Alarms and Discursions | Page 5

signal. I
was trying to read by the last light that died on the lawn a long poem of
the decadent period, a poem about the old gods of Babylon and Egypt,
about their blazing and obscene temples, their cruel and colossal faces.
"Or didst thou love the God of Flies who plagued the Hebrews and was
splashed With wine unto the waist, or Pasht who had green beryls for
her eyes?"
I read this poem because I had to review it for the Daily News; still it
was genuine poetry of its kind. It really gave out an atmosphere, a
fragrant and suffocating smoke that seemed really to come from the
Bondage of Egypt or the Burden of Tyre There is not much in common
(thank God) between my garden with the grey-green English sky-line
beyond it, and these mad visions of painted palaces huge, headless
idols and monstrous solitudes of red or golden sand. Nevertheless (as I
confessed to myself) I can fancy in such a stormy twilight some such
smell of death and fear. The ruined sunset really looks like one of their
ruined temples: a shattered heap of gold and green marble. A black
flapping thing detaches itself from one of the sombre trees and flutters
to another. I know not if it is owl or flittermouse; I could fancy it was a
black cherub, an infernal cherub of darkness, not with the wings of a
bird and the head of a baby, but with the head of a goblin and the wings
of a bat. I think, if there were light enough, I could sit here and write
some very creditable creepy tale, about how I went up the crooked road
beyond the church and met Something-- say a dog, a dog with one eye.
Then I should meet a horse, perhaps, a horse without a rider, the horse
also would have one eye. Then the inhuman silence would be broken; I
should meet a man (need I say, a one-eyed man?) who would ask me
the way to my own house. Or perhaps tell me that it was burnt to the
ground. I could tell a very cosy little tale along some such lines. Or I
might dream of climbing for ever the tall dark trees above me. They are
so tall that I feel as if I should find at their tops the nests of the angels;
but in this mood they would be dark and dreadful angels; angels of
death.
Only, you see, this mood is all bosh. I do not believe in it in the least.

That one-eyed universe, with its one-eyed men and beasts, was only
created with one universal wink. At the top of the tragic trees I should
not find the Angel's Nest. I should only find the Mare's Nest; the
dreamy and divine nest is not there. In the Mare's Nest I shall discover
that dim, enormous opalescent egg from which is hatched the
Nightmare. For there is nothing so delightful as a nightmare--when you
know it is a nightmare.
That is the essential. That is the stern condition laid upon all artists
touching this luxury of fear. The terror must be fundamentally frivolous.
Sanity may play with insanity; but insanity must not be allowed to play
with sanity. Let such poets as the one I was reading in the garden, by
all means, be free to imagine what outrageous deities and violent
landscapes they like. By all means let them wander freely amid their
opium pinnacles and perspectives. But these huge gods, these high
cities, are toys; they must never for an instant be allowed to be anything
else. Man, a gigantic child, must play with Babylon and Nineveh, with
Isis and with Ashtaroth. By all means let him dream of the Bondage of
Egypt, so long as he is free from it. By all means let him take up the
Burden of Tyre, so long as he can take it lightly. But the old gods must
be his dolls, not his idols. His central sanctities, his true possessions,
should be Christian and simple. And just as a child would cherish most
a wooden horse or a sword that is a mere cross of wood, so man, the
great child, must cherish most the old plain things of poetry and piety;
that horse of wood that was the epic end of Ilium, or that cross of wood
that redeemed and conquered the world.
In one of Stevenson's letters there is a characteristically humorous
remark about the appalling impression produced on him in childhood
by the beasts with many eyes in the Book of Revelations: "If that was
heaven, what in the name of Davy Jones was hell like?" Now in sober
truth there is a magnificent idea