The Nightmare Had Triplets (19 page)

    “I also,” said the world’s wife, “I have dreamed about the beautiful high brow, the dark Byronic curls, the refined Grecian nose, the firm chin, and the sensitive mouth which reveals only enough to make its hearers hungry for yet more of Smirt. O lovely Master of the Gods, I am wholly glad that I dreamed you. Now do you tell us about your philosophy of life.”

    Then they all cried out confusedly:

    “What will be the future trend of Southern literature?”

    “Do you compose on the typewriter? Do you dictate? And do you write in the morning or in the evening?”

    “Is alcohol injurious, and are we, or are we not, upon the verge of a vast spiritual awakening?”

    “Tell us frankly which one of your own books do you like best?”

    “What about correspondence courses in short story writing, who is your favorite author, and ought children to be taught to believe in Santa Claus? Why is the
American Spectator?
Do you write every day or do you wait for inspiration to move you?”

    “What, Smirt, are your religious beliefs in not over two hundred words? What constitutes your ideal of; true womanhood? When is your next book to appear and what are you going to call it?”

    All these questions they asked confusedly without waiting for any answer. And all the while, too, the public at large became more pallid. The colors went out of their faces and out of their hair and out of their clothing also. They became like ghosts, nor were they any longer distinct in outline. They were like blown tatters of fog, they were like mere cigarette smoke, now that, very much as Airel and Elair had vanished, so did a wind carry away, gently, all except one of the public at large; but as they passed out of Smirt’s temple they still shrilled and chirped and twittered their questions.

    “Master of the Gods,” said the young girl who remained in Smirt’s temple, “I am called Dorothy—”

    “I prefer Arachne,” Smirt answered, sighing.

    “—And, Master, you did not ever answer my letter—about your lecturing.”

    “I remember that there was once a princess,” Smirt said, with sigh number two, “and you also, my child, I seem to remember, but in a different role.”

    I remember you perfectly (Smirt continued.) Writing in behalf of the two literary societies of your college, you, my dear Dorothy, have asked if, and when, and at what fee per evening, I would agree to lecture in your college auditorium, as to whatsoever topic I may elect—although you aidfully added you were certain that “a message” from me concerning Modern Trends in Literature would be of deep interest to the students, the faculty, and their friends,—and you have asked also that I advise you whether “anything along this line” would be “worth my while.”

    To be frank with you (Smirt went on, as he lighted a fresh cigarette, and leaned back, rather more comfortably, on his pedestal, it would not be worth my while—nor your while either. I still marvel, with an aged and resigned wonder, at the quaint notion that some possible profit is to be got, by anybody concerned, from inducing the professional man of letters
to lecture. You would not ask in just this off-hand fashion, I imagine, that same author to perform upon the college auditorium piano, before the students, the faculty, and their friends, or to adorn the auditorium walls with mural paintings. You would incline, first, to make sure of his musical gifts or of his ability to paint.

    Nor—and this is an analogue even more exact—nor would you address to that author an invitation to appear, upon a set evening, before the students, the faculty, and their friends, and thereupon to enliven the gathering by singing
Celeste Aïda
or
The Last Rose of Summer.
The singer and the author (along with the actor, the lecturer, and the crossword-puzzle maker) do utilize a common material, in that each of them employs words; and yet, after hardly more than a half-hour’s steady thinking about this matter, you will begin to divine, my dear Dorothy, that all these persons use words variously, in accord with the tenets and the limitations of perceptibly different arts.

    I grant that members of a race so multifarious as to produce both men and women may be able in more than one art. It is humanly possible, I mean, for an author to “speak” passably: but the event is rare. Looking back through a long and terrible vista of auctorial lectures, I can recall one woman writer who “spoke” (upon I have no least notion what subject)
with a simple and cordial virtuosity such as kept me through a contented hour’s length mentally purring. I delight, because of that well-nigh unique memory, to recognize, in Zona Gale, an actually accomplished writer who actually could “speak,” and with whom “speaking” was a fine art finely practiced. To the other side, without any unwise name-calling, I think of a woman who had published sundry volumes of the most bland and charming essays ever penned by; an American, and of her dictatorial, her sullen, and her gross conduct of the one lecture I was fated to hear her deliver. That was an all-tragic afternoon, which robbed me forever of any further pleasure in the writings of an over large and regrettably vocal snapping turtle.

    The epiphany of this harridan remains to me, I repeat, a continued distress—and yet, only in degree. For how many other soul-chilling, how many haggardly vivacious females do I recall, all of who “spoke” upon the inconsequent ground that the knew more or less about writing! And with what circumspection did I shun their books afterward!

    As to male authors, I clap one hand on my he and rest the other hand on the family Bible, in the while I protest that every one of them whom I have heard “speak” showed then at his worst. Even did he orate smoothly, without fidgets, without forlornly
clearing his throat, and without too often seeking respite in the ice-water pitcher, yet did his inane utterance glister, as it were, with the greasy high-mindedness and the tin-plated goodfellowship which no public speaker can very well avoid. In most cases this did not matter, because the majority of persons who write badly enough to be in demand as lecturers are charlatans or bunglers at all seasons: but to observe bedizened in any such humbug the man of real talent is painful.

    It is painful because there drift about, in that more rarefied air of the platform, some fumes, some straying gases, which affect the intelligence. A few victims these effluvia reduce to gulping, to the conscientious coughing of Camille, or to blank merciful unintelligibility: but the more hapless they intoxicate
coram populo.
And as a pragmatic people, we have learned to accept this fact. We do not note, as a rule, how wildly does the babblement made upon platforms by the habitué’s of this dire eminence differ from the at least relatively sane speech of our school-teachers and our politicians and our clergy in their private life. It is tacitly understood by everybody that, when “speaking,” the professional “speaker” expects his sentiments to be received at a liberal discount, and upon this full dress occasion will introduce no one of his beliefs in their working clothes.

    All oratory I, in brief, (with the appropriate glibness of a person who knows nothing whatever about it) assume to be an art with its own formal conventions. But I am certain it is an art through which none may attain to self-expression; and in this respect it differs by a world’s width from authorship.

    I mean that the writer, at his desk, so long as he toils over the progress of composition, can imagine that somewhere outside the door of his study an intelligent and sympathetic audience, well worth all painstaking, awaits his masterpiece. To that “acute but honorable minority” he can address himself freely, with glad confidence, and without compromise.

    Let no such happy man turn lecturer! I entreat, with an emotion, you may note, which rises naturally into blank verse. For when once this misled visionary mounts the platform, he becomes conscious that no supermen assemble to honor him. His flesh and blood audience is not even, in any real sense, sympathetic:
at best, it stays receptive, waiting to be wooed, waiting to be roused into approval of him, by its own standards. He perceives, too, that this audience (in common with any audience ever assembled anywhere) is not, or at least is not pre-eminently, intelligent. As a whole it very much prefers, it demands, and it visibly awaits, those sleek false formulae which the
wise honor with lip service in public. So the entrapped word-monger begins with his “Ladies and gentlemen,” and after loosing this trial balloon of fancy he is soon well under way in imaginative truckling.

    I have been privileged at odd times to sit, serene and dutiless, upon the rostrum whence some less lucky author was presently to address his public; and I have considered his raw material. Not ever did the spectacle prove exhilarating: never did I covet his job. To be applauded by such people seemed to me, in all honesty, compromising. Sloth, and ostentation, and a timid lechery, and light-headedness, and self-conceit, and disapproval, and inattention, and boredom, I found over-plainly inscribed on the raised faces turned usward. And in yet more liberal quantities, of course, was to be seen gaping at us that dull-mindedness which continues to betray an uncoerced people into paying for, and even into using, tickets for a lecture.

    Now I daresay, my dear Dorothy, that these are the prevailing traits in any human assemblage, of the better sort, when one views it without prejudice. I admit that, in the last outcome, it is to just this partially cultured audience every American artist must appeal. But my point is that the American author who is seduced into lecturing cannot any more evade
this discouraging fact, inasmuch as night after
he encounters a roomful of his own atrocious admirers, in the persons of you and of the other flibbert-gibbet students and of the depressed faculty and of
their frowsy friends—and, in brief, of the public at large.

    He regards perforce this squatted herd of Mammalia at close range; and no further delusion is possible. Here are the butcher, the baker, and the candlestick maker, here are Tom, Dick and Harry, but above all here are Madame Quelquechose and Senora Etcetera and Lady Ampersand and Mrs. Murgatroyd. The dream-vendor—the purveyor of all beautiful and lofty imaginings, the promoter of divine dissatisfactions—stands face to face with the public at large. He sees immediately before him his paymasters, in the sensual, the bored, the chuckle-headed, and the smug middle-classes of an imperfectly civilized nation, upon whose favor and whose shifty whims he and his famousness and all our national are dependant, at the last pinch.

    The point is, furthermore, that no intelligent person in such circumstances will elect to speak with intelligence. Instead, “subdued,” as the phrase runs “to what he works in,” he will cannily assume the thin virtues, the high-minded illogic, and the false good-humor which all better-thought-of Americans
admire; he will prattle; and he will thus earn his lecture fee honestly, by purveying the sane and edifying entertainment he promised.

    But the more wise, the more cautious writer, remains snug in his study, at play with his words, and happily imagining that he addresses an all-worthy audience. That audience is in some sense the master-work of every writer’s invention. That audience does not exist anywhere in flesh, and at bottom he knows this. But in his bemused fancy that audience exists clearly enough throughout the while that he writes, and for that while it contents him.

    “Then, why, Master of the Gods,” asked the girl Dorothy, when Smirt had ended his speaking, “are you not contented?”

    “But I am contented,” said Smirt. “Did I not just tell you that it contents me to imagine I have my suitably appreciative audience?”

    “And why,” this crop-headed, red-haired girl continued, “do you tell lies?”

    Smirt looked at her; and he smiled slowly. Smirt said:

    “Because I am not any longer young, my dear. For a middle-aged person of my special sort there is no refuge except lying. He must persuade himself at; least, and if possible other people, that he has attained something which does not exist.”

    “And what is that thing, Master?”

    “But I have just told you,” Smirt replied, “that this never found thing is an appreciative and worthy audience. Young people do not have to bother about this requirement, because every young person is his own audience. You may tell me that such is not the case with young women; and that you speak truthfully you will no doubt believe for some years to come. A young man, at all events, regards himself with unfailing gusto, with a delight and a reprehension which are vivid; he perceives that the one creature with whom he is familiar is an interesting creature. Ah, but by-and-by, out of the kindness of his heart, out of altruism, a young man here and there desires to reveal this absorbingly interesting creature to his fellow beings; and the rest of that no longer young man’s life becomes a continued failure in this attempt. So does each one of us who is in some sort an artist seek his audience; and no one of us ever finds it.”

    “I do not understand you, Master. Everybody has an audience whenever she needs an audience. People look at me and they listen to me—or at least the young men do—”

    “They would, my dear, for you have a clear complexion and fine lips and nothing whatever to say with them. I remark all this in your praise, because thinking is a fungus growth which rapidly infects youth and destroys it.”

    Dorothy, smiling a little, looked up at Smirt side-wise. She said by-and-by,—“And is it good to be young, Master?”

    “I do not know,” Smirt returned, after weighing the matter rather carefully. “For it is uncomfortable to be young, and it is silly to be young, and it is unsatisfactory to be young no longer.”

    “I do not understand that,” said the girl, pondering, “for a thing must be either good or bad.”