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 the scrap-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 as may 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 of Jurgen," 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 wrote Jurgen" 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-cabs and 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. And Lusisti satis has 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....