Ardath | Page 9

for their own cruel sport the velvety
wonder of a moth's wing, or the radiant rose and emerald pinions of a
dragon-fly. I was a fool--so I was told with many a languid sneer and
stale jest--to talk of hidden mysteries in the whisper of the wind and the
dash of the waves--such sounds were but common cause and effect.
The stars were merely conglomerated masses of heated vapor
condensed by the work of ages into meteorites and from meteorites into
worlds--and these went on rolling in their appointed orbits, for what
reason nobody knew, but then nobody cared! And Love--the key-note
of the theme to which I had set my mistaken life in tune--Love was
only a graceful word used to politely define the low but very general
sentiment of coarse animal attraction--in short, poetry such as mine was
altogether absurd and out of date when confronted with the facts of
every-day existence--facts which plainly taught us that man's chief
business here below was simply to live, breed, and die--the life of a
silk-worm or caterpillar on a slightly higher platform of ability; beyond
this--nothing!"
"Nothing?" murmured Heliobas, in a tone of suggestive inquiry--
"really nothing?"
"Nothing!" repeated Alwyn, with an air of resigned hopelessness; "for I
learned that, according to the results arrived at by the most advanced
thinkers of the day, there was no God, no Soul, no Hereafter--the
loftiest efforts of the highest heaven--aspiring minds were doomed to
end in non-fruition, failure, and annihilation. Among all the desperately
hard truths that came rattling down upon me like a shower of stones, I
think this was the crowning one that killed whatever genius I had. I use
the word 'genius' foolishly--though, after all, genius itself is nothing to
boast of, since it is only a morbid and unhealthy condition of the
intellectual faculties, or at least was demonstrated to me as such by a
scientific friend of my own who, seeing I was miserable, took great
pains to make me more so if possible. He proved,--to his own
satisfaction if not altogether to mine,--that the abnormal position of
certain molecules in the brain produced an eccentricity or peculiar bias
in one direction which, practically viewed, might be described as an

intelligent form of monomania, but which most people chose to term
'genius,' and that from a purely scientific standpoint it was evident that
the poets, painters, musicians, sculptors, and all the widely renowned
'great ones' of the earth should be classified as so many brains more or
less affected by abnormal molecular formation, which strictly speaking
amounted to brain-deformity. He assured me, that to the properly
balanced, healthily organized brain of the human animal, genius was an
impossibility--it was a malady as unnatural as rare. 'And it is singular,
very singular,' he added with a complacent smile, 'that the world should
owe all its finest art and literature merely to a few varieties of
molecular disease!' I thought it singular enough, too,--however, I did
not care to argue with him; I only felt that if the illness of genius had at
any time affected ME, it was pretty well certain I should now suffer no
more from its delicious pangs and honey-sweet fever. I was cured! The
probing-knife of the world's cynicism had found its way to the
musically throbbing centre of divine disquietude in my brain, and had
there cut down the growth of fair imaginations for ever. I thrust aside
the bright illusions that had once been my gladness; I forced myself to
look with unflinching eyes at the wide waste of universal Nothingness
revealed to me by the rigid positivists and iconoclasts of the century;
but my heart died within me; my whole being froze as it were into an
icy apathy,--I wrote no more; I doubt whether I shall ever write again.
Of a truth, there is nothing to write about. All has been said. The days
of the Troubadours are past,--one cannot string canticles of love for
men and women whose ruling passion is the greed of gold. Yet I have
sometimes thought life would be drearier even than it is, were the
voices of poets altogether silent; and I wish--yes! I wish I had it in my
power to brand my sign-manual on the brazen face of this coldly
callous age-brand it deep in those letters of living lire called Fame!"
A look of baffled longing and un gratified ambition came into his
musing eyes,-his strong, shapely white hand clenched nervously, as
though it grasped some unseen yet perfectly tangible substance. Just
then the storm without, which had partially lulled during the last few
minutes, began its wrath anew: a glare of lightning blazed against the
uncurtained window, and a heavy clap of thunder burst overhead with
the sudden crash of an