What Artaban said to the soldiers he said for himself, because he could
not help it.
Is a lie ever justifiable? Perhaps not. But may it not sometimes seem
inevitable?
And if it were a sin, might not a man confess it, and be pardoned for
it more easily than for the greater sin of spiritual selfishness, or
indifference, or the betrayal of innocent blood? That is what I saw
Artaban do. That is what I heard him say. All through his life he was
trying to do the best that he could. It was not perfect. But there are
some kinds of failure that are better than success.
Though the story of the Fourth Wise Man came to me suddenly and without
labor, there was a great deal of study and toil to be done before it
could be written down. An idea arrives without effort; a form can only
be wrought out by patient labor. If your story is worth telling, you
ought to love it enough to be willing to work over it until it is
true,--true not only to the ideal, but true also to the real. The light
is a gift; but the local color can only be seen by one who looks for it
long and steadily. Artaban went with me while I toiled through a score
of volumes of ancient history and travel. I saw his figure while I
journeyed on the motionless sea of the desert and in the strange cities
of the East.
And now that his story is told, what does it mean?
How can I tell? What does life mean? If the meaning could be put into a
sentence there would be no need of telling the story.