TOUCHSTONES OF PROSE

Press, Volume XLIX, Issue 14836, 29 November 1913, Page 9

TOUCHSTONES OF PROSE

THE IMMORTALITY OF ART.

(Oscar Wilde.) When man acts he is a puppet. "When he describes he is a poet. The whole secret lies in that. It was easy enough on the sandy plains by windy IHon to send the notched arrow from the painted bow, or to hurl against the shield of hide and flamolike brass the long ash-handled spear. It was easy for the adulterous queen to spread tho Tyrian carpets for her lord, and then, as he lay couched in the marble bath, to throw over his head tho purple net, and call to her smooth-faced lover to stab through the meshes at the heart that should have broken at Aulis. For Antigone even, with Death waiting for her as her bridegroom, it was easy to

pass through the tainted air at noon, and climb the hill, and strew with kindly earth the wretched naked corse that bad no tomb. But what of those who wrote about these things? What of those who gave them reality, • and made them lire for ever? Are they not greater than the men and women they sing of? 'Hector that sweet knight is dead,' and Lucian tells us how in the dim under-world Monippus saw the bleaching skull of Helen, ami marvelled that it was for so grim a favour that all those horned shire were launched, those beautiful mailed men laid low, those towered cities brought to dust. Yet, every day the swanlike daughter of Leda comes out on the battlements, and looks down at the tide of war. The grc-ybeards wonder at her loveliness, and she etands by the- side of the king. In his chamber of stained ivory lies her leman. Mo is polishing his dainty armour, and combing the scarlet plume. With squire and page, her husband passes from tent to tent. She can sco his bright hair, and hears, or fancies that she hears, that clear cold voice. In the courtyard below, the son of Priam is buckling on his brazen cuirass. The white arms of Andromache are around his nock. Ho sets his helmet on tho ground, lest their babe should be frightened. Behind the embroidered curtains of his pavilion, sits Achilles, in perfumed raiment, while in harness of gilt and silver the friend of his eoul arrays himself to go forth to the fight. From a curiously carven chest that his mother Thetis had brought to his ship-side, the Lord of the Myrmidons takes out that mystic chalice that the lip of man had never touched, and cleanses it with brimstone, and with fresh water cools it, and. having washed his hands, fills with blnck wine its burnished. hollow, and spjlls the thick grape-blood upon the ground in honour. of Him whom at Dodona barefooted prophets worshipped, and prays to Him, and knows not that ho prays in vain, and that by the hands of two knifrhts from Troy, Panthous's son, Euphorbus, whose love-lor-ks were looped with gold, and the Priamid, the lion-hearted, Patroklus, the comrade of comrades, must meet his doom. Phantoms, are they? Heroes iof mist and mountain? Shadows-in a song? No: they are real. Action I What is action? It dies at the moment of its enerey. It is a base concession to fact. The world is made by tho singer for the dreamer.