Thus, then, I reflected, now that I approached my summing up, the writer who is sustained by the notion of his books' being perpetual things cannot, after two minutes of honest thought, believe himself to be sustained also by altruism, nor by any faith in the superior discernment of posterity. Upon no ground perceptible to me could reason detect, the instant that reason weighed the present rate and direction of man's progress, any marked likelihood of posterity's being in anything more logical than is that contemporaneous, so huge and so depressingly unimpressed audience which every artist must perforce contemn. Posterity in its approach to literary matters would probably muddle forward, as man has always done, upon humanity's time-tested crutches of hearsay and stupidity. The men who after our departure inherited the gray tedium of man's daily living would keep some of our books (but not really read them), and others of our books they would destroy, not in any haphazard fashion, but acting always under the adamantean human compulsion to be illogical about everything.
Not any art or painstaking, nor certainly any accident of "genius," could enable a book to live. Chance alone appeared to do that, and then only in a very limited sense. And in this final, frantic, and yet optimistic appeal to posterity—here, too, man clung to his great racial custom of being illogical about everything; and every serious author triumphantly attested himself to be, after all, quite human. That seemed the conclusion of the matter....
So I ran over my enlinked deductions. Man lived, for the major part of his conceded time, a meagre and monotonous and unsatisfying existence: this he alleviated by endlessly concocting fictions which bedrugged and diverted him. The artist, and in particular the literary artist, like every other person animate, attempted to bedrug and divert primarily himself; which end the literary artist gained, as a rule, by picturing himself as figuring enviably in unfamiliar surroundings, and as making sport with the three martinets that he, in common with all men at bottom, most genuinely abhorred,—that is, with common-sense and piety and death. Moreover, he diverted himself by playing with such human ideas as he found entertaining: and he played too with the notion of hoodwinking posterity into accepting and treasuring his highly imaginative portrait of himself. And the outcome of his multifold playing—of that interminable self-diversion which he, quite unsmilingly, called his "work,"—was always unpredictable, always chance-guided, and, in any case, was of no benefit or hurt to him by and by, and was never of grave importance to anybody else. That seemed to be the whole truth about the literary artist. That seemed the gist of the epilogue I had now evolved for the Biography of Dom Manuel's life, and was submitting to myself to-night as the explanation of why I had given over so many years to writing.
Yes, all my premises seemed true: my deductions appeared to hold together. My logic and its upshot, in any event, contented me. What, I had begun by asking, does the author get out of it all? Well, I had found that unknown quantity; the equation now was solved; and x amounted to, exactly, nothing. That was the mathematics of it: only, as you may recall, it had been revealed to me, through the aid of my small son, that mathematics too amounted to, exactly, nothing. And, besides, here also, in reaching this negation, I had most gratifyingly attained, in the same moment that I discredited, the aim of every valid author. For I had found, I reflected, even here, some rather interesting ideas to play with.... Yes, and my argument ended, neatly, with the day: for the clock behind me was now striking midnight....
FOOTNOTES:
[11] A prominent American littérateur of the period. The titles of many of his books have been preserved, such as His Father's Son, The Last Meeting, A Secret of the Sea, &c.
[12] A newspaper writer of the day. He specialized in very short editorials, so notably preëminent, even in American journalism, for feeble-mindedness that these were published, simultaneously, by some fifty of the leading papers of the United States, and were read everywhere with edification.
[13] Novelists of the day; authors of Charles Rex, Janet March, Greatheart, &c.
THE AUTHOR OF THE EAGLE'S SHADOW
"To the citizens and all the realm I make this proclamation: for now have I moored my bark of life, and so will own myself a happy man. Many are the shapes that fortune takes, and oft the gods bring things to pass beyond our expectation. That which we deemed so sure is not fulfilled, while for that we never thought would be, Heaven finds out a way. And such hath been the issue in the present case."