prince of peace—their hands, their doors, their traditions, their magnificent altars are bespattered with blood. With sonorous chant and opulent prayer and incense and significant symbolism of the worship of non-resistance, they blest the standards of battle. They tortured kings of thought, banned the demi-gods of the imagination, robbing woman of her parallel dignity with man, benumbing her wits, sapping her vitality, stultifying her will, made her a gaping hypocrisy—such women cannot be the mothers of the Masterfolk.
Pah! these very stones reeked with the blood of that Eve of St. Bartholomew. The doors of this church were scarlet with crime. Up yonder in the haze across the river hung the bell that had sounded in Christ’s name the cut-throat command to slay all such as worshipped not after her fashion.
Asceticism is like the will of one who, fearful of the dangers of the sea, fearful to go out on horseback to his wayfarings in the adventures of living, fearful of tragedies that may lurk in every thicket, became so fearful of the accidents that beset life in the living that he shut himself up in a strong castle, its rigid walls hewn from hardest stone—feared even to marry a wife lest she, wearying for another less fearful than he, should put poison in his cup. And the ship went sailing over the sea, and the horseman went riding over the hills, and the woman married her lover and knew life and became a laughing mother of babes, and—the castle fell into the earthquake’s maw....
To such like strange music jig they who suffer the itch of Asceticism’s distorted ideals—hermaphroditic, nay, wholly neuter. Virginity, the fantastic virtue of virtues! They come to find life’s glorification in the supreme denial of life—the chaste nun, she who stands with frantic eyes at issue with her godhood that says to her: “This is the sure and exquisite music of thy lifesong; this is thy office this; for this thy sweet body, thy fragrant breasts; thy every urging is touched with the finger of delicious shame that thou shouldst know with no common thrill the majesty of thy overwhelming significance—Be thou the mother of children.”
Nay, does not the Ascetic even approve the ridiculous lie called Illegitimacy? As though a child shall be illegitimate! As though a woman shall find shame in realizing her godhood! They that strive to be barren, alone, are the illegitimate.
Nay, had not the ancient churches even raised to solemn dignity of sainthood one Anthony, whose ridiculous virtue was the dreadof the love of woman! for which the high God within him had chiefly builded him.
Wiser far, for all their grey and vasty faults, had been the sturdy old Protesters, rude, clumsy, bungling enough though they were—those wise rough men who had emptied abbey and priory of hermaphroditic ideals so that the monkish cell had given place to the family hearth, and the clatter and whisper of inordinate litanies to the laughter and shout of little children.
For the Masterfolk have no fear—neither of birth, nor of life, nor of death.
Noll took the books of the wisdom of Schopenhauer out of his pockets, and flung them from him into the river below—the pages fluttered, beating the air, and the books that tell of the Refuge from life in the contemplation of the Beautiful and in Asceticism, fell upon the messy flood and were borne along on the polluted waters of the city that went, bubbling filth, to cleanse themselves in the immensity of the mighty deep.
And as the books fell, they struck the body of a dead carter that passed in the darkness upon the tide.
There was law—how otherwise the evolving of the Masterfolk? There were the heights. How to reach them?
The grey towers of the cathedral took solid shape; and, beyond and low down, the coming dawn flushed up from afar, and the smoky heavens lifted and grew light; the vague world arose into palpable form; and the day gained possession of the steamy city.
There was a footfall on the dank quays. The bohemians were creeping home to their dingy beds to sleep away the day, turning life upside down, making day into night, night into day—drab symbol of their misconception of the realities.