Lucian

“ It had been a mistake to marry Lucian. Well, it wasn’t too late to rectify the mistake, and one was wise, of course, in rectifying it. If you find out that you are on the wrong road—why, what more politic and advisable than to take the shortest cut to the right one? She was sorry for Lucian, but the path which he was following just then was by no means to her own taste, and she must leave him to tread it alone. She was indeed sorry for him. He had been an ardent and a delightful lover—for a while—and it was a pity he was not a rich man. ”

“ You’ve never known what it was, Lucian, to be refused anything, have you? No: well, that naturally inclines you to the opinion that everything will always be made easy for you. Now supposing you lost your vogue as a poet—oh, there’s nothing impossible about it, my dear boy!—the public are as fickle as fortune herself—and supposing your next tragedy does not catch the popular taste—ah, and that’s not impossible either—what are you going to do? ”

“ Lucian. There are honest men who occupy their lives in discovering types for all things.
Timotheus. Truly and rationally thou speakest now. Honest men and wise men above their fellows are they, and the greatest of all discoverers. There are many types above thy reach, O Lucian!
Lucian. And one which my mind, and perhaps yours also, can comprehend. There is in Italy, I hear, on the border of a quiet and beautiful lake, a temple dedicated to Diana; the priests of which temple have murdered each his predecessor for unrecorded ages. ”

“ It had been their ill-fortune to have all they wanted all their lives, and they lived as if heaven had made a contract with them to furnish their table with manna and their wardrobes with fine linen, and keep no account of the supply. She was of a practical mind, and had old-fashioned country notions about saving up in view of contingencies, and she expounded them at certain seasons with force and vigour to both Lucian and Haidee. ”

“ Lucian knew, and when he came into possession of Lord Simonstower’s legacy he began to surround himself with the fruits of money and knowledge, and as riches came rolling in from royalties, he went on indulging his tastes until the house was full, and would hold no more examples of anything. But by that time it was a nest of luxury wherein even the light, real and artificial, was graduated to a fine shade, where nothing crude in shape or colour interfered with the delicate susceptibilities of a poetic temperament. ”

“ Lucian laughs at this custom when he represents the soul of the ordinary man in the next world as a mere bodiless shade that vanishes at a touch like smoke. It subsists on the libations and offerings it receives from the living, and those who have no friends or relatives on earth are starving and famished. ”

“ Lucian hesitated at sight of them.
‘Come!’ said the earl sharply. ‘His offence?’
‘He insulted Miss Brinklow,’ said Lucian gravely. ‘I told him I should punish him. Then he told lies—about her. I said I would kill him. A man who lies about a woman merits death.’
‘A very excellent apothegm,’ said the earl. ‘Sprats, my dear, draw that chair for me—thank you. Now,’ he continued, taking a seat and sticking out his gouty leg, ‘let me have a clear notion of this delicate question. ”

“ He began to wonder if Lucian’s study or library, or wherever he worked, were similarly devoted to the worship of form and colour.
He was turning over the leaves of an Italian work, a book sumptuous in form and wonderful in its vellum binding and gold scroll-work, when a rustle of skirts aroused him from the first stages of a reverie. He turned, expecting to see his hostess—instead he saw a young lady whom he instinctively recognised as Miss Chilverstone, the girl of the merry eyes and the innumerable freckles of ten years earlier. ”

“ You’re too cock-sure, too easy-going, too thoughtless, Lucian, and this is a hard and a cruel world.’
‘It’s been a very pleasant world to me so far,’ he said. ‘I’ve never had a care or a trouble; I’ve heaps of friends, and I’ve always got everything that I wanted. Why, it’s a very pleasant world! You, Sprats, have found it so, too.’{134}
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I have found it pleasant, but it is hard and cruel nevertheless, and one realises it sometimes when one least expects to. One may wake out of a dream to a very cruel reality.’
‘You speak as of a personal experience,’ he said smiling. ”

“ But when one reflects upon the tender hearts to be found in the literature of the century, it is difficult to think that Lucian can have had any effect on the mass of serious people, unless to quicken in them by repulsion the desire for something less terrible than a godless world of mockery and death, and the impulse to seek it in the ancestral faith of their fathers. He did not love men enough to understand their inmost mind. The instincts that drove men back upon the old religion were among the deepest in human nature, and of their strength Lucian had no idea. ”

“ I feel as I used to feel when I fought with Lucian—there was always a lot of talk before the tearing and rending began. I feel talky now, and I also feel that I must fight you. To begin with, just remember that I am a woman and you’re a man. I don’t know anything about men—they’re incomprehensible to me. ”

“ Mr. Chilverstone read it and the revised proofs of the epic; as he had a great liking for blank verse, rounded periods, and the grand manner, he prophesied success for both. Lucian drank in his applause with eagerness—he had a great belief in his old tutor’s critical powers, and felt that whatever he stamped with the seal of his admiration must be good. ”

“ Ah, Lucian, we have need of you, of your sense and of your mockery! Here, where faith is sick and superstition is waking afresh; where gods come rarely, and spectres appear at five shillings an interview; where science is popular, and philosophy cries aloud in the market-place, and clamour does duty for government, and Thais and Lais are names of power—here, Lucian, is room and scope for you. Can I not imagine a new “Auction of Philosophers,” and what wealth might be made by him who bought these popular sages and lecturers at his estimate, and vended them at their own? ”

“ Such pictures as these were to Lucian a comfort and a help, a remedy against despair. Often when he felt overwhelmed by the difficulty of the work he had undertaken, he thought of the alternative career, and was strengthened.
He returned again and again to that desire of a prose which should sound faintly, not so much with an audible music, but with the memory and echo of it. In the night, when the last tram had gone jangling by, and he had looked out and seen the street all wrapped about in heavy folds of the mist, he conducted some of his most delicate experiments. ”

“ Truly a very Colossus of falsehood, but Lucian's ingenuity is inexhausted and inexhaustible, and the mighty Whale is his masterpiece of impudence. For he "contained in greatness fifteen hundred furlongs"; his teeth were taller than beech-trees, and when he swallowed the travellers, he showed himself so far superior to Jonah's fish, that ship and all sailed down his throat, and happily he caught not the pigmy shallop between his chops. ”

“ Lucian gazed at her with a sickening fear creeping closely round his heart. He had forced the truth away from him: he was to hear it at last from the lips of a dying woman.
‘You were to blame, though,’ she said presently. ‘You ought not to have let me go alone on his yacht or to the Highlands. It was so easy to go wrong there.’
Lucian could not control a sharp cry. ”

“ It had been no part of Lucian’s plans for the future that Sprats should come between him and his friend.
He slept badly that night, and while he lay awake he said to himself that it was all over. It was a mere repetition of history—a woman always came between men. He had read a hundred instances—this was one more. Of course, the Sprats creature would oust him from his place—nothing would ever be as it had been. ”

“ Lucian laughed in his day at small imitators of the manner of Thucydides, as he would laugh now at the small imitators of the manner of Macaulay. He bade the historian first get sure facts, then tell them in due order, simply and without exaggeration or toil after fine writing; though he should aim not the less at an enduring grace given by Nature to the Art that does not stray from her, and simply speaks the highest truth it knows. ”

“ Lucian's picture enables one to portray to oneself the wrinkled, sun-burnt face of the travelled old man, who poured forth the stream of his irresistible eloquence, while his eye flashed with delight and kindly interest. Lucian says that he turned towards his willing captives with a smiling face, and we have the same touch preserved in the Irish legend, when it calls the hero Ogma Grianainech, or Ogma of the Shining Countenance. [35] The combining of the attributes of Heracles and Hermes in one personage, which puzzled the Greek traveller, was no passing whim of the Gauls. ”

“ To other people it seems quite a natural thing. It never seemed to bother Lucian Damerel, for example. You cannot realise the adulation which was showered upon him when he first flashed into the literary heavens. All the women were in love with him; all the girls love-sick because of his dark face and wondrous hair; he was stared at wherever he went; and he might have breakfasted, lunched, and dined at somebody else’s expense every day.’
‘And he liked—that?’ asked Saxonstowe.
‘It’s a bit difficult,’ answered Sprats, ‘to know what Lucian does like. He plays lion to perfection. ”

“ His wit was as mordant as Heine's own;—is it fantastical to suggest that Lucian too carried Hebrew blood in his veins?—yet when the onslaught is most unsparing he is still joyous. For a gay contempt, not a bitter hatred, is the note of his satire. And for the very reason that his scepticism was felt, that it sprang from a close intimacy with the follies of his own time, so it is fresh and familiar to an age that knows not Zeus. Not even the Dialogues of the Gods are out of date, for if we no longer reverence Olympus, we still blink our eyes at the flash of ridicule. ”

“ He set the world in the dry light of truth, and since the vanity of mankind is a constant factor throughout the ages, there is scarce a page of Lucian's writing that wears the faded air of antiquity. His personages are as familiar to-day as they were in the second century, because, with his pitiless determination to unravel the tangled skein of human folly, he never blinded his vision to their true qualities. ”

“ Lucian was worshipping Saxonstowe with the guileless adoration of a child that looks on a man who has seen great things and done great things. It was a trick of his: he had once been known to stand motionless for an hour, gazing in silence at a man who had performed a deed of desperate valour, had suffered the loss of his legs in doing it, and had been obliged to exhibit himself with a placard round his neck in order to scrape a living together. Lucian was now conjuring up a vision of the steppes and plains over which Saxonstowe had travelled with his life in his hands. ”

“ Saxonstowe, who had come back to town for a few weeks before going abroad again, took to calling a good deal at the little house in Mayfair. He had come to understand and to like Lucian, and though they were as dissimilar in character as men of different temperament can possibly be, a curious bond of friendship, expressed in tacit acquiescence rather than in open avowal, sprang up between them. Each had a respect for the other’s world—a respect which was amusing to Sprats, who, watching them closely, knew that each admired the other in a somewhat sheepish, schoolboy fashion. ”

“ And Lucian’s versatility in technique is only a symbol of his versatile powers in general. He is equally at home in heaven and earth and hell, with philosophers and cobblers, telling a story, criticizing a book, describing a picture, elaborating an allegory, personifying an abstraction, parodying a poet or a historian, flattering an emperor’s mistress, putting an audience into good temper with him and itself, unveiling an imposture, destroying a religion or a reputation, drawing a character. ”

“ The catastrophe approached consummation with the inevitableness of a Greek tragedy. Lucian waxed gloomier and gloomier; Sprats endeavoured, agonisingly, to put things on a better footing; Haidee, now thoroughly enjoying herself, tried hard to make the other boy also jealous. But the other boy was too full of the joy of life to be jealous of anything; he gambolled about like a young elephant, and nearly as gracefully; it was quite evident that he loved horseplay and believed that girls were as much inclined to it as boys. ”

“ Demeter and Persephone.
THE DEATH OF PEREGRINE
Lucian to Cronius. Greeting.
Poor dear Peregrine—or Proteus, as he loved to call himself,—has quite come up to his namesake in Homer. We have seen him under many shapes: countless have been his transformations for glory's sake; and now—'tis his last appearance—we see him in the shape of fire. So vast was his ambition. Yes, Cronius; all that is left of the best of men is a handful of ashes. It's just like Empedocles; only with a difference. That philosopher would fain have sneaked into his crater unobserved: not so our high-souled friend. ”

“ Well, you’ll have noticed that he gazes with solemn eyes above your head—he never sees you at all—you aren’t worth it. If he should happen to look at you, he just wonders why the devil you stand there staring at him, and his eyes show a sort of cynical, idle contempt, and become solemn and ever-so-far-away again. Lucian plays lion in that way beautifully. He looks out of his cage with eyes that scorn the miserable wondering things gathered open-mouthed before him.’
‘Does he live in a cage?’ asked Saxonstowe.
‘We all live in cages,’ answered Sprats. ”