HYPOLYMPIA Or The Gods in the Island An Ironic Fantasy, Edmund Gosse [classic literature list .txt] 📗

slight family connection and our adversities are making me strangely familiar....

PHOEBUS.

Speak on, my good Pan.

PAN.

Your Highness was once something of a botanist?

PHOEBUS.

A botanist? Ah, scarcely! A little arboriculture, the laurel; a little horticulture, the sun-flower. Those varieties seem entirely absent here, and I have no thought of replacing them.

PAN.

The last thing I should dream of suggesting would be a hortus siccus....

PHOEBUS.

And I was never a consistent collector. There are reeds everywhere, you fortunate goat-foot, but even in Olympus I was the creature of a fastidious selection.

PAN.

The current of the thick and punctual blood never left me liable to the distractions of choice.

PHOEBUS.

I congratulate you, Pan, upon your temperament, and I recommend to you a further pursuit of the attainable.

[PAN makes a profound obeisance and disappears in the woodland. PHOEBUS watches him depart, and then turns to the moon.]

PHOEBUS [alone].

His familiarity was not distasteful to me. It reminded me of days out hunting, when I have come suddenly upon him at the edge of the watercourse, and have shared his melons and his conversation. I anticipate for him some not unagreeable experiences. The lower order of divinities will probably adapt themselves with ease to our new conditions. They despaired the most suddenly, with wringing of hands as we raced to the sea, with interminable babblings and low moans and screams, as they clustered on the deck of that extraordinary vessel. But the science of our new life must be to forget or to remember. We must live in the past or forego the past. For Pan and his likes I conceive that it will largely resolve itself into a question of temperature--of temperature and of appetite. That orb is of a sinister appearance, but to do it justice it looks heated. My sister had a passion for coldness; she would never permit me to lend her any of my warmth. I cannot say that it is chilly here to-night. I am agreeably surprised.

[The veiled figure flits across again, and PAN once more crosses in close pursuit.]

PHOEBUS [as they vanish].

What an amiable vivacity! Yes; the lower order of divinities will be happy, for they will forget. We, on the contrary, have the privilege of remembering. It is only the mediocre spirits, that cannot quite forget nor clearly remember, which will have neither the support of instinct nor the solace of a vivid recollection.

[He seats himself. A noise of laughter rises from the marsh, and dies away. In the silence a bird sings.]

PHOEBUS.

Not the Daulian nightingale, of course, but quite a personable substitute: less prolongation of the triumph, less insistence upon the agony. How curiously the note breaks off! Some pleasant little northern bird, no doubt. I experience a strange and quite unprecedented appetite for moderation. The absence of the thrill, the shaft, the torrent is not disagreeable. The actual Phocian frenzy would be disturbing here, out of place, out of time. I must congratulate this little, doubtless brown, bird on a very considerable skill in warbling. But the moon--what is happening to it? It is not merely climbing higher, but it is manifestly clarifying its light. When I came, it was copper-coloured, now it is honey-coloured, the horn of it is almost white like milk. This little bird's incantation has, without question, produced this fortunate effect. This little bird, halfway on the road between the nightingale and the cicada, is doubtless an enchanter, and one whose art possesses a more than respectable property. My sister's attention should be drawn to this highly interesting circumstance. Selene! Selene!

[He calls and waits. From the upper woods SELENE slowly descends, wrapped in long white garments.]

PHOEBUS.

Sister, behold the throne that once was thine.

SELENE.

And now, a rocking cinder, fouls the skies.

PHOEBUS.

A magian sweeps its filthy ash away.

SELENE.

There is no magic in the bankrupt world.

PHOEBUS.

Nay, did'st thou hear this twittering peal of song?

SELENE.

Some noise I heard; this glen is full of sounds.

PHOEBUS.

Fling back thy veil, and staunch thy tears, and gaze.

SELENE.

At thee, my brother, not at my darkened orb.

PHOEBUS.

Gaze then at me. What seest thou in mine eyes?

SELENE.

Foul ruddy gleams from what was lately pure.

PHOEBUS.

Nay, but thou gazest not. Look up, look at me!

SELENE.

But on thy sacred eyeballs fume turns fire.

PHOEBUS.

Nay, then, turn once and see thy very moon.

SELENE [turning round].

Ah! wonder! the volcanic glare is gone.

PHOEBUS.

The wizard bird has sung the fumes away.

SELENE.

Empty it seems, and vain; but foul no more.

PHOEBUS [approaching her, and in a confidential tone].

I will not disguise from you, Selene, my apprehension that the hideous colour may return. Your moon is divorced from yourself, and can but be desecrated and forlorn. But at least it should be a matter of interest to you--yes, even of gratification, my sister--that this little bird, if it be a bird, has an enchanting power of temporarily relieving it and raising it.

[SELENE, manifestly more cheerful, ascends to the wood on the left. PHOEBUS, turning again to the moon,]

I have observed that this species of mysterious agency has a very salutary effect upon the more melancholy of our female divinities. They are satisfied if they have the felicity of waiting for something which they cannot be certain of realising, and which they attribute to a cause impossible to investigate. [To SELENE, raising his voice.] Whither do you go, my sister?

SELENE.

I am searching for this little bird. I propose to discuss with it the nature of its extraordinary, and I am ready to admit its gratifying, control over the moon. I think it possible that I may concoct with it some scheme for our return. You shall, in that case, Phoebus, be no longer excluded from my domain.

PHOEBUS.

Let me urge you to do no such thing. The action of this little bird upon your unfortunate luminary is sympathetic, but surely very obscure. It would be a pity to inquire into it so closely as to comprehend it.

[SELENE, without listening to him, passes up into the woods, and exit.]

PHOEBUS [alone].

To comprehend it might even be to discover that it does not exist. Whereas to come here night after night, in the fragrant darkness, to see the unhallowed lump of fire creep out of the lake, to listen for the first clucks and shakes of the sweet little purifying song, and to watch the orb growing steadily more hyaline and lucent under its sway, how delicious! The absolute harmony and concord of nature would be then patent and recurrent before us. My poor sister! However, it is consoling to reflect that she is almost certain not to be able to find that bird.

IV

 

[The same glen. ÆSCULAPIUS alone, busily arranging a great cluster of herbs which he has collected. He sits on a large stone, with his treasures around him.]

ÆSCULAPIUS.

Yew--an excellent styptic. Tansy, rosemary. Spurge and marsh mallow. The best pellitory I ever plucked out of a wall. The herbs of this glen are admirable. They surpass those of the gorges of Cyllene. Is this lavender? The scent seems more acrid.

[Enter PALLAS and EUTERPE.]

PALLAS.

You look enviably animated, Æsculapius. Your countenance is so fresh beneath that long white beard of yours, that the barbarians will suppose you to be some mad boy, masquerading.

EUTERPE.

What will you do with these plants?

ÆSCULAPIUS.

These are my simples. As we shot through the Iberian narrows on our frantic voyage hither, my entire store was blown out of my hands and away to sea. The rarest sorts were flung about on rocks where nothing more valetudinarian than a baboon could possibly taste them. My earliest care on arriving here was to search these woods for fresh specimens, and my success has been beyond all hope. See, this comes from the wet lands on the hither side of the tarn----

EUTERPE.

Where Selene is now searching for the wizard who draws the smoke away from the moon's face at night.

ÆSCULAPIUS.

This from the beck where it rushes down between the stems of mountain-ash, this from beneath the vast ancestral elm below the palace, this from the sea-shore. Marvellous! And I am eager to descend again; I have not explored the cliff which breaks the descent of the torrent, nor the thicket in the gully. There must be marchantia under the spray of the one, and possibly dittany in the peat of the other.

PALLAS.

We must not detain you, Æsculapius. But tell us how you propose to adapt yourself to our new life. It seems to me that you are determined not to find it irksome.

ÆSCULAPIUS.

Does it not occur to you, Pallas, that--although I should never have had the courage to adopt it--thus forced upon us it offers me the most dazzling anticipations? Hitherto my existence has been all theory. What there is to know about the principles of health as applied to the fluctuations of mortality, I may suppose is known to me. You might be troubled, Pallas, with every conceivable malady, from elephantiasis to earache, and I should be in a position to analyse and to deal with each in turn. You might be obscured by ophthalmia, crippled by gout or consumed to a spectre by phthisis, and I should be able, without haste, without anxiety, to unravel the coil, to reduce the nodosities, to make the fleshy instrument respond in melody to all your needs.

PALLAS.

But you have never done this. We knew that you could do it, and that has been enough for us.

ÆSCULAPIUS.

It has never been enough for me. The impenetrable immortality of all our bodies has been a constant source of exasperation to me.

PALLAS.

Is it not much to know?

ÆSCULAPIUS.

Yes; but it is more to do. The most perfect theory carries a monotony and an emptiness about with it, if it is never renovated by practice. In Olympus the unbroken health of all the inmates, which we have accepted as a matter of course, has been more advantageous to them than it has been to me.

PALLAS.

I quite see that it has made your position a more academic one than you could wish.

ÆSCULAPIUS.

It has made it purely academic, and indeed, Pallas, if you will reflect upon it, the very existence of a physician in a social system which is eternally protected against every species of bodily disturbance borders upon the ridiculous.

PALLAS.

It would interest me to know whether in our old home you were conscious of this incongruity, of this lack of harmony between your science and your occasions of using it.

ÆSCULAPIUS.

No; I think not. I was satisfied in the possession of exact knowledge, and not directly aware of the charm of application. It is the result, no doubt, of this resignation of immortality which has startled and alarmed us all so much----

PALLAS.

Me, Æsculapius, it has neither alarmed nor startled.

ÆSCULAPIUS.

I mean that while we were beyond the dread of any attack, the pleasure of rebutting such attack was unknown to us. I have divined, since our misfortunes, that disease itself may bring an excitement with it not all unallied to pleasure.... You smile, Euterpe, but I mean even for the sufferer. There is more in disease than the mere pang and languishment. There is the sense of alleviation, the cessation of the throb, the resuming glitter in the eye, the restoration of cheerfulness and appetite. These, Pallas, are qualities which are indissolubly identified with pain and decay, and which therefore--if we rightly consider--were wholly excluded from our experience. In Olympus we never brightened, for we never flagged; we never waited for