26 “Qualis Artifex!”
And Gerald used to amuse himself by talking with the travelers who passed by the neat log and plaster cottage of Maya the wise woman, upon their way to the court of Queen Freydis and her consort the Master Philologist. For it was a good and shrewd policy, Gerald felt, for a monarch to familiarize himself with his future subjects: so he would sit by the wayside, in the shade of a conveniently placed chestnut-tree,—incognito, as it were,—and would artfully allure them into conversation.
“Hail, friends! And what business draws you to the city of all marvels?” said Gerald, on the first morning that he fell into this long-sighted course.
He was told—by the big-bellied, yellow-haired man, whose skin was so curiously spotted,—that they were two poets upon their way to Antan, the goal of all the gods, and the friendly haven of true poets, where poets might hope to find at last that loveliness which they desired and could nowhere discover in their everyday life upon earth. To Gerald this was excellent news, since it increased the number of his future subjects very gratifyingly.
But he said nothing, while the big-bellied, spotted, thin-legged gentleman in the purple robe adorned with golden stars, went on in his answer to Gerald’s first question, by explaining that the speaker was Nero Claudius Cæsar, the king of all poets, and that his scrawny companion, in a brown doublet of which both elbows needed patching, was an artist of considerable talent from out of the Gallic provinces, who was called François Villon.
Gerald found this also of some interest, in view of what he remembered about the Mirror of Caer Omn. Not often did you thus come face to face with two discarded personalities. But Gerald said nothing about this either. Instead, he questioned Nero yet further, and he thus learned that these two poets were on their way to the court of Freydis, because there alone in the universe was art properly regarded: for there, indeed, true artists were manufactured out of common clay, and were informed with the fire of Audela.
It was one or another old hero from out of Poictesme, Nero had heard, who had first modeled these earthen images; and Freydis, as occasion served, gave life to these images and set them to live upon earth, as changelings. But, above all, said Nero, in Antan the true poets of this world fared happily among the myths and the gods who once had afforded to these poets such fine themes, so that to-day of course these poets wrote even more splendid poems now that they composed with the eye upon the object.
Yet, Nero thought, playing idly with the emerald monocle which hung upon a green cord about his scrawny neck, this Queen would not be very likely ever to create in clay, or to find coming to her court, such another artist as Nero himself had been in the days of his Roman pre-eminence. No other person known to him had ever excelled in all the polite arts. For in dancing and in oratory, in wrestling (even with such dreadful adversaries as lions) and in music both vocal and instrumental,—alike as a charioteer and as a tragic actor,—but, above all, as a poet, and equally as a dramatic, a lyric and an epic poet,—Nero had been unanimously awarded the first prize in every contest. He did not care to appear boastful: yet, by all canons of criticism, one had to consider the list of his overwhelming triumphs, in Rome, in Naples, in Antium, in Alba,—at the Parthian games, at the Isthmian games, at the Olympic games,—and, in fine, in each contest which Nero had ever entered anywhere in all the kingdoms of which he was Emperor. No other artist had a record to compare with that: no other of the world’s great geniuses had ever been confessedly supreme in every polite form of æsthetic endeavor.
Of course, as a student of history, Nero conceded that the elect artist was not to be placed, not permanently, by his ranking in the eyes of his contemporaries, who might often be swayed by such matters, really extraneous to enduring art, as the artist’s ingratiating manners and his personal beauty. As a man of the world, he even conceded the judges of the sacred games in awarding all the first prizes to Nero might furthermore have been influenced by the large sums of money which the Emperor always conferred upon his acclaiming judges after such occasions, as well as by the dexterity of the tortures which would have followed any decision less just.
But the indisputable fact, the fact of superb importance, was that Nero had made of his life a poem which was wholly a unique masterpiece in the way of self-expression: he, above all other men, had served the one end of every poet’s art, by revealing the true nature of man’s being; for Nero had embodied, with loving carefulness, each trait which he found in himself, through some really memorable action,—rearing, as it were, among marshes and quicksands, and in yet other places which other persons feared to visit, those strange and passionately colored orchid growths which alone could express the highly complex nature of every man’s desires—
“That jargon becomes somewhat senescent,” said Gerald. “Still, as a museum piece,—yes, even now, sophistication does display something of the quaint beauty of thorough obsoleteness. It has acquired the charm, and, as it were, the patina, of sedan chairs and of full-bottom wigs and of girdles of chastity and of suits of armor, and of all other things, once useful enough, which are nowadays endeared to every poet’s heart by the fact that they are forever outmoded. So let us grant it, O Cæsar, in the days that are gone you were a devil of a fellow and a sad rip among the ladies—”
“Why, but, for that matter—” Nero began.
“I know. You broad-mindedly despised neither sex. You were in amour a Greek scholar. You were something of a surgeon also. I concede it, I blush, and I urge you to omit all embarrassingly personal details.”
So Nero went on, saying that other emperors, with very much his chances, had lacked the genius necessary to develop these chances. There had, of course, been minor artists. Caligula, for example, among so much hackwork in the way of throat-cutting, had shown at least one jet of rather lovely inspiration when he attempted a criminal assault upon the moon; that was a really finely imagined bit of work. Then, also, Domitian and Commodus and Tiberius had displayed praiseworthy ambitions; quite neat little things had been done by Tiberius, in an amateur way, at Capri; Caracalla too had been so-so: but they had all tended to wallow unimaginatively in cut and dried executions; merely to chop off anybody’s head was not art, no matter how often you did it. Besides, work done upon a public scaffold inevitably coarsened one’s touch. And Heliogabalus, whatsoever the lad’s thin vein of undeniable talent in the way of lyric lechery, had lacked the stamina and gusto for any sustained masterpiece in Nero’s copious epic style.
For Nero alone had been, in every branch of self-expression, the sincere, skilled artist, enriching his handiwork always with that continual slight novelty which art demands. He had builded his appropriate stage, in the Golden House—
“A house entirely overlaid with gold,” said Gerald, reminiscently, “and adorned everywhere with jewels and mother of pearl, a house so rich and ample that it had three-storied porticos a mile long, and huge revolving banqueting halls, and ivory ceilings which perpetually scattered perfumes and red rose-petals—”
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 Poppæa, and of others who had been his wives just for the evening; he spoke of Sporus, of Aiëtes, 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, æsthetically, 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 æsthetically right that, as an artist, I never in my life enjoyed anything 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 dénouement 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.”