"Yes, Harry; that is so. Besides"
"Besides, the resemblance is positively trivial. No one but an artist would think of it. I should never have suspected it without your assistance. In the one face there is written all that is good, and pure, and holy; in the other, all that is reckless, unscrupulous, soulless, and if not vicious might easily become so. It does not take a physiognomist to see that. I beg pardon for saying so, Julian, but it seems to me that there is no more similarity between the two than there is between the opposing elements of your own strange nature. The one all that is good, and the other, well not all that is bad, but very different, you know, old boy. And it is probably these forces within you that answer to the charms of these two beings who are so manifestly opposites. The one inspiring only the nobleness of a blameless love; the other suggesting the abandonment of a reckless passion."
III
"Good and bad are relative terms only," he said, as one pronouncing a text. Every man fulfills his purpose. I can put a stroke of paint on my canvas, and you will call it white. I put another beside it, and by contrast the first appears gray. Still another, and the second has become gray, and the first still darker. And so on, until I have reached the purest white we know. It is the same with humanity. Men are only dark or light as they are contrasted with others; nor can they avoid the place they occupy on God's canvas any more than my colors can choose their places on mine. The world is a great picture. God is the greatest of all artists. His is the master hand the unerring touch that lays on the lights, the half-tones and the shadows. Each fulfills its purpose. Without the shadows there would be no lights.
"What is true of masses is likewise true of individuals," he continued, after a moment's pause. "In a landscape, every blade of grass, every pebble, has its light and its dark side. If you see only the light side of an object, it is only because the shadow is turned from you. It is so with men; one side is sun, the other shadow. Sometimes the light, only, is presented to view, but the darker side is none the less there because unseen. Nature is never unbalanced. Whatever of brightness there is toward the sun there must be an equal amount of shadow opposing, with all the intergradations between. If the light is dim the shadow is soft; if the light is brilliant the shadow is black. Some of us are turned white side to the world, some the reverse; some show the white and the black alternately."
The man in the chair settled himself comfortably to listen. He liked nothing better than to see the artist in his present mood, offering a word now and then that was likely to draw out his peculiar ideas.
"You believe in fate, then, and the absence of moral freedom," he said reflectively.
"I believe nothing. Belief is not the word. What is, is right. To assert otherwise is an insult to the Supreme. He is all powerful, hence wrong cannot exist."
"I should be glad to hear your argument in support of that position."
"Argument! It is a self-evident truth! Argument is not necessary! Argument is never necessary! If an assertion is not true no amount of discussion will make it so, while the truth requires no support."
The other had lighted a pipe, and was smoking lazily.
"Well," he said, as the artist paused; "at least those who have crossed over have solved the mystery."
"Oh, they have! And how do you know that anyone has crossed over? You do not believe in the mortality nor the slumber of the soul; no more do I; but time exists only with life. A man dies and in the same instant opens his eyes upon eternity, and yet a million of years may have been swept away in that instant. As a tired child you have fallen asleep. A moment later you have been called by
your mother to breakfast. And yet, in that moment of dreamless sleep, the long winter night had passed. Adam, the first man, closing his eyes in death; you and I, who will do the same ten, twenty, forty years hence, and the generations who will follow us for a million years, perhaps, will waken to eternity, if there be a waking, in one and the same instant of time, without a knowledge of the intervening years. There were no years. Eternity has no beginning, no end, no measurement."
He paused a moment, then suddenly burst out again.
"Nothing in life is real it is all a dream. You think your being is reality and that you hear my voice speaking. I tell you it is but fancy. We are the figures the mimes in some vast hypnotic exhibition the shadows in some gigantic spirit's disordered dream. Hypnotism," he continued, pursuing a line of thought which his impulsive words had suggested, "has, in fact, proven that no one can distinguish the real from the unreal. You remember, when we went to see Flint, the great hypnotist, how his subjects passed from one condition to another and took on any personality at the operator's will; capering and grimacing about the stage with all the characteristics and even the facial expression of monkeys, one minute, and simpering as silly school-girls the next; and to them it was all real as real as this room, these bodies, these pictures are to us. I read some lines once that seemed to express the idea: