§ 4
"Yet, in this epilogue at least," John Charteris went on, "you may, as
it happens by rare good luck, hope to avoid the ephemeral--"
"Not utterly," I dissented. "In literary fields there are always
so many May-flies about--But then, Charteris, I had thought to add
footnotes which would explain all such allusions--"
"As may be incomprehensible to your readers of a few hundred years
hence? I see. Such carefulness must be granted to display a kindly
heart, in an illuminating blaze of self-complacency. But I was in train
to suggest, my friend, that you might avoid the ephemeral by rather
different methods."
"As how?" I asked.
"By listening," replied Charteris, "to me, while I discourse of eternal
verities. This happens to be one of my loquacious afternoons--"
And here I raised my hand, in utterly unheeded protest.
"--For you inform me that you need for this debatable Biography,"
John Charteris continued, "an epilogue,--which of course ought to be
spoken by the same person who afforded the prologue. Well, I shall
overlook your crass misrepresentation of me in that prologue, which
you so ill-advisedly called _Beyond Life_. You will remember how
many 'spiritualists' turned to it with fervor, and away from it with
disgust? I, none the less, forgive: and off-hand, I would say--"
"No, Charteris! No, for I must myself contrive this epilogue--"
"But, dear man, I have it already complete, to the last paradox. It is
in my mind now, hastening to the tip of my tongue--"
"No, Charteris, I will not hear you!"
"--Art, just as Schiller long ago perceived, is an outcome of the
human impulse to play, and to avoid tedium by using up such vigor as
stays unemployed by the necessities of earning a living. The artist is
life's playboy. The artist, to avert the threats of boredom, rather
desperately makes sport with the universe--"
"It is a universe you are quitting--"
"--For, as you of course perceive, the literary artist plays: he does
nothing else, except with haste and grudgingly: and the sole end of his
endeavor is to divert himself--"
But I had shaped the Parting Sign of Ageus, which is interpreted
variously, but whose efficacy does not vary....
§ 5
I hated thus to despatch the little fellow, after we had played
together for all of twenty-two years. Besides, his going was not alone.
A great many others, I suspected, departed with him: and I fancied
that if, rising, I now looked out of the library window as far as the
Mill Road, I might see yonder,--passing now away from me, now that our
commerce was over, and travelling in motley companionship through the
gray spring weather,--all the various men and women whose lives I had
fashioned for me to play with in my books. Heaven only knew, if Heaven
imprudently concerned itself with such matters, how many hundreds of
them there must be....
And now they were all gone, I turned to the task of getting down upon
paper my notions as to the aims of my writing, and some explanation
as to what I had been about during the years which I had given over
to the compiling of the Biography of Dom Manuel's life. For the task
approached completion: or, rather, the game drew toward its end; and
that ending might well be the appropriate season for me to sit out,
irrevocably, while the others played on.
However! once the Biography was really done, and once the volumes as
yet accessible nowhere save in, as went my resources, that almost
prohibitively priced Intended Edition, when these had been issued
uniformly with the rest,--with the Kalki binding, and the usual number
of misprints,--then I might or might not want to write something else.
Or perhaps before that time came would come death. Time, either way,
would settle the upshot without my aid. Meanwhile I most certainly
wanted my epilogue, in the shape of a summing up which would explain,
if only to me, just why I had been at pains to write this exceedingly
long book,--which all other persons, whether obtusely or whether in
self-protection, insisted upon regarding as _Jurgen_ and several
other books.
§ 6
And somehow, now that, comfortably replete with luncheon, I approach my
epilogue, now it is in my mind to make verses rather than to discourse
in sober and reasonable prose. But I lack any matter, too, that plainly
prompts to versifying. So I somewhat vacantly consider the trees which
stand about my library window. At this season they have put off their
nakedness, but the green of their leaves has not yet come to its full
volume. The leaves are sallow and infrequent. They dapple a luminous
gray sky with much the effect of germs seen under a microscope. The
grass in the long field beyond is pale and sodden: for I regard all
this in a gray shining pause between the heavy spring rains. The world,
in preparing to be very beautiful, is for the while disheveled looking:
and it suggests to me, without any stepping stones of exact analogy,
a handsome woman defamatorily clad in a shabby green dressing-gown,
poised before her mirror, with her hair already partially loosened in
order that she may prepare for a festival.
It is a fine festival for which the world makes ready. It is a pageant
and a banqueting that will feed all the senses, and will last for
months, until the white winds of November come, like gaunt janitors, to
remove the furniture and decorations. Life everywhere will burgeon and
exult, and bear fruit, and wane peacefully.
I mean not only grasses and bushes and trees. There will be a great
barking of dogs, and cats also will make the warm night vocal. And
birds too will cry out in the night, as if amazed and wistful, and
that crying will be very piercingly sweet and, for no reason at all,
pathetic. There will be lambs, and foals, and calves, with amateurishly
constructed legs. And of course the young people--But I wonder about
those young people! There is upon them a bland hard innocence, like
the gloss of white china. It is slippery, and it ever so lightly
chills. Yet it does seem, essentially, innocence. I recall, with a
wealth of ancient instances, that my own generation, where it went
unchaperoned, was remarkably unhampered by innocence: and I wonder if
my own generation was like this in the presence of our elders? I do
not remember; I feel that nobody could hope to remember a thing so far
away: and it is in my mind to make verses.
For I remember many other matters that have to do with moonlight
and with the touch of young flesh and with a lost consciousness of
being fearless and eternal. Music too seems to be woven through the
background of my memories, not as a thing quite noticed, but as not
ever wholly absent. I remember, in fine, youth: and I know that the
glad magic of youth was always a promise of whose fulfillment one
lived, then, utterly assured: and I suspect that to be old means
merely coming to comprehend that this promise has not been, and never
will be, kept. Meanwhile I observe it is still the nature of young
persons to seek out quiet places in couples, and to evince no distaste
for twilight: and I surmise that even those inexplicable automobiles
which stand to the side of our country roads at evening and after
nightfall have at least two persons inside them. These phenomena
also are a portion of the premeditated festival, of that sublimely
irrational festival whose _ducdamê_ (as Jaques in the play, you
will remember, calls that invocation which draws fools into a circle)
is still the promise which all, by and by, perceive to stay eternally
unfulfilled.
Now it is in my mind to make verses about this festival, but I lack
any matter, here again, that plainly prompts to versifying. We
older persons must sit out, sit out forever from this especial form
of recreation, while others play on. We dare at most to attend as
chaperons, and with a smile to observe these junketings: for Time, that
stern old Roman, states outright (in of course his native tongue),
_Lusisti satis!_
I do not say that we have not equally important things to do, in
our traffic with affairs of the mind: I would not assert our utter
readiness, as yet, for the scrap-heap and the graven tributes of the
stone-mason. I merely note that we are but, at best, the chaperons at
this festival for which the April world is preparing. So we must look
on benevolently, and must preserve decorum, and also must not ever
concede what urge it is that prompts this festival.... Still, it is in
my mind to make verses....
§ 7
There is, though, I reflect, than this knack of sitting out at the
right moment, and without sulkiness, from avocations for which the
unfriendly years disqualify you, no finer, no more beneficent, and no
more difficult art. To some, indeed, mere sitting out does not appear
quite adequate: and there is much to be said for the contention that
the key to real success in living is to die soon enough. Yet this is an
un-American accomplishment: even our leaders rarely show the masterly
tact of Lincoln; and the result is that most depressing list which
begins with Benedict Arnold, continues with William Jennings Bryan and
Aaron Burr, and so passes calamitously through the alphabet to Woodrow
Wilson. There is no one of these transient inheritors of glory but has,
through a mere faux-pas in longevity, impaired his chance of retaining
eternal admiration and applause.
The writer, though, I think, is over-precipitate in dying at a day less
than eighty. By that time he, with steadily failing faculties, will
have published a deal of insufferable twaddle: but by that time, too,
his name may well have become familiar to a fair number of ponderable
and unliterary persons; and the excellence of his writing may be
everywhere conceded as the obvious polite alternative to reading it.
He has become in the cultural vista a known, not necessarily majestic,
feature: he has won, in fine, to that certain undeniable assured
position which no American artist anywhere can hope to secure except
by prolonged survival of his talents. Longevity, indeed, is with us
the one auctorial accomplishment which intelligent people can honestly
esteem: we tend to share a generous national pride in all gifted
persons who have painstakingly attained to our common level through
the discomforts of senile decay. Time thus induces us to cherish our
Longfellows and Bryants, and even to tolerate our Whitmans: it enables
our Joseph Jeffersons to earn a competence upon the stage as soon
as they have grown too feeble to act: and it has also persuaded us,
through just this self-same sympathetic desire to gladden the last
years of every striking case of mental indigence, to establish and
stock our American Academy of Arts and Letters.
So I must certainly endeavor to live as long as may prove possible.
Even if I may not hope ever to be anything more than--in the phrase not
utterly peculiar to John Charteris,--"the author of _Jurgen_,"
there may be compensations by and by. And in fact, I turn here to
thinking, with a pleasant warm thrill, about Mencken's prediction that,
if I live to be eighty, I too may be elected to the American Academy....
§ 8
None the less, now that I approach completion of the Biography, this
may well be the time to sit out from the most high and joyous game of
writing. The young are not merely at the door, they are in all the
advertising columns devoted to the season's literary masterpieces,
and behind most of the editorial desks. I, who was but four years
ago a dangerous revolutionary upstart, begin, even among editors and
publishers, to be treated with something of the gingerly respect with
which one handles antique glassware or a veteran of the War Between the
States. Among the really "vital" writers, still in strenuous practise
of their lack of art, "the old fellow who wrote _Jurgen_" is
relegated at best to the Middle or, as they playfully call it, the
Muddle generation in American Letters; and I am become a relic vaguely
associable with bicycles and hansom-cabs and cigar-store Indians and
cast-iron deer, and other coeval items of extinct Americana.
So it may well be time, once the Biography is quite complete, for me to
sit out from the game of writing, and to make sport with words no more.
And _Lusisti satis_ has a dreary sound, at the first hearing:
yet I do not know but that it is, in reality, the aptly worded praise
of attested wisdom. "You have played enough!" I shall take it to mean
that I have not stinted myself at playing, that I have got out of the
writing all the diversion which is allowable.
For I begin to see fine implications in John Charteris' parting
statement that the artist labors primarily, even solely, to divert
himself. Whatever Schiller may have said remains to me unknown: but
I find this theory, of art as play, in notoriously good standing
elsewhere, among many; and I find, too, by the light of experience, a
great deal in this notion that the artist--or, at least, the artist who
happens to be a novelist,--is life's half-frightened playboy....
I