MINIONS OF THE MOON

"Schiller's _Räuber_ perverted the taste and imagination of all

young men. The high-minded, metaphysical thief, its hero, was so

warmly admired that many raw students abandoned their homes and betook

themselves to the forests to levy contributions upon travellers. But

they found that real, everyday robbers were unlike the banditti of the

stage; and that three months in prison was very well to read about by

their own firesides, but not agreeable to undergo in their own proper

persons."

_3._

_Minions of the Moon_

§ 25

The literary artist plays, I had said, with piety.... But here I

was pleasantly interrupted by the sun's appearance without, and the

consequent inrush of new color and of livelier gilding into the massed

bindings of those books, of so many more books than I shall ever accord

a second reading, assembled upon my library shelves. Everything had of

a sudden brightened, with a cheerfulness which my thinking absorbed,

since (even with that awkward question of piety ahead) I had found

at least one excellent palliation for the devoting of my life to the

Biography. For the novelist and every creative writer travelled on the

gay way of wizardry while his less favored fellows, for the major part

of their journeying, approached toward death through more staid and

monotonous corridors.

Yet in these corridors men were continually finding alcoves: and these

alcoves, as reflection had already suggested, were of two sorts. Men

found solace in--to continue my figure,--alcoves of useless or even

of reprehensible action; and in alcoves of thought. By the rogue, and

by the rather rarer addict of mental exercise, might, at reasonable

intervals, diversion be obtained as we passed toward the exit at the

end of the inescapable corridor....

Well, and as I continued idly to regard my books, I noted in particular

two volumes which yet stood side by side. Their appearance in America

had been, I recollected, contemporaneous. And these two relatively

enfranchised types of men--the thinker and the rogue,--had then

been, I considered, afforded exoteric illustration, by that most

quaint of accidents which gave us simultaneously as published books

_The Education of Henry Adams_ and _The Legend of the Glorious

Adventures of Tyl Ulenspiegel_. I could remember thinking that

not often were thus coincidently granted, for the first time to

Americans, two volumes with such a plausible air of being destined

for longevity,--although the cautious would affix to the making of

this assertion the rider that each book centres on a personality which

is by way of being unfairly beguiling. Each protagonist here is a

personality evocative of the reader's friendship, in the instant happy

way in which people between book-covers are privileged to establish

such relationship with beings less permanently issued in flesh; and

so each of these two evades calm judgment. For to many of us these

had figured at once as new-found, heart-delighting and eminently

"personal" friends,--this Ulenspiegel come a-swaggering out of Belgium,

and this wistful Adams then just released from the decent reticences

of living,--and we perforce appraised them with a bias of friendship

rather than by any code of strictly "literary" values.

Still, the two figures appeared quite perfectly to illustrate the

seeking of diversion in alcoves of reverie and of misdemeanor. To

Adams I decided to come back: and to the Fleming I turned with frank

confession that of the somewhat incongruous pair one finds Tyl

Ulenspiegel the more difficult to judge with any pretence of equity,

precisely because this Tyl is, as I suggested at the beginning, a

rogue....

§ 26

It would be pleasant here to digress into speculation why in our

literature there should be so few rogues portrayed full-length; and

why America, that in daily life derives such naïve pleasure from

being cheated by "fine business men" and "far-seeing statesmen"

should have produced in its writings no really memorable rogue, with

the possible exception of Uncle Remus's Br'er Rabbit. But upon the

whole, it appears preferable to say that Tyl Ulenspiegel has been

for some five centuries famous among the people of Belgium and the

Netherlands as a sort of Dutch Figaro or Scapin,--as "mischief-maker,

jack-of-all-trades, and by turns fool, artist, valet and physician."

This character was appropriated and ennobled by Charles de Coster

as the central figure of a heroic romance, _La Légende de Tiel

Uylenspiegel_, published in 1867, and since known as "the Bible

of the Flemings"; and it is this book which was, some fifty years

afterward, translated into our tongue. So much it appears preferable

to say as simply as possible, because, in Geoffrey Whitworth's

translation, a splendid and great-hearted example of literary art was

then rendered into delightfully adequate English: and I incline to

think that a masterpiece should be greeted simply and reverently, and

without vain speaking. Even to recommend it to your consideration (as

I none the less must conscientiously do) seems rather on a par with

saying pleasant things about a sunrise.

So honest comment can but come back to this: for Tyl Ulenspiegel

himself one straightway establishes a sort of personal liking, a

liking unbased on "literary" values, and an unmoralizing liking such

as entraps you into indignation when the reforming Henry the Fifth

repudiates that other not-unlovable rogue, Sir John Falstaff.

"A Fleming am I from the lovely land of Flanders, workingman, nobleman,

all in one,--and I go wandering through the world, praising things

beautiful and good, but boldly making fun of foolishness." Such is Tyl

Ulenspiegel's description of himself, in terms a bit over-modestly

incommensurate to the speaker's variousness. Tyl can, for example,

be upon occasion a very pretty fighting-man, performing salutary

homicides with an approach to professional despatch and thoroughness.

For so often as a national hero finds a deserving person to be rescued

from oppression, ten or twelve adversaries amount, as we sometimes

discontentedly foreknow, to nothing more than to afford, in the moment

that their presumption procures for them demolishment, yet another

proof of the foolishness of the wicked; and all such slight battues

the national hero regards as trifles. Thus here, for serious work,

an Ulenspiegel too requires some three or four fully armed opposing

cohorts of Spanish cavalry to be discomfited single-handed, and really

to justify a display of that animation with which Sieur Roland laid

about him at Roncesvaux, and which enabled Achilles to choke Scamander

with slain Trojans.

So much of physical prowess, I repeat, one has the fair and ancient

right to expect of any national hero. Quite another facet of the jewel

is the roguish, not at all "heroic" Tyl of elder legends, who delights

in perpetrating jokes not always pre-eminent for delicacy. These

thimble-rigging and cloacinal jeux d'esprit De Coster, to be sure, has

for the most part omitted, with here and there just a bland indication.

For another matter, although Tyl is devotedly attached to the fair

Nele, and their marriage at the end of his wanderings is a conclusion

such as the erudite describe as foregone, nobody can expect a rogue

meticulously to emulate Joseph. The national hero of Belgium, be it

repeated, is a rogue.... So there came about inevitably that affair of

the beautiful gay-hearted dame whom Tyl escorted to Dudzeel: in all her

dealings with young men, howsoever impudent, she abhorred in particular

the sin of cruelty, and could not be pricked into it. And there was

the Walloon maiden into whose home Tyl went one night, to take part in

organ practise of the right accompaniment to some Flemish love-songs.

And there was the Comtesse de Meghen, another lovely and benevolent

lady, who offered Ulenspiegel, in the beginning, hospitality, and in

the end, her sincerest compliments upon the fact that he did not in

anything resemble her elderly and flabby husband.... In fine, Tyl

Ulenspiegel marches, in the pride of his youth, about a world of

brightly-colored and generous women, and graces a world wherein he

displays as much continence as appears consistent with politeness; and

wherein Joseph in the final outcome could not manage to combine these

two virtues.

So likewise this rogue marches, with chance for guide, about a world

which--then also,--was ruled by folly and bigotry; and he goes with

jauntiness, as befits "a master of the merry words and frolics of

youth," even in the shadowed places where over-head his betrayed and

gibbeted kindred fester between him and the sun. His is Hamlet's

heritage, but the Fleming wears his rue with a marked difference;

since the ashes of a martyred father lie upon Tyl's breast without at

all oppressing a heart whose core is roguishness. And in the presence

of injustice Tyl Ulenspiegel does not shrink, not even into drawing

morals: instead, with chance for guide, he marches. For those who

would wrong him his eye and tongue and sword stay keen; and the rogue

knows these weapons to be in the long run sufficient: meanwhile, that

one should now and then encounter over-troublesome fellows needing to

be killed, is as naturally a part of wandering at adventure as that

one should find everywhere girls to be assisted out of virginity and

flagons to be emptied, and songs to be made beyond any numbering, but

never the last song.... So the rogue marches, and puts all things to

their proper uses. And the heart of the reader, given something better

than the heart of a flea, goes out to the resistless rogue.

There is, to be sure, a "story": in fact, around this sprightly figure

De Coster has woven--contemporaneously, it is bewildering to reflect,

with the weaving of a dreary mystery about one Edwin Drood,--an

intricate romance as cruel as life and considerably gayer. Somewhat to

deviate metaphorically, De Coster, in this tale of fifteenth-century

Flemings in course of being enlightened and uplifted by the auto-da-fés

and hangmen of the Holy Inquisition, has builded a story which is not

unsuggestive of a time-mellowed fifteenth-century cathedral; with the

gentry about their devotions, and with peasants joking on the porches,

and with a stately hymn music accompanying both the aspiration and

the guffaws; a cathedral, too, that is no less opulent in glowing

paintings of rapt saints and archangels than in captivatingly hideous

gargoyles.... Here again, one is tempted to expatiate, concerning

these gargoyles: and I would like here to talk about the superlunar

bleak buffooneries of the chapter which depicts the death of Charles

the Fifth, and his trial in heaven; or to applaud the account of Tyl's

hunting of the werwolf; or, at least, to note that really intolerable

"catharsis by pity and terror" when Katheline the good witch attempts

to share her cup of cold water with Joos Damman in the torture

chamber....

§ 27

But what, above all, remains with us is the figure of the tall young

rogue who passes hardly any alcove which hide-bound morality has

labelled "Keep Out" without a little dalliance therein. Ahead is a

closed door, lightly ajar, a black door with silver-plated handles,

which one perforce approaches always: in the meantime it is astonishing

to note what a number of pleasant and blameworthy things one can

discover to do.

Reflection finds the circumstance unfortunate that most of the

agreeable actions of life are either forbidden or else deplorably

behedged with restrictions. From drunkenness and from the effects of

certain drugs can be obtained moments, and even hours, of conscious

contentment: probably in no other way, indeed, is it possible for human

beings to induce an unbroken twenty minutes of actual and complete

happiness: but with repetition such pleasures increasingly work the

deuce of a damage to one's health and purse. Besides, our inefficient

bodies prove unable to stay comfortably inebriate, for more than a

brief while, without drifting into sleep or collapsing in sickness:

and our equally inefficient medicine men have found out no amiable

method of, in the time-honored phrase, recuperating from alcoholic

excesses.

Then also the more intimate recreations of amour, when once you are

over with the disappointments unavoidably attendant upon loss of

innocence, compose a very pleasant pastime so long as the game is

played by relative strangers. Even superficial exploration of the

charms and the little ways of any unfamiliar and personable young

woman, they tell me, is unflaggingly rewarded and incited to fresh

exertions by the discovery of some slight novelty or small strangeness.

Thighs differ, breasts are always unpredictable, and the piquant mole

continually "by himself surprises," I am informed. Yet, in America at

all events, one finds extant a perceptible tendency to deprive the

oldest and most popular of amusements of just this essential element of

unfamiliarity, by restricting it to married persons; and even within

this licensed class to limit each husband to the embraces of his own

wife. Now with the morality of this social ruling the most precise

need pick no fault: I would merely point out that, here again, should

monogamy ever become prevalent among us, we would be deliberately

abating one of the more considerable pleasures of an existence wherein

pleasures are not over-frequent.

Nor, of course, not even in actual need, are you allowed to take

another person's money away from him except through the tedious

channels of business; nor to fare publicly appareled in lovely colors

except just where your necktie shows but stays invisible to--of all

people--you alone; nor are you permitted to keep enjoyable, through

the amenities of homicide, your commerce with persons who admittedly

exist but to annoy their fellows. Tyl Ulenspiegel might deal as the

whim took him with those obnoxious cohorts of Spanish cavalry. But

with us there is never an open season for religious revivalists or

book peddlers or collectors of internal revenue: and traffic policemen

and the conductors of "tag-days"[2] and prohibition agents all live in

exasperating immunity. Even the women you adored, and wrote letters to,

approach you intrepidly. Everywhere, in fine, this or that pleasant

action is forbidden or in one way or another restricted; and man, upon

the verge of actual, sharp, zestful enjoyment is brought up short by a

taboo of his own inventing.

So it is pleasant--_faute de mieux_, as in our current

fiction superb worldlings no longer observe to other members of

the _élite_,--it is very pleasant to indulge in these sports

vicariously through considering the exploits of the Ulenspiegelian

rogue who does do these things. And we cannot but rather fondly admire

the dashing fellow who commits the pleasure-giving misdemeanors from

which we are held back by prudence or by physical limitations. Every

country rejoicing in the dubious benefit of a history has, they say,

alike its great national hero and its great national thief: and it

is a fact that St. George endures in balladry with Robin Hood, St.

Denis with Cartouche, St. Andrew with Rob Roy. Then, too, if Belgium

yet remembers Tyl Ulenspiegel, Spain has not yet forgotten Guzman

d'Alfarache, nor Germany her Schinderhannes, nor Hungary her Schubry.

Everywhere through the shadowland of legend canter and gallop--with

the gleaming eyes of nocturnal creatures, with a multitudinous tossed

shining of steel,--these "squires of the night's body, Diana's

foresters, these minions of the moon," whom the prosaic call thieves

and highwaymen: and everywhere men have admired and cherished some

cunning strong unconquerable rogue.

This foible has from the beginning been recognized and shared by the

literary artist. It is perhaps one reason (among others) why really

reputable persons have always felt, however obscurely, that there is

something dangerous in novels; and why the reading of fiction has

always been more or less deprecated by all citizens of appreciable

elevation and influence. And here the well-thought-of are, very luckily

for the literary artist, far more profoundly in the right than ever

the well-thought-of have comprehended: for in all polities imaginative

literature has tirelessly advocated revolution, by depicting the

possibilities of a more pleasure-giving state of affairs; and in his

diversions the artist has consistently tended to identify himself with

the rogue and the law-breaker.

§ 28

Romantic art has from the first inclined to glorify the breaker of

laws current in the artist's lifetime. Nor are the provocatives for

this sedition obscure; since no society has ever provided any exact or

generally respected status for the artist, nor afforded him, at most,

much more than the half-contemptuous, cosseting indulgence which is

granted to lap-dogs. Moreover, the artist alone is permitted hourly

to use his reason,--an action which in any other walk of life would

at once upset business usage or professional etiquette,--because of

men's general conviction that here it doesn't especially matter. In

consequence the artist has always found our human ordering of this

world, under all régimes, to be unsatisfactory; and to offenders

against any part of this ordering he inclines with irrational

unavoidable sympathy.... You may, in fact, observe that nobody is

quite at ease in dealing with a policeman: the man represents, however

genially, with howsoever bright adornments of figured brass and

rubicundity, an oppression that is upon us; and while in theory the

relation between the legally honest tax-payer and his two hired and

liveried retainers, the policeman and the mail-carrier, is the same,

one notes in practise a marked difference. The courts and officers of

the law, and all legal processes, are matters with which we as if by

instinct avoid involvement: for, here again, man occupies somewhat

the position of a Frankenstein.... So Robin Hood is voted an unending

triumph, from black letter ballads to the moving pictures, and the

fact that Christ was crucified by due process of law has everlastingly

endeared His story to romantic art and human sympathy.

Now very often, I daresay, the artist is guided by this sympathy for

the rogue without suspecting its existence. Thus even in the most

genteel and circumspect of arts,--which I take to be the composition

of a novel in the English language,--it is droll to find from the

beginning the most respectable of scribes, if not always of pharisees,

depicting one or another rascally law-breaker with fervors of fond

admiration whereof the writer seems wholly unconscious. For the

English novel began with the rogueries of Lovelace and Tom Jones.

Then followed the chronicles of Rob Roy and Jack Sheppard and Paul

Clifford, most exemplary and magnanimous of highwaymen. Seth Pecksniff

presently fell down the steps of his cottage in Wiltshire: and tall

Redmund Barry fled up to Dublin, just two years later, after his duel

with Captain Quin. By and by, in Lymport, the great Mel assumed his

over-tight lieutenant's uniform, and was laid out in his coffin, by way

of beginning the tale which his personality infuses all through: and

the gay young Master of Ballantrae (after tossing a guinea with his

brother) travelled northward from Durrisdeer, singing as he rode toward

Culloden, with a fine new white cockade in his hat.... For all these

are rogues, in each of whom his creator obviously joyed, no matter

under what protective coloration of moral purpose and of self-deceit.

§ 29

That art is a criticism of life, appears a favorite apothegm among

those who know least about either. Yet the statement is true enough,

in the sense that prison-breaking is a criticism of the penitentiary.

Art is, in its last terms, an evasion of the distasteful. The artist

simply does not like the earth he inhabits: for the laws of nature his

admiration has always been remarkably temperate; and with the laws of

society he has never had any patience whatever.

So the literary artist leaves the earth which he inhabits, daily

and with no more to-do than daily is made over the same feat by

professional aeronauts. And the literary artist diverts himself by

constructing other worlds, whose orderings are different, and to

his mind more approvable. All creative writers have thus, whether

consciously or no, embarked in an undertaking compared with which

the axiomatic attempt to weave ropes of sand or to construct silk

purses from even less adapt material is a quite sane and unassuming

enterprise. For the literary artist here is at play with the second of

his adversaries, with piety; and has offered to instruct the aggregate

wisdom of his fellows and even of Omnipotence how to create a more

satisfactory world.

By the less venturous the suggestions thrown out have been partial

and in the nature of slight amendments to existent orderings. For

centuries where magic has attempted to coerce Providence, and religion

has urged the bribing of Heaven, whether with burnt offerings or good

behavior, here the artist has more urbanely adhered to moral suasion,

by setting a praiseworthy example for the Demiurge to follow.... Thus

has the novelist long proposed, through this delicate intimation

of setting the example, that a time limit might advantageously be

placed upon human discomforts, and immunity from the sum total be

granted, say, along with a marriage license. Suitable incomes, it

has in the same tactful way been suggested to Providence, should be

conferred upon all virtuous and guileless persons, for whom the bonds

of reality rarely afford coupons. And something certainly ought to

be done about man's positively dangerous racial custom of getting

older and dying; for which the novelist's alternative would seem to

be that, after an equitable distribution of confessions and brides

and unexpected legacies and jail-sentences, everybody should enter a

static condition of middle age. Such at least is the impression left

by the last paragraphs of our elder novels, with all the characters

congealed into perdurable domesticity and standing sponsor for one

another's children. Scheherezade is, to me, the only known tale-teller

who has punctiliously and convincingly accounted for the future of her

puppets, after the winding up of each comedy, by stating that they

were duly disposed of by the destroyer of delights, and presumably

the undertaker.... Let it, in fine, be understood that the business

of human life, as we know it, will by and by be reorganized, and

everything be made entirely and permanently different: and fortified by

that firm understanding, we can for the present allow the conditions of

human life. That much at least has been from the beginning a proviso

insisted upon by every creative writer.

But those whom life has more deeply disappointed and bored, these turn

to diverting themselves with worlds that are in everything dissimilar

from the one world with which ill luck has made them familiar. These

are the romantics, the fantastics, who, cursed with actual imagination,

devoted it in youth to pre-figuring what life must be when you became

an untrammeled adult. They have faced the reality, they have faced the

real and incredible antickry of men as social units. They have faced

it with a candor uncharacteristic of common-sense. And they have now

no further concern with the laws and other hebetudes of men, except

to forget these disappointments as utterly as possible, and to divert

themselves in worlds of their own creation wherein their whims are

the only laws. So Ulenspiegel is sent hunting werwolves; Holy Maël

is tricked into sailing northward, in a demon-rigged stone trough,

among fabulous seas and immodest sirens; the huge shadow which bears

obscurely, as if beneath the wings of a bat, the Seven Deadly Sins, is

cast across the roof of Anthony's hut in the Thebaid; the Snow Queen is

bundled into a great sledge painted white, and fetched south to kidnap

little Kay; Alice is lured into the rabbit hole and tumbled, very

slowly, down that very deep well whose walls were inset with cupboards

and bookshelves: and the creating romantic is diverted.

§ 30

Meanwhile you may note the unreflective raising somewhat of a pother

over the circumstance that the artist is as a rule disliked and is

belittled, if not actually persecuted, by his contemporaries. Yet no

other outcome can seem more natural, I am afraid, when you consider

that the art of every important creative writer is an hourly protest

that he finds his contemporaries dull and inadequate persons, and

that he esteems the laws which they have devised, and live under, to

be imbecile. Laws based upon rationality one could endure: but any

sane person, as the fretted artist perceives, must regard with an eye

full of provisos the professed aim of so many of our laws, to make

for the public's general welfare and happiness. For the artist is

logical; and therein differs from the majority of his fellows, who

unthinkingly assume that all efforts to promote the well-being of

mankind at large are praiseworthy. I myself concede that we are here

apt, through however admirable motives, to act precipitately, where one

calm instant's thought would tend to show all such efforts irreligious

and illogical. By no religious code, and by no course of logic taught

in any school, is the average man entitled to happiness: his demerits

justify in logic the earthly misery which religion postulates: and to

impose upon him happiness would be, by the best-thought-of standards,

an unreasonable and blasphemous act, which, one may proudly say,

American civilization has never come anywhere near committing.

Instead, the orthodox should find it very gratifying to note with what

complete inutility altruism flourishes everywhere, and legal enactments

pullulate to promote men's general well-being; since faith and logic

alike, I take it, are strengthened by the utterness with which all

these laws fail, and, in fact, appear to muddle matters rather worse

than ever.

And it is perhaps a good thing too that we, who have taxes,

by-laws, licenses, passports, burial certificates, and permits to

marry,--we who must do all that is done by us either in violation

or with the permission of one or another law, we who live bound

and fretted by innumerable small legal requirements and taboos and

restrictions,--cannot in the least imagine what living must have been

like under less omnipresently paternal governments. In simpler and upon

the whole less muddle-headed ages the relatively few laws whereunder

mankind lived did not pretend to accomplish anybody's positive

benefit; their slighter and more feasible aim was to prevent your

undue annoyance of anybody else: and, that secured, the laws took--it

becomes a positively incredible concept,--no further account of your

actions....

--Which is not of course to suggest that the artist fared in more

Arcadian days a whit the merrier. I would not imply that the artist

was then content with his material surroundings, nor that in any

society he is likely ever to be content. Here and there, to be sure,

as I have admitted, he wins to the cuddlings and applause of the

lapdog with a quaint repertoire of tricks; and dies, some while after

forgetting these tricks, comfortably enough of being over-pampered.

But the romantics, the true romantics, these also, are in a wholly

un-Falstaffian sense all minions of the moon,--who has condemned them,

as I recall my Baudelaire, eternally to love the place where they

are not and the woman whom they know not. Astrology is more exact;

and, under those whom the moon rules, defines very perfectly the true

romantic, as "a soft tender creature, a searcher of and delighter in

novelties; unsteadfast, timorous, prodigal; loving peace and to live

free from care; hating labor; and content in no condition of life,

either good or ill." To me that last clause seems in every sense

conclusive.

He that is born one of the minions of the moon must therefore always

be a little at odds with what his fellows describe as piety. For his

reason, such as it is, compels him to disapprove of most human laws,

upon the ground of their foolishness, and of most natural laws, upon

the ground, not merely of their unreason nor even of their lewdness

and cruelty, but of their ugly and unæsthetic results. So that in the

worlds he builds as both a lesson and a rebuke to Providence, the

creative artist inclines to favor and to place in a heroic light such

persons as Tyl Ulenspiegel and Robin Hood, who, by the standards of

human laws, are better fitted for jail. Nor is that all....

§ 31

No: that is not by any means all. For the romantic enters into frank

competition with nature by attempting not merely to create more

interesting persons than nature creates, but also to outvie nature

by making his creations durable. And, as a sort of supreme affront,

creative art now and then plucks from the graveyard one of nature's

put-by failures, and, with a triumphant, "See now what I can do with

the very material this bungler has flung away!" converts the dead man

or woman into an ever-living romantic myth. So are begotten those

favored persons whose vitality and whose adventuring each generation of

mankind renews.... I refer, of course, to such persons as Prometheus

and Pan and Judas and the Sphinx,--and to Andromeda and Helen of Troy

and Satan. I refer to the Wandering Jew and Faust and Odysseus, who

stay always irresistible to the romanticist: and I refer to King

Solomon and Queen Cleopatra and the knight Tannhäuser, and to Lilith

and Don Juan also, for whom are yet reserved, we know, the most

spirit-stirring adventures in the manuscripts of writers still unborn.

I refer to Blue Beard, and to Dame Mélusine, and to Punch, and to a

great many others who were so lucky as to originate in a satisfyingly

romantic myth, and who in consequence stay always real and always free

of finding life monotonous.

Now, it is an ever-present reminder of our own impermanence to

note that no human being stays real. In private annals a species

of familiary canonization sets in with each fresh advent of the

undertaker; no sooner, indeed, do our moribund lie abed than we begin

even in our thoughts to lie like their epitaphs; and all of us by

ordinary endure the pangs of burying ineffably more admirable kin

than we ever possessed.... Nor does much more of honesty go to the

making of those national chronicles which Mr. Henry Ford, with a

candor that at one time really seemed incurable by anything short of

four years in the White House, has described as "bunk." In history

one finds everywhere an impatient desire to simplify the tortuous and

complex human being into a sort of forthright shorthand. Alexander

was ambitious, Machiavelli cunning, Henry the Eighth bloodthirsty,

and George Washington congenitally incapable of prevarication. That

is all there was to them, so far as they concern the average man: and

thus does history imply its shapers with the most curt of symbols,

somewhat as an astronomer jots down a four's first cousin to indicate

the huge planet Jupiter and compresses the sun that nourishes him, into

a proof-reader's period. Always in this fashion does history work over

its best rôles into allegories about the Lord Desire of Vain-glory and

Mr. By-ends, about Giant Bloody-man and Mr. Truthful; and rubs away the

humanness of each dead personage resistlessly, as if resolute to get

rid in any event of most of him; and pares him of all traits except the

one which men, whether through national pride or the moralist's large

placid preference for lying, have elected to see here uncarnate.

Quite otherwise fare those luckier beings who began existence with the

advantage of being incorporeal, and hence have not any dread of time's

attrition. The longer that time handles them, the more does he enrich

their experience and personalities....

§ 32

I found recorded, for example, not long ago, in Mr. Robert Nichols'

fine book _Fantastica_, the very latest adventures of three

of these favored beings. And let me protest forthwith that I

profoundly enjoyed this book. This trio of stories, about such copious

protagonists as Andromeda and the Sphinx and the Wandering Jew, came,

to me at least, as the most amiable literary surprise since Mr. Donn

Byrne published _Messer Marco Polo_. Here was beauty and irony

and wisdom; here was fine craftsmanship: but here, above all, were

competently reported the more recent events in the existence of favored

persons whose vitality and whose adventuring each generation of mankind

renews.

I found, for instance, Mr. Nichols writing very beautifully about

Andromeda. Well, it was Euripides, they say, who first popularized this

myth of Andromeda: and, for all that the dramas he wrote about her

are long lost, it were time-wasting, of a dullness happily restricted

to insane asylums and the assembly halls of democratic legislation,

here to deliberate whether Andromeda or Euripides be to us the more

important and vivid person, in a world wherein Euripides survives as a

quadrisyllable and wherein Andromeda's living does, actually, go on.

You have but, for that matter, to compare Andromeda with the overlords

of the milieu in which her fame was born, with the thin shadows that

in pedants' thinking, and in the even gloomier minds of schoolboys

upon the eve of an "examination," troop wanly to prefigure Cleon and

Pericles and Nicias, to see what a leg up toward immortality is the

omission of any material existence. These estimable patriots endure at

best as wraiths and nuisances, in a world wherein Andromeda's living

does, actually, go on. It is not merely that she continues to beguile

the poet and painter, but that each year she demonstrably does have

quite fresh adventures.... Only yesterday, I reflected, Mr. C.C.

Martindale had attested as much, in his engaging and far too scantly

famous book, _The Goddess of Ghosts_; as now did Mr. Nichols

in _Fantastica_.... For it is, through whatever human illogic,

yesterday's fictitious and most clamantly impossible characters who

remain to us familiar and actual persons, the while that we remember

yesterday's flesh-and-blood notables as bodiless traits.

So it comes about that only these intrepid men and flawless women

and other monsters who were born cleanlily of imagination, in lieu

of the normal messiness, and were born as personages in whom, rather

frequently without knowing why, the artist perceives a satisfying large

symbolism,--that these alone bid fair to live and thrive until the

proverbial crack of doom. Their living does, actually, go on, because

each generation of artists is irresistibly impelled to provide them

with quite fresh adventures.... And no one can, with certainty, say

why. One merely knows that these favored romantic myths, to whom just

now I directed the stiletto glance of envy, remain the only persons

existent who may with any firm confidence look forward to a colorful

and always varying future, the only persons who stay human in defiance

of death and time and the even more dreadful theories of "new schools

of poetry"; and who keep, too, undimmed the human trait of figuring

with a difference in the eye of each beholder. For all the really fine

romantic myths have this in common. As Mr. Nichols phrases it, in

approaching a continuation of the story of Prometheus one may behold in

the Fire-Bringer, just as one's taste elects, a pre-figuring of Satan

or of Christ or of Mr. Thomas Alva Edison.

And this one sometimes guesses to be--perhaps--the pith of such

myths' durability, that the felt symbolism admits of no quite final

interpreting. Each generation finds for Andromeda a different monster

and another rescuer; continuously romance and irony endeavor to

contrive new riddles for the Sphinx; whereas the Wandering Jew--besides

the tour de force of having enabled General Lew Wallace to write a book

which voiced more fatuous blather than _Ben-Hur_,--has had put to

his account, at various times, the embodying of such disparate pests as

thunderstorms and gypsies and Asiatic cholera.

Well! here--just for an instant to recur to _Fantastica_, as

a volume which I delight in commending to the particular notice

of the urbane,--here one finds Mr. Nichols also writing remarkably

contemporaneous parables about the Sphinx and her latest lover, about

Andromeda and Perseus, about the Wandering Jew and Judas Iscariot.

They are, to my finding, very wise and lovely tales; they are, I hope,

the graduating theses of a maturing poet who has become sufficiently

sophisticated to put aside the, after all, rather childish business

of verse-making. But the really important feature, in any event, is

that Robert Nichols adds to the unending imbroglios of these actually

vital persons, and guides with competence and a fine spirit the

immortal travellers. Nor is this any trivial praise when you recall

that, earlier, they have been served by such efficient if slightly

incongruous couriers as Goethe and Charles Kingsley and Euripides and

Eugène Sue, as Matthew of Paris and Flaubert and Nathaniel Hawthorne

and the Reverend George Crowley.

§ 33

For these great myths have, over and above that quality of which I

spoke just now as wizardry, some common and not readily definable power

which resistlessly makes captive the dreams of men of all conditions

and faiths and degrees of intelligence. I can remember puzzling a

long while over what conceivable feature these so divergent stories

could be said to have in common; since some shared trait must be,

I reasoned, the explanation of their virtually uniform allure. And

these myths baffled me. Their might seemed, as their origin, not

wholly explicable. I say "their origin" because no great romantic myth

seemed the product of any especial brain. Never could we detect any

writer seated at his desk about the diligent invention of any one of

these stories, told now for the first time. Rather did legends gather

slowly and contradictorily, arising none knew whence, about the tale's

protagonist, who was by ordinary an actual personage some while since

dead. By and by somebody had perhaps written down a part of this rumor,

always with plain inability to narrate the whole; and the result

might be, to the one side an _Odyssey_, to the other a _Juif

Errant_.... Sometimes one of these inexplicably macrobiotic myths

had found no formal chronicler, and for centuries existed in detachment

from literature. There was, for example, I reflected, the fine figure

of Punch, which imaginative artists had prodigally left unexploited.

In fact, nobody except Mr. Conrad Aiken[3] seemed ever to have written

with seriousness about Punch; and this superb theme as yet awaited

merely the attention of some gifted writer, to enrich the world with a

masterpiece. Then there was Mélusine. There was, for that matter, Blue

Beard.... All these stayed uncommemorated with any adequacy as yet, and

were, despite that fact, no whit the less recognizable as magnificent

and immortal.

I could not see that these old stories had anything whatever in

common; and even if in these ageless fables some shared feature were

discovered, that would hardly explain the unvarying strange sequel.

It would not, I thought, explain the emergence from the "story" of a

figure which, the story done with, and all its incidents put behind,

continued to live on in other stories, and continued through generation

after generation to have quite fresh adventures. Nothing seemed able

ever to explain that. Yet it was a fact. One was tempted to imagine

these immortal figures had guiles of their own, and exerted strange

potencies less to afford the artist a fruitful theme than to demand

his service. Man here again, it might be, enacted his not infrequent

rôle of Frankenstein.... At any rate, the secret was not in the

stories: artists did not repeat these stories, but instead arranged new

imbroglios for the old tales' protagonists.

Of course the truth was that these figures, for one reason or another

as yet unrevealed to me, were such as, for that reason, appealed to

a majority of creating romanticists. They were toys with which, for

howsoever veiled causes, the artist peculiarly delighted to play. It

might, I guessed, have been the element of dubiety which fascinated,

and the half-vexed feeling that, when all which is apparent to sense

and rationality had been checked off and labeled, much yet remained

amenable to neither. It might be, just as I had said, the pith of

such myths' durability that the felt symbolism admits of no quite

final interpreting; and so arouses the not utterly rational suspicion

that the whole truth about these mythic figures has never yet been

apprehended by anybody.

§ 34

Strikingly did this seem exemplified by the perennial magic of Pan.

His epopee, as taken over by the artist, was virtually eventless. Pan

figured in no story of marked interest or importance. He merely was:

and what he was, nobody had presumed to voice with any precision.

Pan was but indicated--always with a queer effect of the narrator's

suspecting somebody might, undesirably, be eavesdropping,--by this

vague talk about a hirsute wanderer with the horns and feet of a goat

and a taste for pipe-playing: these features were, you knew, not the

essentials. Such tales recorded only small and immaterial truths,

as if--you somehow knew,--you were to define the Pope as an elderly

Catholic who wears underclothing and eats breakfast, or a duly

nominated candidate for the White House as a Protestant of unexigent

honesty. So the creating romanticist had begun to divert himself with

guesses about Pan: and now these guesses filled libraries.

But Pan was not in the library. He was afield, he was in all the

magazines for the month after next now on the news-stands, having quite

fresh adventures, which yet-living poets were under a tribal bond to

contrive for him. In the records of English literature research might

look in vain for any considerable poet who had not paid his scot of

contriving some fresh adventure for Pan, and Pan yet roved the jungle

of free verse. Pan, alone of the old Hellenic gods, had thus lived on,

and had survived all his peers. Pan would not, to be sure, especially

regret them, since he had never forgathered with the other gods....

And there, in that seemingly irrelevant fact, I began to detect a

darkling light. Pan had never forgathered with the other gods: Olympos

he appeared at utmost to visit now and then, with, as I recall _The

Book of Job_, a curious similarity to Satan's coming among the sons

of God, "from going to and fro in the earth and walking up and down in

it." Pan, also, that unexplainedly dreadful and lonely wanderer, was

the divine outcast. In the one existent story, that of Psyche, wherein

Pan was represented as having any even very remote dealing with the

other gods, his part was to aid a mortal against them. Pan, alone of

the gods, had abandoned, and at a pinch sided against, Heaven. And that

might well be the reason why the romantic artist had cherished him.

That perhaps was why Pan had become for romanticists the Master. That

might be why, when Olympos crumbled, romanticists had set between

those ungainly horns the pentagram; had caused this hairy brown body

to burgeon with scales and feathers; had given to the most virile of

the gods the breasts of a woman; and had kindled in his honor the moons

of Chesed and Geburah. The goat god had thus, alone of the Olympians,

endured. He endured as Baphomet, as Azazel, as Janicot, as Eblis; as

the Master of the Gnostics, the Master of the Sabbath, the Master of

the Two Moons, moons which had, here again, their minions....

I shall not, in this place, speak at any length of what the prosaic

perhaps do well to regard as bedlamite nonsense: here I shall only

indicate from afar the mystery I could not ignore. For I knew that

the romantic had whispered of two scapegoats, of Christ and Pan, the

saviors severally of religion and of art: the one dying in atonement

for human sin, in the manner of the stainless beast which was

sacrificed in the Temple; the other serving men in the manner of that

other beast, not necessarily immaculate, which was loaded with the

sins of the twelve tribes, and driven out of the Temple forever, as

one consecrated not to death but to life, and condemned not to rest

but to the exile's freedom, in those desert places which belonged to

Pan-Azazel. For it is recorded--where we would least look for it, even

in our English Bible,[4]--that the Lord of Sabaoth commanded such

sacrifice and such honor be divided between Himself and the goat god,

as equals share. And it is recorded too, in the sacred lore of the

Moslems, that to the Master of the Two Moons, and to that especial

manifesting of Pan which the East called Eblis, was relinquished by

Heaven--through a compact such as, once again, is made by equals,--the

overlordship of all loneliness, of wine, of verse and song and

rhetoric, and of all the arts. You will perceive this is, very exactly,

the heritage of the creating romantic....

Well! thus Christ had His servitors, whose reward was to be, by and by,

in a land fulfilled with the glory of the Sun, eternal rest: and Pan,

the Master of the Two Moons, had mustered likewise his minions, whose

reward was their work. By these exceedingly diverse saviors, I knew,

had been evolved the magic of the sanctuary and of the wilderness,

the white magic and another magic rather less candid. So had arisen

the messiahs who led men severally to hope for contentment to come,

or to create contentment, somehow, even in this unsatisfying life and

moment.... Pan was, in fine, the god who had looked upon the divine

handiwork, and seen that it was not good; or, at any rate, not good

enough. The creating romanticist had always hoped that somewhere must

at least one such clear-sighted god exist; and, finding him, had

worshipped appropriately....

And so I got my clue, and esteemed it, upon the whole, unwelcome.

For I saw that the one feature common to all the great mythic figures

over whose deathlessness I had been puzzling, was that each was a

divine and unrepentant outcast, that each one of them was a rebel who

had gained famousness by warring in one way or another against Heaven.

And that might be, I felt uncomfortably, just what had made them to

all creative artists irresistible. Here well might lurk, for so long

unapprehended by me, another and more lurid instance of art's need to

make sport with piety; here revealed in art's unfaltering endeavor to

glorify not merely the rogue but the rebel. Once the discovery might

have pleased me. But nowadays, rebellion in any form really does seem

rather unurbane and almost certainly futile: and very much as penitent

Villon turned monk, or as the wild Highlanders ceased to rebel after

the Stuarts lost in 'Forty-five, so have I found the same numeral to be

remarkably sedative.

Nevertheless, at the bottom of his heart, the romantic artist, I

knew, has not ever been in harmony with Providence and this world's

Demiurge. He has not ever honestly believed, as I recall the dicta of

John Charteris, that this world reflected credit upon its Maker. And

so, toward offenders against this divine ordering the artist might

well incline with unavoidable, unreasoning and, I preferred to think,

unconscious sympathy.

§ 35

Certainly, of the myths I have named, all save two deal with

protagonists who are condemned perforce to struggle against, and who

contrive to thwart, inimical gods, as did Andromeda and Odysseus; or

who rebel with the volition and candor of Satan and Tannhäuser and

Prometheus. But the myths of the Sphinx and of Queen Helen rest upon

other bases of impiety.... Helen, indeed, stands pedestalled above the

bickerings of mere gods.... And to the romantic the Sphinx has never

really been that offensively feeble-minded monster who molested Œdipus

with a conundrum so inane as to result, quite properly, in the death

of its perpetrator. Instead, the Sphinx has become, for the romantic,

the one being who foreknows the answer to all riddles and the outcome

of all experience. And because of this foreknowledge, obviously denied

to demiurgically experimenting gods, the Sphinx does nothing.... This

dreadful certitude, equally male and female, as was Baphomet and as

was the veiled Lord of Mommur, this quietness that is equally a beast

of the field and an unslayable immortal, this very large and pitiless

felinity, lies waiting; and waits in blasphemous and perturbingly

untroubled ease. The years pass; pious nations come into being and high

power and pass; heaven is no longer great enough to contain a catalogue

of the gods that have reigned in heaven: the Sphinx, men say, has never

stirred. For the Sphinx waits. All the august doings of Olympos and

Sinai and Valhalla have been witnessed by the Sphinx: and the most

favorable interpreting of that changeless face is, upon the whole, to

hope it wears the provisional smile we bend toward the playing of not

yet unbearable children. And therein lies the impiety of the waiting

Sphinx, in this amused deep comprehension that there is no need to

rebel against our gods.... For the Sphinx is immortal: and the secret

of the Sphinx, men say, is that secret which the harried gods strive

desperately to surmise: the Sphinx knows why no god may ever hope to be

immortal.

§ 36

Yes: all these so inexplicably popular myths commemorate a rebel

against Heaven's orderings. Each myth, in one fashion or another,

adopts the true Byronic posture of looking the Omnipotent in the face

and imparting to Him the, upon the whole unstartling, information that

His evil is not good. And that--where every dictum is perforce an

hypothesis,--that well may be why these especial myths, rather than

others, overruled the art of yesterday; and why upon us is yet laid

their mastery, from which the spiritual descendants of us who are

minions of the moon shall not escape.

No matter into what sort of world this planet develops, through

howsoever laudable a magic-working of social and mechanical and

hygienic improvements, that future also belongs to these inscrutable

immortals. Into that world, however handsomely it all be changed by new

inventions and fresh fallacies, I think, they will come as conquerors.

First will come Helen. I mean that Helen who was verily at Troy. For

the wife of Menelaus, we know, did not ever come to this city: and

Philostratus tells us how the whole truth as to the Greeks' crusade, in

the high cause of outraged morality, was revealed by Achilles' ghost

to Apollonius of Tyana. "For a long time we leaders of the Achæans

were deceived and tricked into fighting battles in Helen's behalf,

through our belief that she was in Ilium; whereas she really was living

in Egypt, in the house of Proteus, whither through the device of Zeus

she had been snatched away from Paris. But when we became convinced

of this, we continued fighting to win Troy itself and the riches of

Troy and the power these riches would give to us, proclaiming that

this empire must be destroyed in order that the world might be made

safe for democracy." And from Egypt Helen's husband--if that at all

matters,--duly retrieved her on his way homeward when the warring was

done.

But Hera, it is recorded, gave to Paris that woman's likeness, made of

the white mists of night and of dawn's rosy-colored clouds and of the

golden clouds of sunset, and shaped in that perfect loveliness with

which Hera had before this time betrayed Ixion, leading the King of

Thessaly to beget upon this shining phantom a dreadful spawn of twisted

and blotched monsters.... And this bright emptiness was what the heroes

fought for, in the most famous yet not by any means the most irrational

of all the wars that have ever been. And when the warring was done, the

leaders shared the spoils with much quarreling, and maimed soldiers

knew they had fought for a colored mist, in this war also.

So Troy fell because the appearance of this phantom had beauty without

any flaw. And the Trojans died. And the Greeks died. And Menelaus and

his wife died too. And in time Queen Hera also died. But the phantom

that had been at Troy endured, masterless, purposeless, and immortal.

Wherever men have been, she too, the romantic aver, has passed like

a cool flame of marsh-fire, passionlessly, inconceivably bright:

and of the beauty of this Helen there are many tales recorded. Yet

whosoever has not seen her, it is declared by these poets also, to

him beauty remains but one of the words he puts upon paper. They that

have seen her, are a wistful folk who go thereafter with dazzled eyes

and can write nothing truly. None the less does Helen keep her old

complaisance; she, impassionate, denies not anything to the passion of

her lovers: and they may still beget upon her loveliness all manner of

twisted and blotched monsters, in the fashion of the King of Thessaly.

So art endures, and critics and curators are providentially provided

for. And Helen grants to her lovers everything except happiness: that

they may never hope for; that she has not to give, nor has she ever

known of it, who goes as a bright emptiness, without any like or

kindred anywhere save in the monsters which are her spawn, as Helen

passes from the ruining of one lover to another lover, masterless,

purposeless, and immortal....

Yes, Helen will come first, I think. And near to her, no doubt, will

follow her servitors from of old, crafty and great-thewed Odysseus, and

Faust, in the pulled down cap and the furred robe of a scholar. And Don

Juan, and pallid, desperate Tannhäuser, and Ahasuerus, who has put away

despairing and hope forever, will come too; with many others.

And for an instant these thronged myths will look smilingly upon

the ensorcelled romanticists of that far-off strange future. In

that instant all the "new" schools of literature will perish; all

the magazines sufficiently "vital" to be in bankruptcy will suspend

publication; and--for that single instant,--the youngest of that far

day's "realists" will cease from telling about what a devil of a fellow

he was at college.

"Now," these immortals will say, "do you leave off this foolishness,

and contrive for us fresh adventures."

And the tale-tellers will obey.