“And poetry, my dear friend, what is poetry?”
“I have not the courage to define it, master.”
“Is this the language of despair, Isocrates?”
“It is the curse of the time, dear master,” said the boy’s father, with wan eyes. “This terrible electrical machinery of the age which grandiloquently we call Science, has ground our wits to a point so fine that they pierce through the brave old faiths that once made us happy. This William Jordan of whom you speak spent twenty years in his little room seeking to establish Reason on its only possible basis. He planned his ethic in I know not how many tomes. Each was to be a masterpiece of courage, truth, and vitality; each was to be wrought of the life-blood and fine flower of his manhood. He began his labour a powerful and imperious young man; he passed the all-too-rapid years in his profound speculations; and then he found himself inept and white-haired.”
“So then, after all, Isocrates, your ethic is embodied?” said the aged man with the eager devoutness of the disciple.
The joy in the face of the old man was that of one who has long dreamed of a treasure which at last is to be revealed to his gaze. His eyes were about to feast on its peerless splendour, yet of a sudden his hopes seemed to render him afraid. There might not be a sufficient heat left in his veins to yield those intolerable pangs of rapture which fuse with ecstasy the worship of the devotee.
“Let me see it,” he said. “The desires of my youth are returning upon me. I must look upon it; I must press it to my bosom. I yearn to see how my own strength in the heyday of its promise, in the passion of its development, yet condemned to walk in chains, has yet been able to vindicate the nobility of its inheritance. Show me your Ethic, beloved Isocrates. I yearn to feast my eyes upon this latest blow for freedom with the same intensity with which I fingered the yellow pages in which I first found wisdom hiding her maiden chastity.”
The boy’s father met this entreaty with a gesture that seemed to pierce the old man like a sword.
“Where is it?” he cried. “You will not deny one who is old the last of his hopes!”
The boy’s father had the mien of a corpse.