For she perceived what had befallen. But she well knew how to bridge the chasm between ecstasies and earth’s needs so as to turn raptures into rational-spiritualized results.
Her first swift act was to concentrate on Reginald this focussed energy, in a way to fetch his wandering mind into harmony with the work of this epoch; not by sundering him suddenly from the realm he lived in, but by giving him an interior sense of the presence of those who stood there with her and with him, in that instant’s transfiguration on the mount of vision, when altogether they were allied to the doings of the dualized.
Ethel never “lost herself”—as the term goes—in these ecstasies, any more than an eagle in the delight of its ascending flight to heights, even above the eyrie where it dwells, loses itself. It is an eagle still, and knows its way aloft and below. Nevertheless, she knew that when she went aloft this time, it was as if at the sound of a triumphal trump, persons there rallied and sped away with her. And upborne by her wings and seeing with her un-sun-blinded eyes, they saw what she saw, and learned what she knew. For when the urgency of her need rang through the silence, calling on life, that Life per se should show itself to those who knew it not, that the sight of it should baptize this household into fitness for the Herculean-labors of this epoch, she knew trusted helpers then, with an under-lift, had upborne her and hers into participation with all-creative bliss. And that what they then learned no art, not even music’s own, with octaves ever so many, can hint to mortal ears.
For what these seers then saw, tones, nor half-tones, quarters nor eighths, in octaves ever so many, not yet have learned to melodize.
“Grace of heaven, Daksha, is she living woman, or spirit only?” said Paul Palmer breathlessly.
“I only know,” said Robert, in tones muffled by his heart’s quick pulse, “that one day the spirit of harmony came and dwelt under the roof, where I had had cradle. And this is she.”
“Yes, yes, it is the new Madonna,” whispered Reinsvelt, Robert’s artist friend. And he sped away out at the path from the house to the street.
“He does well,” said Paul. “He goes to whiten white canvas with that white ‘vision’s inward illuminings.’ Visions, which will ‘pierce gross sight, and with mild persistence urge man’s search to vaster issues, whose growing sway controls the growing life of man.’”
“He has caught the art-thought of the new age. For you see, Robert, as the pictures of the Crucified Man have tortured woman’s soul to a devotion of self-sacrificing desire to rescue man from the cross which man’s passions make for him,—so the new picture of that dearer self, in ecstatic union with the gladsome heights above, will arouse men themselves to become the sanctuary of nuptial rites. For see you not the meaning of George Eliot’s most wonderful poem? ‘Oh, Might I Join the Choir Invisible?’ Robert, Madonna, self-crossed by the will-of-wisdom is Elohim; the cabalistic feminine-duad of the Hebrew. And it lacks not the mother there, but ‘shapes it forth before the multitude, divinely human, raising worship so, to reverence more mixed with’ Wisdom.”
And Paul Palmer, like Reinsvelt, as if empowered by some dynametrical battery affixed to the forces of heaven, sped away to write of new deeds for the redemption of that hundred-headed power, the Cerberi—the masses of the people. Seeing that we are all of the mass—the high mass.