Part 11

"'At the risk of wearying hon. members I should like to add just a remark or two on another argument of the alarmists. We have seen the Danish argument; the Hock argument; and the Dutch colonies argument. There remains one more: the aerial argument. I hear from my valet that one Chaplin or Zebraline has made a flight or two through the air.'

"(Voices: 'Zeppelin!')

"'I hear, sir, his name is Zeppelin; probably an abbreviation of Mazeppaline, whom Lord Byron has sung so well.'

"(Opposition members: 'Deucedly clever!')

"'The flight of Mazeppa has naturally much agitated the Germans, all of whom can read English. If they could not, what else would they read? I have never heard of a German literature.

"'But to resume: the Germans, excited by _Mazeppa_ behold in Herr Zeppelin an aerial Mazeppa. That is all, as the French say. But, sir, is it likely that Herr Zeppelin will so perfect his balloon or airship as to make it available for the transportation of an army corps or two to England? Suppose he could do so; what would be simpler than to render his aerial landing in this country impossible? We have simply to refuse him a patent for the British Empire, and lo! he can never set foot on the clouds of England.

"'But the alarmists say that even if Zeppelin's airship could not carry over whole army corps, they might very well serve for German scouts and spies, who might explore the secret preparations and defensive measures made by this country on land.

"'Well, sir, this apparently strong argument has not an atom of vitality in it; and for the simplest of reasons too. The Germans might send their trustiest Zeppelin No. 10 or No. 50, with their best trained scouts in it. These scouts might pry into anything in the shape of military preparations in England; but they will never discover anything.

"'Why, sir, this is why we make no preparations. We do that simply to nullify any possible Zeppelin.'

"('Hear! Hear! Deucedly clever.')

"'Some critics say that we have lost the old bold imperialist spirit. But, sir, is it not evident that we are to-day of a greater military spirit than we ever were formerly? Feeble nations, in order to secure peace, constantly prepare for war; or as the Latin adage holds it: "_Si vis pacem para bellum_." We, on the other hand, make no preparations for war, because we are so strong as to consider war or peace with equal equanimity. To sum up: the aerial argument has no more force in it than the other arguments of the alarmists. If a modern William the Conqueror should be able to conquer the air, and by a modern battle of Hazetings (deucedly clever!) enter the mid-air of this country, he will find Heroes and not Harolds to contest every square inch of Margate winds, of Lincolnshire rain, or of London smoke. This country, sir, can be subjugated neither by land, nor by sea, nor by air. Over these three elements hovers and reigns supreme the indomitable spirit of the race.'

"(Tremendous applause.)

* * * * *

"When the speech of the Leader of the Opposition was ended, Columbus turned to me," continued Cæsar, "and said: 'I have no doubt, O Cæsar, that you are fairly sickened by that speech. But, pray, consider that every word of it was framed and uttered, not to discuss seriously the German danger, but to get back into power. The speaker is neither so ignorant nor so foolish as he appears. He made a special effort to appear absolutely ignorant of geography, because the party in power has won great renown by an imposing ignorance in that subject. You must not smile. I say deliberately, imposing. The English hate geography, maps, atlases, globes. Even in the examinations for the diplomatic service they do not admit geography as a subject.

"'Being convinced of the exclusive importance of their own country, they are simply bored with geographical considerations of any other country. Some time ago it occurred that not one member of the House knew whether British Guiana was an island or a peninsula. Of course, it is neither. It belongs to the _bon ton_ to be ignorant of all geography; that is, to treat Germany or Denmark or Russia as if one spoke of some internal province of the Chinese Empire. For similar reasons, the speaker affected not to see the slightest danger from Germany. The party in power was elected by the people mainly on the ground that with the Goody-Goody ones "in," and the Imperialists "out," the people were safe not to be embroiled in a European war. In order to take the wind out of the tattered sail of Pacifism the speaker acted as if the Germans did not so much as dream of doing England any harm.'

"All this is most disheartening," said Cæsar. "To treat foreign policy merely as a card in the little game of electioneering is most injurious to the interests of a great country. England, like every other country in Europe, has been made in her Downing Street rather than at the polls or in Committee-rooms. European currents determine the minor currents of the home policies of the several countries. You say, and with the utmost right, O Columbus, that you have given the English their most powerful leverage. But would you have thought of doing what you did do, had not a vast event in South-eastern Europe, the coming of the Turk, driven your countrymen to the discovery of a western route, the eastern being closed by the Turk?

"I wish the Parthians in mid-Asia, in my time, had been as strong as the Turks were in your time. We should have had you while I lived, and by the discovery of America over fifteen hundred years before you did discover it, the whole trend of the world's history would have been different. For you would have given this immense new leverage to the Roman Empire instead of to little England. It is rather amusing to hear the English talk of the 'Unspeakable Turk,' a nation to whom they are, if indirectly, more obliged than to any other nation of the past or present, excepting the French.

"The truth is, that no nation makes itself. It is made by itself only in so far as it reacts against the powerful influence of the others, its neighbours and their neighbours. If these neighbours are feeble, and second-rate nations, the reacting nation itself will remain feeble and second-rate. The greatness of the present Germans is a veritable godsend to the English, since the decadence of the French. By reacting against it properly, England will be newly invigorated.

"The scribblers of the little ones ascribe the downfall of the Empire which I founded to the rottenness of my Romans. How untrue! My Empire decayed because, comprising as it did all the then known civilised nations, it lacked a great adversary by reacting against whom it might have reinvigorated itself from time to time. They say the Barbarians, chiefly the Teutons, overpowered us. Alas! I wish they had been much stronger than they were. They never overpowered us. Had the Greeks and Macedonians been able to concert great military measures against us, we should have been forced to give up the fatal idea of an all-compassing Empire, and should have finally arrived at a fine and vitalising balance of power in the Mediterranean.

"The English ought to welcome, although to combat the rise of Germany. They imagine that their principal force comes from their colonies. It will come, not from their colonies, which is geographically impossible, but from their perennial rivalry with great Continental Powers. These rivalries made England, made her colonies. To give up these rivalries, to cease combating great Continental Powers, will be the end both of England and her Empire. In my time I, together with all my friends, gloried in my long-drawn conquest of Gaul, and my final victory over the leader of the Gauls, Vercingetorix. I now wish I had been defeated at Alesia, and a strong and united Gaul had been established under my unlucky adversary. What inestimable centre of healthy rivalry would Gaul not have been for us! To try to conquer it was right; to have definitely deprived it of independence was a disaster. Strifeless bliss prospers only in Olympus."

THE SIXTH NIGHT

APOLLO AND DIONYSUS IN ENGLAND[1]

It is many years ago that in the Bodleian at Oxford I was shown into the beautiful room where John Selden's noble library is placed. It is a lofty, well-proportioned room, and on the walls are arrayed the silent legions of the great scholar's books.

At that time I was still fonder of books than of realities, and with breathless haste I ran over the title-pages and contents of the grand folios in over fifteen languages, written by scholars of all the Western nations and of many an Oriental people.

Then I paused before the fine oil-painting near the entrance of the room representing the face and upper body of the scholar-patriot. The face is singularly, touchingly beautiful. The delicately swung lines of the lips tell at once, more especially in their discreet corners, of the deep reticence and subtle tact of the man. No wonder my Lady Kent loved him. The combination of political power, boundless erudition, and charming male beauty could not but be pleasing to a knowing woman of the world. His eyes, big and lustrous, yet veil more than they reveal. He evidently was a man who saw more than he expressed, and felt more than he cared to show. Living in the troublous times of James the First and Charles the First, he worked strenuously for the liberties of his country, while all the time pouring forth works of the heaviest erudition on matters of ancient law, religions, and antiquities.

His printed works are, in keeping with the custom of his day, like comets: a small kernel of substance, appended to a vast tail of quotations from thousands of authors. Like the unripe man I was, I liked the tail more than the kernel. Yet I had been in various countries and had acquired a little knowledge of substance.

And as I gazed with loving looks at the mild beauty of the scholar, I fell slowly into a reverie. I had read him and about him with such zeal that it seemed to me I knew the man personally. Then also I had walked over the very streets and in the very halls where he had walked and talked to Camden, Cotton, Archbishop Ussher, Sir Mathew Hale, Lord Ellesmere, Coke, Cromwell. It was the period that we, in Hungary, had been taught to admire most in all English history.

And there was more particularly one maxim of Selden's, which he carefully wrote on every one of the books of his library, which had always impressed me most.

It ran: "Liberty above everything"; or as he wrote it, in Greek: περἱ παντὁς τἡν ἑλευθερἱαν.

Yes, liberty--that is, political liberty--above everything else. I had, like all people born in the fifties of the last century, believed in that one idea as one believes in the goodness and necessity of bread and wine. I could not doubt it; I thought, to doubt it was almost absurd. And so I had long made up my mind to go one day to Oxford and to make my reverent bow to the scholar who had adorned the shallowest book of his vast collection by writing on it the Greek words in praise of liberty.

However, before I could carry out my pilgrimage to the Bodleian, I had been five years in the States. There indeed was plenty of political liberty, but after a year or so I could not but see that the sacrifices which the Americans had to make for their political liberty were heavy, very heavy, not to say crushing.

And I began to doubt.

I conceived that it was perhaps not impossible to assume that in Selden's maxim there were certain "ifs" and certain drawbacks. My soul darkened; and when finally I arrived at the Bodleian, I went into Selden's room, and to his portrait, prompted by an unarticulated hope that in some way or other I might get a solution of the problem from the man whose maxim I had held in so great esteem for many a long year.

So I gazed at him, and waited. The room became darker; the evening shadows began spreading about the shelves. The portrait alone was still in a frame of strangely white light. It was as if Apollo could not tear himself away from the face of one who had been his ardent devotee.

After a while I observed, or thought I did, with a sensation of mingled horror and delight, that the eyes of the portrait were moving towards me. I took courage and uttered my wish, and asked Selden outright whether now, after he had spent centuries in the Elysian fields with Pericles and Plato, whether he still was of opinion that liberty, political liberty, is the chief aim of a nation, an aim to be secured at all prices.

Thereupon I clearly saw how his eyes deepened, and how the surface of their silent reserve began to ripple, as it were, and finally a mild smile went over them like a cloud over a Highland lake.

That smile sent a shiver through my soul. Selden, too, doubts his maxim? Can political liberty be bought at too great a price? Are there goods more valuable than political liberty?

After I recovered from my first shock, I boldly approached the smiling portrait, and implored Selden to help me.

And then, in the silence of the deserted room, I saw how his lips moved, and I heard English sounds pronounced in a manner considerably different from what they are to-day. They sounded like the bass notes of a clarionet, and there was much more rhythm and cadence in them than one can hear to-day. They were also of exquisite politeness, and the words were, one imagined, like so many courtiers, hat in hand, bowing to one another, yet with a ready sword at the side.

To my request he replied: "If it should fall out to be your fervent desire to know the clandestine truth of a matter so great and weighty, I shall, for the love of your devotion, be much pleased to be your suitor and help. Do not hesitate to follow me."

With that he stepped out from the frame and stood before me in the costume of the time of the Cavaliers. He took me by the hand, and in a way that seemed both natural and supernatural, so strangely did I feel at that moment, we left unseen and unnoticed the lofty room, and arrived almost immediately after that at a place in the country that reminded me of Kenilworth, or some other part of lovely Warwickshire.

It was night, and a full moon shed her mysteries over trees, valleys, and mountains. On a lawn, in the midst of a fine wood of alders, Selden halted.

There were several persons present. They struck me as being Greeks; their costume was that of Athenians in the time of Alcibiades. I soon saw that I was right, for they talked ancient Greek. Selden explained to me that they had left Elysium for a time, in order to see how the world beneath was going on. In their travels they had come to England, and were anxious to meet men of the past as well as men of the present, and to inquire into the nature and lot of the nation of which they had heard, by rumour, that it had something of the nature of the Athenians, much of the character of the Spartans, a good deal of the people of Syracuse and Tarentum, and also a trait or two of the Romans.

Of those Greeks I at once recognised Pericles, the son of Xanthippus; Alcibiades, the son of Clinias; Plato, the son of Ariston; Euripides, the son of Mnesarchos; moreover, a man evidently an _archon_ or high official of the oracle of Delphi; and in the retinue I saw sculpturesque maidens of Sparta and charming women of Argos, set off by incomparably formed beauties of Thebes, and girls of Tanagra smiling sweetly with stately daintiness.

Selden was received by them with hearty friendliness, and conversation was soon at its best, just as if it had been proceeding in the cool groves of the Academy at Athens.

The first to speak was Pericles. He expressed to Selden his great amazement at the things he had seen in England.

"Had I not governed the city of holy Athena for thirty years," he said, "I should be perhaps pleased with what I see in this strange country. But having been at the head of affairs of a State which in my time was the foremost of the world; and having always availed myself of the advice and wisdom of men like Damon, the musician-philosopher, Anaxagoras, the thinker, Protagoras, the sophist, and last, not least, Aspasia, my tactful wife and friend, I am at a loss to understand the polity that you call England.

"What has struck me most in this country is the sway allowed to what we used to call Orphic Associations. In Athens we had, in my time, a great number of private societies the members of which devoted themselves to the cult of extreme, unnatural, and un-Greek ideas and superstitions. Thus we had _thiasoi_, as we called them, the members of which were fanatic vegetarians; others, again, who would not allow their adherents to partake of a single drop of Chian or any other wine; others, again, who would under no circumstances put on any woollen shirt or garment.

"But if any of these Orphic mystagogues had arrogated to themselves the right of proposing laws in the Public Assembly, or what this nation calls the Parliament, with a view of converting the whole State of Athens into an Association of Orphic rites and mysteries, then, I am sure, my most resolute antagonists would have joined hands with me to counteract such unholy and scurrilous attempts.

"I can well understand that the Spartans, who are quite unwilling to vest any real power whatever in either their kings, their assembly, their senate, or their minor officials, are consequently compelled to vest inordinate power in their few Ephors, and in the constantly practised extreme self-control of each individual Spartan. In a commonwealth like Sparta, where the commune is allowed very little, or no, power; where there are neither generals, directors of police, powerful priests or princes, nor any other incumbents of great coercive powers; in such a community the individual himself must needs be his own policeman, his own priest, prince, general, and coercive power. This he does by being a vegetarian, a strict Puritan, teetotaller, melancholist, and universal killer of joy."

Here Pericles was interrupted by the suave voice of Selden, who, in pure Attic, corroborated the foregoing statements by a reference to the people called Hebrews in Palestine. "These men," Selden said, "were practically at all times so fond of liberty that they could not brook any sort of government in the form of officials, policemen, soldiers, princes, priests, or lords whatever. In consequence of which they introduced a system of individual self-control called ritualism, by means of which each Hebrew tied himself down with a thousand filigree ties as to eating, drinking, sleeping, merrymaking, and, in short, as to every act of ordinary life. So that, O Pericles, the Hebrews are one big Orphic Association of extremists, less formidable than the Spartans, but essentially similar to them."

Selden had scarcely finished his remarks, when Alcibiades, encouraged by a smile from Plato, joined the discussion, and, looking at Pericles, exclaimed:

"My revered relative, I have listened to your observations with close attention; and I have also, in my rambles through this country, met a great number of men and women. It seems to me that but for their Orphic Associations, which here some people call Societies of Cranks and Faddists, the population of this realm would have one civil war after the other.

"Surely you all remember how, in my youth, misunderstanding as I did the Orphic and mystery-craving nature of man, I made fun of it, and was terribly punished for it at the hands of Hermes, a god far from being as great as Zeus, Apollo, or Dionysus. Little did I know at that time that the exuberance of vitality, which I, owing to my wealth and station in life, could gratify by gorgeous chariot races at Olympia under the eyes of all the Hellenes, was equally strong, but yet unsatisfied, in the average and less dowered citizens of my State.

"My chequered experience has taught me that no sort of people can quite do without Orphic mysteries, and when I sojourned among the Thracians, I saw that those barbarians, fully aware of the necessity of Mysteries and Orphic Trances, had long ago introduced festivals at which their men and women could give free vent to their subconscious, vague, yet powerful chthonic craving for impassioned daydreaming and revelry. They indulge in wild dances on the mountains, at night, invoking the gods of the nether world, indulging freely in the wildest form of boundless hilarity, and rivalling in their exuberance the mad sprouting of trees and herbs in spring.

"You Laconian maidens, usually so proud and cold and Amazonian, I call upon you to say whether in your strictly regulated polity of Sparta you do not, at times, rove in the wildest fashion over the paths, ravines, and clefts of awful Mount Taygetus, in reckless search of the joy of frantic vitality which your State ordinarily does not allow you to indulge in? And you women of Argos, are you too not given to wild rioting at stated times? Have I not watched you in your religious revivals of fierce joy?"

Both the Laconian and Argive women admitted the fact, and one of them asked: "Do the women of this country not observe similar festivals? I pity them if they don't."

And a Theban girl added: "The other day we passed over Snowdon and other mounts in a beauteous land which they call Wales. It is much like our own holy Mount Kithæron. Why, then, do the women of this country not rove, in honour of the god, over the Welsh mountains, free and unobserved, as we do annually over wild Kithæron? They would do it gracefully, for I have noticed that they run much better than they walk, and they would swing the _thyrsus_ in their hand with more elegance than the sticks they use in their games."

At that moment there arose from the haze and clouded mystery of the neighbouring woods a rocket of sounds, sung by female voices and soon joined in the distance by a chorus of men. The company on the lawn suddenly stopped talking, and at the bidding of the Delphic archon, whom they called Trichas, they all went in search of ivy, and, having found it, wreathed themselves with it. The music, more and more passionate, came nearer and nearer.

From my place I could slightly distinguish, in mid-air, a fast travelling host of women in light dresses, swinging the _thyrsus_, dancing with utter freedom of beautiful movement, and singing all the time songs in praise of Dionysus, the god of life and joy.

Trichas solemnly called upon us to close our eyes, and he intoned a _pæan_ of strange impressiveness, imploring the god to pardon our presence and to countenance us hereafter as before.

But the Laconian, Theban, and Argive maidens left us, and soaring into air, as it were, joined the host of revelling women.

After a time the music subsided far away, and nothing could be heard but the melodious soughing of the wind through the lank alder-trees.

* * * * *

Then, at a sign of Trichas, Plato took the word and said:

"You are aware, my friends, that whatever I have taught in my Athenian days regarding the punishment of our faults at the hands of the Powers of the Netherworld, all that has been amply visited upon me in the shape of commentaries written on my works by learned teachers, after the fashion of savages who tattoo the beautiful body of a human being.

"I may therefore say that I have at last come to a state of purification and castigation which allows one to see things in their right proportion. Thus, with regard to this curious country in which we are just at present, I cannot but think that while there is much truth in what all of you have remarked, yet you do not seem to grasp quite clearly the essence, or, as we used to say, the οὑσἱα of the whole problem.