I gazed at the lad as he raised his voice with these last words, and was almost awed by his singular beauty. It seemed almost as if a halo should encircle his brow. There was a delicate rose-flush on his cheek that rivalled in strange loveliness the hectic color of the young mother when her first-born nestles close and fondly to her thrilled bosom, and his eyes glowed with a rare lambent light that touched one with the eloquence of a beautiful dream. Mac eyed him with equal wonder and delight, but said, teasingly,—
"Hey! so you have come at last to the 'true and the living,' have you? Art regenerate? I hope thou hast also undergone that true baphometic fire-baptism, whereof the worthy Diogenes Teufelsdröckh hath discoursed so appetizingly, causing us to long after it, none the less that he hath scrupulously refrained from expounding whatever it is."
"Yes, Mac, the new life dawns upon me,—no Plotinian trance, no somnambulic introspection, but a genuine awakening of the soul to a sense of its own beauty."
"Prodigious! as Dominie Sampson would say. Nay, I am not laughing at you, Clarian," said Mac, pointing to the picture; "there is enough to make me believe in you, though how you achieved it I cannot imagine."
"The means, Mac? Is not that rather my question than yours? We judge ourselves from within; 'others judge us by what we have done,' says Goethe. The means, ha, and the motive? Why will men seek stumblingly after these, when actually their sole concern is with the thing done? So, you two look at me,—I was but pondering,—putting a case;—so far, the means here have been simple and innocent,—my hand, my eye, my brain, my purpose; but—Mac!" added he, suddenly, after a pause, "did you never, in reading Rabelais, feel that somehow there was a profound and reverential symbolism underlying the wild froth of words in which the histories of Gargantua and Pantagruel have come down to us? that in all that olla-podrida of filth, quip, jest, wicked folly, and mad wisdom, was yet hidden, like the pearl in the oyster, a deep and most mystic system of world-philosophy?"
"Anan?" said Mac, looking at the boy curiously.
"For instance, in what the good Curé of Meudon says about the 'herb Pantagruelion',—did the symbolism and esoteric meaning of all that never strike you?"
"Oh, yes," cried Mac, with a singularly significant smile, "I see how it is now. I understand. You are improving, Clarian, rapidly. Hum, wonder what your mother would say, if she knew you were a friend of Panurge's, and did draw such inferences from his wisdom! Yes, mon enfant, I have long felt the profundity of Pantagruelion, not less than the oracular efficacy of Bacbuc. And no one can deny that the thinnest strand of Manila, if not full of mysteries per se, can at least open the way for us to the very innermost crypts, and hence may be styled potentially a very gateway to Eleusinia."
"I do not mean that, Mac,—not the mere mechanical warp and woof of it, to hang beggars and sots with,—but the more potent essence, the inner cosmic power of it, to rouse the soul into grand expansive consciousness, and then to suspend it far above the carks and cares of this weary world, to sew it aloft to some leaf of the Tree of Life, like the nest of Jean Paul's tailor-bird, that it may swing there, above the hum and dust of matter, swayed and sung to sleep by the expanding breath of Infinity! Oh, yes!" cried Clarian, while his cheek glowed warmer, his eye flamed brighter, and his voice flowed on with a rhythmic throb, "oh, yes, I know it all, now! The Idea is awake, and dwells in my soul, at once master there and slave. I leap out of this base Present: I stand panting and glowing before the mighty portals of Infinity, from whose inner masses I see the grand Gods beckoning to me, greeting me as of their kindred, summoning me to take my throne also, which awaits me in their midst. I have burst these narrow bonds of flesh, and my soul shall soar henceforth in the grandeur realized of the Spirit, like a proud falcon just unmewed and flung off in sight of the noblest quarry. Art! what a dull, meaningless sound it was yesterday!—but now, the entombing pyramid of matter is up-heaved, flung off forever, and the Spirit stands erect in her bright Palingenesis, half-intoxicate with the all-pervading sense of her own grand beauty. The tree is rent asunder,—Ariel soars again in his element. Psyche has loosed herself from the fettering contact of Daimon, and lo, now, how daintily she poises on tiptoe, fluttering her wings ere she launches like a star into the wide exhilarant ether! O divine Art! pride, glory, first love of my soul! now, indeed, hast thou exchanged the yoke of dull Saturn and the gloomy caverns of earth for the fair heights of Olympus, and the companionship of Zeus [Greek: Nephelaegeretaes], him at whose nod the heavens display themselves like a many-figured arras, all alive with beauties and significance that the dull eye conjectures not, that the impure, unpurged eye shrinks away from, lest it be seared by the too great splendor! I know it all now. I began gropingly, in surmise, error, darkness; but now my brow catches, ay, and reflects, the calm, pure, effulgent light of Nature's definite day, and I bathe myself in its happy warmth. Erst, I grovelled like a worm, blind and earth-fed: now, I shall speed through very space, winged heel and shoulder, a swift, untiring Hermes, who have drunk of the milk that flows rich in Nature's breasts, and am emancipate forever in the decorous freedom of the beautiful self-conscious spirit! Oh, the glory, oh, the boon of Art, the play-deity! Phoebus no longer drives herds for Admetus, but is grown into Helios, feels in his breast the freer life of the very Hyperion, the walker on high. Ay, ay, smile on, Mac, you and Ned! I shall not quarrel with you for not understanding me; it is only just now that I have learned to understand myself. My Art will reward me; even now, while you doubt, it is already doing so. I tell you, you two, whom I love and honor", cried he, rising to his feet, lifted up, as it were, by the exaltation of his soul, while his voice rose like the gush of a fine-toned flute, "I tell you, moreover, that I am an artist, with a work to do that shall be done, and so done that you two who love me will be the first to salute me Artist, to recognize me, and acknowledge me for what I shall become."
"We do that already, Clarian," said Mac's emphatic voice.