Part 11
"Afterward I had comrades. They marched to the sound of flutes, in good order, with equal step, respiring above their bucklers, with plumes loftily nodding, lances oblique. Then on rushed to battle with mighty eagle cries. War was joyous as a banquet. Three hundred men strove against all Asia.
"But the Barbarians are returning;--by myriads they come, by millions! Ah! since numbers, and engines, and cunning are stronger than valour, it were better that I die the death of the brave!"
(_He kills himself._)
VULCAN (_sponging the sweat from his limbs_):
"The world is growing cold. The source of heat must be nourished, the volcanoes and rivers of flowing metal underground. Strike harder!--with full swing of the arms,--with might and main!"
(_The Cabiri wound themselves with their hammers, blind themselves with sparks, and groping, lose themselves in the darkness._)
CERES (_standing in her chariot, impelled by wheels having wings at their hubs_):
"Stop! Stop! Ah! it was with good reason that the exclusion of strangers, atheists, Epicureans, and Christians was commended! Now the mystery of the basket has been unveiled; the sanctuary profaned: all is lost!"
(_She descends a precipitous slope--shrieking, despairing, tearing her hair._)
"Ah! lies, lies! Daira has not been restored to me. The voice of brass calls me to the dead. This is another Tartarus, whence there is no return! Horror!"
(_The abyss engulfs her._)
BACCHUS (_with a frenzied laugh_).
"What matters it? The Archon's wife is my spouse! The law itself reels in drunkenness! To me the new song, the multiplied forms!
"The fire by which my mother was devoured, flows in my veins! Let it burn yet more fiercely, even though I perish!
"Male and female, complaisant to all, I abandon myself to you, Bacchantes! I abandon myself to you, Bacchanalians!--and the vine shall twine herself about the tree-trunks! Howl! dance! writhe! Loosen the tiger and the slave!--rend flesh with ferocious bitings!"
(_And Pan, Silenus, the Bacchantes, the Mimalonæides, and the Mænads,--with their serpents, torches, sable masks,--cast flowers at each other ... shake their tympanums, strike their thyrsi, pelt each other with shells, devour grapes, strangle a goat, and tear Bacchus asunder._)
APOLLO (_furiously whipping his coursers, while his blanching locks are falling from his head_):
"I have left far behind me stony Delos, so pure that all now there seems dead; and I must strive to reach Delphi ere its inspiring vapour be wholly lost. The mules browse in its laurel groves. The Pythoness has wandered away, and cannot be found.
"By a stronger concentration of my power, I will obtain sublime hymns, eternal monuments; and all matter will be penetrated by the vibrations of my cithara!"
(_He strikes the strings of the instrument. They burst, lashing his face with their broken ends. He flings the cithara away; and furiously whipping his quadriga, cries_):
"No! enough of forms!--Further, higher!--to the very summit!--to the realm of pure thought!"
(_But the horses back, rear, dash the chariot to pieces. Entangled by the harness, caught by the fragments of the broken pole, he falls head foremost into the abyss._
_The sky is darkened._)
VENUS (_blue with cold, shivering_):
"Once with my girdle I made all the horizon of Hellas.
"Her fields glowed with the roses of my cheeks; her shores were outlined after the fashion of my lips; and her mountains, whiter than my doves, palpitated beneath the hands of the statuaries. My spirit's manifestation was found in the ordinances of the festivals, in the arrangement of coiffures, in the dialogues of philosophers, in the constitution of republics. But I have doted too much upon men! It is Love that has dishonoured me!"
(_She casts herself back weeping_):
"This world is abominable;--there is no air for me to breathe!
"O Mercury, inventor of the lyre, conductor of souls, take me away!"
(_She places one finger upon her lips, and describing an immense parabola, falls into the abyss._
_Nothing is now visible. The darkness is complete._
_Only, that from the eyes of Hilarion escape two flashes, two rays of lurid light._)
ANTHONY (_begins at last to notice his immense stature_):
"Already several times, while thou wert speaking, it seemed to me thou wert growing taller; and it was no illusion! How? Explain to me ... Thy aspect terrifies me!"
(_Footsteps are heard approaching._)
"What is that?"
HILARION (_extending his arm_):
"Look!"
(_Then, under a pale beam of moonlight, Anthony distinguishes an interminable caravan defiling over the summit of the rocks;--and each voyager, one after the other, falls from the cliff into the gulf below._
_First comes the three great gods of_ Samothrace,--AXIEROS, AXIOKEROS, AXIOKERSA,--_united together as in a fascia, purple-masked, all with hands uplifted._
_Æsculapius advances with a melancholy air, not even perceiving Samos and Telesphorus, who question him with gestures of anguish._ ELEAN SOSIPOLIS, _of python-form, rolls his coils toward the abyss._ DOSIPOENA, _becomes dizzy, leaps in of her own accord._ BRITOMARTIS, _shrieking with fear, clutches fast the meshes of her net. The Centaurs come at a wild gallop, and roll pell-mell into the black gulf._
_Behind them, all limping, advance the bands of the mourning Nymphs. Those of the meadows are covered with dust; those of the woods moan and bleed; wounded by the axes of the woodcutters._
_The Gelludes, the Strygii, the Empusæ, all the infernal goddesses, form one pyramid of blended fangs, vipers, and torches;--and seated upon a vulture-skin at its summit, Eurynome, blue as the flies that corrupt meat, devours her own arms._
_Then in one great whirl simultaneously disappear the bloody Orthia, Hymina of Orchomenus, the Laphria of the Patræns, Aphia of Agina, Bendis of Thrace, Stymphalia with thighs like a bird's. Triopas, in lieu of three eyes, has now but three empty orbits. Erichthonius, his legs paralysed, crawls upon his hands like a cripple._)
HILARION. "What a pleasure, is it not!--to see them all in the abjection of their death-agony! Climb up here beside me, on this rock; and thou shalt be even as Xerxes, reviewing his army.
"Beyond there, very far, dost thou behold that fair-bearded giant, who even now lets fall his sword crimsoned with blood?--that is the Scythian Zalmoxis between two planets,--Artimpasa, Venus, and Orsiloche, the Moon.
"Still further away, now emerging from pallid clouds, are the gods whom the Cimmerians adore, even beyond Thule.
"Their huge halls were warm, and by the gleam of swords that tapestried the vault, they drank their hydromel from horns of ivory. They ate the liver of the whale in dishes of brass wrought by the hammers of demons; or, betimes, they listened to captive sorcerers whose fingers played upon harps of stone.
"They are feeble! They are cold! The snow makes heavy their bearskins; and their feet show through the rents in their sandals.
"They weep for the vast fields upon whose grassy knolls they were wont to draw breath in pauses of battle; they weep for the long ships whose prows forced a way through the mountains of ice;--and the skates wherewith they followed the orb of the poles, upbearing at the length of their mighty arms all the firmament that turned with them."
(_A gust of frosty wind carries them off. Anthony turns his eyes another way. And he perceives--outlined in black against a red background--certain strange personages, with chinbands and gauntlets, who throw balls at one another, leap over each other's heads, make grimaces, dance a frenzied dance._)
HILARION. "Those are the divinities of Etruria, the innumerable Æsars.
"There is Tages, by whom augury was invented. With one hand he seeks to augment the divisions of the sky; with the other he supports himself upon the earth: let him sink therein!
"Nortia gazes at the wall into which she drave nails to mark the number of the passing years. Its whole surface is now covered; and the period is accomplished.
"Like two travellers overtaken by a storm, Kastur and Pulutuk, trembling, seek to shelter themselves beneath the same mantle."
ANTHONY (_closes his eyes_):
"Enough! Enough!"
(_But with a mighty noise of wings, all the Victories of the Capitol pass through the air,--hiding their faces with their hands, dropping the trophies hanging upon their arms._
_Janus,--lord of crepuscules,--flees upon a black ram; and one of his two faces is already putrified; the other slumbers with fatigue._
_Summanus, the headless god of the dark heavens, presses against his heart an odd cake shaped like a wheel._
_Vesta, beneath a ruined cupola, tries to relight her extinguished lamp._
_Bellona gashes her cheeks,--without being able to make that blood flow by which her devotees were purified._)
ANTHONY. "Mercy!--they weary me!"
HILARION. "Before, they amused thee!"
(_And he shows him in a grove of bean-trees,_ A WOMAN, _naked.... .........and a black man, holding in each hand a torch._[8])
"It is the goddess of Aricia, with the demon Virbius. Her sacerdote, the King of the grove, had to be an assassin;[9] and the fugitive slaves, the despoilers of corpses, the brigands of the Via Salaria, the cripples of the Pons Sublicius, all the human vermin of the Suburra worshipped no deities so fervently.
"In the time of Marcus Antonius the patrician women preferred Libitina."
(_And he shows him under the shadow of cypresses and rose-trees_, ANOTHER WOMAN, _clad in gauze. Around her lie spades, litters, black hangings, all the paraphernalia of funerals. She smiles. Her diamonds shine afar off through spiders' webs. The Larvæ, like skeletons, show their bones through the branches; and the Lemures, who are phantoms, extend their bat-like wings._
_At the end of a field lies the god Terminus, uprooted, and covered with ordures._
_In the centre of a furrow, the great corpse of Vertumnus is being devoured by red dogs._
_The rustic deities all depart, weeping:--Sartor, Sarrator, Vervactor, Collina, Vallona, Hostilinus--all wearing little hooded mantles, and carrying either a hoe, a pitchfork, a hurdle, or a boar-spear._)
HILARION. "Their spirits made prosperous the villa,--with its dovecots, its parks of dormice, its poultry-yards protected by nets, its warm stables fragrant with odours of cedar.
"Also they protected all the wretched population who dragged the irons upon their legs over the flinty ways of the Sabine country,--those who called the swine together by sound of horn,--those who were wont to gather the bunches at the very summits of the elms,--those who drove the asses, laden with manure, over the winding bypaths. The panting labourer, leaning over the handle of his plough, prayed them to give strength to his arms; and under the shade of the lindens, beside calabashes filled with milk, the cow-herds were wont, in turn, to sound their praises upon flutes of reed."
ANTHONY (_sighs._)
(_And in the centre of a chamber, upon a lofty estrade, an ivory bed is visible, surrounded by persons bearing torches of pine._)
"Those are the deities of marriage. They await the coming of the bride.
"Domiduca should lead her in,--Virgo unfasten her girdle,--Subigo place her in the bed,--and Præma open her arms, and whisper sweet words into her ear.
"But she will not come!--and they dismiss the others:--Nona and Decima who watch by sick-beds; the three Nixii who preside over child-birth; the two nurses, Educa and Potina; and Carna, guardian of the cradle, whose bouquet of hawthorne keeps evil dreams from the child.
"Afterwards, Ossipago should strengthen his knees;--Barbatus give him his first beard; Stimula inspire his first desires; Volupia grant him his first enjoyment; Fabulimus should have taught him to speak, Numera to count, Cam[oe]na to sing, Consus to reflect."
(_This chamber is empty; and there remains only the centenarian Nænia beside the bed,--muttering to herself the dirge she was wont to howl at the funerals of aged men._
_But her voice is soon drowned by sharp cries. These are uttered by_--
_The_ LARES DOMESTICI, _crouching at the further end of the atrium, clad in dog-skins, with flowers wreathed about their bodies,--pressing their clenched hands against their cheeks, and weeping as loudly as they can._)
"Where is the portion of food we received at each repast, the kindly care of the maid-servant, the smile of the matron, the merriment of the little boys playing at knuckle-bones on the mosaic pavement of the court-yard? When grown up, they used to hang about our necks their bullæ of gold or leather!
"What happiness it was, when on the evening of a triumph, the master, entering, turned his humid eyes upon us! He would recount his combats; and the little house would be prouder than a palace; sacred as a temple!
"How sweet were the family repasts, above all on the morrow of the Feralia! Tenderness for the dead appeased all discords; all kissed each other, while drinking to the glories of the past, and the hopes of the future.
"But the ancestors, of painted wax, locked up behind us, are slowly becoming covered with mold. The new races, visiting their own deceptions upon us, have shattered our jaws; our wooden bodies are disappearing piece-meal under the teeth of rats."
(_And the innumerable gods, watching over doors, kitchens, cellars, baths, disperse in every direction--under the form of enormous ants running over the pavement, or great butterflies soaring away._
_Then a roll of thunder is heard._)
A VOICE:
"I was the God of Armies, the Lord, the Lord God! I pitched the tents of Jacob on the hills; and in the midst of the sands I nourished my chosen people in their flight.
"It was I who consumed the city of Sodom with fire! It was I who overwhelmed the world with the waters of the Deluge! It was I that drowned Pharaoh, with all the princes, sons of Kings,--making the sea to swallow up his chariots of war, and his charioteers!
"I, the Jealous God, held all other gods in abomination. I brayed the impure in my anger; the mighty I cast down; and swiftly the desolation of my wrath ran to the right and to the left, like a dromedary loosened in a field of maize.
"I chose the humble to deliver Israel. Angels, flame-winged, spake to them from out the bushes.
"Perfumed with spikenard, with cinnamon and myrrh, clad in transparent robes, and shod with high-heeled sandals,--women of valiant heart went forth to slay captains. The passing wind carried my prophets with it.
"My law I graved upon tables of stone. Within that law my people were enclosed, as within a strong citadel. They were my people. I was their God! The land was mine; the men also belonged to me, together with their every thought, and all their works, and the tools they wrought with, and their prosperity.
"My ark reposed within a triple sanctuary,--surrounded by curtains of purple and lighted candelabra. I had a whole tribe to serve me as servants, swinging censers; and the high-priest, robed in robes of hyacinth, wore upon his breast precious stones disposed in symmetrical order.
"Woe! Woe! the Holy of Holies is open, the veil is rent, the perfumes of the holocaust are dissipated by all the winds of heaven! The jackal whines in the sepulchres; my temple is destroyed; my people dispersed!
"The priests have been strangled with the girdles of their robes. The women languish in captivity; the holy vessels have all been melted!"
(_The voice, becoming more distant_):
"I was the God of Armies; the Lord, the Lord God!"
(_An enormous silence follows,--and deepest night._)
ANTHONY. "All have passed away!"
SOME ONE (_replies_):
"I remain!"
(_And Hilarion stands before him--but transfigured wholly,--beautiful as an archangel, luminous as a sun, and so lofty that in order to behold his face_--
ANTHONY
_is compelled to throw back his head, to look up as though gazing as a star_):
"Who art thou?"
HILARION. "My kingdom is vast as the universe; and my desire knows no limits. I go on forever,--freeing minds, weighing worlds,--without hatred, without fear, without pity, without love, and without God. Men call me SCIENCE!"
ANTHONY (_recoiling from him_):
"Say, rather, that thou art ... the Devil!"
HILARION (_fixing his eyes upon him_:)
"Wouldst thou behold him?"
ANTHONY (_cannot detach his eyes from that mighty gaze:--the curiosity of the Devil comes upon him. His terror augments; yet his wish grows even to boundlessness_):
"Yet if I should see him ... if I were to see him!"
(_Then in a sudden spasm of wrath_):
"The horror that I have of him will free me from his presence forever!... Yes!"
(_A cloven foot appears. Anthony regrets his wish._
_But the Devil flings him upon his horns and bears him away._)
[1] Matthew II: 10--T.
[2] "Buddha, or more correctly, the Buddha, for Buddha is an appellative meaning Enlightened."--Max Müller (Chips, Vol. I., 206).
[3] Luke II: 25-26.--T.
[4] Ibid II: 46-47.--T.
[5] Or, Haoma, also Hom, the sacred plant, whose fermented juice occupied an important place in the practical rites of Iran. Supposed to be the same plant known in botany as _Sarcostemma viminalis._ Deified in Iranian worship, like the sacred drink _Soma_ in the Vedic hymns. The _Soma_ was the fermented extract of the _Asclepias acida_ or _Sarcostemma ritalis._ See Marius Fontane, "L'Inde Védique," "Les Iraniens."--Trans.
[6] Apuleius says, "a silken mantle."--Trans.
[7] Apuleius says, "strung with knuckle-bones of sheep."--Trans.
[8] This scene, like certain paintings in the Naples museum, is all suited for public exhibition.--Trans.
[9] Readers will recollect the lines in Macaulay's _Lays of Ancient Rome_:
"Beneath Aricia's trees, Those trees in whose dim shadow A ghastly priest doth reign, The priest who slew the slayer, And must himself be slain."
VI
(_He flies beneath him, outstretched like a swimmer; his vast-spreading wings, wholly concealing him, seem like one huge cloud._)
ANTHONY. "Whither do I go? But a little while ago I beheld in a glimpse the form of the Accurst. Nay!--'tis a cloud that upbears me! Perhaps I am dead, and am ascending to God....
"How freely I respire. The immaculate air seems to vivify my soul. No sense of weight!--no more suffering.
"Far below me the lightning breaks,--the horizon broadens, widens,--the rivers cross each other. That blond-bright spot is the desert; that pool of water the ocean!
"And other oceans appear!--vast regions of which I knew nothing! There are the countries of the blacks, which seem to smoke like brasiers!--then is the zone of snows always made dim by fog! Would I might behold those mountains where the sun, each evening, sinks to rest!"
THE DEVIL. "The sun never sinks to rest; the sun never rests!"
(_Anthony is not surprised at this voice. It seems to him an echo of his own thought--a response made by his own memory._
_Meanwhile the earth gradually assumes the shape of a ball; and he beholds it in the midst of the azure, turning upon its poles, and revolving with the sun._)
THE DEVIL. "So it does not form the centre of the universe! Pride of man! humiliate thyself!"
ANTHONY. "Now I can scarcely distinguish it. It mingles confusedly with other glowing worlds. The firmament itself is but one tissue of stars."
(_And they still rise._)
"No sound!--not even the hoarse cry of eagles! Nothing? I listen for the harmony of the spheres."
THE DEVIL. "Thou wilt not hear them! Nor wilt thou behold the antichtonus of Plato,--or the central furnace of Philolaüs,--or the spheres of Aristotle, or the seven heavens of the Jews, with the great waters above the vault of crystal!"
ANTHONY. "Yet from below the vault seemed solid as a wall!--on the contrary I penetrate it, I lose myself in it!"
(_And he beholds the moon,--like a rounded fragment of ice filled with motionless light._)
THE DEVIL. "Formerly it was the sojourn of souls! Even the good Pythagoras adorned it with magnificent flowers, populated it with birds!"
ANTHONY. "I can see only desolate plains there, with extinct craters yawning under a black sky!
"Let us go towards those milder-beaming stars, that we may contemplate the angels who uphold them at arms' length, like torches!"
THE DEVIL (_bears him into the midst of the stars_):
"They attract at the same time that they repel each other. The action of each one results from that of others, and contributes thereunto,--without the aid of any auxiliary, by the force of a law, the virtue of order alone!"
ANTHONY. "Yes!...yes! My intelligence grasps the great truth! It is a joy greater than all tender pleasures! Breathless I find myself with astonishment at the enormity of God!"
THE DEVIL. "Even as the firmament ever rises as thou dost ascend, so with the expansion of thy thought will He become greater to thee; and after this discovery of the universe thou wilt feel thy joy augment with the broadening and deepening of the infinite."
ANTHONY. "Ah! higher!--higher still!--- forever higher!"
(_Then the stars multiply, scintillate. The Milky Way develops in the zenith like a monstrous belt, with holes at intervals; through these rents in its brightness stretches of prolonged darkness are visible. There are rains of stars, long trains of golden dust, luminous vapours that float and dissolve.
At times a comet suddenly passes by; then the tranquillity of innumerable lights recommences.
Anthony, with outstretched arms, supports himself upon the Devil's horns, and thus occupies all the space between them.
He remembers with disdain the ignorance of other days, the mediocrity of his dreams. And now those luminous globes he was wont to gaze upon from below, are close to him. He distinguishes the intercrossing of the lines of their orbits, the complexity of their courses. He beholds them coming from afar,--and, like stones suspended in a sling, describe their circles, form their hyperbolas.
He perceives, all within the field of his vision at once, the Southern Cross and the Great Bear, the Lynx and the Centaur, the nebula of Dorado, the six suns in the constellation of Orion, Jupiter with his four satellites, and the triple ring of the monstrous Saturn!--all the planets, all the stars that men will discover in the future. He fills his eyes with their light; he over-burthens his mind with calculation of their distances: then, bowing his head, he murmurs_):
"What is the purpose of all that?"
THE DEVIL. "There is no purpose. How could God have a purpose? What experience could have instructed him?--what reflection determined him?
"Before the beginning he could not have acted;--and now his action would be useless."
ANTHONY. "Yet he created the world, at one time, by his word only."
THE DEVIL. "But the beings that people the earth come upon it successively. So also, in heaven, new stars arise--different effects of varying causes."
ANTHONY. "The varying of causes is the will of God!"
THE DEVIL. "But to admit several acts of will in God is to admit various causes, and therefore to deny his unity.
"His will is inseparable from his essence. He can have but one will, having but one essence; and inasmuch as he externally exists, he acts eternally.
"Contemplate the sun! From its surface leap vast jets of flame, casting forth sparks that disperse beyond to become worlds here-after;--and further than the last, far beyond those deeps where thou seest only night, whirl other suns,--and behind them others again, and beyond those yet others ... without end!"
ANTHONY. "Enough! Enough! I fear!--I will fall into the abyss!"
THE DEVIL (_pauses, and rocks Anthony gently in the midst of space_).
"Nothingness is--not--there is no void! Everywhere and forever bodies move upon the immovable deeps of space! Were there boundaries to space, it would not be space, but a body only: it is limitless!"