No More Learning

When the procession had passed on, Costello began to follow again, and
saw from a distance the coffin laid upon a large boat, and those about
it get into other boats, and the boats move slowly over the water to
Insula Trinitatis; and after a time he saw the boats return and their
passengers mingle with the crowd upon the bank, and all disperse by
many roads and boreens. It seemed to him that Winny was somewhere on
the island smiling gently as of old, and when all had gone he swam
in the way the boats had been rowed and found the new-made grave
beside the ruined Abbey of the Holy Trinity, and threw himself upon
it, calling to Oona to come to him. Above him the square ivy leaves
trembled, and all about him white moths moved over white flowers, and
sweet odours drifted through the dim air.

He lay there all that night and through the day after, from time to
time calling her to come to him, but when the third night came he had
forgotten, worn out with hunger and sorrow, that her body lay in the
earth beneath; but only knew she was somewhere near and would not come
to him.

Just before dawn, the hour when the peasants hear his ghostly voice
crying out, his pride awoke and he called loudly: 'Winny, daughter of
Dermott of the Sheep, if you do not come to me I will go and never
return to the island of the Holy Trinity,' and before his voice had
died away a cold and whirling wind had swept over the island and he saw
many figures rushing past, women of the Sidhe with crowns of silver and
dim floating drapery; and then Oona, but no longer smiling gently, for
she passed him swiftly and angrily, and as she passed struck him upon
the face crying: 'Then go and never return. '

He would have followed, and was calling out her name, when the whole
glimmering company rose up into the air, and, rushing together in the
shape of a great silvery rose, faded into the ashen dawn.

Costello got up from the grave, understanding nothing but that he had
made his beloved angry and that she wished him to go, and wading out
into the lake, began to swim. He swam on and on, but his limbs were too
weary to keep him afloat, and her anger was heavy about him, and when
he had gone a little way he sank without a struggle, like a man passing
into sleep and dreams.

The next day a poor fisherman found him among the reeds upon the lake
shore, lying upon the white lake sand with his arms flung out as
though he lay upon a rood, and carried him to his own house. And the
very poor lamented over him and sang the keen, and when the time had
come, laid him in the Abbey on Insula Trinitatis with only the ruined
altar between him and Dermott's daughter, and planted above them two
ash-trees that in after days wove their branches together and mingled
their trembling leaves.




ROSA ALCHEMICA


O blessed and happy he, who knowing the mysteries
of the gods, sanctifies his life, and purifies his
soul, celebrating orgies in the mountains with holy
purifications. --_Euripides. _




ROSA ALCHEMICA


I

IT is now more than ten years since I met, for the last time, Michael
Robartes, and for the first time and the last time his friends
and fellow students; and witnessed his and their tragic end, and
endured those strange experiences, which have changed me so that my
writings have grown less popular and less intelligible, and driven
me almost to the verge of taking the habit of St. Dominic. I had
just published _Rosa Alchemica_, a little work on the Alchemists,
somewhat in the manner of Sir Thomas Browne, and had received many
letters from believers in the arcane sciences, upbraiding what they
called my timidity, for they could not believe so evident sympathy
but the sympathy of the artist, which is half pity, for everything
which has moved men's hearts in any age.
I had discovered, early in
my researches, that their doctrine was no merely chemical phantasy,
but a philosophy they applied to the world, to the elements and to
man himself; and that they sought to fashion gold out of common metals
merely as part of an universal transmutation of all things into some
divine and imperishable substance; and this enabled me to make my
little book a fanciful reverie over the transmutation of life into art,
and a cry of measureless desire for a world made wholly of essences.

I was sitting dreaming of what I had written, in my house in one of
the old parts of Dublin; a house my ancestors had made almost famous
through their part in the politics of the city and their friendships
with the famous men of their generations; and was feeling an unwonted
happiness at having at last accomplished a long-cherished design, and
made my rooms an expression of this favourite doctrine. The portraits,
of more historical than artistic interest, had gone; and tapestry, full
of the blue and bronze of peacocks, fell over the doors, and shut out
all history and activity untouched with beauty and peace; and now when
I looked at my Crevelli and pondered on the rose in the hand of the
Virgin, wherein the form was so delicate and precise that it seemed
more like a thought than a flower, or at the grey dawn and rapturous
faces of my Francesca, I knew all a Christian's ecstasy without his
slavery to rule and custom; when I pondered over the antique bronze
gods and goddesses, which I had mortgaged my house to buy, I had all a
pagan's delight in various beauty and without his terror at sleepless
destiny and his labour with many sacrifices; and I had only to go to
my bookshelf, where every book was bound in leather, stamped with
intricate ornament, and of a carefully chosen colour: Shakespeare
in the orange of the glory of the world, Dante in the dull red of
his anger, Milton in the blue grey of his formal calm; and I could
experience what I would of human passions without their bitterness and
without satiety. I had gathered about me all gods because I believed
in none, and experienced every pleasure because I gave myself to none,
but held myself apart, individual, indissoluble, a mirror of polished
steel: I looked in the triumph of this imagination at the birds of
Hera, glowing in the firelight as though they were wrought of jewels;
and to my mind, for which symbolism was a necessity, they seemed the
doorkeepers of my world, shutting out all that was not of as affluent
a beauty as their own; and for a moment I thought as I had thought
in so many other moments, that it was possible to rob life of every
bitterness except the bitterness of death; and then a thought which had
followed this thought, time after time, filled me with a passionate
sorrow. All those forms: that Madonna with her brooding purity, those
rapturous faces singing in the morning light, those bronze divinities
with their passionless dignity, those wild shapes rushing from despair
to despair, belonged to a divine world wherein I had no part; and every
experience, however profound, every perception, however exquisite,
would bring me the bitter dream of a limitless energy I could never
know, and even in my most perfect moment I would be two selves, the
one watching with heavy eyes the other's moment of content. I had
heaped about me the gold born in the crucibles of others; but the
supreme dream of the alchemist, the transmutation of the weary heart
into a weariless spirit, was as far from me as, I doubted not, it had
been from him also. I turned to my last purchase, a set of alchemical
apparatus which, the dealer in the Rue le Peletier had assured me,
once belonged to Raymond Lully, and as I joined the _alembic_ to the
_athanor_ and laid the _lavacrum maris_ at their side, I understood the
alchemical doctrine, that all beings, divided from the great deep where
spirits wander, one and yet a multitude, are weary; and sympathized,
in the pride of my connoisseurship, with the consuming thirst for
destruction which made the alchemist veil under his symbols of lions
and dragons, of eagles and ravens, of dew and of nitre, a search for an
essence which would dissolve all mortal things. I repeated to myself
the ninth key of Basilius Valentinus, in which he compares the fire
of the last day to the fire of the alchemist, and the world to the
alchemist's furnace, and would have us know that all must be dissolved
before the divine substance, material gold or immaterial ecstasy,
awake. I had dissolved indeed the mortal world and lived amid immortal
essences, but had obtained no miraculous ecstasy. As I thought of these
things, I drew aside the curtains and looked out into the darkness, and
it seemed to my troubled fancy that all those little points of light
filling the sky were the furnaces of innumerable divine alchemists, who
labour continually, turning lead into gold, weariness into ecstasy,
bodies into souls, the darkness into God; and at their perfect labour
my mortality grew heavy, and I cried out, as so many dreamers and men
of letters in our age have cried, for the birth of that elaborate
spiritual beauty which could alone uplift souls weighted with so many
dreams.


II

My reverie was broken by a loud knocking at the door, and I wondered
the more at this because I had no visitors, and had bid my servants
do all things silently, lest they broke the dream of my inner life.
Feeling a little curious, I resolved to go to the door myself, and,
taking one of the silver candlesticks from the mantlepiece, began to
descend the stairs. The servants appeared to be out, for though the
sound poured through every corner and crevice of the house there was
no stir in the lower rooms. I remembered that because my needs were so
few, my part in life so little, they had begun to come and go as they
would, often leaving me alone for hours. The emptiness and silence
of a world from which I had driven everything but dreams suddenly
overwhelmed me, and I shuddered as I drew the bolt. I found before me
Michael Robartes, whom I had not seen for years, and whose wild red
hair, fierce eyes, sensitive, tremulous lips and rough clothes made
him look now, just as they used to do fifteen years before, something
between a debauchee, a saint, and a peasant.