“Dost thou forget the Book of the Ages, my beloved?” said his father one night, as he was immersed with a countenance of despair in these remorseless pages.
His father took down the massive tome from the shelf, and laid it open at a familiar passage, which his own eyes were never weary of conning.
“Let us not forget the rotations of the circle, beloved one,” said his father. “Must we not ever return by the path that we went upon?”
It brought unspeakable joy to the young man that, in spite of many months of intercourse with the modern authors, his father’s great tome still retained the power to afford him consolation.
“These dread speculations which come no-whence and return no-whither,” said the young man, “appear to cast a green haze, as of putrefying flesh, upon the minds of these modern authors, who strive to fill eternity itself with the laughter of Bedlam.”
One day of autumn the young man walked abroad with his father until they came to the woods. Here in a sombre and quiet glade, which the winds had already stripped, he gathered flowers.
“I think, my father,” he said as his slender fingers wove them together with a piece of grass, “I shall now have the courage to offer these beautiful creatures of the fields to that goddess who is always in my dreams.”
Upon the evening of the next day the young man discarded his books for the first time for many weeks. Hastening homewards from his daily toil, he arrayed himself in that uncomfortable garb in which he had been first privileged to behold the goddess, and betook himself, devout of heart, to the garish music-hall. He was able to make his way to the chair he had previously occupied, and here, waiting patiently, but this time alone, he again beheld the object of his worship. In all their sanctity the raptures of that former hour returned upon him. How chaste, yet how ravishing seemed this goddess in the shape of a human animal! How was it possible to doubt of her affinity with the immortals? One glance at her noble radiance sufficed to counteract the poison that was distilled by the pages of the modern authors.
They openly mocked at the incarnation of divinities. They even denied an existence to a higher state. They even declared that the very life in his veins was but the expression of a coarse jest, in questionable taste, on the part of One who was old enough to know better. And yet these modern authors knew how to clothe their levity with a witty and bitter shrewdness which could counterfeit universal truth. How he could recall the cynical language of one of the chief among them: “What a stupid and tasteless farce is this, my dear friends. Here are we pierrots and harlequins, we betasselled clowns and buffoons, with many a score of other harmless, mad fools, whose names I forget, yet all have the same meaning—here are we, I say, with our silly grimaces, which make us sweat blood mixed with salt tears, here are we ruffling it in cockades and gold lace, and orders and what not; strutting about like turkeys, so that we may delude ourselves into forgetting that the whole business in which we are engaged is a harlequinade of such vile grossness that only an unpardonable oversight of some obscure and malicious Authority obtained for it a licence to be performed publicly.”