Nero, at that, had out his emerald monocle; and through it he now regarded Gerald with the childlike amiability of a sincere artist whensoever his vanity is flattered.
Yes, Nero admitted, he had endeavored to express himself in that house also. The Golden House had been (to play with metaphor) the handsome binding of that poem which was his life, when in a setting such as the world had never known, before or since, he had given to his every human trait its full color value. In the Golden House he had reared his orchids, he had labored to open many frank and incisive and utterly unstinted avenues of self-expression to that somewhat complex thing called human nature....
But here he entered rather explicitly into details. Gerald felt the style of this emperor to be growing woefully un-American; and Gerald fidgeted.
“Let us, I again urge you,” said Gerald, “speak of less personal matters, and diversify the vividness of these orchids with a few fig-leaves!”
Perhaps, of course, the Emperor continued, he, like every other really great artist, had been somewhat the anthologist, in that he had invented outright none of the art forms among the many in which he had distinguished himself. He had taken over from his predecessors a number of inspirations and a formula or two, as he would be the very last to deny: but the fine craftsmanship was all his, as well as that distinguishing, that peculiarly Neronic, touch of romantic irony, by virtue of which this artist had slain with suavity, had destroyed with a caress, and had ennobled all that was most dear to his human nature by killing it. He spoke now of the deaths of his wives, of Octavia and Poppaea, and of others who had been his wives just for the evening; he spoke of Sporus, of Aietes, of Narcissus, and of that other exceedingly beautiful boy, Aulus Plautinus....
And again Gerald raised a protesting hand. “Let us still,” said Gerald, “avoid these quite un-American personalities! Meanwhile, you do not speak of your mother Agrippina.”
He surprised in the spotted face of Nero something very like terror. But Nero said only, “No.”
And besides, the Emperor continued, with rising animation, that happy chronological accident, the fact that Christianity began in the days of Nero its advance toward world supremacy, had enabled him, by pure luck, to lend to the great poem of his life just the needful felicitous touch of working in a new medium. To burn well-thought-of taxpayers and putative virgins as the torches at your supper parties was a device which, out of a natural desire to surprise and to amuse one’s guests, might have occurred to almost any host in quest of that continual slight novelty which the art of hospitality also demands. But that these flambeaux should later become the brightest glories of a triumphant church had made these supper parties, which were really quite modest affairs, unforgettable. Nero had expressed himself—not merely, as he thought at the time, through persons supposed to be deficient in patriotism and more or less suspected of being (here again, to play with metaphor) not one hundred per cent Roman,—but, as it had turned out, through saints and apostles, and through consecrated religious martyrs, such as not every artist could get for his themes and raw material. So, the succeeding discouragements of Christians had, aesthetically, fallen flat, in their impression upon posterity: their authors had come into this field too late, to find that tragic vein worked out, and all its most striking possibilities exhausted, by the great artist that was Nero. It was hardly remembered that Marcus Aurelius and Diocletian and many others had broken and flayed and mutilated and burned to the very best of their ability: these plodders were but the epigoni and the unimaginative plagiarists of Nero.
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.