"As to the book of the Laws composed by him, what good have they done
us? And yet he ought (as Lycurgus did the Lacedæmonians, and as Solon
did the Athenians, and Zaleucus the Thurians), if they were excellent,
to have persuaded some to adopt them. How, then, can we consider
Plato's conduct anything but ridiculous?--since he appears to have
written his laws, not for men who have any real existence, but rather
for a set of persons invented by him."
_The Author of Jurgen_
§ 1
"But this is grossly unfair!" John Charteris complained. "All these
long years you have been promising to write a book about me. And now,
it seems, I am to remain forever a minor character."
"Well--!" I admitted.
"And why, pray?"
"Well--!" I explained: and I went on, "I mean, of course, that is,
after I had given the matter real consideration--" Then I summed it all
up even more completely. "But, come now, Charteris! you, as a writer
yourself, know how these submitted notions by and by come back from
the cellar of what we--well, as one might say, fraudulently--term the
subconscious; and come back either transmuted into something quite
different or else marked Not Available for Our Present Needs."
He shook his head. "In the fidgeting face of such tergiversation I can
but observe that, really, of all things! For, when one considers the
persons whom you have elected to give a whole book to, civility must
seek refuge in aposiopesis. Me, look you, me, you have passed over in
favor of a moonstruck Kennaston and of that fat little Woods widow!"
"The Author," I pleaded, "does not customarily explain why he elects to
do anything."
"None the less, I am sure I would have made a most remunerative
protagonist. My inconsistencies are amusing: my whimsies, although
decorous, are flavorsome: my morals are, if not exactly beyond
reproach--"
"Beyond hope, anyway," I suggested.
"--And, in short, I am inclined to think that, here again, the Author
does not quite understand just what he is about."
"Upon my word," said I, "you touch a truth--"
"Each has his métier," the little man admitted, modestly. "The flea
leaps well, most senators carry their liquor well, whereas the clergy,
one deduces from the numerousness of their children--"
§ 2
"I mean," I interrupted, "that once you talked to me all through one
fine spring night. It was about Romance you talked--"
"I remember," Charteris stated, with a grin. "I can well remember how,
in that terrible dawn, after all my lovely rhetoric, you thought I had
been explaining how books ought to be written."
"Well, I do not think that now. I incline, rather, to think you were
talking about man's attitude toward life and the universe. I am sure,
though, that in all your speaking of books you left unsettled the
question you raised a moment since, as to what the Author is about? For
what reason, in fine, and with what reward in view, does any author
write his books?"
"I voiced for you most plainly and mellifluously the principles of his
economy--"
"Yes: I remember your high observations as to Villon and Marlowe.
The artist, you argued, is unwilling to be wasted; and he alone
manages--sometimes--to perpetuate himself where everybody else
perishes. You were quite eloquent about the artist's immortality.
Only, I remember too that, toward the end, you admitted a considerable
distinction. In art, you cried, it may so happen that the thing which
a man makes may endure to be misunderstood and gabbled over, but it
is not the man himself. We retain--I am still paying you the handsome
tribute of exact quotation,--we retain the _Iliad_, but oblivion
has swallowed Homer so deep that many question if he ever existed at
all."
Charteris replied with something of the hasty affability appropriate
to dealings with the insane. "Now, my dear man! the whole point was
that the artist strives to make something which endures--"
"I know! You explained what he attempts to do: but you did not explain
why he should want to do it. You did not explain what he gets out
of it,--beyond suggesting, and then retracting the suggestion, that
he aspires to a sort of terrestrial immortality. No, Charteris, you
explained, in fine, nearly everything connected with books except why
an author writes them."
He deliberated this. He said: "Oh, but I must have made that plain. I
can most vividly remember elucidating every bit of the universe, and
that rather important detail could not well have been ignored."
"Ignored or not, you left it unexplained."
And promptly Charteris settled back in his chair, intent to remedy this
omission.
"The author, then, very much as I did, will under provocation become
magniloquent, and will say this, that and the other. But every author's
real reason for writing is that, if he did not write, he would be bored
to death. He writes because--"
Here I stopped him. "No, Charteris! You are too fond of juggling
phrases with no better end in view than to get pleasure from your own
dexterity. And I happen to be in earnest. Some twenty years and more,
you conceive, I have given over, together with health and eyesight, to
the writing of the Biography: and I am nowadays, however late in the
game, quite honestly and not unnaturally concerned to find out why."
"So, then! at last, you sympathize with your reviewers!"
"It was well enough, in the beginning," I went on, "to listen to your
Economist theories: and while you talked I could believe in them,
almost. Your verbal jugglery, I do not question, would still have that
effect. But the moment you have done talking, I can but come back
to the blunt truth, unwillingly: the artist cannot ever by making a
statue or a painting or a book--no matter how long the thing made
may last,--immortalize himself. He would come a great deal nearer to
perpetuating himself by begetting as many children as his natural
forces and the frailty of his friends permitted--"
"Ah, the lewd Jurgen touch!" said Charteris, regretfully.
"--And it can in no way concern the artist, either for good or ill,"
I continued, "that something which he happened to make, endures after
he has perished. No doubt, you could explain the contradiction in
your argument: you slightly married men have learned how to explain
everything. But, after all, this is an affair in which I want my own
notions, not yours."
§ 3
"Let me have just one other book to live and talk in," Charteris said,
"and I will explain the scope and aim of novel writing with such a
grace and loveliness as never was! My notions have a freer wing than
yours: and if you are obstinate about this, you will be encountering by
and by that statement in the public prints. 'The author has here vainly
endeavored to recapture the charm of his earlier _Beyond Life_,
and when he speaks in his own person is by no means so amusing.' That,
I forewarn you, will be the unanimous verdict."
"I do not altogether aim at being amusing. I want, rather, to wind up
affairs by contriving an epilogue for the Biography."
He regarded me for some while: and I do not know how to indicate his
kindly and rather commiserating pensiveness.
Presently he said: "But I forewarn you, too, that nobody is ever
going to recognise the Biography as an actual fact. You may pretend
to yourself, if you like, that all your writing is of this one human
life reincarnated over and over again, in the flesh of Manuel's various
descendants, and endlessly performing the same rôle in what is, at
bottom, always the same comedy. The nearest anyone will ever come to
agreement with you is to admit that you have wasted time and pains
in patching up a sort of genealogy; and that your books, in fact,
are--if you think it a merit,--rather monotonously the same, because
you are unable to draw any figure other than yourself in a more or less
transparent masquerade."
"The charge of monotony--in that word's primal sense, which you might
with profit look up in the dictionary,--I acknowledge, and even glory
in. For, as you say, it is perhaps the main point of the Biography that
it--and human life--present for all practical purposes the same comedy
over and over again with each new generation."
"Ecclesiastes, I believe, commented on the same phenomenon. Still, if
you want people to read more than one of your books--"
"Not my books," I amended, "but my one book, which is the Biography,
and of which my various publications are chapters."
Charteris shrugged. "My dear fellow! I, in common with the remainder of
mankind, refuse to admit the possibility of anybody's writing a book in
nineteen volumes. It simply is not done."
"But," he was told, with stubborn modesty, "but I have done it. Anyhow,
fifteen volumes--"
"Oh, no: you have merely written fifteen books. That is a quite
different affair, which anyone could manage, given pen and ink and
time and a sufficient lack of consideration for one's fellows. The
connection of these various books, I can assure you, is either forced
or imagined: otherwise, they would be an affront to the rest of us."
"Of course," I conceded, a bit mollified, "of course, if you are
putting the Biography upon a basis with Sir Thomas Browne's Relations
Whose Truth We Fear--"
"I am putting, to the contrary, the author of the Biography," said
Charteris, "into a phrase."
"And that phrase is--?"