life, if only at second- or third-hand, from books, precisely as he had
done. Even Amrou had derived his notions as to the value of literature
from a book. Men pretended laboriously that their own lives were like
the purposeful and clearly motived life of book-land. In secret, the
more perspicacious cherished the reflection that, any how, their lives
would begin to be like that to-morrow. The purblind majority quite
honestly believed that literature was meant to mimic human life, and
that it did so. And in consequences, their love-affairs, their maxims,
their passions, their ethics, their conversations, their so-called
natural ties and instincts, and above all, their wickednesses, became
just so many bungling plagiarisms from something they had read, in a
novel or a Bible or a poem or a newspaper. People progressed from the
kindergarten to the cemetery assuming that their emotion at every crisis
was what books taught them was the appropriate emotion, and without
noticing that it was in reality something quite different. Human life
was a distorting tarnished mirror held up to literature: this much at
least of Wilde’s old paradox—that life mimicked art—was indisputable.
Human life, very clumsily, tried to reproduce the printed word. Human
life was prompted by, and was based upon, printed words—“in the
beginning was the Word,” precisely as Gospel asserted. Kennaston had it
now. Living might become symmetrical, well-plotted, coherent, and
rational as living was in books. This was the hope which guided human
beings through to-day with anticipation of to-morrow.
Then he perceived that there was no such thing as symmetry anywhere in
inanimate nature....
It was Ettarre who first pointed out to him the fact, so tremendously
apparent when once observed, that there was to be found nowhere in
inanimate nature any approach to symmetry. It needed only a glance
toward the sky the first clear night to show there was no pattern-work
in the arrangement of the stars. Nor were the planets moving about the
sun at speeds or distances which bore any conceivable relation to one
another. It was all at loose ends. He wondered how he could possibly
have been misled by pulpit platitudes into likening this circumambient
anarchy to mechanism. To his finicky love of neatness the universe
showed on a sudden as a vast disheveled horror. There seemed so little
harmony, so faint a sense of order, back of all this infinite torrent of
gyrations. Interstellar space seemed just a jumble of frozen or flaming
spheres that, moving ceaselessly, appeared to avoid one another’s
orbits, or to collide, by pure chance. This spate of stars, as in three
monstrous freshets, might roughly serve some purpose; but there was to
be found no more formal order therein than in the flow of water-drops
over a mill-wheel.
And on earth there was no balancing in the distribution of land and
water. Continents approached no regular shape. Mountains stood out like
pimples or lay like broken welts across the habitable ground, with no
symmetry of arrangement. Rivers ran anywhither, just as the haphazard
slope of earth’s crevices directed; upon the map you saw quite clearly
that their streams neither balanced one another nor watered the land
with any pretense of equity. There was no symmetry anywhere in inanimate
nature, no harmony, no equipoise of parts, no sense of form, not even a
straight line. It was all at loose ends.
But living things aimed toward symmetry. In plants the notion seemed
rudimentary, yet the goal was recognizable. The branches of a tree did
not put out at ordered distance, nor could you discern any definite plan
in their shaping: but in the leaves, at least, you detected an effort
toward true balance: the two halves of a leaf, in a rough fashion, were
equal. In every leaf and flower and grass-blade you saw this never
entirely successful effort.
And in insects and reptiles and fish and birds and animals you saw again
this effort, more creditably performed. All life seemed about the rather
childish employment of producing a creature which consisted of two equal
and exactly corresponding parts. It was true that in most cases this
effort was foiled by an uneven distribution of color in plumage or
scales or hide; but in insects and in mankind the goal, so far as went
the eye, was reached. Men and insects, to the eye at least, could be
divided into two equal halves....
But even so, there was no real symmetry in man’s body save in externals.
The heart was not in the center; there was no order in the jumbled
viscera; the two divisions of the brain did not correspond; there was
nothing on the left side to balance the troublesome vermiform appendix
on the right; even the lines in the palm of one hand were unlike those
which marked the other: and everywhere, in fine, there was some
irrational discrepancy. Man, the highest form as yet of life, had
attained at most only a teasing semblance of that crude symmetry toward
which all life seemed to aim, and which inanimate nature appeared to
ignore. Nowhere in the universe could Kennaston discover any instance of
quite equal balance, of anything which, as vision went, could be divided
into two similar halves—save only in man’s handiwork. Here, again,
insects approached man’s efforts more closely than the rest of creation;
for many of them builded almost as truly. But man, alone in the
universe, could produce exact visual symmetry, in a cathedral or a
dinner-table or a pair of scissors, just as man so curiously mimicked
symmetry in his outward appearance. The circumstance was droll, and no
less quaint for the fact that it was perhaps without significance....
But Kennaston bemused himself with following out the notion that life
was trying to evolve symmetry—order, proportion and true balance. Living
creatures represented life’s gropings toward that goal. You saw, no
doubt, a dim perception of this in the dream which sustained all human
beings—that to-morrow living would begin to be symmetrical, well-plotted
and coherent, like the progress of a novel.... And that was precisely
what religion promised, only in more explicit terms, and with the
story’s _milieu_ fixed in romantic, rather than realistic, settings.
Kennaston had here the sensation of fitting in the last bit of a puzzle.
Life, yearning for symmetry, stood revealed as artist. Life strove
toward the creation of art. That was all life cared about. Living things
were more or less successful works of art, and were to be judged
according to art’s canons alone. The universe was life’s big barren
studio, which the Artist certainly had neither planned nor builded, but
had, somehow, occupied, to make the best of its limitations. For
Kennaston insisted that living things and inanimate nature had none of
the earmarks of being by the same author. They were not in similar
style, he said; thus, presupposing a sentient creator of the stars and
planets, it would seem to have been in contradiction of his code to make
both a man’s eyes of the same color.
It was this course of speculation which converted Kennaston to an
abiding faith in Christianity, such as, our rector informs me, is
deplorably rare in these lax pleasure-loving days of materialism. To
believe this inconsiderable planet the peculiar center of a God’s
efforts and attention had for a long while strained Kennaston’s
credulity: the thing was so woefully out of proportion when you
considered earth’s relative value in the universe. But now Felix
Kennaston comprehended that in the insensate universe there was no
proportion. The idea was unknown to the astral architect, or at best no
part of his plan, if indeed there had been any pre-meditation or
contriver concerned. Singly on our small earth—not even in the solar
system of which earth made a part—was any sense of proportion evinced;
and there it was apparent only in living things. Kennaston seemed to
glimpse an Artist-God, with a commendable sense of form—Kennaston’s
fellow craftsman—the earth as that corner of the studio wherein the God
was working just now, and all life as a romance the God was inditing....
That the plot of this romance began with Eden and reached its climax at
Calvary, Kennaston was persuaded, solely and ardently, because of the
surpassing beauty of the Christ-legend. No other myth compared with it
from an æsthetic standpoint. He could imagine no theme more adequate to
sustain a great romance than this of an Author suffering willingly for
His puppets’ welfare; and mingling with His puppets in the similitude of
one of them; and able to wring only contempt and pity from His
puppets—since He had not endowed them with any faculties wherewith to
comprehend their Creator’s nature and intent. Indeed, it was pretty much
the plight which Kennaston had invented for his own puppets at
Storisende, as Kennaston complacently reflected. It was the most
tremendous situation imaginable; and quite certainly no Author could
ever have failed to perceive, and to avail Himself of, its dramatic
possibilities. To conceive that the world-romance did not center upon
Calvary was to presume an intelligent and skilled Romancer blind to the
basic principles of His art. His sense of pathos and of beauty and of
irony could have led Him to select no other legend. And in the
inconsistencies and unsolved problems, or even the apparent
contradictions, of Christianity, Felix Kennaston could see only a
possible error or omission on the Author’s part, such as was common to
all romances. A few errata did not hamper the tale’s worth and splendor,
or render it a whit less meritorious of admiration....
And, indeed, Felix Kennaston found that his theory of the Atonement was
in harmony with quite orthodox teachings. The library at Alcluid
revealed bewildered and perturbed generations at guess-work. How could a
God have been placated, and turned from wrath to benevolence, by
witnessing the torment of His own son? What pleasure, whereby He was
propitiated, could the God have derived from watching the scene on
Calvary? Or was the God, as priests had taught so long (within the same
moment that they proclaimed the God’s omnipotence) not wholly a free
agent, because bound by laws whereby He was compelled to punish some one
for humanity’s disobedience, with the staggering option of substituting
an innocent victim? For if you granted that, you conceded to be higher
than the God, and overruling Him, a power which made for flat injustice.
Since Schleiermacher’s time, at least, as Kennaston discovered, there
had been reasoning creatures to contest the possibility of such
discrepant assumptions, and a dynasty of teachers who adhered to the
“subjective” theory of propitiation. For these considered that Christ
came, not primarily to be crucified, but by his life to reveal to men
the nature of their God. The crucifixion was an incidental, almost
inevitable, result of human obtuseness; and was pregnant with value only
in that thereby the full extent of divine love was perfectly evinced.
The personality, rather than the sufferings, of the Nazarene had thus
satisfied, not any demand or attribute of the God by acting upon it from
without, “but God’s total nature by revealing it and realizing it in
humanity.” The God, in short, had satisfied Himself “by revealing and
expressing His nature” in the material universe, precisely as lesser
artists got relief from the worries of existence by depicting themselves
in their books. Just as poets express themselves communicatively in
words, so here the Author had expressed Himself in flesh. Such, in
effect, had been the teaching of Karl Immanuel Nitzsch, of Richard
Rothe, and of von Hofman, in Germany; of Auguste Bouvier in Geneva; of
Alexandre Vinet, and of Auguste Sabatier, in France; of Frederick
Denison Maurice, and John Caird, and Benjamin Jowett, in England; and in
America of Horace Bushnell, and Elisha Mulford, and William Newton
Clarke. The list was imposing: and Kennaston rejoiced to find himself at
one with so many reputable theologians. For all these scholars had dimly
divined, with whatever variousness they worded the belief, that the
God’s satisfaction sprang, in reality, from the consciousness of having
at last done a fine piece of artistic work, in creating the character of
Christ....
So, as nearly as one can phrase the matter, it was really as a proof of
confidence in his Author’s literary abilities that Felix Kennaston was
presently confirmed at our little country church, to the delight of his
wife and the approbation of his neighbors. It was felt to be eminently
suitable: that such a quiet well-to-do man of his years and station
should not be a communicant was generally, indeed, adjudged unnatural.
And when William T. Vartrey (of the Lichfield Iron Works) was gathered
to his grandfathers, in the following autumn, Mr. Kennaston was rather
as a matter of course elected to succeed him in the vestry. And
Kennaston was unfeignedly pleased and flattered.
* * * * *
To the discerning it is easy enough to detect in all this fantastic
theorizing the man’s obsessing love of ordered beauty and his abhorrence
of slovenliness—of shapelessness—which make his writings so admirable,
here alluring him to believe that such ideals must also be cherished by
Omnipotence. This poet loved his formal art to the extent of coming to
assume it was the purpose and the origin of terrestrial life. Life
seemed to him, in short, a God’s chosen form of artistic
self-expression; and as a confrère, Kennaston found the result
praiseworthy. Even inanimate nature, he sometimes thought, might be a
divine experiment in _vers libre_.... But neither the justice of
Kennaston’s airdrawn surmises, nor their wildness, matters; the point is
that they made of him a vestryman who in appearance and speech and
actions, and in essential beliefs, differed not at all from his
associates in office, who had comfortably acquired their standards by
hearsay. So that the moral of his theorizing should be no less obvious
than salutary.
* * * * *
Thus, he too entered at last into that belief which is man’s noble
heritage....
“Or I would put it, rather, that belief is man’s _métier_,” Kennaston
once corrected me—“for the sufficient reason that man has nothing to do
with certainties. He cannot ever get in direct touch with reality. Such
is the immutable law, the true cream of the jest. Felix Kennaston, so
long as he wears the fleshly body of Felix Kennaston, is conscious only
of various tiny disturbances in his brain-cells, which entertain and
interest him, but cannot pretend to probe to the roots of reality about
anything. By the nature of my mental organs, it is the sensation the
thing arouses in my brain of which I am aware, and never of the thing
itself. I am conscious only of appearances. They may all be illusory. I
cannot ever tell. But it is my human privilege to believe whatever I may
elect.”
“And, my dear sir,” as I pointed out, “is not this hair-splitting,
really, a reduction of human life to the very shallowest sort of
mysticism, that gets you nowhere?”
“Now again, Harrowby, you are falling into the inveterate race-delusion
that man is intended to get somewhere. I do not see that the notion
rests on any readily apparent basis. It is at any rate a working
hypothesis that in the world-romance man, being cast for the part of
fool, quite obviously best furthers the dénouement’s success by wearing
his motley bravely.... There was a fool in my own romance, a character
of no great importance; yet it was an essential incident in the story
that he should irresponsibly mislay the King’s letter, and Sir Guiron
thus be forced to seek service under Duke Florestan. Perhaps, in similar
fashion, it is here necessary to the Author’s scheme that man must
simply go on striving to gain a little money, food, and sleep, a trinket
or two, some moments of laughter, and at the last a decent bed to die
in. For it may well be that man’s allotted part calls for just these
actions, to round out the drama artistically. Yes; it is quite
conceivable that, much as I shaped events at Storisende, so here the
Author aims toward making an æsthetic masterpiece of His puppet-play as
a whole, rather than at ending everything with a transformation scene
such as, when we were younger, used so satisfactorily to close _The
Black Crook_ and _The Devil’s Auction_. For it may well be that the
Author has, after all, more in common with Æschylus, say, than with Mr.
Charles H. Yale.... So I must train my mind to be contented with
appearances, whether they be true or not—and reserving always a
permissible preference for pleasant delusions. Being mortal, I am able
to contrive no thriftier bargain.”
“Being mortal,” I amended, “we pick our recreations to suit our tastes.
Now I, for instance—as is, indeed, a matter of some notoriety and
derision here in Lichfield—am interested in what people loosely speak of
as ‘the occult.’ I don’t endeavor to persuade defunct poetesses to
dictate via the Ouija board effusions which give little encouragement as
to the present state of culture in Paradise, or to induce Napoleon to
leave wherever he is and devote his energies to tipping a table for me,
you understand.... But I quite fixedly believe the Wardens of Earth
sometimes unbar strange windows, that face on other worlds than ours.
And some of us, I think, once in a while get a peep through these
windows. But we are not permitted to get a long peep, or an unobstructed
peep, nor, very certainly, are we permitted to see all there is—out
yonder. The fatal fault, sir, of your theorizing is that it is too
complete. It aims to throw light upon the universe, and therefore is
self-evidently moonshine. The Wardens of Earth do not desire that we
should understand the universe, Mr. Kennaston; it is part of Their
appointed task to insure that we never do; and because of Their
efficiency every notion that any man, dead, living, or unborn, might
form as to the universe will necessarily prove wrong. So, if for no
other reason, I must decline to think of you and me as characters in a
romance.”
------------------------------------------------------------------------
_Book Fifth_
“This was the measure of my soul’s delight;
It had no power of joy to fly by day,
Nor part in the large lordship of the light;
But in a secret moon-beholden way
Had all its will of dreams and pleasant night,
And all the love and life that sleepers may.
“But such life’s triumph as men waking may
It might not have to feed its faint delight.”
------------------------------------------------------------------------
I
Of Poetic Love: Treated with Poetic Inefficiency
SO much for what Kennaston termed his “serious reading” in chance-opened
pages of the past. There were other dreams quite different in nature,
which seemed, rather, to fulfil the function of romantic art, in
satisfying his human craving for a full-fed emotional existence—dreams
which Kennaston jestingly described as “_belles lettres_.” For now by
turn—as murderer, saint, herdsman, serf, fop, pickpurse, troubadour,
monk, bravo, lordling, monarch, and in countless other estates—Kennaston
tasted those fruitless emotions which it is the privilege of art to
arouse—joys without any inevitable purchase-price, regrets that were not
bitter, and miseries which left him not a penny the worse.
But it was as a lover that his rôle most engrossed him, in many dreams
wherein he bore for Ettarre such adoration as he had always wistfully
hoped he might entertain toward some woman some day, and had not ever
known in his waking hours. It was sober truth he had spoken at
Storisende: “There is no woman like you in my country, Ettarre. I can
find no woman anywhere resembling you whom dreams alone may win to.” But
now at last, even though it were only in dreams, he loved as he had
always dimly felt he was capable of loving.... Even the old lost faculty
of verse-making seemed to come back to him with this change, and he
began again to fashion rhymes, elaborating bright odd vignettes of
foiled love in out-of-the-way epochs and surroundings. These were the
verses included, later, under the general title of “Dramatis Personæ,”
in his _Chimes at Midnight_.
He wrote of foiled love necessarily, since not even as a lover might he
win to success. It was the cream of some supernal jest that he might not
touch Ettarre; that done, though but by accident, the dream ended, and
the universe seemed to fold about him, just as a hand closes. He came to
understand the reason of this. “Love must look toward something not
quite accessible, something not quite understood,” he had said at
Storisende: and this phrase, so lightly despatched, came home to him now
as pregnant truth. For it was this fact which enabled him to love
Ettarre, and had always prevented his loving any other woman.
All mortal women either loved some other man, and went with him
somewhither beyond the area of your daily life, and so, in time were
forgotten; or, else, they loved you, and laid bare to you their minds
and bodies—and neither of these possessions ever proved so remarkable,
when calmly viewed, as to justify continued infatuation therewith. Such
at least Felix Kennaston had always found to be the case: love did not
live, as lovers do, by feeding; but, paradoxically, got strength by
hungering. It should be remembered, however, that Felix Kennaston was a
poet....
* * * * *
He would sometimes think of the women who had loved him; and would
speculate, with some wistfulness, if it was invariably true, as with his
own amorous traffic, that love both kept and left its victims strangers
to each other? He knew so little of these soft-lipped girls and women,
when everything was said....
Yet there had been—he counted—yes, time had known eight chaste and
comely gentlewomen, in all, who had “given themselves to him,” as the
hackneyed phrase was. These eight affairs, at any event, had conformed
to every tradition, and had been as thorough-going as might romantically
be expected: but nothing much seemed to have come of them; and he did
not feel in the upshot very well acquainted with their heroines. His
sole emotion toward them nowadays was that of mild dislike. But six of
them—again to utilize a venerable conjunction of words—had “deceived
their husbands” for the caresses of an impecunious Kennaston; and the
other two had anticipatorily “deceived” the husbands they took later: so
that they must, he reflected, have loved Felix Kennaston sincerely. He
was quite certain, though, that he had never loved any one of them as he
had always wanted to love. No one of these women had given him what he
sought in vain. Kennaston had felt this lack of success dispiritedly
when, with soft arms about him, it was necessary to think of what he
would say next. He had always in such circumstances managed to feign
high rapture, to his temporary companion’s entire satisfaction, as he
believed; but each adventure left him disappointed. It had not roused in
him the overwhelming emotions lovers had in books, nor anything
resembling these emotions; and that was what he had wanted, and had not
ever realized, until the coming of Ettarre....
He had made love, as a prevalent rule, to married women—allured, again,
by bookish standards, which advanced the commerce of Lancelot with
Guinevere, or of Paolo Malatesta with his brother’s wife, as the supreme
type of romantic passion. On more practical grounds, Kennaston preferred
married women, partly because they were less stupid to converse with in
general, and in particular did not bring up the question of marrying
you; and in part because the husband in the background helped the
situation pictorially—this notion also now seemed to be of literary
origin—besides furnishing an unfailing topic of conversation. For
unfaithful or wavering wives, to Kennaston’s finding, peculiarly
delighted in talking about their husbands; and in such prattle failed
either to exhibit the conventional remorse toward, or any very grave
complaint against, the discussed better-half. The inconsistency would
have worried Kennaston’s sense of justice, had not these husbands always
been so transparently certain of Kennaston’s insignificance.... Although
judging of necessity only from his own experience, Kennaston was unable
conscientiously to approve of adulterous love-affairs: they tended too
soon toward tediousness; and married women seemed horribly quick to
become matter-of-fact in the details of a liaison, and ready almost to
confuse you with the husband.