Old was the man upon his left who awoke with his cracked voice the dead echoes of dead centuries, old the man upon his right who wielded a wand; and old all those who spoke to him and listened to him before and around the green iron cage.
Old were the words they spoke, and their faces were drawn and white and lifeless, without expression or solemnity; like the ikons of old cathedrals.
For of naught they knew, but of what was written in the old, yellow books. And all the joys and the pains and the loves and hatreds and furies and labors and strifes of man, all the fierce and divine passions that battle and rage in the heart of man, never entered into the great greenish room but to sit in the green iron cage.
Senility, dullness and dissolution were all around the green iron cage, and nothing was new and young and alive in the great room, except the three men who were in the cage.
And, then, when the prosecutor speaks, we have an insight into the fervor with which Giovannitti greets the overthrow of the old and the budding of the new:
... he said (and dreary as a wind that moans thru the crosses of an old graveyard was his voice):
“I will prove to you that these three men in the cage are criminals and murderers and that they ought to be put to death.”
Love, it was then that I heard for the first time the creak of the moth that was eating the old painting and the old books, and the worm that was gnawing the old bench, and it was then that I saw that all the old men around the great greenish room were dead.
They were dead like the old man in the painting, save that they could still read the old books he could read no more, and still spoke and heard the old words he could speak and hear no more, and still passed the judgment of the dead, which he could no more pass, upon the mighty life of the world outside that throbbed and thundered and clamored and roared the wonderful anthem of human labor to the fatherly justice of the Sun.
To me such stuff as this means a hundred times more than a thousand sonnets to a mistress’ eye-lash, or than the weak maudlinities of an absinthe-soaked eroto-dabbler, wailing puling repentance to a pale Christ. It is compact of life—life as it is today, made, not for the tittillation of dilletantes, but for the enjoyment and inspiration of men who can appreciate the meat of life redolent of sweat and blood and tears.