Part 4

"Well, I mean that, when I was younger, no intelligent person for one instant saw more than nonsense in the legend that Simon Magus had ridden visibly through the air in a winged car or that Apollonius of Tyana could be acquainted with remote events within a minute or two after they happened. Such old wives' tales were outgrown superstitions, and that was all there was to it. But to-day--"

"In this enlightened age," he suggested, with a small smile.

"--To-day, with the manufacture of aeroplanes ranking as a standardized business, and with radios in every third home, these miracles, as you see for yourself, do not sound a bit remarkable. To-day, with one precaution, nobody need question that Pietro d'Apone actually did hold imprisoned, each in his separate metal vase, seven spirits to instruct him audibly in astronomy, alchemy and philosophy, in painting, physic, poetry and music. The needful precaution is, of course, merely to call these vases phonographs."

"I see, I see," said Harrowby, quietly. He was still smiling, for some reason or another. "They were crystal vases, by the way. And they were not phonographs."

"Anyhow," I answered, in the dismissory large manner of Mrs. Nickleby, "the principle is the same. And beyond just such material suggestions I, for one, would not venture--"

"I think," Harrowby stated, "that you will very soon hear others going farther. Men begin to perceive, in a great many other ways, that for some two thousand years has existed covertly a vast fund of knowledge and philosophy and religious teaching, not necessarily at odds with the more popular tenets of Christendom, but not sharing anything with these tenets nor at all reverencing them."

To me this sounded interestingly insane. So I began, "But, why--?"

"It is, obviously, a fund which its inheritors have been compelled to keep occult, through Christendom's set habit of arraigning and murdering out of hand all caught adherents to such irritating standards, as sorcerers."

"Indeed?" said I, with a pleasant consciousness of now having him nicely started.

"Men are beginning," Harrowby continued, "to discover piecemeal by 'scientific' methods something of that knowledge which sorcerers, as ignoramuses call them, have since time's youth attained through rather different avenues. And more and more widely is the fact becoming recognized that sorcery and witchcraft and magic were as far from being popular delusions as they were remote from being implicated with Christian mythology, to the imputed extent of siding with the devil against Heaven."

"You don't tell me!" I observed.

But he did. He went on to tell me, in fact, a great deal more. For here, he told me, is a religion really old: and to its adherents that faith which came out of Nazareth seems still, they say, an upstart affair which may yet prove ephemeral. So the devotees of that elder faith have not ever really concerned themselves with Christianity, not even those of them who have, for one reason or another, become bishops and cardinals and popes. There had been, in the outcome of this indifference, Dick Harrowby considered, something of irony: and it was droll enough to reflect that the supreme head of the Christian church--as when Gerbert of Aurillac, Hildebrand, Felice Peretti, Benedict Cajetan or Jacques d'Euse was pope,--had so often been the devout practitioner of an unspeakably more ancient religion.

So Harrowby talked on, with that rapt gravity which the old fellow reserves for discussion of "the occult": and I listened, in part almost believing him, who knew so much more about such matters than did I, and in part reflecting that sanity and insanity are, at best, elastic terms....

§ 21

But now I listened more attentively: for Harrowby had gone on to suggest that theories now endemic among the miscellaneous gentry whom we inclose in the term "scientists"--these "new" theories as to a fourth dimension,--begin to-day to enable us to see much more than nonsense in that reiterated ageless whispering as to men who had sought and through the aid of magic had found their diversion in lands not formally set down on any map.

"You mean--?" I prompted him.

Well, it developed, he meant that certain travellers, this whispering has always reported, had been to very queer places. And returning, they had told discreetly of realms wherein living was much more satisfactorily conducted than in our workaday existence.

"Yes, but," I commented, "even so--" I spoke just as a conversational spur, just as a dubious provocative: and Harrowby went on.

One traveller had been down into a twilit country where the people were small and flaxen-haired, and ate neither fish nor flesh of any kind. These people, he reported, wore brown caps to which were fastened little silver bells. Their country knew no sunlight, but was radiant with the shining of what, to the eye, seemed diamonds and carbuncles: and nothing noxious nor hurtful was to be found anywhere in this covert lovely land.

"Still--!" I observed.

Another spoke of a hollow mountain, wherein you entered to unending delights. And he spoke, spoke as if he were troubled, of the queen of this place. Yes, she was different from other women. And he talked too of the great Emperor Karl, and of giants and dwarfs, and of the Wildefrauen, who were more beautiful than the wives and daughters of men.

"Nevertheless--" I stated. But Harrowby was in full cry.

So he went on to tell me how yet another spoke of a palace which was builded, so far as human sense might judge, of pink seashells and of crystal. A woman was to be encountered there also, very lovely in a robe of green: her eyes were intent and changeless: her black hair was interwoven with red coral. To her postulants she served, in a hall hung with pearls, eight kinds of wine in as many goblets of chased silver: and then with a gold frying-pan she prepared the velladen of fish, which was the marriage feast.

A fourth told of a quite different palace that was designed by the apostle Thomas; and was builded of Sethym wood and sardius and imperishable ebony and ivory and onyx; and was enwrought with the horns of reptiles. Before this palace stood a mirror to which you ascended upon a stairway of porphyry and serpentine: armed warriors guarded it night and day, for in this mirror you beheld all that was taking place in every province and region subject to the master of this palace: and within this palace you lived among all manner of pleasures and delights.

And yet another spoke of an untroubled and great-hearted people ruled by one that had not the appearance of a human being. Some said the real name of this ruler was Aradia: others boasted of large reason to believe the lord of the hidden city of Mommur in everything male. This monarch retained among mankind many secret worshippers, marked with the sign of their service: these worshippers had privileges: and in the eye of each one of them, when you looked closely, you would find the small likeness of a horse.

Then also men had been to Blath Annis, and to the Strembölglings, and to a secret country among mountains wherein the lost tribes of Israel awaited the coming of Anti-Christ, when a fox would liberate them; and to the pleasant uplands of Ladaria, about which rolled perpetually, with terrible reverberations, a river not of water but of great stones; and to bright Audela, to which the very brave might enter through a gateway of fire, and no man could enter except in that way. Whereas yet other travellers had journeyed beyond Mistorak and the dreadful trumpets and thunder-blasts of the Vale of the Devil's Head, and had so won to the happy Isle of Bragman--

"But they came back," I suggested, at this point.

Yes, all had perforce returned to man's colorless workaday life, to the tediousness of over-familiar things, and to the ever-nearing shadow of death. Yet here and there, and now and then, some men had managed to enter into quite other ways of living. Men had in journeying toward death contrived--sometimes by chance, more frequently by the aid of magic,--for a while to elude the laws of ordinary human life, and for a while to divert themselves--

"In alcoves," I suggested.

"Yes, if you like," said Harrowby,--"in alcoves in which the laws of human polity and of material nature, as we know them, had not any jurisdiction. The point is that these tales were obviously not invented by liars with the intention of deceiving their hearers. For these tales, encountered in every part of the world, have never made the tiniest concession to plausibility: instead of wooing, they summons faith with the abruptness of a sheriff; and have assumed from the first that all our best-thought-of theories about the universe are comparable, let us say, to the knowledge which a fly in a dining-car possesses as to the management of railways."

"I see," I stated, comfortably. "Men, it was whispered, had, for however brief a while, escaped from the obligations and restraints and, above all, from the tediousness of workaday life,--that tediousness which people have always tried to vary and color, under every sort of human civilization, with so many forms of fiction. I see.... Yes, Harrowby, I see: and your insanity is really a great help to me."

"But," he began, "you have the ladder of seven metals, and you know perfectly well the secret of the mirror and the pigeons--"

"That," I protested, "isn't the point!..."

For I was in fact not at all concerned with the exact amount of truth upon which these legends were based. The point, with me, was that men had since time's beginning wanted such tales to be true; and that these stories illustrated man's immemorial and universal desire to escape from the self-imposed routine of his daily life. Man had always believed that he could do this by the aid of wizardry: and in this belief, as I now saw, he had been always and perfectly right.

§ 22

For everywhere, of course,--to-day, just as in Homer's nonage,--this need is contented by the literary artist. The literary artist--he, in any event,--does actually fulfil this universal desire, by his own especial wizardry. He temporarily endows his followers with the illusion of possessing what all alchemists have sought,--unfading youth, wealth and eternal life. He engineers the escape for which men have always longed, and which they have always known to be attainable, as here, by magic. And his is the charitable miracle-working which enables you to figure enviably in unfamiliar surroundings. Through his kind thaumaturgy you, as Odysseus, deal intrepidly with cyclopes and ascend the ivory beds of goddesses; as Job you get, from any ethical standpoint, decidedly the better of the Lord God of Hosts and reduce Him to rhetorical bullying; as the third prince you overpass all perils to win to the desired trinket; and as Christian you with a deadly thrust superbly discomfit lion-mouthed, bat-winged Apollyon. It is in this fashion that the artist makes sport with the first of his three adversaries, and derides common-sense.

For common-sense tempts men to be contented with their lot, to get the most from what is theirs, and not to hanker nonsensically after the unattainable. At the elbow of each of us lurks always this enchantress, with luring rhapsodies, more treacherous than ever any siren lilted, in praise of the firm worth of money and conformity. "Let us be rational," she whispers; "and let us remember that, whatever we might prefer, in this world two and two make four." And with many gaudy enticements does she prompt the unwary to yield homage to her insensate paramour, the doltish and vain idol of mathematics.... Thus tirelessly, thus unabashedly, does common-sense urge every man to obtain in this world, such as it is, the permitted uttermost from that life which stays peculiarly his own: and to the wheedling solicitings of common-sense the literary artist can answer but one word. That word is "Bosh!" And having uttered it, the artist proceeds to divert himself by living dozens upon dozens of lives which in nothing resemble the starveling and inadequate existence allotted him by the mere accident of birth.

§ 23

Yes: the creative romanticist alone can engineer a satisfying evasion of that daily workaday life which is to every man abhorrent. I am convinced, upon several grounds, that the motive of the literary artist is wholly unaltruistic: he blazes for his own pleasuring the trail upon which any number of readers may, so far as he cares, follow or not follow, just as they elect, and be hanged to them! Whenever he journeys into some such improbable country as, let us say, Poictesme, it is, I know, for his own recreation. But I choose here, entirely from the viewpoint of a reader of books, to consider with less scrutiny his selfishness than my firm grounds for gratitude.

For, thanks to these haphazard sorcerers, my life has been a marvellous affair. I look back, for example, upon the last month, which, as my high-flown and roystering way of living averages, has been uneventful enough. Yet in that time, I have quested through Thessaly, disguised by the old magic of Apuleius as Mr. Gilbert Seldes, in pursuit of all the lively arts, and, somewhat more necessitously, of a wreath of roses; and have, with an intrepidity which I perforce admired, sailed for the moon, to take part in the wars between Endymion and Phaëthon.... Descending, I have passed that night with a fair and charming woman--in a bed very white and wide, with two coverlets of scarlet silk cloth,--and all our queer intercourse has been conducted, amid many other incomprehensible happenings, chastely. In the morning we two went out into sunlit fields; and so came to a spring of clear water enclosed by a stone basin, upon which someone had left forgotten a comb of gilded ivory. Entangled in this comb, as I (whom men called Lancelot) saw with glad wondering, and with the heroic passion for which I had long suspected myself to have the talent, was near a handful of the hair of Guenevere. And I remember how I thought that gold a hundred thousand times refined would seem darker than midnight compared with the brightest day of that year's summer, if anyone were to set such gold beside this hair.... Soon passing thence,--and travelling now under the alias of Gil Blas de Santillane,--I have disastrously changed rings with a plump, dimpled brown-eyed niece of the governor of the Philippine Islands; I have come, disguised as a green and gold pasteboard dragon, into the bedroom of the most beautiful of Casmirians; I have criticised the sermons of the Archbishop of Granada and found him in nothing different from any other author under criticism. Fleeing episcopal wrath, I chatted, near Plessis les Tours, with a thin-nosed and threadbare burgess, who turned out to be the most shrewd of kings, and who sent me perilously journeying to the court of yet another bishop. But Louis de Bourbon had been murdered, I discovered, at an over-uproarious supper-party conducted by the Wild Boar of Ardennes.... So I journeyed instead into England, to fetch back the Queen's diamonds in good time for her to foil the nefarious Cardinal, by duly wearing these twelve gems when she danced in the ballet of La Merlaison at the fête of Messieurs the Echevins. In England, though, I wandered so far astray, both northward and chronologically, that, lost, I paused, under the wood of Lettermore, to ask my way of red Colin Campbell, in the very moment the great, ruddy jovial gentleman was shot down from ambush; and through this mishap I became again a fugitive, now wandering through the howes and bracken of wild Scotland.... Always, you perceive, no matter what mage guided, he kept to the tried formula, and led me, footloose and at free adventure, through eras and surroundings which were to him and me in nothing familiar.... So that eventually I came, by way of the British Linen Company's bank, and so past the lair of Tharagavverug, to the steel gate, to The Porte Resonant, of the Fortress Unvanquishable; and I am now upon the point of going in to cut off, for the third or fourth time, Gaznak's evil head.

Yes, looking back, I can see that the last month has been fairly various and contenting. And I am convinced that I must owe all these happy adventurings to the charity of beneficent wizards rather than of mere writing persons. And I elect to think of each and every valid romantic novelist as a skilled sorcerer who, accompanied by a suitable cortège of readers, departs at will from the workaday world, to travel, eternally young and always comfortably opulent, upon the blessed way of wizardry which conducts him away from boredom, and enables him to wander footloose and at continuous unflagging adventure, in unfamiliar lands wherein, as Poictesme phrases it, almost anything is rather more than likely to happen.

§ 24

And I would like to think that every self-respecting novelist goes to his magicking in suitable estate, and follows high and approved old formulæ. In any event, so many persons have, at odd times, inquired about my own "methods" of composition that it seems well here to jot down what would appear to be a few of the more obvious rules of thumb.

The novelist, then, most appropriately prologizes his evasion of common-sense--after of course performing the proper suffumigations of camphor and aloes and amber,--by writing his first chapter in a robe of white, with a triple collar of crystals and pearls and selenite. His diet upon this day will be fish. When there is fighting in manuscript, the writer may always advantageously, I believe, shift to a rust-colored robe adorned with amethysts, and having a belt and bracelets of steel,--clothed in which gear, he will while writing keep as near as circumstances permit to the chimney, favored by Mars. When he is about to kill anyone scriptorially, he will in mere self-protection put on a wreath of ash and cypress, and burn scammony and alum. He will likewise upon this day be careful to stint none of the functions of nature; and will circumspectly remember that he traffics with the wan and ashy overlord of the greater infortune.

But to bring off a love scene properly, demands of course much more elaborate paraphernalia. The room, so far as general experience indicates, should be hung with green and rose; the author, whom a Nubian mute is fanning with swans' down, now is robed in sky blue, and wears a graven turquoise ring. Musicians are in attendance, preferably choristers, fiddlers and pipers. Upon the writer's head is a tiara of lapis lazuli and beryl, wreathed about with myrtle and roses: upon the auctorial breast a copper talisman opposes to the busied keys of the typewriter the mystic sign of Anael and the inscription AVEEVA VADELILITH....

I do not mean that in writing the Biography I myself have always in every detail followed these exact "methods" of composition. What with one thing and another, such as having small children in the house, a similar account at the bank, and the attendance within candid conversational range of one who holds at best the customary views as to what may be put up with in a husband,--with such deterrents about, these "methods" have sometimes, in some respects, been found inexpedient. And so I merely suggest them here as that ideal of conduct which should be aimed at by the creating romanticist, in absolute and strict logic. For he in reality is a sorcerer, and in consequence is amenable to the most ancient of rules.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 1: An American periodical of the day, designed to cure the habit of reading magazines.]

III

MINIONS OF THE MOON

"Schiller's _Räuber_ perverted the taste and imagination of all young men. The high-minded, metaphysical thief, its hero, was so warmly admired that many raw students abandoned their homes and betook themselves to the forests to levy contributions upon travellers. But they found that real, everyday robbers were unlike the banditti of the stage; and that three months in prison was very well to read about by their own firesides, but not agreeable to undergo in their own proper persons."

_3._

_Minions of the Moon_

§ 25

The literary artist plays, I had said, with piety.... But here I was pleasantly interrupted by the sun's appearance without, and the consequent inrush of new color and of livelier gilding into the massed bindings of those books, of so many more books than I shall ever accord a second reading, assembled upon my library shelves. Everything had of a sudden brightened, with a cheerfulness which my thinking absorbed, since (even with that awkward question of piety ahead) I had found at least one excellent palliation for the devoting of my life to the Biography. For the novelist and every creative writer travelled on the gay way of wizardry while his less favored fellows, for the major part of their journeying, approached toward death through more staid and monotonous corridors.

Yet in these corridors men were continually finding alcoves: and these alcoves, as reflection had already suggested, were of two sorts. Men found solace in--to continue my figure,--alcoves of useless or even of reprehensible action; and in alcoves of thought. By the rogue, and by the rather rarer addict of mental exercise, might, at reasonable intervals, diversion be obtained as we passed toward the exit at the end of the inescapable corridor....

Well, and as I continued idly to regard my books, I noted in particular two volumes which yet stood side by side. Their appearance in America had been, I recollected, contemporaneous. And these two relatively enfranchised types of men--the thinker and the rogue,--had then been, I considered, afforded exoteric illustration, by that most quaint of accidents which gave us simultaneously as published books _The Education of Henry Adams_ and _The Legend of the Glorious Adventures of Tyl Ulenspiegel_. I could remember thinking that not often were thus coincidently granted, for the first time to Americans, two volumes with such a plausible air of being destined for longevity,--although the cautious would affix to the making of this assertion the rider that each book centres on a personality which is by way of being unfairly beguiling. Each protagonist here is a personality evocative of the reader's friendship, in the instant happy way in which people between book-covers are privileged to establish such relationship with beings less permanently issued in flesh; and so each of these two evades calm judgment. For to many of us these had figured at once as new-found, heart-delighting and eminently "personal" friends,--this Ulenspiegel come a-swaggering out of Belgium, and this wistful Adams then just released from the decent reticences of living,--and we perforce appraised them with a bias of friendship rather than by any code of strictly "literary" values.

Still, the two figures appeared quite perfectly to illustrate the seeking of diversion in alcoves of reverie and of misdemeanor. To Adams I decided to come back: and to the Fleming I turned with frank confession that of the somewhat incongruous pair one finds Tyl Ulenspiegel the more difficult to judge with any pretence of equity, precisely because this Tyl is, as I suggested at the beginning, a rogue....

§ 26