The Witch-Woman Trilogy

  For this never written Witch-Woman was to have been, in its Intended Edition, a dizain which would have followed through several centuries the adventuring of Ettarre and her immortal souteneur,—or, to be wholly accurate, the adventuring of ten lovers of Ettarre who, howsoever differing in other respects, yet one and all committed the grave error of touching, and of striving to possess, the mortal body which at that time Ettarre was wearing. Yet in the final outcome of affairs, through causes hereinafter indicated clearly enough, this intended dizain, now that I complete The Way of Ecben, has dwindled into a mere trilogy concerned with Ettarre and with three attitudes toward human life. ... I think there is, at this late date, no pressing need for me to name this trinity of attitudes about which I have written so much. Yet, for safety’s sake, I shall formally point out here that The Music from Behind the Moon is about Ettarre and the poet Madoc (who may or who may not have been called Horvendile after the losing of his wealth, his wife, and his wits also), and that The White Robe deals with Ettarre and a Bishop of Valneres who was notably gallant. In logic, therefore, when I found it was permitted me to complete but one more of the eight unfinished stories about Ettarre, I elected to write out The Way of Ecben, which, as you have seen, treats of Ettarre and of an Alfgar who was, above all, chivalrous.

  Moreover, this story of The Way of Ecben had the advantage of suggesting in itself, I thought, at least some of the reasons why there should now be no more books about Poictesme or Lichfield, or about any more of the inheritors of Dom Manuel’s life,—of which life all my books up to this date have been a biography. For the touch of time, about the effects of which you have but now been reading, with a king as protagonist, does not spare writers either. The uncharitable may even assert that The Way of Ecben quite proves this fact. In any case, now that the units of the long Biography of Dom Manuel’s life add up to a neat twenty which is convenient to the laws of Poictesme, and now that with a yet more coercive arithmetic the years of my own living add up to fifty, The Way of Ecben has appeared to its writer a thesis wholly fit to commemorate my graduation from, and my eternal leave-taking of, the younger generation, alike in life and in letters.

Chapter II. Which Takes Up an Unprofitable Subject

  I APPROACH thus unavoidably a theme which nobody can approach with any real profit. I mean, the younger generation. I mean that the conduct of the younger generation is a topic concerning which the sole possible verdict to be rendered from the more sedate side of forty was long ago fixed by adamantean usage.

  To such time-ripened judgment the activities of the younger generation have always, without any exception, been a sign of world-wide degeneracy ever since these activities provoked the Deluge, and brought about the decadence of Rome—aetas parentum tulit nos nequiores, you may find Horace lamenting at, quaintly enough, about the time of Christ’s birth,—and enraged Dante, and upset John Milton into reams of marmoreal blank verse, and, at a slightly later period, aggrieved the Old Woman who Lived in a Shoe.

  From the beginning, it would seem, all really matured opinion has been at one on the point that the younger generation was speeding posthaste to the dogs. Since the commencement of recorded literature, in any event, full proof has not been lacking that oldsters everywhere in every era have drawn a snarling comfort from this pronouncement just as pertinaciously, and just as pathetically, as the world’s current youth has always been positive that, once everybody over fifty was disposed of, the human race was bound for the millennium around the next corner but one.

  In practice, though, the younger generation appears invariably to get to middle age before it does to either the dogs or the millennium; and then of course replaces the fallacies of youth with such substitutes for logic as middle age finds acceptable whensoever it discourses as to yet another pestiferous younger generation.

  Of middle age I intend to speak later. Meanwhile, so far as I may conjecture, the younger generation has always passed through its so brief career in a never failing excitement,—an excitement roused by the discovery that the existence of God is open to dispute, but that the pleasures of coition are not.

  I can well recall that in my own Victorian first heyday these facts were known. They were not, to be sure, very often encountered in print: but in the conversation of the young, and especially in, as it were, co-educational tête-à-têtes, I am afraid that no themes were more familiar.