"To this end, that Scyrian Pherecydes, Pythagoras his Master, broached
in the East among the Heathens first the immortality of the Soul, as
Trismegistus did in Egypt, with a many of feigned Gods. 'Twas for a
politic end and to this purpose the old Poets feigned those Elysian
fields, their Æcus, Minos, and Rhadamanthus, their infernal Judges,
and those Stygian lakes, fiery Phlegethons, Pluto's kingdom, and
variety of torments after death."
_5_.
_Celestial Architecture_
§ 44
The literary artist plays, I had said, with death. But everybody played
with death: it was the one subject not anywhere to be approached except
in a spirit of sober superficiality. And I wanted--in at any event this
epilogue to the Biography,--to offend the sensibilities of nobody. At
forty-five one has become, with no choice in the matter, bourgeois; and
has no least desire to épater one's clan.
Here, indeed, it occurred to me that, somewhat farther back, I had
referred, without assuming the proper elongation of countenance and
a suitably spondaic utterance, to our natural delight in most forms
of what we are generally agreed to describe as sin. And I hoped that
would not be taken as implying that we can nowhere find more diverting
employment than in wrong-doing, and should give over our lives to its
practise. For iniquity, in its pleasanter branches, I reflected, is
a pursuit in which the young excel. With age, one is adapted only for
the less amusing crimes: and so with age one tends, upon the whole,
and willy-nilly, to become reasonably virtuous. One tends, one in fact
is driven, to seek diversion in the alcoves of thought rather than of
action. One begins to toy amorously with ideas, now that age abates the
ardor and the equipment for more juvenile recreations.
Of course there were many ideas to play with: so congressmen harped
zealously upon morals, with a just half-boastful air of having often
heard of them; the clergy averted from instructing Heaven in its
painful duty toward Germany, to settle civic affairs and the proper
number of feet allowable to an embrace in moving picture films; and
among our state justiciary far-reaching codes of literary criticism,
not to speak of Clean Book Leagues, were evolved by the distressing
discovery that one's daughter was running counter to parental
traditions by reading a book.
But hardier spirits would play with the greatest and most diverting
of all ideas.... So that, in the outcome, I decided I would not,
as I had intended to do, recur to Henry Adams. His thinking hardly
aspires, it lacks such elevation as would warrant dwelling upon its
modest pinnacles. Besides, there was always the ugly book which Adams
wrote about John Randolph of Roanoke, to shake one's faith in the
_Education_: once anybody has been at public pains to demonstrate
himself an expert at coloring and falsifying the truth about another
man, he cannot complain if none regards very trustingly his pretensions
to write the truth as to himself. No doubt the prompter to this
biographical blackguardism, the notion of standing up for your family
name and your great-grandfather's intelligence, was all very well: and
here, indeed, I could peculiarly sympathize, since it happened that my
own paternal great-grandfather, also, had been aspersed by Randolph
with just the same spirited and careful malignity he displayed in his
verbal portraits of the Adams "bear and cub." Even so, it seemed to me
that the natural impulse to atone by defaming Randolph was more easily
understood than justified.
§ 45
In any event, this Henry Adams, too, is everywhere faintly rancid with
the taint of Puritanism, and that fact could not but lead me into
injustice. Puritanism has many excellent points, which it perhaps
employs too much in the manner of the porcupine: yet we Virginians
cannot ever quite overcome our feeling that the Puritans are parvenus,
deriving from families too recently arrived in this country to be as
yet completely Americanized. We have never, for that matter, learned
to think of the Pilgrim Fathers and their descendants as belonging,
exactly, to the gentry. And while we do try, at a pinch, to be polite
and respectful about their undeniable virtues, the result, somehow,
stays a bit unconvincing and condescending.
Besides, I had faced my especial troubles with the Puritan tradition,
through the imbroglio incidental to the attempt to suppress
_Jurgen_, and through the clinging, undesirable repute thus
fastened to that book, and indeed to my books in general. I mildly
resent, even now, my need to rest for the remainder of my lifetime
under the imputation of being in lack-lustre eyes an "indecent writer."
It sounds all very well, and stays, I believe, undeniable, to say that
it was only a coterie of the obsessed--obsessed with the mad notion
that "decency" is an affair of corporal centrifugality,--who had
esteemed _Jurgen_ an improper book. But that is, too, upon a par
with protesting on a pestered summer night it is only mosquitoes who
are annoying you. Those shyster Sanhedrins of tinpot Torquemadas--as
Mr. Mencken, you may remember, has for some reason or another not
yet called the incorporated supporters of the Puritan tradition in
letters,--are, beyond question, made up of peculiarly filthy and
senseless little creatures acting after the law of their insectean
kind. Yet they are also innumerable and poisonous: and they are blest,
too (no doubt in common with the mosquitoes) with sincerity and an
approving conscience, in all these assaults of the petty upon that
which, however harmless, offends them by being bigger than they are.
But I drift into a discussion of the _Jurgen_ case, which, as
goes the law, is settled: and all that I really need to say about the
indecency of _Jurgen_, or of the Biography as a whole, and about
the baffling literary problem of censorship in general, was said some
while ago.
§ 46
For censorship of our reading matter, as I granted even when
_Jurgen_ was yet lying under arrest in Mr. Sumner's[5] cellar,
may, in pure theory, be--just possibly--advisable. In practise, though,
I can imagine no persons or class of persons qualified to perform
this censorship. Speaking here with all, if only, the respect due to
the Society for the Suppression of Vice, I must none the less insist
there is a difference between pornography and fine literature, if but
the difference that everybody enjoys the first where few care one
way or the other about the second: and certainly the two should be
appraised by diverse and appropriate standards. A work of art should
therefore, in theory, be judged entirely as a work of art, by a jury of
practitioners of the art concerned.
Yet, since every self-respecting author at bottom abominates his
competitors, despises his inferiors, and is frantically irritated by
the writings of those who differ from him in æsthetic canons, such an
arrangement would, in practise, only fling open more conspicuous fields
wherein to flaunt the mutual spite and miscomprehension common to us
creative writers. Besides, it is not difficult to forecast what sort of
writers might, and would, be chosen for the judiciary, as representing
pre-eminence in letters by the happiest combination of mediocrity and
senility. Thus, in the end, an attempt to establish a purely "literary"
tribunal would result in setting over American art a death-watch of
genial clergymen and decrepit college professors: and I despondently
question if their decisions would be a whit less imbecile than the
present arbitraments of the Society's hired spies.
It remains, moreover, the defect of every method of legal "suppression"
that magistrates and courts of law are unable really to suppress any
book. A book, once printed, either suppresses itself or else stays,
as things human fare, immortal. And that always appeared to me the
very silliest feature of the _Jurgen_ imbroglio. Irrespective
of any possible legal decision, as I patiently pointed out, over and
over again, when _Jurgen_ lodged in Mr. Sumner's cellar, the
book existed in a sufficient number of unarrestable copies to place
it beyond destruction by anything except its own inherent faults. If
_Jurgen_ contained the right constituents it would live; and if it
lacked the stuff of longevity it would in due course die: either way,
the outcome was to be decided neither by me nor by vice commissioners,
nor even by a judge and a grand jury.
Nobody disputed this logic: nobody in fact paid any attention to it.
And as touches my personal share in the publication of an "indecent
book called _Jurgen_"--though, indeed, I hear that a great deal of
the Biography is "indecent,"--it is in the end by my book that I must
be condemned or justified, rather than by what anyone, including me,
may for some while to come elect to say about my book, which is the
Biography. So I say nothing. For against the explicit charge of having
violated the current morality of 1920, I think, any serious defence
would be waste of effort, if only because the question must so soon,
and in fact already tends to, become of purely antiquarian interest.
Our children may not improve, even from the standpoint of humor, upon
our moral standards, but our children will certainly not retain them.
When, as must inevitably happen before very long, our present ethical
criteria have come to seem as quaint as those of the Druids or the
Etruscans, or even as the flyblown and rococo axioms of 1913 appear
nowadays, offences against any one of these outmoded codes will hardly
be esteemed worth talking about. Should _Jurgen_ be remembered ten
years hence, it will, through being remembered, be amply exonerated:
whereas if _Jurgen_ be forgotten, the book will then of course
be violating nobody's moral sensibility. Time thus lies under bond to
silence, whether with praise or with oblivion, every conceivable sort
of "moral" aspersion; and willy-nilly I must defer to time.
None the less do I still believe that _Jurgen_ is, as originally
labelled, "a book wherein each man will find what his nature enables
him to see": and when anyone confesses that he finds therein only
"offensiveness, and lasciviousness, and lewdness, and indecency," I
must make bold to take the announcement as a less candid summary of the
book's nature than of the critic's.
§ 47
What can be done, people very often ask of me, with a flattering if
misplaced assumption of my ability to answer,--what can be done toward
restraining our present literary saturnalia of prudishness? And I
must answer, if at all, with a shrug: for the intelligent here contend
against well-meaning and courageous persons who fight for high aims.
The most fantastic feature of this droll year-long warring is the
profound sincerity of the participants, upon both sides. You and I
may know--and welcome, as the saying runs,--that we are in the right
so far as goes the unhuman abstraction called rationality. But the
officers and backers of the Clean Book League and of the Society for
the Suppression of Vice, also, quite honestly believe they are engaged
in praiseworthy work when, to cite but two farces from the exhaustless
repertoire, they hale Petronius and _Mademoiselle de Maupin_ into
the police courts.
Indeed they appear inebriated to these antics by much the same real
love of virtue which incites a portion of their congeners to burn an
unruly negro as a torch to illumine their reprehension of lawlessness;
and drives yet others to express their disfavor of intemperance by
decreeing that wine is a compound too atrocious to be employed for any
purpose except to symbolize the blood of Christ. In the face of so many
laudable intentions thus obscurely communicated, we can but deduce, I
am afraid, that whenever stupidity and high morals pig together they
beget an offspring doubly cursed with zealotry and toxic aphasia. Nor,
of course, does it appear quite unblasphemous to contend against these
presumably ordained phenomena.
At all events, those who believe the artist has any "rights" are in
the negligible minority. I hardly need to explain why the bashaws of
such orgiastic societies have embattled back of them the complacent
muddle-headedness of that "solid" upper middle-class which pays
pew-rent, and which from the first has rather fretfully resented any
talk about æsthetics. Dr. Paul E. More,[6] in one of the letters
relative to the _Jurgen_ imbroglio, has nicely summed up this
popular point of view: "I am not at all in sympathy with a group
of writers who would take any protest against the Society as a
justification of what they are pleased to call art. The harm done by
the Society seems to me very slight, whereas the harm done by the
self-styled artist may be very great."
Now that is really the popular and, therefore, the most exalted moral
attitude. For the morality of a republic is, after all, a matter of
elementary arithmetic: and one counts the ballots (sometimes, here and
there, it is said, quite honestly) in order to distinguish between
right and wrong, because the voice of the people is notoriously the
voice of God. And time and again this divine orality has proclaimed
that the American peerage of nature's noblemen does not want to be
bothered with any nonsense about literature and art: for the reasons,
first, that such fripperies play no part in honest poll-tax-payers'
lives; and, second, that in very much the manner of this Dr. More, our
reputable citizenry--obscurely and inarticulately, but none the less
genuinely,--resents the impudence of "self-styled artists" who presume
to know more than their betters about "what they are pleased to call
art."
And here, I must protest, our more reputable citizens are wholly in the
right. I think they feel, without ever quite perceiving, the innumerous
dangers, for the reputable, which lurk in this continual playing with
piety and common-sense. The artist, they dimly feel, is up to something
which--somehow--threatens them and their security: and in this, I
repeat, they are wholly right. If art were not very cruelly restrained
it would empoison and wreck all civilizations, not here to speak of
reordering heaven. But there is no need to worry, because art, as it
happens, is always, and probably always will be, just thus restrained,
by the inefficiency of the artist. So art may never ruin America, after
all.
It seems, in any case, eminently appropriate that in our National Hall
of Statuary, along with such world-famous statesmen and shapers of
human destiny as Jacob Collamer, S.J. Kirkwood and George L. Shoup, the
sole representative of our art and letters should to-day be General
Lew Wallace; for _Ben-Hur_ is really the perfected expression of
the best-thought-of American ideals in literature. And it is equally
appropriate, I like to think, that, when judged by these ideals,
_Jurgen_ and all the rest of the Biography should be decreed
"offensive, and lascivious, and lewd, and indecent...."
Well! a good deal of this I said (over and over again) before the
courts decided that _Jurgen_ had been incarcerated for twenty-one
months, as an "indecent" book, through error.... And I have not
anything to add or to retract. Still, the affair has left me, I
cannot but suspect, with a bias against the Puritan tradition and its
adherents. I feel, indeed, that much of what I have just written down
does not over-cloyingly reek of loving-kindness toward--in Swinburne's
phrase,--"the barbarian sect from whose inherited and infectious
tyranny this nation is as yet imperfectly delivered." So I dismiss the
Puritans and their latter-day flowering in Henry Adams, in favor of
a noticeably different person. I turn instead to M. Anatole France,
as affording a clear illustration of the point I have in mind; and
as perfectly illustrating my point as to the most diverting of all
themes which thought can play with, in _La Rôtisserie de la Reine
Pédauque_.
§ 48
What one first notes about _La Rôtisserie de la Reine Pédauque_,
as I have elsewhere observed, is the fact that in this ironic and
subtle book is presented a "story" which is remarkable for its
innocence of subtlety and irony. Abridge the "plot" into a synopsis,
and you will find your digest to be what is manifestly the outline of a
straightforward, plumed romance by the elder Dumas.
Indeed, Dumas would have handled to a nicety the "strange surprising
adventures" of Jacques Tournebroche, if only Dumas had ever thought
to have his collaborators write this brisk tale, wherein d'Astarac
and Tournebroche and Mosaïde display, even now, a noticeable
something in common with the Balsamo and Gilbert and Althotas of the
_Mémoires d'un Médicin_. One foresees, to be sure, that, with the
twin-girthed Creole for guide, M. Jérôme Coignard would have waddled
into our affections not quite as we know him, but with somewhat more
of a fraternal resemblance to the Dom Gorenflot of _La Dame de
Monsoreau_ and _Les Quarante-Cinq_; and that the blood of the
abbé's deathwound could never have bedewed the book's final pages,
in the teeth of Dumas' economic unwillingness ever to despatch any
character who could be used in a sequel.
And one thinks rather kindlily of the _Rôtisserie_ as Dumas would
have equipped it.... Yes, in reading this book, it is the most facile
and least avoidable of mental exercises to prefigure how excellently
Dumas would have contrived this book,--somewhat as in the reading of
Mr. Joseph Conrad's novels a many of us are haunted by the sense that
the Conrad "story" is, in its essential beams and stanchions, the sort
of thing which W. Clark Russell used to put together, in a rather
different way, for our illicit perusal. Whereby I only mean that such
seafaring was illicit in those aureate days when, Cleveland being
consul for the second time, your geography figured as the screen of
fictive reading-matter during school hours.
One need not say that here is no question, in either case, of
"imitation," far less of "plagiarism"; nor need one, surely, point out
the impossibility of anybody's ever mistaking the _Rôtisserie_
for a novel by Alexandre Dumas. Ere Homer's eyesight began not to be
what it had been, the fact was noted by the observant Chian, that
very few sane architects commence an edifice by planting and rearing
the oaks which are to compose its beams and stanchions. You take over
all such supplies ready hewn, and choose by preference time-seasoned
timber. Since Homer's prime a host of other great creative writers have
recognized this axiom when they too began to build: and "originality"
has by ordinary been, like chess and democracy, a Mecca for little
minds.
Besides, there is the vast difference that M. Anatole France has
introduced into the Dumas theatre some pre-eminently un-Dumas-like
stage-business: the characters, between assignations and combats,
toy amorously with ideas. That is the difference which at a stroke
dissevers them from any helter-skelter character in Dumas as utterly as
from any of our clearest thinkers in office.
It is this toying, this series of mental amourettes, which
incommunicably "makes the difference" in almost all the volumes of M.
France familiar to me; but our affair is with this one story. Now in
this vivid book we have our fill of color and animation and gallant
strangenesses, and a stir of characters who impress us as living
with a poignancy unmastered as yet by anybody's associates in flesh
and blood. We have, in brief, all that Dumas could ever offer, here
utilized not to make drama but background, all being woven into a
bright undulating tapestry behind an erudite and battered figure,--a
figure of odd medleys, in which the erudition is combined with much of
Autolycus, and the unkemptness with something of à Kempis. For what one
remembers of the _Rôtisserie_ is l'Abbé Jérôme Coignard; and what
one remembers, ultimately, about Coignard is not his crowded career,
however opulent in larcenous and lectual escapades and fisticuffs and
broached wineflasks, but his religious meditations, wherein a merry
heart does, quite actually, go all the way.
Coignard I take to be a peculiarly rare type of man (there is no female
of this species), the type that is genuinely interested in religion.
In that his mind is actually at grapple with the most diverting of all
themes, he stands apart. He halves little with the staid majority of
us who sociably contract our sacred tenets from our neighbors like a
sort of theological measles. He halves nothing whatever with our more
earnest-minded juniors who--perennially discovering that all religions
thus far put to the test of nominal practise have, whatever their
paradisial entrée, resulted in a deplorable earthly hash,--perennially
run yelping into the shrill agnosticism which believes only that one's
neighbors should not be permitted to believe in anything.
The creed of Coignard is more urbane: "Always bear in mind that a sound
intelligence rejects everything that is contrary to reason, except
in matters of faith, where it is necessary to believe blindly." Your
opinions are thus all-important, your physical conduct is largely
a matter of taste, in a philosophy which ranks affairs of the mind
immeasurably above the gross accidents of matter. Indeed, man can
win to heaven only through repentance, and the initial step toward
repentance is to do something to repent of. There is no flaw in
this logic, and in its clear lighting such abrogations of parochial
and transitory human laws as may be suggested by reason, and the
consciousness that nobody is looking, take on the aspect of divinely
appointed duties.
§ 49
Some dullard may here object that M. France could not himself have
believed all this while writing the book, and that it was with an
ironic glitter in his ink he recorded these dicta. To which the
obvious answer would be that M. France (again, like all great creative
writers) is an ephemeral and negligible person beside his more
permanent puppets; and that, moreover, to reason thus is, it may be
precipitately, to disparage the plumage of birds on the ground that
an egg has no feathers.... Whatever M. France may have believed, our
concern is here with the conviction of M. Coignard that his religion
is all-important and all-significant. And I find it curious to observe
how unerringly the abbé's thoughts aspire, from no matter what remote
and low-lying starting point, to the loftiest niceties of religion and
the high thin atmosphere of ethics. Sauce spilt upon his collar is but
a reminder of the influence of clothes upon our moral being, and of how
terrifyingly is the destiny of each person's soul dependent upon such
trifles; a glass of light white wine leads, not, as we are nowadays
taught to believe, to instant ruin, but to edifying considerations
of the life and glory of St. Peter; and a pack of cards suggests,
straightway, intransigent fine points of martyrology. Always this
churchman's thoughts deflect to the most interesting of themes, to the
relationship between God and His children, and what familiary etiquette
may be necessary to preserve the relationship unstrained. These
problems alone engross Coignard unfailingly, even when the philosopher
has had the ill luck to fall simultaneously into drunkenness and a
public fountain; and retains so notably his composure between the
opposed assaults of fluidic unfriends.
What, though, is found the outcome of this philosophy, appears a
question to be answered with wariness of empiricism. None can deny that
Coignard says, when he lies dying: "My son, reject, along with the
example I gave you, the maxims which I may have proposed to you during
my period of life-long folly. Do not listen to those who, like myself,
subtilize over good and evil." Yet this is just one low-spirited
moment, as set against the preceding fifty-two high-hearted years. And
the utterance wrung forth by this moment is, after all, merely that
sentiment which seems the inevitable bedfellow of the moribund,--"Were
I to have my life over again, I would live differently." The sentiment
is familiar and venerable, but its truthfulness has not yet been
attested.
To the considerate, therefore, it may appear expedient to dismiss
Coignard's trite winding-up of a half-century of splendid talking,
as just the infelicitous outcropping, in the dying man's enfeebled
condition, of an hereditary foible. And when moralizing would approach
an admonitory forefinger to the point that Coignard's manner of living
brought him to die haphazardly, among preoccupied strangers at a casual
wayside inn, you do, there is no questioning it, recall that a more
generally applauded manner of living has been known to result in a more
competently arranged-for demise, under the best churchly and legal
auspices, through the rigors of crucifixion.
So it becomes the part of wisdom to waive these mundane riddles, and
to consider instead the justice of Coignard's fine epitaph, wherein we
read that "living without worldly honors, he earned for himself eternal
glory." The statement may (with St. Peter keeping the gate) have been
challenged in paradise; but in literature at all events, the unhonored
life of Jérôme Coignard has clothed him with glory of tolerably
longeval looking texture. It is true that this might also be said of
Iago and Tartuffe, but then we have Balzac's word for it that merely
to be celebrated is not enough. Rather is the highest human desideratum
twofold,--_D'être célebré et d'être aimé._ And that much Coignard
promises to be for a long while.
§ 50
The thoughts of M. Jérôme Coignard, then,--here somewhat to retrace
my argument,--untiringly return to the most diverting of all themes,
to the relationship between God and His children, and what familiary
etiquette seems most adapt to keep that relationship an affable one.
I know that religion is, just now, rather out-of-date. I know that
nowadays a great deal of atheism is going about among the foolish and
unreflective. But we may wiseliest, I am sure, put out of mind the
notion of there being no God, and of the dead finding beyond the black
door at the end of the gray corridor, that silver-handled door which
is the sole exit from our workaday existence, nothing whatever. Even
if one would, upon the whole, prefer to find there nothing, here it
remains, in every sense, a rather wasteful parade of agnosticism to
admit the existence of nothing.
It is wasteful because no diversion is to be had of thinking about
nothing. But any amount of diversion can be gained from meditation
upon the strange realms beyond the tomb for which we may, quite
conceivably, all be en route: for in this place also is the proffered
lure that ageless aspiration toward lands which are in nothing familiar.
These conjectural kingdoms were, of course, the earliest chosen subject
matter for poetic adornment everywhere: poets were, of course, the
first to guess at what it would be most interesting to find beyond the
black door: and every ancient religion, again, of course, grew up from
people indulging in the two habits, now equally antique, of reciting
poetry and of taking it seriously. They had at least the excuse that
this poetry was magnificent, because in surveying and populating these
post mortem countries the creating romanticist has displayed his most
imposing reach of power.... Here he, indeed, has need of power: for he
is here intent to make sport with his third great opponent, and to play
with death; intent to bereave the tyrant of all terribleness, intent
to color roseately the dreadful face of doom, intent to detect in the
skeleton's multidentate grinning a smile of reassurance. He has done
this, handsomely.
--Though, to be sure, these promised paradises are fugacious: over
and over again has the Scriptural prophecy been fulfilled as to the
heavens being rolled up like a scroll, and one by one the heavens pass
away with no greater noise than is made by the staid commentaries of
ethnologists. For a winter that will have no ending has oppressed the
blissful fields of Aälu: the proud castle of Nin-kigal is pulled down,
its seven gates are fallen away into dust; and only pedants now and
then recall the lion-guarded golden thrones whereon sat crowned, and
endowed with eternal youth, the chief ones and the sages of Babylon.
Manannan holds court no more in Emhain. Instead, he amicably shares his
somewhat lowlier estate in nothingness with Oannes and Ahura-Mazda;
for all of these well know to-day that all promised paradises are
fugacious.... Nor may the noblest of heroes any longer win to Xisuthros
and that most lovely, nameless land, "at the mouth of the rivers,"
wherein contentment had no wasting away under the nibbling of time, and
human grief was like the fragment of some word in a torn manuscript
written in a language which no man any more remembers. The white vase
of Thoth is broken, also: he has no need of it to-day, he has desisted
from the weighing and the taxing of ghostly imports, now that the
narrow bridge which led across the abyss to Sraosha's thousand-pillared
palace upon Demavend, has for some while been closed to traffic. For
these promised paradises are really very fugacious.... So the carved
and shining house of E-Sagila is decayed; and Olympos may not claim
to oversee and rule the doings of gods and men from a rather modest
official altitude of 9,754 feet. Only the professorial in quest of
solar myths now care to thrust and poke, like rag-pickers, among
the dust-heaps that were Gimli and Audlang and Vidblain: and time
strips every paradise alike of its delights and its believers. Yet,
at forty-five, one does not really marvel at the flying of felicity
anywhence. And so it seems a stranger pillagement that all the hells,
which once were the fine thriving homes of bale and anguish, have been
by time's dilapidation bereft of every little discomfort. For the ice
of Nifleheim is melted: the dreadful flames of Tartarus have spluttered
out like damp firecrackers: even Aratu, wherein reigned mere oblivion,
has been swallowed by oblivion.... Poets build against eternity
sometimes in dealing with trifles; but never in erecting the eternal
homes of men.
Meanwhile it is most gratifying to reflect that, while they lasted, the
glories and the terrors of all this celestial architecture divertingly
filled many lives with spiritual consolation and salutary dread; have
checked extravagance in the way of bloodletting or of chastity or of
whatever at the time was vice; have heartened the devout to eat their
parents or to burn infidels or to give alms, or to do whatever else at
the time was virtue; and have evolved their countless hierarchies of
saints and holy persons. Here is no room for irony. Nuns, doubtless,
have assumed the veil and entered convents in a religious exaltation
as lofty as that with which the virgins of Assyria put on the crown
of little cords and went to the temple of Mylitta and their first
communion with the first amorous male passer-by. Yet, to uphold the
splendors of the paradise of Mohammed his Mussulmans have waged
religious wars with a malignity not often surpassed by the servitors
of Christ: and Solomon may well have gazed upon the completed Temple,
and have beheld the ark of the covenant of the Lord brought in unto
the most holy place under the wings of the cherubim, in very much that
pious joy with which, from high Tenochtitlan, rapt priests looked
down upon the slowly advancing line, two stately miles in length,
of warriors who ascended to disembowelment upon the jasper altar of
Huitzilopochtli. In fine, these hells and paradises, the while that
their bright evanescence lasted, have provided employment, and support,
and recreation, and exalted sentiments to boot, for innumerable
millions.
Even so, in populating these worlds, the romanticist has been tardy
ever to imagine the gods as other than sinister and, as a rule,
detestable beings. You see, the creature stays incurably logical, he
is as faithful to logic as was Florian de Puysange in the old story,
and he reasons from effect to cause. The romanticist has thus from the
first been unable to conceive of this world, which he found, upon the
whole, abominable, as being the creation of any other sort of Demiurge,
or as being ruled by any other sort of overlords. In all heathen
theogonies heaven is thus the home of every pravity in the way of lust
and greed, of deceit and cruelty and plain childishness; and looms as
a mysteriously splendid court of rogues and paphians presided over by
a supreme tyrant, who is also a master-rogue. This formula was, very
gradually, improved upon by Hebraic poets, who in particular recolored
all anaphrodisiacally: so that the Old Testament presents, by and
large, a rather novel and a more strait-laced notion of the Demiurge
and his immediate entourage; with only here and there, in passages
about the sons of God and the daughters of men, and more embarrassingly
in the stories of Eve and Sarah, the unedited, unexpurgated,
unrecolored legend of divine amours left, to consideration, apparent.
§ 51
But about the Jahveh-Elohim of the Old Testament, who remains by tacit
admission the God the Father of the New Testament, I really prefer
here not to speak at all. I find it far too difficult to resist an
unfair bias in the favor of any target of so many assaults. For His
present embarrassment is not merely that Colonel William Jennings
Bryan[7] and the Reverend William Ashley Sunday[8] have ruthlessly
united to compromise Him with their praise: even the state legislators
of Tennessee and Oklahoma, and Florida, have officially endorsed Him
in His difference of opinion with Charles Darwin, and rest vociferant
in Zion.... Outside, is a troubling babblement about tribal deities
and Babylonian myths, and a rather distressing tendency to discuss the
birth of Christ from Joseph's point of view. Meanwhile the ordained
and inescapable clergy are at pains to suggest that in His official
revelations the Lord God of Sabaoth, like the dear, queer, overmodest
old fellow He is, has branded Himself with uncommitted atrocities; and
in their denials of any really grave wrong-doing, commend Him in terms
as high as were, from any pulpit, ever applied to a prohibition agent
detected in embezzlement. And meanwhile too, among the advanced young,
there is much superior sniffing at His bloodthirstiness and variability
of mind, at Jonah's great fish and the bears of Elisha, at Noah's raven
and Adam's rib. And I find it droll to reflect that the deity who was
everywhere trusted and worshipped in my youth is to-day as little
regarded as Jupiter Stator or Marduk of the Bright Glance.
And to me His downfall seems in some ways rather sad. For, as I recall
it, He was not thought of as being particularly cruel and dreadful--any
longer. And the Old Testament was accepted in its entirety and without
any especial difficulty in the Virginia of that day, wherein almost all
other generally respected elderly gentlemen had been, as a matter of
public knowledge, rather wild in their youth.... As I recall it, there
was a prevalent feeling that God had some while since settled down,
in very much the manner of your grandfather; and that the Amalekites
and the Hittites and all those other demolished persons were in some
way connected with the hundreds of Yankee soldiers whom, for equally
inexplicable but assuredly good causes, your grandfather had killed so
long before you were born. Thus there was no large difficulty about our
Episcopalian Jehovah, and really no terribleness....
And I sometimes incline to question if this god--with wild oats
undeniably sown and harvested in the past, but with a prevailing
disposition nowadays to be agreeable, subject always to His not having
been of late upset by one or another mysterious grown-up affair,--was
not, after all, the most plausible sort of demiurge I have yet heard
of. He still seems to me the likeliest creator, upon the whole, to
have fashioned, it may be in some moment of youthful indiscretion
and effusion, such as elsewhere had resulted in people having
mulatto cousins, the wholly incomprehensible world we live in....
And essentially, I find, I still believe in Him, with a faith that
undermines and goes deeper than mere reason because it was developed
in me earlier. During thunderstorms this faith assumes especial vigor:
and while I do not presume to think all this terrific display was got
up solely for my benefit, the notion most certainly does flicker about
me, livid and troubling, that while He has this storm in hand, and is
actually passing my way, it might appear to Him mere thriftiness to
use a thunderbolt in the old, practical, explicit manner. So I do not
quite heartily enjoy the beauty of a thunderstorm.... But the point is
that this demiurge also conformed to the great general rule. The point
is that men have not ever, at any time, pictured the benevolence of
their gods and creators as being anything like a good risk; and that no
mythology has ever told of such gods as would in strict logic seem apt
to be foreplanning a pleasant future for anybody.
None the less, here also, men have very manfully forced that slippery
shirk optimism to help out with logic's work. And so have men always
been assured that these overlords would by and by arrange everything
satisfactorily; and that the door at the far end of the corridor
opened, when you also had done with alcoves, and when you also had
perforce passed through, upon one or another delightful vista. The
fact has been divinely revealed, or in any event has the authentic
Ingoldsbean support of one or another leading citizen who "well
remembers to have heard his grandmother say that 'Somebody told her
so.'" ... And men have preferred to accept the revelation rather than
to recollect that, by all current accounts, the deity accredited with
this revelation is not elsewhere remarkable for truthful dealings. Men
have, out of so many thousand years of speculation, contrived no surer
creed than Coignard's creed, that "in matters of faith it is necessary
to believe blindly." Men have discovered no firmer hope than that,
in defiance of all logic and of all human experience, something very
pleasant may still be impending, in--need I say?--bright lands which
are in nothing familiar.