"This pleasing method of instilling instruction into the mind has been
found by experience to be the shortest and best way of accomplishing
that end among all ranks of persons. The fable of The Poor Man and His
Lamb, for example, as related by Nathan to King David, carried with
it a blaze of truth that flashed conviction on the mind of the royal
transgressor: and many lessons of reproof, religion, and morality, we
find to be continually delivered in this mode by the sages."
_4._
_The Thin Queen of Elfhame_
§ 37
The literary artist plays, I had said, with these large ageless
symbols. And all artists would, I thought, continue indefinitely in
such playing, because their fundamental desire in life is not quite the
same desire which guides their fellows. The artist is as other men:
he may well, in common with Shylock, assert himself to be fed by the
same food and subject to the same diseases as a Christian is: and yet
between him and the Christian is a difference.
Certainly, there was a difference: and the nearest I could come to
defining this difference was to say it lay paradoxically housed in
the circumstance that the artist, precisely like the most zealous of
Christians, is in this material, four-square world not ever utterly
at home. The Christian's desiderated home, we knew, was heaven: but
the artist, as I had suggested, looked to a somewhat different savior.
Meanwhile the artist went among men as a visitor, evincing at once
the astonished interest and the detachment of a tourist in a foreign
country. His home, and his fundamental desire, stayed elsewhere. This
world of men and women did not content nor even vitally concern him:
and always he wanted--no matter with what nebulousness he envisaged his
need,--something else, which, somehow, was his heritage.
Some day, the artist felt, he would set forth to seek and find this
needed something, like Anavalt in the old tale which I had once retold.
And I fell here to recalling the story of Anavalt's last quest. For
I had been assured time and again that this tale was a parable of a
withdrawal from life to the solaces of art, and that there was some
obvious symbolism, toward the end, in a seemingly off-hand reference
to the tenuity of canvas and of paper. And I could only reply with the
admission which youth finds it impossible to make about anything, but
which with age comes easier. I said, I do not know. Nescience seemed
alike the end and the beginning of the old story, which narrated why so
many silken ladies wept....
§ 38
For even just how many silken ladies wept, well out of eyeshot of their
husbands, when it was known that courteous Anavalt had left Count
Emmerick's court, remains an indeterminable matter. But it is certain
the number was large. There were, in addition, the tale tells, three
women whose grieving for him was not ever to be ended: these did not
weep. In the meanwhile, with all this furtive sorrowing some leagues
behind him, and with a dead horse at his feet, tall Anavalt stood at a
sign-post, and doubtfully considered a rather huge dragon.
"No," the dragon was saying, comfortably, "no, for I have just had
dinner, and exercise upon a full stomach is unwholesome. So I shall not
fight you, and you are welcome, for all of me, to go your ways into the
Wood of Elfhame."
"Yet what," says Anavalt, "what if I were to be more observant than you
of your duty and of your hellish origin? and what if I were to insist
upon a fight to the death?"
When dragons shrug in sunlight their bodies are one long green
glittering ripple. "I would be conquered. It is my business to be
conquered in this world, where there are two sides to everything, and
where one must look for reverses. I tell you frankly, tired man, that
all we terrors who keep colorful the road to the Elle Maid are here for
the purpose of being conquered. We make the way seem difficult, and
that makes you who have souls in your bodies the more determined to
travel on it. Our thin Queen found out long ago that the most likely
manner of alluring men to her striped windmill was to persuade men she
is quite inaccessible."