“Keep cool, it will be all one in a hundred years.” So we say to others, so we try to persuade ourselves; but the tempestuous teapot seems fatally fixed over the live coals of life and the teapot tempest must as fatally follow. So mightily important, so imperative, so irresistibly puissant where those seeming geyser-forces in their day; perhaps we who laugh at their spent spray would more wisely learn the lessons they may teach us.
But just as a matter of spent spray and evanishing iridescence, those struggles of the long ago seem magically beautiful; and the men and women who figured prominently in them seem to peer through the mist even as flame-light from which flame has fled, even as pictured pain, reflex sorrows, unrealities--spray-shrouded, color-clouded. Cleopatra, nobly dead, a Queen forever; ugly old Socrates growing humanly dear and beautiful to all the ages as he drinks the poison-hemlock; Marie Antoinette, in the tumbrel, at the guillotine, under the glittering blade; Charles I. upon the scaffold, on the block awaiting the headsman’s blow--these things have been, but now they are not; yet they endure.
Blenheim, Ramillies, Oudenarde, and Malplaquet--somehow these names lie contiguous in the mind; so stored away, perhaps, in the brain cells long ago, and thus forever associative.
Where is all that we know when it is not in play upon the plane of consciousness? Where is the music of a Rachmaninoff--while he sleeps? the reminiscent wealth of a Gladstone--while he plays with his great grandchild? the genius of an Edgar Allan Poe--while narcotic night silences the streets of Baltimore?
“Potentially down in subconsciousness,” says my glib psychologist. Eloquent answer! But where and what _is_ subconsciousness?
Better is it silently to gaze wide-eyed, sincere, perplexed into the omnipresent _I-do-not-know_, than to squirrel gyrate in the old vicious circle, or to cob-web life-deep chaos with verbiage, subterfuge, and explanations that do not explain.
Blenheim, cumulatively at least, stands for the first and fatal blow that fortune dealt to her fair haired favorite Louis le Grand. The treaties of Utrecht (1713) and Rastadt (1714) were an appalling humiliation to the Grand Monarch who had imperiously dictated the conditions of Aix-la-Chapelle and Nimeguen.