“I had a revelation. It took place in a London fog in front of a fire in a little backroom where I had my books. And, as it were, scales fell from my eyes, and I saw men as trees walking.” Gildea, the true arch-mocker, for the first time in his life had to undergo the sensation of doubt whether or no he was being mocked at.
“Well?” he said.
“Well, I was in a rather miserable state at the time. Someone to whom I was attached had had to leave me. I was sick of trying to satisfy myself with the life of pleasure as pleasure, and I had the temptation to take spiritual drugs, for I felt an appalling loneliness of soul. I thought that no one had ever looked at things as I felt I should like to look at them, and I was at times almost afraid that I was suffering under a delusion that might end in something very like madness. Then I had my revelation. I found out that there had been a whole race whose central belief was the one I was stretching out my arms to.”
“Greece?” said Gildea, “Greece?”
“Yes, Greece! Here I found were men who realized the secret of life, who knew what Truth was. They looked at life as it was, and they saw calmly and clearly that the butterfly’s life is enough for the butterfly, and the man’s for the man. They took no spiritual opium as the Christians do: they have no yearning love. They have not resignation as the Heathens have, resignation that sullenly accepts the evil, or that brightly determines to make the best of the good in things. They have better; they have truth and light and joy! Take, then, your Christian Faith and Love: your Heathen Trust and Hope: I am a Pagan, and my care is Truth and Light!—And I found,” she went on, “I found, after a time, that there had been others in these later days that had looked, or striven to look at things, as I did. Such was Goethe, such was Keats. With Goethe the freedom of his Paganism was bought at a great price, but Keats was born free. When Goethe recognised what it was to have been a Christian, to be a Heathen, and to wish to be a Pagan, he renounced his past and present with all the strength of his soul, and fixed his eyes resolutely on his future. But he never won it—that is to say, as he had won the others. He was never a Pagan as he was a Heathen or a Christian. The Second Part of Faust is not like the First. It is not with impunity that we have passed through the Christianity of Catholicism and the Heathenism of the Renascence. A Dante or a Shakspere could not be shaken off by a Goethe, and a Sophokles wholly put on. Is a great pagan soul possible yet? How shall we say no with what Keats might have become before us?—Sometimes I think,” she said a little dreamily, “that I am the only one of my time who understood these great men; Goethe, the god of the Transition, Keats, the Herakles of Modernity, strangled in his cradle by the serpents of Hera! And, for either of them, I would readily have given my life.” ...
Mrs. Medwin turned round towards them, Alcock turning too, as if they had reached a point in their conversation in which a break was expedient. Then Mrs. Medwin and Alcock rose and came up to them.
“Is not the water exquisitely clear?” she said to Gildea, “It reminds me of Capreae. It only wants the beautiful coral rocks.”
Gildea smilingly assented. He remembered a remark of Mrs. Medwin’s to the effect that, as you approached Melbourne from the north, it was like the bay of Naples with Vesuvius.
“Miss Medwin,” he said, with the smile changing on his face and becoming sweet and radiant, “Miss Medwin has just been explaining to me a passage from Goethe which I never understood.”
“Indeed?” said Mrs. Medwin, “I did not know you read German, Alice. Was it a passage from Faust? I think Faust is very difficult, and I do not understand the Second Part in the least.”