to lighten the mind of some burden of
love or bitterness thrown upon it by the events of life. We are only
permitted to desire life, and all the rest should be our complaints or
our praise of that exacting mistress who can awake our lips into song
with her kisses. But we must not give her all, we must deceive her a
little at times, for, as Le Sage says in 'The Devil on Two Sticks,' the
false lovers who do not become melancholy or jealous with honest passion
have the happiest mistress and are rewarded the soonest and by the most
beautiful. Our deceit will give us style, mastery, that dignity, that
lofty and severe quality Verlaine spoke of. To put it otherwise, we
should ascend out of common interests, the thoughts of the newspapers,
of the market-place, of men of science, but only so far as we can carry
the normal, passionate, reasoning self, the personality as a whole. We
must find some place upon the Tree of Life high enough for the forked
branches to keep it safe, and low enough to be out of the little
wind-tossed boughs and twigs, for the Phoenix nest, for the passion
that is exaltation and not negation of the will, for the wings that are
always upon fire.

THE PRAISE OF OLD WIVES' TALES

An art may become impersonal because it has too much circumstance or too
little, because the world is too little or too much with it, because it
is too near the ground or too far up among the branches. I met an old
man out fishing a year ago who said to me 'Don Quixote and Odysseus are
always near to me;' that is true for me also, for even Hamlet and Lear
and OEdipus are more cloudy. No playwright ever has made or ever will
make a character that will follow us out of the theatre as Don Quixote
follows us out of the book, for no playwright can be wholly episodical,
and when one constructs, bringing one's characters into complicated
relations with one another, something impersonal comes into the story.
Society, fate, 'tendency,' something not quite human begins to arrange
the characters and to excite into action only so much of their humanity
as they find it necessary to show to one another. The common heart will
always love better the tales that have something of an old wives' tale
and that look upon their hero from every side as if he alone were
wonderful, as a child does with a new penny. In plays of a comedy too
extravagant to photograph life, or written in verse, the construction is
of a necessity woven out of naked mo