Prince Zaleski

by M. P. Shiel

inmates of Orven Hall no hidden significance?The wildest guesses were made throughout the country; theoriespropounded. But no theory explained _all_ the points. The ferment,however, has now subsided. To-morrow morning Maude Cibras ends her lifeon the gallows.'

  Thus I ended my narrative.

  Without a word Zaleski rose from the couch, and walked to the organ.Assisted from behind by Ham, who foreknew his master's every whim, heproceeded to render with infinite feeling an air from the _Lakme_ ofDelibes; long he sat, dreamily uttering the melody, his head sunken onhis breast. When at last he rose, his great expanse of brow was clear,and a smile all but solemn in its serenity was on his lips. He walkedup to an ivory _escritoire_, scribbled a few words on a sheet of paper,and handed it to the negro with the order to take my trap and drivewith the message in all haste to the nearest telegraph office.

  'That message,' he said, resuming his place on the couch, 'is a lastword on the tragedy, and will, no doubt, produce some modification inthe final stage of its history. And now, Shiel, let us sit together andconfer on this matter. From the manner in which you have expressedyourself, it is evident that there are points which puzzle you--you donot get a clean _coup d'oeil_ of the whole regiment of facts, and theircauses, and their consequences, as they occurred. Let us see if out ofthat confusion we cannot produce a coherence, a symmetry. A great wrongis done, and on the society in which it is done is imposed the task ofmaking it translucent, of seeing it in all its relations, and ofpunishing it. But what happens? The society fails to rise to theoccasion; on the whole, it contrives to make the opacity more opaque,does not see the crime in any human sense; is unable to punish it. Nowthis, you will admit, whenever it occurs, is a woful failure: woful Imean, not very in itself, but very in its significance: and there mustbe a precise cause for it. That cause is the lack of something notmerely, or specially, in the investigators of the wrong, but in theworld at large--shall we not boldly call it the lack of culture? Donot, however, misunderstand me: by the term I mean not so muchattainment in general, as _mood_ in particular. Whether or when suchmood may become universal may be to you a matter of doubt. As for me, Ioften think that when the era of civilisation begins--as assuredly itshall some day begin--when the races of the world cease to becredulous, ovine mobs and become critical, human nations, then will bethe ushering in of the ten thousand years of a _clairvoyant_ culture.But nowhere, and at no time during the very few hundreds of years thatman has occupied the earth, has there been one single sign of itspresence. In individuals, yes--in the Greek Plato, and I think in yourEnglish Milton and Bishop Berkeley--but in humanity, never; and hardlyin any individual outside those two nations. The reason, I fancy, isnot so much that man is a hopeless fool, as that Time, so far as he isconcerned, has, as we know, only just begun: it being, of course,conceivable that the creation of a perfect society of men, as the firstrequisite to a _regime_ of culture, must nick to itself a longer loopof time than the making of, say, a stratum of coal. A loquaciousperson--he is one of your cherished "novel"-writers, by the way, ifthat be indeed a Novel in which there is nowhere any pretence atnovelty--once assured me that he could never reflect without swellingon the greatness of the age in which he lived, an age the mightycivilisation of which he likened to the Augustan and Periclean. Acertain stony gaze of anthropological interest with which I regardedhis frontal bone seemed to strike the poor man dumb, and he took ahurried departure. Could he have been ignorant that ours is, ingeneral, greater than the Periclean for the very reason that theDivinity is neither the devil nor a bungler; that three thousand yearsof human consciousness is not nothing; that a whole is greater than itspart, and a butterfly than a chrysalis? But it was the assumption thatit was therefore in any way great in the abstract that occasioned myprofound astonishment, and indeed contempt. Civilisation, if it meansanything, can only mean the art by which men live musicallytogether--to the lutings, as it were, of Panpipes, or say perhaps, totriumphant organ-bursts of martial, marching dithyrambs. Any formuladefining it as "the art of lying back and getting elaborately tickled,"should surely at this hour be _too_ primitive--_too_ Opic--to bringanything but a smile to the lips of grown white-skinned men; and thevery fact that such a definition can still find undoubting acceptancein all quarters may be an indication that the true [Greek: _idea_]which this condition of being must finally assume is far indeed--far,perhaps, by ages and aeons--from becoming part of the generalconception. Nowhere since the beginning has the gross problem of livingever so much as approached solution, much less the delicate andintricate one of living _together: a propos_ of which your bodycorporate not only still produces criminals (as the body-naturalfleas), but its very elementary organism cannot so much as catch areally athletic one as yet. Meanwhile _you_ and _I_ are handicapped.The individual travaileth in pain. In the struggle for quality, powers,air, he spends his strength, and yet hardly escapes asphyxiation. Hecan no more wriggle himself free of the psychic gravitations thatinvest him than the earth can shake herself loose of the sun, or he ofthe omnipotences that rivet him to the universe. If by chance oneshoots a downy hint of wings, an instant feeling of contrast puffs himwith self-consciousness: a tragedy at once: the unconscious being "thealone complete." To attain to anything, he must needs screw the head upinto the atmosphere of the future, while feet and hands drip darkichors of despair from the crucifying cross of the crude present--_ahorrid strain_! Far up a nightly instigation of stars he sees: but hemay not strike them with the head. If earth were a boat, and mine, Iknow well toward what wild azimuths I would compel her helm: butgravity, gravity--chiefest curse of Eden's sin!--is hostile. Whenindeed (as is ordained), the old mother swings herself into a sublimerorbit, we on her back will follow: till then we make to ourselvesIcarian "organa" in vain. I mean to say that it is the plane of stationwhich is at fault: move that upward, you move all. But meantime is itnot Goethe who assures us that "further reacheth no man, make he whatstretching he will"? For Man, you perceive, is not many, but One. It isabsurd to suppose that England can be free while Poland is enslaved;Paris is _far_ from the beginnings of civilisation whilst Toobooloo andChicago are barbaric. Probably no ill-fated, microcephalous son of Adamever tumbled into a mistake quite so huge, so infantile, as did Dives,if he imagined himself rich while Lazarus sat pauper at the gate. Notmany, I say, but one. Even Ham and I here in our retreat are not alone;we are embarrassed by the uninvited spirit of the present; the adamantroot of the mountain on whose summit we stand is based ineradicably inthe low world. Yet, thank Heaven, Goethe was not _quite_ right--as,indeed, he proved in his proper person. I tell you, Shiel, I _know_whether Mary did or did not murder Darnley; I know--as clearly, asprecisely, as a man can know--that Beatrice Cenci was not "guilty" ascertain recently-discovered documents "prove" her, but that the Shelleyversion of the affair, though a guess, is the correct one. It _is_possible, by taking thought, to add one cubit--or say a hand, or adactyl--to your stature; you may develop powers slightly--veryslightly, but distinctly, both in kind and degree--in advance of thoseof the mass who live in or about the same cycle of time in which youlive. But it is only when the powers to which I refer are shared by themass--when what, for want of another term, I call the age of theCultured Mood has at length arrived--that their exercise will becomeeasy and familiar to the individual; and who shall say whatpresciences, prisms, _seances_, what introspective craft, Genieapocalypses, shall not _then_ become possible to the few who standspiritually in the van of men.

  'All this, you will understand, I say as some sort of excuse formyself, and for you, for any hesitation we may have shown in looseningthe very little puzzle you have placed before me--one which wecertainly must not regard as difficult of solution. Of course, lookingat all the facts, the first consideration that must inevitably rivetthe attention is that arising from the circumstance that ViscountRandolph has strong reasons to wish his father dead. They are avowedenemies; he is the _fiance_ of a princess whose husband he is probablytoo poor to become, though he will very likely be rich enough when hisfather dies;
and so on. All that appears on the surface. On the otherhand, we--you and I--know the man: he is a person of gentle blood, asmoral, we suppose, as ordinary people, occupying a high station in theworld. It is impossible to imagine that such a person would commit anassassination, or even countenance one, for any or all of the reasonsthat present themselves. In our hearts, with or without clear proof, wecould hardly believe it of him. Earls' sons do not, in fact, go aboutmurdering people. Unless, then, we can so reason as to discover othermotives--strong, adequate, irresistible--and by "irresistible" I mean amotive which must be _far_ stronger than even the love of lifeitself--we should, I think, in fairness dismiss him from our mind.

  'And yet it must be admitted that his conduct is not free of blame. Hecontracts a sudden intimacy with the acknowledged culprit, whom he