Part 9
So it becomes the part of wisdom to waive these mundane riddles, and to consider instead the justice of Coignard's fine epitaph, wherein we read that "living without worldly honors, he earned for himself eternal glory." The statement may (with St. Peter keeping the gate) have been challenged in paradise; but in literature at all events, the unhonored life of Jérôme Coignard has clothed him with glory of tolerably longeval looking texture. It is true that this might also be said of Iago and Tartuffe, but then we have Balzac's word for it that merely to be celebrated is not enough. Rather is the highest human desideratum twofold,--_D'être célebré et d'être aimé._ And that much Coignard promises to be for a long while.
§ 50
The thoughts of M. Jérôme Coignard, then,--here somewhat to retrace my argument,--untiringly return to the most diverting of all themes, to the relationship between God and His children, and what familiary etiquette seems most adapt to keep that relationship an affable one. I know that religion is, just now, rather out-of-date. I know that nowadays a great deal of atheism is going about among the foolish and unreflective. But we may wiseliest, I am sure, put out of mind the notion of there being no God, and of the dead finding beyond the black door at the end of the gray corridor, that silver-handled door which is the sole exit from our workaday existence, nothing whatever. Even if one would, upon the whole, prefer to find there nothing, here it remains, in every sense, a rather wasteful parade of agnosticism to admit the existence of nothing.
It is wasteful because no diversion is to be had of thinking about nothing. But any amount of diversion can be gained from meditation upon the strange realms beyond the tomb for which we may, quite conceivably, all be en route: for in this place also is the proffered lure that ageless aspiration toward lands which are in nothing familiar.
These conjectural kingdoms were, of course, the earliest chosen subject matter for poetic adornment everywhere: poets were, of course, the first to guess at what it would be most interesting to find beyond the black door: and every ancient religion, again, of course, grew up from people indulging in the two habits, now equally antique, of reciting poetry and of taking it seriously. They had at least the excuse that this poetry was magnificent, because in surveying and populating these post mortem countries the creating romanticist has displayed his most imposing reach of power.... Here he, indeed, has need of power: for he is here intent to make sport with his third great opponent, and to play with death; intent to bereave the tyrant of all terribleness, intent to color roseately the dreadful face of doom, intent to detect in the skeleton's multidentate grinning a smile of reassurance. He has done this, handsomely.
--Though, to be sure, these promised paradises are fugacious: over and over again has the Scriptural prophecy been fulfilled as to the heavens being rolled up like a scroll, and one by one the heavens pass away with no greater noise than is made by the staid commentaries of ethnologists. For a winter that will have no ending has oppressed the blissful fields of Aälu: the proud castle of Nin-kigal is pulled down, its seven gates are fallen away into dust; and only pedants now and then recall the lion-guarded golden thrones whereon sat crowned, and endowed with eternal youth, the chief ones and the sages of Babylon. Manannan holds court no more in Emhain. Instead, he amicably shares his somewhat lowlier estate in nothingness with Oannes and Ahura-Mazda; for all of these well know to-day that all promised paradises are fugacious.... Nor may the noblest of heroes any longer win to Xisuthros and that most lovely, nameless land, "at the mouth of the rivers," wherein contentment had no wasting away under the nibbling of time, and human grief was like the fragment of some word in a torn manuscript written in a language which no man any more remembers. The white vase of Thoth is broken, also: he has no need of it to-day, he has desisted from the weighing and the taxing of ghostly imports, now that the narrow bridge which led across the abyss to Sraosha's thousand-pillared palace upon Demavend, has for some while been closed to traffic. For these promised paradises are really very fugacious.... So the carved and shining house of E-Sagila is decayed; and Olympos may not claim to oversee and rule the doings of gods and men from a rather modest official altitude of 9,754 feet. Only the professorial in quest of solar myths now care to thrust and poke, like rag-pickers, among the dust-heaps that were Gimli and Audlang and Vidblain: and time strips every paradise alike of its delights and its believers. Yet, at forty-five, one does not really marvel at the flying of felicity anywhence. And so it seems a stranger pillagement that all the hells, which once were the fine thriving homes of bale and anguish, have been by time's dilapidation bereft of every little discomfort. For the ice of Nifleheim is melted: the dreadful flames of Tartarus have spluttered out like damp firecrackers: even Aratu, wherein reigned mere oblivion, has been swallowed by oblivion.... Poets build against eternity sometimes in dealing with trifles; but never in erecting the eternal homes of men.
Meanwhile it is most gratifying to reflect that, while they lasted, the glories and the terrors of all this celestial architecture divertingly filled many lives with spiritual consolation and salutary dread; have checked extravagance in the way of bloodletting or of chastity or of whatever at the time was vice; have heartened the devout to eat their parents or to burn infidels or to give alms, or to do whatever else at the time was virtue; and have evolved their countless hierarchies of saints and holy persons. Here is no room for irony. Nuns, doubtless, have assumed the veil and entered convents in a religious exaltation as lofty as that with which the virgins of Assyria put on the crown of little cords and went to the temple of Mylitta and their first communion with the first amorous male passer-by. Yet, to uphold the splendors of the paradise of Mohammed his Mussulmans have waged religious wars with a malignity not often surpassed by the servitors of Christ: and Solomon may well have gazed upon the completed Temple, and have beheld the ark of the covenant of the Lord brought in unto the most holy place under the wings of the cherubim, in very much that pious joy with which, from high Tenochtitlan, rapt priests looked down upon the slowly advancing line, two stately miles in length, of warriors who ascended to disembowelment upon the jasper altar of Huitzilopochtli. In fine, these hells and paradises, the while that their bright evanescence lasted, have provided employment, and support, and recreation, and exalted sentiments to boot, for innumerable millions.
Even so, in populating these worlds, the romanticist has been tardy ever to imagine the gods as other than sinister and, as a rule, detestable beings. You see, the creature stays incurably logical, he is as faithful to logic as was Florian de Puysange in the old story, and he reasons from effect to cause. The romanticist has thus from the first been unable to conceive of this world, which he found, upon the whole, abominable, as being the creation of any other sort of Demiurge, or as being ruled by any other sort of overlords. In all heathen theogonies heaven is thus the home of every pravity in the way of lust and greed, of deceit and cruelty and plain childishness; and looms as a mysteriously splendid court of rogues and paphians presided over by a supreme tyrant, who is also a master-rogue. This formula was, very gradually, improved upon by Hebraic poets, who in particular recolored all anaphrodisiacally: so that the Old Testament presents, by and large, a rather novel and a more strait-laced notion of the Demiurge and his immediate entourage; with only here and there, in passages about the sons of God and the daughters of men, and more embarrassingly in the stories of Eve and Sarah, the unedited, unexpurgated, unrecolored legend of divine amours left, to consideration, apparent.
§ 51
But about the Jahveh-Elohim of the Old Testament, who remains by tacit admission the God the Father of the New Testament, I really prefer here not to speak at all. I find it far too difficult to resist an unfair bias in the favor of any target of so many assaults. For His present embarrassment is not merely that Colonel William Jennings Bryan[7] and the Reverend William Ashley Sunday[8] have ruthlessly united to compromise Him with their praise: even the state legislators of Tennessee and Oklahoma, and Florida, have officially endorsed Him in His difference of opinion with Charles Darwin, and rest vociferant in Zion.... Outside, is a troubling babblement about tribal deities and Babylonian myths, and a rather distressing tendency to discuss the birth of Christ from Joseph's point of view. Meanwhile the ordained and inescapable clergy are at pains to suggest that in His official revelations the Lord God of Sabaoth, like the dear, queer, overmodest old fellow He is, has branded Himself with uncommitted atrocities; and in their denials of any really grave wrong-doing, commend Him in terms as high as were, from any pulpit, ever applied to a prohibition agent detected in embezzlement. And meanwhile too, among the advanced young, there is much superior sniffing at His bloodthirstiness and variability of mind, at Jonah's great fish and the bears of Elisha, at Noah's raven and Adam's rib. And I find it droll to reflect that the deity who was everywhere trusted and worshipped in my youth is to-day as little regarded as Jupiter Stator or Marduk of the Bright Glance.
And to me His downfall seems in some ways rather sad. For, as I recall it, He was not thought of as being particularly cruel and dreadful--any longer. And the Old Testament was accepted in its entirety and without any especial difficulty in the Virginia of that day, wherein almost all other generally respected elderly gentlemen had been, as a matter of public knowledge, rather wild in their youth.... As I recall it, there was a prevalent feeling that God had some while since settled down, in very much the manner of your grandfather; and that the Amalekites and the Hittites and all those other demolished persons were in some way connected with the hundreds of Yankee soldiers whom, for equally inexplicable but assuredly good causes, your grandfather had killed so long before you were born. Thus there was no large difficulty about our Episcopalian Jehovah, and really no terribleness....
And I sometimes incline to question if this god--with wild oats undeniably sown and harvested in the past, but with a prevailing disposition nowadays to be agreeable, subject always to His not having been of late upset by one or another mysterious grown-up affair,--was not, after all, the most plausible sort of demiurge I have yet heard of. He still seems to me the likeliest creator, upon the whole, to have fashioned, it may be in some moment of youthful indiscretion and effusion, such as elsewhere had resulted in people having mulatto cousins, the wholly incomprehensible world we live in.... And essentially, I find, I still believe in Him, with a faith that undermines and goes deeper than mere reason because it was developed in me earlier. During thunderstorms this faith assumes especial vigor: and while I do not presume to think all this terrific display was got up solely for my benefit, the notion most certainly does flicker about me, livid and troubling, that while He has this storm in hand, and is actually passing my way, it might appear to Him mere thriftiness to use a thunderbolt in the old, practical, explicit manner. So I do not quite heartily enjoy the beauty of a thunderstorm.... But the point is that this demiurge also conformed to the great general rule. The point is that men have not ever, at any time, pictured the benevolence of their gods and creators as being anything like a good risk; and that no mythology has ever told of such gods as would in strict logic seem apt to be foreplanning a pleasant future for anybody.
None the less, here also, men have very manfully forced that slippery shirk optimism to help out with logic's work. And so have men always been assured that these overlords would by and by arrange everything satisfactorily; and that the door at the far end of the corridor opened, when you also had done with alcoves, and when you also had perforce passed through, upon one or another delightful vista. The fact has been divinely revealed, or in any event has the authentic Ingoldsbean support of one or another leading citizen who "well remembers to have heard his grandmother say that 'Somebody told her so.'" ... And men have preferred to accept the revelation rather than to recollect that, by all current accounts, the deity accredited with this revelation is not elsewhere remarkable for truthful dealings. Men have, out of so many thousand years of speculation, contrived no surer creed than Coignard's creed, that "in matters of faith it is necessary to believe blindly." Men have discovered no firmer hope than that, in defiance of all logic and of all human experience, something very pleasant may still be impending, in--need I say?--bright lands which are in nothing familiar.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 5: John S. (Sexton?) Sumner; other authorities state that Sex was his middle name; secretary of the then notorious New York State Society for the Suppression of Vice.]
[Footnote 6: Archæologist of the period. Mencken has several mentions of him.]
[Footnote 7: Of the Third Nebraska Volunteer Infantry.]
[Footnote 8: Itinerant clergyman of the day, who preached a species of Christianity.]
VI
ROMANTICS ABOUT THEM
"He has more authorities than those whose names he has given. These are, however, a few: Alcmæon of Crotona; Dionysius of Apollonia; Herodorus of Heracleum in Pontus, the father of Bryson the sophist; Ctesias of Cnidos; Herodotus of Halicarnassus; Syennesis of Cyprus; Polybus; Democritus of Abdera; Anaxagoras of Clazomene; Empedocles of Sicily; and many more which do not just now occur to my memory."
_6._
_Romantics About Them_
§ 52
The literary artist plays, I repeated, with death. But I had not meant only in a religious way: I had not meant merely that the artist lovingly carves the beads, and polishes the rhetoric of the prayer-books, with which not merely the aged delight to play in turn. And I had not meant, either, to dwell so long upon orthodox religious diversions, since reputable religion is of necessity, like any other popular fashion, an ever-varying unstable affair.
One sect alone--made up of true believers in the everywhere underlying, and the really religious principle, as I interpreted it, of the Biography,--seemed not ever to have varied in its faith. I was thinking of the immodest, impotent, and internecine sect of literary artists. And I could, I believed, best indicate the two main tenets of the literary artist's religion by a rather roundabout approach.
§ 53
For chance, no great while earlier, had condemned me to sit by and listen to a pair of notably successful authors in what, at that time, had seemed a preposterous talk. This talk, a little, troubles memory even now.... For they were not at all heeding me. These two when they forgather effuse a naïve effect of emperors meeting, incognito and with a relished casting off of formality, in a world of underlings. Each one of them is, in fact, too fair a judge of literature to depreciate in anything an admirable book on account of his own name being upon the title-page: and if these two endure each other excellently, it is because each loyally esteems the other to be the next to the most wondrous of American writers, and affects some modest reticence as to the first choice.
The scene was the library of one of them, the period after dinner. The visiting author had but now looked up from where his polychromatic volumes were gaily marshalled (with a perhaps not unpremeditated conspicuousness) toward a shelf across the way, a shelf whereon the host's own books more sombrely convened. The two men had, I repeat, quite recently eaten and had drunk with some thoroughness. They were replete and a bit drowsy. All earthly worries and obligations stood for the moment aloof. Both men had reached their later forties; both were done alike with actual fervors and with real self-distrust; and each, I am certain, is assured, in his private meditations, of a tolerably permanent sort of fame.
"We," said the visitor, the while that he, reflectively, thus looked from the backbones of the one set of books to those of the other, "we have been lucky."
"I wonder?" said the host....
"Yes," stated the first and (upon the whole) the fatter of the two speakers, "for we have got what we wanted, without paying the full price. We might have been poor Dowson or Villon, you know--"
"Or any other of the mighty poets in their misery and customary attics dead? I always wondered how they managed to stuff the broken window pane with a pair of trousers, though--"
But the visitor was talking unfrivolously. "Yes, the world's full of talent. Talent is nothing. Genius is nothing. These congenital amateurs who have nothing but genius give me a pain." He specified the corporal location of this pain. He continued: "It is the getting what you want that counts. And we have got a great deal--"
"I grant it: we belong, we also, to the race of go-getters. But then the bargain, I suspect, was for cash payment."
Now for an instant, through the two pairs of big round spectacles, as if with the magnified eyes of somewhat torpid insects, the two men were looking each at the other, in a slow sort of shared and unmirthful amusement. They said nothing. Then the visitor went on:
"Yes, we have paid a great deal, too. Still, here at almost fifty we have rather charming homes and bank accounts, and wives that continue to put up with us; and the books are done, quite as we wanted them done. There aren't many of us, you know: not many S.O.B.'s contrive to say that much unsmashed. No: we haven't paid for doing those books the full and usual price. We have slipped by, somehow--"
The other surmised pensively: "You mean, by that big Thing that doesn't approve of our getting our books done? I hadn't guessed He bothers you."
After a request for deific condemnation of the third personal singular neuter pronoun, the visitor stated he meant all the Things. "They don't like us, you know. They're as vicious as the bright young men."
"It _is_ droll, how They seem," the host conceded, "to lurk behind you somewhere, watching, waiting, and--that's the worst,--so able to wait. They don't have, you see, to hurry. But you have to. So, with every book, when I unwrap the advance copies, I always feel, Well, I got that one done, anyway!"
"And we've slipped by Them!"
"So far," the other amended. And he exhibited his fingers crossed.
Whereon the visitor mentioned the infernal regions, with an outbreak of rolling, oleaginous, wholly unreticent laughter. And he said exultantly: "But I'm forty-seven! And sixteen books are done the way I god-damn wanted them done! They can begin on me, now, when They are ready."
The host, however, looked disapproving. "I wish you would be a little more tactful about Them. This is my library, you know. I really, you know, would rather not have anything said here to attract Their particular attention to the place. You see, only next month I am all of forty-nine, and there are one or two other books I want to do here."
Both of these aging romantics seemed quite in earnest....
§ 54
They were talking, I reflected, the most incomprehensible of nonsense. A whit later, though, I believe, I understood these not unpompous and, from some aspects, not utterly underisible nor unpathetic fiction-mongers. For, as I now construe it, they talked of that formidable three with whom the artist plays and makes his troubled sport. They talked,--they also, I believe,--of common-sense and piety and death. And so to these oldsters some slight periphrases seemed called for, since, in their own romanticizing eyes (as I interpret it), they went as rebels under the fitful surveillance of powers that do not deal tenderly with rebels.
They felt themselves to have escaped quite unaccountably, thus far. Besides, at best, you went to each day's typing a bit precariously, having only the stiffening fingers of this undependable middle-aged body to work with, nowadays, in a world wherein, according to the morning paper, your juniors were every day evincing such inconsideration for your natural feelings, by dropping down with apoplexies and heart seizures.... Well, by and by would come the unavoidable, with its concomitant indecent exposure of the partially done book on which you would then be typing. And people, viewing it, would perforce decide that your mind had preceded you in your departure, for people would not comprehend that only in the last revisions could you knit together the loose ends with verbal love-knots. Meanwhile you went about the one thing you, nowadays, knew how to do, typing, always typing, in a continuous tête-à-tête with this indeterminate tapped-out tattoo of ticktocking types and tinklings. For you were intent upon getting a fair copy of what might yet be finished, intent to get down what might yet be permanently phrased, if only They did not strike in time for to-morrow's paper....
Yes, I, upon reflection, seemed to understand those aging romantics' odd air of furtiveness--and the blustering, too.
§ 55