It was an intense and reckless egotism, made alike cruel and sublime by its intensity and purity, like the egotism of a mother in her child. To it, as the mother to her child, he would have sacrificed every living creature; but to it also, like her, he would have sacrificed his very existence as unhesitatingly. But it was an egotism which, though merciless in its tyranny, was as pure as snow in its impersonality; it was untainted by any grain of avarice, of vanity, of selfish desire; it was independent of all sympathy; it was simply and intensely the passion for immortality:—that sublime selfishness, that superb madness, of all great minds.
Art had taken him for its own, as Demeter, in the days of her desolation, took the child Demophoon, to nurture him as her own on the food of gods, and to plunge him through the flames of a fire that would give him immortal life. As the pusillanimous and sordid fears of the mortal mother lost to the child for evermore the possession of Olympian joys and of perpetual youth, so did the craven and earthly cares of bodily needs hold the artist back from the radiance of the life of the soul, and drag him from the purifying fires. Yet he had not been utterly discouraged; he strove against the Metaniera of circumstance; he did his best to struggle free from the mortal bonds that bound him; and as the child Demophoon mourned for the great goddess that had nurtured him, refusing to be comforted, so did he turn from the base consolations of the senses and the appetites, and beheld ever before his sight the ineffable majesty of that Mater Dolorosa who once had anointed him as her own.
Even now, as the strength returned to his limbs and the warmth to his veins, the old passion, the old worship, returned to him.
The momentary weakness which had assailed him passed away. He shook himself with a bitter impatient scorn for the feebleness into which he had been betrayed; and glanced around him still with a dull wonder as to the strange chances which the night past had brought. He was incredulous still; he thought that his fancy, heated by long fasting, might have cheated him; that he must have dreamed; and that the food and fuel which he saw must surely have been his own.
Yet reflection told him that this could not be; he remembered that for several weeks his last coin had been spent; that he had been glad to gather the birds' winter berries to crush beneath his teeth, and gather the dropped corn from the floor to quiet the calm of hunger; that for many a day there had been no fire on the hearth, and that only a frame which the long sunless northern winters had braced in early youth, had enabled him to resist and endure the cold. Therefore, it must be charity!
Charity! as the hateful truth came home to him, he met the eyes of the white, slender, winged Hermes; eyes that from out that colorless and smiling face seemed to mock him with a cruel contempt.
His was the old old story;—the rod of wealth bartered for the empty shell that gave forth music.
Hermes seemed to know it and to jeer him.
Hermes, the mischief-monger, and the trickster of men, the inventive god who spent his days in chicanery of his brethren, and his nights in the mockery of mortals; the messenger of heaven who gave Pandora to mankind; Hermes, the eternal type of unscrupulous Success, seemed to have voice and cry to him:—"Oh, fool, fool, fool! who listens for the music of the spheres and disdains the only melody that men have ears to hear—the melody of gold!"
Arslàn turned from the great cartoon of the gods in Pheræ, and went out into the daylight, and stripped and plunged into the cold and turbulent stream. Its chillness and the combat of its current braced his nerves and cleared his brain.