He was a notably handsome boy, too, in a blue coat and a golden yellow waistcoat, with a tall white stock and ruffles about his throat. His hair seemed red: and Gerald noted, moreover, the lazy and mildly humorous, half-mocking gaze with which this boy regarded Mispec Moor, as he rode by unhurriedly toward Antan, without any pausing, and Gerald noted in particular the very lovely smiling of this boy’s so amply curved and rather womanish mouth, as the boy went by upon the horse which was astonishingly like Kalki.
Yes, he had quite the air of a gentleman: and it was a great pity that this young whippersnapper had not the manners of a gentleman also, Gerald reflected, as Gerald stood there, feeling unwarrantably snubbed, and blinking behind his rose-colored spectacles. .
36. Tannhauser’s Troubled Eyes
AND upon yet another day Gerald talked with the comely but now aged knight Tannhauser, as this famous myth passed by, in full armor, upon his journey into Antan.
“There,” said Tannhauser, “there I may find again, it may be, the fair Dame Venus and all the brave and high-hearted sinners who would not compromise with the narrow and cruel ways of respectable persons.”
“My friend,” said Gerald, mildly, “there is considerable virtue to be found, here and there, among respectable persons. There is even a virtue in compromise.”
And Tannhauser shouted: “That I deny! All my life denies that, and so long as my name lives I am that lie’s denial! For it was the good and the respectable who betrayed me. I found pride and worldliness and a lack of cordiality to exist among the bourgeoisie and even among those professional churchmen who should have been the first to sustain and guide a repentant sinner. And so I turned again to that frankly pagan beauty which is hateful to pious and small-minded persons.”
Then this resplendent gray-haired myth spoke heatedly of his own life history and of how his love for this frankly pagan beauty had led him into the hollow mountain called the Horselberg, to live there as the lover of Dame Venus in all manner of frankly pagan pleasure-seeking; and of how, after seven years of frankly pagan recreations, when repentance smote him, abetted by the frailties of middle age, it was among the leading church members, and in the heart of the very head of the church, that he had found no sympathy. Therefore Tannhauser was returning to those frankly pagan recreations, so far at least as they were consistent with late middle life, because he was disgusted by those whining anti-hypocritical, cruel church members.
And Gerald listened. He remembered how in the Mirror of Caer Omn he for a while had been Tannhauser. Yet it was a queer thing, and a circumstance which made Gerald suspect time to be changing him, somehow, who used to be such a tremendous iconoclast, that now this old rebellious myth,—which represented yet another of Gerald’s discarded personalities,—appeared to Gerald remarkably over-colored and rather pitiably foolish. For here was a story which led to wrong conclusions. It ended by depicting a god at loggerheads with the head of his own church: and it begot, somewhat inevitably, those loud sneers at the bourgeois virtues, and those denunciations of people who, after all, had done nothing worse than to live quiet and common-sense lives which Tannhauser was now declaiming, and which to Gerald appeared unutterably childish. There was no conceivable reason why a well-thought-of pope should be hobnobbing with and coddling a broken-down old lecher just come out of a superior brothel. In fact, in reproving Pope Urban so publicly, Heaven had been, to Gerald’s finding, rather tactless, and had violated the
Still, Gerald did listen: and Gerald smiled, friendlily enough.
“I know, I know!” said Gerald. “I know, friend, all about you. When you repented of evil-doing,—and, really, you did take your time about that,—then you turned hopefully to religion, but, alas! you were repelled by its ministers. You found them to be human beings subject to human frailties. You found that—in Heaven’s eyes, anyhow,—even a pope might make a mistake. And so, quite naturally, you proceeded to drown the surprise and horror awakened by this discovery in out-and-out debauchery and in cutting reflections upon all pew-renters. For your discovery was revolutionary; no doubt the stars were shaken in their courses, to observe a human being making a mistake; and you also must have found the spectacle extremely trying. Still, you in this way became useful to romantic art.”