Youth awoke.
These people about him were Failures—the pallid ghosts of men and women.
They were taken up with the shadow.
Could this delight in the mere craftsmanship of art be enough? Was this sufficient end? Was it for this the world had been evolved, to this that was set the vast music of the spheres? To this end—to be set down beautifully in man’s handwriting—that the thunders brought the lightnings to the riven oak, that the wondrous mystic seasons took their courses, that the waters leaped hissing to the tornado’s smite, that the angry majesty of the resounding heavens gave place to exultant sunshine and serenest peace! Were these things so, but to be set down in man’s scrap-albums?
Was delight in craftsmanship enough to live for?
Tush! this was absolute, if subtle, suicide—self-killing of the body and intellect and conscience and will and energy. This sipping at the mere pleasantnesses of life—it was emaciating them in mind, body, will, senses.
Their very loves were a dandified make-believe. The kiss of a woman’s mouth was become but a passing pleasure. All these shabby little adulteries were without desire for the child beyond—the child when it came was an unlooked-for inconsequence, a burden, a thing of shame. The sweetest thing in life an affair of accident—to be feared—flinched from!
Life might be a tragedy. These were making of it a melancholy and a ghastly farce.
Noll got up from his place and slipped from the smoke-befogged room amidst the clamorous din of applause that greeted the recital of an Ode in Envy of One who had died Young.
He went out into the night.