Part 33 (1/2)

In most men and women, Love waking wakes, with itself, the soul.

In poets Love waking kills it.

When G.o.d gives genius, I think He makes the brain of some strange, glorious stuff, that takes all strength out of the character, and all sight out of the eyes. Those artists--they are like the birds we blind: they sing, and make people weep for very joy to hear them; but they cannot see their way to peck the worms, and are for ever wounding their b.r.e.a.s.t.s against the wires. No doubt it is a great thing to have genius; but it is a sort of sickness after all; and when love comes--

Lippo knew that wise men do not do harm to whatever they may hate.

They drive it on to slay itself.

So without blood-guiltiness they get their end, yet stainless go to G.o.d.

He was a little sh.e.l.l off the seash.o.r.e that Hermes had taken out of millions like it that the waves washed up, and had breathed into, and had strung with fine chords, and had made into a syrinx sweet for every human ear.

Why not break the simple sh.e.l.l for sport? She did not care for music.

Did the G.o.ds care--they could make another.

Start a lie and a truth together, like hare and hound; the lie will run fast and smooth, and no man will ever turn it aside; but at the truth most hands will fling a stone, and so hinder it for sport's sake, if they can.

He heard the notes of a violin, quite faint and distant, but sweet as the piping of a blackbird amongst the white anemones of earliest spring.

”Nature makes some folks false as it makes lizards wriggle,” said he.

”Lippo is a lizard. No dog ever caught him napping, though he looks so lazy in the sun.”

He did not waver. He did not repine. He made no reproach, even in his own thoughts. He had only lost all the hope out of his life and all the pride of it.

But men lose these and live on; women also.

He had built up his little kingdom out of atoms, little by little; atoms of time, of patience, of self-denial, of h.o.a.rded coins, of s.n.a.t.c.hed moments;--built it up little by little, at cost of bodily labour and of bodily pain, as the pyramids were built brick by brick by the toil and the torment of unnoticed lives.

It was only a poor little nook of land, but it had been like an empire won to him.

With his foot on its soil he had felt rich.

And now it was gone--gone like a handful of thistle-down lost on the winds, like a spider's web broken in a shower of rain. Gone: never to be his own again. Never.

He sat and watched the brook run on, the pied birds come to drink, the throstle stir on the olive, the cloud shadows steal over the brown, bare fields.