Page:The Atlantic Monthly Volume 5.djvu/754

748 heaven and an inevitable hell, one naked and open vision of herself.

Long had the Sphinx waited. Year after year the flocking pigeons flitted and wheeled through the sweet skies of spring, built their nests and reared their young; tiny lizards, the new birth of the season, coiled and glittered on the hot sands like wandering jewels; every creature, dying out of conscious life, left its perpetuated self behind it, and repeated its own youth in its young, according to its kind: but the Sphinx lived alone. Nor all-unconscious of her solitude: for he who formed that massive shape, chiselled those calm, expectant lips, and wide eyes pensive as setting moons, he had not failed to do what all true artists do in virtue of their truth,—he had shared his own life with his own creation, and it was his lonely yearning that stirred her pulseless heart. Little did he think, toiling at that stupendous figure, ages gone by, that he transfused into the stone at which he labored, like a patient ant at some stupendous burden, no little share of that creative yearning that inspired him to his task; as little as you think, dear poet, whether poet, painter, or sculptor,—for all are one, and one is all,—that in those dreams which you write, as unconscious of your power as the transcribing stylus of its office, your own heart pulsates for a listening world, and the very linking of words that so respire their own music makes those words self-sentient of their breaking, thrilling melody, and wrings or exalts them, idea-garments as they are, with the restless heaving of the thought that wears them.

Or you, whose sun-steeped brush brings to life on canvas the golden trances of August noons, the high, still splendor of its mountain-tops, which the sun caresses with fiery languor, the unrippled slumber of its warm streams, the broad glory of its woods and meadows fused with light and heat into the resplendent haze that earth exhales in her day of prime, till he who sees the picture hears the cricket's chirping in its moveless grasses, and scents the rich aromatic breath of its summer-passion and its rapturous noon,—do you dream, when at last the perfect work repeats your thought, and you rest in the tropic atmosphere you have created, that in very truth the picture itself is full of inward heat and breathless languor? For you have poured out the colors that light makes out of heat, and in them the still inevitable light shall ever stir the recreating heat that clothes itself in color, and bring your thought, no more a dead abstraction, but a living power, into the very substance whereby you have expressed it. And even so far as you were creative, so shall your work be informed by you, and not mere dead pigment and dried oil and dull canvas be your autograph, but the vivid and inspiring blazon of an inspired idea shall glow life-like on some friendly wall, and in its turn inspire some other soul, whose light within needs but the breath from without to burst upward in clear flame.

Or you, who unveil from its marble tomb that figure of a chained and stainless woman, whose atmosphere is as a nun's veil, whose sad divinity is a crown,—do you dare imagine that the holy despair you have imaged, the pause of a saint's resignation and a martyr's courage, is but the outline and the faultless contour of a stone? Come back, Pygmalion, from your mythic sleep! return, Art's divinest mystery, germ of all its power, from the deep dust of ages! and teach these modern men that his story whose passion fired a statue's breast was but an immortal fable, a similitude of the truth you feel, but do not see,—that even as our Creator shared His life with His creatures, so do you pour, in far less measure, but obedient to that precedent which is law, your own life and the magnetic instincts of that life, into what you create!

Keep your hearts pure and your hands clean, therefore; for these things that you sell for dead shall one day livingly confront you, and tell their own story of your life and your nature with terrible honesty to men and angels.

But whoever, in those mystic ages that have ceased to be historic and have be-