Part 8

‘Cæsar, there was once a king of Bithynia or Cappadocia or some such country, who had a mind to marry. Now the king next door had two daughters; both were beautiful, but one was as Venus and the other as Minerva. One was beautiful and voluptuous, witty and charming, while the other was wise and just, humane and ever careful that no one should be oppressed. Now which of these should he have married?’

‘Had I been in his place, I would have married both,’ replied the emperor.

‘But that was impossible.’

‘H’m! Well, in that case I should have taken the wise one.’

‘That,’ said Flaxius, ‘is what he did, and it is what the world will do: it will adopt the religion which, despite all the corruption with which man surrounds it, promises the greatest good to the greatest number.’

‘I believe that thou art in the right, O sage!’ replied the emperor slowly. ‘However, _jacta est alea_, the die is cast, and I shall ever remain Julian the Apostate. But what will be the end of it all?’

‘Thou wilt die nobly as a king should die--in battle for thy country.’

‘Then,’ said Julian, ‘I am content.’

FLAXIUS IN HADES

SHOWING HOW FLAXIUS WENT DOWN INTO HELL, AND OF THE MARVELLOUS THINGS WHICH HE SAW AND LEARNED WHILE THERE

‘To the Esthete who regards all Nature and Eternity as a mere paint-box for art, hell is a necessity, as is illustrated by Ruskin when he howls that “in the utmost solitudes of Nature the existence of hell seems to me as legibly declared by a thousand spiritual utterances as that of heaven.”’

‘THEY manage these things,’ said Flaxius, ‘I verily believe, better in hell.’

‘You have been in hell, I suppose,’ said the goblin-snob, with the most civilly impertinent air in the world, to the sage.

‘Strange!’ reflected Flaxius, ‘that a place which may be readily reached in a minute, if we may believe the common exhortation of the vulgar, or even in an instant by the aid of electricity as they manage it in America--with I forget how many volts, but “in a demi-volt”--should be unknown to me. I must consult the Fairy. Decidedly, my education has been neglected. I have not yet made the grand tour.’

Flaxius was living then near a town in the Austrian Tyrol, in a lonely, grey, and ancient ivied tower and small house, hidden away in the mountains; and there, with his usual disregard for appearances, he had installed a small gypsy family whom he had found camped in the woods, three chairs, a table, and a stupendous service of gold plate: this last not for luxury but because it was the first which, as a buried treasure near by, came to hand. The Goblin of the Tower had revealed to him its existence, and he used it because it saved him the trouble of going to town for crockery. His servants had instructions, whenever sent to buy anything, to steal one half the money, and then half of what they bought, under penalty of severe punishment, which had the natural result that whenever they could do so without detection, they never stole anything. Once, indeed, when his boy Lajos impudently brought him a manifestly superabundant supply of fruit for a half florin, or more than he expected, did Flaxius proceed, I cannot say to spoil the child, for the young devil was beyond all spoiling, but to break a rod on him. Whereupon he fell on his knees in tears, but was pardoned on promising never to be honest any more. Even Flaxius, great as he was, could not have his own way in everything, for things got to such a pitch at last, that these gypsies would tell the truth before his very face openly with the utmost impunity, and even without blushing.

It was midnight, and Flaxius the Immortal sat alone in his baronial hall. True, it was only about twenty feet in length and fifteen in breadth, but it was a hall. The walls were rich, or, at least, ragged, with Roman-picturesque and very-much-battered stone carvings, representing a lettuce-like confusion of crockets and finials, in which were nestled angels as ugly as devils, and devils not much prettier than the angels, like crayfish, or _écrevisses_, in foliage, the whole resembling an early Christian or Pre-Raphaelite salad which would have enchanted a Gothiconolator.

There was in the hall a large black Cat and an Owl, both of whom had come in uninvited from the Without, and joined the family, on speculation, from a desire for human sympathy and love, also for mice and any little edible odds and ends which might be obtainable. There was, too, a florid chimney-piece, so large that the hall seemed to be only a portion of it, or adjunct, just as the body and tail of the pricklefish seem to be only a part of his vast ogival jaw. In it blazed a fire, and by, or in that fire, sat the house goblin. His name was _Slangbrand_, and he was engaged in swallowing live coals, and then blowing out a storm of sparks from his nose, or _de retro_--as ye may see exemplified in Callot’s picture of Saint Anthony--anon swallowing the poker like a juggler, and then rising and falling on the smoke, up and down the chimney, like a ball in a fountain, to the great admiration of the Cat and the Owl, who constituted his audience.

Then Flaxius himself took a coal from the fire, placed it on a small silver dish on the table, and sprinkled on it a powder which burned, emitting an intensely aromatic and most agreeable but strange perfume, the magian meanwhile murmuring an incantation. A beautiful, soft light diffused itself all over the room; ’twas like a delicate, rosy Aurora with a memory of moonlight, and not without stars, for in it shone two celestial eyes, and then anon the Fairy stood revealed to her worshipper.

‘Joyful greeting to thee, Flaxius!’ said the _Fata_.

‘Deepest reverence to thee, O loveliest in form as in spirit, of all thy kind!’ replied the magian in a tone of deep sincerity.

‘And how goes the world with thee?’ inquired his queen.

‘With the world ever something new, as of old. As for me, and it was for this that I summoned thee, I would fain go----’

‘Go whither?’ inquired the fairy.

‘Go to hell!’ replied Flaxius.

‘Wherefore this unprovoked hostility?’ asked the spirit.

‘It was not spoken in the vocative,’ replied Flaxius. ‘I did but indicate the route which I fain would take, not commend it to thee, though by the twelve gods!’ he added passionately, ‘happy indeed would he be who on such a journey could meet with such an Eurydice!’

‘Flaxius,’ replied the fair one, ‘thou hadst ever so much modesty as to declare thyself unfit for heaven, and too much pride to allow that thou wert fit for the lower regions. Therefore didst thou elect to remain on earth to study and master its problems as thoroughly as it was in thee to do so, maintaining that of the few magians who like thyself had mastered immortality, too few prepared themselves, as they should do by studying the rudiments.’

‘Ay,’ replied Flaxius with his worldly smile. ‘They are mostly like boys who would fain run straight from their school to their dinner, not tarrying just for a little wholesome exercise to give a better appetite and health. But the truth which forces itself on me more and more is that hell and earth are so nearly allied that it becomes more and more difficult every day to investigate the one without knowing the other, even as a knowledge of chemistry becomes essential to an astronomer.’

‘You are quite right,’ replied the fairy. ‘_Sit tibi voluntas_, you shall have your wish. Fortunately it is extremely easy to get there, especially to obtain a place as permanent boarder, but even as a casual visitor I can assure you special honour. All the great geniuses of yore made a three days’ visit to the realm; it was a ceremony _de rigueur_, a kind of court presentation which no well-bred immortal could omit. I do not consider,’ she added reflectively, ‘that hell is exactly the place to which I would recommend parents to send their boys for an education, but for men of intelligence there are a great many valuable ideas to be picked up there. And when would you depart?’

‘Now, if you please.’

‘Said and done then,’ answered the spirit. ‘_Dicto citius_, as Virgil used to say to you--_in un batter d’occhio--in un balen--in un amen_!

‘In a wink and in a flash, In a snap, and at a dash, While a priest “amen” could say! From this earth now pass away To the mystic world below, Which all men dread yet none do know!’

As she uttered this incantation, Flaxius sank back in his great arm-chair to a deep sleep. The fairy looked at him with a loving glance, evidently with earnest and sympathetic thought, kissed his forehead, and softly sighed:

‘Ah well, Eternity is long!’

And turning to the goblin she said:

‘Slang, take heed that no mortal enters this house for three days and nights, and see that the master here be not disturbed! And do ye,’ she added to the Owl and Cat, ‘take care also that no noise be made hereabouts, and if ye do your work well, ye shall become witch and wizard in human form. Farewell!’ Saying this she winged her way heavenward:

‘To the joyous realms afar, Where the angel dwellers are.’

Now of the four members of that happy family, it would have been difficult to say who was the most delighted. Flaxius surely, because he had been sent to hell; the Owl and Cat certainly because they hoped to rise to the most degraded state of humanity; or Slang assuredly, simply because he had been spoken to by a queen and charged with a commission. And the three latter solemnly swore among themselves that if a mouse or bird so much as ventured to cheep or chirp about the house, they would rend it limb from limb, and have it served up for supper. According to the Penal Code of the Goblins. V. CXXXIIIV, _libro alto, capitulo nullo, folio nigro_.

* * * * *

As all the richest and most artistic or artful adornment of cathedrals or palaces, diamonded with panes of quaint device, ‘innumerable of stains and splendid dyes,’ and twilight saints and dim emblazonings, with half unearthly, holy, elfin shade, is all as trash and gingerbread, compared to the greenwood with its ineffable beauties of summer, and golden glory of autumn, so is all earthly music ever played mere scrannel-piping contrasted with that in which the soul of Flaxius seemed swept away, as he sank to sleep under the spell of the fairy. For he always loved music in every form, however made or by what mind composed; and that which now seemed to be life itself and waft him on, was what he would have had idealised for him, or that which he would have wanted had he known how to want it. This fulfilment of ideals in every form was the introduction to and the great moral lesson of Inferno. For therein lies such temptation as is mercifully spared to man on earth.

‘By the glory of the gods!’ said Flaxius, rousing himself to strength, ‘if the devil can bring art like this to bear on common mortals, who the devil can be saved? Truly it was high time for me to get out of the ruts of earth for a season, when there are such tremendous paradoxes as _this_ to solve outside it. And I thought that the problem and puzzle, and contrast, and anomaly were confined to life--_me stupide_! Verily, I say unto myself, Flaxius, that I foresee I shall find the very humour of humour in the mystery of hell, as this music intimates.’

And the music dying away, yet not quite vanishing, for Flaxius while he was in Inferno always heard it--just as in a garden we scent perfume of some kind, rising or falling--he found himself on the summit of a marvellously pleasant hill amid rocks and trees, grass and wild-flowers, with a mossy bench under an arbour, such a place as of all others he loved. He sat down on the bench and saw that there was before him a tremendous, yawning mountain gulf or valley, miles deep, but what lay beyond he knew not, since it was all covered with a veil of rolling, purple cloud of richest hue, in which he saw eyes of light wander like stars....

Then he perceived standing by his side, a very beautiful woman, young and lithe, holding a flask.

‘Have I not known thee of yore, O sister?’ asked Flaxius in Etruscan. ‘Art thou not of the _Lases_, who receive the spirits of the departed?’

‘I am of the Lases, and I am Alpan, or Alban, the Fairy of the Dawn, and their chief,’ said the maiden gently, ‘and I am sent by the lord of this land, whom men know as Pluto, to welcome thee. But first--behold!’

And as the music, sweet beyond dreams, again rose gently--as in a play or orchestra--the Lasa waved her hand and, the purple cloud vanishing, revealed to Flaxius such a vision of stupendous and beautiful palaces--all forming one--as he had never in all the splendour of the antique world seen the like of. He recalled Babylon, Memphis, Persepolis, Athens, Alexandria, Rome, the temples of Greece and of Egypt in all their massive mystery, the marvels of the Buddhist structures of Cambodia and India, the awful grotesques of America, the stately Lombard-Norman cathedrals of the West--the Gothic glory of Europe--and all seemed to be poor and wretched, yea, squalid, beside the grandeur, magnitude, and elaborate perfection of what was now before him.

‘This must be,’--he said, but he could speak no more, so overwhelmed was he at the sight.

‘Yes,’ added Albana, reading his thought. ‘It is--Pandemonium--the first structure ever erected.’

‘Ay,’ replied Flaxius recovering, of course to make a reflection, ‘and I see that architecture has step by step sunk, as man has risen. Another paradox! And this,’ he suddenly exclaimed, ‘is hell!’

‘Yes, Flaxius,’ replied the fairy with a sad smile, ‘and be thankful that thou comest here as an immortal who will depart as soon as thou shalt have learned the mystery, for verily with thy love and knowledge of the beautiful in art it had also gone hard with thee.’

‘Another paradox!’ thought Flaxius. ‘So, _tout lasse, tout passe, tout casse. En avant!_’

‘And now,’ said Albana, ‘for new sights! But wait! Drink from this flask! All who enter this realm must do so!’

‘I know it of old,’ said Flaxius. ‘It was the draught of the mysteries given me by the Fairy when I was made immortal. I drink to thee,’ he said, ‘O terrible ruler of this wondrous world! Yes, to thy realm and to thy mystic spouse! and with them to the angel of my dreams! and also thee, my fair, angelic guide!’

As he said this, there came from the depth below an ebony car or boat, exquisitely inlaid with gold in richest profusion, which rose slowly, quivering with the music, to their feet. Then there was a far, soft sound as of melodious chimes of a thousand bells.

‘Enter with me,’ said Albana. And having entered, they floated slowly over the gulf: they saw the city palace in new forms, while far beyond a landscape of marvellous beauty also developed itself, and in it too were other palaces, towns, towers, burgs, and villes or villas, castles, and immense ranges of crenellated, arched walls with glorious gates, and over the walls grew or hung masses of trees or clustering vines, bright with a mystic beauty of their own.

They landed at the edge of an immense marble precipice, which was however richly carved far adown with quaint devices, the more beautiful for moss and grey lichen. There appeared to be nothing freshly new, yet nothing ruined in the whole land; all spoke of an old time for ever young.

‘You see no escort,’ said Albana. ‘You are too great a visitor to be received with a cortège, or a procession, as we welcome the small great men of earth. It is long indeed since any one was received with such honour as this. You are deemed to be above ceremony.’

‘Charming!’ thought Flaxius, ‘the greatest mark of attention which I ever received in my life is the most devoid of all semblance of politeness. Another paradox, but this I understand.’

‘I think, beautiful Albana,’ he remarked, ‘that your company alone is here considered the highest compliment which can be paid to a guest.’

‘His majesty the king has said so,’ replied Albana simply. Meanwhile they had been passing along streets and scenes of surpassing magnificence or beauty, and after traversing a garden of the gods came to an immense open portal which they entered. And so on and ever on through stupendous colonnaded corridors, and cloistered squares with innumerable groups of statuary and fountains like vast rivers trained to play, great as the Nile when freshets fill its flood, leaping on high a mile, then roaring down through arches strange and high, falling over thundering waterfalls, broad and deep as Niagara, by towers like that of glorious Babylon which met the clouds; and above and beyond and higher yet again, like stairs of mountains beyond mountains growing dim, were walls of citadels like snowy marble, with a coral blush in the sunset, and domes like diamond, and pearly spires, glinting with gold in every form of grace.

When at last passing along a turquoise-walled and opal-paved arcade, to which unbroken divans of lapis lazuli, inlaid with silver, seemed more beautiful for inexhaustible masses of all shades and kinds of blue flowers hanging from vines, growing in vases of sapphire, so that the very air seemed to be of a dreamy azure hue, they came to a door and passed into a hall.

Wherein sat, not on a throne, but in a throne-like, ebony, high chair, at a table, a man of god-like mien and marvellous dignity.

So far beyond anything human in his awful beauty was he, that Flaxius was more deeply impressed by him than by all the wonders which he had thus far beheld. And truly, as Flaxius reflected, when a man has passed some scores of centuries in forming ideals of the beautiful and finds his ideal outdone, ’tis time to look about for _new powers_!

The Olympian Jove with a shade of Lucifer, the Spirit of the serene heaven mingled with the darker yet still beautiful earth below, the two united as by a spirit in the eternal yet ever intermingling ocean of the eye. Such he appeared, and Flaxius recalled Goethe:

‘The soul of man Is like the water. From heaven it cometh To heaven it riseth, And thence at once It must back to earth For ever changing.’

Moreover there was in the wonderfully grand face something sympathetically human, and humanly chevaleresque, even touching in genial moods on the ‘devilish handsome fellow.’ ‘I have heard,’ thought Flaxius, ‘of a town in Western America, wherein appeared a married lady of such irresistible beauty that all the male inhabitants of the place, even unto the deacons, gave up the commandments, or more especially one of them, as a bad job. A few like his majesty, turned loose on London society, would convert Mayfair into a divorce court.’

For he had at times a smile, a laugh which went like an electric flash of champagne to the heart of your heart, which is the reason why the inhabitants of a certain American State, with the exquisite poetry peculiar to their refined natures, call apple brandy ‘Jersey lightning,’ it being so potent that a taste thereof goes flashing and coruscating through the soul, suggesting Etna in full play on the great fourth of July Day of Judgment, when the _sæculum_, or _fin de siècle_, or the age, is to be dissolved in sparks, since having gone up like a rocket it is to come down--like the stick! This glance had Pluto, and Flaxius found it useful, because by means of it his majesty rendered clear, or, as one may say, coloured, like an artist, the outlines of his spoken arguments.

‘You are truly welcome, Flaxius!’ said the Lord of the Underworld, ‘as are all immortal mortals who have raised themselves as types of ideas to such a power that they can pass my realm as tourists between heaven and earth without becoming mine. Ah! that is a very vulgar error on earth that I pass my time in trying to catch souls! Did men but know how I pass all my life in painful effort to get rid of them! Well, I have seen here in days of yore, each for his three days, Adonis--ah, _he_ stayed six months, by request of my wife! Orpheus--music--poor fellow!... Socrates, Buddha, Dante--you know the list--and so on down to Emanuel Swedenborg. And every one of them saw hell after his own fashion--and then raised it after his peculiar style to earth, and no one interfered with the seeing thereof....

‘But, my Flaxius,’ resumed Pluto, with a genial smile, ‘is there any reason why we should not drink, although we are in hell?’

‘_Raison de plus_, most men would surely think,’ replied Flaxius.

And at the word there were before them two goblets creaming and streaming over; and Flaxius noticed that the infernal care of details was exquisitely carried out in this, that the _drops_ which are generally a great drawback to the over-brimming beaker, did not fall on his clothes and wet or stain them, but, becoming diamonds or pearls, rebounded dry.

And the draught was transcendental--so cool, so piquant, so enlivening! Pluto smiled.

‘Confess, Flaxius,’ he said, ‘that hell is not, as you find it, exactly what man imagines it to be?’

‘True,’ said Flaxius emptying his goblet, which refilled itself; ‘and yet I imagine that I am as far as ever from knowing what it is!’

‘And that distance,’ replied the monarch, drawing his own glass, ‘I will diminish for thee, O thou Sage of Sublime Common Sense, for thou shalt have a nearer perception of the truth and what Inferno is than any of thy predecessors.’

Now, Flaxius, comfortably seated in a high-backed chair, with the towering, Jacqueline can, or goblet, foaming before him, listened, _arrectis auribus_, graving every word which he heard on the tablet of his soul, even as Alba seated on a Greek tabouret at a little distance was doing on a leaf of ivory with her stylus. [And here notes Flaxius in the margin: ‘It is a curious fact that Alban is depicted in Etruscan vases as holding a stylus or pen, and that the witches of Tuscany, who still know her as Bellaria, declare that she is the spirit of the Pen, and is the one to be invoked by all who would write, _i.e._ compose well. _Aurora Musis amica._]

‘Know, my Flaxius,’ began his majesty, ‘that earth and all its trials, troubles, and torments, diseases, and miseries, ceases even for the worst and wickedest when they come here. We begin with them all _de novo_, on an entirely new system--the old body is gone and we are done with it. Physical torment ceases with the old life, for even the most earthly. Only ideas and earthly ideals remain, and to these is given full scope and free play. All begin here with unlimited freedom and indulgence.’

‘If I may interrupt your majesty,’ said Flaxius, ‘I would remark that many people would suppose that you are, by inadvertent error, describing heaven.’

‘Yes,’ replied Pluto, ‘that is indeed the heaven of every fool. But it is the surest way to come to grief in the long run. The ultimate extreme of hell or of punishment is for every man to be left utterly to himself, to have his own way, to follow his own fancies, to rule as he lists, and do uncontrolled just what he likes. Few and far between have those mortals ever been who, gifted with power, would not damn themselves on earth if left without guidance or control.

‘Now this is _hell_, and if thou wouldst know what the word really means, I reply, “a place where every one can do just what he pleases, and have all that he wants.” Every one entering here is supplied with such a world as he desires, with corresponding scenes and companions--he himself unconsciously drawing them all from memory and imagination. But note--for it is an important point--that they believe it all to be real, and in a certain sense it is so, for they have given to them the power, which science will some day give to man on earth, of perfect synthesis by volition--that is of drawing out the elements by _will_ from the _prima materia_ or _materialising_ unseen elements, or conceptions.’

‘I understand,’ said Flaxius. ‘Gods in a small way. Demiurguses. Make things!’