A ROGUE’S TRAGEDY
First Published in 1906
CONTENTS
A ROGUE’S TRAGEDY.
PART I
A LOVERS’ PROLOGUE
Matter is but the eternal dressing of the imagination; the world the unconscious self-delusion of a Spirit. Everything springs from Love, and Love is the dreaming God.
Two figments of that endless sweet obsession stood alone—high on a slope of Alp this time. Born of a dream to flesh, they thought they owed themselves to flesh—a sacred debt. Truth seemed as plain to them as pebbles in a brook, which lie round and firm for all their apparent shaking under ripples. There, actual to their eyes, were the white mountains, the hoary glaciers, the pine woods and foamy freshets of eighteenth century Le Prieuré. Here, actual in the ears of each, was the whisper of the deathless confidence which for ever and ever helps on love’s succession. They loved, and therefore they lived.
Man has been for ten thousand ages at the pains to prove love a delusion, and still he greets a baby, and a kitten, and the nesting song of birds, and a hawthorn bush in flower, as freshly as if each, in its latest expression, were the newest product of his wisdom. But love is no delusion, save in the shadows which it builds itself for habitation. “Of dust thou art,” said the older God, “and unto dust returnest.” Yet man does not inherit from the earth, but from the imagination of that which created the earth and its life—the brain of the dreaming Love. Nor has he once, in all his æons of sequence, touched or borrowed from the earth. The seed which is himself was his mother’s seed, herself the seed of another who contained his seed within his mother’s seed within herself—a “nest” ad infinitum. Womb within womb, myriadfold, he proceeds from Love, his flight a heavenly meteor’s, his origin the origin of the star which has never been of earth until it falls extinguished on it. He draws from the eye of the dawn. He is the top section in a telescope of countless sections, each extending from the other, and all from all, and the last from the first. Close it, and it is he. Open it, and it is he. He helps to Love’s view of the dream of which he is a part. He is Love’s heir in dreams.
Or call him a bubble which rises in deep waters, and floats a moment on the surface and breaks. Whence came he? Whither vanishes? He is a breath; the expiration of a dream. The spirit of him looks out upon its phantom journey, as a traveller gazes from a coach window on the landscape. He is within it, but not of it. His destination is death, which is Love’s sleep. He is reclaimed to Love, of whom he was always a thought. As a thought he can never be launched again. He has played his part and is at rest in Love.