Part 8

‘Thou shalt see it, O Cæsar,’ replied Flaxius. ‘But it seems to me that the miracle would be improved on, if instead of an ox we were to substitute a man. For it might be said by the sceptical that we had poisoned the ox beforehand.’

‘By Medea!’ exclaimed the emperor admiringly, ‘I never thought of that!’

‘While if we take a man who declares himself to be in good health, there can be no suspicion. Now, Cæsar, thou hast, I doubt not, in thy prisons more than one unlucky wretch condemned to the torture and the crucifix, to whom a quick and painless death would be as a divine blessing and great joy?’

‘_Depone!_ bet your head on it!’ cried Julian. ‘I sent one this morning to the Mamertine--hell would be too good for him--and I meant to give him a foretaste of it by means of preparation.’

‘He will do,’ replied Flaxius.

So on the following day, when the emperor and his court and all Rome assembled in the great amphitheatre, there was led in a ferocious, giant-like and bitterly wicked-looking Gaul, who, expecting to be tortured to death to make a Roman holiday, was on his best behaviour as regards defiance and dying game.

‘Man, whence comest thou,’ asked Flaxius.

‘From Lutetia,’ was the proud reply.

‘_Ame de boue_,’ thought the sage in a language of the future, and then asked:

‘And what is thy religion?’

‘I worship the devil; it was the last fashion ere I left home.’

‘You expect torture!’

‘I do not fear it. It will pain me, but when dead, I shall be amply revenged on ye all, if hate and hell can do it.’

‘If I could give thee out of pity a sudden painless death, wouldst thou declare that thou in all thy health and strength forgivest all men?’

The Gaul glared at him stolidly and grimly and then uttered in a strange tongue which none understood.

‘_Mais, nom d’une pipe, pourquoi pas? J’aurais bien de quoi m’amuser sans me soucier de ces b-là!_’ And then in rude Latin he said:

‘I consent. Hurry along with your washing, and get the pigs in!’ And he made the declaration.

Then Flaxius, who bore in his hand a long wand, as all the Magi were wont to do, touched him with it, while whispering a word in his ear. And the man fell dead at full length, while a thrill of awe and a murmur rose from all Rome, at sight of this mighty deed. And the great and wise and even the good, or such few of the latter as were present, _rari nantes_, thronged about him, and adored him.

‘And now, Flaxius,’ said the emperor, as they sat in solemn concert over the Holy Bottle, which his highness was never tired of admiring, ‘if thou canst explain to me on natural grounds how thou didst slay that Gaul, then “by Gaule!” as Julius Cæsar said to Vercingetorix, I will believe, or disbelieve, anything!’

‘Yea, Cæsar, I will do it,’ replied the sage. ‘Now if thou wilt remember Begoe or Bergoia, her who slew the Ox with a single word, left to Rome a book on the _Ars Fulguritorum_ or the averting, that is to say, managing thunder and lightning, and this book, which is in the ancient Etruscan tongue, and hard to understand, for those who know the language, is even yet in the temple of the Palatine Apollo, where I read it. And it explains that the lightning is caused by an invisible but terrible secret force, which like heat pervades all things while seen by none, and this is the awful power of the Divinity to smite the earth, and it was by means of it that Bergoia slew the Ox. And know that there was in my wand a charge of condensed thunder and lightning, quite strong enough to knock a bull sky-high.’

‘But the word?’ asked Julian who had not quite recovered from his ideas of miracle.

‘Truly, Cæsar, the word was _Electricity_, which is as yet unknown, but which in ages to come will be the great heritage and power of mankind. For as when thou art done with a garment thou givest it to a servant, so the gods when they have somewhat worn out their attributes and glories, hand them over to men.’

‘_Semper similem ducit Deus ad similem_, and so the gods lead ever like to like. Ah, it _is_ wonderful. And now, Flaxius, the light begins to shine in on me, and I see that there is indeed a higher and far more wonderful magic and miracle than the poor, thin Thaumaturgy which I sought for once. For true magic is the mastering the awful power and secrets of nature. Now I see that because thou mightest explain to me by natural means how Christ fed the multitude, or raised the dead or healed the sick, it would be none the less wonderful, for genius, even the genius to amaze and nothing more, is miraculous.’

‘That will be better understood, O Cæsar, in times to come when science shall have risen to glory, by means of such stupendous genius that no man can help revering it.’

‘Ah!’ said Julian with a deep sigh, ‘happy the age and happy mankind when there shall be but one faith, whatever it be! Thou wilt never know what I have suffered between the old faith in the Gods and Christianity. As Terence says, I think, somewhere in the _Andria_:

‘“How happy could I be with either, Were t’ other dear charmer away!”’

‘Yes, Cæsar, yours is a hard case, and all the harder because you wish heart and soul to do what is right.’

‘Orcus and hell, heathen and Christian, take me if I don’t!’ replied the emperor in a passion and looking as wild as a panther on the spring: he who had seen him then and there would have believed him to be some young god enraged. ‘What the devil _can_ they expect a man to do who has seen what _I_ have seen, and gone through what I have endured? Well, I began in good faith enough as a Christian, and in truth I was cut out for one as few young Roman gentlemen are. I was never sensual, cruel, nor over-selfish.’

‘Right you are, O Cæsar,’ thought Flaxius, ‘and a very good Christian gentleman you’d have made, if your guardians had let well alone.’

‘So I, with a deep love of ancient heathen beauty and art and poetry, was put into a cloister, where the meanest, monkish, shaveling spite made a sin and a shame of all that I loved. It was not belief in their own faith, but the bitterest hate of what they called heathenism, which chiefly inspired every one of them. That was their real religion--all the rest was mere form--the adaptation to their ritual of what I knew were old Oriental ceremonies. Then I began to think out, O Flaxius, what has ever since been the idea of my life: Why cannot man keep the old faith in Beauty, and all that was charming in the old religion, and unite with it the humanity and higher truth of Christianity.’

‘There will perhaps be a time, in the dim and remote future,’ quoth Flaxius, prophetically quoting Gladstone, ‘when that idea will occur to others.’

‘So I dreamed that I, as an Eclectic--having read something of Ammonius Saccas the Egyptian--would be the apostle of the new combined religion. Well! time passed, and after I had become Cæsar, it occurred to me to examine all the faiths into which Christianity had split, and a nice job it was! Pheugh! everything from Trinitarians, Arians, and Unitarians down to Cainites, who worship the flesh and sin and the devil, all hating the common enemy but hating one another worse, like the Jews who slew one another in the siege of Jerusalem while all fought Titus.

‘O sage,’ he resumed, ‘when I think how beautiful and noble, how holy and perfect were the conceptions of Christ, and how it was His ideal that every man should commune directly with God, and when I see how each one of these sects steps in and proposes with saints and forms to do for you what you should do for yourself, I cannot wonder at the scarcity of Christians. Yet there is a stupendous truth in Christianity, the truth of human rights, which even they cannot crush. _Magna est veritas et prævalebit._’

‘And the old religion?’ asked Flaxius.

‘Well! it admitted the Beautiful and let a man philosophise freely, and did not make devils out of all the sweet and fair conceptions of poetry, of fauns and nymphs and Oreads and all; and so, as I believe that nature must prevail in the end with man, I went back to it. Yet the old religion is not humane. It admits slavery and inhumanity, it allows the grosser passions of cruelty and lust full play, evil nature as well as good, and it needs reform. I would fain be that reformer.’

‘Now here is a great man,’ thought Flaxius, ‘who is either two hundred years behind his time, or a thousand or more in advance of it. He means well, but is out of the age.’ Then speaking aloud he said:

‘Cæsar, there was once a king of Bithynia or Cappadocia or some such country, who had a mind to marry. Now the king next door had two daughters; both were beautiful, but one was as Venus and the other as Minerva. One was beautiful and voluptuous, witty and charming, while the other was wise and just, humane and ever careful that no one should be oppressed. Now which of these should he have married?’

‘Had I been in his place, I would have married both,’ replied the emperor.

‘But that was impossible.’

‘H’m! Well, in that case I should have taken the wise one.’

‘That,’ said Flaxius, ‘is what he did, and it is what the world will do: it will adopt the religion which, despite all the corruption with which man surrounds it, promises the greatest good to the greatest number.’

‘I believe that thou art in the right, O sage!’ replied the emperor slowly. ‘However, _jacta est alea_, the die is cast, and I shall ever remain Julian the Apostate. But what will be the end of it all?’

‘Thou wilt die nobly as a king should die--in battle for thy country.’

‘Then,’ said Julian, ‘I am content.’

FLAXIUS IN HADES

SHOWING HOW FLAXIUS WENT DOWN INTO HELL, AND OF THE MARVELLOUS THINGS WHICH HE SAW AND LEARNED WHILE THERE

‘To the Esthete who regards all Nature and Eternity as a mere paint-box for art, hell is a necessity, as is illustrated by Ruskin when he howls that “in the utmost solitudes of Nature the existence of hell seems to me as legibly declared by a thousand spiritual utterances as that of heaven.”’

‘THEY manage these things,’ said Flaxius, ‘I verily believe, better in hell.’

‘You have been in hell, I suppose,’ said the goblin-snob, with the most civilly impertinent air in the world, to the sage.

‘Strange!’ reflected Flaxius, ‘that a place which may be readily reached in a minute, if we may believe the common exhortation of the vulgar, or even in an instant by the aid of electricity as they manage it in America--with I forget how many volts, but “in a demi-volt”--should be unknown to me. I must consult the Fairy. Decidedly, my education has been neglected. I have not yet made the grand tour.’

Flaxius was living then near a town in the Austrian Tyrol, in a lonely, grey, and ancient ivied tower and small house, hidden away in the mountains; and there, with his usual disregard for appearances, he had installed a small gypsy family whom he had found camped in the woods, three chairs, a table, and a stupendous service of gold plate: this last not for luxury but because it was the first which, as a buried treasure near by, came to hand. The Goblin of the Tower had revealed to him its existence, and he used it because it saved him the trouble of going to town for crockery. His servants had instructions, whenever sent to buy anything, to steal one half the money, and then half of what they bought, under penalty of severe punishment, which had the natural result that whenever they could do so without detection, they never stole anything. Once, indeed, when his boy Lajos impudently brought him a manifestly superabundant supply of fruit for a half florin, or more than he expected, did Flaxius proceed, I cannot say to spoil the child, for the young devil was beyond all spoiling, but to break a rod on him. Whereupon he fell on his knees in tears, but was pardoned on promising never to be honest any more. Even Flaxius, great as he was, could not have his own way in everything, for things got to such a pitch at last, that these gypsies would tell the truth before his very face openly with the utmost impunity, and even without blushing.

It was midnight, and Flaxius the Immortal sat alone in his baronial hall. True, it was only about twenty feet in length and fifteen in breadth, but it was a hall. The walls were rich, or, at least, ragged, with Roman-picturesque and very-much-battered stone carvings, representing a lettuce-like confusion of crockets and finials, in which were nestled angels as ugly as devils, and devils not much prettier than the angels, like crayfish, or _écrevisses_, in foliage, the whole resembling an early Christian or Pre-Raphaelite salad which would have enchanted a Gothiconolator.

There was in the hall a large black Cat and an Owl, both of whom had come in uninvited from the Without, and joined the family, on speculation, from a desire for human sympathy and love, also for mice and any little edible odds and ends which might be obtainable. There was, too, a florid chimney-piece, so large that the hall seemed to be only a portion of it, or adjunct, just as the body and tail of the pricklefish seem to be only a part of his vast ogival jaw. In it blazed a fire, and by, or in that fire, sat the house goblin. His name was _Slangbrand_, and he was engaged in swallowing live coals, and then blowing out a storm of sparks from his nose, or _de retro_--as ye may see exemplified in Callot’s picture of Saint Anthony--anon swallowing the poker like a juggler, and then rising and falling on the smoke, up and down the chimney, like a ball in a fountain, to the great admiration of the Cat and the Owl, who constituted his audience.

Then Flaxius himself took a coal from the fire, placed it on a small silver dish on the table, and sprinkled on it a powder which burned, emitting an intensely aromatic and most agreeable but strange perfume, the magian meanwhile murmuring an incantation. A beautiful, soft light diffused itself all over the room; ’twas like a delicate, rosy Aurora with a memory of moonlight, and not without stars, for in it shone two celestial eyes, and then anon the Fairy stood revealed to her worshipper.

‘Joyful greeting to thee, Flaxius!’ said the _Fata_.

‘Deepest reverence to thee, O loveliest in form as in spirit, of all thy kind!’ replied the magian in a tone of deep sincerity.

‘And how goes the world with thee?’ inquired his queen.

‘With the world ever something new, as of old. As for me, and it was for this that I summoned thee, I would fain go----’

‘Go whither?’ inquired the fairy.

‘Go to hell!’ replied Flaxius.

‘Wherefore this unprovoked hostility?’ asked the spirit.

‘It was not spoken in the vocative,’ replied Flaxius. ‘I did but indicate the route which I fain would take, not commend it to thee, though by the twelve gods!’ he added passionately, ‘happy indeed would he be who on such a journey could meet with such an Eurydice!’

‘Flaxius,’ replied the fair one, ‘thou hadst ever so much modesty as to declare thyself unfit for heaven, and too much pride to allow that thou wert fit for the lower regions. Therefore didst thou elect to remain on earth to study and master its problems as thoroughly as it was in thee to do so, maintaining that of the few magians who like thyself had mastered immortality, too few prepared themselves, as they should do by studying the rudiments.’

‘Ay,’ replied Flaxius with his worldly smile. ‘They are mostly like boys who would fain run straight from their school to their dinner, not tarrying just for a little wholesome exercise to give a better appetite and health. But the truth which forces itself on me more and more is that hell and earth are so nearly allied that it becomes more and more difficult every day to investigate the one without knowing the other, even as a knowledge of chemistry becomes essential to an astronomer.’

‘You are quite right,’ replied the fairy. ‘_Sit tibi voluntas_, you shall have your wish. Fortunately it is extremely easy to get there, especially to obtain a place as permanent boarder, but even as a casual visitor I can assure you special honour. All the great geniuses of yore made a three days’ visit to the realm; it was a ceremony _de rigueur_, a kind of court presentation which no well-bred immortal could omit. I do not consider,’ she added reflectively, ‘that hell is exactly the place to which I would recommend parents to send their boys for an education, but for men of intelligence there are a great many valuable ideas to be picked up there. And when would you depart?’

‘Now, if you please.’

‘Said and done then,’ answered the spirit. ‘_Dicto citius_, as Virgil used to say to you--_in un batter d’occhio--in un balen--in un amen_!

‘In a wink and in a flash, In a snap, and at a dash, While a priest “amen” could say! From this earth now pass away To the mystic world below, Which all men dread yet none do know!’

As she uttered this incantation, Flaxius sank back in his great arm-chair to a deep sleep. The fairy looked at him with a loving glance, evidently with earnest and sympathetic thought, kissed his forehead, and softly sighed:

‘Ah well, Eternity is long!’

And turning to the goblin she said:

‘Slang, take heed that no mortal enters this house for three days and nights, and see that the master here be not disturbed! And do ye,’ she added to the Owl and Cat, ‘take care also that no noise be made hereabouts, and if ye do your work well, ye shall become witch and wizard in human form. Farewell!’ Saying this she winged her way heavenward:

‘To the joyous realms afar, Where the angel dwellers are.’

Now of the four members of that happy family, it would have been difficult to say who was the most delighted. Flaxius surely, because he had been sent to hell; the Owl and Cat certainly because they hoped to rise to the most degraded state of humanity; or Slang assuredly, simply because he had been spoken to by a queen and charged with a commission. And the three latter solemnly swore among themselves that if a mouse or bird so much as ventured to cheep or chirp about the house, they would rend it limb from limb, and have it served up for supper. According to the Penal Code of the Goblins. V. CXXXIIIV, _libro alto, capitulo nullo, folio nigro_.

* * * * *

As all the richest and most artistic or artful adornment of cathedrals or palaces, diamonded with panes of quaint device, ‘innumerable of stains and splendid dyes,’ and twilight saints and dim emblazonings, with half unearthly, holy, elfin shade, is all as trash and gingerbread, compared to the greenwood with its ineffable beauties of summer, and golden glory of autumn, so is all earthly music ever played mere scrannel-piping contrasted with that in which the soul of Flaxius seemed swept away, as he sank to sleep under the spell of the fairy. For he always loved music in every form, however made or by what mind composed; and that which now seemed to be life itself and waft him on, was what he would have had idealised for him, or that which he would have wanted had he known how to want it. This fulfilment of ideals in every form was the introduction to and the great moral lesson of Inferno. For therein lies such temptation as is mercifully spared to man on earth.

‘By the glory of the gods!’ said Flaxius, rousing himself to strength, ‘if the devil can bring art like this to bear on common mortals, who the devil can be saved? Truly it was high time for me to get out of the ruts of earth for a season, when there are such tremendous paradoxes as _this_ to solve outside it. And I thought that the problem and puzzle, and contrast, and anomaly were confined to life--_me stupide_! Verily, I say unto myself, Flaxius, that I foresee I shall find the very humour of humour in the mystery of hell, as this music intimates.’

And the music dying away, yet not quite vanishing, for Flaxius while he was in Inferno always heard it--just as in a garden we scent perfume of some kind, rising or falling--he found himself on the summit of a marvellously pleasant hill amid rocks and trees, grass and wild-flowers, with a mossy bench under an arbour, such a place as of all others he loved. He sat down on the bench and saw that there was before him a tremendous, yawning mountain gulf or valley, miles deep, but what lay beyond he knew not, since it was all covered with a veil of rolling, purple cloud of richest hue, in which he saw eyes of light wander like stars....

Then he perceived standing by his side, a very beautiful woman, young and lithe, holding a flask.

‘Have I not known thee of yore, O sister?’ asked Flaxius in Etruscan. ‘Art thou not of the _Lases_, who receive the spirits of the departed?’

‘I am of the Lases, and I am Alpan, or Alban, the Fairy of the Dawn, and their chief,’ said the maiden gently, ‘and I am sent by the lord of this land, whom men know as Pluto, to welcome thee. But first--behold!’

And as the music, sweet beyond dreams, again rose gently--as in a play or orchestra--the Lasa waved her hand and, the purple cloud vanishing, revealed to Flaxius such a vision of stupendous and beautiful palaces--all forming one--as he had never in all the splendour of the antique world seen the like of. He recalled Babylon, Memphis, Persepolis, Athens, Alexandria, Rome, the temples of Greece and of Egypt in all their massive mystery, the marvels of the Buddhist structures of Cambodia and India, the awful grotesques of America, the stately Lombard-Norman cathedrals of the West--the Gothic glory of Europe--and all seemed to be poor and wretched, yea, squalid, beside the grandeur, magnitude, and elaborate perfection of what was now before him.

‘This must be,’--he said, but he could speak no more, so overwhelmed was he at the sight.

‘Yes,’ added Albana, reading his thought. ‘It is--Pandemonium--the first structure ever erected.’

‘Ay,’ replied Flaxius recovering, of course to make a reflection, ‘and I see that architecture has step by step sunk, as man has risen. Another paradox! And this,’ he suddenly exclaimed, ‘is hell!’