Festus · Scene 3 (2/2) (1/2)
Festus, alone.
Festus All things are calm, and fair, and passive. Earth Looks as if lulled upon an angel’s lap Into a breathless dewy sleep: so still, That we can only say of things, they be! The lakelet now, no longer vexed with gusts, Replaces on her breast the pictured moon Pearled round with stars. Sweet imaged scene of time To come, perchance, when this vain life o’erspent, Earth may some purer beings’ presence bear; Mayhap even God may walk among His saints, In eminence and brightness like yon moon, Mildly outbeaming all the beads of light Strung o’er night’s proud dark brow. How strangely fair Yon round still star, which looks half suffering from, And half rejoicing in its own strong fire; Making itself a lonelihood of light, Like Deity, where’er in Heaven it dwells. How can the beauty of material things So win the heart and work upon the mind, Unless like-natured with them? Are great things And thoughts of the same blood? They have like effect.
Lucifer Why doubt on mind? What matter how we call That which all feel to be their noblest part? Even spirits have a better and a worse: For every thing created must have form. Passions they have, somewhat like thine; but less Of grossness and that downwardness of soul Which men have. It is true they have no earth; For what they live on is above themselves.
Festus There seems a sameness among things; for mind And matter speak, in causes, of one God. The inward and the outward worlds are like; The pure and gross but differ in degree. Tears, feeling’s bright embodied form, are not More pure than dewdrops, Nature’s tears, which she Sheds in her own breast for the fair which die. The sun insists on gladness; but at night, When he is gone, poor Nature loves to weep.
Lucifer There is less real difference among things Than men imagine. They overlook the mass, But fasten each on some particular crumb, Because they feel that they can equal that, Of doctrine, or belief, or party cause.
Festus That is the madness of the world⁠—and that Would I remove.
Lucifer It is imbecility, Not madness.
Festus Oh! the brave and good who serve A worthy cause can only one way fail; By perishing therein. Is it to fail? No; every great or good man’s death is a step Firm set towards their end⁠—the end of being; Which is the good of all and love of God. The world must have great minds, even as great spheres Or suns, to govern lesser restless minds, While they stand still and burn with life; to keep Them in their places, and to light and heat them. If I desire immortal life for aught, It is to learn the mystery of mind And somewhat more of God. Let others rule Systems or succour saints, if such things please; To live like light or die in light like dew, Either! I should be blest.
Lucifer It may not be. For as we do not see the sun himself, It is but the light about him, like a ring Of glory round the forehead of a saint, so God thou wilt never see. His unveiled love Were terrible, too mud for man to meet.
Festus Men have a claim on God; and none who hath A heart of kindness, reverence and love, But dare look God in the face and ask His smile. He dwells in no fierce light⁠—no cloud of flame; And if it were, Faith’s eye can look through Hell, And through the solid world. We must all think On God. Yon water must reflect the sky. Midnight! Day hath too much light for us, To see things spiritually. Mind and Night Will meet, though in silence, like forbidden lovers, With whom to see each other’s sacred form Must satisfy. The stillness of deep bliss, Sound as the silence of the high hill-top Where thunder finds no echo⁠—like God’s voice Upon the worldling’s proud, cold, rocky heart⁠— Fills full the sky; and the eye shares with Heaven That look, so like to feeling, which the bright And glorious things of Nature ever wear. There is much to think and feel of things beyond This earth; which lie, as we deem, upwards⁠—far From the day’s glare and riot⁠—they are Night’s! Oh! could we lift the future’s sable shroud!
Lucifer Behind a shroud what shouldst thou see but death?
Festus Spirit is like the thread whereon are strung The beads or worlds of life. It may be here, It may be there that I shall live again; In yon strange world whose long nights know no star, But seven fair maidlike moons attending him Perfect his sky⁠—perchance in one of those⁠— But live again I shall wherever it be. We long to learn the future⁠—love to guess.
Lucifer The science of the future is to man, But what the shadow of the wind might be. Such thoughts are vain and useless.
Festus Forced oh us.
Lucifer All things are of necessity.
Festus Then best. But the good are never fatalists. The bad Alone act by necessity, they say.
Lucifer It matters not what men assume to be; Or good, or bad, they are but what they are.
Festus What is necessity? Are we, and thou, And all the worlds, and the whole infinite We cannot see, but working out God’s thoughts? And have we no self-action? Are all God?
Lucifer Then hath He sin and all absurdity.
Festus Yet, if created Being have free-will, Is it not wrong to judge it may traverse God’s own high will, and yet impossible To think on’t otherwise?
Lucifer It may be so. All creature wills, and all their ends and powers Must come within the boundless scope of God’s.
Festus And all our powers are but weaknesses To what we shall have, and to that God hath. Doth not the wish, too, point the likelihood Of life to come?
Lucifer Boys wish that they were kings. And so with thee. A deathless spirit’s state, Freed from gross form and bodily weightiness, Seems kingly by the side of souk like thine. And boys and men will likely both be balked. What if it be, that spirit, after death, Is loosed like flesh into its elements? The worlds which man hath constellated, hold No fellowship in nature; nor perchance As he hath systematised life, mind and soul. But sooth to say, I know not aught of this. I have no kind. No nature like to me Exists. And human spirits must at least Sleep till the day of doom, if it ever be.
Festus Hast never known one free from body?
Lucifer None.
Festus Why seek then to destroy them?
Lucifer It is my part. Let ruin bury ruin. Let it be Woe here, woe there, woe, woe, be everywhere! It is not for me to know, nor thee, the end Of evil. I inflict and thou must bear. The arrow knoweth not its end and aim. And I keep rushing, ruining along Like a great river rich with dead men’s souls. For if I knew, I might rejoice; and that To me by Nature is forbidden. I know Nor joy nor sorrow; but a changeless tone Of sadness like the nightwind’s is the strain Of what I have of feeling. I am not As other spirits⁠—but a solitude Even to myself; I the sole spirit sole.
Festus Can none of thine immortals answer me?
Lucifer None, mortal!
Festus Where then is thy vaunted power?
Lucifer It is better seen as thus I stand apart From all. Mortality is mine⁠—the green Unripened universe. But as the fruit Matures, and world by world drops mellowed off The wrinkling stalk of Time, as thine own race Hath seen of stars now vanished⁠—all is hid From me. My part is done. What after comes I know not more than thou.
Festus Raise me a spirit! Awake ye dead! out with the secret, death! The grave hath no pride nor the rise-again. Let each one bring the bane whereof he died. Bring the man his, the maiden hers! Oh! half Mankind are murderers of themselves or souls. Yea, what is life but lingering suicide? Wake, dead! Ye know the truth; yet there ye lie All mingling, mouldering, perishing together Like, run sand in the hour-glass of old Time. Death is the mad world’s asylum. There is peace; Destruction’s quiet and equality. Night brings out stars as sorrow shows as truths: Though many, yet they help not; bright, they light not. They are too late to serve us: and sad things Are aye too true. We never see the stars Till we can see nought but them. So with truth. And yet if one would look down a deep well, Even at noon, we might see those same stars Far fairer than the blinding blue⁠—the truth; Probe the profound of thine own nature, man! And thou may’st see reflected, e’en in life, The worlds, the Heavens, the ages; by and by, The coming come. Then welcome, world-eyed Truth! But there are other eyes men better love Than Truth’s: for when we have her she is so cold, And proud, we know not what to do with her. We cannot understand her, cannot teach; She makes us love her, but she loves not us; And quits us as she came and looks back never. Wherefore we fly to Fiction’s warm embrace, With her to relax and bask ourselves at ease; And, in her loving and unhindering lap Voluptuously lulled, we dream at most On death and truth: she knows them, loves them not; Therefore we hate them and deny them both. Call up the dead!
Lucifer Let rest while rest they may! For free from pain and from this world’s wear and tear It may be a relief to them to rot; And it must be that at the day of doom, If mortals should take up immortal life, They will curse me with a thunder which shall shake The sun from out the socket of his sphere. The curse of all created. Think on it!
Festus Those souls thou mean’st whom thou hast ruined, damned.
Lucifer Nor only those; when once the virgin bloom Of soul is soiled⁠—and rudely hath my hand Swept o’er the swelling clusters of all life⁠— Little it matters whether crushed or touched Scarcely: each speaks the spoiler hath been there. The saved, the lost, shall curse me both alike: God too shall curse me, and I, I, myself. That curse is ever greatening⁠—quick with hell; The coming consummation of all woe.
Festus O man, be happy! Die and cease for ever! Why wear we not the shroud alway, that robe Which speaks our rank on earth, our privilege? To know I have a deathless soul I would lose it
Lucifer Believest thou all I tell thee?
Festus All, I do. Stringing the stars at random round her head, Like a pearl network, there she sits⁠—bright night! I love night more than day⁠—she is so lovely. But I love night the most because she brings My love to me in dreams which scarcely lie; Oh! all but truth and lovelier oft than truth! Let me have dreams like these, sweet Night, for ever, When I shall wake no more; an endless dream Of love and holy beauty ’mid the stars.
Lucifer I see thy heart and I will grant thy wish. I have lied to thee. I have command over spirits. Whom wilt thou that I call?
Festus Mine Angela!
Lucifer There is an Angel ever by thine hand. What seest thou?
Festus It is my love! It is she! My glory! spirit! beauty, let me touch thee. Nay, do not shrink back: well then I am wrong: Thou didst not use to shrink from me, my love. Angela! dost thou hear me? Speak to me. And thou art there⁠—looking alive and dead. Thy beauty is then incorruptible. I thought so, oft as I have looked on thee. Thou art too much even now for me as once. I cannot gather what I raved to say; Nor why I had thee hither. Stay, sweet sprite! Dear art thou to me now, as in that hour When first Love’s wave of feeling, spray-like broke Into bright utterance, and we said we loved. Yea, but I must come to thee. Move no more! Art thou in death or Heaven or from the stars? Have I done wrong in calling for thee thus? What art thou? Speak, love; whisper me as wont In the dear times gone bye; or durst thou not Unfold the mystery of thine and mine Own being? Was it Death who hushed thy lips? Is his cold finger there still? Let me come! She is not!
Lucifer And thou canst not bring her back.
Festus I will not, cannot be without her. Call her!
Lucifer I call on spirits and I make them come: But they depart according to their own will. Another time and she shall speak with thee⁠— Ere long⁠—and she shall show thee where she dwells, And how doth pass her immortality;⁠— If lengthening decay can so be called. Can lines finite one way be infinite Another? And yet such is deathlessness.
Festus It is hard to deem that spirits cease, that thought And feeling flesh-like perish in the dust. Shall we know those again in a future state Whom we have known and loved on earth? Say yes!
Lucifer The mind hath features as the body hath.
Festus But is it mind which shall rerise?
Lucifer Man were Not man without the mind be had in life.
Festus Shall all defects of mind and fallacies Of feeling be immortalized? all needs, All joys, all sorrows, be again gone through, Before the final crisis be imposed? Shall Heaven but be old earth created new? Or earth, treelike, transplanted into Heaven, To flourish by the waters of all life, And we within its shade, as heretofore, Cropping its fruit, with life-seeds cored at heart?
Lucifer Man’s nature, physical and psychical, Will be together raised, changed, glorified; And all shall be alike, like God; and all Unlike each other, and themselves. The earth Shall vanish from the thoughts of those she bore, As have the idols of the olden time From men’s hearts of the present. All delight And all desire, shall be with Heavenly things, And the new nature God bestowed on man.
Festus Then man shall be no more man but an Angel.
Lucifer When he is dead and buried. What remains⁠— That such an obscure, contradictory, thing Should be perpetuated anywhere?
Festus Oh! if God hates the flesh, why made He it So beautiful that e’en its semblance maddens? Am I to credit what I think I have seen? Or am I suffering some deceit of thine?
Lucifer I am explaining, not deluding.
Festus True. Defining night by darkness, death by dust. I run the gauntlet of a file of doubts, Each one of which down hurls me to the ground. I ask a hundred reasons what they mean, And every one points gravely to the ground, With one hand, and to Heaven with the other. In vain I shut mine eyes. Truth’s burning beam Forces them open, and when open, blinds them.
Lucifer Doubly unhappy!
Festus I am too unhappy To die; as some too way-worn cannot sleep. Planets and suns, that set themselves on fire By their own rapid self-revolvements, are But like some hearts. Existence I despise. The shape of man is wearisome; a bird’s, A worm’s⁠—a whirlwind’s, I would change with aught. Time! dash thine hour-glass down. Have done with this! The course of Nature seems a course of Death, And nothingness the sole substantial thing.
Lucifer Corruption springs from Light: ’tis the same power Creates, preserves, destroys: the matter which It works on, being one ever-changing form⁠— The living and the dying and the dead.
Festus I’ll not believe a thing which I have known. Hell was made hell for me, and I am mad.
Lucifer True venom churns the froth out of the lips; It works, and works like any waterwheel. And she then was the maiden of thy heart. Well, I have promised. Ye shall meet again.