THE AUTHOR OF JURGEN
"As to the book of the Laws composed by him, what good have they done us? And yet he ought (as Lycurgus did the Lacedæmonians, and as Solon did the Athenians, and Zaleucus the Thurians), if they were excellent, to have persuaded some to adopt them. How, then, can we consider Plato's conduct anything but ridiculous?—since he appears to have written his laws, not for men who have any real existence, but rather for a set of persons invented by him."
"As to the book of the Laws composed by him, what good have they done us? And yet he ought (as Lycurgus did the Lacedæmonians, and as Solon did the Athenians, and Zaleucus the Thurians), if they were excellent, to have persuaded some to adopt them. How, then, can we consider Plato's conduct anything but ridiculous?—since he appears to have written his laws, not for men who have any real existence, but rather for a set of persons invented by him."
The Author of Jurgen
§ 1
"Butthis is grossly unfair!" John Charteris complained. "All these long years you have been promising to write a book about me. And now, it seems, I am to remain forever a minor character."
"Well—!" I admitted.
"And why, pray?"
"Well—!" I explained: and I went on, "I mean, of course, that is, after I had given the matter real consideration—" Then I summed it all up even more completely. "But, come now, Charteris! you, as a writer yourself, know how these submitted notions by and by come back from the cellar of what we—well, as one might say, fraudulently—term the subconscious; and come back either transmuted into something quite different or else marked Not Available for Our Present Needs."
He shook his head. "In the fidgeting face of such tergiversation I can but observe that, really, of allthings! For, when one considers the persons whom you have elected to give a whole book to, civility must seek refuge in aposiopesis. Me, look you, me, you have passed over in favor of a moonstruck Kennaston and of that fat little Woods widow!"
"The Author," I pleaded, "does not customarily explain why he elects to do anything."
"None the less, I am sure I would have made a most remunerative protagonist. My inconsistencies are amusing: my whimsies, although decorous, are flavorsome: my morals are, if not exactly beyond reproach—"
"Beyond hope, anyway," I suggested.
"—And, in short, I am inclined to think that, here again, the Author does not quite understand just what he is about."
"Upon my word," said I, "you touch a truth—"
"Each has his métier," the little man admitted, modestly. "The flea leaps well, most senators carry their liquor well, whereas the clergy, one deduces from the numerousness of their children—"
§ 2
"I mean," I interrupted, "that once you talked to me all through one fine spring night. It was about Romance you talked—"
"I remember," Charteris stated, with a grin. "Ican well remember how, in that terrible dawn, after all my lovely rhetoric, you thought I had been explaining how books ought to be written."
"Well, I do not think that now. I incline, rather, to think you were talking about man's attitude toward life and the universe. I am sure, though, that in all your speaking of books you left unsettled the question you raised a moment since, as to what the Author is about? For what reason, in fine, and with what reward in view, does any author write his books?"
"I voiced for you most plainly and mellifluously the principles of his economy—"
"Yes: I remember your high observations as to Villon and Marlowe. The artist, you argued, is unwilling to be wasted; and he alone manages—sometimes—to perpetuate himself where everybody else perishes. You were quite eloquent about the artist's immortality. Only, I remember too that, toward the end, you admitted a considerable distinction. In art, you cried, it may so happen that the thing which a man makes may endure to be misunderstood and gabbled over, but it is not the man himself. We retain—I am still paying you the handsome tribute of exact quotation,—we retain theIliad, but oblivion has swallowed Homer so deep that many question if he ever existed at all."
Charteris replied with something of the hastyaffability appropriate to dealings with the insane. "Now, my dear man! the whole point was that the artist strives to make something which endures—"
"I know! You explained what he attempts to do: but you did not explain why he should want to do it. You did not explain what he gets out of it,—beyond suggesting, and then retracting the suggestion, that he aspires to a sort of terrestrial immortality. No, Charteris, you explained, in fine, nearly everything connected with books except why an author writes them."
He deliberated this. He said: "Oh, but I must have made that plain. I can most vividly remember elucidating every bit of the universe, and that rather important detail could not well have been ignored."
"Ignored or not, you left it unexplained."
And promptly Charteris settled back in his chair, intent to remedy this omission.
"The author, then, very much as I did, will under provocation become magniloquent, and will say this, that and the other. But every author's real reason for writing is that, if he did not write, he would be bored to death. He writes because—"
Here I stopped him. "No, Charteris! You are too fond of juggling phrases with no better end in view than to get pleasure from your own dexterity. And I happen to be in earnest. Some twenty years and more, you conceive, I have given over, togetherwith health and eyesight, to the writing of the Biography: and I am nowadays, however late in the game, quite honestly and not unnaturally concerned to find out why."
"So, then! at last, you sympathize with your reviewers!"
"It was well enough, in the beginning," I went on, "to listen to your Economist theories: and while you talked I could believe in them, almost. Your verbal jugglery, I do not question, would still have that effect. But the moment you have done talking, I can but come back to the blunt truth, unwillingly: the artist cannot ever by making a statue or a painting or a book—no matter how long the thing made may last,—immortalize himself. He would come a great deal nearer to perpetuating himself by begetting as many children as his natural forces and the frailty of his friends permitted—"
"Ah, the lewd Jurgen touch!" said Charteris, regretfully.
"—And it can in no way concern the artist, either for good or ill," I continued, "that something which he happened to make, endures after he has perished. No doubt, you could explain the contradiction in your argument: you slightly married men have learned how to explain everything. But, after all, this is an affair in which I want my own notions, not yours."
§ 3
"Let me have just one other book to live and talk in," Charteris said, "and I will explain the scope and aim of novel writing with such a grace and loveliness as never was! My notions have a freer wing than yours: and if you are obstinate about this, you will be encountering by and by that statement in the public prints. 'The author has here vainly endeavored to recapture the charm of his earlierBeyond Life, and when he speaks in his own person is by no means so amusing.' That, I forewarn you, will be the unanimous verdict."
"I do not altogether aim at being amusing. I want, rather, to wind up affairs by contriving an epilogue for the Biography."
He regarded me for some while: and I do not know how to indicate his kindly and rather commiserating pensiveness.
Presently he said: "But I forewarn you, too, that nobody is ever going to recognise the Biography as an actual fact. You may pretend to yourself, if you like, that all your writing is of this one human life reincarnated over and over again, in the flesh of Manuel's various descendants, and endlessly performing the same rôle in what is, at bottom, always the same comedy. The nearest anyone will ever come to agreement with you is to admit that youhave wasted time and pains in patching up a sort of genealogy; and that your books, in fact, are—if you think it a merit,—rather monotonously the same, because you are unable to draw any figure other than yourself in a more or less transparent masquerade."
"The charge of monotony—in that word's primal sense, which you might with profit look up in the dictionary,—I acknowledge, and even glory in. For, as you say, it is perhaps the main point of the Biography that it—and human life—present for all practical purposes the same comedy over and over again with each new generation."
"Ecclesiastes, I believe, commented on the same phenomenon. Still, if you want people to read more than one of your books—"
"Not my books," I amended, "but my one book, which is the Biography, and of which my various publications are chapters."
Charteris shrugged. "My dear fellow! I, in common with the remainder of mankind, refuse to admit the possibility of anybody's writing a book in nineteen volumes. It simply is not done."
"But," he was told, with stubborn modesty, "but I have done it. Anyhow, fifteen volumes—"
"Oh, no: you have merely written fifteen books. That is a quite different affair, which anyone could manage, given pen and ink and time and a sufficientlack of consideration for one's fellows. The connection of these various books, I can assure you, is either forced or imagined: otherwise, they would be an affront to the rest of us."
"Of course," I conceded, a bit mollified, "of course, if you are putting the Biography upon a basis with Sir Thomas Browne's Relations Whose Truth We Fear—"
"I am putting, to the contrary, the author of the Biography," said Charteris, "into a phrase."
"And that phrase is—?"
Charteris grinned. "The author ofJurgen."
"I begin already," I commented, "to dislike that phrase—"
"Nevertheless, you need never look to find yourself regarded as anything save the author ofJurgenand, just incidentally, of some other books. There, after all, my friend, the Tumble-bug has scored: and nobody, for the rest of your lifetime, will you ever hear speak of those other books except, more or less politely, to find fault with their likeness or their unlikeness toJurgen. Either quality, as you perhaps have learned already, is equally to be deplored and shrugged over."
"As the subscriber to a clipping bureau," I admitted, "I have noticed the fact rather unavoidably. Any likeness toJurgenis the tiresome reworking ofan exhausted vein: but any difference fromJurgenproves my exhausted abilities."
Again beneath his moustache his teeth showed. "So you remain, you see, the author ofJurgen."
"Scott," I replied, "wroteThe Antiquary; and Thackeray wroteHenry Esmond; and Dickens wroteOur Mutual Friend: yet people even to-day continue to think of them as the authors, severally, ofIvanhoeandVanity FairandPickwick Papers. So I suppose that nothing can be done about it."
Charteris regarded me for a lengthened while. "I see: you have become stoically reconciled to having posterity go on thinking of you, for century after century, as merely the author ofJurgen."
It may be that I flushed. "But, Charteris, I never said—"
And now his shoulders went up. "My dear man! as if you had to!"
§ 4
"Yet, in this epilogue at least," John Charteris went on, "you may, as it happens by rare good luck, hope to avoid the ephemeral—"
"Not utterly," I dissented. "In literary fields there are always so many May-flies about—But then, Charteris, I had thought to add footnotes which would explain all such allusions—"
"As may be incomprehensible to your readers ofa few hundred years hence? I see. Such carefulness must be granted to display a kindly heart, in an illuminating blaze of self-complacency. But I was in train to suggest, my friend, that you might avoid the ephemeral by rather different methods."
"As how?" I asked.
"By listening," replied Charteris, "to me, while I discourse of eternal verities. This happens to be one of my loquacious afternoons—"
And here I raised my hand, in utterly unheeded protest.
"—For you inform me that you need for this debatable Biography," John Charteris continued, "an epilogue,—which of course ought to be spoken by the same person who afforded the prologue. Well, I shall overlook your crass misrepresentation of me in that prologue, which you so ill-advisedly calledBeyond Life. You will remember how many 'spiritualists' turned to it with fervor, and away from it with disgust? I, none the less, forgive: and off-hand, I would say—"
"No, Charteris! No, for I must myself contrive this epilogue—"
"But, dear man, I have it already complete, to the last paradox. It is in my mind now, hastening to the tip of my tongue—"
"No, Charteris, I will not hear you!"
"—Art, just as Schiller long ago perceived, is anoutcome of the human impulse to play, and to avoid tedium by using up such vigor as stays unemployed by the necessities of earning a living. The artist is life's playboy. The artist, to avert the threats of boredom, rather desperately makes sport with the universe—"
"It is a universe you are quitting—"
"—For, as you of course perceive, the literary artist plays: he does nothing else, except with haste and grudgingly: and the sole end of his endeavor is to divert himself—"
But I had shaped the Parting Sign of Ageus, which is interpreted variously, but whose efficacy does not vary....
§ 5
I hated thus to despatch the little fellow, after we had played together for all of twenty-two years. Besides, his going was not alone. A great many others, I suspected, departed with him: and I fancied that if, rising, I now looked out of the library window as far as the Mill Road, I might see yonder,—passing now away from me, now that our commerce was over, and travelling in motley companionship through the gray spring weather,—all the various men and women whose lives I had fashioned for me to play with in my books. Heaven only knew, if Heaven imprudently concerned itself with suchmatters, how many hundreds of them there must be....
And now they were all gone, I turned to the task of getting down upon paper my notions as to the aims of my writing, and some explanation as to what I had been about during the years which I had given over to the compiling of the Biography of Dom Manuel's life. For the task approached completion: or, rather, the game drew toward its end; and that ending might well be the appropriate season for me to sit out, irrevocably, while the others played on.
However! once the Biography was really done, and once the volumes as yet accessible nowhere save in, as went my resources, that almost prohibitively priced Intended Edition, when these had been issued uniformly with the rest,—with the Kalki binding, and the usual number of misprints,—then I might or might not want to write something else. Or perhaps before that time came would come death. Time, either way, would settle the upshot without my aid. Meanwhile I most certainly wanted my epilogue, in the shape of a summing up which would explain, if only to me, just why I had been at pains to write this exceedingly long book,—which all other persons, whether obtusely or whether in self-protection, insisted upon regarding asJurgenand several other books.
§ 6
And somehow, now that, comfortably replete with luncheon, I approach my epilogue, now it is in my mind to make verses rather than to discourse in sober and reasonable prose. But I lack any matter, too, that plainly prompts to versifying. So I somewhat vacantly consider the trees which stand about my library window. At this season they have put off their nakedness, but the green of their leaves has not yet come to its full volume. The leaves are sallow and infrequent. They dapple a luminous gray sky with much the effect of germs seen under a microscope. The grass in the long field beyond is pale and sodden: for I regard all this in a gray shining pause between the heavy spring rains. The world, in preparing to be very beautiful, is for the while disheveled looking: and it suggests to me, without any stepping stones of exact analogy, a handsome woman defamatorily clad in a shabby green dressing-gown, poised before her mirror, with her hair already partially loosened in order that she may prepare for a festival.
It is a fine festival for which the world makes ready. It is a pageant and a banqueting that will feed all the senses, and will last for months, until the white winds of November come, like gaunt janitors, to remove the furniture and decorations. Life everywherewill burgeon and exult, and bear fruit, and wane peacefully.
I mean not only grasses and bushes and trees. There will be a great barking of dogs, and cats also will make the warm night vocal. And birds too will cry out in the night, as if amazed and wistful, and that crying will be very piercingly sweet and, for no reason at all, pathetic. There will be lambs, and foals, and calves, with amateurishly constructed legs. And of course the young people—But I wonder about those young people! There is upon them a bland hard innocence, like the gloss of white china. It is slippery, and it ever so lightly chills. Yet it does seem, essentially, innocence. I recall, with a wealth of ancient instances, that my own generation, where it went unchaperoned, was remarkably unhampered by innocence: and I wonder if my own generation was like this in the presence of our elders? I do not remember; I feel that nobody could hope to remember a thing so far away: and it is in my mind to make verses.
For I remember many other matters that have to do with moonlight and with the touch of young flesh and with a lost consciousness of being fearless and eternal. Music too seems to be woven through the background of my memories, not as a thing quite noticed, but as not ever wholly absent. I remember, in fine, youth: and I know that the glad magic ofyouth was always a promise of whose fulfillment one lived, then, utterly assured: and I suspect that to be old means merely coming to comprehend that this promise has not been, and never will be, kept. Meanwhile I observe it is still the nature of young persons to seek out quiet places in couples, and to evince no distaste for twilight: and I surmise that even those inexplicable automobiles which stand to the side of our country roads at evening and after nightfall have at least two persons inside them. These phenomena also are a portion of the premeditated festival, of that sublimely irrational festival whoseducdamê(as Jaques in the play, you will remember, calls that invocation which draws fools into a circle) is still the promise which all, by and by, perceive to stay eternally unfulfilled.
Now it is in my mind to make verses about this festival, but I lack any matter, here again, that plainly prompts to versifying. We older persons must sit out, sit out forever from this especial form of recreation, while others play on. We dare at most to attend as chaperons, and with a smile to observe these junketings: for Time, that stern old Roman, states outright (in of course his native tongue),Lusisti satis!
I do not say that we have not equally important things to do, in our traffic with affairs of the mind: I would not assert our utter readiness, as yet, for thescrap-heap and the graven tributes of the stone-mason. I merely note that we are but, at best, the chaperons at this festival for which the April world is preparing. So we must look on benevolently, and must preserve decorum, and also must not ever concede what urge it is that prompts this festival.... Still, it is in my mind to make verses....
§ 7
There is, though, I reflect, than this knack of sitting out at the right moment, and without sulkiness, from avocations for which the unfriendly years disqualify you, no finer, no more beneficent, and no more difficult art. To some, indeed, mere sitting out does not appear quite adequate: and there is much to be said for the contention that the key to real success in living is to die soon enough. Yet this is an un-American accomplishment: even our leaders rarely show the masterly tact of Lincoln; and the result is that most depressing list which begins with Benedict Arnold, continues with William Jennings Bryan and Aaron Burr, and so passes calamitously through the alphabet to Woodrow Wilson. There is no one of these transient inheritors of glory but has, through a mere faux-pas in longevity, impaired his chance of retaining eternal admiration and applause.
The writer, though, I think, is over-precipitate in dying at a day less than eighty. By that time he, with steadily failing faculties, will have published a deal of insufferable twaddle: but by that time, too, his name may well have become familiar to a fair number of ponderable and unliterary persons; and the excellence of his writing may be everywhere conceded as the obvious polite alternative to reading it. He has become in the cultural vista a known, not necessarily majestic, feature: he has won, in fine, to that certain undeniable assured position which no American artist anywhere can hope to secure except by prolonged survival of his talents. Longevity, indeed, is with us the one auctorial accomplishment which intelligent people can honestly esteem: we tend to share a generous national pride in all gifted persons who have painstakingly attained to our common level through the discomforts of senile decay. Time thus induces us to cherish our Longfellows and Bryants, and even to tolerate our Whitmans: it enables our Joseph Jeffersons to earn a competence upon the stage as soon as they have grown too feeble to act: and it has also persuaded us, through just this self-same sympathetic desire to gladden the last years of every striking case of mental indigence, to establish and stock our American Academy of Arts and Letters.
So I must certainly endeavor to live as long asmay prove possible. Even if I may not hope ever to be anything more than—in the phrase not utterly peculiar to John Charteris,—"the author ofJurgen," there may be compensations by and by. And in fact, I turn here to thinking, with a pleasant warm thrill, about Mencken's prediction that, if I live to be eighty, I too may be elected to the American Academy....
§ 8
None the less, now that I approach completion of the Biography, this may well be the time to sit out from the most high and joyous game of writing. The young are not merely at the door, they are in all the advertising columns devoted to the season's literary masterpieces, and behind most of the editorial desks. I, who was but four years ago a dangerous revolutionary upstart, begin, even among editors and publishers, to be treated with something of the gingerly respect with which one handles antique glassware or a veteran of the War Between the States. Among the really "vital" writers, still in strenuous practise of their lack of art, "the old fellow who wroteJurgen" is relegated at best to the Middle or, as they playfully call it, the Muddle generation in American Letters; and I am become a relic vaguely associable with bicycles and hansom-cabsand cigar-store Indians and cast-iron deer, and other coeval items of extinct Americana.
So it may well be time, once the Biography is quite complete, for me to sit out from the game of writing, and to make sport with words no more. AndLusisti satishas a dreary sound, at the first hearing: yet I do not know but that it is, in reality, the aptly worded praise of attested wisdom. "You have played enough!" I shall take it to mean that I have not stinted myself at playing, that I have got out of the writing all the diversion which is allowable.
For I begin to see fine implications in John Charteris' parting statement that the artist labors primarily, even solely, to divert himself. Whatever Schiller may have said remains to me unknown: but I find this theory, of art as play, in notoriously good standing elsewhere, among many; and I find, too, by the light of experience, a great deal in this notion that the artist—or, at least, the artist who happens to be a novelist,—is life's half-frightened playboy....