第80章 THE ABBEY MASON(2)

"He said: 'You pride yourself too much On your creation. Is it such?

"'Surely the hand of God it is That conjured so, and only His! -

"'Disclosing by the frost and rain Forms your invention chased in vain;

"'Hence the devices deemed so great You copied, and did not create.'

"I feel the abbot's words are just, And that all thanks renounce I must.

"Can a man welcome praise and pelf For hatching art that hatched itself? . . .

"So, I shall own the deft design Is Heaven's outshaping, and not mine."

"What!" said she. "Praise your works ensure To throw away, and quite obscure "Your beaming and beneficent star?

Better you leave things as they are!

"Why, think awhile. Had not your zest In your loved craft curtailed your rest -

"Had you not gone there ere the day The sun had melted all away!"

- But, though his good wife argued so, The mason let the people know That not unaided sprang the thought Whereby the glorious fane was wrought, But that by frost when dawn was dim The method was disclosed to him.

"Yet," said the townspeople thereat, "'Tis your own doing, even with that!"

But he--chafed, childlike, in extremes -

The temperament of men of dreams -

Aloofly scrupled to admit That he did aught but borrow it, And diffidently made request That with the abbot all should rest.

- As none could doubt the abbot's word, Or question what the church averred, The mason was at length believed Of no more count than he conceived, And soon began to lose the fame That late had gathered round his name . . .

- Time passed, and like a living thing The pile went on embodying, And workmen died, and young ones grew, And the old mason sank from view And Abbots Wygmore and Staunton went And Horton sped the embellishment.

But not till years had far progressed Chanced it that, one day, much impressed, Standing within the well-graced aisle, He asked who first conceived the style;

And some decrepit sage detailed How, when invention nought availed, The cloud-cast waters in their whim Came down, and gave the hint to him Who struck each arc, and made each mould;

And how the abbot would not hold As sole begetter him who applied Forms the Almighty sent as guide;

And how the master lost renown, And wore in death no artist's crown.

- Then Horton, who in inner thought Had more perceptions than he taught, Replied: "Nay; art can but transmute;

Invention is not absolute;

"Things fail to spring from nought at call, And art-beginnings most of all.

"He did but what all artists do, Wait upon Nature for his cue."

- "Had you been here to tell them so Lord Abbot, sixty years ago, "The mason, now long underground, Doubtless a different fate had found.

"He passed into oblivion dim, And none knew what became of him!

"His name? 'Twas of some common kind And now has faded out of mind."

The Abbot: "It shall not be hid!

I'll trace it." . . . But he never did.

- When longer yet dank death had wormed The brain wherein the style had germed From Gloucester church it flew afar -

The style called Perpendicular. -

To Winton and to Westminster It ranged, and grew still beautifuller:

From Solway Frith to Dover Strand Its fascinations starred the land, Not only on cathedral walls But upon courts and castle halls, Till every edifice in the isle Was patterned to no other style, And till, long having played its part, The curtain fell on Gothic art.

- Well: when in Wessex on your rounds, Take a brief step beyond its bounds, And enter Gloucester: seek the quoin Where choir and transept interjoin, And, gazing at the forms there flung Against the sky by one unsung -

The ogee arches transom-topped, The tracery-stalks by spandrels stopped, Petrified lacework--lightly lined On ancient massiveness behind -

Muse that some minds so modest be As to renounce fame's fairest fee, (Like him who crystallized on this spot His visionings, but lies forgot, And many a mediaeval one Whose symmetries salute the sun)

While others boom a baseless claim, And upon nothing rear a name.