Capes A Rogue's Tragedy

1. Auflage 2022
ISBN: 978-3-98744-846-1
Verlag: OTB eBook publishing
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, 217 Seiten

Reihe: Classics To Go

Excerpt: Matter is but the eternal dressing of the imagination; the world the unconscious self-delusion of a Spirit. Everything springs from Love, and Love is the dreaming God. Two figments of that endless sweet obsession stood alone?high on a slope of Alp this time. Born of a dream to flesh, they thought they owed themselves to flesh?a sacred debt. Truth seemed as plain to them as pebbles in a brook, which lie round and firm for all their apparent shaking under ripples. There, actual to their eyes, were the white mountains, the hoary glaciers, the pine woods and foamy freshets of eighteenth century Le Prieuré. Here, actual in the ears of each, was the whisper of the deathless confidence which for ever and ever helps on love?s succession. They loved, and therefore they lived.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Capes, Bernard

Leseproben

PART I
A LOVERS’ PROLOGUE
Matter is but the eternal dressing of the imagination; the world the unconscious self-delusion of a Spirit. Everything springs from Love, and Love is the dreaming God. Two figments of that endless sweet obsession stood alone—high on a slope of Alp this time. Born of a dream to flesh, they thought they owed themselves to flesh—a sacred debt. Truth seemed as plain to them as pebbles in a brook, which lie round and firm for all their apparent shaking under ripples. There, actual to their eyes, were the white mountains, the hoary glaciers, the pine woods and foamy freshets of eighteenth century Le Prieuré. Here, actual in the ears of each, was the whisper of the deathless confidence which for ever and ever helps on love’s succession. They loved, and therefore they lived. Man has been for ten thousand ages at the pains to prove love a delusion, and still he greets a baby, and a kitten, and the nesting song of birds, and a hawthorn bush in flower, as freshly as if each, in its latest expression, were the newest product of his wisdom. But love is no delusion, save in the shadows which it builds itself for habitation. “Of dust thou art,” said the older God, “and unto dust returnest.” Yet man does not inherit from the earth, but from the imagination of that which created the earth and its life—the brain of the dreaming Love. Nor has he once, in all his æons of sequence, touched or borrowed from the earth. The seed which is himself was his mother’s seed, herself the seed of another who contained his seed within his mother’s seed within herself—a “nest” ad infinitum. Womb within womb, myriadfold, he proceeds from Love, his flight a heavenly meteor’s, his origin the origin of the star which has never been of earth until it falls extinguished on it. He draws from the eye of the dawn. He is the top section in a telescope of countless sections, each extending from the other, and all from all, and the last from the first. Close it, and it is he. Open it, and it is he. He helps to Love’s view of the dream of which he is a part. He is Love’s heir in dreams. Or call him a bubble which rises in deep waters, and floats a moment on the surface and breaks. Whence came he? Whither vanishes? He is a breath; the expiration of a dream. The spirit of him looks out upon its phantom journey, as a traveller gazes from a coach window on the landscape. He is within it, but not of it. His destination is death, which is Love’s sleep. He is reclaimed to Love, of whom he was always a thought. As a thought he can never be launched again. He has played his part and is at rest in Love. But his part, while he played it, was Love’s part. It was when he realised this most that the palpable world became a shadow, the solid ground a cloud, the sun and moon and hills but figments of a rapture of Love’s dream. It was then that he stepped exalted, knowing his fair succession—knowing of whom he was born and for what reason. He had been accredited Love’s representative. So the man felt it here, walking on air. The mountains were more real to him than the rock he stood on. He dealt in dreams’ paradoxes. “I have never lived till now,” he said. There was a little wind abroad which fluted in the pines, making sharp notes of their fragrance. One’s ears and nose were always at a conflict in the matter, whether to claim music for perfume or perfume for music. It was the same as to the battle between sun and snow, which fought to a compromise on the terms of chilly warmth or glowing coldness. Yet the name was of no importance in the bracing sweetness of the atmosphere they contrived together. One could not breathe there and think of breathing as a condition of life. The temperature was the temperature of a neutral ground between earth and heaven—of a present unreality and a real distance. The two had just issued in company from a hillside chapel, a little lonely ark stranded on a shelf of rock hung up in a pine thicket, with rills of water tinkling all about it like the last streaks of a receded flood. They had sent forth their unreturning dove, and had followed it to find their phantasm of a new world budding in green islands from a lake of mist. Their feet seemed to sink in eternity. Only the bright heavens above them were actual. A butterfly, like a flake of stained glass blown from the robe of the Christ in the little painted window within, came wafted after them as they emerged. From a loophole in the presbytery above, the face of the old sacristan leered out secretly, and, marking their going, grinned and apostrophised it in a fit of silent laughter. “You sha’n’t have him; you sha’n’t have him!” thought he, like the very sacristan of St Anne’s Chapel under the Hinne Mountain, of whom children read. Then they vanished in the mist, going upwards, and he sat down to chuckle. As they ascended, the vapour sank beneath their feet, or was rolled away like bales to topple over the precipices. It had all been clear enough, bright palpable fact, before they entered the chapel. The swift change was nothing surprising in these resting-places of the clouds. Yet it seemed to them as if, returning to their world, they found it transformed beyond all precedent. But then, was not their rapture beyond all precedent? None had ever before loved as they loved—and that was true, because there is no such thing as a stereotype in Nature. The whistle of a marmot straight ahead on a boulder startled them suddenly as into a self-consciousness of guilt. They saw an atom of mist cleave and close to the red flick of him as he vanished, and then the phantoms of mountains looking in upon them above the place where he had sat. It was like a priestly summons to love’s shrift. They stopped, as by one consent, and stood in scarlet confusion to falter out their confessions. First love, I think, must reveal itself to fervent Catholics, as these two were, in a more poignant form than to most others. The wonder of it, as a divine absolution for shamefaced thoughts, as a divine authorisation of those thoughts’ indulgence to a natural end, must thrill their most sacred traditions of virginity to the marrow. Then they must first realise, on its human merits, the sacrifice of the Christ who died that men might live. They have worshipped the transubstantiation apart; now they are bidden to an intimate share in it. That, perhaps, was why this man and woman were justified in feeling their state an ecstasy unparalleled. Love to them was a transubstantiation, such as no heterodox soul could ever know. They, to whom flesh had been a shame, were authorised, in a moment, of nakedness; they were surrendered, for their faith, to the paradise of mortal raptures. Henceforth, dear incarnations of a dream, they believed they owed themselves to flesh—while they trod on air. Young god and goddess certainly they looked, poised on their misty Ida. The man was cream-pink of face, sunny of hair, blue and a thought prominent of eye. A fervour of soul perpetually flurried his cheek, flushing or paling it in flying moods. He had the air and appearance of an eager evangelist who had a little outgrown his spiritual strength. He would sometimes overbalance on self-exaltation, and pitch into an abyss of depression. He was tall and well-moulded as a whole; but his hips were unduly feminine. His colour, too, erred on the feminine side of prettiness. But he looked, all in all, a fit bright mate for the happy figure beside him. She, as like a Dresden china shape in melting demureness, as sunnily contrived in pink and blue and gold, was only the other’s better partner by reason of eyes slightly bluer than his, of hair a shade more golden, of lips of a rosier dye on the soft pallour of her face. By the same token she stood as much nearer to womanhood as he stood from manhood—a step either way. It swelled in her, though she was but fifteen, as the milk-kernels swell in nuts. I think she was at the perfect poise, largeness in promise waiting on performance, shapely as Psyche when first stolen by love—a covetable bud, whom no mortal man could be above the desire to open with a kiss. As this man, this good man, in a fury of love sanctified, desired suddenly and uncontrollably. She stood before him, her face a little raised, her lips a little parted—the prettiest figure between tears and rapture. Her hat hung on her shoulders by a blue ribbon looped about her neck, leaving her hair loose-coiled to snare the sun. Her dress was a fine smock, having half-sleeves tied at the elbows with ribbons, and a low bodice of rich blue velvet, open and laced in front, to clasp it about the middle. From her hips fell, in a fluting of Greek folds, a white skirt just long enough to show her ankles and silver shoe-buckles, and there were blue velvet ribbons fastened with diamond studs on her wrists. So she stood gazing up at him, tremulous and fearful, unknowing but half guessing what she had brought upon herself, what outrage on her meek decorum. The shrine she had most cherished, held most sacred, was threatened somehow; and God, it seemed, was on the side of the enemy. For had not this man’s piety, sincere beyond question, been his passport, a divine one, to her heart? How could she have allowed his advances else? They were friends of but a few weeks; had met first in the chapel hard by, bent upon a common worship. Some accident, of stress in storm, had been his pretext for a self-introduction; and she?—she had loved the pretext because in this figure she had come to picture her ideal of virtuous manhood. And then words had wakened knowledge, and knowledge admiration, and admiration rapture—the desire of the moth for the star. He had...