University of Virginia Library

SCENE III

ABDIEL.
For a word,
As easy uttered as a prayer, a song,
A jibe, a sigh, a laugh, an anything,
To disinherit and dethrone oneself,
Why, what is that but lofty lunacy?

LUCIFER.
What word?

ABDIEL.
What word but God?

LUCIFER.
Who uttered it?

ABDIEL.
Yourself.

LUCIFER.
When,—when?

ABDIEL.
This moment, when you sped
Yon dwindling wonder of the hills adown
Her flockward course. How pat the parting came,
“God wend you!”—pious, valedictory.

LUCIFER.
A courtly fiction.

ABDIEL.
All our words are fictions.
But my uncourtly philosophic Prince,
Save when a rustic petticoat is by,
Prefers the unpleasant to the pleasant ones.

LUCIFER.
An exclamation cozened from my tongue
By a surprising glimpse of what might serve
For Heaven, if Heaven were not so fanciful.
You catch men talking the old tongue sometimes
Long after they have entered the new country. 'Tis
The force of habit.

ABDIEL.
Habit is a force;
Then why oppose it?

LUCIFER.
What a winsome child!
She lent the mountains softness, and the rocks
Smiled like her gaze when it was shining on them.
The rampant torrents slackened as she stepped
Over their broken bridges, and the roar
Was changed to rippling treble when they heard
The soft mysterious minor of her voice.
Think you that she is safe? If mischief should
Hinder her steps! I should have gone with her.

ABDIEL.
Go now; 'tis not too late. O princely dupe,
Whose heart's dew deluges his head with mist,
As little danger lurks for such a maid
Among such mountains, as the streams confront
Along the channels that belong to them.
But what of the Dispatches?

LUCIFER.
True, she is
A native denizen of dangerous tracks.
And yet I saved her.

ABDIEL.
The Dispatches, Prince,
Are full of pleasant matter, and, meseems,
Open a gate for your return.

LUCIFER.
The lamb!
The little lamb! I should have kept the lamb,
Memento of our hazard. O, it must
Have been the prettiest paradox to see
The fleecy truant nestling in her arms,
Its tender shepherdess upheld by mine,
Her hazel curls against my grizzled beard,
And the immutable mountains looking on,
With a contented smile.

ABDIEL.
Were you a king,
Some courtly artist would have painted it,
And worn a title. Now, it fades on air
With the reverberation of your voice.

LUCIFER.
A King? A king! A king without a crown!
A swordless, sceptreless, assenting thing,
An idol prayed to so it grants the prayer,
Painted and gewgawed! Do they think that I,
Since born to servitude, must live a slave?
A king may win his freedom, like another:
I have won mine, and will not forfeit it.
I think as freely as the lowliest churl
In my foregone dominions, nor would change
That liberty for kingship of the world.

ABDIEL.
Read the Dispatches; you will see they meet
Your thoughts half-way.

LUCIFER.
A via media,
The by-way of the feeble. Offered half,
And half refused, I leave and keep the whole,
Their folly and my wisdom. They consent
That Love shall have the birthright of his wings,
Nor longer, like a captive eagle, blink
Chained to a nuptial perch, so only Prayer
Remain the pensioned gaoler of the mind,
Going his constant round. I will not have it.
Leave Heaven the face to frown, Earth still will cower
Before that awful Presence, and again,
Or swift or slow, the Altar on the hearth
Rivet the ancient fetters. Other Realms
Have seen the throne learn wisdom from the lips
Of the far-seeing many. But, in mine,
The Prince shall force his People to be free,
Or spurn them to their self-wrought servitude,
The phantom sceptre of a World unseen,
Unknown, and unexistent.

ABDIEL.
Look how bright
The lamp of the Madonna gleams and glows!

LUCIFER.
The most beneficent deity e'er conceived.
Want you the brand and scope of Man, he is
Maker of Gods. A novice at the trade,
He made God out of winds and thunder-clouds,
The unpropitious seasons, threatening moons,
And the invisible ambuscade of death.
Poor frightened babe, he worshipped with a wail,
Clutching his mother earth, and in her face
Burying his fears. Then childlike artist grown,
He craved for form, and from the shapes around,
Contorted, fair, the figure of himself,
Moulded his deities; in wood, in stone,
Around his bed, his banquet-board, his tomb,
As yet a bungler. But when youth infused
Into the sap and marrow of his brain
The vernal subtleties of love, he dreamed
Of Gods as fair as he himself would be,
Majestic, abstract, yet with solid power
To make a goddess tremble; and behold!
Under the yearning passion of his thought
The embryonic marble sloughed its shell,
And Gods of strength and beauty trod the earth,
Their forehead high in heaven. Mighty Gods,
And mighty maker of them! Had he done
No other thing than this to prove his craft,
Man would have justified his birth, and thus
Exonerated Nature for her failures,
Too-oft abortive mother.

ABDIEL.
Pagan Prince,
Those Gods are dead.

LUCIFER.
The Gods all die at last,
Or fair, or foul; for Man who perisheth
Can not beget a God imperishable.
But he within his workshop labours still,
Inventing new Divinities. When the pulse
Of amorous Manhood slackened, and his heart
Pined for the fixed felicities of home,
He fashioned God a father, then a child,
Gave him a wife and mother, eager still,
True to his artist instinct, to exalt
The latest idol of himself; and hence,
When with the hearth's sweet sanctities entwined,
Came sickness, death, and sorrow, his new Gods
He hewed in anguish, beautiful no more,
But lacerated, tender, sad, austere,
Grave with the weight of disciplined desire:
Ingenuous, touching, egoist Maker still!

ABDIEL.
And how, sagacious Prince, will you decree
A strict and permanent divorce betwixt
Man and his shadow?

LUCIFER.
'Tis impossible.
But once Man knows the shadow is his own,
And starts at it no more, nor grovels down
Low on the ground where it is thrown, 'twill serve.
Man will be godlike when he has no Gods,
Or owns them creatures of his own begetting,
And loves but fears them not. Thus answer them,
Or any way you will that leaves my mind
Impregnable against all compromise.
And, pray you, see the oil within that lamp
Remains replenished.

[Exit Lucifer.
ABDIEL.
(alone)
O thou sophist, Man!
Reason by reason proved unreasonable,
Continues reasoning still! Confronted close,
What is this reason? Like the peacock's tail,
Just useful for a flourish, nothing more;
And when 'tis down, the world goes on the same.
Poor Lucifer! He fancies that the brain
Can banish contradiction, so that life
Trembles no more than doth an even balance,
With intellect and passion nicely poised
In friendly scales. Burn on, thou tranquil lamp!
Thou dost not reason.

THE MATTERHORN.
Generation after generation, they come and they go:
They are brief as the clouds that melt, they are vain as the winds that blow.
They climb to the heights of ruin, they climb but they cannot stay:
They have wings that flag in the ether, they have feet that are clogged with clay.

THE WEISSHORN.
Down in the valley the hamlet is quiet with curls of smoke.
There is happiness under the faggot, there is comfort under the yoke.
'Mid the crags there is soaring and straining, the tumult of things that dare,
The lightning of vagrant passions, the thunder of vague despair.

THE MATTERHORN.
What do they want with our silence? We have eyes, but they do not heed;
We have tongues, but they do not listen. We have ears for each thought and deed.
They look on our face for a moment, they look, and wonder, and prate:
They are straws on the stream, they are flakes in the foam, they are fashioned and steered by Fate.