Part 9

‘Yes, Flaxius,’ replied the fairy with a sad smile, ‘and be thankful that thou comest here as an immortal who will depart as soon as thou shalt have learned the mystery, for verily with thy love and knowledge of the beautiful in art it had also gone hard with thee.’

‘Another paradox!’ thought Flaxius. ‘So, _tout lasse, tout passe, tout casse. En avant!_’

‘And now,’ said Albana, ‘for new sights! But wait! Drink from this flask! All who enter this realm must do so!’

‘I know it of old,’ said Flaxius. ‘It was the draught of the mysteries given me by the Fairy when I was made immortal. I drink to thee,’ he said, ‘O terrible ruler of this wondrous world! Yes, to thy realm and to thy mystic spouse! and with them to the angel of my dreams! and also thee, my fair, angelic guide!’

As he said this, there came from the depth below an ebony car or boat, exquisitely inlaid with gold in richest profusion, which rose slowly, quivering with the music, to their feet. Then there was a far, soft sound as of melodious chimes of a thousand bells.

‘Enter with me,’ said Albana. And having entered, they floated slowly over the gulf: they saw the city palace in new forms, while far beyond a landscape of marvellous beauty also developed itself, and in it too were other palaces, towns, towers, burgs, and villes or villas, castles, and immense ranges of crenellated, arched walls with glorious gates, and over the walls grew or hung masses of trees or clustering vines, bright with a mystic beauty of their own.

They landed at the edge of an immense marble precipice, which was however richly carved far adown with quaint devices, the more beautiful for moss and grey lichen. There appeared to be nothing freshly new, yet nothing ruined in the whole land; all spoke of an old time for ever young.

‘You see no escort,’ said Albana. ‘You are too great a visitor to be received with a cortège, or a procession, as we welcome the small great men of earth. It is long indeed since any one was received with such honour as this. You are deemed to be above ceremony.’

‘Charming!’ thought Flaxius, ‘the greatest mark of attention which I ever received in my life is the most devoid of all semblance of politeness. Another paradox, but this I understand.’

‘I think, beautiful Albana,’ he remarked, ‘that your company alone is here considered the highest compliment which can be paid to a guest.’

‘His majesty the king has said so,’ replied Albana simply. Meanwhile they had been passing along streets and scenes of surpassing magnificence or beauty, and after traversing a garden of the gods came to an immense open portal which they entered. And so on and ever on through stupendous colonnaded corridors, and cloistered squares with innumerable groups of statuary and fountains like vast rivers trained to play, great as the Nile when freshets fill its flood, leaping on high a mile, then roaring down through arches strange and high, falling over thundering waterfalls, broad and deep as Niagara, by towers like that of glorious Babylon which met the clouds; and above and beyond and higher yet again, like stairs of mountains beyond mountains growing dim, were walls of citadels like snowy marble, with a coral blush in the sunset, and domes like diamond, and pearly spires, glinting with gold in every form of grace.

When at last passing along a turquoise-walled and opal-paved arcade, to which unbroken divans of lapis lazuli, inlaid with silver, seemed more beautiful for inexhaustible masses of all shades and kinds of blue flowers hanging from vines, growing in vases of sapphire, so that the very air seemed to be of a dreamy azure hue, they came to a door and passed into a hall.

Wherein sat, not on a throne, but in a throne-like, ebony, high chair, at a table, a man of god-like mien and marvellous dignity.

So far beyond anything human in his awful beauty was he, that Flaxius was more deeply impressed by him than by all the wonders which he had thus far beheld. And truly, as Flaxius reflected, when a man has passed some scores of centuries in forming ideals of the beautiful and finds his ideal outdone, ’tis time to look about for _new powers_!

The Olympian Jove with a shade of Lucifer, the Spirit of the serene heaven mingled with the darker yet still beautiful earth below, the two united as by a spirit in the eternal yet ever intermingling ocean of the eye. Such he appeared, and Flaxius recalled Goethe:

‘The soul of man Is like the water. From heaven it cometh To heaven it riseth, And thence at once It must back to earth For ever changing.’

Moreover there was in the wonderfully grand face something sympathetically human, and humanly chevaleresque, even touching in genial moods on the ‘devilish handsome fellow.’ ‘I have heard,’ thought Flaxius, ‘of a town in Western America, wherein appeared a married lady of such irresistible beauty that all the male inhabitants of the place, even unto the deacons, gave up the commandments, or more especially one of them, as a bad job. A few like his majesty, turned loose on London society, would convert Mayfair into a divorce court.’

For he had at times a smile, a laugh which went like an electric flash of champagne to the heart of your heart, which is the reason why the inhabitants of a certain American State, with the exquisite poetry peculiar to their refined natures, call apple brandy ‘Jersey lightning,’ it being so potent that a taste thereof goes flashing and coruscating through the soul, suggesting Etna in full play on the great fourth of July Day of Judgment, when the _sæculum_, or _fin de siècle_, or the age, is to be dissolved in sparks, since having gone up like a rocket it is to come down--like the stick! This glance had Pluto, and Flaxius found it useful, because by means of it his majesty rendered clear, or, as one may say, coloured, like an artist, the outlines of his spoken arguments.

‘You are truly welcome, Flaxius!’ said the Lord of the Underworld, ‘as are all immortal mortals who have raised themselves as types of ideas to such a power that they can pass my realm as tourists between heaven and earth without becoming mine. Ah! that is a very vulgar error on earth that I pass my time in trying to catch souls! Did men but know how I pass all my life in painful effort to get rid of them! Well, I have seen here in days of yore, each for his three days, Adonis--ah, _he_ stayed six months, by request of my wife! Orpheus--music--poor fellow!... Socrates, Buddha, Dante--you know the list--and so on down to Emanuel Swedenborg. And every one of them saw hell after his own fashion--and then raised it after his peculiar style to earth, and no one interfered with the seeing thereof....

‘But, my Flaxius,’ resumed Pluto, with a genial smile, ‘is there any reason why we should not drink, although we are in hell?’

‘_Raison de plus_, most men would surely think,’ replied Flaxius.

And at the word there were before them two goblets creaming and streaming over; and Flaxius noticed that the infernal care of details was exquisitely carried out in this, that the _drops_ which are generally a great drawback to the over-brimming beaker, did not fall on his clothes and wet or stain them, but, becoming diamonds or pearls, rebounded dry.

And the draught was transcendental--so cool, so piquant, so enlivening! Pluto smiled.

‘Confess, Flaxius,’ he said, ‘that hell is not, as you find it, exactly what man imagines it to be?’

‘True,’ said Flaxius emptying his goblet, which refilled itself; ‘and yet I imagine that I am as far as ever from knowing what it is!’

‘And that distance,’ replied the monarch, drawing his own glass, ‘I will diminish for thee, O thou Sage of Sublime Common Sense, for thou shalt have a nearer perception of the truth and what Inferno is than any of thy predecessors.’

Now, Flaxius, comfortably seated in a high-backed chair, with the towering, Jacqueline can, or goblet, foaming before him, listened, _arrectis auribus_, graving every word which he heard on the tablet of his soul, even as Alba seated on a Greek tabouret at a little distance was doing on a leaf of ivory with her stylus. [And here notes Flaxius in the margin: ‘It is a curious fact that Alban is depicted in Etruscan vases as holding a stylus or pen, and that the witches of Tuscany, who still know her as Bellaria, declare that she is the spirit of the Pen, and is the one to be invoked by all who would write, _i.e._ compose well. _Aurora Musis amica._]

‘Know, my Flaxius,’ began his majesty, ‘that earth and all its trials, troubles, and torments, diseases, and miseries, ceases even for the worst and wickedest when they come here. We begin with them all _de novo_, on an entirely new system--the old body is gone and we are done with it. Physical torment ceases with the old life, for even the most earthly. Only ideas and earthly ideals remain, and to these is given full scope and free play. All begin here with unlimited freedom and indulgence.’

‘If I may interrupt your majesty,’ said Flaxius, ‘I would remark that many people would suppose that you are, by inadvertent error, describing heaven.’

‘Yes,’ replied Pluto, ‘that is indeed the heaven of every fool. But it is the surest way to come to grief in the long run. The ultimate extreme of hell or of punishment is for every man to be left utterly to himself, to have his own way, to follow his own fancies, to rule as he lists, and do uncontrolled just what he likes. Few and far between have those mortals ever been who, gifted with power, would not damn themselves on earth if left without guidance or control.

‘Now this is _hell_, and if thou wouldst know what the word really means, I reply, “a place where every one can do just what he pleases, and have all that he wants.” Every one entering here is supplied with such a world as he desires, with corresponding scenes and companions--he himself unconsciously drawing them all from memory and imagination. But note--for it is an important point--that they believe it all to be real, and in a certain sense it is so, for they have given to them the power, which science will some day give to man on earth, of perfect synthesis by volition--that is of drawing out the elements by _will_ from the _prima materia_ or _materialising_ unseen elements, or conceptions.’

‘I understand,’ said Flaxius. ‘Gods in a small way. Demiurguses. Make things!’

‘They think so,’ laughed Pluto. ‘All here believe for a long time--as they believed like fools on earth--that all which they saw on earth or see here is real. What is real is unchangeable and eternal. Who lives in Evolution, as all do on earth or in matter, lives in the Transient. It is when they realise by mere satiety the unreality of things that their punishment comes--that of despair. Then after a season they begin to exert themselves to seek higher ideals or something new, which being attained, there comes again satiety, and then renewed effort, every new stage becoming easier, until at last man rises to the gods or God. The best experience disappointment and rebuffs; but they go on. The wise who on earth have shaped better ideals, the altruists and benevolent philosophers or Christians, and people who have not meddled with others, or lived entirely in the eyes and opinions of others, or revelled in notoriety, or been selfish and tyrannical in the small or great relations of life, these do not remain long in our world of shams. The honest poet or artist or man of letters is let off very easily, as indeed are all who have been kinder to mankind than mankind has been unto them.

‘The world is ever advancing,’ continued Pluto, ‘and to satisfy the soul with what is for the time around it on earth, or to think of carrying it on for ever into the future, as _all_ creeds do’ added his majesty significantly, ‘is _to stop_. (Flaxius, my son, be thou not like to them, but keep that holy emblem the Cup going.’) They both drained, and the Lord of Hades resumed:

‘The selfish nature thus gratified and satisfied with temporary forms does not lift its mind to, or progress with--Evolution.’

‘Ha!’ quoth Flaxius, ‘light is coming fast; I do begin to feel I have indeed immortal longings in me! This then is the faith so long foretold--which is neither Buddhist nor Christian, nor Material.’

‘Ay, Flaxius, it is the very truth, as it seems to me every one might surmise from the very infinity of creative forms in nature, from the ideals which they declare and the inexhaustibility of matter and force. All goes on, slowly it seems, but there is eternity to work in, and its great law is progress.

‘Now Evolution is the creation of new laws from old, of new types from others exhausted, of new ideals, as new patterns are created _ad infinitum_ by a revolving kaleidoscope, a continual out-blossoming and ripening of flowers which were once small, wild blossoms and are now hundred-leaved _grandifloræ_. And these again will be raised to newer and more magnificent forms. And you need not ask what is to become of Man in all this, for, rely upon it, where all is progressing, all is well. He who is magnanimous, and who can grasp in its fulness all this scheme, will not be afraid to cast himself headlong into the foaming flood and trust to its bearing him safely on. Fortune favours the bold, and he who _is_ afraid, whimpering “What is to become of poor little _Me_?” will be carried away in time all the same. But that man never loved the beautiful or nature who feared death.

‘Now we may consider all mankind on earth as a single man in hell--living in Evolution, yet ignorant of it, opposing it with his self-formed, conservative ideas--an old woman sweeping out the sea with a broom--and you have the key to the whole.’

‘It appears to me,’ observed Flaxius, who had listened to these remarks with evident approbation--if the taking a drink ever and anon and sighing with content could be interpreted as ‘Hear! Hear!’ or ‘fervent applause’--‘that there is a marvellous spirit of romance and poetry and wild adventure in Evolution as you set it forth, and exquisite inspiration to a higher devotion, and a purer and far more vigorous religion than man has ever before dreamed of. For this faith in nature with her ever-unfolding ideals, and that of self, in “_What_ I know not, but in the best, _that_ I know!” is so bold and knightly that before it all that was ever presented to man seems poor and weak and dim. The Church and conventional cant, or modern life, have well-nigh crushed out in man every trace of daring or chivalry, and this religion has in it that which will revive such qualities on a far higher scale than was found in the Middle Ages.’

‘Saving this, Flaxius,’ added his majesty, ‘that Evolution asks man to understand pure science as a basis and accept its deductions as to evolving ideals, and not rely entirely on tradition which is well-nigh folk-lore. And when the simple truth of anything has once been studied or accepted, the poetry and romance soon follow. _Crede experto Roberto!_’

‘Ay, by the Father of the Fathers of Faith!’ exclaimed Flaxius, ‘your majesty has had some experience. May I venture to inquire,’ he added, ‘what part this ever “freshly fresh and newly new,” as the Hindus sing it, this ever-beautiful and good young lady whom I see here has in your tremendous _pension_, or boarding-school for eternity?’

‘Eternity!’ said Pluto, with a smile. ‘Nay, you have not yet heard the last word. But as for Albana----’ Here he gave a glance of ineffably respectful, fond kindness at the subject of their discourse. ‘You have seen in life in many lands noble women who, as Sisters of Charity or slummers--go anywhere to do good. Albana ranges through hell, earth, and heaven. The pure soul is everywhere at home, and love hath no bounds. We are not so cruel in our punishment as to leave souls entirely to themselves in the task of rehabilitation. She and her sisters--love and love alone--suggest to the despairing new ideals of life.’

‘Ay,’ cried Flaxius, ‘hell is the gate to heaven, that I see. A lesson which I should have learned on earth. Yet man has been there longer than I without learning it. It must be so--“Pluto, thou reasonest well,”’ he added. (And to himself, ‘I suppose the reviewers will light on _that_ as a typographical error.’)

‘And now,’ said his majesty, ‘the lecture is over for to-day. Go with Albana as a Beatrice through my realm and visit the condemned in their homes.’

‘And the _last word_ to which you alluded?’ inquired Flaxius.

‘It is,’ said Pluto, with a smile, ‘that all which you have seen, or shall see here in Hades, as I have indeed plainly said already, is, to speak Sanscritically, only Maya, or Illusion. All smoke, but it rises from a real fire. _Ite!--missa est!_’

* * * * *

‘And what did you think of the Lower World?’ inquired the Fairy of Flaxius.

‘That it is misnamed, O Soul of the Violets!’ replied the Etruscan, ‘since it appeared to me as being one degree higher than this. For in it the average Philistine and guinea-pig and sinful gossip are gently led or induced to find out that they are fools or evil-doers, and that he who gives himself most earnestly to life goes deepest into death. Now man is destined to slowly learn this lesson through the ages, and as he progresses in it, Science will, step by step, overcome death. So that as we become idealists, so shall we also advance into earthly immortality. That, your Fairyness, is what I conclude from what I beheld. In fact I am so smitten with admiration at the beautiful humanity of hell as I saw it, that I can only declare that if there is really no such place there _ought_ to be one!’

‘It will do just as well if you write and publish an account of it,’ replied the fairy. ‘The main thing is to teach mankind the great lesson that most men left to mere commonplace and earthly ideals must inevitably damn themselves.’

‘Beyond this, O Loveliness,’ resumed Flaxius, ‘I was induced to reflect, that to avoid hell, satiety, and despair, it is necessary to have an iron _will_, and one formed on the strictest moral lines. And he who can make a perfect will unto himself, so as to make his whole soul or intellect obey his spirit or conscience or God-within, has won all that he needs in time or eternity. This, O Life of Endless Light! is the great lesson of Orcus.’

‘It would have been well worth going there to learn that,’ said the fairy, ‘had it even been all fire and suffering. But haste and write it down, for many there be who need the lesson, which is the highest of all in true wisdom.

‘He to whom the devil grants All he wishes, all he wants, However gaily time be passed Will catch the devil at the last.’

FLAXIUS AND ADELINDÈ

A LEGEND OF THE EARLY LOMBARD DAYS, BEING ONE OF THE VISIONS WHICH FLAXIUS HAD WHILE IN HELL

‘Said Chider the immortal, the ever young: “I passed by a city, a man stood near Plucking fruit that in a fair garden hung. I asked, “How long has the city been here?” He said, as the clustering fruit he caught, “There was always a city in this spot, And so there will be till time is not.” Five hundred years passed by as before: I was standing upon that spot once more.”’

WHILE the learned Flaxius repeated these lines with strange feeling, as if recalling to him missing memories, he looked intently at every object round as if he would wring from it some buried mystery or long-hidden secret. It was twilight-tide in the last golden-brown of a Carpoccio sky. Broad and wide in the rapidly dimming distance were undulating hills covered with vineyards and olives, like a waving sea topped with green foam; here and there were hamlets of white houses, and above them stately towered castles, like shepherds watching flocks of sheep at eve; long lines of stone walls, flowing with maiden-hair or helmeted with cactus--all softly fair and far away!

It was a beautiful picture; but what interested the man of many years, and by-gone lives, was what lay close about him--the grey and mossy relics of an ancient ville--it may have been a quaint, small town of well-marked fortalices, or a brave and beautiful little city in Lombard times--now all abandoned in its solitude. Here and there a run of ivied wall and a square tower still held themselves up respectably, as if opposing a stout heart to bad fortune;--a fine thing to see in any ruin, be it of man or marble. There were hillocks--ruined arches--and now it was all a home for ghosts and owls, or else some shadowy night-hag wandering slow.

And as Flaxius considered the masses of ferns and weeds, and saucy acanthus, and golden blossoms of many kinds, and arrogant asphodels, which seemed to crowd themselves into the ruins and say: ‘Poor things, _we_ will protect you and make everything look respectable,’ the sage reflected:

‘’Tis all, as in every city--where _la génération qui vient se moque de la noblesse qui va_--golden blossoms or guinea-pigs--flaunting weeds, rotting while they cover that which is older and nobler!--_avanti!_ Dandelions--_pisciacane_ in Italian--with your flowers like golden florins, and your dandy-lions of sons, begone!’

As if in answer to him he heard a bell from some church cloister far away strike twelve, softly and slowly, as if the chimes had been transfused through the honey-golden summer air which lingered into night. And with the last note all the weeds and flowers vanished; the ruins revived, shooting up again into ancient glory; towers rose from the dust--façades en-niching many a form of forgotten saints--transfigured and idealised, and over all zig-zagging and working wildly into life-like, pictured dreams, innumerable arabesques of old Lombard vines and monsters, warriors fighting dragons whose tails ended in branching dragon-wort and dogs who were half dog-wood, chasing wolves who were three-quarters wolfsbane--puns in stone, for those who can read them.

Stern and unmoved sat the man of many ages, looking at the wondrous transformation scene, as if at the opera. Like one who has had for years a season ticket, he keenly looked to see if it were well done, for he was a member of the Eternal Press which reports history, the great _Times_ of all time.

And verily he who has mastered the course of the circling ages in chronicles, and feels their soul, and has learned their lesson, may sit like Mephistopheles before the Sphinx and put such mocking questions as he will, with all the might of all that man may dare.