Fantastics and other Fancies/"His Heart is Old"
HIS HEART IS OLD[1]
Chrystoblepharos—Elikoblepharos,—eyelids grace-kissed,—the eyes of Leucothea,—the dreaming marble head of the Capitoline Museum,—the face of the girl-nurse of the wine-god, with a spray of wine-leaves filleting her sweet hair,—that inexpressible, inexplicable, petrified dream of loveliness, which well enables us to comprehend old monkish tales regarding the infernal powers of enchantment possessed by the antique statues of those gods who Tertullian affirmed were demons. For in howsoever thoughtless a mood one may be when he first visits the archaeological shrine in which the holiness of antique beauty reposes, the first glorious view of such a marble miracle compels the heart to slacken its motion in the awful wonder of that moment. One breathes low, as in sacred fear lest the vision might dissolve into nothingness—as though the witchery might be broken were living breath to touch with its warm moisture that wonderful marble cheek. Vainly may you strive to solve the secret of this magical art; the exquisite mystery is divine—human eye may never pierce it; one dare not laugh, dare not speak in its presence—that beauty imposes silence by its very sweetness; one may pray voicelessly, one does not smile in presence of the Superhuman. And when hours of mute marveling have passed, the wonder seems even newer than before. Shall we wonder that early Christian zealots should have dashed these miracles to pieces, maddened by the silent glamour of beauty that defied analysis and seemed, indeed, a creation of the Master-Magician himself?
And the Centauress, in cameo, kneeling to suckle her little one;—the supple nudity of exquisite ephebi turning in eternal dance about the circumference of wondrous vases;—gentle Psyche, butterfly-winged, weeping on a graven carnelian;—river-deities in relief eternally watching the noiseless flow of marble waves from urns that gurgle not;—joyous Tritons with knotty backs and seaweed twined among their locks;—luxurious symposia in sculpture, such as might have well suggested the Oriental fancy of petrified cities, with their innumerable pleasure-seekers suddenly turned to stone;—splendid processions of maidens to the shrine of the Maiden-Goddess, and Bacchantes leading tame panthers in the escort of the Rosy God: all these and countless other visions of the dead Greek world still haunted me, as I laid aside the beautiful and quaint volume of archaeological learning that inspired them—bound in old fashion, and bearing the imprint of a firm that had ceased to exist ere the close of the French Revolution,—a Rococo Winkelmann. And still they circled about me, with the last smoke-wreaths of the last evening pipe, on the moonlight balcony, among the shadows.
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Then as I dreamed the beautiful dead world seemed to live again, in a luminous haze, in an Elysian glow. The processions of stone awoke from their sleep of two thousand years, and moved and chanted;—marble dreams became lithe flesh;—the phantom Arcadia was peopled with shapes of unclad beauty;—I saw eyelids as of Leucothea palpitating under the kisses of the Charities,—the incarnate loveliness superhuman of a thousand godlike beings, known to us only by their shadows in stone;—and the efflorescent youth of that vanished nation, whose idols were Beauty and Joy,—who laughed much and never wept,—whose perfect faces were never clouded by the shadow of a grief, nor furrowed by the agony of thought, nor wrinkled by the bitterness of tears.
I found myself in the honeyed heart of that world, where all was youth and joy,—where the very air seemed to thrill with new happiness in a paradise newly created,—where innumerable flowers, of genera unknown in these later years, filled the valley with amorous odor of spring. But I sat among them with the thoughts of the Nineteenth Century, and the heart of the Nineteenth Century, and the garb of the Nineteenth Century, which is black as a garb of mourning for the dead. And they drew about me, seeing that I laughed not at all, nor smiled, nor spoke; and low-whispering to one another, they murmured with a silky murmur as of summer winds:—
"His heart is old!"
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And I pondered the words of the Ecclesiast: "Sorrow is better than laughter; for by the sadness of the countenance the heart is made better It is better to go to the house of mourning than to the house of feasting; and the day of one's death is better than the day of one's birth." But I answered nothing; and they spake again, whispering, "His heart is old!"
And one with sweet and silky-lidded eyes, lifted her voice and spake:—
"O thou dreamer, wherefore evoke us, wherefore mourn us,—seeing that there is no more joy in the world?
"Ours was a world of light and of laughter and of flowers, of loveliness and of love. Thine is smoke-darkened and sombre; there is no beauty unveiled; and men have forgotten how to laugh.
"Ye have increased wisdom unto sorrow, and sorrow unto infinite despair;—for there is now no Elysium,—the vault of heaven has sunk back into immensity, and dissolved itself into nothingness; the boundaries of earth are set, and the earth itself resolved into a grain of dust, whirling in the vast white ring of innumerable suns and countless revolving worlds. Yet we were happier, believing the blossoming of stars to be only drops of milk from the perfect breast of a goddess.
"Nymphs haunted our springs; dryads slumbered in the waving shadows of our trees; zephyrs ethereal rode upon our summer winds; and great Pan played upon his pipe in the emerald gloom of our summer woods. Ye men of to-day have analyzed all substances, decomposed all elements, to discover the Undiscoverable, and ye have found it not. But in searching for the unsearchable, ye have lost joy.
"We loved the beauty of youth,—the litheness of young limbs,—the rosy dawn of maturity,—the bloom of downy cheeks,—the sweetness of eyes sweetened by vague desires of life's spring,—the marvelous thrill of a first kiss,—the hunger of love which had only to announce itself to be appeased,—and the glory of strength. But ye have sought the secret of the Universal life in charnel-houses,—dismembering rottenness itself and prying open the jaws of Death to view the awful emptiness therein. Learning only enough to appal you, ye have found that science can teach you less of beauty than our forgotten gymnasiums; but in the mean time, ye have forgotten how to love.
"We gave to the bodies of our well-beloved the holy purification of fire; ye confide them to the flesh-eating earth, filling your cities with skeletons. For us Death was bodiless and terrible; for you she is visible and yet welcome; —for so weary have men become of life that her blackness seems to them beauty,—the beauty of a mistress, the universal Pasiphila, who alone can give consolation to hearts weary of life. So that ye have even forgotten how to die!
"And thou, O dreamer, thou knowest that there was no beginning and that there shall be no end; but thou dost also know that the dust beneath thy feet has lived and loved, that all which now lives once lived not, and that what is now lifeless will live again;—thou knowest that the substance of the sweetest lips has passed through myriad million transformations, that the light of the sweetest eyes will still pass through innumerable changes after the fires of the stars have burnt themselves out. In seeking the All-Soul, thou hast found it in thyself, and hast elevated thyself to deity, yet for thee are vows vain and oracles dumb. Hope is extinguished in everlasting night; thou mayst not claim even the consolation of prayer, for thou canst not pray to thyself. Like the Mephistopheles of thy poet, O dreamer of the Nineteenth Century, thou mayst sit between the Sphinx of the Past and the Sphinx of the Future, and question them, and open their lips of granite, and answer their mocking riddles. But thou mayst not forget how to weep, even though thy heart grow old." . . .
But I could not weep !—And the phantoms, marveling, murmured with a strange murmur, —"The heart of Medusa!"
- ↑ Times-Democrat, May 7, 1882.