No, he could not play it. His soul was so out of tune. The sounds jarred on it, and made him almost mad.
“Ah, wretched me!” he cried; “Saul had a saint to play to him. He was not alone with the spirits of darkness; but here is no sweet bard of Israel to play to me; I, lonely, with crushed heart, on which a black fiend sitteth mountain high, must make the music to uplift that heart to heaven; it may not be.” And he grovelled on the earth weeping and tearing his hair.
VERTEBATUR AD MELANCHOLIAM.
(1) It requires nowadays a strong effort of the imagination
to realize the effect on poor people who had never seen them
before of such sentences as this
“Blessed are the poor” etc.
(2) The primitive writer was so interpreted by others
besides Clement; and in particular by Peter of Blois, a
divine of the twelfth century, whose comment is noteworthy,
as he himself was a forty-year hermit.
CHAPTER XCIII
One day as he lay there sighing and groaning, prayerless, tuneless, hopeless, a thought flashed into his mind. What he had done for the poor and the wayfarer, he would do for himself. He would fill his den of despair with the name of God and the magic words of holy writ, and the pious, prayerful consolations of the Church.
Then, like Christian at Apollyon's feet, he reached his hand suddenly out and caught, not his sword, for he had none, but peaceful labour's humbler weapon, his chisel, and worked with it as if his soul depended on his arm.
They say that Michael Angelo in the next generation used to carve statues, not like our timid sculptors, by modelling the work in clay, and then setting a mechanic to chisel it, but would seize the block, conceive the image, and at once, with mallet and steel, make the marble chips fly like mad about him, and the mass sprout into form. Even so Clement drew no lines to guide his hand. He went to his memory for the gracious words, and then dashed at his work and eagerly graved them in the soft stone, between working and fighting.
He begged his visitors for candle ends, and rancid oil.