e
evil forces bore her through the tragedy, kept up her feeble
strength--for she was but a frail creature; and as the action rose and
the stir deepened, how wildly they shook her with their passions of the
pit! They wrote HELL on her straight, haughty brow. They tuned her
voice to the note of torment. They writhed her regal face to a demoniac
mask. Hate and Murder and Madness incarnate she stood.

It was a marvellous sight: a mighty revelation.

It was a spectacle low, horrible, immoral.

Swordsmen thrust through, and dying in their blood on the arena sand;
bulls goring horses disembowelled, made a meeker vision for the
public--a milder condiment for a people's palate--than Vashti torn by
seven devils: devils which cried sore and rent the tenement they
haunted, but still refused to be exorcised.

Suffering had struck that stage empress; and she stood before her
audience neither yielding to, nor enduring, nor, in finite measure,
resenting it: she stood locked in struggle, rigid in resistance. She
stood, not dressed, but draped in pale antique folds, long and regular
like sculpture. A background and entourage and flooring of deepest
crimson threw her out, white like alabaster--like silver: rather, be it
said, like Death.

Where was the artist of the Cleopatra? Let him come and sit down and
study this different vision. Let him seek here the mighty brawn, the
muscle, the abounding blood, the full-fed flesh he worshipped: let all
materialists draw nigh and look on.

I have said that she does not _resent_ her grief. No; the weakness of
that word would make it a lie. To her, what hurts becomes immediately
embodied: she looks on it as a thing that can be attacked, worried
down, torn in shreds. Scarcely a substance herself, she grapples to
conflict with abstractions. Before calamity she is a tigress; she rends
her woes, shivers them in convulsed abhorrence. Pain, for her, has no
result in good: tears water no harvest of wisdom: on sickness, on death
itself, she looks with the eye of a rebel. Wicked, perhaps, she is, but
also she is strong; and her strength has conquered Beauty, has overcome
Grace, and bound both at her side, captives peerlessly fair, and docile
as fair. Even in the uttermost frenzy of energy is each maenad movement
royally, imperially, incedingly upborne. Her hair, flying loose in
revel or war, is still an angel's hair, and glorious under a halo.
Fallen, insurgent, banished, she remembers the heaven where