Ambrose, Son of Marcus Aurelius

An Author saw a Laborer hammering stones into the pavement of a street, and approaching him said: ‘My friend, you seem weary. Ambition is a hard taskmaster.’

‘I’m working for Mr. Jones, sir,’ the Laborer replied.

‘ Well, cheer up,’ the Author resumed; ‘fame comes at the most unexpected times. To-day you are poor, obscure, and disheartened, but to-morrow the world may be ringing with your name.’

‘What are you telling me?’ the Laborer said. ‘Can not an honest pavior perform his work in peace, and get his money for it, and his living by it, without others talking rot about ambition and hopes of fame?’

‘Can not an honest writer?’ said the Author. —Fantastic Fables

I

AMBITION he defined as ‘an overmastering desire to be vilified by enemies while living and made ridiculous by friends when dead.’ Disclaiming it as he might and did for himself, he was not to escape plucking either of the sour fruits specified in his definition. They were, in fact, but half of his harvest, for his friends did what they could to make him ridiculous while he was living, and he has been plentifully vilified by enemies since his mysterious death.

The vilification, whether contemporary or posthumous, is certainly not hard to account for. He was, from first to last, a difficult and thorny being, and his lifelong trade was the making, chiefly gratuitous, of enemies. When a woman feature writer, hounding him for an interview on the rearing of the young, asked him if any of the ancients had bequeathed us profitable counsel on the subject, he replied: ‘Study Herod, madam — study Herod.’ Publicly placed ‘among our three greatest writers’ by that kindliest of mortals, William Dean Howells, he commented only: ‘I am sure Mr. Howells is the other two.’ The pieces of a cane which he had broken over the head of a former associate he saved to remind himself, as he said, of the nature of friendship. He recorded in cold print his sorrow because cremation had robbed him of the pleasure of spitting on a dead enemy’s grave. When Theodore Roosevelt, always eclectic in his hospitality, invited him to the White House he replied that he had a previous engagement with an old friend who was visiting Washington, and that he never neglected old friends to make new. Roosevelt neatly parried with a second note ending ‘Come to-night, and let us be old friends.’ When, toward the close of the evening, the President showed the spirited painting of the Rough Riders at San Juan Hill, with himself leading the charge, his implacable guest stated that the picture was historically false, inasmuch as Roosevelt had not been among those present.

An imp of the perverse drove this strange man all his days, and the more inexorably as his days became many. His stories, of which by his own account he had never shown a line to any publisher east of the Rockies, he issued in San Francisco with a prefatory statement that they had been ‘denied existence by the chief publishing houses of the country.’ He quarreled violently with all that he hated, and twice as violently with much that he loved. From the mother of his children, the one woman whom, by his own solemn avowal late in life, he had ever loved, he parted for a no-reason which was reason enough to him, and for her remaining years he communicated with her only through an intermediary. Through an intermediary went likewise the sums he sent at intervals to the widow of his son; for he had declined to see her as either bride or widow. On the threshold of old age he could still refer to his parents, estimable Mid-West farming folk, as ‘unwashed savages.’ As surely as he was Ambrose Gwinett, youngest son and ninth child of Marcus Aurelius Bierce, as surely as he was born on June 24, 1842, in the hamlet of Meigs County, Ohio, then known as Horse Cave, just so surely he was writing about himself and still loathing his origins when he set down the words: —

II

Ambrose Bierce the man, while he was alive, both gained and lost by his brilliant perversity, the glamour of his personal legend; but Ambrose Bierce the writer has only lost by it. It is, to this day, chief among the factors which keep his genius from being seen in rational perspective.

For the forty years past, and especially during the twenty-odd since his romantic, much-publicized disappearance, he has been treated as an irresistibly fascinating character who happened to do a good deal of miscellaneous writing in his day. Insatiate curiosity about the man prompts students of the bizarre to look up the writings and glance through them; and what they see is, naturally, whatever happens to reënforce the legend of the man. This approach happens to be the one utterly futile method of prospecting for what is of ultimate importance in Bierce. Obsession with such a personality is like fixing one’s eyes on a glare — it being the property of a glare to blind one to all but itself. Bierce’s epigram on the sea gull which dashes itself to destruction against the lighthouse is a perfect statement of what has happened to virtually all contemplation of himself.

To survey the works in the light of the man’s vagaries is to be dazzled by irrelevancies and incidentals, and so to miss the steady luminosity which the works have always had in themselves and perhaps always will have.

The tide of interest in Bierce and of print about him rose steadily after his disappearance in 1914. It reached full flood in the year 1929, which brought forth no fewer than five books about Bierce. With the exception of one, Mr. Vincent Starrett’s bibliography, they were preoccupied with a commanding personality to the neglect of a commanding pen. The general impression which one gets from them is that Bierce was a rocket and that his work is the charred stick which came down to prove the fact and the line of his flight.

Even the quasi-official life by Mr. Carey McWilliams, the one rich, authoritative, permanently valuable source of information about Bierce in spite of some faults of presentation, ends on this discouraging surmise: ‘Perhaps the ultimate judgment will be that he was more interesting as a man than important as a writer.’ Mr. McWilliams, quite properly for his purpose, did not even attempt a rounded critical evaluation. He comments in extenso only on Bierce’s stories. Now, the stories do indeed provide a handle to some aspects of Bierce which a biographer can hardly ignore; but to create, for however logical a reason, the net impression that his literary importance springs chiefly from his stories is a capital distortion of the very subject one is trying to bring to focus. It is as if one should portray Thackeray in terms of his minor miscellanies in Punch with only a slighting incidental mention of Vanity Fair and Pendennis.

Of Bierce’s eventual ‘dramatic exit’ into Mexico Mr. McWilliams remarks: ‘Nothing he ever did was more fortunate so far as his fame is concerned.’ True enough, from the point of view which tacitly belittles the writings while magnifying the writer. But what if one happen to be concerned with another kind of fame? The question then becomes: What did the dramatic exit accomplish toward making Bierce known in the sense of being pondered, inwardly digested, or simply read?

The answer thus far is, Next to nothing.

III

Bierce himself played into the hands of his detractors conscious and unconscious, hostile and friendly. At the low practical plane on which men achieve careers in letters and make themselves felt in their own day, he was one of the poorest managers who ever lived. In the period 1870-1900 there was but one possible way for such a writer to make his works count for a fraction of their worth. That way was by an unbroken association of decades with an established publishing house which could understand him, have faith in his longrange importance, and work and plan with him year in and year out for an indefinitely delayed reward. So far from benefiting by any such steadying continuity, Bierce published his little volumes of journalistic scraps here and there from London to San Francisco, at capricious intervals and in small editions which soon became minor collectors’ items. His books were given to the world with the testy absentmindedness of a bored child throwing handfuls of pebbles into a pond, and with about as much effect. Some of them he owed to the quixotic caprices of friends and idolaters. In the end he gave himself up as hopeless in the rôle of a man of letters. He half reconciled himself to the thought that he had been, after all, nothing but a redoubtable journalist whose trade was, as he said, abuse.

Then, a tired, discouraged, half-forgotten old man, he was made the beneficiary (or the victim) of still another ill-conceived enterprise — this time a pretentious, ornate, forbiddingly monumental Collected Works into which his output of a lifetime was crammed with no selection and little arrangement, like remnants into a rag bag. This uncalled-for twelve-volume monstrosity reminds one of Bierce’s comment on the absurdity of monuments to the unknown dead — ‘that is to say, monuments to perpetuate the memory of those who have left no memory.’ He disappeared into Mexico. There or somewhere, in 1914 or another year, he died. The man and the works were at that time alike dead. By a romantic afterthought it was shortly (and dubiously) discovered that the man might be, after all, of the immortals. The works, which have an intrinsic quality suggesting indestructibleness, still await their resurrection to immortality.

By posthumous criticism, and also by the form of criticism known as publication, Bierce has been made a victim of the over-specialized professionalism which conditions most of the activities and institutions of our time. Everyone who has ever had a finger in publishing knows that it is always a burning question what a given author shall be published as. Did Bierce write some war stories? Very well, we will reprint them and capitalize on the renewed interest in the psychologic and other phenomena of war. Did he have a flair for the ghostly and the ghastly, was he at home among spinal chills and in the charnel house? Excellent: let us parade him as a neglected master of horror. So, very naturally, the baffled publisher reasons; and the no less baffled critic has always rather abetted than enlightened him. Bierce did work in these two veins, to be sure. He also did work in half a dozen other conventionally established categories. But no one of them is central to Bierce. Not all of them together contain him. To define him as a virtuoso of the short story or the sketch, an essayist, a satirist, a literary critic, a writer of reminiscences, or a practitioner of any other of the literary forms which we are accustomed to find sorted and packed in volumes for our convenience, is completely to miss his distinguishing quality and the source of his transcendence. Yet it is in these ways that he has always been defined.

Hardly a grain of intuition or of basic horse sense has been applied from beginning to end, by either Bierce himself or any other, to the problem of getting his manifest destiny realized and establishing him in his place among viable American authors. There is, to this day, but one method of finding out what Bierce is really worth and what his prolonged inaccessibility costs the national letters. It is a fearfully circuitous method — one physically denied to most and intellectually impossible to some hundreds of thousands who might, if they were permitted, discover Bierce with the thrill of stout Cortez. The first necessity is to be among the lucky few who possess Bierce in that formidable mausoleum, the Collected Works; or, failing this, one must be in a position to haunt an exceptionally well-stocked library. Then one must assimilate some 5000 pages of mingled prose and verse, genius and bathos, wheat and chaff, stuff certainly ephemeral and stuff possibly undying, not only tumbled together in confusion, but actually interpenetrating and almost inextricable. Finally one must, by an act of almost creative criticism which few can perform at all and none without a vast appropriation of time and tissue, winnow the whole immense bulk for oneself — in short, review Bierce in one’s mind, not as he was published, but as he might be.

What Ambrose Bierce has always needed, then, what he needs to this hour and minute, is first to be seen, and then to be competently published, and then to be read. The third desideratum is automatic, granted the second. The capital difficulty is the first.

IV

Bierce would have hooted at the prospect of anyone’s taking thought in the interest of his posthumous renown and laboring to ensure his eventually coming into, as the saying is, his own. He would have protested instantly that the dead have no ‘own.’ When he says: ‘Respect for the wishes of the dead is a tender and beautiful sentiment, certainly,’ he is careful to add: ‘Unfortunately, it cannot be ascertained that they have any wishes.’ In another context he observes: —

Posthumous fame being what it is — if nothing can be said to be something — the desire to attain it is comic. It seems the invention of a humorist, this ambition to attach to your name . . . something that you will not know you have attached to it. You labor for a result which you know that you are to be forever unaware that you have brought about — for a personal gratification which you know that you are eternally forbidden to enjoy: if the gods ever laugh, do they not laugh at that?

Let the gods laugh, and Bierce with them; but we have ourselves to think of. As inheritors and beneficiaries of whatever in the past is valuable, durable, we cannot leave him to his beloved oblivion, however disposed we might otherwise be to take him at his reiterated word. A nation which does not eventually salvage the treasures which a Bierce leaves accessibly buried would not deserve to breed men of genius. For a man of genius — pure literary genius — is exactly what Ambrose Bierce was. It is only a question of time, and perhaps of not much time, when we shall see him emerge from the mists of his legend and appear not only as an American writer of the very first stature, but also as a world figure.

What words hitherto written on this continent are likeliest to withstand the abrasions of time we need not pretend to know. Of things which we can set beside the breath-taking thought of immortality without ipso facto rendering them (or ourselves) ridiculous, I can think offhand of a few: sixteen lines of Longfellow, bits of Poe; at least two pages of Holmes, more of Thoreau, more still of Melville, conceivably two or three tales of Hawthorne; some letters and various other passages of Abraham Lincoln; the best aphorisms of Emerson and of Poor Richard. To these, after twenty years of constant familiarity which began in skepticism and ended in awe, I am obliged mentally to add a substantial amount of Ambrose Bierce — how much, it is impossible to determine without actually isolating it, but probably more than the English-speaking part of the New World has yet had from any other one pen.

Contemplate any fragment from the best of Bierce: for instance, his definition of applause as ’the echo of a platitude,’ or of the forefinger as ‘the finger commonly used in pointing out two malefactors,’ or of an acquaintance as ‘a person whom we know well enough to borrow from, but not well enough to lend to,’ or of achievement as ‘the death of endeavor and the birth of disgust.’ Or take a pair of the prose epigrams: ‘At sunset our shadows reach the stars, yet we are no greater at death than at the noon of life’; and this fine one: ‘Every heart is the lair of a ferocious animal. The greatest wrong that you can put upon a man is to provoke him to let out his beast.’ Or let it be one of the epigrams in verse: —

Or one of the several hundreds of fables, some in prose, some in rhyme: —

A Philosopher seeing a Fool beating his Donkey said: ‘Abstain, my son, abstain, I implore. Those who resort to violence shall suffer from violence.’

‘That,’ said the Fool, diligently belaboring the animal, ‘is what I am trying to teach this beast — which has kicked me.’

‘Doubtless,’ said the Philosopher to himself, as he walked away, ‘the wisdom of fools is no deeper nor truer than ours, but they really do seem to have a more impressive way of imparting it.’

Because it is nearly impossible to imagine such aperçus as having had a personal author or a beginning, it is likewise hard to think of them as ceasing to be. They have a quality of intrinsic inevitableness — the quality of La Rochefoucauld’s undying maxim that ‘Hypocrisy is the homage which vice pays to virtue,’ or of Joubert’s that ‘The man of imagination without learning has wings and no feet.’ It is as if they had always been. Reading them, we say: These things were not written, they were discovered. Devoid of all betrayal of effort, all eccentricity either temporal or personal, they possess the limpidity of perfect style. They are quite as good in one language as in another, and in any language they seem to have written themselves. It is not even possible to detect that the ones written sixty years ago have either more or less of perennial timeliness than those written but thirty years ago. Look at them from what side you will, they present no facet to attrition; for their hardness is that of the black diamond.

V

It is a matter for some astonishment that no one has seized on the quasisymbolical hint contained in the biographic accident of Bierce’s sonship to a man named Marcus Aurelius. This name, in the illumination of subsequent events and the peculiar nature of Ambrose Bierce’s distinction, seems like a prophecy uttered in the year 1799. The son, together with what he inherited from the Massachusetts Bay and Connecticut Bierces, got from somewhere a quality and a stature of mind such as put him actually in the lineage of the timeless classical moralists, aphorists, epigrammatists, and fabulists. Like them he repeatedly packed the whole force of his wit, the entire scope of his imagination, into a page, a pensée, a quatrain, an epithet.

It is a remarkable testimony to the ascendancy of a momentary fashion, a socio-literary habit, and the dictates laid down by the publishing trade for its own convenience, that critics will still seek in vain to localize Bierce’s magnificence where it was always the most clouded — that is, in his longer works, and more especially his tales of soldiers, civilians, and ghosts. The age, it appears, wants its writers to be great by the ream, the romance, the tome, the shelfful. It can hardly be prevailed upon to look elsewhere for greatness. But we have to seek Bierce’s by the anecdote, the paragraph, the retort courteous or discourteous, the single line, on pain of not finding it at all. The last thought to occur to us is that (as Joubert also said) what is exquisite is better than what is ample — and this in spite of the swarming reminders that, of all that has long survived, little is to be found in fiction and little of that little in the realistic novel. We are disconcerted and baffled by a writer whose longevity is his wit—‘the salt with which,’ Bierce said, ‘the American humorist spoils his intellectual cookery by leaving it out.’

Bierce himself had the firmest possible grasp of these truisms, and all his thinking as a critic was done beyond the range of our modern illusion about the surpassing importance of novels. St. Peter’s, he said, is a work of high art; then he asked, ‘But is Rome a work of high art?’ ‘The only way to get unity of impression from a novel is to shut it up and look at the covers.’ ‘Novels are still produced in suspicious abundance and read with fatal acclaim, but the novel of to-day has no art broader and better than that of its individual sentences — the art of style. That would serve if it had style.’ ‘To their gift of genius the gods add no security against its misdirection. I wish they did. I wish they would enjoin its diffusion in the novel, as for so many centuries they did by forbidding the novel to be. And what more than they gave might we not have had from Virgil, Dante, Tasso, Camoëns, and Milton if they had not found the epic poem ready to their misguided hands?’ ‘The art of writing novels, such as it was, is long dead everywhere except in Russia, where it is new. Peace to its ashes — some of which have a large sale.’ Bierce also expressed his literary philosophy in that most famous of all brief reviews (of course, of a realistic novel): ‘The covers of this book are too far apart.’ And he seldom missed an occasion to point out that current novels, though read and written about, go unjudged. ‘Of the incalculable multitude written only a few have been read by competent judges, and of those judges few indeed have uttered judgment that is of record.’

The late Mrs. Mary Austin — a novelist — is reported by Mr. McWilliams as having found Bierce ‘conscious of lack and failure in his own life. . . . What he really wanted would not come.’ And she speaks of his ‘alternate high confidence in himself and puzzled bewilderment over the failure of his genius.’ Mrs. Austin, who was brilliantly wrong about many things, seems to have been dully right about Bierce’s attitude toward himself. At least half the time he believed that he had wasted eminent gifts and made a blank failure of a life which might have counted if he had not frittered it away. But a man’s notion of what he has accomplished may be one thing, his actual accomplishment another; and in the strange, perverse economy of genius the longest way round may be the shortest way home.

Bierce squandered himself, as it seemed, for year after year in the production of columns of witty trifles for the Hearst papers (which, by the way, he used chiefly for the expression of views diametrically opposed to everything young Mr. Hearst thought and was); and when it was all done and the sands run out it was to be perceived, by those having eyes to see, that he had submitted himself to the one form of compulsion most perfectly designed for his self-fulfillment. He had kept his independence of mind. He had been saved in spite of himself from all manner of diffuseness and from the consequences of the facility which was his without the structural sense to make a salutary use of it. And he had wrought, as it were in a trance, a greater body of consummate, hard-hammered, supremely original opuscules than we owe to any other American and perhaps to any other modern. It is idle, it is fantastic, to argue that such a man did not, up to the measure of reasonable human possibility, get himself expressed. Whatever he thought himself, whatever he may have died thinking, he had not failed.

There were, indeed, times when he himself had more than an inkling of the sense in which his ostensible waste was the only conservation, his temporary failure the eventual success in which he instinctively believed. Surely his own story, with that of the critics who would reduce him to their standardized preconceptions and make him out anything on earth but what he was, is told clear-sightedly enough in these lines ‘For a Certain Critic’: —

VI

Time and the recurrences of history have strangely renewed the pertinence of a great deal that Bierce wrote in his lightest topical vein and must have regarded at the time as ephemeral journalism needlessly well written for its use. He had a mysterious knack of seizing on the eternally recurrent aspects of things; and I do not see why we may not, with aptness and in all sobriety, call that knack genius. (‘These are the prerogatives of genius: To know without having learned; to draw just conclusions from unknown premises; to discern the soul of things.’) A mind which has once been even slightly steeped in Bierce is thereafter constantly visited by a curious sense of plagiarism in the events which make up any day’s news, and remembered words of his may unexpectedly mildew the freshest thoughts of our day almost before they can be uttered.

On the morning when I sat down to begin these paragraphs a trivial item in the early news broadcast reported an impending strike by 1700 unionized drivers of funeral cars and hearses in Manhattan. (‘Hearse, n. Death’s babycarriage.’) The advertised return of good times had emboldened the members of this worthy sodality to claim five dollars more a week for their services to society. I found myself suddenly challenged by that feeling of significant familiarity which we have — illusively — in dreams. It took only a second to identify its source across a gap of some years, and only a minute more to find it. It was Bierce’s fable called ‘A Prophet of Evil’: —

An Undertaker Who Was a Member of a Trust saw a Man Leaning on a Spade and asked him why he was not at work.

‘Because,’ said the Man Leaning on a Spade, ‘I belong to the Gravediggers’ National Extortion Society, and we have decided to limit the production of graves and get more money for the reduced output. We have a corner in graves and purpose working it to the best advantage.’

‘My friend,’ said the Undertaker Who Was a Member of the Trust, ‘this is a most hateful and injurious scheme. If people can not be assured of graves I fear they will no longer die, and the best interests of civilization will wither like a frosted leaf.’

And blowing his eyes upon his handkerchief, he walked away lamenting.

The last Presidential campaign reverberated with just such echoes. Here are two that have stuck in my memory : —

(1) One of the candidates announced a sudden decision to stump several thousand miles of itinerary that he had earlier conceded to his opponent. To the reader of Bierce this occurrence could not fail to bring back the fable of the Man Running for Office and overtaken by Lightning, which, as it ‘crept past him inch by inch,’ boasted: ‘I can travel considerably faster than you.’ ‘Yes,’ the Man Running for Office replied, ‘but think how much longer I keep going.’ (2) On the morning of November 4, a news broadcast reported that quaint quadrennial phenomenon of American politics, the defeated candidate’s message of congratulation to the opponent whom, up to twenty-four hours earlier, he had been denouncing as a menace to our institutions — a message to the usual effect that, the voice of the people having been heard, it was the part of every good American to acquiesce faithfully in their decision. The words that inevitably flashed into my mind were, as usual, Bierce’s: —

Bierce’s touch was just as unerring in comment on the ironies implicit in international affairs and racial relations. On the very morning when Mr. Landon announced his electioneering excursion to the West Coast, London was being agitated by the news of bloody Moslem-Hindu street riots in Bombay. Bierce’s little editorial comment reaches us across half a century: —

Hearing a sound of strife, a Christian in the Orient asked his Dragoman the cause of it.

‘The Buddhists are cutting Mohammedan throats,’ the Dragoman replied with Oriental composure.

‘I did not know,’ remarked the Christian with scientific interest, ‘that that would make so much noise.’

‘The Mohammedans are cutting Buddhist throats,’ added the Dragoman.

‘It is astonishing,’ mused the Christian, ‘how violent and how general are religious animosities.’

So saying, he visibly smugged and went off to telegraph for a brigade of cutthroats to protect Christian interests.

Thus, by a curious fatality, the world keeps putting its toes into bear traps which Bierce set decades ago. There is hardly an aspect of current domestic or international politics, æsthetics, industry, or science upon which he did not utter some word of a more telling finality than the new words which each occasion brings forth in floods. The whole moral history of Geneva and of Europe in the sinister years 1935-1936 is packed into the dialogue of his one terrible page called ‘Moral Principle and Material Interest.’ On the various economic quackeries of depression the last, most crushing word is still his: —

Philosopher. — I have been thinking of the pocopo.

Fool. — So have I; what is it?

Philosopher. — The pocopo is a small Brazilian animal, chiefly remarkable for singularity of diet. A pocopo eats nothing but other pocopos. As these are not easily obtained, the annual mortality from starvation is very great. As a result, there are fewer mouths to feed, and by consequence the race is rapidly multiplying.

Fool. — From whom had you this?

Philosopher. — A professor of political economy.

Fool. — Let us rise and uncover.

And the pious and fervid nationalists who insist to-day that God is on the side of their revived militarism, and that their aims are really dictated by the principles of Christian ethics, put themselves squarely in the trajectory of the epigram — a rabid pacifist-hater’s utterance, by the way — which ends: —

The same uncanny pertinence runs through a good half of Bierce’s work, including much of it which, being specifically topical, can hardly have been expected to reach beyond its passing hour. There is, for example, a casual jingle called ‘The Statesmen,’ one of many written of another depression campaign in another century. It reads like a trenchant and accurate lampoon of the seven 1936 contenders for the Presidency and their haranguing partisans (harangue-outangs, Bierce once named their kind). It begins: —

Then he sets the speakers one after another on their stumps — the men who shout with one voice: ‘I — I alone — can show that black is white as grass.’ Free silver is the panacea of one, free trade of another, freer banking laws of a third. (‘Free board, clothes, lodging would from me win warm applause.’) The single-taxer lifts up his voice, and after him the inflationist — ‘as many cures as addle-wits who know not what the ailment is.’ From contemplation of the orators he falls to diagnosing the ills of the suffering Body Politic, whose wretched fate it is ‘to be not altogether quick, nor very dead. You take your exercise in squirms, your rest in fainting fits between.’ The complaint, he decides, is nothing but worms:

And he ends this occasional trifle on a Butlerian touch well calculated to provoke rapacious envy in the best of our contemporary wits of the daily column and make their everlasting fortunes if they could contrive to duplicate it: —

It would, however, be a pity to leave the impression that Bierce’s province was primarily political satire. I can think of scarce a phase of morals, religion, invention, or human relations which the reader of Bierce does not sooner or later see with a new starkness in the glare of his lightning flash. He even has, I discover, some petards to set under the grand shaman of psychoanalysis whose 250,000-word treatise I have moiled my way through in the interest of a publisher who needs one ounce of sense which he can understand on several pounds of ingenious hocus-pocus which he cannot. One of the most concentrated and high-powered of the petards is this: ‘Thought and emotion dwell apart. When the heart goes into the head there is no dissension: only an eviction.’

And here is a last general word on the subject — a word which fits our day almost infinitely better than that for which it was written and will fit tomorrow better yet: —

‘Whose dead body is that?’

‘Credulity’s.’

‘ By whom was he slain ? ’

‘Credulity.’

‘Ah, suicide.’

‘No, surfeit. He dined at the table of Science, and swallowed all that was set before him.’

VII

Bierce hated, in his time, some things which no longer seem so very hateful. He fought against ideas which now look impregnable and for ideas which the world has thrown on its scrap heap. Against labor and capital, democracy and monarchism, imperialistic war and pacifistic sentimentalism, he was equally implacable. Politically he was nearer to the complete Fascist, the out-andout Hitlerian, than to anything else now extant; and yet he abominated tyranny. Sometimes, no doubt in weariness of spirit, he perpetrated humor which was jangling, in bad taste, and, worst of all, not very funny. His character contained indefensible (though not inexplicable) elements of arrogance, obstinacy, and the snob-baiter’s snobbishness. Mr. H. L. Mencken, himself not exactly an apostle of optimistic sweetness and light, recoils from Bierce’s ‘appalling cynicism.’ Perhaps the man’s only quality which never knew a flaw was his courage.

This imbalance of attributes is inevitable material for the biographer. It is perhaps important to the critic, too, while an author is alive and his claim to attention an issue still being fought out. It may even be relevant to posthumous criticism of works composed on a scale great enough to contain the author whole, as novels and histories may. It has always been customary to discuss the work of Bierce in conjunction with his brilliant defects, and to find the defects in the writings by the simple process of ignoring those which do not contain them. But to-day, twenty-odd years after the probable time of his death, what do such excrescences matter to us as readers of that which we find intrinsically worth our time?

Bierce was always passionate in defense of two ideas: first, that a work of the imagination must be judged entirely apart from the personality which produced it; secondly, that an author, like a race horse or a discus thrower, has a reasonable claim to be rated by his best performances, not his worst or his average. These stipulations apply with unique force to his own characteristic works, precisely because they are so concentrated as to be nullified by the smallest flaw. If there is perfection in them, you may be sure that there is nothing else, for there is room for nothing else.

‘The philosopher’s profoundest conviction is that which he is most reluctant to express, lest he mislead.’ ‘Nothing is more logical than persecution. Religious tolerance is a kind of infidelity.’ ‘Experience is a revelation in the light of which we renounce the errors of youth for those of age.’ ‘In childhood we expect, in youth demand, in manhood hope, and in age beseech.’ ‘Adam probably regarded Eve as the woman of his choice, and exacted a certain gratitude for the distinction of his preference.’ ‘ We are what we laugh at. The stupid person is a poor joke; the clever, a good one.’

‘God keep thee, stranger; what is thy name?’

‘Wisdom. And thine?’

‘Knowledge. How does it happen that we meet?’

‘This is an intersection of our paths.’

‘Will it ever be decreed that we travel always the same road?’

‘We were well named if we knew.’

In such things — and Bierce turned them out by hundreds — what matters or can ever matter but the justice of the perceptions, the impact of the truth or half-truth, the swift out-flowering of suggestion, the sovereign way he had with words? What difference can it make whether the man behind the words was once, in his mortal clay, proud or humble, consistent or erratic, philanthropist or misanthrope, materialist or mystic, Catholic, Protestant, or pagan? Is there anything in the words themselves to disclose to you that he was a hedonist, a journalist, an adoptive Californian, a father, an exsoldier who had been wounded and decorated for valor? Would they be any less incredible from an ascetic, a scholar, a Vermonter, a bachelor, a hunchback? Could you even tell by internal evidence within a century of when they were written? And if their author wrote so much as one paragraph which lives, how is it made in any single particular more or less living by the order or confusion of his life, or by the number of other paragraphs he may also have written which are now as dead as he?

In the worked-over river beds of his California in recent summers twentyodd thousands of unprosperous hardy folk have camped and lived by the panning of gold. It does not occur to them to complain much about the quantity of sand and gravel that washes away as they rock their pans or sluice boxes. The issue to them is how many grains of gold remain when the last handful of waste has disappeared.

Ambrose Bierce’s dross might have been, but was not, washed away in the critical process of editing his work for publication — a process unhappily never half performed. Subsequently his waste might have been sluiced away by public criticism and the composite taste of readers; but no sufficiently alert and disinterested consensus of criticism has yet been brought to bear, and, as I have noted, the work has been physically inaccessible to all but a trifling number.

The gold and the gravel, intermingled, remain in situ to this day, waiting for the greater critic called Time to do the work which the others have neglected. That the gold is there, of a purity and weight to stick to the pan, I have tried to indicate by a few random samples. Devoutly I believe that Time is going to prove, as I cannot, that it is not fools’ gold.