V

CELESTIAL ARCHITECTURE

"To this end, that Scyrian Pherecydes, Pythagoras his Master, broached in the East among the Heathens first the immortality of the Soul, as Trismegistus did in Egypt, with a many of feigned Gods. 'Twas for a politic end and to this purpose the old Poets feigned those Elysian fields, their Æcus, Minos, and Rhadamanthus, their infernal Judges, and those Stygian lakes, fiery Phlegethons, Pluto's kingdom, and variety of torments after death."

Celestial Architecture

§ 44

Theliterary artist plays, I had said, with death. But everybody played with death: it was the one subject not anywhere to be approached except in a spirit of sober superficiality. And I wanted—in at any event this epilogue to the Biography,—to offend the sensibilities of nobody. At forty-five one has become, with no choice in the matter, bourgeois; and has no least desire to épater one's clan.

Here, indeed, it occurred to me that, somewhat farther back, I had referred, without assuming the proper elongation of countenance and a suitably spondaic utterance, to our natural delight in most forms of what we are generally agreed to describe as sin. And I hoped that would not be taken as implying that we can nowhere find more diverting employment than in wrong-doing, and should give over our lives to its practise. For iniquity, in itspleasanter branches, I reflected, is a pursuit in which the young excel. With age, one is adapted only for the less amusing crimes: and so with age one tends, upon the whole, and willy-nilly, to become reasonably virtuous. One tends, one in fact is driven, to seek diversion in the alcoves of thought rather than of action. One begins to toy amorously with ideas, now that age abates the ardor and the equipment for more juvenile recreations.

Of course there were many ideas to play with: so congressmen harped zealously upon morals, with a just half-boastful air of having often heard of them; the clergy averted from instructing Heaven in its painful duty toward Germany, to settle civic affairs and the proper number of feet allowable to an embrace in moving picture films; and among our state justiciary far-reaching codes of literary criticism, not to speak of Clean Book Leagues, were evolved by the distressing discovery that one's daughter was running counter to parental traditions by reading a book.

But hardier spirits would play with the greatest and most diverting of all ideas.... So that, in the outcome, I decided I would not, as I had intended to do, recur to Henry Adams. His thinking hardly aspires, it lacks such elevation as would warrant dwelling upon its modest pinnacles. Besides, there was always the ugly book which Adams wrote aboutJohn Randolph of Roanoke, to shake one's faith in theEducation: once anybody has been at public pains to demonstrate himself an expert at coloring and falsifying the truth about another man, he cannot complain if none regards very trustingly his pretensions to write the truth as to himself. No doubt the prompter to this biographical blackguardism, the notion of standing up for your family name and your great-grandfather's intelligence, was all very well: and here, indeed, I could peculiarly sympathize, since it happened that my own paternal great-grandfather, also, had been aspersed by Randolph with just the same spirited and careful malignity he displayed in his verbal portraits of the Adams "bear and cub." Even so, it seemed to me that the natural impulse to atone by defaming Randolph was more easily understood than justified.

§ 45

In any event, this Henry Adams, too, is everywhere faintly rancid with the taint of Puritanism, and that fact could not but lead me into injustice. Puritanism has many excellent points, which it perhaps employs too much in the manner of the porcupine: yet we Virginians cannot ever quite overcome our feeling that the Puritans are parvenus, deriving from families too recently arrived in this country tobe as yet completely Americanized. We have never, for that matter, learned to think of the Pilgrim Fathers and their descendants as belonging, exactly, to the gentry. And while we do try, at a pinch, to be polite and respectful about their undeniable virtues, the result, somehow, stays a bit unconvincing and condescending.

Besides, I had faced my especial troubles with the Puritan tradition, through the imbroglio incidental to the attempt to suppressJurgen, and through the clinging, undesirable repute thus fastened to that book, and indeed to my books in general. I mildly resent, even now, my need to rest for the remainder of my lifetime under the imputation of being in lack-lustre eyes an "indecent writer." It sounds all very well, and stays, I believe, undeniable, to say that it was only a coterie of the obsessed—obsessed with the mad notion that "decency" is an affair of corporal centrifugality,—who had esteemedJurgenan improper book. But that is, too, upon a par with protesting on a pestered summer night it is only mosquitoes who are annoying you. Those shyster Sanhedrins of tinpot Torquemadas—as Mr. Mencken, you may remember, has for some reason or another not yet called the incorporated supporters of the Puritan tradition in letters,—are, beyond question, made up of peculiarly filthy and senseless little creatures acting after the law of their insecteankind. Yet they are also innumerable and poisonous: and they are blest, too (no doubt in common with the mosquitoes) with sincerity and an approving conscience, in all these assaults of the petty upon that which, however harmless, offends them by being bigger than they are.

But I drift into a discussion of theJurgencase, which, as goes the law, is settled: and all that I really need to say about the indecency ofJurgen, or of the Biography as a whole, and about the baffling literary problem of censorship in general, was said some while ago.

§ 46

For censorship of our reading matter, as I granted even whenJurgenwas yet lying under arrest in Mr. Sumner's[5]cellar, may, in pure theory, be—just possibly—advisable. In practise, though, I can imagine no persons or class of persons qualified to perform this censorship. Speaking here with all, if only, the respect due to the Society for the Suppression of Vice, I must none the less insist there is a difference between pornography and fine literature, if but the difference that everybody enjoys the first where few care one way or the other about the second: and certainly the two should be appraised bydiverse and appropriate standards. A work of art should therefore, in theory, be judged entirely as a work of art, by a jury of practitioners of the art concerned.

Yet, since every self-respecting author at bottom abominates his competitors, despises his inferiors, and is frantically irritated by the writings of those who differ from him in æsthetic canons, such an arrangement would, in practise, only fling open more conspicuous fields wherein to flaunt the mutual spite and miscomprehension common to us creative writers. Besides, it is not difficult to forecast what sort of writers might, and would, be chosen for the judiciary, as representing pre-eminence in letters by the happiest combination of mediocrity and senility. Thus, in the end, an attempt to establish a purely "literary" tribunal would result in setting over American art a death-watch of genial clergymen and decrepit college professors: and I despondently question if their decisions would be a whit less imbecile than the present arbitraments of the Society's hired spies.

It remains, moreover, the defect of every method of legal "suppression" that magistrates and courts of law are unable really to suppress any book. A book, once printed, either suppresses itself or else stays, as things human fare, immortal. And that always appeared to me the very silliest feature of theJurgenimbroglio. Irrespective of any possible legal decision, as I patiently pointed out, over and over again, whenJurgenlodged in Mr. Sumner's cellar, the book existed in a sufficient number of unarrestable copies to place it beyond destruction by anything except its own inherent faults. IfJurgencontained the right constituents it would live; and if it lacked the stuff of longevity it would in due course die: either way, the outcome was to be decided neither by me nor by vice commissioners, nor even by a judge and a grand jury.

Nobody disputed this logic: nobody in fact paid any attention to it.

And as touches my personal share in the publication of an "indecent book calledJurgen"—though, indeed, I hear that a great deal of the Biography is "indecent,"—it is in the end by my book that I must be condemned or justified, rather than by what anyone, including me, may for some while to come elect to say about my book, which is the Biography. So I say nothing. For against the explicit charge of having violated the current morality of 1920, I think, any serious defence would be waste of effort, if only because the question must so soon, and in fact already tends to, become of purely antiquarian interest. Our children may not improve, even from the standpoint of humor, upon our moral standards, but our children will certainly not retain them.When, as must inevitably happen before very long, our present ethical criteria have come to seem as quaint as those of the Druids or the Etruscans, or even as the flyblown and rococo axioms of 1913 appear nowadays, offences against any one of these outmoded codes will hardly be esteemed worth talking about. ShouldJurgenbe remembered ten years hence, it will, through being remembered, be amply exonerated: whereas ifJurgenbe forgotten, the book will then of course be violating nobody's moral sensibility. Time thus lies under bond to silence, whether with praise or with oblivion, every conceivable sort of "moral" aspersion; and willy-nilly I must defer to time.

None the less do I still believe thatJurgenis, as originally labelled, "a book wherein each man will find what his nature enables him to see": and when anyone confesses that he finds therein only "offensiveness, and lasciviousness, and lewdness, and indecency," I must make bold to take the announcement as a less candid summary of the book's nature than of the critic's.

§ 47

What can be done, people very often ask of me, with a flattering if misplaced assumption of my ability to answer,—what can be done toward restraining our present literary saturnalia of prudishness?And I must answer, if at all, with a shrug: for the intelligent here contend against well-meaning and courageous persons who fight for high aims. The most fantastic feature of this droll year-long warring is the profound sincerity of the participants, upon both sides. You and I may know—and welcome, as the saying runs,—that we are in the right so far as goes the unhuman abstraction called rationality. But the officers and backers of the Clean Book League and of the Society for the Suppression of Vice, also, quite honestly believe they are engaged in praiseworthy work when, to cite but two farces from the exhaustless repertoire, they hale Petronius andMademoiselle de Maupininto the police courts.

Indeed they appear inebriated to these antics by much the same real love of virtue which incites a portion of their congeners to burn an unruly negro as a torch to illumine their reprehension of lawlessness; and drives yet others to express their disfavor of intemperance by decreeing that wine is a compound too atrocious to be employed for any purpose except to symbolize the blood of Christ. In the face of so many laudable intentions thus obscurely communicated, we can but deduce, I am afraid, that whenever stupidity and high morals pig together they beget an offspring doubly cursed with zealotry and toxic aphasia. Nor, of course, does it appearquite unblasphemous to contend against these presumably ordained phenomena.

At all events, those who believe the artist has any "rights" are in the negligible minority. I hardly need to explain why the bashaws of such orgiastic societies have embattled back of them the complacent muddle-headedness of that "solid" upper middle-class which pays pew-rent, and which from the first has rather fretfully resented any talk about æsthetics. Dr. Paul E. More,[6]in one of the letters relative to theJurgenimbroglio, has nicely summed up this popular point of view: "I am not at all in sympathy with a group of writers who would take any protest against the Society as a justification of what they are pleased to call art. The harm done by the Society seems to me very slight, whereas the harm done by the self-styled artist may be very great."

Now that is really the popular and, therefore, the most exalted moral attitude. For the morality of a republic is, after all, a matter of elementary arithmetic: and one counts the ballots (sometimes, here and there, it is said, quite honestly) in order to distinguish between right and wrong, because the voice of the people is notoriously the voice of God. And time and again this divine orality has proclaimed that the American peerage of nature's noblemendoes not want to be bothered with any nonsense about literature and art: for the reasons, first, that such fripperies play no part in honest poll-tax-payers' lives; and, second, that in very much the manner of this Dr. More, our reputable citizenry—obscurely and inarticulately, but none the less genuinely,—resents the impudence of "self-styled artists" who presume to know more than their betters about "what they are pleased to call art."

And here, I must protest, our more reputable citizens are wholly in the right. I think they feel, without ever quite perceiving, the innumerous dangers, for the reputable, which lurk in this continual playing with piety and common-sense. The artist, they dimly feel, is up to something which—somehow—threatens them and their security: and in this, I repeat, they are wholly right. If art were not very cruelly restrained it would empoison and wreck all civilizations, not here to speak of reordering heaven. But there is no need to worry, because art, as it happens, is always, and probably always will be, just thus restrained, by the inefficiency of the artist. So art may never ruin America, after all.

It seems, in any case, eminently appropriate that in our National Hall of Statuary, along with such world-famous statesmen and shapers of human destiny as Jacob Collamer, S.J. Kirkwood and George L. Shoup, the sole representative of our artand letters should to-day be General Lew Wallace; forBen-Huris really the perfected expression of the best-thought-of American ideals in literature. And it is equally appropriate, I like to think, that, when judged by these ideals,Jurgenand all the rest of the Biography should be decreed "offensive, and lascivious, and lewd, and indecent...."

Well! a good deal of this I said (over and over again) before the courts decided thatJurgenhad been incarcerated for twenty-one months, as an "indecent" book, through error.... And I have not anything to add or to retract. Still, the affair has left me, I cannot but suspect, with a bias against the Puritan tradition and its adherents. I feel, indeed, that much of what I have just written down does not over-cloyingly reek of loving-kindness toward—in Swinburne's phrase,—"the barbarian sect from whose inherited and infectious tyranny this nation is as yet imperfectly delivered." So I dismiss the Puritans and their latter-day flowering in Henry Adams, in favor of a noticeably different person. I turn instead to M. Anatole France, as affording a clear illustration of the point I have in mind; and as perfectly illustrating my point as to the most diverting of all themes which thought can play with, inLa Rôtisserie de la Reine Pédauque.

§ 48

What one first notes aboutLa Rôtisserie de la Reine Pédauque, as I have elsewhere observed, is the fact that in this ironic and subtle book is presented a "story" which is remarkable for its innocence of subtlety and irony. Abridge the "plot" into a synopsis, and you will find your digest to be what is manifestly the outline of a straightforward, plumed romance by the elder Dumas.

Indeed, Dumas would have handled to a nicety the "strange surprising adventures" of Jacques Tournebroche, if only Dumas had ever thought to have his collaborators write this brisk tale, wherein d'Astarac and Tournebroche and Mosaïde display, even now, a noticeable something in common with the Balsamo and Gilbert and Althotas of theMémoires d'un Médicin. One foresees, to be sure, that, with the twin-girthed Creole for guide, M. Jérôme Coignard would have waddled into our affections not quite as we know him, but with somewhat more of a fraternal resemblance to the Dom Gorenflot ofLa Dame de MonsoreauandLes Quarante-Cinq; and that the blood of the abbé's deathwound could never have bedewed the book's final pages, in the teeth of Dumas' economic unwillingness ever to despatch any character who could be used in a sequel.

And one thinks rather kindlily of theRôtisserieas Dumas would have equipped it.... Yes, in reading this book, it is the most facile and least avoidable of mental exercises to prefigure how excellently Dumas would have contrived this book,—somewhat as in the reading of Mr. Joseph Conrad's novels a many of us are haunted by the sense that the Conrad "story" is, in its essential beams and stanchions, the sort of thing which W. Clark Russell used to put together, in a rather different way, for our illicit perusal. Whereby I only mean that such seafaring was illicit in those aureate days when, Cleveland being consul for the second time, your geography figured as the screen of fictive reading-matter during school hours.

One need not say that here is no question, in either case, of "imitation," far less of "plagiarism"; nor need one, surely, point out the impossibility of anybody's ever mistaking theRôtisseriefor a novel by Alexandre Dumas. Ere Homer's eyesight began not to be what it had been, the fact was noted by the observant Chian, that very few sane architects commence an edifice by planting and rearing the oaks which are to compose its beams and stanchions. You take over all such supplies ready hewn, and choose by preference time-seasoned timber. Since Homer's prime a host of other great creative writers have recognized this axiom when they too began to build:and "originality" has by ordinary been, like chess and democracy, a Mecca for little minds.

Besides, there is the vast difference that M. Anatole France has introduced into the Dumas theatre some pre-eminently un-Dumas-like stage-business: the characters, between assignations and combats, toy amorously with ideas. That is the difference which at a stroke dissevers them from any helter-skelter character in Dumas as utterly as from any of our clearest thinkers in office.

It is this toying, this series of mental amourettes, which incommunicably "makes the difference" in almost all the volumes of M. France familiar to me; but our affair is with this one story. Now in this vivid book we have our fill of color and animation and gallant strangenesses, and a stir of characters who impress us as living with a poignancy unmastered as yet by anybody's associates in flesh and blood. We have, in brief, all that Dumas could ever offer, here utilized not to make drama but background, all being woven into a bright undulating tapestry behind an erudite and battered figure,—a figure of odd medleys, in which the erudition is combined with much of Autolycus, and the unkemptness with something of à Kempis. For what one remembers of theRôtisserieis l'Abbé Jérôme Coignard; and what one remembers, ultimately, about Coignard is not his crowded career, however opulent in larcenousand lectual escapades and fisticuffs and broached wineflasks, but his religious meditations, wherein a merry heart does, quite actually, go all the way.

Coignard I take to be a peculiarly rare type of man (there is no female of this species), the type that is genuinely interested in religion. In that his mind is actually at grapple with the most diverting of all themes, he stands apart. He halves little with the staid majority of us who sociably contract our sacred tenets from our neighbors like a sort of theological measles. He halves nothing whatever with our more earnest-minded juniors who—perennially discovering that all religions thus far put to the test of nominal practise have, whatever their paradisial entrée, resulted in a deplorable earthly hash,—perennially run yelping into the shrill agnosticism which believes only that one's neighbors should not be permitted to believe in anything.

The creed of Coignard is more urbane: "Always bear in mind that a sound intelligence rejects everything that is contrary to reason, except in matters of faith, where it is necessary to believe blindly." Your opinions are thus all-important, your physical conduct is largely a matter of taste, in a philosophy which ranks affairs of the mind immeasurably above the gross accidents of matter. Indeed, man can win to heaven only through repentance, and the initialstep toward repentance is to do something to repent of. There is no flaw in this logic, and in its clear lighting such abrogations of parochial and transitory human laws as may be suggested by reason, and the consciousness that nobody is looking, take on the aspect of divinely appointed duties.

§ 49

Some dullard may here object that M. France could not himself have believed all this while writing the book, and that it was with an ironic glitter in his ink he recorded these dicta. To which the obvious answer would be that M. France (again, like all great creative writers) is an ephemeral and negligible person beside his more permanent puppets; and that, moreover, to reason thus is, it may be precipitately, to disparage the plumage of birds on the ground that an egg has no feathers.... Whatever M. France may have believed, our concern is here with the conviction of M. Coignard that his religion is all-important and all-significant. And I find it curious to observe how unerringly the abbé's thoughts aspire, from no matter what remote and low-lying starting point, to the loftiest niceties of religion and the high thin atmosphere of ethics. Sauce spilt upon his collar is but a reminder of the influence of clothes upon our moral being, and of how terrifyinglyis the destiny of each person's soul dependent upon such trifles; a glass of light white wine leads, not, as we are nowadays taught to believe, to instant ruin, but to edifying considerations of the life and glory of St. Peter; and a pack of cards suggests, straightway, intransigent fine points of martyrology. Always this churchman's thoughts deflect to the most interesting of themes, to the relationship between God and His children, and what familiary etiquette may be necessary to preserve the relationship unstrained. These problems alone engross Coignard unfailingly, even when the philosopher has had the ill luck to fall simultaneously into drunkenness and a public fountain; and retains so notably his composure between the opposed assaults of fluidic unfriends.

What, though, is found the outcome of this philosophy, appears a question to be answered with wariness of empiricism. None can deny that Coignard says, when he lies dying: "My son, reject, along with the example I gave you, the maxims which I may have proposed to you during my period of life-long folly. Do not listen to those who, like myself, subtilize over good and evil." Yet this is just one low-spirited moment, as set against the preceding fifty-two high-hearted years. And the utterance wrung forth by this moment is, after all, merely that sentiment which seems the inevitable bedfellowof the moribund,—"Were I to have my life over again, I would live differently." The sentiment is familiar and venerable, but its truthfulness has not yet been attested.

To the considerate, therefore, it may appear expedient to dismiss Coignard's trite winding-up of a half-century of splendid talking, as just the infelicitous outcropping, in the dying man's enfeebled condition, of an hereditary foible. And when moralizing would approach an admonitory forefinger to the point that Coignard's manner of living brought him to die haphazardly, among preoccupied strangers at a casual wayside inn, you do, there is no questioning it, recall that a more generally applauded manner of living has been known to result in a more competently arranged-for demise, under the best churchly and legal auspices, through the rigors of crucifixion.

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, butthen 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 thestrange 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 staidcommentaries 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 arather 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 assumedthe 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 toconceive 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 notmerely 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 youthfulindiscretion 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 withalcoves, 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:[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.[6]Archæologist of the period. Mencken has several mentions of him.[7]Of the Third Nebraska Volunteer Infantry.[8]Itinerant clergyman of the day, who preached a species of Christianity.

[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.

[6]Archæologist of the period. Mencken has several mentions of him.

[7]Of the Third Nebraska Volunteer Infantry.

[8]Itinerant clergyman of the day, who preached a species of Christianity.

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