§ 22
For everywhere, of course,—to-day, just as in Homer's nonage,—this need is contented by the literary artist. The literary artist—he, in any event,—does actually fulfil this universal desire, by his own especial wizardry. He temporarily endows his followers with the illusion of possessing what all alchemists have sought,—unfading youth, wealth and eternal life. He engineers the escape for which men have always longed, and which they have always known to be attainable, as here, by magic. And his is the charitable miracle-working which enables you to figure enviably in unfamiliar surroundings. Through his kind thaumaturgy you, as Odysseus, deal intrepidly with cyclopes and ascend the ivory beds of goddesses; as Job you get, from any ethical standpoint, decidedly the better of the Lord God of Hosts and reduce Him to rhetorical bullying; as the third prince you overpass all perils to win to the desired trinket; and as Christian you with a deadly thrust superbly discomfit lion-mouthed, bat-winged Apollyon. It is in this fashion that the artist makes sport with the first of his three adversaries, and derides common-sense.
For common-sense tempts men to be contented with their lot, to get the most from what is theirs, and not to hanker nonsensically after the unattainable. At the elbow of each of us lurks always this enchantress, with luring rhapsodies, more treacherous than ever any siren lilted, in praise of the firm worth of money and conformity. "Let us be rational," she whispers; "and let us remember that, whatever we might prefer, in this world two and two make four." And with many gaudy enticements does she prompt the unwary to yield homage to her insensate paramour, the doltish and vain idol of mathematics.... Thus tirelessly, thus unabashedly, does common-sense urge every man to obtain in this world, such as it is, the permitted uttermost from that life which stays peculiarly his own: and to the wheedling solicitings of common-sense the literary artist can answer but one word. That word is "Bosh!" And having uttered it, the artist proceeds to divert himself by living dozens upon dozens of lives which in nothing resemble the starveling and inadequate existence allotted him by the mere accident of birth.
§ 23
Yes: the creative romanticist alone can engineer a satisfying evasion of that daily workaday life which is to every man abhorrent. I am convinced, upon several grounds, that the motive of the literary artist is wholly unaltruistic: he blazes for his own pleasuring the trail upon which any number of readers may, so far as he cares, follow or not follow, just as they elect, and be hanged to them! Whenever he journeys into some such improbable country as, let us say, Poictesme, it is, I know, for his own recreation. But I choose here, entirely from the viewpoint of a reader of books, to consider with less scrutiny his selfishness than my firm grounds for gratitude.
For, thanks to these haphazard sorcerers, my life has been a marvellous affair. I look back, for example, upon the last month, which, as my high-flown and roystering way of living averages, has been uneventful enough. Yet in that time, I have quested through Thessaly, disguised by the old magic of Apuleius as Mr. Gilbert Seldes, in pursuit of all the lively arts, and, somewhat more necessitously, of a wreath of roses; and have, with an intrepidity which I perforce admired, sailed for the moon, to take part in the wars between Endymion and Phaëthon.... Descending, I have passed that night with a fair and charming woman—in a bed very white and wide, with two coverlets of scarlet silk cloth,—and all our queer intercourse has been conducted, amid many other incomprehensible happenings, chastely. In the morning we two went out into sunlit fields; and so came to a spring of clear water enclosed by a stone basin, upon which someone had left forgotten a comb of gilded ivory. Entangled in this comb, as I (whom men called Lancelot) saw with glad wondering, and with the heroic passion for which I had long suspected myself to have the talent, was near a handful of the hair of Guenevere. And I remember how I thought that gold a hundred thousand times refined would seem darker than midnight compared with the brightest day of that year's summer, if anyone were to set such gold beside this hair.... Soon passing thence,—and travelling now under the alias of Gil Blas de Santillane,—I have disastrously changed rings with a plump, dimpled brown-eyed niece of the governor of the Philippine Islands; I have come, disguised as a green and gold pasteboard dragon, into the bedroom of the most beautiful of Casmirians; I have criticised the sermons of the Archbishop of Granada and found him in nothing different from any other author under criticism. Fleeing episcopal wrath, I chatted, near Plessis les Tours, with a thin-nosed and threadbare burgess, who turned out to be the most shrewd of kings, and who sent me perilously journeying to the court of yet another bishop. But Louis de Bourbon had been murdered, I discovered, at an over-uproarious supper-party conducted by the Wild Boar of Ardennes.... So I journeyed instead into England, to fetch back the Queen's diamonds in good time for her to foil the nefarious Cardinal, by duly wearing these twelve gems when she danced in the ballet of La Merlaison at the fête of Messieurs the Echevins. In England, though, I wandered so far astray, both northward and chronologically, that, lost, I paused, under the wood of Lettermore, to ask my way of red Colin Campbell, in the very moment the great, ruddy jovial gentleman was shot down from ambush; and through this mishap I became again a fugitive, now wandering through the howes and bracken of wild Scotland.... Always, you perceive, no matter what mage guided, he kept to the tried formula, and led me, footloose and at free adventure, through eras and surroundings which were to him and me in nothing familiar.... So that eventually I came, by way of the British Linen Company's bank, and so past the lair of Tharagavverug, to the steel gate, to The Porte Resonant, of the Fortress Unvanquishable; and I am now upon the point of going in to cut off, for the third or fourth time, Gaznak's evil head.
Yes, looking back, I can see that the last month has been fairly various and contenting. And I am convinced that I must owe all these happy adventurings to the charity of beneficent wizards rather than of mere writing persons. And I elect to think of each and every valid romantic novelist as a skilled sorcerer who, accompanied by a suitable cortège of readers, departs at will from the workaday world, to travel, eternally young and always comfortably opulent, upon the blessed way of wizardry which conducts him away from boredom, and enables him to wander footloose and at continuous unflagging adventure, in unfamiliar lands wherein, as Poictesme phrases it, almost anything is rather more than likely to happen.
§ 24
And I would like to think that every self-respecting novelist goes to his magicking in suitable estate, and follows high and approved old formulæ. In any event, so many persons have, at odd times, inquired about my own "methods" of composition that it seems well here to jot down what would appear to be a few of the more obvious rules of thumb.
The novelist, then, most appropriately prologizes his evasion of common-sense—after of course performing the proper suffumigations of camphor and aloes and amber,—by writing his first chapter in a robe of white, with a triple collar of crystals and pearls and selenite. His diet upon this day will be fish. When there is fighting in manuscript, the writer may always advantageously, I believe, shift to a rust-colored robe adorned with amethysts, and having a belt and bracelets of steel,—clothed in which gear, he will while writing keep as near as circumstances permit to the chimney, favored by Mars. When he is about to kill anyone scriptorially, he will in mere self-protection put on a wreath of ash and cypress, and burn scammony and alum. He will likewise upon this day be careful to stint none of the functions of nature; and will circumspectly remember that he traffics with the wan and ashy overlord of the greater infortune.