The Cream of the Jest

Curious, very curious, it was to Kennaston, to see the burning of sixty-three plays written by Æschylus, of a hundred and six by Sophocles, and of fifty-five by Euripides – masterworks eternally lost, which, as Kennaston knew, the world would affect to deplore eternally, whatever might be the world's real opinion in the matter.

But of these verbal artificers something at least was to endure. They would fare better than Agathon and Ion and Achæus, their admitted equals in splendor, whose whole life-work was passing, at the feet of Horvendile, into complete oblivion. There, too, were perishing all the writings of the Pleiad – the noble tragedies of Homerus, and Sositheus, and Lycophron, and Alexander, and Philiscus, and Sosiphanes, and Dionysides. All the great comic poets, too, were burned pellmell with these – Telecleides, Hermippus, Eupolis, Antiphanes, Ameipsas, Lysippus, and Menander -"whom nature mimicked," as the phrase was. And here, posting to obliteration, went likewise Thespis, and Pratinas, and Phrynichus – and Choerilus, whom cultured persons had long ranked with Homer. Nothing was to remain of any of these save the bare name, and even this would be known only to pedants. All these, spurred by the poet's ageless monomania, had toiled toward, and had attained, the poet's ageless goal – to write perfectly of beautiful happenings: and of this action's normal by-product, which is immortality in the mouths and minds of succeeding generations, all these were being robbed, by the circumstance that parchment is inflammable.

Here was beauty, and wit, and learning, and genius, being wasted – quite wantonly – never to be recaptured, never to be equaled again (despite the innumerable painstaking penmen destined to fret the hearts of unborn wives), and never, in the outcome, to be thought of as a very serious loss to anybody, after all…

These book-rolls burned with great rapidity, crackling cheerily as the garnered wisdom of Cato's octogenarian life dissolved in puffs of smoke, and the wit of Sosipater blazed for the last time in heating a pint of water… But then in Parma long afterward Kennaston observed a monk erasing a song of Sappho's from a parchment on which the monk meant to inscribe a feeble little Latin hymn of his own composition: in an obscure village near Alexandria Kennaston saw the only existent copy of the Mimes

of Herondas crumpled up and used as packing for a mummy-case; and at Prior Park Kennaston watched Mrs. Elizabeth Barnes, then acting as cook for Dr. William Warburton, destroy in making piecrust the unique manuscript copies of three of Shakespeare's dramas, which had never been printed.

And – conceding Heaven to be an actual place, and attainment of its felicities to be the object of human life – Kennaston could not, after all, detect any fault in Amrou's logic. Æsthetic considerations could, in that event, but lead to profitless time-wasting where every moment was precious.

III

By-Products of Rational Endeavor

THEN again Kennaston stood in a stone-walled apartment, like a cell, wherein there was a furnace and much wreckage. A contemplative friar was regarding the disorder about him with disapproval, the while he sucked at two hurt fingers.

"There can be no doubt that Old Legion conspires to hinder the great work," he considered.

"And what is the great work, father?" Kennaston asked him.

"To find the secret of eternal life, my son. What else is lacking? Man approaches to God in all things save this, Imaginis imago, created after God's image. But as yet, by reason of his mortality, man shudders in a world that is arrayed against him. Thus, the heavens threaten with winds and lightnings, with plague-breeding meteors and the unfriendly aspect of planets; the big seas molest with waves and inundations, stealthily drowning cities overnight, and sucking down tall navies as a child gulps sugarplums; whereas how many plants and gums and seeds bear man's destruction in their tiny hearts! what soulless beasts of the field and of the wood are everywhere enleagued in endless feud against him, with tusks and teeth, with nails and claws and venomous stings, made sharp for man's demolishment! Thus all struggle miserably, like hunted persons under a sentence of death that may at best be avoided for a little while. And manifestly, this is not as it should be."

"Yet I much fear it is so ordered, father."