The crystal truthfulness, the barbaric liberty, the pure idealism of her mind and temper revolted in contempt from the visible presentment and the vari-colored harlequinade of the actor's art. To her, a note of song, a gleam of light, a shadowy shape, a veiled word, were enough to unfold to her passionate fancy a world of dreams, a paradise of faith and of desire; and for this very cause she shrank away, in amazement and disgust, from this realistic mockery of mere humanity, which left nothing for the imagination to create, which spoke no other tongue than the common language of human hopes and fears. It could not touch her, it could not move her; it filled her—so far as she could bring herself to think of it at all—with a cold and wondering contempt.
For to the reed which has once trembled under the melody born of the breath divine, the voices of mortal mouths, as they scream in rage, or exult in clamor, or contend in battle, must ever seem the idlest and the emptiest of all the sounds under heaven.
"That is your art?" she said wearily to the actors when they came to her.
"Well, is it not art; and a noble one?"
A scornful shadow swept across her face.
"It is no art. It is human always. It is never divine. There is neither heaven nor hell in it. It is all earth."
They were sharply stung.
"What has given you such thoughts as that?" they said, in their impatience and mortification.
"I have seen great things," she said simply, and turned away and went out into the darkness, and wept,—alone.
She who had knelt at the feet of Thanatos, and who had heard the songs of Pan amidst the rushes by the river, and had listened to the charmed steps of Persephone amidst the flowers of the summer;—could she honor lesser gods than these?