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Updated: June 6, 2025
This is the archaic part of that very world which we look at as so ancient; an 'antiquity' which descended to them, hardly altered, perhaps, from times long antecedent, which were as unintelligible to them as to us, or more so.
These being the conditions of the case, the following inquiry naturally presents itself: not, be it observed, as a recondite problem, generated by modern speculation, but as a plain suggestion flowing out of that very ordinary and archaic piece of knowledge that water cannot be piled up like in a heap, like sand; or that it seeks the lowest level.
Gradually it emancipated itself from archaic forms and childish symbolism, converted the lifeless typical figures into living individuals, lit up their dull eyes and expressionless faces with human intelligence and human feeling, and finally aimed at archaeological accuracy in costume and other details.
At dawn these people had left their comfortable sleeping-cars at Chadron, in the Nebraska desert, to change to the train of archaic coaches which transported the land-seekers across the last stretch of their journey.
By way of glorifying French music, they set to work to throw ridicule on the famous men of the last century, with the exception of one Master, who was very good and very pure and a Belgian. Having done that amount of slaughter, they were free to admire the archaic Masters, who had been forgotten, while a certain number of them were absolutely unknown.
These archaic distinctions bring home to us very forcibly the distance of a refined from a rude jurisprudence. The modern administrator of justice has confessedly one of the hardest tasks before him when he undertakes to discriminate between the degrees of criminality which belong to offences falling within the same technical description.
"There's a lot of different explosives which they fire by mathematics, and which you can learn in part from our homely encyclopedias, but the main game will be fought out on the same principles that Attila fought it and Genghis Khan numbers, traps, unexpectedness, the same dull old flanking activities, the raid of supplies and communications, the bending back of wings, the crimp of a line by making a hole in one part and all that archaic rot.
For in the history of traditional religions goddesses have been as popular as gods; and if we are right in seeing, with Grimm, the archaic gods in the Hidden Heroes, some where we must find their mates, the corresponding goddesses. The lady-housekeeper is expressly called in one story Dame Holle.
Even the saline springs of Canada and the Northern States of America, where the wapiti love to congregate, and the noble hunter lurks in the thicket to murder them unperceived, derive their saltness, as an able Canadian geologist has shown, from the thinly scattered salts still retained among the sediments of that very archaic sea whose precipitates form the earliest known life-bearing rocks.
Madame Chalice looked out of this ancient avenue, a contrast, yet a harmony; for, though her dress was modern, her person had a rare touch of the archaic, and fitted into the picture like a piece of beautiful porcelain, coloured long before the art of making fadeless colours was lost. There was an amused, meditative smiling at her lips, a kind of wonder, the tender flush of a new experience.
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