No More Learning

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. Aherne made me sit down on an oak bench, and having bowed
very low before the crucifix, took the bronze box from the altar, and
sat down beside me with the box upon his knees.

'You will perhaps have forgotten,' he said, 'most of what you have
read about Joachim of Flora, for he is little more than a name to even
the well read. He was an abbot in Cortale in the twelfth century,
and is best known for his prophecy, in a book called _Expositio in
Apocalypsin_, that the Kingdom of the Father was passed, the Kingdom
of the Son passing, the Kingdom of the Spirit yet to come. The
Kingdom of the Spirit was to be a complete triumph of the Spirit, the
_spiritualis intelligentia_ he called it, over the dead letter. He
had many followers among the more extreme Franciscans, and these were
accused of possessing a secret book of his called the _Liber Inducens
in Evangelium AEternum_. Again and again groups of visionaries were
accused of possessing this terrible book, in which the freedom of the
Renaissance lay hidden, until at last Pope Alexander IV. had it found
and cast into the flames. I have here the greatest treasure the world
contains. I have a copy of that book; and see what great artists have
made the robes in which it is wrapped. The greater portion of the book
itself is illuminated in the Byzantine style, which so few care for
to-day, but which moves me because these tall, emaciated angels and
saints seem to have less relation to the world about us than to an
abstract pattern of flowing lines, that suggest an imagination absorbed
in the contemplation of Eternity. Even if you do not care for so formal
an art, you cannot help seeing that work where there is so much gold,
and of that purple colour which has gold dissolved in it, was valued at
a great price in its day. But it was only at the Renaissance the labour
was spent upon it which has made it the priceless thing it is. The
wooden boards of the cover show by the astrological allegories painted
upon them, as by the style of painting itself, some craftsman of the
school of Francesco Cossi of Ferrara, but the gold clasps and hinges
are known to be the work of Benvenuto Cellini, who made likewise the
bronze box and covered it with gods and demons, whose eyes are closed,
to signify an absorption in the inner light.

I took the book in my hands and began turning over the gilded,
many-coloured pages, holding it close to the candle to discover the
texture of the paper.