Part 5

It would be pleasant here to digress into speculation why in our literature there should be so few rogues portrayed full-length; and why America, that in daily life derives such naïve pleasure from being cheated by "fine business men" and "far-seeing statesmen" should have produced in its writings no really memorable rogue, with the possible exception of Uncle Remus's Br'er Rabbit. But upon the whole, it appears preferable to say that Tyl Ulenspiegel has been for some five centuries famous among the people of Belgium and the Netherlands as a sort of Dutch Figaro or Scapin,--as "mischief-maker, jack-of-all-trades, and by turns fool, artist, valet and physician." This character was appropriated and ennobled by Charles de Coster as the central figure of a heroic romance, _La Légende de Tiel Uylenspiegel_, published in 1867, and since known as "the Bible of the Flemings"; and it is this book which was, some fifty years afterward, translated into our tongue. So much it appears preferable to say as simply as possible, because, in Geoffrey Whitworth's translation, a splendid and great-hearted example of literary art was then rendered into delightfully adequate English: and I incline to think that a masterpiece should be greeted simply and reverently, and without vain speaking. Even to recommend it to your consideration (as I none the less must conscientiously do) seems rather on a par with saying pleasant things about a sunrise.

So honest comment can but come back to this: for Tyl Ulenspiegel himself one straightway establishes a sort of personal liking, a liking unbased on "literary" values, and an unmoralizing liking such as entraps you into indignation when the reforming Henry the Fifth repudiates that other not-unlovable rogue, Sir John Falstaff.

"A Fleming am I from the lovely land of Flanders, workingman, nobleman, all in one,--and I go wandering through the world, praising things beautiful and good, but boldly making fun of foolishness." Such is Tyl Ulenspiegel's description of himself, in terms a bit over-modestly incommensurate to the speaker's variousness. Tyl can, for example, be upon occasion a very pretty fighting-man, performing salutary homicides with an approach to professional despatch and thoroughness. For so often as a national hero finds a deserving person to be rescued from oppression, ten or twelve adversaries amount, as we sometimes discontentedly foreknow, to nothing more than to afford, in the moment that their presumption procures for them demolishment, yet another proof of the foolishness of the wicked; and all such slight battues the national hero regards as trifles. Thus here, for serious work, an Ulenspiegel too requires some three or four fully armed opposing cohorts of Spanish cavalry to be discomfited single-handed, and really to justify a display of that animation with which Sieur Roland laid about him at Roncesvaux, and which enabled Achilles to choke Scamander with slain Trojans.

So much of physical prowess, I repeat, one has the fair and ancient right to expect of any national hero. Quite another facet of the jewel is the roguish, not at all "heroic" Tyl of elder legends, who delights in perpetrating jokes not always pre-eminent for delicacy. These thimble-rigging and cloacinal jeux d'esprit De Coster, to be sure, has for the most part omitted, with here and there just a bland indication. For another matter, although Tyl is devotedly attached to the fair Nele, and their marriage at the end of his wanderings is a conclusion such as the erudite describe as foregone, nobody can expect a rogue meticulously to emulate Joseph. The national hero of Belgium, be it repeated, is a rogue.... So there came about inevitably that affair of the beautiful gay-hearted dame whom Tyl escorted to Dudzeel: in all her dealings with young men, howsoever impudent, she abhorred in particular the sin of cruelty, and could not be pricked into it. And there was the Walloon maiden into whose home Tyl went one night, to take part in organ practise of the right accompaniment to some Flemish love-songs. And there was the Comtesse de Meghen, another lovely and benevolent lady, who offered Ulenspiegel, in the beginning, hospitality, and in the end, her sincerest compliments upon the fact that he did not in anything resemble her elderly and flabby husband.... In fine, Tyl Ulenspiegel marches, in the pride of his youth, about a world of brightly-colored and generous women, and graces a world wherein he displays as much continence as appears consistent with politeness; and wherein Joseph in the final outcome could not manage to combine these two virtues.

So likewise this rogue marches, with chance for guide, about a world which--then also,--was ruled by folly and bigotry; and he goes with jauntiness, as befits "a master of the merry words and frolics of youth," even in the shadowed places where over-head his betrayed and gibbeted kindred fester between him and the sun. His is Hamlet's heritage, but the Fleming wears his rue with a marked difference; since the ashes of a martyred father lie upon Tyl's breast without at all oppressing a heart whose core is roguishness. And in the presence of injustice Tyl Ulenspiegel does not shrink, not even into drawing morals: instead, with chance for guide, he marches. For those who would wrong him his eye and tongue and sword stay keen; and the rogue knows these weapons to be in the long run sufficient: meanwhile, that one should now and then encounter over-troublesome fellows needing to be killed, is as naturally a part of wandering at adventure as that one should find everywhere girls to be assisted out of virginity and flagons to be emptied, and songs to be made beyond any numbering, but never the last song.... So the rogue marches, and puts all things to their proper uses. And the heart of the reader, given something better than the heart of a flea, goes out to the resistless rogue.

There is, to be sure, a "story": in fact, around this sprightly figure De Coster has woven--contemporaneously, it is bewildering to reflect, with the weaving of a dreary mystery about one Edwin Drood,--an intricate romance as cruel as life and considerably gayer. Somewhat to deviate metaphorically, De Coster, in this tale of fifteenth-century Flemings in course of being enlightened and uplifted by the auto-da-fés and hangmen of the Holy Inquisition, has builded a story which is not unsuggestive of a time-mellowed fifteenth-century cathedral; with the gentry about their devotions, and with peasants joking on the porches, and with a stately hymn music accompanying both the aspiration and the guffaws; a cathedral, too, that is no less opulent in glowing paintings of rapt saints and archangels than in captivatingly hideous gargoyles.... Here again, one is tempted to expatiate, concerning these gargoyles: and I would like here to talk about the superlunar bleak buffooneries of the chapter which depicts the death of Charles the Fifth, and his trial in heaven; or to applaud the account of Tyl's hunting of the werwolf; or, at least, to note that really intolerable "catharsis by pity and terror" when Katheline the good witch attempts to share her cup of cold water with Joos Damman in the torture chamber....

§ 27

But what, above all, remains with us is the figure of the tall young rogue who passes hardly any alcove which hide-bound morality has labelled "Keep Out" without a little dalliance therein. Ahead is a closed door, lightly ajar, a black door with silver-plated handles, which one perforce approaches always: in the meantime it is astonishing to note what a number of pleasant and blameworthy things one can discover to do.

Reflection finds the circumstance unfortunate that most of the agreeable actions of life are either forbidden or else deplorably behedged with restrictions. From drunkenness and from the effects of certain drugs can be obtained moments, and even hours, of conscious contentment: probably in no other way, indeed, is it possible for human beings to induce an unbroken twenty minutes of actual and complete happiness: but with repetition such pleasures increasingly work the deuce of a damage to one's health and purse. Besides, our inefficient bodies prove unable to stay comfortably inebriate, for more than a brief while, without drifting into sleep or collapsing in sickness: and our equally inefficient medicine men have found out no amiable method of, in the time-honored phrase, recuperating from alcoholic excesses.

Then also the more intimate recreations of amour, when once you are over with the disappointments unavoidably attendant upon loss of innocence, compose a very pleasant pastime so long as the game is played by relative strangers. Even superficial exploration of the charms and the little ways of any unfamiliar and personable young woman, they tell me, is unflaggingly rewarded and incited to fresh exertions by the discovery of some slight novelty or small strangeness. Thighs differ, breasts are always unpredictable, and the piquant mole continually "by himself surprises," I am informed. Yet, in America at all events, one finds extant a perceptible tendency to deprive the oldest and most popular of amusements of just this essential element of unfamiliarity, by restricting it to married persons; and even within this licensed class to limit each husband to the embraces of his own wife. Now with the morality of this social ruling the most precise need pick no fault: I would merely point out that, here again, should monogamy ever become prevalent among us, we would be deliberately abating one of the more considerable pleasures of an existence wherein pleasures are not over-frequent.

Nor, of course, not even in actual need, are you allowed to take another person's money away from him except through the tedious channels of business; nor to fare publicly appareled in lovely colors except just where your necktie shows but stays invisible to--of all people--you alone; nor are you permitted to keep enjoyable, through the amenities of homicide, your commerce with persons who admittedly exist but to annoy their fellows. Tyl Ulenspiegel might deal as the whim took him with those obnoxious cohorts of Spanish cavalry. But with us there is never an open season for religious revivalists or book peddlers or collectors of internal revenue: and traffic policemen and the conductors of "tag-days"[2] and prohibition agents all live in exasperating immunity. Even the women you adored, and wrote letters to, approach you intrepidly. Everywhere, in fine, this or that pleasant action is forbidden or in one way or another restricted; and man, upon the verge of actual, sharp, zestful enjoyment is brought up short by a taboo of his own inventing.

So it is pleasant--_faute de mieux_, as in our current fiction superb worldlings no longer observe to other members of the _élite_,--it is very pleasant to indulge in these sports vicariously through considering the exploits of the Ulenspiegelian rogue who does do these things. And we cannot but rather fondly admire the dashing fellow who commits the pleasure-giving misdemeanors from which we are held back by prudence or by physical limitations. Every country rejoicing in the dubious benefit of a history has, they say, alike its great national hero and its great national thief: and it is a fact that St. George endures in balladry with Robin Hood, St. Denis with Cartouche, St. Andrew with Rob Roy. Then, too, if Belgium yet remembers Tyl Ulenspiegel, Spain has not yet forgotten Guzman d'Alfarache, nor Germany her Schinderhannes, nor Hungary her Schubry. Everywhere through the shadowland of legend canter and gallop--with the gleaming eyes of nocturnal creatures, with a multitudinous tossed shining of steel,--these "squires of the night's body, Diana's foresters, these minions of the moon," whom the prosaic call thieves and highwaymen: and everywhere men have admired and cherished some cunning strong unconquerable rogue.

This foible has from the beginning been recognized and shared by the literary artist. It is perhaps one reason (among others) why really reputable persons have always felt, however obscurely, that there is something dangerous in novels; and why the reading of fiction has always been more or less deprecated by all citizens of appreciable elevation and influence. And here the well-thought-of are, very luckily for the literary artist, far more profoundly in the right than ever the well-thought-of have comprehended: for in all polities imaginative literature has tirelessly advocated revolution, by depicting the possibilities of a more pleasure-giving state of affairs; and in his diversions the artist has consistently tended to identify himself with the rogue and the law-breaker.

§ 28

Romantic art has from the first inclined to glorify the breaker of laws current in the artist's lifetime. Nor are the provocatives for this sedition obscure; since no society has ever provided any exact or generally respected status for the artist, nor afforded him, at most, much more than the half-contemptuous, cosseting indulgence which is granted to lap-dogs. Moreover, the artist alone is permitted hourly to use his reason,--an action which in any other walk of life would at once upset business usage or professional etiquette,--because of men's general conviction that here it doesn't especially matter. In consequence the artist has always found our human ordering of this world, under all régimes, to be unsatisfactory; and to offenders against any part of this ordering he inclines with irrational unavoidable sympathy.... You may, in fact, observe that nobody is quite at ease in dealing with a policeman: the man represents, however genially, with howsoever bright adornments of figured brass and rubicundity, an oppression that is upon us; and while in theory the relation between the legally honest tax-payer and his two hired and liveried retainers, the policeman and the mail-carrier, is the same, one notes in practise a marked difference. The courts and officers of the law, and all legal processes, are matters with which we as if by instinct avoid involvement: for, here again, man occupies somewhat the position of a Frankenstein.... So Robin Hood is voted an unending triumph, from black letter ballads to the moving pictures, and the fact that Christ was crucified by due process of law has everlastingly endeared His story to romantic art and human sympathy.

Now very often, I daresay, the artist is guided by this sympathy for the rogue without suspecting its existence. Thus even in the most genteel and circumspect of arts,--which I take to be the composition of a novel in the English language,--it is droll to find from the beginning the most respectable of scribes, if not always of pharisees, depicting one or another rascally law-breaker with fervors of fond admiration whereof the writer seems wholly unconscious. For the English novel began with the rogueries of Lovelace and Tom Jones. Then followed the chronicles of Rob Roy and Jack Sheppard and Paul Clifford, most exemplary and magnanimous of highwaymen. Seth Pecksniff presently fell down the steps of his cottage in Wiltshire: and tall Redmund Barry fled up to Dublin, just two years later, after his duel with Captain Quin. By and by, in Lymport, the great Mel assumed his over-tight lieutenant's uniform, and was laid out in his coffin, by way of beginning the tale which his personality infuses all through: and the gay young Master of Ballantrae (after tossing a guinea with his brother) travelled northward from Durrisdeer, singing as he rode toward Culloden, with a fine new white cockade in his hat.... For all these are rogues, in each of whom his creator obviously joyed, no matter under what protective coloration of moral purpose and of self-deceit.

§ 29

That art is a criticism of life, appears a favorite apothegm among those who know least about either. Yet the statement is true enough, in the sense that prison-breaking is a criticism of the penitentiary. Art is, in its last terms, an evasion of the distasteful. The artist simply does not like the earth he inhabits: for the laws of nature his admiration has always been remarkably temperate; and with the laws of society he has never had any patience whatever.

So the literary artist leaves the earth which he inhabits, daily and with no more to-do than daily is made over the same feat by professional aeronauts. And the literary artist diverts himself by constructing other worlds, whose orderings are different, and to his mind more approvable. All creative writers have thus, whether consciously or no, embarked in an undertaking compared with which the axiomatic attempt to weave ropes of sand or to construct silk purses from even less adapt material is a quite sane and unassuming enterprise. For the literary artist here is at play with the second of his adversaries, with piety; and has offered to instruct the aggregate wisdom of his fellows and even of Omnipotence how to create a more satisfactory world.

By the less venturous the suggestions thrown out have been partial and in the nature of slight amendments to existent orderings. For centuries where magic has attempted to coerce Providence, and religion has urged the bribing of Heaven, whether with burnt offerings or good behavior, here the artist has more urbanely adhered to moral suasion, by setting a praiseworthy example for the Demiurge to follow.... Thus has the novelist long proposed, through this delicate intimation of setting the example, that a time limit might advantageously be placed upon human discomforts, and immunity from the sum total be granted, say, along with a marriage license. Suitable incomes, it has in the same tactful way been suggested to Providence, should be conferred upon all virtuous and guileless persons, for whom the bonds of reality rarely afford coupons. And something certainly ought to be done about man's positively dangerous racial custom of getting older and dying; for which the novelist's alternative would seem to be that, after an equitable distribution of confessions and brides and unexpected legacies and jail-sentences, everybody should enter a static condition of middle age. Such at least is the impression left by the last paragraphs of our elder novels, with all the characters congealed into perdurable domesticity and standing sponsor for one another's children. Scheherezade is, to me, the only known tale-teller who has punctiliously and convincingly accounted for the future of her puppets, after the winding up of each comedy, by stating that they were duly disposed of by the destroyer of delights, and presumably the undertaker.... Let it, in fine, be understood that the business of human life, as we know it, will by and by be reorganized, and everything be made entirely and permanently different: and fortified by that firm understanding, we can for the present allow the conditions of human life. That much at least has been from the beginning a proviso insisted upon by every creative writer.

But those whom life has more deeply disappointed and bored, these turn to diverting themselves with worlds that are in everything dissimilar from the one world with which ill luck has made them familiar. These are the romantics, the fantastics, who, cursed with actual imagination, devoted it in youth to pre-figuring what life must be when you became an untrammeled adult. They have faced the reality, they have faced the real and incredible antickry of men as social units. They have faced it with a candor uncharacteristic of common-sense. And they have now no further concern with the laws and other hebetudes of men, except to forget these disappointments as utterly as possible, and to divert themselves in worlds of their own creation wherein their whims are the only laws. So Ulenspiegel is sent hunting werwolves; Holy Maël is tricked into sailing northward, in a demon-rigged stone trough, among fabulous seas and immodest sirens; the huge shadow which bears obscurely, as if beneath the wings of a bat, the Seven Deadly Sins, is cast across the roof of Anthony's hut in the Thebaid; the Snow Queen is bundled into a great sledge painted white, and fetched south to kidnap little Kay; Alice is lured into the rabbit hole and tumbled, very slowly, down that very deep well whose walls were inset with cupboards and bookshelves: and the creating romantic is diverted.

§ 30

Meanwhile you may note the unreflective raising somewhat of a pother over the circumstance that the artist is as a rule disliked and is belittled, if not actually persecuted, by his contemporaries. Yet no other outcome can seem more natural, I am afraid, when you consider that the art of every important creative writer is an hourly protest that he finds his contemporaries dull and inadequate persons, and that he esteems the laws which they have devised, and live under, to be imbecile. Laws based upon rationality one could endure: but any sane person, as the fretted artist perceives, must regard with an eye full of provisos the professed aim of so many of our laws, to make for the public's general welfare and happiness. For the artist is logical; and therein differs from the majority of his fellows, who unthinkingly assume that all efforts to promote the well-being of mankind at large are praiseworthy. I myself concede that we are here apt, through however admirable motives, to act precipitately, where one calm instant's thought would tend to show all such efforts irreligious and illogical. By no religious code, and by no course of logic taught in any school, is the average man entitled to happiness: his demerits justify in logic the earthly misery which religion postulates: and to impose upon him happiness would be, by the best-thought-of standards, an unreasonable and blasphemous act, which, one may proudly say, American civilization has never come anywhere near committing.

Instead, the orthodox should find it very gratifying to note with what complete inutility altruism flourishes everywhere, and legal enactments pullulate to promote men's general well-being; since faith and logic alike, I take it, are strengthened by the utterness with which all these laws fail, and, in fact, appear to muddle matters rather worse than ever.

And it is perhaps a good thing too that we, who have taxes, by-laws, licenses, passports, burial certificates, and permits to marry,--we who must do all that is done by us either in violation or with the permission of one or another law, we who live bound and fretted by innumerable small legal requirements and taboos and restrictions,--cannot in the least imagine what living must have been like under less omnipresently paternal governments. In simpler and upon the whole less muddle-headed ages the relatively few laws whereunder mankind lived did not pretend to accomplish anybody's positive benefit; their slighter and more feasible aim was to prevent your undue annoyance of anybody else: and, that secured, the laws took--it becomes a positively incredible concept,--no further account of your actions....

--Which is not of course to suggest that the artist fared in more Arcadian days a whit the merrier. I would not imply that the artist was then content with his material surroundings, nor that in any society he is likely ever to be content. Here and there, to be sure, as I have admitted, he wins to the cuddlings and applause of the lapdog with a quaint repertoire of tricks; and dies, some while after forgetting these tricks, comfortably enough of being over-pampered. But the romantics, the true romantics, these also, are in a wholly un-Falstaffian sense all minions of the moon,--who has condemned them, as I recall my Baudelaire, eternally to love the place where they are not and the woman whom they know not. Astrology is more exact; and, under those whom the moon rules, defines very perfectly the true romantic, as "a soft tender creature, a searcher of and delighter in novelties; unsteadfast, timorous, prodigal; loving peace and to live free from care; hating labor; and content in no condition of life, either good or ill." To me that last clause seems in every sense conclusive.