“Yes, we are very crude,” sighed Thalia to Terpsichore.
“I will tell you instead a perfectly true story, quite unadorned and not at all epic. When you get a little riper, I will read you one of my own poems, but not to-night. To-night you have to put up with the following drivel.”
This is the drivel which they had to put up with:—
There was once a man, an Athenian, who was the opposite of all that he wanted to be. The gods had made him for a joke, and a very good joke he was; but as a man he was a failure.
To start with, he desired to have a perfect body and then to despise it. He wanted to be beautiful, and strong, and think nothing of it. Yet he thought a good deal of the bent piece of ugliness which was the nearest he could do to a perfect body. For he had nothing he wanted, and could do nothing he wanted. Sometimes he made good resolutions and tried to lead a fine life; then the gods dug one another in the ribs, and rolled about Olympus gasping with laughter. They knew very well that they had taken unusual pains about that man’s physical composition; they had afflicted him with several hereditary taints; they knew that he might make enough good resolutions to pave the whole of—well, Westminster Abbey, and that it was a physical impossibility that he should keep any of them. “Let this man,” one of the gods had said to Zeus, shortly before the failure was born, “be cowardly, sensual, and brutal.” Then Zeus said that he was tired of making that sort. “Oh,” the other god urged, “but we’ll give him at the same time the emotions and aspirations of a noble mind. Then we shall see soul and body fighting, and the soul will get thrashed every time.” “Now, that is something like sport,” Zeus had remarked, as he gave the necessary order.
So this man went on providing amusement for gods and men until he was twenty-five years of age. Sometimes he, unfortunately, was quite unable to laugh at himself. Then he wrote verses. At other times he laughed at himself very well—often in self-defence, because it made other men let him off easier—and then he would tear his verses up.
On that last day he lay in bed in the morning and shivered. He had slept for a little while—he had seen to that before he went to bed—but he was wide awake now, and his head was burning, and his thoughts were of the kind that tighten the muscles of the body and are likely nowadays to lead on to padded rooms. For the day before he had been found out; one act of fatal cowardice on his part—such cowardice as no one could forgive—had cost a girl her life, and this girl was the sister of his own familiar friend. There was plenty of variety about his thoughts. Sometimes he felt like a murderer. Sometimes he heard the dead girl’s brother speaking awful things to him, contemptuous, heart-broken words. There was no hope of concealment, no pretty story that he could tell. It had all been seen and known. In his dreams that night he had been through the whole scene again, but his own part had been altered. In his dream he had been equal to the occasion—taken the plunge, rescued the girl, and been welcomed with praise and honour, and he had walked back through the streets of Athens feeling more happy than a god. Suddenly he awoke and recalled the facts. The girl whom he had loved was dead—dead through his own cowardice. It was such loathly cowardice that he shuddered to think of it. All men would hate him, and yet their hatred would be nothing to his own hatred for himself. Every thought was a torture, a knife that went into his heart and brain, fiercely and with regular beat, stabbing and stabbing.
He sprang from his bed, and dressed himself hurriedly. The house seemed to him to be strangely quiet. He called—in a parched, husky voice—and no one answered. All had left him: the very slaves had run away from such a master, and he was alone. No one, he thought, would come near him now. He had served as a laughing-stock for his friends: he was now too despicable to be laughed at. If you wish the villain of your drama to be hissed as villain was never hissed before, make him during the first two acts the low comedian of the piece.
The man was trembling and shuddering. He made a small fire, and crouched down by it. Ah, if he only had it to do again! A million deaths were better than such torture as this. An impulse—irresistible almost—came over him to shriek aloud and to tear with his hands at something. Could he be going mad? The thought horrified him. He fetched wine, and drank it, and tried to calm himself, crouching down by the fire again. Suddenly he heard footsteps, and presently one of his old companions—and the worst man in Athens—stood before him.