Such were the Sphinx's children: had they but died out with their need!
Here and there a monk, fresh from his Desert-Laura, hurtles through the
eclipse-light of history like the stone from a catapult,--rules a church
with iron rods, organizes, denounces, intrigues, executes, keeps an unarmed
soldiery to do his behests, and hurls ecclesiastic thunders at kings and
emperors with the grand audacity of a commission presumedly divine, while
Greeks cringe, and Jews blaspheme, and heathen flee into, or away from,
conversion; and the Church itself canonizes this spiritual father, this
Sphinx-son of an instinct and a stone!
Or an Emperor exalted himself above the legions and the populace of Rome,
banqueted his enemies and beheaded them at table, drank in the sight of
blood and the sound of human shrieks as if they were his natural light and
air, tormented God's creatures and cursed his kind, kindled a fire among
the miserable myriads of his own city, and, exulting in a safe height,
mixed the leaping, frantic discords of his own music with the horrid sounds
of the hell's tragedy below him; seething in crime, steeped in murder,
black with blasphemy, the horror and the hate of men, death gaped for his
coming, and he went! Men revile him through all posterior ages; women
shudder at the legend of his deeds; but the Sphinx stands unconscious in
the Desert,--she knew not her child!
Or a Reformer springs up. High above his birthplace the snowy Alps paint
themselves against the sky, an aerial dream of beauty, softened by the
tender hues of dawn and sunset, serenely fair through the rift of the
tempest; even their white death takes a nameless grace from distance and
atmosphere, clothing itself in beauty as a spirit in clay, and tempting
wanderers to their graves: but no such beauty clothes the man whose daily
vision beholds them; hard, clamorous, disputatious, with one hand he rends
the rotten splendors of Rome from its tottering Image, and with the other
plunges baby-souls to inevitable damnation; strong and fiercely rigid, full
of burning and slaughter for the idolatries and harlotries of Popery, fired
with lurid zeal, and bestriding one stringent idea, he rides on over dead
and living, preaches predestination and hell as if the Gospel dwelt only
upon destiny and despair, casts no tender look at the loving piety that
underlay shrines and woman-worship and bead-counting wherever a true heart
sought its God through the sole formulas it knew, but spurs forward to the
end, a mighty power to destroy, to do away with old corruptions and break
down idols on their altars,--saint and iconoclast! Did the heart of stone
within him know its ancestry,--track its hard, loveless descent from the
Sphinx's children?
Then a Queen;--a solitary woman, proud of her solitude, isolated in her
regnant splendor, a dead planet like the moon, sung and pictured and
adored, but keeping on her majestic path in awful beauty, deaf to human
entreaty, cold to human love; a great statesman in a queen's robes; a keen,
subtle politician, coifed and farthingaled; a revengeful sovereign; a
deadly enemy; a woman who forgave nothing to a woman, and retaliated
everything upon a man; she who brought unshrinkingly to death a sister
queen discrowned and captive, a sister whose grace and loveliness and
kindly aspect might have moved the lions of the arena to fawn upon her, but
nowise disarmed the tigress who lapped her blood; she who banished and slew
the man she would not stoop to love, because he dared to love another; and
when death stared her in the face, and open-eyed judgment shook her soul,
rose from that death-pallet to grapple and abuse a false woman, penitent
for and confessing her falseness; a virgin-monarch, pitiless, relentless,
cruel as jealousy; an anomalous woman, were she not a stone-born child of
the Sphinx!
Or a great General, before whose iron will horse and horseman quailed and
fled, like dry stubble before flame; who wielded the sword of Gideon, and
cut off the armies of his kindred people and his anointed king as a mower
fells the glittering grass on a summer dawn, heedless that he, too, shall
be cut down from his flourishing.
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