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

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:

[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.