The Cream of the Jest quotes

She wondered at him, and showed as much in the big blue eyes which had troubled so many men’s sleep. “Since time began, there has lived no nobler person or more constant lover than my lord Guiron.”

“Oh, yes, Sir Guiron, I grant you, is very nearly immaculate,” said Horvendile; and he yawned.

“My friend, you have always served him faithfully. We two cannot ever forget how much we have owed in the past to your quick wits and shrewd devices. Yet now your manner troubles me.”

“It is not possible for you to believe me, of course. And it may be that I, too, am only a figment of some greater dream, in just such case as yours, and that I, too, cannot understand.

It may be the very cream of the jest that my country is no more real than Storisende.

How could I judge if I, too, were a puppet? It is a thought which often troubles me. …”

“You touch on a disheartening truth. People never want to be told anything they do not believe already. Yet I quite fail to see why, in books or elsewhere, anyone should wish to be reminded of what human life is actually like.

For living is the one art in which mankind has never achieved distinction.

It is perhaps an obscure sense of this that makes us think the begetting of mankind an undiscussable subject, and death a sublime and edifying topic.”

“You touch on a disheartening truth.

People never want to be told anything they do not believe already.

Yet I quite fail to see why, in books or elsewhere, anyone should wish to be reminded of what human life is actually like. For living is the one art in which mankind has never achieved distinction.

So Kennaston did not embroider verbally his theme—of Living Adequately—as he had felt himself in vein to do could he have found a listener.

“Some day,” he ruefully reflected, “I shall certainly write a paper upon The Lost Art of Conversing with One’s Wife. Its appeal, I think, would be universal.”

Then his eggs came. …

Kennaston cherished that reflection as he sedately partook of a dish he recollected to have seen described, on menu cards, as “Hungarian goulash” and sipped sherry of no very extraordinary flavor. …

He was to remember how plain the fare was, and more than once, was to refer to this meal⁠—quite casually

—beginning “That reminds me of what Such-an-one said once, when I was lunching with him,” or perhaps, “The last time I lunched with So-and-so, I remember—” With such gambits he was able, later on, to introduce to us of Lichfield several anecdotes which, if rather …

“Madam,” he was insanely stating, “I would not for the world set up as a fit exponent for the mottoes of a copybook; but I am not all base.”

“You are,” flashed she, “a notorious rogue.”

“And what do you knit, mother?” Kennaston asked her.

“Eh, I shall never know until God’s funeral is preached,” the old woman said. “I only know it is forbidden me to stop.”

So he went past her, aware that through some nameless grace the girl whom he had twice seen in dreams awaited him there, and that the girl’s face was the face of Ettarre.

Yes, I shall thriftily sell this secret, and so get money to go on with the great work.”

Seeking to find the means of making life perpetual, he had accidentally discovered gunpowder.

Then at Valladolid an age-stricken seaman, wracked with gout, tossed in a mean bed and grumbled to bare walls. He, “the Admiral,” was neglected by King Philip, the broth was unfit for a dog’s supper, his son Diego was a laggard fool.

and man’s quaint dislike of facing reality was here disguised as a high moral principle. That was why all art, which strove to make the sensations of a moment soul-satisfying, was dimly felt to be irreligious.

For art performed what religion only promised.

… And that was precisely what religion promised, only in more explicit terms, and with the story’s milieu fixed in romantic, rather than realistic, settings. Kennaston had here the sensation of fitting in the last bit of a puzzle.

Life, yearning for symmetry, stood revealed as artist.

Life strove toward the creation of art. That was all life cared about. Living things were more or less successful works of art, and were to be judged according to art’s canons alone.

It is called Les Facheux—The Bores. It is rumored to take off very cleverly the trivial tedious fashion in which perfectly well-meaning people chatter their way through life. But that more fittingly would be the theme of a tragedy, Ettarre.

Men are condemned eternally to bore one another.

Two hundred years and more from today—perhaps forever—man will lack means, or courage, to voice his actual thoughts adequately.

“I see,” says Kennaston, intently regarding his fingernails: “they must have been highly enjoyable social outings, all around.”

“They must have been worse than family reunions,” put in Mrs. Kennaston, and affected to shudder.

“Indeed, there are certain points of resemblance,” I conceded, “in the general atmosphere of jealous hostility and the ruthless digging-up of what were better left buried.”

“They must have been worse than family reunions,” put in Mrs. Kennaston, and affected to shudder.

“Indeed, there are certain points of resemblance,” I conceded, “in the general atmosphere of jealous hostility and the ruthless digging-up of what were better left buried.”

Then Kennaston asked carelessly, “But how could such absurd superstitions ever get any hold on people, do you suppose?”

“Why, not of necessity,” said I. “As touches what we call the ‘occult,’ delusion after delusion has been dissipated, of course, and much jubilant pother made over the advance in knowledge.

But the last of his delusions, which man has yet to relinquish, is that he invented them.

This too must be surrendered with time; and already we are beginning to learn that many of these wild errors are the illegitimate children of grave truths. Science now looks with new respect on folklore—”

but here was just ‘a citadel of peace in the heart of the trouble.’ And—well, I was satisfied.

People do not think much when they are satisfied.

”

Thereafter Felix Kennaston, as the world knows, wrote no more books, save to collect his later verses into a volume. “

I am afraid to write against the author of The Tinctured Veil,

” he was wont flippantly to declare. And a few of us suspected even then that he spoke the absolute truth.

“But why shouldn’t I have been?” he said, a little later, in reply to the point-blank query. “I had a handsome home, two motors, money in four banks, and a good-looking wife who loved and coddled me.

The third prince gets no more at the end of any fairy tale.

Still, the old woman spoke the truth, of course—one pays as one goes out. … Oh, yes, one pays!—that is an inevitable rule; but what you have to pay is not exorbitant, all things considered. … So, be off with your crude pessimisms, Harrowby!”

… nonage, have invented and have manipulated a host of staple severances for their puppet lovers—sedulously juggling, ever since Menander’s heyday, with compromising letters and unscrupulous rivals and shipwrecks and wills and testy parents and whatnot—and have contrived to show love overriding these barriers plausibly enough.

But he must truly be a boldfaced rhapsodist who dared at outset marry his puppets, to each other, and tell you how their love remained unchanged.

I am thus digressing, in obsolete Thackerayan fashion, to twaddle about love-matches alone. People marry through a variety of other reasons, and with varying results: but to marry for love is to invite inevitable tragedy.

these dramas are of the body. They may be taken as the sardonic comedies, or at their most outrageous as the blustering cheap melodramas, of existence; and so lie beyond the tragic field.

For your true right tragedy is enacted on the stage of a man’s soul, with the man’s reason as lone auditor.

And being happily married—but how shall I word it? Let us step into the very darkest corner. Now, my dear Mr. Grundy, your wife is a credit to her sex, an ornament to her circle, and the mainstay of your home;

And people glibly think of you as Mr. and Mrs. Grundy now, almost as a unit: but do you really know very much about that woman whose gentle breathing—for we will not crudely call it snoring—you can always hear at will o’ nights?

Suppose, by a wild flight of fancy, that she is no more honest with you than you are with her?

So to Kennaston his wife remained a not unfriendly mystery. They had been as demigods for a little while; and the dream had faded, to leave it matters not what memories; and they were only Mr. and Mrs. Felix Kennaston.

But among her effects, hidden away as before in the press in her bathroom, Kennaston found both the pieces of metal.

They were joined together now, forming a perfect circle, but with the line of their former separation yet visible.

He showed me the sigil of Scoteia, having told this tale. …