And this one sometimes guesses to be—perhaps—the pith of such myths' durability, that the felt symbolism admits of no quite final interpreting. Each generation finds for Andromeda a different monster and another rescuer; continuously romance and irony endeavor to contrive new riddles for the Sphinx; whereas the Wandering Jew—besides the tour de force of having enabled General Lew Wallace to write a book which voiced more fatuous blather than Ben-Hur,—has had put to his account, at various times, the embodying of such disparate pests as thunderstorms and gypsies and Asiatic cholera.

Well! here—just for an instant to recur to Fantastica, as a volume which I delight in commending to the particular notice of the urbane,—here one finds Mr. Nichols also writing remarkably contemporaneous parables about the Sphinx and her latest lover, about Andromeda and Perseus, about the Wandering Jew and Judas Iscariot. They are, to my finding, very wise and lovely tales; they are, I hope, the graduating theses of a maturing poet who has become sufficiently sophisticated to put aside the, after all, rather childish business of verse-making. But the really important feature, in any event, is that Robert Nichols adds to the unending imbroglios of these actually vital persons, and guides with competence and a fine spirit the immortal travellers. Nor is this any trivial praise when you recall that, earlier, they have been served by such efficient if slightly incongruous couriers as Goethe and Charles Kingsley and Euripides and Eugène Sue, as Matthew of Paris and Flaubert and Nathaniel Hawthorne and the Reverend George Crowley.

§ 33

For these great myths have, over and above that quality of which I spoke just now as wizardry, some common and not readily definable power which resistlessly makes captive the dreams of men of all conditions and faiths and degrees of intelligence. I can remember puzzling a long while over what conceivable feature these so divergent stories could be said to have in common; since some shared trait must be, I reasoned, the explanation of their virtually uniform allure. And these myths baffled me. Their might seemed, as their origin, not wholly explicable. I say "their origin" because no great romantic myth seemed the product of any especial brain. Never could we detect any writer seated at his desk about the diligent invention of any one of these stories, told now for the first time. Rather did legends gather slowly and contradictorily, arising none knew whence, about the tale's protagonist, who was by ordinary an actual personage some while since dead. By and by somebody had perhaps written down a part of this rumor, always with plain inability to narrate the whole; and the result might be, to the one side an Odyssey, to the other a Juif Errant.... Sometimes one of these inexplicably macrobiotic myths had found no formal chronicler, and for centuries existed in detachment from literature. There was, for example, I reflected, the fine figure of Punch, which imaginative artists had prodigally left unexploited. In fact, nobody except Mr. Conrad Aiken[3] seemed ever to have written with seriousness about Punch; and this superb theme as yet awaited merely the attention of some gifted writer, to enrich the world with a masterpiece. Then there was Mélusine. There was, for that matter, Blue Beard.... All these stayed uncommemorated with any adequacy as yet, and were, despite that fact, no whit the less recognizable as magnificent and immortal.

I could not see that these old stories had anything whatever in common; and even if in these ageless fables some shared feature were discovered, that would hardly explain the unvarying strange sequel. It would not, I thought, explain the emergence from the "story" of a figure which, the story done with, and all its incidents put behind, continued to live on in other stories, and continued through generation after generation to have quite fresh adventures. Nothing seemed able ever to explain that. Yet it was a fact. One was tempted to imagine these immortal figures had guiles of their own, and exerted strange potencies less to afford the artist a fruitful theme than to demand his service. Man here again, it might be, enacted his not infrequent rôle of Frankenstein.... At any rate, the secret was not in the stories: artists did not repeat these stories, but instead arranged new imbroglios for the old tales' protagonists.

Of course the truth was that these figures, for one reason or another as yet unrevealed to me, were such as, for that reason, appealed to a majority of creating romanticists. They were toys with which, for howsoever veiled causes, the artist peculiarly delighted to play. It might, I guessed, have been the element of dubiety which fascinated, and the half-vexed feeling that, when all which is apparent to sense and rationality had been checked off and labeled, much yet remained amenable to neither. It might be, just as I had said, the pith of such myths' durability that the felt symbolism admits of no quite final interpreting; and so arouses the not utterly rational suspicion that the whole truth about these mythic figures has never yet been apprehended by anybody.

§ 34

Strikingly did this seem exemplified by the perennial magic of Pan. His epopee, as taken over by the artist, was virtually eventless. Pan figured in no story of marked interest or importance. He merely was: and what he was, nobody had presumed to voice with any precision. Pan was but indicated—always with a queer effect of the narrator's suspecting somebody might, undesirably, be eavesdropping,—by this vague talk about a hirsute wanderer with the horns and feet of a goat and a taste for pipe-playing: these features were, you knew, not the essentials. Such tales recorded only small and immaterial truths, as if—you somehow knew,—you were to define the Pope as an elderly Catholic who wears underclothing and eats breakfast, or a duly nominated candidate for the White House as a Protestant of unexigent honesty. So the creating romanticist had begun to divert himself with guesses about Pan: and now these guesses filled libraries.

But Pan was not in the library. He was afield, he was in all the magazines for the month after next now on the news-stands, having quite fresh adventures, which yet-living poets were under a tribal bond to contrive for him. In the records of English literature research might look in vain for any considerable poet who had not paid his scot of contriving some fresh adventure for Pan, and Pan yet roved the jungle of free verse. Pan, alone of the old Hellenic gods, had thus lived on, and had survived all his peers. Pan would not, to be sure, especially regret them, since he had never forgathered with the other gods....

And there, in that seemingly irrelevant fact, I began to detect a darkling light. Pan had never forgathered with the other gods: Olympos he appeared at utmost to visit now and then, with, as I recall The Book of Job, a curious similarity to Satan's coming among the sons of God, "from going to and fro in the earth and walking up and down in it." Pan, also, that unexplainedly dreadful and lonely wanderer, was the divine outcast. In the one existent story, that of Psyche, wherein Pan was represented as having any even very remote dealing with the other gods, his part was to aid a mortal against them. Pan, alone of the gods, had abandoned, and at a pinch sided against, Heaven. And that might well be the reason why the romantic artist had cherished him.