Chapter IX: A Theme With Variations 239 (3)

Romantic art has from the first inclined to glorify the breaker of laws current in the artist's lifetime. Nor are the provocatives for this sedition obscure; since no society has ever provided any exact or generally respected status for the artist, nor afforded him, at most, much more than the half-contemptuous, cosseting indulgence which is granted to lap-dogs. Moreover, the artist alone is permitted hourly to use his reason,--an action which in any other walk of life would at once upset business usage or professional etiquette,--because of men's general conviction that here it doesn't especially matter. In consequence the artist has always found our human ordering of this world, under all régimes, to be unsatisfactory; and to offenders against any part of this ordering he inclines with irrational unavoidable sympathy.... You may, in fact, observe that nobody is quite at ease in dealing with a policeman: the man represents, however genially, with howsoever bright adornments of figured brass and rubicundity, an oppression that is upon us; and while in theory the relation between the legally honest tax-payer and his two hired and liveried retainers, the policeman and the mail-carrier, is the same, one notes in practise a marked difference. The courts and officers of the law, and all legal processes, are matters with which we as if by instinct avoid involvement: for, here again, man occupies somewhat the position of a Frankenstein.... So Robin Hood is voted an unending triumph, from black letter ballads to the moving pictures, and the fact that Christ was crucified by due process of law has everlastingly endeared His story to romantic art and human sympathy.

Now very often, I daresay, the artist is guided by this sympathy for the rogue without suspecting its existence. Thus even in the most genteel and circumspect of arts,--which I take to be the composition of a novel in the English language,--it is droll to find from the beginning the most respectable of scribes, if not always of pharisees, depicting one or another rascally law-breaker with fervors of fond admiration whereof the writer seems wholly unconscious. For the English novel began with the rogueries of Lovelace and Tom Jones. Then followed the chronicles of Rob Roy and Jack Sheppard and Paul Clifford, most exemplary and magnanimous of highwaymen. Seth Pecksniff presently fell down the steps of his cottage in Wiltshire: and tall Redmund Barry fled up to Dublin, just two years later, after his duel with Captain Quin. By and by, in Lymport, the great Mel assumed his over-tight lieutenant's uniform, and was laid out in his coffin, by way of beginning the tale which his personality infuses all through: and the gay young Master of Ballantrae (after tossing a guinea with his brother) travelled northward from Durrisdeer, singing as he rode toward Culloden, with a fine new white cockade in his hat.... For all these are rogues, in each of whom his creator obviously joyed, no matter under what protective coloration of moral purpose and of self-deceit.

§ 29

That art is a criticism of life, appears a favorite apothegm among those who know least about either. Yet the statement is true enough, in the sense that prison-breaking is a criticism of the penitentiary. Art is, in its last terms, an evasion of the distasteful. The artist simply does not like the earth he inhabits: for the laws of nature his admiration has always been remarkably temperate; and with the laws of society he has never had any patience whatever.

So the literary artist leaves the earth which he inhabits, daily and with no more to-do than daily is made over the same feat by professional aeronauts. And the literary artist diverts himself by constructing other worlds, whose orderings are different, and to his mind more approvable. All creative writers have thus, whether consciously or no, embarked in an undertaking compared with which the axiomatic attempt to weave ropes of sand or to construct silk purses from even less adapt material is a quite sane and unassuming enterprise. For the literary artist here is at play with the second of his adversaries, with piety; and has offered to instruct the aggregate wisdom of his fellows and even of Omnipotence how to create a more satisfactory world.

By the less venturous the suggestions thrown out have been partial and in the nature of slight amendments to existent orderings. For centuries where magic has attempted to coerce Providence, and religion has urged the bribing of Heaven, whether with burnt offerings or good behavior, here the artist has more urbanely adhered to moral suasion, by setting a praiseworthy example for the Demiurge to follow.... Thus has the novelist long proposed, through this delicate intimation of setting the example, that a time limit might advantageously be placed upon human discomforts, and immunity from the sum total be granted, say, along with a marriage license. Suitable incomes, it has in the same tactful way been suggested to Providence, should be conferred upon all virtuous and guileless persons, for whom the bonds of reality rarely afford coupons. And something certainly ought to be done about man's positively dangerous racial custom of getting older and dying; for which the novelist's alternative would seem to be that, after an equitable distribution of confessions and brides and unexpected legacies and jail-sentences, everybody should enter a static condition of middle age. Such at least is the impression left by the last paragraphs of our elder novels, with all the characters congealed into perdurable domesticity and standing sponsor for one another's children. Scheherezade is, to me, the only known tale-teller who has punctiliously and convincingly accounted for the future of her puppets, after the winding up of each comedy, by stating that they were duly disposed of by the destroyer of delights, and presumably the undertaker.... Let it, in fine, be understood that the business of human life, as we know it, will by and by be reorganized, and everything be made entirely and permanently different: and fortified by that firm understanding, we can for the present allow the conditions of human life. That much at least has been from the beginning a proviso insisted upon by every creative writer.

But those whom life has more deeply disappointed and bored, these turn to diverting themselves with worlds that are in everything dissimilar from the one world with which ill luck has made them familiar. These are the romantics, the fantastics, who, cursed with actual imagination, devoted it in youth to pre-figuring what life must be when you became an untrammeled adult. They have faced the reality, they have faced the real and incredible antickry of men as social units. They have faced it with a candor uncharacteristic of common-sense. And they have now no further concern with the laws and other hebetudes of men, except to forget these disappointments as utterly as possible, and to divert themselves in worlds of their own creation wherein their whims are the only laws. So Ulenspiegel is sent hunting werwolves; Holy Maël is tricked into sailing northward, in a demon-rigged stone trough, among fabulous seas and immodest sirens; the huge shadow which bears obscurely, as if beneath the wings of a bat, the Seven Deadly Sins, is cast across the roof of Anthony's hut in the Thebaid; the Snow Queen is bundled into a great sledge painted white, and fetched south to kidnap little Kay; Alice is lured into the rabbit hole and tumbled, very slowly, down that very deep well whose walls were inset with cupboards and bookshelves: and the creating romantic is diverted.

§ 30

Meanwhile you may note the unreflective raising somewhat of a pother over the circumstance that the artist is as a rule disliked and is belittled, if not actually persecuted, by his contemporaries. Yet no other outcome can seem more natural, I am afraid, when you consider that the art of every important creative writer is an hourly protest that he finds his contemporaries dull and inadequate persons, and that he esteems the laws which they have devised, and live under, to be imbecile. Laws based upon rationality one could endure: but any sane person, as the fretted artist perceives, must regard with an eye full of provisos the professed aim of so many of our laws, to make for the public's general welfare and happiness. For the artist is logical; and therein differs from the majority of his fellows, who unthinkingly assume that all efforts to promote the well-being of mankind at large are praiseworthy. I myself concede that we are here apt, through however admirable motives, to act precipitately, where one calm instant's thought would tend to show all such efforts irreligious and illogical. By no religious code, and by no course of logic taught in any school, is the average man entitled to happiness: his demerits justify in logic the earthly misery which religion postulates: and to impose upon him happiness would be, by the best-thought-of standards, an unreasonable and blasphemous act, which, one may proudly say, American civilization has never come anywhere near committing.

Instead, the orthodox should find it very gratifying to note with what complete inutility altruism flourishes everywhere, and legal enactments pullulate to promote men's general well-being; since faith and logic alike, I take it, are strengthened by the utterness with which all these laws fail, and, in fact, appear to muddle matters rather worse than ever.

And it is perhaps a good thing too that we, who have taxes, by-laws, licenses, passports, burial certificates, and permits to marry,--we who must do all that is done by us either in violation or with the permission of one or another law, we who live bound and fretted by innumerable small legal requirements and taboos and restrictions,--cannot in the least imagine what living must have been like under less omnipresently paternal governments. In simpler and upon the whole less muddle-headed ages the relatively few laws whereunder mankind lived did not pretend to accomplish anybody's positive benefit; their slighter and more feasible aim was to prevent your undue annoyance of anybody else: and, that secured, the laws took--it becomes a positively incredible concept,--no further account of your actions....

--Which is not of course to suggest that the artist fared in more Arcadian days a whit the merrier. I would not imply that the artist was then content with his material surroundings, nor that in any society he is likely ever to be content. Here and there, to be sure, as I have admitted, he wins to the cuddlings and applause of the lapdog with a quaint repertoire of tricks; and dies, some while after forgetting these tricks, comfortably enough of being over-pampered. But the romantics, the true romantics, these also, are in a wholly un-Falstaffian sense all minions of the moon,--who has condemned them, as I recall my Baudelaire, eternally to love the place where they are not and the woman whom they know not. Astrology is more exact; and, under those whom the moon rules, defines very perfectly the true romantic, as "a soft tender creature, a searcher of and delighter in novelties; unsteadfast, timorous, prodigal; loving peace and to live free from care; hating labor; and content in no condition of life, either good or ill." To me that last clause seems in every sense conclusive.

He that is born one of the minions of the moon must therefore always be a little at odds with what his fellows describe as piety. For his reason, such as it is, compels him to disapprove of most human laws, upon the ground of their foolishness, and of most natural laws, upon the ground, not merely of their unreason nor even of their lewdness and cruelty, but of their ugly and unæsthetic results. So that in the worlds he builds as both a lesson and a rebuke to Providence, the creative artist inclines to favor and to place in a heroic light such persons as Tyl Ulenspiegel and Robin Hood, who, by the standards of human laws, are better fitted for jail. Nor is that all....

§ 31

No: that is not by any means all. For the romantic enters into frank competition with nature by attempting not merely to create more interesting persons than nature creates, but also to outvie nature by making his creations durable. And, as a sort of supreme affront, creative art now and then plucks from the graveyard one of nature's put-by failures, and, with a triumphant, "See now what I can do with the very material this bungler has flung away!" converts the dead man or woman into an ever-living romantic myth. So are begotten those favored persons whose vitality and whose adventuring each generation of mankind renews.... I refer, of course, to such persons as Prometheus and Pan and Judas and the Sphinx,--and to Andromeda and Helen of Troy and Satan. I refer to the Wandering Jew and Faust and Odysseus, who stay always irresistible to the romanticist: and I refer to King Solomon and Queen Cleopatra and the knight Tannhäuser, and to Lilith and Don Juan also, for whom are yet reserved, we know, the most spirit-stirring adventures in the manuscripts of writers still unborn. I refer to Blue Beard, and to Dame Mélusine, and to Punch, and to a great many others who were so lucky as to originate in a satisfyingly romantic myth, and who in consequence stay always real and always free of finding life monotonous.

Now, it is an ever-present reminder of our own impermanence to note that no human being stays real. In private annals a species of familiary canonization sets in with each fresh advent of the undertaker; no sooner, indeed, do our moribund lie abed than we begin even in our thoughts to lie like their epitaphs; and all of us by ordinary endure the pangs of burying ineffably more admirable kin than we ever possessed.... Nor does much more of honesty go to the making of those national chronicles which Mr. Henry Ford, with a candor that at one time really seemed incurable by anything short of four years in the White House, has described as "bunk." In history one finds everywhere an impatient desire to simplify the tortuous and complex human being into a sort of forthright shorthand. Alexander was ambitious, Machiavelli cunning, Henry the Eighth bloodthirsty, and George Washington congenitally incapable of prevarication. That is all there was to them, so far as they concern the average man: and thus does history imply its shapers with the most curt of symbols, somewhat as an astronomer jots down a four's first cousin to indicate the huge planet Jupiter and compresses the sun that nourishes him, into a proof-reader's period. Always in this fashion does history work over its best rôles into allegories about the Lord Desire of Vain-glory and Mr. By-ends, about Giant Bloody-man and Mr. Truthful; and rubs away the humanness of each dead personage resistlessly, as if resolute to get rid in any event of most of him; and pares him of all traits except the one which men, whether through national pride or the moralist's large placid preference for lying, have elected to see here uncarnate.

Quite otherwise fare those luckier beings who began existence with the advantage of being incorporeal, and hence have not any dread of time's attrition. The longer that time handles them, the more does he enrich their experience and personalities....

§ 32

I found recorded, for example, not long ago, in Mr. Robert Nichols' fine book _Fantastica_, the very latest adventures of three of these favored beings. And let me protest forthwith that I profoundly enjoyed this book. This trio of stories, about such copious protagonists as Andromeda and the Sphinx and the Wandering Jew, came, to me at least, as the most amiable literary surprise since Mr. Donn Byrne published _Messer Marco Polo_. Here was beauty and irony and wisdom; here was fine craftsmanship: but here, above all, were competently reported the more recent events in the existence of favored persons whose vitality and whose adventuring each generation of mankind renews.

I found, for instance, Mr. Nichols writing very beautifully about Andromeda. Well, it was Euripides, they say, who first popularized this myth of Andromeda: and, for all that the dramas he wrote about her are long lost, it were time-wasting, of a dullness happily restricted to insane asylums and the assembly halls of democratic legislation, here to deliberate whether Andromeda or Euripides be to us the more important and vivid person, in a world wherein Euripides survives as a quadrisyllable and wherein Andromeda's living does, actually, go on. You have but, for that matter, to compare Andromeda with the overlords of the milieu in which her fame was born, with the thin shadows that in pedants' thinking, and in the even gloomier minds of schoolboys upon the eve of an "examination," troop wanly to prefigure Cleon and Pericles and Nicias, to see what a leg up toward immortality is the omission of any material existence. These estimable patriots endure at best as wraiths and nuisances, in a world wherein Andromeda's living does, actually, go on. It is not merely that she continues to beguile the poet and painter, but that each year she demonstrably does have quite fresh adventures.... Only yesterday, I reflected, Mr. C.C. Martindale had attested as much, in his engaging and far too scantly famous book, _The Goddess of Ghosts_; as now did Mr. Nichols in _Fantastica_.... For it is, through whatever human illogic, yesterday's fictitious and most clamantly impossible characters who remain to us familiar and actual persons, the while that we remember yesterday's flesh-and-blood notables as bodiless traits.

So it comes about that only these intrepid men and flawless women and other monsters who were born cleanlily of imagination, in lieu of the normal messiness, and were born as personages in whom, rather frequently without knowing why, the artist perceives a satisfying large symbolism,--that these alone bid fair to live and thrive until the proverbial crack of doom. Their living does, actually, go on, because each generation of artists is irresistibly impelled to provide them with quite fresh adventures.... And no one can, with certainty, say why. One merely knows that these favored romantic myths, to whom just now I directed the stiletto glance of envy, remain the only persons existent who may with any firm confidence look forward to a colorful and always varying future, the only persons who stay human in defiance of death and time and the even more dreadful theories of "new schools of poetry"; and who keep, too, undimmed the human trait of figuring with a difference in the eye of each beholder. For all the really fine romantic myths have this in common. As Mr. Nichols phrases it, in approaching a continuation of the story of Prometheus one may behold in the Fire-Bringer, just as one's taste elects, a pre-figuring of Satan or of Christ or of Mr. Thomas Alva Edison.

And this one sometimes guesses to be--perhaps--the pith of such myths' durability, that the felt symbolism admits of no quite final interpreting. Each generation finds for Andromeda a different monster and another rescuer; continuously romance and irony endeavor to contrive new riddles for the Sphinx; whereas the Wandering Jew--besides the tour de force of having enabled General Lew Wallace to write a book which voiced more fatuous blather than _Ben-Hur_,--has had put to his account, at various times, the embodying of such disparate pests as thunderstorms and gypsies and Asiatic cholera.

Well! here--just for an instant to recur to _Fantastica_, as a volume which I delight in commending to the particular notice of the urbane,--here one finds Mr. Nichols also writing remarkably contemporaneous parables about the Sphinx and her latest lover, about Andromeda and Perseus, about the Wandering Jew and Judas Iscariot. They are, to my finding, very wise and lovely tales; they are, I hope, the graduating theses of a maturing poet who has become sufficiently sophisticated to put aside the, after all, rather childish business of verse-making. But the really important feature, in any event, is that Robert Nichols adds to the unending imbroglios of these actually vital persons, and guides with competence and a fine spirit the immortal travellers. Nor is this any trivial praise when you recall that, earlier, they have been served by such efficient if slightly incongruous couriers as Goethe and Charles Kingsley and Euripides and Eugène Sue, as Matthew of Paris and Flaubert and Nathaniel Hawthorne and the Reverend George Crowley.

§ 33

For these great myths have, over and above that quality of which I spoke just now as wizardry, some common and not readily definable power which resistlessly makes captive the dreams of men of all conditions and faiths and degrees of intelligence. I can remember puzzling a long while over what conceivable feature these so divergent stories could be said to have in common; since some shared trait must be, I reasoned, the explanation of their virtually uniform allure. And these myths baffled me. Their might seemed, as their origin, not wholly explicable. I say "their origin" because no great romantic myth seemed the product of any especial brain. Never could we detect any writer seated at his desk about the diligent invention of any one of these stories, told now for the first time. Rather did legends gather slowly and contradictorily, arising none knew whence, about the tale's protagonist, who was by ordinary an actual personage some while since dead. By and by somebody had perhaps written down a part of this rumor, always with plain inability to narrate the whole; and the result might be, to the one side an _Odyssey_, to the other a _Juif Errant_.... Sometimes one of these inexplicably macrobiotic myths had found no formal chronicler, and for centuries existed in detachment from literature. There was, for example, I reflected, the fine figure of Punch, which imaginative artists had prodigally left unexploited. In fact, nobody except Mr. Conrad Aiken[3] seemed ever to have written with seriousness about Punch; and this superb theme as yet awaited merely the attention of some gifted writer, to enrich the world with a masterpiece. Then there was Mélusine. There was, for that matter, Blue Beard.... All these stayed uncommemorated with any adequacy as yet, and were, despite that fact, no whit the less recognizable as magnificent and immortal.

I could not see that these old stories had anything whatever in common; and even if in these ageless fables some shared feature were discovered, that would hardly explain the unvarying strange sequel. It would not, I thought, explain the emergence from the "story" of a figure which, the story done with, and all its incidents put behind, continued to live on in other stories, and continued through generation after generation to have quite fresh adventures. Nothing seemed able ever to explain that. Yet it was a fact. One was tempted to imagine these immortal figures had guiles of their own, and exerted strange potencies less to afford the artist a fruitful theme than to demand his service. Man here again, it might be, enacted his not infrequent rôle of Frankenstein.... At any rate, the secret was not in the stories: artists did not repeat these stories, but instead arranged new imbroglios for the old tales' protagonists.

Of course the truth was that these figures, for one reason or another as yet unrevealed to me, were such as, for that reason, appealed to a majority of creating romanticists. They were toys with which, for howsoever veiled causes, the artist peculiarly delighted to play. It might, I guessed, have been the element of dubiety which fascinated, and the half-vexed feeling that, when all which is apparent to sense and rationality had been checked off and labeled, much yet remained amenable to neither. It might be, just as I had said, the pith of such myths' durability that the felt symbolism admits of no quite final interpreting; and so arouses the not utterly rational suspicion that the whole truth about these mythic figures has never yet been apprehended by anybody.

§ 34

Strikingly did this seem exemplified by the perennial magic of Pan. His epopee, as taken over by the artist, was virtually eventless. Pan figured in no story of marked interest or importance. He merely was: and what he was, nobody had presumed to voice with any precision. Pan was but indicated--always with a queer effect of the narrator's suspecting somebody might, undesirably, be eavesdropping,--by this vague talk about a hirsute wanderer with the horns and feet of a goat and a taste for pipe-playing: these features were, you knew, not the essentials. Such tales recorded only small and immaterial truths, as if--you somehow knew,--you were to define the Pope as an elderly Catholic who wears underclothing and eats breakfast, or a duly nominated candidate for the White House as a Protestant of unexigent honesty. So the creating romanticist had begun to divert himself with guesses about Pan: and now these guesses filled libraries.

But Pan was not in the library. He was afield, he was in all the magazines for the month after next now on the news-stands, having quite fresh adventures, which yet-living poets were under a tribal bond to contrive for him. In the records of English literature research might look in vain for any considerable poet who had not paid his scot of contriving some fresh adventure for Pan, and Pan yet roved the jungle of free verse. Pan, alone of the old Hellenic gods, had thus lived on, and had survived all his peers. Pan would not, to be sure, especially regret them, since he had never forgathered with the other gods....

And there, in that seemingly irrelevant fact, I began to detect a darkling light. Pan had never forgathered with the other gods: Olympos he appeared at utmost to visit now and then, with, as I recall _The Book of Job_, a curious similarity to Satan's coming among the sons of God, "from going to and fro in the earth and walking up and down in it." Pan, also, that unexplainedly dreadful and lonely wanderer, was the divine outcast. In the one existent story, that of Psyche, wherein Pan was represented as having any even very remote dealing with the other gods, his part was to aid a mortal against them. Pan, alone of the gods, had abandoned, and at a pinch sided against, Heaven. And that might well be the reason why the romantic artist had cherished him.

That perhaps was why Pan had become for romanticists the Master. That might be why, when Olympos crumbled, romanticists had set between those ungainly horns the pentagram; had caused this hairy brown body to burgeon with scales and feathers; had given to the most virile of the gods the breasts of a woman; and had kindled in his honor the moons of Chesed and Geburah. The goat god had thus, alone of the Olympians, endured. He endured as Baphomet, as Azazel, as Janicot, as Eblis; as the Master of the Gnostics, the Master of the Sabbath, the Master of the Two Moons, moons which had, here again, their minions....

I shall not, in this place, speak at any length of what the prosaic perhaps do well to regard as bedlamite nonsense: here I shall only indicate from afar the mystery I could not ignore. For I knew that the romantic had whispered of two scapegoats, of Christ and Pan, the saviors severally of religion and of art: the one dying in atonement for human sin, in the manner of the stainless beast which was sacrificed in the Temple; the other serving men in the manner of that other beast, not necessarily immaculate, which was loaded with the sins of the twelve tribes, and driven out of the Temple forever, as one consecrated not to death but to life, and condemned not to rest but to the exile's freedom, in those desert places which belonged to Pan-Azazel. For it is recorded--where we would least look for it, even in our English Bible,[4]--that the Lord of Sabaoth commanded such sacrifice and such honor be divided between Himself and the goat god, as equals share. And it is recorded too, in the sacred lore of the Moslems, that to the Master of the Two Moons, and to that especial manifesting of Pan which the East called Eblis, was relinquished by Heaven--through a compact such as, once again, is made by equals,--the overlordship of all loneliness, of wine, of verse and song and rhetoric, and of all the arts. You will perceive this is, very exactly, the heritage of the creating romantic....

Well! thus Christ had His servitors, whose reward was to be, by and by, in a land fulfilled with the glory of the Sun, eternal rest: and Pan, the Master of the Two Moons, had mustered likewise his minions, whose reward was their work. By these exceedingly diverse saviors, I knew, had been evolved the magic of the sanctuary and of the wilderness, the white magic and another magic rather less candid. So had arisen the messiahs who led men severally to hope for contentment to come, or to create contentment, somehow, even in this unsatisfying life and moment.... Pan was, in fine, the god who had looked upon the divine handiwork, and seen that it was not good; or, at any rate, not good enough. The creating romanticist had always hoped that somewhere must at least one such clear-sighted god exist; and, finding him, had worshipped appropriately....

And so I got my clue, and esteemed it, upon the whole, unwelcome.

For I saw that the one feature common to all the great mythic figures over whose deathlessness I had been puzzling, was that each was a divine and unrepentant outcast, that each one of them was a rebel who had gained famousness by warring in one way or another against Heaven. And that might be, I felt uncomfortably, just what had made them to all creative artists irresistible. Here well might lurk, for so long unapprehended by me, another and more lurid instance of art's need to make sport with piety; here revealed in art's unfaltering endeavor to glorify not merely the rogue but the rebel. Once the discovery might have pleased me. But nowadays, rebellion in any form really does seem rather unurbane and almost certainly futile: and very much as penitent Villon turned monk, or as the wild Highlanders ceased to rebel after the Stuarts lost in 'Forty-five, so have I found the same numeral to be remarkably sedative.

Nevertheless, at the bottom of his heart, the romantic artist, I knew, has not ever been in harmony with Providence and this world's Demiurge. He has not ever honestly believed, as I recall the dicta of John Charteris, that this world reflected credit upon its Maker. And so, toward offenders against this divine ordering the artist might well incline with unavoidable, unreasoning and, I preferred to think, unconscious sympathy.

§ 35

Certainly, of the myths I have named, all save two deal with protagonists who are condemned perforce to struggle against, and who contrive to thwart, inimical gods, as did Andromeda and Odysseus; or who rebel with the volition and candor of Satan and Tannhäuser and Prometheus. But the myths of the Sphinx and of Queen Helen rest upon other bases of impiety.... Helen, indeed, stands pedestalled above the bickerings of mere gods.... And to the romantic the Sphinx has never really been that offensively feeble-minded monster who molested Œdipus with a conundrum so inane as to result, quite properly, in the death of its perpetrator. Instead, the Sphinx has become, for the romantic, the one being who foreknows the answer to all riddles and the outcome of all experience. And because of this foreknowledge, obviously denied to demiurgically experimenting gods, the Sphinx does nothing.... This dreadful certitude, equally male and female, as was Baphomet and as was the veiled Lord of Mommur, this quietness that is equally a beast of the field and an unslayable immortal, this very large and pitiless felinity, lies waiting; and waits in blasphemous and perturbingly untroubled ease. The years pass; pious nations come into being and high power and pass; heaven is no longer great enough to contain a catalogue of the gods that have reigned in heaven: the Sphinx, men say, has never stirred. For the Sphinx waits. All the august doings of Olympos and Sinai and Valhalla have been witnessed by the Sphinx: and the most favorable interpreting of that changeless face is, upon the whole, to hope it wears the provisional smile we bend toward the playing of not yet unbearable children. And therein lies the impiety of the waiting Sphinx, in this amused deep comprehension that there is no need to rebel against our gods.... For the Sphinx is immortal: and the secret of the Sphinx, men say, is that secret which the harried gods strive desperately to surmise: the Sphinx knows why no god may ever hope to be immortal.

§ 36

Yes: all these so inexplicably popular myths commemorate a rebel against Heaven's orderings. Each myth, in one fashion or another, adopts the true Byronic posture of looking the Omnipotent in the face and imparting to Him the, upon the whole unstartling, information that His evil is not good. And that--where every dictum is perforce an hypothesis,--that well may be why these especial myths, rather than others, overruled the art of yesterday; and why upon us is yet laid their mastery, from which the spiritual descendants of us who are minions of the moon shall not escape.

No matter into what sort of world this planet develops, through howsoever laudable a magic-working of social and mechanical and hygienic improvements, that future also belongs to these inscrutable immortals. Into that world, however handsomely it all be changed by new inventions and fresh fallacies, I think, they will come as conquerors.

First will come Helen. I mean that Helen who was verily at Troy. For the wife of Menelaus, we know, did not ever come to this city: and Philostratus tells us how the whole truth as to the Greeks' crusade, in the high cause of outraged morality, was revealed by Achilles' ghost to Apollonius of Tyana. "For a long time we leaders of the Achæans were deceived and tricked into fighting battles in Helen's behalf, through our belief that she was in Ilium; whereas she really was living in Egypt, in the house of Proteus, whither through the device of Zeus she had been snatched away from Paris. But when we became convinced of this, we continued fighting to win Troy itself and the riches of Troy and the power these riches would give to us, proclaiming that this empire must be destroyed in order that the world might be made safe for democracy." And from Egypt Helen's husband--if that at all matters,--duly retrieved her on his way homeward when the warring was done.

But Hera, it is recorded, gave to Paris that woman's likeness, made of the white mists of night and of dawn's rosy-colored clouds and of the golden clouds of sunset, and shaped in that perfect loveliness with which Hera had before this time betrayed Ixion, leading the King of Thessaly to beget upon this shining phantom a dreadful spawn of twisted and blotched monsters.... And this bright emptiness was what the heroes fought for, in the most famous yet not by any means the most irrational of all the wars that have ever been. And when the warring was done, the leaders shared the spoils with much quarreling, and maimed soldiers knew they had fought for a colored mist, in this war also.

So Troy fell because the appearance of this phantom had beauty without any flaw. And the Trojans died. And the Greeks died. And Menelaus and his wife died too. And in time Queen Hera also died. But the phantom that had been at Troy endured, masterless, purposeless, and immortal.

Wherever men have been, she too, the romantic aver, has passed like a cool flame of marsh-fire, passionlessly, inconceivably bright: and of the beauty of this Helen there are many tales recorded. Yet whosoever has not seen her, it is declared by these poets also, to him beauty remains but one of the words he puts upon paper. They that have seen her, are a wistful folk who go thereafter with dazzled eyes and can write nothing truly. None the less does Helen keep her old complaisance; she, impassionate, denies not anything to the passion of her lovers: and they may still beget upon her loveliness all manner of twisted and blotched monsters, in the fashion of the King of Thessaly. So art endures, and critics and curators are providentially provided for. And Helen grants to her lovers everything except happiness: that they may never hope for; that she has not to give, nor has she ever known of it, who goes as a bright emptiness, without any like or kindred anywhere save in the monsters which are her spawn, as Helen passes from the ruining of one lover to another lover, masterless, purposeless, and immortal....

Yes, Helen will come first, I think. And near to her, no doubt, will follow her servitors from of old, crafty and great-thewed Odysseus, and Faust, in the pulled down cap and the furred robe of a scholar. And Don Juan, and pallid, desperate Tannhäuser, and Ahasuerus, who has put away despairing and hope forever, will come too; with many others.

And for an instant these thronged myths will look smilingly upon the ensorcelled romanticists of that far-off strange future. In that instant all the "new" schools of literature will perish; all the magazines sufficiently "vital" to be in bankruptcy will suspend publication; and--for that single instant,--the youngest of that far day's "realists" will cease from telling about what a devil of a fellow he was at college.

"Now," these immortals will say, "do you leave off this foolishness, and contrive for us fresh adventures."

And the tale-tellers will obey.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 2: The reference is to a then prevalent form of brigandage and blackmail practised by the females of the smaller American cities, by which reputable women also were permitted to "accost" and to exercise all the other street privileges of strumpets.]

[Footnote 3: A minor poet and essayist of the period.]

[Footnote 4: In the Revised Version: King James's bishops hushed up this awkward matter with a pious mistranslation.]

IV

THE THIN QUEEN OF ELFHAME

"This pleasing method of instilling instruction into the mind has been found by experience to be the shortest and best way of accomplishing that end among all ranks of persons. The fable of The Poor Man and His Lamb, for example, as related by Nathan to King David, carried with it a blaze of truth that flashed conviction on the mind of the royal transgressor: and many lessons of reproof, religion, and morality, we find to be continually delivered in this mode by the sages."

_4._

_The Thin Queen of Elfhame_

§ 37

The literary artist plays, I had said, with these large ageless symbols. And all artists would, I thought, continue indefinitely in such playing, because their fundamental desire in life is not quite the same desire which guides their fellows. The artist is as other men: he may well, in common with Shylock, assert himself to be fed by the same food and subject to the same diseases as a Christian is: and yet between him and the Christian is a difference.

Certainly, there was a difference: and the nearest I could come to defining this difference was to say it lay paradoxically housed in the circumstance that the artist, precisely like the most zealous of Christians, is in this material, four-square world not ever utterly at home. The Christian's desiderated home, we knew, was heaven: but the artist, as I had suggested, looked to a somewhat different savior. Meanwhile the artist went among men as a visitor, evincing at once the astonished interest and the detachment of a tourist in a foreign country. His home, and his fundamental desire, stayed elsewhere. This world of men and women did not content nor even vitally concern him: and always he wanted--no matter with what nebulousness he envisaged his need,--something else, which, somehow, was his heritage.

Some day, the artist felt, he would set forth to seek and find this needed something, like Anavalt in the old tale which I had once retold. And I fell here to recalling the story of Anavalt's last quest. For I had been assured time and again that this tale was a parable of a withdrawal from life to the solaces of art, and that there was some obvious symbolism, toward the end, in a seemingly off-hand reference to the tenuity of canvas and of paper. And I could only reply with the admission which youth finds it impossible to make about anything, but which with age comes easier. I said, I do not know. Nescience seemed alike the end and the beginning of the old story, which narrated why so many silken ladies wept....

§ 38

For even just how many silken ladies wept, well out of eyeshot of their husbands, when it was known that courteous Anavalt had left Count Emmerick's court, remains an indeterminable matter. But it is certain the number was large. There were, in addition, the tale tells, three women whose grieving for him was not ever to be ended: these did not weep. In the meanwhile, with all this furtive sorrowing some leagues behind him, and with a dead horse at his feet, tall Anavalt stood at a sign-post, and doubtfully considered a rather huge dragon.

"No," the dragon was saying, comfortably, "no, for I have just had dinner, and exercise upon a full stomach is unwholesome. So I shall not fight you, and you are welcome, for all of me, to go your ways into the Wood of Elfhame."

"Yet what," says Anavalt, "what if I were to be more observant than you of your duty and of your hellish origin? and what if I were to insist upon a fight to the death?"

When dragons shrug in sunlight their bodies are one long green glittering ripple. "I would be conquered. It is my business to be conquered in this world, where there are two sides to everything, and where one must look for reverses. I tell you frankly, tired man, that all we terrors who keep colorful the road to the Elle Maid are here for the purpose of being conquered. We make the way seem difficult, and that makes you who have souls in your bodies the more determined to travel on it. Our thin Queen found out long ago that the most likely manner of alluring men to her striped windmill was to persuade men she is quite inaccessible."

Said Anavalt, "That I can understand; but I need no such baits."

"Aha, so you have not been happy out yonder where people have souls? You probably are not eating enough: so long as one can keep on eating regularly, there is not much the matter. In fact, I see the hunger in your eyes, tired man."

Anavalt said:

"Let us not discuss anybody's eyes, for it is not hunger, nor indigestion either, which drives me to the Wood of Elfhame. There is a woman yonder, dragon, a woman whom ten years ago I married. We loved each other then, we shared a noble dream. To-day we sleep together, and have no dreams. To-day I go in flame-colored satin, with heralds before me, into bright long halls where kings await my counsel, and my advising becomes the law of cities that I have not seen. The lords of this world accredit me with wisdom, and say that nobody is more shrewd than Anavalt. But when at home, as if by accident, I tell my wife about these things, she smiles, not very merrily. For my wife knows more of the truth as to me and my powers and my achievements than I myself would care to know: and I can no longer endure the gaze of her forgiving eyes, and the puzzled hurt which is behind that forgiveness. So let us not discuss anybody's eyes."

"Well, well!" the dragon returned, "if you come to that, I think it would be more becoming for you not to discuss your married life with strangers, especially when I have just had dinner, and am just going to have a nap."

With that the evil worm turned round three times, his whiskers drooped, and he coiled up snugly about the sign-post which said "Keep Out of These Woods." He was a time-worn and tarnished dragon, as you could see now, with no employment in the world since men had forgotten the myth in which he used to live appallingly; so he had come, in homeless decrepitude, to guard the Wood of Elfhame.

Anavalt thus left this inefficient and outmoded monster.

§ 39

And the tale tells how, when Anavalt had passed this inefficient and outmoded monster, Anavalt went into the wood. He did not think of the tilled meadows or the chests of new-minted coin or the high estate which belonged to Anavalt in the world where people have souls. He thought of quite other matters as he walked in a dubious place. Here to the right of Anavalt's pathway were seen twelve in red tunics: they had head-dresses of green, and upon their wrists were silver rings. These twelve were alike in shape and age and loveliness: there was no flaw in the appearance of any, there was no manner of telling one from another. All these made a lament, with small sweet voices that followed the course of a thin and tinkling melody: they sang of how much better were the old times than the new; and none could know more thoroughly than did Anavalt the reason of their grieving, but since they did not molest him he had no need to meddle with these women's secrets any more. So he went on: and nothing as yet opposed him; at most, a grass-hopper started from the path, sometimes a tiny frog made way for him.

He came to a blue bull that lay in the road, blocking it.

§ 40

The tale tells that a blue bull lay in the road, blocking it. The tale narrates that this beast appeared more lusty and more terrible than other bulls, telling of how all his appurtenances were larger and seemed more prodigally ready to give life and death.

Courteous Anavalt cried out, "O Nandi, now be gracious, and permit me to pass unhindered toward the striped windmill."

"To think," replied the bull, "that you should mistake me for Nandi! No, tired man, the Bull of the Gods is white, and nothing of that serene color may ever come into these woods."

And the bull nodded very gravely, shaking the blue curls that were between his cruel horns.

"Ah, then, sir, I must entreat your forgiveness for the not unnatural error into which I was betrayed by the majesty of your appearance."

While Anavalt was speaking, he wondered why he should be at pains to humor an illusion so trivial as he knew this bull to be. For this of course was just the ruler of the Kittle cattle which everywhere feed upon the dewpools. The Queen of Elfhame, in that low estate to which the world's redemption had brought her, could employ only the most inexpensive of retainers, the Gods served her no longer.

"So you consider my appearance majestic! To think of that now!" observed the flattered bull; and he luxuriously exhaled blue flames. "Well, certainly you have a mighty civil way with you, to be coming from that overbearing world of souls. Still, my duty is, as they say, my duty; fine words are less filling than moonbeams: and, in short, I do not know of any sound reason why I should let you pass toward Queen Vae."

Anavalt answered:

"I must go to your thin mistress because among the women yonder whose bodies were not denied to me there is one woman whom I cannot forget. We loved each other once; we had, as I recall that radiant time, a quaint and callow faith in our shared insanity. Then somehow I stopped caring for these things, I turned to matters of more sensible worth. She took no second lover, she lives alone. Her beauty and her quick laughter are put away, she is old, and the home of no man is glad because of her who should have been the tenderest of wives and the most merry of mothers. When I see her there is no hatred in the brown eyes which once were bright and roguish, but only forgiveness and a puzzled grieving. Now there is in my mind no reason why I should think about this woman differently from some dozens of other women who were maids when I first knew them, but there is in my mind an unreason that will not put away the memory of this woman's notions about me."

"Well," said the bull, yawning, "for my part, I find one heifer as good as another; and I find, too, that in seeking Queen Vae one pretext is as good as another pretext, especially from the mouth of such a civil gentleman. So do you climb over my back, and go your way, to where there are no longer two sides to everything."

Thus Anavalt passed the King of the Kittle cattle.

§ 41

Anavalt thus passed the King of the Kittle cattle, and the tale tells how Anavalt journeyed deeper into the Wood of Elfhame. No trumpets sounded before him as they sounded when the Anavalt who was a great lord went about the world where people have souls: and the wonders which Anavalt saw to this side and to that side did not disturb him, nor he them. He came to a house of rough-hewn timber, where a black man, clothed in a goat-skin, barked like a dog and made old gestures. This, as Anavalt knew, was the Rago: within the house sat cross-legged, at that very moment, the Forest-Mother, whose living is innocent of every normal vice, and whose food is the red she-goat and men. Yet upon the farther side of the home of perversity was to be seen a rusty nail in the pathway, and bits of broken glass, prosaic relics which seemed to show that men had passed this place.

So Anavalt made no reply to the obscene enticements of the Rago. Anavalt went sturdily on, to a tree which in the stead of leaves was overgrown with human hands: these hands had no longer any warmth in them as they caught at and tentatively figured Anavalt, and presently released him.

Now the path descended, among undergrowth that bore small purple flowers with five petals. Anavalt came here upon wolves which went along with him a little way. Running they could not be seen, but as each wolf leaped in his running his gray body would show momentarily among the green bushes that instantly swallowed it: and these wolves cried hoarsely, "Janicot is dead!" But for none of these things did Anavalt care any longer, and none of the peculiarities of Elfhame stayed him, until his path had led further downward, and the roadway had become dark and moist. Here were sentinels with draggled yellow plumes, a pair of sentinels at whom Anavalt looked only once: then with averted head he passed them, in what could not seem a merry place to Anavalt, for in the world where people have souls he was used to mirth and soft ease and to all such delights as men clutch desperately in the shadow of death's clutching hand.

In this place Anavalt found also a naked boy.

§ 42

In this place Anavalt found, as the tale tells, a naked boy whose body was horrible with leprosy: this malady had eaten away his fingers, so that they could retain nothing, but his face was not much changed.

The leper stood knee-deep in a pile of ashes: and he demanded what Anavalt was called nowadays.

When courteous Anavalt had answered, the leper said then:

"You are not rightly called Anavalt. But my name is still Owner-of-the-World."

Says Anavalt, very sadly, "Even though you bar my way, ruined boy, I must go forward to the windmill of the Elle Maid."

"And for what reason must you be creeping to this last woman? For she will be the last,--as I forewarn you, tired man, who still pretend to be Anavalt,--she will be the last of all, and of how many!"

Anavalt answered: