‘He will not have long to wait. Those plunderers will not be as squeamish as I.... Strange, now! From Armenian reminiscences I should have fancied myself as free from such tender weakness as any of my Canaanite-slaying ancestors.... And yet by some mere spirit of contradiction, I couldn’t kill that fellow, exactly because he asked me to do it.... There is more in that than will fit into the great inverted pyramid of “I am I.”. Never mind, let me get the dog’s lessons by heart first. What next, Bran? Ah! Could one believe the transformation? Why, this is the very trim villa which I passed yesterday morning, with the garden-chairs standing among the flower-beds, just as the young ladies had left them, and the peacocks and silver pheasants running about, wondering why their pretty mistresses did not come to feed them. And here is a trampled mass of wreck and corruption for the girls to find, when they venture back from Rome, and complain how horrible war is for breaking down all their shrubs, and how cruel soldiers must be to kill and cook all their poor dear tame turtle-doves! Why not? Why should they lament over other things—which they can just as little mend—and which perhaps need no more mending? Ah! there lies a gallant fellow underneath that fruit-tree!’
Raphael walked up to a ring of dead, in the midst of which lay, half-sitting against the trunk of the tree, a tall and noble officer in the first bloom of manhood. His casque and armour, gorgeously inlaid with gold, were hewn and battered by a hundred blows; his shield was cloven through and through; his sword broken in the stiffened hand which grasped it still. Cut off from his troop, he had made his last stand beneath the tree, knee-deep in the gay summer flowers, and there he lay, bestrewn, as if by some mockery—or pity—of mother nature, with faded roses, and golden fruit, shaken from off the boughs in that last deadly struggle. Raphael stood and watched him with a sad sneer.
‘Well!—you have sold your fancied personality dear! How many dead men?.... Nine.... Eleven! Conceited fellow! Who told you that your one life was worth the eleven which you have taken?’
Bran went up to the corpse—perhaps from its sitting posture fancying it still living—smelt the cold cheek, and recoiled with a mournful whine.
‘Eh? That is the right way to look at the phenomena, is it? Well, after all, I am sorry for you.... almost like you.... All your wounds in front, as a man’s should be. Poor fop! Lais and Thais will never curl those dainty ringlets for you again! What is that bas-relief upon your shield? Venus receiving Psyche into the abode of the gods!.... Ah! you have found out all about Psyche’s wings by this time.... How do I know that? And yet, why am I, in spite of my common sense—if I have any—talking to you as you, and liking you, and pitying you, if you are nothing now, and probably never were anything? Bran! What right had you to pity him without giving your reasons in due form, as Hypatia would have done? Forgive me, sir, however—whether you exist or not, I cannot leave that collar round your neck for these camp-wolves to convert into strong liquor.’
And as he spoke, he bent down, and detached, gently enough, a magnificent necklace.
‘Not for myself, I assure you. Like Ate’s golden apple, it shall go to the fairest. Here, Bran!’ And he wreathed the jewels round the neck of the mastiff, who, evidently exalted in her own eyes by the burden, leaped and barked forward again, taking, apparently as a matter of course, the road back towards Ostia, by which they had come thither from the sea. And as he followed, careless where he went, he continued talking to himself aloud after the manner of restless self-discontented men.
....‘And then man talks big about his dignity and his intellect, and his heavenly parentage, and his aspirations after the unseen, and the beautiful, and the infinite—and everything else unlike himself. How can he prove it? Why, these poor blackguards lying about are very fair specimens of humanity.—And how much have they been bothered since they were born with aspirations after anything infinite, except infinite sour wine? To eat, to drink; to destroy a certain number of their species; to reproduce a certain number of the same, two-thirds of whom will die in infancy, a dead waste of pain to their mothers and of expense to their putative sires.... and then—what says Solomon? What befalls them befalls beasts. As one dies, so dies the other; so that they have all one breath, and a man has no pre-eminence over a beast; for all is vanity. All go to one place; all are of the dust, and turn to dust again. Who knows that the breath of man goes upward, and that the breath of the beast goes downward to the earth? Who, indeed, my most wise ancestor? Not I, certainly. Raphael Aben-Ezra, how art thou better than a beast? W hat pre-eminence hast thou, not merely over this dog, But over the fleas whom thou so wantonly cursest? Man must painfully win house, clothes, fire.... A pretty proof of his wisdom, when every flea has the wit to make my blanket, without any labour of his own, lodge him a great deal better than it lodges me! Man makes clothes, and the fleas live in them.... Which is the wiser of the two?....
‘Ah, but—man is fallen.... Well—and the flea is not. So much better he than the man; for he is what he was intended to be, and so fulfils the very definition of virtue, which no one can say of us of the red-ochre vein. And even if the old myth be true, and the man only fell, because he was set to do higher work than the flea, what does that prove—but that he could not do it?
‘But his arts and his sciences?.... Apage! The very sound of those grown-children’s rattles turns me sick.... One conceited ass in a generation increasing labour and sorrow, and dying after all even as the fool dies, and ten million brutes and slaves, just where their fore-fathers were, and where their children will be after them, to the end of the farce.... The thing that has been, it is that which shall be; and there is no new thing under the sun....