"He has more authorities than those whose names he has given. These
are, however, a few: Alcmæon of Crotona; Dionysius of Apollonia;
Herodorus of Heracleum in Pontus, the father of Bryson the sophist;
Ctesias of Cnidos; Herodotus of Halicarnassus; Syennesis of Cyprus;
Polybus; Democritus of Abdera; Anaxagoras of Clazomene; Empedocles of
Sicily; and many more which do not just now occur to my memory."
_6._
_Romantics About Them_
§ 52
The literary artist plays, I repeated, with death. But I had not
meant only in a religious way: I had not meant merely that the
artist lovingly carves the beads, and polishes the rhetoric of the
prayer-books, with which not merely the aged delight to play in turn.
And I had not meant, either, to dwell so long upon orthodox religious
diversions, since reputable religion is of necessity, like any other
popular fashion, an ever-varying unstable affair.
One sect alone--made up of true believers in the everywhere underlying,
and the really religious principle, as I interpreted it, of the
Biography,--seemed not ever to have varied in its faith. I was thinking
of the immodest, impotent, and internecine sect of literary artists.
And I could, I believed, best indicate the two main tenets of the
literary artist's religion by a rather roundabout approach.
§ 53
For chance, no great while earlier, had condemned me to sit by and
listen to a pair of notably successful authors in what, at that time,
had seemed a preposterous talk. This talk, a little, troubles memory
even now.... For they were not at all heeding me. These two when they
forgather effuse a naïve effect of emperors meeting, incognito and with
a relished casting off of formality, in a world of underlings. Each
one of them is, in fact, too fair a judge of literature to depreciate
in anything an admirable book on account of his own name being upon
the title-page: and if these two endure each other excellently, it
is because each loyally esteems the other to be the next to the most
wondrous of American writers, and affects some modest reticence as to
the first choice.
The scene was the library of one of them, the period after dinner. The
visiting author had but now looked up from where his polychromatic
volumes were gaily marshalled (with a perhaps not unpremeditated
conspicuousness) toward a shelf across the way, a shelf whereon the
host's own books more sombrely convened. The two men had, I repeat,
quite recently eaten and had drunk with some thoroughness. They were
replete and a bit drowsy. All earthly worries and obligations stood for
the moment aloof. Both men had reached their later forties; both were
done alike with actual fervors and with real self-distrust; and each,
I am certain, is assured, in his private meditations, of a tolerably
permanent sort of fame.
"We," said the visitor, the while that he, reflectively, thus looked
from the backbones of the one set of books to those of the other, "we
have been lucky."
"I wonder?" said the host....
"Yes," stated the first and (upon the whole) the fatter of the two
speakers, "for we have got what we wanted, without paying the full
price. We might have been poor Dowson or Villon, you know--"
"Or any other of the mighty poets in their misery and customary attics
dead? I always wondered how they managed to stuff the broken window
pane with a pair of trousers, though--"
But the visitor was talking unfrivolously. "Yes, the world's full of
talent. Talent is nothing. Genius is nothing. These congenital amateurs
who have nothing but genius give me a pain." He specified the corporal
location of this pain. He continued: "It is the getting what you want
that counts. And we have got a great deal--"
"I grant it: we belong, we also, to the race of go-getters. But then
the bargain, I suspect, was for cash payment."
Now for an instant, through the two pairs of big round spectacles, as
if with the magnified eyes of somewhat torpid insects, the two men were
looking each at the other, in a slow sort of shared and unmirthful
amusement. They said nothing. Then the visitor went on:
"Yes, we have paid a great deal, too. Still, here at almost fifty we
have rather charming homes and bank accounts, and wives that continue
to put up with us; and the books are done, quite as we wanted them
done. There aren't many of us, you know: not many S.O.B.'s contrive to
say that much unsmashed. No: we haven't paid for doing those books the
full and usual price. We have slipped by, somehow--"
The other surmised pensively: "You mean, by that big Thing that doesn't
approve of our getting our books done? I hadn't guessed He bothers you."
After a request for deific condemnation of the third personal singular
neuter pronoun, the visitor stated he meant all the Things. "They don't
like us, you know. They're as vicious as the bright young men."
"It _is_ droll, how They seem," the host conceded, "to lurk behind
you somewhere, watching, waiting, and--that's the worst,--so able to
wait. They don't have, you see, to hurry. But you have to. So, with
every book, when I unwrap the advance copies, I always feel, Well, I
got that one done, anyway!"
"And we've slipped by Them!"
"So far," the other amended. And he exhibited his fingers crossed.
Whereon the visitor mentioned the infernal regions, with an outbreak
of rolling, oleaginous, wholly unreticent laughter. And he said
exultantly: "But I'm forty-seven! And sixteen books are done the way
I god-damn wanted them done! They can begin on me, now, when They are
ready."
The host, however, looked disapproving. "I wish you would be a little
more tactful about Them. This is my library, you know. I really,
you know, would rather not have anything said here to attract Their
particular attention to the place. You see, only next month I am all of
forty-nine, and there are one or two other books I want to do here."
Both of these aging romantics seemed quite in earnest....
§ 54
They were talking, I reflected, the most incomprehensible of nonsense.
A whit later, though, I believe, I understood these not unpompous
and, from some aspects, not utterly underisible nor unpathetic
fiction-mongers. For, as I now construe it, they talked of that
formidable three with whom the artist plays and makes his troubled
sport. They talked,--they also, I believe,--of common-sense and piety
and death. And so to these oldsters some slight periphrases seemed
called for, since, in their own romanticizing eyes (as I interpret it),
they went as rebels under the fitful surveillance of powers that do not
deal tenderly with rebels.
They felt themselves to have escaped quite unaccountably, thus far.
Besides, at best, you went to each day's typing a bit precariously,
having only the stiffening fingers of this undependable middle-aged
body to work with, nowadays, in a world wherein, according to
the morning paper, your juniors were every day evincing such
inconsideration for your natural feelings, by dropping down with
apoplexies and heart seizures.... Well, by and by would come the
unavoidable, with its concomitant indecent exposure of the partially
done book on which you would then be typing. And people, viewing
it, would perforce decide that your mind had preceded you in your
departure, for people would not comprehend that only in the last
revisions could you knit together the loose ends with verbal
love-knots. Meanwhile you went about the one thing you, nowadays, knew
how to do, typing, always typing, in a continuous tête-à-tête with this
indeterminate tapped-out tattoo of ticktocking types and tinklings.
For you were intent upon getting a fair copy of what might yet be
finished, intent to get down what might yet be permanently phrased, if
only They did not strike in time for to-morrow's paper....
Yes, I, upon reflection, seemed to understand those aging romantics'
odd air of furtiveness--and the blustering, too.
§ 55
For the aim of art is, to the one side, an illegal economy and a
thievish sortie upon oncoming times' remembrance.... This, to be sure,
is the less important of the artist's bifold endeavors. "Fame" and
"immortality" rank in all moderately clear eyes (for reasons to which I
shall recur) as but the stakes that, with favoring luck, may be won at
this game which the clear-eyed play in chief for diversion. The artist,
even so, does undeniably strive for these stakes; sometimes indeed he
(foolishly enough) thinks his "immortality" a really important hazard:
and his art becomes a form of freebooting rebellion, in a world whose
polity foredooms all men to perish utterly as far as go their earthly
relics.... Yet none the less does the literary artist mutinously
attempt to avoid the appointed customs of obliteration; and he tacks
with a harried and piratical shiftiness about the quiet haven wherein
his betters--the far-seeing statesmen and the Federal judges, the
bankers and the writers of book reviews and the big-sleeved bishops
and the best known of moving-picture actors,--all enter every day
and law-abidingly cast anchor, among the wharfs of Lethe. For his
despairing, futile aim is to economize and--herewith to remit that
perhaps over-colored buccaneerish simile, in favor of a more cadaverous
figure,--to embalm as lastingly as may be, where time flows like a
cool and steady wind and all else is vapor, his personal notions. Yet,
somewhere, may be watching him, as to the mazed artist is whispered
by what seems a nameless and troubled instinct, somewhere may be
incuriously observing his rebellion, a power which that instinct fears
as the calm foe of human presumption. Somewhere may exist supernally
an all-overbrooding common-sense aware that the upshot of any man's
life is a matter most profitably forgotten. And this high common-sense
(endowed perhaps with plenary executive duties) may well be one of
Them....
§ 56
To the other side, the artist seeks and goes always
seeking--unpatriotically, if not with absolute irreligion,--to
divert himself in his native universe, whose constitution does not
self-evidently provide for the amusement of the inhabitants. No
artist's long-faced magniloquence about "his work," I must for the
hundredth or so time repeat, can in the least prevent that vocation
being in reality, and only, his diversion.... And a very striking
attestation of this truth, now I think of it, is furnished by the
failure of such talk for one half-instant to delude the man's wife.
For women have, as some profound philosopher or another has observed,
their intuitions. The woman whom marriage with a creative artist has
swindled of a husband thus always knows, or she at worst obscurely
feels, that behind those locked doors the humbug is at a sort of secret
tippling: and for that reason (among others) you will find the wife
of every valid artist to regard his art, however tacitly, however
self-perjuringly even, with unconcealable impatience....
So much is true, I believe, of all the arts. The endeavor of the really
serious creative writer, in any case, is hourly to divert himself:
and, pending extinction, he intends to continue to divert himself with
such fancies as he elects. The man, as I have admitted, lies about it,
through, one would like to think, some remnants of shame. Or perhaps
it is by his publishers alone that the besotted hedonist is restrained
from answering those critics who deplore his fancies, or who pick fault
with his chosen manner of expressing them: "What is that to me? and how
am I concerned with your likings and your dislikings? These notions
divert me. I have set them forth in the fashion which I personally
found most diverting. Why, as we meet here, momentarily, doomed
prisoners in the death-cell of existence, should I be bothering about
your taste in anæsthetics? Mix, in your own god's name, whatever drugs
you like, to keep you firm in magnanimity until you too are summoned to
that last hackneyed journalistic hearty breakfast of ham and eggs and
to the other clichés of being killed. Meanwhile I stick to my approved
strong tipple."
So then--not quite out of rash hilarity,--does the creating writer
intoxicate himself with such self-brewed imaginings as he finds most
effective: so does he flout perforce the opinions of his fellow
citizens, the while that he creates a more approvable race in his own
image: and so does he dismiss, half negligently, the material cosmos
as rather bungling prentice work, in very little exemplifying the
rules which he himself prefers as demiurge. As Hecuba to Hamlet, so to
him is the knowledge that such creatures as "realists" are everywhere
truckling to nature in their tenth large editions, and go enfranchised
in these books to patch up a mimic existence in every respect as
undesirable as their own.... For the creating romanticist quite simply
declines to accept either the human conduct of life upon earth or
any assumable theocratic overseeing of it from heaven as a competent
performance. Men and whatever gods may potter about in charge of men
this myopic weakling unaffectedly esteems to be not at all up to his
standards. Yet, none the less, somewhere from afar may be watching
him--as, here again, seems whispered by irrational instinct,--a power
which exacts, without any pliable descent into logic, that its material
handiwork be approached with the civil condonations of piety....
That power may well be the second of Them. And by this ruthless but
unangered power perhaps the babbling runagate must always be punished,
in one way or another, for his disloyalties to his fellows and to his
native overlords. Such was the feeling, I believe, which fidgeted
in the bottom of the minds of my replete, romantic oldsters,--the
both of them well-nigh used up, it might be, but both unsmashed,
and both unrepentantly aware of not having been, in common with the
most of their contemporaries, wasted,--as they drowsed among their
finished books. For, whatever happened, that many of their books were
finished....
§ 57
Why then, though, granting these delusions,--the sane may reasonably
inquire,--should any madman seek to provoke this punishment, and
even court it with painstakings and with year-long self-denials? The
reply to that question is simple: I do not know. I doubt if anybody
does. Nor, I imagine, had either of these paunched and spectacled
and thin-haired fanatics, blinking among his finished books, the
leisure for such, upon the whole, irrelevant problems.... It would
merely seem, I daresay, to his romanticizing time-bleared eyes, that
single-mindedness, if but occasionally, if but for a brief while as
go the necessaries of high-wrought prose, may evade Them. It would
seem to him that, in this grudged, snatched while, he, somehow,--in
part through less of crass ill luck than daily tumbles mere genius
graveward, and in part, too, through wasting no least moment upon
irrelevant matters,--had contrived to get some of his books completed
in more or less the shape he had wanted, with that irrational, inborn,
resistless hunger which made the other matters irrelevant.... And
then you would be almost as grateful for as you were worried by the
unaccountable way in which you would seem still to be slipping by Them,
somehow, and thus far. And so at times you would bluster to keep up
your courage. And at other times you would cross your fingers.... For,
really, in the last forties, with those depressing items in the paper
every morning, you might with an equal sense of assurance be typing,
always typing, on a battlefield to a distracting accompaniment of
burst shells. And each new book completed by you would thus take on an
element of the miraculous not wholly based upon the volume's contents:
and you would, in point of fact, quite probably unwrap the first actual
copies saying, with rather more of wonder than of gloating, "Well, I
got that one done, anyway!"
For about the third of Them there is no doubt nor any possible
disputing. And it is against common-sense and piety and death that the
artist conducts his utterly futile rebellion.... Yes, I believe, I
understood those aging romantics, who approached, the colophon of so
many books.
§ 58
--Because, I submit, it is wholly conceivable that men may, by and
by, get rid of common-sense and piety; but this human habit of dying
appears ineradicable. There is always ahead, and always a little
nearer, the one and one only exit from the familiar corridor of
our workaday existence. All of us thus pass, futilely, nesciently,
helplessly, through tedium to horror: for we live _in articulo
mortis_; our doings here, when unaffectedly regarded, are but the
restlessness of a prolonged demise; and the birth-cry of every infant
announces the beginning of the death-agony....
And that, too, you observe, is in the approved time-tested style. For
it is through consideration of his own unimportance and transiency that
man rises to the largest resonance of poetry and wisdom. Vanity of
vanities! saith the Preacher, the son of David: and Æschylos answers,
Oh, ye little race of men, what does your living show! and goes on with
the customary observations as to parti-colored leaves that are swept
away by the wind. Horace takes up the tale, We are all bound on one
voyage. Villon continues with derogatory evaluations of the final worth
of the fair queens and the thrasonical potentates and the melted snows
of yesterday; and Shakespeare rounds off the dirge with the assertion
that human living, however full of sound and fury, signifies precisely
nothing.... Everywhere fine literature, in its more purple passages,
tends to voice the futility of man's endeavors, the impermanence of
his works, and his generally unarguable claims not to be worth writing
about.
Nevertheless,--here to continue in this high scholastic
vein,--nevertheless, as Chrysippus of Cnidos, you will remember, has
strikingly phrased a weighty truth, in that noble monograph _On
the Cabbage_ (which some critics of the Alexandrian school, as we
should of course with due caution bear in mind, would attribute to a
somewhat later date and to a pupil of Erasistratus),--nevertheless,
death is the one impending fact which is certain. Now, thought of in
its physical aspects, death is an indignity before which any sort of
human self-respect--not here to speak of the wild actuality of human
pride,--becomes preposterous. Thought about logically, it makes any
conceivable human action rather silly, as upon the whole inappropriate
to condemned persons in a death cell. Thought of in the light of man's
possible immortality, it seems no longer to raise, if ever it did,
any positive enthusiasm. And so beyond doubt the majority of us act
wiseliest by not thinking about it at all, except as a thing which
happens to other people.
And it is perhaps inadequate comfort to reflect that the one world
known to us, wherein everything exists by virtue of destruction, can
hardly be described as a realm of life rather than of death. As I
write, I can observe, in the long field across the roadway, our family
cow indefatigably grazing in the level light of sunset, a stolid Gothic
monster whose placid conduct of existence I have sometimes envied....
More often, though, have I frowningly gazed out of the library window,
in search of some elusive word, to find the creature tirelessly
munching forward, and never for one instant having to use her brain;
and then I have suspected that cow of being a really competent literary
critic.... Well, the grass is, as we say, alive, and by its death she
is being nourished. And it is rather vexatious to reflect that this
cow will probably for some time be retained as the source of our milk
supply. Otherwise I could go on to moralize how she will presently
become steaks and roasts, to furnish me with nutriment through her
cenatical interment; and how I in a little while shall be dead and
nourishing new grasses for her descendants to feed on; and how the
cycle of grass, cow and man will thus go on interminably and, some say,
aimlessly. It could be worked up, I think, into a quite effective prose
passage. Unluckily, I know I shall in every likelihood never eat that
especial cow; and so my neat and edifying sermon is despoiled by the
raid of common-sense, always inimical to art.
None the less do two minutes of reflection beget perturbing offspring,
in shape of the knowledge that everywhere life brings about death, and
death life, until the hardiest of philosophers may hardly dare assert
which upon earth is prevalent. From wasp to tiger, from the eagle to
the frog, all animate beings must kill ceaselessly, and eat and kill
again, until they themselves be killed for another's nourishing. We
may say, as we very glibly do, that the worm is the wren's food: yet
it seems equally true that every wren is but a flying compost of dead
worms, just as that cow yonder is, to the considerate, a heaving rick
of dead hay.... And we human beings also are condemned to incessant
killing, we are doomed to the diurnal massacre of innumerable fellow
mammals, who very much excel us in some virtues, such as patience
and taciturnity, even if they be upon the whole our inferiors in
malevolence and folly. I do not imagine, for example, that many persons
would declare an archbishop to be as near a thorough Christian as is a
lamb, or could, with an unpricking conscience, affirm a congressman to
be, in every district, as intelligent as a cow.
So we all live by grace of killing, as indubitably as did any mediæval
bravo or headsman. Wheresoever, in the familiar Scriptural phrase, two
or three are gathered together, there again is the customary alliance
of the Bible and Shakespeare justified by the aptness of the naïve old
stage direction, _Enter three murderers_.... Nor is it instantly
apparent that an assassination is converted into righteousness by a
subsequent eating of the corpse. It is an epilogue, indeed, which
savors a little distastefully of the necrophile. Besides, a passionate
or disinterested murder may well in many circumstances retain a certain
childish grace, as befits the first invention of the first baby: a mere
murder is often picturesque and, I am told, enjoyable: but that crime
which is called a dinner party was never, to my knowledge, either of
these things.... And therefore one laments this obscene crunching and
devouring which, when reflected upon, abates man's proper pride in his
race, and coolingly checks love and every other exalted sentiment. It
is not possible to think with adoration, or even with actual pleasure,
of the most dear of ladies as the sarcophagus of fish and chicken, as
the moving monument of so many mangled sheep, as the animated ossuary
of oxen, as in brief a mere morgue. And man that is born of woman
does literally, we see, come out of a coffin into the tedium of life,
whereunder he encounters on all sides the yawning of one or another
grave, in the persons of his fellow omnivora.
So by the considerate our world may hardly be described as the realm
of life rather than of death. And in all lands men have obscurely felt
that death was perhaps the beginning as well as the end of all things.
Thus, naturally enough, you find the Northmen talking of Ymir, the
slain giant, whose flesh and blood and bones decayed into our earth
and sea and mountains. In India men told of the giant Purusha, from
whose dead body the world was just thus mortifyingly made: in Babylon,
of rotting Tiamat; in China, of P'an Ku; and in Persia, of Gayomart.
Everywhere you encounter the suspicion that this world and the busy
life with which it swarms reveal the phenomena attendant upon the
putrefying of any other sizable carcass: among all nations the older
poets have, with queer unanimity, identified mankind with the worms
which breed in a puffed and bubbling corpse; and have protested that,
rightly speaking, in our terrestrial existence is nowhere apparent
anything save the operation and products of death.
§ 59
Yet the chelonian-footed progress of science here, as usual, has in
the outcome managed to catch up with the forerunning hare-brained
fancies of the poets. Astronomers are now agreed that we inhabit a
world already dying, a world made tenable for parasites through the
abating of its vital heat; and that our race infests earth only during
the last stages of the globe's demise. We men and women in our worldly
relations rank, if you be an optimist, with lice: if pessimism be your
creed, you will lean to the old poetic idea of our being maggots. For
the science of the astronomer does, in essentials, but revert to the
most ancient notions of cosmology; finds nowhere apparent anything save
the operation and products of death; and rather cheerlessly unveils the
cold and murderous tides of circumambient æther, about which drift so
many other moribund planets among the corpses of their fellows.
None the less, it is with this omnipresent and omnicorporeal monarch
that the artist makes sport, depriving death of terrors with the
opiates of religion; and maiming death of potency likewise, so long
as the artist eludes destruction and survives in his art. To that
attenuated, grotesque and defamatory survival I shall by and by come
back: meanwhile I must protest, even here, that in this third struggle
is no least beckoning chance of victory.
For, before common-sense or piety man figures, as I have said, in the
rôle of Frankenstein; he is as Dom Manuel before the vivified image of
Sesphra; and he combats, without much hope, his own terrible creation:
but here, the opponent seems far more likely to have created him,
however accidentally. By the fanciful may mankind, thus, be viewed as
an unpremeditated by-product, as some serious task's débris, which for
the moment rather clutters this corner of death's workroom. Others
will play with the notion--which, as I remember, Felix Kennaston once
suggested,--of life's having somehow got into the material universe
as a small, alien, unwelcome interloper; and will suspect this is the
reason that death appears to come upon us and our labors frowningly, as
the vexed housewife comes toward the unloved weavings of the spider,
just seen.
But, in either case, the poets are sonorously agreed that never while
time lasts can man's existence really matter; for time, they say, is
death's broom.