Part 10

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.

VII

DIVERSIONS OF THE ANCHORITE

"He shaved himself, and changed his raiment, and came in unto Pharaoh.... And Pharaoh took off his ring from his hand, and put it upon Joseph's hand, and arrayed him in vestures of fine linen, and put a gold chain about his neck; and he made Joseph to ride in the second chariot which he had; and they cried before him:--'Bow the knee!'... And in the plenteous years the earth brought forth by handfuls."

_7._

_Diversions of the Anchorite_

§ 60

The literary artist plays, I had said, with such ideas as he personally finds diverting.... But at this point criticism, remote but decisive, dwelt feelingly, and with, I believe, a tinge of imaginative embellishment, upon the miseries of housekeeping in establishments wherein people never could manage to be on time for their meals. For I seemed to have written through and blotted out another entire, bright, irretrievable afternoon: and rising, prior to a brief venturing into the society of human beings, I wondered how the poetically favored simile of the life of a galley-slave could ever have occurred to, of all persons, some writer or another, as representing thralldom....

After supper I returned to the library: and there--with the artificial aid of electricity now, somehow symbolically, replacing the true sun,--I resumed the quest of my epilogue....

To the one side, as I had pointed out, the artist seeks to divert himself with the ideas which he, whether or no he absolutely and crudely "believes in them," does personally find diverting. This is the game he chooses to play: it is the game with which, at any cost, he intends to amuse himself. And considering all things, I was really afraid that when Mr. Joseph Conrad talked about the artist being prompted by "an obscure inner necessity," we overheard the resort of a pricking conscience to pleonasm. There is nothing particularly "obscure" about our general human unwillingness to be bored: and the artist evades his boredom by playing at his art. That seemed to me all there was to it.

Let us excogitate, as a most pregnant example,--I said, with the pedantic touch befitting graver issues,--the famous case of Joseph Hergesheimer....

§ 61

Now, in order to approach the most striking but one of all modern instances, and the case which in so many features, I believe, resembles my own case, I must recapitulate a great deal written a while back, when Joseph Hergesheimer was to me, in the main, a collection of some half a dozen books, and the hand which wrote them had shaken my hand not more than half a dozen times. Since then we have become--within the limits of such confidence as remains possible and wary between creative writers,--rather intimate....

But I am speaking of a time before this intimacy, and of my very first impressions of Mr. Hergesheimer as these impressions were derived from his books alone. At that time so said they, spoke they, and told they the tale, in "literary gossip," that Joseph Hergesheimer "wrote" for a long while before an iota of his typing was transmuted into proof sheets. And the tale told how for fourteen years he could find nowhere any magazine editor to whose present needs a Hergesheimer story was quite suited.

It was then, and to-day remains, my belief that, in approaching Mr. Hergesheimer's writings, one should bear constantly in mind those fourteen years, for to me they appear, not uncuriously, to have shaped and colored every book he has ever published.

The actual merit of the writing done during that period of "unavailability" is--here, at least--irrelevant. It is not the point of the fable that he high-heartedly wrote a story to which, when completed, his unbiased judgment could not quite honestly deny such deference as is due to a literary masterpiece; and which, through some odd error, was rejected by a magazine that every month was publishing vastly inferior stories; and which was later declined by another magazine, and by a host of magazines, with a dispiriting bland unanimity not unsuggestive of editorial conspiracy. Meanwhile--of course--he had written another tale, which was much better than the first, and which proved to be an equally faithful chaperon of return postage. So story followed story, each dreeing the same weird....

And he used to wait for the postman, no doubt, and to note from afar that it was a large envelope; and would open the damned thing with a faint hope that perhaps they just wanted some slight changes made; and would find only the neat, impersonal, and civilly patronizing death-warrant of hope. And Joseph Hergesheimer kept on with his foolishness, without any gleam of success, or even (they report) any word of encouragement. And doubtless his relatives said the customary things....

Yet none of these circumstances, either, is the point of the apologue, because in all save one detail the comedy has been abraded into pointlessness by over-constant repetition; and is, of course, being futilely performed at this moment in one prefers not to reflect how many thousand homes. The leading rôle, though, is too unprofitable and irksome for any quite sane person to persist in enacting it for fourteen years. Here I speak with curt decision as to a subject upon which I protest myself an authority.... This rôle, then, Joseph Hergesheimer did enact for fourteen years; and that is the fable's significant point.

§ 62