The Witch-Woman Trilogy

It is possible, too, to let the last-named speak for the three, of them. “All I can do now,” said Thackeray,—at about the time of his fiftieth’ birthday,—“is to bring out my old puppets, and put new bits of ribbon on them. I have told my tale in the novel department. I only repeat old things in a pleasant way. I have nothing new to say. I get sick of my task when I am ill, and I think, ‘Good Heavens! what is all this story about!’”

It is a query which has been echoed by his readers, and by the readers of Dickens, and by the readers of Scott, and by the readers of many another aging novelist. ... I pause here. I am tempted. But I reflect, rather wistfully, that I had resolved to name no living American author.

I now regret that resolve. I would much like here to speak frankly of my own generation in American letters.

Chapter VIII. Which Slightly Anticipates

YES, I would very much like here to speak frankly of my own generation in American letters. For it was, in so far as it stays at all memorable, the first generation which criticized the polity of the United States. It was the first generation which said flatly: All is not well with this civilization. And it was, pre-eminently, the generation which destroyed taboos,—not all taboos, of course, but a great many of those fetishes which the preceding generations had all left in unmolested honor.

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.

Meanwhile, young men continue to solicit my tuition in black magic and my opinion of journalism as a profession. Only yesterday I received a letter from a thitherto-unknown-to-me young lady of the Middle West who is conducting “an experimental study of love” and had thought of me as a possible collaborator. Wives write to me about their husbands, quite explicitly. Beginning authors yet favor me with the manuscripts of novels which they desire me to rewrite and get published for them. Entire strangers still ring my doorbell upon the plea that they are in town only for the day and would like to spend that day with me. ... I may consider myself, in fine, for all that my books have not ever sold in such quantities as a publisher might reasonably prefer, to be honored with a fair allotment of the annoyances of notoriety, now that I come to be fifty.

Let none mistake me here. I have already enumerated those causes which must lead every considerate person to believe that bleak oblivion and general disregard await me, beyond any rational doubt, in common with all the writers of my generation. My point is merely that at this especial season I find myself to be, as yet, appreciably far from either reward. My point is that this especial season would therefore seem the happiest and the most fit time to wind up the long enterprise of the Biography, while everyone concerned stays, as yet, in a fairly genial humor. My point, in brief, is that the date which I had set for the winding up of the Biography’s affairs turns out to be, after all, a rather well chosen date, now that I come to finish, in The Way of Ecben, the last of all the many stories about the many inheritors of Dom Manuel’s life.

Chapter X. Which, at Long Last, Says All

I NEVERTHELESS regret that there may henceforward come from my typewriter no more stories about Ettarre, who has been always, I confess, the most dear to me of Dom Manuel’s daughters. My comfort is that there will always be new stories about Ettarre, under one or another name, by the writers who shall come after my decaying generation. For all the young men everywhere that were poets have had their glimpse of her loveliness, and they have heard a cadence or two of that troubling music which accompanies the passing of Ettarre; and they have made, and they will make forever, their stories about the witch-woman, so long as youth endures among mankind and April punctually returns into the world which men inhabit.

But we who are not young any longer, and who, despite our memories, yet must behold Ettarre and all things else with the eyes which time has given us, and who (despite how many glowing memories) must yet find in her music, nowadays, no more than did old Alfgar,—we may not dare to depend upon mere memories, howsoever splendid and dear, to piece out for us any more tales as to Ettarre the witch-woman. For memories alone remain. We may well dare, as Alfgar dared, to preserve our faith in that which is beyond and above us: but we would wiseliest keep faith, even so, in silence as to that which our lean human senses now deny. For memories alone remain. We that have reached our middle life may not any longer behold Ettarre with that clearness which is granted to our juniors: and this is an unpleasant fact, this is indeed in some sort an ever restive taunt, which must, to-day and for all time, obscurely discontent the living of every poet who has entered into his prosaic and over quiet fifties, and who has discovered, quietly, that of the lad who followed after Ettarre now memories alone remain.

Even so, you have heard what all these maimed and discontented poets yet cry to the witch-woman: “We would have nothing changed. That loveliness which we saw once and then lost forever, and that music which we heard just once and. might not ever hear again, were things more fine than is contentment. Hail and farewell, Ettarre!”

Richmond-in-Virginia

14 April 1929

explicit

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