To the other side, the artist seeks and goes always seeking—unpatriotically, if not with absolute irreligion,—to divert himself in his native universe, whose constitution does not self-evidently provide for the amusement of the inhabitants. No artist's long-faced magniloquence about "his work," I must for the hundredth or so time repeat, can in the least prevent that vocation being in reality, and only, his diversion.... And a very striking attestation of this truth, now I think of it, is furnished by the failure of such talk for one half-instant to delude the man's wife. For women have, as some profound philosopher or another has observed, their intuitions. The woman whom marriage with a creative artist has swindled of a husband thus always knows, or she at worst obscurely feels, that behind those locked doors the humbug is at a sort of secret tippling: and for that reason (among others) you will find the wife of every valid artist to regard his art, however tacitly, however self-perjuringly even, with unconcealable impatience....

So much is true, I believe, of all the arts. The endeavor of the really serious creative writer, in any case, is hourly to divert himself: and, pending extinction, he intends to continue to divert himself with such fancies as he elects. The man, as I have admitted, lies about it, through, one would like to think, some remnants of shame. Or perhaps it is by his publishers alone that the besotted hedonist is restrained from answering those critics who deplore his fancies, or who pick fault with his chosen manner of expressing them: "What is that to me? and how am I concerned with your likings and your dislikings? These notions divert me. I have set them forth in the fashion which I personally found most diverting. Why, as we meet here, momentarily, doomed prisoners in the death-cell of existence, should I be bothering about your taste in anæsthetics? Mix, in your own god's name, whatever drugs you like, to keep you firm in magnanimity until you too are summoned to that last hackneyed journalistic hearty breakfast of ham and eggs and to the other clichés of being killed. Meanwhile I stick to my approved strong tipple."

So then—not quite out of rash hilarity,—does the creating writer intoxicate himself with such self-brewed imaginings as he finds most effective: so does he flout perforce the opinions of his fellow citizens, the while that he creates a more approvable race in his own image: and so does he dismiss, half negligently, the material cosmos as rather bungling prentice work, in very little exemplifying the rules which he himself prefers as demiurge. As Hecuba to Hamlet, so to him is the knowledge that such creatures as "realists" are everywhere truckling to nature in their tenth large editions, and go enfranchised in these books to patch up a mimic existence in every respect as undesirable as their own.... For the creating romanticist quite simply declines to accept either the human conduct of life upon earth or any assumable theocratic overseeing of it from heaven as a competent performance. Men and whatever gods may potter about in charge of men this myopic weakling unaffectedly esteems to be not at all up to his standards. Yet, none the less, somewhere from afar may be watching him—as, here again, seems whispered by irrational instinct,—a power which exacts, without any pliable descent into logic, that its material handiwork be approached with the civil condonations of piety.... That power may well be the second of Them. And by this ruthless but unangered power perhaps the babbling runagate must always be punished, in one way or another, for his disloyalties to his fellows and to his native overlords. Such was the feeling, I believe, which fidgeted in the bottom of the minds of my replete, romantic oldsters,—the both of them well-nigh used up, it might be, but both unsmashed, and both unrepentantly aware of not having been, in common with the most of their contemporaries, wasted,—as they drowsed among their finished books. For, whatever happened, that many of their books were finished....

§ 57

Why then, though, granting these delusions,—the sane may reasonably inquire,—should any madman seek to provoke this punishment, and even court it with painstakings and with year-long self-denials? The reply to that question is simple: I do not know. I doubt if anybody does. Nor, I imagine, had either of these paunched and spectacled and thin-haired fanatics, blinking among his finished books, the leisure for such, upon the whole, irrelevant problems.... It would merely seem, I daresay, to his romanticizing time-bleared eyes, that single-mindedness, if but occasionally, if but for a brief while as go the necessaries of high-wrought prose, may evade Them. It would seem to him that, in this grudged, snatched while, he, somehow,—in part through less of crass ill luck than daily tumbles mere genius graveward, and in part, too, through wasting no least moment upon irrelevant matters,—had contrived to get some of his books completed in more or less the shape he had wanted, with that irrational, inborn, resistless hunger which made the other matters irrelevant.... And then you would be almost as grateful for as you were worried by the unaccountable way in which you would seem still to be slipping by Them, somehow, and thus far. And so at times you would bluster to keep up your courage. And at other times you would cross your fingers.... For, really, in the last forties, with those depressing items in the paper every morning, you might with an equal sense of assurance be typing, always typing, on a battlefield to a distracting accompaniment of burst shells. And each new book completed by you would thus take on an element of the miraculous not wholly based upon the volume's contents: and you would, in point of fact, quite probably unwrap the first actual copies saying, with rather more of wonder than of gloating, "Well, I got that one done, anyway!"

For about the third of Them there is no doubt nor any possible disputing. And it is against common-sense and piety and death that the artist conducts his utterly futile rebellion.... Yes, I believe, I understood those aging romantics, who approached, the colophon of so many books.

§ 58

—Because, I submit, it is wholly conceivable that men may, by and by, get rid of common-sense and piety; but this human habit of dying appears ineradicable. There is always ahead, and always a little nearer, the one and one only exit from the familiar corridor of our workaday existence. All of us thus pass, futilely, nesciently, helplessly, through tedium to horror: for we live in articulo mortis; our doings here, when unaffectedly regarded, are but the restlessness of a prolonged demise; and the birth-cry of every infant announces the beginning of the death-agony....

And that, too, you observe, is in the approved time-tested style. For it is through consideration of his own unimportance and transiency that man rises to the largest resonance of poetry and wisdom. Vanity of vanities! saith the Preacher, the son of David: and Æschylos answers, Oh, ye little race of men, what does your living show! and goes on with the customary observations as to parti-colored leaves that are swept away by the wind. Horace takes up the tale, We are all bound on one voyage. Villon continues with derogatory evaluations of the final worth of the fair queens and the thrasonical potentates and the melted snows of yesterday; and Shakespeare rounds off the dirge with the assertion that human living, however full of sound and fury, signifies precisely nothing.... Everywhere fine literature, in its more purple passages, tends to voice the futility of man's endeavors, the impermanence of his works, and his generally unarguable claims not to be worth writing about.

Nevertheless,—here to continue in this high scholastic vein,—nevertheless, as Chrysippus of Cnidos, you will remember, has strikingly phrased a weighty truth, in that noble monograph On the Cabbage (which some critics of the Alexandrian school, as we should of course with due caution bear in mind, would attribute to a somewhat later date and to a pupil of Erasistratus),—nevertheless, death is the one impending fact which is certain. Now, thought of in its physical aspects, death is an indignity before which any sort of human self-respect—not here to speak of the wild actuality of human pride,—becomes preposterous. Thought about logically, it makes any conceivable human action rather silly, as upon the whole inappropriate to condemned persons in a death cell. Thought of in the light of man's possible immortality, it seems no longer to raise, if ever it did, any positive enthusiasm. And so beyond doubt the majority of us act wiseliest by not thinking about it at all, except as a thing which happens to other people.