GILBERT （after a pause）.Yes:I believe I ventured upon that simple truth.Surely you see now that I am right?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 Ilion to send the notched arrow from the painted bow,or to hurl against the shield of hide and flamelike brass the long ash-handled spear.It was easy for the adulterous queen to spread the Tyrian carpets for her lord,and then,as he lay couched in the marble bath,to throw over his head the 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 had no tomb.But what of those who wrote about these things?What of those who gave them reality,and made them live 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 Menippus saw the bleaching skull of Helen,and marvelled that it was for so grim a favour that all those horned ships 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 greybeards wonder at her loveliness,and she stands by the side of the king.In his chamber of stained ivory lies her leman.He is polishing his dainty armour,and combing the scarlet plume.With squire and page,her husband passes from tent to tent.She can see 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 neck.He sets his helmet on the 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 soul 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 black wine its burnished hollow,and spills 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 he prays in vain,and that by the hands of two knights from Troy,Panthous'son,Euphorbus,whose love-locks were looped with gold,and the Priamid,the lion-hearted,Patroklus,the comrade of comrades,must meet his doom.Phantoms,are they?Heroes of mist and mountain?Shadows in a song?No:they are real.Action!What is action?It dies at the moment of its energy.It is a base concession to fact.The world is made by the singer for the dreamer.
ERNEST.While you talk it seems to me to be so.
GILBERT.It is so in truth.On the mouldering citadel of Troy lies the lizard like a thing of green bronze.The owl has built her nest in the palace of Priam.Over the empty plain wander shepherd and goatherd with their flocks,and where,on the wine-surfaced,oily sea,[Greek text which cannot be reproduced],as Homer calls it,copper-prowed and streaked with vermilion,the great galleys of the Danaoi came in their gleaming crescent,the lonely tunny-fisher sits in his little boat and watches the bobbing corks of his net.Yet,every morning the doors of the city are thrown open,and on foot,or in horse-drawn chariot,the warriors go forth to battle,and mock their enemies from behind their iron masks.All day long the fight rages,and when night comes the torches gleam by the tents,and the cresset burns in the hall.
Those who live in marble or on painted panel,know of life but a single exquisite instant,eternal indeed in its beauty,but limited to one note of passion or one mood of calm.Those whom the poet makes live have their myriad emotions of joy and terror,of courage and despair,of pleasure and of suffering.The seasons come and go in glad or saddening pageant,and with winged or leaden feet the years pass by before them.They have their youth and their manhood,they are children,and they grow old.It is always dawn for St.Helena,as Veronese saw her at the window.Through the still morning air the angels bring her the symbol of God's pain.
The cool breezes of the morning lift the gilt threads from her brow.On that little hill by the city of Florence,where the lovers of Giorgione are lying,it is always the solstice of noon,of noon made so languorous by summer suns that hardly can the slim naked girl dip into the marble tank the round bubble of clear glass,and the long fingers of the lute-player rest idly upon the chords.It is twilight always for the dancing nymphs whom Corot set free among the silver poplars of France.In eternal twilight they move,those frail diaphanous figures,whose tremulous white feet seem not to touch the dew-drenched grass they tread on.But those who walk in epos,drama,or romance,see through the labouring months the young moons wax and wane,and watch the night from evening unto morning star,and from sunrise unto sunsetting can note the shifting day with all its gold and shadow.For them,as for us,the flowers bloom and wither,and the Earth,that Green-tressed Goddess as Coleridge calls her,alters her raiment for their pleasure.The statue is concentrated to one moment of perfection.The image stained upon the canvas possesses no spiritual element of growth or change.If they know nothing of death,it is because they know little of life,for the secrets of life and death belong to those,and those only,whom the sequence of time affects,and who possess not merely the present but the future,and can rise or fall from a past of glory or of shame.
