THE STONE OF THE PHILOSOPHERS
89
Our best.
You want a tender gray,
Prepare your palette half the day,
Take brush, and find to your surprise
The snout of scarlet stab your eyes.
Bad art, my boy! I never cared
To try the piece again.
—We’ve aired
Our dinner.
By the way, though, here
You are. That ’s it! How smooth and clear
The moonlight
runs from point to hilt!
Steel in the end beats silver-gilt!
Well, there’s an end of my cigar:
The girls will wonder where we are.
Strange!
how
this
question
of motive
deceives
historians—and
others!
said the scholar.
Froude was hardly a fool; but his Henry
the Eighth
is incredible.
So is the conventional
monster.
I for one
shall
not
be
surprised
at
the
Day of Judgment to hear
that
the
Constantine
of Protestantism
was actuated
by
some
quite
simple
motive like suppressed vegetarianism.
Very likely it
never
happened
at
all,
said
Denzi!
thoughtfully.
Nothing ever did.
Look at the Christ-myth.
The Trial and
Death
and so on—mere
stage-directions
from a ritual of Mithraism.
.
.
.
But who was Mithras? asked the big man.
Like any other question,
it goes on for ever, til! you get to the big question.
With your answer to
it,
said Basil.
On the question of motive, though,
said
the Doctor,
I
like your
theory of Messalina
as an ascetic.
Since
the
divine
consciousness
only appears as the negation of the human, and
is
only to be attained
by wearing out all the sensation-points,
till no response occurs to any
stimulus——
Nonsense!
interjected
the big man,
one
can control
them,
not