VIII
THE DELTA OF RADEGONDE
"The same mode of teaching was not adopted by all, nor, indeed, did individuals always confine themselves to the same system, but each varied his plan of instruction according to circumstances. For they were accustomed, in stating their argument with the utmost clearness, to use figures and apologies, and to put cases as circumstances required; and these might be either cases which came under trial in the courts or fictitious cases."
8.
The Delta of Radegonde
§ 72
The literary artist plays, I had said, at the game of lending to his personal notions a life which will survive the life of his body. But, as I prepared to go on to that, I was stayed by an uneasy doubt lest here was needed some further explanation as to why I should label the younger Joseph Hergesheimer, and for that matter every other valid artist, an anchorite. The especial word, I reflected, might still be considered inappropriate by persons who in their muddled minds had somehow associated anchorites with extreme religious zeal and with physical asceticism and pietistic self-denials.
Yet an anchorite was, of course, a person who lived in actual rather than specious retirement: among the great anchorites of all time, whose real living was "in the little farm of one's own mind, where a silence so profound may be enjoyed," had been that Marcus Aurelius who walked and spoke in unflagging imperial publicity and slept with Faustina.... But, I knew, here again was a matter most nearly explicable by a parable: and my thoughts turned to another old tale out of Poictesme, the story of that gallant Holden who was for all the bustle of his daily living an anchorite and also, in his way, I suspect, an artist.
§ 73
It was, the tale declares, just after the followers of the Silver Stallion had sacked Lacre Kai that young Holden found, among his plunder, the triangular portrait of Elphànor's queen: and for the time young Holden thought little about the picture. He could not foreknow that its old frame, in shape like the Greek letter Delta, was to bind all his living. But after a few months of peace the lad went to Guivric, afterward called the Sage, who was already coming into esteem as a most promising thaumaturgist.