The Nightmare Had Triplets Read Online Free Page B

safe religious tenet, that Thomas Cranmer wrote excellent prose. Apart from that dogma he was well content (in so far as Smirt could recall what Pater had written about Botticelli) “to accept that middle world in which men take no side in great conflicts, and decide no great causes, and make great refusals; setting thus for himself the limits within which art, undisturbed by any moral ambition, does its most sincere and surest work.”
        Afterward Smirt said: “On the other hand, I once dreamed, more or less like the philosopher Chuang Tzu, that I was a blue-bottle fly. I was then conscious only of my thoughts, my interests, and my beliefs as a blue-bottle fly, and unconscious of my present individuality as a man. I awoke from that dream, and it seemed to me I was myself again. Still, I cannot be certain. Still, I do not know whether I was at that time a gifted literary genius dreaming I was a bluebottle fly, or whether I am at this time a blue-bottle fly dreaming I am a literary genius.”
        It was not, he reflected, that any urbane and literate person could object to being a fly. To the contrary, Homer had lauded the fly, finding no higher praise possible for any warrior than to liken his boldness in battle to the boldness, during the dog days, of a fly, which although driven away once and again from the skin of men, still is eager to bite, and sweet to it is the blood of mankind.
        And Lucian also, Lucian had devoted an entire essay to praising the beauty and wisdom and musical gifts, and yet other virtues, of the fly, an essay in which Lucian had laid special emphasis upon the fact, not very generally known even to-day, that if a little ashes be sprinkled on a dead fly, it experiences a second birth, and stands up, spreading its delicate and peacock-hued wings for a fresh start in life,—a circumstance, as Lucian conceded half-enviously, which could not but be interpreted as a proof that the soul of every fly is both rational and immortal, where the soul of man may well be made of less durable stuff, inasmuch as the soul of a fly, after returning somehow from an insectean Hades, can thus recognize and reanimate its discarded body.
        You could not desire better sponsors. No living literary genius had ever been commended by both Homer and Lucian, no mere man of letters could now hope to be mentioned thus honorably by these masters.... And yet, after all, one’s flyship was but a possibility. It might be a deluding mirage. To imagine that you were born of the Calliphora family, and related closely to all the Muscoidea and kin to the great race of Diptera, might even be an excursion into that overweening and highly dangerous pride termed hubris; for after weighing every bit of the evidence, you had no sound legal proof with which to establish in any court of law that Smirt was a bluebottle fly who was now dreaming about you.
        For this reason Smirt said also: “The problem bafflesme. It is plain that I move in a dream. Yet in no way known to me can I deduce from a dream the person who is dreaming it. He is Smirt, obviously. Ah, but who is Smirt? As to that profound question I remain unassured. He may very well be a blue-bottle fly, most nobly descended from the Diptera, through the Calliphora family; but with equal likelihood he may be the Peripatetic Episcopalian, a personage no less splendid. I do not know. I know only that in this dream, no matter who may happen to be dreaming it, my desire reaches beyond the doings and the rewards of an applauded literary genius, about whom all the public at large are now talking. And the moral of that is (as the dear Duchess put it) that I must satisfy this desire, the very instant I have discovered its nature.”
        “Perhaps, Smirt, it is your desire to give a brief interview to the Times-Leader, ” the young man suggested.

VI. REASONS FOR NOT TALKING
     
        “No,” Smirt replied, “it is not my desire to ‘give’ either a