THE GILDED MAN
[FOREWORD]
Two dreams have persistently haunted the imagination of man since dreams began. You find them in all mythologies, and, perhaps most dramatically, in the Arabian Nights: the dream of the Water of Immortality, and the dream of the Golden City. Within recent times—that is, during the sixteenth century—both were lifted out of the region of fairy lore, and men as far from “dreamers,” in the ordinary sense, as the “conquistador” Ponce de Leon and Sir Walter Raleigh raised them into the sphere of something like Elizabethan practical politics. Whether or not Ponce de Leon did actually discover the Fountain of Eternal Youth on the Bimini Islands concerns us but incidentally here. At all events, he seems to have died without drinking of it; as death on the scaffold was the penalty for Raleigh’s failure to discover El Dorado. So practically had the courts of Elizabeth and James regarded the dream of the Golden City, and so firm had been Raleigh’s own belief in it. Though Raleigh’s name is most conspicuously and tragically connected with it, of course it had been Spanish adventurers for several generations before—exploring that “Spanish Main” which they had already, and in romance forever, made their own—who had given that dream its local habitation and its name. Martinez had been the first to tell how, having drifted on the coast of Guiana, he had been taken inland to a city called Manoa, whose king was in alliance with the Incas. Manoa, said he, to opened mouths and wondering eyes, on his return to Spain, was literally built, walls and roofs, houses big and little, of silver and gold. His tale, garnished with many other mysterious matters, soon speeded expedition after expedition, dreaming across those
“perilous seas
In fairyland forlorn.”
All came back with marvels on their tongues. All had caught glimpses of the gilded domes of the city, but that was all. Gonzales Ximinez de Quesada from Santa Fé de Bogotá was “warmest,” perhaps; but he too failed. Many a daring sailor since has vainly gone on a like quest. Even in our prosaic times—in the true Elizabethan spirit, that, for all their romance, actually animated those enterprises of old time—when men sought real gold as now, not “faery-gold”—an enterprise, with a prospectus, shareholders, and those dreams now known as promised dividends, has made it its serious “incorporated” business to go in quest of El Dorado.
But, elaborate as all previous expeditions and enterprises have been, and dauntless as the courage of the individual explorer, one and all have failed—till now. Till now, I say—for at last El Dorado has been discovered, and it is my proud privilege to announce, for the first time, the name of its discoverer—Dr. Clifford Smyth.
Dr. Smyth has chosen the medium of fiction for the publication of his discovery, like other such eminent discoverers as the authors of Erewhon and Utopia, but that fact, I need hardly say, in nowise invalidates the authenticity and serious importance of his discovery. Though truth be stranger than fiction, it has but seldom its charm, and, to use the by-gone phrase, Dr. Smyth’s relation of happenings which we never doubt for a rapt moment did happen “reads as entertainingly as a fiction.” In fact, the present writer—who confesses to the idleness of keeping au courant with the good and even merely advertised fiction of the day, recalls no fiction in some years that has seemed to him comparable in imaginative quality with The Gilded Man, or has given him, in any like degree, the special kind of delight which Dr. Smyth’s narrative has given him. For any such thrill as the latter part of the book in particular holds, he finds that his memory must travel back, no difficult or lengthy journey, to Mr. Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines—a book which one sees more and more taking its place as one of the classics of fantastic romance, the kind of romance which combines adventure with poetic strangeness; though, at its publication, “superior persons,” with the notable exception of that paradoxical most superior person, and man of genius, Andrew Lang, disdained it as a passing “thriller.”
Perhaps it is not indiscreet to say that one circumstance of Dr. Smyth’s life gave him exceptional opportunities for that dreaming on his special object which is found to be the invariable incubation, so to say, preceding all great discoveries. For some years Dr. Smyth was United States consul at Carthagena, that unspoiled haunted city of the Spanish Main, which, it may be recalled, furnishes a spirited chapter in the history of Roderick Random, Esquire, of His Majesty’s Navy. He was, therefore, seated by the very door to that land of enchantment, which, as we have been saying, had drawn so many adventurous spirits under roaring canvas across the seas, in the spacious days. He was but a short mule-back journey from that table-land raised high in the upper Andes where Bogotá, the capital of Colombia, is situated, the region around which all those “superstitions” retailed by Indians to those early adventurers centre. Descendants of the same Indians still tell the same stories, and still the average prosaic mind laughs at them as “superstitions.” El Dorado! as if any one could take it seriously nowadays! Has not the term long been a picturesque synonym for The City of Impossible Happiness, the Land of Heart’s Desire, the Paradise of Fools, and all such cities and realms and destinations and states of being, as the yearning heart of man, finding nowhere on the earth he knows, imagines in the sun-tipped cloudland of his dreams, and toward which he pathetically turns his eyes, and stretches out his arms to the end?