The Romance of Zion Chapel | Page 5

beauty it would awake. The fairy prince!
That was going to be our friend Theophil, of course. Well, of course,
though it's a little early on to admit it. However, I am unequal to the
task of concealing from the hawk-eyed reader through a succession of
chapters that Jenny and Theophil were to be each other's "fates." Of
course, he hadn't been there a month before Jenny's face was beginning
to wear that superscription of his passionate intelligence, to grow merry
from his laughter, and still sweeter by his kisses.
Of course, Theophil and Jenny fell in love. Do you think it was merely
to save New Zion and to bring the Renaissance to Coalchester that
Theophilus Londonderry was sent to live in Zion Place--or for any
other purpose less important than to love Jenny? Yes, we may as well
take that for granted as we begin the next chapter.
CHAPTER V
OF THE ARTIST IN MAN AND HIS MATERIALS
There is only one way to give life to the dead or the moribund, the way
of the Hebrew prophet,--to give it one's own. Theophilus Londonderry
instinctively knew this, and he began at once to breathe mightily upon
New Zion.
The goldsmith blows merrily all day through his little blowpipe, but it
is gold he is working on. The poet breathes upon the dictionary, and lo!
it flushes and breaks into flower. But then he is breathing on words.
The material of such artists is a joy in itself. They are workers in the
precious metals. Theophilus Londonderry had very different material to
mould,--an old chapel and some very dull humanity. Humanity is not a
precious metal, but if you know how to use it, it is excellent clay,--a
clay not without streaks of gold.
What was Theophilus Londonderry's purpose with his material, his will
towards the uncreated world over which his young vitalising spirit was
moving? To save it? Yes, incidentally; but primarily to express himself
by means of it, to set it vibrating to the rhythm of his nature, to set it

dancing to a tune of his piping. Already he was being stamped in gold
on Jenny's face. The coarser face of the world was to wear his smile too.
For the pebble had only been thrown in at New Zion. Who knows to
what coasts of fame the imperious ripples of his personality would
circle on before they touched the shores of death?
We may be polite as we please to humanity in the mass, and humanity
in occasional rarely encountered individuals is--well, divine; and to
such we gladly and humbly and rapturously pay divine honours. But in
any given thousand human beings, poor or rich, what would be your
calculation for the average of such divine,--how many faces would you
fall down and worship, how many hands would you care to take, how
many hearts would you dare to trust?
Alas, the rather good eyes must go so often with the disastrous chin, the
mouth succeed where the nose fails, the expansive impulse be checked
by the narrow habit, the little gleam of gold be lost in the clay.
Preponderant charm does not crowd into chapels or anywhere else to be
minted, it is busy on some vantage height of its own, impressing its
own image; and it is with minds maimed by the cruel machinery of life,
natures stunted and starved by adverse and innutritive condition, that
the artist in man must be satisfied. With what pathetic little flashes of
faculty, what fleeting and illusory glimpses of insight, what waifs and
strays of attractiveness, must he work and be happy, and with what a
thankfulness that the tenth rate is not twentieth or thirtieth!
Then, too, how often must the intractible material be impressed again
and again and again before it begins to wear the first trace of your
image. Once a poet has impressed himself with mastery upon words,
the impression remains for ever, the words do not disperse in idle
crowds when he has done speaking to them, never again to reassemble
in a like combination; whereas the greatest oratorical mover of men is
doomed, even after his most electrical self-impression, to see his image,
as soon as taken, fade away, with a shuffle of escaping feet and a
scramble for hats and cloaks. It was a masterpiece; but with the last
touch, see, the colours are flying in a hundred directions, and the very
canvas itself is off in a thousand threads of hurried disintegration!

But all this, of course, has to do entirely with the poetry of the
ministerial life; prosaic even as preaching and praying to the New
Zioners may sound, there was yet a drearier prose. For these artistic
materials had not only to be preached and prayed to,--they had