It was a profound pause, during which all those souls were suddenly blinded and cast, as it were, into an abyss after the ray of light thrown upon the great Mystery by him who was about to enter it had suddenly died out.
The master guessed the sadness produced among his faithful followers by this sudden gloom, and the wings of his thought soon spread again. Reality appeared to him through the medium of the senses, and held him back for a while in the field of the finite and the perceptible. He felt time fly, life flow on. Perhaps his ears caught some sound from the stately city, perhaps his nostrils inhaled the perfume of the early summer just approaching as his eyes rested on Phaedo with the beautiful hair.
Seated on his bed, with Phaedo beside him on a low stool, he laid his hand on the head of his disciple, and caressed him and stroked the hair on his neck, for it was a habit of his thus to let his fingers stray playfully in that thick young forest. Still he did not speak, so intense was his emotion, and so chequered with delight. Through this beautiful and ephemeral living being he was communicating once more with that earthly life in which he had attained his perfection, in which he had realised his ideal of virtue; and perhaps he felt that there was nothing beyond, that this finished existence of his was sufficient to itself, that its prolongation in eternity was only—like the halo of a star—an illusion produced by the extraordinary radiance of his humanity. Never had the locks of the young Elian been so sublimely precious to him. He was enjoying them for the last time, for he had to die; indeed, he knew that next day those locks would be cut off in sign of mourning. At last he said—and his disciples had never known such a tone in his voice before—he said: “To-morrow, oh Phaedo, thou wilt cut off these beautiful locks.” And the youth answered: “So it seems, oh Socrates.”
This sentiment—which I at once absorbed and exalted within me as I read the episode for the first time in the Platonic dialogue—became afterwards by means of analogy so complex and so familiar to my mind, that I made it the open or concealed theme of that music to which I wished to hearken.
In this way the Ancient Sage taught me the commemoration of death in a manner conformable to my nature, that I might find a rarer value and a graver significance in things near at hand. And he taught me to seek and discover in my own nature genuine virtues and genuine defects, that I might arrange both in accordance with a premeditated design, striving with patient care to give a seemly appearance to the latter, and to raise the former upwards towards the supreme perfection. And he taught me to exclude everything which was discordant with my ruling idea, everything which could alter the lines of my design, which could slacken or interrupt the rhythmical development of my thought. And he taught me to discern with sure intuition those souls over whom to exercise benevolence or mastery, or from whom to obtain some extraordinary revelation. And at last he communicated to me also his faith in the dæmon, which was none other than the mysteriously significant power of Style, inviolable by any, even by himself in his own person.
Full of this teaching and quite alone, I set to work, with the hope of succeeding, in tracing with precise and strong outlines that effigy of myself, to whose existence so many remote causes had contributed, operating from time immemorial through an infinite number of generations. That virtue of race, which in Socrates’ country was called eugeneia, came out stronger and stronger as my discipline became more severe; and my pride increased with my satisfaction as I thought how only too many other souls would have sooner or later revealed their vulgar essence under the ordeal of that fire. But sometimes from the very roots of my being—where the indestructible soul of ancestors slumbers—such positive and vehement fountains of energy would spring up, that I felt sad as I recognised their uselessness in an epoch when public life is only a miserable spectacle of meanness and dishonour. “It is marvellous indeed,” the dæmon used to say to me, “that these ancient barbaric energies should have been preserved in thee with all their freshness. They are still beautiful even though they be inopportune. In another age they would assist in performing the duty worthy of such as thee; that is to say, the duty of the leader who points out a certain goal, and guides his followers towards it. As that day seems far off, do thou now attempt, by condensing these energies, to transform them into living poetry.”
Very distant indeed that day appeared; for even the arrogance of the populace was not so great as the cowardice of those who tolerated and supported it. Living in Rome as I did, I was witness of the most ignominious breaches of faith, of the most obscene connections which ever dishonoured a sacred spot. Evil-doers gathered together within the fatal circle of the divine city as within the precincts of an infamous forest, and it seemed as though only some magnificent power armed with ideas more brilliant than past memories could be able nowadays to raise its head above the monstrous phantoms of empire. Like the overflow of sewers, the flood of base desires was invading the market-place and the cross-roads, a flood perpetually swelling and growing more putrid, never even illuminated by any flame of crooked but titanic ambition, never even bursting out in a flash of magnificent crime. The lonely dome on the distant side of the Tiber, inhabited by a soul, which although senile, yet stood firm in the consciousness of its own aims, was still the most prominent landmark, contrasted as it was with another unnecessarily exalted dwelling-place, where a king of warlike race showed a wonderful example of patience in the fulfilment of the humble and fatiguing office assigned to him by the decree of the people.
One evening in September, as I stood on that acropolis of the Quirinal guarded by the twin Tindarides, while a dense crowd was commemorating with bestial howls a conquest, the frightful extent of which they could not understand (Rome was looking terrible as a crater under a conflagration of clouds), I thought to myself: “What visions might not these conflagrations of the Latin sky kindle in the great heart of a king? Such a vision that under its weight the gigantic horses of Praxiteles would bend like twigs. Ah, who will ever be able to embrace the great Mother and fertilise her with his all-powerful idea? To her alone—within her womb of stone, which for ages has been the pillow of Death—to her alone it is given to generate such abundance of life that the world may be renewed with it again.”
And behind the glittering windows of the royal balcony I saw in imagination a pale contracted brow, carved like the brow of the Corsican with the mark of a superhuman destiny.