Something About Eve

    So had it come about that of all the emperors Rome had known, and of all the tyrants and despots in every land and era, who had followed the fine art of self-expression, and who had shown what human nature really is—in, as it were, the nude, when any man is released from time-serving and is made omnipotent,—of all these, there had remained just one whose name was remembered everywhere; just one whose fame was imperishable; just one who had become a never-dying myth: and that one was Nero. The legend of Nero was, in a world wherein every other man stayed more or less unwillingly an unfulfilled Nero, the supreme type of the literature of escape. The legend of Nero was a poem which men would not ever forget: it was a poem current in all languages: and it was a poem which, now, everybody could cordially admire and delight in, because time had removed the need of considering any current moral standards or one’s own physical safety in judging this poem, now that Nero was only a character in a book, like—as the Emperor said, with a quaint revealment of his retained interest in literature,—like Iago or Volpone or Tartuffe. For whether you called any particular book a history or a poem or a drama did not, of course, effect the impressiveness and vigor and complexity of the character drawing in it, nor the value of the author’s apt and edifying revelations as to any eternal verities of man’s being.

    “For, certainly,” said Nero, “my life presented, as no other artist has ever done, the gist of all human nature as that nature actually is, when freed of such inhibitions as constrain it in but too many baffled lives. My life was, thus, a connoisseur’s production, and a work of art which escaped even the grave risk of anti-climax. For there was not anything lacking in the ending of it, either. My fall and the circumstances of my death were so aesthetically right that, as an artist, I never in my life enjoyed anything I quite so much. Nothing could conceivably have been in better taste. For, overnight, as you may remember, I passed from the throne of the world, to hide in a tumbled-down out-house, under a ragged, very faded blue coverlet, and to perish thus by my own hand,—with an appropriate tragic verse upon my lips,—and without any friend remaining anywhere. No tragedy could have been more boldly proportioned, with all the Aristotelian unities so exactly preserved. And it was most gratifyingly led up to, too. For just as I was about to approach the denouement of my poem, the statues of my Lares tumbled down miraculously, the hind quarters of my favorite riding-horse were transformed into the hind quarters of an ape, and the doors of the mausoleum of Augustus having unclosed of their own accord, there issued from the tomb a divine voice which summoned me to destruction. These incidents, I repeat, were gratifying, for they showed that the exercise of my art had been viewed by Heaven appreciatively. Ah, yes, in all I was peculiarly favored.”

27. Regarding the Stars

    VILLON spat meditatively between his yellow front teeth. He fingered, in the while that he continued his reflections, his scarred and puckered lower lip. Then he confessed that he dissented from a great many of his predecessor’s remarks.

    “You were impressive. Your life was a competent job, boldly executed, and nobody denies its merits on their own melodramatic plane. Yet it lacked the indispensable touch of tenderness, without which no work of art is of the first class. No: it was I who was truly favored; and I made of my life a flawless poem without dragging in such gaudy accessories as thrones and burning cities and the wasting of a lovely, mother-naked virgin on a mere lion.”

    And this Francois Villon went on to speak of the great blessings which had been accorded him. He had been granted irresolution, and lewdness, and poverty, and cowardice, and a large weakness for drink, and an ingrained dishonesty, and a disease-wrecked body, and everything else which was needed to make him a knave as contemptible as any man could hope to be.

    “I was, in brief, gentlemen, as I have elsewhere remarked, a hog with a voice. And there was no voice like my voice.”

    For out of the mire that wallowing, lustful and cowardly beast had sung. Now he sang jeeringly, and made fun of the whole world with satire and mockery and invective, and with plain filth-flinging,—which was all quite good art, because it pleases people to see a man superior to his fate. Now he sang piercingly of the great platitude that death conquers and ruins everything: and to that sentiment nobody can ever turn a deaf ear, because it is the only sentiment with a universal personal application. But, above all, he sang of his regret for his past indiscretions, and of his yearning for spiritual cleanliness, and—“soaring,” as Villon now quoted, with admirable complacency, “to the very gates of Heaven upon the star-sown wings of faith and song,”