CORNELL 
 
 UNIVERSITY 
 
 LIBRARY 
 
 BOUGHT WITH THE INCOME 
 OF THE SAGE ENDOWMENT 
 FUND GIVEN IN 1891 BY 
 
 HENRY WILLIAMS SAGE 
 
Cornell University Library 
 PS 3507.E175C4 
 
 Chameleon.being the book of my selves.b' 
 
 3 1924 022 352 433 
 
The original of tliis book is in 
 tine Cornell University Library. 
 
 There are no known copyright restrictions in 
 the United States on the use of the text. 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924022352433 
 
amm 
 
 Casseres 
 
 LlEBEI^&LEiilS New-York 
 
Copyright, 1922, 
 By LIEBER & LEWIS 
 
 PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
TO BIO 
 
These essays have appeared (1903-1915) 
 in the New York Sun, the PhUistine, Mind, 
 Reedy's Mirror, the Critic, lAherty, Moods 
 and Wiltshire's Magazine. Thanks are here- 
 by extended for permission to reprint them. 
 
■t 1 1 
 
 CONTENTS ' 
 
 The Brain and the World .... 7 
 
 The Mirth of the Brain 13 
 
 Wonder 20 
 
 The Ahnightiness of Might .... 31 
 
 The Intangible Life 39 
 
 The Irony of Negatives 61 
 
 History 63 
 
 The Passion of Distance 75 
 
 The Comic View 82 
 
 The Artist 89 
 
 Under a Mask 99 
 
 A Memorable Escape 106 
 
 The Masquerade 117 
 
 Respectability 124 
 
 The Impenitent 131 
 
 The Eternal Renaissance 146 
 
 Silence 154 
 
 Posterity: The New Superstition . . 163 
 An Evaporating Universe .... 170 
 
 The Trail of the Worm 180 
 
 Cosmic Marionettes 188 
 
 The Drama of Days 194 
 
 Absorption: A Universal Law . . . 199 
 
 Acatalepsy 208 
 
 Coda 215 
 
THE BRAIN AND THE WORLD 
 
 WE never come into contact with 
 things, but only with their images. 
 We never know the real — only 
 effigies of the real. We do not pursue 
 objects ; we pursue the reflection of objects. 
 We do not possess things; we possess the 
 emotions that things iijspire. 
 
 If I pluck a flower and hold it in my 
 hand I have merely come into contact with 
 an image in my brain created by certain 
 complex influences transmitted through the 
 senses from an unknowable. No one pur- 
 sues power 6r wealth; he pursues ideas and 
 images of power and wealth. Strictly 
 speaking, I do not live in a house, in the 
 air, but live in my house-image, my air- 
 image. Images and thoughts being the 
 very pulp of consciousness, it follows that 
 in images and thoughts there lies the only 
 reality we can ever know. Imagination 
 and its elements are not the effigies of 
 matter, but what we term matter is the 
 (7) 
 
8 THE BRAIN AND THE WORLD 
 
 effigy of our images. Hence the imaginary 
 world — the world of intellect and images — 
 is the only real world. It is the imanalyz- 
 able data of consciousness. 
 
 We never get over the threshold of our 
 images. We live in images whether in rest 
 or motion. Illusion does not consist in be- 
 lieving our images and dreams to be real, 
 but in believing that there exists anything 
 else but images and dreams. The illusions 
 of the brain are the only realities; they 
 become delusions when we try to ex- 
 ternalize them. AH practical men are 
 insane because they seek to externalize the 
 internal. AU poets and philosophers are 
 sane because they seek to internalize the 
 external. 
 
 Idolatry is the worship of the non- 
 existent. All practical life is founded on 
 the belief that there is something to be 
 had outside of the self, that there is a 
 pleasm-e to be had in things per se, that 
 Mecca is a place, not a belief. Matter is 
 something fashioned by the brain, an eidolon 
 of the will, the symbol of an image. The 
 practical person tries to grasp the symbol; 
 the poet tries to grasp the image. The 
 former must always fail because we never 
 
THE BRAIN AND THE WORLD 9 
 
 come into contact with matter, which is 
 the symbol of ideas; no mind ever comes 
 into contact with the external world. The 
 latter (the poet) always succeeds because 
 he arrays himself in himself; lives imme- 
 diately in the thought, image or emotion 
 that a thing creates; he knows that the 
 materialization of an image is the substi- 
 tution of a symbol for a reality. 
 
 The sense of universal disillusion, of the 
 almost total absence of relation between 
 dream and deed, is the ever-recurring proof 
 of the egocentricity of man. He is the 
 sun around which swing and dance the 
 worlds tossed off through immeasiuable 
 time; worlds so seeming real, but which are 
 mere spawn of dreams, man's chance-litter. 
 To stretch out the hand from the House 
 of Images seeking to grasp this domed and 
 pinnacled mirage is the signal that wakes 
 the imps of irony from their subterranean 
 vaults and sends them swarming and gib- 
 bering over the roofs and through the 
 streets of that image-chrismed city, now 
 suddenly become a deserted city of rotted 
 rookeries. 
 
 The eternal legend of the Brain and the 
 World, of the Image and the Mirage is 
 
10 THE BRAIN AND THE WORLD 
 
 found in all ages — ^in the fables of Tantalus 
 and Ixion, in the world-wisdom of Don 
 Quixote and Faust, in "El Magico Pro- 
 digioso" of Calderon, in the Dhamapada, 
 in the Ibsen plays. The legerdemain of 
 the senses it is that scratches those lines of 
 sorrow at mouth-ends, draws heavy blank 
 ciu"tains over the wild scenery of the eye, 
 sets a flag of truce on the purposeful brow 
 and sends us to cower behind the breast- 
 works of an eternal reticence. 
 
 Men sail the seas for adventiu'e, travel 
 towards the poles for the novel and seek in 
 remote lands the tang of the strange, the 
 witchery of the weird; but the adventure, 
 the novelty, the tang and the witchery are 
 in men themselves. I am my own novelty, 
 my own adventure; it is I who give tang 
 to life. I am bewitched of wonder and mys- 
 tery — than me there is nothing more weird 
 that is conceivable. He who goes a-seeking 
 leaves himself behind. Other than yoiu- 
 soul there is no ideality. We can go toward 
 nothing imless that thing has first come 
 toward us. The brain is not only the center 
 of gravity, but is gravity. The Will is not 
 only the inventor of the universe, but is 
 the universe. 
 
THE BRAIN AND THE WORLD 11 
 
 We go toward ourselves. My images 
 and dreams and thoughts are eggs. I 
 enwomb and imwomb myself. I have in- 
 finities, eternities, nadirs, zeniths boxed in 
 my brain. I am always delivering myself 
 to myself, cannot forsake myself, cannot 
 possibly exist in the world — seeing that the 
 world exists in me. 
 
 The world began with mind; before that 
 it was only a possibility. The brain is the 
 radiant hub of the imiversal illusion. We 
 have exiled the stars in their spaces and 
 imprisoned light in its wall-less tombs of 
 air. Pole star and the frozen moimtains 
 of the moon are the mere flotsam and jetsam 
 of our evolved and highly elaborated imag- 
 ining. All — all is only the balustrade of 
 the mind, out on the furthest portals of 
 which this mysteriously appeared I peers 
 for all its days at the image-children that 
 it has flimg off in its incalculable evolutions. 
 
 This ethereal upstart with the brazen 
 acclaim, this image-haunted mystery that 
 we name Man, who, after all, is but a 
 slight excess of Nothing and yet the meas- 
 ure of all, a drop of blazing; oil that has 
 bubbled out of a beaker of flame in the 
 hands of a Something — ^what does he know? 
 
12 THE BRAIN AND THE WORLD 
 
 There are the image and the imagined, 
 the Brain and the World, the Eternal 
 Ghost fabricating its world-shrouds. 
 
THE MIRTH OF THE BRAIN 
 
 WHY is there laughter in an 
 existence that none of us laughs 
 at? Why is there mirth in 
 a world of struggle and precarious 
 chances? We come into hfe with a scream 
 of agony and go out df it with palms ex- 
 tended, signifying nothing. Proserpina is 
 the goddess of death, and no one has been 
 found stronger than she — except it be 
 Momus, the god of laughter, whom Proser- 
 pina cannot slay. 
 
 Laughter is no accident. It is something 
 rooted in the depths of our being. Pain 
 is deeper than all thought; laughter is 
 higher than all pain. Care cudgels us with 
 an ebon stave — but look above! there is 
 Laughter — ^the fairy goddess waving a sil- 
 ver-bright wand. 
 
 There is a comic spirit in things as well 
 
 as a tragic spirit. The gods bowl us over 
 
 and still we make merry. Hmricane, 
 
 earthquake, war and fire conspire to an- 
 
 (13) 
 
14 THE MIRTH OF THE BRAIN 
 
 nihilate us, but jocosity and joviality flow 
 in an unbroken stream from the springs of 
 buoyancy set deep within the soul of man. 
 
 Only the heart suffers. The brain is 
 the peaceful, undisturbed, eternal spectator 
 of the monstrous paradox called Life. The 
 mind never worries, is never perturbed, is 
 never in pain. The heart — ^that great lu- 
 panar of desires — ^may seduce the brain 
 to participate in its earth-itches; but in it- 
 self the mind is a detached, impersonal ob- 
 server of the great tangled web of passion 
 and error that is spun in the heart of man. 
 
 Mind as mind has the placidity of a mir- 
 ror. All things are reflected in it, but for 
 the image of Lady Macbeth it cares no 
 more than for the image of Falstaff. 
 
 The unconscious universe struggled and 
 fought until it evolved a brain. In mind 
 the star and plant rise to thought. The 
 World-Spirit contemplates itself through 
 the brain of man. It is the light born of 
 darkness. Through the brain nature passes 
 from actor to observer, from blind, eyeless 
 combat to wide-eyed inteUigence, from an 
 immemorial pain to the beginnings of an 
 immemorial mirth. 
 
 Impersonal contemplation — ^that is the 
 
THE MIRTH OF THE BRAIN 15 
 
 secret of laughter. Mirth is as old as the 
 first mind that detached itself — even for a 
 single hour — from the service of the emo- 
 tions and the lower nature generally. The 
 first man who said, "I will retire from the 
 combat a little while to the hiU to watch 
 the fray" was the first man who laughed 
 with his brain. Distance, aloofness, height 
 strike out by a magic psychic friction the 
 spark that bears in its centre the germ of 
 philosophy. Only cosmic comedians be- 
 come as the gods. 
 
 The elements of the incongruous and ri- 
 diculous run through all the affairs of men. 
 The intervention of the unknovra at each 
 moment in their affairs and schemes whirls 
 them off their feet and ehcits from Intellect 
 the same gleeful scream that children give 
 vent to in a circus when the trapeze per- 
 former whirls unexpectedly through the 
 air. With the significant difference that 
 the circus acrobat knows where he is going 
 to land, but the acrobat Man in this great 
 cosmic circus is caught unawares and lands 
 where Circimistance forgot to spread her 
 nets. 
 
 The World-Spirit is a freakish, ironic 
 spirit. It contrives strange outcomes to our 
 
16 THE MIRTH OF THE BRAIN 
 
 conscious plans. We plan and plan in one 
 spirit, and behold I another spirit takes 
 possession. Dante's Inferno, written in a 
 religious fervor as an exposition of theo- 
 logical conception, set at work the forces 
 which finally overthrew those very concep- 
 tions. The Inquisition, instituted to fasten 
 by force a religious creed on the world, 
 was the means that brought about the final 
 annihilation of the means. Anarchy spreads 
 just in the measure that you persecute it. 
 The means employed to enslave a people 
 are the very means that awaken the pas- 
 sion for liberty in their souls. There 
 is no surer way to keep forces in motion 
 that you wish to annihilate than to persist- 
 ently struggle against them. If you wish 
 to see how far a pendulum will swing to 
 the right, draw it to the extreme left. 
 
 This is the Immanent Mirth in things — 
 the quiet laughter of the hidden Prestidigi- 
 tateur; the exquisite mockery of nature 
 which made hilarious the days of Rabelais. 
 
 Leisure is the condition of the growth 
 of the smile in the brain. Laughter comes 
 with contemplation. A man may take joy 
 in his work, but he cannot laugh at it. 
 Mirth is a kind of serene scepticism. It 
 
THE MIRTH OF THE BRAIN 17 
 
 comes only with intelligence. The percep- 
 tion that life is something of a joke may 
 possibly come to a boor laboring in -the 
 fields, but it clothes itself to him as a bitter 
 jest, for his brain is still the handmaiden 
 of his stomach. The leisure of Mephisto- 
 pheles, the intelligence of Lucifer-^these 
 must be approached to perceive the depth 
 on depth of world- jollity. 
 
 Fanaticism, the man with the fixed idea — 
 the antithetical mental attitude to the world- 
 sceptic — is incapable of cerebral mirth. The 
 finest minds are those in which inteUigence 
 and insight spread out like the gradual 
 opening of a circular fan. They come to 
 perceive all sides in one glance. They are 
 like a man who stands at the north pole — 
 all longitudes centre in him; he sees all 
 the imaginary lines that men map and mmi- 
 ber and believe in. He is conscious for the 
 first time of the absurdity of direction; he 
 comes to know in a flash how purely arbi- 
 trary are afiirmative ideas about any- 
 thing. 
 
 And he laughs a long laugh into the 
 skies. 
 
 The dominant note observable in Nature 
 — observable only to the eye of the mind 
 
18 THE MIRTH OF THE BRAIN 
 
 that has severed itself from the prejudices 
 of the will — is bhtheness. She seems al- 
 ways to be laughing; her most terrible mo- 
 ments are like the scowls that elders put 
 on in front of naughty children who really 
 amuse them — ^the mocking mask of mirth. 
 Nature goes her way through her four 
 seasons with a carelessness, an insouciance, 
 a sangfroid such as men have who care 
 nothing for death or who have learned the 
 fine secret that the tomb covers but does 
 not hide. Life is a huge joke to the Im- 
 mortal Mother. She laughs eternally 
 because she is wiser than her children. She 
 laiows nothing is lost. She knows that 
 death is recomposition and pain is the way 
 character is tooled. 
 
 How deep was Shakespeare's mirth when 
 he gave us Puck! Puck, the lordly imp of 
 a topsy-turvy rmiverse; Puck who is the 
 seer par excellence of the world ; Puck who 
 put a girdle of laughter around the universe ; 
 Puck who smiled and smiled and was not 
 a villain — only a divine sportsman who 
 played battledore and shuttlecock with us 
 in the fields of Eternity. 
 
 There is quenchless grief in all things — 
 if we will have it so. Move up into the 
 
THE MIRTH OF THE BRAIN 19 
 
 higher altitudes and the grief in all things 
 turns to a quenchless mirth. 
 
 The higher altitude is just that step from 
 the heart to the hrain. 
 
WONDER 
 
 TO see, one must close the eyes. This 
 is the paradox of insight — a seeing 
 into. The physical world is nothing 
 but insulated force. It is only the mind's 
 eye that can pierce the arras of images and 
 behold the unimaginable. 
 
 The mystic sense is a form of vascular 
 activity. It is the palpitant ethereal in us, 
 the radio-activity of the corpuscle. In the 
 sluiceways of the brain it rises to conscious- 
 ness. 
 
 Our brains are portable imiverses, and 
 oiu" souls are imbirthed worlds. God 
 created the material world, Bishop Berkeley 
 destroyed it, and Herbert Spencer re- 
 created it. We are coequal with the creat- 
 ive gods. Man weaves microcosm into 
 macrocosm, bastes the ideal to the real, hems 
 soul to body. He tracks the roving ideal 
 from its lair in the cell of the polyp to its 
 full growth in his own brain, and he pins 
 the Eternal to a Law. His dreams trans- 
 (20) 
 
WONDER 21 
 
 figure the Known to the Unknowable. 
 
 We have no criterion for anything. We 
 live in a Mystery. The data of life are 
 pleasure and pain, and these may be myths; 
 an illusion of the nerve cells. 
 
 Seas of sound, light and motion swirl in 
 our brains, and the "great processes" are 
 cell-eddy. Thought is cerebral sight. We 
 may trail Circumstance back to the Primal 
 Antagonism, and there it is lost. Conscious- 
 ness is the flash produced by friction. Birth 
 is recomposition of old matter, and death 
 is dissolution and recomposition. Mind is 
 evolved from mud, and mud is mind in 
 transition. Form is piirely accidental, and 
 the accidental is the unexpected inexorable. 
 Time is the space between thoughts, and 
 thought is Time spluttering. Space is the 
 distance between two illusions, and illu- 
 sions are what-might-have-been projected 
 on the blank screen of tomorrow. All 
 growth presupposes pain, and all pain en- 
 genders growth. Society is the systemati- 
 zation of instincts, and instincts are strati- 
 fied lusts. All knowledge is word- juggle. 
 To know all would be to know nothing. 
 
 The mystic waits and wonders. 
 
 And this Wonder is the back-stairs to 
 
22 WONDER 
 
 the stars — it is the Northwest Passage to 
 the pinnacle of the cosmos. It is where 
 one beholds most, but where one knows 
 least. It is to feel all things — ^yet to stand 
 in universal relations. It is a vision of 
 things in their totality but not in tlieir 
 wholeness. 
 
 Everything is grounded in mystery. 
 Everything is swimming, and the stable 
 does not exist. Life is a series of guesses, 
 and there is mystery in a match. The com- 
 monplace is the habitual, and the habitual 
 is a mystery that has grown stale from 
 sense-insistence. Life undulates; there is 
 no such thing as a level; a straight Une 
 is a myth, and all directions are indirec- 
 tions. Up and down are movable points 
 on horizons that do not exist; focus is an 
 eye-trick, and motion is cell-palpitation. 
 
 AU things radiate from a common point, 
 and differences are the same looked at from 
 various angles. The sap that flows in the 
 tree, the blood that flows in the veins, the 
 fires that flame from the sun, the waters 
 that run to the stars, and the passion litanies 
 breathed by lovers are aspects of force. 
 Star-shine and eye-glance and water-gleam 
 are the same. 
 
WONDER 23 
 
 The star sees itself through the , medium 
 of the human eye, and the moon shines on 
 itself. 
 
 Law created the brain, and the brain is 
 a crucible of Law. So each thing is a 
 compendiimi of all things, and still the All 
 is not found. 
 
 All acts are multiplied in the doing. Our 
 breathing builds or destroys imknown uni- 
 verses, and a gesture is a signal to eternity. 
 The cells are chalices of desire. Every act 
 is a breeder of beings. On what shore 
 breaks the last vibration caused by the 
 lowering of an eyelash? Does the lover 
 alone throb with ecstasy when his beloved's 
 eyes thicken with love-mists? And who 
 shall say that our most subtle smile does 
 not stir to life a thousand unseen existences 
 that have been quivering on the thresholds 
 of life? 
 
 'No act ever succeeds or fail; it does both. 
 We influence the unknown at every turn. 
 We are unknown workers in an unknown 
 world. We weave tomorrow on the shuttle 
 of today and unravel the past each minute. 
 All things are trying to stand still and go 
 on at the same time. Men desire rest and 
 motion simultaneously. They desire to go 
 
24 WONDER 
 
 on in order to be able to rest. Self -con- 
 servation is the basic principle in both rest 
 and motion. It is an everlasting ebb and 
 flow. But the mind ravished by Wonder is 
 beyond ebb and flow. 
 
 "Things pass into their opposites by 
 accumulation of indefinable quantities," 
 says Walter Pater. In that process is 
 buried the paradox of evolution and the 
 concept which breeds the mystic mind. Hate 
 is comic, for you shall in time become that 
 which you hate; and the thing you scorn — 
 behold! that thou art! "Tvat Twam Asi" 
 (for that thou art) repeats the Hindoo 
 sage when the West talks of Me, Thou, It. 
 "Tvat Twam Asi" repeat Schopenhauer and 
 Emerson. A fact is but the glazed surface 
 on an abysmal mystery. It is the symbohst 
 in art who knows this. And all symbolists 
 are mystics. 
 
 Evolution is a method, and method is 
 the mantle of law. The Law itself lies out 
 of time and space. It is the Spencerian 
 Eternal Energy; it is that which knows 
 neither "upward" nor "downward." Like 
 ether, it permeates all things; it floods the 
 atoms; it is world-shine — consciousness. 
 
 Our souls are a method — part of the 
 
WONDER 25 
 
 mantle; and every act is redolent of the 
 past. Things rise to a summit and flow 
 down on the other side, and the baby in its 
 birth hour may have attained the pinnacle 
 of the inconceivable, for the birth of a babe 
 has more of accomphshment in it than the 
 maturity of a man. 
 
 Nothing is spurious ; all things are in their 
 place. Artificiality is the curd on the nat- 
 ural. No man wills; he is willed— for he 
 is a growth, and his roots are in the primor- 
 dial. The secret is in the seed, and the seed 
 is the secret. No man can say, "I am 
 evolved;" he is forever evolving. He is a 
 "God in the crib," and his acts are only 
 hints of his dreams. 
 
 Decay is growth seen from the other 
 side. Decay and growth flout permanence. 
 An eternal continuance dragging anchor; 
 a measured swirl of unmeasured waters; 
 light flowering to form; abstraction mask- 
 ing as a concretion — ^what else do we know? 
 
 We came from the simian and tend to the 
 sublime; and as the simian for ages was big 
 with man, so is the sublime heavy with its 
 unborn gods. The worm treads fast upon 
 the heels of God. Change has woven 
 shrouds for myriads of Creators, for the 
 
26 WONDER 
 
 universe subsists en passant. The opal tint 
 in the dawn was spun by the lihes of the 
 field, and the human form is chiselled star- 
 dust. Alchemy is as universal as gravita- 
 tion. 
 
 The universe began in an equiUbration 
 and will end in an equilibration. A sigh, 
 an unrest, a faint ripple caused by some 
 antagonistic principle — and the Law moved, 
 and suffering was born. The pageantry 
 of the Fates began. Vega in Lyra and the 
 ant on its hiU were diswombed in travail. 
 
 But why? With that question Wonder 
 falls on us. 
 
 You cannot seize upon the past or the 
 future. The universe is an eternal minute 
 forever tottering to its doom — cosmic 
 splash; torrent-mist; dream follicles that 
 have burst on the brain walls. Our sub- 
 limest act is still the abracadabra of an 
 Unknown God — a God who hides behind 
 a leaf and scribbles his contrarieties ; a God 
 who is flea and futurity ; who is oxygen and 
 Arcturus. There are cabals held in the 
 acorn, and the gods are enthroned in diatom. 
 The radiating laws are hubbed on a pimple, 
 and "evolution" is but a spoke in the Wheel 
 of Fire, 
 
WONDER 27 
 
 Genius has Wonder; it is its sixth sense. 
 The being that has envisaged the cosmos 
 in a glance exhales the ether of the un- 
 plumbed spaces his eyes have beheld. He 
 is a white flame fleshed for the nonce. And 
 his poems and pictures and philosophies 
 are fables of Wonder. 
 
 Without this sense of Wonder the sing- 
 ing of the stars is calliope music; the imi- 
 verse is doggerel. 
 
 With the mystic gleam the universe is 
 still doggerel — but scrawled by a Shakes- 
 peare. 
 
 Science is bankrupt. The unlettered 
 mystic in the Indian forest three thousand 
 years ago knew what science is just now 
 beginning to tell us. They now announce 
 that atoms are, after all, but centres of 
 force. "There is no such thing as matter," 
 said the Hindoo complacently ages ago. 
 Science has discovered a substance called 
 radiimi, which gives forth particles without 
 losing weight. Nothing can be lost, nothing 
 can be gained in an infinite imiverse, has 
 been the essence of mystical teaching from 
 Heraclitus to Emerson. Wonder's method 
 is divination. 
 
 To the mystic, life is a "conscious slum- 
 
28 WONDER 
 
 ber." Goethe and Balzac were great som- 
 nambulists who in a dream wrote hastily 
 and feverishly what they thought they saw, 
 then went back to bed again. Poe's soul 
 never awakened to a single reality. From 
 the ebon vaults of the Unconscious it stole 
 upon a world of toppling shadows, ashen 
 days and vaporous, opiate sallows. In- 
 stead of imiversal law he felt the universal 
 awe, and his life was a meditation on 
 shadows. 
 
 Walt Whitman had but to name a thing 
 and straightway that thing became a mys- 
 tery. This solid-seeming and substantial 
 world he made to reel and hung the mystic 
 glamour of his soul upon the ant. He saw 
 no greater mystery than the hair on the 
 back of his hand, and he said that "a glance 
 of the eye shall confoimd the science of aU 
 time." 
 
 The plodding fact-grubber crawls upon 
 a rim like a fly on a vase, but the mystic 
 is the light within. 
 
 To those who walk the world with open 
 eyes yet see not — ^those bald realists who 
 believe that when you have named a star 
 you have explained it — ideas stand for 
 things. But to the mystic things stand for 
 
WONDER 29 
 
 ideas. They translate particulars into gen- 
 erals. Goethe drew the universe into his 
 soul, and his dying words were, "More 
 Light." He had translated all things into 
 thoughts and all thoughts into visions, and, 
 standing of all men of the century on the 
 pinnacle of the spirit, he still stood in the 
 dark. The light he had was just great 
 enough to show him the impenetrability of 
 the darkness beyond and around. But he 
 fared forth with Wonder in his soul. 
 
 The mystics in philosophy, literature and 
 art do not differ essentially in any age. 
 Environment cannot touch them. Knowl- 
 edge comes — and goes; the mystic lingers. 
 He is above time and clime, and the 
 "modern investigators" are ancient crooners 
 that shall be. Heraclitus or Maeterlinck, 
 Lucretius or Tolstoi, Spinoza or Thomas 
 Hardy, Sir Thomas Browne or Amiel, 
 Buddha or Carlyle, Shelley or D'Annunzio 
 — their premise is everlastingly the same: 
 Shadows that emerge from a Void, scud 
 across the earth, some in fury, some in 
 pallid calm — and then the Void again. A 
 ring, a circle; an arc of consciousness, an 
 arc of sleep ; an emergence and a disappear- 
 ance — ^like that illusion of stagecraft where- 
 
30 WONDER 
 
 in fifty men, by marching in a circle before 
 and behind the scenery, simulate an in- 
 finite host — ^that is hfe. 
 
 These solemn-suited Brethren of Wonder 
 dwell in the husk of things, but are not of 
 the husk. They are wizard souls glaring 
 through the lattice of dreams, praying 
 sceptics immured in the Tomb with the 
 Black Panels. Their type of face is the 
 face of Percy Bysshe Shelley — the Angel 
 Israfel in flesh. 
 
THE ALMIGHTINESS OF MIGHT 
 
 THE refinements of civilization are 
 more dangerous than the frank 
 brutalities of savagery; it is a sub- 
 stitution of the serpent for the prowling 
 man-eater; the substitution of an insidious 
 corruption for a ceaseless battle in the day- 
 light. In a state of nature the weakest go 
 to the wall; in a state of over-refined civil- 
 ization both the weak and the strong even- 
 tually go to the wall. 
 
 Civilization is the last refinement of the 
 herding instinct. All weakness is centri- 
 petal. Strength is centrifugal. The "so- 
 cial instinct" is a phase of fear. 
 
 As Nietzsche has pointed out, our "rights" 
 are otir mights — ^that is, the thing we have 
 the power to do (if there go along with 
 it the power to immunize oneself from 
 penalty) we do; in fact, must do. Govern- 
 ment imposes penalties on those who trans- 
 gress its ordinances — that is, it opposes 
 power with power; escapes a pain by pre- 
 (31) 
 
32 THE ALMIGHTINESS OF MIGHT 
 
 scribing one. The excuse made is that "the 
 welfare of the whole race" is at stake — ^that 
 is, organized society must forever make 
 war on minorities. And yet, if our view 
 take in a great space of time, we see these 
 minorities becoming majorities and the 
 majorities passing into minorities. When 
 the latter are ensconsed in power they, 
 forgetting their former "rights" as minor- 
 ities, use exactly the same methods to per- 
 petuate themselves as did their enemies, 
 now their prey. 
 
 The law of gravitation is the only dis- 
 coverable moral law in the universe. Gravi- 
 tation is involved in every "right." Without 
 gravitation the words good and evil could 
 not exist; we could have no attractions and 
 repulsions. The things to which I am at- 
 tracted and which are attracted to me — 
 those things I have a "right" to; they are 
 my veiled destinies, my veritable selves. A 
 "right" springs from a need, and need is 
 the ethical equivalent of the physical law of 
 gravitation. 
 
 The obstacles that stand in the path of 
 my inexorable attractions must die — or else 
 slay me. It is merely a question of which 
 is the stronger, not whose is the trespass. 
 
THE ALMIGHTINESS OF MIGHT 33 
 
 Strength and Strength's will is the supreme 
 ethiq. All else are dreams from hospital 
 beds, the sly goodness of weak souls. 
 
 It is the weak man who urges compro- 
 mise — ^never the strong man. A weak man 
 is one who has not the courage of his gravi- 
 tations; a strong man is the converse of 
 this. Power knows no evil but the threat- 
 ened destruction of itself. 
 
 The essence of wilUng is self-destruction 
 — and aggression; self -exploitation cannot 
 be conceived of except as aggression. A 
 society prospers materially in so far as 
 each individual aggresses on the other. It 
 is called "Business." The problem is how 
 to subtilize it. "Immorality" is the essence 
 of "progress." There is, it is true, a com- 
 mon sense that "holds a fretful realm in 
 awe." But it is no more "moral" than 
 gravitation or the centrifugal and centri- 
 petal forces that preserve the orbit of the 
 planet. It is a mechanical law with social 
 implications. 
 
 This element of warfare is so deeply rooted 
 in the nature of things — it is so absolutely 
 a necessity ,if the imiverse is to continue 
 to exist — tWift Nature in order to perpet- 
 uate herself everlastingly invents opposite? 
 
34 THE ALMIGHTINESS OF MIGHT 
 
 to attain her ends. Thus love. Affection 
 is one of the World-Spirit's devices for 
 more effectually carrying on her war of 
 part against part. It is a minor device in 
 the Great Method. Woman is the strong 
 man's recreation; or, in cosmic language, 
 after depletion, replenishment. 
 
 Supreme happiness engenders not only 
 the feeling of exalted weU-being in our- 
 selves but an overmastering desire to make 
 others suffer by either forcibly imposing 
 our happiness upon them or tantahzingly 
 parading it before their eyes. Or the su- 
 premely happy may show the masked cru- 
 elty of this state by patronizing those in 
 pain — ^by creating obligations, to be col- 
 lected in the form of charity-kisses when 
 their own painful season comes on. To 
 prey — ^to prey — ^that is our essence. If we 
 cannot be powerful and happy and prey 
 on others we invent conscience and prey on 
 ourselves. 
 
 Have you divined the secret thoughts 
 of those who privily pride themselves on 
 their life of self-sacrifice? — ^how, finding 
 none to pat them on the back, they fabri- 
 cate in their own souls a Greater than they 
 who tells them each night: "Well done, my 
 
THE ALMIGHTINESS OF MIGHT 35 
 
 servant." Ah! the comphments this mystic 
 being pays them! In spite of their smug, 
 dutiful countenances they, too, have their 
 bloated ego for companionship. They must 
 find a reward somewhere for their self- 
 slaughter. So intoxicated do they become 
 in their self-adulations, so hysterically 
 happy are these beings with their flagellant 
 rites that they seek to impose their beatifi- 
 cation on others. So they invented Christ 
 and pass "Christian laws." 
 
 Humanity cannot escape its origins; it 
 admires force more than "goodness." It 
 will applaud power imalhed to moral prin- 
 ciples, but never moral principles imallied 
 to power. It loves the bold, though the 
 bold be "bad." 
 
 Only iQ the fury of excess does one catch 
 glimpses of the immortal truths. Ah! the 
 divine excess in great things — ^the excess 
 that shot Mont Blanc toward the stars, the 
 excess of hfe-force that sent Byron flaming 
 through Europe, the excess that flvmg Ver- 
 laine into the gutter! They who keep the 
 balances live long — and see nothing. 
 
 No two men's environments are the same 
 because no two men's mental states are the 
 same. Environment is a series of mental 
 
36 THE ALMIGHTINESS OF MIGHT 
 
 states superposed on a hypothetical world. 
 Environment is not "the sum of the forces 
 which surround you," but the sum of the 
 illusions which fire your brain. 
 
 All suffering is caused by an obstacle in 
 the path of a force. See that you are not 
 your own obstacle. 
 
 All willing is not necessarily a willing 
 into fuller life, but it is invariably a willing 
 away from death. Man gives little thought 
 to his destination so long as he can remain 
 out of reach of his Pursuer. 
 
 The right to live has never been proved 
 except by the murderer and the thief. 
 
 There are countless reasons, no doubt, 
 why we should not be evil, but it is impos- 
 sible to think of a single rational reason 
 why we should be "good." "Goodness" does 
 not necessarily bring health, wealth, wisdom 
 or peace of mind. Rather is it a smiling 
 martjrrdom. 
 
 The joy of the savage who has slain his 
 enemies, the joy of the ascetic-saint who 
 has slain his instinctive nature are both 
 derived from the same source, the pleasure 
 of putting something to death. 
 
 If all Christians were hke Christ there 
 would be no necessity for Christianity; for 
 
THE ALMIGHTINESS OF MIGHT 37 
 
 when once we have achieved absolutely and 
 in every particular our object, our passion, 
 our dream, the motives that urged us on to 
 that consummation disappear, and we are 
 left in exactly the same predicament from 
 which we wriggled. There is no Utopia 
 that would be worth living in for a single 
 month. Unless you are prepared for pain, 
 prepared to kiU, skirt precipices and be 
 killed, you will always remain a decadent, 
 i. e., an idealist, a sick man. 
 
 The Christian "Kingdom of God," where 
 the weak, the stunted, the underfed and the 
 outcasts shaU riot and roister and gorge 
 and swill and blaspheme at the strong 
 earth-man singing his deathless war-chant 
 in the hell-pits of strife I 
 
 There is no rising from lower to higher 
 in social systems — there is only a constant 
 redistribution of mediocrity, a thinning or 
 a thickening of the crust beneath which 
 glows the passion for liberty. 
 
 When society no longer exists for the wel- 
 fare of the individual both must go, but the 
 individual will be the last to disappear be- 
 cause he was the first to appear. Hence 
 to live for others to the exclusion of self 
 tends to the annihilation of both. But to 
 
38 THE ALMIGHTINESS OF MIGHT 
 
 live for self to the exclusion of others does 
 not necessarily tend to the annihilation of 
 both the individual and society, for it is 
 easier to conceive of the existence of a single 
 individual without society than it is to con- 
 ceive of society without a single individual. 
 
 Wherever "justice" has righted a wrong 
 it has wronged a right. 
 
 The social system is maintained by oppos- 
 ing one vice to another; it is a balance main- 
 tained by bogus weights. The aggressive 
 instincts of the individual are held in check 
 by the threatened aggression of many in- 
 dividuals. 
 
THE INTANGIBLE LIFE 
 
 LIFE is a manifestation of uncon- 
 scious ideas, a flowerlike exfolia- 
 tion from an unseen, unknown 
 within to a visible, known without, of which 
 death is the rim. 
 
 The mind, the earlier mind, of man, half 
 opened, as a flower just before dawn, be- 
 holding, fearing, this rim — this almost tan- 
 gible cessation of the activities of the be- 
 loved body — reacts upon itself in thought, 
 seeking blindly for something of the in- 
 finite beyond matter; dreaming thus of 
 gaining for mental, spiritual intensity what 
 so soon must be lost in space and time; 
 asking, as it were, a concession from Fate 
 by a steady withdrawal from participation 
 in her more obvious empire, the external 
 world. 
 
 So is the dream born; and from the un- 
 mapped territories in the atoms in the brain 
 there springs a being within a being — ^the 
 imaginative-prophetic soul, forerunner of 
 (39), 
 
40 THE INTANGIBLE LIFE 
 
 the Intangible Life, the subverter and 
 sapper of the external world, a thing that 
 shall function in the limitless. 
 
 To beings so elected — few and unique 
 among those who live literally, the mud- 
 worms — ^the nearest thing is the remotest 
 thing. They are never quite socketted in 
 their environment, never quite come into 
 contact with their own bodies. Extension, 
 encoimter and impact of bodily things are 
 not true for them. They stand with one 
 hand upon the door-bolt, about to go forth 
 from their enchanted souls into the grooves 
 of practical life; but they never make the 
 motion that is decisive. Merely they stand 
 there to listen apperceptively, or they peer 
 through the knot-hole of sense at the elabo- 
 rate rituals of buffoonery. 
 
 Standing farther away from life, they 
 stand nearer to that which gives life; mov- 
 ing not anywhere, they are everywhere. 
 They are never real in the sense that a 
 wall is real, being at most mere effigies of 
 flesh and blood leashed to a Vision. 
 
 They have for environment all that is 
 conceivable, all that is scooped into the nets 
 of imagination and intelligence from the 
 abysses of the unsounded inland sea — ^things 
 
THE INTANGIBLE LIFE 41 
 
 strange, things chastened by ages of im- 
 mobUity and deep-sea lave, residue of lost 
 worlds, and things still alive reaching 
 through the tangled treasure of the soul 
 hands that grip, forcing through to the day 
 the short, agonized utterance of the baflfled. 
 And, in rarer moments, they are environed 
 by the inconceivable — ^by those bare hints 
 that are the souls of the great unuttered 
 poems, and by those stranger epiphanies 
 that amaze, illuminate and destroy sense's 
 last belief in sense. 
 
 One may pick the world apart, pick it 
 to its last shred of matter; but it is pre- 
 cisely here that life — ^the inexplicable, un- 
 analyzable, intangible roots of matter — 
 begins, and the scalpel I must abdicate in 
 favor of the imagination, the winged intel- 
 ligence. 
 
 Imagination is a spurt from the depths 
 of Being, a swirling geyser that gravitates 
 to a zenith set in the infinite. 
 
 Memory cannot take us beyond ourselves, 
 cannot carry us further than the experiences 
 of our special form of existence; it moves 
 in limits always. But in the mystic imagi- 
 nation will be found the fragmentary 
 records of pasts long swallowed up, the 
 
42 THE INTANGIBLE LIFE 
 
 shining dust of worlds crumbled beyond 
 possibility of reintegration, the whirling, 
 blazing meteoric stones flung from the 
 wrecks of incalculably remote selves. 
 
 Some golden minute overlooked in Time's 
 monstrous hoiu", a miraculous survival in 
 the impersonal memory of a wonder-time, 
 ungarnered of Obhvion: such magical 
 visitors come to the bedside of the ever- 
 dying body! For the Eternal Dreamer, 
 which is the soul of man, never dies, though 
 dreams themselves are made of perishables. 
 
 We dreamed as impulse and desire in 
 our parents and are lured into our bodies 
 by vague imaginings, urged from husk to 
 husk by the impetus of Karma, the spirits 
 of accumulated past acts. Whatever one 
 dreams tends to beget a body, and what we 
 are now is old dream come to be the phan- 
 tasm of place, ancestral imagination turned 
 brain and sinew and blood. 
 
 The divinizing imagination can detach 
 itself from this present crucible wherein 
 it flows for a day and plunge into that age- 
 less past, circumventing the shameful quick- 
 ness of life, superposing on the suUen mys- 
 tery of death the greater miracle of con- 
 tinuity through perpetual eflFacement. 
 
THE INTANGIBLE LIFE 43 
 
 Inundating me, I am back-rendered to 
 the things I was, fore-rendered to the things 
 I must be, resolving in a single eye-shot my 
 marvellous complexities into their simples; 
 beholding in this vile impulse the ravin of 
 some old fatality: recognizing in this im- 
 medicable wound in the soul the work of 
 the Avenger who seeks out the unbalanced 
 and the impenitent — the old wolf with shin- 
 ing tooth who prowls and whelps forever in 
 the souls of us ! 
 
 Imagination is thus the menstruum of all 
 materials, and the poet in his contempla- 
 tions gathers up this world in his brain as 
 one gathers waters in the hand. It was 
 Alexander who sat down and wept because 
 there were no more worlds to conquer. Had 
 he been a devotee of the Intangible Life 
 he would have wept because he could not 
 conquer all the worlds he saw. 
 
 Only the poet can track Time back to 
 its soiu-ce, only the mystic is permitted to 
 step out of space or to lift the veil of the 
 uncircumstanced, where images fail, but 
 imagination still leads, where the guess is 
 the only certainty, where logic is nursery 
 block-building. He is the live king in the 
 catacombs of matter; the mummy that has 
 
44 THE INTANGIBLE LIFE 
 
 split its wrappings and wings away. He 
 dislodges, disturbs, seeing in Law merely 
 the method of miracles. 
 
 Not where I am, but where I dream — 
 there am I. 
 
 When the sword is absent from the sheath 
 what matter where Siie sheath dangles? 
 
 My body may be beside you, but I may 
 not be there — nor anywhere where that 
 body could follow. All our troubles come 
 from standing too close to our skins. The 
 sword becomes bitten by the acids that cor- 
 rode the scabbard. Sorrow is often only 
 an error of vision. 
 
 Imagination is a form of hunger. Ani- 
 mals have little imagination because they 
 are easily satisfied — food and sexual gra- 
 tification are all they require. The most 
 powerful imaginations are foimd in the un- 
 happy. Poverty drives genius to the Intan- 
 gible Life or brigandage. AU great imag- 
 inative art is a transcript of world-sorrow, 
 a record of things imperfect. All art is 
 a record of the Intangible Life, a confes- 
 sion of the inadequacy of action. Natiire 
 has, in the intellect of man, bred her foe. 
 She has in her blind wilhng willed her doom. 
 There is always a tendency in the intellec- 
 
THE INTANGIBLE LIFE 45 
 
 tual mind to reject the things of sense, or 
 to use them merely to further the ends of 
 imderstanding. And the more the brain 
 imderstands the less the body lusts. 
 
 The intellect is religious: it demands a 
 rational universe. No end that is merely 
 a rebeginning can be a rational end. 
 
 The imagination — ^the eye of the intellect 
 — strains its orbs in search of another kind 
 of eternity than that in which we lie quite 
 helpless. And on her retina there is a tiny 
 shadow of the Reality. 
 
 Certain beings there are who seem to be 
 doing a work in some other sphere, to be 
 occupied elsewhere, to be mere shadowy 
 visitants of earth, looking on things about 
 them as clumsy forgeries of something 
 divinely writ — ^writ on other and finer 
 parchments than stone and earth and wave. 
 That feeling of walking in a "world unreal- 
 ized" is no poetic myth, but the actual daily 
 experience of a type of mind not so rare 
 as most believe. It is direct contact with 
 Reahty, the everlasting mood of the Un- 
 changeable. 
 
 It is the secret of the Intangible Life, 
 this contact with the great scene-shifter; 
 
46 THE INTANGIBLE LIFE 
 
 and perpetual melancholy is given for its 
 birthmark. 
 
 The agony of those on whom has fallen the 
 Infinite! of those doomed to sit up to their 
 eyes in the brack of this world and to feel 
 that above the eyes they are bathed by the 
 waters that flow nowhither from out the 
 nowhere. These centaurs of the mud and 
 of the azure cannot take the common part, 
 yet they cannot reject it whoUy. Cakes 
 and ale and the hair-shirt they spurn; cakes 
 and ale and the hair-shirt are theirs stUl. 
 Their broodiag, wistful faces peer across 
 the sills of the House of Revels and they 
 pass on, unallied, ahens beneath an alien 
 sun. To them the shoulders of Time seem 
 overweighted, forever and forever holding 
 up this accumulating burden of evil, this 
 daily increment of deed and dream, this per- 
 petual transference of today's burdens to 
 the shoulders of endless reluctant tomor- 
 rows. 
 
 The abstract mind, with its dower of 
 imaginative sight, swallows up aU its im- 
 pulses toward practical life. Why should 
 a man do anything when all that is done 
 changes in the doing? Our own moticms 
 generate the cataracts that carry us to- 
 
THE INTANGIBLE LIFE 47 
 
 ward life. The whole universe changes in 
 the moment of contemplation. There is 
 a dying and a resurrection of each thing 
 and aU things each second. Into that bot- 
 tomless sea of the Infinite there tumble all 
 stars, all peoples, all pleasant ways, all 
 bitter memories, all sub-human and super- 
 human compoimds, all the organized 
 shadows which we call things. 
 
 The being gnawed by this monstrous, in- 
 visible super-concept is something of a god. 
 There is no rest for him night or day: 
 come spring, come autumn; come birth, 
 come death — it is all to him as though it 
 were not. For over and under and round 
 about he sees, like the Ancient Mariner, 
 Life-in-Death and Death-in-Life, and 
 things visit his ear dully and life slides by 
 like distant shores seen through a tropic 
 haze — ^himself caught in the debris, half of 
 him gravitating toward the Viewless, the 
 other half full socketted in matter. 
 
 Matter! There are those who have done 
 away with that clog. If one stay long 
 enough with inorganic, inanimate things, 
 concentrate his thought on their inertness, 
 their deadly calm, one becomes curiously 
 aware of something bordering on semi- 
 
48 THE INTANGIBLE LIFE 
 
 intelligible expectancy in their attitudes. 
 The table, bed, chair in a room, under this 
 mental surveillance, will become half- 
 create. These dumb things, somehow, as- 
 sume an air of questioning watchfulness — 
 as of embryons about to receive the spark 
 that will stir their limbs and engender move- 
 ment. Motion and rest seem one thing, and 
 the Reality underlying each comes oui|; 
 stark. 
 
 Mind and matter are one thing operating 
 in two ways imder one primal impulse — 
 the impulse of appetite. There is a passion 
 of change in matter, and one of the results 
 of this passion has been the production of 
 mind. Matter is the subsidence of passion, 
 mind in the gross state. 
 
 If it were not for the principle of decay — 
 that is, the principle of evanescing change — 
 we should be able to see a tree become a 
 man in the evolutionary series before our 
 very eyes and the solidest boulder trans- 
 form itself into a crying baby. 
 
 It was with this knowledge that Walt 
 Whitman apostrophised a tree as "Thou un- 
 told life of mel" No man's life is long 
 enough nor his instruments of perception 
 keen enough to behold this translation. The 
 
THE INTANGIBLE LIFE 49 
 
 imagination alone conceives it and knows 
 that it is so. The passion of Pygmalion 
 made of the statue of Galatea a breath- 
 ing, living woman. The legend is eternally 
 true. The living are the dead made mani- 
 fest; and the so-called dead are the living 
 unmanifest. 
 
 Every woi'd we utter is but the utterance 
 of a drowsy phantom in our blood, the open- 
 ing of the lips of a spectre. For this reason 
 in rare moments of self -consciousness our 
 voice sounds strange, far away, not ours. 
 It is the sudden perception of that great 
 truth: We are not ourselves. 
 
 The human soul, the Eternal Substance, 
 is the immortal Spectator and placid Ob- 
 server of the endless recurrence of its own 
 shadows. Thought is the endless recurrence 
 of its dreams; movement the endless recur- 
 rence of its method. At the end of un- 
 imaginably vast cycles of time the Soul 
 swallows its own consciousness and draws 
 back into itself its shadows, which we call 
 matter; its dreams, which we call thought; 
 its method, which we call motion. And all 
 that was lies dormant in the Nought, a 
 possibility of Nothing. It is the Sabbath 
 of works and days. The Eternal Substance 
 
50 THE INTANGIBLE LIFE 
 
 lives as a desire, and shadows and dreams 
 and motion are born again, and the endless 
 bitter burdens are taken up once more. 
 
 The native interior sense, the quick ap- 
 prehension of the soul of things, some sud- 
 den rebirth- in the brain of knowledge that 
 had long lain dormant — ^this is the most 
 marvellous of human possessions. He who 
 has it in large measure may skip all learn- 
 ing, for he has wisdom; and wisdom is the 
 instinct for values — a lightning in the soul 
 that strikes the husk of illusion from the 
 kernel of eternality and lays bare the essen- 
 tial. 
 
 The deepest wisdom has nothing to do 
 with facts, with accuracy, with proof, cor- 
 roboration. Wisdom is the Fact. It is the 
 gift of the Intangible Life. 
 
THE IRONY OF NEGATIVES 
 
 TO wish for the fulfilment of your 
 desire — ^that is childish. To fear the 
 fulfilment of your desire — ^that is 
 the beginning of spiritual senility. To de- 
 sire not to desire — ^that is wisdom. 
 
 All great negations are at last splendid 
 affirmations. We renoxmce by desiring not 
 to have, and to say, "I refrain" is really 
 to say, "I wiU not to will." This is the 
 humor of all great refusals. We reject 
 the pennies because we covet the gold 
 pieces, and spurn brown bread for the 
 manna that may fall to us. There is a 
 latent Yea in each great Nay. 
 
 Absolute renunciations cannot be con- 
 ceived. We forsake the worse for the 
 better, the gutter for the stars, counterfeit 
 days for real days, the senses for the super- 
 senuous. The dominating instinct can only 
 be overcome by a dominating instinct. We 
 are the gibes of an eternal Will. Turn 
 wheresoever we may we cannot escape it. 
 (51) 
 
52 THE IRONY OF NEGATIVES 
 
 When we give it battle we are most its bond- 
 man. It smiles back at us from the end of 
 our swords, and when we flee from it, it is 
 both pursuer and pursued. 
 
 The militant remmciants, from the 
 Buddha to Schopenhauer, have been the 
 founders of powerful movements — ^power- 
 ful negations, if one likes — strenuous nays. 
 These flesh-walled prisons were too narrow 
 for the mighty lusts of their souls; this spin- 
 ning green pebble was too small a stage 
 for their spirit-strut. They counselled renun- 
 ciation here for a mightier life "elsewhere." 
 They would lay waste the temporal order 
 with the flaming fagots of their dreams, let 
 loose the thirst-parched hoimds of endless 
 desire from their kennels of clay, rip the 
 mask from the minute, drain eternity of its 
 secrets, and plant their streamers of affirma- 
 tion on the last cosmic ruin. Renunciation I 
 There is no such thing. No is a transfig- 
 ured Yes. Renunciations are the cocoons 
 in which the dehcate silk of our finer de- 
 sires is spun. 
 
 The process of evolution, the whole of 
 that marvellous exfoliation from the amoeba 
 to Thomas Hardy, is a process of "renun- 
 ciation," a progressive leaving behind, a 
 
THE IRONY OF NEGATIVES 53 
 
 sloughing off, an endless denial, an eternal 
 series of terminations that are beginnings, 
 and beginnings that are only valuable be- 
 cause they record terminations. The uni- 
 verse is eternally dying in order to live. 
 We give up what we must when we must. 
 A deeper necessity than oiu" likes and dis- 
 likes commands. We flower in pain. We 
 are exiles forever on the march to a Siberia 
 whose terrors are purely imaginative. 
 
 All thought is action renounced. The 
 elaborated brain of a Newton, the bvurow- 
 ing mental eye of a Shakespeare, the flame- 
 crowned dreams of a Keats — all record the 
 inbreedings of the spirit. The finer, the 
 higher life begins with a veto. Each new 
 law repeals an old one, and when we have 
 discovered the illusiveness of days we reso- 
 lutely cancel the world in contemplation, 
 and "renounce" our hobbyhorses for Pega- 
 sus. 
 
 Action is characteristic of life on the in- 
 stinctive plane. A will-less inaction can be 
 reached only by the few. The centers of 
 inhibition develop late in life. With our 
 hand on that switchboard we may wreck 
 with a smile the blind, plunging impulses. 
 The iron-heeled spirit listens with pride 
 
54 THE IRONY OF NEGATIVES 
 
 to the crackling of the bones of dead selves 
 over which it stalks in grim-humorous de- 
 fiance — ^those selves of a million yeas; those 
 luring, seductive selves tricked out in a mil- 
 lion guises, that solicit him by night, by 
 day — ^selves born of a myriad lapses in a 
 myriad lives. 
 
 Procession, concession, recession — the 
 defiant "Forward!" "Forward I" of youth, 
 the compromises of half -disillusioned middle 
 life; the "peccavi!" of old age — ^that is the 
 psychical history of the average being — 
 the average being who only learns that life 
 is pure hallucination after going through 
 the horrors, who has no organ of divination, 
 who does not believe in sewage imtil he has 
 swum through a sewer. He renoimces 
 when there is nothing left to renounce. He 
 confounds renunciation with death. And 
 Tolstoi is his prophet. 
 
 How few have learned the art of with- 
 drawing from life noiselessly and yet with 
 dignity! On a day you have discovered the 
 mockery of it all; some curious and swiftly 
 knit suspicion has given you coiu*age to rip 
 the wrappings from yovu* universe, and you 
 behold where you thought to find God — 
 bah ! — a Cagliostro ! You announce from the 
 
THE IRONY OF NEGATIVES 55 
 
 market place your discovery. A million 
 voices hiss in your ear "Traitor!" The 
 totter-kneed gods on their pasteboard 
 thrones crack their whips at you. But they 
 avail not. You have become the spirit of 
 revolt and you will lay the world in the 
 dust. You have seen the core of creation 
 and the vacuity thereof. You have beheld 
 as in a vision the sinister Soul of things 
 and the grin thereon; and you strike back 
 in blind rage at the lies sacrosanct with 
 age that enmesh you. 
 
 Your rage is useless, admirable, asinine. 
 Spinoza glanced at the bill-of-fare, threw 
 it out of the window and took to lens-grind- 
 ing. Quit the stews without noise ; thus only 
 may one keep the beasts off his trail. 
 
 Tomorrow, that miUion-spired mirage- 
 city toward which the soul of man forever 
 wends its way; Tomorrow, with myrrh and 
 spice in her casket, her fingers tipped with 
 healing ointment for the wounds inflicted by 
 this unromantic, calendared today — To- 
 morrow can be won only by wooing Today. 
 How few can renounce the next Now I Yet 
 that way alone lies wisdom. We live be- 
 tween-times, and nothing is. We are noc- 
 tambulists forever stepping off into space. 
 
56 THE IRONY OF NEGATIVES 
 
 We Kve between the minutes, in the mythic 
 state that separates and yet vmites a here 
 and beyond. We never quite touch our ob- 
 jects, never close wholly the hand on the 
 object of our desire. Always the essential 
 escapes — the essence flies just above our 
 heads. The St. Elmo fire of perpetual illu- 
 sion flits around us, and we are our own 
 undoing. 
 
 We seek for a spirit of rationality in 
 things and do not find it because the seek- 
 ing is itself irrational. Renoimce the pvu-- 
 suit of things and those things will glide 
 silently into your soul. Seek not and ye 
 shall find : Let us dig where we stand — there 
 is gold vmder our feet; the future is a 
 pocket, and the fine ghnt on the outposts 
 of things is but the phosphorescent reflec- 
 tion from the corpses of dead pasts on a 
 vacuous perspective. 
 
 There is a fine irony embedded in the 
 spectacle of this imending chase through 
 , fen and forest : bloodhounds on the scent of 
 eagles and butterflies; arrows, poison 
 tipped, sent hurtling after fireflies; vast 
 armies accoutred to the knees, making 
 forced marches to reach Cockayne. 
 
 Ring, Olympus, with thy eternal laugh- 
 
THE IRONY OF NEGATIVES 57 
 
 ter! for the solemnity of man is the comedy 
 of the gods! 
 
 The born renimciant's elaborated appa- 
 ratus of inhibition is a labor-saving device. 
 He skips the living of hfe in order to at- 
 tain a life that lives. It is not necessary 
 to experience in order to know. Some 
 souls hold the universe in solution at birth. 
 Their lives are excursions of verification. 
 They inventory the vmiverse at a glance 
 and divert their lusts toward the stars. 
 Thrust into Eternity's Black Hole with its 
 three dimensions of Time, Space and Cir- 
 cumstance, they disdain the waU-feeling, 
 waU-poundrng and clamoring of their fel- 
 low-prisoners. Instead they fix their eyes 
 on the white splendor of the dome — and 
 wait. The Keepers find their bodies rigid 
 in calm, a placid mock upon their faces. 
 Amid the babel their souls have passed out 
 through the little wicket in the great white 
 dome — passed into — ^well, what matter? 
 
 Life is a lewd game of tag played by I 
 Want and Catch Me. 
 
 In the last analysis our acts are but the 
 combustions of cells big with voids. And 
 our dreams are inbreedings — ^the obscene 
 jimctions of impotent potentiahties. Under- 
 
58 THE IRONY OF NEGATIVES 
 
 standing is the organ wherewith we finally 
 comprehend that nothing is. Discrimination 
 is that fine sense that places the dead fish 
 in one pile and the maggots that feed on 
 them in another. The passions are brewed 
 in the cardiac vats and their steam singes 
 and scorches the body with their senseless 
 urgings. 
 
 Life I a butchers' picnic in the Alhambra; 
 a column-cracked, half -foundered Venice; 
 a vermin-ridden Arcady. 
 
 Those fine young seers, "the predestined," 
 who walk out of the gates of birth and with 
 swift and sm-e step dart to the center of 
 the banquet-room and overturn the grub- 
 table without tasting the edible junk have 
 abridged their lives, it is true, but what 
 they have missed they shall never feel the 
 need of. They might have eaten, you say, 
 and then judged. Satiety is the hog's 
 judgment. Renunciation ex post facto is 
 fashionable; besides, there are so many 
 spiritual Baden-Badens where one may 
 have his maw washed clean. Real renun- 
 ciants are born, not tolstoied. 
 
 The Intellect is the mirror of Passion. 
 She looks into that wondrous glass and 
 murmurs: "The same — yet I cannot touch 
 
THE IRONY OF NEGATIVES 59 
 
 thee. You are my higher self shaped as a 
 face in smoke. I gave thee birth; you fol- 
 low me; antic me and are my slave — ^my 
 pale and wondrous slave, as ethereal as I 
 am gross; my slave to whose beauty I ren- 
 der thy shackles." Intellect, forged in the 
 foundries of desire, that is destined to strike 
 down the arm that poured it molten in the 
 brain matrices and gouge out the eye that 
 watched it cool to imdestanding. It is the 
 Moses born amid the tulrushes and tangled 
 weeds of elemental passion — ^this mighty 
 Moses, light-smitten with Horebic visions, 
 bringing to the groundlings who will listen 
 a new tablet of laws. 
 
 Every fine action implies or characterizes 
 some aspect of self-conquest, which is an- 
 other name for renunciation. Every fine 
 action is such because, fimdamentaUy, it 
 is a negation; some door must be shut be- 
 fore we open another. Life opens outward 
 to an inward. "I have gained on myself," 
 murmurs the dreamer when he feels the life 
 energies boiling within him, and with the 
 sure hand of him who controls the powers 
 generated by Niagara Falls he directs those 
 energies into the channels mapped out on 
 the dream parchment of his mind. None 
 
60 THE IRONY OF NEGATIVES 
 
 but those who have experienced it koow 
 of that virile joy, that bounding rapture, 
 of the spirit that deliberately smiles a de- 
 fiant no to some old lure, some petty, tran- 
 sitory tickle, and hears in his ear the long 
 halloa I of congratulation from somewhere 
 up the heights. 
 
 There is nothing in the world that is not 
 worth having, but there is nothing in the 
 world that is worth lifting the hand to ob- 
 tain. We pay too much for our prizes; we 
 are the eternal dupes of the imagination. 
 An Epiciu-ean receptivity, the desire to 
 know, to feel, to assimilate all things — ^with 
 a semi-hvmiorous reservation as to the value 
 of the things received; a keen discernment 
 of the prankishness that reigns at the heart 
 of things; the ability to outlaw what you 
 cannot get; a looking without a lusting, 
 or to lust with one's hand on the valve; an 
 alien attitude toward joy, so when she 
 comes it is with the surprise of unexpected 
 good news— ^something of calm, some meas- 
 ure of surcease from the terror of days may 
 be won in thus fronting life. 
 
 Man makes of his will the measure of his 
 demands. The dream versus the brutal 
 fact! — the theme of the finest tragedy and 
 
THE IRONY OF NEGATIVES 61 
 
 comedy. What incongruity 1 — a Hottentot 
 marooned on an iceberg, or an Esquimau 
 gravely assuring himself that the desert is 
 frigid. Man is capable of believing any- 
 thing but the truth. AdaptabiUty is the 
 process by which one gets used to the use- 
 lessness of things. 
 
 The intellectual renunciant, the pure 
 sceptic who has minimized the personal 
 equation in his quest for rationality (which 
 is, again, some principle that will coddle a 
 temperamental bias) assumes all truths to 
 be hes and all lies aspects of some truth. 
 His universal premise is the denial of all 
 premises — each premise being but the 
 termination of some anterior syllogism. But 
 he has faith: he assvmies chaos. He rips 
 from himself all the tatters of mental cus- 
 tom and aims at an oversight. His is what 
 Nietzsche contemptuously called "the im- 
 maculate perception." The contradictori- 
 ness of things lies open to his vision. Im- 
 pact, shudder, dispersion, recombmation in 
 endless forms new and strange; this is his 
 ultimate formula, and beyond — ^the Black 
 Panel. What "highest" shall he choose in 
 this flowing frustration? In an evanescing 
 universe what shall he waylay that will give 
 
62 THE IRONY OF NEGATIVES 
 
 him more satisfaction than himself? He 
 turns within and chants with Walt Whit- 
 man, "Me impertnrbe." So he stands at 
 pause at the cross-roads, and life swirls in 
 and out of these highways at his. feet. He 
 takes no road. The view is finer from the 
 forks. Besides, he has his secret. 
 
HISTORY 
 
 THS pomp of many mythical yester- 
 days — -that is history. History must 
 be lived; it cannot be written. AU 
 the paper in the world could not contain 
 the events of a minute. 
 
 As all the events of the past are saturated 
 with the imagination, written history is the 
 annal of man's illusions. The past is the 
 one thing we create at each minute. It is 
 the one thing that is revocable. It is the 
 one thing we can create in our own image. 
 There are as many Luthers, as many Napo- 
 leons, as many Robespierres as there are 
 minds that think of them. The battle of 
 Waterloo is no more important than you 
 believe it is. Cromwell was a murderer or 
 a saint — ^you are the judge. There are no 
 facts; there are only beliefs. There is no 
 past; there is only the kaleidoscope of the 
 imagination. There is no history; there is 
 only myth. 
 
 In that back-travelling glance the trivial 
 (63) 
 
64 HISTORY 
 
 becomes grandiose; the stupendous is 
 rounded off with the reservations of crit- 
 icism. And this stained-glass hero who to- 
 day stands all a-glitter in the magic of my 
 thought tomorrow I shall hurl into the ditch 
 of disillusion and cover with the quicklime 
 of venomous ridicule. 
 
 "Have you read history?" Some one once 
 asked me. "'No," I replied. "I have never 
 even read historians." 
 
 Tell me the secret of the violet and I 
 will tell you the secret of God, a poet said. 
 Tell me the secret of this minute and I will 
 tell you the secret of all minutes. And 
 until you can tell me what that event means 
 which you call yom-self I can tell you 
 nothing of the meaning of history. I do not 
 know that I am not a myth. So what can 
 I affirm of Caesar? Livy and Tacitus, 
 Gibbon and Carlyle reported their own 
 dreams, analyzed their own imaginations 
 and wrote down themselves. The only 
 archives from which they drew treasures 
 were the countless cells in the brain, and 
 their Messalinas and Hannibals and Mira- 
 beaus are as purely mythical as the Homeric 
 gods. 
 
 The hot, steaming imagination throws 
 
HISTORY 65 
 
 off its moons which it calls its "facts." 
 Grote had an idea, and that idea had an 
 echo, and he called it Greece. Is there a 
 history of England? No. There are 
 Hallam's England, and Green's England, 
 and Macaulay's England. 
 
 Each man is the conscript of his tem- 
 perament. We know the lying mask that 
 Memory draws over the face of each par- 
 ticular yesterday. And those infinite faded 
 yesterdays! Who shall unmask them shall 
 write history! They are the monstrous pil- 
 lars that stretch away into the Infinite, 
 each crowned with its separate Sphinx, each 
 with its separate riddle, each veined with 
 coimtless hieroglyphics. 
 
 History is not fascinating, and indeed has 
 no reason for being, until some supremely 
 great poetic liar — a Shakespeare, a Hugo, • 
 or a Dumas — ^recreates it for us; or until 
 some seer blows into its body a fictitious 
 soul which he calls a philosophic theory. 
 The historian must have a migratory imagi- 
 nation. He puts clothes on ghosts. He is 
 the tailor of dead men. The past is his 
 clinic and he demonstrates over his own 
 Frankensteins. 
 
 History is, then, like the visible universe 
 
66 HISTORY 
 
 itself, a fable of the imagination. What I 
 see there is there. To me it is merely an 
 excuse for setting down some thoughts on 
 the evolution of man. 
 
 All events from the first appearance of 
 man on the planet to the writing of these 
 words constitute an Iliad of ghastly jests. 
 Man is the anonymous atom. He is one 
 of the masks of the Supernatural. The 
 aspirations of races are born in Venetian 
 pomp. They all end in a Verdun. That 
 is the satiric repartee of our Antagonist 
 hidden behind the arras. The history of a 
 particular race is merely that race's ante- 
 mortem statement to posterity, which holds 
 an autopsy on its ancestor, and starts to 
 write its own ante-mortem statement. 
 
 The history of mankind! Listen! — and 
 you shall hear the forlorn music made by 
 drowsy Ghosts on violins of bronze. 
 
 History has a metaphysic. It is the will- 
 to-persist. The will-to-persist must not be 
 confused with the wiU-to-power of Nietzsche 
 or the will-to-live of Schopenhauer. It 
 includes both of these. It uses life and 
 power in order to persist. 
 
 The race denies death. The evolution 
 
HISTORY 67 
 
 of man is the epic of Persistence. The spirit 
 reaches out for a Beyond at each of its 
 movements. To be Other, to be Elsewhere, 
 to be in the place where one is not — ^that 
 is the primal instinct. 
 
 Not to be is the only hell man ever 
 feared. Not to move is the only monstrous 
 thought that can be thought. Not to per- 
 sist is the only blasphemy that repels him. 
 And aU the torment of existence flows 
 from this will-to-persist, this inexplicable 
 need of going — on. Lashed, branded, 
 stoned, bludgeoned, kicked and cuifed from 
 hell to hell, spat upon by nature, vomited 
 back into life from out the ground where he 
 is laid, man fears but one thing: Boredom — 
 the boredom of eternal extinction. And the 
 knick-knack Gods and the sublime gib- 
 berish of prayer and that vulgar scuffle 
 from territory to territory which is called 
 the "march of progress" are nothing but 
 the rumble and rattle of the Will-to-Persist. 
 
 The history of the nations is the search for 
 Utopia. The millennium is imminent — 
 just ahead. Egypt, Greece, Rome, China, 
 Japan, America — so many multiples of the 
 besetting, parasitic illusion of Man. The 
 
68 HISTORY 
 
 sacred scroll containing that eternal prom- 
 ise in jewelled letters unfolds before the 
 march of tribes and peoples. The New 
 Jerusalem is by the Tiber, on the Missis- 
 sippi, on the Rhine, on the Nile. 
 
 Into the fastnesses of their dreams there 
 never comes a prowling doubt. Each peo- 
 ple is the chosen people. The Capitol is 
 the Ark of the Covenant. Sidon, Tyre, 
 Alexandria, Alliens, Rome, Paris, London, 
 Washington are the shining Ararats where 
 the tempest-tossed shall lodge in peace at 
 last! 
 
 History is, again, a museum of cant 
 phrases. Each nation, each people, has 
 its sacred syllable Om, which it repeats in 
 ecstasy. They are the aphrodisiacs of na- 
 tional ideals. Ah, the sublime pneumatic 
 catchwords that keep the masses bowed and 
 allow the preachers of "our manifest des- 
 tiny" to ride them pickaback! 
 
 Each generation stands waiting the 
 apocalyptic formula, which it fingeris like 
 a favorite pimple. No great movement is 
 legitimate vmtil a motto is stitched into the 
 minds of the masses. 
 
 "Liberty, Equahty and Fraternity," 
 
HISTORY 69 
 
 "Taxation without representation is tyr- 
 anny," "Remember the Maine," "For God 
 and Fatherland," "The Brotherhood of 
 Man," "Onward, Christian Soldiers," 
 "Making the world safe for democracy," 
 these are a few decoy cries of the Ideal, 
 the eternal blood-sucker, the imsurfeited 
 vampire that no atom is too small to con- 
 ceal and no constellation large enough for 
 its traffic. 
 
 Give me a phrase and I will create mo- 
 tion in dead masses. Give me a warcry and 
 I will invent a war. Give me an emblem 
 and I will lead a people. Give me a device 
 and I will overturn dynasties. With what 
 mighty blustering epigram did Lucifer 
 draw the rebellious hosts up before the face 
 of God? The Reformation began when 
 Luther tacked ninety-five phrases on a 
 Wittenberg church-door. The millions 
 who have fallen in battle from Salamis to 
 Chateau-Thierry fell to perpetuate maxims, 
 and those who survived were decorated with 
 medals and lived forever after in the eiful- 
 gent light of -their favorite saw. 
 
 There is nothing more sentimental than 
 war. History is all sentiment. To "create 
 new values" a lie is necessary — a senti- 
 
70 HISTORY 
 
 mental lie, a lie that shall be strong enough 
 to found kingdoms and cathedrals, lazaret- 
 tos and pension lists, inquisitions and 
 Reigns of Terror. It must be strong 
 enough to justify the paranoia of a Joan 
 of Arc, the epilepsy of a Cassar, the sadism 
 of a Robespierre, the sublime mania of a 
 Napoleon, the pride of a Kaiser, the relig- 
 ious fervor of a Charles the Ninth. The 
 eternal cant phrase! Thy will be done 
 here below and may thy monstrous charnel 
 houses top Arcturus! 
 
 The socialists are right when they say 
 the fundamental question is the economic 
 question. In history the whimper of the 
 belly dominates. In all uprisings the 
 bakeries are sacked first. The pinched 
 visage of Hunger overawes the world. Food 
 is the only God who has never been blas- 
 phemed. There are no atheists to confront 
 Mm. 
 
 Man can hve by bread alone. God, 
 patriotism, love, rehgion may be spurious. 
 Hunger is real. Himger is a fang. Thirst 
 is a thug. The billions who have come out 
 of the earth and have gone into it were 
 all bellywise. Kings and Popes fear the 
 
HISTORY 71 
 
 mutinies of the Belly beyond the wrath of 
 God. When the people in Rome became 
 restive the public granaries were opened. 
 Behind all the hubbub of the world, behind 
 the purple and the cloth, behind the cata- 
 clysms of history, behind the mouthings of 
 the jingo gods of the masses, behind all 
 the painted scenery of civilization and bar- 
 barism there stands the eternal breadline. 
 It is the skeleton in the closet. It is the 
 abominable Fact. It is the Banquo's ghost 
 at the feast of the masters. 
 
 History knows one Superman: it is 
 Lazarus. Against the animosity of the 
 empty stomach Reason, Logic and Com- 
 monsense are mute. It justifies every crime. 
 The hollow stomach is seditious. It is apos- 
 tate to every religious, social and ethical 
 dogma. It is Anarch and Atheist. All his- 
 tory plays satellite to Stomach. 
 
 In the beginning was the BeUy, and the 
 Belly was with man, and the Belly was 
 man. 
 
 The masses! the masses! That mighty 
 strangled sigh that goes into the infinite! 
 The trillion-eyed being who sees nothing, 
 whose life is nothing, who is just the Mass! 
 
72 HISTORY 
 
 They manure the glory of the great. They 
 drag the chariots of Charlemagne and 
 CsBsar and Napoleon into the empyrean 
 and fall back into gaping graves below. 
 
 I have watched from a star stricken 
 with ague — a star that was old at the birth 
 of man on the earth — ^the hordes that have 
 lived here in this world. A meaningless 
 generation. A useless fecundity. A buf- 
 foonery of nature. A flood of sap. The 
 stench of an enormous iniquity. Will the 
 earth never cease belching! Behold the In- 
 finite on parade! Behold the flaming gey- 
 sers of life! The uncountable, inscrutable 
 masses — pedestals of flesh and bone for the 
 strong man — skulk back to oblivion, one 
 crawling over the other ant-wise. The 
 obscene, gluttonous, putrescent trillions — 
 the eruption of some eternal subhuman 
 hell. 
 
 The masses are the paid panders of those 
 notorious blackguards called great men. 
 Their great men are their Cloaca Maxima. 
 They are the incarnations of their criminal 
 instincts, the clearing houses of their hypoc- 
 risies. 
 
 The masses without their heroes! Incon- 
 ceivable. The average man in every age 
 
HISTORY 73 
 
 has always been naturally a pimp. He is 
 the parasitic suckling of "the man of the 
 hour." His lips are forever sucking at the 
 nipple of a demagogue. The stars sparkle, 
 the seas surge and chant their magnificent 
 litanies in his ears, the seasons blow their 
 aromatic breaths into his face, cataracts of 
 light falling from inconceivable heights 
 lave his head — of this he sees nothing. He 
 prefers to worship a Corsican blackguard, 
 chant hosannahs to a spectacled monster 
 born in Aix, or stand in mute adoration 
 aroimd the eloquent rump of his economic 
 Kaiser. 
 
 And at last the masses arrive at Democ- 
 racy! The divine right of kings has become 
 the divine right of the masses. The crown 
 has been taken from the head of the ass 
 and glued on the head of the ape. We pass 
 from an assocracy to an apeocracy. The 
 slave of five hundred million years at last 
 comes to sit on a latrine (which he mis- 
 takes for a throne). The meaning of the 
 ages is at last promulged, the Sphinx gives 
 up its secret, we have a clue to God, the 
 atom discloses its reason-for-being, it is the 
 ninth-month of historic gestation: the 
 
74 HISTORY 
 
 masses are about to take possession of the 
 planet. 
 
 Verily now the earth belongs to the peo- 
 ple. But the stars still belong to the poets. 
 
THE PASSION OF DISTANCE 
 
 SPACE is the original sin; distance is 
 the mother of desire. Perspective 
 lends wings to the soul — and sets us 
 in the mud in amaze. 
 
 For we may not fly to that Alpine ridge 
 — nor to that thought that beckons at the 
 end of a mental perspective. 
 
 Alpine ridge and mental ridge are illu- 
 sions of space, aerial promontories such as 
 we see on the stage — paint, cardboard and 
 grease; beautiful to behold, the parent 
 of an aspiration, but treacherous to land 
 on. 
 
 The pursuit of the spectres that inhabit 
 distance brings us at last to the terror of 
 the Infinite, to the monstrous, timeless 
 thing we call Eternity. 
 
 AU philosophy is the attempt to batter 
 down walls, to shatter limitations, to reach 
 that utter distance called the Supreme 
 Generalization, where, if the adventurer 
 has the real buccaneer blood in him, he 
 (75) 
 
76 THE PASSION OF DISTANCE 
 
 rests in eternal coiitemplation, fed forever 
 by his immortal distance passion. 
 
 Or if his soul be not yet strong enough 
 he flies, like Pascal, back a-trembling to 
 the skirts of the concrete, brain-mangled, 
 soul-shattered at what he has seen, seeking 
 shelter in the pomps of the transitory. 
 
 Philosophers are idea-drunkards. Their 
 heady abstractions — the rare vintages, as it 
 were, of all the illusions that clamber over 
 the deathless Spirit of Things, vine twisted 
 around vine — ^make of them lords of the 
 distances, abolishing as they do, for in- 
 stance, the petty difference between an ant 
 and a star, between simmtier and winter, 
 between the first man and the last man. 
 
 It is Nature's great paradox of distance 
 that a watery pulp like the brain — a mere 
 thinking sponge that can be held in the 
 palm of the hand — can hold within itself 
 that stupendous conception of the evolution 
 of man from protoplasm to what he is ; can 
 hold it not only in bits as scattered detail, 
 but as one single idea, to be envisaged in a 
 single flash of consciousness; an idea that 
 in the drop of an eyelash destroys each in- 
 dividual existence and solves everjrthing in 
 a law that sets all beginning and end at de- 
 
THE PASSION OF DISTANCE 77 
 
 fiance, a law that requires an eternity of 
 time in which to body forth the secrets of 
 its deeps and uses infinite space as its 
 mould. 
 
 Approaching the monstrous — is it not? — 
 that that little globe perched so oddly on 
 the shoulders of Arthur Schopenhauer 
 should have secreted within its circumfer- 
 ence that marvellous theory of the Will-^a 
 menstruum that before our very eyes va- 
 porizes a late substantial universe and sets 
 the mind a-rocking and a-reehng in the 
 limitless. Sublime paradox indeed! — ^the 
 paradox of paradoxes. For here the lesser 
 holds the greater, the unlimited is found 
 secreted in the limited, the infinite in a skull! 
 
 The Hindu seer travelling his upward 
 Path rises from prospect to prospect with 
 a rapt joy blazoned on his soul, indulging 
 that passion of distance, that frenetic desire 
 to be lost in the Infinite, to be hub to a 
 million prospects, to be the vent of Time 
 and Space. 
 
 The yogi is the divine intoxicant, an 
 eater of form and matter. His hasheesh 
 is distance; his ultimate the complete ab- 
 sorption of himself in a buoyant, spaceless, 
 timeless, shelterless Nirvana, where dis- 
 
78 THE PASSION OF DISTANCE 
 
 tance has consumed distance, and where at 
 last there remains only the extensionless 
 Now. 
 
 Amiel, who like Pascal, was touched — 
 one may only be touched by it to retain his 
 sanity — by this passion for endlessness, 
 was transfixed into a lifelong inaction. 
 
 The Infinite had petrified him. His pas- 
 sion for distance ended in a passion for 
 death, an ineradicable longing to escape 
 from the net of this and that^ from the dull 
 mummeries of change, the tawdry pag- 
 eantry of earth. 
 
 The average person holds fast to the 
 limited. The boimdaries of the territory in 
 which he strolls — for the average man never 
 wanders — are as clearly marked out for 
 him as the streets of his native town. He 
 ambles through life the smiling prisoner 
 of use-and-wont, chilled by the imfamihar, 
 the scarcely manumitted child of the cos- 
 mic nurseries. He travels unsuspectingly 
 the well-worn grooves of sense, his mind 
 seldom expanding beyond the tip of the 
 nose or the nerve-centre of the longest 
 finger. He feels weU-housed, safe in the 
 concrete, in the very real walls of his men- 
 tal abode, surrounded by his imperishable 
 
THE PASSION OF DISTANCE 79 
 
 lares and penates — ^with his unchanging God 
 of sundries in back of it all. 
 
 The thought never enters his mind that 
 that which he most firmly clutches has no 
 more reality than fountain spray, is, in fact, 
 a kind of coarsened ether — an equilibration 
 for a little while of imponderable force; 
 that the object most familiar to him is 
 nothing but an externalized state of con- 
 sciousness, a thing of no-name really, only 
 dubbed "tree" or "house" or "chair" or 
 "woman" as a kind of makeshift for our 
 unalterable ignorance. 
 
 StiU, this stands — this Thing of no-name 
 — ^in an infinite number of relations to an 
 infinite number of other things, capable of 
 an infinite nimiber of destinies, with abysm 
 on abysm beneath it and incommensurable 
 distances ramifying in every direction from 
 it. 
 
 And yet on a day — a day ticked oif, 
 maybe, on his mental calendar; or, not un- 
 derstanding, left shde by, hardly noted — 
 this "average person," standing for a mo- 
 ment on a mountain top or casting a 
 glance out to sea or unconcernedly tossing 
 his eye deep into the blue illusion over his 
 head, is aware of a swift inquiet, a sudden 
 
80 THE PASSION OF DISTANCE 
 
 arrest of being, a falling sensation such 
 as he may have experienced in a nightmare. 
 He has a vague glimpse of something that 
 can only be described as the Nothing- 
 Everything. Then he comes back in his 
 body again, sound, safe, with a grip of 
 death upon his world of thick cubes and 
 gravitating chattels. 
 
 He does not know exactly what hap- 
 pened, but half -guesses that his soul had 
 been shot some distance out of his body — 
 or that his body had been suddenly shot 
 from under his souL 
 
 The absorptive, annihilating Infinite — 
 abstract of all distances — ^had for an in- 
 calculably small space of time swept him 
 away bag and baggage. The eye of his 
 soul had caught for a moment on its retina 
 a picture of the perdurable. 
 
 There are some faces that intoxicate us 
 with the illimitable prospects they open 
 up; faces that hmn interstellar distances; 
 far-away faces, space-hallucinated, object- 
 blind — ^the forehead and eye recording so 
 expressively the vertiginous flights of the 
 soul. 
 
 Here, too, in these faces there is always 
 a touch of the wistful, such a look as we 
 
THE PASSION OF DISTANCE 81 
 
 see on the faces of those who gaze expect- 
 antly out to sea the day long; a touch of 
 nostalgia. 
 
 Be we ever so near to these beings they 
 are still, we feel, so far away really that 
 contact with them gives us back something 
 of the uncanny. 
 
 They bear the air of one sent on a 
 strange, perplexing errand by a malign 
 god. They have about them a vague pres- 
 age of the ultimate destiny of the soul, 
 which seeks in each movement, however 
 trivial, the secret of that last unification, 
 that ultimate redemption within itself of 
 all distances, the final reclamation of all 
 horizons — and the meaning thereof. 
 
THE COMIC VIEW 
 
 THE comic is Dissonance viewed from 
 the Imperturbable. Life is a con- 
 tretemps. Life is an encounter be- 
 tween I Would and Thou Shalt Not. Life 
 is Mind out for a lark. Life is what you 
 will, but the hiatus between what you will 
 and what you do not get is the great motive 
 for the humorous in art, literature and the 
 magazines. 
 
 Spencer says laughter is caused by a "de- 
 scending incongruity," In plain English, 
 a "descending incongruity" is an xm- 
 expected tumble. Man describing a para- 
 bola as he slips up on the banana peel of 
 Chance is the cause of that inextinguish- 
 able laughter that reverberates from Olym- 
 pus to Broadway. 
 
 George Meredith tells us that the comic 
 is the laughter of the Reason. And reason, 
 he might have added, is the laughter of the 
 Emotions. 
 
 The smile is the scintillant light that 
 (82) 
 
THE COMIC VIEW 83 
 
 sparkles on the tear. The comic is the 
 tragic viewed from the wings. Hmnor 
 is the tabasco sauce that gives life a flavor. 
 It is mirth that keeps us sane. 
 
 The tragic is ridiculous because it has no 
 sense of proportion. The Tragic View 
 measures man against man. The Comic 
 View measures man against the imiverse. 
 One records the collisions of personality. 
 The other records the impact of the mis- 
 chievous molecule against the irrevocable. 
 
 The Tragic View is defective because 
 it takes itself seriously and bombards etern- 
 ity with its whimperings. The Comic View 
 is perfect because it takes nothing seriously, 
 chucks the menacing to devom-ing Time, 
 and impales the Inevitable on a smile. 
 
 The Comic View is exhilarating. It 
 mounts the barricades of limitation with a 
 hop-skip-and-a-jump. It knows the value 
 of all things. Science? Mere mimiblings 
 in a vacuum. Life? A parenthetical affir- 
 mative between two negatives. Honor? A 
 bauble for idealists. Love? Vascular ex- 
 citation. Morality? A clever device of the 
 first impostor — ^the State. Tra-la! 
 
 Hoop-la! Hold up your paper hoops. 
 Master of Ceremonies, and see Merry- 
 
84 THE COMIC VIEW 
 
 andrew dive through them and slit them 
 into shreds. 
 
 The Comic View is the cosmic view. The 
 world of time and chance is meaningless. 
 The Demiurge, the world-creator, is the 
 Browning of celestial mechanics: style 
 without ideas. The world is chaos drama- 
 tized. The earth is the Farnese torso among 
 the scuptured planets. Life is a problem 
 in contingencies. Nothing eventuates. Ac- 
 tions are webbed nothings spun by a Syn- 
 copated Spider. Time is a loafer playing 
 at tenpins. And whether you drink, or 
 sleep, or make wry faces at Demigorgon, 
 or shy spitballs at Fate — -it is all the same. 
 You dissolve at last in fine smut. 
 
 So get the Cosmic-Comic View before 
 you slough off and snuff out. Peep at 
 yourself en passant. Look at yoiu* mean- 
 ingless gyrations and silly circumvolutions 
 from a perspective. Stop your sulking and 
 come up to Pike's Peak. Sittirig recumbent 
 in your stews, you taint the air. Your 
 disappointments are bacterial. You litter 
 the things that devour you. Your sighs 
 are miasmatic. Your liver has got in your 
 eye and your heart in your boots. Get 
 flush with the Spirit that abides. 
 
THE COMIC VIEW 85 
 
 The raucous guffaw of Rabelais rever- 
 berates to this day. The silvery rill of 
 Cervantes — who dragged Prometheus from 
 his rock and set him tilting at windmills — 
 is Spain's immortal contribution to the 
 Comic View. The dry smile of Mohere 
 lingers on French letters. The metallic 
 chuckle of Mephisto — I believe it was his 
 chuckle that saved Faust! And even the 
 sardonic grin of Aristophanes is as broad 
 today as it was when it first split his face. 
 
 These are the wondrous mirrors that 
 image the human contretemps and flash back 
 our calamitous comicalities. Here man- 
 kind is skewered on the poignant wit of 
 genius. Could we read Balzac at a single 
 sitting the best of us would forever re- 
 nounce life. How grotesque are our days! 
 How aimless our actions! How petty our 
 passions! The "Comedie Humaine" is a 
 picture of a huge animal chasing its tail. 
 
 Louis Lambert mistook the cataleptic 
 trance for the Kingdom of Heaven! Pere 
 Goriot gave up all for love and died of 
 starvation! Old Grandet desired gold and 
 wallowed in it; his daughter Eugenie de- 
 sired love and died a paUid virgin. And 
 yet Lowell says, "God may be had for the 
 
86 THE COMIC VIEW 
 
 asking 1" Balzac knew better: It is the 
 gods who may be had for the asking. 
 
 Man darts out of negation and begins 
 to scratch the ground like a chicken out 
 of the egg. With what care he builds the 
 house of lifel With what seriousness and 
 pride he goes about his daily tasks! He 
 begins each day at exactly the same place 
 he began the day before. But being serious, 
 he lacks omniscience. He builds as though 
 it were for eternity, as though Death — the 
 joker in the stacked pack — did not lie in 
 wait for him. His house is suspended in 
 air, and for every brick he puts on the edi- 
 fice a brick at the bottom drops silently 
 into space. He is a mechanical figure mov- 
 ing on a grooved stage between the right 
 wing of Despair and the left wing of Ennui. 
 His spiritual tympanum has been destroyed 
 in the great Boiler Factory. Else he would 
 renounce and smile. 
 
 To reach the comic height you traverse 
 the Valley of the Shadow. The Country 
 of the White Lights is reached only through 
 the Land of Ultra- Violet Despairs. You 
 first wander through the pits of implacable 
 negations and beneath Tsickly, pitted suns, 
 and keep tryst with Succubus. 
 
THE COMIC VIEW 87 
 
 The pinnacle of the ludicrous is attained 
 only after having won all sorts of nasty 
 opinions of yourself. The little peeping 
 double on high is evolved in travail. In 
 early life our theories of personality are 
 geocentric and our social universe is Ptole- 
 maic. On our dear tear-mildewed souls we 
 mirror the earth and the fatness thereof. 
 Everything revolves around us. The Self 
 is garbed as Hamlet. What eyes behold us ! 
 How our every action is recorded! We 
 manufacture utterly absvu-d moral systems 
 that we imagine others think we ought to 
 live up to. We shed oceans of tears be- 
 cause oiu-self doesn't like ourself. The very 
 stars we believe to be spy-glasses pointed 
 straight at our mewling and puking souls. 
 Oh, the agonies of the self-conscious — the 
 parturition of self from self! Ego, like 
 protozoon, multiplies by fission. Each new 
 thought is born with the evil eye. 
 
 But sudden on a day the black garb is 
 doffed — ^we know not how. Tears cease to 
 flow, and the sob ends in a squeak. We 
 are aware of a synthesis, an amalgamation, 
 a blending as of many waters. 
 
 It is the miracle of perspective. What 
 was all this pother about? Who is this 
 
88 THE COMIC VIEW 
 
 blubberer? I turn aside, watch myself come 
 and go, and now smile indulgently at my 
 antics. Funny little fellow, you there — erst 
 myself— with your labors and loves and 
 mouthings! Hi, little fellow there, come 
 amuse me; give me a jest or break a bottle 
 with me; sing me a funny woe-begone 
 serenade beneath Dolores' window; or let 
 me see your funny little legs sprint to the 
 tomb. Hey there, little mannikin that once 
 I thought a giant Thor, what deviltry will 
 you be up to tomorrow? 
 
 There is a wail in the night. A babe is 
 crying for the moon. The wail has ceased; 
 the babe has cried itself to sleep. This is 
 often called renunciation. But the Comic 
 Self on high smiles. He knows. 
 
THE ARTIST 
 
 THE artist! 
 He garners the world in a dream, and 
 lo! the dream is more real than reality; 
 he touches the dead and they tremble back 
 into life and are more vital than the merely 
 galvanized beings that stare at you in the 
 street; his brain is fecund of worlds, of real 
 men and women, systems and great cosmic 
 dramas. 
 
 What you see, what you feel is not real; 
 only feeling and seeing and understanding 
 are the immortal realities. The mind in- 
 corporates the world, and what the artist 
 gives forth is Chaos transfigured, turmoil 
 stilled in its frenzies, the old foolish ges- 
 tures called action transfixed on an Idea. 
 The difference between art and hfe is 
 the difference between reality and a mir- 
 ror — art being the reality, life the mirror. 
 Art is the reahty because it is the exact 
 record of what we feel and know, of what 
 we aspire to be, of the ideal — whence real — 
 (89) 
 
90 THE ARTIST 
 
 self -enactment. Life is only a faint reflec- 
 tion of our desires, and so the poet, the 
 painter, the dreamer as men are ghosts, 
 mere flesh-films; but their poems and then* 
 pictures and their abstractions are the 
 highest reality. Our ideals and our in- 
 stincts are our standards; and in a book, 
 a poem, a picture, a statue, these ideals 
 and instincts live to their fulness. 
 
 Life wakes only our caricatures; art 
 wakes the spiritual protagonist complete, 
 substantial, sempiternal. 
 
 Art takes life for its theme. Life has 
 no theme. Practical Kfe is aimless; it is 
 the reel of a homeless, drunken man. It is 
 detail, detail, detail, infinitely spread. Our 
 acts are stop-gaps between moments of 
 painful disillusion — mud-floundering at 
 their best. The artistic spirit constructs 
 ends; having attained them, it rests, a 
 marbled, immortal contemplation. It dwells 
 in an everlasting Now, and has the power 
 to hallow smut and aureole the beast. 
 
 My vision! Who can take that from me? 
 My impassioned dream that burst my 
 brain-dikes and overflowed on to canvas, 
 that forced the marble block to yield its 
 curved secrets, or that flashed on paper as 
 
THE ARTIST 91 
 
 a rhapsody — that is the real moment, over 
 against which the seething caldron of muti- 
 lations we call the "great world" has only 
 that validity for being that a fertilizer has. 
 
 The particular seen as a particular has 
 no meaning. No man can understand any- 
 thing imtil he thinks abstractly. The differ- 
 ence between the breed of slugs that move 
 from point to point, from fact to fact, 
 feeling their way like a snout along a dimg- 
 hill, and the godlike apprehension of the 
 great creative artist is not a difference in 
 degree but a difference in kind of brain- 
 stuff. The mental difference between the 
 Black Fellow and the anthropoid ape is 
 not as great as the mental difference be- 
 tween a plantation darky and Henry James. 
 
 Life is mean and petty to most people 
 because they lack the artistic instinct. They 
 see John and James, and they are com- 
 monplace. But read of John and James 
 as Balzac saw them or a boor as Thomas 
 Hardy saw him and the scales have fallen 
 from yovir eyes. The finite has no longer 
 any existence as such; the individual has 
 ceased to be an individual: the man be- 
 comes a type; an abstraction made flesh — 
 or breathing flesh become an abstraction; 
 
92 THE ARTIST 
 
 an insulated force; a concourse of ideas; 
 an entombed universe. 
 
 It is this exaltation of consciousness — 
 this challenge to the commonplace, this war 
 of the Idea on the tyranny of the senses 
 that would cudgel the soul to an abject sub- 
 servience — that constitutes the superiority 
 of the art-instinct over the hfe-instinct. 
 That which we touch too often is either 
 destroyed by us or destroys us. The habit- 
 ual kills wonder and familiarity slays awe. 
 The Alps guide has no sense of the gran- 
 deur and mystery which surround him; 
 the astronomer sweeps the constellations 
 nightly with his telescope and soon he 
 dwindles to an automatic calculating ma- 
 chine. And the crowds of the pavement 
 have no eye for the subhme. Did not the 
 sun and moon rise yesterday? And Venus 
 in her brilliance is only "pretty." 
 
 Walt Whitman one day crossed over to 
 Brooklyn on a ferryboat. Years after he 
 wrote a poem called "Crossing Brooklyn 
 Ferry," and all who now read that poem 
 want to cross the river and see the sky, the 
 boat, the gulls, the deck-hands as Old Walt 
 saw them. 
 
 The great artist is a seer; he stands out- 
 
THE ARTIST 93 
 
 side of the world. The human race fills 
 in a perspective. The creative dreamer 
 is sundered from environment — ^he is his 
 own milieu — ^he is brain-light, detached cell- 
 ecstasy. He beholds the endless procession 
 into being from out of the womb of nonen- 
 tity, and etherealizes God and diatom. The 
 writhing, pain-gutted phantoms called men 
 are the Epic of Evil, an epic of the artist's 
 creation. He alone is likest God. 
 
 Whether we writhe in the strait jacket 
 of pain or are solved in the radiant monot- 
 ony of a transcendent [Perfection; whether 
 we have flouted all the seductive but venge- 
 ful sanctities in oin* effort to preserve the 
 greater sanctity — self — ^whether we have 
 challenged all the wooden deities of time 
 and reviled the Arch-Bungler each day — 
 these things which we have done or have 
 not done are significant but seldom of 
 practical importance. The creative intel- 
 lect looks down upon himself and draws 
 the essential facts out of its experiences 
 and fashions them into images. 
 
 The artistic temperament is the philo- 
 sophic temperament, and good and evil and 
 the codified cant called the moralities are 
 the clay with which the creative dreamer 
 
94 THE ARTIST 
 
 works ; they have no other use. If a "sin" 
 yield me truth or beauty it is no longer 
 a sin. But this privilege belongs only to 
 the strong. Weakness is the preroga- 
 tive of power — only the strong man 
 can afford to transgress. Before he falls he 
 knows he will be up again. He never loses 
 his strength. The great soul — ^the self- 
 centered artistic temperament — ^thrives on 
 his poisons, because to him they are not 
 poisons. He would not always be with the 
 Highest because his Highest alone is sure. 
 The transgressions of the weak have no 
 ideality in them. The weak, in reality, 
 never transgress; they merely lapse. 
 
 Nietzsche, Ibsen, D'Annunzio, Whitman! 
 — four great storm petrels of the Inland 
 Sea, workers in the Time-Mist, somber 
 heralds of dawn — or night. Their dreams 
 are sublime futilities, but dreams that 
 swaddle us in an aura of godhood. Could 
 ^he crowd grasp them, could the world 
 enact in its drab, vulgar way the passion- 
 glozed hallucinations that are blown from 
 the skulls of these men, life would lose its 
 flavor, ideal transgression its fascination, 
 and evil and good their aesthetic value. 
 
 Only ideal transgressions are worth 
 
THE ARTIST 95 
 
 while; action is comic. What the gods wish 
 to destroy they first make real. Were we 
 all Hamlets, lagos and Lears no one would 
 read Shakespeare. 
 
 Give us our immortal dreams, show us 
 ourselves as we are not, give us the riot of 
 our anarch minds ; foil us, foil, us, eternally 
 foil us, that we may dream again 1 Let the 
 scavengers scrape the gutters for coppers 
 and duck in the mud for dimes. They are 
 the "Captains of Industry" — the grimy, 
 smutty captains of the marts and their 
 "industry" a grimy, smutty, lurid hell. 
 
 Philosophers are artists in ideas. They 
 are the white heralds of the Great Release, 
 eagles of the Infinite; they solve the iron 
 thong of earthly limitations in a molten 
 white idea, and walk not on terra firma. 
 The creative philosopher seems in his 
 highest flights to dam the eternal flux and 
 in his widest generahzations to erase acci- 
 dent. In Time under protest, he stands 
 equipped for eternity, and his calamities 
 are his foods. The abstract mind flows into 
 the matrices of the concrete and changes 
 the shape of the moulds. It hoods itself 
 under all forms, but is none of these. It is 
 that which perceives, but is never perceiv- 
 
96 THE ARTIST 
 
 able. It sucks from a world of illusive ap- 
 pearances the marrow of reality, and spits 
 whole epochs of social movement upon the 
 gleaming point of a generahzation. The 
 philosophic mind of the first order packs 
 all of history, with its crescendos and de- 
 crescendos of joy and woe, its evanishings 
 and recrudescences, under a single scalp, 
 and finds in the perversities, aspirations, 
 meannesses and cruelties of a single soul 
 the history of mankind in action. 
 
 There lies in each soul a history of the 
 universe ; indeed, the soul of each is nothing 
 but embryo and cadaver — ^the new spring- 
 ing from the old, life springing from death. 
 Each impulse to action is a ghost seeking 
 flesh again, some old dead ancestral self, 
 scenting from its arterial prison-house its 
 ancient loves. Within the recesses of your 
 clay, mewed in brain-cell or aorta, there 
 live Charlemagne, Christ, Peter the Hermit, 
 Nero, Judas, St. Francis of Assisi and 
 Shelley. Your temptations, your betrayals, 
 your cruelties, your asceticisms, yoiur 
 penances, your wiU-to-power, your "cry for 
 light," your lusts — that is history, and it 
 needs not Gibbon in six ponderous tomes 
 to tell me why Rome decayed. The poison 
 
THE ARTIST 97 
 
 that killed Rome is in me, and the fate of 
 America I can forecast in a study of my 
 own strengths and weaknesses. The Law 
 works everywhere. It is the one single 
 reality. It is the immovable screen against 
 which Time projects her endless shapes. 
 
 The commonest objects have this in com- 
 mon with the subhmest spectacles which 
 nature or man oifers: they are at bottom 
 but phantoms of the brain, modes of 
 cellular life. Children and geniuses bear 
 on their faces a look of exalted wonder. 
 That mingled expression of perplexity, 
 awe, amazement on the face of a child when 
 fingering a button on your coat differs only 
 in degree from the feeling in the poet's soul 
 when for the first time he sees Mont Blanc. 
 The same feeling of wonder overcomes the 
 philosopher when, step by step, he has 
 tracked the variegated universe back to an 
 impalpable, eternally persisting Force. A 
 touch of the soul melts solids to fiuids, and 
 a flash of insight in the brain of man dis- 
 covers to him the great cosmic cataracts — 
 and we humans the perpetually evanescing 
 debris on their surfaces. 
 
 We are travelling toward the zenith of 
 Self, and all great art is a report of the 
 
98 THE ARTIST 
 
 progress made. Action is only valuable 
 because it engenders reaction; because it 
 shocks the brain to thought and moulds 
 the soul to pictured moods which seek ex- 
 pression. The shocks, the moods, the visions 
 are real; the objects that caused them are 
 brain data. 
 
 The world is my dream, but I the 
 Dreamer am everlastingly, else I could not 
 say "It is a dream." 
 
UNDER A MASK 
 
 THE right to live implies theft. If 
 you cannot take, you cannot live. 
 Seizing and assimilating to one's 
 needs the things that lie about us are pri- 
 mary notions. There is no law that sets a 
 bound to any special manifestation of the 
 law of acquisitiveness except another and 
 opposing special manifestation of the same 
 law. In organized society we piUage under 
 prescribed conditions, plunder within limits ; 
 what we call social justice is merely the 
 machinery by which we regulate theft. 
 
 The eternal combat waged between the 
 House pf Have and the House of Want — 
 that is, between ability and inability — ^is the 
 clash of gigantic forces which he in the 
 nature of things, so far as we know them. 
 It is true, indeed, that the combatants 
 drape their nakedness in all manner of 
 gaudy apparel and that they fly beautiful 
 home-made banners with little touch-and-go 
 ethical mottoes; but these romantic trap- 
 (99) 
 
100 UNDER A MASK 
 
 pings please the stay-at-homes mostly — ^the 
 drowsy Utopians, with their ideals of lazi- 
 ness which they, again, with that incm-able 
 idealizing instinct of theirs, nickname self- 
 development. 
 
 "All property is robbery" — that is the 
 reason why we hold aU property to be 
 sacred. What I possess I have wrested 
 from some weaker being by superior 
 strength or craft or subterfuge, or imder 
 the patronage of some legal lie. The 
 effort involved, this final appropriation of 
 a thing after a life-and-death struggle in 
 which all the life-forces are engaged — ^this 
 is what gives value to property and 
 apotheosizes it in our eyes. 
 
 "All property is robbery" — ^that is abso- 
 lutely true, but to say that robbery is an 
 evil is false. Who will probe the subtleties 
 of theft in organized society? Who dare 
 trace his smallest possession to its begin- 
 nings? All the things we own are smeared 
 with blood and tears, and our triumphal 
 marches are over the skeletons of the lost. 
 Each one takes what he must; each takes 
 what he dares to take ; he calls it the "self- 
 preservative right," ignoring the implica- 
 tions of the phrase. For the right to pre- 
 
UNDER A MASK 101 
 
 serve one's self carries with it the right to 
 slay and steal until the self be perfectly 
 balanced with its own youthful dreams of 
 well-being. 
 
 In the last analysis, all law and custom 
 exist to safeguard and benefit the individual, 
 who is the race-unit, the ultimate appraiser 
 of all values. There is no such thing as 
 "the common good," for there is no good 
 common to all. "Perpetuity of the race" 
 is inconceivable unless the well-being of the 
 individual is conserved. Thus we have the 
 paradox: Government, in the name of the 
 "common good," destroying the units of 
 which it is composed. Society is an ab- 
 straction that has got itself organized. It 
 "safeguards" the rights of the individuals 
 by taking away his rights and makes him 
 "upright" by clamping him in a strait- 
 jacket. Like most romantics, the State is 
 totally devoid of himior. 
 
 Who boimd me to follow "social ends"? 
 Where did I precontract to labor and sweat 
 for the "common good"? — to offend my- 
 self by feeding it with iU-smelling phrases 
 when it sickens for a life that lives, a voy- 
 age against the stars, or into hell if so I 
 please? 
 
102 UNDER A MASK 
 
 The ideal of good citizenship is the philo- 
 sophy of servants. They pass and repass 
 before themselves — the herd; they pass and 
 repass before their heaven-created State 
 like a fop before his mirror — admiring, 
 smirking, titillating themselves with their 
 own magnified image. Their slogan is 
 Progress and their problem: How may we 
 become smaller? Of growth they know 
 nothing — growth, which is to pass beyond 
 yourself, you the individual, you the iso- 
 lated one. Leave the flock, outlaw yourself, 
 you will be original and immoral; for all 
 originality is "immoral." 
 
 The weak panoply themselves in codes 
 and systems. It is their slowly evolved 
 organ of defense against the strong — a spe- 
 cies of vengeance, urged of course in the 
 name of justice. How may I survive? 
 asks the weak man. Organize the State 
 and plunder the strong, whispers his con- 
 science. All popular uprisings are attempts 
 to impose upon the strong the very yoke 
 which the weak are trying to cast off — the 
 yoke of slavery. The slogan is always 
 "justice"; the secret intent is revenge; the 
 result is triumphant incapacity. The strong 
 man's justice is always justice — that is, 
 
UNDER A MASK 103 
 
 three parts of the cloak for himself and the 
 remaining part for the beggar. The weak 
 man's justice is only equality — a phrase 
 that corresponds to nothing but the letters 
 that compose it. 
 
 Communities — cities, countries — what 
 signify all these various forms of herding — 
 this formal amalgamation of Custom's 
 slaves — against extraordinary states of 
 consciousness in a few chosen individuals? 
 'Till the seer and the prophet and teller of 
 news comes, accoutred in rebel garb, life 
 has no significance. Life is merely the irk 
 of a long sombre day, a crouching in a dingy 
 corner of the universe listening with bated 
 breath to the long-reiterant menace of 
 death, a parley with the unseen, eyeless ills 
 crouching bellywise by our sides — 'till the 
 challenger comes, he who augments Fate 
 with a larger destiny — and goes to his 
 Calvary. Out of the commonplace rises the 
 interpreter of the commonplace; forth from 
 organized government comes the unorgan- 
 ized rebel. 
 
 The outlawed being may offend aesthet- 
 ically, but he cannot offend morally; what 
 he does may not be beautiful, but it cannot 
 be wrong. He may bungle the scheme, be 
 
104 UNDER A MASK 
 
 clumsy and awkward, build himself un- 
 mathematically ; but if he is sincere he can- 
 not be wrong; self -fulfilment is the only 
 moral law. The thing that I must do is 
 always right. Evil treads the same path as 
 goodness, but it goes further; it is the un- 
 curbed, the vmleashed, the uncalculating, 
 and, always dazzHng the imaginations of 
 men, is worshipped as power under various 
 guises; it even taking the garb of humility. 
 There are no bad men; there are only 
 men who affect us badly; men who reject 
 our way to felicity; who will have none of 
 our blessed state. "Sweetness and light" 
 are bitterness and darkness to a nature that 
 finds delight in danger, war, depredation. 
 Cain did boldly, in the full hght of day, 
 what Abel would probably have done from 
 the thicket, for Abel was heaven's first 
 sycophant; Cain, earth's first man who 
 dared. Cain stood upon the dignity of his 
 soul. Abel was the forerunner of those 
 who perpetrated all the conceivable devil- 
 tries which the mob-soul is heir to for the 
 "glory of God" — a justification which to- 
 day steals among us under a new mask, 
 "the welfare of the race." The criminal — 
 so called — preys upon Society in the name 
 
UNDER A MASK 105 
 
 of his instincts; Society preys upon the 
 criminal — so called — in the name of an ab- 
 straction. The State, once anointed of 
 heaven, has now become the anointed of 
 man, and those who were formerly of God 
 are now the lobbyists of the Smnmum 
 Bonum. 
 
 The strong man seeks out evil; the weak 
 man is sought out by evil. The doctrine 
 of evil for strength's sake, of rebellion for 
 the soul's sake, is not for the domestic 
 animal, nor yet for the jackal; nor may 
 cripples become gymnasts nor kitten-eyes 
 dart glances at the sun. At last, and al- 
 ways, the mob must have its footpaths. 
 Few there are who dare walk the shifting 
 surfaces of the Milky Way; few are born 
 to voyage against the North Star. 
 
 Wreak your soul on Life. Use your 
 powers. Never question whether they are 
 moral. Once you put the question you are 
 already weak. 
 
 And 'ware the sly Delilah, Miss Morality, 
 and her lupanar, the State, with its oils 
 and balsams and mighty gelding-knife! 
 
A MEMORABLE ESCAPE 
 
 PHILOSOPHY is the keyhole 
 through which the curious may peep 
 into the smithy of the Eternal, where 
 the great iron laws are forged. 
 
 The quest for truth is the hxmian fond- 
 ness for novelty — a highly specialized in- 
 fantile trait. You must become as little 
 children to set forth on these trackless 
 mental wastes. Like children, you wiU be 
 buffetted hither and thither by a million 
 impulses. AU things must be tried and 
 tested — ^and cast away. To the mind of a 
 child nothing has been proved, nothing dis- 
 proved; all paths lie open. There is no 
 evil; no good that has not the mark of hu- 
 man expediency on it. To the seer and the 
 child there are no dogears on the pages of 
 Life's book; no one has been there before, 
 and it matters not what is written on the 
 page — ^read, and pass on. AU things must 
 be approached in innocence and with a 
 naive fearlessness. It is literally true that 
 (106) 
 
A MEMORABLE ESCAPE 107 
 
 you must become as little children in order 
 to see. 
 
 I wish to see men, like Spinoza, as lines, 
 planes, bodies and circles, and so study 
 them. Still, while I wish to see them thus 
 for purposes of passionless dissection, it 
 must not be forgotten that men are not 
 lines, planes, bodies and circles — that they 
 are living masses of matter in pain, and 
 that there is more logic in their blasphemies 
 than in their prayers. 
 
 The relation of man to the Great Neces- 
 sity which is called God is not an ethical 
 relation but is a geometrical one. There is 
 no such thing as Providence; what we mis- 
 take for such is cosmic economy. 
 
 When the mind first perceives the illusory 
 nature of the heart's greatest desire it is at 
 that moment that the individual has taken 
 his first step along the upper cosmic tracts. 
 Once this glimpse is caught, there is no 
 permanent back-going — ^there may be lapses 
 to lower levels, a slipping back; but forever 
 and ever the hyper-physical eye shall re- 
 member that one glimpse it caught of the 
 Infinite. 
 
 It is at this moment that the larger lust 
 begins. Earth life thenceforward will be a 
 
108 A MEMORABLE ESCAPE 
 
 kind of long sickness, with the salt savor 
 of that endless sea forever stinging the 
 nostrils of the mind, begging it hence and 
 away. 
 
 He who believes that good is the end of 
 the universe, tolerate him; he who believes 
 that evil is the end of the universe, respect 
 him- — ^but he who says that ends are myths, 
 follow him! 
 
 Looking from a very high building down 
 on a great city one is powerfully impressed 
 almost at the first look with the evident 
 absurdity of life. One receives exactly the 
 same impression as he ascends in intelli- 
 gence. The eye and the mind are here in 
 startling agreement. 
 
 Progress defined for the highest mind is 
 a motion away from the centres of motion, 
 an accretion of insight. The active being 
 flows toward his objects; the contemplative 
 being has objects flow to him. 
 
 All the waves of Time can be held at 
 peace in the lap of the mind, all delusions 
 can be held in the pupil of the eye, and the 
 mouth of pain can be twisted into a smile. 
 Against the infinite screen of Self the 
 world-shadows come and go, and the fire- 
 flies of knowledge emit their light and fall 
 
A MEMORABLE ESCAPE 109 
 
 dead forever, and Chance undulates in 
 countless waves, or swirls and spouts, bear- 
 ing peoples and nations to the crest and 
 silently dropping them into the hollows 
 of Oblivion. Against the screen of Self 
 is all this pictured, and each one may see 
 it, for each is that Self. 
 
 If the objects of the so-called material 
 universe are nothing but states of conscious- 
 ness, then there is no one particular state 
 of consciousness that has a greater validity 
 than any other state of consciousness. If 
 the mind is merely an interpretative organ — 
 a way of rendering things, a manner in 
 which the individual reduces an aspect of 
 the Great Mystery to some degree of ra- 
 tionality — and if minds differ not only in 
 degree but in kind, then Reality is an indi- 
 vidual problem, and my universe is not your 
 universe, my Reality not your Reality. 
 
 There are as many laws as there are sepa- 
 rate existences. Huxley tells us about 
 chalk, Plotinus about the Infinite, Sweden- 
 borg about angels. Can it be said that 
 Huxley's interpretation of the images in 
 his mind produced by an utterably unknown 
 object in his hand is an interpretation that 
 comes closer to some central Reality than 
 
110 A MEMORABLE ESCAPE 
 
 the interpretation of the images in the mind 
 of Swedenborg produced by some peculiar- 
 ity of his organism? If the angels were an 
 hallucination, why not the chalk? If Ploti- 
 nus was the dupe of his images when he be- 
 lieved that twice in his lifetime he had united 
 with the Infinite, so is every being the dupe 
 of his images when he unites himself with 
 the finite. 
 
 We are no more "rational" than is nec- 
 essary for our continuance. 
 
 Those states of consciousness which come 
 from a diseased brain, and which we call 
 insanity, are valid for the insane. Grotesque, 
 fantastic, irrational they may be; but no 
 less grotesque, fantastic, irrational, imbe- 
 cile are the actions of all who dwell in the 
 finite to the eye of the Yogi, the eman- 
 cipated mind. 
 
 Delusion and aimlessness are the ear- 
 marks of insanity; delusion and aimlessness 
 are the earmarks of planetary life. One 
 need but look from a height. 
 
 Pleasure consists in the passing from a 
 lower perfection to a higher perfection — 
 that is, from a less complete realization of 
 Self to a more complete realization of Self. 
 Its condition is the instinct to eternal rebel- 
 
A MEMORABLE ESCAPE 111 
 
 lion, an undying tendency to negative all 
 seeming finalities. 
 
 The mind lives in the Eternal in the 
 degree that it puts aside intent, aim, object. 
 They who shoot at targets never see the 
 heavens. Inveterate swimmers are at last 
 lost in the element they sport with. All in- 
 tention is proscription and smells of death. 
 
 To the contemplative mind one hour is 
 the measure of the hfe and death of a 
 million suns — one day the hour-glass of all 
 eternity. 
 
 The cosmic mind can have no evil 
 thoughts; the vilest things can be pictured 
 there and smiled at, as sunlight may lie 
 over a brackish, slimy pool and will none 
 the less be spotless light, or, again, as vile 
 pictures can be shown on a white screen and 
 leave the whiteness untarnished. 
 
 To understand a thing thoroughly for- 
 ever puts that thing beyond the pale of 
 hatred; to love a thing merely is to sub- 
 ject oneself to the possibility of hating 
 that thing. Hence, understanding is the 
 highest thing in the world because it in- 
 cludes hate. The emancipated reason of 
 man is the Holy Innocent. 
 
 The illusion of good and bad ; in the per- 
 
112 A MEMORABLE ESCAPE 
 
 fbrmance of a "good" action the mind is 
 focused on the effect that it voluntarily de- 
 sires to bring about, heedless of the law that 
 each act begets a multitude of other acts 
 which have no relation in morals to the pri- 
 mal intention. 
 
 Pain is wrought by the intrusion of a 
 personal desire, opinion, or prejudice in 
 the presence of an inexorable law. 
 
 Misery, in the last analysis, is neither 
 social, political nor racial; it is caused by 
 the inability of the individual mind to dis- 
 criminate between what is its good and 
 what is its not-good. Social evils, so-called, 
 are merely the lumping together of the 
 many ignorances of many minds. Where 
 aU are blind all must fall into the ditch. 
 He who can discriminate goes free. 
 
 The higher the intelligence the finer the 
 powers of discrimination, the more things 
 you will reject; the more things you reject 
 the freer you will become. All social 
 "remedies" direct us how to get more, not 
 how to be more, how to become more. The 
 rich dominate the poor; as a remedy the 
 poor purpose to dominate the rich. Where- 
 in lies the difference? The hawk watches the 
 chicken and the chicken watches the worm. 
 
A MEMORABLE ESCAPE 113 
 
 That is, in brief, the game of society. 
 Unless you abide in Self you are evil. 
 
 Evil is always becoming good; good is 
 always becoming evil. Change is readjust- 
 inent ; and what we mean by eternal change 
 is eternal readjustment. Hence progress 
 is an illusion. For progress presupposes 
 a constant net gain in an eternal process. 
 Which is the same thing as saying that 
 if we pour a peck of peas into another peck 
 measure we have two pecks of peas. 
 
 The intellect cannot sin; what is called 
 conscience is a wordy war in the blood — a 
 strictly pathologic symptom; the brain 
 listens to the dispute, and the "still small 
 voice" is born. But the brain may smile 
 and smile and forever be a villain. All 
 things are permitted it. 
 
 All future events are decided — ^the intel- 
 lefct merely reveals the manner of the in- 
 tention. Each tomorrow is already past, 
 and related to eternity you have already 
 died; related to Time, you still live. 
 
 The thoughts in the brain are nothing 
 but the bodily appetites in another form. 
 
 AU human development tends to the 
 generation and perpetuation of error, for 
 the more complex man's activities become 
 
114 A MEMORABLE ESCAPE 
 
 the greater the number of illusions it re- 
 quires to stimulate his diverse activities. If 
 man in his growing complexity were get- 
 ting nearer and nearer to some great eter- 
 nal, unifying truth, his activities would de- 
 crease as he neared the goal and hxmian 
 life would be characterized by a greater and 
 greater simplicity. 
 
 The brain is the flower of organic life, 
 and our thoughts the petals on the flower. 
 The shedding of these petals, the ceaseless 
 dropping, fading, of our thoughts reveal 
 finally the worm in the bud — ^the nothing- 
 ness of man and the f utihty of desire. 
 
 Emotion is the elemental cosmic fire; in- 
 tellect the cleansing, soothing waters. 
 
 Herbert Spencer tells us that we cannot 
 get beyond states of mind; thus we can 
 never know the Reality of which mind is 
 a mode of expression. In positing this 
 Reality he had denied the possibility of 
 apprehending it — a contradiction. There 
 is a Consciousness that is not a state of 
 mind; it is something immediately given — 
 and in rare moments we know we are that 
 Consciousness. Its presence is not appre- 
 hended as a state of mind; it cannot be 
 thought about — indeed, it vanishes the mo- 
 
A MEMORABLE ESCAPE 115 
 
 ment we think about it — ^that is, the moment 
 we have a "state of mind" about it. 
 
 In these moments we know that all our 
 states of mind — personality itself — are 
 merely a lower activity of that Super-Con- 
 sciousness. It is not known through thought, 
 but thought is known through it. It is 
 felt as a Presence when there is the least 
 conscious thought in the mind. It is known, 
 apprehended, with a degree of certainty to 
 which a transitory state of mind can never 
 attain. It comes as a supreme Awareness, 
 abohshes by absorbing Object and Sub- 
 ject, Time and Space. It is the datum of 
 which states of mind are mere infinite data. 
 
 Flee wheresoever we may we cannot es- 
 cape the Centre. The universe is composed 
 of infinite centres ; circumference and diam- 
 eters are illusions. Endless space is end- 
 less centre. All evolution is a movement 
 from centre to centre, because any point 
 bounded on all sides by the Infinite must 
 be a centre. 'The centre of immensities, the 
 conflux of eternities" — ^there is nothing 
 conceivable that is not always there — and 
 There is always Here, for other than Here 
 there is naught. 
 
 The highest kind of action is meditation. 
 
116 A MEMORABLE ESCAPE 
 
 Memory may cease, identity may lapse, 
 consciousness may blow out, but Life can- 
 not end. 
 
THE MASQUERADE 
 
 THE belief in an external universe is 
 the superstition of the senses. Of hear- 
 ing, seeing, feeling and tasting have 
 we woven these filaments of matter and 
 garnished the immeasurable hollows of the 
 cosmos with stucco and pilaster of seeming. 
 The brain itself is only a dream of conscious 
 force and this body of mine but a haunted 
 house, itself forever withering and crumb- 
 ling imder the strain of its mutabilities. 
 
 The Ego, tiu*ning everlastingly on its 
 pivots of inexorable activities, whelps its 
 eerie spectres which the whimpering thirst 
 for the familiar in man kneads to a provi- 
 sional hard-and-fast universe. 
 
 Change is avid of her spawn, and the 
 slime of circimistance breeds the brilliant 
 bubbles which we are, only to suck us back 
 into the swart of the grave, which is the 
 womb of newer bubbles. 
 
 I move, I talk, I gesture between the 
 thing named zenith and the thing named 
 (117) 
 
118 THE MASQUERADE 
 
 nadir, but who shall tell me what I move 
 toward when eternity and infinity stretch 
 before and behind me? I speak, but who 
 shall put a value on my speech when the 
 ambushed forerunning Minute shall blend 
 my voice into the spirit of a milKon gales 
 and spht my words into their infinite sound- 
 particles? I gesture, but what do I hail 
 when the phantom I hallooed had started 
 out of the same hollow heart of things as 
 my gesture? We stand upon a platform of 
 shadows and hail the echoes of Appearance. 
 We are the dials that mark no time; we 
 are clocks with our circumferences every- 
 where and our pivots nowhere. Out on the 
 crag of our supremest imaging there is 
 nothing but — ^imagining! 
 
 See that headless, trunkless, footless, 
 brainless spirit of man with its one tentacle 
 of desire sprung hke a hair from off the im- 
 mobile, unstirred surface of the pre-crea- 
 tional protoplasm — that hair-like tentacle 
 feeling its way from the cellars of the Un- 
 create up into the life-possibility, coming 
 out of its swoon of a trillion cycles in 
 nuUebiety, bulging into — aye, fathering — 
 this phantasmal universe of the "hypocritic 
 days." 
 
THE MASQUERADE 119 
 
 See how it wove that fantastic cycle of 
 law which we call evolution, but which is 
 only the ghostly tape-measure in the hands 
 of we Wraiths of Desire. Evolution is 
 only the method by which matter changes 
 from protoplasm to putridity and the 
 method by which mind ascends from imita- 
 tion to extinction. 
 
 There lie cancelled in the sepulchres of 
 the brain-cells and blood-cells of man more 
 ingenious universes than all accumulated 
 Mind can imagine; worlds the strange en- 
 ginery of which would turn mankind into 
 gibbering idiots if they ever caught a 
 glimpse of them through some freak of the 
 subconscious, ghost-fabricating spirit that is 
 the soul of us. The ghosts of the antique 
 worlds that are socketed down there in 
 Time's soundless voids I When they walk we 
 shall have a ghmpse — if we retain ouir 
 reasons — of the absurdity of this latest 
 makeshift of the imagination in which we 
 live. 
 
 So these cosmic trial-rooms have come 
 and gone, and we and they are the milhon 
 anatomical experiments of the Thing. 
 
 Moonless, starless universes there have 
 been, and stones with brains, and men and 
 
120 THE MASQUERADE 
 
 women who grew from trees, and lank, 
 gigantic, formless beings who strode from 
 abyss to abyss, and furry imps with twelve 
 senses, and things innominable in imiverses 
 that fructified and waned and shrunk into 
 huddled corpses and are no more. Or, they 
 live as faint reminiscence in backworld 
 dreaming souls, little wrinkled memories in 
 the byplaces of the subconscious, the half- 
 erased memorabiUa of the Almighty 
 Mockery. 
 
 This colored ooze of matter which flows 
 along Time's lubricious sluiceways — ^this 
 colored ooze of matter which is our universe, 
 think you it is any the less absurd than 
 those foundered in incalculable past cycles? 
 Cause and effect give you proof of rational- 
 ity, you say; but what is the cause of cause 
 and effect and the effect of cause and 
 effect? Where is your ultimate? Under the 
 cowl of Imagination there is the set face 
 of Fear! You are a phantom no less than 
 the spectres that stood in the half -lit rooms 
 of your brain last night when you "slept" — 
 the sleep of a dreaming. 
 
 That brooding vapor which we name 
 thought sends off these glaring rings of 
 matter which noose us the better to the mud 
 
THE MASQUERADE 121 
 
 and quicksands. The beds of rivers, the 
 bases of mountains, the roots of trees are 
 of the imaged vapor that projects its shapes 
 against the white screen of consciousness. 
 Upstarts from our own tombs, we etch in 
 the ghastly spaces that confront us suns 
 and moons and the constellations of shining 
 pebbles — and rub them out again. 
 
 The fangs of Change fasten on aU sub- 
 stances and all things that are born have 
 as sole dower a windingsheet. We are each 
 and all of us separate urns filled with il- 
 lusory flame that licks up shadows and that 
 inter at last only silence. 
 
 We are Time's ail and Motion's malady. 
 
 To grasp and hold and possess a thing 
 is the marriage of mockeries, the coition of 
 shadows. Man is the wastrel of the inutile, 
 ageless cycles. Call forth from the earth 
 all that have gone therein and the earth 
 would turn charnel-house, the very trees 
 pale into ashy corpses and the waters swim 
 with depth on depth of phantom faces and 
 the Himalayas gray to multiplied skull- 
 towers. 
 
 Such are we in these kilns of chance and 
 change and illusion. 
 
 Little lanterns and bell-buoys — nothing 
 
122 THE MASQUERADE 
 
 more are our senses ; lanterns and bell buoys 
 that guide the phantom Ego for a little 
 while across a phantom, mirage-studded 
 waste. Performance is the gallows-tree of 
 Intention, and action is strangled in the 
 hempen folds of insight. 
 
 Persons, things, historical incidents are 
 the poetics of Change, the scenic properties 
 in a play that is neither a tragedy nor a 
 comedy. Rich in its buffoonery, it ap- 
 proaches the farcical or the pantomimic — a 
 pantomime played in a darkened auditorium 
 with a mortal coldness blowing out of the 
 wings. 
 
 The, spirit that rules life is neither a spirit 
 of destruction nor a spirit of creation ; it is 
 the Spirit of Evanescence, a lapsing of 
 shadow into shadow, a fusing and inter- 
 changing, with a perpetual tendency to ex- 
 tinction, for each thing tends to return to 
 its metaphysical condition. All things are 
 momentary, even Eternity, which is but a 
 flitting thought across the blank surfaces 
 of the Ego, unseizable, imstable; all that 
 can possibly be is implicated in the transi- 
 tory, confederate to Oblivion. 
 
 Pass the whole universe of sense-contact 
 through the spectrum of the Ego's interior 
 
THE MASQUERADE 123 
 
 vision and one has colors and vibrations 
 only. Here Euclid and Grimm are of equal 
 importance and they that built the Pyramids 
 built things as vain and less beautiful than 
 they who lie under the Aurelian wall. 
 
RESPECTABILITY 
 
 NO word cows like Respectability. 
 We constantly hear those phrases : 
 "The respectable elements of the 
 community," "the respectable citizens," "re- 
 spectable people." And we pass dumbly, 
 hat in hand as though we had entered a 
 fane dedicated to some high purpose, when 
 as a matter of fact we are cringing before 
 a paradise of cowards, the cardboard gate 
 of which is painted to look hke iron. 
 
 On the waxed and shining ramparts of 
 Respectability struts Conformity dressed 
 like a flunkey. Behind him shambles the 
 lackey Hypocrisy muflBed in gold-leaf. 
 From behind the walls, from deep within 
 this Eden of parasites, is blown a sickening 
 odor. It comes from the live beings im- 
 prisoned within whose souls are without 
 drainage. 
 
 The dominant instinct in "respectable 
 circles" is fear. The psychology of respect- 
 ability is, thread for thread, link for link, 
 (124) 
 
RESPECTABILITY 125 
 
 the psychology of cowardice. Long genera- 
 tions of "respectable families" have stu- 
 pidity flickering from the eyes and bilious 
 abjectness a-flutter on the cheek* 
 
 Respectability is a survival of the herd- 
 ing instinct of the lower animals. The 
 plane of initiative, which is distinctively 
 human, has not been attained. In the great 
 droves of the respectable — a strange mix- 
 ture of bovine and fox-like instincts — dif- 
 ferentiation has not yet begun. The law 
 of variation does not apply here. And this 
 is because in these vast herds there are no 
 individuals; there is only type. It is true 
 that they are called by different names, but 
 this no more signifies individuality than the 
 branding of numbers on oxen signifies 
 differences of intelligence. 
 
 The evolution of respectability would of 
 course have to include the evolution of mo- 
 tion and its ramifications from the first 
 Colorless Conformity, wherein Nothing 
 was; detailing the metaphysical history of 
 the first rebellious tremblings in that massed 
 vacuum — ^the first spurts of color, the first 
 sinful hankerings, the first defiance of 
 immobility of the original sinful atoms. 
 
 Some such idea as this, I take it, runs 
 
126 RESPECTABILITY 
 
 through the legend of Prometheus, who 
 rebelled against the deadly-dull philistinism 
 of the gods and who flung the glove — or, 
 rather the fennel-rod of fire-anointed 
 thought — in the face of Olympian respeet- 
 abihty, with its Sorosis, ennuis and porch 
 gossip, and who was punished by having 
 his vitals nibbled for aU eternity by the 
 croaking ravens of the Olympian Status 
 Quo. 
 
 Again we find it in another form in the 
 war between the hosts of the Lord and 
 Lucifer, whose quick mind, tinged with the 
 healthy Byronism of that pre-Byronic age, 
 conceived that memorable insurrection 
 against the cataleptic respectability of 
 Heaven. 
 
 Still, again, the legend reappears in 
 Genesis, where the serpent, brain-full of 
 knowledge and wisdom, stuck his fangs 
 deep into the Arcadian respectability of 
 Eden, shattering not only the complacency 
 of Adam and Eve but preparing the way 
 for Cain, whose heel, stuck deep into the 
 sacrificial offerings of his smugly dutiful 
 brother, flattened the nose of respectability 
 and gave to history in himself its first Man. 
 
 In the sphere of zoology we are on firmer 
 
RESPECTABILITY 127 
 
 ground. In the long run, mammals of the 
 same species are militantly bourgeois. They 
 think in droves and instinctively fend them- 
 selves against the incursions of the New. 
 There are no doubt renegade whales and 
 baboons with ideas of individualized des- 
 tinies and deers that overstep the calcined 
 codes of mob-action and who have analyzed 
 the meaning of the mincing step, the boot- 
 leg glance and the homely fireside virtues 
 of their companions ; but there is always .the 
 restraint of a depleted larder and a ruffled 
 skin and Opinion with its condemnations 
 to divers hells. Variation from the type 
 is never respectable. A reasonable resiUence 
 is often granted, but, in the long run, it is 
 fatal not to do as others do. Whinny in 
 herd-rhythm, snarl to the note of the drove, 
 let your lowing be according to your sta- 
 tion — something like this we conceive may 
 be the rules of the sub-human protagonists 
 of the "respectable elements" of society. 
 And life is jigged in herd-time and the soul 
 of the sub-human species lies in its lucent 
 pickle. 
 
 So sub-human respectability streams into 
 the human, passing over by narrow ways 
 and mule-trails. As we know them here 
 
128 RESPECTABILITY 
 
 they are the sons of God and Home is 
 God's acre. They worship at the godhead 
 of Authority, "things said," the embalmed 
 historic lies. They stand solidly arrayed 
 against variation from the mass, as do their 
 four-footed betters. They all have the 
 courage of rejecting their own convictions. 
 They sit rigid in their moral tarpaulins. 
 They make daily pilgrimages to their own 
 souls, spotless nullities. The Kabala is in 
 Philadelphia. The Sacred Stone is a nugget. 
 Pretence is the first virtue among them. 
 If they post to forbidden sheets, it is done 
 on some moral hypothesis. 
 
 This giant silent conspiracy of mediocrity, 
 this race-thesaurus of the average, has- in 
 all ages been the sworn enemy of all men- 
 tal and moral progress. Respectability is 
 the leaden weight in the scale of conserv- 
 atism. It crucified Christ and egged Byron 
 out of England. It excommunicated Spi- 
 noza and hurried with the fagots that 
 burned Bruno. It invents anti-vice societies 
 to shelter its mind against its own porno- 
 graphic instincts. In all history Respect- 
 ability has never given the world a brave 
 act, a brave thought, a beautiful idea. Food 
 and se:jf;— fhe^ aj-g Jthe axes on which it 
 
RESPECTABILITY 129 
 
 turns; for it life is only significant below 
 the navel. 
 
 It is impossible to compute the number 
 of beings that have been chloroformed in 
 the House of Respectability. Bribed, 
 beaten, threatened, the spark of moral or 
 mental revolt has gone out of thousands 
 of young minds and they have lived in 
 those fetid purheus and died with a chaplet 
 of the ordained virtues on their brows, 
 pews paid up to date, the coffin neatly be- 
 flowered. 
 
 At birth handed iron lances to fling at 
 the sun, they came to cut them up into 
 darning needles and book-cutters. Found- 
 lings of ideas pregnant with dreams, they 
 were farmed out to Rote, their dreams pal- 
 ing to ashy fears. Their hands outstretched 
 toward the open-seas of life, they have felt 
 in their muscles the palsy of will-lessness 
 before the croaking cries of the landlubbers 
 of Respectability. The fine purple coat of 
 rebellion becomes a seedy house- jacket and 
 the sandals of fire are exchanged for car- 
 pet-slippers that convey one noiselessly over 
 the plush conventions. All who enter there 
 have abandoned themselves. 
 
 The temples of Respectability are the 
 
130 RESPECTABILITY 
 
 abattoirs of the quick and the catacombs 
 of the virile. 
 
 Respectability is always dragged behind 
 the Spirit of Age. It is the inveterate 
 enemy of the innovative spirit. Phihstia 
 ends where ideas begin. What seems to 
 be growth is really change of environment. 
 Respectability is the same in aU ages. They 
 are the same people who drove Mary Mag- 
 dalen into the gutter as those who held up 
 their exquisitely manicured fingertips in 
 horror at Richard Strauss' "Salome." Re- 
 spectability refused to accept the Coperni- 
 can theory of the universe until it was 
 hinted that not to do so would stamp it as 
 unconventional. It refused to accept Ibsen 
 as a great seer and poet until it found out 
 that the seventh-rate literary umpires had 
 swallowed him. 
 
 Nevertheless, the Viking spirit in litera- 
 ture, art and life should bless Respectabil- 
 ity. It is the citadel against whose walls 
 strong men may try their strength. It is 
 a brazen hollow image, against whose pas- 
 sionless face warriors may practice their 
 skill at lance-throwing. It is a proving- 
 ground for those who go forth. 
 
THE IMPENITENT 
 
 TO have the courage of one's trans- 
 gressions — that is heroic. To repent 
 of one's transgressions — ^that is mere- 
 ly virtue. All apology contains an element 
 of baseness. To whom should we abase 
 ovu-selves? All men are guilty of the same 
 meannesses — and he to whom I bring propi- 
 tiatory gifts will give them to some one 
 whom he has oifended. It is the penny that 
 ever returns. No man ever asked to be 
 forgiven a wrong whose knees did not 
 quake. This joint-sag is the atavistic ten- 
 dency to beg for mercy on the knees, a prim- 
 itive obeisance to Strength, the "Peccavi!" 
 of the lost. 
 
 The arch-impenitent awes us by his as- 
 sumption of power; in his fine disdains we 
 catch gleams of the elemental, the barbaric. 
 His is the confidence of the predestined; 
 the aloofness and soul-suificiency that rely 
 on Fate, whose will will be done. He is of 
 the open spaces. Conscience, with its sick- 
 (131) 
 
132 THE IMPENITENT 
 
 room airs, has not yet alchemized the Pro- 
 methean fires in his soul to the poisonous 
 drool wherewith the terror-hounded forever 
 water the rank flowers of the past. He who 
 is without conscience is without weakness — 
 for conscience is the past trying to live 
 twice, the frost that chills the seeds of god- 
 hood in us, the back-water that we hold to 
 scour our souls when life is at low-tide. 
 A poet of transcendent overdreams has re- 
 corded the fact that "Conscience does make 
 cowards of us all" — and he gave us Hamlet 
 from his hot, subtle brain to prove it. 
 
 To trace the evolution of conscience — of 
 that pathologic still, small voice which man- 
 kind declares tells it when it is doing wrong 
 — would be to write the history of mankind's 
 defeated dreams. Anything that man can 
 accomplish is right. , By a trick of thought, 
 goaded by some stern, masked necessity, he 
 makes it so. What he has failed in he decrees 
 "wrong." The race is eternally adjusting 
 itself to its own weaknesses, which it styles 
 its virtues. The individual soul is a hell of 
 lost lusts whose ghosts forever trouble us 
 with their claims. We seldom stop to ask 
 whether they have real rights, whether the 
 fetor of their breath on our pale, anemic 
 
THE IMPEl^ITENT 133 
 
 souls is not the poison that our later selves 
 have breathed into these wondrous, ancient 
 beasts, whom we have denied in our fear, 
 but who lie deep-buried in the sands of our 
 souls, mumbling and drowsing and calcu- 
 lating like the Sphinx. 
 
 There is a living soul behind that hand 
 which in the shadow of the gibbet firmly 
 waves aside the rose-water consolations of 
 the priest. The gesture has the sombre 
 majesty of the Inexorable. Murderer he 
 may be ten times over — a murderer, like an 
 adultress, is a legal fiction — still he will not 
 suUy his soul with that last, greatest in- 
 firmity — ^the cry of the hvraian to the Eter- 
 nal to reverse the iron order and sponge 
 from time what time was bade do. We 
 may hurl at the malefactor who is sullen 
 defiance to the last our fatuous anathemas 
 with the wonderful syntax, but in secret 
 we revere his grim amiability in the face of 
 the Irrevocable. An inflexible necessity 
 hounds him to the end. He who builded 
 the house, let Him look to it. The tenant 
 must take what he finds. And if we for- 
 give him^ — ^that is the crowning puerility of 
 mediocrity. For at bottom "I forgive thee" 
 means "I no longer fear thee." We never 
 
134 THE IMPENITENT 
 
 forgive those who have it still in their power 
 to harm us. And the patronizing forgive- 
 ness of Eternal Omnipotence, the pat on 
 the head, to have the dust smilingly flecked 
 from your coat by the finger of Omni- 
 science — ^what great soul will submit to that? 
 
 Hope is a masked blasphemy — and re- 
 pentance is the mask turned inside out. The 
 self swells to huge proportions beneath the 
 introspective eye. The ego, reeling drvmk 
 on its own private lusts — intoxicated by 
 its very thirst — makes of its desires an end- 
 less tape-measure, which it unreels from the 
 cradle to the pit; and even upon the brink 
 of the clay-walled hole, with lean and flesh- 
 poor fingers, it tries to measure some 
 phantom, brain-born Beyond. We will 
 have no destiny but our own, no wide- 
 circling fate-full laws that have not pro- 
 vided' for us, no wind that does not blow 
 our bark to some haven mapped out in the 
 chaotic foreworld for the special delectation 
 and eternal safe-housing of that gilded 
 granule — the fadeless and indestructible 
 Mel 
 
 There is not enough natural faith in the 
 world. There is nothing we have doubted 
 more than the fundamental verities. All 
 
THE IMPENITENT 135 
 
 believe that two and two make four until 
 it comes time to die; then we ask God to 
 make two and two five — or, please God, 
 four-and-a-half; and we twist and turn and 
 try to blarney Him down to four-and-a- 
 quarter — "just this once, God." This spe- 
 cies of God-baiting is called repentance. 
 Few have the courage to believe their evil 
 deeds were predestined, were the outcome 
 of an endless past, the sewage of great 
 world-currents. "I am I," cried Magda, 
 the impenitent and regal — and that fine 
 challenge was answered by "Come up 
 Higher, thou!" 
 
 Each trivial act is dissolved in a govern- 
 ing law, and all law is noosed in a remote 
 necessity. Each impulse is compounded 
 of many impulses, and our faintest thought 
 trails back to the sun. The very disbelief 
 in a necessity for all our acts and thoughts 
 is a matter of necessity. There is a tem- 
 perament that would deny the fatality of 
 temperament. The author of Job gave us 
 a peep into the star-chamber where our in- 
 dividual destinies are decided. And Goethe, 
 who himself smiled from his citadel set on 
 the other side of good and evil, made Faust 
 the victim of a conspiracy. 
 
136 THE IMPENITENT 
 
 The philosopher of impenitence was the 
 great Spinoza — Spinoza the remorseless and 
 the daring. He was the master immoralist 
 ■ — or non-moraUst — and from his spiritual 
 loins sprang the great psychologist, the 
 ferret-brained Nietzsche. God created time 
 and Spinoza destroyed it. For him the 
 past did not exist — his serene soul moved 
 from Now to Now. Booted and sandaled, 
 a Knight of the Open Road, he went forth 
 in youth to do battle with the most profit- 
 able lie ever concocted — ^the lie of free-will — 
 a priestly invention to absolve the Most 
 High. 
 
 Spinoza's God we can pass over. It was 
 nothing but a formula for ennui — an omni- 
 potent, omnipresent, indestructible stupid- 
 ity. It had no knowledge of good or evil, 
 but abided in a transcendental state of 
 total ignorance. It was a sort of spiritual 
 glue that held all things together. 
 
 The days of this lens-grinder were white- 
 capped negations. From the other side of 
 life he watched humans playing and dis- 
 sected their emotions. He conceived the 
 emotions to be a sort of poisonous coil, a 
 tangle that held man in the mud. For the 
 tear-besotted sentimentality that is forever 
 
THE IMPENITENT 137 
 
 looking back upon an arid past he had that 
 profound contempt which philosophers 
 have masked imder a brain-smile. 
 
 Good and evil are relative terms and 
 mean nothing to him whose vision extends 
 beyond the immediate effect of each act. 
 There is no code that lasts a thousand years. 
 There is necessity, which is to say no man 
 can escape himself. His most unlawful 
 acts are lawful, and in nature there are no 
 such things as transgressions. Or, rather, 
 there is nothing else — all is transgression. 
 Government is an organized transgression. 
 Its excuse for being is that it can carry on 
 the cosmic system of vengeance better than 
 the individual can. 
 
 Spinoza was the most cold-blooded anarch 
 who ever lived and certainly the boldest 
 moral — or immoral — philosopher. He 
 crawled out to the eaves of things, peeped 
 over, and boldly took the leap. He burned 
 all bridges, cut all bonds, wiped all yester- 
 days from his mental slate, asked for no 
 philosophic quarter and gave none. 
 
 What is evil? he asked. Evil is that which 
 gives man pain. Not only pain that comes 
 from external things, but pain that comes 
 from ourselves is evil. Conscience is evil 
 
138 THE IMPENITENT 
 
 because it is the soul preying on itself. It 
 is a Torquemada invented by sickly souls 
 who still dweU in the mists of the emotional 
 foreworld. 
 
 Come with me into the beyond-world of 
 the intellect, of the understanding, and see 
 yourself and your comic sins as my placid, 
 immovable, passion-dry God sees you! cried 
 Spinoza. 
 
 "Repentance is not a virtue, nor does it 
 arise from reason; but he who repents of 
 an action is doubly wretched and infirm," 
 he says calmly in a celebrated proposition. 
 The original transgression has inflicted pain 
 on someone; but the act was motived not 
 in you but in the endless past that stretched 
 away before your birth and was latent in 
 the sidereal gases. What can your repent- 
 ance do but add pain to pain, tear to tear, 
 anguish to anguish? All the waters of 
 Araby will not wash your damned spots out, 
 because the waters of Araby cannot inun- 
 date the infinite; and yoxir weaknesses, 
 which you call yom- sins, were predestined 
 in unremembered past dm-ations. 
 
 The doctrine of human responsibility is 
 one that has its uses. Historically, society 
 is an evolving illusion, and it feeds on lies 
 
THE IMPENITENT 139 
 
 like the daughter of Rappacini lived and 
 thrived on poisons. But there is a finer 
 virtue than self-condemnation — ^it is self- 
 absolution. Penitence is an hysterical 
 tickle-self. It is like one of those scorching, 
 belly-burning dishes that degenerate Rome 
 concocted to stimulate a jaded palate and 
 a blase maw. "Confession is good for the 
 soul," it is said — ^that is, it is pleasurable, 
 and we invent sins for the pleasure of con- 
 fession and repentance. Like dead flies in 
 a bowl of curdled cream, so lies the soul 
 of man in his tear-vats. The lives of men 
 are an endless expiation, as Emerson, a 
 crowned god of the Overworld, has said. 
 The souls of the repentant are great penal 
 colonies — their days a series of vicarious 
 atonements. 
 
 Each day we should be apostate to a self 
 is the essence of the teaching of Spinoza. 
 The progressive evolution of the individual 
 soul is like the uncoiling of an infinite chain, 
 each hnk of which differs from the other. 
 Some hnks are dun-colored, some are slime- 
 corroded, some are of gleaming gold, some 
 of neutral tints, and some fleece-white. The 
 slime-smeared link cannot dominate the free 
 soul. It was forged in hell; let hell look to 
 its works I 
 
140 THE IMPENITENT 
 
 There are two orders of beings; they 
 whom their devils use and they who 
 use their devils. Spinoza was Orestes 
 triumphant. 
 
 Goethe was a spiritual Titan who strode 
 through his own soul and reached an outer- 
 most gate where he signaled back a "Come 
 hither and see!" to the sickly age in which 
 he hved. Goethe saw life from so high a 
 point that his rejection of life and his ac- 
 ceptance of life were the same thing. He 
 stood where all things merged and com- 
 prehended in a glance the meaninglessness 
 of any one thing and yet the necessity which 
 urged all things to disappear in one another. 
 "Sin," "evil," "pain" were to him fine ex- 
 periences which no great soul should shrink 
 from; rather should pain be courted for 
 the residuum of wisdom that lies at the 
 bottom of it. Does the physician who has 
 inoculated himself with deadly germs for 
 the purpose of furthering an intellectual 
 lust regret his action if the experiment has 
 yielded him a truth, even though looking 
 on that truth has condemned him to death? 
 So in the spiritual sphere Goethe would 
 urge us to live our sins half-gayly for the 
 knowledge they bring, and never to look 
 
THE IMPENITENT 141 
 
 back lest we turn to pillars of jelly. 
 
 Let him who is perfect and stupid repent, 
 for he has not yet lived; but he who has 
 been bludgeoned and has bludgeoned in 
 turn; who has been taken and given in the 
 combats where each instinct fights for its 
 own; who has made of his own life a 
 shambles and yet peered at himself from 
 time to time from the little white turret 
 in the brain-apex — let him rejoice and 
 repent not. The fox is caught in the gin 
 and the star is enmeshed in law and the 
 souls of men are matrixed in their destinies. 
 The hthe-limbed Goethe swam through the 
 flotsam and jetsam of his acts and brushed 
 the slime-matted seaweed from his eyes — 
 swam to a point where the waters meet the 
 stars and escaped with Spinoza into the un- 
 arithmetical spaces. 
 
 How fast our sickly pasts would decom- 
 pose and vanish in their poisonous mists did 
 we not forever keep them alive with our in- 
 verted glances! We lie on the crest of an 
 on-moving wave, but instead of taking our 
 bearings from an everlasting height — ^the 
 immovable present moment — ^we glance 
 down with tear-stained cheeks into the 
 hollow we believe we just rose from, or 
 
142 THE IMPENITENT 
 
 stand wringing our hands in fear of the 
 hollow we believe we are about to disappear 
 in. 
 
 What is the outcome of our acts? Our 
 most damnable lies may breed in time's 
 mighty tangle unforgettable virtues. And 
 if one could trace back those actions which 
 make him complacent he would find them 
 rooted in degradation that would bring the 
 inerasable pallors to his soul. 
 
 The religion of Buddha is founded on 
 the profoundest cosmic vision that ever il- 
 limiined a human mind. The world is an 
 expedient, and nothing is or is not but 
 thinking makes it so. In the view of the 
 Buddhist, repentance is as idle as rejoicing, 
 for both spring from the illusion of self — 
 that transitory agglomeration of millions 
 of individuals which science calls cells. All 
 are in the whirl of law; the individual is 
 bound to a fiery, whirling wheel that one 
 moment ducks him in mud and the next 
 moment whirls him to azure vistas. You 
 are the mud, the azure, the wheel, and the 
 fiery whirl; you are all but yourself. So 
 the Buddhist, negativing past, present, top, 
 bottom, good, evil, here, hereafter, folds his 
 toga about him and lies down to pleasant 
 Nirvanas. 
 
THE IMPENITENT 143 
 
 Self -consciousness may destroy or create. 
 The first peep into ourselves terrifies us, 
 and if we do not succumb to what we see 
 in that glance into the inferno out of which 
 we have wriggled we shall live to spurn it, 
 or better, utiUze it. Your soul will in time 
 become a fine drama — a playhouse with 
 one silent auditor. You will love your 
 "sins" for the sake of the climaxes that 
 their triumph or defeat leads up to. You 
 will become your own hero, your own 
 ideal of perfect villainy; and when you 
 grow tired of the performance you can 
 enter, through the medium of art, into the 
 marvellous adventures of other men's souls, 
 for all lofty minds at last dramatize or sing 
 themselves in some form. Emerson's essays 
 are the chronicle of his spiritual escapades, 
 Ibsen's plays are his jungle-story, Chopin 
 set himself to music, and Balzac explored 
 himself and made of truth a gorgeous fic- 
 tion. 
 
 St. Augustine, who was so black that he 
 turned white, and who, like Tolstoi, mistook 
 impotency for self-mastery, says that we 
 may rise on our dead selves to higher things. 
 Rather may we rise on our live selves to 
 higher things. The past is dead only in 
 
144 THE IMPENITENT 
 
 the sense that it never existed. Walt 
 Whitman sang of himself in his entirety — 
 "denying nothing." He was always just 
 ahead of himself. Nature, he saw, had no 
 penitential days; she was ruthless and 
 bhthe, possessed something of a naive cun- 
 ning, used compost and lily-poUen in her 
 laboratories, made poems of her rain-days 
 and fair days — and nothing was ever amiss. 
 Both Emerson and Whitman recognized 
 evil, but refused to admit the idea of sin 
 into their conception of things. They lived, 
 hke Spinoza and Goethe, in the overspaces 
 and were never troubled by that form of 
 spiritual dyspepsia which comes from over- 
 eating at the tables of the past. 
 
 Friedrich Nietzsche saw in conscience 
 the greatest evil that the brooding mind of 
 man had ever raised up. The great rhap- 
 sodical psychologist, who flung down in 
 passionate hate the gage of battle to the 
 other-world roisterers, saw to the bottom 
 of that pit of slime, the soul of man. Those 
 who had lusted and failed of their lusts 
 had spawned conscience, which begat guilt, 
 which begat sin, which begat emaciation, 
 penitence and heaven-hunger, which begat 
 another world, where the strong men cease 
 
THE IMPENITENT 145 
 
 from taking and the eunuchs get the best. 
 The weak, the tear-stained, the neurotic, 
 the diseased build and build, and into their 
 earth-palaces they enter not, so they have 
 conspired to overthrow the palaces that 
 have been erected by their masters, the 
 strong, the unrelenting, the never-regret- 
 ting, the imp^nitents. And they have made 
 of their weaknesses virtues and put craft 
 and cunning into the seat of power and 
 made idols of pillars of salt. The vengeful 
 eyes of the lost flash from behind their 
 masks of love, and the knotted veins of 
 cruelty are concealed by a crown of thorns. 
 There is no motive power in regrets — 
 that way lies death — or, worse, the jealous 
 rage that begets him who loves his fellow- 
 man too much and himself not at all. Self- 
 love is the condition of all love: the bud 
 must flower before it can seed; the sun 
 is the sun to its last outpost of flame. The 
 impenitent is himself to his last act; he 
 presages a new series, where evolution and 
 devolution are one; where there is neither 
 growth nor decay, but an eternal transition, 
 a rising from equilibrium to equilibrium, 
 from infinite sweep to infinite sweep, 
 
THE ETERNAL RENAISSANCE 
 
 THE mystery of surfaces, the delight 
 of touch, the joy bred of the mel- 
 odies of motion, the ecstasy of con- 
 tact with ideas that germinate newer per- 
 spectives aiid that pullulate with reminis- 
 cences that wear over their faces the purple 
 veils of fantasy, mutilated memorabilia of 
 ante-natal experiences — and all these things 
 unallied to any idea of responsibiUty, mun- 
 dane or super-mundane; just life for life's 
 sake; the adventure of the mind in matter; 
 the adventure of the senses in air and water 
 and sunlight and rain ; to sack the minutes 
 of their possibilities; to privateer against 
 the day of death; to skirt the coasts of 
 strange lands built of those moods that arise 
 in the brain just before waking time; 
 plagiarizing no rules and making none; 
 foraging on all men's thoughts; smuggling 
 through the cellars of the sub-conscious the 
 gold and silver of daily experience, to be 
 wrought to unfamiliar shapes in those dark- 
 (146) 
 
THE ETERNAL RENAISSANCE 147 
 
 ened smithies; to gut life, to maraud on the 
 farthest borders of the conceivable, and to 
 stand accoutred at the tomb with the loot 
 of all this world prepared for another ap- 
 prenticeship in consciousness: Such is the 
 passionate purpose of the pagan. 
 
 The miraculous does not happen; the 
 miraculous is. The pagan attitude is the 
 attitude of wonder, amazement, childish 
 delight. Matter is haunted. Winter is 
 haunted with the ghost of a spring. With- 
 ered branches with the ice glittering upon 
 them hold latent within them the perfumed 
 rose. The atom is a tiny house with many 
 ghosts. Sunlight on my shoe is inexpli- 
 cable. Aye, this sunlight is haunted — else 
 how came this world? All science is classi- 
 fied folklore. Government by pixies is not 
 one jot inferior to government by earth- 
 quake, fire, famine and evolving sidereal 
 extinction. 
 
 So the pagan stands swathed in the sense 
 of elemental mystery, translating all things 
 back to their private, original glamour, and 
 with the witchcraft of his holy innocence — 
 which contains much of the riant diablerie 
 of adolescence — unwinding the cords of 
 complexity that man has wound round and 
 
148 THE ETERNAL RENAISSANCE 
 
 round the omnipotent Ghost that permeates 
 all things. 
 
 By the mechanism of association of ideas 
 we generally ally the word paganism with 
 the words Ancient Greece. But that ad- 
 mirable flowering of the human spirit, those 
 few centuries wherein Mind and Matter 
 played the unrepentant prodigal with their 
 own native inheritances, was no isolated 
 phenomenon. Paganism is the instinct for 
 liberty. It is a tendency, not a bimdle of 
 opinions. 
 
 A pagan movement is always a "new 
 movement." It is always a rebelhon against 
 dogma, codes, conventions, systems; it is 
 the deep procreant spirit that wages war 
 against all forms of stupidity. It is the im- 
 mortal red bud that miraculously, age after 
 age, in literature, art and thought, bm-sts 
 through the leaden strata of custom; the 
 sword whetted with light that cuts the 
 thongs of familiarity that are twisted roimd 
 and round the living, palpitant soul of man. 
 
 There is always a renaissance somewhere 
 in the world. The human spirit will not 
 long be set in limits. It will suffer, but 
 it will not rest. The pagan spirit comes 
 to stir the dead, to blast the sight with its 
 
THE ETERNAL RENAISSANCE 149 
 
 supernal vistas or to twist us to frenetic 
 maenads with its sudden inundation of 
 Beauty. It may be the sudden epiphany 
 of a Nietzsche in philosophy, a murderous 
 force that burns up everything in its trail, 
 including itself, after having set in flames 
 the rotting, ramparts of the orthodox gods. 
 
 Or it may be the quiet intrusion in life 
 of a Walter Pater, who wove with the 
 golden thread of antique dreams that great 
 arras curtain that holds in the irrevocable 
 quiescence of its web the stories of the 
 spiritual wayfaring of Marius, Denis 
 L'Auxerrois, Sebastian Van Storck and 
 Florian Deleal ; — Pater who was the renais- 
 sance of the Renaissance. 
 
 Or it may be the unannoimced recurrence 
 of a Pierre Louys, whose "Songs of Bilitis" 
 conjugate the things seen with the eye and 
 the things touched of the body in all their 
 moods, tenses and inflections. With the 
 language of babes he transfigures and re- 
 juvenates a staled world. The wonder of 
 trees, of lakes, of human nudity, of the 
 simplest emotions assaults us like a reproach 
 after turning these pages. The bellied, 
 sun-flecked sail of the ship that lurches 
 high-low in Mitylene waters, the singing of 
 
150 THE ETERNAL RENAISSANCE 
 
 rain^drops on the surfaces of pools set in a 
 sombre woods, the music of lovers' steps 
 as they walk to the tryst — simple, immortal 
 things, with not a trace of moral millinery 
 about them nor the rouged smirk of guilt. 
 
 Wilham Sharpe was of those who pro- 
 claimed the Golden Year. In "Vistas" there 
 is a Pere Hilarion who forsakes his cowl 
 and girdle at the call of love, and, ripping 
 the Crucified from the Cross that stands 
 on the shore of the waters that divide Yea- 
 land from Nay-land, he flings it angrily 
 into the current and plunges to the other 
 shore — Yea-land — ^with the woman he loves. 
 They vanish in the dawn. The same motive 
 recurs in "Cathal of the Woods." A yoimg 
 priest is buried alive in a tree for breaking 
 his vows. He loved a King's daughter. 
 But from the tree the soul of Cathal 
 prophesies the doom of the preachers of the 
 new faith, the disciples of the White God 
 of Gahlee, Of the priest who decreed his 
 tree-death Cathal sings: — 
 
 "Flame burn him in heart of flame, and 
 may he wane as wax at the furnace. 
 
 And his soul drown in tears, and his body 
 be a nothingness upon the sands." 
 
 Cathal becomes a tree-man and finds his 
 
THE ETERNAL RENAISSANCE 151 
 
 sweetheart, a tree-woman, and they become 
 as immortal as Nature, spurning the 
 ephemeral Gods of nations and their sapless 
 priests. 
 
 And through the familiar labyrinths of 
 life it is thus that some human revenant of 
 the usurped gods always comes to pour his 
 libations of joy, to jettison his fulness, to 
 spill into the golden matrices of art this 
 Hyperborean postlude. 
 
 If the erotic Sappho was a pagan, so 
 was the austere Epicurus. In our day Renan 
 and Anatole France, Goethe and Keats, 
 Swinburne and D'Annunzio were pagans. 
 Rabelais and Montaigne left records that 
 smug gentility has not yet found the means 
 of annulling. The spirit of scepticism is 
 essentially pagan. Dogma and morals orb 
 in the same beaten track. Both are pa- 
 rochial. There is a chance that man, evolv- 
 ing toward superterrestrial spheres, may 
 stumble across the skirts of Truth some 
 day; but he can never do it in the company 
 of Dogma or Morals. 
 
 Paganism, on its intellectual side, is the 
 spirit of receptivity. It feels all things and 
 knows nothing, smiles and fingers with a 
 pitying touch the §buttle of Destiny 
 
152 THE ETERNAL RENAISSANCE 
 
 which weaves such calamitous issues. 
 
 For what one thinks signifies little; but 
 the manner in which one thinks reveals 
 one's affinities. Individuality does not lie 
 in our thought, but the way we characterize 
 thought. There are no new messages for 
 the world; there are only new messengers 
 from old principalities; new eyes that re- 
 read the old parchments. The manner in 
 which one feels a thought, that consecrates 
 him. 
 
 Paganism is attitude. 
 
 The psychical root of paganism is feel- 
 ing. Its test-tubes are pleasure and pain. 
 Its metaphysic is the eternality of the pres- 
 ent moment. Life is its own excuse and 
 pleasurable feelings — omental and physical — 
 are the anthemings of the glad gods on the 
 keyboard of nerves. Religion is fatigue. 
 To be "saved" for another world is to be 
 "lost" to this — ^the adventurer grown tired, 
 Siegfried hesitating before the rampart of 
 flame, Prometheus recanting, Man the Vik- 
 ing on the seas of sound, color and menac- 
 ing wave turned parish beadle. 
 
 And the "ethic" of the pagan impulse? 
 It is this: Squander yourself on the winds, 
 but be not blindly blown along with them. 
 
THE ETERNAL RENAISSANCE 153 
 
 Be the heart of the blast. Absolute sub- 
 mission to life is absolute mastery of life. 
 
 The emptiness of that word "progress"! 
 All hfe, the evolutionary process, tends to 
 dissonance, complexity. Differentiation ia 
 itself is estrangement from the common 
 World-Root; and as we go to seek the 
 Great Harmony it recedes before us. Circle 
 emerges from circle, and the last circle is 
 only the last illusive horizon. Each single 
 thing holds the sought secret, but we spurn 
 it. Science sees only in it a link in a chain. 
 Each minute is only part of an hour, the 
 disciples of method and system will tell us, 
 when in reality the hour is the essence, the 
 very heart of the minute. Pluck the minute 
 in its entirety, and the secret of the hour — 
 of all hoiirs — is yours. 
 
 The pagan spirit can never die. It is it- 
 self the instinct to live, it is the eternal 
 knocker at the door of the House of Cir- 
 cumstance, the Voice that calls in all cen- 
 turies to the pursuit of Beauty. It is the 
 spirit of revolt in art and thought. It is the 
 cloven flame that consumes age after age 
 the citadels of authority and their comman- 
 ders sheathed cap-a-pie in their ethical 
 petticoats. 
 
SILENCE 
 
 THEY who are won to silence have 
 passed the gaudy gates of Vanity 
 Fair — ^the gates that open outward 
 to the Purple Hills of Dreams. They have 
 famished 'mid plenty and roistered with 
 sick heart, and the noises they brewed and 
 the beautiful dreams they spilled on the 
 dusty highways and the soft lies their eyes 
 have told are no more. For them the reign 
 of the Real has begun. In silence they 
 hear — and their souls are the noiseless foot- 
 falls of the Eternal. 
 
 Caked in those whispering south winds, 
 burnished by those eternal suns that warm 
 without scorching, swaddled in those white 
 wrappings, gulfed thus in the immur- 
 murous — they are the supreme critics of 
 life. Before the tribunals of taciturnity the 
 strident is rapped to order, and the gilded 
 gabbler of the portico is sentenced to wear 
 the motley and caper with fishwomen. 
 
 yyith shout and laughter we garnish the 
 (154) 
 
SILENCE 155 
 
 days; but Sorrow comes with finger lifted 
 to her puckered lip, and we are silent; or 
 if we cry aloud it is where no one can hear. 
 
 Each action contains the germ of a des- 
 tiny; each action is a distinct individual in 
 embryo; and if we had a finer spiritual 
 organ we should find in these great silences 
 of the soul destinies and embryos and veiled 
 Fates in myriad procession. The best of 
 us, as we are, immured in our limitations, 
 deafened by bodily hearing and blinded by 
 bodily eyesight, can hear them, sometimes, 
 scratching their messages on the walls of 
 om- being as they pass by. 
 
 I see a huge crowd pacing the boulevards 
 at midnight. Fanfare, pell-mell, cackle — 
 eyes that rove from point to point in anxious 
 quest of Pleasure; fruitless pacings to and 
 fro, inutile phrases whispered to gold-sodden, 
 paimchy disciples of "sociabiUty" by papier 
 mache women — each soul in reality yawn- 
 ing at each other. I see also a narrow 
 room on the top floor of a house shrouded 
 in silence. A youth holds Shelley's poems 
 in his hand. "Swiftly walk over the western 
 wave, Spirit of Kight" — ^he has begun that 
 exquisite invocation written by the Boy of 
 Spezia Bay. With half-closed eyes he 
 
156 SILENCE 
 
 treads with Shelley the western wave and 
 is afloat in the Spirit of Night, and he has 
 heard more than all the mottled mobs of 
 the boulevard, for he listens, while the mobs 
 can only hear. 
 
 To be mewed in marmoreal silences, to 
 fall with sated visage and cloyed tongue 
 and a self, hewn to a mUhon diversities, 
 upon this downy bed canopied and cur- 
 tained with gauzes and textures of strange 
 patterns; to hear the uproar, tragic in its 
 inutility, inutile in its tragedy, dwindle to 
 a world-buzz, then cease entirely — that is 
 to feel the rapture of calm, the ecstasy of 
 conscious surcease, a passionate peace. 
 
 There are an awe, a wonder, a sheen of 
 the ethereal in all fine silences. We here 
 breathe upon the adamantine — and the 
 adamantine is not; we give ourselves to 
 float upon a far-winding stream tinct with 
 ancient sunlights — a bubble drifting upon 
 a greater bubble, blown from pipes greater 
 than Pan's. On these stilled waters we 
 may be immersed without fear of drowning. 
 It is immersion without submersion, reality 
 without illusion — and we are hidden, yet 
 seen of all. 
 
 Hamlet's silences are the most impressive 
 
SILENCE 157 
 
 parts of the play; in his soliloquies we rec- 
 ognize the soul of the troubled Dane. The 
 Fates that lure him to the catastrophe 
 evolve their deviltries in silence. The secret 
 of the tragedy is spoken by no mouth; it 
 is a Presence unseen, unheard, but not un- 
 felt by that inner nerve that responds to 
 the Idea in which the muddied action of 
 the play is cradled. 
 
 And with what subtle, silent motions do 
 the Fates weave their filaments of adamant 
 around the trusting Othello — damned by 
 a fine virtue, xmdone by his own nature, 
 discovered, routed and bludgeoned to earth 
 by an ingrained optimistic faith in the good- 
 ness of mankind! lago is the fiend par 
 exceUe^ce of dramatic literature. He is 
 the quiet, grim architect of a most magni- 
 ficent palace of pain. His sense of touch 
 is exquisite. His building is a destroying. 
 And yet in nothing that he says, in nothing 
 that is heard, do we discover the depths 
 of his extremest infamy. It is left to si- 
 lence — to the imagination. It is Othello 
 who goes out in utter spiritual darkness; 
 and though lago is gyved, he stands tri- 
 vmiphant — and silent. In that silence of 
 lago in the bedroom of Desdemona the 
 
158 SILENCE 
 
 Eumenides have paused to survey their 
 work. lago was only their instrument. 
 , In those deep recesses of our being where 
 the ashes of our dreams he inurned in their 
 bronzed, time-worn receptacles; in those 
 caverns of the imdersoul, where our pro- 
 jected but abrogated selves murmur against 
 the decree that has sentenced them to those 
 barren wombs; in aU that past that is not, 
 yet is everlastingly, we recognize something 
 of the inarticulate, something that may not 
 be uttered even by the heart to the brain. 
 Ecstasy is mute. Shadows curl around 
 "I Will," and acts are the undoing of 
 dreams. "I Will Not" is bred of the higher 
 view. If it is cold at the poles of ultimate 
 negation, it is so only in spiritual prospect. 
 When one has fought his way there he has 
 cast his laprobes of illusions behind. The 
 sense of opposites is lost. There is neither 
 cold nor heat on those silent promontories; 
 there is placidity, the m*gency to rest. The 
 calm of a half -humorous disdain bathes us. 
 The soul is then a rendezvous for shadows; 
 the mind the Rialto of the dead. Postpone- 
 ments are postponed — and it is on the con- 
 dition of perpetual silence that Eternity 
 has made her assignation with Time. 
 
SILENCE 159 
 
 Thought laps us all about and we are 
 hemmed in by dreams. Speech and act 
 at best are but a stammering. Our confes- 
 sions to each other are mere stutter. The 
 finest revelations are made to ourselves. 
 Who has never paid a pilgrimage unto him- 
 self has never touched the Kabala. The 
 Mecca of motion is Oblivion. 
 
 Elate youth darts upon Life and with 
 rough hand and strident voice seizes his 
 tinselled trophies. He takes the universe 
 for his 'scutcheon, and by the divine right 
 of vascular palpitation he claims the circling 
 worlds. Blatant youth! where dost thou 
 run — or, rather, where runnest thou not? 
 In mid-life his cries have withered to a 
 whine and our Don Quixote has dwindled 
 to a vinegary critic. His elder age is a 
 discreet silence. 
 
 Old age should hold its tongue. Like the 
 walls of old houses, it has secrets to tell. 
 
 There is no soul born to flesh-woof that 
 has not on a day heard the drumbeait of 
 retreat sounded in its ears. We have fought 
 and wept, replied and defied, but in the 
 Unconscious our genius is chiselling the 
 Hdur^that fateful hour that shall put 
 clamps upon our affirmations and sew up 
 
160 SILENCE 
 
 our lips with the golden threads of taci- 
 turnity. Our scale of life-values has been 
 wrong. The battles we have fought have 
 only served to cloud our brains with the 
 dust of combat. We see we have been 
 trying to measure Eternity by minutes; 
 thenceforth we shall eternize minutes. We 
 smile — and take the veil. 
 
 In silence there is universality. Lonely 
 souls seek the solitudes of nature because 
 it is there the dreams of spiritual liberty 
 come true. In these fastnesses are creatures 
 disburdened of trammels. Winged and 
 crawling things empty their souls of im- 
 pulse as they list. In the wilderness desire 
 and attainment are one. The spirit soaked 
 in these silences participates in the wild 
 riot of life — ^riot without uproar; revels 
 that are mum; endless muffled motion. The 
 soul passes into all living things. The 
 silent observer becomes the spirit of the 
 place, and his meditations are spun into the 
 crannies of shadows and the crevices of im- 
 apprehended worlds. 
 
 Here man regains his lost kingdom and 
 sits proudly throned on Self. He feels 
 himself at the very core of Being, flush 
 with every conceivable future. He is 
 
SILENCE 161 
 
 welded into a One. What has been is 
 jettisoned; what is to come is unvisored. 
 It is Nirvana without annihilation. The 
 squirrel that darts up the tree carries a 
 human soul with it, and the bird that flies 
 overhead is chanting a finer song than it 
 knows, for it warbles for two. The forest 
 dreamer rides on the crest of a fiery cloud; 
 and the slime on the tarn— that is he, too. 
 The individual is blotted out, and the mys- 
 tery of the One-in-Many — ^thenceforth it 
 is no mystery. 
 
 This is the only liberty man can ever 
 attain, and the path lies through silence. 
 Each must go his own way. There is a 
 supreme release for each, but two cannot 
 find it together. The unthwarted will, 
 equihbration, quiescence, the suffusion of 
 dateless days — would these be yours? Then 
 rivet yourself to the silences, put your ear 
 to the dark shell of Night, and fly the 
 hubbub. 
 
 Man is a phenomenal fragment, a tem- 
 poral circumstance, a momentary coagula- 
 tion of debris on the infinite stream of 
 Being. His personaMty is dispersed in 
 death and meditation. In the vast upper 
 silences the infantile I of daily blab fades 
 
162 SILENCE 
 
 like the shadow of a dream. The whole 
 universe of things lies stretched before us 
 like islets in an ocean. The radiating 
 streams of Time flow back to their sources 
 and drag with them the bubble ages. 
 
 Like a Greek naked and sweaty from the 
 games who plunges into a cooling stream, 
 so we, sweaty and distraught, fresh from 
 the Satanic saturnalias of action, may 
 plunge into the lustral calms, the healing 
 silences — and forget. 
 
POSTERITY: THE NEW 
 SUPERSTITION 
 
 THE latest decoy set up by the inde- 
 structible god of illusions is Poster- 
 ity. Man has been invited to live for 
 various motives. Once it was for the glory 
 of God. Comte proposed as a motive the 
 glory of man. Now we are invited to live 
 for the glory of Posterity. Nietzsche called 
 Posterity the Overman; sociahsts call it 
 "the rising generation." 
 
 No one has thought of the glory of liv- 
 ing for the sake of living, of eating, fight- 
 ing, reproducing merely because they give 
 pleasure. Always thei*e are devil-gods that 
 call for sacrifices ; always there is the bogey- 
 word that demands obeisance and tribute 
 of all our actions. Nothing must be allowed 
 to exist for itself. Each thing must exist 
 for the sake of some other thing. The per- 
 fume in a rose is only legitimate if there 
 is a human nostril somewhere to be intox- 
 icated; and the perfume of our acts and 
 (163) 
 
164 POSTERITY: THE NEW SUPERSTITION 
 
 thoughts is only a "moral" or a "right" 
 perfume if it gives pleasure to the nostrils 
 of God, Church, the Common Good, or 
 Posterity. 
 
 Man has not yet become a good animal. 
 He suffers from ideals, as he once suffered 
 from superstitions. An ideal is a super- 
 stition in court clothes. It makes very little 
 difference whether you believe that an east- 
 wind blowing down the chimney on a moon- 
 light night will bring you good luck or that 
 an act that gives you pleasure in the doing 
 is "right" if it benefits Posterity and wrong 
 if it doesn't. 
 
 The East worships its ancestors ; the West 
 worships Posterity. The East lies prone 
 on its belly offering tributes to ghosts; 
 the West bows its head in adoration to the 
 ghosts not yet born. When an Oriental 
 worships the soul of a bit of wood we call 
 him superstitious; when the Westerner 
 worships certain letters of his alphabet 
 which spell "God" or "Church" or "Moral- 
 ity" or "Posterity" we call it the Ideal. 
 
 And a smile steals over the brow of Puck 
 and Momus reels in glee. 
 
 Ancestor- worship is the old superstition; 
 posterity-worship the new superstition. The 
 
POSTERITY: THE NEW SUPERSTITION 165 
 
 old bottles are filled with the new wine, 
 but the old labels have never been taken off. 
 We still march under mottoes and tramp 
 to Ultima Thule to the raging tom-toms 
 beaten by priests and idealists. Still we 
 signal a host of imaginary beings with the 
 gaudily colored pocket-handkerchiefs of 
 our latest trumpery abstraction. 
 
 All these words that man bows before 
 one after another in his flight across the 
 face of Time are born of the idea of Re- 
 sponsibility, that somewhere there is Some- 
 thing that is taking cognizance of all his 
 acts and will bring him to account for them. 
 Sometimes it is the bearded, concrete 
 Jehovah of the Jews ; now it happens to be 
 a beardless, visageless, vaguely shadowed 
 Posterity. The idea of responsibility is as 
 universal as all other illusions — the imi- 
 versality of an idea or instinct merely proves 
 its universality. From the feeling of re- 
 sponsibility sprung the most immoral and 
 strength-destroying doctrine that we know 
 of — ^the doctrine of the Vicarious Atone- 
 ment. 
 
 Responsibility to God was the first great 
 necessary lie — for if the race is to be pre- 
 served (no one has ever found a rational 
 
166 POSTERITY: THE NEW SUPERSTITION 
 
 reason why it should be) lies are more nec- 
 essary to its growth and sustenance than 
 truths. Responsibility to God — or gods — 
 was the first ideal, the birth-boards that 
 clamped and twisted the brain and soul of 
 healthy self-centred beings and changed 
 their centres of gravity from the enkerneUed 
 Self to an all-seeing, all-recording Nonentity 
 that had a name but no local habitation. 
 
 Man is born in his own incalculable ante- 
 rior images, but he came to believe in his 
 all-ignorance that he had been created in 
 the image of another, a giant jail- warden 
 who allowed him to rove the earth at his 
 pleasure under a heavy bail-bond to keep 
 the peace. The idea of an eternal responsi- 
 bility to this abstraction germinated the 
 first seeds of man's moral weakness, para- 
 lyzed his activities, sickened him with 
 scrupulosities and filled him with the con- 
 sciousness that healthy activity was sin. 
 War began within him, a war between his 
 superb irresponsible instincts and the idea 
 of a vicarious responsibility, and out of 
 that shambles issued the whining Christian, 
 the lord of tatters called the Idealist, and 
 that mincing prig, Conscience. 
 
 The idea of responsibility to, God began 
 
POSTERITY: THE NEW SUPERSTITION 167 
 
 to wane with the dawning suspicion that 
 man was not a celestial but a sociological 
 animal. Conceiving himself to be this new 
 thing, he now invented a new kind of re- 
 sponsibility called "social responsibility." 
 The old mask was being repainted. The 
 phrase "social well-being" was hoisted into 
 the Ark of the Covenant of Lies. An act 
 was now good or bad as it affected the com- 
 munity. Man loved his neighbor for the 
 responsibihties he could shoulder on him; 
 the corner ballot box was the Kabala; the 
 community had power to bless or cm^se the 
 individual. God had become a town-hall 
 orator; the Recording-Angel had become 
 a court-reporter. The era of the State-Lie 
 had begun. 
 
 The transition is easy from the cant about 
 living for the sake of "doing good in the 
 community" and "benefiting the whole" 
 to the ideal of hving for the sake of poster- 
 ity. The old obscure doctrine of blood sacri- 
 fice reappears in this new posterity super- 
 stition, slightly attenuated and shorn of 
 its immediate and more obvious savage 
 characteristics ; but the old trail of responsi- 
 bihty and life-guilt is there. 
 
 We are told to live for the sake of pos- 
 
168 POSTERITY: THE NEW SUPERSTITION 
 
 terity, we must breed for posterity, eat for 
 the sake of posterity, be moral for the sake 
 of posterity, dress hygienically for the sake 
 of posterity, and even die when necessary 
 for the sake of posterity. We legislate for 
 posterity, rear a child with an eye to pos- 
 terity, tinker with the social system for the 
 sake of posterity, tamper with individual 
 hberty for the sake of posterity, construct 
 Utopias for the sake of posterity, vote the 
 socialist ticket for the sake of posterity. 
 
 It is the fetich, the Moloch, the Golden 
 Calf of our civilization. We who are liv- 
 ing, palpitating in the flesh and blood pres- 
 ent have no rights; the ego is not sufficient 
 unto itself; we are only straws to show 
 which way the sociological and evolutionary 
 winds are blowing; we are only the bricks 
 and mortar that shall go to build the mar- 
 vellous, fantastic, phantasmal edifice to 
 house that coming Holy Family — Posterity. 
 Our deeds have no value unless they feed 
 the bulging belly of incalculable non-exist- 
 ent tomorrows. We are only as scraps of 
 bone and meat tossed to that fugitive glut- 
 ton, the Future, by pasty-souled Idealists 
 and the spineless altruists who poison life 
 with theu- doctrines of responsibility and 
 
POSTERITY: THE NEW SUPERSTITION 169 
 
 hoax the feminine with their metaphysical 
 Cardiff Giants. 
 
 We are to be systematized, badged, classed, 
 grooved, wired, stuffed. Our instincts, our 
 very marrow, are to be inoculated by the 
 virus of altruism and our faces beatified 
 with the forerunning rays of the great 
 Posterity Light. How we are to glow with 
 the shine of "right Uving" — all because the 
 altruistic quacks with their obsessions of 
 Succubse and Incubse have dreamed a new 
 dream which they call Posterity! 
 
 Weak, impotent, helpless before the im- 
 movable present, man salves his sore spot 
 with hopes for the future. Not being able 
 to regulate his life today, he promises him- 
 self a virtuous, vicarious tomorrow. Not 
 daring to set up his Ego as God and its end- 
 less pleasure as sufficient motive for all his 
 acts, he sets up an Alter Ego and calls it 
 Posterity, as he once called it God, then 
 the State or the Community. 
 
 With ecstatic eye and lolling, anticipatorj'^ 
 tongue he awaits for his happiness in Pos- 
 terity — something no one has ever seen, 
 something no one can define, something 
 that could not possibly exist. 
 
AN EVAPORATING UNIVERSE 
 
 THERE are those who will look up 
 at that great round clock without 
 a circumference called the Universe 
 with its two hands — Time and Space — of 
 infinite length and pretend to tell you the 
 exact time! 
 
 The older we grow the less we know. As 
 the years roll over us we become more dog- 
 matic about the few things we do know, and 
 it is this dogmatism that is mistaken for 
 wisdom, just as a deep, matured voice is 
 often mistaken for brains. 
 
 The fruit of all knowledge is not know- 
 ing, but doubt. If we wiU one single ac- 
 tion long enough its contrary will be born. 
 A truth will not bear prolonged study. 
 First it begins to look I'idiculous; then it 
 disappears into something else. Knowledge 
 seekers are wave-chasers. 
 
 The believer is allowed his little illusion. 
 He is a comic shape. He is set in limits, 
 mortised in his mania, specialized, forever 
 (170) 
 
^iV EVAPORATING UNIVERSE 171 
 
 mummified. God and the Devil both smile 
 at him indulgently. But the unbeliever — 
 the Seeker prowling across the Eternities, 
 the Wanderer who rejects and passes on — 
 is the tragic shape at which neither God 
 nor the Devil laughs. They know that if 
 in some unimaginably remote being-shape 
 this unbeliever should happen on the thing 
 he seeks both Valhalla and Nibelheim will 
 crumble. The little comic shape prinked 
 out in his cock-surety goes straight to 
 heaven when he dies — and so ends. But the 
 other lives in hell here and hereafter. And 
 that's why the Twin Powers never smile. 
 We know that the character of our 
 dreams when asleep is wholly determined 
 by certain subjective conditions — that they 
 are frightful, beautiful, obscure as certain 
 organs of the body are affected. In the same 
 way the whole external universe — ^with its 
 endless moving panorama of trees, stars, 
 animals, our own bodies — is determined 
 for us by subjective conditions. The uni- 
 formity of nature is nothing but uniformity 
 of brain-structure. The external world is 
 a dream — ^more coherent, it is true, than the 
 brain-pictures of the night — but the coher- 
 ence is a matter of degree only, for the laws 
 
172 AN EVAPORATING UNIVERSE 
 
 of coherence are rooted in the mind. 
 
 Could we stand at the core of things we 
 should see no difference in kind between 
 that vision of height, solidity and sublimity 
 which when standing at its base at high 
 noon we call Mont Blanc and the vision of 
 Mont Blanc in sleep.*' We transfer to the 
 senses what properly belongs in conscious- 
 ness. The perfume of a flower is not in the 
 olfactory nerves, but in the brain. Per- 
 fume is a form of consciousness; so are light 
 and heat. The proof of this is in the fact 
 that ansesthetics abolish for us the whole 
 universe, while stimulants that fire the brain 
 heighten our consciousness of it. Dreams 
 are nothing but blood stimulation — brain- 
 expansion — and the universe of motion and 
 matter exists under the scalp. 
 
 Thus to adjust ourselves properly to the 
 amazing fugacity of things we must re- 
 main sceptics. The intellect at least should 
 be sceptic; emotion should build itself 
 some great object of faith — even if it be 
 but faith in the grandeur of the sceptical 
 intellect. 
 
 Opinion is Pride and Prejudice scrawling 
 their justification on the walls of the brain. 
 
 If you stare at a truth too long it will 
 
^JV EVAPORATING UNIVERSE 173 
 
 become an error. We should blink continu- 
 ally. Truth is not a thing, but an aspect. 
 You must catch it off guard by continually 
 playing 'possimi. 
 
 Life evaporates when we attempt to seize 
 it. What is the tangible if not a state of 
 consciousness? 
 
 The survival of an idea — rehgious, philo- 
 sophical, ethical — one that survives age 
 after age through infinite changes and vicis- 
 situdes, may prove that idea to be a uni- 
 versal truth or may prove that the soil in 
 which that idea has grown is incapable of 
 improvement. Damp cellars will always 
 produce fungus — and damp cellars are im- 
 mortal things. What is fit survives; what- 
 ever serves is true; but fitness is antithetical 
 to universality, and that which serves can 
 never be the Absolute. So the longest 
 surviving truth has nothing in common 
 with the Truth. 
 
 The sublime and the ridiculous adhere 
 in the same object. They are mental states, 
 points of view — ^not different things. The 
 action that at twenty we thought sublime, 
 at sixty, with deeper insight, has become 
 ridiculous. An inhabitant of the moon 
 could see nothing subhme in its aspect. To 
 
174 AN EVAPORATING UNIVERSE 
 
 sacrifice our life for another is ridiculous 
 from nature's point of view, for nature 
 knows nothing of individuals. "What differ- 
 ence does anything make?" asks the cynic, 
 thus turning all things into objects of ridi- 
 cule. Still, the question is subhme! 
 
 The desire to do good is the soiu-ce of 
 all the evil in the world. In attempting 
 to better our condition we add to the com- 
 plexity of things. Like a man caught in 
 a soft bog, the more frantic his efforts to 
 extricate himself the deeper he sinks. In 
 the eye of nature a good impulse is merely 
 so much force which, coming into contact 
 with another force, may generate a third 
 force that will cause more pain than the 
 original "good" force sought to suppress. 
 
 A pessimist is a man who sees life as it 
 is. To present any aspect of life as it is in 
 itseK through the medium of art — ^that is, 
 with the highest degree of impersonality 
 that a mind stiU in the flesh can attain — 
 is necessarily to have one's self stamped 
 a pessimist. Hence, the disinterested seeker 
 after truth is always the pessimist, the 
 alarmist, the iconoclast. The optimist is 
 never concerned with truth, or things in 
 themselves — he is only concerned with the 
 
^JV EVAPORATING UNIVERSE 175 
 
 status quo and its preservation. He is a 
 chubby soul with visions, or a lean soul 
 who is a victim of monomania. An ele- 
 mental truth is always a painful one be- 
 cause the bases of the world are a hunger 
 of some sort. 
 
 Ibsen's stark souls who stand shivering 
 in the rush of inexorable forces, Nietzsche's 
 pitiless psychology, gnawing with ravenous 
 tooth at the rotten timbers of civihzation; 
 Gorky's perfet incisions, De Maupassant's 
 fine ironic gesture — all these strike terror 
 to parochial souls. But to tell the truth 
 about things is not necessarily to be a pes- 
 simist. Every increment of power is an in- 
 crement of life. To know the elemental 
 truths and to stand calmly by the world's 
 stink-pots, to watch with cahn, unimpas- 
 sioned eye and record with calm, imimpas- 
 sioned pen or brush the workings of our 
 futile passions react upon our souls and 
 tonic us for battle. The man who looks 
 under the lids of the world gains in mental 
 ruggedness what he loses in color. 
 
 For a man to see life as it really is he 
 should spend a year in a madhouse, a year 
 in a hospital, a year in a jail, and a year in a 
 tomb. In the madhouse he will come to 
 
176 AN EVAPORATING UNIVERSE 
 
 understand practical life, in a hospital he 
 will see the soul of man as it slowly turns 
 and writhes on its bed of needles, in the jail 
 he will come to comprehend the meaning of 
 universal necessity and catch upon his ear 
 the wail from the depths of things, in the 
 tomb he will meet Change the Comedian. 
 
 Then he will be prepared to think. 
 
 Mankind are hke flies that have settled 
 on a giant Gymnast. His novel feats we 
 call the miraculous; his habitual contor- 
 tions we call Law. 
 
 And then so glibly men speak of growth ! 
 Endless growth is an eternal and simul- 
 taneous advance of each desire toward every 
 point of a circle that widens to infinity. 
 That is the irony of all movement. 
 
 Universal unhappiness is caused by the 
 inability of infinite appetite to subsist on a 
 finite number of crumbs. 
 
 The life-happiness (or unhappiness) of 
 the individual is a purely arithmetical prob- 
 lem. Each one of us could work the problem 
 out to his entire satisfaction — that is, if he 
 knew the kind of multiplication table the 
 Unknowable is using. 
 
 There is a cold so intense that we come 
 to believe it is warmth. There is a terror 
 
AN EVAPORATING UNIVERSE 177 
 
 that numbs. Sharp pain, by causing us to 
 swoon, abolishes pain. There are truths 
 so great that if presented to us suddenly 
 we instantly recognize them as delusions. 
 There are such tragic possibilities in our 
 each act that if pondered over long enough 
 they will evoke a smile. Thus do all things 
 pass into one other; opposites turn out to 
 be aspects, and aspects the relations of x 
 to X. 
 
 Philosophical scepticism — Pyrrhonism — 
 is the tendency of the mind to ubiquity. The 
 finest minds are attracted to every point in 
 the Circle — they are the arch-susceptibles. 
 The greatest mind sees aU things from all 
 standpoints in one single act of intuition — 
 it feels a propulsion from its every center 
 to every conceivable other center. 
 
 Why should I go ghost hunting, for who 
 has explained man? Where is there a 
 haunted house that can compare with this 
 universe before me? 
 
 Where are there rappings and creakings 
 such as I hear around me here in this 
 strange place of mind and matter — and 
 earth and sea? Where are there more won- 
 derful apparitions than these billions and 
 billions of ghosts of flesh and fpr^e called 
 
178 AN EVAPORATING UNIVERSE 
 
 men and women that have risen from this 
 eternal, immeasurable Desire in things? 
 What sudden translation and disappearance 
 more unaccountable or monstrous than this 
 lapse into death? This is the Haunted 
 House of Life in which we move around, 
 and each single being is but a wraith above 
 his own grave. 
 
 Sanity is the completest view of the com- 
 pletest mind, an instantaneous vision of 
 each thing from all possible sides. Com- 
 plete sanity makes for the negative attitude 
 toward life, just as the concentration of a 
 mind on a single idea to the exclusion of 
 all other ideas tends to narrowness, mono- 
 mania, insanity. All positive men are pas- 
 sionate men because they are not developed 
 mentally. The Indian yogis, Pyrrho, Mon- 
 taigne were the sanest of men. Beware 
 of knowing only one thing and knowing it 
 well. In its limits the rabbit is master of 
 the thing it knows best. 
 
 We speak about "the great crises of his- 
 tory," which are purely imaginary crises. 
 Time works her really great changes si- 
 lently, is her own critic, and records nothing 
 of importance. Sleep is crisis, waking is 
 crisis; each turns on its own pivot, and the 
 
^JV EVAPORATING UNIVERSE 179 
 
 great things are no matter, and history is 
 the chronicle of sleepwalkers. Only Illusion 
 is eternal. 
 
 Victory is always disastrous. It is the 
 moment of disillusion. 
 
 Nature is not a series of Laws. Nature 
 is infinite readjustment. An eternal Law 
 is only an adjustment that has lasted a 
 long while. 
 
 Irony is an acid pity, the despair of the 
 brain, an iron mask that impotent tender- 
 ness sometimes puts on to seem the bravo. 
 
 Looking forward at twenty we say, "We 
 are Destiny." Looking backward at sixty 
 we say, "We have been Destiny's work." 
 That illusion of twenty was the most im- 
 portant part of her work. Destiny we may 
 never know; but we may know her masks. 
 As force she masks as Free-WiU, as Evil 
 she masks as Goodness. She is Necessity 
 dominoed as Pride. 
 
 To look on the trees and the sunhght a 
 little while, to read a sage or two, to medi- 
 tate and wonder at that which is forever 
 vanishing, to sleep upon her breasts a night 
 or two — ^then quietly to slip away, still 
 young, still swollen with unbirthed desires: 
 that is to taste life, that is to know all. 
 
THE TRAIL OF THE WORM 
 
 THE human ego is an organ with a 
 hundred pipes and one stop — ^Death. 
 Life is Death's dream. Our nature 
 is rooted in the Unconscious, and our life 
 is but a little waking from that eternal 
 swoon. The brain is never anything but 
 the organ of dreams, and our body with 
 its endless anatomical subdivisions is 
 nothing but a huge tentacle of a Shadow. 
 
 Do men come back from the tomb? Aye, 
 for the Unconscious is a tomb and all of 
 us who breathe move and dream now — 
 all who say they are — are merely reappear- 
 ances, uneasy shapes moving across the 
 blurred vision of the Great Syncopated 
 God. 
 
 The irony of life I the irony of death! 
 For only the dead are satisfied, and they 
 would not be satisfied if they were conscious 
 of their satisfaction. In that midnight of 
 silence they dream not, and never comes 
 to them the bitter ecstasies. 
 (180) 
 
THE TRAIL OF THE WORM 181 
 
 The irony of birth I the birth of a child 
 is the triumph of death. At the moment a 
 new being comes into the world a grave 
 somewhere stands empty. 
 
 The day is a bitter almond; the night a 
 vision of falsehoods — and the bitter truths 
 of open-eyed sentiency and the fantastic 
 jigging in the brain we call our dreams are 
 alike fictions, solved and drowned all at 
 last in that grotesque reality — Death. 
 
 Indeed, has not Hegel said that to live is 
 a kind of blasphemy? 
 
 The one fact is Pain; all other facts are 
 factors. The great central soul of things 
 temporal is an unquenchable Pain, and the 
 great central soul of things extra-temporal 
 is a supreme indifference. Pain creates; in- 
 difference absorbs. And when the Supreme 
 Indifference has absorbed aU of Pain sorrow 
 will be no more, and when sorrow is gone 
 the imiverse will disappear. 
 
 The worst ill that can befall me is more 
 easily realized by the imagination and is 
 known by the intellect to be more probable 
 than the greatest good fortvme. The worst 
 is always probable ; the best is often not 
 even possible. So in mentioning some great 
 potential misfortune we always preface it 
 
182 THE TRAIL OF THE WORM 
 
 with the fear-begotten prayer, "which God 
 forbid," But the smile of increduUty is 
 never very far from our dreams of felicity. 
 The Eternal has packed its mighty secrets 
 in our pains, and if our cosmic memories 
 were as profound as our cosmic experiences 
 we would never hope. Our roots are be- 
 neath us, but the flower — ^the mind — ^is born 
 anew in each life and dies with that life. 
 The elder dreams revisit us at certain im- 
 expected moments in our lives, and it is 
 then, in a single moment, we nail truth, and 
 see the imimaginable woe in things, the vmi- 
 versality of anguish, the giant, writhing 
 spectres of the things we have been. Pluck 
 from that moment its gift of wisdom, or 
 forever live the dupe of the Impossible I 
 
 For what is this lapse between two eter- 
 nities we call life? Life is a myth and a 
 mirage. The past never existed. We have 
 clothed a few mean facts in a tawdry rem- 
 iniscent fancy. Our memories of childhood 
 are not the same as the childhood we re- 
 member. Our youth is a simken, lost At- 
 lantis; but when we lived that youth it was 
 commonplace — oh, so commonplace I The 
 future is a mirage woven of dreams. What- 
 might-have-been is the mother of fantasy. 
 
THE TRAIL OF THE WORM 183 
 
 Or, life is a series of endlessly recurring 
 dreams. That dream which recurs oftenest 
 we style mathematical truth ; the dream that 
 comes but once in a thousand years we call 
 a miracle. 
 
 What have we of light? The more light 
 there is in the world the blacker grows the 
 encircling gloom. Increase of light does 
 not mean decrease of darkness. You cannot 
 clip anything from the Infinite. If knowlr 
 edge is infinite the recesses from which it 
 is quarried are infinite. The stalactylic 
 thought-formations grow more and more 
 brilliant as we move farther and farther 
 into the caves of consciousness ; but it is be- 
 cause the darkness is profounder, not be- 
 cause the crystals are brighter. 
 
 And the hp- wisdom of science! The "uni- 
 formity of Nature" is merely the uniformity 
 of a belief. A thing observed by all peo- 
 ples, at all times, under all circumstances 
 is still rooted in credence, and not in cer- 
 tainty, and possesses no greater claim to be 
 the truth than one thing observed by one 
 man, at a single moment, imder a single set 
 of circvmistances. Truth — if Truth there 
 be — does not lie in multiplicity, but in 
 vividness of insight. That the sun will rise 
 
184 THE TRAIL OF THE WORM 
 
 and set tomorrow is not so certain in my 
 mind as that the process of its rising and 
 setting is inane, inutile. What I know of a 
 process is of less importance to me than 
 what I see in that process. 
 
 We know nothing of Law. We hear its 
 reverberations as it thunders through the 
 soul or catch its shadow on our retina as 
 it weaves the dawn or evanesces in the mys- 
 tery of death; but the thing itself cannot 
 be laid hold of. Experience is hearsay, 
 seeming. It is the same with thought. As 
 in the physical world no two bodies can 
 ever touch, so in the soul world no being 
 ever touches his thought. Between him 
 and his highest thought there is a chasm 
 which even his imagination cannot bridge. 
 It is girdled by a sacred fire that holds him 
 at bay. Into its centre man can never 
 penetrate. We but lie in its shadow. And 
 man himself is but one of the infinite num- 
 ber of shadows cast by the syncopated 
 breathing of the Shadow-Maker, the myth- 
 weaver, who reigns excarnate in Eternity, 
 who is everlastingly and who everlastingly Is. 
 
 Stability eludes the net of thought. We 
 seek stability in change, and when it comes 
 as Death we flee from it in terror. 
 
THE TRAIL OF THE WORM 185 
 
 Time baffles like a dream. Time is but 
 the slime left by the slugworm of Circum- 
 stance as it crawls lazily over the white 
 eternities. 
 
 Our acts ridicule our thoughts. The last 
 sin to die will be Pride because it is the 
 first and greatest virtue. Everything that 
 is born with an ego has pride; those who 
 affirm life do it through pride; those who 
 seek death do it through a greater pride; 
 those who battle do it through pride; those 
 who renounce in sackcloth and ashes are 
 ill of great pride. All is pride and a 
 vanity and a mockery. And the first virtue 
 was the first sin. Distinctions are circum- 
 stantial. Behind all masks of time and 
 place there is the grimace of Mephisto. 
 
 Say aloud but once, "I am happy!" — 
 whisper it to the air, whisper it into the 
 night, murmur it to thy pillow, and already 
 the navvies have razed the edifice, the fiends 
 are at their sculduggery. Happiness and 
 consciousness are at war. The lids always 
 lie closed over the eyes of Happiness; her 
 lashes are fine needles; you cannot rape her 
 sight with impunity. 
 
 Ideas — Plato's verities — are at last as 
 dust. Ideas grow senile and slumber and 
 
186 THE TRAIL OF THE WORM 
 
 die and lie in their graves for long ages and 
 come again in the garb of youth and 
 slaughter and slay and liberate; and this 
 death and resurrection go on throughout 
 all time. In Time there is nothing new; 
 and Eternity is neither new nor old. 
 
 Who shall sleep and dream not? In what 
 a place are the Ideas housed! What a slum's 
 lodging-house is the brain of man! What 
 strange, ragged, unshorn thoughts take up 
 their home there in the night, and slink 
 away in the morn, maybe never to return; 
 what loathsome-visaged impulses take up 
 their bed and board there! And sometimes 
 there come wan, pale wayfarers who seem 
 to bear about them the griefs of ageless days 
 and who flit away as they came — like ghosts 
 in the dawnlight. 
 
 Ideas reflect only the temporal order — 
 that grim and grimy rent in Eternity. 
 
 For we are the ligatures of a Relation, 
 When dream and deed are one then self- 
 consciousness will disappear. When emo- 
 tion, intellect and act are knit into such a 
 unity that the joints and seams have dis- 
 appeared, then comes the Man- God — then 
 will the Ideal be made real and the Real 
 be the Ideal. 
 
THE TRAIL OF THE WORM 187 
 
 Vain dream! It is the war of wills that 
 breeds limitation, and so long as there 
 is limitation there is Pain, and pain — ^the 
 severance of dream from deed — ^brings us 
 back to self -consciousness. 
 
 The waters are lifted to the moon, but 
 will never reach the moon — so our dreams 
 tend to deeds, but they ever remain dreams. 
 
COSMIC MARIONETTES 
 
 A LL the great novelists are fatalists. 
 
 /% Admission or denial on their part 
 ■^ -^ is beside the question. The man 
 who believes in free will is a fatalist. He 
 is temperamentally what he is. Fate is 
 mental squint; it is the angle of vision, a 
 viewpoint, physical compulsion. 
 
 Balzac called himself the "Secretary of 
 Society," and his books are but an inven- 
 tory of its forces. These forces he incar- 
 nated and called human beings. He thought 
 the human soul could be identified with 
 electricity, and conferred on it about as 
 much free will as he would have accorded 
 any other kind of battery. From his Jovian 
 heights he surveyed the movements of these 
 galvanized figures; recorded their attrac- 
 tions and repulsions ; pulled them apart and 
 showed us their insides ; and made you feel 
 when he had finished his task that his brain 
 was the House of Life, and we the wonder 
 children of his creation. His men and 
 (188) 
 
COSMIC MARIONETTES 189 
 
 women drift hither and thither on the 
 soundless sea of Being, while the viewless 
 gods of the deep are the masters of the 
 currents. 
 
 Thackeray is always taking you aside 
 and explaining the way he does the trick. 
 He brings each of his characters into hfe 
 with a drag on him — ^the drag of having 
 to be himself. All of Thackeray's creations 
 carry this air of compulsion with them. 
 They are hand-me-down human beings, 
 and wear the look of long ill-usage. In 
 the nature of things Beatrix Esmond must 
 become the Baroness Bernstein. She seems 
 to expect some such destiny, and accepts 
 it with delicious sang-froid. Foker is — ^just 
 Foker; he coudn't possibly be anybody else, 
 and Dobbin we know has been Dobbin 
 from all eternity. Thackeray's belief in 
 an overruhng Destiny was so profoimd 
 that his gentle soul, half -frightened at his 
 conclusions, was always casting around for 
 ways and means to let the old Gorgon 
 doAvn easily. 
 
 Turgenev's characters are gripped in a 
 vise. They go through life Eke somnam- 
 bulists. Bazaroff is an arsenal of tenden- 
 cies. Liza is a mediaeval nun that by some 
 
190 COSMIC MARIONETTES 
 
 curious freak has been revamped for nine- 
 teenth-century consumption. Her soul, 
 shocked by the secular and buffeted by the 
 trivial, sought again the cloistral glooms 
 of the nunnery. 
 
 Hardy's and Meredith's characters are 
 of a piece. The searing breath of life blows 
 with equal force in their pages. Spiritual 
 resistance is fate working from the other 
 side. Chloe was blasted from within; Tess 
 was blasted from without. 
 
 Zola's fatalism is more pronovmced than 
 any of these masters of fiction. This is 
 because of the stress he lays on heredity 
 and environment. His mission was to 
 assort our souls and pigeonhole them. He 
 was, indeed, the Claude Bernard of imag- 
 inative literature. Blood, nerve, cell — ^there 
 you are. Pick out good forebears, for you 
 are the wraith of a dead man. You are 
 integrated matter in the process of redis- 
 tribution. The history of your atoms is 
 the history of your soul. You "elect" to 
 lead a drab life; but your resolution counts 
 for nothing; some day it shall melt like 
 wax in the fires of sudden desire. The 
 future is an ogre; it is the past that slays. 
 
 Zola's miscroscopic eye, his piercing 
 
COSMIC MARIONETTES 191 
 
 glances into the subsoil of life, are nowhere 
 better exemplified than in his masterwork, 
 "L'Assommoir." It is a fine study of the 
 subtle laws that damn. The connection be- 
 tween an injured foot and a drunkard's 
 death — where is it? That's the art of it. 
 Moral logic there is none; but there is an 
 intellectual logic. The links in the chain of 
 causation — the connection between Cou- 
 peau's physical and mental fall— were 
 forged by a cunning Fate. 
 
 Our lives are steeped in these subtleties. 
 Each moment is big with ante-natal pur- 
 pose. Our characters are pieced together 
 by trifles that escape observation, and the 
 way of our degradation is fixed. 
 
 Focus the mind for one moment on this 
 world of the great novelists. What a piece- 
 meal pageant! What a carnival of marion- 
 ettes! What cosmic mummery! Tentative 
 men and women; alleged lives; souls barely 
 basted to a body; suggestions; thin pipings; 
 the imevolved elemental; stumps and ends 
 and shreds and butts of beings. 
 
 Here in this bogus earth-world, in this 
 slimy Malebolge, everything is planned; 
 nothing is completed. These children, 
 tethered to the Iron Ring of Necessity, eat 
 
192 COSMIC MARIONETTES 
 
 the cake of hope; the brown bread of the 
 tangible is thrown into the street. We are 
 starving today, but it will always rain 
 manna tomorrow! 
 
 Are these creations aught but somnam- 
 bulists who walk in the brains of their crea- 
 tors? — and are we of flesh and blood aught 
 but somnabulists who walk in the dream- 
 cells bf a hidden god? These master-dream- 
 ers, these wraith-workers — will they wake 
 at the cock-crow of Eternity? Nay, they 
 are bubble-blowers as we are bubble-blown; 
 they are not voices, they are voiced; and 
 Charles Bovary was as "real" as Napoleon 
 Bonaparte. 
 
 These men who sketch life are used. They 
 submit their souls to the spirit, and their 
 characters move in the grooves of inexor- 
 able law. No man knows what he does; 
 no great novelist ever knew what he was 
 writing. His fingers clutch the pen, but 
 the writing is mere copying; the original 
 is in the nature of things. His brain is 
 nothing more than a phonogi-aph; he is a 
 notary of the spirit, a transcriber of the 
 Law, a scrivener of the gods, an assorter 
 of junk. 
 
 Destiny works through the intellect, and 
 
COSMIC MARIONETTES 193 
 
 the seers of life are subalterns. They sail 
 under sealed orders. They live with the 
 Great Camerado, but not on equal terms. 
 He is hidden — behind a pebble, it may be. 
 You may kick it, but He smiles — for He is 
 the kick. 
 
 The author of "Madame Bovary" was 
 Madame Bovary. Flaubert was her secre- 
 tary. 
 
THE DRAMA OF DAYS 
 
 A DAY! From the first opalescent 
 slur on the horizon to the last fire- 
 flecked cloud that hangs on the 
 last sunray, shot up from the abysm into 
 which the sun has fallen, on through the 
 span of ebon we caU the night till the 
 moment when that opalescent slur again 
 slinks over the horizon — what things are 
 spun for us in that time! 
 
 Time is a coxcomb, and the days are his 
 many vestments. Days are, again, the 
 calendar of Chance, the dial of our sorrows 
 and revolts and joys. 
 
 In youth each day is a golden scabbard 
 from which we drag a ghttering sword to 
 conquer some imaginative domain. In age 
 each day is but another fold in a winding- 
 sheet that mufiles a gray, out-running imi- 
 verse. 
 
 In that subtle ebb of the spirit which 
 
 we call memory there stand out gauntly, like 
 
 shoals that rise from the ocean after its 
 
 flood, days that were memorable in their 
 
 (194) 
 
THE DRAMA OF DAYS 195 
 
 events, days with the shine and shimmer of 
 some triumph on their brows or with the 
 bitter record of some reprisal of Chance 
 branded on their cheeks. Then it is that 
 imagination, in that look backwards, per- 
 sonifies the days, giving to arbitrary divis- 
 ions of time this or that quality, breathing 
 bitter breaths into their thence corporate 
 selves, conferring on that little congerie of 
 minutes and seconds the qualities of malig- 
 nity or buoyancy, placing in their hands a 
 wand or a knout — ^giving thus to pleasure 
 and pain a place on the calendar. 
 
 The spume of imagination covers the past, 
 and we carve in that passion of retrospec- 
 tive self-conservation these little salient 
 time-pegs whereon to hang the rags and 
 tatters of memory. Wonder-children that 
 we are, the eternal revenants of the indis- 
 soluble Spectre, it is thus we breathe the 
 breath of life into our old selves and mul- 
 tiply our ghosts and replenish our empty 
 mental wardrobes. 
 
 On such a day — now that the years have 
 pelted us we see it — ^Destiny came to us 
 spying from its lurk-hole in a trifle. We 
 have come to know that little things decide ; 
 big things are only decisive. 
 
196 THE DRAMA OF DAYS 
 
 Each second has a sliding panel over its 
 surface; behind it, in its lair, sprawls the 
 Sphinx, scrawling in the shme of circum- 
 stance our future days. 
 
 That day we laughed and we were 
 doomed on that very day; this day we 
 groaned and we were elected to joy. We 
 know not what we dd — we only know what 
 we have done. 
 
 Time is a moth that settles and nibbles 
 where the dust has gathered. There are 
 monstrous gaps in our days. We are lucky 
 if ten days in each year are saved to our 
 memory. That grave-like taciturnity be- 
 tween remembered days! To memory and 
 identity it is just as though one had not 
 been. And sometimes from the depths of 
 the Unconscious, from that unfathomable 
 sea whereto we are finally ushered, 
 there will start up, like the re-evocation of 
 lost islands, .a day long forgotten, with still 
 its shroud about it and the unerased tints 
 and hues of death still on its body. The 
 time-sea tosses up many a strange pebble 
 on these naked coasts of abandoned days. 
 
 It is hard to segregate a day in memory. 
 The emotions and dreams — knowing 
 nothing of the mechanical inventions that 
 
THE DRAMA OF DAYS 197 
 
 man has fabricated to keep himself posted 
 on the progress he is making toward the 
 tomb— are fluid, blend and link themselves 
 by finer bonds than calendared tallies. 
 
 AU our past-remembered life makes a 
 series of lakes in the mind, or, rather, pools 
 wherein, with head reverted, we see only 
 mirrored epochs in our wayfaring. The day 
 we lay on the grass, and looking up at the 
 heavens, suddenly guessed, by a quick 
 amalgamation in consciousness, the illusive- 
 ness of all creation, the impossibility of ever 
 finding the relation of the finite Me to the 
 infinite It — this does not seem to have 
 happened on a day — really, it was only a 
 minute in that day — but, related to our 
 future spiritual existence, it happened in 
 a cycle set apart for us by our destiny. The 
 rough clutch of Memory dragging that im- 
 memorial minute higher and higher above 
 the seas of mnemonic oblivion as the years 
 go by has inflated and transfigured that 
 minute in that May or June day to gigan- 
 tesque proportions. 
 
 For the ego marks oif its history on sun- 
 dials and moon-dials that begin at the Greek 
 Kalends. 
 
 And yet we hold to dates and days. They 
 
198 THE DRAMA OF DAYS 
 
 are the timepieces of intelligence, and we 
 use them till the dust of death clogs the 
 works. It is the ineradicable instinct for 
 the tangible that sends us back over our 
 tracks seeking the specific day for this or 
 that adventure or revelation. Our feet are 
 moored to the concrete however much our 
 heads bob in the timeless ether. 
 
ABSORPTION: A UNIVERSAL 
 LAW 
 
 ALL life is absorption — a sucking up, 
 a blending of forces. Absorption 
 ^ and dissipation are the laws that 
 govern all the processes of the organic and 
 the inorganic worlds. I say absorption and 
 dissipation, but, properly there is nothing 
 but absorption. Dissipation is but absorp- 
 tion seen from the other side. 
 
 The sun dissipates heat and light, but 
 the earth consumes both. Moving bodies 
 pulse their vibrations into the atmosphere, 
 and the atmosphere is lost in ether. The 
 seed drops to the earth and is lost in the 
 soil; the oak comes forth and in time passes 
 into decay, and is soil again, and seed again, 
 and oak again. In the gaseous flames of 
 the nebular orb a universe of force is ab- 
 sorbed, and from the flaming retort of fire 
 it is belched forth into infinite space 
 in forms new and strange, to be absorbed 
 again by withered worlds and passion-spent 
 spheres. 
 
 (199) 
 
200 ABSORPTION: A UNIVERSAL LAW 
 
 A mighty and consuming thirst pervades 
 things. Naked forces skirt the topmost 
 heavens and the nether depths of the seas, 
 seeking to be clothed, hooded, wrapped, 
 shod, absorbed in matter. Who are the 
 dead but those who have absorbed life, who 
 in coffined silence await new unions in 
 mystic spheres? Who are the quick but 
 those who have come to this plane to absorb 
 planetary life and its myriad pulsing 
 streams of sentiency? Indeed, are the hve 
 aught but the peelings and tailings of an- 
 cestral existences — pale, wan relics of the 
 dead, vibrant wraiths, trailing after them 
 the forces and tendencies of their ancient 
 lives? 
 
 The living breathe and move and have 
 their being because they have absorbed 
 their dead past selves, because they have 
 passed through imimaginable modes of life 
 and sucked into' their souls the breath of 
 the past. They stand before us mere 
 echoes, sounding-boards on which a note or 
 two of the Great Diapason is registered. 
 As a sponge sucks up water, so do we suck 
 up life. Our eyes suck in the colors and 
 forms of the material world; our ears suck 
 in sounds, om* palates suck in tastes, our 
 
ABSORPTION: A UNIVERSAL LAW 201 
 
 nostrils suck in odors. These sense-ducts 
 flow to the brain, carrying their flotsam and 
 jetsam of impressions, and in that won- 
 drous and ever-mysterious alembic the raw 
 materials which the senses furnish are ab- 
 sorbed, minced, blended, and from the magic 
 cells flow those complex ideas that give us 
 "The Eve of Saint Agnes," or "Mona 
 Lisa." 
 
 What is that vast dream that underhes 
 the somnambulism of the ages? What is 
 that Idea which coheres through incoherency 
 and stands forever calm through cosmic 
 clash? What is it for which the seer has 
 pined, the saint has prayed, and the de- 
 votee has wrought? Absorption — ^reabsorp- 
 tion in the One. Names differ; tendencies 
 do not change. And whether we be Bud- 
 dhists and accept the idea of the non-per- 
 sonal Divine Intelligence that is the sub- 
 stratum of the phenomenal world, where 
 phantoms squeak and gibber and call it 
 life ; or we believe in the One of Pythagoras 
 and Plato, or we accept the Christian meta- 
 phor of the Father; or we yearn for the 
 Pure Being, or Non-Being, of Hegehanism, 
 or crave for immersion in the Oversoul of 
 Transcendentalism — ^whether it be any one 
 
202 ABSORPTION: A UNIVERSAL LAW 
 
 of these, it is reabsorption we are conscious- 
 ly or unconsciously seeking. It is this in- 
 tuition that is the basic concept of aU reli- 
 gions and religio-philosophic systems. 
 
 "Absorption in God" is the primary in- 
 stinct of the religious soul and the last hope 
 of man. The temporal order is built of ex- 
 pediency; its construction has been piece- 
 meal; its forms are transitory. It is a mere 
 stop-gap between Eternity and Eternity. 
 It is a buffer state. Built in time, grounded 
 in the shifting sands of Change and Cir- 
 cumstance, it is destined to die with the 
 planet. 
 
 It is the widest generalizations we crave. 
 Science does not crawl from point to point; 
 it circles from generahzation to generaliza- 
 tion. Each ending is but a beginning, and 
 each outermost an interior. The horizon 
 broadens with our ascension. Line merges 
 into line, circle into circle, cycle into cycle, 
 and still the press is ever forward. We 
 believe we are absorbing, while in reality 
 we are being absorbed. We believe we 
 are discovering, while in truth we are being 
 discovered. With each new obstacle sur- 
 mounted, the under, hidden private Self 
 circles into broader life. We pierce the 
 
ABSORPTION: A UNIVERSAL LAW 203 
 
 chrysalis of our last limitation and believe 
 that in sloughing it off we are discarding 
 it. But the Great Thaumaturgist never 
 discards anything. The new is the old re- 
 vamped. The skin we slough off drops 
 silently into the Unconscious, where it is 
 remoulded nearer to the heart's more 
 urgent desire. It emerges transfigured as 
 our present self. The mind, like the heart, 
 has its systole and diastole. We escape into 
 higher forms of life by daily dying unto 
 ourselves. 
 
 In society — ^that vast and complex net- 
 work of organized, objectified Will-^this 
 all-powerful law of absorption is seen at 
 work pursuing as relentlessly and as in- 
 exorably its obscure end as in the purely 
 physical or psychic world. The individual 
 is cancelled in the family, the family ab- 
 sorbed in the tribe, the tribe obhterated in 
 the nation. 
 
 The social unit cannot escape the fate 
 that awaits it. As surely as the needle 
 turns toward the pole does part overlap 
 part and the segmental become indistin- 
 guishable in the whole. This law that passes 
 up through the circles of social change is 
 today apparent in the commercial world. 
 
204 ABSORPTION: A UNIVERSAL LAW 
 
 We hear much in denunciation of the trusts, 
 those giant combinations of capital that 
 absorb the small dealer and dangerous com- 
 petitor, not by main force, but by a pro- 
 cess as legitimate and as inexorable as the 
 drop of rain is absorbed into the sea or the 
 dew in the atmosphere. The trust is our 
 widest commercial generalization — ^the in- 
 stinct of the sublime manifesting itself ia 
 the world of give-and-take. As the great 
 nations of the earth assimilate the smaller 
 ones, and they, in turn, assimilate the tribes 
 within their borders, so the great purveyors 
 of the necessaries of hfe are drawing into 
 their hands the means of production and 
 the machinery of distribution of the whole 
 commercial world. 
 
 The logical question now that forces it- 
 self on the mind is : Why not let the nation 
 instead of the individual do this? Why not 
 make the nation a trust and the people the 
 trustees? Why not absorb these giant cor- 
 porations into the fabric of the State, and 
 put the stamp of approval on a law that 
 win have its way, willy-nilly? This is the 
 dream and the jargon of socialism. It is 
 founded on the incontrovertible proposition 
 that all things tend toward a common 
 
ABSORPTION: A UNIVERSAL LAW 205 
 
 centre, no matter how great may appear 
 to be their surface diversity and differen- 
 tiation from a common standard. It is this 
 that makes socialism right. It is founded 
 on the law of absorption, my euphemism 
 for murder. 
 
 No one thing can long remain wholly in- 
 dependent. A human being may rise to 
 indefinite heights on the rungs of his en- 
 vironment; but in these altitudes the air is 
 difficult to breathe. Gravitation tugs. Man 
 channels his own descents. A remorseless 
 Nemesis pursues those who rise above the 
 common level. The ligature which binds 
 man to man in works and days cannot be 
 dissolved with impunity. There are mo- 
 ments in life when the individual may, like 
 Ibsen's Master Builder, achieve for a mo- 
 ment absolute Selfhood, but his fate is 
 written on the scroll of natural law, and 
 from his dizzy height he will be dashed to 
 atoms. The ideal of absolute individualism 
 aims, consciously or unconsciously, at 
 achieving this quixotic independence. At the 
 basis of individualism hes the competitive 
 system. Man competes against man, and 
 achieves power and place — or poverty and 
 death. 
 
206 ABSORPTION: A UNIVERSAL LAW 
 
 And thus are all things woven of one 
 thread. Who shall trace the eurvetings of 
 Law? Circle on circle towers above our 
 heads in rhythmic windings. Whorl upon 
 whorl rises above us, and its mystic spirality 
 is lost in the Unapparent. 
 
 Our souls are engulfed for an aeon or 
 two but to reappear on the curved surface 
 of consciousness. Like vigorous swimmers 
 who plunge beneath the watery avalanche 
 only to rise sound and whole on the placid 
 surface beyond the breakers, so do we sport 
 in the eternal forces. As an eagle circles 
 round and round over unknown seas, so 
 we rise higher and higher on the crest of 
 the laws that have ferried us hither and that 
 shall ferry us beyond. Microcosm melts 
 into macrocosm; the less flows molten into 
 the greater ; the trivial dissolves in the signi- 
 ficant, and through all the Will is pro- 
 mulgated. . 
 
 In spouting mud and elemental mist — ^the 
 Dream of Absorption was there; in pale- 
 ozoic slime — the Dreani was there; in the 
 boundless underworld of instinct and blind 
 procreation — the Dream was there. Belt 
 and buckle and chain have burst and fallen 
 into the past; belt and buckle and chain 
 
ABSORPTION: A UNIVERSAL LAW 207 
 
 are forged — and the Dream persists. When 
 the earth shall be hooded in flame and its 
 poles capped and shod in vapor — the Dream 
 will be there. 
 
 Plunging from birth to rebirth, the soul 
 of Man gnaws and files at his gyves. Limi- 
 tation he recognizes as his one enemy. 
 Through storm and bloom and the press 
 of circumstance he seeks to clasp the Ultra- 
 Generalization. Systems and codes he 
 sloughs off like snake-skin. Time and space 
 wilt in the breath of his Desire. He labors 
 to force the Northwest Passage to the Polar 
 Seas of Quiescence. He ponders on his 
 latest, newest route to the Indies of Pas- 
 sivity. 
 
 Absorption is God's method — God, who 
 is the last, the final Equilibration, the Spent 
 Dynamic, the Eternal Static. 
 
ACATALEPSY 
 
 THE doctrine of the Acataleptics was 
 the doctrine of the incomprehensibil- 
 ity of things. Pyrrho is the supreme 
 acataleptic among the ancients. Anatole 
 France is the supreme acataleptic among the 
 moderns. All opinion is heretical. To say "I 
 know" is to put the stamp of ignorance on 
 one's self. If catalepsy is a possession, 
 acatalepsy is the state of ultimate freedom. 
 It is a condition of transcendental ignor- 
 ance. The brain of the acataleptic is an Eye 
 that through an eternity of time focuses its 
 vision in an infinite number of directions. 
 The world is a whimsy. Nothing can be 
 proven, nothing can be disproven. 
 "Eureka!'* was uttered by a madman. 
 
 Acatalepsy is the ecstasy of indifference. 
 It is the Nirvana of knowledge. Pyrrho 
 lived in a world without longitude or lati- 
 tude. The "I think, therefore I am" of 
 Descartes would have been wi"itten, "I 
 think, therefore I only think I am" by 
 (208) 
 
ACATALEPSY 209 
 
 Pyrrho. At the touch of this Prospero of 
 negations the dogmas of the world crumble 
 to dust and the dear truths we have nuzzled 
 on our bosoms turn to fantastic mockeries. 
 
 Flux and reflux, eternal transition — 
 what do we know? BeHef of any kind is a 
 species of hypnosis. Certainty is the super- 
 stition of the senses. Time is an illusion. 
 Eternity is a word. Each thing is only a 
 mask for some other thing. Names are the 
 placards we put on incomprehensible ob- 
 jects. Nature winks at us slyly. There is 
 a Rabelaisian hilarity on the face of the 
 external universe, as if it would say, 
 "Presto! Behold me! Behold me not! Hold 
 tightly to your possessions, man; whatever 
 is is not. That is my supreme jest." 
 
 This monster of gullibility, man, believes 
 in what he sees and touches — ^that it is just 
 that thing, and nothing else! He arranges 
 his beliefs just as he arranges his clothes 
 in his wardrobe. His world is as definite 
 as a map for a townsite. His God could be 
 stowed away in a bandbox. 
 
 The eternal Sancho Panza on his ass of 
 Certitude! He munches his brown bread 
 and cheese in the Garden of Hesperus. He 
 picnjc§ m the empyrean. He shambles over 
 
210 ACATALEPSY 
 
 the stars. He is the vulgar Knower. He 
 moves in an incomprehensible Mystery. 
 But he never suspects. His universe is 
 solid and substantial. His brain is a yard- 
 stick. In the great hurricane of atoms he 
 cautiously raises a parasol called a creed. 
 "It is ten o'clock," "It is noon," he says. 
 How does he know? It is forever the Hour 
 of the Eternal. 
 
 The sceptic is a bankrupt who through 
 all eternity cannot rehabihtate himself. In 
 No-Man's-Land he is a Sultan. The nets 
 woven by the system-makers will never 
 strangle him in their folds. Through the 
 walls of all the granite superstitions, 
 whether they are scientific, political or reli- 
 gious, he passes like a ghost. He is the mys- 
 tic of realism. 
 
 If Shakespeare created a world, Mon- 
 taigne destroyed a sidereal system. Only 
 the absurd is true. The senses lie, the brain 
 lies, consciousness lies. How do we know 
 they lie? Because another lie says so. 
 
 The acataleptic glance melts the light 
 of the stars and puts out the sun. Acata- 
 lepsis! In the retorts of its brain it melts 
 cosmologies and gods. It puts its finger 
 on Death and says, "Not proven." It puts 
 
ACATALEPSY 211 
 
 its ear to the heart of Life thundering in 
 its Gargantuan hulk of matter and says, 
 "Thou art only a seeming." 
 
 Crescent and Cross, Scarabee and Dra- 
 gon fuse and evaporate in the mighty men- 
 struum of this alchemic ironist. One folly 
 is pitted against another folly, one mon- 
 strous illusion rises to confront another 
 monstrous illusion. The iron gates of God 
 are papier mache. Plato's Eternal Ideas 
 are plaster paris. Brahma is painted fog. 
 The celestial seraglios of Mohammedanism 
 are sacrosanct pigsties. The Christian 
 "Mansion in the Skies" is in cinders. The 
 Kingdom of God is a fading mirage that 
 even the dying are no longer able to con- 
 jure up. The Jehovah of the Jews is a Big 
 Wind. The First Cause of theology is a 
 spite-wall. The Ego of the Romantics is a 
 huge dummy swollen taut with flatulent 
 German metaphysics. Anarchism, Socialism, 
 Protestantism, Agnosticism, Manicheism, 
 Buddhism are the tabulation, consolidation 
 and fuhnination of mental and tempera- 
 mental disorders. They are the passing in- 
 carnations of the Incomprehensible, the 
 scoffing incantations of the immortal Maya; 
 the radiant revelations of the Immanent 
 Yawn. 
 
212 ACATALEPSY 
 
 In the omnipotent orgy of ideas the acata- 
 leptic preserves an indulgent passivity. 
 While the battle rages he polishes a spy- 
 glass. He belongs to no army. He is not 
 interested in the outcome. Only the spec- 
 tacle enchants. His brain is ascetic; his eye 
 is gluttonous. Over the earth go the 
 armies — over the earth and into the earth. 
 He is at Troy, at Waterloo, at Gettysburg, 
 at Verdun — ^there is always a Bloody Angle 
 in the combat of concepts where the fray 
 is the most picturesque. It is all the horse- 
 play of ants on a star. Aristotle and Plato, 
 Spinoza and Hobbes, Leibnitz and Scho- 
 penhauer, Pascal and Nietzsche — ^these are 
 merely the gigantic oscillations of one pen- 
 dulum. 
 
 Doctrines flow from the agy ill. Qf„ per- 
 sonality. To be, to think, to know was the 
 primordial heresy. 
 
 This little man, this little man, who comes 
 a-whining into the world to solve the riddle 
 of Being I This self -constituted aide-de-camp 
 to the Infinite I This sculpted piece of proto- 
 plasm who with arms akimbo buzzes his 
 prejudices into the ears of the Sphinx! 
 This choreboy of a blind Will who believes 
 he is moulding stars 1 
 
ACATALEPSY 213 
 
 Mahomet went to heaven on a white mule, 
 another rode into Jerusalem on an ass, and 
 still another who had Aladdinized the world 
 rode to death on Rosinante. All symbols! 
 
 Ah! If the sceptics dared laugh to their 
 fill! The stars would founder in space at 
 the uproar and atoms and potencies still 
 unborn would age in their nothingness. 
 
 The petrified smile on the face of the 
 ironic Nihilist is a smile that is a weapon. 
 All the bobbing hobby-horses on the merry- 
 go-round of religion and philosophy come 
 to a standstill and their riders sit motion- 
 less when the Unbeliever is seen standing 
 at the door. He is the grand dissociator 
 of ideas, the surgeon of illusions, a snow 
 that blankets aU growing things, 
 
 Yom- dreams? — he skins them alive. Your 
 God? — ^he splits it into an infinite number 
 of particles and hands you back a hatful 
 of waste. He is a magician. He can 
 transform matter into force and force into 
 matter, and both into the incomprehensible. 
 He makes a witches' broth out of all the 
 materials of human thought and brews from 
 them — nothing, except it be his petrified 
 smile or the glint of malice in his eye. 
 
 The idol-makers fabricate through the 
 
214 ACATALEPSY 
 
 aeons. There are plaster-cast images and 
 images in bronze and images built of ebon 
 and adamant. But an end is made to aU 
 of them with the bare bodkin of incredulity. 
 
 "What do I know?" asks Montaigne. 
 
 "Just that," answers Pyrrho from his 
 tomb. 
 
CODA 
 
 THE Jews gave us Jehovah, a fan- 
 tastic old man of thunders and 
 scourges, as testy as King Lear and 
 as childish. The Mohammedans gave us 
 Allah, who punishes with fire and rewards 
 with flesh; an ironic, hot-blooded, Fal- 
 staffian God who acts as a "bouncer" in a 
 celestial seraglio. Christianity gave us the 
 symbol of Calvary with its pale God nailed 
 between two thieves — ^which conveys this 
 truth: Law and order come first; mendi- 
 cant gods and thieves, take notice! 
 
 Olympus was an aristocracy. Sublime, 
 cruel, Satanic, merciful — ^these supermen 
 and superwomen of the Greek imagination 
 were based in life itself. They were the 
 personifications of real aspirations and pas- 
 sions. They were bubbles blown from pipes 
 of clay by beings who loved the world, the 
 flesh and the beautiful. And so no matter 
 how far these bubbles went into the empy- 
 rean they still pictured the earth, its forti- 
 (215) 
 
216 CODA 
 
 fying hells and its redemptive pains and the 
 sex-aura — worn not as a shroud as in the 
 Christ-myth, but as a garment of glory. 
 Olympus was a place of quality, the Ver- 
 sailles of the imagination; not a Vatican of 
 diseases or a mausoleum of canonized 
 corpses or apotheosized renunciants of ques- 
 tionable manhood. 
 
 Olympus was beautiful. There was there 
 no stench of skulls, no reek from the unaired 
 beds of Allah's houris, no insipid, simpering 
 asexual angels whose whole eternity was 
 spent in telling God the time. There were 
 air and light on Olympus. A cosmology 
 was here raised to the dignity of a sport. 
 Whichever way you turned you faced the 
 Beautiful. Whatever door you tapped 
 opened on the Infinite. Every step on 
 those heights was like a magical levitation. 
 
 Mysterious, suggestive, equivocal, in pas- 
 sing throu^ the great Greek myth the 
 imagination throws out its flaming colored 
 shafts from its zenith to its nadir. Every- 
 thing is fecund on those heights. Death 
 is the one inconceivable thing. Homer and 
 Aeschylus and Plato and Sophocles have 
 been there before you. No matter. In that 
 world every poet is a pioneer. The eyes 
 
CODA 217 
 
 of those gods never say the same thing 
 twice because their brains never focus twice 
 in the same direction. 
 
 Those giant mosaics of a spent race ! How 
 many millions collaborated in the evolu- 
 tion of those dreams? What mind put the 
 first tint of that stupendous vision on the 
 dead palette of Reahty? Who was that 
 Rembrandt with the drop of transfiguring 
 color in his brain? Who was that Phidias 
 who chiselled with his brittle dream the 
 brow of Apollo? Who was that Michael 
 Angelo who charted in imaginative ecstasy 
 that ether-capped Olympus that was to 
 eject from its mysterious ovum gods and 
 goddesses as long-lived as the star which 
 fostered them? 
 
 Against that monstrous background of 
 the Unknown that man in all ages gashes 
 with the hghtning of his thought Olympus 
 stands out unalterable in time, a master- 
 work of alto-relievo whose sculpted figures 
 are posed for eternity. The tears of Christ, 
 flowing for two thousand years from the 
 unknown heavens whereto he ascended, 
 have not washed away that breedy world 
 of antique thought. 
 
 Christ lives. Aphrodite reigns I 
 
218 CODA 
 
 The Gods of Greece were not an 
 ambulance corps, Olympus was not a dis- 
 pensary. To be carried into the presence 
 of Zeus on a stretcher was no aid to im- 
 mortality. Paganism did not seek to amend 
 nature or cleanse God. It personified the 
 real. Facing hfe with every sense agape, 
 it uttered a lyrical amen. Bounding from 
 the heart of the ageless Mother, it uttered 
 a hosannah to the Sun. 
 
 Paganism was dynamic. It took the part 
 of the eternally pulsating atom against the 
 frosty glamour of Nirvana. It struck to- 
 gether the cymbals of victory over the grave. 
 It would have held Dyonisiac revels' on 
 Golgotha, and on him who was pinioned to 
 the wooden Caucasus on that mount it 
 would have bound eglantine and over the 
 crown of thorns it would have strewn rose- 
 leaves. It threw dice with Destiny, know- 
 ing that Destiny is a blackleg. To lose or 
 win — there is no difference. To have lived 
 and to have played the game — ^that is the 
 glory. Power and Beauty, Ecstasy and 
 Frenzy, a riant diabolism, the sense of a 
 weltering joy — that was the Pagan meta- 
 physic. 
 
 Man is a dike between Time and Eter- 
 
CODA 219 
 
 nity, and he gleams with the waters of both. 
 He is the corybantic apparition. His life 
 is a delirium. He is a erackbrained God. 
 His seventy years are an orgy of feehng 
 and thought. This shatterpated upstart 
 makes a superb gesture even before the 
 gates of hell. The life of the dullest of 
 beings is stiU epical. Genius is a dementia. 
 The winged hounds of Desire have sunk 
 their fangs into our souls and we have 
 rabies. 
 
 Thus do I see the soul of Greece, and the 
 gods that pontificated on Olympus are the 
 multi-incarnation of that soul. 
 
 Front this lusty dream of man with the 
 plush dreams of the theological dandies and 
 the nanny-goats of morality of today. The 
 lightnings that are locked in my veins, the 
 passions pent and tombed in my nethers 
 are sins! 
 
 Power lies abed and sucks the nipple of 
 a milkless breast. Beauty petitions at the 
 gate of Mammon. The envenomed Christ- 
 blood still flows from those immedicable 
 woimds that know no healing. And we 
 who once beheld Aphrodite shake the sea 
 from her tresses and once were chum to 
 satyr and faun and in another time dogged 
 
220 CODA 
 
 the footsteps of Diana, we are rammed into 
 a manger and cuffed into a charnelhouse 
 and puddle in the sweat of fear. 
 
 From that transstellar Olympus we are 
 come to a carpenter's table. From the 
 parley of the gods we are come to the 
 bickerings of Gargantuan eunuchs. We 
 who once wore the laurel wreath now wear 
 the mildewed helmet of salvation. The 
 beaker once filled with ambrosia is now a 
 monstrance from which one may quaff an 
 apocryphal Holy Ghost. Pegasus is be- 
 come a Palm Sunday ass. Jason is a mis- 
 sionary who decoys the heathen, and his 
 golden fl.eece comes from the fleeced. The 
 Bacchic amphora graven with mystical 
 festive rites has become a consecrated bowl 
 wherein Ignorance dips its dirty finger-tips. 
 
 Christianity has amputated Life at the 
 navel. It has watered the milk in the breast 
 of Aphrodite. It has thrown the cowl of 
 asceticism over Apollo. It has put a crown 
 of thorns on Pan. 
 
 But the snows on Olympus are melting, 
 and in the veins of Time are the seeds of 
 the old gods, who are incarnated again and 
 again on the earth. Religions are passing 
 epidemics, but Paganism is as immortal as 
 
CODA m 
 
 matter, as indestructible as sex, as eternally 
 legitimate as sensation. 
 
 Out of the purple seas of the Coming 
 Time again rises the divine Aphrodite be- 
 fore my prophetic eyes, and at Her breast 
 she clasps Eros, who is the Christ reborn, 
 regenerated, paganized. 
 
 It is the Second Advent! 
 
 THE END.