No More Learning

Then, bending towards his dear, adorable, and execrable wife, his
inevitable and pitiless muse, he kissed her respectfully upon the hand,
and added, "Ah, dear angel, how I thank you for my skill! "




THE SHOOTING-RANGE AND THE CEMETERY.


"Cemetery View Inn"--"A queer sign," said our traveller to himself; "but
it raises a thirst! Certainly the keeper of this inn appreciates Horace
and the poet pupils of Epicurus. Perhaps he even apprehends the profound
philosophy of those old Egyptians who had no feast without its skeleton,
or some emblem of life's brevity. "

He entered: drank a glass of beer in presence of the tombs; and slowly
smoked a cigar. Then, his phantasy driving him, he went down into the
cemetery, where the grass was so tall and inviting; so brilliant in the
sunshine.

The light and heat, indeed, were so furiously intense that one had said
the drunken sun wallowed upon a carpet of flowers that had fattened upon
the corruption beneath.

The air was heavy with vivid rumours of life--the life of things
infinitely small--and broken at intervals by the crackling of shots from
a neighbouring shooting-range, that exploded with a sound as of
champagne corks to the burden of a hollow symphony.

And then, beneath a sun which scorched the brain, and in that atmosphere
charged with the ardent perfume of death, he heard a voice whispering
out of the tomb where he sat. And this voice said: "Accursed be your
rifles and targets, you turbulent living ones, who care so little for
the dead in their divine repose! Accursed be your ambitions and
calculations, importunate mortals who study the arts of slaughter near
the sanctuary of Death himself! Did you but know how easy the prize to
win, how facile the end to reach, and how all save Death is naught, not
so greatly would you fatigue yourselves, O ye laborious alive; nor would
you so often vex the slumber of them that long ago reached the End--the
only true end of life detestable! "




THE DESIRE TO PAINT.


Unhappy perhaps is the man, but happy the artist, who is torn with this
desire.
I burn to paint a certain woman who has appeared to me so rarely, and so
swiftly fled away, like some beautiful, regrettable thing the traveller
must leave behind him in the night. It is already long since I saw her.

She is beautiful, and more than beautiful: she is overpowering. The
colour black preponderates in her; all that she inspires is nocturnal
and profound. Her eyes are two caverns where mystery vaguely stirs and
gleams; her glance illuminates like a ray of light; it is an explosion
in the darkness.

I would compare her to a black sun if one could conceive of a dark star
overthrowing light and happiness. But it is the moon that she makes one
dream of most readily; the moon, who has without doubt touched her with
her own influence; not the white moon of the idylls, who resembles a
cold bride, but the sinister and intoxicating moon suspended in the
depths of a stormy night, among the driven clouds; not the discreet
peaceful moon who visits the dreams of pure men, but the moon torn from
the sky, conquered and revolted, that the witches of Thessaly hardly
constrain to dance upon the terrified grass.

Her small brow is the habitation of a tenacious will and the love of
prey. And below this inquiet face, whose mobile nostrils breathe in the
unknown and the impossible, glitters, with an unspeakable grace, the
smile of a large mouth; white, red, and delicious; a mouth that makes
one dream of the miracle of some superb flower unclosing in a volcanic
land.

There are women who inspire one with the desire to woo them and win
them; but she makes one wish to die slowly beneath her steady gaze.




THE GLASS-VENDOR.


These are some natures purely contemplative and antipathetic to action,
who nevertheless, under a mysterious and inexplicable impulse, sometimes
act with a rapidity of which they would have believed themselves
incapable. Such a one is he who, fearing to find some new vexation
awaiting him at his lodgings, prowls about in a cowardly fashion before
the door without daring to enter; such a one is he who keeps a letter
fifteen days without opening it, or only makes up his mind at the end of
six months to undertake a journey that has been a necessity for a year
past. Such beings sometimes feel themselves precipitately thrust towards
action, like an arrow from a bow.

The novelist and the physician, who profess to know all things, yet
cannot explain whence comes this sudden and delirious energy to indolent
and voluptuous souls; nor how, incapable of accomplishing the simplest
and most necessary things, they are at some certain moment of time
possessed by a superabundant hardihood which enables them to execute the
most absurd and even the most dangerous acts.

One of my friends, the most harmless dreamer that ever lived, at one
time set fire to a forest, in order to ascertain, as he said, whether
the flames take hold with the easiness that is commonly affirmed.