Title:      The Interpreters
Author:     A.E.  (George William Russell)
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Language:   English
Date first posted:          July 2003
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A Project Gutenberg of Australia eBook

Title:      The Interpreters
Author:     A.E.  (George William Russell)




"In Him we live and move and have our being."--St. Paul

"What relation have the politics of time to the politics of
eternity?"--Leroy

"How can right find its appropriate might?"--Lavelle




To Stephan Mackenna
For the delight I have in his noble translation of Plotinus.





PREFACE


I have been intimate with some who risked and with some who lost
life for causes to which they were devoted, and came to understand
that with many the political images in imagination were but the
psychic body of spiritual ideas.  Behind the open argument lurked
a spiritual mood which was the true decider of destiny.  Nations
conceive of themselves as guided or sustained by a divine wisdom,
and I have wondered in what manner impulse might flow from Heaven
to Earth.  Out of my meditation on this came The Interpreters.
Those who take part in the symposium suppose of the universe that
it is a spiritual being, and they inquire what relation the politics
of Time may have to the politics of Eternity.  Their varying faiths
have been held by many ancients and by some who are modern, but the
symposium has been laid in a future century so that ideals over
which there is conflict today might be discussed divested of passion
and apart from transient circumstance.  I was not interested in the
creation of characters but in tracking political moods back to
spiritual origins, and The Interpreters may be taken as a symposium
between scattered portions of one nature dramatically sundered as
the soul is in dream.
     --A.E.





On an evening in the late autumn a young man was hurrying through
the lit crowded streets of his city, his mind but dimly aware of
his fellow-citizens, for he was raised above himself by the
adventure on which he was bent, and what had been familiar seemed
now remote as the body is to the soul in spiritual exaltation.
Because the high purpose seeks the companionship of high things,
he paused awhile, looking beyond the dark roofs, where, over horizons
of murky citron, the air glowed through regions of passionate green
to a blue abyss becoming momentarily more fathomless.  Never to his
eyes had that vision appeared so beautiful, trembling from one
exquisite transience of color to another.  Tall pillars crested with
a ruby glow marked the airways, and their dark lines and lights sank
westward over the city.  On each side the freighted galleons, winged
shapes of dusk and glitter, roared overhead, whirring up swiftly
from the horizon or fading with all their glitter into the green
west.  Not these hurrying lights his eye sought, but those changeless
lights which have watched earth from its beginnings.  Some cosmic
emotion made him feel akin with those heavenly lights.  A world
empire was in trouble.  A nation long restless under its rule had
resurrected ancient hopes, and this young man with many others was
bent on a violent assertion of its right to freedom.  His imagination
had long passed beyond fear of death.  But, having in thought cast
life aside, life strangely had become richly augmented.  He seemed
to himself a being of fire dwelling in a body of air, so intense
was feeling, so light his limbs.  In that mood the people in the
streets, on his own level yesterday, appeared faint as shadows;
but as compensation a new multitudinous life sprang up within him
as if all those who had his hope and were with him in his deed had
come to a mystic unity in the spirit.  In this dilation of
consciousness he felt the gods were with him, and it was then he
looked up at the stars, feeling in an instant of vision that he
was comrade with them and with all god-inspired life, and they,
with earth and its people, were sustained and directed by one
inflexible cosmic will.  He felt it strange he had not realized
before how high was the enterprise to which he had been led by a
study of the history and culture of his nation.  He moved
confidently as a warrior of antiquity with whom Athene or Hera
went invisibly to battle.  He was a poet, and because his soul
was a treasure-house stored with the thoughts of the great who
lived before him, he interpreted his own emotions as his more
uneducated comrades never could have done, they whose action was
instinctive, and whose minds were not subtle enough to discern
the immortal mingling with their moods, and who would perhaps
have lost enthusiasm if they had been told what purposes Nature
had with them, and to what event, aeons away, they were being led,
and that this heroic enterprise of their life was but an hour's
incident in a cyclic pilgrimage.

As he crossed an open square there came a roar which shook the air.
An orange flame spurted athwart the dusky citron of the sky, and
after that clouds of smoke ruddily obscure, began to pile themselves
up gigantically in the higher blue of night.  He gazed at this
uprising of flame as the Israelites of old might have looked on
the cloud and the fire which mantled the Shepherd of their host,
for this was the signal that at the other end of the city the revolt
had begun.  Yet his body shivered, for the intelligence in it which
stood sentinel guarding its mortality knew that this conflagration
began a struggle in which itself might  perish, and which for it
would be the end of all.  That mute appeal was unheeded, for the
will of the young man was like a drawn bow, and life the arrow ready
to be sped by the will.  He experienced the terrible joy of life
which has been emancipated.  The spirit of man had risen from the
grave which was fear, was emerging from that narrow prison cell
like the sky-reaching genie from the little copper vessel in the
tale of Arabian enchantment.  Like a god it was laying hands on
the powers of storm and commotion.  Life had broken its moulds.
It was no longer static but fluid, a river moving to some ocean.
He watched the ruddily glowing smoke hungrily.  Underneath it he
imagined faces pale and bright.  There were comrades, fearless,
willful, laughing, intoxicated as he was himself, breaking the
iron law of the Iron Age.  After centuries of frustrated effort
the nation, long dominated by an alien power which seemed immutable,
had a resurrection.  It would join the great procession of states,
of beings mightier than man created by man.  It would become like
Egypt, Assyria, Greece, or Rome.  The genius of multitudes would
unite to give it spiritual greatness.  Thoughts like these thronged
the brain of the young man as he moved closer to the great building
which he and others had planned to take by surprise.  The moment
arranged drew nigh.  Hundreds of men were mysteriously gathering,
loitering with intent, gazing at the distant illumination in the
sky yet all the time nearing the gate of the arsenal.  What had
brought about that orchestration of life?  They were united in
the deed.  Were they really united in soul?  Was the same mood in
the heart of that sombre concentrated workman as in the imaginative
poet or that sharp-featured cynical journalist?  Were they all
raised above themselves by the same aspiration?  Here were men
hardly able to restrain themselves from action, which was their
life.  Here were thinkers drawn by some agony of conscience which
bade them leave the fireside and the intimate lives about it,
trusting their young to a destiny which, had they thought over it,
had ever seemed heedless of life.  Had each one his own dream which
he believed his nation would fulfill?  Or was there a Wisdom moving
all for purposes of its own?  Was there an inexorable war waged
by the gods upon humanity, shattering its peace, never allowing it
to rest, shepherding the host from cycle to cycle until it had
grown to power and those divine enemies became its kinsmen?  Of
what lay beneath that gathering the poet, for all his imagination,
knew little, for he was so blinded by his own impulse, that he
imputed it to those who moved with him, that crowd which grew ever
thicker, casting furtive glances at each other, at those they did
not recognize, who might be agents of the power they sought to
overthrow.  Every heart heard its own beating.  Here were resolute
men who would act.  Then the hour struck from a tall spire, bell
after bell tolling slowly as if it symbolized the beating of the
heart of the nation.  On the instant men everywhere put on their
sleeves the scarf which revealed all to each other.  Those hitherto
only known to the leaders of their groups could now recognize their
comrades.  Weapons of all kinds were drawn forth.  Voices rang out
sternly in command, and the crowd, a river of fiery life, surged
through the open gate of the arsenal.





II.



We waken from dream, from a nightmare in which we fought with
demons, to find the body cold, clammy, and trembling, but all
recollection of that dark agony is soon lost beyond recall.  The
body still shudders but knows not why.  Our ascents to Heaven, our
descents into Hell, lay too high or too heavy a burden upon the
soul for memory.  It cannot mirror them for more than an instant,
and they melt dreamlike from consciousness.  Of the physical
conflict in the arsenal the poet remembered little.  It was blurred
to his intellect by excess of energy or passion as objects are
blurred to the eye by excess of light.  He came back to himself at
last crowded into a corner with a group of his surviving comrades
cut off from escape.  Here at least the revolution had failed.
Empires are like those beings in the Apocalypse full of eyes within
and without.

One of these eyes had discovered a detail of the conspiracy and
the open gate of the arsenal was a trap.  Another of these
apocalyptic eyes overlooked them searching for persons of power
among the rebels.  They were taken one by one as a finger pointed
them out.  The poet was of these.  He was led by his guards up
many steps and along many dim-lit corridors and was halted at last
by a door about which armed men stood sentinel.  He was thrust
within and the door was locked behind him.  He was greeted by a
tumult of gay and exalted voices.  It was a spiritual gaiety.  The
voices had the exaltation of those who had been engaged in a death-
struggle not so much with others as with themselves and had been
conquerors.  They could not have explained why they were so gay.
They were prisoners and defeated.  Some of them were wounded.  On
the morrow they might be standing with their backs to a wall taking
a wild farewell of the sky, drinking greedily the last drop in
the cup of life before a voice called on the executioners to fire.
The exaltation was secret and of the spirit, for all conflicts are
at the last between soul and body and here the soul had triumphed;
the immortal in each one had made a great stride to conscious
dwelling within them and it was sustaining them with its own
lavish power.  Outwardly they were but men who had not failed each
other however they had failed in their enterprise.  Their gaze on
each other was frank and affectionate.  The young poet was hailed
uproariously by those who knew him.  Others who had heard of him
gazed on him with pride.

"All here for Valhalla!"'

"I also am a traveler," said the newcomer.

"They will never allow you to go, Lavelle.  You might be admitted.
There will be no lingering over our fate.  Hell was built for such
rascals as we are."

"Hush, fools, we may be out before day-break.  Does that sound
like a city subdued?"

The room was reddening in a glow from without.  There was a rattle
increasing in intensity, not in one place but over the city.  Then
came a sinister noise like a sabre of sound swishing through the air
and deeper and more tremendous notes boomed from further distances.

"See! see!" cried one.  "The air lights have gone out."

They crowded to the windows.  The towering poles which had lifted
up their red lamps through the dusk to guide the night journeying
airships were now lightless and darkly silhouetted against glowing
masses of smoke.  The airships were scattering, flying wildly,
like winged dragons on some fabulous adventure who had met a
volcano in eruption on their path.  Some had ascended, their lights
scintillating remotely in the higher darkness, while others in
lower levels flashed flame-colored against the blue, their wings
gilded with fire from the glowing city below.

"They must come down!  They will be ours!  There were men ready
to rush the boats.  They cannot risk passage east or west with
the ways unlighted!"

Rumor started mysteriously among the prisoners.  Some one had
heard or surmised something, and in the fever of feeling it grew
in a moment, like a phantasmal tree created by the magic of a faquir,
to be of gigantic import.  This rumor dwindled to give place to
others more exciting.  The poet soon turned away, gazing through a
window at the spectacle of the night which never tired him.
Imagination was at work.  It created huge figures of gods seated on
the mountains that lay around the city, figures still as if cast in
gold, with immense pondering brows bent downward, waiting, perhaps,
for god folk to rise up from men folk out of that furnace into which
so many had cast themselves as a sacrifice.

"You should feel proud as Helen looking over the ruins of Troy."

An intense guttural voice was in his ear.  Lavelle turned round
and saw a pallid face with beaked nose, lips thick but not sensual,
humorous rather, even mocking, quick moving black eyes like polished
ebony, bushy gray brows and hair, every feature carved and etched
by mind, the head large on a shrunken body.  It was the writer he
had seen in the crowd, Leroy, a notoriety, in whose work fantastical
humor hardly disguised the agony of the idealist without faith in
society.  There existed between himself and the poet that attraction
which opposites have for each other.  His feeling for Lavelle was
friendly, almost tender.  He looked sorrowfully upon the face of
the young poet so unlike his own, upon a noble beauty whose
invisible sculptors were ecstasy, ardour, and the music of murmured
or chanted speech.

"Why?"

"Why, who created the spirit of this revolt?  Who led the people
to quit the beer which gives peace, to drink the heady wine of
imagination?  Who ransacked the past and revived the traditions
of the nation?  Who but you found in the fairy tales of its infancy
the basis of a future civilization?  The wine has gone to peoples'
heads.  What are they doing?  Thinking they are building a heaven
on earth while they are fighting like devils!"

"Ah!" said the poet.  "I wish it were true.  But you know how little
high traditions move the people."

"It may be so with them but not with the leaders.  The people may
not guess the thoughts that move the mightier of their kind but
they follow all the same.  And the leaders are aglow from a
phosphorescence engendered in the brains of poets like you, or
imaginative historians like Brehon.  What is it they are led by in
the end but a fragile thought;  a colored dream;  a thing of air!"

"No! no!" said Lavelle impetuously.  "It is not unreal.  Heaven is
in the kindled spirit of man.  How do you come to be here yourself?
Are you not with us?  For what but a dream do you cast away life?"

"Oh," said the other, "I am an anarchist and I wish to be free,
and also my Dark Angel told me there was nothing real in my
character and I wished to test it."

"What did you find in yourself?"

"Nothing!  More foam on wilder waters!  But who is this?"

The door had opened again, and a man, by attire, manner, and voice
evidently a personage, was pushed in backwards protesting vehemently
of his innocence, that he was not a rebel, that he hated them, when
an ungentle thrust from the weapon of his guard cut short speech
from him, and he was propelled from the doorway into the room.

"You can explain all that tomorrow," said a surly voice, evidently
skeptical that the prisoner could explain the circumstance which
caused his arrest.  The door was again closed.  The newcomer turned
to face the curious and not too friendly faces of the prisoners.

"You are the fanatics who have upset the city!  I hope there will
not be one of you alive tomorrow night!"

"Sir," said Leroy, "I do not know how you came to be here, but I
am sure it is not your good angel who inspires you to speak as you
do.  There are some here who might insist on your escape through
the window, and the distance from the window to the pavement is
exactly the distance from life to death."

"I think I know who this is," said another prisoner.  Then turning to
the last arrival he asked "Why did they take you?  You are not of us."

Then newcomer was quieting, his agitation overcome by coolness of
those about him.  He had picked up a colored scarf in the street,
missing the owner who was hurrying on, and he was still holding it
when he was arrested by a patrol.  The scarf was worn by those
active in the revolt.  One of the prisoners whispered to Leroy it
was more likely the arrest was made because of the prisoner's
personal likeness to one of their own leaders.  The newcomer
mentioned his name, Heyt, the autocrat of one of those great
economic federations which dominated state policy and whose
operations had created deep bitterness among the revolting people.
The name was greeted with roars of laughter.  The patrol had
arrested a pillar of state.   "The guilty on both sides in the
same prison!" cried Leroy.  "I never believed Deity had any
attributes but I must now endow it with the attribute of humor.
Sir," he said, turning to Heyt, "If you should be shot before me
tomorrow you may die with the consolation that your death has
shaken a skeptic in his unbelief."

Heyt, whose features had assumed the expression of haughtiness
which seemed habitual to them, looked disdainfully at Leroy and
made no reply.  He sat down on a bench which ran along by the wall,
ignoring his fellow-prisoners who also ignored him as an unlikely
source of information about the progress of the revolt.  The
excitement began to dwindle, a more solemn mood to replace the
gaiety and to turn their thoughts to that other world, in which,
had they known it, they already existed, entering it in all hours
of intense and deeper being.  Even to the heaven lit spirit of the
saint the prospect of death and the transit from familiar things
induces solemnity of feeling, though the heart has the certitude
that there is the heart's desire.   These for the most part had
taken little thought of that morrow or what spiritual raiment might
be put on them, but they remembered the popular persistent talk
about death and judgment, and they began to speculate among
themselves upon such things as men who knew their stay here may
be short and who must think of their further traveling.  Leroy with
his back to them listened irritably to their anticipations of death
and after.  Looking out through a window he began whistling softly
and savagely to himself.  That men who were in revolt against the
conventions of this world should accept the conventions of the next
world, which to him were even more objectionable, angered him so
that he could hardly trust himself to speech.





III.


It is rarely that a single mood stays long with those who believe
they are nigh to death.  A horde of thoughts and feelings rush
from the subconscious as if they knew how little time remained for
them to prove themselves.  There is swift reaction.  Leroy's
desperate mood soon passed, his ironic humor kindled by the desire
of a prisoner for consolation by a priest of his church.

"Do you really believe his blessing will secure you welcome in
the Kingdom of Heaven?" he said.  "My Dark Angel tells me there
has been very little difference between his ideas of religion and
the churches' for a very long time, so little, indeed, that his
master was thinking of quietly dropping his old title and calling
himself God.  Myself I hold the substitution was effected centuries
ago and was quite unnoticed.  Everything went on as before.  The
princes of religion sat undisturbed upon episcopal thrones.  I
think," he added grimly, their long and faithful services to their
new master merit sympathetic consideration from the judge of all
the world."

The prisoners gathered, laughing around Leroy.  His resolute spirit
dominated the rest as resolute spirits do all men in time of peril.
They began to even their mood to his.

"Come, tell us all about it!  What is to be our fate?  Will there
be another court-martial in Heaven when we are dispatched here?"

"What are we guilty of before Heaven?  What relation have the
politics of time to the politics of eternity?  Are we concerned
with the battles of beasts in the jungle, or the pursuit and flight
under the waters?  If there are beings above us, not of our order,
how do we offend them?  Do we throw Heaven into disorder when we
revolt against tyranny here?  I do not think the ridgepole of the
universe is so fragile as to be shaken by our rubbing ourselves
against it."

"I think," said Lavelle, "that Heaven and Earth must be a Unity,
and that men are often Heaven inspired, and that ideas descend on
us from a divine world, and they must finally make a conquest of
Earth and draw us into a conscious unity with the Heavens.  If the
universe is a spiritual being, everything finally must be in harmony
with it, and wild creatures, the elements even, undergo a
transfiguration, fierce things becoming gentle, and--"

"The shark becoming vegetarian," interrupted Leroy.  "O Lavelle,
Lavelle, you are the imperialist of idealism.  When you had remade
the nation in your own image you would impose the law of your being
upon the world.  Even the fishes would be swept into your net.  How
wise was the Chinese sage who said 'when a man begins to reform the
world I perceive there will be no end to it.'  There, would be no
place in your universe for an individualist like myself.  I would
be a gnat irritating its spiritual body."

"You may laugh at the marriage of Heaven and Earth," Lavelle spoke
again.  "But there is a power behind ideas.  I remember what a
dispirited group met to discuss the revolt, what a burden lay upon
every heart.  Yet when we decided to act for the nation what a
magical transformation took place!  How joyful every one became!
They were gay and laughed and cried as if it was resurrection morn.
What was the source of that joy?  By what alchemy was the chill
made fiery?  I felt glowing as if Heaven had lifted me up to itself.
What was that but the power of an idea?  You felt it yourself.  Is
there one even here who would wish now to withdraw?  Would we not
all prefer death with our nation fighting against the rule of the
iron powers?"

"No, no, not one of us repents," cried the prisoners.

"I prefer to be here, it is true," said Leroy.  "But I cannot
convince myself that I am not a fool.  It is ludicrous to me to
feel heroic irrational emotions welling up in me overturning reason.
It is doubtless heredity.  Some remote ancestor of mine ought to be
executed in my place."

"No, no, Leroy.  The heroic is the deep reality in you and all of
us.  It is translucent to spirit and the will of Heaven is seen
in its actions."

"Are our actions then all Heaven inspired?  If I am anything I am
an anarchist.  I would break up tyrannies because I am a lover of
liberty.  I wish to be free to come and go, to do or not to do,
to think as I will, to speak as I will.  You would have your nation
free that it might come under another domination;  that there might
be but one cultural mood in it.  You want an orchestration of life
so that every one in the nation may have the same character and
their works make one harmony.  There is Rian, who is an artist.  I
think he is with us truly because the state does not create beauty.
I found him in a rage cursing the last imperial edifice in our city.
It was designed by a blockhead, he said, to house blockheads whose
work it would be to make the whole nation into blockheads.  Men
ought to revolt against a state which imposes a dull ugliness upon
us all our lives.  Was not that so, Rian?"  Leroy said to a young
man who was listening to the talk.

"Well, it helped to bring me here anyhow," said Rian, smiling.

"Rian is fighting for beauty.  Between himself and Heaven that is
his motive.  He is a creature of aesthetic passions.  Put power
into his hands and he would arrest people for wearing inharmonious
colors in the streets.  Our great Culain is a socialist.  He has
an economic ideal while you have a cultural ideal.  I think every
one who is with us turned different faces to Heaven in their prayers.
Does Heaven accept them all?  Are all these conflicting ideals in
the cosmic plan?  If it approves everything it designs nothing.  I
am sure too that there are those fighting against us who believe
their empire is a manifestation of the Absolute, and they are filled
with as pure a glow as you are."

"Do you really believe, Leroy, that the same quality of inspiration
can exist in opposites?"

"Well, the opposites at least are willing to pay for their
inspiration in the same coin of life as you are.  Is it not better
to base your case simply on obvious right than to bring in a mystical
theory of nationality?  Every people today fights in the name of God.
The ancients were more logical.  They had tribal deities.  But you,
my dear Lavelle, while you are satisfied with your tribe on earth,
claim that all Heaven is with you.  In one of the old tales of our
people it is told of two heroes that they paused and embraced in
the midst of their conflict.  They saw noble things in each other.
Life was a game to be played nobly as indeed you play it;  but if
you insist on Heaven as the ally of your race you can only suppose
that the forces of Hell are behind your antagonist, and then there
is an end of chivalry.  You cannot weep over the fallen.  You can
only curse them as that old savage Dante denied pity to the spirit
that uprose out of the miry pool in the Inferno."

"But you have too subtle a mind to believe the soul of man is
completely isolated, is a being by itself and receives no light
except from the sun, stars, and lamp-posts."

"We exist, it is true, in some miraculous being which bathes us,
but I do not know whether it does not lend itself to my whimsies,
whether it is not a mirror of our being rather than we of it.  When
I dream I create like a God, but I know my dreams spring out of my
desires.  Though they seem to melt into infinity I know that
infinity is an illusion in the hollow of my brain.  I dreamed a
few nights ago that I saw God, really an august being, moving on
His rolling throne through His dominions contemplating His children
the stars.  He came close to our earth, but had to skip back very
quickly, so high up were the shells bursting, and the anti-aircraft
guns were taking no chances with suspicious luminosities.  He
called me and asked, 'What is the trouble here?' and I said, 'Lord,
it is a spiritual conflict.'  'That interests me.  Tell me all
about it,' and I explained that the people of the earth were at war
to decide whether they would receive their culture from such organs
of public opinion as 'The Horn of Empire' or 'The Clarion of the
People,' and old God looked at me and looked through me, and He
burst out laughing, and He laughed and laughed until the aether
began rocking, and on the waves of the aether the stars went dancing
and scintillating, tossing up and down in the wildest gymnastics,
like corks on wild waters.  I pretended to be amused also, but I
really could not see what the joke was about.  Then I awoke hearing
people laughing uncontrollably below my window, and it was that
laughter caused the dream.  It was a miraculous creation in a second,
but I know it sprang out of my humor.  You, if you dreamed, would
see a vision so beautiful that you would imagine it was a vision of
Paradise, but it would be no less of yourself than my fantasy.  That
magical element which bathes us would have made itself for you a
mirror with the illusion of infinite reality, just as it made itself
a theatre and supplied the properties to stage my ironic imagination.
Perhaps that miraculous element which creates illusions in us with
such swiftness may be God, and It may like a joke about Itself.  Now
neither you nor Rian would admit my fantasy was a divine revelation,
though it was swift, coherent, and complete, in fact as much a
miracle as any vision of Ezekiel."

"I'll admit it.  There is character and originality in it," said
the artist.

"I would not despair, if I had time, of proving your imagination
an extension of the imagination of our ancestors,"  laughed Lavelle.

Leroy placed his hand affectionately on the shoulder of the poet.
He was an older man than any there, more master of himself, and he
was talking deliberately to lead a reaction of mood to the normal
after the fierce excitement of the struggle in which they had been
captured.  Leroy and Lavelle were men who lived by intellect and
imagination, and to the last their outlook would be intellectual
rather than bodily;  but there were some of the prisoners who were
realists and who had no interest in metaphysical discussion, and
these had been watching with passionate interest everything in the
city which could be seen  from the high windows from which they
gazed.  There came a shout from these, and all hurried to the
windows of the great room to see what new action was taking place
in the drama in whose yet unfolded finale their fate was hidden.





IV.


Lavelle gazing from the high window saw at first only the restless
and ruddy glimmering of fire and shadow over the city.  But looking
up he saw the vision which had excited his companions.  The guardians
of empire had sent a summons for aircraft to overawe the revolting
people, and they were coming, a blazing caravan traveling across the
limitless desert of the sky.  Not Babylon nor Luxor to overawe the
denizens of their cities ever created in the squat magnificence of
their palaces such images of power as these dragons of the air which
drew up from far horizons.  Irresistible and disdainful as eagles
of a tumult of earth-crawling mice, they floated with all their
lights displayed that the city might know what might overhung it.
The air, everywhere was vibrant from the deep purring of their
engines, and it shook as Heaven might have shaken at the opening
of the seals in the Apocalypse.  The heart felt strained dreading,
not individual doom, but the annihilation of cities and races.  The
conflict below was now too interknit for action, but the ships
floated high up like palaces of gods built on some mountain slope
of night, minatory to those who gazed and who knew not at what
instant the glow of life might be extinguished in an obliterating
rain from the sky.  From these aerial cruisers the high admirals
of empire overawed the subject peoples.  There was nothing which
could oppose them in the underworld.  Their crews were apart from
the earth dwelling races, made distinct by the ecstasy of the high
air they breathed, by a culture and poetry of their own fully
intelligible only to the air-dwellers.  Lifted up by pride and
united by a spirit which seemed almost a new manifestation of
cosmic consciousness, they regarded themselves less as servants
of the empire than as acting under a mandate from Heaven to keep
the peace of the world.  Their vision of earth was wide and
etherealized, for there were no frontiers to the realm they traveled
in.  Their isolation begot dreams disdainful of the differences
between races.  A world empire was the only politic which harmonized
with their mood, and they were ruthless in suppression of revolt in
territories whose people remembered an ancient sovereignty over
themselves.  Nothing exasperates the spirit in man more than power
which seems unconquerable and which makes impotent all protest.
One of the  prisoners cursed bitterly.  But with Lavelle, the poet
in him made him for an instant almost traitor to his nation, stirred
as he was by that vision of the culmination of human power soaring
above the planet.  The problem of the interpretation of cosmic
consciousness raised by Leroy recurred to him.  Was his sense of an
infinity in his emotion a criterion of truth, or was that antiquity
true that might indicated right?  Did the long overflow of power
through centuries into the organism of empire reveal a harmony with
cosmic purpose?  Or was that vast being in which all life germinated
as indifferent to the creatures which became in it as the night
which enveloped the passionate city in an even calm?  The thinkers
of his time had divined an all-pervading element by which life
seemed to be manifested.  By it everything was born.  Thought and
desire by it were translated into deed and energy.  It lay between
the seed and the corn, between the germ and the fulfilled being.
It seemed to vitalize the good and the bad indifferently.  As a
child equally pleased by flower or glittering serpent, so this
omnipotent child seemed to delight equally in bringing to birth
monstrous and beautiful forms in nature.  That miraculous element
withheld itself from nothing which desired manifestation in nature
or man.  To some, like the poet, it gave the vision of beauty, and
to others, to those who floated so high in the aether, it gave
almost an omnipotence of power.  He felt how frail were his dreams
for such a battle as he was engaged in;  as frail as clouds cast
aside like smoke from the prow of an aerial cruiser.  Turning away
with bitterness in his heart he was aware of Leroy by his side.

"Leroy," he said, "I understand the stories of men who sold
themselves to a devil.  There are powers which seem as if they
would be overcome only by super-natural power.  What forces can
we summon up to deliver us from these?"

"Well by our death we may become supernatural beings ourselves,
and so assail our conquerors with legions of spirits.  The primitive
believed he absorbed the spirit of the savage he killed and added
its force to his own, which perhaps meant that he felt the foe
within himself fighting beyond death.  Most of our comrades are
quite savage enough to continue fighting in that way."

"Leroy, I can find no comfort in fantasies.  Can you, in the
evolution of world forces, foresee what may bring about the
downfall of power such as we see yonder in the sky?  We could not
submit to it.  We took the only way we knew.  We die and go out.
Yet I feel there must be a way even in this world by which right
may find its appropriate might.  If there be no way we are only
struggling against the nature of things."

"I think a revolt so widespread in the world must shake them even
up yonder in their heaven, and I do not believe the influence of
the dead on the living is altogether a fantasy.  The victors in
great wars have always been spiritually defeated by the conquered.
Rome came to be dominated by Greek culture, and in the world war
some centuries ago the last vengeance of the dying German Empire
on its conquerors was to imprint on them its own characteristics.
Your poetry and Brehon's History will be favorite studies in
imperial circles in a few years."

The poet smiled but faintly.  He was one of those who suffer on
behalf of their nation that agony which others feel over personal
misfortunes.  He pursued his meditation dreamily.  Why did the
Earth spirit inspire so many millions of its children in such
contrary ways?  Could a cosmic plan be divined amid these opposites?
Had Earth any dream of a culmination of her humanity, or was there
some trouble in the heavenly house, a division of purpose among
gods?  He might himself soon be absorbed into that being, and in
the light of that new dawn of consciousness his thoughts were less
about his own race and its immediate problems than about ultimates.
He might have pursued this obscure meditation further, only the
door opened, and two figures appeared in the doorway, their faces
dark and undistinguishable against the light beyond.  They were
thrust in by the guards and the door again closed.  Out of the
shadow one of the newcomers, a huge figure of a man, came forward.
The red light through a window fell upon him and a cry of dismay
broke from the prisoners.  "Oh, it is Culain! Culain!" and they
crowded about the man by whose influence the workers of the nation
had been brought to take part in the revolt.





V.


The figure which emerged from the shadowy into the red air was
massive, noble, and simple.  It might have stood for an adept of
labor or avatar of the Earth spirit incarnated in some grand
laborer to inspire the workers by a new imagination of society.
To the workers this Culain appeared an almost superhuman type of
themselves, a clear utterer of what in them was inarticulate.
That deep, slow, thrilling voice myriads had listened to as the
voice of their own souls.  It affected Lavelle strangely as it
came, the one thing firm and tranquil, out of the excited mass of
prisoners.  Every figure in that group was momentarily changing in,
a moth-like flickering from pale to dark caused by the leaping of
flame or rolling of smoky clouds over the city.  Everything appeared,
unreal, the room itself, face, limb, body, mass, all that the
imagination normally rested upon as solid seemed vague and thin as
dream.  Only that deep voice seemed real as if it was the undisturbed
voice of immortality.

"No! No!" that deep voice was saying.  "It is not over.  It is only
beginning.  It is an earth movement.  All that will topple from the
sky before it is over."  And he waved a hand towards the glittering
menace in the air.

"But we have no sky craft of our own!"

"If the roots deny sap the leaves fall from the tree.  They have
the air now but we have the earth.  We are not using violence.  We
deny labor.  Every tributary which fed them with power ceases to
flow from today.  For a while they may rain death, but they must
descend and be as we are."

"I wish I could believe that," cried one.  "But their power comes
from sources beyond our control."

"This is not a revolt of two or three nations.  It is a revolt of
humanity.  To you it may be a rebellion of your nation.  To us it
is a revolution.  The workers of the world have dreamed towards
this for centuries.  They are organized and know now their own
power and their own hearts.  They wish nations to be free, but
they wish more to be free themselves.  We would not be in this
struggle merely to exchange world masters for nation masters.  The
workers will have no master except their own collective will.  All
who have tried to raise humanity from above have only pressed more
weightily on those below.  Those who are beneath life alone can
raise life.  Tomorrow no ships will leave harbor.  No wagons will
carry on land.  The air will soon be empty.  The armies will starve
if they fight.  Our terms of peace are the surrender of the world
to the workers of the world."

Here indeed was vaster trouble than the prisoners had planned, or
imagined possible, though they might have known that never did one
wild power awaken in the world but its kinsmen followed fast as
the wild riders follow one another in the vision of St. John.

"It is a new tyranny," muttered Leroy.

"I am with it," cried Rian the artist.  "We will make something
out of this old world after all.  Culain, I will design the most
wonderful cities for you if we ever get out of this.  We will build
palaces for everybody.  I have always hated designing houses for
the rich.  It seemed like the sin of simony, selling beautiful
imaginations for money.  We artists built first for the gods and
we did our best work for them.  Since then we have built for the
Caesars, the aristocracies, and the oligarchies, and our work was
worse with every change of masters.  To work for the world will,
be like working for the gods again."

"The more masters you have the worse will it be," growled Leroy.

"Cannot you see the majestic things harmony of effort makes possible,
old grumbler that you are?" said Rian.  "I have looked at the remains
of the Parthenon, and have sat for days brooding over the ruins of
temples in Egypt.  The people who saw such beauty and magnificence
must have been proud and uplifted in heart.  However mean their
original nature they lived in an atmosphere of greatness.  That
divine architecture must have colored their thought as a sunset
makes everything in harmony with its own light.  If the empire had
created beauty I might have been with it.  I am afraid I could
always be bribed by fairy gold.  But it cannot create.  It can only
suppress.  It multiplies images of stupidity everywhere.  Beauty
is flying from the gray cities and the mean streets where people
live out their lives.  If this continues humanity will grow gray
and ugly as the world it lives in.  We will forget what beauty means.
It will be a word with lost meanings like the Etruscan inscriptions.
You are frightened at the idea of any kind of state as a mouse is
of a trap.  Such oppression as we live under I will revolt against
with you.  But I have imagination of a state of another character.
You are so much an individualist that you speak as if every man
was a distinct species of being by himself, that no harmonious
action was possible, and we were all as apart in character from
each other as the lion is from the tiger."

"We are really much more distinct from each other than animals of
different species are,"' Leroy retorted.  "One law for the lion
and the tiger would not be oppression.  They have the same appetites.
The lion and the tiger go one path to the pool to drink and to the
same covert to stalk the same prey.  Our souls drink from a pool
deeper and wider than ocean.  You and I see different eternities.
We have the universe to roam in, in imagination.  It is our virtue
to be infinitely varied.  The worst tyranny is uniformity."

"Do you conceive of that being within you as indefinite in character
and purpose?" a quiet voice behind Leroy made question.  Lavelle,
Rian, and Leroy turned.  They saw a tall, slightly stooping man,
white-haired, a face aquiline and eager, the dark eyes with fire
in them which turned from one to another indicating unabated
intellectual vigor.  It was the prisoner who had entered behind
Culain, but who had been overlooked in the excitement caused by
the entrance of so notable a personality.  The name of the newcomer
was familiar to all, but Lavelle alone recognized the historian of
the nation.  "How do you come to be here, sir?" he asked.  "You
were not in our councils, though you are the father of us all."

"Well, since you young men made a bible of my history, our rulers
seem to think it is better I should be out of the way while the
trouble you created continues."

"People think the state obtains information by incredibly secret
methods," said Leroy.  "I believe it occupies itself in an incredibly
unintelligent study of popular journals.  It is sufficient for it
to find a name there associated with a thing to warrant arrest.
But after all it only anticipates. If its prisoners are not guilty
before arrest they are ready to join any conspiracy afterwards."

"I shall not regret my loss of liberty," said the newcomer.  "I
am sure I would hear nothing so interesting without these walls
as I shall hear within them."

Fifty years before, when national sentiment appeared almost extinct,
Brehon, then a young man, proposed to himself to write the history
of his country, and in the labor of twenty years he had unveiled
so extraordinary a past, so rich a literature in a language almost
forgotten, that his work became an object of passionate study by
his countrymen, and what had been intended almost as a funeral
oration or panegyric over a dead nation had the effect of rekindling
it, and it came forth, young and living from its grave.  The
historian had been followed by creative writers like Lavelle, in
whom the submerged river of nationality again welled up shining and
life-giving.  The Youth of the nation bathed in it, washing from
their souls the grime of empire, its mechanical ideals, and the
characterless culture it had imposed on them.  But after his
history appeared the historian seemed to take no interest in the
great movement he had inspired.  He became absorbed in more abstruse
studies, the nature of which was known to but few among his countrymen.

"I have for a long time thought revolutions spring from other than
the ostensible causes to which they are attributed, though these
may seem adequate.  Even in the moments I have been here I have
heard reference to principles which are not commonly discussed.
You," said the historian, addressing Leroy, "were explaining some
political ideal as being an extension of a spiritual concept."

"Oh, if the people fighting without there had only known the ideas
Lavelle and Leroy discuss among themselves, there would have been
no revolt," said Rian.  "They would not have understood what their
leaders were talking about.  The room before you came in was less
like a prison for rebels than an academy of philosophers discussing
what relation the politics of time had to the politics of eternity."

"Could we not continue that discussion and try to discover whether
political emotions are not in reality spiritual emotions?" asked
the historian.  "The poets and lovers before Plato traced the divine
ancestry of love, and other emotions have been related by the mystics
to divine originals.  Yet political emotions, which are as profound
as any, and are powerful enough to draw the lover away from love,
are not made sacred by association with an Oversoul.  Historical
and objective origins are attributed to passions deep and absorbing
as those evoked by great religions.  We shall not sleep here tonight,
I fancy;  and how could we employ the hours better than by each
telling as between himself and Heaven what imagination about society
brought him to consider his imagination more important than life?"

"As between myself and Heaven," said Rian, "I believe I desired
passionately to build the palaces and cities of dream here on the
earth, and I wanted the prophets of beauty like Lavelle to prepare
the way in people's souls.  I never peered inside myself except to
search for unearthly compounds of stone and mortar.  But Lavelle
and Leroy have probed deeper things in their being.  Lavelle will
tell us what brought him from dream to action.  We cannot spend
the night better.  Tell us, Lavelle, how the national idea turned
a poet into a fighter.  You were moved, I know, by impulses you
never uttered to the crowds you inspired.  I suspect you talked,
like Moses, to gods upon the mountains."





VI.


"Where else," answered Lavelle, "but on lone earth or mountain
come inspiration, and how but by divine visitations, whisperings
and breathings from the dark were nations inspired?  Every race,
Greek, Egyptian, Hindu, or Judaean, whose culture moves us deeply,
looked back to divine origins.  My  belief in such inspirations has,
I confess, been more I to me than the thoughts  about the nation I
have shared with others.  But I do not know if I can make clear
reasons for my belief in an oversoul guiding and inspiring our
people.  You will agree, I think, that we do not bring about
revolutions because of the few people we may know personally.  We
do so because of the millions we do not know.  And I think it is
true also that we are stirred less by the ideas we make clear to
ourselves than by the myriad uncomprehended ideas and forces which
pour on us and through us, which are hardly intelligible to ourselves,
which we cannot rationalize, but which give us impulse, direction,
and the sensation of fullness of being."

"I guess what you mean," said Rian.  "I rarely designed a building
without imagination creating a city in harmony with it, and from
this piling up of fanciful cities in the imagination comes the
inspiration for the single house."

"Do you see the buildings in your imaginary city clearly?"
asked Lavelle.

"I do in part.  Sometimes I can see the sun shining on architrave,
carving, or pillar, casting clear-cut shadows.  This I think strange
and wonder how it all was born in me.  I often feel a mere craftsman
employed by a supernatural architect to carry out a few of his
prodigal designs."

"You believe," Brehon asked of Lavelle, "these intuitions about
the nation have their origin in a being which has an organic life
of its own, just as the half-perceived buildings of imagination
with him give the sense they are really complete like a city in
the heavens before he becomes aware of them?"

"Yes, I think that is a parallel.  But Rian, for all his vision
of cities, would find it difficult to draw in detail one after
another the buildings he surmises in that architectural atmosphere
around the one building he concentrates on.  It is no less difficult
for me to give substance to a multitude of feelings, which, if I
pass them through a filter of words, will not sound like planetary
murmurs, though I feel they come out of the soul of the world.  I
will try, however, to isolate some of these moods and interpret
them.  I feel it is easier now to do this because here we are, it
may be, in the antechamber of death where unrealities are rare
visitors.  Here I find the thoughts I shared with others fade in
power and the spiritual concept of nationality alone remains with me."

"I think we shall have some light on the problem how theocratic
states were born," said Leroy. "Lavelle is an antique."

"It is a long history, beginning when I was a boy," said the poet,
who accepted the ironical comment of his friend with good nature.
"You remember, Rian, our holiday among the mountains?  One day you
wished to climb to the top of the hill, and I would not, and you
went on and for hours I was alone.  But as I lay on the hillside
I was no longer solitary, but smitten through and through with
another being, and I knew it was the earth, and it was living,
and its life was mingling with my own.  Some majesty was shining
on me all the day, nodding at me behind the veil of light and air,
or playing hide and seek within the shade, or it was in me as a
spirit beseeching love from my own.  It seemed older than life,
yet younger and nigher to me than my own boyhood.  I lay there
drenched in the light and all the while imagination, as a cloud
which wanders between the Earth and Heaven, was wandering between
my transience and some immortal youth.  I can remember that magical
day.  I can see the white sun blinding the sky, and light in
dazzling cataracts outpoured and foam from cloud to cloud, and
the earth glow beneath an ocean of light with purple shaded valleys,
and lakes that mirrored back the burning air, and woods vaporous
as clouds along the hills, and jutting crags, and mountains hewn
in pearl, all lustrous as dream images and all remote as dream.
Earth had suffused its body with its soul, and I lay on the mountain
side clinging to it in a passion.  When Rian came down I heard his
voice beside me as from an immense distance calling me back to
myself;  and I was irritated by his coming for I wanted to be
alone with that spirit which had found me."  "Oh, I know," groaned
Leroy.  "If nature catches the soul young it is lost to humanity."

"No, no, the Earth spirit does not draw us aside from life.  How
could that which is father and mother of us all lead us to err
from the law of our being?"

"The earth may be our mother," retorted Leroy, "'but I am sure it
is not our father.  We get intellect from something beyond planets
or sun."

"Be quiet, Leroy," said Rian, "we will hear your reasons for
revolution later.  I am sure they will be the maddest of all,
though Lavelles political  thinking appears to me to begin in
very abstract regions."

"No, there are the true realities," cried the poet.  "Abstractions
begin when we get away from the Earth spirit, which has begotten us.
Out of it have come plant; animal and man--all real things.  Do plant
and animal arrange their own evolution?  Does the flower dream its
own color and scent?  Does the bee devise its own wings or the
polity of the hive?  Are we less exempt from that dominion over our
ways?  Since I was born some wisdom, never sleeping though I slept,
was in me, and cell by cell I was fashioned and woven together and
over my making I had no control.  We dwell in the house of the body
but its perfection and intricate life are the work of a wisdom which
never relaxes dominion over a single cell.  I believe that wisdom
is within the soul to guide it.  It is ready at every instant to
declare to us the evolutionary purpose.  It has planned for us a
polity as it has planned for the bee the polity of the hive.  We
are higher than plant or animal.  We can be conscious co-workers
with the spirit of nature.  We fall into unreal fantasy or thin
abstraction when we think apart from it.  We are empty as a vessel
turned down-ward which fills itself only with air.  If we think
with the Earth spirit our souls become populous with beauty, for
we turn the cup of our being to a spring which is always gushing.

"The Earth spirit speaks with one voice to you on your mountain
and with another voice to some solitary in a desert in Araby."

"The Earth spirit throws itself into innumerable forms of life,"
answered Lavelle.  "Did you expect it to make its children all of
one pattern?  For every race its own culture.  Every great
civilization, I think, had a deity behind it, or a divine shepherd
who guided it on some plan in the cosmic imagination.  'Behold,'
said an ancient oracle, 'how the Heavens glitter with intellectual
sections.'  These are archetypal images we follow dimly in
our evolution."

"How do you conceive of these powers as affecting civilization?"

"I believe they incarnate in the race:  more in the group than in
the individual;  and they tend to bring about an orchestration of
the genius of the race to make manifest in time their portion of
eternal beauty.  So arises that unity of character which existed
in the civilization of Egypt or Attica, where art, architecture,
and literature were in such harmony that all that is best seems
almost the creation of one myriad-minded artist."

"But," said the indefatigable Leroy, "your world spirit does not
merely inspire variety of civilization in Greece, Egypt, or China,
it inspires individuals in the same country to work in contrary
directions.  How do you distinguish among varieties of national
ideals those which have the divine signature from the rest?  How
do you thus distinguish your inspirations from those of my Dark
Angel?"  It was as a Dark Angel Leroy wrote his fantasies.

"It is difficult to answer you," said Lavelle, "and if there was
a general certainty in human thought I might be regarded as foolish
to risk life because of momentary illuminations.  But to all of us
life is a mystery, and we are like Columbus who was encouraged to
venture further on the unraveled seas because he saw a single leafy
branch floating on the water.  We likewise dare all things if we
hear a horn blown from some height of being and remember that some
who lived before us reported that they too heard that horn.  We
have control over the work of our hands but little over the working
of the soul.  But yet we must yield to it, for without it we have
nothing.  You or I may write something and others will say of it
that there is a mastery over our art;  or Rian may design a building
all will applaud for its beauty;  but the fountains of thought or
vision are not under our control.  If vision ceased suddenly with
you or me how could we regain it?  If ideas did not well up
spontaneously from some deep none of us would know how to trap them,
so far beyond conscious life is the true begetter of thought or
vision.  We would appear to ourselves to have no real being but for
the continuity of character of the ideas which well up within us.
Because of this continuity and harmony we infer some being out of
which they arise.  I have come by a round-about way to answer your
question.  As it is by the continuity of character in our ideas we
infer a soul in ourselves, so it is by continuity and harmony of
inspiration in a race we distinguish those inspirations which come
from the national genius from ideas which are personal.  I came but
slowly myself to see these distinctions, for many years passed before
imagination and feeling passed into vision and I began to see in
that interior light figures which enchanted me with their beauty.
These were at first mythological in character and I could not connect
them with anything in the world.  Then I read the history of our
nation, and I was excited by that tale which began among the gods,
and from history I turned to literature, and it was then I knew the
forms I had seen in vision had been present to the ancestors
thousands of years ago, and ever since they had been in the
imagination of the poets.  I felt the continuity of national
inspiration, that the same light was cast upon generation after
generation just as the lamp in that high window casts a steadfast
glow and shape on the smoke which hurries past," and he pointed to
the ruddy coilings of smoke which flowed by a high building beyond
the square.

"What do you mean when you describe forms as mythological in character?"

"There are certain figures which appear continually in our
literature, spoken of as a divine folk, apparitions of light
taller than human, riding on winged horses, or shining musicians
circled by dazzling birds, or queens bearing branches with blossoms
of light or fruit from the world of immortal youth, all moving in
a divine aether.  These were messengers of the gods and through
these came about that marriage of Heaven and Earth in our literature
which made it for long centuries seem almost the utterance of a
single voice.  These divine visitations have been the dominant
influence in our literature so that our poets have sung of their
country as the shadow of Heaven.  The hills were sacred, the woods
were sacred, and holy too were the lakes and rivers because of that
eternal beauty which was seen behind them as the flame is seen
within the lamp.  Political thought with us too has been more
inspired by the national culture than by the economic needs which
almost completely inspire political activity elsewhere.  But why
should I try to convince you of the reality of national character?
Has it not been noted by all who come to us?  If we had not been
restrained by alien power from control over our own destiny we would
have manifested the national genius in a civilization of our own
and it would have been molded nearer to the divine polity.  While
all can see the unity of mood and character I am perhaps alone among
you here, though not alone in the nation, in believing it comes from
the soul of the world.  Such beliefs are perhaps above proof, though
we may know the truth after tomorrow's sun has set, falling back
into that fountain from which we came."





VII.


"I fail to see Leroy a harmonious bee in the divine hive," said
Rian slyly glancing at that personality.  "I remember a temple
wall in Egypt all solemn with immemorial forms, and some ribald
ancient had scrawled a comic crocodile upon it.  Leroy would be a
creator of comic crocodiles in your scheme of things, Lavelle.  I
am trying to imagine him the slave of the inner light.  But--" he
broke off laughing.

The other was intellectually indignant.  "I am the slave of the
inner light," he said.  "But I do not wish to be the slave of the
inner Lavelle.  I do not know why you delight to see everywhere
the echo of a single mood.  I take joy in Lavelle's imagination,
in yours, and in all free imagination, but you desire to impose
your dream on others.  I, if I met a man with imagination like my
own, would turn my back on him.  I believe the emanations of all
creatures are poisonous to themselves."

"Well, I am with Lavelle.  There could be no place for my art in
the world without the aid of others.  Architects by themselves do
not build cities.  Nor would we continue imagining a beauty which
could never be manifested.  This must also be true of statesmen.
They could not go on with the noble labor of civilization unless
there was to be harmonious effort among many to bring it about."'

"An idea may be heaven inspired, but is the will to enforce it by
violence part of the inspiration?" the historian asked of Lavelle.

"Every idea which arises in the heaven world of consciousness must
ally itself with an appropriate force if it is to be born in this
world.  When we devise anything for ourselves our thought allies
itself with force to move the body, and in carrying out what we
devise we must often suppress energies and passions which would
impel the body to contrary action.  So the national genius, if it
is to move the body politic, must ally itself with force to overbear
what is hostile to it.  How else can right find its appropriate
might?  How could national genius create a civilization if an alien
power controls the economic and cultural activities of the people,
if it substitutes in youth a mongrel culture for the national
culture?  How but by force can the nation free itself from a power
which has taken the sceptre from it, which has killed its noblest
children and broken up its laws?  Now, being in peril, it would
force us to fight for it, to fight for the power which enslaves us.
So," added Lavelle bitterly, "might a man who had violated a woman,
on the ground of this enforced intimacy expect the woman to sacrifice
herself for him ever afterwards."

"You spoke of a mongrel culture.  Did you mean an alien culture only,
or had you another meaning?  Do you contend for the superiority of
the culture of our nation over the culture of all other races?"

"Could we argue for the superiority of poet over musician and
having decided this ask poet or musician to express themselves in
the superior art?  No, we realize that natural aptitudes are not
interchangeable, and each person must of biological or spiritual
necessity practice the art for which he is fitted.  If there be a
true national culture it is best for the nation.  It associates
what is manifested with what is yet unmanifested in the soul of
the country, and tends to draw down from heaven to earth a complete,
embodiment of the divine idea.  I feel it to be true about poetry
that it is born in the dream consciousness and made perfect there
before it enters the waking consciousness.  If a verse or even a
line I think beautiful sounds in my brain, I know that by brooding
upon it.  I can draw down the complete poem.  I think in the same
way when we brood on what is beautiful in the dream of the
ancestors we attract out of the deeps of being all beauty which
is akin to it.  But to argue about the abstract superiority of
cultures would be to enter upon a futile controversy like an
argument between ants and bees over their civilizations, as if
those who had the worst of the argument could change their species."

"Yet there are no biological distinctions between men such as
divide ants from bees.  The literature of other races we understand
as we do our own.  Nothing which is human can be alien to humanity."

"We can draw inspiration from other races, but their culture can
never be a substitute for our own," said Lavelle.  "The wisdom of
others is full of danger, for we may lose what is ours and break
up our natural mould of mind.  A Chaldaean oracle uttered a warning
against changing the ancient names of evocation in a country
because such had a power affixed to them by the mind of the Father.
A national culture evokes by association of ideas a thousand moods
which an alien culture, however noble, cannot evoke because the
symbols and forces referred to are not always present in us.  If
all wisdom was acquired from without it might be politic for us
to make our culture cosmopolitan.  But I believe our best wisdom
does not come from without, but arises in the soul and is an
emanation from the earth spirit, a voice speaking directly to us
dwellers in this land.  We are among the few races still remaining
on earth whose traditions run back to the gods and the divine
origin of things.  There have been men in every generation who
have seen through earth as through a colored transparency into the
world of which this is a  shadow.  Hence it comes that our land,
the earth underfoot, is holy ground.  In the earliest mythological
tales the sacred mountains, lakes, and rivers are named.  And why
were they sacred?  Because there, as on Sinai, men spake with
divinities;  or, starting hence, they were visitors to the Country
of Immortal Youth, and returning reported of it that it was not
far off but near and it was accessible to all of us.  Even where
the literature is unread something of the tradition remains with
the peasant, and at times he has vision so that he sees in waste
places the blaze of supernatural palaces, and people look out
upon him with eyes which are brighter than human.  He broods on
such things, and in dream he visits the world he broods on, and
there arises from this a commingling of natures, and a certainty
about spiritual things, and the soul follows a true path and is
not led into the maya of abstractions.  I know there are few now
who travel on the primeval highways of being, and they have become
tangled byways for most, and are rarely traveled, but still the
way to those who walk in light is known and I would preserve what
remains of knowledge so that we may continue to draw from out our
own well of wisdom.  In countries where they have lost the primeval
consciousness of unity with the earth spirit they either have no
mythology and cosmogony and thought is materialistic, or else they
go to Greek or Jew for their spiritual culture.  So distant lands
are made sacred, but not the air they breathe;  not the earth
underfoot.  A culture so created has rarely deep roots, for its
is derivative, and nobody can climb into heaven by its aid, and
it is of such cultures I spoke as mongrel.  We find something false
even in the greatest masterpieces of such literature.  We admire
the grandiose style of Milton, but feel his heaven-world is rootless
and unreal and not very noble phantasy.  We wander in such literature
into many palaces of the soul where there are no windows looking out
into eternity, and their beauty at last becomes a weariness to us,
for we seem for ever to be imprisoned in personal phantasy, and we
come to think there is nothing but individual life and the race
drops out of the divine procession.

"The roots of your being seem remote from humanity, Lavelle, though
I have heard you move crowds as deeply as Culain.  Your heart, I
think, you use only on public occasions, but privately its
temperature seems a little Arctic."

"Were we not to discuss our ideals as between ourselves and Heaven
and the relation of our politics to the politics of eternity?"
Lavelle defended himself.

"I have tried to make clear to you where I think the Spirit breathed
in the deeps of my being and what ideas of our destiny arose in me.
I do not think I am unconcerned, about the quality of human life.
Why am I here?  Why did I take a part in this revolt?  I saw a
spiritual culture being extinguished and a materialistic and ignoble
culture being imposed on us to the degradation of human life.  I
believe humanity divine at its root.  Out of this root comes beauty,
intellect, imagination, and will.  Out of this was born everything
we adore in humanity.  The heroes of our own race, all those we hold
in our memory, had this half divine character.  They were transparent
to spirit.  Though I believe with the apostle if we find the Kingdom
of Heaven within ourselves everything else will come to us, yet if
I had to build up a social order and could not wait for the slow
evolution I would begin it with consideration for the poorest first
and I would have Culain as my architect."

The Socialist leader, a huge figure half hidden in shadow, had been
listening with head bent as if brooding doubtfully over ideas remote
from his own but which came by long detours to a sudden harmony
in action.  He lifted up his head as if he was about to speak, but
out of the silence which followed Lavelle's words there came a
disdainful voice.

"All this is very well in poetry.  Our wives and daughters may
read such things in pretty books.  But what a basis for world
politic!  Such imaginations as these may allure romantic boys and
girls, but Nature does not endow them with vitality. The tribal
communities are gone behind time irrevocably and are like fossils
in human memory."

The prisoners peered into the shadow.  The voice came from Heyt,
the president of the great air federation who had been so strangely
thrust into their company.  The world state was here to defend
itself from its rebels.




VIII.


The disdainful voice went on, "You are intellectuals, in your
political thinking like those mathematicians who pursue the
elements beyond aether into mathematical space, and when their
calculations are worked out are unable to find the material
analogue of the result.  You have lost relation to the body
politic, and political thinking apart from an organism is futile.
The intention of Nature is seen in the forms it creates and not
in the dreams of its creatures.  The kid which hears a lion
roaring may desire limbs of a colossus and a neck powerful to
toss like the rhinoceros, but does Nature therefore enlarge its
stature?  You cry out against the world state which Nature has
made like the lion, but the will of the world soul is seen in
the organisms it endows with power.  The might of an organism is
a measure of its rightness, for no organism could grow to power
through centuries maintaining itself against the evolutionary
purpose.  The upholding of a regional ideal is like the display
of a ruined house inhabited by a few shadowy ghosts.  If Nature
was with your thought it would have bestowed power on it, but the
world soul has decreed the world state."

"That decree," an angry voice protested, "if ever was made, is
now annulled in this city and over the world," and there was
a clamor of prisoners repudiating Heyt's interpretation of
cosmic purpose.

"Our discussion would be unprofitable," said the historian finally,
"if it became merely controversial as to the outcome of the present
conflict.  Our fellow-prisoner was explaining why as between himself
and Heaven he is for a world empire.  Should we not listen to him
also, for, if fire falls on this city from the sky ships, he may
be a fellow-traveler with us to the great Original, and I think
myself in every dream and hope of man there is some story of the
glory of that King."

"Well," said Leroy, "I am ready to hear any politic discussed.  It
would be one of the finest ironies of life if he converted any, and
they were brought out to die for the nation having just become
initiates of the empire.  Go on, sir," he said to Heyt.  "I
represent individual as you collective humanity.  Perhaps our
extremes may meet."

"How does this power enter the organism of empire?" the historian
asked of the imperialist.  "An avalanche gathers power as it slides
down the mountain, and a man may gather power momentarily from the
summoning up of the baser passions of his nature.  You will admit
power may be generated in many ways, but you, in your use of the
word, implied purpose and an overflow from the world soul."

"I find the design of Nature in the organisms which have birth in
it, and from the energy which fills them I divine their future
development,"  Heyt made answer.  "The power I spoke of does not
lie in the generation of mechanical force but in the minds which
organize control.  Nor do I think the intellectual power which
comprehends natural law and uses cosmic forces low in the scale
of human faculties.  There are many with such wisdom in the service
of the world state.  Why?  Because their science has revealed to
them the unity of law and the harmony of power which make the
universe a solidarity, and their politic is to make this unity
self-conscious in humanity.  Minds with this idea leap to each
other as atoms of the same element leap to each other in the
chemistry of nature.  I felt what I believe to be cosmic
consciousness stirring in myself and others when organizing unity
of control in the many fleets which had roamed the air.  Before
that each had brought into an element with no frontiers petty
ideas of nationality born in regions bounded by hill, river, or
sea.  What place has nationality in the  limitless sky, and yet
the little nations, if permitted, would proclaim territorial rights
in the aether up to the infinite.  The cosmic consciousness
manifests in the world state and to it these tribal distinctions
are invisible."

"If you get at a sufficient distance from Earth," said the ironical
Leroy  "it also will disappear and need not be considered.  At
present altitudes only humanity is invisible."

"Humanity has heights and depths which are invisible to each other.
It is possible the heights may seem inhuman to the depths," retorted
Heyt, equally ironical.

Leroy persisted, "Lavelle interprets cosmic consciousness in a sense
contrary to you.  I think you both err.  I heard a street orator
zealous for souls interpreting cosmic consciousness in his own
fashion:  'In that last dreadful day,' he cried, 'God will flout at
you.  He will point His finger at you.  He will say, "Ha! ha!"  You
had your chance.  You would not take it.  Now you will go to Hell!"
You and Lavelle are more dignified.  You do not create Deity in the
image of the corner boy.  But are you less anthropomorphic in your
conceptions?  You justify the molding of humanity to your will by
imperialism in the heavens.  I believe in the intensive cultivation
of human life and think the cosmic purpose is seen in the will of
myself and others to be individual and free.  The cosmic consciousness
I conceive to be an autocracy gradually resolving itself into a
democracy of free spirits.  You would make me the slave of a light
I do not see, a law I do not know.  How is cosmic consciousness to
be recognized when it can be so variously interpreted?"

"The interpretation," said Heyt, "which is most in consonance with
Nature has first claim to consideration.  To men of science the
universe is demonstrably under the dominion of unalterable and
inflexible law.  And it can be sustained in argument that
apprehension of that law is the only light of cosmic consciousness
in man.  I perceive you hold democratic ideas, but where in Nature
do you find traces of democracy to justify you in surmising it in
supernature?  Do you suppose the heavenly host is a democracy and
planetary affairs are arranged in council as with men in some
petty commune?  If you think so argue it out with the mathematicians."

Every one in this age sought for the source and justification of
their own activities in that divine element in which matter, energy,
and consciousness when analyzed disappeared.  It was an era of arcane
speculation, for science and philosophy had become esoteric after
the visible universe had been ransacked and the secret of its being
had eluded the thinkers.  Heyt was high in the councils of the world
state.  On such men as upon deities converged all the forces of
protest, and to them also came all that was to be said in support
of state policy by the thinkers who, as priesthoods have always done,
supported established authority.  The prisoners were irritated by
his tone as of one speaking from an immense height, who could with
difficulty discern the ideas stirring in the world beneath him.  But
the historian in his endeavor to relate political moods to their
spiritual ancestry went on.

"To perceive law in Nature does not of necessity lead to the
conception of a world state.  Where do you get natural or
supernatural justification for your denial of freedom of evolution
to so many millions?  On what truth do you rely to balance all that
curbing of life?"

"On the unity of Nature," was Heyt's answer.  "Has not our science
tracked the elements back to one primordial substance, and the
forces operating in Nature to one fountain?  Our science in its
theory and practice is based on these conceptions.  Our politic in
its theory and practice rests also on these fundamental unities.
Through the world state humanity moves upwards to its source and
becomes conscious of its own majesty.

"It is the begetter of very bad art," interrupted Rian.  "I
refuse to believe there can be truth in the spirit which does
not create beauty."

"When the building is well built we may think about the decoration."

"Beauty is not decoration.  If it is not in the design, if it is
not laid with the foundation stone, it will never be in the
completed edifice.  Where there is no beauty there is no spiritual
authority.  You shall not rule us with that story until the words
you cry even in wrath break in a foam of beauty on the ear."

"Possibly," said Heyt scornfully, "you are mourning so much over
the ruins which must be removed that the design of the world state
is to you invisible.  I have no doubt the scrub which withers under
the shadow of a great tree can see no shapeliness in the strength,
which pushes it aside and denies it sunlight.  But the decay beneath
fertilizes the forest.  Nature works the material into higher forms.
The world state will absorb its romantics and transmute emotion
into wisdom.  The change of phase is inevitable as the change from
childhood to manhood."

"How can the state be an organism in the sense that I am?" cried
Leroy.  "Is there anything affecting simultaneously its disconnected
cells?  With us the cells are knit and thrill together.  In what
sense other than mere metaphor is the world state an organism at all?"

"The state is a true organism because its units exist in an element
which is the vehicle of emotion and thought, so that the units
vibrate together.  Have you never seen an orator by his magic make
one creature, of which he is head and heart, out of a thousand
people?  Is that unity only brought about by the words he utters?
Do we not know that as water is stained ruby by wine his passion
colors the element which bathes his audience so that they vibrate
in unison.  This is an internal or psychic unity, and by this they
become for the moment as much one being as you are.  The orator
creates a temporary unity.  The state creates an enduring unity.
Every state begins with some powerful personality more absorbent
than others of the element which is the source of power, and he
gathers myriads about him as an atom of crystal flung into a bath
draws to itself the atoms of that element in solution.  The
organism so created continues until a higher phase of consciousness
is reached, and humanity instinctively turns and regroups itself
about the higher power, realizing a profounder consciousness in the
contact.   Human evolution is the eternal revealing of the Self to
the selves.  In the ancient world the state had the character of
the most powerful person in it.  The state gradually becomes
impersonal through science and the comprehension of Nature whose
energies are becoming self-conscious in humanity.  Science now
sits in the seat of Caesar.  It is sustained in power because
through it life rises from ignorance to wisdom and it clings to
the revealer.  I do not think your revolution will shake the unity
of powerful minds which control human destiny through the world
state.  Your ideas are weeds growing in the fields of being and
they must be uprooted like weed."

Heyt paused for a moment and there was a certain grandeur about
him as he continued:

"I know that I am part of an organism lit up by a cosmic
consciousness which shall rule the world.  Humanity has yet to
be born from the world egg but it shall be born by the stirring
of cosmic consciousness through all its units.  It shall control
the elements and extend its dominion illimitably through Nature."

"He will next threaten to subdue the Ruler of Heaven!" cried Leroy
fascinated in spite of himself.

"Yes," said Heyt turning on him, "we may storm His Paradise!"





XI.


"With such ideas," said Leroy gaily, "you will hardly be welcome
in the Kingdom of Heaven.  Though I would myself cast out from
that majesty all souls who would wriggle in as worms and miserable
sinners, insulting Heaven by their abasement before it.  Here you
are an enchanting companion.  In prison you enlarge our imagination.
But you imprison our minds when you are free.  It is true the orator
may make a myriad replica of his own passion out of those who listen
to him.  But that does not prove he is right or they are not fools.
The state may create a more long enduring unity of mood among minions
but it does not prove that they are not being dehumanized.  They
become fractional elements in an organism rather than complete beings.
The more scientifically efficient is the organism you create the more
does it dominate the units and remake them in its own image, and when
has the mass ever risen to the level of the individual?  Though there
be one thousand millions in your world state does totality equal one
Shakespeare?  I am with Lavelle in the struggle for national freedom,
and if the nation wins I shall fight in it for the freedom of the
local community and for the greatest richness and variety in life.
Prove to me that your world state is a human organism, that the
law of its being is the law of my being:  let your multitude in
action give me the inspiration I receive when solitary, and I will
consider it."

"The culture of the individual!  What is that but images and
shadows of happenings in mighty states?"  retorted Heyt.  "The
very words you utter are sparks smitten from the anvil of
civilization, and there has been no civilization apart from the
highly organized state.  You speak of the law of your being.  Do
you know what is the law of your being?  You would probably have
denied thirty years ago the being you are today.  Is there any
law for you which is not the law of my being and of all being?
Only egomania demands consideration apart from the species.  You
speak as if the individual mind could be a mirror of infinity."

"It can," said Leroy calmly.

"It cannot be the channel of infinite power," said the other.  "If
the Absolute could have manifested itself and become self-conscious
in an individual would it have created multitudes?  The individual
will is not a magnet powerful enough to attract the mighty forces
which are becoming self-conscious in humanity.  Without these
energies operating in the human mind it would be in a state of
arrested development--be unable to transmute its vision into being."

"What," asked the old historian, "is the nature of the power you
speak of and how is it to be discerned apart from the individual
energies we are endowed with?"

"The energy of universal mind, the fountain of all the energies
in Nature," was Heyt's reply.  "It is this we discern in the
highest human intelligences and they are conscious of direction.
In the great laboratories of the state men seem at first to be
absorbed in special studies, but, when they confer later, they
find their special labors were only contributory to great
discoveries made in common and all had unconsciously worked to
one end.  We have come to believe every energy and element in
nature has intellectual guidance, and the human mind can enter
into relation with the mind in Nature.  We are passing beyond the
stage where scientist or inventor harnessed Nature energies
to a mechanism and tapped them for power.  We are nearing the
possibility of direct intellectual control of these Nature
energies through a growing comprehension of their relation to
their own intellectual guiders."

"It is not science sits in the seat of the Caesars," cried Leroy,
"but the magicians.  We are coming back in a spiral of three
thousand years to the rule of magician and astrologer!"

"The ancients," said Lavelle, "comprehended and used spiritual
powers, but your science only uses material energies.  The ancients
attained to a divine vision and saw beauty in its very essence
where you only lay hold of some force like electricity."

"If they indeed attained such a vision of the universe," said Heyt,
"it may have come by uniting their consciousness with the very force
you despise.  I believe this mighty force through all its correlations
and manifestations to be guided by intelligence, and that intelligence
is the artificer of the universe, of planet and atom, of state and
individual alike.  The more we understand its operations the more
does it enter into consciousness, and the cosmic will reinforces
our own.  We attain our fullest life by becoming its slaves, for
we can have no real being setting ourselves against the cosmic will."

"You conceive then of cosmic mind shaping world history, acting
by its intellectual energy on us through a hierarchy of powers and
intelligences, and using the world state as its vehicle because
it has widest ramifications?"  Brehon asked of Heyt.

"Yes. You may so state it."

"The design is to endow humanity with power transmitted from
higher to lower?"

"Of course as it is all Heaven inspired it is blasphemy of any
of us to question the wisdom of the interpreters of Heaven,"
cried Leroy raging.  "We know earth history even if we do not
know heavenly history.  A union of economic federations first
strangle national life, then they become international and create
world councils and at last dominate everything.  Then they discover
divine justification for autocratic rule.  It is all in the cosmic
plan!  You concentrate power in the hands of a few and assert you
are endowing all humanity with power and intellect."

"Intellect in any organism must act from some centre," said the
imperialist.  "I have not asserted the evolution of society is
complete.  The body of a child is first animated by childish
passions.  The being of the grown thinker finally is thrilled by
the majesty of law.  Humanity as a whole will finally absorb and
be moved by those powers which are now the heritage of a few.  The
power passes from mind to mind linking them by a common impulse or
will.  If there is revolt against the law the power will overcome
it or break it.  An allegory of this you may find in the tale of
the master who made a feast and invited all to it.  When they would
not come he sent out into the highways and byways and compelled
them with an iron hand.  The freedom you conceive of is a chimera.
You were born without your consent being asked.  Your body, as
another here has said, is shaped by a power beyond yourself and you
are in it as in a prison.  Only in a little nook in your brain you
nourish a fantastic conception of  freedom, while every cell in
your body, the air you breathe, the sounds you hear, the vision of
Nature you behold stir you with impulses beyond your control."

"I am not certain that I did not, like Ulysses in the Platonic
myth, choose my own body," said Leroy, "or that through the labor
of ages my spirit did learn how to build it.  And I am certain it
is not for another to dictate to me thought or action."

"You claim too much for the individual from the universe."

"You see too little of humanity for a ruler.  It is easy for you
to be slave to your own imagination, and you think it easy for
others to be slave to the same imagination, but your world state
will be broken upon myriads of wills as rooted in eternity as your
own, as passionate for freedom as mine."

"I believe," said Lavelle, "it will be broken by the national
will because it tries to blot out the past of nations and would
substitute an arid and inhuman science for the infinitely varied
cultures which had enriched the world. You train men to run a
machine efficiently but they cannot guide their own souls.  When
the labor of their day is over there is a riot of uncultivated
senses, Walpurgis nights where everything that is obscene or vulgar
meets undisciplined by any memory of beauty.  I count it the
greatest of tragedies for a man that he should suddenly lose memory
so that he could not recollect what songs were sung about his cradle,
or the dreams of his youth, or for what ideal he had labored.  And
your ideals have brought on many nations the greatest of spiritual
tragedies for they lose memory of their past and do not see the way
they came and by what unnumbered dreams they were led.  They lose
the beauty of poetry, the ennobling influence of heroic story;  and
the cavalcade which set out thousands of years before miss their
destiny and wander without spiritual guidance in a desert of
vulgarity.  We have rediscovered our ancient history, language,
and literature, our treasure-house or paradise of beautiful memories,
and we resume the pilgrimage to our own goal.  Other nations with
us revolt against the domination your world state would impose on
them.  The river of national life though submerged for a while
rises up again.  The momentum of a thousand ages, the character
and the deep life created cannot be destroyed in a generation."

"The future is as living in eternity as the  past," said Heyt.  "It
is destiny you oppose. Your revolt will not succeed.  Too many
myriads have been liberated from the tyranny of the past and the
narrow prison cells of its cultures which were but the heaping up
of fantastic and personal conception's.  The wisdom of Nature which
science reveals constitutes a true intellectual culture which knits
the whole earth together in a brotherhood with universal Nature.
Humanity can now speak one language.  Will it return to the past--
put on itself the ancient fetters of frontiers, tariffs, and
languages which hindered it from a realization of its myriad unity?
I do not think so.  Break, if you can, us who brought about a world
unity, but you will find you can only continue our work.  You must
pursue the science of power which has made the skies as native to
us as earth to our ancestors, which made unending airways in great
spaces, and thronged them with a life which but for us had crawled
beneath, or had its movements limited by regional rights.  You
speak of beauty as if it had perished because of our science, but
what beauty ever glimmered in the imagination to equal the vision
of earth made possible by our art?  You can leave this city at dawn
and see the sun set in the valley of Kashmir at night, and you can,
if you will, picnic meanwhile on the Mountains of the Moon.  Oh,
yes! to do this we trampled on a thousand prejudices, but we
created a magnificence of power earth has not before known.  You
see above you in air those who keep watch and ward for the world
state.  At a word they could destroy this city.  If they were
destroyed a thousand more could darken the day overhead for you
or illuminate your night.  What power can you invoke mighty enough
to overcome that power?"

"It will be overcome by pity;" came in answer the voice of Culain.





X.


"The power of empire," said the Socialist, does not descend from
any sky, but is earth born and sucked up from human depths where
millions pay tribute in labor and pain.  You breathe the magnificence
but do not feel the agony out of which it is born.  Pity for that
human agony has grown until it has become mightier than empire and
has marshaled against it armies that are numberless.  There are two
among you here who find inspiration outside the circle of human life
for the deeds they do.  But I believe humanity itself is its own
absolute, and within itself are its own fountains of beauty and power.
Its destiny is to realize its own nature and the unity inherent in
that being, not a unity imposed from without.  It cannot acknowledge
as above its own the beauty of another being, or allow another power
to dominate it.  You look outside humanity.  I look within it and
find its profoundest impulse is to itself.  Lavelle as a boy began
to dream about Heaven and Earth.  I as a child began a long
meditation about human life, for I was born in a city of many
millions, in the dark heart of it where the sunlight was gray before
it lit our faces, and the air before we inhaled it had traveled
through long leagues of pollution.  I lived in a tenement crowded
with necessitous life, in an abyss where most had come to the very
end of all, where there was nothing more to be feared and there was
that peace in pain.  It was there I found pity lay at the root of
our profoundest being and there was a secret joy in self-forgetfulness.
My first thought beyond myself came because of an old woman who wept
a quarter of an hour or so before she died being unable to rise and
give help to another.  That self-forgetfulness when the self was
passing from life seemed to me to be wonderful.  I have read poets
who sung of fabulous and magic things, of starbright, clear, immortal
drops of life, and how whoso drinks of that elixir has never fear of
death, nor sickness comes, nor anything which wounds.  But the life
which forgets itself turns to its true immortality, and in that
taming there is a deeper life than the poets have fabled.  The
immortality they imagined was but a shadow."

"Oh, it is true, Culain," cried the poet, "it is true, that was
the deepest life.  We follow too much after shadows for their
beauty.  But we do so thinking we will become what we contemplate."

"Take care, Lavelle, lest you be dragged out of yourself by your
virtues as other people are by their vices," Leroy warned the poet.
"Culain exalts pity over beauty or strength.  He would lead you by
that star into his fold.  You will find his humanity has one soul
with a single idea which is to sacrifice the many to the One.  To
sacrifice life!  That would be easy!  But to sacrifice the self!
To do that is to oppose nature, whose purpose is to bring innumerable
personalities into being.  It was the labor of ages to bring us to
be ourselves and it is no duty of ours to hurry away from ourselves."

"To think like that is also to mistake shadow for substance,"
Culain went on.  "You dream you have a rich life when you only
have a multitude of ideas.  To think is not to live.  I believe
it is true we become what we brood on, and if it be true, then
only an image of life can give us life.  On what should we brood
but upon humanity, the only life we know?  I too have sat on the
mountains.  The Earth there did not whisper to me of a life of its
own:  but with closed eyes as I sat there came up before me images
and scenes of human life, not as external things, but as souls they
entered into and burned my very soul, and I comprehended and felt
agonies, aspirations, doubts, despairs, and striving.  I saw in my
vision that these souls were brighter as they turned from themselves,
and their shining darkened as they clutched at the personal, and I
knew the shining came because they were rising to their fount.
That this vision was of realities I know, for afterwards I met some
I knew first when in an illumined deep of brooding.  I know we can
open the soul to that innumerable life so that it can reflect itself
in us, and truly we become it, for it is at its root one being, one
Heavenly Man manifesting in legions of forms.  I am communist and
socialist because I believe humanity to be a single being in spite
of its myriad forms, faces, and eyes, and there is only in it such
seeming separation as we find in our own being when it is
dramatically sundered in dream.  Whatever makes us clutch at the
personal, whatever strengthens the illusion of separateness, whether
it be the possession of wealth, or power over the weak, or fear of
the strong, all delay the awakening from this pitiful dream of life
by fostering a false egoism."

"You know, Culain," Leroy spoke earnestly, "that I love your mind
and heart.  You have vision but it is of a life so innumerable
that it can only be revealed in the simplest of generalizations.
You say humanity is one being, and you would build on that formula
a social order for the whole earth, a social order where everybody
possesses everything, and nobody has anything, and the infinite
complexities of human nature are constrained into one mould of
thought.  You have vision and you see infinitude, but you cannot
give your vision to those who will build up your communist state.
Your organization will be to them an opaque idea, an end in itself,
not an avenue to the soul.  Life by it will be constrained and
limited, and there will be unspeakable cruelty to the souls of men.
The greater the organization you build the more must it be governed
by regulation and formula.  It will force on humanity an iron
brotherhood, a brotherhood of force not of affection, and that
would be the deepest of the human hells!  You offer your candle of
vision to the blind.  But what use can it be to the blind except
as a bludgeon?"

"All this," said Heyt, "would merely result in a spineless society
dominated by vague emotionalism.  In every vital organism there
must be an element of power.  A grandiose conception of society is
a worthy aspiration.  Love will follow the swift and strong but
will not make itself its own ideal.  Nothing is sufficient for itself,
not even humanity.  It must still enlarge its boundaries, because if
it feeds on itself it will get thin and weedy like herds where there
is too much. inbreeding."

"I too think an imagination which is over humanity is engaged in
its molding," said the poet.  "Culain, you admit no influence from
Nature, though we come out of its womb, nay, are still in its womb.
That Nature in which we are bathed is our real nurse.  It is she
who moulds us in clans yet in infinite variety.  When we surrender
ourselves to her how full of life we feel!  She transmits to her
lovers her own power of making beauty and whatever is done by those
who live nigh to her is lovely.  When men live too long in great
cities the cord which connects them with the mother being is cut,
and what becomes then is misshapen.

The works of art conceived in cities are first hectic with the
colors of decay, and, lastly, there is nothing which has not erred
in every line from its natural beauty."

There was a friendship born of ancient enmity of ideals between
Leroy and Culain, and the latter may have considered it useless
renewing a controversy already plumbed to its depth between them,
for he began a commentary on Heyt's conception of power.

"What is power?  To be able to move life as we desire?  We call a
ruler powerful who at a word can fill the sky with armadas."  But
what is it moves the ruler?  An emotion? a passion? or a vanity?
And those armadas which leap into air at his will--what is the link
between them and their ruler but an emotion?   Such power at its
root is on a unity of sentiment or feeling among many.  What is it
has made a hundred million of workers withdraw labor from the world
state?  What but a feeling, pity for human life?  Can you arouse a
deeper feeling than pity to compel them to renew their labors?  I
think too that as all human power arises from feeling or desire so
the forces in Nature if we had knowledge of their mode of motion
are also moved by some desire.  Is there a chemist in your
laboratories who could deny that the affinity between atom and atom
was not an affinity of life with life rather than a destiny inherent
in the mechanism of their structure?"

"The will in itself is power," said Heyt.  "The will is the self,
the king principle in our being, and it orders all other emotions."

"In the heroic tales of our people," said Lavelle, "one story is
more famous than the rest which tells how an aristocracy of lordly
warriors was rent asunder by pity for a beauty which had been bowed
to sorrow by their king.  Beauty itself exercises the most sovereign
power over the soul and the will bends before it.  There is a divine
beauty which is overlord of our being."

"The beauty in humanity is inherent in it," Culain replied.  "As
the beauty of a flower is hidden in the seed cell so the beauty
of humanity flows from its ancestral self, a mightier Adam or
heavenly Man."

"Do you conceive of that oversoul to humanity as conscious of its
unity with its children?"  asked Brehon, "or is its consciousness
of its unity now lost as we in dream are divided up into This and
That and Thou and I, and while we dream have not the sense that
the dramatis personae are but one character?"

"I cannot say I know," answered Culain.  "I can only say I believe,
and yet I feel that that which upholds belief has knowledge. I can
argue here and make the plea for a communist state so logical that
it is without flaw, and it needs in this world for its completeness
no argument drawn from a deeper life.  Yet for myself I elect to
be socialist not merely because logic and justice unite in the
theory, but because of a vision which is incomplete, but which
weighs more heavily with me than the most perfect logic.  By faith
only can I complete the segment I perceive of the vaster circle of
human life which includes the Heavenly Man.  I know it to be true
indeed that soul can have vision of soul, not seeing only as the
eyes see, but feeling the being of another as we feel the passion
of our own hearts.  Because of this the ancient Buddha commanded
his followers to meditate with love and sympathy on life in the
four quarters of the world.  This I have done for many years, and
there broke in upon that meditation intimate and poignant, the
sense of myriads of lives, and I saw and felt them as portion of
myself, and they burned my very soul."

He paused for a while as if he hesitated to reveal himself further,
but continued in his slow speech:  "Once at the height of vision,
overwhelmed with that intermingled life, I cried out in my heart
to know its hope and way and end, and in my vision these myriad
souls became transfigured, and all even the darkest of them I saw
as gods, all shining and ancient with youth;  and a fire which was
within them all seemed to consume them and draw them into itself
and they fled into it and disappeared or were melted in darkness
and rapture into that Ancestral Self."





XI.


"Why do you speak of pity as the profoundest emotion in such a
being?" asked the historian.

"There are no words but pity or compassion to indicate likeness
to that feeling which, indeed is not so much pity as an emotion
of infinite desire, or the yearning rather of a life limited and
divided from itself for the being it has lost, and which should
be as much itself as the beatings of the heart.  As between myself
and Heaven it was the intuition of the unity of humanity which led
me to become communist.  Wherever in history any were born with
that knowledge life near to them reflected it as in a glowing glass,
and there was no fierce thought of thine and mine.  What was the
polity of those who listened to Christ or Buddha?  Had they not
all things in common?  They forbade warfare, for they would not
have the spirit at enmity with that which was intimately itself,
and they would overcome hatred by love.  Those who are with me do
not arm.  We separate ourselves from a social order which is
oppressive.  We deny it the strength of labor, and when that is
denied the old social order with its passionate possessive instincts
must crumble.  On its ruins we will build a new social order
restoring the world to humanity.  No one in the new earth will have
private property in the earth.  There will be nothing to make men
feel they have interests distinct from the being of which they
are part."

"I do not believe," said Leroy, "if you put devils in Paradise
they become angels.  If there are any heavens they must be holy
only because of things which are imagined there, not because the
streets are as fabled of gold or the gates of precious stones.  A
man may gain his soul by giving up the world, but if his share of
the world is taken from him by force it by no means follows his
soul will be paid him, as compensation.  I am skeptical about all
methods of achieving spiritual ends by material means.  You say
there will be nothing in the new social order to make men feel they
have interests distinct from the being of which they are part.  You
will never create such a world.  A man can be a glutton upon a crust
of bread as well as upon a Neronian banquet, and if he has not great
material possessions his vanity will glut itself upon the shapeliness
of his nose, or his ideas, or anything else which is his."

"If we bring about the ownership of the world by the people of the
world, by the race, not by individuals, such a change is itself
evidence the inner attitude of the soul has changed," answered Culain.
"The spiritual change comes and must come before the material change.
If it had not come the will of the workers would not have been set
upon this polity.  The collective will acts in this way because its
hidden throne is upon this interior unity."

"You believe then," asked the historian, "that in some region of
our being we are conscious of unity with that myriad life?  Our
being here you say is dramatically sundered as it is in dream.  Is
there any sphere where this dream does not dominate the spirit?"

"I believe," said Culain, "in sleep and death we go back to
ourselves, and the meanest of us here is there as a god.  There
have been men at all times who have known this to be true.  A
great religion based its psychology upon the unity of the soul
with all other life in that state which is dreamless sleep to us.
In one of its scriptures we are told of a sage who found an outcast
sleeping by the roadside, and he hailed that outcast by heavenly
names, 'Thou great one, clad in shining!  King!' and of that
outcast he said, so high was his being in sleep he was then like a
king moving among his dominions.  From that high being men come
forth every morning to take up and renew their cyclic labor, which
is to make the mightier Adam conscious in all its children, and
they of it as their oversoul and very self."

"You think the unity inherent in deepest being must at last become
conscious in our life here and express itself in a social order
and polity in harmony with itself?"

"I believe we are evolving to a state where the individual life
will reflect in itself the entire being of humanity.  The heart
will attain its own infinitude of feeling as our eyes have already
attained their own infinitude of seeing.  They reflect the external
universe with its multitudinous forms.  The soul will reflect the
internal world of multitudinous life.  When it has attained this
consciousness the polity of earth must be transfigured.  Who then
would grasp at sceptre or crown or possessions for a self which he
knows to be unreal?"

"I do not understand," said a prisoner who had listened with puzzled
face to the symposium."

"Never mind, Rudd," said Leroy kindly.  "Nothing Culain has said
need affect your faith in your leader.  It only means his communism
is more absolute than any one had ever imagined, and if he has his
way nobody will be able to call his soul his own."

"All this," persisted that prisoner obstinately, "seems to be less
our concern than the churches.  The priests can tell me about God
and the next world, if I want to know about them.  I expect my
leader to tell me how this world is to be made fit to live in.  I
do not like the mixing of religion with politic."

"The God you heard about in the churches died a very long time ago,"
said Leroy.  "It is centuries since His voice was able to be heard
even in a whisper in the sanctuary.  It came to pass that spirit
fell into matter while matter was ascending to spirit.  That means,
my dear Rudd, that if you want to understand business in its most
subtle forms you must now go to the churches.  If on the other hand
you wish to understand the heavenly things you must now consult
the politicals."

"I do not understand," repeated Rudd.

"Well, if Culain's ideas are true you only need to fall asleep to
understand everything.  Here are two who are now like kings moving
among their dominions," said Leroy pointing to some prisoners
stretched asleep upon the floor.  He gazed on them with a kind of
exasperated admiration.

"I do not know whether I should praise them for their courage or
despise them for their indifference to living.  Here are the last
exquisite drops in the cup of life and they turn down the cup.  I
never enjoyed life more intensely.  It is worth while to take Death
as a companion because it brings out all that is most alive in
Life.  'Oh,' he cried, 'there are some people out there who are
living intensely."'

A thunder as of some vast concussion, in the city smote on their
ears.  It was followed by a flare which made momentarily a wild
illumination in the room.  The faces of the prisoners gleamed in
a magic moonlight of many colors.  The sleepers awoke.  All hurried
to the windows.  The lofty night was pierced by a thousand circling
rays.  The airships were searching the dark above and below, and
the revolving beams made each appear the fiery hub of a wheel whose
vast spokes rayed out to some remote and incalculable circumference,
and these were the chariots of gods rolling across the sky.  One
of the rays rested on a little mist overhead.  It surmised something
sinister within it.  There was a vibration in the air as if a brazen
gong had been beaten, and at that signal all the ray's converged
on that mist.  Something fell from the cloud.  One of the great
airships blazed out as if stricken by fire and it dropped within
the city.  A fountain of flame leaped up where it fell, and there
was another fierce illumination of the room and of the staring
faces of the watchers at the windows, who all, breathless and still,
were intent on the spectacle in the sky.  Those aerial cruisers,
hitherto floating slumberously over the city, were now in wild
activity.  Rising to that higher dark where their enemy had been
hidden they became hunters of the heavens.  For that solitary
airship of the rebels there was no escape.  Soon it dropped like
a falling star.  There came a sigh as of pent-up breath escaping,
and then Rian broke the silence.

"Oh! that was heroic, that deed of our comrades.  With that little
ship to lie up there waiting for these giants and for death!  That
fall!  My heart went dropping with them.  Oh, what was life to
them in those ten tragic seconds!"

"I wonder," said Leroy, did consciousness fly from the centre to
the circumference, from earth to heaven?  Or did everything in
their being race to the centre in a mad concentration on the self
that was to perish?"

"All physical combats are a nightmare," Culain said, "hate, despair,
terror, every emotion called into being suck the soul down and
further away from heavenly being."

"No, no, it cannot be so with these," cried Lavelle.  "Death was a
terror sunken below far horizons ere they rose on that adventure.
The self had already perished for they had abandoned themselves to
the genius of their race and it was captain of their souls.  The
last of life they knew was the rapture of sacrifice."

"I would like such an exit," said Leroy.  "Oh, from all that would
crowd on me I think I would know myself truly.  While we live a
thought hardly lights the brain ere it vanishes.  Our emotions have
but warmed the heart and they go.  They all hide in caves, and we
can be conscious of but the minutest fraction of our being at any
one time, never the whole being.  I think if I took part in such
an adventure the whole populace of thoughts and feelings would rush
out of their caves and I could be my entire self if but for a few
seconds.  Perhaps if they put an end to me tomorrow I may have such
an instant looking down a rifle before it is fired.  I would not
lose it.  What I fear is that these airships will wreck the city,
and I may go out without a moment to arouse the habitants of my
being so that they may all answer the call and I may know myself
in death."





XII.


"What an epicure of the spirit!" cried Rian, "The feasts of
Heliogabalus are pale images of gluttony set by this desire to
swallow life in an instant.  I hope if I am shot I will not see
rising all at once before me the cities I might have builded.
The one thing which might make death bitter would be the thought
such imaginations never could be realized."

"You like the others want to externalize yourself.  I want to
internalize and be myself fully.  The end of life is to be, not
to do.  If your desire is to act all that is infinite in you will
try to drag others out of themselves to aid you in your labors.
You will try to build the world in your own image and there will
be no freedom.  The world can only be free when men are content
in themselves and each draws from his own fountain."

"Many people," urged Lavelle, "are born under one star and are
kinsmen of each other in the spirit and find themselves most truly
when they follow together that single light."

But Leroy would admit nothing which subdued the individual to
the group idea.

"When you speak of people following one star all that means is
that they are weak enough to surrender their individuality to
some more powerful than themselves.  Every man must be original
or be nothing.  Who is interested in the followers of greatness?
Were there any Christians worth thinking about after Christ?  If
we remember any it was because they revealed something in their
spirit which was not in the original gospel.  No life inspires
us because it is like another life.  I was once indeed converted
to a church, but it was in a dream.  I saw a procession in a
squalid street in the core of some grimy city, and a venerable
old man was there being consecrated as prince of his church.  He
was adjudged by it most Christlike;  and the highest dignity it
could confer on him was to name him prince;  to give him a garret
in those squalid streets so that he might live among the poorest
like his Master.  In that church of a dream all the priestly work
done by archbishops and other dignitaries was intrusted to the
newly consecrated for it was only business.  The profound science
of the soul was not for youth.  I remember in my dream cheering
that old man with the tears streaming down my cheeks, and then I
awoke and knew it was only a dream and could never happen in life.
Though the church endured for an hundred thousand years it would
never produce another Christ.  I do not believe a second Christ
could ever inspire the world as the first did, for time has no
story which inspires us when told a second time.  The great
spiritual clans, the great national clans, all try to cast
humanity into a single mould.  I am against the state as I am
against a state religion.  Nature in the infancy of the spirit
may have been behind the religions and the nationalities;  it may
have been in them as the spirit of the hive.  But in far ages the
time came, I think, when some unknown god whispered to man, 'Now,
you yourself, my darling, must create yourself by your own efforts.
The universe is before you.  Its powers are yours.  Take whatever
you can.'  We are to reverse the ancient process by which Saturn
devoured his children.  It is for the children now to devour
Saturn, and absorb the universe into themselves individuality.
The universe is infinite and there can be infinitely varied
personalities.  If there are differences of character among you
it is in spite of yourselves.  You are all jealous in demanding
adhesion to national dogma, imperial dogma, or social dogma and
you imprison the soul in little cubicles of thought, the soul
which might have grown into a myriad wisdom."

"Oh, now!" Rian managed to interrupt the torrent of speech, "you
need not be so indignantly individual.  I remember a few years ago
you had built a civilization in your own head, and wanted us all
to come into it.  You were proud of it as Nebuchadnezzar when he
walked on the roof of his palace and cried out, 'Is not this great
Babylon that I have built?' "

"Yes, but I learned wisdom like Nebuchadnezzar.  My Dark Angel
told me the truth about that myth.  The great King found the
Babylon he created was only the shadow of himself, and he felt
solitary as the man who sees replicas of his own face in a
thousand mirrors, and he retired to the simple life.  I escaped
from the coils of the net.  I live and feed myself on an acre of
ground, but I am free and have the universe to roam in thought.
I measure men by the magnificence of their imagination, not by
the height of their cities."

"What is the universe to roam in if the spirit never meets its
own kinsmen?" cried Lavelle.

"Do you really so love to meet your spiritual kinsmen?" asked
Leroy slyly.  "I never found you so happy or animated with them
as with Culain or myself.  You liked us because of our unlikeness.
Confess, dear Lavelle, you were tired of your followers.  They
never enlarged the boundaries of your spirit but only multiplied
ideas you were already familiar with.  Should not that lassitude
have filled you with terror it the thought that your enterprise
might succeed and millions of many colored characters be dimmed
to one tone.

"I do not admit the lassitude," said Lavelle, smiling, "nor the
terrible character of the uniformity of thought you surmise among
my friends."

"Oh, I do not deny minor variations.  You permit variety in the
little things but not in the great.  The dogma of the nation
dominates everything and obscures the end of being.  You are like
people who can only look out on the world through a single keyhole!"

"You know," said Lavelle, "I do not think national character or
culture is imposed on men from without by other men, but in their
highest form or spirit are the extension of divine consciousness
into the human.  You will not agree with me in this, but you will
admit there must be identities of thought or culture among those
who live in the same region, or else chaos or mere anarchy, not
in your sense but in the physical, will follow."

"Oh, yes, we preserve language which is necessary for
communication of thought as light is for perception of form.
But I do not agree that there need be more in common between
the souls of men than the spirit of kindness which reconciles
all things otherwise incompatible."

Here the historian interposed.  "You said something a little
while ago inferring an original unity for all living things.
You spoke of the universe as an autocracy gradually resolving
itself into a democracy of free spirits.  Can these spirits
divest themselves altogether of any relation to that being of
which they are emanations?  What is the relation?  You use
language which pre-supposes identity and yet you affirm
separateness.  If there be any dependence of your being upon
heavenly being you must surmise that relation for the rest of
humanity.  And if there be a link of identity of consciousness
on some plane of being this naturally would express itself in
life.  Do you assume any relation between Heaven and your spirit?"

"You may think of me as a rebel angel," answered Leroy.  "I am
in revolt against Heaven."





XIII.


"I am not averse to Heaven.  I confess an artist's longing to see
the fabled palaces, the gates of precious stones, and the streets
of gold which some rail at.  What is amiss with Heaven?  Is the
government oppressive?" asked Rian, laughing.

"Leroy is lapsing into fantasy," said Lavelle.  "His Dark Angel
will not allow him to be long serious."

"Fantasy!" cried Leroy, "when I utter the thing I hold to be most
true, when I reveal myself most, you think I am not serious!  I
am rebel against the Heaven to which in imagination, you are slaves.
You all rest on divine powers to which humanity must be subservient.
Yet it was to escape from their dominion over the spirit I verily
believe a migration set in from Heaven to Earth.  You assume it
was in the divine plan.  Have you never dreamed it might be our
own primal will carried us here, that  we would not be the slaves
of light, and we chose free individual existence full of agony
even rather than spiritual passivity.  Do you remember too Dante,
overwhelmed in Paradise, Beatrice speaking?

     "What overmasters thee
     A virtue is from which naught shields itself."

When we gaze at the sun we are blinded to all else.  What could
the spirit be in Heaven but a mirror of that glory?  There would
be nothing for it but vision and it could have no being of its own.
What wisdom could there be for 'those who are pure by birthright,
who have not suffered or struggled nor willed in freedom their own
destiny.  We grow into a myriad wisdom through aeons of pain, and
by that wisdom we are higher than seraph or archangel who have not
wept as we have nor stayed themselves against the cosmic powers.
You read the scriptures of the world but forget that the seers who
revealed the architecture of Heaven told us to fly from Heaven,
and that the highest was not there, and it seduced by its sweetness.
Aeons ago the spirit of man revolted against Heaven, but it has
forgotten its primal will.  Heaven through the religions and
philosophies and through statecraft renews its lordship over the
soul so that in all that is done it defers to some divine power.
Yet we have in ourselves the seed of something higher than the
Heaven you worship."

"The extremes have met!" cried Rian.  "The representatives of
individual as of collective humanity both dream of storming
the Heavens."

"That was the one thrilling thought expressed here," answered
Leroy, "But he will never storm the Heavens with an army of slaves.
The more the world state dominates humanity the more is the will
of the individual made incapable of powerful effort."

"The Will grows stronger by self-suppression than in self-assertion,"
said Heyt.  "In  the first case it truly overcomes something.  In
the other desire is mistaken for will, and the man is most driven
when he most thinks he is the driver."

"That," said Leroy, "is one of those subtleties which can be uttered
in a sentence but which need hours for their refutation.  I will
say no more than this that the truth of it depends upon what self
is suppressed.  I hold your statecraft would suppress manifestation
of the deep inner being of man, and when that is overlaid, when you
have submission to the world state, there must creep into society
that stagnation, which is the precursor of death.  Whether it be you
or Lavelle or Culain achieves the harmony of society individuality
must be weakened, and the will lose that diamond hardness which can
only be maintained by continuous effort never relaxed for a single
instant.  If the will be relaxed the powers we should oppose sweep
like a tide over the soul and carry it away.  We are then like one
who has rowed against the stream but who rests on his oars and
drifts back and loses all he has gained.  I have purchased freedom
at a great price, warring against all those who would draw me into
an unintellectual harmony with themselves.  I give no allegiance
to the principles you speak of as the divine beauty or power or soul.
If I am swayed by any deity it is some unknown god."

"Your unknown god is suspiciously like the ancient devil," said Rian.

"What, was the ancient devil but some still earlier deity, some
rebel of the Heavens who whispered freedom to the spirit of man;
who against all external rule urged on it still to persist, still
to defy, still to obey the orders of another captain, that Dweller
in the Innermost whose least whisper sounds louder than all the
cries of men?"

"Well,"' said Rian, "'it is heroic to, defy the universe.  I admire
even if I cannot follow.  For all your prickles, Leroy, you are
sweet at heart, and I wonder how all this was born with you.  Had
you a vision on a hill like Lavelle? or did you like Culain find
your heart the council chamber where humanity met?"

"We all develop from the first contact of the spirit with the body,
and the governing myth in my life was a dream which was born in me
as a child.  I believe it came from the same primeval consciousness
from which welled up the Promethean myth, the legend of Lucifer
and the wars in Heaven and many another myth of revolt, that mood
in which the many eternally break from the One.  In that dream I
was one of the 'Children of Light' dwelling in Paradise.  Outside
that circle, were the Children of Darkness whom we knew not but
they were rumored to us as dreadful and abhorrent; and in my dream
I wandered away from that Paradise into lonely and interstellar
spaces, and I was there overshadowed by some dark divine presence,
and I know it was one of the Host of Darkness and I trembled.  But
it whispered gently, 'We of the Darkness are more ancient than you
of the Light,' and of many other things it said I recall this only,
'When most you rebel against the known God the lips of the unknown
God are tenderest upon your forehead.'  That, without then
understanding, I remembered when I awoke, but because it was the
first visitation of the spirit it became powerful in memory and
everything in the conscious mind gathered about it, and at last I
think that Dark Angel became my Soul."

"From such fragile and gentle dreams what mighty movements in the
human mind begin!" the wondering Rian mused aloud.  "Lavelle hears
a whisper from the Earth-spirit in his native land, and it becomes
at last a sacred land, to him, and he fights as desperately to keep
it inviolate as the ancient Jews fought for their holy city.
Culain saw some one die who had forgotten she had a self, and he
began to remake the world in her image.  You hear a voice in dream
which hints of something higher than Heaven, and you become the
most potent scatterer of revolt against all that men worship.
Yes, I can see from the foundation stone how grew up the whole
architecture of your thought.  Talk of beauty leading us by a
single hair!  Here is a world in revolt, and three who have each
a multitude of followers themselves follow phantoms that none
other but themselves may see!  O, earth whisper! dream of the heart!
Dark Angel! who visited these in childhood, do you know what a storm
you have created in the world?  I revolt against the evil I see and
I would replace it with a civilization and social order I see no
less clearly in the mind.  In the civilization Lavelle advocates,
or in the social order Culain would establish, I see how the means
provide a bulwark against the end to which they would lead us.  The
common mind of humanity can assert itse