THE WEAVER WHO CLAD THE SUMMER[11]
Reading edition
THE WEAVER WHO CLAD THE SUMMER[11]
By HARRIS MERTON LYON From The Illustrated Sunday Magazine
I had always felt vaguely that there must be at times an intense pathos which overcame the master-worker in perishable materials—the actor in his supreme moment; the singer, the musician—I thought—must feel a bitter regret that his glory cannot live but must die, in articulo gloriæ, with the sound, the effect he has created. Bernhardt seemed to me to have that in the back of her mind when she exulted over her appearance in the moving pictures. “I am immortal,” she cried, dramatically—always dramatic, that old lady—“I am a film.” So thin a bridge to immortality!
The actor, the singer, the musician; struggling through years and over obstacles to attain perfection—and then what? A brief triumph in a perishable art; a transient, fugitive gracing of a day, an hour, a moment ... and then another forgotten mortal artist. I remembered Gautier’s decision, “The coin outlasts Tiberius.” Paint, chisel, then, or write if you wish your work to endure.
No doubt here was wisdom in a little box; and I fell to wondering stupidly what there could possibly be in being a worker at the other, the evanescent thing. I remembered a certain kind of moth that dies soon after it is born. Are these people moths?
And then one night a ragtag ghost came and answered me.