Part 6

He that is born one of the minions of the moon must therefore always be a little at odds with what his fellows describe as piety. For his reason, such as it is, compels him to disapprove of most human laws, upon the ground of their foolishness, and of most natural laws, upon the ground, not merely of their unreason nor even of their lewdness and cruelty, but of their ugly and unæsthetic results. So that in the worlds he builds as both a lesson and a rebuke to Providence, the creative artist inclines to favor and to place in a heroic light such persons as Tyl Ulenspiegel and Robin Hood, who, by the standards of human laws, are better fitted for jail. Nor is that all....

§ 31

No: that is not by any means all. For the romantic enters into frank competition with nature by attempting not merely to create more interesting persons than nature creates, but also to outvie nature by making his creations durable. And, as a sort of supreme affront, creative art now and then plucks from the graveyard one of nature's put-by failures, and, with a triumphant, "See now what I can do with the very material this bungler has flung away!" converts the dead man or woman into an ever-living romantic myth. So are begotten those favored persons whose vitality and whose adventuring each generation of mankind renews.... I refer, of course, to such persons as Prometheus and Pan and Judas and the Sphinx,--and to Andromeda and Helen of Troy and Satan. I refer to the Wandering Jew and Faust and Odysseus, who stay always irresistible to the romanticist: and I refer to King Solomon and Queen Cleopatra and the knight Tannhäuser, and to Lilith and Don Juan also, for whom are yet reserved, we know, the most spirit-stirring adventures in the manuscripts of writers still unborn. I refer to Blue Beard, and to Dame Mélusine, and to Punch, and to a great many others who were so lucky as to originate in a satisfyingly romantic myth, and who in consequence stay always real and always free of finding life monotonous.

Now, it is an ever-present reminder of our own impermanence to note that no human being stays real. In private annals a species of familiary canonization sets in with each fresh advent of the undertaker; no sooner, indeed, do our moribund lie abed than we begin even in our thoughts to lie like their epitaphs; and all of us by ordinary endure the pangs of burying ineffably more admirable kin than we ever possessed.... Nor does much more of honesty go to the making of those national chronicles which Mr. Henry Ford, with a candor that at one time really seemed incurable by anything short of four years in the White House, has described as "bunk." In history one finds everywhere an impatient desire to simplify the tortuous and complex human being into a sort of forthright shorthand. Alexander was ambitious, Machiavelli cunning, Henry the Eighth bloodthirsty, and George Washington congenitally incapable of prevarication. That is all there was to them, so far as they concern the average man: and thus does history imply its shapers with the most curt of symbols, somewhat as an astronomer jots down a four's first cousin to indicate the huge planet Jupiter and compresses the sun that nourishes him, into a proof-reader's period. Always in this fashion does history work over its best rôles into allegories about the Lord Desire of Vain-glory and Mr. By-ends, about Giant Bloody-man and Mr. Truthful; and rubs away the humanness of each dead personage resistlessly, as if resolute to get rid in any event of most of him; and pares him of all traits except the one which men, whether through national pride or the moralist's large placid preference for lying, have elected to see here uncarnate.

Quite otherwise fare those luckier beings who began existence with the advantage of being incorporeal, and hence have not any dread of time's attrition. The longer that time handles them, the more does he enrich their experience and personalities....

§ 32

I found recorded, for example, not long ago, in Mr. Robert Nichols' fine book _Fantastica_, the very latest adventures of three of these favored beings. And let me protest forthwith that I profoundly enjoyed this book. This trio of stories, about such copious protagonists as Andromeda and the Sphinx and the Wandering Jew, came, to me at least, as the most amiable literary surprise since Mr. Donn Byrne published _Messer Marco Polo_. Here was beauty and irony and wisdom; here was fine craftsmanship: but here, above all, were competently reported the more recent events in the existence of favored persons whose vitality and whose adventuring each generation of mankind renews.

I found, for instance, Mr. Nichols writing very beautifully about Andromeda. Well, it was Euripides, they say, who first popularized this myth of Andromeda: and, for all that the dramas he wrote about her are long lost, it were time-wasting, of a dullness happily restricted to insane asylums and the assembly halls of democratic legislation, here to deliberate whether Andromeda or Euripides be to us the more important and vivid person, in a world wherein Euripides survives as a quadrisyllable and wherein Andromeda's living does, actually, go on. You have but, for that matter, to compare Andromeda with the overlords of the milieu in which her fame was born, with the thin shadows that in pedants' thinking, and in the even gloomier minds of schoolboys upon the eve of an "examination," troop wanly to prefigure Cleon and Pericles and Nicias, to see what a leg up toward immortality is the omission of any material existence. These estimable patriots endure at best as wraiths and nuisances, in a world wherein Andromeda's living does, actually, go on. It is not merely that she continues to beguile the poet and painter, but that each year she demonstrably does have quite fresh adventures.... Only yesterday, I reflected, Mr. C.C. Martindale had attested as much, in his engaging and far too scantly famous book, _The Goddess of Ghosts_; as now did Mr. Nichols in _Fantastica_.... For it is, through whatever human illogic, yesterday's fictitious and most clamantly impossible characters who remain to us familiar and actual persons, the while that we remember yesterday's flesh-and-blood notables as bodiless traits.

So it comes about that only these intrepid men and flawless women and other monsters who were born cleanlily of imagination, in lieu of the normal messiness, and were born as personages in whom, rather frequently without knowing why, the artist perceives a satisfying large symbolism,--that these alone bid fair to live and thrive until the proverbial crack of doom. Their living does, actually, go on, because each generation of artists is irresistibly impelled to provide them with quite fresh adventures.... And no one can, with certainty, say why. One merely knows that these favored romantic myths, to whom just now I directed the stiletto glance of envy, remain the only persons existent who may with any firm confidence look forward to a colorful and always varying future, the only persons who stay human in defiance of death and time and the even more dreadful theories of "new schools of poetry"; and who keep, too, undimmed the human trait of figuring with a difference in the eye of each beholder. For all the really fine romantic myths have this in common. As Mr. Nichols phrases it, in approaching a continuation of the story of Prometheus one may behold in the Fire-Bringer, just as one's taste elects, a pre-figuring of Satan or of Christ or of Mr. Thomas Alva Edison.

And this one sometimes guesses to be--perhaps--the pith of such myths' durability, that the felt symbolism admits of no quite final interpreting. Each generation finds for Andromeda a different monster and another rescuer; continuously romance and irony endeavor to contrive new riddles for the Sphinx; whereas the Wandering Jew--besides the tour de force of having enabled General Lew Wallace to write a book which voiced more fatuous blather than _Ben-Hur_,--has had put to his account, at various times, the embodying of such disparate pests as thunderstorms and gypsies and Asiatic cholera.

Well! here--just for an instant to recur to _Fantastica_, as a volume which I delight in commending to the particular notice of the urbane,--here one finds Mr. Nichols also writing remarkably contemporaneous parables about the Sphinx and her latest lover, about Andromeda and Perseus, about the Wandering Jew and Judas Iscariot. They are, to my finding, very wise and lovely tales; they are, I hope, the graduating theses of a maturing poet who has become sufficiently sophisticated to put aside the, after all, rather childish business of verse-making. But the really important feature, in any event, is that Robert Nichols adds to the unending imbroglios of these actually vital persons, and guides with competence and a fine spirit the immortal travellers. Nor is this any trivial praise when you recall that, earlier, they have been served by such efficient if slightly incongruous couriers as Goethe and Charles Kingsley and Euripides and Eugène Sue, as Matthew of Paris and Flaubert and Nathaniel Hawthorne and the Reverend George Crowley.

§ 33

For these great myths have, over and above that quality of which I spoke just now as wizardry, some common and not readily definable power which resistlessly makes captive the dreams of men of all conditions and faiths and degrees of intelligence. I can remember puzzling a long while over what conceivable feature these so divergent stories could be said to have in common; since some shared trait must be, I reasoned, the explanation of their virtually uniform allure. And these myths baffled me. Their might seemed, as their origin, not wholly explicable. I say "their origin" because no great romantic myth seemed the product of any especial brain. Never could we detect any writer seated at his desk about the diligent invention of any one of these stories, told now for the first time. Rather did legends gather slowly and contradictorily, arising none knew whence, about the tale's protagonist, who was by ordinary an actual personage some while since dead. By and by somebody had perhaps written down a part of this rumor, always with plain inability to narrate the whole; and the result might be, to the one side an _Odyssey_, to the other a _Juif Errant_.... Sometimes one of these inexplicably macrobiotic myths had found no formal chronicler, and for centuries existed in detachment from literature. There was, for example, I reflected, the fine figure of Punch, which imaginative artists had prodigally left unexploited. In fact, nobody except Mr. Conrad Aiken[3] seemed ever to have written with seriousness about Punch; and this superb theme as yet awaited merely the attention of some gifted writer, to enrich the world with a masterpiece. Then there was Mélusine. There was, for that matter, Blue Beard.... All these stayed uncommemorated with any adequacy as yet, and were, despite that fact, no whit the less recognizable as magnificent and immortal.

I could not see that these old stories had anything whatever in common; and even if in these ageless fables some shared feature were discovered, that would hardly explain the unvarying strange sequel. It would not, I thought, explain the emergence from the "story" of a figure which, the story done with, and all its incidents put behind, continued to live on in other stories, and continued through generation after generation to have quite fresh adventures. Nothing seemed able ever to explain that. Yet it was a fact. One was tempted to imagine these immortal figures had guiles of their own, and exerted strange potencies less to afford the artist a fruitful theme than to demand his service. Man here again, it might be, enacted his not infrequent rôle of Frankenstein.... At any rate, the secret was not in the stories: artists did not repeat these stories, but instead arranged new imbroglios for the old tales' protagonists.

Of course the truth was that these figures, for one reason or another as yet unrevealed to me, were such as, for that reason, appealed to a majority of creating romanticists. They were toys with which, for howsoever veiled causes, the artist peculiarly delighted to play. It might, I guessed, have been the element of dubiety which fascinated, and the half-vexed feeling that, when all which is apparent to sense and rationality had been checked off and labeled, much yet remained amenable to neither. It might be, just as I had said, the pith of such myths' durability that the felt symbolism admits of no quite final interpreting; and so arouses the not utterly rational suspicion that the whole truth about these mythic figures has never yet been apprehended by anybody.

§ 34

Strikingly did this seem exemplified by the perennial magic of Pan. His epopee, as taken over by the artist, was virtually eventless. Pan figured in no story of marked interest or importance. He merely was: and what he was, nobody had presumed to voice with any precision. Pan was but indicated--always with a queer effect of the narrator's suspecting somebody might, undesirably, be eavesdropping,--by this vague talk about a hirsute wanderer with the horns and feet of a goat and a taste for pipe-playing: these features were, you knew, not the essentials. Such tales recorded only small and immaterial truths, as if--you somehow knew,--you were to define the Pope as an elderly Catholic who wears underclothing and eats breakfast, or a duly nominated candidate for the White House as a Protestant of unexigent honesty. So the creating romanticist had begun to divert himself with guesses about Pan: and now these guesses filled libraries.

But Pan was not in the library. He was afield, he was in all the magazines for the month after next now on the news-stands, having quite fresh adventures, which yet-living poets were under a tribal bond to contrive for him. In the records of English literature research might look in vain for any considerable poet who had not paid his scot of contriving some fresh adventure for Pan, and Pan yet roved the jungle of free verse. Pan, alone of the old Hellenic gods, had thus lived on, and had survived all his peers. Pan would not, to be sure, especially regret them, since he had never forgathered with the other gods....

And there, in that seemingly irrelevant fact, I began to detect a darkling light. Pan had never forgathered with the other gods: Olympos he appeared at utmost to visit now and then, with, as I recall _The Book of Job_, a curious similarity to Satan's coming among the sons of God, "from going to and fro in the earth and walking up and down in it." Pan, also, that unexplainedly dreadful and lonely wanderer, was the divine outcast. In the one existent story, that of Psyche, wherein Pan was represented as having any even very remote dealing with the other gods, his part was to aid a mortal against them. Pan, alone of the gods, had abandoned, and at a pinch sided against, Heaven. And that might well be the reason why the romantic artist had cherished him.

That perhaps was why Pan had become for romanticists the Master. That might be why, when Olympos crumbled, romanticists had set between those ungainly horns the pentagram; had caused this hairy brown body to burgeon with scales and feathers; had given to the most virile of the gods the breasts of a woman; and had kindled in his honor the moons of Chesed and Geburah. The goat god had thus, alone of the Olympians, endured. He endured as Baphomet, as Azazel, as Janicot, as Eblis; as the Master of the Gnostics, the Master of the Sabbath, the Master of the Two Moons, moons which had, here again, their minions....

I shall not, in this place, speak at any length of what the prosaic perhaps do well to regard as bedlamite nonsense: here I shall only indicate from afar the mystery I could not ignore. For I knew that the romantic had whispered of two scapegoats, of Christ and Pan, the saviors severally of religion and of art: the one dying in atonement for human sin, in the manner of the stainless beast which was sacrificed in the Temple; the other serving men in the manner of that other beast, not necessarily immaculate, which was loaded with the sins of the twelve tribes, and driven out of the Temple forever, as one consecrated not to death but to life, and condemned not to rest but to the exile's freedom, in those desert places which belonged to Pan-Azazel. For it is recorded--where we would least look for it, even in our English Bible,[4]--that the Lord of Sabaoth commanded such sacrifice and such honor be divided between Himself and the goat god, as equals share. And it is recorded too, in the sacred lore of the Moslems, that to the Master of the Two Moons, and to that especial manifesting of Pan which the East called Eblis, was relinquished by Heaven--through a compact such as, once again, is made by equals,--the overlordship of all loneliness, of wine, of verse and song and rhetoric, and of all the arts. You will perceive this is, very exactly, the heritage of the creating romantic....

Well! thus Christ had His servitors, whose reward was to be, by and by, in a land fulfilled with the glory of the Sun, eternal rest: and Pan, the Master of the Two Moons, had mustered likewise his minions, whose reward was their work. By these exceedingly diverse saviors, I knew, had been evolved the magic of the sanctuary and of the wilderness, the white magic and another magic rather less candid. So had arisen the messiahs who led men severally to hope for contentment to come, or to create contentment, somehow, even in this unsatisfying life and moment.... Pan was, in fine, the god who had looked upon the divine handiwork, and seen that it was not good; or, at any rate, not good enough. The creating romanticist had always hoped that somewhere must at least one such clear-sighted god exist; and, finding him, had worshipped appropriately....

And so I got my clue, and esteemed it, upon the whole, unwelcome.

For I saw that the one feature common to all the great mythic figures over whose deathlessness I had been puzzling, was that each was a divine and unrepentant outcast, that each one of them was a rebel who had gained famousness by warring in one way or another against Heaven. And that might be, I felt uncomfortably, just what had made them to all creative artists irresistible. Here well might lurk, for so long unapprehended by me, another and more lurid instance of art's need to make sport with piety; here revealed in art's unfaltering endeavor to glorify not merely the rogue but the rebel. Once the discovery might have pleased me. But nowadays, rebellion in any form really does seem rather unurbane and almost certainly futile: and very much as penitent Villon turned monk, or as the wild Highlanders ceased to rebel after the Stuarts lost in 'Forty-five, so have I found the same numeral to be remarkably sedative.

Nevertheless, at the bottom of his heart, the romantic artist, I knew, has not ever been in harmony with Providence and this world's Demiurge. He has not ever honestly believed, as I recall the dicta of John Charteris, that this world reflected credit upon its Maker. And so, toward offenders against this divine ordering the artist might well incline with unavoidable, unreasoning and, I preferred to think, unconscious sympathy.

§ 35

Certainly, of the myths I have named, all save two deal with protagonists who are condemned perforce to struggle against, and who contrive to thwart, inimical gods, as did Andromeda and Odysseus; or who rebel with the volition and candor of Satan and Tannhäuser and Prometheus. But the myths of the Sphinx and of Queen Helen rest upon other bases of impiety.... Helen, indeed, stands pedestalled above the bickerings of mere gods.... And to the romantic the Sphinx has never really been that offensively feeble-minded monster who molested Œdipus with a conundrum so inane as to result, quite properly, in the death of its perpetrator. Instead, the Sphinx has become, for the romantic, the one being who foreknows the answer to all riddles and the outcome of all experience. And because of this foreknowledge, obviously denied to demiurgically experimenting gods, the Sphinx does nothing.... This dreadful certitude, equally male and female, as was Baphomet and as was the veiled Lord of Mommur, this quietness that is equally a beast of the field and an unslayable immortal, this very large and pitiless felinity, lies waiting; and waits in blasphemous and perturbingly untroubled ease. The years pass; pious nations come into being and high power and pass; heaven is no longer great enough to contain a catalogue of the gods that have reigned in heaven: the Sphinx, men say, has never stirred. For the Sphinx waits. All the august doings of Olympos and Sinai and Valhalla have been witnessed by the Sphinx: and the most favorable interpreting of that changeless face is, upon the whole, to hope it wears the provisional smile we bend toward the playing of not yet unbearable children. And therein lies the impiety of the waiting Sphinx, in this amused deep comprehension that there is no need to rebel against our gods.... For the Sphinx is immortal: and the secret of the Sphinx, men say, is that secret which the harried gods strive desperately to surmise: the Sphinx knows why no god may ever hope to be immortal.

§ 36

Yes: all these so inexplicably popular myths commemorate a rebel against Heaven's orderings. Each myth, in one fashion or another, adopts the true Byronic posture of looking the Omnipotent in the face and imparting to Him the, upon the whole unstartling, information that His evil is not good. And that--where every dictum is perforce an hypothesis,--that well may be why these especial myths, rather than others, overruled the art of yesterday; and why upon us is yet laid their mastery, from which the spiritual descendants of us who are minions of the moon shall not escape.

No matter into what sort of world this planet develops, through howsoever laudable a magic-working of social and mechanical and hygienic improvements, that future also belongs to these inscrutable immortals. Into that world, however handsomely it all be changed by new inventions and fresh fallacies, I think, they will come as conquerors.

First will come Helen. I mean that Helen who was verily at Troy. For the wife of Menelaus, we know, did not ever come to this city: and Philostratus tells us how the whole truth as to the Greeks' crusade, in the high cause of outraged morality, was revealed by Achilles' ghost to Apollonius of Tyana. "For a long time we leaders of the Achæans were deceived and tricked into fighting battles in Helen's behalf, through our belief that she was in Ilium; whereas she really was living in Egypt, in the house of Proteus, whither through the device of Zeus she had been snatched away from Paris. But when we became convinced of this, we continued fighting to win Troy itself and the riches of Troy and the power these riches would give to us, proclaiming that this empire must be destroyed in order that the world might be made safe for democracy." And from Egypt Helen's husband--if that at all matters,--duly retrieved her on his way homeward when the warring was done.