King Skeptic wears his modern crown, his stern, destructive law
prevails; he's tearing all our idols down, disproving all our fav'rite
tales. Is there a legend you hold dear, some legend of the long ago?
King Skeptic hears it with a sneer, and digs up history to show that
things of that sort never chanced, and never could, and never will.
"We have," he says, "so much advanced, that fairy tales don't fill the
bill. No faked-up tales of knightly acts, no Robin Hood romance for
me; the only things worth while are Facts, Statistics, and the Rule of
Three."
With diagrams he shows full well that old-time tales are things to
scorn; that such a man as William Tell, in liklihood, was never born.
If Gessler lived and had a hat, he didn't hang it on a pole; the rules
of Euclid show us that--so goes King Skeptic's rigmarole. But,
granting that he had a lid, and hung it on a pole awhile, and granting
that the people did bow down to reverence that tile, this does not
prove that William shot an apple through an apple's core, and so the
anecdote is rot--don't let us hear it any more.
One-eyed Horatius never held the bridge beside his comrades bold, while
Sextus and his foemen yelled--because there was no bridge to hold.
With Fact King Skeptic pounds your head, and prods you with it to the
hilt, and shows Horatius had been dead ten years before the bridge was
built. "He fell not in the Tiber's foam, performed no feats of arms
sublime. I know! The city clerk of Rome sent me the records of that
time!"
Mazeppa's ride was all a joke, as all the statisticians know; the horse
he rode was city broke, and stopped whene'er he whispered "whoa." Most
luckily, the village vet wrote down the facts with rugged power;
Mazeppa simply made a bet the horse could go three miles an hour; he
wasn't strapped upon its back, no perils dire did him befall; he rode
around a kite-shaped track, and lost his bet, and that was all.
And so it goes; you can't relate a legend of heroic acts but that the
Skeptic then will state objections based on Deadly Facts. Romance is
but a total loss, and all the joy of life departs; we've nothing left
but Charlie Ross, and he'll turn up, to break our hearts.