"It is, obviously, a fund which its inheritors have been compelled
to keep occult, through Christendom's set habit of arraigning and
murdering out of hand all caught adherents to such irritating
standards, as sorcerers."
"Indeed?" said I, with a pleasant consciousness of now having him
nicely started.
"Men are beginning," Harrowby continued, "to discover piecemeal by
'scientific' methods something of that knowledge which sorcerers, as
ignoramuses call them, have since time's youth attained through rather
different avenues. And more and more widely is the fact becoming
recognized that sorcery and witchcraft and magic were as far from
being popular delusions as they were remote from being implicated with
Christian mythology, to the imputed extent of siding with the devil
against Heaven."
"You don't tell me!" I observed.
But he did. He went on to tell me, in fact, a great deal more. For
here, he told me, is a religion really old: and to its adherents that
faith which came out of Nazareth seems still, they say, an upstart
affair which may yet prove ephemeral. So the devotees of that elder
faith have not ever really concerned themselves with Christianity,
not even those of them who have, for one reason or another, become
bishops and cardinals and popes. There had been, in the outcome of
this indifference, Dick Harrowby considered, something of irony: and
it was droll enough to reflect that the supreme head of the Christian
church--as when Gerbert of Aurillac, Hildebrand, Felice Peretti,
Benedict Cajetan or Jacques d'Euse was pope,--had so often been the
devout practitioner of an unspeakably more ancient religion.
So Harrowby talked on, with that rapt gravity which the old fellow
reserves for discussion of "the occult": and I listened, in part almost
believing him, who knew so much more about such matters than did I,
and in part reflecting that sanity and insanity are, at best, elastic
terms....
§ 21
But now I listened more attentively: for Harrowby had gone on to
suggest that theories now endemic among the miscellaneous gentry whom
we inclose in the term "scientists"--these "new" theories as to a
fourth dimension,--begin to-day to enable us to see much more than
nonsense in that reiterated ageless whispering as to men who had sought
and through the aid of magic had found their diversion in lands not
formally set down on any map.
"You mean--?" I prompted him.
Well, it developed, he meant that certain travellers, this whispering
has always reported, had been to very queer places. And returning,
they had told discreetly of realms wherein living was much more
satisfactorily conducted than in our workaday existence.
"Yes, but," I commented, "even so--" I spoke just as a conversational
spur, just as a dubious provocative: and Harrowby went on.
One traveller had been down into a twilit country where the people
were small and flaxen-haired, and ate neither fish nor flesh of any
kind. These people, he reported, wore brown caps to which were fastened
little silver bells. Their country knew no sunlight, but was radiant
with the shining of what, to the eye, seemed diamonds and carbuncles:
and nothing noxious nor hurtful was to be found anywhere in this covert
lovely land.
"Still--!" I observed.
Another spoke of a hollow mountain, wherein you entered to unending
delights. And he spoke, spoke as if he were troubled, of the queen of
this place. Yes, she was different from other women. And he talked
too of the great Emperor Karl, and of giants and dwarfs, and of the
Wildefrauen, who were more beautiful than the wives and daughters of
men.
"Nevertheless--" I stated. But Harrowby was in full cry.
So he went on to tell me how yet another spoke of a palace which was
builded, so far as human sense might judge, of pink seashells and of
crystal. A woman was to be encountered there also, very lovely in a
robe of green: her eyes were intent and changeless: her black hair was
interwoven with red coral. To her postulants she served, in a hall hung
with pearls, eight kinds of wine in as many goblets of chased silver:
and then with a gold frying-pan she prepared the velladen of fish,
which was the marriage feast.
A fourth told of a quite different palace that was designed by the
apostle Thomas; and was builded of Sethym wood and sardius and
imperishable ebony and ivory and onyx; and was enwrought with the horns
of reptiles. Before this palace stood a mirror to which you ascended
upon a stairway of porphyry and serpentine: armed warriors guarded it
night and day, for in this mirror you beheld all that was taking place
in every province and region subject to the master of this palace: and
within this palace you lived among all manner of pleasures and delights.
And yet another spoke of an untroubled and great-hearted people ruled
by one that had not the appearance of a human being. Some said the
real name of this ruler was Aradia: others boasted of large reason to
believe the lord of the hidden city of Mommur in everything male. This
monarch retained among mankind many secret worshippers, marked with
the sign of their service: these worshippers had privileges: and in the
eye of each one of them, when you looked closely, you would find the
small likeness of a horse.
Then also men had been to Blath Annis, and to the Strembölglings, and
to a secret country among mountains wherein the lost tribes of Israel
awaited the coming of Anti-Christ, when a fox would liberate them; and
to the pleasant uplands of Ladaria, about which rolled perpetually,
with terrible reverberations, a river not of water but of great stones;
and to bright Audela, to which the very brave might enter through a
gateway of fire, and no man could enter except in that way. Whereas
yet other travellers had journeyed beyond Mistorak and the dreadful
trumpets and thunder-blasts of the Vale of the Devil's Head, and had so
won to the happy Isle of Bragman--
"But they came back," I suggested, at this point.
Yes, all had perforce returned to man's colorless workaday life, to the
tediousness of over-familiar things, and to the ever-nearing shadow of
death. Yet here and there, and now and then, some men had managed to
enter into quite other ways of living. Men had in journeying toward
death contrived--sometimes by chance, more frequently by the aid of
magic,--for a while to elude the laws of ordinary human life, and for a
while to divert themselves--
"In alcoves," I suggested.
"Yes, if you like," said Harrowby,--"in alcoves in which the laws of
human polity and of material nature, as we know them, had not any
jurisdiction. The point is that these tales were obviously not invented
by liars with the intention of deceiving their hearers. For these
tales, encountered in every part of the world, have never made the
tiniest concession to plausibility: instead of wooing, they summons
faith with the abruptness of a sheriff; and have assumed from the
first that all our best-thought-of theories about the universe are
comparable, let us say, to the knowledge which a fly in a dining-car
possesses as to the management of railways."
"I see," I stated, comfortably. "Men, it was whispered, had, for
however brief a while, escaped from the obligations and restraints and,
above all, from the tediousness of workaday life,--that tediousness
which people have always tried to vary and color, under every sort
of human civilization, with so many forms of fiction. I see.... Yes,
Harrowby, I see: and your insanity is really a great help to me."
"But," he began, "you have the ladder of seven metals, and you know
perfectly well the secret of the mirror and the pigeons--"
"That," I protested, "isn't the point!..."
For I was in fact not at all concerned with the exact amount of truth
upon which these legends were based. The point, with me, was that men
had since time's beginning wanted such tales to be true; and that
these stories illustrated man's immemorial and universal desire to
escape from the self-imposed routine of his daily life. Man had always
believed that he could do this by the aid of wizardry: and in this
belief, as I now saw, he had been always and perfectly right.
§ 22
For everywhere, of course,--to-day, just as in Homer's nonage,--this
need is contented by the literary artist. The literary artist--he,
in any event,--does actually fulfil this universal desire, by his
own especial wizardry. He temporarily endows his followers with the
illusion of possessing what all alchemists have sought,--unfading
youth, wealth and eternal life. He engineers the escape for which men
have always longed, and which they have always known to be attainable,
as here, by magic. And his is the charitable miracle-working which
enables you to figure enviably in unfamiliar surroundings. Through his
kind thaumaturgy you, as Odysseus, deal intrepidly with cyclopes and
ascend the ivory beds of goddesses; as Job you get, from any ethical
standpoint, decidedly the better of the Lord God of Hosts and reduce
Him to rhetorical bullying; as the third prince you overpass all
perils to win to the desired trinket; and as Christian you with a
deadly thrust superbly discomfit lion-mouthed, bat-winged Apollyon. It
is in this fashion that the artist makes sport with the first of his
three adversaries, and derides common-sense.
For common-sense tempts men to be contented with their lot, to get the
most from what is theirs, and not to hanker nonsensically after the
unattainable. At the elbow of each of us lurks always this enchantress,
with luring rhapsodies, more treacherous than ever any siren lilted, in
praise of the firm worth of money and conformity. "Let us be rational,"
she whispers; "and let us remember that, whatever we might prefer, in
this world two and two make four." And with many gaudy enticements
does she prompt the unwary to yield homage to her insensate paramour,
the doltish and vain idol of mathematics.... Thus tirelessly, thus
unabashedly, does common-sense urge every man to obtain in this world,
such as it is, the permitted uttermost from that life which stays
peculiarly his own: and to the wheedling solicitings of common-sense
the literary artist can answer but one word. That word is "Bosh!" And
having uttered it, the artist proceeds to divert himself by living
dozens upon dozens of lives which in nothing resemble the starveling
and inadequate existence allotted him by the mere accident of birth.
§ 23
Yes: the creative romanticist alone can engineer a satisfying evasion
of that daily workaday life which is to every man abhorrent. I am
convinced, upon several grounds, that the motive of the literary artist
is wholly unaltruistic: he blazes for his own pleasuring the trail
upon which any number of readers may, so far as he cares, follow or
not follow, just as they elect, and be hanged to them! Whenever he
journeys into some such improbable country as, let us say, Poictesme,
it is, I know, for his own recreation. But I choose here, entirely from
the viewpoint of a reader of books, to consider with less scrutiny his
selfishness than my firm grounds for gratitude.
For, thanks to these haphazard sorcerers, my life has been a marvellous
affair. I look back, for example, upon the last month, which, as my
high-flown and roystering way of living averages, has been uneventful
enough. Yet in that time, I have quested through Thessaly, disguised
by the old magic of Apuleius as Mr. Gilbert Seldes, in pursuit of
all the lively arts, and, somewhat more necessitously, of a wreath
of roses; and have, with an intrepidity which I perforce admired,
sailed for the moon, to take part in the wars between Endymion and
Phaëthon.... Descending, I have passed that night with a fair and
charming woman--in a bed very white and wide, with two coverlets
of scarlet silk cloth,--and all our queer intercourse has been
conducted, amid many other incomprehensible happenings, chastely.
In the morning we two went out into sunlit fields; and so came to a
spring of clear water enclosed by a stone basin, upon which someone
had left forgotten a comb of gilded ivory. Entangled in this comb,
as I (whom men called Lancelot) saw with glad wondering, and with
the heroic passion for which I had long suspected myself to have the
talent, was near a handful of the hair of Guenevere. And I remember
how I thought that gold a hundred thousand times refined would seem
darker than midnight compared with the brightest day of that year's
summer, if anyone were to set such gold beside this hair.... Soon
passing thence,--and travelling now under the alias of Gil Blas de
Santillane,--I have disastrously changed rings with a plump, dimpled
brown-eyed niece of the governor of the Philippine Islands; I have
come, disguised as a green and gold pasteboard dragon, into the bedroom
of the most beautiful of Casmirians; I have criticised the sermons of
the Archbishop of Granada and found him in nothing different from
any other author under criticism. Fleeing episcopal wrath, I chatted,
near Plessis les Tours, with a thin-nosed and threadbare burgess, who
turned out to be the most shrewd of kings, and who sent me perilously
journeying to the court of yet another bishop. But Louis de Bourbon
had been murdered, I discovered, at an over-uproarious supper-party
conducted by the Wild Boar of Ardennes.... So I journeyed instead into
England, to fetch back the Queen's diamonds in good time for her to
foil the nefarious Cardinal, by duly wearing these twelve gems when
she danced in the ballet of La Merlaison at the fête of Messieurs
the Echevins. In England, though, I wandered so far astray, both
northward and chronologically, that, lost, I paused, under the wood of
Lettermore, to ask my way of red Colin Campbell, in the very moment the
great, ruddy jovial gentleman was shot down from ambush; and through
this mishap I became again a fugitive, now wandering through the howes
and bracken of wild Scotland.... Always, you perceive, no matter what
mage guided, he kept to the tried formula, and led me, footloose and
at free adventure, through eras and surroundings which were to him and
me in nothing familiar.... So that eventually I came, by way of the
British Linen Company's bank, and so past the lair of Tharagavverug, to
the steel gate, to The Porte Resonant, of the Fortress Unvanquishable;
and I am now upon the point of going in to cut off, for the third or
fourth time, Gaznak's evil head.
Yes, looking back, I can see that the last month has been fairly
various and contenting. And I am convinced that I must owe all these
happy adventurings to the charity of beneficent wizards rather than
of mere writing persons. And I elect to think of each and every valid
romantic novelist as a skilled sorcerer who, accompanied by a suitable
cortège of readers, departs at will from the workaday world, to travel,
eternally young and always comfortably opulent, upon the blessed way
of wizardry which conducts him away from boredom, and enables him to
wander footloose and at continuous unflagging adventure, in unfamiliar
lands wherein, as Poictesme phrases it, almost anything is rather more
than likely to happen.
§ 24
And I would like to think that every self-respecting novelist goes to
his magicking in suitable estate, and follows high and approved old
formulæ. In any event, so many persons have, at odd times, inquired
about my own "methods" of composition that it seems well here to jot
down what would appear to be a few of the more obvious rules of thumb.
The novelist, then, most appropriately prologizes his evasion of
common-sense--after of course performing the proper suffumigations
of camphor and aloes and amber,--by writing his first chapter in
a robe of white, with a triple collar of crystals and pearls and
selenite. His diet upon this day will be fish. When there is fighting
in manuscript, the writer may always advantageously, I believe, shift
to a rust-colored robe adorned with amethysts, and having a belt and
bracelets of steel,--clothed in which gear, he will while writing
keep as near as circumstances permit to the chimney, favored by
Mars. When he is about to kill anyone scriptorially, he will in mere
self-protection put on a wreath of ash and cypress, and burn scammony
and alum. He will likewise upon this day be careful to stint none
of the functions of nature; and will circumspectly remember that he
traffics with the wan and ashy overlord of the greater infortune.
But to bring off a love scene properly, demands of course much more
elaborate paraphernalia. The room, so far as general experience
indicates, should be hung with green and rose; the author, whom a
Nubian mute is fanning with swans' down, now is robed in sky blue, and
wears a graven turquoise ring. Musicians are in attendance, preferably
choristers, fiddlers and pipers. Upon the writer's head is a tiara of
lapis lazuli and beryl, wreathed about with myrtle and roses: upon
the auctorial breast a copper talisman opposes to the busied keys of
the typewriter the mystic sign of Anael and the inscription AVEEVA
VADELILITH....
I do not mean that in writing the Biography I myself have always in
every detail followed these exact "methods" of composition. What with
one thing and another, such as having small children in the house,
a similar account at the bank, and the attendance within candid
conversational range of one who holds at best the customary views
as to what may be put up with in a husband,--with such deterrents
about, these "methods" have sometimes, in some respects, been found
inexpedient. And so I merely suggest them here as that ideal of conduct
which should be aimed at by the creating romanticist, in absolute and
strict logic. For he in reality is a sorcerer, and in consequence is
amenable to the most ancient of rules.