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Title: Straws and prayer-books; dizain des diversions
Author: James Branch Cabell
Release date: November 16, 2024 [eBook #74748]
Language: English
Original publication: United States: Robert M. McBride & Company
Credits: Charlene Taylor, Graeme Mackreth and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK STRAWS AND PRAYER-BOOKS; DIZAIN DES DIVERSIONS ***
STRAWS _and_
PRAYER-BOOKS
BOOKS _by_ MR. CABELL
_Biography_:
Beyond Life
Figures of Earth
Domnei
Chivalry
Jurgen
The Line of Love
The High Place
Gallantry
The Certain Hour
The Cords of Vanity
From the Hidden Way
The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck
The Eagle's Shadow
The Cream of the Jest
Straws and Prayer-Books
_Scholia_:
The Lineage of Lichfield
Taboo
The Jewel Merchants
Jurgen and the Law
(_Edited by Guy Holt_)
_STRAWS AND
PRAYER-BOOKS_
_Dizain des Diversions_
_By_
JAMES BRANCH CABELL
"_Behold the child, by Nature's kindly law,
Pleased with a rattle, tickled with a straw....
Scarfs, garters, gold, amuse his riper stage,
And beads and prayer-books are the toys of age._"
ROBERT M. McBRIDE & COMPANY
NEW YORK : : : : : : 1924
Copyright, 1924, by
James Branch Cabell
_Printed in the
United States of America_
Third Edition
Published, 1924
To
BALLARD HARTWELL CABELL
_is dedicated whatever may be of worth in this
volume, or elsewhere in the Biography_.
_Contents_
PAGE
The Author of Jurgen 3
I A Note on Alcoves 25
II The Way of Wizardry 49
III Minions of the Moon 79
IV The Thin Queen of Elfhame 123
V Celestial Architecture 139
VI Romantics About Them 171
VII Diversions of the Anchorite 193
VIII The Delta of Radegonde 225
IX A Theme With Variations 239
X Flaws in the Spur 267
The Author of The Eagle's Shadow 285
THE AUTHOR OF JURGEN
"As to the book of the Laws composed by him, what good have they done
us? And yet he ought (as Lycurgus did the Lacedæmonians, and as Solon
did the Athenians, and Zaleucus the Thurians), if they were excellent,
to have persuaded some to adopt them. How, then, can we consider
Plato's conduct anything but ridiculous?--since he appears to have
written his laws, not for men who have any real existence, but rather
for a set of persons invented by him."
_The Author of Jurgen_
§ 1
"But this is grossly unfair!" John Charteris complained. "All these
long years you have been promising to write a book about me. And now,
it seems, I am to remain forever a minor character."
"Well--!" I admitted.
"And why, pray?"
"Well--!" I explained: and I went on, "I mean, of course, that is,
after I had given the matter real consideration--" Then I summed it all
up even more completely. "But, come now, Charteris! you, as a writer
yourself, know how these submitted notions by and by come back from
the cellar of what we--well, as one might say, fraudulently--term the
subconscious; and come back either transmuted into something quite
different or else marked Not Available for Our Present Needs."
He shook his head. "In the fidgeting face of such tergiversation I can
but observe that, really, of all things! For, when one considers the
persons whom you have elected to give a whole book to, civility must
seek refuge in aposiopesis. Me, look you, me, you have passed over in
favor of a moonstruck Kennaston and of that fat little Woods widow!"
"The Author," I pleaded, "does not customarily explain why he elects to
do anything."
"None the less, I am sure I would have made a most remunerative
protagonist. My inconsistencies are amusing: my whimsies, although
decorous, are flavorsome: my morals are, if not exactly beyond
reproach--"
"Beyond hope, anyway," I suggested.
"--And, in short, I am inclined to think that, here again, the Author
does not quite understand just what he is about."
"Upon my word," said I, "you touch a truth--"
"Each has his métier," the little man admitted, modestly. "The flea
leaps well, most senators carry their liquor well, whereas the clergy,
one deduces from the numerousness of their children--"
§ 2
"I mean," I interrupted, "that once you talked to me all through one
fine spring night. It was about Romance you talked--"
"I remember," Charteris stated, with a grin. "I can well remember how,
in that terrible dawn, after all my lovely rhetoric, you thought I had
been explaining how books ought to be written."
"Well, I do not think that now. I incline, rather, to think you were
talking about man's attitude toward life and the universe. I am sure,
though, that in all your speaking of books you left unsettled the
question you raised a moment since, as to what the Author is about? For
what reason, in fine, and with what reward in view, does any author
write his books?"
"I voiced for you most plainly and mellifluously the principles of his
economy--"
"Yes: I remember your high observations as to Villon and Marlowe.
The artist, you argued, is unwilling to be wasted; and he alone
manages--sometimes--to perpetuate himself where everybody else
perishes. You were quite eloquent about the artist's immortality.
Only, I remember too that, toward the end, you admitted a considerable
distinction. In art, you cried, it may so happen that the thing which
a man makes may endure to be misunderstood and gabbled over, but it
is not the man himself. We retain--I am still paying you the handsome
tribute of exact quotation,--we retain the _Iliad_, but oblivion
has swallowed Homer so deep that many question if he ever existed at
all."
Charteris replied with something of the hasty affability appropriate
to dealings with the insane. "Now, my dear man! the whole point was
that the artist strives to make something which endures--"
"I know! You explained what he attempts to do: but you did not explain
why he should want to do it. You did not explain what he gets out
of it,--beyond suggesting, and then retracting the suggestion, that
he aspires to a sort of terrestrial immortality. No, Charteris, you
explained, in fine, nearly everything connected with books except why
an author writes them."
He deliberated this. He said: "Oh, but I must have made that plain. I
can most vividly remember elucidating every bit of the universe, and
that rather important detail could not well have been ignored."
"Ignored or not, you left it unexplained."
And promptly Charteris settled back in his chair, intent to remedy this
omission.
"The author, then, very much as I did, will under provocation become
magniloquent, and will say this, that and the other. But every author's
real reason for writing is that, if he did not write, he would be bored
to death. He writes because--"
Here I stopped him. "No, Charteris! You are too fond of juggling
phrases with no better end in view than to get pleasure from your own
dexterity. And I happen to be in earnest. Some twenty years and more,
you conceive, I have given over, together with health and eyesight, to
the writing of the Biography: and I am nowadays, however late in the
game, quite honestly and not unnaturally concerned to find out why."
"So, then! at last, you sympathize with your reviewers!"
"It was well enough, in the beginning," I went on, "to listen to your
Economist theories: and while you talked I could believe in them,
almost. Your verbal jugglery, I do not question, would still have that
effect. But the moment you have done talking, I can but come back
to the blunt truth, unwillingly: the artist cannot ever by making a
statue or a painting or a book--no matter how long the thing made
may last,--immortalize himself. He would come a great deal nearer to
perpetuating himself by begetting as many children as his natural
forces and the frailty of his friends permitted--"
"Ah, the lewd Jurgen touch!" said Charteris, regretfully.
"--And it can in no way concern the artist, either for good or ill,"
I continued, "that something which he happened to make, endures after
he has perished. No doubt, you could explain the contradiction in
your argument: you slightly married men have learned how to explain
everything. But, after all, this is an affair in which I want my own
notions, not yours."
§ 3
"Let me have just one other book to live and talk in," Charteris said,
"and I will explain the scope and aim of novel writing with such a
grace and loveliness as never was! My notions have a freer wing than
yours: and if you are obstinate about this, you will be encountering by
and by that statement in the public prints. 'The author has here vainly
endeavored to recapture the charm of his earlier _Beyond Life_,
and when he speaks in his own person is by no means so amusing.' That,
I forewarn you, will be the unanimous verdict."
"I do not altogether aim at being amusing. I want, rather, to wind up
affairs by contriving an epilogue for the Biography."
He regarded me for some while: and I do not know how to indicate his
kindly and rather commiserating pensiveness.
Presently he said: "But I forewarn you, too, that nobody is ever
going to recognise the Biography as an actual fact. You may pretend
to yourself, if you like, that all your writing is of this one human
life reincarnated over and over again, in the flesh of Manuel's various
descendants, and endlessly performing the same rôle in what is, at
bottom, always the same comedy. The nearest anyone will ever come to
agreement with you is to admit that you have wasted time and pains
in patching up a sort of genealogy; and that your books, in fact,
are--if you think it a merit,--rather monotonously the same, because
you are unable to draw any figure other than yourself in a more or less
transparent masquerade."
"The charge of monotony--in that word's primal sense, which you might
with profit look up in the dictionary,--I acknowledge, and even glory
in. For, as you say, it is perhaps the main point of the Biography that
it--and human life--present for all practical purposes the same comedy
over and over again with each new generation."
"Ecclesiastes, I believe, commented on the same phenomenon. Still, if
you want people to read more than one of your books--"
"Not my books," I amended, "but my one book, which is the Biography,
and of which my various publications are chapters."
Charteris shrugged. "My dear fellow! I, in common with the remainder of
mankind, refuse to admit the possibility of anybody's writing a book in
nineteen volumes. It simply is not done."
"But," he was told, with stubborn modesty, "but I have done it. Anyhow,
fifteen volumes--"
"Oh, no: you have merely written fifteen books. That is a quite
different affair, which anyone could manage, given pen and ink and
time and a sufficient lack of consideration for one's fellows. The
connection of these various books, I can assure you, is either forced
or imagined: otherwise, they would be an affront to the rest of us."
"Of course," I conceded, a bit mollified, "of course, if you are
putting the Biography upon a basis with Sir Thomas Browne's Relations
Whose Truth We Fear--"
"I am putting, to the contrary, the author of the Biography," said
Charteris, "into a phrase."
"And that phrase is--?"
Charteris grinned. "The author of _Jurgen_."
"I begin already," I commented, "to dislike that phrase--"
"Nevertheless, you need never look to find yourself regarded as
anything save the author of _Jurgen_ and, just incidentally, of
some other books. There, after all, my friend, the Tumble-bug has
scored: and nobody, for the rest of your lifetime, will you ever hear
speak of those other books except, more or less politely, to find
fault with their likeness or their unlikeness to _Jurgen_. Either
quality, as you perhaps have learned already, is equally to be deplored
and shrugged over."
"As the subscriber to a clipping bureau," I admitted, "I have noticed
the fact rather unavoidably. Any likeness to _Jurgen_ is the
tiresome reworking of an exhausted vein: but any difference from
_Jurgen_ proves my exhausted abilities."
Again beneath his moustache his teeth showed. "So you remain, you see,
the author of _Jurgen_."
"Scott," I replied, "wrote _The Antiquary_; and Thackeray wrote
_Henry Esmond_; and Dickens wrote _Our Mutual Friend_: yet
people even to-day continue to think of them as the authors, severally,
of _Ivanhoe_ and _Vanity Fair_ and _Pickwick Papers_. So
I suppose that nothing can be done about it."
Charteris regarded me for a lengthened while. "I see: you have become
stoically reconciled to having posterity go on thinking of you, for
century after century, as merely the author of _Jurgen_."
It may be that I flushed. "But, Charteris, I never said--"
And now his shoulders went up. "My dear man! as if you had to!"
§ 4
"Yet, in this epilogue at least," John Charteris went on, "you may, as
it happens by rare good luck, hope to avoid the ephemeral--"
"Not utterly," I dissented. "In literary fields there are always
so many May-flies about--But then, Charteris, I had thought to add
footnotes which would explain all such allusions--"
"As may be incomprehensible to your readers of a few hundred years
hence? I see. Such carefulness must be granted to display a kindly
heart, in an illuminating blaze of self-complacency. But I was in train
to suggest, my friend, that you might avoid the ephemeral by rather
different methods."
"As how?" I asked.
"By listening," replied Charteris, "to me, while I discourse of eternal
verities. This happens to be one of my loquacious afternoons--"
And here I raised my hand, in utterly unheeded protest.
"--For you inform me that you need for this debatable Biography,"
John Charteris continued, "an epilogue,--which of course ought to be
spoken by the same person who afforded the prologue. Well, I shall
overlook your crass misrepresentation of me in that prologue, which
you so ill-advisedly called _Beyond Life_. You will remember how
many 'spiritualists' turned to it with fervor, and away from it with
disgust? I, none the less, forgive: and off-hand, I would say--"
"No, Charteris! No, for I must myself contrive this epilogue--"
"But, dear man, I have it already complete, to the last paradox. It is
in my mind now, hastening to the tip of my tongue--"
"No, Charteris, I will not hear you!"
"--Art, just as Schiller long ago perceived, is an outcome of the
human impulse to play, and to avoid tedium by using up such vigor as
stays unemployed by the necessities of earning a living. The artist is
life's playboy. The artist, to avert the threats of boredom, rather
desperately makes sport with the universe--"
"It is a universe you are quitting--"
"--For, as you of course perceive, the literary artist plays: he does
nothing else, except with haste and grudgingly: and the sole end of his
endeavor is to divert himself--"
But I had shaped the Parting Sign of Ageus, which is interpreted
variously, but whose efficacy does not vary....
§ 5
I hated thus to despatch the little fellow, after we had played
together for all of twenty-two years. Besides, his going was not alone.
A great many others, I suspected, departed with him: and I fancied
that if, rising, I now looked out of the library window as far as the
Mill Road, I might see yonder,--passing now away from me, now that our
commerce was over, and travelling in motley companionship through the
gray spring weather,--all the various men and women whose lives I had
fashioned for me to play with in my books. Heaven only knew, if Heaven
imprudently concerned itself with such matters, how many hundreds of
them there must be....
And now they were all gone, I turned to the task of getting down upon
paper my notions as to the aims of my writing, and some explanation
as to what I had been about during the years which I had given over
to the compiling of the Biography of Dom Manuel's life. For the task
approached completion: or, rather, the game drew toward its end; and
that ending might well be the appropriate season for me to sit out,
irrevocably, while the others played on.
However! once the Biography was really done, and once the volumes as
yet accessible nowhere save in, as went my resources, that almost
prohibitively priced Intended Edition, when these had been issued
uniformly with the rest,--with the Kalki binding, and the usual number
of misprints,--then I might or might not want to write something else.
Or perhaps before that time came would come death. Time, either way,
would settle the upshot without my aid. Meanwhile I most certainly
wanted my epilogue, in the shape of a summing up which would explain,
if only to me, just why I had been at pains to write this exceedingly
long book,--which all other persons, whether obtusely or whether in
self-protection, insisted upon regarding as _Jurgen_ and several
other books.
§ 6
And somehow, now that, comfortably replete with luncheon, I approach my
epilogue, now it is in my mind to make verses rather than to discourse
in sober and reasonable prose. But I lack any matter, too, that plainly
prompts to versifying. So I somewhat vacantly consider the trees which
stand about my library window. At this season they have put off their
nakedness, but the green of their leaves has not yet come to its full
volume. The leaves are sallow and infrequent. They dapple a luminous
gray sky with much the effect of germs seen under a microscope. The
grass in the long field beyond is pale and sodden: for I regard all
this in a gray shining pause between the heavy spring rains. The world,
in preparing to be very beautiful, is for the while disheveled looking:
and it suggests to me, without any stepping stones of exact analogy,
a handsome woman defamatorily clad in a shabby green dressing-gown,
poised before her mirror, with her hair already partially loosened in
order that she may prepare for a festival.
It is a fine festival for which the world makes ready. It is a pageant
and a banqueting that will feed all the senses, and will last for
months, until the white winds of November come, like gaunt janitors, to
remove the furniture and decorations. Life everywhere will burgeon and
exult, and bear fruit, and wane peacefully.
I mean not only grasses and bushes and trees. There will be a great
barking of dogs, and cats also will make the warm night vocal. And
birds too will cry out in the night, as if amazed and wistful, and
that crying will be very piercingly sweet and, for no reason at all,
pathetic. There will be lambs, and foals, and calves, with amateurishly
constructed legs. And of course the young people--But I wonder about
those young people! There is upon them a bland hard innocence, like
the gloss of white china. It is slippery, and it ever so lightly
chills. Yet it does seem, essentially, innocence. I recall, with a
wealth of ancient instances, that my own generation, where it went
unchaperoned, was remarkably unhampered by innocence: and I wonder if
my own generation was like this in the presence of our elders? I do
not remember; I feel that nobody could hope to remember a thing so far
away: and it is in my mind to make verses.
For I remember many other matters that have to do with moonlight
and with the touch of young flesh and with a lost consciousness of
being fearless and eternal. Music too seems to be woven through the
background of my memories, not as a thing quite noticed, but as not
ever wholly absent. I remember, in fine, youth: and I know that the
glad magic of youth was always a promise of whose fulfillment one
lived, then, utterly assured: and I suspect that to be old means
merely coming to comprehend that this promise has not been, and never
will be, kept. Meanwhile I observe it is still the nature of young
persons to seek out quiet places in couples, and to evince no distaste
for twilight: and I surmise that even those inexplicable automobiles
which stand to the side of our country roads at evening and after
nightfall have at least two persons inside them. These phenomena
also are a portion of the premeditated festival, of that sublimely
irrational festival whose _ducdamê_ (as Jaques in the play, you
will remember, calls that invocation which draws fools into a circle)
is still the promise which all, by and by, perceive to stay eternally
unfulfilled.
Now it is in my mind to make verses about this festival, but I lack
any matter, here again, that plainly prompts to versifying. We
older persons must sit out, sit out forever from this especial form
of recreation, while others play on. We dare at most to attend as
chaperons, and with a smile to observe these junketings: for Time, that
stern old Roman, states outright (in of course his native tongue),
_Lusisti satis!_
I do not say that we have not equally important things to do, in
our traffic with affairs of the mind: I would not assert our utter
readiness, as yet, for the scrap-heap and the graven tributes of the
stone-mason. I merely note that we are but, at best, the chaperons at
this festival for which the April world is preparing. So we must look
on benevolently, and must preserve decorum, and also must not ever
concede what urge it is that prompts this festival.... Still, it is in
my mind to make verses....
§ 7
There is, though, I reflect, than this knack of sitting out at the
right moment, and without sulkiness, from avocations for which the
unfriendly years disqualify you, no finer, no more beneficent, and no
more difficult art. To some, indeed, mere sitting out does not appear
quite adequate: and there is much to be said for the contention that
the key to real success in living is to die soon enough. Yet this is an
un-American accomplishment: even our leaders rarely show the masterly
tact of Lincoln; and the result is that most depressing list which
begins with Benedict Arnold, continues with William Jennings Bryan and
Aaron Burr, and so passes calamitously through the alphabet to Woodrow
Wilson. There is no one of these transient inheritors of glory but has,
through a mere faux-pas in longevity, impaired his chance of retaining
eternal admiration and applause.
The writer, though, I think, is over-precipitate in dying at a day less
than eighty. By that time he, with steadily failing faculties, will
have published a deal of insufferable twaddle: but by that time, too,
his name may well have become familiar to a fair number of ponderable
and unliterary persons; and the excellence of his writing may be
everywhere conceded as the obvious polite alternative to reading it.
He has become in the cultural vista a known, not necessarily majestic,
feature: he has won, in fine, to that certain undeniable assured
position which no American artist anywhere can hope to secure except
by prolonged survival of his talents. Longevity, indeed, is with us
the one auctorial accomplishment which intelligent people can honestly
esteem: we tend to share a generous national pride in all gifted
persons who have painstakingly attained to our common level through
the discomforts of senile decay. Time thus induces us to cherish our
Longfellows and Bryants, and even to tolerate our Whitmans: it enables
our Joseph Jeffersons to earn a competence upon the stage as soon
as they have grown too feeble to act: and it has also persuaded us,
through just this self-same sympathetic desire to gladden the last
years of every striking case of mental indigence, to establish and
stock our American Academy of Arts and Letters.
So I must certainly endeavor to live as long as may prove possible.
Even if I may not hope ever to be anything more than--in the phrase not
utterly peculiar to John Charteris,--"the author of _Jurgen_,"
there may be compensations by and by. And in fact, I turn here to
thinking, with a pleasant warm thrill, about Mencken's prediction that,
if I live to be eighty, I too may be elected to the American Academy....
§ 8
None the less, now that I approach completion of the Biography, this
may well be the time to sit out from the most high and joyous game of
writing. The young are not merely at the door, they are in all the
advertising columns devoted to the season's literary masterpieces,
and behind most of the editorial desks. I, who was but four years
ago a dangerous revolutionary upstart, begin, even among editors and
publishers, to be treated with something of the gingerly respect with
which one handles antique glassware or a veteran of the War Between the
States. Among the really "vital" writers, still in strenuous practise
of their lack of art, "the old fellow who wrote _Jurgen_" is
relegated at best to the Middle or, as they playfully call it, the
Muddle generation in American Letters; and I am become a relic vaguely
associable with bicycles and hansom-cabs and cigar-store Indians and
cast-iron deer, and other coeval items of extinct Americana.
So it may well be time, once the Biography is quite complete, for me to
sit out from the game of writing, and to make sport with words no more.
And _Lusisti satis_ has a dreary sound, at the first hearing:
yet I do not know but that it is, in reality, the aptly worded praise
of attested wisdom. "You have played enough!" I shall take it to mean
that I have not stinted myself at playing, that I have got out of the
writing all the diversion which is allowable.
For I begin to see fine implications in John Charteris' parting
statement that the artist labors primarily, even solely, to divert
himself. Whatever Schiller may have said remains to me unknown: but
I find this theory, of art as play, in notoriously good standing
elsewhere, among many; and I find, too, by the light of experience, a
great deal in this notion that the artist--or, at least, the artist who
happens to be a novelist,--is life's half-frightened playboy....
I
A NOTE ON ALCOVES
"Such is the present state of the world: and the nature of the
animated beings which exist upon it, is hardly in any degree less
worthy of our contemplation than its other features. Yet our first
attention is justly due to Man, for whose sake all other things appear
to have been produced by Nature; though with so great and severe
penalties for the enjoyment of her bounteous gifts, that it is far
from easy to determine whether she has proved to him a kind parent or
a merciless step-mother."
_I._
_A Note on Alcoves_
§ 9
"The literary artist plays: and the sole end of his endeavor is to
divert himself...."
Seated now at my desk, I weighed the phrase. All valid artists in
letters might or might not with justice be describable as life's
half-frightened playboys. I, in any event, knew that, whatever other
motives might now and then have prompted me, the Biography had been
written in chief for my own diversion. Whenever people had unfavorably
criticised my writing--I now perceived,--my first emotion had been,
always, surprise at their imagining I had especially tried to give
pleasure to them. I had, instead, for nearly a quarter of a century,
been trying with the Biography to divert myself. That might or might
not be the correct principle upon which to write novels: it was most
certainly a principle to which I was committed in any justifying of
the form and scope of the Biography.
So I tapped out upon my typewriter, first of all, as a self-obvious
axiom, "The literary artist labors primarily to divert himself...."
§ 10
It is surprising, though, what protean gifts a theme develops once
you attempt to grapple with it. When I was just now moved to set down
on paper my personal notions as to the form and scope and aim of the
novel, as these notions are illustrated in the Biography, the affair
seemed simple. With the task actually begun, the typewriter-bell may
hardly tinkle thrice (for my machine is of a venerable model) before
one sees that the guide to further composition must be that once
celebrated chapter, in I forget whose Natural History, upon The Snakes
of Iceland. It read, as you recall, "There are no snakes in Iceland."
For one perceives that the form and scope of the novel, if not
similarly non-existent, at least stay indeterminable in lands wherein
the form and the scope of prose fiction stay limitless.
The aim, however, of the written, printed and formally labeled novel
is, I take it, to divert. Such is (one may assume with in any event
quite reputable backing) the only aim of creative writing, and of
all the arts. But much the same sort of diversion seems to be the
purpose of a staggering number of human endeavors: and it is when one
considers the novels which are not formally labeled, that the theme
evasively assumes all manner of shapes, and the field of prose fiction
is revealed as limitless.
I do not hunt paradox. I wish in real sincerity to acknowledge that our
trade of novel writing and publishing is an ineffably minor evincement
of the vast and pride-evoking truth, that human beings are wiser than
reason. Pure reason--I mean, as pure as human reason assays,--reveals
out of hand that the main course of daily living is part boredom,
part active discomfort and fret, and, for the not inconsiderable
rest, a blundering adherence to some standard derived from this or
that hearsay. But human beings, in this one abnegation infinitely
wise, here all discard the use of their reasoning powers, which are
perhaps felt here to be at least as gullible as usual: and brave men
cheerily deny their immersion in the futile muddle through which they
toil lip-deep.... Pinned to the wall, the more truthful of flesh
and blood may grant that this current afternoon does, by the merest
coincidence, prove answerable to some such morbid and over-colored
description by people bent on being "queer": but in the admitter's mind
forgetfulness is already about its charitable censorship of the events
of the morning, to the intent that this amended account be placed on
file with many expurgated editions of yesterday and the most brilliant
romances about to-morrow.... For human memory and human optimism are
adepts at the prevarications which everybody grasps, retails and
tirelessly reiterates: these two it is who coin the fictions which
every person weaves into the interminable extravaganza that he recites
to himself as an accurate summing-up of his own past and future: and
everywhere about this earth's revolving surface moves a circulating
library of unwritten novels bound in cloth and haberdashery.
The wholesome effect of these novels is patent. It is thanks to this
brace of indefatigable romancers, it is due to the lax grasp of memory
and to the perennation of optimism, that nobody really needs to notice
how the most of us, in unimportant fact, approach toward death through
gray and monotonous corridors. Besides, one finds a number of colorful
alcoves here and there, to be opened by intoxication or venery, by
surrender to the invigorating lunacy of herd action, or even by mental
concentration upon new dance-steps and the problems of chess and
auction bridge. One blunders, indeed, into a rather handsome number of
such alcoves which, when entered, temporarily shut out the rigidity
and the only exit of the inescapable corridor. Life thus becomes for
humankind a far different matter from what it would seem to any
merely reasonable creature, since life's monotonous main tenor is thus
diversified by an endless series of slight distracting interests and
of small but very often positive pleasures in the way of time-wasting
and misdemeanor. And in addition, as we go, all sorts of merry tales
are being interchanged, about what lies beyond the nearing door and the
undertaker's little black bag.
§ 11
These are not, though, the only anæsthetics. The human maker of fiction
furnishes yet other alcoves, whether with beautiful or shocking ideas,
with many fancy-clutching toys that may divert the traveller's mind
from dwelling on the prevalent tedium of his journey and the ambiguity
of its end. I have not yet, of course, come to consideration of the
formally labeled novel, for this much is true of every form of man-made
fiction, whether it be concocted by poets or statesmen, by bishops in
conclave or by advertisers in the back of magazines. And since memory
and optimism, as has been said, are the archetypal Homer and St. John,
the supreme and most altruistic of all deceivers, the omnipotent and
undying masters of omnipresent fictive creation, their "methods" are
in the main pursued by the great pair's epigoni; who likewise tend to
deal with the large deeds of superhuman persons seen through a glow of
amber lucency, not wholly unakin to that of maple syrup.
Of the romances which make for business prosperity and religious
revivals and wars to end war forever, here is no call to speak. Nor
need I here point out that well-nigh everyone who anywhere writes prose
to-day, whether it take form as a tax return or a magazine story or a
letter beginning "My dear So-and-so," is consciously composing fiction:
and in the spoken prose of schoolrooms and courts of law and social
converse, I think, no candid person will deny that expediency and
invention collaborate. It may be true that lies have short legs, but
civilization advances upon them.
§ 12
I, in any event, get daily bewilderment from considering how
deep-rooted seem all life's serious and practical endeavors in
implausible fictions. The most long-headed of us, for instance, may
reasonably confess to some faith in money and in mathematics: these
things at least are stable realities, these are the pillars, the very
Bohas and Jakin in the Temple of Common-Sense. And yet, here also, is
disclosed by two minutes' consideration another side.
Money I regard, I hope, with all appropriate gravity. I know that I
now and then accept without derisory outcry, even thankfully, small
metal disks disfigured with a remarkably unaquiline eagle and the
fat-jowled head of a female criminal very neatly guillotined. Nor am
I here deceived by appearances. These things suggest extremely rococo
poker-chips, they look like counters to be used in playing some sort of
game, for the sound reason that this is precisely what they are. And
we play. We all play quite gravely, at every hour in our lives, at the
game wherein these disks, which in themselves no mortal could regard
with æsthetic pleasure or employ for any imaginable practical purpose,
are supposed to be worth something. In time we get quite used to these
horary excursions of fancy: and indeed we so enter into the spirit of
the game as very often to "buy" things with a feeling that the clerk is
swindling us, rather than we him.
But, as an even more remarkable fiction, I consider the new five-dollar
bill which I chance this morning to possess. In itself, like the metal
disks, it is worth nothing: and its glazed surface chills the thought
of devoting it to the one use suggested by its general dimensions. It
bears, though, I find, an engraved assurance that to the bearer of this
paper the People's National Bank of Strasburg, Virginia, will pay five
dollars.
Since, as it happens, the president and the cashier of that
institution have not signed in the spaces reserved for them, the
assurance comes unsupported: for it nobody, so far as I can see,
assumes any least responsibility. Yet, in any event, if the unsponsored
statement be true, such is the sole value of this paper rectangle: its
only virtue is that in Strasburg, Virginia, you can exchange it for
five dollars.
I have no intention of going to Strasburg, Virginia: I shall instead
buy something with this note, under the romantic pretence that the
shopkeeper is going to exchange it, in Strasburg, Virginia, for
five dollars. And he will part with it to somebody else on the same
imaginative terms. And that make-believe will continue until this note
is worn out. Meanwhile this bit of paper will gravely be exchanged,
in varied surroundings, for every sort of commodity.... It will
be transmuted into dinners, it will tread the pavements of remote
outlandish cities in the form of a pair of shoes, and as pajamas it
will pass beyond the proper scope of my meditations. It will flower
into orchids, it will blaze as coal. Not without ostentation will it
fall into the collection plate, nor toward Christmas flutter into the
kettle of the Salvation Army: more furtively will it, thrice-folded,
slip into the top of the feminine stocking. Darkness will sometimes
engulf it like a pocket. Very deep will it descend, as fares the sewer
rat, into grim social underworlds; as most inferior whiskey it will be
swallowed up; and in the manner of the dead that are laid away, will
it go down into the steel catacombs beneath banking houses. Thence
presently it will arise. It will arise unchanged, a trifle deteriorate
in crispness perhaps, yet very potent to aid in lifting mortgages, in
raising children, and in elevating many households, I would like to
think, in the avatar of two of my books.... But never on any forenoon
in Strasburg, Virginia, will it be exchanged for five dollars: and the
one purpose for which this paper is so precisely designed is precisely
the one to which it will not ever be put.
What will in point of fact become of it, I learn after serious inquiry
into this mystery--in financial circles, wherein I was humored as a
harmless lunatic,--is that, when the note gets sufficiently dirty and
decrepit, "some bank will turn it in, at Washington," in exchange for
a fresh paper rectangle; and the senior note will then be destroyed by
Treasury employees. But nobody will ever convey to Strasburg, Virginia,
this representation of Benjamin Harrison looking like a dishonest
Santa Claus, and of the Pilgrims putting ashore at Plymouth Rock to
investigate the phenomena of a wind that blows two ways and of a tree
growing from the ocean. Nobody will ever deal logically with all this
intricate engraving: and if anybody ever did, he would, as the very
cream of this monetary fiction, be thought "queer." At worst, his
sanity would become a matter of medical investigation: at best, he
would be given for this paper rectangle another banknote, and the
romancing would now gild a different Carcassonne.
And similarly outrageous seem to any calm considering the fictions
of mathematics. This fact, indeed, was recently pointed out to me by
my small son, in whom his governess was endeavoring to implant the
conviction that two and two make four. But the child stayed sceptical.
He was reservedly polite about a rational "Suppose you had two apples,
and I gave you two more apples, how many apples would you have then?"
He conceded with readiness, not unflavored with resignation to the
obtuseness of grown-up persons, that in such circumstances he would
have four apples, but could not eat that many without being real sick.
Yet that two and two, in consequence, make four, he excluded as a
logical inference: and he depreciated that inference by stating it did
not mean anything. He was, of course, quite right.
For that "two and two make four" becomes, the very instant that you
play this familiar axiom the childish trick of thinking about it, at
best an unprovable hypothesis. That two apples and two more apples
compose four apples is, as my son admitted, plain enough. Or, you may
change your unit to a penny, a match, a pencil, or to a bungalow, and
still produce convincing evidence to prove your arithmetic. But the
mathematician requests us to consider an abstract "two," to believe
in two apples with the pomaceousness removed: his incorporal and
incorporeal "two" has never existed and never can exist. His "two" is
not merely a fiction, but an inconceivable fiction which the human mind
can no more, really, imagine than it can his "four." You need only for
one moment attempt to form some rational and clear-cut idea of this
"two" to perceive that the governess in fact was (with all respect to
her) talking about incredible fictions, just as my son affirmed.... And
when the mathematician goes on from "two" and "four" into the higher
branches of his romance weaving, and postulates as yet other realities
his "lines" that have length but no breadth or thickness, or his
"points" that have not even length, you face the choice between fleeing
from his self-evident lunacy and accepting his insane but very useful
fictions.
§ 13
So do we all exist as if in a warm grateful bath, submerged and soothed
by fiction. In contrast to the inhabitants of the Scilly Islands, who
are reputed to have lived by taking in one another's washing, so do
we live by interchanging tales that will not wash. There seems to be
no bound, no frontier trading-post appointed anywhere to this barter
of current fiction, not in the future nor in the years behind.... Men
have been, almost cynically, shown with what ease the romance which we
call history may be recast throughout, now that America rejoices in an
amended past which has all been painstakingly rewritten with more care
of the King's English, and wherein the War of the Revolution takes its
proper place as the latest addition to the list of German outrages.
State legislatures dispose of man's arboreal ancestry by passing a
law against it: and Congress, by bestowing upon non-intoxicating
beverages an illegal alcoholic content, at once repeats and repudiates
the miracle of Cana. Our newspapers continue the war-time economizing
of intelligence, and still serve patriotic substitutes in serials,
wherein Black and Yellow and Red perils keep colorful the outlook, and
fiends oppose broad-minded seraphim in every political difference. Our
clergy are no less prolific in their more futuristic school of art,
and on every Sabbath morning discourse engagingly of paradise and of
that millennium of which the arrival is at present being furthered by
the more "modern" of our prelates bringing fearlessly to bear upon the
mystery of the Incarnation the intellect of a midwife.... The past, the
present and the future are thus everywhere presented in the terms of
generally diverting prose fictions: and life is rendered passable by
our believing in those which are most to our especial liking.
§ 14
Man is, they say, the only animal that has reason; and so he must have
also, if he is to stay sane, diversions to prevent his using it. Man,
always nearing and always conscious of approaching death with its
unpredictable sequel, and yet bored beyond sufferance by the routine of
his daily living, must in this predicament have playthings to divert
him from bringing pitiless reason to bear upon his dilemma: and he must
have too the false values which he ascribes to these playthings.
The lines of Pope that I have quoted elsewhere dwell truthfully
enough upon life's endless playing,--upon the playing of the child
with straws and rattles, of the young man with his mistresses, of the
mature with wealth and worldly honors, and of the aged with rosaries
and prayer-books. But the solace, the true virtue, of these playthings
arises from the fiction that the player tells to himself about them. No
child plays with a straw: he brandishes a sword that has just chopped
off a dragon's head. The young man, exultant, terrified, touches and
uncovers, not an expanse of epidermis and small hairs and sweat glands,
but the body of a goddess. The banker is reveling in that romance
about Strasburg, Virginia: and the aged clasp not a prayer-book but the
key to eternal bliss. Everywhere, in fine, the creating romantic who
lives in every human being is either composing or else borrowing the
kind of romance which most potently diverts him, and prevents his going
mad.
§ 15
Well, it is the privilege of the novelist--I mean, at last, the
novelist who is frankly listed as such in Who's Who--to aid according
to his abilities in this old world-wide effort, so to delude mankind
that nobody from birth to death need ever really bother about his, upon
the whole, unpromising situation in the flesh. It is the privilege of
the novelist who happens also to be an artist, to blaze a trail upon
which his readers may follow, and be delighted by the by-products of
his hedonism. For it is his higher privilege to divert his own thoughts
from unprofitable and rational worrying; and to lead such as may choose
to follow him in one more desperate sortie from that ordered living and
from the selves of which all men are tired.
So I suspect there must always be, to the last digit, precisely as many
"methods" as there are novelists. For the endeavor of the novelist,
even by the lowest and most altruistic motives, is to tell untruths
that will be diverting: and of their divertingness he needs, and
in fact can have (prior to the receipt of royalty statements), no
touchstone save only the response which these untruths evoke from him.
His primary endeavor must therefore, upon merely rational and sordid
grounds, be to divert, not any possible reader, but himself.
By the novelist who is more tradesman than artist, and who is guided
by ideals rather than selfishness, this truth is not recognised:
and he often commits the deadly error of succumbing to praiseworthy
motives. He, as a rule, indeed, wrong-headedly begins by considering
his public's real virtues and aspirations; he endeavors to strengthen
these by finding for them vicarious exercise: and he thus allows
himself to be misled into evanescence through philanthropy. Now it is
the privilege of the public (which, to be sure, has an alternative)
to consider the artist: but the artist who for one half second during
his hours of play with ink and paper considers anybody except himself
is contriving a suicide without dignity. For the one really ponderable
sort of writer--the writer who communicates to us something of his
own delight and interest in his playing, and who thus in the end
contributes to our general human happiness,--has been influenced while
about this playing by none save selfish considerations. He has written
wholly to divert himself: he has for that moment been inclavated to
pleasure-seeking with somewhat the ruthlessness of a Nero and all the
tenacity of a débutante: and if I seem unduly to emphasise this obvious
fact, it is merely because the man afterward so often lies about it.
Some tale-tellers find themselves most readily bedrugged by yearning
toward loveliness unknown and unobtainable: these are, we say, our
romanticists. To them are, technically, opposed such Pollyannas among
fiction writers as Mr. Theodore Dreiser and Mr. Sinclair Lewis, who can
derive a species of obscure æsthetic comfort from considering persons
even less pleasantly situated than themselves,--somewhat as a cabin
passenger on a sinking ship might consider the poor devils in the
steerage,--and so turn rhyparographer, and write "realism." The process
is not unnatural, and has been more or less profitable since at least
the time of Piræicus.
But, either way, the inspiring principle remains unchanged: you think
of that which is above or below you in order to avoid thinking of what
is about you. So it really does not greatly matter whether you travel
with Marco Polo to Cathay or with the Kennicotts to Gopher Prairie.
The excursion may be for the purpose of looking at beautiful things
wistfully or at ugly things contemptuously: the point is that it is an
excursion from the place where you regard over-familiar things with a
yawn.
When one considers these truisms,--and fails to see why they need be
disputed by anybody not actually engaged in the physical labor of
teaching or of contributing to the more successful periodicals,--then
the form and scope of even the formally labeled novel seems, plainly,
fluctuating and indeterminable. The novelist, it is apparent, will
write in the form--with such dramatic, epic or lyric leanings as his
taste dictates,--which he personally finds alluring: his rhythms will
be such as caress his personal pair of ears: and the scope of his
writing will be settled by what he personally does or does not find
interesting. For the serious prose craftsman will write primarily to
divert himself,--with a part thrifty but in the main a philanthropic
underthought of handing on, at a fair price, the playthings and the
games which he contrives, for the diversion of those with a like taste
in anodynes. And to do this will content him. For he will believe that
he may win to fame by brewing oblivion, he will hope to invent, if he
prove thrice lucky, some quite new form of "let's pretend." But he
will not believe that anybody with a valid claim to be considered a
post-graduate child can gravely talk about affixing limits to the form
and scope of that especial pastime.
§ 16
And so his "creed," to my experience, stays troublingly nebulous.
At most he will admit but general tenets to himself, conceding very
secretly:
Imprimis, I play, when all is said, with common-sense and piety, as my
fellows appraise these matters, and with death also. I have embarked in
a gaming in which to win is not possible: and every sensible person of
course thinks this extremely foolish. Yet I know that, for my purpose,
the opinions of all other persons are negligible. My own opinions, if
indeed I have the patience and the temerity to unearth them, are, as
I know also, erroneous; they are unstable: but they remain, none the
less, the only reliable guides to my intended goal, diversion.... And
my rational standards can be adhered to, I consider, with more safety
if they are kept concealed.
Item, I must find out what are, in reality, my real beliefs: and I must
set these forth to the best possible advantage; and I must be zealous,
above all, not ever to regard my beliefs quite seriously. Human ideas
are of positive worth in that they make fine playthings for the less
obtuse of mankind. That seems to be the ultimate lean value of all
human ideas, even of my ideas. I must carefully conceal my knowledge of
this humiliating fact.
Item, I must cherish my ideas as I do my children, with a great love
commingled with admitted inability to foresee what they may be like
to-morrow. For my ideas and my impressions, in the moment that these
visit and pass away from the consciousness which is I, from the
fragment of consciousness which insecurely lurks inside this skull,
are the only realities known to me in the brief while wherein I am, as
yet, permitted to play with common-sense and piety and death. I will to
enjoy and play with and, it may be, to perpetuate after my flickering
from this skull, these true realities: if I succeed in perpetuating
them, that is well; if I fail, I shall not at all worry about this
failure once I am dead, and I am fairly certain to be dead by and by.
At worst, the ability and the body and the life which transiently were
at my disposal will have been really used, both to make something and
to divert me.... And at best, it would be foolhardy not to keep such
intentions concealed.
Item, with human life as a whole I have no grave concern, and I am
beguiled by no notion of "depicting" it. My concern is solely with
myself. I have no theory of what we call "life's" cause or object;
nor can I detect in material existence any general trend. The stars
and the continents, the mountains and these flustering hordes of men,
every mole-hill and the diligent dancing of gnat swarms,--all appears
to blend in a vagrant and very prettily tinted and generally amusing
stream by which I too am swept onward. If but for my dignity's sake, I
prefer to conceal my knowledge of this fact.
Item, there is upon me a resistless hunger to escape from use and wont:
I seem more utterly resolved than are my fellows, not to be bored: and
it is in my endeavor to evade the tediousness of familiar things that I
am playing--playing, as I know, quite futilely,--with common-sense and
piety and death. Such levity tends, it well may be, to no applaudable
outcome: meanwhile this playing diverts me.... And meanwhile, my
fellows being what they are, my amusement is a matter very profitably
concealed.
Item, I really must, in the teeth of all solicitation, refuse to
plagiarize anything from what people call "nature" and "real life." My
playing, which I term my "art," has no concern with things which, in
any case, are too ill-managed to merit imitation. For, still adhering
to that simile of the prettily tinted stream, I am persuaded my art
need not pretend to be a treatise upon hydrodynamics: my art is well
content to be the autobiography of an unvalued straw adrift in this
sparkling and babbling stream that hastens toward an unguessable ocean.
Let us avoid guesswork, since it is profitless. Let us avoid, too, no
reasonable pains to conceal this fact.
Item, let us avoid, also, the narcotizing perils of reverence,--even
for our juniors, who are in all æsthetic matters invariably in the
right,--or of being quite as serious about ourselves and our doings
in collusion with printers and publishers as if mankind and the books
of men were of grave and demonstrable importance. And let us, above
all, avoid disastrous candors, and say boldly none of these things.
Let us who "write" protest that we have no concealments, that we
expose ourselves entire, and that our unselfish aim is to benefit
and entertain other persons, the while that we play ceaselessly with
common-sense and piety and death.
II
THE WAY OF WIZARDRY
"Such star-gazings show you indeed a bluer heaven and bigger stars
and a sun rising out of the night: yet neither Athos will reveal to
those who climb up to it, nor Olympos, so much extolled by the poets,
in what way God cares for the human race, nor make plain the nature
of virtue and of justice and temperance, unless the soul scans these
matters narrowly; and the soul, if it engages on the task, pure and
undefiled, will soar much higher than this summit of Caucasus."
_2._
_The Way of Wizardry_
§ 17
The literary artist plays, I had said, with common-sense.... But here I
harked back, compunctious. For only a moment since I had admitted that
"travel with Marco Polo to Cathay" was, after all, not the sole end of
our art: such romanticizing was merely one of the two avenues which,
equally, afforded escape from the tediousness of familiar material
surroundings. Yet it was the only avenue I was in train to recommend.
And so I paused here to reflect that in the Biography I had always
ignored the very real and solid claims of "realism."
Well, of that other method of escape, just indicated by my
concession of the possibilities of "travel with the Kennicotts to
Gopher Prairie"--of the type of diversion which is furnished by
the "realist,"--I could but admit the existence and the potency,
restricted, to be sure, to an unenvied class of minds; and must so
pass on, with no too obvious shuddering. "Realism" simply did not
divert me, that was all: and thus in my mind ranked with dancing and
The Literary Digest[1] and golf, as aberrancies of dullness that I
could profitably avoid without reprehending.... Indeed, it had been
my droll luck to have some pre-compository insight into the shaping
of, if not the most notable, certainly the wideliest talked about,
of this century's "realistic" novels; so that I still cherish a
peculiar leniency for these Kennicotts whom I first met in manuscript;
and I read their family history with a double sense of guilt. Here
is the marriage I suggested between the school-teacher and Ramie
Wutherspoon: and I recall, with qualms describable as second cousins
to remorse, that in a "realistic" novel no marriage can ever turn
out really happily. Here, murdered by me, I am afraid, in the middle
of another man's book, is the unoffending Scandinavian girl, Bea
Sorgenson, who, but for my lethal intervention, might perhaps have
thrived and have utilized the resources, and have educed the covert
virtues and nobilities of Gopher Prairie, overlooked by the less
practical heroine in chief; for this was to have been coincidently
the story of Bea's success and of Carol's failure as an exponent of
general social uplift: and would so have converted the whole affair
into a feminized and unreadable down-to-date version of the Idle and
Industrious Apprentices. I might, I reflect with a troubled spirit, I
might perhaps have here struck "realism" a shrewd blow by heartening
Lewis in his first suicidal plan.... To the other side, here is Carol's
technical virtue preserved unmarred, in the teeth of my lewd urgings:
for I was resolute to have her fall from grace, duly escorted by Eric
Valborg, and then to find that nothing whatever came of it. And here
is not one of the suggested remedies for the Middle West's regrettable
provincialism, of which, but for my protestations and scoffings upon
bended knees, the reader might have had full benefit. I recall rather
vaguely the nature, but vividly the great number, of these possible
remedies which Lewis, once, planned to suggest: and I guiltily
speculate if it would not have been the part of true kindliness, as
well as of æsthetic morality, to have encouraged the launching of that
avalanche of constructive criticism upon the unsuspecting reader of
_Main Street_. He, paralyzed, engulfed, demolished, would probably
not ever again, my conscience whispers, have opened another "realistic"
novel.... At all events, I too had been in this matter of "realism" at
least once, tinily, a _particeps criminis_. I confessed it, and
resumed my epilogue.
For all this seemed remarkably remote from my introductory remark
about Marco Polo. I had in mind, then, not _The Travels of Marco
Polo the Venetian_, but the small novel called _Messer Marco
Polo_ which Donn Byrne published now some years ago. And it is of
this fiction that I wish here to speak more specifically, because of my
personal involvement in its fortunes.
§ 18
Not often does one sustain the sense of having long awaited the book
which time and chance and a kindred desire in another's being have
combined to produce at last, and to make at last a vended commodity, as
easy now to come by as blotting-paper or bad whiskey. I had this sense
about _Messer Marco Polo_. It was, to me, the most delightful of
surprises, a bit of unanticipatable flotsam washed up from the wide
sunless sea of "realism." For we were, at just that time, being edified
rather remorselessly. Sinclair Lewis had, via the book to which I
have but now referred, detected several flaws in the cultural life of
the Middle West; John Dos Passos had discovered that the Wilson War
had been conducted not altogether as a pleasure trip for the private
soldier; and Upton Sinclair was in his customary low spirits. Nobody, I
think, could have looked for the coming of a _Messer Marco Polo_
through the auctorial welter,--whose susurrus was after all but a more
literate, vast "Ain't it awful, Mabel?"--among those fretful waves of
indignation over the dreariness of small-town life and the loneliness
of the artist in this unappreciative country, and over how terribly our
army swore in Flanders, and over the venality of our press and pulpit
and every other institution, and (lone lisper of good yet to come) over
the imminence of several more stupendous wars that would wipe out us
and all our sordid existence. And yet, through these gray floods of
portentous information (here neatly to round off my simile) floated
this carved spar of loveliness, with absolutely startling irrelevance.
That _Messer Marco Polo_ should have "happened" at this precise
moment seemed a small miracle so pleasure-giving that I hastily waived
all consideration as to the book's ultimate value. I only knew I had
joyed in the reading of it, somewhat as the partially starved might
rejoice in an unexpected windfall of savory food, without any need to
deliberate the viands' durability.
None the less does the tale, some years after that first keen greedy
gulping of its delights, and after a more leisured third reading,
remain a very fine and beautiful strange book. I sincerely hope you
are familiar with it: even if you are not, here is no need for me
to summarize this tale of how young Marco Polo, loitering through
youth's amiable adulteries in thirteenth century Venice, became
enamored, through report, of the Khan of Tartary's daughter, and of his
adventuring as he crossed Asia to win to her. It suffices to report
that here, in brief, we have a variant of the old high tale of Geoffrey
Rudel and his Far Princess, adorned with very vivid, curious ornament,
and brought to a dénouement no less sad but more soul-contenting.
Yet the essential thing about this book, I thought at my first reading,
was its prodigality in the transforming magic which--heaven knows, in
how few books!--quite incommunicably lends romantic beauty to this
or that not necessarily unusual or fertile theme, somewhat as sunset
tinges the wooded and the barren mountain with equal glamour. To me
this book at once exposed Donn Byrne as a practitioner of that rare and
unteachable wizardry without which one writes only words, and without
which the most carefully made sentences tend but to bury one another
like neat undertakers.
Technically, though, the construction of _Messer Marco Polo_ must
remain always to any novelist peculiarly interesting. To Mr. Byrne,
in Westchester, N.Y., "at the second check of the hunt, came the
message that a countryman and a clansman needed me," in the person of
Malachi Campbell of the Long Glen: and it is the old Celt who tells of
what, in a far-off golden yesterday, Marco Polo the Venetian saw and
encountered in Cataia. So then does Mr. Byrne set about his magicking,
to lure you from the prosaic to the wonderful, at last to leave you
contentedly cuddled in the lap of the incredible. He raises for you, to
begin, the milieu of his Westchester,--"the late winter grass, sparse,
scrofulous, the jerry-built bungalows, the lines of uncomely linen, the
blatant advertising boards." It is in, seen through, and continuously
colored by, this almost Gopher Prairean atmosphere that Malachi evokes
the old time and the great plenty of Ireland in the days of her
championship, and the gleaming world of tall Dermot and Granye of the
Bright Breasts and amorous fierce Maeve and Cuchulain in whose heroic
looks were love and fire; and evokes too, seen as if beyond and colored
by the glow of this Celtic wonderland, not merely the opulent sleek
life of the heyday and prime of Venice, "that for riches and treasures
was the wonder of the world"; since past even that, illuminate and
tinged by all, is evoked also the Venetian's notion of the inscrutable,
good-tempered, shining, evil East.
The tale, thus, seems a fantastic and gracious pageant, saddened
somehow by the known evanescence of its beauty, regarded through
three opalescent veils: or, rather, all that happens--just as we upon
reflection prefer to have had it happen,--in the Chinese jasmine
garden by the Lake of Cranes, is viewed through a rose-tinted gauze
of mediæval fancies seen through thin aureate Celtic mists observed
through the unhued but glazing window-panes of a Westchester, N.Y.,
drawing-room. I am by no means sure this curious tour de force was
worth performing; but I am unshakably convinced that Mr. Byrne "brings
it off" to a nicety.
Well, such was the romance which appeared some years ago without much
heralding, and which, when I first read it, had existed as a book for a
month or two without attracting any particular attention. And, reading,
I wondered. For this tale, in itself delightful--for a reason to which
I shall recur,--seemed to me to be told in words so "warm and colored,"
and so adroitly marshalled as to drive any honest-minded reader to the
confessional. I confessed, then, to being uncritically seduced by the
fact that Mr. Byrne, without apparent effort or shame, wrote perfectly
of beautiful happenings and seemed no whit afraid of elaborated
diction. I confessed to thinking that many of the episodes, perhaps
most notably the efforts of Marco Polo to convert to Christianity the
pagan girl who while he talks is merely conscious of the fact that she
loves the talker, have a queer and heart-wringing loveliness that is
well-nigh intolerable. And I confessed to finding the brief chapter
which bridges seventeen years, and winds up the story to "the true
rhythm of life," a small masterpiece of art and wisdom.
Above all, I now confess this is the only contemporary book that ever
I actually sought the privilege of reviewing. And when this task was
entrusted to me, by The Nation, I indited every word of _Messer Marco
Polo's_ encomium with a teasing faint suspicion that I was almost
certainly writing high-pitched nonsense which I would some day re-read
with embarrassment.
At all events, while the first rapture lasts, said I, let me profess
that I most cordially admire this story, and seem to find no praise too
exquisite. You, I advised potential readers, may derive from it a more
temperate pleasure, you may not even enjoy what my more sophisticated
juniors, I confess, are deprecating as "this pseudo-Celtic stuff":
and, in fact, the tale can hardly appeal to any considerable audience,
just now, since it "exposes" and "arraigns" nothing whatever. With
that I had no concern. It was merely my affair to tell everybody who
would listen that, to my finding, _Messer Marco Polo_ was a very
magically beautiful book.
§ 19
So I said all this in a review which I have here more or less exactly
iterated. I count myself to-day fortunate that this review achieved
a brief bewildering sort of fame. Virtuosi thought well of it, it was
quoted with approval by the literary editors of the leading papers
of Des Moines and Walla Walla and Mobile. It seemed, indeed, to be
reprinted illimitably in papers everywhere throughout the country, so
that The Nation's honorarium but visited me in transit to the bank
account of my clipping bureau. And the publishers reproduced this
review at full length in their advertisements, and reproduced it,
again virtually at full length, upon the novel's dust jacket.... I
could open no periodical wherein reading-matter was advertised without
encountering the proclamation, "James Branch Cabell says _Messer
Marco Polo_ is a very magically beautiful book." At first the phrase
read like a ukase, it had the full and final ring of an imperial
decree: later, with so constant repetition, it began to take on somehow
the flavor of a taunt, and I would read on a bit further, in the next
advertisement, hurriedly.... And people wrote to me about my pæans,
some to thank me for, as they put it, "discovering" the novel for them,
and some of course to rebuke me as the member of a petty clique of
assassins, atheists and tomb-defilers who combined thus shamelessly
to puff one another's books. And in fine there was rarely seen so
much bombilation over any one brief and not especially remarkable
criticism, whose only striking characteristics were the dubious ones
of enthusiasm and sincerity.
But this to-do had the merit of drawing people's attention to _Messer
Marco Polo_ and of provoking people to read this small novel. And
many thousands joyed in the reading of it, very much as I had done.
For here again was the true formula and the hero with whom mankind
peculiarly delights in imagination to identify itself,--the hero
who wanders footloose and at adventure through lands which are to
him and to the reader in nothing familiar. It is the formula of the
_Odyssey_, the formula of picaresque romance, and of all fairy
stories properly equipped with quests and an indomitable third prince.
It is of course precisely the one formula which cannot ever lose its
charm so long as men retain that frame of mind which seems coeval
with recorded history, of being bored by the routine of their daily
living.... And people also found in _Messer Marco Polo_ just the
quality I had ascribed to this book, the quality which I have vaguely
indicated as wizardry.
§ 20
Wizardry is, we know, one of the very oldest of human avocations....
Yet I recall how my friend Richard Harrowby, of Montevideo, once told
me that, to his mind, the most strange feature of wizardry was the
adroit consistency with which truth here has always been distorted or
concealed. For it stays an indisputable fact, as Harrowby pointed out,
that many persons still believe wizardry, in common with its sister
branch of witchcraft, to have been a delusion; and that the majority
of those who are wiser remain at considerable pains not actively to
dispute this quite common belief. The art of censorship had, in fact,
here achieved its oldest and capital triumph.
"Well, you," I admitted, "know more about such matters than I even
pretend to. So far as I can judge, your friends the wizards have
just emulated the family doctor and all business men, in their usual
endeavors, to prolong life and to change less rare materials into
gold. Their sagas, from the history of Geber to that of Cagliostro,
present--in so far, anyhow, as the tale is formally told,--mighty dull
and sordid reading: and each of these ancient fakirs would seem to have
got little enough out of the powers and privileges of the mage who, in
that jolly old sonorous phrase, holds in his left hand the branch of
the blossoming almond, and in his right hand the clavicles of Solomon."
To which Harrowby replied quite gravely: "Cabell, you tempt me. You
really should distinguish between wizards and sorcerers-- But, no!
I shall not voice any indiscretions. The day is not yet come, I
too concede, for wise persons to speak candidly about magic, though
already, I believe, the day dawns."
His faith in that day is perennial, and at times rather pathetic....
"For one thing, though," I urged him on, "I am ready to argue that,
just on material grounds, much of the fabulous wonder-working which our
long-headed fathers used to dismiss with a shrug, to-day is taking on a
different aspect; and that it becomes increasingly difficult to reject
as a popular delusion performances which our own senses note to the
right and left of us every day."
"And what," asked Harrowby, "imply these rolling periods?"
"Well, I mean that, when I was younger, no intelligent person for one
instant saw more than nonsense in the legend that Simon Magus had
ridden visibly through the air in a winged car or that Apollonius of
Tyana could be acquainted with remote events within a minute or two
after they happened. Such old wives' tales were outgrown superstitions,
and that was all there was to it. But to-day--"
"In this enlightened age," he suggested, with a small smile.
"--To-day, with the manufacture of aeroplanes ranking as a standardized
business, and with radios in every third home, these miracles, as
you see for yourself, do not sound a bit remarkable. To-day, with one
precaution, nobody need question that Pietro d'Apone actually did hold
imprisoned, each in his separate metal vase, seven spirits to instruct
him audibly in astronomy, alchemy and philosophy, in painting, physic,
poetry and music. The needful precaution is, of course, merely to call
these vases phonographs."
"I see, I see," said Harrowby, quietly. He was still smiling, for some
reason or another. "They were crystal vases, by the way. And they were
not phonographs."
"Anyhow," I answered, in the dismissory large manner of Mrs. Nickleby,
"the principle is the same. And beyond just such material suggestions
I, for one, would not venture--"
"I think," Harrowby stated, "that you will very soon hear others going
farther. Men begin to perceive, in a great many other ways, that for
some two thousand years has existed covertly a vast fund of knowledge
and philosophy and religious teaching, not necessarily at odds with the
more popular tenets of Christendom, but not sharing anything with these
tenets nor at all reverencing them."
To me this sounded interestingly insane. So I began, "But, why--?"
"It is, obviously, a fund which its inheritors have been compelled
to keep occult, through Christendom's set habit of arraigning and
murdering out of hand all caught adherents to such irritating
standards, as sorcerers."
"Indeed?" said I, with a pleasant consciousness of now having him
nicely started.
"Men are beginning," Harrowby continued, "to discover piecemeal by
'scientific' methods something of that knowledge which sorcerers, as
ignoramuses call them, have since time's youth attained through rather
different avenues. And more and more widely is the fact becoming
recognized that sorcery and witchcraft and magic were as far from
being popular delusions as they were remote from being implicated with
Christian mythology, to the imputed extent of siding with the devil
against Heaven."
"You don't tell me!" I observed.
But he did. He went on to tell me, in fact, a great deal more. For
here, he told me, is a religion really old: and to its adherents that
faith which came out of Nazareth seems still, they say, an upstart
affair which may yet prove ephemeral. So the devotees of that elder
faith have not ever really concerned themselves with Christianity,
not even those of them who have, for one reason or another, become
bishops and cardinals and popes. There had been, in the outcome of
this indifference, Dick Harrowby considered, something of irony: and
it was droll enough to reflect that the supreme head of the Christian
church--as when Gerbert of Aurillac, Hildebrand, Felice Peretti,
Benedict Cajetan or Jacques d'Euse was pope,--had so often been the
devout practitioner of an unspeakably more ancient religion.
So Harrowby talked on, with that rapt gravity which the old fellow
reserves for discussion of "the occult": and I listened, in part almost
believing him, who knew so much more about such matters than did I,
and in part reflecting that sanity and insanity are, at best, elastic
terms....
§ 21
But now I listened more attentively: for Harrowby had gone on to
suggest that theories now endemic among the miscellaneous gentry whom
we inclose in the term "scientists"--these "new" theories as to a
fourth dimension,--begin to-day to enable us to see much more than
nonsense in that reiterated ageless whispering as to men who had sought
and through the aid of magic had found their diversion in lands not
formally set down on any map.
"You mean--?" I prompted him.
Well, it developed, he meant that certain travellers, this whispering
has always reported, had been to very queer places. And returning,
they had told discreetly of realms wherein living was much more
satisfactorily conducted than in our workaday existence.
"Yes, but," I commented, "even so--" I spoke just as a conversational
spur, just as a dubious provocative: and Harrowby went on.
One traveller had been down into a twilit country where the people
were small and flaxen-haired, and ate neither fish nor flesh of any
kind. These people, he reported, wore brown caps to which were fastened
little silver bells. Their country knew no sunlight, but was radiant
with the shining of what, to the eye, seemed diamonds and carbuncles:
and nothing noxious nor hurtful was to be found anywhere in this covert
lovely land.
"Still--!" I observed.
Another spoke of a hollow mountain, wherein you entered to unending
delights. And he spoke, spoke as if he were troubled, of the queen of
this place. Yes, she was different from other women. And he talked
too of the great Emperor Karl, and of giants and dwarfs, and of the
Wildefrauen, who were more beautiful than the wives and daughters of
men.
"Nevertheless--" I stated. But Harrowby was in full cry.
So he went on to tell me how yet another spoke of a palace which was
builded, so far as human sense might judge, of pink seashells and of
crystal. A woman was to be encountered there also, very lovely in a
robe of green: her eyes were intent and changeless: her black hair was
interwoven with red coral. To her postulants she served, in a hall hung
with pearls, eight kinds of wine in as many goblets of chased silver:
and then with a gold frying-pan she prepared the velladen of fish,
which was the marriage feast.
A fourth told of a quite different palace that was designed by the
apostle Thomas; and was builded of Sethym wood and sardius and
imperishable ebony and ivory and onyx; and was enwrought with the horns
of reptiles. Before this palace stood a mirror to which you ascended
upon a stairway of porphyry and serpentine: armed warriors guarded it
night and day, for in this mirror you beheld all that was taking place
in every province and region subject to the master of this palace: and
within this palace you lived among all manner of pleasures and delights.
And yet another spoke of an untroubled and great-hearted people ruled
by one that had not the appearance of a human being. Some said the
real name of this ruler was Aradia: others boasted of large reason to
believe the lord of the hidden city of Mommur in everything male. This
monarch retained among mankind many secret worshippers, marked with
the sign of their service: these worshippers had privileges: and in the
eye of each one of them, when you looked closely, you would find the
small likeness of a horse.
Then also men had been to Blath Annis, and to the Strembölglings, and
to a secret country among mountains wherein the lost tribes of Israel
awaited the coming of Anti-Christ, when a fox would liberate them; and
to the pleasant uplands of Ladaria, about which rolled perpetually,
with terrible reverberations, a river not of water but of great stones;
and to bright Audela, to which the very brave might enter through a
gateway of fire, and no man could enter except in that way. Whereas
yet other travellers had journeyed beyond Mistorak and the dreadful
trumpets and thunder-blasts of the Vale of the Devil's Head, and had so
won to the happy Isle of Bragman--
"But they came back," I suggested, at this point.
Yes, all had perforce returned to man's colorless workaday life, to the
tediousness of over-familiar things, and to the ever-nearing shadow of
death. Yet here and there, and now and then, some men had managed to
enter into quite other ways of living. Men had in journeying toward
death contrived--sometimes by chance, more frequently by the aid of
magic,--for a while to elude the laws of ordinary human life, and for a
while to divert themselves--
"In alcoves," I suggested.
"Yes, if you like," said Harrowby,--"in alcoves in which the laws of
human polity and of material nature, as we know them, had not any
jurisdiction. The point is that these tales were obviously not invented
by liars with the intention of deceiving their hearers. For these
tales, encountered in every part of the world, have never made the
tiniest concession to plausibility: instead of wooing, they summons
faith with the abruptness of a sheriff; and have assumed from the
first that all our best-thought-of theories about the universe are
comparable, let us say, to the knowledge which a fly in a dining-car
possesses as to the management of railways."
"I see," I stated, comfortably. "Men, it was whispered, had, for
however brief a while, escaped from the obligations and restraints and,
above all, from the tediousness of workaday life,--that tediousness
which people have always tried to vary and color, under every sort
of human civilization, with so many forms of fiction. I see.... Yes,
Harrowby, I see: and your insanity is really a great help to me."
"But," he began, "you have the ladder of seven metals, and you know
perfectly well the secret of the mirror and the pigeons--"
"That," I protested, "isn't the point!..."
For I was in fact not at all concerned with the exact amount of truth
upon which these legends were based. The point, with me, was that men
had since time's beginning wanted such tales to be true; and that
these stories illustrated man's immemorial and universal desire to
escape from the self-imposed routine of his daily life. Man had always
believed that he could do this by the aid of wizardry: and in this
belief, as I now saw, he had been always and perfectly right.
§ 22
For everywhere, of course,--to-day, just as in Homer's nonage,--this
need is contented by the literary artist. The literary artist--he,
in any event,--does actually fulfil this universal desire, by his
own especial wizardry. He temporarily endows his followers with the
illusion of possessing what all alchemists have sought,--unfading
youth, wealth and eternal life. He engineers the escape for which men
have always longed, and which they have always known to be attainable,
as here, by magic. And his is the charitable miracle-working which
enables you to figure enviably in unfamiliar surroundings. Through his
kind thaumaturgy you, as Odysseus, deal intrepidly with cyclopes and
ascend the ivory beds of goddesses; as Job you get, from any ethical
standpoint, decidedly the better of the Lord God of Hosts and reduce
Him to rhetorical bullying; as the third prince you overpass all
perils to win to the desired trinket; and as Christian you with a
deadly thrust superbly discomfit lion-mouthed, bat-winged Apollyon. It
is in this fashion that the artist makes sport with the first of his
three adversaries, and derides common-sense.
For common-sense tempts men to be contented with their lot, to get the
most from what is theirs, and not to hanker nonsensically after the
unattainable. At the elbow of each of us lurks always this enchantress,
with luring rhapsodies, more treacherous than ever any siren lilted, in
praise of the firm worth of money and conformity. "Let us be rational,"
she whispers; "and let us remember that, whatever we might prefer, in
this world two and two make four." And with many gaudy enticements
does she prompt the unwary to yield homage to her insensate paramour,
the doltish and vain idol of mathematics.... Thus tirelessly, thus
unabashedly, does common-sense urge every man to obtain in this world,
such as it is, the permitted uttermost from that life which stays
peculiarly his own: and to the wheedling solicitings of common-sense
the literary artist can answer but one word. That word is "Bosh!" And
having uttered it, the artist proceeds to divert himself by living
dozens upon dozens of lives which in nothing resemble the starveling
and inadequate existence allotted him by the mere accident of birth.
§ 23
Yes: the creative romanticist alone can engineer a satisfying evasion
of that daily workaday life which is to every man abhorrent. I am
convinced, upon several grounds, that the motive of the literary artist
is wholly unaltruistic: he blazes for his own pleasuring the trail
upon which any number of readers may, so far as he cares, follow or
not follow, just as they elect, and be hanged to them! Whenever he
journeys into some such improbable country as, let us say, Poictesme,
it is, I know, for his own recreation. But I choose here, entirely from
the viewpoint of a reader of books, to consider with less scrutiny his
selfishness than my firm grounds for gratitude.
For, thanks to these haphazard sorcerers, my life has been a marvellous
affair. I look back, for example, upon the last month, which, as my
high-flown and roystering way of living averages, has been uneventful
enough. Yet in that time, I have quested through Thessaly, disguised
by the old magic of Apuleius as Mr. Gilbert Seldes, in pursuit of
all the lively arts, and, somewhat more necessitously, of a wreath
of roses; and have, with an intrepidity which I perforce admired,
sailed for the moon, to take part in the wars between Endymion and
Phaëthon.... Descending, I have passed that night with a fair and
charming woman--in a bed very white and wide, with two coverlets
of scarlet silk cloth,--and all our queer intercourse has been
conducted, amid many other incomprehensible happenings, chastely.
In the morning we two went out into sunlit fields; and so came to a
spring of clear water enclosed by a stone basin, upon which someone
had left forgotten a comb of gilded ivory. Entangled in this comb,
as I (whom men called Lancelot) saw with glad wondering, and with
the heroic passion for which I had long suspected myself to have the
talent, was near a handful of the hair of Guenevere. And I remember
how I thought that gold a hundred thousand times refined would seem
darker than midnight compared with the brightest day of that year's
summer, if anyone were to set such gold beside this hair.... Soon
passing thence,--and travelling now under the alias of Gil Blas de
Santillane,--I have disastrously changed rings with a plump, dimpled
brown-eyed niece of the governor of the Philippine Islands; I have
come, disguised as a green and gold pasteboard dragon, into the bedroom
of the most beautiful of Casmirians; I have criticised the sermons of
the Archbishop of Granada and found him in nothing different from
any other author under criticism. Fleeing episcopal wrath, I chatted,
near Plessis les Tours, with a thin-nosed and threadbare burgess, who
turned out to be the most shrewd of kings, and who sent me perilously
journeying to the court of yet another bishop. But Louis de Bourbon
had been murdered, I discovered, at an over-uproarious supper-party
conducted by the Wild Boar of Ardennes.... So I journeyed instead into
England, to fetch back the Queen's diamonds in good time for her to
foil the nefarious Cardinal, by duly wearing these twelve gems when
she danced in the ballet of La Merlaison at the fête of Messieurs
the Echevins. In England, though, I wandered so far astray, both
northward and chronologically, that, lost, I paused, under the wood of
Lettermore, to ask my way of red Colin Campbell, in the very moment the
great, ruddy jovial gentleman was shot down from ambush; and through
this mishap I became again a fugitive, now wandering through the howes
and bracken of wild Scotland.... Always, you perceive, no matter what
mage guided, he kept to the tried formula, and led me, footloose and
at free adventure, through eras and surroundings which were to him and
me in nothing familiar.... So that eventually I came, by way of the
British Linen Company's bank, and so past the lair of Tharagavverug, to
the steel gate, to The Porte Resonant, of the Fortress Unvanquishable;
and I am now upon the point of going in to cut off, for the third or
fourth time, Gaznak's evil head.
Yes, looking back, I can see that the last month has been fairly
various and contenting. And I am convinced that I must owe all these
happy adventurings to the charity of beneficent wizards rather than
of mere writing persons. And I elect to think of each and every valid
romantic novelist as a skilled sorcerer who, accompanied by a suitable
cortège of readers, departs at will from the workaday world, to travel,
eternally young and always comfortably opulent, upon the blessed way
of wizardry which conducts him away from boredom, and enables him to
wander footloose and at continuous unflagging adventure, in unfamiliar
lands wherein, as Poictesme phrases it, almost anything is rather more
than likely to happen.
§ 24
And I would like to think that every self-respecting novelist goes to
his magicking in suitable estate, and follows high and approved old
formulæ. In any event, so many persons have, at odd times, inquired
about my own "methods" of composition that it seems well here to jot
down what would appear to be a few of the more obvious rules of thumb.
The novelist, then, most appropriately prologizes his evasion of
common-sense--after of course performing the proper suffumigations
of camphor and aloes and amber,--by writing his first chapter in
a robe of white, with a triple collar of crystals and pearls and
selenite. His diet upon this day will be fish. When there is fighting
in manuscript, the writer may always advantageously, I believe, shift
to a rust-colored robe adorned with amethysts, and having a belt and
bracelets of steel,--clothed in which gear, he will while writing
keep as near as circumstances permit to the chimney, favored by
Mars. When he is about to kill anyone scriptorially, he will in mere
self-protection put on a wreath of ash and cypress, and burn scammony
and alum. He will likewise upon this day be careful to stint none
of the functions of nature; and will circumspectly remember that he
traffics with the wan and ashy overlord of the greater infortune.
But to bring off a love scene properly, demands of course much more
elaborate paraphernalia. The room, so far as general experience
indicates, should be hung with green and rose; the author, whom a
Nubian mute is fanning with swans' down, now is robed in sky blue, and
wears a graven turquoise ring. Musicians are in attendance, preferably
choristers, fiddlers and pipers. Upon the writer's head is a tiara of
lapis lazuli and beryl, wreathed about with myrtle and roses: upon
the auctorial breast a copper talisman opposes to the busied keys of
the typewriter the mystic sign of Anael and the inscription AVEEVA
VADELILITH....
I do not mean that in writing the Biography I myself have always in
every detail followed these exact "methods" of composition. What with
one thing and another, such as having small children in the house,
a similar account at the bank, and the attendance within candid
conversational range of one who holds at best the customary views
as to what may be put up with in a husband,--with such deterrents
about, these "methods" have sometimes, in some respects, been found
inexpedient. And so I merely suggest them here as that ideal of conduct
which should be aimed at by the creating romanticist, in absolute and
strict logic. For he in reality is a sorcerer, and in consequence is
amenable to the most ancient of rules.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 1: An American periodical of the day, designed to cure the
habit of reading magazines.]
III
MINIONS OF THE MOON
"Schiller's _Räuber_ perverted the taste and imagination of all
young men. The high-minded, metaphysical thief, its hero, was so
warmly admired that many raw students abandoned their homes and betook
themselves to the forests to levy contributions upon travellers. But
they found that real, everyday robbers were unlike the banditti of the
stage; and that three months in prison was very well to read about by
their own firesides, but not agreeable to undergo in their own proper
persons."
_3._
_Minions of the Moon_
§ 25
The literary artist plays, I had said, with piety.... But here I
was pleasantly interrupted by the sun's appearance without, and the
consequent inrush of new color and of livelier gilding into the massed
bindings of those books, of so many more books than I shall ever accord
a second reading, assembled upon my library shelves. Everything had of
a sudden brightened, with a cheerfulness which my thinking absorbed,
since (even with that awkward question of piety ahead) I had found
at least one excellent palliation for the devoting of my life to the
Biography. For the novelist and every creative writer travelled on the
gay way of wizardry while his less favored fellows, for the major part
of their journeying, approached toward death through more staid and
monotonous corridors.
Yet in these corridors men were continually finding alcoves: and these
alcoves, as reflection had already suggested, were of two sorts. Men
found solace in--to continue my figure,--alcoves of useless or even
of reprehensible action; and in alcoves of thought. By the rogue, and
by the rather rarer addict of mental exercise, might, at reasonable
intervals, diversion be obtained as we passed toward the exit at the
end of the inescapable corridor....
Well, and as I continued idly to regard my books, I noted in particular
two volumes which yet stood side by side. Their appearance in America
had been, I recollected, contemporaneous. And these two relatively
enfranchised types of men--the thinker and the rogue,--had then
been, I considered, afforded exoteric illustration, by that most
quaint of accidents which gave us simultaneously as published books
_The Education of Henry Adams_ and _The Legend of the Glorious
Adventures of Tyl Ulenspiegel_. I could remember thinking that
not often were thus coincidently granted, for the first time to
Americans, two volumes with such a plausible air of being destined
for longevity,--although the cautious would affix to the making of
this assertion the rider that each book centres on a personality which
is by way of being unfairly beguiling. Each protagonist here is a
personality evocative of the reader's friendship, in the instant happy
way in which people between book-covers are privileged to establish
such relationship with beings less permanently issued in flesh; and
so each of these two evades calm judgment. For to many of us these
had figured at once as new-found, heart-delighting and eminently
"personal" friends,--this Ulenspiegel come a-swaggering out of Belgium,
and this wistful Adams then just released from the decent reticences
of living,--and we perforce appraised them with a bias of friendship
rather than by any code of strictly "literary" values.
Still, the two figures appeared quite perfectly to illustrate the
seeking of diversion in alcoves of reverie and of misdemeanor. To
Adams I decided to come back: and to the Fleming I turned with frank
confession that of the somewhat incongruous pair one finds Tyl
Ulenspiegel the more difficult to judge with any pretence of equity,
precisely because this Tyl is, as I suggested at the beginning, a
rogue....
§ 26
It would be pleasant here to digress into speculation why in our
literature there should be so few rogues portrayed full-length; and
why America, that in daily life derives such naïve pleasure from
being cheated by "fine business men" and "far-seeing statesmen"
should have produced in its writings no really memorable rogue, with
the possible exception of Uncle Remus's Br'er Rabbit. But upon the
whole, it appears preferable to say that Tyl Ulenspiegel has been
for some five centuries famous among the people of Belgium and the
Netherlands as a sort of Dutch Figaro or Scapin,--as "mischief-maker,
jack-of-all-trades, and by turns fool, artist, valet and physician."
This character was appropriated and ennobled by Charles de Coster
as the central figure of a heroic romance, _La Légende de Tiel
Uylenspiegel_, published in 1867, and since known as "the Bible
of the Flemings"; and it is this book which was, some fifty years
afterward, translated into our tongue. So much it appears preferable
to say as simply as possible, because, in Geoffrey Whitworth's
translation, a splendid and great-hearted example of literary art was
then rendered into delightfully adequate English: and I incline to
think that a masterpiece should be greeted simply and reverently, and
without vain speaking. Even to recommend it to your consideration (as
I none the less must conscientiously do) seems rather on a par with
saying pleasant things about a sunrise.
So honest comment can but come back to this: for Tyl Ulenspiegel
himself one straightway establishes a sort of personal liking, a
liking unbased on "literary" values, and an unmoralizing liking such
as entraps you into indignation when the reforming Henry the Fifth
repudiates that other not-unlovable rogue, Sir John Falstaff.
"A Fleming am I from the lovely land of Flanders, workingman, nobleman,
all in one,--and I go wandering through the world, praising things
beautiful and good, but boldly making fun of foolishness." Such is Tyl
Ulenspiegel's description of himself, in terms a bit over-modestly
incommensurate to the speaker's variousness. Tyl can, for example,
be upon occasion a very pretty fighting-man, performing salutary
homicides with an approach to professional despatch and thoroughness.
For so often as a national hero finds a deserving person to be rescued
from oppression, ten or twelve adversaries amount, as we sometimes
discontentedly foreknow, to nothing more than to afford, in the moment
that their presumption procures for them demolishment, yet another
proof of the foolishness of the wicked; and all such slight battues
the national hero regards as trifles. Thus here, for serious work,
an Ulenspiegel too requires some three or four fully armed opposing
cohorts of Spanish cavalry to be discomfited single-handed, and really
to justify a display of that animation with which Sieur Roland laid
about him at Roncesvaux, and which enabled Achilles to choke Scamander
with slain Trojans.
So much of physical prowess, I repeat, one has the fair and ancient
right to expect of any national hero. Quite another facet of the jewel
is the roguish, not at all "heroic" Tyl of elder legends, who delights
in perpetrating jokes not always pre-eminent for delicacy. These
thimble-rigging and cloacinal jeux d'esprit De Coster, to be sure, has
for the most part omitted, with here and there just a bland indication.
For another matter, although Tyl is devotedly attached to the fair
Nele, and their marriage at the end of his wanderings is a conclusion
such as the erudite describe as foregone, nobody can expect a rogue
meticulously to emulate Joseph. The national hero of Belgium, be it
repeated, is a rogue.... So there came about inevitably that affair of
the beautiful gay-hearted dame whom Tyl escorted to Dudzeel: in all her
dealings with young men, howsoever impudent, she abhorred in particular
the sin of cruelty, and could not be pricked into it. And there was
the Walloon maiden into whose home Tyl went one night, to take part in
organ practise of the right accompaniment to some Flemish love-songs.
And there was the Comtesse de Meghen, another lovely and benevolent
lady, who offered Ulenspiegel, in the beginning, hospitality, and in
the end, her sincerest compliments upon the fact that he did not in
anything resemble her elderly and flabby husband.... In fine, Tyl
Ulenspiegel marches, in the pride of his youth, about a world of
brightly-colored and generous women, and graces a world wherein he
displays as much continence as appears consistent with politeness; and
wherein Joseph in the final outcome could not manage to combine these
two virtues.
So likewise this rogue marches, with chance for guide, about a world
which--then also,--was ruled by folly and bigotry; and he goes with
jauntiness, as befits "a master of the merry words and frolics of
youth," even in the shadowed places where over-head his betrayed and
gibbeted kindred fester between him and the sun. His is Hamlet's
heritage, but the Fleming wears his rue with a marked difference;
since the ashes of a martyred father lie upon Tyl's breast without at
all oppressing a heart whose core is roguishness. And in the presence
of injustice Tyl Ulenspiegel does not shrink, not even into drawing
morals: instead, with chance for guide, he marches. For those who
would wrong him his eye and tongue and sword stay keen; and the rogue
knows these weapons to be in the long run sufficient: meanwhile, that
one should now and then encounter over-troublesome fellows needing to
be killed, is as naturally a part of wandering at adventure as that
one should find everywhere girls to be assisted out of virginity and
flagons to be emptied, and songs to be made beyond any numbering, but
never the last song.... So the rogue marches, and puts all things to
their proper uses. And the heart of the reader, given something better
than the heart of a flea, goes out to the resistless rogue.
There is, to be sure, a "story": in fact, around this sprightly figure
De Coster has woven--contemporaneously, it is bewildering to reflect,
with the weaving of a dreary mystery about one Edwin Drood,--an
intricate romance as cruel as life and considerably gayer. Somewhat to
deviate metaphorically, De Coster, in this tale of fifteenth-century
Flemings in course of being enlightened and uplifted by the auto-da-fés
and hangmen of the Holy Inquisition, has builded a story which is not
unsuggestive of a time-mellowed fifteenth-century cathedral; with the
gentry about their devotions, and with peasants joking on the porches,
and with a stately hymn music accompanying both the aspiration and
the guffaws; a cathedral, too, that is no less opulent in glowing
paintings of rapt saints and archangels than in captivatingly hideous
gargoyles.... Here again, one is tempted to expatiate, concerning
these gargoyles: and I would like here to talk about the superlunar
bleak buffooneries of the chapter which depicts the death of Charles
the Fifth, and his trial in heaven; or to applaud the account of Tyl's
hunting of the werwolf; or, at least, to note that really intolerable
"catharsis by pity and terror" when Katheline the good witch attempts
to share her cup of cold water with Joos Damman in the torture
chamber....
§ 27
But what, above all, remains with us is the figure of the tall young
rogue who passes hardly any alcove which hide-bound morality has
labelled "Keep Out" without a little dalliance therein. Ahead is a
closed door, lightly ajar, a black door with silver-plated handles,
which one perforce approaches always: in the meantime it is astonishing
to note what a number of pleasant and blameworthy things one can
discover to do.
Reflection finds the circumstance unfortunate that most of the
agreeable actions of life are either forbidden or else deplorably
behedged with restrictions. From drunkenness and from the effects of
certain drugs can be obtained moments, and even hours, of conscious
contentment: probably in no other way, indeed, is it possible for human
beings to induce an unbroken twenty minutes of actual and complete
happiness: but with repetition such pleasures increasingly work the
deuce of a damage to one's health and purse. Besides, our inefficient
bodies prove unable to stay comfortably inebriate, for more than a
brief while, without drifting into sleep or collapsing in sickness:
and our equally inefficient medicine men have found out no amiable
method of, in the time-honored phrase, recuperating from alcoholic
excesses.
Then also the more intimate recreations of amour, when once you are
over with the disappointments unavoidably attendant upon loss of
innocence, compose a very pleasant pastime so long as the game is
played by relative strangers. Even superficial exploration of the
charms and the little ways of any unfamiliar and personable young
woman, they tell me, is unflaggingly rewarded and incited to fresh
exertions by the discovery of some slight novelty or small strangeness.
Thighs differ, breasts are always unpredictable, and the piquant mole
continually "by himself surprises," I am informed. Yet, in America at
all events, one finds extant a perceptible tendency to deprive the
oldest and most popular of amusements of just this essential element of
unfamiliarity, by restricting it to married persons; and even within
this licensed class to limit each husband to the embraces of his own
wife. Now with the morality of this social ruling the most precise
need pick no fault: I would merely point out that, here again, should
monogamy ever become prevalent among us, we would be deliberately
abating one of the more considerable pleasures of an existence wherein
pleasures are not over-frequent.
Nor, of course, not even in actual need, are you allowed to take
another person's money away from him except through the tedious
channels of business; nor to fare publicly appareled in lovely colors
except just where your necktie shows but stays invisible to--of all
people--you alone; nor are you permitted to keep enjoyable, through
the amenities of homicide, your commerce with persons who admittedly
exist but to annoy their fellows. Tyl Ulenspiegel might deal as the
whim took him with those obnoxious cohorts of Spanish cavalry. But
with us there is never an open season for religious revivalists or
book peddlers or collectors of internal revenue: and traffic policemen
and the conductors of "tag-days"[2] and prohibition agents all live in
exasperating immunity. Even the women you adored, and wrote letters to,
approach you intrepidly. Everywhere, in fine, this or that pleasant
action is forbidden or in one way or another restricted; and man, upon
the verge of actual, sharp, zestful enjoyment is brought up short by a
taboo of his own inventing.
So it is pleasant--_faute de mieux_, as in our current
fiction superb worldlings no longer observe to other members of
the _élite_,--it is very pleasant to indulge in these sports
vicariously through considering the exploits of the Ulenspiegelian
rogue who does do these things. And we cannot but rather fondly admire
the dashing fellow who commits the pleasure-giving misdemeanors from
which we are held back by prudence or by physical limitations. Every
country rejoicing in the dubious benefit of a history has, they say,
alike its great national hero and its great national thief: and it
is a fact that St. George endures in balladry with Robin Hood, St.
Denis with Cartouche, St. Andrew with Rob Roy. Then, too, if Belgium
yet remembers Tyl Ulenspiegel, Spain has not yet forgotten Guzman
d'Alfarache, nor Germany her Schinderhannes, nor Hungary her Schubry.
Everywhere through the shadowland of legend canter and gallop--with
the gleaming eyes of nocturnal creatures, with a multitudinous tossed
shining of steel,--these "squires of the night's body, Diana's
foresters, these minions of the moon," whom the prosaic call thieves
and highwaymen: and everywhere men have admired and cherished some
cunning strong unconquerable rogue.
This foible has from the beginning been recognized and shared by the
literary artist. It is perhaps one reason (among others) why really
reputable persons have always felt, however obscurely, that there is
something dangerous in novels; and why the reading of fiction has
always been more or less deprecated by all citizens of appreciable
elevation and influence. And here the well-thought-of are, very luckily
for the literary artist, far more profoundly in the right than ever
the well-thought-of have comprehended: for in all polities imaginative
literature has tirelessly advocated revolution, by depicting the
possibilities of a more pleasure-giving state of affairs; and in his
diversions the artist has consistently tended to identify himself with
the rogue and the law-breaker.
§ 28
Romantic art has from the first inclined to glorify the breaker of
laws current in the artist's lifetime. Nor are the provocatives for
this sedition obscure; since no society has ever provided any exact or
generally respected status for the artist, nor afforded him, at most,
much more than the half-contemptuous, cosseting indulgence which is
granted to lap-dogs. Moreover, the artist alone is permitted hourly
to use his reason,--an action which in any other walk of life would
at once upset business usage or professional etiquette,--because of
men's general conviction that here it doesn't especially matter. In
consequence the artist has always found our human ordering of this
world, under all régimes, to be unsatisfactory; and to offenders
against any part of this ordering he inclines with irrational
unavoidable sympathy.... You may, in fact, observe that nobody is
quite at ease in dealing with a policeman: the man represents, however
genially, with howsoever bright adornments of figured brass and
rubicundity, an oppression that is upon us; and while in theory the
relation between the legally honest tax-payer and his two hired and
liveried retainers, the policeman and the mail-carrier, is the same,
one notes in practise a marked difference. The courts and officers of
the law, and all legal processes, are matters with which we as if by
instinct avoid involvement: for, here again, man occupies somewhat
the position of a Frankenstein.... So Robin Hood is voted an unending
triumph, from black letter ballads to the moving pictures, and the
fact that Christ was crucified by due process of law has everlastingly
endeared His story to romantic art and human sympathy.
Now very often, I daresay, the artist is guided by this sympathy for
the rogue without suspecting its existence. Thus even in the most
genteel and circumspect of arts,--which I take to be the composition
of a novel in the English language,--it is droll to find from the
beginning the most respectable of scribes, if not always of pharisees,
depicting one or another rascally law-breaker with fervors of fond
admiration whereof the writer seems wholly unconscious. For the
English novel began with the rogueries of Lovelace and Tom Jones.
Then followed the chronicles of Rob Roy and Jack Sheppard and Paul
Clifford, most exemplary and magnanimous of highwaymen. Seth Pecksniff
presently fell down the steps of his cottage in Wiltshire: and tall
Redmund Barry fled up to Dublin, just two years later, after his duel
with Captain Quin. By and by, in Lymport, the great Mel assumed his
over-tight lieutenant's uniform, and was laid out in his coffin, by way
of beginning the tale which his personality infuses all through: and
the gay young Master of Ballantrae (after tossing a guinea with his
brother) travelled northward from Durrisdeer, singing as he rode toward
Culloden, with a fine new white cockade in his hat.... For all these
are rogues, in each of whom his creator obviously joyed, no matter
under what protective coloration of moral purpose and of self-deceit.
§ 29
That art is a criticism of life, appears a favorite apothegm among
those who know least about either. Yet the statement is true enough,
in the sense that prison-breaking is a criticism of the penitentiary.
Art is, in its last terms, an evasion of the distasteful. The artist
simply does not like the earth he inhabits: for the laws of nature his
admiration has always been remarkably temperate; and with the laws of
society he has never had any patience whatever.
So the literary artist leaves the earth which he inhabits, daily
and with no more to-do than daily is made over the same feat by
professional aeronauts. And the literary artist diverts himself by
constructing other worlds, whose orderings are different, and to
his mind more approvable. All creative writers have thus, whether
consciously or no, embarked in an undertaking compared with which
the axiomatic attempt to weave ropes of sand or to construct silk
purses from even less adapt material is a quite sane and unassuming
enterprise. For the literary artist here is at play with the second of
his adversaries, with piety; and has offered to instruct the aggregate
wisdom of his fellows and even of Omnipotence how to create a more
satisfactory world.
By the less venturous the suggestions thrown out have been partial
and in the nature of slight amendments to existent orderings. For
centuries where magic has attempted to coerce Providence, and religion
has urged the bribing of Heaven, whether with burnt offerings or good
behavior, here the artist has more urbanely adhered to moral suasion,
by setting a praiseworthy example for the Demiurge to follow.... Thus
has the novelist long proposed, through this delicate intimation
of setting the example, that a time limit might advantageously be
placed upon human discomforts, and immunity from the sum total be
granted, say, along with a marriage license. Suitable incomes, it
has in the same tactful way been suggested to Providence, should be
conferred upon all virtuous and guileless persons, for whom the bonds
of reality rarely afford coupons. And something certainly ought to
be done about man's positively dangerous racial custom of getting
older and dying; for which the novelist's alternative would seem to
be that, after an equitable distribution of confessions and brides
and unexpected legacies and jail-sentences, everybody should enter a
static condition of middle age. Such at least is the impression left
by the last paragraphs of our elder novels, with all the characters
congealed into perdurable domesticity and standing sponsor for one
another's children. Scheherezade is, to me, the only known tale-teller
who has punctiliously and convincingly accounted for the future of her
puppets, after the winding up of each comedy, by stating that they
were duly disposed of by the destroyer of delights, and presumably
the undertaker.... Let it, in fine, be understood that the business
of human life, as we know it, will by and by be reorganized, and
everything be made entirely and permanently different: and fortified by
that firm understanding, we can for the present allow the conditions of
human life. That much at least has been from the beginning a proviso
insisted upon by every creative writer.
But those whom life has more deeply disappointed and bored, these turn
to diverting themselves with worlds that are in everything dissimilar
from the one world with which ill luck has made them familiar. These
are the romantics, the fantastics, who, cursed with actual imagination,
devoted it in youth to pre-figuring what life must be when you became
an untrammeled adult. They have faced the reality, they have faced the
real and incredible antickry of men as social units. They have faced
it with a candor uncharacteristic of common-sense. And they have now
no further concern with the laws and other hebetudes of men, except
to forget these disappointments as utterly as possible, and to divert
themselves in worlds of their own creation wherein their whims are
the only laws. So Ulenspiegel is sent hunting werwolves; Holy Maël
is tricked into sailing northward, in a demon-rigged stone trough,
among fabulous seas and immodest sirens; the huge shadow which bears
obscurely, as if beneath the wings of a bat, the Seven Deadly Sins, is
cast across the roof of Anthony's hut in the Thebaid; the Snow Queen is
bundled into a great sledge painted white, and fetched south to kidnap
little Kay; Alice is lured into the rabbit hole and tumbled, very
slowly, down that very deep well whose walls were inset with cupboards
and bookshelves: and the creating romantic is diverted.
§ 30
Meanwhile you may note the unreflective raising somewhat of a pother
over the circumstance that the artist is as a rule disliked and is
belittled, if not actually persecuted, by his contemporaries. Yet no
other outcome can seem more natural, I am afraid, when you consider
that the art of every important creative writer is an hourly protest
that he finds his contemporaries dull and inadequate persons, and
that he esteems the laws which they have devised, and live under, to
be imbecile. Laws based upon rationality one could endure: but any
sane person, as the fretted artist perceives, must regard with an eye
full of provisos the professed aim of so many of our laws, to make
for the public's general welfare and happiness. For the artist is
logical; and therein differs from the majority of his fellows, who
unthinkingly assume that all efforts to promote the well-being of
mankind at large are praiseworthy. I myself concede that we are here
apt, through however admirable motives, to act precipitately, where one
calm instant's thought would tend to show all such efforts irreligious
and illogical. By no religious code, and by no course of logic taught
in any school, is the average man entitled to happiness: his demerits
justify in logic the earthly misery which religion postulates: and to
impose upon him happiness would be, by the best-thought-of standards,
an unreasonable and blasphemous act, which, one may proudly say,
American civilization has never come anywhere near committing.
Instead, the orthodox should find it very gratifying to note with what
complete inutility altruism flourishes everywhere, and legal enactments
pullulate to promote men's general well-being; since faith and logic
alike, I take it, are strengthened by the utterness with which all
these laws fail, and, in fact, appear to muddle matters rather worse
than ever.
And it is perhaps a good thing too that we, who have taxes,
by-laws, licenses, passports, burial certificates, and permits to
marry,--we who must do all that is done by us either in violation
or with the permission of one or another law, we who live bound
and fretted by innumerable small legal requirements and taboos and
restrictions,--cannot in the least imagine what living must have been
like under less omnipresently paternal governments. In simpler and upon
the whole less muddle-headed ages the relatively few laws whereunder
mankind lived did not pretend to accomplish anybody's positive
benefit; their slighter and more feasible aim was to prevent your
undue annoyance of anybody else: and, that secured, the laws took--it
becomes a positively incredible concept,--no further account of your
actions....
--Which is not of course to suggest that the artist fared in more
Arcadian days a whit the merrier. I would not imply that the artist
was then content with his material surroundings, nor that in any
society he is likely ever to be content. Here and there, to be sure,
as I have admitted, he wins to the cuddlings and applause of the
lapdog with a quaint repertoire of tricks; and dies, some while after
forgetting these tricks, comfortably enough of being over-pampered.
But the romantics, the true romantics, these also, are in a wholly
un-Falstaffian sense all minions of the moon,--who has condemned them,
as I recall my Baudelaire, eternally to love the place where they
are not and the woman whom they know not. Astrology is more exact;
and, under those whom the moon rules, defines very perfectly the true
romantic, as "a soft tender creature, a searcher of and delighter in
novelties; unsteadfast, timorous, prodigal; loving peace and to live
free from care; hating labor; and content in no condition of life,
either good or ill." To me that last clause seems in every sense
conclusive.
He that is born one of the minions of the moon must therefore always
be a little at odds with what his fellows describe as piety. For his
reason, such as it is, compels him to disapprove of most human laws,
upon the ground of their foolishness, and of most natural laws, upon
the ground, not merely of their unreason nor even of their lewdness
and cruelty, but of their ugly and unæsthetic results. So that in the
worlds he builds as both a lesson and a rebuke to Providence, the
creative artist inclines to favor and to place in a heroic light such
persons as Tyl Ulenspiegel and Robin Hood, who, by the standards of
human laws, are better fitted for jail. Nor is that all....
§ 31
No: that is not by any means all. For the romantic enters into frank
competition with nature by attempting not merely to create more
interesting persons than nature creates, but also to outvie nature
by making his creations durable. And, as a sort of supreme affront,
creative art now and then plucks from the graveyard one of nature's
put-by failures, and, with a triumphant, "See now what I can do with
the very material this bungler has flung away!" converts the dead man
or woman into an ever-living romantic myth. So are begotten those
favored persons whose vitality and whose adventuring each generation of
mankind renews.... I refer, of course, to such persons as Prometheus
and Pan and Judas and the Sphinx,--and to Andromeda and Helen of Troy
and Satan. I refer to the Wandering Jew and Faust and Odysseus, who
stay always irresistible to the romanticist: and I refer to King
Solomon and Queen Cleopatra and the knight Tannhäuser, and to Lilith
and Don Juan also, for whom are yet reserved, we know, the most
spirit-stirring adventures in the manuscripts of writers still unborn.
I refer to Blue Beard, and to Dame Mélusine, and to Punch, and to a
great many others who were so lucky as to originate in a satisfyingly
romantic myth, and who in consequence stay always real and always free
of finding life monotonous.
Now, it is an ever-present reminder of our own impermanence to
note that no human being stays real. In private annals a species
of familiary canonization sets in with each fresh advent of the
undertaker; no sooner, indeed, do our moribund lie abed than we begin
even in our thoughts to lie like their epitaphs; and all of us by
ordinary endure the pangs of burying ineffably more admirable kin
than we ever possessed.... Nor does much more of honesty go to the
making of those national chronicles which Mr. Henry Ford, with a
candor that at one time really seemed incurable by anything short of
four years in the White House, has described as "bunk." In history
one finds everywhere an impatient desire to simplify the tortuous and
complex human being into a sort of forthright shorthand. Alexander
was ambitious, Machiavelli cunning, Henry the Eighth bloodthirsty,
and George Washington congenitally incapable of prevarication. That
is all there was to them, so far as they concern the average man: and
thus does history imply its shapers with the most curt of symbols,
somewhat as an astronomer jots down a four's first cousin to indicate
the huge planet Jupiter and compresses the sun that nourishes him, into
a proof-reader's period. Always in this fashion does history work over
its best rôles into allegories about the Lord Desire of Vain-glory and
Mr. By-ends, about Giant Bloody-man and Mr. Truthful; and rubs away the
humanness of each dead personage resistlessly, as if resolute to get
rid in any event of most of him; and pares him of all traits except the
one which men, whether through national pride or the moralist's large
placid preference for lying, have elected to see here uncarnate.
Quite otherwise fare those luckier beings who began existence with the
advantage of being incorporeal, and hence have not any dread of time's
attrition. The longer that time handles them, the more does he enrich
their experience and personalities....
§ 32
I found recorded, for example, not long ago, in Mr. Robert Nichols'
fine book _Fantastica_, the very latest adventures of three
of these favored beings. And let me protest forthwith that I
profoundly enjoyed this book. This trio of stories, about such copious
protagonists as Andromeda and the Sphinx and the Wandering Jew, came,
to me at least, as the most amiable literary surprise since Mr. Donn
Byrne published _Messer Marco Polo_. Here was beauty and irony
and wisdom; here was fine craftsmanship: but here, above all, were
competently reported the more recent events in the existence of favored
persons whose vitality and whose adventuring each generation of mankind
renews.
I found, for instance, Mr. Nichols writing very beautifully about
Andromeda. Well, it was Euripides, they say, who first popularized this
myth of Andromeda: and, for all that the dramas he wrote about her
are long lost, it were time-wasting, of a dullness happily restricted
to insane asylums and the assembly halls of democratic legislation,
here to deliberate whether Andromeda or Euripides be to us the more
important and vivid person, in a world wherein Euripides survives as a
quadrisyllable and wherein Andromeda's living does, actually, go on.
You have but, for that matter, to compare Andromeda with the overlords
of the milieu in which her fame was born, with the thin shadows that
in pedants' thinking, and in the even gloomier minds of schoolboys
upon the eve of an "examination," troop wanly to prefigure Cleon and
Pericles and Nicias, to see what a leg up toward immortality is the
omission of any material existence. These estimable patriots endure at
best as wraiths and nuisances, in a world wherein Andromeda's living
does, actually, go on. It is not merely that she continues to beguile
the poet and painter, but that each year she demonstrably does have
quite fresh adventures.... Only yesterday, I reflected, Mr. C.C.
Martindale had attested as much, in his engaging and far too scantly
famous book, _The Goddess of Ghosts_; as now did Mr. Nichols
in _Fantastica_.... For it is, through whatever human illogic,
yesterday's fictitious and most clamantly impossible characters who
remain to us familiar and actual persons, the while that we remember
yesterday's flesh-and-blood notables as bodiless traits.
So it comes about that only these intrepid men and flawless women
and other monsters who were born cleanlily of imagination, in lieu
of the normal messiness, and were born as personages in whom, rather
frequently without knowing why, the artist perceives a satisfying large
symbolism,--that these alone bid fair to live and thrive until the
proverbial crack of doom. Their living does, actually, go on, because
each generation of artists is irresistibly impelled to provide them
with quite fresh adventures.... And no one can, with certainty, say
why. One merely knows that these favored romantic myths, to whom just
now I directed the stiletto glance of envy, remain the only persons
existent who may with any firm confidence look forward to a colorful
and always varying future, the only persons who stay human in defiance
of death and time and the even more dreadful theories of "new schools
of poetry"; and who keep, too, undimmed the human trait of figuring
with a difference in the eye of each beholder. For all the really fine
romantic myths have this in common. As Mr. Nichols phrases it, in
approaching a continuation of the story of Prometheus one may behold in
the Fire-Bringer, just as one's taste elects, a pre-figuring of Satan
or of Christ or of Mr. Thomas Alva Edison.
And this one sometimes guesses to be--perhaps--the pith of such
myths' durability, that the felt symbolism admits of no quite final
interpreting. Each generation finds for Andromeda a different monster
and another rescuer; continuously romance and irony endeavor to
contrive new riddles for the Sphinx; whereas the Wandering Jew--besides
the tour de force of having enabled General Lew Wallace to write a book
which voiced more fatuous blather than _Ben-Hur_,--has had put to
his account, at various times, the embodying of such disparate pests as
thunderstorms and gypsies and Asiatic cholera.
Well! here--just for an instant to recur to _Fantastica_, as
a volume which I delight in commending to the particular notice
of the urbane,--here one finds Mr. Nichols also writing remarkably
contemporaneous parables about the Sphinx and her latest lover, about
Andromeda and Perseus, about the Wandering Jew and Judas Iscariot.
They are, to my finding, very wise and lovely tales; they are, I hope,
the graduating theses of a maturing poet who has become sufficiently
sophisticated to put aside the, after all, rather childish business
of verse-making. But the really important feature, in any event, is
that Robert Nichols adds to the unending imbroglios of these actually
vital persons, and guides with competence and a fine spirit the
immortal travellers. Nor is this any trivial praise when you recall
that, earlier, they have been served by such efficient if slightly
incongruous couriers as Goethe and Charles Kingsley and Euripides and
Eugène Sue, as Matthew of Paris and Flaubert and Nathaniel Hawthorne
and the Reverend George Crowley.
§ 33
For these great myths have, over and above that quality of which I
spoke just now as wizardry, some common and not readily definable power
which resistlessly makes captive the dreams of men of all conditions
and faiths and degrees of intelligence. I can remember puzzling a
long while over what conceivable feature these so divergent stories
could be said to have in common; since some shared trait must be,
I reasoned, the explanation of their virtually uniform allure. And
these myths baffled me. Their might seemed, as their origin, not
wholly explicable. I say "their origin" because no great romantic myth
seemed the product of any especial brain. Never could we detect any
writer seated at his desk about the diligent invention of any one of
these stories, told now for the first time. Rather did legends gather
slowly and contradictorily, arising none knew whence, about the tale's
protagonist, who was by ordinary an actual personage some while since
dead. By and by somebody had perhaps written down a part of this rumor,
always with plain inability to narrate the whole; and the result
might be, to the one side an _Odyssey_, to the other a _Juif
Errant_.... Sometimes one of these inexplicably macrobiotic myths
had found no formal chronicler, and for centuries existed in detachment
from literature. There was, for example, I reflected, the fine figure
of Punch, which imaginative artists had prodigally left unexploited.
In fact, nobody except Mr. Conrad Aiken[3] seemed ever to have written
with seriousness about Punch; and this superb theme as yet awaited
merely the attention of some gifted writer, to enrich the world with a
masterpiece. Then there was Mélusine. There was, for that matter, Blue
Beard.... All these stayed uncommemorated with any adequacy as yet, and
were, despite that fact, no whit the less recognizable as magnificent
and immortal.
I could not see that these old stories had anything whatever in
common; and even if in these ageless fables some shared feature were
discovered, that would hardly explain the unvarying strange sequel.
It would not, I thought, explain the emergence from the "story" of a
figure which, the story done with, and all its incidents put behind,
continued to live on in other stories, and continued through generation
after generation to have quite fresh adventures. Nothing seemed able
ever to explain that. Yet it was a fact. One was tempted to imagine
these immortal figures had guiles of their own, and exerted strange
potencies less to afford the artist a fruitful theme than to demand
his service. Man here again, it might be, enacted his not infrequent
rôle of Frankenstein.... At any rate, the secret was not in the
stories: artists did not repeat these stories, but instead arranged new
imbroglios for the old tales' protagonists.
Of course the truth was that these figures, for one reason or another
as yet unrevealed to me, were such as, for that reason, appealed to
a majority of creating romanticists. They were toys with which, for
howsoever veiled causes, the artist peculiarly delighted to play. It
might, I guessed, have been the element of dubiety which fascinated,
and the half-vexed feeling that, when all which is apparent to sense
and rationality had been checked off and labeled, much yet remained
amenable to neither. It might be, just as I had said, the pith of
such myths' durability that the felt symbolism admits of no quite
final interpreting; and so arouses the not utterly rational suspicion
that the whole truth about these mythic figures has never yet been
apprehended by anybody.
§ 34
Strikingly did this seem exemplified by the perennial magic of Pan.
His epopee, as taken over by the artist, was virtually eventless. Pan
figured in no story of marked interest or importance. He merely was:
and what he was, nobody had presumed to voice with any precision.
Pan was but indicated--always with a queer effect of the narrator's
suspecting somebody might, undesirably, be eavesdropping,--by this
vague talk about a hirsute wanderer with the horns and feet of a goat
and a taste for pipe-playing: these features were, you knew, not the
essentials. Such tales recorded only small and immaterial truths,
as if--you somehow knew,--you were to define the Pope as an elderly
Catholic who wears underclothing and eats breakfast, or a duly
nominated candidate for the White House as a Protestant of unexigent
honesty. So the creating romanticist had begun to divert himself with
guesses about Pan: and now these guesses filled libraries.
But Pan was not in the library. He was afield, he was in all the
magazines for the month after next now on the news-stands, having quite
fresh adventures, which yet-living poets were under a tribal bond to
contrive for him. In the records of English literature research might
look in vain for any considerable poet who had not paid his scot of
contriving some fresh adventure for Pan, and Pan yet roved the jungle
of free verse. Pan, alone of the old Hellenic gods, had thus lived on,
and had survived all his peers. Pan would not, to be sure, especially
regret them, since he had never forgathered with the other gods....
And there, in that seemingly irrelevant fact, I began to detect a
darkling light. Pan had never forgathered with the other gods: Olympos
he appeared at utmost to visit now and then, with, as I recall _The
Book of Job_, a curious similarity to Satan's coming among the sons
of God, "from going to and fro in the earth and walking up and down in
it." Pan, also, that unexplainedly dreadful and lonely wanderer, was
the divine outcast. In the one existent story, that of Psyche, wherein
Pan was represented as having any even very remote dealing with the
other gods, his part was to aid a mortal against them. Pan, alone of
the gods, had abandoned, and at a pinch sided against, Heaven. And that
might well be the reason why the romantic artist had cherished him.
That perhaps was why Pan had become for romanticists the Master. That
might be why, when Olympos crumbled, romanticists had set between
those ungainly horns the pentagram; had caused this hairy brown body
to burgeon with scales and feathers; had given to the most virile of
the gods the breasts of a woman; and had kindled in his honor the moons
of Chesed and Geburah. The goat god had thus, alone of the Olympians,
endured. He endured as Baphomet, as Azazel, as Janicot, as Eblis; as
the Master of the Gnostics, the Master of the Sabbath, the Master of
the Two Moons, moons which had, here again, their minions....
I shall not, in this place, speak at any length of what the prosaic
perhaps do well to regard as bedlamite nonsense: here I shall only
indicate from afar the mystery I could not ignore. For I knew that
the romantic had whispered of two scapegoats, of Christ and Pan, the
saviors severally of religion and of art: the one dying in atonement
for human sin, in the manner of the stainless beast which was
sacrificed in the Temple; the other serving men in the manner of that
other beast, not necessarily immaculate, which was loaded with the
sins of the twelve tribes, and driven out of the Temple forever, as
one consecrated not to death but to life, and condemned not to rest
but to the exile's freedom, in those desert places which belonged to
Pan-Azazel. For it is recorded--where we would least look for it, even
in our English Bible,[4]--that the Lord of Sabaoth commanded such
sacrifice and such honor be divided between Himself and the goat god,
as equals share. And it is recorded too, in the sacred lore of the
Moslems, that to the Master of the Two Moons, and to that especial
manifesting of Pan which the East called Eblis, was relinquished by
Heaven--through a compact such as, once again, is made by equals,--the
overlordship of all loneliness, of wine, of verse and song and
rhetoric, and of all the arts. You will perceive this is, very exactly,
the heritage of the creating romantic....
Well! thus Christ had His servitors, whose reward was to be, by and by,
in a land fulfilled with the glory of the Sun, eternal rest: and Pan,
the Master of the Two Moons, had mustered likewise his minions, whose
reward was their work. By these exceedingly diverse saviors, I knew,
had been evolved the magic of the sanctuary and of the wilderness,
the white magic and another magic rather less candid. So had arisen
the messiahs who led men severally to hope for contentment to come,
or to create contentment, somehow, even in this unsatisfying life and
moment.... Pan was, in fine, the god who had looked upon the divine
handiwork, and seen that it was not good; or, at any rate, not good
enough. The creating romanticist had always hoped that somewhere must
at least one such clear-sighted god exist; and, finding him, had
worshipped appropriately....
And so I got my clue, and esteemed it, upon the whole, unwelcome.
For I saw that the one feature common to all the great mythic figures
over whose deathlessness I had been puzzling, was that each was a
divine and unrepentant outcast, that each one of them was a rebel who
had gained famousness by warring in one way or another against Heaven.
And that might be, I felt uncomfortably, just what had made them to
all creative artists irresistible. Here well might lurk, for so long
unapprehended by me, another and more lurid instance of art's need to
make sport with piety; here revealed in art's unfaltering endeavor to
glorify not merely the rogue but the rebel. Once the discovery might
have pleased me. But nowadays, rebellion in any form really does seem
rather unurbane and almost certainly futile: and very much as penitent
Villon turned monk, or as the wild Highlanders ceased to rebel after
the Stuarts lost in 'Forty-five, so have I found the same numeral to be
remarkably sedative.
Nevertheless, at the bottom of his heart, the romantic artist, I
knew, has not ever been in harmony with Providence and this world's
Demiurge. He has not ever honestly believed, as I recall the dicta of
John Charteris, that this world reflected credit upon its Maker. And
so, toward offenders against this divine ordering the artist might
well incline with unavoidable, unreasoning and, I preferred to think,
unconscious sympathy.
§ 35
Certainly, of the myths I have named, all save two deal with
protagonists who are condemned perforce to struggle against, and who
contrive to thwart, inimical gods, as did Andromeda and Odysseus; or
who rebel with the volition and candor of Satan and Tannhäuser and
Prometheus. But the myths of the Sphinx and of Queen Helen rest upon
other bases of impiety.... Helen, indeed, stands pedestalled above the
bickerings of mere gods.... And to the romantic the Sphinx has never
really been that offensively feeble-minded monster who molested Œdipus
with a conundrum so inane as to result, quite properly, in the death
of its perpetrator. Instead, the Sphinx has become, for the romantic,
the one being who foreknows the answer to all riddles and the outcome
of all experience. And because of this foreknowledge, obviously denied
to demiurgically experimenting gods, the Sphinx does nothing.... This
dreadful certitude, equally male and female, as was Baphomet and as
was the veiled Lord of Mommur, this quietness that is equally a beast
of the field and an unslayable immortal, this very large and pitiless
felinity, lies waiting; and waits in blasphemous and perturbingly
untroubled ease. The years pass; pious nations come into being and high
power and pass; heaven is no longer great enough to contain a catalogue
of the gods that have reigned in heaven: the Sphinx, men say, has never
stirred. For the Sphinx waits. All the august doings of Olympos and
Sinai and Valhalla have been witnessed by the Sphinx: and the most
favorable interpreting of that changeless face is, upon the whole, to
hope it wears the provisional smile we bend toward the playing of not
yet unbearable children. And therein lies the impiety of the waiting
Sphinx, in this amused deep comprehension that there is no need to
rebel against our gods.... For the Sphinx is immortal: and the secret
of the Sphinx, men say, is that secret which the harried gods strive
desperately to surmise: the Sphinx knows why no god may ever hope to be
immortal.
§ 36
Yes: all these so inexplicably popular myths commemorate a rebel
against Heaven's orderings. Each myth, in one fashion or another,
adopts the true Byronic posture of looking the Omnipotent in the face
and imparting to Him the, upon the whole unstartling, information that
His evil is not good. And that--where every dictum is perforce an
hypothesis,--that well may be why these especial myths, rather than
others, overruled the art of yesterday; and why upon us is yet laid
their mastery, from which the spiritual descendants of us who are
minions of the moon shall not escape.
No matter into what sort of world this planet develops, through
howsoever laudable a magic-working of social and mechanical and
hygienic improvements, that future also belongs to these inscrutable
immortals. Into that world, however handsomely it all be changed by new
inventions and fresh fallacies, I think, they will come as conquerors.
First will come Helen. I mean that Helen who was verily at Troy. For
the wife of Menelaus, we know, did not ever come to this city: and
Philostratus tells us how the whole truth as to the Greeks' crusade, in
the high cause of outraged morality, was revealed by Achilles' ghost
to Apollonius of Tyana. "For a long time we leaders of the Achæans
were deceived and tricked into fighting battles in Helen's behalf,
through our belief that she was in Ilium; whereas she really was living
in Egypt, in the house of Proteus, whither through the device of Zeus
she had been snatched away from Paris. But when we became convinced
of this, we continued fighting to win Troy itself and the riches of
Troy and the power these riches would give to us, proclaiming that
this empire must be destroyed in order that the world might be made
safe for democracy." And from Egypt Helen's husband--if that at all
matters,--duly retrieved her on his way homeward when the warring was
done.
But Hera, it is recorded, gave to Paris that woman's likeness, made of
the white mists of night and of dawn's rosy-colored clouds and of the
golden clouds of sunset, and shaped in that perfect loveliness with
which Hera had before this time betrayed Ixion, leading the King of
Thessaly to beget upon this shining phantom a dreadful spawn of twisted
and blotched monsters.... And this bright emptiness was what the heroes
fought for, in the most famous yet not by any means the most irrational
of all the wars that have ever been. And when the warring was done, the
leaders shared the spoils with much quarreling, and maimed soldiers
knew they had fought for a colored mist, in this war also.
So Troy fell because the appearance of this phantom had beauty without
any flaw. And the Trojans died. And the Greeks died. And Menelaus and
his wife died too. And in time Queen Hera also died. But the phantom
that had been at Troy endured, masterless, purposeless, and immortal.
Wherever men have been, she too, the romantic aver, has passed like
a cool flame of marsh-fire, passionlessly, inconceivably bright:
and of the beauty of this Helen there are many tales recorded. Yet
whosoever has not seen her, it is declared by these poets also, to
him beauty remains but one of the words he puts upon paper. They that
have seen her, are a wistful folk who go thereafter with dazzled eyes
and can write nothing truly. None the less does Helen keep her old
complaisance; she, impassionate, denies not anything to the passion of
her lovers: and they may still beget upon her loveliness all manner of
twisted and blotched monsters, in the fashion of the King of Thessaly.
So art endures, and critics and curators are providentially provided
for. And Helen grants to her lovers everything except happiness: that
they may never hope for; that she has not to give, nor has she ever
known of it, who goes as a bright emptiness, without any like or
kindred anywhere save in the monsters which are her spawn, as Helen
passes from the ruining of one lover to another lover, masterless,
purposeless, and immortal....
Yes, Helen will come first, I think. And near to her, no doubt, will
follow her servitors from of old, crafty and great-thewed Odysseus, and
Faust, in the pulled down cap and the furred robe of a scholar. And Don
Juan, and pallid, desperate Tannhäuser, and Ahasuerus, who has put away
despairing and hope forever, will come too; with many others.
And for an instant these thronged myths will look smilingly upon
the ensorcelled romanticists of that far-off strange future. In
that instant all the "new" schools of literature will perish; all
the magazines sufficiently "vital" to be in bankruptcy will suspend
publication; and--for that single instant,--the youngest of that far
day's "realists" will cease from telling about what a devil of a fellow
he was at college.
"Now," these immortals will say, "do you leave off this foolishness,
and contrive for us fresh adventures."
And the tale-tellers will obey.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 2: The reference is to a then prevalent form of brigandage
and blackmail practised by the females of the smaller American cities,
by which reputable women also were permitted to "accost" and to
exercise all the other street privileges of strumpets.]
[Footnote 3: A minor poet and essayist of the period.]
[Footnote 4: In the Revised Version: King James's bishops hushed up
this awkward matter with a pious mistranslation.]
IV
THE THIN QUEEN OF ELFHAME
"This pleasing method of instilling instruction into the mind has been
found by experience to be the shortest and best way of accomplishing
that end among all ranks of persons. The fable of The Poor Man and His
Lamb, for example, as related by Nathan to King David, carried with
it a blaze of truth that flashed conviction on the mind of the royal
transgressor: and many lessons of reproof, religion, and morality, we
find to be continually delivered in this mode by the sages."
_4._
_The Thin Queen of Elfhame_
§ 37
The literary artist plays, I had said, with these large ageless
symbols. And all artists would, I thought, continue indefinitely in
such playing, because their fundamental desire in life is not quite the
same desire which guides their fellows. The artist is as other men:
he may well, in common with Shylock, assert himself to be fed by the
same food and subject to the same diseases as a Christian is: and yet
between him and the Christian is a difference.
Certainly, there was a difference: and the nearest I could come to
defining this difference was to say it lay paradoxically housed in
the circumstance that the artist, precisely like the most zealous of
Christians, is in this material, four-square world not ever utterly
at home. The Christian's desiderated home, we knew, was heaven: but
the artist, as I had suggested, looked to a somewhat different savior.
Meanwhile the artist went among men as a visitor, evincing at once
the astonished interest and the detachment of a tourist in a foreign
country. His home, and his fundamental desire, stayed elsewhere. This
world of men and women did not content nor even vitally concern him:
and always he wanted--no matter with what nebulousness he envisaged his
need,--something else, which, somehow, was his heritage.
Some day, the artist felt, he would set forth to seek and find this
needed something, like Anavalt in the old tale which I had once retold.
And I fell here to recalling the story of Anavalt's last quest. For
I had been assured time and again that this tale was a parable of a
withdrawal from life to the solaces of art, and that there was some
obvious symbolism, toward the end, in a seemingly off-hand reference
to the tenuity of canvas and of paper. And I could only reply with the
admission which youth finds it impossible to make about anything, but
which with age comes easier. I said, I do not know. Nescience seemed
alike the end and the beginning of the old story, which narrated why so
many silken ladies wept....
§ 38
For even just how many silken ladies wept, well out of eyeshot of their
husbands, when it was known that courteous Anavalt had left Count
Emmerick's court, remains an indeterminable matter. But it is certain
the number was large. There were, in addition, the tale tells, three
women whose grieving for him was not ever to be ended: these did not
weep. In the meanwhile, with all this furtive sorrowing some leagues
behind him, and with a dead horse at his feet, tall Anavalt stood at a
sign-post, and doubtfully considered a rather huge dragon.
"No," the dragon was saying, comfortably, "no, for I have just had
dinner, and exercise upon a full stomach is unwholesome. So I shall not
fight you, and you are welcome, for all of me, to go your ways into the
Wood of Elfhame."
"Yet what," says Anavalt, "what if I were to be more observant than you
of your duty and of your hellish origin? and what if I were to insist
upon a fight to the death?"
When dragons shrug in sunlight their bodies are one long green
glittering ripple. "I would be conquered. It is my business to be
conquered in this world, where there are two sides to everything, and
where one must look for reverses. I tell you frankly, tired man, that
all we terrors who keep colorful the road to the Elle Maid are here for
the purpose of being conquered. We make the way seem difficult, and
that makes you who have souls in your bodies the more determined to
travel on it. Our thin Queen found out long ago that the most likely
manner of alluring men to her striped windmill was to persuade men she
is quite inaccessible."
Said Anavalt, "That I can understand; but I need no such baits."
"Aha, so you have not been happy out yonder where people have souls?
You probably are not eating enough: so long as one can keep on eating
regularly, there is not much the matter. In fact, I see the hunger in
your eyes, tired man."
Anavalt said:
"Let us not discuss anybody's eyes, for it is not hunger, nor
indigestion either, which drives me to the Wood of Elfhame. There is a
woman yonder, dragon, a woman whom ten years ago I married. We loved
each other then, we shared a noble dream. To-day we sleep together,
and have no dreams. To-day I go in flame-colored satin, with heralds
before me, into bright long halls where kings await my counsel, and my
advising becomes the law of cities that I have not seen. The lords of
this world accredit me with wisdom, and say that nobody is more shrewd
than Anavalt. But when at home, as if by accident, I tell my wife
about these things, she smiles, not very merrily. For my wife knows
more of the truth as to me and my powers and my achievements than I
myself would care to know: and I can no longer endure the gaze of her
forgiving eyes, and the puzzled hurt which is behind that forgiveness.
So let us not discuss anybody's eyes."
"Well, well!" the dragon returned, "if you come to that, I think it
would be more becoming for you not to discuss your married life with
strangers, especially when I have just had dinner, and am just going to
have a nap."
With that the evil worm turned round three times, his whiskers drooped,
and he coiled up snugly about the sign-post which said "Keep Out of
These Woods." He was a time-worn and tarnished dragon, as you could
see now, with no employment in the world since men had forgotten the
myth in which he used to live appallingly; so he had come, in homeless
decrepitude, to guard the Wood of Elfhame.
Anavalt thus left this inefficient and outmoded monster.
§ 39
And the tale tells how, when Anavalt had passed this inefficient and
outmoded monster, Anavalt went into the wood. He did not think of the
tilled meadows or the chests of new-minted coin or the high estate
which belonged to Anavalt in the world where people have souls. He
thought of quite other matters as he walked in a dubious place. Here to
the right of Anavalt's pathway were seen twelve in red tunics: they
had head-dresses of green, and upon their wrists were silver rings.
These twelve were alike in shape and age and loveliness: there was no
flaw in the appearance of any, there was no manner of telling one from
another. All these made a lament, with small sweet voices that followed
the course of a thin and tinkling melody: they sang of how much better
were the old times than the new; and none could know more thoroughly
than did Anavalt the reason of their grieving, but since they did
not molest him he had no need to meddle with these women's secrets
any more. So he went on: and nothing as yet opposed him; at most, a
grass-hopper started from the path, sometimes a tiny frog made way for
him.
He came to a blue bull that lay in the road, blocking it.
§ 40
The tale tells that a blue bull lay in the road, blocking it. The tale
narrates that this beast appeared more lusty and more terrible than
other bulls, telling of how all his appurtenances were larger and
seemed more prodigally ready to give life and death.
Courteous Anavalt cried out, "O Nandi, now be gracious, and permit me
to pass unhindered toward the striped windmill."
"To think," replied the bull, "that you should mistake me for Nandi!
No, tired man, the Bull of the Gods is white, and nothing of that
serene color may ever come into these woods."
And the bull nodded very gravely, shaking the blue curls that were
between his cruel horns.
"Ah, then, sir, I must entreat your forgiveness for the not unnatural
error into which I was betrayed by the majesty of your appearance."
While Anavalt was speaking, he wondered why he should be at pains to
humor an illusion so trivial as he knew this bull to be. For this of
course was just the ruler of the Kittle cattle which everywhere feed
upon the dewpools. The Queen of Elfhame, in that low estate to which
the world's redemption had brought her, could employ only the most
inexpensive of retainers, the Gods served her no longer.
"So you consider my appearance majestic! To think of that now!"
observed the flattered bull; and he luxuriously exhaled blue flames.
"Well, certainly you have a mighty civil way with you, to be coming
from that overbearing world of souls. Still, my duty is, as they say,
my duty; fine words are less filling than moonbeams: and, in short, I
do not know of any sound reason why I should let you pass toward Queen
Vae."
Anavalt answered:
"I must go to your thin mistress because among the women yonder whose
bodies were not denied to me there is one woman whom I cannot forget.
We loved each other once; we had, as I recall that radiant time, a
quaint and callow faith in our shared insanity. Then somehow I stopped
caring for these things, I turned to matters of more sensible worth.
She took no second lover, she lives alone. Her beauty and her quick
laughter are put away, she is old, and the home of no man is glad
because of her who should have been the tenderest of wives and the most
merry of mothers. When I see her there is no hatred in the brown eyes
which once were bright and roguish, but only forgiveness and a puzzled
grieving. Now there is in my mind no reason why I should think about
this woman differently from some dozens of other women who were maids
when I first knew them, but there is in my mind an unreason that will
not put away the memory of this woman's notions about me."
"Well," said the bull, yawning, "for my part, I find one heifer as good
as another; and I find, too, that in seeking Queen Vae one pretext is
as good as another pretext, especially from the mouth of such a civil
gentleman. So do you climb over my back, and go your way, to where
there are no longer two sides to everything."
Thus Anavalt passed the King of the Kittle cattle.
§ 41
Anavalt thus passed the King of the Kittle cattle, and the tale tells
how Anavalt journeyed deeper into the Wood of Elfhame. No trumpets
sounded before him as they sounded when the Anavalt who was a great
lord went about the world where people have souls: and the wonders
which Anavalt saw to this side and to that side did not disturb him,
nor he them. He came to a house of rough-hewn timber, where a black
man, clothed in a goat-skin, barked like a dog and made old gestures.
This, as Anavalt knew, was the Rago: within the house sat cross-legged,
at that very moment, the Forest-Mother, whose living is innocent of
every normal vice, and whose food is the red she-goat and men. Yet upon
the farther side of the home of perversity was to be seen a rusty nail
in the pathway, and bits of broken glass, prosaic relics which seemed
to show that men had passed this place.
So Anavalt made no reply to the obscene enticements of the Rago.
Anavalt went sturdily on, to a tree which in the stead of leaves was
overgrown with human hands: these hands had no longer any warmth in
them as they caught at and tentatively figured Anavalt, and presently
released him.
Now the path descended, among undergrowth that bore small purple
flowers with five petals. Anavalt came here upon wolves which went
along with him a little way. Running they could not be seen, but as
each wolf leaped in his running his gray body would show momentarily
among the green bushes that instantly swallowed it: and these wolves
cried hoarsely, "Janicot is dead!" But for none of these things did
Anavalt care any longer, and none of the peculiarities of Elfhame
stayed him, until his path had led further downward, and the roadway
had become dark and moist. Here were sentinels with draggled yellow
plumes, a pair of sentinels at whom Anavalt looked only once: then with
averted head he passed them, in what could not seem a merry place to
Anavalt, for in the world where people have souls he was used to mirth
and soft ease and to all such delights as men clutch desperately in the
shadow of death's clutching hand.
In this place Anavalt found also a naked boy.
§ 42
In this place Anavalt found, as the tale tells, a naked boy whose body
was horrible with leprosy: this malady had eaten away his fingers, so
that they could retain nothing, but his face was not much changed.
The leper stood knee-deep in a pile of ashes: and he demanded what
Anavalt was called nowadays.
When courteous Anavalt had answered, the leper said then:
"You are not rightly called Anavalt. But my name is still
Owner-of-the-World."
Says Anavalt, very sadly, "Even though you bar my way, ruined boy, I
must go forward to the windmill of the Elle Maid."
"And for what reason must you be creeping to this last woman? For she
will be the last,--as I forewarn you, tired man, who still pretend to
be Anavalt,--she will be the last of all, and of how many!"
Anavalt answered:
"I must go to this last love because of my first love. Once I lay under
her girdle, I was a part of the young body of my first love. She bore
me to her anguish, even then to her anguish. I cannot forget the love
that was between us. But I outgrew my childhood and all childishness:
I became, they say, the chief of Manuel's barons: and my living has
got me fine food and garments and tall servants and two castles and
a known name, and all which any reasonable mother could hope for her
son. Yet I cannot forget the love that was between us, nor our shared
faith in what was to be! To-day I visit this ancient woman now and
then, and we make friendly talk together about everything except my
wife, and our lips touch, and I go away. That is all. And it seems
strange that I was once a part of this woman,--I who have never won to
nor desired real intimacy with anyone,--and it seems strange to hear
people applauding my wisdom and high deeds of statecraft, and in all
matters acclaiming the success of Anavalt. I think that this old woman
also finds it strange. I do not know, for we can understand each other
no longer. I only know that, viewing me, there is in this old woman's
filmed eyes a sort of fondness, even now, and a puzzled grieving. I
only know that her eyes also I wish never to see any more."
"Still, still, you must be talking Œdipean riddles!" the leper
answered. "I prefer simplicity, I incline to the complex no longer. So,
very frankly, I warn you, who were Anavalt, that you are going, spent
and infatuate, toward your last illusion."
Anavalt replied:
"Rather do I flee pellmell from the illusions of others. Behind me I
am leaving the bright swords of adversaries and the more deadly malice
of out-rivalled friends and the fury of some husbands, but not because
I fear these things. Behind me I am leaving the puzzled eyes of women
that put faith in me, because I fear these unendurably."
"You should have feared them earlier, tired man," replied the other,
"in a sunlit time when I who am Owner-of-the-World would wonderfully
have helped you. Now you must go your way, as I go mine. There is one
who may, perhaps, yet bring us together once again; but now we are
parted, and you need look for no more reverses."
As he said this, the ruined boy sank slowly into the ash-heap, and so
disappeared; and Anavalt went on, through trampled ashes, into the
quiet midst of the wood. Among the bones about the striped windmill
that is supported by four pillars, the witless Elle Maid was waiting.
§ 43
The witless Elle Maid was waiting there, as the tale tells, among much
human wreckage. She rose and cried:
"Now you are very welcome, Sir Anavalt. But what will you give Maid
Vae?"
Anavalt answered, "All."
"Then we shall be happy together, dear Anavalt, and for your sake I am
well content to throw my bonnet over the windmill."
She took the red bonnet from her head, and turned. She flung her
bonnet fair and high. So was courteous Anavalt assured that the Queen
of Elfhame was as he had hoped. For when seen thus, from behind, the
witless Queen was hollow and shadow-colored, because Maid Vae is just
the bright thin mask of a woman, and, if looked at from behind, she is
like any other mask, with no more thickness than has canvas or paper.
So when she faced him now and smiled,--and as if in embarrassment
looked down and pushed aside a thigh bone with her little foot,--then
Anavalt could see that the Elle Maid was, when properly regarded, a
lovely and most dear illusion.
He kissed her. He was content. Here was the woman he desired, the woman
who did not exist in the world where people have souls. The Elle Maid
had no mortal body that time would parody and ruin, she had no brain to
fashion dreams of which he would fall short, she had no heart that he
would hurt. There was an abiding peace in this quiet Wood of Elfhame
wherein no love could enter, and nobody could, in consequence, hurt
anybody else very deeply. At court the silken ladies wept for Anavalt,
and three women were not ever to be healed of their memories: but in
the Wood of Elfhame, where all were soulless masks, there were no
memories and no weeping, there were no longer two sides to everything,
and a man need look for no reverses.
"I think we shall do very well here," said courteous Anavalt, as yet
again he kissed Maid Vae.
V
CELESTIAL ARCHITECTURE
"To this end, that Scyrian Pherecydes, Pythagoras his Master, broached
in the East among the Heathens first the immortality of the Soul, as
Trismegistus did in Egypt, with a many of feigned Gods. 'Twas for a
politic end and to this purpose the old Poets feigned those Elysian
fields, their Æcus, Minos, and Rhadamanthus, their infernal Judges,
and those Stygian lakes, fiery Phlegethons, Pluto's kingdom, and
variety of torments after death."
_5_.
_Celestial Architecture_
§ 44
The literary artist plays, I had said, with death. But everybody played
with death: it was the one subject not anywhere to be approached except
in a spirit of sober superficiality. And I wanted--in at any event this
epilogue to the Biography,--to offend the sensibilities of nobody. At
forty-five one has become, with no choice in the matter, bourgeois; and
has no least desire to épater one's clan.
Here, indeed, it occurred to me that, somewhat farther back, I had
referred, without assuming the proper elongation of countenance and
a suitably spondaic utterance, to our natural delight in most forms
of what we are generally agreed to describe as sin. And I hoped that
would not be taken as implying that we can nowhere find more diverting
employment than in wrong-doing, and should give over our lives to its
practise. For iniquity, in its pleasanter branches, I reflected, is
a pursuit in which the young excel. With age, one is adapted only for
the less amusing crimes: and so with age one tends, upon the whole,
and willy-nilly, to become reasonably virtuous. One tends, one in fact
is driven, to seek diversion in the alcoves of thought rather than of
action. One begins to toy amorously with ideas, now that age abates the
ardor and the equipment for more juvenile recreations.
Of course there were many ideas to play with: so congressmen harped
zealously upon morals, with a just half-boastful air of having often
heard of them; the clergy averted from instructing Heaven in its
painful duty toward Germany, to settle civic affairs and the proper
number of feet allowable to an embrace in moving picture films; and
among our state justiciary far-reaching codes of literary criticism,
not to speak of Clean Book Leagues, were evolved by the distressing
discovery that one's daughter was running counter to parental
traditions by reading a book.
But hardier spirits would play with the greatest and most diverting
of all ideas.... So that, in the outcome, I decided I would not,
as I had intended to do, recur to Henry Adams. His thinking hardly
aspires, it lacks such elevation as would warrant dwelling upon its
modest pinnacles. Besides, there was always the ugly book which Adams
wrote about John Randolph of Roanoke, to shake one's faith in the
_Education_: once anybody has been at public pains to demonstrate
himself an expert at coloring and falsifying the truth about another
man, he cannot complain if none regards very trustingly his pretensions
to write the truth as to himself. No doubt the prompter to this
biographical blackguardism, the notion of standing up for your family
name and your great-grandfather's intelligence, was all very well: and
here, indeed, I could peculiarly sympathize, since it happened that my
own paternal great-grandfather, also, had been aspersed by Randolph
with just the same spirited and careful malignity he displayed in his
verbal portraits of the Adams "bear and cub." Even so, it seemed to me
that the natural impulse to atone by defaming Randolph was more easily
understood than justified.
§ 45
In any event, this Henry Adams, too, is everywhere faintly rancid with
the taint of Puritanism, and that fact could not but lead me into
injustice. Puritanism has many excellent points, which it perhaps
employs too much in the manner of the porcupine: yet we Virginians
cannot ever quite overcome our feeling that the Puritans are parvenus,
deriving from families too recently arrived in this country to be as
yet completely Americanized. We have never, for that matter, learned
to think of the Pilgrim Fathers and their descendants as belonging,
exactly, to the gentry. And while we do try, at a pinch, to be polite
and respectful about their undeniable virtues, the result, somehow,
stays a bit unconvincing and condescending.
Besides, I had faced my especial troubles with the Puritan tradition,
through the imbroglio incidental to the attempt to suppress
_Jurgen_, and through the clinging, undesirable repute thus
fastened to that book, and indeed to my books in general. I mildly
resent, even now, my need to rest for the remainder of my lifetime
under the imputation of being in lack-lustre eyes an "indecent writer."
It sounds all very well, and stays, I believe, undeniable, to say that
it was only a coterie of the obsessed--obsessed with the mad notion
that "decency" is an affair of corporal centrifugality,--who had
esteemed _Jurgen_ an improper book. But that is, too, upon a par
with protesting on a pestered summer night it is only mosquitoes who
are annoying you. Those shyster Sanhedrins of tinpot Torquemadas--as
Mr. Mencken, you may remember, has for some reason or another not
yet called the incorporated supporters of the Puritan tradition in
letters,--are, beyond question, made up of peculiarly filthy and
senseless little creatures acting after the law of their insectean
kind. Yet they are also innumerable and poisonous: and they are blest,
too (no doubt in common with the mosquitoes) with sincerity and an
approving conscience, in all these assaults of the petty upon that
which, however harmless, offends them by being bigger than they are.
But I drift into a discussion of the _Jurgen_ case, which, as
goes the law, is settled: and all that I really need to say about the
indecency of _Jurgen_, or of the Biography as a whole, and about
the baffling literary problem of censorship in general, was said some
while ago.
§ 46
For censorship of our reading matter, as I granted even when
_Jurgen_ was yet lying under arrest in Mr. Sumner's[5] cellar,
may, in pure theory, be--just possibly--advisable. In practise, though,
I can imagine no persons or class of persons qualified to perform
this censorship. Speaking here with all, if only, the respect due to
the Society for the Suppression of Vice, I must none the less insist
there is a difference between pornography and fine literature, if but
the difference that everybody enjoys the first where few care one
way or the other about the second: and certainly the two should be
appraised by diverse and appropriate standards. A work of art should
therefore, in theory, be judged entirely as a work of art, by a jury of
practitioners of the art concerned.
Yet, since every self-respecting author at bottom abominates his
competitors, despises his inferiors, and is frantically irritated by
the writings of those who differ from him in æsthetic canons, such an
arrangement would, in practise, only fling open more conspicuous fields
wherein to flaunt the mutual spite and miscomprehension common to us
creative writers. Besides, it is not difficult to forecast what sort of
writers might, and would, be chosen for the judiciary, as representing
pre-eminence in letters by the happiest combination of mediocrity and
senility. Thus, in the end, an attempt to establish a purely "literary"
tribunal would result in setting over American art a death-watch of
genial clergymen and decrepit college professors: and I despondently
question if their decisions would be a whit less imbecile than the
present arbitraments of the Society's hired spies.
It remains, moreover, the defect of every method of legal "suppression"
that magistrates and courts of law are unable really to suppress any
book. A book, once printed, either suppresses itself or else stays,
as things human fare, immortal. And that always appeared to me the
very silliest feature of the _Jurgen_ imbroglio. Irrespective
of any possible legal decision, as I patiently pointed out, over and
over again, when _Jurgen_ lodged in Mr. Sumner's cellar, the
book existed in a sufficient number of unarrestable copies to place
it beyond destruction by anything except its own inherent faults. If
_Jurgen_ contained the right constituents it would live; and if it
lacked the stuff of longevity it would in due course die: either way,
the outcome was to be decided neither by me nor by vice commissioners,
nor even by a judge and a grand jury.
Nobody disputed this logic: nobody in fact paid any attention to it.
And as touches my personal share in the publication of an "indecent
book called _Jurgen_"--though, indeed, I hear that a great deal of
the Biography is "indecent,"--it is in the end by my book that I must
be condemned or justified, rather than by what anyone, including me,
may for some while to come elect to say about my book, which is the
Biography. So I say nothing. For against the explicit charge of having
violated the current morality of 1920, I think, any serious defence
would be waste of effort, if only because the question must so soon,
and in fact already tends to, become of purely antiquarian interest.
Our children may not improve, even from the standpoint of humor, upon
our moral standards, but our children will certainly not retain them.
When, as must inevitably happen before very long, our present ethical
criteria have come to seem as quaint as those of the Druids or the
Etruscans, or even as the flyblown and rococo axioms of 1913 appear
nowadays, offences against any one of these outmoded codes will hardly
be esteemed worth talking about. Should _Jurgen_ be remembered ten
years hence, it will, through being remembered, be amply exonerated:
whereas if _Jurgen_ be forgotten, the book will then of course
be violating nobody's moral sensibility. Time thus lies under bond to
silence, whether with praise or with oblivion, every conceivable sort
of "moral" aspersion; and willy-nilly I must defer to time.
None the less do I still believe that _Jurgen_ is, as originally
labelled, "a book wherein each man will find what his nature enables
him to see": and when anyone confesses that he finds therein only
"offensiveness, and lasciviousness, and lewdness, and indecency," I
must make bold to take the announcement as a less candid summary of the
book's nature than of the critic's.
§ 47
What can be done, people very often ask of me, with a flattering if
misplaced assumption of my ability to answer,--what can be done toward
restraining our present literary saturnalia of prudishness? And I
must answer, if at all, with a shrug: for the intelligent here contend
against well-meaning and courageous persons who fight for high aims.
The most fantastic feature of this droll year-long warring is the
profound sincerity of the participants, upon both sides. You and I
may know--and welcome, as the saying runs,--that we are in the right
so far as goes the unhuman abstraction called rationality. But the
officers and backers of the Clean Book League and of the Society for
the Suppression of Vice, also, quite honestly believe they are engaged
in praiseworthy work when, to cite but two farces from the exhaustless
repertoire, they hale Petronius and _Mademoiselle de Maupin_ into
the police courts.
Indeed they appear inebriated to these antics by much the same real
love of virtue which incites a portion of their congeners to burn an
unruly negro as a torch to illumine their reprehension of lawlessness;
and drives yet others to express their disfavor of intemperance by
decreeing that wine is a compound too atrocious to be employed for any
purpose except to symbolize the blood of Christ. In the face of so many
laudable intentions thus obscurely communicated, we can but deduce, I
am afraid, that whenever stupidity and high morals pig together they
beget an offspring doubly cursed with zealotry and toxic aphasia. Nor,
of course, does it appear quite unblasphemous to contend against these
presumably ordained phenomena.
At all events, those who believe the artist has any "rights" are in
the negligible minority. I hardly need to explain why the bashaws of
such orgiastic societies have embattled back of them the complacent
muddle-headedness of that "solid" upper middle-class which pays
pew-rent, and which from the first has rather fretfully resented any
talk about æsthetics. Dr. Paul E. More,[6] in one of the letters
relative to the _Jurgen_ imbroglio, has nicely summed up this
popular point of view: "I am not at all in sympathy with a group
of writers who would take any protest against the Society as a
justification of what they are pleased to call art. The harm done by
the Society seems to me very slight, whereas the harm done by the
self-styled artist may be very great."
Now that is really the popular and, therefore, the most exalted moral
attitude. For the morality of a republic is, after all, a matter of
elementary arithmetic: and one counts the ballots (sometimes, here and
there, it is said, quite honestly) in order to distinguish between
right and wrong, because the voice of the people is notoriously the
voice of God. And time and again this divine orality has proclaimed
that the American peerage of nature's noblemen does not want to be
bothered with any nonsense about literature and art: for the reasons,
first, that such fripperies play no part in honest poll-tax-payers'
lives; and, second, that in very much the manner of this Dr. More, our
reputable citizenry--obscurely and inarticulately, but none the less
genuinely,--resents the impudence of "self-styled artists" who presume
to know more than their betters about "what they are pleased to call
art."
And here, I must protest, our more reputable citizens are wholly in the
right. I think they feel, without ever quite perceiving, the innumerous
dangers, for the reputable, which lurk in this continual playing with
piety and common-sense. The artist, they dimly feel, is up to something
which--somehow--threatens them and their security: and in this, I
repeat, they are wholly right. If art were not very cruelly restrained
it would empoison and wreck all civilizations, not here to speak of
reordering heaven. But there is no need to worry, because art, as it
happens, is always, and probably always will be, just thus restrained,
by the inefficiency of the artist. So art may never ruin America, after
all.
It seems, in any case, eminently appropriate that in our National Hall
of Statuary, along with such world-famous statesmen and shapers of
human destiny as Jacob Collamer, S.J. Kirkwood and George L. Shoup, the
sole representative of our art and letters should to-day be General
Lew Wallace; for _Ben-Hur_ is really the perfected expression of
the best-thought-of American ideals in literature. And it is equally
appropriate, I like to think, that, when judged by these ideals,
_Jurgen_ and all the rest of the Biography should be decreed
"offensive, and lascivious, and lewd, and indecent...."
Well! a good deal of this I said (over and over again) before the
courts decided that _Jurgen_ had been incarcerated for twenty-one
months, as an "indecent" book, through error.... And I have not
anything to add or to retract. Still, the affair has left me, I
cannot but suspect, with a bias against the Puritan tradition and its
adherents. I feel, indeed, that much of what I have just written down
does not over-cloyingly reek of loving-kindness toward--in Swinburne's
phrase,--"the barbarian sect from whose inherited and infectious
tyranny this nation is as yet imperfectly delivered." So I dismiss the
Puritans and their latter-day flowering in Henry Adams, in favor of
a noticeably different person. I turn instead to M. Anatole France,
as affording a clear illustration of the point I have in mind; and
as perfectly illustrating my point as to the most diverting of all
themes which thought can play with, in _La Rôtisserie de la Reine
Pédauque_.
§ 48
What one first notes about _La Rôtisserie de la Reine Pédauque_,
as I have elsewhere observed, is the fact that in this ironic and
subtle book is presented a "story" which is remarkable for its
innocence of subtlety and irony. Abridge the "plot" into a synopsis,
and you will find your digest to be what is manifestly the outline of a
straightforward, plumed romance by the elder Dumas.
Indeed, Dumas would have handled to a nicety the "strange surprising
adventures" of Jacques Tournebroche, if only Dumas had ever thought
to have his collaborators write this brisk tale, wherein d'Astarac
and Tournebroche and Mosaïde display, even now, a noticeable
something in common with the Balsamo and Gilbert and Althotas of the
_Mémoires d'un Médicin_. One foresees, to be sure, that, with the
twin-girthed Creole for guide, M. Jérôme Coignard would have waddled
into our affections not quite as we know him, but with somewhat more
of a fraternal resemblance to the Dom Gorenflot of _La Dame de
Monsoreau_ and _Les Quarante-Cinq_; and that the blood of the
abbé's deathwound could never have bedewed the book's final pages,
in the teeth of Dumas' economic unwillingness ever to despatch any
character who could be used in a sequel.
And one thinks rather kindlily of the _Rôtisserie_ as Dumas would
have equipped it.... Yes, in reading this book, it is the most facile
and least avoidable of mental exercises to prefigure how excellently
Dumas would have contrived this book,--somewhat as in the reading of
Mr. Joseph Conrad's novels a many of us are haunted by the sense that
the Conrad "story" is, in its essential beams and stanchions, the sort
of thing which W. Clark Russell used to put together, in a rather
different way, for our illicit perusal. Whereby I only mean that such
seafaring was illicit in those aureate days when, Cleveland being
consul for the second time, your geography figured as the screen of
fictive reading-matter during school hours.
One need not say that here is no question, in either case, of
"imitation," far less of "plagiarism"; nor need one, surely, point out
the impossibility of anybody's ever mistaking the _Rôtisserie_
for a novel by Alexandre Dumas. Ere Homer's eyesight began not to be
what it had been, the fact was noted by the observant Chian, that
very few sane architects commence an edifice by planting and rearing
the oaks which are to compose its beams and stanchions. You take over
all such supplies ready hewn, and choose by preference time-seasoned
timber. Since Homer's prime a host of other great creative writers have
recognized this axiom when they too began to build: and "originality"
has by ordinary been, like chess and democracy, a Mecca for little
minds.
Besides, there is the vast difference that M. Anatole France has
introduced into the Dumas theatre some pre-eminently un-Dumas-like
stage-business: the characters, between assignations and combats,
toy amorously with ideas. That is the difference which at a stroke
dissevers them from any helter-skelter character in Dumas as utterly as
from any of our clearest thinkers in office.
It is this toying, this series of mental amourettes, which
incommunicably "makes the difference" in almost all the volumes of M.
France familiar to me; but our affair is with this one story. Now in
this vivid book we have our fill of color and animation and gallant
strangenesses, and a stir of characters who impress us as living
with a poignancy unmastered as yet by anybody's associates in flesh
and blood. We have, in brief, all that Dumas could ever offer, here
utilized not to make drama but background, all being woven into a
bright undulating tapestry behind an erudite and battered figure,--a
figure of odd medleys, in which the erudition is combined with much of
Autolycus, and the unkemptness with something of à Kempis. For what one
remembers of the _Rôtisserie_ is l'Abbé Jérôme Coignard; and what
one remembers, ultimately, about Coignard is not his crowded career,
however opulent in larcenous and lectual escapades and fisticuffs and
broached wineflasks, but his religious meditations, wherein a merry
heart does, quite actually, go all the way.
Coignard I take to be a peculiarly rare type of man (there is no female
of this species), the type that is genuinely interested in religion.
In that his mind is actually at grapple with the most diverting of all
themes, he stands apart. He halves little with the staid majority of
us who sociably contract our sacred tenets from our neighbors like a
sort of theological measles. He halves nothing whatever with our more
earnest-minded juniors who--perennially discovering that all religions
thus far put to the test of nominal practise have, whatever their
paradisial entrée, resulted in a deplorable earthly hash,--perennially
run yelping into the shrill agnosticism which believes only that one's
neighbors should not be permitted to believe in anything.
The creed of Coignard is more urbane: "Always bear in mind that a sound
intelligence rejects everything that is contrary to reason, except
in matters of faith, where it is necessary to believe blindly." Your
opinions are thus all-important, your physical conduct is largely
a matter of taste, in a philosophy which ranks affairs of the mind
immeasurably above the gross accidents of matter. Indeed, man can
win to heaven only through repentance, and the initial step toward
repentance is to do something to repent of. There is no flaw in
this logic, and in its clear lighting such abrogations of parochial
and transitory human laws as may be suggested by reason, and the
consciousness that nobody is looking, take on the aspect of divinely
appointed duties.
§ 49
Some dullard may here object that M. France could not himself have
believed all this while writing the book, and that it was with an
ironic glitter in his ink he recorded these dicta. To which the
obvious answer would be that M. France (again, like all great creative
writers) is an ephemeral and negligible person beside his more
permanent puppets; and that, moreover, to reason thus is, it may be
precipitately, to disparage the plumage of birds on the ground that
an egg has no feathers.... Whatever M. France may have believed, our
concern is here with the conviction of M. Coignard that his religion
is all-important and all-significant. And I find it curious to observe
how unerringly the abbé's thoughts aspire, from no matter what remote
and low-lying starting point, to the loftiest niceties of religion and
the high thin atmosphere of ethics. Sauce spilt upon his collar is but
a reminder of the influence of clothes upon our moral being, and of how
terrifyingly is the destiny of each person's soul dependent upon such
trifles; a glass of light white wine leads, not, as we are nowadays
taught to believe, to instant ruin, but to edifying considerations
of the life and glory of St. Peter; and a pack of cards suggests,
straightway, intransigent fine points of martyrology. Always this
churchman's thoughts deflect to the most interesting of themes, to the
relationship between God and His children, and what familiary etiquette
may be necessary to preserve the relationship unstrained. These
problems alone engross Coignard unfailingly, even when the philosopher
has had the ill luck to fall simultaneously into drunkenness and a
public fountain; and retains so notably his composure between the
opposed assaults of fluidic unfriends.
What, though, is found the outcome of this philosophy, appears a
question to be answered with wariness of empiricism. None can deny that
Coignard says, when he lies dying: "My son, reject, along with the
example I gave you, the maxims which I may have proposed to you during
my period of life-long folly. Do not listen to those who, like myself,
subtilize over good and evil." Yet this is just one low-spirited
moment, as set against the preceding fifty-two high-hearted years. And
the utterance wrung forth by this moment is, after all, merely that
sentiment which seems the inevitable bedfellow of the moribund,--"Were
I to have my life over again, I would live differently." The sentiment
is familiar and venerable, but its truthfulness has not yet been
attested.
To the considerate, therefore, it may appear expedient to dismiss
Coignard's trite winding-up of a half-century of splendid talking,
as just the infelicitous outcropping, in the dying man's enfeebled
condition, of an hereditary foible. And when moralizing would approach
an admonitory forefinger to the point that Coignard's manner of living
brought him to die haphazardly, among preoccupied strangers at a casual
wayside inn, you do, there is no questioning it, recall that a more
generally applauded manner of living has been known to result in a more
competently arranged-for demise, under the best churchly and legal
auspices, through the rigors of crucifixion.
So it becomes the part of wisdom to waive these mundane riddles, and
to consider instead the justice of Coignard's fine epitaph, wherein we
read that "living without worldly honors, he earned for himself eternal
glory." The statement may (with St. Peter keeping the gate) have been
challenged in paradise; but in literature at all events, the unhonored
life of Jérôme Coignard has clothed him with glory of tolerably
longeval looking texture. It is true that this might also be said of
Iago and Tartuffe, but then we have Balzac's word for it that merely
to be celebrated is not enough. Rather is the highest human desideratum
twofold,--_D'être célebré et d'être aimé._ And that much Coignard
promises to be for a long while.
§ 50
The thoughts of M. Jérôme Coignard, then,--here somewhat to retrace
my argument,--untiringly return to the most diverting of all themes,
to the relationship between God and His children, and what familiary
etiquette seems most adapt to keep that relationship an affable one.
I know that religion is, just now, rather out-of-date. I know that
nowadays a great deal of atheism is going about among the foolish and
unreflective. But we may wiseliest, I am sure, put out of mind the
notion of there being no God, and of the dead finding beyond the black
door at the end of the gray corridor, that silver-handled door which
is the sole exit from our workaday existence, nothing whatever. Even
if one would, upon the whole, prefer to find there nothing, here it
remains, in every sense, a rather wasteful parade of agnosticism to
admit the existence of nothing.
It is wasteful because no diversion is to be had of thinking about
nothing. But any amount of diversion can be gained from meditation
upon the strange realms beyond the tomb for which we may, quite
conceivably, all be en route: for in this place also is the proffered
lure that ageless aspiration toward lands which are in nothing familiar.
These conjectural kingdoms were, of course, the earliest chosen subject
matter for poetic adornment everywhere: poets were, of course, the
first to guess at what it would be most interesting to find beyond the
black door: and every ancient religion, again, of course, grew up from
people indulging in the two habits, now equally antique, of reciting
poetry and of taking it seriously. They had at least the excuse that
this poetry was magnificent, because in surveying and populating these
post mortem countries the creating romanticist has displayed his most
imposing reach of power.... Here he, indeed, has need of power: for he
is here intent to make sport with his third great opponent, and to play
with death; intent to bereave the tyrant of all terribleness, intent
to color roseately the dreadful face of doom, intent to detect in the
skeleton's multidentate grinning a smile of reassurance. He has done
this, handsomely.
--Though, to be sure, these promised paradises are fugacious: over
and over again has the Scriptural prophecy been fulfilled as to the
heavens being rolled up like a scroll, and one by one the heavens pass
away with no greater noise than is made by the staid commentaries of
ethnologists. For a winter that will have no ending has oppressed the
blissful fields of Aälu: the proud castle of Nin-kigal is pulled down,
its seven gates are fallen away into dust; and only pedants now and
then recall the lion-guarded golden thrones whereon sat crowned, and
endowed with eternal youth, the chief ones and the sages of Babylon.
Manannan holds court no more in Emhain. Instead, he amicably shares his
somewhat lowlier estate in nothingness with Oannes and Ahura-Mazda;
for all of these well know to-day that all promised paradises are
fugacious.... Nor may the noblest of heroes any longer win to Xisuthros
and that most lovely, nameless land, "at the mouth of the rivers,"
wherein contentment had no wasting away under the nibbling of time, and
human grief was like the fragment of some word in a torn manuscript
written in a language which no man any more remembers. The white vase
of Thoth is broken, also: he has no need of it to-day, he has desisted
from the weighing and the taxing of ghostly imports, now that the
narrow bridge which led across the abyss to Sraosha's thousand-pillared
palace upon Demavend, has for some while been closed to traffic. For
these promised paradises are really very fugacious.... So the carved
and shining house of E-Sagila is decayed; and Olympos may not claim
to oversee and rule the doings of gods and men from a rather modest
official altitude of 9,754 feet. Only the professorial in quest of
solar myths now care to thrust and poke, like rag-pickers, among
the dust-heaps that were Gimli and Audlang and Vidblain: and time
strips every paradise alike of its delights and its believers. Yet,
at forty-five, one does not really marvel at the flying of felicity
anywhence. And so it seems a stranger pillagement that all the hells,
which once were the fine thriving homes of bale and anguish, have been
by time's dilapidation bereft of every little discomfort. For the ice
of Nifleheim is melted: the dreadful flames of Tartarus have spluttered
out like damp firecrackers: even Aratu, wherein reigned mere oblivion,
has been swallowed by oblivion.... Poets build against eternity
sometimes in dealing with trifles; but never in erecting the eternal
homes of men.
Meanwhile it is most gratifying to reflect that, while they lasted, the
glories and the terrors of all this celestial architecture divertingly
filled many lives with spiritual consolation and salutary dread; have
checked extravagance in the way of bloodletting or of chastity or of
whatever at the time was vice; have heartened the devout to eat their
parents or to burn infidels or to give alms, or to do whatever else at
the time was virtue; and have evolved their countless hierarchies of
saints and holy persons. Here is no room for irony. Nuns, doubtless,
have assumed the veil and entered convents in a religious exaltation
as lofty as that with which the virgins of Assyria put on the crown
of little cords and went to the temple of Mylitta and their first
communion with the first amorous male passer-by. Yet, to uphold the
splendors of the paradise of Mohammed his Mussulmans have waged
religious wars with a malignity not often surpassed by the servitors
of Christ: and Solomon may well have gazed upon the completed Temple,
and have beheld the ark of the covenant of the Lord brought in unto
the most holy place under the wings of the cherubim, in very much that
pious joy with which, from high Tenochtitlan, rapt priests looked
down upon the slowly advancing line, two stately miles in length,
of warriors who ascended to disembowelment upon the jasper altar of
Huitzilopochtli. In fine, these hells and paradises, the while that
their bright evanescence lasted, have provided employment, and support,
and recreation, and exalted sentiments to boot, for innumerable
millions.
Even so, in populating these worlds, the romanticist has been tardy
ever to imagine the gods as other than sinister and, as a rule,
detestable beings. You see, the creature stays incurably logical, he
is as faithful to logic as was Florian de Puysange in the old story,
and he reasons from effect to cause. The romanticist has thus from the
first been unable to conceive of this world, which he found, upon the
whole, abominable, as being the creation of any other sort of Demiurge,
or as being ruled by any other sort of overlords. In all heathen
theogonies heaven is thus the home of every pravity in the way of lust
and greed, of deceit and cruelty and plain childishness; and looms as
a mysteriously splendid court of rogues and paphians presided over by
a supreme tyrant, who is also a master-rogue. This formula was, very
gradually, improved upon by Hebraic poets, who in particular recolored
all anaphrodisiacally: so that the Old Testament presents, by and
large, a rather novel and a more strait-laced notion of the Demiurge
and his immediate entourage; with only here and there, in passages
about the sons of God and the daughters of men, and more embarrassingly
in the stories of Eve and Sarah, the unedited, unexpurgated,
unrecolored legend of divine amours left, to consideration, apparent.
§ 51
But about the Jahveh-Elohim of the Old Testament, who remains by tacit
admission the God the Father of the New Testament, I really prefer
here not to speak at all. I find it far too difficult to resist an
unfair bias in the favor of any target of so many assaults. For His
present embarrassment is not merely that Colonel William Jennings
Bryan[7] and the Reverend William Ashley Sunday[8] have ruthlessly
united to compromise Him with their praise: even the state legislators
of Tennessee and Oklahoma, and Florida, have officially endorsed Him
in His difference of opinion with Charles Darwin, and rest vociferant
in Zion.... Outside, is a troubling babblement about tribal deities
and Babylonian myths, and a rather distressing tendency to discuss the
birth of Christ from Joseph's point of view. Meanwhile the ordained
and inescapable clergy are at pains to suggest that in His official
revelations the Lord God of Sabaoth, like the dear, queer, overmodest
old fellow He is, has branded Himself with uncommitted atrocities; and
in their denials of any really grave wrong-doing, commend Him in terms
as high as were, from any pulpit, ever applied to a prohibition agent
detected in embezzlement. And meanwhile too, among the advanced young,
there is much superior sniffing at His bloodthirstiness and variability
of mind, at Jonah's great fish and the bears of Elisha, at Noah's raven
and Adam's rib. And I find it droll to reflect that the deity who was
everywhere trusted and worshipped in my youth is to-day as little
regarded as Jupiter Stator or Marduk of the Bright Glance.
And to me His downfall seems in some ways rather sad. For, as I recall
it, He was not thought of as being particularly cruel and dreadful--any
longer. And the Old Testament was accepted in its entirety and without
any especial difficulty in the Virginia of that day, wherein almost all
other generally respected elderly gentlemen had been, as a matter of
public knowledge, rather wild in their youth.... As I recall it, there
was a prevalent feeling that God had some while since settled down,
in very much the manner of your grandfather; and that the Amalekites
and the Hittites and all those other demolished persons were in some
way connected with the hundreds of Yankee soldiers whom, for equally
inexplicable but assuredly good causes, your grandfather had killed so
long before you were born. Thus there was no large difficulty about our
Episcopalian Jehovah, and really no terribleness....
And I sometimes incline to question if this god--with wild oats
undeniably sown and harvested in the past, but with a prevailing
disposition nowadays to be agreeable, subject always to His not having
been of late upset by one or another mysterious grown-up affair,--was
not, after all, the most plausible sort of demiurge I have yet heard
of. He still seems to me the likeliest creator, upon the whole, to
have fashioned, it may be in some moment of youthful indiscretion
and effusion, such as elsewhere had resulted in people having
mulatto cousins, the wholly incomprehensible world we live in....
And essentially, I find, I still believe in Him, with a faith that
undermines and goes deeper than mere reason because it was developed
in me earlier. During thunderstorms this faith assumes especial vigor:
and while I do not presume to think all this terrific display was got
up solely for my benefit, the notion most certainly does flicker about
me, livid and troubling, that while He has this storm in hand, and is
actually passing my way, it might appear to Him mere thriftiness to
use a thunderbolt in the old, practical, explicit manner. So I do not
quite heartily enjoy the beauty of a thunderstorm.... But the point is
that this demiurge also conformed to the great general rule. The point
is that men have not ever, at any time, pictured the benevolence of
their gods and creators as being anything like a good risk; and that no
mythology has ever told of such gods as would in strict logic seem apt
to be foreplanning a pleasant future for anybody.
None the less, here also, men have very manfully forced that slippery
shirk optimism to help out with logic's work. And so have men always
been assured that these overlords would by and by arrange everything
satisfactorily; and that the door at the far end of the corridor
opened, when you also had done with alcoves, and when you also had
perforce passed through, upon one or another delightful vista. The
fact has been divinely revealed, or in any event has the authentic
Ingoldsbean support of one or another leading citizen who "well
remembers to have heard his grandmother say that 'Somebody told her
so.'" ... And men have preferred to accept the revelation rather than
to recollect that, by all current accounts, the deity accredited with
this revelation is not elsewhere remarkable for truthful dealings. Men
have, out of so many thousand years of speculation, contrived no surer
creed than Coignard's creed, that "in matters of faith it is necessary
to believe blindly." Men have discovered no firmer hope than that,
in defiance of all logic and of all human experience, something very
pleasant may still be impending, in--need I say?--bright lands which
are in nothing familiar.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 5: John S. (Sexton?) Sumner; other authorities state that Sex
was his middle name; secretary of the then notorious New York State
Society for the Suppression of Vice.]
[Footnote 6: Archæologist of the period. Mencken has several mentions
of him.]
[Footnote 7: Of the Third Nebraska Volunteer Infantry.]
[Footnote 8: Itinerant clergyman of the day, who preached a species of
Christianity.]
VI
ROMANTICS ABOUT THEM
"He has more authorities than those whose names he has given. These
are, however, a few: Alcmæon of Crotona; Dionysius of Apollonia;
Herodorus of Heracleum in Pontus, the father of Bryson the sophist;
Ctesias of Cnidos; Herodotus of Halicarnassus; Syennesis of Cyprus;
Polybus; Democritus of Abdera; Anaxagoras of Clazomene; Empedocles of
Sicily; and many more which do not just now occur to my memory."
_6._
_Romantics About Them_
§ 52
The literary artist plays, I repeated, with death. But I had not
meant only in a religious way: I had not meant merely that the
artist lovingly carves the beads, and polishes the rhetoric of the
prayer-books, with which not merely the aged delight to play in turn.
And I had not meant, either, to dwell so long upon orthodox religious
diversions, since reputable religion is of necessity, like any other
popular fashion, an ever-varying unstable affair.
One sect alone--made up of true believers in the everywhere underlying,
and the really religious principle, as I interpreted it, of the
Biography,--seemed not ever to have varied in its faith. I was thinking
of the immodest, impotent, and internecine sect of literary artists.
And I could, I believed, best indicate the two main tenets of the
literary artist's religion by a rather roundabout approach.
§ 53
For chance, no great while earlier, had condemned me to sit by and
listen to a pair of notably successful authors in what, at that time,
had seemed a preposterous talk. This talk, a little, troubles memory
even now.... For they were not at all heeding me. These two when they
forgather effuse a naïve effect of emperors meeting, incognito and with
a relished casting off of formality, in a world of underlings. Each
one of them is, in fact, too fair a judge of literature to depreciate
in anything an admirable book on account of his own name being upon
the title-page: and if these two endure each other excellently, it
is because each loyally esteems the other to be the next to the most
wondrous of American writers, and affects some modest reticence as to
the first choice.
The scene was the library of one of them, the period after dinner. The
visiting author had but now looked up from where his polychromatic
volumes were gaily marshalled (with a perhaps not unpremeditated
conspicuousness) toward a shelf across the way, a shelf whereon the
host's own books more sombrely convened. The two men had, I repeat,
quite recently eaten and had drunk with some thoroughness. They were
replete and a bit drowsy. All earthly worries and obligations stood for
the moment aloof. Both men had reached their later forties; both were
done alike with actual fervors and with real self-distrust; and each,
I am certain, is assured, in his private meditations, of a tolerably
permanent sort of fame.
"We," said the visitor, the while that he, reflectively, thus looked
from the backbones of the one set of books to those of the other, "we
have been lucky."
"I wonder?" said the host....
"Yes," stated the first and (upon the whole) the fatter of the two
speakers, "for we have got what we wanted, without paying the full
price. We might have been poor Dowson or Villon, you know--"
"Or any other of the mighty poets in their misery and customary attics
dead? I always wondered how they managed to stuff the broken window
pane with a pair of trousers, though--"
But the visitor was talking unfrivolously. "Yes, the world's full of
talent. Talent is nothing. Genius is nothing. These congenital amateurs
who have nothing but genius give me a pain." He specified the corporal
location of this pain. He continued: "It is the getting what you want
that counts. And we have got a great deal--"
"I grant it: we belong, we also, to the race of go-getters. But then
the bargain, I suspect, was for cash payment."
Now for an instant, through the two pairs of big round spectacles, as
if with the magnified eyes of somewhat torpid insects, the two men were
looking each at the other, in a slow sort of shared and unmirthful
amusement. They said nothing. Then the visitor went on:
"Yes, we have paid a great deal, too. Still, here at almost fifty we
have rather charming homes and bank accounts, and wives that continue
to put up with us; and the books are done, quite as we wanted them
done. There aren't many of us, you know: not many S.O.B.'s contrive to
say that much unsmashed. No: we haven't paid for doing those books the
full and usual price. We have slipped by, somehow--"
The other surmised pensively: "You mean, by that big Thing that doesn't
approve of our getting our books done? I hadn't guessed He bothers you."
After a request for deific condemnation of the third personal singular
neuter pronoun, the visitor stated he meant all the Things. "They don't
like us, you know. They're as vicious as the bright young men."
"It _is_ droll, how They seem," the host conceded, "to lurk behind
you somewhere, watching, waiting, and--that's the worst,--so able to
wait. They don't have, you see, to hurry. But you have to. So, with
every book, when I unwrap the advance copies, I always feel, Well, I
got that one done, anyway!"
"And we've slipped by Them!"
"So far," the other amended. And he exhibited his fingers crossed.
Whereon the visitor mentioned the infernal regions, with an outbreak
of rolling, oleaginous, wholly unreticent laughter. And he said
exultantly: "But I'm forty-seven! And sixteen books are done the way
I god-damn wanted them done! They can begin on me, now, when They are
ready."
The host, however, looked disapproving. "I wish you would be a little
more tactful about Them. This is my library, you know. I really,
you know, would rather not have anything said here to attract Their
particular attention to the place. You see, only next month I am all of
forty-nine, and there are one or two other books I want to do here."
Both of these aging romantics seemed quite in earnest....
§ 54
They were talking, I reflected, the most incomprehensible of nonsense.
A whit later, though, I believe, I understood these not unpompous
and, from some aspects, not utterly underisible nor unpathetic
fiction-mongers. For, as I now construe it, they talked of that
formidable three with whom the artist plays and makes his troubled
sport. They talked,--they also, I believe,--of common-sense and piety
and death. And so to these oldsters some slight periphrases seemed
called for, since, in their own romanticizing eyes (as I interpret it),
they went as rebels under the fitful surveillance of powers that do not
deal tenderly with rebels.
They felt themselves to have escaped quite unaccountably, thus far.
Besides, at best, you went to each day's typing a bit precariously,
having only the stiffening fingers of this undependable middle-aged
body to work with, nowadays, in a world wherein, according to
the morning paper, your juniors were every day evincing such
inconsideration for your natural feelings, by dropping down with
apoplexies and heart seizures.... Well, by and by would come the
unavoidable, with its concomitant indecent exposure of the partially
done book on which you would then be typing. And people, viewing
it, would perforce decide that your mind had preceded you in your
departure, for people would not comprehend that only in the last
revisions could you knit together the loose ends with verbal
love-knots. Meanwhile you went about the one thing you, nowadays, knew
how to do, typing, always typing, in a continuous tête-à-tête with this
indeterminate tapped-out tattoo of ticktocking types and tinklings.
For you were intent upon getting a fair copy of what might yet be
finished, intent to get down what might yet be permanently phrased, if
only They did not strike in time for to-morrow's paper....
Yes, I, upon reflection, seemed to understand those aging romantics'
odd air of furtiveness--and the blustering, too.
§ 55
For the aim of art is, to the one side, an illegal economy and a
thievish sortie upon oncoming times' remembrance.... This, to be sure,
is the less important of the artist's bifold endeavors. "Fame" and
"immortality" rank in all moderately clear eyes (for reasons to which I
shall recur) as but the stakes that, with favoring luck, may be won at
this game which the clear-eyed play in chief for diversion. The artist,
even so, does undeniably strive for these stakes; sometimes indeed he
(foolishly enough) thinks his "immortality" a really important hazard:
and his art becomes a form of freebooting rebellion, in a world whose
polity foredooms all men to perish utterly as far as go their earthly
relics.... Yet none the less does the literary artist mutinously
attempt to avoid the appointed customs of obliteration; and he tacks
with a harried and piratical shiftiness about the quiet haven wherein
his betters--the far-seeing statesmen and the Federal judges, the
bankers and the writers of book reviews and the big-sleeved bishops
and the best known of moving-picture actors,--all enter every day
and law-abidingly cast anchor, among the wharfs of Lethe. For his
despairing, futile aim is to economize and--herewith to remit that
perhaps over-colored buccaneerish simile, in favor of a more cadaverous
figure,--to embalm as lastingly as may be, where time flows like a
cool and steady wind and all else is vapor, his personal notions. Yet,
somewhere, may be watching him, as to the mazed artist is whispered
by what seems a nameless and troubled instinct, somewhere may be
incuriously observing his rebellion, a power which that instinct fears
as the calm foe of human presumption. Somewhere may exist supernally
an all-overbrooding common-sense aware that the upshot of any man's
life is a matter most profitably forgotten. And this high common-sense
(endowed perhaps with plenary executive duties) may well be one of
Them....
§ 56
To the other side, the artist seeks and goes always
seeking--unpatriotically, if not with absolute irreligion,--to
divert himself in his native universe, whose constitution does not
self-evidently provide for the amusement of the inhabitants. No
artist's long-faced magniloquence about "his work," I must for the
hundredth or so time repeat, can in the least prevent that vocation
being in reality, and only, his diversion.... And a very striking
attestation of this truth, now I think of it, is furnished by the
failure of such talk for one half-instant to delude the man's wife.
For women have, as some profound philosopher or another has observed,
their intuitions. The woman whom marriage with a creative artist has
swindled of a husband thus always knows, or she at worst obscurely
feels, that behind those locked doors the humbug is at a sort of secret
tippling: and for that reason (among others) you will find the wife
of every valid artist to regard his art, however tacitly, however
self-perjuringly even, with unconcealable impatience....
So much is true, I believe, of all the arts. The endeavor of the really
serious creative writer, in any case, is hourly to divert himself:
and, pending extinction, he intends to continue to divert himself with
such fancies as he elects. The man, as I have admitted, lies about it,
through, one would like to think, some remnants of shame. Or perhaps
it is by his publishers alone that the besotted hedonist is restrained
from answering those critics who deplore his fancies, or who pick fault
with his chosen manner of expressing them: "What is that to me? and how
am I concerned with your likings and your dislikings? These notions
divert me. I have set them forth in the fashion which I personally
found most diverting. Why, as we meet here, momentarily, doomed
prisoners in the death-cell of existence, should I be bothering about
your taste in anæsthetics? Mix, in your own god's name, whatever drugs
you like, to keep you firm in magnanimity until you too are summoned to
that last hackneyed journalistic hearty breakfast of ham and eggs and
to the other clichés of being killed. Meanwhile I stick to my approved
strong tipple."
So then--not quite out of rash hilarity,--does the creating writer
intoxicate himself with such self-brewed imaginings as he finds most
effective: so does he flout perforce the opinions of his fellow
citizens, the while that he creates a more approvable race in his own
image: and so does he dismiss, half negligently, the material cosmos
as rather bungling prentice work, in very little exemplifying the
rules which he himself prefers as demiurge. As Hecuba to Hamlet, so to
him is the knowledge that such creatures as "realists" are everywhere
truckling to nature in their tenth large editions, and go enfranchised
in these books to patch up a mimic existence in every respect as
undesirable as their own.... For the creating romanticist quite simply
declines to accept either the human conduct of life upon earth or
any assumable theocratic overseeing of it from heaven as a competent
performance. Men and whatever gods may potter about in charge of men
this myopic weakling unaffectedly esteems to be not at all up to his
standards. Yet, none the less, somewhere from afar may be watching
him--as, here again, seems whispered by irrational instinct,--a power
which exacts, without any pliable descent into logic, that its material
handiwork be approached with the civil condonations of piety....
That power may well be the second of Them. And by this ruthless but
unangered power perhaps the babbling runagate must always be punished,
in one way or another, for his disloyalties to his fellows and to his
native overlords. Such was the feeling, I believe, which fidgeted
in the bottom of the minds of my replete, romantic oldsters,--the
both of them well-nigh used up, it might be, but both unsmashed,
and both unrepentantly aware of not having been, in common with the
most of their contemporaries, wasted,--as they drowsed among their
finished books. For, whatever happened, that many of their books were
finished....
§ 57
Why then, though, granting these delusions,--the sane may reasonably
inquire,--should any madman seek to provoke this punishment, and
even court it with painstakings and with year-long self-denials? The
reply to that question is simple: I do not know. I doubt if anybody
does. Nor, I imagine, had either of these paunched and spectacled
and thin-haired fanatics, blinking among his finished books, the
leisure for such, upon the whole, irrelevant problems.... It would
merely seem, I daresay, to his romanticizing time-bleared eyes, that
single-mindedness, if but occasionally, if but for a brief while as
go the necessaries of high-wrought prose, may evade Them. It would
seem to him that, in this grudged, snatched while, he, somehow,--in
part through less of crass ill luck than daily tumbles mere genius
graveward, and in part, too, through wasting no least moment upon
irrelevant matters,--had contrived to get some of his books completed
in more or less the shape he had wanted, with that irrational, inborn,
resistless hunger which made the other matters irrelevant.... And
then you would be almost as grateful for as you were worried by the
unaccountable way in which you would seem still to be slipping by Them,
somehow, and thus far. And so at times you would bluster to keep up
your courage. And at other times you would cross your fingers.... For,
really, in the last forties, with those depressing items in the paper
every morning, you might with an equal sense of assurance be typing,
always typing, on a battlefield to a distracting accompaniment of
burst shells. And each new book completed by you would thus take on an
element of the miraculous not wholly based upon the volume's contents:
and you would, in point of fact, quite probably unwrap the first actual
copies saying, with rather more of wonder than of gloating, "Well, I
got that one done, anyway!"
For about the third of Them there is no doubt nor any possible
disputing. And it is against common-sense and piety and death that the
artist conducts his utterly futile rebellion.... Yes, I believe, I
understood those aging romantics, who approached, the colophon of so
many books.
§ 58
--Because, I submit, it is wholly conceivable that men may, by and
by, get rid of common-sense and piety; but this human habit of dying
appears ineradicable. There is always ahead, and always a little
nearer, the one and one only exit from the familiar corridor of
our workaday existence. All of us thus pass, futilely, nesciently,
helplessly, through tedium to horror: for we live _in articulo
mortis_; our doings here, when unaffectedly regarded, are but the
restlessness of a prolonged demise; and the birth-cry of every infant
announces the beginning of the death-agony....
And that, too, you observe, is in the approved time-tested style. For
it is through consideration of his own unimportance and transiency that
man rises to the largest resonance of poetry and wisdom. Vanity of
vanities! saith the Preacher, the son of David: and Æschylos answers,
Oh, ye little race of men, what does your living show! and goes on with
the customary observations as to parti-colored leaves that are swept
away by the wind. Horace takes up the tale, We are all bound on one
voyage. Villon continues with derogatory evaluations of the final worth
of the fair queens and the thrasonical potentates and the melted snows
of yesterday; and Shakespeare rounds off the dirge with the assertion
that human living, however full of sound and fury, signifies precisely
nothing.... Everywhere fine literature, in its more purple passages,
tends to voice the futility of man's endeavors, the impermanence of
his works, and his generally unarguable claims not to be worth writing
about.
Nevertheless,--here to continue in this high scholastic
vein,--nevertheless, as Chrysippus of Cnidos, you will remember, has
strikingly phrased a weighty truth, in that noble monograph _On
the Cabbage_ (which some critics of the Alexandrian school, as we
should of course with due caution bear in mind, would attribute to a
somewhat later date and to a pupil of Erasistratus),--nevertheless,
death is the one impending fact which is certain. Now, thought of in
its physical aspects, death is an indignity before which any sort of
human self-respect--not here to speak of the wild actuality of human
pride,--becomes preposterous. Thought about logically, it makes any
conceivable human action rather silly, as upon the whole inappropriate
to condemned persons in a death cell. Thought of in the light of man's
possible immortality, it seems no longer to raise, if ever it did,
any positive enthusiasm. And so beyond doubt the majority of us act
wiseliest by not thinking about it at all, except as a thing which
happens to other people.
And it is perhaps inadequate comfort to reflect that the one world
known to us, wherein everything exists by virtue of destruction, can
hardly be described as a realm of life rather than of death. As I
write, I can observe, in the long field across the roadway, our family
cow indefatigably grazing in the level light of sunset, a stolid Gothic
monster whose placid conduct of existence I have sometimes envied....
More often, though, have I frowningly gazed out of the library window,
in search of some elusive word, to find the creature tirelessly
munching forward, and never for one instant having to use her brain;
and then I have suspected that cow of being a really competent literary
critic.... Well, the grass is, as we say, alive, and by its death she
is being nourished. And it is rather vexatious to reflect that this
cow will probably for some time be retained as the source of our milk
supply. Otherwise I could go on to moralize how she will presently
become steaks and roasts, to furnish me with nutriment through her
cenatical interment; and how I in a little while shall be dead and
nourishing new grasses for her descendants to feed on; and how the
cycle of grass, cow and man will thus go on interminably and, some say,
aimlessly. It could be worked up, I think, into a quite effective prose
passage. Unluckily, I know I shall in every likelihood never eat that
especial cow; and so my neat and edifying sermon is despoiled by the
raid of common-sense, always inimical to art.
None the less do two minutes of reflection beget perturbing offspring,
in shape of the knowledge that everywhere life brings about death, and
death life, until the hardiest of philosophers may hardly dare assert
which upon earth is prevalent. From wasp to tiger, from the eagle to
the frog, all animate beings must kill ceaselessly, and eat and kill
again, until they themselves be killed for another's nourishing. We
may say, as we very glibly do, that the worm is the wren's food: yet
it seems equally true that every wren is but a flying compost of dead
worms, just as that cow yonder is, to the considerate, a heaving rick
of dead hay.... And we human beings also are condemned to incessant
killing, we are doomed to the diurnal massacre of innumerable fellow
mammals, who very much excel us in some virtues, such as patience
and taciturnity, even if they be upon the whole our inferiors in
malevolence and folly. I do not imagine, for example, that many persons
would declare an archbishop to be as near a thorough Christian as is a
lamb, or could, with an unpricking conscience, affirm a congressman to
be, in every district, as intelligent as a cow.
So we all live by grace of killing, as indubitably as did any mediæval
bravo or headsman. Wheresoever, in the familiar Scriptural phrase, two
or three are gathered together, there again is the customary alliance
of the Bible and Shakespeare justified by the aptness of the naïve old
stage direction, _Enter three murderers_.... Nor is it instantly
apparent that an assassination is converted into righteousness by a
subsequent eating of the corpse. It is an epilogue, indeed, which
savors a little distastefully of the necrophile. Besides, a passionate
or disinterested murder may well in many circumstances retain a certain
childish grace, as befits the first invention of the first baby: a mere
murder is often picturesque and, I am told, enjoyable: but that crime
which is called a dinner party was never, to my knowledge, either of
these things.... And therefore one laments this obscene crunching and
devouring which, when reflected upon, abates man's proper pride in his
race, and coolingly checks love and every other exalted sentiment. It
is not possible to think with adoration, or even with actual pleasure,
of the most dear of ladies as the sarcophagus of fish and chicken, as
the moving monument of so many mangled sheep, as the animated ossuary
of oxen, as in brief a mere morgue. And man that is born of woman
does literally, we see, come out of a coffin into the tedium of life,
whereunder he encounters on all sides the yawning of one or another
grave, in the persons of his fellow omnivora.
So by the considerate our world may hardly be described as the realm
of life rather than of death. And in all lands men have obscurely felt
that death was perhaps the beginning as well as the end of all things.
Thus, naturally enough, you find the Northmen talking of Ymir, the
slain giant, whose flesh and blood and bones decayed into our earth
and sea and mountains. In India men told of the giant Purusha, from
whose dead body the world was just thus mortifyingly made: in Babylon,
of rotting Tiamat; in China, of P'an Ku; and in Persia, of Gayomart.
Everywhere you encounter the suspicion that this world and the busy
life with which it swarms reveal the phenomena attendant upon the
putrefying of any other sizable carcass: among all nations the older
poets have, with queer unanimity, identified mankind with the worms
which breed in a puffed and bubbling corpse; and have protested that,
rightly speaking, in our terrestrial existence is nowhere apparent
anything save the operation and products of death.
§ 59
Yet the chelonian-footed progress of science here, as usual, has in
the outcome managed to catch up with the forerunning hare-brained
fancies of the poets. Astronomers are now agreed that we inhabit a
world already dying, a world made tenable for parasites through the
abating of its vital heat; and that our race infests earth only during
the last stages of the globe's demise. We men and women in our worldly
relations rank, if you be an optimist, with lice: if pessimism be your
creed, you will lean to the old poetic idea of our being maggots. For
the science of the astronomer does, in essentials, but revert to the
most ancient notions of cosmology; finds nowhere apparent anything save
the operation and products of death; and rather cheerlessly unveils the
cold and murderous tides of circumambient æther, about which drift so
many other moribund planets among the corpses of their fellows.
None the less, it is with this omnipresent and omnicorporeal monarch
that the artist makes sport, depriving death of terrors with the
opiates of religion; and maiming death of potency likewise, so long
as the artist eludes destruction and survives in his art. To that
attenuated, grotesque and defamatory survival I shall by and by come
back: meanwhile I must protest, even here, that in this third struggle
is no least beckoning chance of victory.
For, before common-sense or piety man figures, as I have said, in the
rôle of Frankenstein; he is as Dom Manuel before the vivified image of
Sesphra; and he combats, without much hope, his own terrible creation:
but here, the opponent seems far more likely to have created him,
however accidentally. By the fanciful may mankind, thus, be viewed as
an unpremeditated by-product, as some serious task's débris, which for
the moment rather clutters this corner of death's workroom. Others
will play with the notion--which, as I remember, Felix Kennaston once
suggested,--of life's having somehow got into the material universe
as a small, alien, unwelcome interloper; and will suspect this is the
reason that death appears to come upon us and our labors frowningly, as
the vexed housewife comes toward the unloved weavings of the spider,
just seen.
But, in either case, the poets are sonorously agreed that never while
time lasts can man's existence really matter; for time, they say, is
death's broom.
VII
DIVERSIONS OF THE ANCHORITE
"He shaved himself, and changed his raiment, and came in unto
Pharaoh.... And Pharaoh took off his ring from his hand, and put it
upon Joseph's hand, and arrayed him in vestures of fine linen, and put
a gold chain about his neck; and he made Joseph to ride in the second
chariot which he had; and they cried before him:--'Bow the knee!'...
And in the plenteous years the earth brought forth by handfuls."
_7._
_Diversions of the Anchorite_
§ 60
The literary artist plays, I had said, with such ideas as he
personally finds diverting.... But at this point criticism, remote but
decisive, dwelt feelingly, and with, I believe, a tinge of imaginative
embellishment, upon the miseries of housekeeping in establishments
wherein people never could manage to be on time for their meals. For I
seemed to have written through and blotted out another entire, bright,
irretrievable afternoon: and rising, prior to a brief venturing into
the society of human beings, I wondered how the poetically favored
simile of the life of a galley-slave could ever have occurred to, of
all persons, some writer or another, as representing thralldom....
After supper I returned to the library: and there--with the artificial
aid of electricity now, somehow symbolically, replacing the true
sun,--I resumed the quest of my epilogue....
To the one side, as I had pointed out, the artist seeks to divert
himself with the ideas which he, whether or no he absolutely and
crudely "believes in them," does personally find diverting. This is
the game he chooses to play: it is the game with which, at any cost,
he intends to amuse himself. And considering all things, I was really
afraid that when Mr. Joseph Conrad talked about the artist being
prompted by "an obscure inner necessity," we overheard the resort
of a pricking conscience to pleonasm. There is nothing particularly
"obscure" about our general human unwillingness to be bored: and the
artist evades his boredom by playing at his art. That seemed to me all
there was to it.
Let us excogitate, as a most pregnant example,--I said, with the
pedantic touch befitting graver issues,--the famous case of Joseph
Hergesheimer....
§ 61
Now, in order to approach the most striking but one of all modern
instances, and the case which in so many features, I believe, resembles
my own case, I must recapitulate a great deal written a while back,
when Joseph Hergesheimer was to me, in the main, a collection of some
half a dozen books, and the hand which wrote them had shaken my hand
not more than half a dozen times. Since then we have become--within
the limits of such confidence as remains possible and wary between
creative writers,--rather intimate....
But I am speaking of a time before this intimacy, and of my very first
impressions of Mr. Hergesheimer as these impressions were derived from
his books alone. At that time so said they, spoke they, and told they
the tale, in "literary gossip," that Joseph Hergesheimer "wrote" for
a long while before an iota of his typing was transmuted into proof
sheets. And the tale told how for fourteen years he could find nowhere
any magazine editor to whose present needs a Hergesheimer story was
quite suited.
It was then, and to-day remains, my belief that, in approaching Mr.
Hergesheimer's writings, one should bear constantly in mind those
fourteen years, for to me they appear, not uncuriously, to have shaped
and colored every book he has ever published.
The actual merit of the writing done during that period of
"unavailability" is--here, at least--irrelevant. It is not the point
of the fable that he high-heartedly wrote a story to which, when
completed, his unbiased judgment could not quite honestly deny such
deference as is due to a literary masterpiece; and which, through
some odd error, was rejected by a magazine that every month was
publishing vastly inferior stories; and which was later declined by
another magazine, and by a host of magazines, with a dispiriting bland
unanimity not unsuggestive of editorial conspiracy. Meanwhile--of
course--he had written another tale, which was much better than the
first, and which proved to be an equally faithful chaperon of return
postage. So story followed story, each dreeing the same weird....
And he used to wait for the postman, no doubt, and to note from afar
that it was a large envelope; and would open the damned thing with a
faint hope that perhaps they just wanted some slight changes made;
and would find only the neat, impersonal, and civilly patronizing
death-warrant of hope. And Joseph Hergesheimer kept on with his
foolishness, without any gleam of success, or even (they report) any
word of encouragement. And doubtless his relatives said the customary
things....
Yet none of these circumstances, either, is the point of the apologue,
because in all save one detail the comedy has been abraded into
pointlessness by over-constant repetition; and is, of course, being
futilely performed at this moment in one prefers not to reflect how
many thousand homes. The leading rôle, though, is too unprofitable
and irksome for any quite sane person to persist in enacting it for
fourteen years. Here I speak with curt decision as to a subject upon
which I protest myself an authority.... This rôle, then, Joseph
Hergesheimer did enact for fourteen years; and that is the fable's
significant point.
§ 62
Yes, it is the boy's illogical pertinacity which is the fable's point,
because that pertinacity at once explains why nearly all the men in
Mr. Hergesheimer's books are hag-ridden by one or another sole desire
which spurs them toward a definite goal, through every instant of their
mimic lives. These men but variously reflect, I take it, that younger
Hergesheimer's "will to write," that wholly selfish and unconquerable
will. To Mr. Hergesheimer, even to-day, it probably seems natural
that a man's whole living should be devoted to the attaining of one
desire quite clearly perceived, because once his own life was thus
dedicated.... The more shrewd mass of practical persons that go about
in flesh are otherwise; and comfortably fritter through the day, with
no larger objective at any time in mind than the catching of a car, the
rounding off of a business transaction, the keeping of an engagement
for luncheon, and the vesperal attendance to some unmental form of
recreation,--with one small interest displacing another in endless
succession, until bed-time arrives and the undertaker tucks them in.
Those fourteen years explain to me the Hergesheimer women, too, those
somewhat troublingly ornamental odalisques. They are fine costly toys,
tricked out in curious tissues: and, waiting for the strong male's
leisure, they smile cryptically. They will divert him by and by, when
the day's work is despatched, maintaining their own thoughts inviolate,
even in that treacherous instant of comminglement wherein the strongest
of men must abate reserve. But their moment is not daylit, for the
Hergesheimer women are all-incongruous with what is done during
office-hours, nor are they to be valued then. Sometimes they are
embodied ideals, to be sure, remotely prized as symbols or else grasped
as trophies to commemorate the nearing of the goal: but for the most
part they rank candidly as avocational interests. I find nowhere in
Joseph Hergesheimer's stories any record of intimacy and confidence
between a man and a woman.... And this too, I think, reflects that
all-important formative fourteen years wherein, whatever may have been
Mr. Hergesheimer's conduct of his relatively unimportant physical life,
his fundamental concernments were pursued in a realm, of necessity,
uninhabited by women.
Indeed, no woman can with real content permit the man whom she
proprietorially cherishes, to traffic in this queer lonely realm, and
she cannot but, secretly, regard his visits thereto as a personal
slight. So the creative artist remains (when luckiest) at silent feud
with his current wife, because both are perpetually irritated by the
failure of their joint effort to ignore the fact that she ranks as
an avocational interest. And the creative artist remains, at bottom,
an anchorite whose actual living is given over to his diversions in
a withdrawn and not over-wholesome country whereinto no other person
can ever enter; and whence he, tired out for the while by his playing,
deviates now and then into four-square existence--should it be only, we
will say, to come down to his supper,--as a talking and laughing and
amorous and blatant animal, very much as other wearied persons wander
off into their dreams.
§ 63
What, though, the dull may wonder, was the precise goal of the fourteen
years of visually unproductive "writing"? Since those first stories
have not ever been printed, one may here seem to advance on a bridge
of guesswork. Yet really, to the considerate, the answer is plain. In
all that is to-day accessible of Mr. Hergesheimer's earlier creative
feats--with one exception duly noted hereinafter,--you observe
perforce an overt negligence, and indeed an ostentatious avoidance,
of any aiming toward popularity. That during the fourteen years young
Hergesheimer labored toward the applause and cheques of a "best-seller"
becomes to the considerate inconceivable. Nor could that well, indeed,
have been a motive strong enough to sustain him thus long, since the
maker of reading-matter, like any other tradesman, has need of quick
returns where the artist battens on immediate rejections.
No: Mr. Hergesheimer's monomania, one perceives, was then to write
for his own diversion. He was then playing all the while at the game
the artist must always play: and doubtless he also, like the most of
his confrères in diversion, devised extremely imposing titles for his
self-indulgence. But the point is that here, for fourteen years, the
one possible incentive for the boy to go on writing was that he enjoyed
doing it. The point is that Joseph Hergesheimer, whatever his voiced
pretexts or his actual intentions, gave over these fourteen years to an
attestation of the fact that the main and the all-absorbing purpose of
literary art is to divert the literary artist.
Some by-products in the way of minor gains, he, questionless, might
look for as he went about his playing with words, and gave all to the
game which he played in large part because he could not help it, and
in part with the hope of, somehow and some day, obtaining an audience
with the same or a kindred sense of beauty.... This hope, to be sure,
seems always a vain aspiration: and that which we loosely talk about
as "beauty" perhaps does not exist as a vital thing save here and
there in the thoughts of not too many and not to be too seriously taken
persons. In life, rather frequently, one appears to catch a glimpse of
something of the sort just around the corner or over the way; but it is
rarely, and perhaps never, actually at hand. Sometimes, of course, one
seems about to incorporate the elusive thing into one's daily living;
and, striving, finds the attempt a grasping at an opalescent bubble,
with the same small shock, the same disrupting disillusionment. And
"beauty," thus, is by the judicious conceded to be an unembodiable
thought, never quite to be grasped by the mind; and certainly not ever
nicely nor with any self-content to be communicated via the pages
of a book, wherein are preserved, at best, the faded petals and the
flattened crumbling stalks of what seemed lovely once to somebody who
is as dead as are these desiccated relics of his ardor and of his
disputable taste.
In brief, it may be granted--and by Mr. Hergesheimer most cheerfully
of all persons,--that during these fourteen years young Joseph
Hergesheimer diverted himself by attempting the self-evidently
impossible.
§ 64
Now, to my thinking, there is something curiously similar to that
unreasonable endeavor to be found in all the Hergesheimer novels.
Here always I find portrayed, with an insistency and a reiteration to
which I seem to detect a queer analogue in the writings of Christopher
Marlowe, men laboring toward the unattainable, and a high questing
foiled. No one of the Hergesheimer novels has varied from this formula,
from the first published of them to the current _Balisand_....
Anthony Ball, of _The Lay Anthony_, strives toward the beauty
of chastity,--not morally concerned one way or the other, but bent
to preserve his physical purity for the sake of a girl whose body,
he finds at last, has long ago been ravished by worms. Again, in
_Mountain Blood_ is no hint of moral-mongering,--for Mr.
Hergesheimer is no more concerned with moral values than is the
Decalogue,--when Gordon Makimmon toils toward the beauty of atonement,
to die in all a broken man, with his high goal yet gleaming on the
horizon untouched. The three black Pennys flounder toward the beauty of
a defiant carnal passion, which through the generations scorches and
defiles, and burns out futilely by and by, leaving only slag where the
aspiring lovely fire was. And through the formal garden ways of _Java
Head_ pass feverishly at least five persons who struggle (and
fretfully know their failure to be fore-doomed) toward the capturing
of one or another evincement of beauty, with the resultant bodily
demolishment of three of them and the spiritual maiming of the others.
That which one, for whatever reason, finds most beautiful must become
one's diversion from all other interests; it is a goal which one
seeks futilely, and with discomfort and peril, but which one seeks
inevitably: such is the "plot" of these four novels. Such is also, as
I need hardly say, the "plot" of the aforementioned fourteen years
wherein not anything tangible was achieved except the consuming of
youth and postage....
Nor does the dénouement differ, either, in any of these novels: the
postman comes with the plethoric envelope which signals from afar that
the result of much high-hearted striving is not quite suited to the
present needs of this world's editor; and sometimes the postman is Age,
but more often he is Death.
§ 65
Now the fifth of the Hergesheimer novels is _Linda Condon_, which
renders self-confessedly a story of "the old service of beauty, of the
old gesture toward the stars,"--"here never to be won, never to be
realized,"--of the service which "only beauty knows and possesses"....
For _Linda Condon_ is to be valued less as the life-history of a
woman than as the depiction--curt, incisive and yet pitying,--of a
shrine that, however transiently, was hallowed.
At the exacting workaday pursuit of being a human being this Linda
fails, fails chilled and wistful. She has, like more of us than dare
proclaim the defect, no talent whatever for heart-felt living: so
that most persons seem but to pass grayly upon the horizon of her
consciousness, like unintelligible wraiths gesticulating,--and always
remaining somehow disjunct and not gravely important,--the while that
all the needs and obligations of one's corporal life must be discharged
with an ever-present sense of their queer triviality. Toward nobody,
neither toward Linda Condon's mother nor lover, nor husband nor
children, may she, the real Linda, quite entertain any sense of actual
attachment, far less of intimacy....
Meanwhile she has her loveliness, not of character or mind, but a loan
of surpassing physical beauty. And to Linda Condon her own bright
moving carcass becomes a thing to be tended and preserved religiously,
because beauty is divine, and she herself is estimable, if at all, as
the fane which beauty briefly inhabits.... And by and by, under time's
handling, her comeliness is shriveled, and her lovers are turned to
valueless dust: but first, has Linda's lost young beauty been the
buried sculptor's inspiration, and this has been perpetuated, in
everlasting bronze. The perfection of Linda Condon's youth is never
to perish, and is not ever to be dulled by old age or corrupted in
death. She comprehends this as she passes out of the story, a faded,
desolate and insignificant bit of rubbish, contented to know that
the one thing which really meant much to her is, as if by a miracle,
preserved inviolate. The statue remains, the immutable child of Linda's
comeliness and Pleydon's genius, the deathless offspring of transitory
things.
Beauty is divine; a power superior and somewhat elfinly inimical to
all human moralities and rules of thumb, and a divinity which must
unflinchingly be served: that, in this book is Mr. Hergesheimer's text.
For this is the divinity which he, too, has served, time and again,
with strangely patterned evocations, in striving to write perfectly of
beautiful happenings.
It is an ideal here approached more nearly and more nobly than in the
preceding Hergesheimer books. Nowhere, indeed, to my thinking, has
Joseph Hergesheimer found an arena nicelier suited to the exercise of
his most exquisite powers than in this modern tale of domnei,--of the
worship of woman's beauty as, upon the whole, Heaven's finest sample
of artistic self-expression, and as, in consequence, the most adequate
revelation of God; and, as such a symbol, therefore, the one thing to
be revered above all else that visibly exists, even by its temporary
possessor. That last is Mr. Hergesheimer's especial refinement upon
a tenet sufficiently venerable to have been nodded over by Troy's
gray-bearded councillors when that phantom woman whom they believed to
be Queen Helen passed,--and a refinement, too, which would have been
repudiated by Helen herself, who, if one may trust to Euripides' report
of her sentiments, was inclined to regard more prosaically her own
personal appearance, as a disaster-provoking nuisance.
Well, and to Linda, also, was beauty a nuisance,--"a bitter and
luxurious god," that implacably required to be honored with sacrifices
of common joys and ties and ruddy interests, but was none the less
divine. Sustained by this one faith, Linda Hallet goes out of the
story, when youth is over, and when she too must pass,--and goes
regarding not very seriously that which is human and ephemeral, even as
embodied in her lovers and her children, nor in herself, but, rather,
always turning grave blue eyes toward that which is--perhaps--divine.
She passes, as at once the abandoned sanctuary, the priestess, the
postulant, and the martyr, of that beauty to which fools had referred
as "hers." She passes not as the wreckage of a toy, but as an outworn
instrument which has helped to further--it may be--the labor of a god.
For she passes, as all must pass, without any assurance of achievement;
but with content. That, really, is the happy end....
§ 66
--Which reminds me that for the most part I am rattling very old
bones. Those seemingly unfruitful fourteen years are to-day at one
with those other fourteen years which brought an elder Joseph into
Egyptian publicity. Neglected merit has here been rewarded with that
sort of loud and full-blown triumphing which in fairy-stories moves
us to delighted applause, and in real life to instant, envious, sharp
disparagement. For Mr. Hergesheimer has long ago "arrived": his books
have found their proper and appreciative audience; whereas his short
stories are purchased, and probably read, along with the encomiums of
ready-made clothing and safety razors, by the I forget how many million
buyers of the world's most popular magazine....
Now, here, when I first wrote about Mr. Hergesheimer, here I seemed
to find stark provocations of uneasiness. I spoke with diffidence,
and was not entirely swayed, I believe, by the natural inclination of
every writer to backbite his fellow craftsman. In any event, dismissing
_Gold and Iron_ (after some reflection) with unqualified applause,
I took up _The Happy End_: and of the seven stories contained
therein six seemed to me to display a cornerstone of eminently
"popular" psychology, ranging from the as yet sacrosanct belief that
all Germans are perfectly horrid people, to the axiom that the
youngest, unrespected brother is invariably the one to exterminate the
family enemies; and duly including the sentiment that noble hearts
very often beat under ragged shirts. And I was made uneasy by the
spectacle of these uplifting faiths--these literary baking powders more
properly adapted to the Horrible Trites and the Gluepot Stews among
reading-matter confectioners,--thus utilized by a Joseph Hergesheimer.
I was made uneasy because I reasoned in this way: when Mr. Hergesheimer
is writing a short story to be printed next to advertising matter
in some justly popular periodical, Mr. Hergesheimer, being rational
and human, cannot but think of the subscribers to that popular
periodical. I forget, I repeat, how many millions of them have
been duly attested upon affidavit to exist, but certainly not many
thousands of our fellow citizens can regard Mr. Hergesheimer at his
best and purest with anything save bewildered abhorrence. So he must
compromise,--subconsciously, I believe,--and must adapt his methods to
the idiosyncrasies and the limitations of his audience, very much as he
probably refrains from addressing his chauffeur in the heightened and
consummated English of _San Cristóbal de la Habana_.
The danger, I reflected, was not that Joseph Hergesheimer would lower
his ideals, nor in anything alter what he wished to communicate; but
was the fact that he must attempt to transmit these things into the
vernacular and into the orbits of thought of his enormous audience,
with the immaculate motive of making his ideas comprehensible. He could
not, being rational and human, but by and by be tempted yet further to
endeavor--as he had flagrantly endeavored in the tale called "Tol'able
David,"--to convey his wayside apprehensions of life via some such
always acceptable vehicle as the prehistoric fairy-tale cliché of
the scorned and ultimately victorious third champion. This was with
a vengeance the pouring of new wine into a usage-battered and always
brazen cup which spoiled the brew....
Six of these stories, then, were beautifully written moral tales:
although, to be sure, there was an alleviating seventh, in "The Flower
of Spain," which was a well-nigh perfect and a profoundly immoral work
of art. I therefore put aside this volume with discomfort....
But I suspect that here the axiomatic mutual jealousy of all authors
should be discounted. As an "outsider" in letters, I could not, at
the time to which I refer, be expected to view with equanimity the
then recent installation of Mr. Hergesheimer in the American National
Institute of Arts and Letters, wherein the other representatives of
creative literature were such approved masters as Mr. Nelson Lloyd,
Mr. Will Payne, Mr. Robert W. Chambers and Professor Hermann Hagedorn.
At this port, once so neatly charted as "the Ellis Island of the
Academy," had the skipper of _The Happy End_ arrived. The fact
had been formally recognized by our best-thought-of cultural element,
that in artistic achievement Joseph Hergesheimer had but fifty living
superiors, and only a hundred and ninety-nine equals, at that moment
resident in the United States: and I, who had not been tendered any
such accolade, could not but be aware of human twinges when Mr.
Hergesheimer as a matter of course accepted this distinction.
So it was, no doubt, the impurest sort of envy and low-mindedness which
caused me here to suspect alarming symptoms. I, in any event, put
aside _The Happy End_ with profound discomfort; and turned to the
reflection that Mr. Hergesheimer had since written _Linda Condon_,
which discomforted me quite as poignantly by exposing to me my poverty
in phrases sufficiently noble to apply to this wholly admirable book.
§ 67
Yet Mr. Hergesheimer, even in the least worthy of his magazine stories,
writes really well. The phrase has an inadequate ring: but of how
many novelists can this be pardonably said by anybody save their
publishers? The majority of us, whatever and however weighty may be our
other merits, can manage, in this matter of sheer writing, to select
and arrange our adjectives and verbs and other literary ingredients
acceptably enough, every now and then: and that is the utmost which
honesty can assert.
But Mr. Hergesheimer almost always writes really well, once you have
licensed his idiosyncrasy of depending upon interjected proper names
to explain to whom his, Hergesheimer's, pronouns refer; or of, as if
with a feigned yawn, inserting the synonym, the qualification, which
explains, suggests, that the word, the phrase, used, printed, isn't,
after all, entirely, quite the affair he'd wanted.... Perhaps I here
drift too remotely into technicalities, and tend to substitute for a
consideration of architecture a treatise upon brick-making. In any
event, I shall not here join in the chorus of the innumerable hundreds
of critics who have pointed out how intensely Mr. Hergesheimer realizes
the sensuous world of his characters and, in particular, the optic
world. Yet I grant, he is the most insistently superficial of all
writers known to me, in his emphasis upon shapes and textures and
pigments. His people are rendered from complexion to coat-tail buttons,
and the reader is given precisely the creasing of each forehead and
the pleating of their under-linen. "The Works of Joseph Hergesheimer"
contain whole warehousefuls of the most carefully finished furniture
in print; and at bric-à-brac he has no English equal. It is all
visioned, moreover, very minutely. Here is a guide who exhibits not
merely the halls and presence-chambers of the building wherethrough
he shepherds the public, but forces you to observe the chairs and
panellings and wall-papers and window-curtains also, with an abnormal
scrutiny. The scenery and the weather, to be sure, are "done" just as
painstakingly; but these are indigenous impedimenta to most stories.
Now of course, like virtually every other practise of "realism," this
is untrue to life: nobody does in living regard adjacent objects as
attentively as the reader of a Hergesheimer story is compelled to
note them. For one, I cannot quite ignore this fact, even when I
read with most complaisance. I have, though, my own faith as to the
value of all descriptory passages: and, it may be, I shall presently
speak of this.... Meanwhile I sometimes wonder if Mr. Hergesheimer
premeditatedly sits down to inventory for scriptorial use the precise
aspect of a chair or an andiron, of a fan or a shelf of East India
money or a fallen magnolia petal; or whether his personal existence is
actually given over to this concentration upon externals and inanimate
things. But he was once a painter; and large residuals of the put-by
art survive.
All this results in a "style" to which the reader is never quite
oblivious. The Hergesheimer dramas--dramas wherein each of the players
has a slight touch of fever,--are enacted, with a refining hint of
remoteness, behind the pellucid crystal of this "style," which sharpens
outlines, and makes colors more telling than they appear to everyday
observation, and brings out unsuspected details (seen now for the first
time by the reader, with a pleasurable shock of delight), and just
noticeably glazes all.
The Hergesheimerian panorama is, thus, if I may plagiarize a little,
rather truer than truth: and to turn from actual life to Joseph
Hergesheimer's pages arouses a sensation somewhat akin to that
sustained by a myopic person when he puts on spectacles.... And thus,
too, is an inoffensive tropic town fore-doomed to be a perennial source
of disappointment to all tourists who have previously read _San
Cristóbal de la Habana_,--that multi-colored sorcerous volume, with
which I have here no instant concern,--and who, being magic-haunted,
will over-rashly bring to rest upon a duly incorporated city, thriftily
engaged in the tobacco and liquor-business, their eyes unre-enforced.
§ 68
Such, then, were, and are yet, this artist's materials: in a world
of extraordinary vividness a drama of high questing foiled, a
tragedy of beauty sought, with many blunders but single-mindedly,
by monomaniacs,--in fine, a performance suggestively allied, in its
essentials, to the smaller-scaled and unaudienced drama of the young
man with the percipient eyes of a painter, who throughout fourteen
years was striving to visualize in words his vision of beauty; and
who was striving to communicate that vision; and who--the tastes of
the average man being that queer slovenly aggregation which makes the
popular periodical popular, and the ostensible leaders of men being
regular subscribers to the slatternly driveling host,--was striving in
vain.
These things are but the raw materials, I repeat,--the bricks and
mortar and the scantlings,--for, of course, there is in Joseph
Hergesheimer's books far more than plot or thought, or even "style":
there very often is that indescribable element which is magic.
When Linda Condon came to look closely at Pleydon's statue, you may
remember, she noted in chief the statue's haunting eyes, and marveled
to find them "nothing but shadows over two depressions." Much the
equivalent of that is the utmost to which one can lay a crude finger in
appraising the best of Mr. Hergesheimer's books. They are like other
books in that they contain nothing more prodigious than words from
the nearest dictionary put together upon ordinary paper.... But the
eyes of Pleydon's statue--you may remember, too,--for all that they
were only indentations in wet clay, "gazed fixed and aspiring into a
hidden dream perfectly created by his desire." And viewing the statue,
you were conscious of that dream, not of wet clay: and you were moved
by the dream's loveliness as it was communicated, incommunicably, by
Pleydon's art.
Now, at its purest, the art of the real Hergesheimer, the fundamental
and essential thing about Joseph Hergesheimer, is just that intangible
magic which he ascribes to his fictitious Pleydon. And the dream that
Joseph Hergesheimer, too, has perfectly created by his desire, and has
so often sought to communicate, I take to be "the old gesture toward
the stars ... a faith spiritual, because, here, it is never to be won,
never to be realized."
This is, I think, the "gesture" of the materially unproductive fourteen
years: and its logic, either then or now, is indefensible. Still, one
agrees with Cyrano, _Mais quel geste!_ and one is conscious of
"a warm indiscriminate thrill about the heart" and of a treacherous
sympathy, which evades reason....
§ 69
It was through distrust of this beguiling sympathy that, when I first
wrote elsewhere about Mr. Hergesheimer, I spoke throughout with
self-restraint, and hedged with "I think" and "I believe" and "It seems
to me," and niggled over Hergesheimerian faults that were certainly
tiny and possibly non-existent; because of my private suspicion
that all my private notions about Joseph Hergesheimer were probably
incorrect. To me, I confess, he did at that time appear a phenomenon a
little too soul-satisfying to be entirely credible.
Pure reason did not brevet it as plausible that the Hergesheimer I
privately found in the pages of the Hergesheimer books could flourish
in any land wherein the creative writer is as a rule condemned to
choose between becoming the butt or the buttress of mediocrity; so
that I must cautiously refrain from quite believing in this Joseph
Hergesheimer as a physical manifestation in actual trousers and
waistcoat.... Indeed, his corporeal existence could not well be
conceded except upon the hypothesis that America had produced, and was
even nourishing, a literary artist who might endure in the first rank.
Which was absurd, of course, and a contention not to be supported this
side of Bedlam, and, none the less, was my firm private belief.
None the less, also, did it then seem to me the part of wisdom to speak
with very self-conscious self-restraint, because for the judicious any
more thorough-going dicta were checked by the probability, and the
ardent hope, that Mr. Hergesheimer's playing with words and ideas had
hardly begun. Nobody would be so rash as to predict the upshot of any
author's career with no ampler data to educe from than the initial
chapters, however fine. Rather, must it perforce content me to believe
that the Joseph Hergesheimer who had made head against the fourteen
years of neglect and apparent failure, without ever arranging any very
serious compromise with human dunderheadedness and self-complacency,
was now in train to weather unarithmeticable decades of public success
by virtue of the same wholesome egoism. And I could see besetting him,
I said, just one lean danger,--a feline peril which hunts subtly, with
sheathed claws and amicable purrings,--in the circumstance that the
well-meaning Philistia which yesterday had been Mr. Hergesheimer's
adversary, so far as it had noted him at all, would be henceforward
affording him quite sensible and friendly and sincere advice.
Well! the results should, at the worst,--I said also,--be
interesting....
§ 70
And the results have, indeed, been interesting. The drawback to my
appraising these results is the fact that I have since come to know the
author with a familiarity which clouds my vision of his art. I can
invest in my judgment of Joseph Hergesheimer's later books no heartier
faith than I would hazard on my opinion of my own writings.
No: I for various reasons cannot judge _Steel_, nor _The
Bright Shawl_, nor _Balisand_; about my extreme fondness for
_The Presbyterian Child_ here is no need to speak; and as to
_Cytherea_ I shall likewise say not anything. For the man talks to
me--talks all abeam and generally reminiscent of a time-battered cherub
who fell long ago with Lucifer, but only as far as Pennsylvania,--about
the book he is going to write. I, meekly attendant, warm alike to
his notion and to his cordial delight in himself. And by and by he
publishes a volume which, to cold reason, would seem, I daresay, very
faintly suggestive of the book he talked about. But I do not ever read
the published volume in the light of cold reason. Instead, I read with
comprehension. Not only do I understand and by ordinary applaud the
changes from his original conception, the changes based upon logic and
expediency and upon Mr. Hergesheimer's virtually inerrant technical
skill: I also read into the actual book those fine first ideas which,
for one cause or another, proved impracticable, and were omitted
wholly. I read the book, in brief, with a comprehending sympathy that
befogs judgment, and with such passionate unwillingness to find fault
anywhere as makes for no very valuable critical appraisements. I
know it is all most gratifyingly good. But just how good, I have no
notion.... No: here is an artist whom I can no longer criticize with
any feeling of security; and so about his later books (which, indeed,
do not bear weightily upon the point I would now emphasize) I shall
here say nothing.
Yet I must in this place confess that I read sundry criticisms of his
playing--which you may, if you like, call "work,"--with a half-fretted
sense of wonder. Joseph Hergesheimer is, to my mind, a fact, a largish,
a significant, and an enduring fact. The regret of brilliant and
earnest-minded reviewers that Joseph Hergesheimer is not in one or
another feature different, seems a small and ephemeral fact: and I
candidly wonder why the critic thinks the regret worth stating. It
really does, when appraised from any utilitarian standpoint, suggest
the squandered insolence of the gentleman who spoke disrespectfully
of the equator. I do not contemplate with seriousness the notion that
some reviewer here or there may imagine that his disapproval will cause
Joseph Hergesheimer, or, for that matter, any other self-centered
creating romanticist, to follow in his next book the critic's advice,
because such a delusion cannot be harbored, I hope, by anybody. For
the artist plays the especial game he chooses: the diversion he gets
out of such playing is for him the one veritably important thing in
life: and when you tell him you do not approve of all the by-products
of his diversion, he very frequently does not damn your impudence quite
audibly; but he invariably wonders why you should be telling, of all
persons, him about your disapproval, rather as if you expected him to
do something about it.
§ 71
So,--to go back,--I can criticize none of these later books with
any feeling of security. But of one thing I am wholly certain. It
is to the Hergesheimer I never knew that I now have large cause to
be grateful,--to the younger Hergesheimer of those seemingly wasted
fourteen years, which, far from being wasted, were given over to
establishing the fact that at least one other novelist then wrote
primarily to divert himself; and that, for at least one other person,
the craft of the creating romanticist stayed all this while a game at
which the artist played, regardful always of his high and joyous gaming
and of nothing else.
Nor, very naturally, does he play with those ideas--any more than does
M. Anatole France,--in which he crudely "believes." I glance back, for
example, over the novels of which I have just spoken. Well! the author
of _Mountain Blood_ and _The Lay Anthony_ is, I consider,
as rational as most of us about atoning for his misdeeds or about
preserving one's physical chastity: I would trust him as utterly as
I would myself never in private life to evince upon either topic any
embarrassing fanaticism. And it is equally gratifying to record that
the man who wrote _The Three Black Pennys_ and _Linda Condon_
is neither the dazed slave of carnal passion nor of any continual
high evaluation of his own physical loveliness. The "ideas" of these
novels, in fine, are not his idols but his playthings; and are the
diverting toys with which the anchorite has entertained his stay in
that withdrawn queer lonely country to which also I recently referred.
And such, I repeat, is the ultimate and lean, but real, value of all
human ideas. So I applaud the wisdom of Joseph Hergesheimer. I applaud
too, because of the joy I have got out of it, his talent. Yet I in
part applaud because of my pleased consciousness that this fine talent
seems, like all considerable creative talent, a form of self-indulgence
which has become beneficent to other persons almost by chance. For
I think that through the haze of those "wasted" fourteen years one
glimpses, clearly enough, the artist who labors primarily to divert
himself.
VIII
THE DELTA OF RADEGONDE
"The same mode of teaching was not adopted by all, nor, indeed, did
individuals always confine themselves to the same system, but each
varied his plan of instruction according to circumstances. For they
were accustomed, in stating their argument with the utmost clearness,
to use figures and apologies, and to put cases as circumstances
required; and these might be either cases which came under trial in
the courts or fictitious cases."
_8._
_The Delta of Radegonde_
§ 72
The literary artist plays, I had said, at the game of lending to his
personal notions a life which will survive the life of his body. But,
as I prepared to go on to that, I was stayed by an uneasy doubt lest
here was needed some further explanation as to why I should label the
younger Joseph Hergesheimer, and for that matter every other valid
artist, an anchorite. The especial word, I reflected, might still be
considered inappropriate by persons who in their muddled minds had
somehow associated anchorites with extreme religious zeal and with
physical asceticism and pietistic self-denials.
Yet an anchorite was, of course, a person who lived in actual rather
than specious retirement: among the great anchorites of all time, whose
real living was "in the little farm of one's own mind, where a silence
so profound may be enjoyed," had been that Marcus Aurelius who walked
and spoke in unflagging imperial publicity and slept with Faustina....
But, I knew, here again was a matter most nearly explicable by a
parable: and my thoughts turned to another old tale out of Poictesme,
the story of that gallant Holden who was for all the bustle of his
daily living an anchorite and also, in his way, I suspect, an artist.
§ 73
It was, the tale declares, just after the followers of the Silver
Stallion had sacked Lacre Kai that young Holden found, among his
plunder, the triangular portrait of Elphànor's queen: and for the time
young Holden thought little about the picture. He could not foreknow
that its old frame, in shape like the Greek letter Delta, was to
bind all his living. But after a few months of peace the lad went to
Guivric, afterward called the Sage, who was already coming into esteem
as a most promising thaumaturgist.
"Guivric," says Holden, "the lady in this three-cornered picture is the
lady of my love; and you must tell me how I may win her affections."
Guivric looked at the portrait for some while, scratched off a fleck of
paint from it with his finger-nail, and answered:
"There are impediments to your winning this Queen Radegonde. For one
thing, she has been dead for thirteen centuries."
"I admit that thirteen is proverbially an unlucky number; but my
all-consuming love is not to be intimidated by superstitions."
Guivric thereupon consulted the oldest and most authentic poems, and
Guivric admitted:
"Well, perhaps her being dead such an unlucky number of centuries does
not matter, after all, because my authorities appear agreed that love
defies time and death. Yet it does matter, I suspect, that the woman
in this picture was the notion which a dead artist perpetuated of the
Queen Radegonde whom he saw in the flesh."
"So would I see her, Guivric."
"Holden, my meaning is more respectable than your meaning. I mean
that, if the man labored as a tradesman executing an order, your cause
may prosper: but there is the ugly chance that this radiant, slim,
gray-eyed girl was born of the man's brain, very much as, even more
anciently, they say, King Jove brought forth a gray-eyed daughter to
devastate the world with wisdom: and in that case, I fear the worst."
"What, then, is the worst that can happen?"
"Thinking about it too much beforehand," replied Guivric, drily.
Whereupon the young mage gave directions which must be followed to the
letter if one wished to avoid an indescribable fate. But Holden was
cautious, and did follow these instructions to the letter; and when it
proved to be the Greek letter Delta he entered it, and so came to his
desire, and communicated his love to Queen Radegonde.
Now this Radegonde had been alone ever since she was first painted,
because in filling in the background, and in completing her portrait,
the painter had provided her with no company in the quaint triangular
tropic garden he had painted to enhance her charms. So to have Holden
thus thrusting himself into the vacancy was welcome to Radegonde. And
to him her loveliness, and the dearness of her, was greater than he
could quite believe in after he had left the Delta, and had returned,
in the gray and abject way which Guivric had foretold, to the world of
men.
§ 74
Holden thereafter kept the picture in a secret place, and the years
wore on: and in the spring of one of these years Sir Holden rescued
a bright-haired princess, from an enchanter in a large and appalling
line of business near Perdigon: and Holden married her, and they got on
together very nicely. But times had changed in Poictesme, for Manuel
the Redeemer had ridden away to a far place beyond the sunset, and
his wife Dame Niafer ruled over-strictly in the tall hero's stead:
and to Holden life seemed not the affair it once had been, and all
his pleasuring was to go into the Delta that belonged to tender and
warm-blooded Radegonde. The delights of that small tropic garden were
joys unknown in the world of men, wherein there are no such women as
Elphànor's queen: and therefore the poets have not invented any words
to describe these delights, and they must stay untold.
But these delights contented Holden. "Blessed above all men that live
am I, in that I am lord of the Delta of Radegonde," said Holden, who
could not foreknow his fate.
§ 75
And it was to Holden an unfailing cordial, thus to steal away
from his prosaic workaday life of fighting dragons and ogres, and
discomfiting wicked monarchs by guessing their riddles out of hand,
and riding about in every kind of weather redressing the afflictions
of downtrodden strangers in whom he was not interested; and from the
strain of pretending to be wise and admirable in all things for the
benefit of his numerous children; and from living among many servitors
somewhat lonelily. For comeliness and mirth had soon departed from his
bright-haired princess wife, through much child-bearing, and presently
life too had gone out of her; and her various informal successors
proved to be rather stupid once you got to know them. But tender and
warm-blooded Radegonde, whom alone Sir Holden loved, and the engaging
ever-new endearments of Elphànor's queen, were to the knight an
unfailing cordial.
"Blessed above all men that live am I, in that I am lord of the Delta
of Radegonde," still said, in his gray beard, Sir Holden, who could not
foreknow his fate.
§ 76
But as the years went, so went youth; and the appearance and the
abilities of Holden were altering, and bashfully Radegonde asked
questions about certain noticeable changes. The aging champion
explained, as well as he could, the ways of nibbling age and of
devouring death, to Elphànor's ageless queen, who knew nothing of
these matters, because her painter had willed to put other affairs in
the triangular garden. And it troubled Radegonde that Holden must be
stripped by such marauders of all vigor. Her love for her sole lover,
and her horror of being left alone where no other man was ever apt to
come thrusting himself into the vacancy, were so great that, with a
shedding of resistless tears, the gray-eyed girl persuaded Holden to
consult once more with Guivric the Sage; and to discover through the
aid of his magic if there were no wizardry by which Radegonde could be
made mortal.
"For then," said she, "we shall abate in vigor together, my dearest,
and die together; and not even after death need we dread separation,
when I lie buried at your side where men will have engraved upon your
tomb _Resurgam_."
And wise Guivric said that certainly there was a way in which Radegonde
might come out of the picture, and assume mortality. But Guivric,
shaking his white head, advised against it.
And Guivric said:
"It would be better, old friend, to accept the common lot of men; and
to be content to see your dreams played with a while and then put by,
rather than see them realized. Besides, you have many grandchildren,
and you owe them an example."
But Holden answered, "Bosh! Do I owe nothing to myself?"
So the high-hearted lovers followed the way of which Guivric had told
them. This way is not to be talked about; but blood was shed in the
Delta, and the worm that dies not was imprisoned: and after other
appalling happenings, Holden the Brave climbed out rheumatically from
the canvas, and gave his hand to Queen Radegonde; and she also stepped
from the triangular frame, and entered into life as the mortal woman
that Radegonde had been in the old time.
§ 77
Straightway she recollected her husband and her children and many of
her lovers, and the gilded domes of Elphànor's seven proud cities,
where now not even a hut was, and all the perfumed wasteful living
which Radegonde had known in the old time; and straightway, too, she
saw that Holden was a tedious decrepit fellow, well past the love of
women. And Holden saw that his Radegonde was a flighty and a rather
silly barbarian wench, sufficiently good-looking to be sure, but in no
way remarkable. And the two gazed at each other rather forlornly.
The queen began to shiver and to whimper. "I never," she said, "I never
for one moment was so lonely in my Delta as I am now."
Avuncularly he patted her white shoulder. "Do not give way, my dear.
We have acted unwisely, and nobody denies it: but do you come out of
this draught, and I will get you some clothes and have you baptised;
and then I will present you to our young Count Emmerick, and you can
entertain yourself, within Christian limits, by making a fool of him."
"A vigorous and handsome count would be better than nothing," the fair
girl conceded.
So this presentation was arranged. And tall Emmerick was infatuated
the moment he saw the queen's beguiling innocent young face. Forthwith
the high Count of Poictesme proclaimed a banquet: and when all were
dancing, Holden returned to the void frame; and he considered that lost
tropic garden, bereft now forever of the radiant and gray-eyed slip of
womanhood whom he had loved, and who would content his life no more.
Guivric came with him: and these two old men kept silence.
§ 78
"We may deduce that the painter loved her thirteen centuries ago," says
Guivric,--"erecting loveliness where there was little to build upon.
Thus it is that the brain of man creates women more desirable than
may be created by other means: and such women endure. But the women
children that have two parents, may endure only a very little longer
than may the scant delights a man can get in gardens that bear bitter
fruit or else insipid fruit: for these women have no such Delta as had
your lost Radegonde, no more than has that dispossessed lean ogling
flirt of whom young Emmerick will presently be tiring."
Moreover Guivric said:
"The women who are born of man's brain have no flaw in them and no
seed of death. There was a Radegonde conceived in Camwy, that walked
the glittering pavements of Lacre Kai, and wedded Elphànor, King of
Kings, and trysted with many lovers, and later trysted with small
worms: but in the artist's brain was conceived another Radegonde, a
maid who walks the sun-paths of eternity, and who is new-born with
every April. Thus it was of old: and this tale is not ended."
And Guivric said also:
"The women who are born of man's brain bear to their lovers no issue
save dissatisfaction. Their ways are lovely, but contentment does not
abide in these ways: and he that follows after the women who are born
of man's brain is wounded subtilely with wounds which may not ever
be quite healed. So let no woman with two parents cosset him: for
she toils vainly and in large peril; because it is upon her that he
will requite his subtile wounding, just as you, poor Holden, were the
destruction of that golden-haired young wife who loved you, and whom
you could not love."
§ 79
Thus said Guivric the Sage; and Holden, a spent man, much hurt but very
proud, who now foreknew his fate, replied with resolute smiling:
"Blessed above all men that live am I, in that in the days of my folly
I have been lord of the Delta of Radegonde. I know this, Guivric, as
you may not ever know it,--not you, who are as old as I, and who have
only wisdom to look back upon."
Guivric the Sage answered very soberly:
"That is true. For, to have been wise throughout one's youth becomes by
and by a taunt; and to remember it is a disease."
And Holden the Brave said now, with another sort of smiling:
"There is in attendance upon everybody a physician that heals all
disease. Pending his coming, old friend, I mean to beat you at one more
game of chess."
Whereon these aged men fell to such staid diversion as was suited to
their remainder of life. But slim gray-eyed Radegonde danced merrily
with her new lover.
IX
A THEME WITH VARIATIONS
"I expose myself entire: 'tis a body where, at one view, the veins,
muscles and tendons are apparent, every of them in its proper place;
here the effect of a cold; there of the heart beating, very dubiously.
I do not write my own acts, but myself and my essence.... Because
Socrates had alone digested to purpose the precept of his god, 'to
know himself,' and by that study had arrived at the perfection of
setting himself at nought, he only was reputed worthy the title of a
sage."
_9._
_A Theme With Variations_
§ 80
The literary artist plays, I had said, at the game of perpetuating, not
merely (as did the painter of Queen Radegonde) his personal notions,
but also his own personality....
To me that seemed a secondary consideration. Yet that was, I took it,
the main tenet of the Economists and of the creed which John Charteris
had elsewhere expounded. Kings and prime ministers and admirals and
czars and popes and bank-presidents all shrivelled with the passing of
time, as I had said earlier, into some uncarnate quality, uncertainly
remembered. But writers here and there did attain to a sort of
terrestrial immortality as rounded, actual human beings. The lyric
poet bequeaths to us like a legacy his personal emotion, the familiar
essayist makes the gossamer of his whims and fancies perdurable as
diamonds. The great egotists, in particular, such as Pepys, Casanova,
Montaigne, Cellini, Rousseau, are generally conceded each to have
immortalized himself and all his traits, especially his frailties: for
each lounges into our libraries unreticently, proclaiming, in the words
of Montaigne, "I expose myself entire"; and each too has, by lending
to every peccadillo permanency, kept letters healthily lewd, with the
lustiness of eternal youth....
Well! that, with just one reservation, which I thought not unimportant,
seemed true enough. For the great egotists do achieve very charming and
tolerably permanent results, in a fashion that I could best appraise,
I believed, by pausing here to consider the triumphant outcome, in our
own era, of the literary endeavors of Mr. George Moore.
§ 81
No reasonably conceited author, I said,--if for the moment one might
imagine any of the tribe to merit the adverb,--would aspire to be
perpetuated in a form more worthy than, in the Carra Edition, had
lately been bestowed upon the Collected Works of George Moore. It was
true that I spoke with, of the promised twenty volumes, only fourteen
at hand: but these I had found in every nicety of book-making to be
wholly admirable. Paper and binding and printing were of the sort
describable as luxurious. The frontispieces most handsomely presented
George Moore in every imaginable phase of moustache and mental
abstraction. In fine, it was the sort of Collected Edition which any
victim of the ennervating habit of writing books could not but view a
little wistfully. And, though for a while I had thought to lay finger
upon one marked, consolatory defect,--that the lack of running-heads
to the pages creates some difficulty in locating at once the especial
subdivision of the volume for which you happen to be looking,--yet
reflection had made against such petty fault-finding, by revealing
that, after all, it was as remunerative to read in one place as
another, in this longish book which is devoted, after all, entirely to
one topic.
For Mr. Moore, of course, had nowhere written except incidentally about
anything except George Moore. To some this might appear a dubious
axiom, in view of the circumstance that of these fourteen volumes no
less than eight consisted of the earlier Realistic Novels,--as we used
to hear them called, only yesterday, with a certain lowering of the
voice,--wherein there is no explicit word as to George Moore. Yet,
when seen in the entirety of the Carra Edition, I thought,--as I still
think,--and when appraised as component parts of the one longish book
which every sincere literary artist perforce composes, and of which
his various publications are each a chapter, then these novels fall
into their proper niche. George Moore in youth was exposed to, among
other perils, the corrupting influence of "realism"; and here are some
of the results, directly valuable to letters, in chief, as the record
of a phase through which passed, long ago, George Moore. These books,
to-day, rank somewhat with the extracts which Balzac gives you from
the writings of his auctorial protagonists,--of Lucien de Rubempré, of
Lousteau, of Canalis,--and which Balzac very sensibly presents not as
literature _per se_, but as useful lights upon their partly taken
from life and partly imagined author. So here, in depicting George
Moore, does the compiler of the Carra Edition appear to illumine his
subject with copious extracts from the novels of his hero, who, again,
is partly taken from life.
§ 82
I must at outset confess that I find these novels are quaint reading
now. They seem faded, and somewhat pathetically droll, and they a bit
too aptly illustrate their writer's petted word _suranné_, the
while that young George Moore toils conscientiously at a ruthless
exposition of the race-track, or a depiction of the evils of drink,
or is daringly describing the temptations of stage life. Yes; it
really is rather quaint as long as George Moore is playing up to his
then current Vizetellean advertisements, and turning out "studies of
degradation mercilessly done," or is endeavoring to convince the unwary
that "you are in a moral dissecting room, watching the demonstration
of a brilliant psychological surgeon." But the first moment he spies
a chance to let his characters, at some breathing-spell between their
disasters and their fornications, fall into talk about academic or
æsthetic matters which interest George Moore, then the style quickens
and fancy gallops. And the puppets discourse for pages upon pages the
heresies and petulancies and "studied disrespects" of George Moore,
and all advances briskly, undrugged by any narcotizing "drops of
story." By and by, to be sure, the ghost of Germinie Lacerteux or of
Bel-Ami (though the Carra Edition tactfully omits _Mike Fletcher_)
arises to coerce the apostle of candor--the whole-hearted devotee of
candor, even then,--with its gibbers about realism. But in a while the
young puppet-master is again playing truant from his art's imagined
responsibilities, and is contentedly expounding the notions of George
Moore.
So one must not take these realistic novels over-seriously. That sort
of realism--the realism of "the human document" and the selected
"corner of creation," here to re-echo that far time's old-fangled
catchwords,--was, as they said, the "trend" of that era. And even
to-day, with the innate conservatism of youth, still do the immature
laboriously transcribe the insignificant, in their exposures of the
inadequacy of American standards and the loneliness of the budding
artist in one or another parish of Philistia. These "trends" we,
willy-nilly, must put up with....
§ 83
Of course, there is not, and never has been, in any important sense,
any trend in literature. One says, in any important sense, because of
the so amply attested fact that the only books which ultimately count,
for their permitted season, are adequate expressions, not of any ideas
just then in the air (to employ that delightfully two-edged phrase),
but of the individual being who wrote that particular book. And
personality seems a remarkably haphazard affair. You are born, for one
inexplicable reason or another, as such and such a person, as a person
endowed with private and especial faults and hallucinations. And if
your book is ultimately to count, however transiently, you will in your
book have managed to expose that person, very much as Mr. Moore came in
the end to do, without talking or thinking any nonsense about "trends."
You will have contrived, in fine, your own particular "method": and in
contriving it you will do well to remember that, just as I pointed out
at the beginning, there must always be, to the last digit, precisely
as many "methods" as there are novelists.
Meanwhile, to be sure, the popular styles in books for the
intelligentsia must always be varying, somewhat as every season the
styles a little alter in disbeliefs and neckwear, and give room to some
other method of irritating the conventional. And all really competent
manufacturers of reading-matter, whether as publishers or authors,
must always stay upon the alert to cater to the latest hebetude of
serious-minded persons sufficiently cultured to assume that whatever
they cannot quite understand or read with reasonable pleasure is
probably high art. But the philosopher recalls that, somewhat to emend
the proverb, every vogue has its day; and that, also, all literary
modes must pass, pass very often with a hullabaloo, but always with
rapidity.
It seems, in fact, only yesterday that both the books and the decolleté
"sport shirt" of Blasco Ibáñez were the height of fashion, and _The
Young Visiters_ was a perdurable production. And now, in really
literary circles, they tell me, the sublimities of M. Maeterlinck are
no longer spoken of in lowered tones, but rather with raised eyebrows;
Stevenson has become just a working model for writers upon the art
of selling the short story; and even Mr. Kipling has passed into the
_götterdämmerung_ of being praised by Mrs. Gerould.[9] Thus
suddenly their fame is made a vain and doubtful good, and the shining
gloss of all their glories is vaded, in the bright prime of such
impeccant prosateurs as Herman Melville and Joseph Conrad and Marcel
Proust: and it is salutary to reflect that Sir Rabindranath Tagore
and O. Henry, they also, were once upon a time immortal for several
months....
Well, and just so, in the departed youth of this George Moore, in
the perverse Victorian 'eighties and 'nineties,--when, as Mr. Moore
now puts it, "we were all cowed by the spell of realism, external
realism,"--did many persons regard Zola and Flaubert and Maupassant
and Huysmans with a seriousness which the considerate dare not wager
that posterity will emulate, when it comes to appraising us and our own
literary idols.
--All of which seems rather Mooreishly digressive. It would be perhaps
a neater adhesion to the point succinctly to note here that, with
the addition of some peculiarly delightful prefaces, the books which
Vizetelly & Co. used to advertise as Mr. George Moore's Realistic
Novels--listing them, one finds, with an invidious separateness from
those of the firm's publications which, The Sheffield Independent was
wont to guarantee, "may be safely left lying about where the ladies of
the family can pick them up and read them,"--have, in preparing these
books for this Carra Edition, been rewritten throughout, alike with
a view of stylistic improvement and of, as it is rather handsomely
phrased, "returning from the conventions of _Vanity Fair_ and
_The Small House at Allington_ to those that inspired the writing
of Shakespeare's plays and the Bible." Mr. Moore, at last at ease in
the exclusive company of one thousand subscribers only, can now speak
freely without bothering about such finicking contemporaneous notions
of delicacy and indelicacy as, we now learn, had until the printing of
this Carra Edition somewhat hampered him. And for the rest, even in
their most tedious passages of brilliant psychology, Mr. George Moore's
Realistic Novels really do remain interesting, as relics.
Yet there perhaps I underrate these novels, which may be taken as
interesting from quite other points of view. Mr. Moore is, for example,
so convincingly the great prose artist everywhere in manner and gesture
that we are rather generally apt to overlook his frequent omission to
be anything of the sort in his writing....
§ 84
In fact I now recall that I once, regretfully, compiled my choice of
the world's ten worst writers. Regretfully, I say, because I suspected
that about every author in my list I was, in all likelihood, entirely
wrong. For I found that, somehow, I had listed only such writers as
possessed their recognized "cults" of perfervid admirers, and such
writers as a respectable lapse of time had attested--perhaps--really
to make some sort of mysterious appeal to a largish number of persons.
One might of course, in private, assume that æsthetically these persons
bemuse themselves with notions of their own superiority and refinement.
Such anæsthetic notions still enable self-complacency to pull through
many pages that are perused with rather less admiration of the author
than of the reader,--although, for that matter, the majority of
generally acknowledged and most permanent literary reputations would
seem to be based upon some similar innocuous self-deceit.
Here, in any event, are the ten "established" authors endowed with
"cults" whose masterpieces once appeared to me the most violently
uninteresting and ill written: Jane Austen, George Borrow, Miguel de
Cervantes, Henry James, Herman Melville, George Meredith, Friedrich
Nietzsche, Thomas Love Peacock, François Rabelais, and Walt Whitman.
I submitted this list without any comment save that I had made all
suitable endeavors toward Melville since 1907: the antipathy was not
new-born, among the bleated idiocies of his later ovine, or more
robustiously arietin, admirers. And upon consideration, Peacock,
I admitted, had not ever annoyed me with the relentless and deep
tediousness of the others: and I for a moment inclined to strike out
his name in disfavor of Marcel Proust or of James G. Huneker or of
W.H. Hudson, who were at the time regarded vociferously; but refrained
because that week's pother about any of these three might, after all,
very well and speedily prove transient. The ten I named, though, seemed
actually established in one or another sort of enduringness,--which
was, to me, a fact that roused wonder not unmingled with regret. For
there really must be something of enjoyment deep-hidden in the writings
of these appalling persons. And, naturally, one dislikes to miss it.
§ 85
I repeat all this because to-day, upon reflection, and upon the
strength of these Realistic Novels, I somewhat incline to substitute
for the name of Thomas Love Peacock the name George Moore. The
reputations of Mr. Moore and of Ananias, in fact, as masters of
fictitious narrative, stand high above almost equally slender
pediments; with no proof anywhere existent that Ananias even attempted
the difficult art wherein Mr. Moore has certainly never succeeded.
I am now about to speak with all possible moderation. For I very
cordially admire the talent of Mr. Moore. That is one of the reasons
why I must regret its occultation in these Realistic Novels.
It is not merely that these novels adhere to the naïve and now
senescent device of assuming for the author omniscience. These stories
have, that is, no stable point of view: the thoughts and the emotions
of each character are divulged just as these come into being; and you
are thus kept skipping, with all the agility and considerably more
than the penetration of the well-named genus _pulex irritans_,
from the inside of one imagined mind to the interior of another. That
convention, I know, is old, it is, in fact, decrepit; but it is also
childish: prose fiction really has advanced beyond such puerilities,
except of course in its more popular variants and in the prevailing
balderdash of the imperishable classics of prose fiction: and this
convention, for me at least, destroys everywhere the illusion which I
would willingly foster, destroying it for the reason that I can imagine
no existence wherein I would know, even partially, what everybody was
thinking and feeling.
Nor is it merely that these thin-blooded novels are broken out with a
rash of descriptory passages. I confess that, for one, the utmost I can
do is to put up with the writer who formally and impersonally sets out
to describe anything. When I am in my more amiable moods, then hurrying
eyes glide by the solid stolid-looking paragraphs; I incuriously accept
on faith the probability that the description is being competently
attended to: and I, unvexed, pass on toward such portions of the book
as may conceivably prove remunerative reading.... But far oftener am I
the prey of logic and of peevishness, when I consider the malversation
of time involved in every attempt to convey the true efficacy of a
regarded vista, or of any observed object, by recording seriatim such
attributes as, in life, we note simultaneously with plural senses. The
discrepancy is the really considerable difference between a row of
canned vegetable tins, howsoever painstakingly labeled, and a vegetable
soup. And Lessing did so long ago dispose of the whole topic, among
so many allied topics, that one would whole-heartedly like to see the
passing of an examination upon the _Laokoön_ made preliminary to
the securing of a license to write prose.... No: here again, I must
protest, the conscientious novelist will assume a conscious point of
view. The utmost he will permit himself in the way of description is to
note that which would be noted, naturally, from that point of view at
that especial moment. And all description will thus be converted into
action, in the form, not necessarily stated outright, that so-and-so
observed such-and-such phenomena. For I must here point out some
obvious, if disregarded, truisms: that no scene or object can display
any qualities unless there is some one to notice them; that, even then,
these qualities stay undisplayed unless the potential observer have the
needful interest and the time, just then, to notice them; and that to
present these qualities as existing impersonally--howsoever general in
"writing" may be this insane practise,--is to present (here again) an
existence which is inconceivable.
But, passing over these grave common imbecilities, it does seem to
be somebody's duty to protest against the equally grave and common
delusion that Mr. Moore, even in these Realistic Novels, is "a master
of English prose." The assertion is as a rule advanced, I suspect,
by ordinarily well-balanced persons who have just seen or heard Mr.
Joseph Conrad described as "a master of English prose," and have not
utterly recovered: the prose of Mr. Moore, in any event,--not here,
but in his embellished romancing about himself,--one may very often
grant to be adequate. Yet Mr. Moore's vocabulary is far from adequate,
for anyone who seeks distinction in an art of which the masters are
omniverbarious. Here, too, variety appears a grace unthought-of;
and his employment (in these Realistic Novels) of the ready-made,
time-battered phrase amounts--where his clichés do not, indeed, effuse
a perturbing aspect of feeble-mindedness,--to mere wallowing in the
slovenly.
I am still speaking with all possible moderation, as to a man whose
writing, in his major performances, I admire. And yet I fear that what
I have just said may sound overstated.... Well, I open the revised
and final version of _A Mummer's Wife_, as it chances, at page
220; and Mr. Moore there tells me, "A word sufficed to set the whole
gang recounting experiences and comparing notes." I turn to page 229,
and, still avoiding dialogue, I find Mr. Moore in the rôle of narrator
averring, "At the end of the act she received an ovation." Hastily I
proceed to page 236, where Mr. Moore philosophises,--"As is generally
the case, there was right upon both sides." Even then do I afford him
another chance; I go on to the next chapter, which, upon page 245, I
discover to begin, "It never rains but it pours." And thereupon I close
the book: for really nobody, no matter how widely he be acclaimed a
master of vigorous and delightful prose, is privileged to talk with me
in just that flat and meagre tone.... If, for the rest, you have an
hour to waste, not quite unedifyingly, you might compare almost any
one of the earlier versions of Mr. Moore's more ambitious passages
with its replacer in the Carra Edition, and marvel over his faith in
the stylistic thaumaturgy wrought by interjecting the word "and."
And so will it become apparent to you that the haven of the artist's
dream and the unfalteringly sought ideal of "revising" is not utterly
inaccessible, and can be won to by and by, through steadily adhering
to this bland and magic monosyllable, and by employing it to link each
sentence in the book with the sentence which precedes it and with the
sentence which follows it, and so to connect all the sentences into one
single and sliding and ever slipping forward sentence, and languidly
to model all upon the tentative and wavering progression of a long and
thin and frail and flesh-tinted angle-worm....
But at this point I desist from tapping at the typewriter keys; and I
re-read what I have just said in--upon the whole--depreciation of Mr.
Moore. And every word of it seems to me quite true. Yet it lacks that
fine frank ring of amateurishness without which literary dicta are as
nothing; and I appear somehow to have lapsed into the professional
accent of the luckless being who makes a business of reviewing books.
Now, this accent I can only describe as that of one speaking from an
eminence, which it is not at all necessary to have attained. It is
the accent which implies that you may by and by, should other more
important interests permit, take a Saturday afternoon off, and write
a literary masterpiece of the same genre in which the discussed writer
has, you benignantly allow, done his poor best during the last year or
so. It is the accent with which the eunuch advocates birth control,
strongly every month in The Dial, and weekly in The New York Times Book
Review.[10] It is, in fine, an unlovable accent.
So I lament this accent, even in the moment that I protest it voices
here--rather sniffishly, if you will,--the truth. I have endeavored
to speak, I repeat, with all possible moderation. But that accent
very certainly has crept in,--perhaps because I am here dealing with
"realism," perhaps because of some occult underlying envy of these
books' handsome physical appearance. It may be I am thinking the
Biography ought to be issued thus, instead of George Moore's novels. I
am sure I do not know....
In any event, I reflect that Balzac, also, does not always, nor
indeed as a rule, ascribe to his auctorial heroes the gift of writing
especially well; that the samples which Balzac, also, presents from the
novels of an imaginary author do not pretend to be fine literature; and
that Mr. Moore, in preparing this Carra Edition, had thus the shield of
weighty precedent....
§ 86
The going, even so, is immeasurably better when we come, as now, to the
consistently important books, to _The Confessions of a Young Man_,
_Avowals_, _Memoirs of My Dead Life_, _Conversations in
Ebury Street_, and to the _Hail and Farewell_ trilogy. For here
Mr. Moore is candidly, and without any vain pretence of ascribing real
weightiness to anything else, expressing his own nervous reactions
to painting and books and to the best examples of human thought and
anatomy, and here he has turned most potently to ensnaring us with
"nets woven of curious stuffs,--of a singer's corset-lace, a forgotten
dream, a strand of honey-colored hair, a phrase from Walter Pater,
moonlight on a pillow in Orelay, a scrap from the Catechism translated
by Verlaine, hopes, and aspirations, and, here and there, a faint and
not too secret shame."
Now, it is in these books, to my finding, that Mr. Moore has made
perhaps his only but his ineffably interesting addition to creative
literature; and has caused to move like a corporeal, breathing
being of flesh and blood his one great character, George Moore. How
lavishly that character repays attention by the parodist was shown
but yesterday when, in _Heavens_--that most trenchant of volumes
from which I have just quoted,--Mr. Louis Untermeyer wrote what is,
actually, the very best and loveliest appreciation of George Moore
yet given us by anybody outside the pages of Mr. Moore. Then, too,
there is the Beerbohm parody, not anything like so good, of course,
but still containing its really superb sentence,--"There are moments
when one does not think of girls, are there not, dear reader?" This
is the sentence which George Moore has not ever, quite, dictated to
his secretary: but for some years now he has fluttered close to its
perfection....
Yes, certainly, the character does lend itself to caricature. Yet I
shall not here speak of the rôle's component oddities, nor prattle
any word about the Nouvelle Athènes or the Celtic Renaissance. Nobody
dare attempt in one chapter to sum up George Moore after seeing a fine
artist give over a lifetime to the task. So I can but refer you to the
Carra Edition, as to a longish book which is devoted entirely to this
topic, with the rider that I have found nowhere volumes more engaging
than are the best of these.
One's human taste for the irrelevant provokes, of course, some natural
speculation as to how little of this perverse, painstaking, fleering
and inconsequential personality is based upon truth? What parsimonies
in veracity, how much of self-denial, in short, has Mr. Moore at odd
times woven into his scandal-mongering about George Moore? I grant
that, from the reader's selfish standpoint, it does not matter; and
that our general pleasure in the performance ought not to be dashed
by anybody's lugging in the refrain of Edgar Allan Poe's most famous
poem. For Casanova also, you will recall, indulged in the same sort of
romancing; and secured his most admirable effects through mixing in
some revelatory fiction with etymologically pure truth. Nor did Cellini
write under affidavit.... Then too, to me, the George Moore of the
Carra Edition suggests--with, to be sure, a difference,--that Thackeray
who is really the main character of Thackeray's Collected Works, the
Thackeray who is always interrupting his puppets, to edify you with
the unaffected confidences of the author, as a shrewd and tolerant and
tender-hearted man of the great world who, as we now know, existed
nowhere outside these books. Just so, one tacitly assumes, Mr. Moore
has given us George Moore as he, not wholly spurred by either moral or
æsthetic criteria, would like to be: and, for one, I find--upon the
whole, and if it a bit matters,--both his aspiration and his artistry
to be commendable. In that unending literary shadow-show wherein "all
passes except Shakespeare and the Bible," George Moore should stay for
a long while one of the great characters of English fiction: and in
creating him, Mr. Moore has rendered everybody a considerable service
at the price of condemning himself to eternal oblivion.
For these egotists who write perpetually about themselves are under
no bond, and under no temptation whatever, to write the truth. So
do we come to the reservation which I said just now I thought not
unimportant: it is that in pretending to commemorate himself the
self-respecting artist, who is also an egoist, substitutes an edited
and a considerably embellished effigy. He immortalizes, in fine,
somebody else.
And it is indeed to-day a fairly open secret that Mr. Moore in very
little resembles the George Moore of the confessional romances. All
persons who have known Mr. Moore in the flesh seem here unanimous:
and in particular do those who have known in the flesh this historian
of his own so many fleshly loves acclaim in him a beguiling tendency
to rival the eremite St. Anthony in continence and imagination. "Some
men kiss and do not tell,"--thus Lady Gregory has phrased it, with
perfection:--"George Moore does not kiss; but he tells." Yet the point
is that he "tells" very charmingly; and that therefore, beyond any
possible doubt, posterity will rejoicingly accept George Moore, and,
with admirable good sense, forget all about Mr. Moore.
So Mr. Moore has not hired perpetuity for himself, but has prolonged
the existence of quite another person, through, no doubt, actual
philanthropy....
Nor can I think of any conceivable reason why any author, whether he
be called Moore or Thackeray or Casanova,--and no matter what be his
notorious repute as an egoist where other writers have with lower
cunning concealed their similarity to him,--should be at pains to
immortalize himself. In fact, an egoist thinks too much of himself
ever to let the truth get out. And no one who has encountered and
conversed with authors, whether of marked or moderate ability, can fail
to note what superior persons and how much more desirable associates
they are in their books.... Nor, of course, does that alter the truth
I voiced just now: your book, if it is to count, must express your
personality: but most assuredly not all of it naked. Rather, should
your book suggest what you would like to make of that personality when
shaved, and bathed, and becomingly clothed, and judiciously inspirited
with alcohol, before going out to be, to the reach of one's ability,
agreeable company.
Besides, the literary artist, I must here repeat, labors primarily
to divert himself. A man can get many emotions from contemplating a
quite candid portrait of the person he finds in his own mind and in
the bathtub, but pleasure, I suspect, is not one of them. So when the
artist takes as his ostensible theme himself, he must take too the
liberty to adorn that theme with such variations as may happen to
strike his fancy. Otherwise, his art might very well fail in its main
purpose, which--need I say again?--is to divert the artist.
§ 87
And I shall here claim the advantage of my own rulings, I shall here
divert myself by turning candidly to egotism, without any beatings
about the bush in search of even one fig-leaf.... I have, then, always
aimed to give my writings some quality of permanence: but I am in smug
accord with all the more unsympathetic of my critics in detecting in no
one of my now numerous volumes any tendency to immortalize me. That is
a fault of which the Biography, I rejoicingly protest, is innocent.
It would, for one matter, be unendurable to find myself portrayed in
books which I so often am forced to read in the already depressing
enough pursuit of misprints and blunders. For no man--as Molière and
Isaiah and William Dean Howells have all not improbably observed, at
some time or another,--cares quite to face the truth about himself.
Looking back upon my own past, I find it undiversified, under howsoever
many dappling clouds of legend, by any very striking crimes: but there
is much of what to the first glance seems shirking and equivocation,
so much of petty treacheries, of small lies, and of responsibilities
evaded, that I am whole-heartedly glad to reflect my private
observatory is not, and never will be, open to the public. Item by
item, I can explain away each one of the disfiguring features; I can
prove, in my half-magnanimous and half-aggrieved meditations, that
in no one of these affairs was I really to blame; and I can utterly
extenuate myself from all fault and wrong-doing. I do, very often.
But, at bottom,--even so,--somewhere,--lurks as if clouded with much
ink the cuttlefish suspicion that I may not after all be endowed with
the wholly blameless and, indeed, heroic character which mere logic
assures me I possess. I have the notion, too, that many of my most near
associates would agree with the suspicion rather than the logic.
And when I talk about my own doings or my personal sentiments, I
momentarily detect myself in heightening, softening, or overcoloring
the reality, as if in an instinctive effort to conform with what my
hearer will, conceivably, expect and approve. Certainly not much of
me gets into my conversation.... In writing, I do wax, as one might
phrase it, bolder. This is largely fruit of my knowledge that to the
persons among whom my physical existence is passed, my writing means
nothing, or at most is visited now and then by an unardent glance, as
a highly problematic source of income: the persons about whom alone I
really care will never read whatever I may elect to publish, nor ever,
if by some unforeseeable circumstances compelled to do so, could they
take my nonsense seriously. I am thus at liberty to write, without
incurring any discomforts of actual weight, whatever I may prefer. I am
nowadays even sure of getting it printed. Yet when I reflect how little
I find, in so much writing, of any candid and fair expression of that
person whom I with real regret accept as myself,--in my own thoughts'
very privately issued version, with so many unopened leaves and with
such handsome margins of error,--why, then, I am somewhat astonished
and vastly pleased.... I marvel at, for one thing, the maniacal zeal
with which I have transferred the credit for almost every line I have
written, to this or the other invented "authority" or narrator. I seem
from the first thus to have hidden myself as if instinctively. And
moreover, in the few nooks thus unprotected, I find I have, throughout
the whole Biography, enacted one who is rather wiser and more amiable,
and rather more clever and more sophisticatedly broad-minded and more
freakish, than I can on any terms believe myself.... No: I am not
intimate with the author of the Biography: and now and then I suspect
a certain condescension in his manner, even toward me, because of my
persistency in working for him so hard.
And all these small deceits are benefactions for everybody concerned.
But the point is that every person whom egoism reduces to writing,
must aspire to, and the more adroit do truly succeed in, just this
laborious form of suicide and self-interment, under the effigy they
find diverting.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 9: Katherine Fullerton Gerould, a writer of the day, and the
author of many stories so exactly in the best manner of Henry James
that they well might actually have been written during the latter years
of his life by Mrs. Edith Wharton.]
[Footnote 10: Periodicals of the day, which occasionally published
articles dealing with literary matters.]
X
FLAWS IN THE SPUR
"Exploits, however splendidly achieved, come, by length of time, to
be less known to fame, or even forgotten among posterity. In this
manner the renown of many kings has faded, and their deeds have sunk
with them into the grave where their bodies lie buried,--deeds that
had been performed with great magnificence when unanimous applause
set them up as models before the people. The ancient Greeks, aware of
this, were wise enough to use the pen as a remedy against oblivion."
_10._
_Flaws in the Spur_
§ 88
The literary artist plays, I had said, not merely in such fashions as I
had enumerated. He plays, even over and above all this, with the notion
that his self-diversions are altruistic and for the large benefit of
posterity. This idea is, to the considerate, inexplicable: but nobody
need seriously question its potency. "Fame is the spur," as Milton some
while since observed, that very often rowels the artist into doing
rather objectionably painstaking work.
For custom assumes that time deals very carefully with reading-matter,
omnisciently discarding the trash, and preserving to outlast a kingdom
or two that which is finest. And probably the notion of this posthumous
atonement for the current era's stupidity has heartened, in every era,
the creative writer who viewed with a shared seriousness his craft and
his income.
One may permissibly wonder, none the less, if time does right all
unfailingly, in quite this taken-for-granted fashion. The present
generation is the utmost that has thus far been produced in the way of
posterity. It seems, at least, remarkable that we who have made the
Saturday Evening Post a literary success second only to the Telephone
Book should be the clear-eyed cognoscenti to whom dead poets appealed;
and that it was in our standards of criticism they invested their
life's labor and confidence. For _Les Contes Drolatiques_ were,
really, written for the beguilement of Dr. Brander Matthews[11] and
it was with an eye upon Mr. H.L. Mencken that à Kempis compiled the
_Imitation of Christ_.
§ 89
Now, not as that all-righting posterity do we approach, of course,
the books we actually read. Nobody expects that our judgments of
current literature be perennially brazen when two or three unbend in
talk about that merchandise which is sold in the same "department" as
stationery and string and glue. The rub is, rather, that our chief
"classics" appear to have been selected and handed down to fame by
the long arm of coincidence. That which remains to us of Greek and
Roman literature composes by general consent our greatest treasure,
the treasure which time has most thoroughly tested and approved. And
it is precisely here that one finds least cause to suspect time of
any entangling alliance with justice. There is no vaguest reason to
suppose that of the Greek and Roman writers we have preserved, by any
standards, what was best worth keeping; nor that of such authors as
Æschylos and Aristophanes of whom oblivion has spared more than the
name we have retained the masterworks. We cherish, instead, each scrap
that accident has made peerless by the destruction of its betters.... I
might go on to speak, even more tediously, of Sappho and Petronius and
Plutarch, and of Virgil's foiled endeavors to destroy the latter part
of his _Æneid_--and about the dream that revealed the hiding place
of Dante's lost cantos, and about John Warburton's cook, and about how
the Bible came by its present contents,--to show through what queer
accidents the world's chief "classics," the books which are likely
always to remain in theory man's finest literary achievements, have
been made just what they are. But the point is that they might quite
as easily have been something else. The point is that they have not
earned their present and probably perpetual rank by their pre-eminence
in special qualities, nor by any æsthetic principle whatever. And if
the supreme names and masterpieces of the world's literature have
been tagged as such by justice,--which always remains just barely
possible,--it was done without removing her bandage, in the hazards of
a game of blind man's buff.
But I refrain in charity from such pedantic considerations. Here is
real need, though, to point out that before printing became pandemic
the only way in which anybody's writing won a chance of survival was
by some other person's finding its matter sufficiently congenial
to be at pains to make a copy of it. In nature, that which most
rapturously recorded the inane struck home to most bosoms, upon the
chronic principle that still procures admirers for the philosophy of
Dr. Frank Crane,[12] and for the novels of Floyd and Ethel Dell:[13]
so, from the first, have long odds favored earnest mediocrity.... To
the vitality of the mediocre I shall return. Meanwhile that dangerous
invention of Gutenberg's has changed all; and has ensured a fair
chance of perpetuity for that which is excellent, provided always this
excellence be not swept away unnoted and hidden by the spume and froth
of the torrential river it floats in, that ever-passing deluge of the
current books. Sometimes befalls a favoring miracle of salvage, and
such dissimilar lost argosies as those of Samuel Butler and Herman
Melville return upstream with flying colors. But who may say how deep,
how irretrievably, their betters may not lie sunken? or can gravely
assert that literary permanence is in any very general demand among
the buyers or publishers or writers of new books?... Indeed, I know of
no class of men which quite whole-heartedly desires the production and
formal recognizing of any more "classics": since even those who care
for fine literature cannot but obscurely feel that there is already a
deal more of it existent than any human being can hope to assimilate;
and that already the literary pantheon of the self-respecting is
thronged with gods whose virtues we are compelled, in this limited
lifetime, to accept as an article of faith. There is, for example,
Defoe or Richardson--or, of more recent hierarchs, Mr. Thomas Hardy or
Mr. Joseph Conrad,--before the shrine of each of whom many are zealous
to pass with every form of respect which does not entail stopping. And
I suspect, if the persons who cry up _Don Quixote_ were afforded
a choice between silence and reading every line of this world-famous
"classic," there would no longer be any need to think an instant before
you pronounce its name.
§ 90
But I spoke of the vitality of the mediocre. The quality which makes
for acknowledged greatness in a writer is--I know not how many
textbooks have assured us,--the universality of his appeal. His ideas
are, in brief, the ideas which the majority of persons find acceptable;
and Shakespeare has been praised, for once with absolute justice,
as "the myriad-minded," because myriads have always had just such a
mind as his. The writer of "classics," in short, has need of quite
honest and limited thinking, and of an ability to utter platitudes
with that wholesome belief in their importance which no hypocrisy nor
art can ever mimic.... Of the letters of a foreign nation nobody can
speak without some danger of magnifying his everyday folly. But it
appears safe here to point out that the main treasures of our national
literature, including its British tributaries, really are, when
considered in the light of the ideas they express, rather startlingly
silly. The "ideas" of Chaucer and Shakespeare and Milton, when once
looked at without prejudice, appear to wander sheepishly from the
platitudinous to the imbecile, the while that their "stories" rove, in
somewhat more the manner of the mountain goat, about the heights of
idiocy. And when you compare the reality with the ideas which Scott and
Thackeray and Dickens quite gravely expressed about human existence,
the incongruity breathes more of pathos than of mirth: for these
novelists expressed the usual ideas.
Most persons really do believe, for example, that complete and abiding
happiness is to be won by marriage until they have tried it: and,
for that matter, widows have been known to carry this romanticism to
the extreme of taking a second husband. And most persons do honestly
believe that, in the outcome, wickedness is punished and virtue
is rewarded (again) with a complete and abiding happiness: and in
consequence of this belief most persons make it a point in social
intercourse to check their natural, not infrequent impulses toward
rape and murder. Most persons do, in fact, for various reasons, think
it best to be "good"; and do expect, for equally various reasons, to
be happy by and by. Now, with hardly an exception, the concededly
"classic" writers have, without any detectable scepticism, set forth
such popular notions, with every fit adornment of rhetoric and cunning
diction: and their ideas have endured for the plain reason that they
were endurable.
§ 91
Yet here again, I am afraid, the fool is answered according to his
folly. It is, when you think of it, a rather dreadful fate to become a
classic. Once the writer is thus deified, his private character is the
first burnt offering. He has well hidden himself beneath the effigy he
found diverting; he rests thereunder, untroubled: but about his tomb
frisk commentators obviously raised, by a superior education, from
that troglodytic race which enlivens the public privies with verse.
For his cult has need of a legend, and prefers a highly colored epopee
of lechery and sexual curiosa, such as affords vicarious outlet to
those desires which we imprison fearfully in ourselves, and reveals the
demigod to be no better than anybody else. So Mary Fitton and Georgina
Hogarth and Mrs. Brookfield are dragged into the saga: stout volumes
are devoted to proving that Wordsworth begot a bastard, or that Byron
was caught in incest with his sister; nobody appears able to write
about Molière without suggesting that his wife was also very probably
his daughter: and all our literary gossip becomes a whispered and
sniggered ritual of phallic worship.
Nor do many of the auctorially great escape calumny in the form of a
Complete Edition, wherein their self-confessed failures at writing,
and the chips and rubbish of the workshop, and the rough draughts and
notes designed for the waste-basket, and the politic ephemeræ into
which most writers are allured by kindness and advertising purposes,
are piddlingly amassed to be bound up, in pompous scavengery, with
all the unsigned refuse from the back files of magazines which can
be "attributed" to the victim. None other of the dead has even
his appointed executors combined to convict him of idiocy. And of
course those less put-upon immortals who are recollected, however
infrequently, by virtue of one book alone are but too apt to get
into some such collection as Everyman's Library, and have the upshot
of their existence identified with the twaddle and smug tediums of
Trollope and Jane Austen and Mary Cowden Clarke.
And the writer who is raised to the peerage of the remembered dead
is likewise granted an estate, commensurate with his dignity, in the
fields of human aversion. Luckless typesetters have to read every word
of his books; in your library he usurps grudged shelfroom in the bright
armor of a binding too handsome to be relegated to the dustheap of any
married man; the oppressed young have his loathed archaisms included in
their "parallel reading" at school, where also they are sometimes put
to the _peine dure et forte_ of "parsing" him; in women's clubs he
incurs the stigma of being quoted with approval from the platform, by
persons in the bankruptcy of mind appropriate to that deadly eminence;
and dear old bishops likewise quote him in their sermons, utilizing
his dreams as hypnotics.... He becomes, in fine, a nuisance, and is
thought of with mingled condescension and haziness and dislike. And
it appears, to the considerate, a prodigality of currishness, thus in
so many ways to "beat the bones of the buried" because their outcast
owner once voiced memorably the common beliefs and hopes,--the tonic
fallacies, the sustaining delusions,--which keep a vigorous heart in
the ribs, and marrow in the bones, of all that are not buried, not yet.
Here is no need to assume, however, that every classic author has from
the beginning been commonplace in absolutely everything. It may happen,
indeed, that a writer putting forth an unpopularly rational thought
may have his heresy so generally assailed and so often controverted as
to make it sufficiently hackneyed for wide acceptance: but mediocrity,
even in "daringness" and "unconventionality," thrives from the first;
and is the firmlier assured of posterity's respectful reprinting.
And the display of uncommon mentality is, as a rule, as fatal to the
literary life of a book as it is to the physical life of man.
§ 92
For there really does seem to be over all a force--to be labelled what
you will,--that is hostile to the undue development, in any direction,
of man's mind. Here death is not directly involved: rather, does it
appear to be life which is resolute to use men within very inflexible
limits.... And so I now incline to dismiss those earlier notions as
to nothing being apparent anywhere except the operation and products
of death. I begin to play with the fancy that life is indeed aiming
at something quite definite; and that the wise man's part therein is
to be patient, to cling to mediocrity, and to get bread and children,
and presently to die, with no more of active discomfort than may be
unavoidable.
It well may be, I reflect, that all is not at loose ends; and that
some scheme of happenings is fore-ordained; and that we serve in it,
somehow, when we live tranquilly and propagate; since, certainly, the
desire to do just these two things is the one human desire encountered
everywhere.
And perhaps--I yet further speculate,--the phenomena called "literary
genius" and "artistic ability" are vexatious little mishaps, a trifle
gone wrong, in the broad working out of a plan which they minutely
hamper.... So the contretemps is remedied. The person afflicted with
"genius" is removed, be it by his other diseases or by his fellows'
natural dislike of him, it hardly matters: either way, there is by
ordinary in his removal a smack of haste: and you will note that,
whether in polity or mercy, it is somehow provided that his children
do not inherit his affliction.... So does life seem to keep her pawns
from errancy. So does she seem to restrict them, with now and then
some show of pettishness, to the arena and service of her large and dim
and patient gaming: and wisdom bids us emulate this patience, in the
time that we get bread and children, and strive to die with no more of
active discomfort than may be unavoidable.
And yet, even so, in the bared teeth of outraged reason, no one of us
rests quite content to be a mere transmitter of semen, and to serve
as one of many millions of instruments in life's inexplicable labor,
used for a little while as such, and then put by, worn out and finished
with forever. We appeal against oblivion. And not only does the
shatter-pated artist appeal: the Pharaohs have filed pyramidic caveats,
the best-thought-of business-men yet enter demurrers in the form of
public libraries: there is no tomb-stone however modest but insanely
appeals to posterity to keep in mind somebody's dates of birth and
death and middle name.
For we will to continue here, in the world known to us, to continue
if only as syllables. We all will not to be forgotten utterly by
those that must so soon inherit our familiar dear estate of tedium
and muddle-headedness and fret and failure; and that in our places
will get bread and children; and that after our going will in our
beds be striving to die with no more of active discomfort than may be
unavoidable.
Yet here is an odd thing: we can pretend to offer no example worth
the following, not even any salutary instance of just what to avoid;
nor can we, in any of the limbos which have been divinely revealed,
thus far, derive from being so remembered one minim of profit. We are
spurred by neither altruism nor self-seeking; the counsellor that
persuades to the appeal remains anonymous: and it seems that, here
again, some power which mocks at reason, or at least at human reason,
is moving us to serve unknown but, one suspects, not unappointed ends.
For we do not know, either here or elsewhere, what ends may be
appointed: but we do know, I think, that every wise man will avoid too
much of guesswork, in the brief while that he gets bread and children,
and patiently foreplans to die with no more of active discomfort than
is unavoidable.
§ 93
Thus, then, I reflected, now that I approached my summing up, the
writer who is sustained by the notion of his books' being perpetual
things cannot, after two minutes of honest thought, believe himself
to be sustained also by altruism, nor by any faith in the superior
discernment of posterity. Upon no ground perceptible to me could reason
detect, the instant that reason weighed the present rate and direction
of man's progress, any marked likelihood of posterity's being in
anything more logical than is that contemporaneous, so huge and so
depressingly unimpressed audience which every artist must perforce
contemn. Posterity in its approach to literary matters would probably
muddle forward, as man has always done, upon humanity's time-tested
crutches of hearsay and stupidity. The men who after our departure
inherited the gray tedium of man's daily living would keep some of our
books (but not really read them), and others of our books they would
destroy, not in any haphazard fashion, but acting always under the
adamantean human compulsion to be illogical about everything.
Not any art or painstaking, nor certainly any accident of "genius,"
could enable a book to live. Chance alone appeared to do that, and
then only in a very limited sense. And in this final, frantic, and
yet optimistic appeal to posterity--here, too, man clung to his great
racial custom of being illogical about everything; and every serious
author triumphantly attested himself to be, after all, quite human.
That seemed the conclusion of the matter....
So I ran over my enlinked deductions. Man lived, for the major part of
his conceded time, a meagre and monotonous and unsatisfying existence:
this he alleviated by endlessly concocting fictions which bedrugged
and diverted him. The artist, and in particular the literary artist,
like every other person animate, attempted to bedrug and divert
primarily himself; which end the literary artist gained, as a rule, by
picturing himself as figuring enviably in unfamiliar surroundings, and
as making sport with the three martinets that he, in common with all
men at bottom, most genuinely abhorred,--that is, with common-sense
and piety and death. Moreover, he diverted himself by playing with
such human ideas as he found entertaining: and he played too with
the notion of hoodwinking posterity into accepting and treasuring
his highly imaginative portrait of himself. And the outcome of his
multifold playing--of that interminable self-diversion which he, quite
unsmilingly, called his "work,"--was always unpredictable, always
chance-guided, and, in any case, was of no benefit or hurt to him by
and by, and was never of grave importance to anybody else. That seemed
to be the whole truth about the literary artist. That seemed the gist
of the epilogue I had now evolved for the Biography of Dom Manuel's
life, and was submitting to myself to-night as the explanation of why I
had given over so many years to writing.
Yes, all my premises seemed true: my deductions appeared to hold
together. My logic and its upshot, in any event, contented me. What, I
had begun by asking, does the author get out of it all? Well, I had
found that unknown quantity; the equation now was solved; and _x_
amounted to, exactly, nothing. That was the mathematics of it: only, as
you may recall, it had been revealed to me, through the aid of my small
son, that mathematics too amounted to, exactly, nothing. And, besides,
here also, in reaching this negation, I had most gratifyingly attained,
in the same moment that I discredited, the aim of every valid author.
For I had found, I reflected, even here, some rather interesting ideas
to play with.... Yes, and my argument ended, neatly, with the day: for
the clock behind me was now striking midnight....
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 11: A prominent American littérateur of the period. The
titles of many of his books have been preserved, such as _His
Father's Son_, _The Last Meeting_, _A Secret of the Sea_,
&c.]
[Footnote 12: A newspaper writer of the day. He specialized in very
short editorials, so notably preëminent, even in American journalism,
for feeble-mindedness that these were published, simultaneously, by
some fifty of the leading papers of the United States, and were read
everywhere with edification.]
[Footnote 13: Novelists of the day; authors of _Charles Rex_,
_Janet March_, _Greatheart_, &c.]
THE AUTHOR OF THE EAGLE'S SHADOW
"To the citizens and all the realm I make this proclamation: for now
have I moored my bark of life, and so will own myself a happy man.
Many are the shapes that fortune takes, and oft the gods bring things
to pass beyond our expectation. That which we deemed so sure is not
fulfilled, while for that we never thought would be, Heaven finds out
a way. And such hath been the issue in the present case."
_The Author of The Eagle's Shadow_
§ 94
"Would you advise me, sir," he was asking, "to become a regular
writer--now?"
For I had got just this far, and, as I have said, the clock behind me
was just striking midnight, when I was interrupted by an unlooked-for
visitor.
Most writers, for their sins, are used to the incursions of the
literarily-inclined young man (with, as a rule, quite dreadful
manuscripts hidden about his person) who wants advice as to his
life-work. But that this especial young man should be calling upon me
for that purpose, or for any other purpose, did, I confess, even on
Walburga's Eve, astonish me....
For he undeniably sat there. He was fat, remarkably fat for a lad of
twenty-two or thereabouts; and he had, as I noticed first of all,
most enviably thick hair, sleeked down, and parted "on the side" with
some fanfaronade in the way of capillary flourishes. He was rather
curiously dressed, too, I considered: the lapels of his coat were so
small and stiff; they were held in place, I deduced, by a coat-spring,
which would be to-day, I could have no doubt, the only coat-spring
in existence. And he wore a fawn-colored waistcoat, and his rigorous
collar towered, incredible in height, above a sky-blue "Ascot tie,"
which was resplendently secured with a largish sword-hilt asparkle
everywhere with diamonds. And to describe the majestic rotundities
of this boy's shoulders as due to "padding" would be through
understatement to deceive you; since these coat-shoulders could have
been designed and builded (I reflected), by no imaginable tailor, but
only by an upholsterer.... It must have been, in fine, a good twenty
years since I had seen anybody appareled quite as he was....
"You see, I have just sold three stories to magazines," he continued,
"and I was wondering, sir, if you would advise me to become a regular
writer now."
To that I gave my customary, sage and carefully considered reply. "Of
course," I informed him, "there is a great deal to be said upon both
sides."
"I wrote five, you see: and I mailed them all out together. And The
Smart Set took one; and The Argosy took the one I sent them, too; and
Mr. Alden wrote me a real nice letter about the one I sent Harper's,
and said they would be very glad to use it if I would let them say
'paunch' where I had written 'belly'--"
"Dear me! and so you are already writing with offensive coarseness. But
don't mind me. Go on."
"Well, but I was just going to say, and that's all right, of course,
though you do sort of think of Falstaff as having one. But the other
two came back, although I can't see why, when you look at the stuff
those very magazines--!"
"You will see, by and by," I assured him: "and then you will wonder
about the stories that did not come back."
"Anyhow, I got a hundred and five dollars for the lot of them. Yes,
sir, not a cent less. And to have three out of five stick, the very
first time, is pretty unusual, don't you think?"
To that I assented. "It is the bait in the trap, it is the stroke of
doom, it is the tasted pomegranate of Persephone."
"Then I have the notion for a book, too. It's about a young man who is
in love with a girl--"
"That now is a good idea. It is an idea that has possibilities."
"--Only, he can't ask her to marry him, because she has lots of money,
and he is poor. Of course, though, it all comes out all right in the
end. His uncle left another will, you see."
"Now was that will, by any chance," I wondered, "discovered long years
afterward, in the secret drawer of an old desk? and did it transform
your high-minded but impoverished hero into a multi-millionaire?"
And the young man asked, "Why, how did you know?"
"It is not always possible to explain these divinations. Such flashes
of imaginative clairvoyance just incommunicably come to me sometimes."
He considered this. He said, with a droll sort of awe, "Probably you do
think of things quicker after you have been writing so long--"
I shook my head morosely. "Quite the contrary."
"And of course you have written so many books that--You see, I
naturally read them, on account of our similarity in names--"
"You liked them, I hope?"
Very rarely have I seen any young man counterfeit enthusiasm less
convincingly. "Why, how can you ask that, I wonder! when everybody
knows that your books, sir--!"
"Come, come!" I heartened him, "I have been reviewed a great deal,
remember! The production of articles as to my plagiarisms and
obscenities ranks as a national industry. Very lately Judge Leonard
Doughty[14] exposed me to all Texas as a chancre-laden rat whose
ancestry had mixed and simmered in the devil's cauldron of Middle
Europe. And, besides, since Professor Fred L. Pattee[15] let the
news get out, in perfectly public print, that I am dead and my soul
is already in hell, there does not seem much left for any moderately
optimistic person to be afraid of."
"Well, but," the young man pointed out, "I'm not unbiased. There is so
much about me in your books, you see, sir; and you do make me seem sort
of funny. You sort of keep poking fun at me."
"I know. But I cannot help it. For you appear to me, I confess, the
most ridiculous person save one that I have ever known. I am the other
person."
"Well, I am afraid I don't entirely like your books, sir," he conceded.
And I sat looking at him, both amused and saddened. For never until
to-night had it occurred to me how unutterably would this especial
young man dislike my books if ever he could know of them. And he was
trying so hard, too, to be polite about it.
§ 95
"Why do you do it, sir?" the boy asked now, almost reproachfully. "You
get a plenty of pleasure out of life, don't you? and what did you
want, anyhow, that you never got?"
"Yes: and I don't know," I admitted, seriatim.
"Well, then, why don't you write some books that will make people see
the world is a pretty good sort of place after all?"
"But surely it does not require two persons to point out such an
obvious geographical feature? Cannot posterity rely upon you, by and
by, to diffuse that truism single-handed?"
"I certainly do hope so," he replied. Now his voice changed. "For
I would like to write the very nicest sort of books,--like Henry
Harland's and Justus Miles Forman's and Anthony Hope's. They would
be about beautiful fine girls and really splendid young men, and
everything would come out all right in the end, so they could get
married, and not be sort of bitter and smart-alecky and depress people
the way"--he coughed,--"the way some people do."
"Young man," I started out severely, "it is quite evident you are not
married--"
To which he countered, now I think of it, rather staggeringly. "But
you, sir, are not in love. You never will be, sir, not ever any more."
I said: "Yes; that does make a difference. I remember." Then I
said: "Stop talking bosh! and stop calling me 'sir'! I'm not your
grandfather. It is rather the other way round. And, besides, we were
talking about books. Well, you may try, if you like, to write the
blithering kind of novel you describe. But, somehow, I don't think you
will ever succeed at it."
"You ought to know best, sir, of course, about my abilities. And so, if
you would really and truly advise me--Still, I would certainly like to
be a real author--"
He was looking at me now, across that remarkable blue tie and shiny
sword-hilt, with very touching deference, and with, of all conceivable
emotions, envy. I understood, with the most quaint of shocks, that
I possessed every one of the things which this preposterous young
fellow wanted. I had written and published, sometimes even with
commercial extenuation, at least as many magazine stories and books
as he hoped by and by to have to his credit: I could imagine how my
comfortable-looking large home, and my ownership of actual stocks and
bonds, and my acquaintance with a number of more or less distinguished
persons, would figure in his callow mild eyes: and I had tasted, too,
if not of fame, most certainly of all the notoriety he ever aspired
to. Why, but what does it not seem to this pathetic boy, I reflected,
actually to have one's picture in the papers! For I could well remember
certain ancient glancings toward that awesome pinnacle of being a
celebrity.
I was, in fine, by this boy's standards, a success. I had to-day each
one of the things he had ever consciously desired. That really was a
rather terrible reflection....
§ 96
But he was speaking. "Then you would honestly advise me, sir, not to
take up writing as a regular thing?"
"I don't see how I can advise you that,--not honestly, at least. For
you will get out of the writing all--heaven help you!--that you hope to
get."
"Why, then--" He was abeam.
"You simply wait until you have got it! You can attend to your grinning
then, if you feel like it. For you will get every one of the things you
think you want. Only, you will get them by the, upon the whole, most
philanthropic process of not ever writing any of the mush which you now
plan to write."
"But I don't understand--"
"Nor do I, either, quite. But from the start will be tugging at your
pen a pig-headed imp that will be guiding it his way instead of the way
you intended. And with each book he will be growing stronger and more
importunate and more cunning, and he will be stealing the pen away from
you for longer and longer intervals. And by and by that imp, full grown
now and the very devil of a taskmaster, will be dictating your books
from beginning to end,--not to speak here of his making you sweat blood
when you revise, at his orders, all the earlier ones."
"Come, now,"--and the young fellow was looking at me rather like a
troubled cow,--"come, now, sir, but you don't really mean I am going to
be possessed by a devil?"
"Some people will put it that way, only a bit less politely. But I
would say, by a dæmon. Socrates had one, you may remember."
"Yes, but this one--?"
"You," I replied, "will call him the desire to write perfectly of
beautiful happenings. Other persons will call him quite different
things. Anyhow, with time, you will fall into a sort of bedrugging
dæmon-worship, and you will go the way he commands you, without
resisting any longer. It will be most deplorable. So Professor Henry A.
Beers[16] will have, after all, to dismiss your literary claims from
the pale of serious consideration, because you are not of Colonial
stock--"
The boy viewed this as urgent. "But, sir, my father's people came in
1727, and my mother's in 1619--"
"That will not matter. Facts are but reeds in the wind of moral
indignation. And Maurice Hewlett must become very cuttingly sarcastic
about your being a Jew brought up on the Talmud--"
"Me, sir?"
"Most certainly, you. And a transfigured Richard Le Gallienne,[17]
purified by his intellectual death and descent into the helotage of
reviewing, will be compelled to unmask you as a moral and spiritual
hooligan with a diminutive and unkempt and unsavory ego. And an
enterprising young person named Bierstadt[18] will, on the strength
of having twice had luncheon with you, write out for The Bookman
a remarkably intimate account of how partial you are to provoking
tragedies and throwing flesh-pots at people's heads. And there will
be others,--oh, quite a number of others.... So that, altogether, you
perceive, you will get, through this dæmon-worship, into some trouble."
Very rarely have I seen any young man more unaffectedly appalled. "But
look here, sir! I don't want to get into any trouble. I simply want to
contribute to the best magazines, and write some wholesome and nice
entertaining books, that will sell like _The Cardinal's Snuff-Box_
and _The Prisoner of Zenda_."
"I know. It is rather funny that you should begin with just those
goals in view. You will not ever attain them. That will not matter
so much--after a while. But what will very vitally matter--to you,
anyhow,--is that, having once meddled with the desire to write
perfectly of beautiful happenings, you will not ever be able to
forswear your dæmon. And such folly is, of course, enough to set every
really well-thought-of person in America braying. So that in time--who
knows--you too may come to be a chancre-laden rat, and a German Jew
with a soul in hell and simmered ancestors and a notoriously unkempt
ego, and may otherwise help out with the week's literary gossip."
Whereon the young man rose; and he remarked, with a perhaps not wholly
unwarranted uncertainty, "Then you advise me, sir--?"
"I cannot advise you the one way or the other. I am merely forewarning
you that, if you insist upon writing books, you will get what you
wanted."
He smiled now, brightly, intimately, strangely. "I see: but isn't that
also in the one way which matters," he demanded of me, "true?"
And I smiled back at him. "Yes," I admitted, "it seems true in the one
way which matters, also."
"Why, then," said he, "I reckon I had better keep right on with _The
Eagle's Shadow_."
And after that he went quite suddenly away. He returned, I imagine, to
1902 or thereabouts.
I hope he did, for his sake. There was a rather nice girl awaiting
him, back there in 1902. Then, in addition to her, he would have the
facile, false inspirations of _The Eagle's Shadow_ to play with, I
reflected, as I went back, a little saddened somehow, to concocting the
needed epilogue for the long Biography of Dom Manuel's life....
§ 97
But that queer boy's brief visit had quite broken my train of thought.
His passing seemed, indeed, to have disproved my train of thought.
For the instant I had proved, to my own satisfaction, that what I, in
common with all creative writers, got out of writing was, exactly,
nothing,--at that same moment he had appeared with his mild, bleated,
so respectful question, "Would you advise me, sir, to become a
writer--now?"
And I had answered his question. I had failed, at least, to advise
him not to become "a regular writer." I had, virtually, admitted that
were my youth restored to me, as Jurgen's was, and had I my life to
muddle through all over again, I would, still somewhat in the Jurgenic
manner, repeat its unprofitable dedication. I could not deny to him, I
could not truthfully deny to anybody, that, in the one way which really
seemed to count, I had in the end got what I wanted.
§ 98
No doubt it had been intermixed with a great deal which nobody could
conceivably enjoy. From the beginning my books had been strong
irritants to many of their readers,--it might be that their manner was
annoying, indeed, as Dr. Canby put it, "to all warm-hearted people." In
any event there were my scrapbooks bulging with "reviews" by persons
who appeared to have written in seizures of incoherent rage, without
ever having discovered precisely what they were angry about. These
chattered denunciations had begun with _The Eagle's Shadow_: and
no book by me had since failed to evoke them in respectable volume....
_The Cords of Vanity_, in fact, had seemed to unhinge all power
of self-control and self-expression in well-nigh everybody who wrote
about it: the scrapbooks which contained the press clippings relative
to this novel suggested just the corybantics and mowings of a madhouse.
The people who had at most length and most bitterly denounced "such a
book as _Jurgen_" did at least base upon understandable ground
their claims to be heard with respect,--this ground, of course, being
that their judgment had been kept healthily uncontaminated by their
abstention from reading _Jurgen_.
Nor was time outmoding this frenzy. _The High Place_ seemed to
have aroused in sundry quarters much the same quality of inexplicable
or, in any event, of unexplained fury. There was no doubt about it: the
instinctive reaction of many, many persons everywhere to each one of my
books--even, as it seemed, without reading them,--had been the instant,
unreasoning response of a reputable business-man or of a bull to the
Soviet flag.... And that had not been pleasant.
Apart from those who went about thus incommunicatively raging, had been
the pitilessly explicit. These had, indeed, been tirelessly explicit
in their exposure of my auctorial crimes and defects. Nobody could
pretend to remember all the literary vices which I had practised nor
all the contagions in which I had been detected, but every one of these
infamies had, as I recalled it, been competently exposed, over and
over again. I was both knave and imbecile, whose "mannered" writing
was mere kleptomania; I had, indeed, no sort of natural endowments
once you excepted the singular nastiness of my feeble mind: such were
the facts that had been quite regularly deplored, now I thought of it,
for the fifth part of a whole century. And when the press clippings
came in next week, somebody would, I knew, still be regretting these
facts. I could have little doubt that for the rest of my life I would
be continually encountering these regrets.... And that, too, was not
pleasant.
What the reviewers had said did not, especially and eventually,
matter. They were, in fact, to-day united in their abuse nowhere
except in my scrapbooks: I alone had--now for some twenty years,
and rather charitably, I thought,--been at pains to preserve their
utterances. Otherwise, all of yesterday's Olympians had loosed their
thunderbolts and had passed sonorously; and each demolishing of me
was to-day as little remembered as was any other of that year's
thunderstorms. To-day--if with a lessened frequency, from even loftier
altitudes,--still now and then descended peltingly the onslaughts of
young godlings. Yet to-day I still clung, somehow, to the belief that
my intelligence and morals were not so markedly below the average as
I was constantly assured. And, in the manner of those elder tempests,
so likewise, I knew, must pass away the reverberant condescensions
of the young, who were condemned as yet to appraise my book, and all
books, in the light of their contrast with that masterpiece which youth
is immemorially about to dash off on some vacant Saturday afternoon.
For presently these godlings too would turn from the serious work of
reviewing creative literature to the diversion of writing it....
And whatever any other formally empowered or free-lance commentator
might futurely say, whether in print or conversation, about my
stupidity and crass plagiarisms and self-conceit and futile
pruriencies, would not, I knew, matter either, in itself. The one
trouble was that all this maintained a clouded and sulphuric atmosphere
in which I dubiously moved, so far as went the thoughts of so many
dear, dull persons.... Meanwhile I had got the hearing which throughout
eighteen years of unreason I had hoped to get, and had always believed
to be imminent; and the book which I had written, in the Biography, was
finished, more or less, and would for its allotted season remain. With
the length, or, if you will, with the extreme brevity of that season, I
had no concern: it was enough to know that the Biography was finished,
and would outlast me.
§ 99
For that infernal boy had drawn from me the truth: I really had got
out of life what I most wanted. I had wanted to make the Biography:
and I had made it, in just the way which seemed good to me. To do that
had been, no doubt, my play and my diversion, in the corridors where
men must find diversion, whether in trifling with bank notes or women,
whether in clutching at straws or prayer-books, or else go mad: and
my enlinked deductions held as far as the chain stretched. But one
link more was needed. For it seemed to me, too, that I had somehow
fulfilled, without unduly shirking, an obligation which had been
laid upon me to make the Biography. I was not, heaven knew, claiming
for myself any heavenly inspiration or even any heavenly countenance.
Rather, it seemed to me that the ability and the body and the life
which transiently were at my disposal had been really used: with these
lent implements which were not ever properly speaking mine, and which
presently would be taken away from me, I had made something which was
actually mine. That something was the Biography....
§ 100
And still,--with all the bright day gone, and with the deepest gloom of
midnight also an affair of the past,--still, I seem not quite to have
found that final link, not wholly to have completed my epilogue. Some
word, as yet unthought of, stays needed to round off all....
Here then, upon this shelf, in these brown volumes which make up the
Biography, I can lay hand and eye upon just what precisely my life has
amounted to: the upshot of my existence is here before me, a tangible
and visible and entirely complete summing up, within humiliatingly
few inches. And yet, as I consider these inadequate brown volumes,
I suspect that the word I am looking for is "gratitude." It most
certainly is not "pride": and, as I hastily admit, nobody else is
called on to share in my suspicion.
But I at least, who have found human living and this world not wholly
admirable, and who have here and there made formal admission of the
fact, feel that in honor one ought to acknowledge all courtesies too.
With life, then, I, upon the whole, have no personal quarrel: she has
mauled, scratched and banged, she has in all ways damaged me: but she
has permitted me to do that which I most wanted. So that I must be, I
suppose, grateful.
--With which decision I very lightly pass my finger-tips across these
fifteen book-backs; and touch in this small gesture, so didactically
small, the whole of that to which, for good or ill, I have amounted.
And thereafter (with a continuing sense of wholesome allegory) I go
quietly to bed.
_Dumbarton Grange,
30 April, 1924._
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 14: Nothing is known of him.]
[Footnote 15: Dr. Pattee is stated to have lectured professionally, at
Pennsylvania State College, upon what patriotism described as American
literature. He is known to have edited Shakespeare's _Macbeth_,
and to have contributed to The American Mercury.]
[Footnote 16: Connected with Yale University.]
[Footnote 17: An English writer of some promise under the latter years
of Victoria's reign.]
[Footnote 18: See note on Judge Leonard Doughty, page 288.]
EXPLICIT
Transcribers note: "Text enclosed by underscores is in italics
(_italics_)."
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