Something About Eve

    Yet, Nero thought, playing idly with the emerald monocle which hung upon a green cord about his scrawny neck, this Queen would not be very likely ever to create in clay, or to find coming to her court, such another artist as Nero himself had been in the days of his Roman pre-eminence. No other person known to him had ever excelled in all the polite arts. For in dancing and in oratory, in wrestling (even with such dreadful adversaries as lions) and in music both vocal and instrumental,—alike as a charioteer and as a tragic actor,—but, above all, as a poet, and equally as a dramatic, a lyric and an epic poet,—Nero had been unanimously awarded the first prize in every contest. He did not care to appear boastful: yet, by all canons of criticism, one had to consider the list of his overwhelming triumphs, in Rome, in Naples, in Antium, in Alba,—at the Parthian games, at the Isthmian games, at the Olympic games,—and, in fine, in each contest which Nero had ever entered anywhere in all the kingdoms of which he was Emperor. No other artist had a record to compare with that: no other of the world’s great geniuses had ever been confessedly supreme in every polite form of aesthetic endeavor.

    Of course, as a student of history, Nero conceded that the elect artist was not to be placed, not permanently, by his ranking in the eyes of his contemporaries, who might often be swayed by such matters, really extraneous to enduring art, as the artist’s ingratiating manners and his personal beauty. As a man of the world, he even conceded the judges of the sacred games in awarding all the first prizes to Nero might furthermore have been influenced by the large sums of money which the Emperor always conferred upon his acclaiming judges after such occasions, as well as by the dexterity of the tortures which would have followed any decision less just.

    But the indisputable fact, the fact of superb importance, was that Nero had made of his life a poem which was wholly a unique masterpiece in the way of self-expression: he, above all other men, had served the one end of every poet’s art, by revealing the true nature of man’s being; for Nero had embodied, with loving carefulness, each trait which he found in himself, through some really memorable action,—rearing, as it were, among marshes and quicksands, and in yet other places which other persons feared to visit, those strange and passionately colored orchid growths which alone could express the highly complex nature of every man’s desires—

    “That jargon becomes somewhat senescent,” said Gerald. “Still, as a museum piece,—yes, even now, sophistication does display something of the quaint beauty of thorough obsoleteness. It has acquired the charm, and, as it were, the patina, of sedan chairs and of full-bottom wigs and of girdles of chastity and of suits of armor, and of all other things, once useful enough, which are nowadays endeared to every poet’s heart by the fact that they are forever outmoded. So let us grant it, O Caesar, in the days that are gone you were a devil of a fellow and a sad rip among the ladies—”

    “Why, but, for that matter—” Nero began.

    “I know. You broad-mindedly despised neither sex. You were in amour a Greek scholar. You were something of a surgeon also. I concede it, I blush, and I urge you to omit all embarrassingly personal details.”

    So Nero went on, saying that other emperors, with very much his chances, had lacked the genius necessary to develop these chances. There had, of course, been minor artists. Caligula, for example, among so much hackwork in the way of throat-cutting, had shown at least one jet of rather lovely inspiration when he attempted a criminal assault upon the moon; that was a really finely imagined bit of work. Then, also, Domitian and Commodus and Tiberius had displayed praiseworthy ambitions; quite neat little things had been done by Tiberius, in an amateur way, at Capri; Caracalla too had been so-so: but they had all tended to wallow unimaginatively in cut and dried executions; merely to chop off anybody’s head was not art, no matter how often you did it. Besides, work done upon a public scaffold inevitably coarsened one’s touch. And Heliogabalus, whatsoever the lad’s thin vein of undeniable talent in the way of lyric lechery, had lacked the stamina and gusto for any sustained masterpiece in Nero’s copious epic style.

    For Nero alone had been, in every branch of self-expression, the sincere, skilled artist, enriching his handiwork always with that continual slight novelty which art demands. He had builded his appropriate stage, in the Golden House—

    “A house entirely overlaid with gold,” said Gerald, reminiscently, “and adorned everywhere with jewels and mother of pearl, a house so rich and ample that it had three-storied porticos a mile long, and huge revolving banqueting halls, and ivory ceilings which perpetually scattered perfumes and red rose-petals—”