The Witch-Woman Trilogy

  To the other side, it is a generation of which the present-day survivors appear, to my finding, a bit ludicrously to go on fighting battles that were won long ago. It is a generation which nowadays evinces a quite distressing tendency to preserve at all costs the posture of Ajax defying the lightnings under an unclouded sky. It has thus become, already, a depressingly comic spectacle. It has done its work successfully: and that gratifying fact is the one fact which this generation of writers who prided themselves upon facing all facts, will not face to-day. Instead, it goes on working at its some-while-since-finished job, and it tilts at dead dragons, rather dodderingly, in the beginning palsy of superannuation.

  So is it that, speaking always under the correction of time, I would say this is a generation destined quite quickly to be huddled away, by man’s common-sense, into oblivion. For this generation has said, All is not well. To say that is permitted; to say that is indeed a conventional gambit in every known branch of writing. But this generation thereafter proffered no panacea: and that especial form of reticence is not long permissible.

  To the contrary it is most plain here that, just as Manuel told Coth, the dream is better. It is man’s nature to seek the dream; he requires an ever-present recipe for the millennium; and he vitally needs faith in some panacea or another which by and by will correct all ills. This generation has proffered no such recipe: and that queer omission has suggested, howsoever obliquely, that just possibly no panacea may exist anywhere. This is a truth which man’s intelligence can confront for no long while. He very much prefers that equivalent of hashish which I have seen described, in the better thought of and more tedious periodicals, as constructive criticism. Most properly, therefore, have those junior writers who were not ever harried by taboos, or by the draft laws, begun to suggest a tasteful variety of panaceas: and all persons blessed with common-sense, will eventually select, if but at random, some one or another of these recipes, wherein to invest faith, and wherefrom to extract comfort.

  Meanwhile all intelligent persons will, moreover, put out of mind, as soon as may be possible, that unique and bothersome generation of writers who suggested no panacea whatever. . . . And meanwhile, too, as I have remarked a bit earlier, I intend in this place to say not anything about this generation.

  Even so, you will see, I trust, my point. In rough figures, all the available evidence tends to show that after fifty every creative writer labors in an ever-thickening shadow of decadence. There may be exceptions; I believe that, if they indeed exist, they are few: and, in any case, one does not build upon exceptions.

Chapter IX. Which Keeps a Long Standing Engagement

  I DETERMINED, therefore, now some ten years ago, to finish the Biography before I had passed fifty, if it were granted me to live that long; and afterward to add no line to, and to change in nothing, the Biography. The Biography of the life of Manuel seems now, to my partial gaze, a completed performance.

  With the lateliest added of my comedies—I allude to Something About Eve, the last of my books to have any general circulation,—the reviewers have dealt in a sufficing vein of pleasantness; moreover, the book has evoked dispraise from all the desirable quarters; and for a respectable, but not incriminating, number of weeks did the Comedy of Fig-leaves also figure in the lists of “best sellers.”

  The autograph hunters, Heaven and the postman be my witnesses, have not yet departed. I find that, day in, day out, I mail to “collectors” rather more of my book plates than I paste in my books. I am still favored with invitations to address, if but gratis, the local woman’s club in some town of which I had not previously heard. I am honored now and then with the suggestion that I present my collected works, with each volume suitably inscribed and signed, to one or another public library. School children write me every day or so, requesting that I prepare for them a sketch of my life, illustrated with at least two photographs, of my home and person, and that I add thereto a full critical account of the books which I have written and my general aesthetic theories. They desire in particular to know the names of my books.