There is, to be sure, a "story": in fact, around this sprightly figure De Coster has woven—contemporaneously, it is bewildering to reflect, with the weaving of a dreary mystery about one Edwin Drood,—an intricate romance as cruel as life and considerably gayer. Somewhat to deviate metaphorically, De Coster, in this tale of fifteenth-century Flemings in course of being enlightened and uplifted by the auto-da-fés and hangmen of the Holy Inquisition, has builded a story which is not unsuggestive of a time-mellowed fifteenth-century cathedral; with the gentry about their devotions, and with peasants joking on the porches, and with a stately hymn music accompanying both the aspiration and the guffaws; a cathedral, too, that is no less opulent in glowing paintings of rapt saints and archangels than in captivatingly hideous gargoyles.... Here again, one is tempted to expatiate, concerning these gargoyles: and I would like here to talk about the superlunar bleak buffooneries of the chapter which depicts the death of Charles the Fifth, and his trial in heaven; or to applaud the account of Tyl's hunting of the werwolf; or, at least, to note that really intolerable "catharsis by pity and terror" when Katheline the good witch attempts to share her cup of cold water with Joos Damman in the torture chamber....

§ 27

But what, above all, remains with us is the figure of the tall young rogue who passes hardly any alcove which hide-bound morality has labelled "Keep Out" without a little dalliance therein. Ahead is a closed door, lightly ajar, a black door with silver-plated handles, which one perforce approaches always: in the meantime it is astonishing to note what a number of pleasant and blameworthy things one can discover to do.

Reflection finds the circumstance unfortunate that most of the agreeable actions of life are either forbidden or else deplorably behedged with restrictions. From drunkenness and from the effects of certain drugs can be obtained moments, and even hours, of conscious contentment: probably in no other way, indeed, is it possible for human beings to induce an unbroken twenty minutes of actual and complete happiness: but with repetition such pleasures increasingly work the deuce of a damage to one's health and purse. Besides, our inefficient bodies prove unable to stay comfortably inebriate, for more than a brief while, without drifting into sleep or collapsing in sickness: and our equally inefficient medicine men have found out no amiable method of, in the time-honored phrase, recuperating from alcoholic excesses.

Then also the more intimate recreations of amour, when once you are over with the disappointments unavoidably attendant upon loss of innocence, compose a very pleasant pastime so long as the game is played by relative strangers. Even superficial exploration of the charms and the little ways of any unfamiliar and personable young woman, they tell me, is unflaggingly rewarded and incited to fresh exertions by the discovery of some slight novelty or small strangeness. Thighs differ, breasts are always unpredictable, and the piquant mole continually "by himself surprises," I am informed. Yet, in America at all events, one finds extant a perceptible tendency to deprive the oldest and most popular of amusements of just this essential element of unfamiliarity, by restricting it to married persons; and even within this licensed class to limit each husband to the embraces of his own wife. Now with the morality of this social ruling the most precise need pick no fault: I would merely point out that, here again, should monogamy ever become prevalent among us, we would be deliberately abating one of the more considerable pleasures of an existence wherein pleasures are not over-frequent.

Nor, of course, not even in actual need, are you allowed to take another person's money away from him except through the tedious channels of business; nor to fare publicly appareled in lovely colors except just where your necktie shows but stays invisible to—of all people—you alone; nor are you permitted to keep enjoyable, through the amenities of homicide, your commerce with persons who admittedly exist but to annoy their fellows. Tyl Ulenspiegel might deal as the whim took him with those obnoxious cohorts of Spanish cavalry. But with us there is never an open season for religious revivalists or book peddlers or collectors of internal revenue: and traffic policemen and the conductors of "tag-days"[2] and prohibition agents all live in exasperating immunity. Even the women you adored, and wrote letters to, approach you intrepidly. Everywhere, in fine, this or that pleasant action is forbidden or in one way or another restricted; and man, upon the verge of actual, sharp, zestful enjoyment is brought up short by a taboo of his own inventing.

So it is pleasant—faute de mieux, as in our current fiction superb worldlings no longer observe to other members of the élite,—it is very pleasant to indulge in these sports vicariously through considering the exploits of the Ulenspiegelian rogue who does do these things. And we cannot but rather fondly admire the dashing fellow who commits the pleasure-giving misdemeanors from which we are held back by prudence or by physical limitations. Every country rejoicing in the dubious benefit of a history has, they say, alike its great national hero and its great national thief: and it is a fact that St. George endures in balladry with Robin Hood, St. Denis with Cartouche, St. Andrew with Rob Roy. Then, too, if Belgium yet remembers Tyl Ulenspiegel, Spain has not yet forgotten Guzman d'Alfarache, nor Germany her Schinderhannes, nor Hungary her Schubry. Everywhere through the shadowland of legend canter and gallop—with the gleaming eyes of nocturnal creatures, with a multitudinous tossed shining of steel,—these "squires of the night's body, Diana's foresters, these minions of the moon," whom the prosaic call thieves and highwaymen: and everywhere men have admired and cherished some cunning strong unconquerable rogue.

This foible has from the beginning been recognized and shared by the literary artist. It is perhaps one reason (among others) why really reputable persons have always felt, however obscurely, that there is something dangerous in novels; and why the reading of fiction has always been more or less deprecated by all citizens of appreciable elevation and influence. And here the well-thought-of are, very luckily for the literary artist, far more profoundly in the right than ever the well-thought-of have comprehended: for in all polities imaginative literature has tirelessly advocated revolution, by depicting the possibilities of a more pleasure-giving state of affairs; and in his diversions the artist has consistently tended to identify himself with the rogue and the law-breaker.

§ 28

Romantic art has from the first inclined to glorify the breaker of laws current in the artist's lifetime. Nor are the provocatives for this sedition obscure; since no society has ever provided any exact or generally respected status for the artist, nor afforded him, at most, much more than the half-contemptuous, cosseting indulgence which is granted to lap-dogs. Moreover, the artist alone is permitted hourly to use his reason,—an action which in any other walk of life would at once upset business usage or professional etiquette,—because of men's general conviction that here it doesn't especially matter. In consequence the artist has always found our human ordering of this world, under all régimes, to be unsatisfactory; and to offenders against any part of this ordering he inclines with irrational unavoidable sympathy.... You may, in fact, observe that nobody is quite at ease in dealing with a policeman: the man represents, however genially, with howsoever bright adornments of figured brass and rubicundity, an oppression that is upon us; and while in theory the relation between the legally honest tax-payer and his two hired and liveried retainers, the policeman and the mail-carrier, is the same, one notes in practise a marked difference. The courts and officers of the law, and all legal processes, are matters with which we as if by instinct avoid involvement: for, here again, man occupies somewhat the position of a Frankenstein.... So Robin Hood is voted an unending triumph, from black letter ballads to the moving pictures, and the fact that Christ was crucified by due process of law has everlastingly endeared His story to romantic art and human sympathy.