Ariel (10 page)

Before posterity, before history, every great people ought to appear as a growth whose harmonious development has produced a fruit whose fine essence offers to the future the fragrance of its ideality and a fecund seed. Without this durable, human result, raised above the transitory end of the immediately useful, the power and grandeur of empires are but as dreams of a night in the existence of man, to be unheeded, uncounted in the doings of the day which weave the world’s destiny. A great civilization, a great people, in the eye of history, is that which after its time has passed still leaves the chords of its memory vibrating, its spirit a lasting legacy to posterity, a new and divine portion of the sum of things. So Carlyle said of the souls of his heroes. So when Helena, in Goethe’s poem, called from the realms of night, returns again to the shades, she leaves to
Faust her tunic and her veil; the vestments are not herself, but as she has worn them, they breathe of her divineness and possess ever a spell to elevate the soul of him who keeps them above all vulgar things.

An organized society which limits its idea of civilization to the accumulation of material abundance, and of justice to their equitable distribution among its members, will never make of its great cities anything that differs essentially from the heaping-up of anthills. Populous, opulent cities do not suffice to make a civilization immutable, intensive; they are, indeed, necessary for the highest culture, are its natural atmosphere; the soul of the great man can rarely grow from amid the petty interests of small towns; but this quantitative side of a nation’s greatness, like the size of its armies, is but means, not results. Of the stones of Carthage not one remains to bear any message of light, and all the immensity of Babylon or Nineveh does not fill in
human
memory the hollow of man’s hand as compared with the few furlongs that lie between the Acropolis and the Piraeus. In the perspective of the ideal no city appears great, though it occupy all the space around the towers of Nimrod, nor strong because it can build again those Babylonian walls which carried six chariots abreast; nor beautiful because it was paved with flagstones of alabaster and girt with the gardens of Semiramis.... No. In this view that city only is great whose spirit’s barriers extend far beyond the mountains or the seas, whose very name pronounced illuminates for posterity an epoch of human thought, a horizon of history. It is strong and lovely when its days are something more than the invariable repetition of the same echo, repeated in never-ending circle; when in it there is something which floats above the faces of the crowd; when amid its night lights there are the lamps which light the solitude of vigils devoted only to thought; thoughts whence germinate ideas which are to come to the sunlight of the coming day with a cry to humanity, a force that shall compel men’s souls.

Then only may the extent and material greatness of the city measure the intensity of its civilization. Royal capitals, avenues of proud palaces, are a narrower home than the desert for man’s thinking when it is not thought that overlords them. In Tennyson’s “Maud” there is a symbol of this torturing of the soul when man’s society leaves it still in solitude; where the hero in his madness dreams himself to be dead and buried but a few feet underground, beneath a London pavement; and his consciousness remains, despite his death, attached to the poor remains of his body; the confused clamour of the street makes a dull rumbling that shakes his narrow tomb and impedes his every dream of peace; the weight of an indifferent multi
tude
weighs heavily above his grave, the heavy tread of horses seems to trample on it with disdain; the days succeed days with inexorable tedium. And Maud would wish her grave still farther, farther down, deeper yet within the earth; the dim noises of its surface serve but to keep alive the consciousness that she is dead.

Already there exist, in our Latin America, cities whose material grandeur and apparent civilization place them in the first rank; but one may fear lest a touch of thought upon their exterior, so sumptuous, may make the shining vessel ring hollow within; lest our cities too—though they had their Moreno, their Rivadavia, their
Sarmiento,
cities which gave initiative to an immortal revolution that, like a stone cast on water, spread the glory of their heroes and the words of their tribunes in ever-widening circles over a vast continent — may end like Tyre or Sidon, or as Carthage ended.

It is your generation that must prevent this; the youth which is of to-day, blood and muscle and nerve of the future. I speak to you, seeing in you those who are destined to guide the others in coming battles for a spiritual cause. The perseverance of your strength must be in you as your certainty of victory. Be not afraid to preach the evangel of refinement to the Scythians, of intelligence to the Boeotians, of disinterest to the Phoenicians. It is enough that thought insists on being, on showing that it exists, as Diogenes proved of movement, to make its spread irresistible and its ultimate triumph secure. Palm by palm, of its own impulse, it will win what space it needs to establish its kingdom among all the other manifestations of life. In its physical organization it will elevate and augment the hollow of the very skull it works in, by its own
activity:
the thinking races in their physiological growth reveal this power of the unseen workman within. In his social organization also will the thinker well knowhow to broaden the stage for his drama without the intervention of any power alien to his own. But that conviction, which should preserve from a discouragement whose one utility is to make us rid ourselves of the mean and mediocre, should also keep us from the impatience which demands from time any alteration of its majestic rhythm.

Every one who devotes himself to propagate and preserve in contemporary America a disinterested ideal of the soul — art, science, ethics, religious belief, a political policy of ideals — should educate his belief in the persevering preparation for the future. The past belonged entirely to the sword arm; the present seems well-nigh given over to the horny hand that clears away and builds; the future—a future that seems all the nearer as the thinking and willing of those who look forward to it grow more earnest — shall offer the stability, the scenario, the right atmosphere, to make possible the higher evolution of man’s soul.

Can you not picture to yourselves the America we others dream of? Hospitable to things of the spirit, and not only to the immigrant throngs; thoughtful, without sacrificing its energy of action; serene and strong and withal full of generous enthusiasm; resplendent with the charm of morning calm like the smile of a waking infant, jet with the light of awakening thought. Think on her at least; the honour of your future history depends on your keeping constantly before your eyes the vision of that America, radiant above the realities of the present like the rose window above the dark nave of a cathedral.... You may not be its founders; but you will at all events be its forerunners. In the glories of the future there be also palms for such. To prepare the advent of a new human type, a new social unity, a profound student of history, Edgar Quinet, has observed that there always precedes, long before, a scattered group, premature, whose r
ô
le in the evolution of society is like that of the prophetic species in biology discovered by
Héer.
The new type begins by barely signalizing individualities; these later get organized into varieties, and finally these last, encountering a favouring medium, attain the rank of a species; then, says Quinet, the “group” becomes the multitude, and rules.

This is why your moral philosophy, in labour or in combat, should be the reverse of the Horatian
carpe
diem ;
treat the present moment only as the first step in the stairway you are to tread, or as a breach in the enemy wall you are to enter by. Ask not at once for the final victory, but for bettering your conditions for the conflict. Thus will your energy have the greater stimulus, since the dramatic interest is

greater in the continual renewal and advance, fit school to purify the forces of an heroic generation, than in the serene and Olympic attitude in which a golden age might invest the acolytes of its glory. “It is not the possession of good things, but their attainment which gives to man delight and glory in his power,” said Taine, speaking of the happy times of the Renaissance.

Perhaps it were an audacious and ingenuous hope to believe in so rapid and fortunate an evolution, so efficacious an employment of your powers, as to expect that the span of your own generation will suffice to bring in America the conditions of intellectual life; from our now primitive surroundings a true social interest; from our present dead level a summit which shall really be supreme. But where there may not be entire transformation there may be progress; and even though you know that the first fruits of the soil you labour may not be yours, they will if you are generous and brave be a new stimulus to action. The best work is that which is realized without impatience for immediate success, the most glorious effort that which places the goal beyond the visible horizon, and the purest abnegation that which renounces for the present, not indeed the laurel of men’s applause, but the bliss of seeing one’s labour consummate and its goal attained.

Antiquity had altars “for the unknown Gods.” Consecrate a part of your soul to the unknown future. As societies develop, thought for the future becomes more and more a factor in their growth and an inspiration to their labours. From the blind improvidence of the savage, who only sees in it that time which shall bring him to the setting of the day’s sun and conceives not how his lot in other days may be determined by his present action, up to our anxious preoccupation with the future and provision for our posterity, there is an immense distance; yet even this may seem little enough some day. We are only capable of progress in so far as we can adapt our actions every day to the conditions of a more distant future, to countries farther and farther away. Assurance of our part in bringing about a work which shall survive us, fruitful in times to come, exalts our human dignity and gives us triumph even over the limitations of our nature. If unhappily humanity had to despair definitely of the immortality of the individual consciousness, the most religious sentiment that it could substitute would be that which comes of the thought that even after our dissolution into the heart of things there would outlast, as part of all human inheritance, the very best of all that we had felt or thought, our deepest and our purest essence—just as the beams of a long-extinguished star go on indefinitely and still cheer us mortals, albeit with a melancholy light.

The future is, in the life of human societies, the one inspiring thought. From pious veneration of the past and the cult of tradition, on the one hand, and, on the other, a daring impulse toward the future, comes the noble force which, uplifting the common thought above the present limitations, imparts to its collective agitations and sentiments a sense for some ideal. Men and peoples work under the inspiration of ideas, as the beasts by instinct; and that society which labours and struggles, even unconsciously, to impose an idea upon actualities, acts as does the bird who, building its nest at the prompting of some inner imagination, obeys at once an unconscious memory of the past and a mysterious presentiment of the future.

A preoccupation for the ulterior destiny of our life, by eliminating any suggestion of self-interest, purifies and tranquillizes it and also ennobles; and it is a proud honour of this century that the impelling force of this thought for the future, this sense of what is due the dignity of a rational being, should have shown itself so clearly. Even in the depths of the most utter pessimism, in the bosom of that bitter metaphysic which brought from the East the love of dissolution and nonentity, even Hartmann, the apostle for the return to the Unconscious, has preached, and with some appearance of logic, the austere duty of going on with the work of improvement, labouring for the good of the future, so that human effort, aiding evolution, may bring about a more rapid impulse to the final end — which is the termination of all sorrow, and likewise of all life.

But not, as did Hartmann, in the name of death, but in that of life and hope do I ask of you a portion of your soul for the labour for the future; and it is to ask this of you that I have sought inspiration in the gentle and lovely image of my Ariel. The bounti
ful
Spirit whom
Shakespeare
hit upon to clothe with so high a symbolism, perhaps with that divine unconsciousness of all it meant which is common to great geniuses, shows clearly, even in this statuette, its ideal significance, admirably expressed in the sculptor’s lines
.
Ariel
is reason, and the higher truth. Ariel is that sublime sentiment of the perfectibility of man through whose virtue human clay is magnified and transformed in the realm of things for each one who lives by his light — even that miserable clay of which Ahriman spoke to Manfred
...
Ariel is, to nature, that crowning of its work which ends the ascending process of organic life with the call of the spirit. Ariel triumphant signifies ideality and order in life, noble inspiration in thought, unselfishness in conduct, high taste in art, heroism of action, delicacy and refinement in manners and usages. He is the eponymous hero in the
é
pop
é
e of man, the immortal protagonist, since first his
presence inspired the feeble struggles of reason in primitive man, when he first knitted his brow in the effort to shape the flint, or to scratch rude drawings on a reindeer’s bones; since first with his arms he fanned the sacred fire which the ancient Aryan, progenitor of the peoples we call civilized, lit, by what mystery we know not, on the banks of the Ganges, and forged from the divine flame the sceptre of man’s mastery. Ariel accompanies him still, and onward, breeding races ever higher, until at the end he hovers radiant above those souls which have over-passed the natural limit of humanity; the same for Plato on the Sunium Promontory as for Francis of Assisi on the solitude of the Albem Mont. His invincible power has as its impulse every uplifting moment of a human life. Though overcome a thousand and one times by the untamable rebellion of Caliban, proscribed by the victorious barbarian, smothered in the clouds of battle, his bright wings spotted by trailing in “the eternal dunghill of Job,” Ariel ever rises again, immortally renews his beauty and his youth. Ariel runs nimbly as at the call of
Prospero
to all who really care for him and seek to find him. His kindly power goes even out at times to those who would deny him. He guides the blind forces of evil and ignorance often to aid, and unwittingly, in works of good. He crosses human history with a song, as in the “Tempest,’’ to inspire those who labour and those who fight until he brings about the fulfilment of that divine plan to them unknown — and he is permitted, as in Shakespeare’s play, to snap his bonds in twain and soar forever into his circle of diviner light.

And more than for these words of mine I would have you ever remember tenderly this little figure of Ariel. I would that the image, light and graceful, of this bronze, impress itself upon your inmost spirit.... Once I saw, in a museum, an old coin;
worn and effaced I could still read its device, in the thin gold, the one word
Esperanza.
I pondered on the influence that simple inscription might have had on the many generations through whose hands the coin had passed; how many fainting spirits it had cheered, how many generous impulses it had fostered, how many desperate resolutions it had prevented. So may the figure of this bronze, graven in your hearts, fulfil in your lives this invisible yet determining part In dark hours of discouragement may it rekindle in your conscience the warmth of the ideal, return to your hearts the glow of a perishing hope. And Ariel, first enthroned behind the bastion of your inner life, may sally thence to the attack and conquering of other souls. I see the bright spirit smiling back upon you in future times, even though your own still works in shadow. I have faith in your will and in your strength, even more in those to whom you shall transfer your life,
transmit your work. I dream in rapture of that day when realities shall convince the world that the Cordillera which soars above the continent of the Americas has been carved to be the pedestal of this statue, the altar of the cult of Ariel.

So spoke
Prospero.
The youths departed, after a filial grasping of the Master’s hand. Of his sweet words there lingered an echo in each one’s mind as when a finger is drawn across a musical glass. It was the last hour of eve. A ray of the dying sun fell through the shadowed hall, and touching the front of bronze seemed almost to animate the face of the figure with the unquiet spark of life; and the ray prolonged itself as if the genius imprisoned in the bronze were sending his last look toward the young men going away....

For a long time they walked in silence. Guarded by their common absorption each soul could feel that fine distilling of medi
tation
that falls on thought like quiet dew on the wool of sleeping lambs. When the rough contact of the street crowds roused them, it was already night; a serene, soft night of summer. The grace and calm that dropped from its ebon urn over the land rose above the prosy realities of the things of men; only their presence brought the youths again back to earth. A soft breeze charged the air with a languid, delicious sense of abandon, like the trembling of the cup in a Bacchante’s hand. The darkness in the heavens was not of black, but rather of a deep azure that seemed expressive of a thoughtful calm. Enamelled in it the great stars blazed amid their infinite company: Aldebaran, arrayed in purple light; Sirius, like the hollow of a silver chalice turned toward the
world;
the Cross, whose arms are open over our America as if to guard and hold its final hope....

And then it was that after a prolonged silence the youngest of the group — they
called him
“Enjolrás”
because of his ardent thought — spoke, pointing out first the idle movement of the human herd and then the radiant beauty of the skies:

“See
... while the crowd goes by, it never looks up to the heavens: yet they look down upon the multitude.
.
. something des
cends upon the indifferent mass…
the vibration of the stars reminds me of the waving arms of a sower, sowing seed
…
”

THE END