No More Learning

This
part of the pier had been but lately refaced with blocks of granite,
so that it was almost clear of seaweed; but when I came to the old
part, I found it so slippery with green weed that I had to climb up
on to the roadway. I looked towards the Temple of the Alchemical Rose,
where the fishermen and the women were still shouting, but somewhat
more faintly, and saw that there was no one about the door or upon the
pier; but as I looked, a little crowd hurried out of the door and began
gathering large stones from where they were heaped up in readiness for
the next time a storm shattered the pier, when they would be laid under
blocks of granite. While I stood watching the crowd, an old man, who
was, I think, the voteen, pointed to me, and screamed out something,
and the crowd whitened, for all the faces had turned towards me. I ran,
and it was well for me that pullers of the oar are poorer men with
their feet than with their arms and their bodies; and yet while I ran I
scarcely heard the following feet or the angry voices, for many voices
of exultation and lamentation, which were forgotten as a dream is
forgotten the moment they were heard, seemed to be ringing in the air
over my head.

There are moments even now when I seem to hear those voices of
exultation and lamentation, and when the indefinite world, which has
but half lost its mastery over my heart and my intellect, seems about
to claim a perfect mastery; but I carry the rosary about my neck, and
when I hear, or seem to hear them, I press it to my heart and say: 'He
whose name is Legion is at our doors deceiving our intellects with
subtlety and flattering our hearts with beauty, and we have no trust
but in Thee'; and then the war that rages within me at other times is
still, and I am at peace.




THE TABLES OF THE LAW


I

'WILL you permit me, Aherne,' I said, 'to ask you a question, which I
have wanted to ask you for years, and have not asked because we have
grown nearly strangers? Why did you refuse the berretta, and almost
at the last moment? When you and I lived together, you cared neither
for wine, women, nor money, and had thoughts for nothing but theology
and mysticism. ' I had watched through dinner for a moment to put my
question, and ventured now, because he had thrown off a little of
the reserve and indifference which, ever since his last return from
Italy, had taken the place of our once close friendship. He had just
questioned me, too, about certain private and almost sacred things, and
my frankness had earned, I thought, a like frankness from him.

When I began to speak he was lifting to his lips a glass of that old
wine which he could choose so well and valued so little; and while
I spoke, he set it slowly and meditatively upon the table and held
it there, its deep red light dyeing his long delicate fingers. The
impression of his face and form, as they were then, is still vivid
with me, and is inseparable from another and fanciful impression:
the impression of a man holding a flame in his naked hand. He was to
me, at that moment, the supreme type of our race, which, when it has
risen above, or is sunken below, the formalisms of half-education and
the rationalisms of conventional affirmation and denial, turns away,
unless my hopes for the world and for the Church have made me blind,
from practicable desires and intuitions towards desires so unbounded
that no human vessel can contain them, intuitions so immaterial that
their sudden and far-off fire leaves heavy darkness about hand and
foot. He had the nature, which is half monk, half soldier of fortune,
and must needs turn action into dreaming, and dreaming into action;
and for such there is no order, no finality, no contentment in this
world. When he and I had been students in Paris, we had belonged to a
little group which devoted itself to speculations about alchemy and
mysticism.
More orthodox in most of his beliefs than Michael Robartes,
he had surpassed him in a fanciful hatred of all life, and this hatred
had found expression in the curious paradox--half borrowed from some
fanatical monk, half invented by himself--that the beautiful arts were
sent into the world to overthrow nations, and finally life herself, by
sowing everywhere unlimited desires, like torches thrown into a burning
city. This idea was not at the time, I believe, more than a paradox,
a plume of the pride of youth; and it was only after his return to
Ireland that he endured the fermentation of belief which is coming upon
our people with the reawakening of their imaginative life.

Presently he stood up, saying: 'Come, and I will show you, for you at
any rate will understand,' and taking candles from the table, he lit
the way into the long paved passage that led to his private chapel. We
passed between the portraits of the Jesuits and priests--some of no
little fame--his family had given to the Church; and engravings and
photographs of pictures that had especially moved him; and the few
paintings his small fortune, eked out by an almost penurious abstinence
from the things most men desire, had enabled him to buy in his travels.
The pictures that I knew best, for they had hung there longest,
whether reproductions or originals, were of the Sienese School, which
he had studied for a long time, claiming that it alone of the schools
of the world pictured not the world but what is revealed to saints in
their dreams and visions. The Sienese alone among Italians, he would
say, could not or would not represent the pride of life, the pleasure
in swift movement or sustaining strength, or voluptuous flesh. They
were so little interested in these things that there often seemed to
be no human body at all under the robe of the saint, but they could
represent by a bowed head, or uplifted face, man's reverence before
Eternity as no others could, and they were at their happiest when
mankind had dwindled to a little group silhouetted upon a golden abyss,
as if they saw the world habitually from far off. When I had praised
some school that had dipped deeper into life, he would profess to
discover a more intense emotion than life knew in those dark outlines.
'Put, even Francesca, who felt the supernatural as deeply,' he would
say, 'beside the work of Siena, and one finds a faint impurity in his
awe, a touch of ghostly terror, where love and humbleness had best
been all. ' He had often told me of his hope that by filling his mind
with those holy pictures he would help himself to attain at last to
vision and ecstasy, and of his disappointment at never getting more
than dreams of a curious and broken beauty. But of late he had added
pictures of a different kind, French symbolistic pictures which he had
bought for a few pounds from little-known painters, English and French
pictures of the School of the English Pre-Raphaelites; and now he stood
for a moment and said, 'I have changed my taste. I am fascinated a
little against my will by these faces, where I find the pallor of souls
trembling between the excitement of the flesh and the excitement of the
spirit, and by landscapes that are created by heightening the obscurity
and disorder of nature. These landscapes do not stir the imagination
to the energies of sanctity but as to orgaic dancing and prophetic
frenzy. ' I saw with some resentment new images where the old ones had
often made that long gray, dim, empty, echoing passage become to my
eyes a vestibule of Eternity.

Almost every detail of the chapel, which we entered by a narrow Gothic
door, whose threshold had been worn smooth by the secret worshippers of
the penal times, was vivid in my memory; for it was in this chapel that
I had first, and when but a boy, been moved by the mediaevalism which
is now, I think, the governing influence in my life. The only thing
that seemed new was a square bronze box which stood upon the altar
before the six unlighted candles and the ebony crucifix, and was like
those made in ancient times of more precious substances to hold the
sacred books.