already have dozens of them eating their heads off all over the moor?
and when in the world, you pest, I became ‘your darling’ I would really
like to know!”
“Now, but have you, indeed? The very first moment I saw you, my dear.”
“I do wish you would sometimes, just for a change, talk half rationally.
And of course it has always been my custom to further the true happiness
of the men with whom I was particularly intimate by turning them into
domestic animals of one kind or another. Quite a number of them came out
horses—”
“I do not altogether approve of such a custom. Still, women have
incalculable fancies: and all men find out sooner or later that it is
less trouble to indulge these fancies than to thwart them. At any rate,
a god has no concern with these minor sorceries.”
“Of course not!” Maya agreed. “A scatter-brained, talk-you-to-death,
carrot-topped, and generally good-for-nothing god is not concerned with
anything except with getting on to that minx Freydis.”
Gerald waved aside the insinuation. He continued to talk about more
immediate matters, and he said:
“Nevertheless, your story interests me. It would be droll to have a
horse like that. So suppose, now, my dear, suppose that I trade my
divine steed for one of those unusual horses of yours?”
“No, Gerald, really I would rather not. For the men that I put my magic
upon used once to be fine knights or barons or even kings,—and, for
that matter, there were a couple of emperors, though only in a small
way,—and I confess to a certain sentiment about them still.”
Then in a clay chafing-dish Maya of the Fair Breasts burned fig-leaves
with benzoin and macis and storax. And she showed Gerald how one might
master mercurial things. She displayed to him the small magics which are
Wednesday’s. She revealed to him—cursorily, since they had only a
morning at their disposal,—the secrets of remunerative mediocrity in
the learned professions, in truth-telling, in upholstering, in the
removal of mountains into the sea, in the erection of bridges over any
unpassable place, in the preparation of rose-colored mirrors, in
criticism, in oratory, in jurisprudence, and in the safe interpretation
of Holy Writ. As himself a former student of magic, Gerald found these
formulæ of interest: but, as a god, he regarded Maya with profound
respect, as one who, with no native divine advantages, had yet mastered
this quite reputable stock of knowledge and ability.
Yet the workings of these magics were not apparent until Gerald had put
on the spectacles which Maya gave him. He found these glasses so
soothing to the eyes that he retained them, just for the remainder of
his visit to her cottage.
For, after all, Gerald decided to stay over the week-end, since Maya was
so unflatteringly eager to be rid of him. It was an eagerness troubling
to his self-respect. Here was he, a god whom women had always run after,
and had pestered beyond reasonable endurance, here was he, of all
persons, being treated with unconcealed indifference by a mere
hedge-sorceress, by a creature who had not even any remarkable good
looks or wit to justify her impudence. This Maya of the Fair Breasts
needed taking down quite a large number of pegs. So Gerald fell to
wooing her with an ardor that somewhat surprised him. For it was
eminently necessary, it was, indeed, a rather beautiful idea, to win the
woman, and then to jilt her, so as to teach her, once for all, not ever
again to make free and easy with the will of a god.
Meanwhile, Maya had suggested that he conceal the fact he was a god; and
that she should introduce him to the local gentry of Turoine as a
visiting sorcerer.
“For I must tell you, Gerald,” Maya said, “all the best-thought-of
people hereabouts are in one or another branch of sorcery. We have,
thus, never had any relations with Heaven. All our connections have been
with another quarter. And it is not that we are unduly conceited and
exclusive, it is simply that it has just happened so. Nevertheless, so
many gods have straggled by, on their way to an ambiguous end, as they
went down to encounter the Master Philologist, and whatever it is that
he does to them, that there is a tendency among the best people
hereabouts, as I will not conceal from you, to regard them as not quite
the sort that one meets socially.”
“But I—!” said Gerald, in uncontrolled indignation.
“I know, my poor boy, you are entirely different. And I am perfectly
broad-minded about it, myself. But other people are not. And it would
sound much better.”
Then Gerald spoke with dignity and firmness. Gerald said that not for
one moment would he stoop to such a subterfuge. Not for an instant would
he who was a lord of all exalted white magics pretend to be a sorcerer
soiled with infernal traffics and patronized by mere devils. After that,
Gerald passed as a visiting sorcerer.
26.
“Qualis Artifex!”
AND Gerald used to amuse himself by talking with the travelers who
passed by the neat log and plaster cottage of Maya the wise woman, upon
their way to the court of Queen Freydis and her consort the Master
Philologist. For it was a good and shrewd policy, Gerald felt, for a
monarch to familiarize himself with his future subjects: so he would sit
by the wayside, in the shade of a conveniently placed
chestnut-tree,—incognito, as it were,—and would artfully allure them
into conversation.
“Hail, friends! And what business draws you to the city of all marvels?”
said Gerald, on the first morning that he fell into this long-sighted
course.
He was told—by the big-bellied, yellow-haired man, whose skin was so
curiously spotted,—that they were two poets upon their way to Antan,
the goal of all the gods, and the friendly haven of true poets, where
poets might hope to find at last that loveliness which they desired and
could nowhere discover in their everyday life upon earth. To Gerald this
was excellent news, since it increased the number of his future subjects
very gratifyingly.
But he said nothing, while the big-bellied, spotted, thin-legged
gentleman in the purple robe adorned with golden stars, went on in his
answer to Gerald’s first question, by explaining that the speaker was
Nero Claudius Cæsar, the king of all poets, and that his scrawny
companion, in a brown doublet of which both elbows needed patching, was
an artist of considerable talent from out of the Gallic provinces, who
was called François Villon.
Gerald found this also of some interest, in view of what he remembered
about the Mirror of Caer Omn. Not often did you thus come face to face
with two discarded personalities. But Gerald said nothing about this
either. Instead, he questioned Nero yet further, and he thus learned
that these two poets were on their way to the court of Freydis, because
there alone in the universe was art properly regarded: for there,
indeed, true artists were manufactured out of common clay, and were
informed with the fire of Audela.
It was one or another old hero from out of Poictesme, Nero had heard,
who had first modeled these earthen images; and Freydis, as occasion
served, gave life to these images and set them to live upon earth, as
changelings. But, above all, said Nero, in Antan the true poets of this
world fared happily among the myths and the gods who once had afforded
to these poets such fine themes, so that to-day of course these poets
wrote even more splendid poems now that they composed with the eye upon
the object.
Yet, Nero thought, playing idly with the emerald monocle which hung upon
a green cord about his scrawny neck, this Queen would not be very likely
ever to create in clay, or to find coming to her court, such another
artist as Nero himself had been in the days of his Roman pre-eminence.
No other person known to him had ever excelled in all the polite arts.
For in dancing and in oratory, in wrestling (even with such dreadful
adversaries as lions) and in music both vocal and instrumental,—alike
as a charioteer and as a tragic actor,—but, above all, as a poet, and
equally as a dramatic, a lyric and an epic poet,—Nero had been
unanimously awarded the first prize in every contest. He did not care to
appear boastful: yet, by all canons of criticism, one had to consider
the list of his overwhelming triumphs, in Rome, in Naples, in Antium, in
Alba,—at the Parthian games, at the Isthmian games, at the Olympic
games,—and, in fine, in each contest which Nero had ever entered
anywhere in all the kingdoms of which he was Emperor. No other artist
had a record to compare with that: no other of the world’s great
geniuses had ever been confessedly supreme in every polite form of
æsthetic endeavor.
Of course, as a student of history, Nero conceded that the elect artist
was not to be placed, not permanently, by his ranking in the eyes of his
contemporaries, who might often be swayed by such matters, really
extraneous to enduring art, as the artist’s ingratiating manners and his
personal beauty. As a man of the world, he even conceded the judges of
the sacred games in awarding all the first prizes to Nero might
furthermore have been influenced by the large sums of money which the
Emperor always conferred upon his acclaiming judges after such
occasions, as well as by the dexterity of the tortures which would have
followed any decision less just.
But the indisputable fact, the fact of superb importance, was that Nero
had made of his life a poem which was wholly a unique masterpiece in the
way of self-expression: he, above all other men, had served the one end
of every poet’s art, by revealing the true nature of man’s being; for
Nero had embodied, with loving carefulness, each trait which he found in
himself, through some really memorable action,—rearing, as it were,
among marshes and quicksands, and in yet other places which other
persons feared to visit, those strange and passionately colored orchid
growths which alone could express the highly complex nature of every
man’s desires—
“That jargon becomes somewhat senescent,” said Gerald. “Still, as a
museum piece,—yes, even now, sophistication does display something of
the quaint beauty of thorough obsoleteness. It has acquired the charm,
and, as it were, the patina, of sedan chairs and of full-bottom wigs and
of girdles of chastity and of suits of armor, and of all other things,
once useful enough, which are nowadays endeared to every poet’s heart by
the fact that they are forever outmoded. So let us grant it, O Cæsar, in
the days that are gone you were a devil of a fellow and a sad rip among
the ladies—”
“Why, but, for that matter—” Nero began.
“I know. You broad-mindedly despised neither sex. You were in amour a
Greek scholar. You were something of a surgeon also. I concede it, I
blush, and I urge you to omit all embarrassingly personal details.”
So Nero went on, saying that other emperors, with very much his chances,
had lacked the genius necessary to develop these chances. There had, of
course, been minor artists. Caligula, for example, among so much
hackwork in the way of throat-cutting, had shown at least one jet of
rather lovely inspiration when he attempted a criminal assault upon the
moon; that was a really finely imagined bit of work. Then, also,
Domitian and Commodus and Tiberius had displayed praiseworthy ambitions;
quite neat little things had been done by Tiberius, in an amateur way,
at Capri; Caracalla too had been so-so: but they had all tended to
wallow unimaginatively in cut and dried executions; merely to chop off
anybody’s head was not art, no matter how often you did it. Besides,
work done upon a public scaffold inevitably coarsened one’s touch. And
Heliogabalus, whatsoever the lad’s thin vein of undeniable talent in the
way of lyric lechery, had lacked the stamina and gusto for any sustained
masterpiece in Nero’s copious epic style.
For Nero alone had been, in every branch of self-expression, the
sincere, skilled artist, enriching his handiwork always with that
continual slight novelty which art demands. He had builded his
appropriate stage, in the Golden House—
“A house entirely overlaid with gold,” said Gerald, reminiscently, “and
adorned everywhere with jewels and mother of pearl, a house so rich and
ample that it had three-storied porticos a mile long, and huge revolving
banqueting halls, and ivory ceilings which perpetually scattered
perfumes and red rose-petals—”
Nero, at that, had out his emerald monocle; and through it he now
regarded Gerald with the childlike amiability of a sincere artist
whensoever his vanity is flattered.
Yes, Nero admitted, he had endeavored to express himself in that house
also. The Golden House had been (to play with metaphor) the handsome
binding of that poem which was his life, when in a setting such as the
world had never known, before or since, he had given to his every human
trait its full color value. In the Golden House he had reared his
orchids, he had labored to open many frank and incisive and utterly
unstinted avenues of self-expression to that somewhat complex thing
called human nature....
But here he entered rather explicitly into details. Gerald felt the
style of this emperor to be growing woefully un-American; and Gerald
fidgeted.
“Let us, I again urge you,” said Gerald, “speak of less personal
matters, and diversify the vividness of these orchids with a few
fig-leaves!”
Perhaps, of course, the Emperor continued, he, like every other really
great artist, had been somewhat the anthologist, in that he had invented
outright none of the art forms among the many in which he had
distinguished himself. He had taken over from his predecessors a number
of inspirations and a formula or two, as he would be the very last to
deny: but the fine craftsmanship was all his, as well as that
distinguishing, that peculiarly Neronic, touch of romantic irony, by
virtue of which this artist had slain with suavity, had destroyed with a
caress, and had ennobled all that was most dear to his human nature by
killing it. He spoke now of the deaths of his wives, of Octavia and
Poppæa, and of others who had been his wives just for the evening; he
spoke of Sporus, of Aiëtes, of Narcissus, and of that other exceedingly
beautiful boy, Aulus Plautinus....
And again Gerald raised a protesting hand. “Let us still,” said Gerald,
“avoid these quite un-American personalities! Meanwhile, you do not
speak of your mother Agrippina.”
He surprised in the spotted face of Nero something very like terror. But
Nero said only, “No.”
And besides, the Emperor continued, with rising animation, that happy
chronological accident, the fact that Christianity began in the days of
Nero its advance toward world supremacy, had enabled him, by pure luck,
to lend to the great poem of his life just the needful felicitous touch
of working in a new medium. To burn well-thought-of taxpayers and
putative virgins as the torches at your supper parties was a device
which, out of a natural desire to surprise and to amuse one’s guests,
might have occurred to almost any host in quest of that continual slight
novelty which the art of hospitality also demands. But that these
flambeaux should later become the brightest glories of a triumphant
church had made these supper parties, which were really quite modest
affairs, unforgettable. Nero had expressed himself—not merely, as he
thought at the time, through persons supposed to be deficient in
patriotism and more or less suspected of being (here again, to play with
metaphor) not one hundred per cent Roman,—but, as it had turned out,
through saints and apostles, and through consecrated religious martyrs,
such as not every artist could get for his themes and raw material. So,
the succeeding discouragements of Christians had, æsthetically, fallen
flat, in their impression upon posterity: their authors had come into
this field too late, to find that tragic vein worked out, and all its
most striking possibilities exhausted, by the great artist that was
Nero. It was hardly remembered that Marcus Aurelius and Diocletian and
many others had broken and flayed and mutilated and burned to the very
best of their ability: these plodders were but the epigoni and the
unimaginative plagiarists of Nero.
So had it come about that of all the emperors Rome had known, and of all
the tyrants and despots in every land and era, who had followed the fine
art of self-expression, and who had shown what human nature really
is—in, as it were, the nude, when any man is released from time-serving
and is made omnipotent,—of all these, there had remained just one whose
name was remembered everywhere; just one whose fame was imperishable;
just one who had become a never-dying myth: and that one was Nero. The
legend of Nero was, in a world wherein every other man stayed more or
less unwillingly an unfulfilled Nero, the supreme type of the literature
of escape. The legend of Nero was a poem which men would not ever
forget: it was a poem current in all languages: and it was a poem which,
now, everybody could cordially admire and delight in, because time had
removed the need of considering any current moral standards or one’s own
physical safety in judging this poem, now that Nero was only a character
in a book, like—as the Emperor said, with a quaint revealment of his
retained interest in literature,—like Iago or Volpone or Tartuffe. For
whether you called any particular book a history or a poem or a drama
did not, of course, effect the impressiveness and vigor and complexity
of the character drawing in it, nor the value of the author’s apt and
edifying revelations as to any eternal verities of man’s being.
“For, certainly,” said Nero, “my life presented, as no other artist has
ever done, the gist of all human nature as that nature actually is, when
freed of such inhibitions as constrain it in but too many baffled lives.
My life was, thus, a connoisseur’s production, and a work of art which
escaped even the grave risk of anti-climax. For there was not anything
lacking in the ending of it, either. My fall and the circumstances of my
death were so æsthetically right that, as an artist, I never in my life
enjoyed anything quite so much. Nothing could conceivably have been in
better taste. For, overnight, as you may remember, I passed from the
throne of the world, to hide in a tumbled-down out-house, under a
ragged, very faded blue coverlet, and to perish thus by my own
hand,—with an appropriate tragic verse upon my lips,—and without any
friend remaining anywhere. No tragedy could have been more boldly
proportioned, with all the Aristotelian unities so exactly preserved.
And it was most gratifyingly led up to, too. For just as I was about to
approach the dénouement of my poem, the statues of my Lares tumbled down
miraculously, the hind quarters of my favorite riding-horse were
transformed into the hind quarters of an ape, and the doors of the
mausoleum of Augustus having unclosed of their own accord, there issued
from the tomb a divine voice which summoned me to destruction. These
incidents, I repeat, were gratifying, for they showed that the exercise
of my art had been viewed by Heaven appreciatively. Ah, yes, in all I
was peculiarly favored.”
27.
Regarding the Stars
VILLON spat meditatively between his yellow front teeth. He fingered,
in the while that he continued his reflections, his scarred and puckered
lower lip. Then he confessed that he dissented from a great many of his
predecessor’s remarks.
“You were impressive. Your life was a competent job, boldly executed,
and nobody denies its merits on their own melodramatic plane. Yet it
lacked the indispensable touch of tenderness, without which no work of
art is of the first class. No: it was I who was truly favored; and I
made of my life a flawless poem without dragging in such gaudy
accessories as thrones and burning cities and the wasting of a lovely,
mother-naked virgin on a mere lion.”
And this François Villon went on to speak of the great blessings which
had been accorded him. He had been granted irresolution, and lewdness,
and poverty, and cowardice, and a large weakness for drink, and an
ingrained dishonesty, and a disease-wrecked body, and everything else
which was needed to make him a knave as contemptible as any man could
hope to be.
“I was, in brief, gentlemen, as I have elsewhere remarked, a hog with a
voice. And there was no voice like my voice.”
For out of the mire that wallowing, lustful and cowardly beast had sung.
Now he sang jeeringly, and made fun of the whole world with satire and
mockery and invective, and with plain filth-flinging,—which was all
quite good art, because it pleases people to see a man superior to his
fate. Now he sang piercingly of the great platitude that death conquers
and ruins everything: and to that sentiment nobody can ever turn a deaf
ear, because it is the only sentiment with a universal personal
application. But, above all, he sang of his regret for his past
indiscretions, and of his yearning for spiritual cleanliness,
and—“soaring,” as Villon now quoted, with admirable complacency, “to
the very gates of Heaven upon the star-sown wings of faith and
song,”—he had proclaimed his trust in that divine love which,
ultimately, would redeem all properly repentant persons from the logical
outcome of their doings in this world, and would give to the marred life
of every properly repentant person a happy ending in a fair-colored
paradise agreeably full of harps and lutes. And people liked that, too,
of course, because such a philosophy made everybody feel muggily
consoled and, for no especial reason, magnanimous.
So had Villon become a very great poet whose art was a fine blending of
mirth and of pathos and of faith, and so might he hope to win to high
honors in Antan, where, if anywhere, poets were properly rewarded. And
the squalor and degradation of his terrestrial living were, now, but so
many picturesque ingredients in the superb poem of his life, now that
Villon too was—just as his Roman confrère had pointed out,—to be
regarded as a character in a book. The difference was that Villon had
become a never-dying myth of vagabondage with its heart in the right
place, and a parable which revealed how much of good always survives in
the most vile and abandoned of criminals and even in persons
unsuccessful in business life. The legend of Villon thus proved exactly
the contrary to that which was proved by the legend of Nero: as the one
demonstrated the real nature of man to aspire only to lust and cruelty
the moment that inhibitions were removed, so did the other legend show
the real fundamental nature of every man to be incurably good and
lovable under all possible surface stains. And the legend of Villon,
Villon repeated, had in it tenderness,—that indispensable flavor of
tenderness and of a sentimentality as wholesomely nourishing as
molasses, without which no work of art can ever really be of the first
class so far as goes its popular appeal.
“For my life, gentlemen, was truly a superb parable. And it has been
properly appreciated, it has ever been paid the fine compliment of being
plagiarised by Holy Writ. Why, what the devil! if the parable of the
Prodigal Son be good art in the New Testament, is it the less good art
for being acted out with the vigor and the brio I brought to that task?
For I too wasted all my substance, with some feminine assistance, and
went down among the swine and the husks, without ever forgetting that by
and by I was to be comforted with never-failing love and veal cutlets.
In brief, although I lived perforce in the gutter, yet my eyes were upon
the stars.”