“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,”
—he had proclaimed his trust in that divine love which, ultimately, would redeem all properly repentant persons from the logical outcome of their doings in this world, and would give to the marred life of every properly repentant person a happy ending in a fair-colored paradise agreeably full of harps and lutes. And people liked that, too, of course, because such a philosophy made everybody feel muggily consoled and, for no especial reason, magnanimous.
So had Villon become a very great poet whose art was a fine blending of mirth and of pathos and of faith, and so might he hope to win to high honors in Antan, where, if anywhere, poets were properly rewarded. And the squalor and degradation of his terrestrial living were, now, but so many picturesque ingredients in the superb poem of his life, now that Villon too was—just as his Roman confrere had pointed out,—to be regarded as a character in a book. The difference was that Villon had become a never-dying myth of vagabondage with its heart in the right place, and a parable which revealed how much of good always survives in the most vile and abandoned of criminals and even in persons unsuccessful in business life. The legend of Villon thus proved exactly the contrary to that which was proved by the legend of Nero: as the one demonstrated the real nature of man to aspire only to lust and cruelty the moment that inhibitions were removed, so did the other legend show the real fundamental nature of every man to be incurably good and lovable under all possible surface stains. And the legend of Villon, Villon repeated, had in it tenderness,—that indispensable flavor of tenderness and of a sentimentality as wholesomely nourishing as molasses, without which no work of art can ever really be of the first class so far as goes its popular appeal.
“For my life, gentlemen, was truly a superb parable. And it has been properly appreciated, it has ever been paid the fine compliment of being plagiarised by Holy Writ. Why, what the devil! if the parable of the Prodigal Son be good art in the New Testament, is it the less good art for being acted out with the vigor and the brio I brought to that task? For I too wasted all my substance, with some feminine assistance, and went down among the swine and the husks, without ever forgetting that by and by I was to be comforted with never-failing love and veal cutlets. In brief, although I lived perforce in the gutter, yet my eyes were upon the stars “
Then Gerald remarked, to this one of his discarded personalities: “You move me, Messire Francois. You sound upon my heart-strings a resounding chord, through your employment of a figure of speech which is always effective. I do not know why, but any imaginable bit of verse conveying a statement manifestly untrue can be made edifying and sublime through ending it with the word ‘stars’. We poets have convinced everybody, including ourselves, that there is some occult virtue in the act of looking at the stars. So, when you said just now, ‘Although I lived perforce in the gutter, yet my eyes were upon the stars’, I was moved very mightily. I seemed to hear the yearning cry of all human aspirations, foiled but superb. Yet if you had asserted your eyes to have been habitually, or at least every clear night, upon the planets—or, for that matter, upon the comets or the asteroids,—I would not have been moved in the least.”
“It is sufficient that you were moved without knowing why,” observed Nero. “That is the magic of poetry. Very often when I recited some of my best poems, to commemorate the sorrows of Orestes or Canace or OEdipus, I myself could not quite understand the springs of that terrible misery which convulsed my hearers. They wept; they fainted; a number of the women entered prematurely into the labors of childbirth; and I was compelled to have the doors and windows guarded by my Praetorian soldiers because so many of the audience invariably attempted to escape from the well-nigh intolerable ecstasies which my art provoked. Such is the magic of great poetry, a thing not ever wholly to be explained even by the poet.”
Then Gerald said: “Yet, you two poets who have traveled through the Marches of Antan, wherein only two truths endure, and the one teaching is that we copulate and die,—do you not look to find when you have reached Antan, which is the goal of all the gods, some third truth?”
And it seemed to him that the faces of the two myths had now become evasive and more wary.
Nero replied, “For a poet, there exist always just as many truths as he cares to imagine.”
And Villon remarked: “I would phrase it somewhat differently. I would say there exist more truths than any poet cares to imagine. But it comes to the same thing.”
“Yes,” Gerald assented,—“for it comes to an evasion. Yet I, who also am a poet, I retain my faith in the rather beautiful idea of that third truth.”
And then Gerald told them that he himself had long dabbled in the art of poetry. “Indeed,” he added, generously, “I will now recite to you one of my sonnets which appears appropriate to the occasion.”
“Dog,” Villon replied, taking up his hat, “does not eat dog.”
And Nero very hastily stated that, howsoever unbounded their regret, they really must be hurrying on to the city of marvels.
So these myths departed, traveling together, with an intimacy somewhat remarkable in the light of their flatly diverse teachings. And Gerald warned them to make the most of the present state of affairs in Antan, because the day after to-morrow the Lord of the Third Truth, a deity with several not uninteresting aspects, would be descending upon Antan, to take over all the powers of the Master Philologist, and to deal with Queen Freydis afterward as his divine inclinations might prompt.
Thereafter Gerald went back to Maya and to his dinner quite jauntily, now that he knew in his appointed kingdom the true poets of this world were assembling to purvey his amusement: and he felt himself to be afire with impatience to reach that city of all marvels, yonder behind him, as he walked away from Antan, leisurely ascending to the trim cottage of Maya the wise woman, who went as a crowned queen, and would have none of his love-making, and yet was such an excellent cook, in her plain way.
PART EIGHT THE BOOK OF MAGES
28. Fond Magics of Maya
“Not every good scholar is a good schoolmaster.”
GERALD delayed his departure until Friday, because Gerald was cordially amused by the fond magics of Maya of the Fair Breasts. He regarded them, as he did her, through those roseate spectacles which the wise woman had loaned him to be an unfailing comfort to his eyes: and he found all very good.
He had known many lovelier and more brilliant women, alike in the relinquished world of Lichfield and in his journeying through the Marches of Antan. But Maya contented him: he had really not the heart to disappoint his Maya by not forcing upon her—after four prolonged and tender arguments,—those physical attentions which all women seemed to expect.