I

ALFRED NOYES has written a book called The Opalescent Parrot, which is neither here nor there save for its denunciation of John Bunyan. The Pilgrim’s Progress, Noyes tells us, is the world’s worst allegory — and indeed it is, as anyone who will take the no inconsiderable trouble of reading it may at once discover. But — and this is yet more remarkable— The Pilgrim’s Progress is also, as everybody knows, the world’s best allegory, though in its own peculiar way, which is not quite the way of the Divine Comedy or The Faërie Queene.

The mystery of the contradiction is very simple, and lies in the fact that nobody ever does read The Pilgrim’s Progress, not cross-my-heart and all the way through. Nobody within the memory of living men ever did read it, and probably nobody ever will. Therefore to all it is great — yes, even to Mr. Alfred Noyes, who has made the mistake of dipping into it.

’Mr. Birrell,’ Noyes complains, ‘calls Mr. Worldly-Wiseman one of the greatest characters in fiction.’ Of course he does. So do I. So do you. So does Mr. Noyes, in his heart. But in what fiction? Certainly not in Bunyan’s. There is another and greater fiction, however, a quite sublime allegory, which, because we all contribute to it more or less, we somewhat grandiloquently call life, though most of our knowledge of it is fictional enough. And here Mr. Worldly-Wiseman — to say nothing of Hopeful, Giant Despair, and the other Bunyan characters — flourishes mightily. What Bunyan did was to pick up a pebble from the ground at his feet, label it, leave it conveniently accessible — and lo, it became a loadstone! From that day to this, it has, after the manner of loadstones, been drawing bits of material to itself— iron filings, brass filings, and even gold filings — which subsequent observers have scraped from their own experience by means of their own wits. The result is a magnificent pile, a monument to worldly wisdom which no one author in the world could by himself have gathered together and set up. The Pilgrim’s Progress is superlatively good because it is so superlatively bad in all particulars save one. Bunyan’s genius spent itself upon empty names, which he tried to fill up with details so inapt, ideas so inane, an attitude so unintelligent and un-Christian, that for all practical purposes the names remained empty — and therefore useful.

Now if this sort of thing had stopped with Bunyan — but why speculate? It did not stop. It might, however, be well to consider the case of Mr. Worldly-Wiseman a little further.

We all know how the charm began, in that little book with the woodcuts — or maybe that big book with steel engravings — which used to lie on the parlor table, along with the Bible, Baxter, the family album, and possibly a one-volume Shakespeare, in those happy days when these constituted a library and there yet were parlors, wax flowers, and corner whatnots. One saw pictures, delightful pictures, of giants, lions, and angels in white robes. One asked mother what it was all about, and she replied out of her recollections of what her mother had told her, supplemented by such inventions as suggested themselves. After all, it was a Bible story, and could easily be guessed at. Everything thus remained sweet and lovely.

‘A tale in which anything may happen at any moment always appeals to the young,’ says Mr. Noyes. And why should it not? To the young the world itself is a place in which anything may happen at any moment. Time and experience have not yet revealed these tedious, repetitive habits in things which we fatuously come to call the laws of nature. ‘Three men come tumbling over a wall. You see a black man in front of you in a white robe. You fall into a pit. You are cast into a dungeon and beaten senselessly by a giant who has fits.’ Pure realism. That is the way things do happen when life is new, and I am not at all certain that it is not the way they continue to happen when life is old. But by that time we have ourselves fallen into habits, especially the very bad habit of making abstractions and generalizations, of turning every roundish thing into a sphere, and otherwise losing the actual novelty of all that occurs while finding only its specious resemblance to that which has occurred before. From the moment when the inner Solomon whispers, ‘There is nothing new under the sun,’ all is vanity and vexation of spirit.

Bunyan left his plot as empty and sketchy as his names, and it was equally good. Its moral, its motivation, its reason, its philosophy, its theology, were rubbish which simply did not apply, and so its incidents stood out as pure miracle, as they do in the fascinating Book of Daniel. And thus were those bright names permitted to be photographed upon our memories along with Adam and Eve, Samson, David, Goliath, and Og, the King of Bashan.

It was later that we discovered Mr. Worldly-Wiseman to be our neighbor, possibly that next-door neighbor who lives behind the looking-glass. Wiseman pins his faith to strictly standardized brass tacks, avoids the point of the living exception, and seeks to profit by the law that like circumstances produce like results. But we should never have seen him clearly had we not already known his name.

II

Mr. Noyes recognizes all this, and even praises the old Bedford prisoner for what he terms ‘a useful phraselabel.’ But evidently he regards this as faint praise and damning — as if a useful phrase-label were of little account. He wants ‘portraiture.’ Fortunately, however, Bunyan’s canvas was so blackened with curses splashed across the fair fame of ‘Quakers, Ranters, Roman Catholics, Anabaptists, Independents, Presbyterians,’ and users of the English Book of Common Prayer, that there was no clear space left for portraiture. His Talkative never has a chance to say anything, and so now can give his innumerable namesakes the floor.

The great characters of fiction are the great, characters of fact. Authors who go into readable and relevant detail step down and out of folklore and rob us of healthful exercise, like the servant who insists upon spreading the butter on rolls or spoils the breakfast, with predigested foods. They lose the type in making a mere individual, who usually becomes more unreal as he becomes more minute. If you must be readable you must be careful, and confine yourself to a few bold strokes, for the Immortals never have but one trait apiece.

Aladdin always rubs his lamp, Ali Baba robs the forty thieves; Uncle Tom is always faithful, Leatherstocking never misses a shot; Haidee is always beautiful, Mrs. Grundy is extreme to mark what is done amiss, while Macduff lays on. Mrs. Malaprop cannot open her mouth without sticking her foot in it, Scheherazade keeps telling us another, and Raffles never burgles without wearing evening clothes. Did you ever hear of Lochinvar coming out of the East? Or of Micawber turning something up? No; Jack the Giantkiller sticks to giants, and would no more hurt a dwarf than Puss-in-Boots would attend Cinderella’s ball, or Faust renounce the Devil, or Elsie Dinsmore play a fox-trot on Sunday. Galahad is a perfect Galahad; Don Juan a veritable Don Juan. And this is why, I think, Dickens succeeded in ‘creating’ a whole world of famous characters, but Henry James and the thought-stream novelists never a one.

But what about Hamlet? Well, what? Do you think he was a great character in fiction the first time he permitted matters of great pith and moment to become sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought? I do not. I think he was merely a good part, drenched in sublime poetry. A whole tribe of actors, culminating perhaps in Edwin Booth, contributed toward making him a great part. Since then every genius on earth has helped in his characterization — and it is still unfinished. Hamlet lives and breathes with old emotions collected from dusty folios in doubly dusty garrets by children who read him for the first time and are never able afterward to forget. These write or talk, and other children read and listen. So Hamlet goes his eternal way, like a snowball long since grown beyond all comparison because of the good things it has picked up from a million and one snowy brainstorms.

There had, of course, to be a nucleus, something which those first children and other critics could not forget. With Bunyan it was the aptness of a name tacked on to what then passed for piety, or to occasional beauties stolen from Holy Writ. With Dickens it was a tag, followed usually by a good story, which impressed the tag upon us by dint of repetition when our hearts were softened and sympathetic. The analytical novel has no tag to repeat, no tag which can detach itself and go its way or make us come to it. In Shakespeare’s case, it was the marvelous line of the verse, or perhaps the pageantry. All of his more famous characters, save this one of Hamlet, arc very simple. Even Hamlet is a bit of a monomaniac, and rather makes a hobby of his complexity. Better still, Shakespeare had the genius never quite to discover what his Hamlet was. He left him a mystery, like the lady of the sonnets, shadowy at the edges and inexplicable at the core, more ghostly in spite of his gorgeous raiment than that old mole his father. The author’s dream has not hardened so as to interfere with ours. Thus Hamlet has come to out-top all other sanely mad men under heaven, even Lear.

Shakespeare did the trick so often that his own name has become a useful, I should say a magic, label. It awakens in us the spirit of cooperation, a disposition to understand everything in its greatest sense. For even the great characters of fiction must advertise, and what medium so effective as Shakespeare’s plays? We feel in the presence of important matters the minute the volume opens or the curtain goes up. A single line there is enough to set the gossips going. He is a character in fiction himself — some very wild fiction. He has been sold to us, thoroughly and finally. Also we owe to great authors all the delight they have given in a thousand ways having nothing to do with the characters they have drawn, including all the cunning they have provoked in other pen-smiths.

It is these giants, too, who simplify things until we can grasp them. But once we do, the process goes on. One by one the less essential strokes are rubbed out. For we pigmies are, collectively, that Folk Genius, poet of poets, master of masters. So finally one may enjoy the work of all. Reality, muddy and confused to our nearsighted eyes, has become legend, clear, childlike, and colossal.

III

Folklore has made Don Quixote into a greater figure than Hamlet. Hamlet suffers, after all, from being readable. So does Falstaff. Jack’s fat coarseness, his wit, his lies, gross and palpable like the father that begets them, are not quite palpable enough and were too well set down on paper. He should be hail fellow well met everywhere, and he is not. He sticks fast where he first was put, in Literature. We meet him in life, but fail to remark him, his own recorded remarks being too sublimely apt. The author here ‘hogs’ the stage, and the greatest stage is not quite the world. We little co-contributors are overawed in spite of the vastness of the assembly to which we belong. We dare not improvise, simplify, coarsen, and improve, or put ourselves in competition with those jokes too, too, too, too, too good in the original. So the firstnighters go home and take out all their sesquipedalian words and circumlocutions, instead of just telling us what it was all about. The second-nighters do but inflate the first, and the man in the street — himself a fiction character inferior to few — misses the point. You will hear men called Quixotic even on the bleachers, where so few really are, but never one, however fat, hailed as a Falstaff.

The real Falstaff was so much more than fat — aye, there’s the rub. He refuses to be expressed as so many pounds of flesh, and so fails to find the broad and common immortality even of Shylock. The ordinary fat man is, paradoxically, an empty frame. Draw a frame big enough, and the world can fill it with whatever matter is at hand. But let it contain the slaughter of a few misbegotten knaves in Kendal green, slaughtered subtly in a darkness which forbids you to see your hand, and yet darkens only within the welllighted, sack-reeking Boar’s Head, and nothing more is to be said. These particulars are too delightful to be sloughed off. None dares to add or to take away. You cannot cram your next three-hundred-pounder into such a frame as that. No room remains, for all its vastness.

The Fat Alan, as such, has never had his Boswell. Perhaps, because he is so simple, he does not need one. His is a case we can all manage for ourselves without the help of letters. On the stage, a rubber stomach suffices. In life he looms above all books, and has yet to be compressed within board covers. He is more famous than the famous, but the name Falstaff will not fit him, nor stretch over his Gargantuan, generic paunch. The name is of too particular and fine a weave, when what is needed is a comfortable decrochez-moi. Too many people have read the second part of Henry IV, and read too long, instead of snatching at the label and going their way to attach it to every appropriate girth. The Fat Man is his own label. He laments, so without reason, that nobody ever loved him, but in renown he has no rival save the Bald-headed Man, supposed by slander to haunt those front rows he always has avoided that those behind might not be dazzled by the glare of reflected light. No; Hamlet cannot quite compete with the unread, still less with the unwritten. But Caliban may rush in where Ariel fears to tread, and such Hamlets as we are stand more chance of being called Babbitt now.

IV

Authors have little to do with ultimates, as may be learned from the case of Sherlock Holmes, a magnetic figure commonly attributed to the late Conan Doyle. Two other writers, neither of them altogether without repute, had a shy at Holmes before Doyle was born — Voltaire in Zadig the Babylonian, and Poe in The Murders in the Rue Morgue. All the essentials of Holmes were already there in Zadig — his cleverness, his deductiveness, his delightful, insufferable impossibility. But Voltaire put the loadstone on too high a shelf, and Poe put it in too musty a cupboard. It had collected considerable dust, but no great amount of nuggets. Doyle’s inestimable service to mankind was in taking it out, giving it a more catchy ‘moniker,’ and putting it in an accessible shrine in Baker Street. We could all sit there and smoke our shag. Sherlock Holmes became the mousecolored gown in which we dressed our innate talent for finding out things through the exercise of pure reason; and Dr. Watson, with his intellectual density, was everybody else.

Doyle, having written several volumes, presumed to kill his hero, and then resurrected him for two more — and immediately the critics cried: ‘ Mr. Holmes does n’t seem to be quite the same man since his death.’ It was just the sort of thing that critics would say. But there really was no falling off in the stories — not till near the very end. What actually happened was that Holmes, the legend, had outgrown anything which could be written of him. It began to be noticed that Doyle seldom let him do anything worthy of his metal. A detective who was allowed to behave intelligently would of course ruin any story by solving the mystery on the second page. We had re-created Holmes in our own vaster image, and had no further need of Doyle. He had done his work.

For the young, of course, the broughams still stop at the Baker Street address. The rising generation has had the entire series reprinted for it in two convenient, Bible-like volumes. But they are doomed to disappointment. They have read too much about the wizard, and when — as so often happens — the clients who apply for protection are murdered for the sake of the plot, they will blame the biographer.

Oh, that mine enemy would write a book, and my friend have a book written about him! Doyle’s misfortune was that books were written about Holmes, not about Doyle. Parts of books, anyway. But when it is the author who becomes copy for the paragrapher — well, look at what happened to Stephen Crane. Genius though he was, he was mortal, and even dead, when Conrad resurrected by a few well-chosen remarks and Thomas Beer made a home for the poor ghost in a full-length biography. And so the Black Riders still ride — by proxy.

When Shakespeare permitted it to be said that a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, it was just one of those things which playwrights are excused for doing because they are not speaking for themselves. What’s in a name, indeed!

I remember, long ago, when I was in boarding school, how I used to put this matter to the test. I played the piano then, and occasionally I would interpret choice hits of Beethoven for the more musical of the faculty and student body — and call the bits my own. There was never any enthusiasm. Then I would improvise a few bars of solemn twaddle, and tag it, ‘An excerpt from the Waldstein Sonata,’ or something such. ‘How beautiful!’ the little audience would sigh. Finally I would confess that I had made a mistake; that what I had called mine was Beethoven’s, and what I had called Beethoven’s was mine. Soon I abandoned this practice in order to escape a hanging which then might have been regarded as premature, but I have never forgotten the lesson. Those little audiences were not composed entirely of fools. Indeed, it was necessary to be cautious lest they should catch some strain which wars too familiar and identifying. It would never have done to try to palm off the ‘Moonlight’ fantasia as something lesser and else. But I had asked them to do without the name Beethoven, to admire a sunset without its trailing clouds of glory, to listen to phrases deprived of the thunders of tradition, and expected them not to feel the vacuum of this absence — as if the heart dared to lean upon a tune, however sweet, to which it had not been properly introduced!

One must not put the ear above the imagination. Footsteps do not echo on the sand just outside the door as they do when they pass down the corridors of time. Listen to Man Friday’s now deafening barefooted tread! Yet what is the sound of a naked sole sinking into the soft beach of a desert island? To-day its solitary print falls with a crash. Time and tide have done it — and Defoe’s little label. What then are we to think of those who would deprive us forever of all echoes? Who say that history is nonsense because it was so largely not so in the time of it? Who would leave us living hand-to-mouth in a Now, with never a resonating chamber in which to store its interest-bearing treasure?

True, Now makes a noise. But noise is not music any more than rosined horsehair and catgut are a violin. This interest which comes from sounding boards is like credit, sweeter and far more extensive than the original capital from which it springs. Beethoven was not quite so great as he now seems. He did not soar quite so far above his contemporaries and immediate predecessors as we fondly imagine. His music, when new, lacked many an overtone. Johann Sebastian Bach was a splendid musician, but there were a host of others almost as good. We hear them all now in a single fugue. Nor does this happen only when he has craftily purloined their phrases and put them a little more in tune — phrases to which we add the ringing in our ears. There is also the romance of his name, giving his least subject a new richness of answer.

He once wrote a fugue upon that name, B-A-C-H, the h standing for B natural following a B flat in the German nomenclature. But now the name alone is the best subject of all. For better than music is the nostalgic past, with its loves and memories and hopes and incomparable grandeur, where the heart forever lives and moves and has its being. Without the past, from whence would anyone draw the strength to face the as yet empty and barren future? For hope itself, which seems to people the future, is a hope that is past. The future certainly wall not be like that. We hope that it will be? But we know that our hope is vain. We hope that it will be better, and fear that it may be worse — and either may come true. But both arc unimaginable. We live upon the brink of something Different. We cannot love this stranger who has not yet darkened the door — not unless he has given us some earnest of himself which is already with us. We should like to bar him out. If but the best of what is or has been might be again! And so, if we cannot reach to where the was and the will be are one, we like to live with our eyes shut and in ancient dreams.

V

Music has the peculiarity of being sweet without, on our part, the narrowing necessity of brains — for the notion that music is intellectual comes from confusing the roles of composer and executant with that of listener. To make music demands sweat from the inner brow. But to drink it in only requires an easily gained familiarity. All truly musical countries make good beer and sell it cheap without Prohibition. The Drys, I think, should look into this. The growing taste for good music in America is a menace to the Eighteenth Amendment. Taste is akin to thirst, and drinking music and drinking something else have a subtle essence in common. Who can help looking upon the beer mug when it is filled with Beethoven?

This Beethoven was not only something of a toper himself; he has provoked more consumption of mildly alcoholic beverages than any other one single influence save that of highly seasoned sausages. Jazz may fret its brief and fitful moment; but, like the synthetic stuff which accompanies it, jazz must pass away. The gently intoxicating Ludwig pours on forever. And if he makes us drunken without moistening the lips, so much the worse. The Volsteads may strain out the gnats, partially and with pain, but even they must swallow this camel. Not Anthony Comstock himself could have Bowdlerized the symphonies or expurgated all the spirits from their ninefold prayer. And, thanks to the perfected processes of canning, and to the financial support given to orchestral concerts by the Jews, our acoustical tippling grows deeper every day. Let me pick out a country’s songs, and I care not who raids its speak-easies.

What has all this to do with tags? A lot. Good wine needs its bush, no matter what the saw may say, and good beer needs its label. Beethoven simply happens to be the Pilsener of tone, the mark of the world’s favorite brand. May he never be Scotched!

Of course he is n’t quite folk music. He was n’t made up by innumerable improvements added to what was once commonplace. The ‘Eroica’ is no ‘Annie Laurie.’ Most of us are so dull when it comes to music that we need giants to weave even our folk songs into symphonies. We need them, also, to weave our folklore into epics. But in music we cannot go on and drop the original Homer or Bunyan. We continue to lean on the giants. So Beethoven must be classed with those authors who are not only written and talked about, but read. But for his real equals in literature one must go to those who are read no more, whose work is done. For Literature is that in the sight of which we all like to browse, but upon which none of us likes to feed — not much, nor after we are twenty-one and married.