Complete Works

glances and waiting for a dark moment, we buried our discovery discreetly, and kept on in the old direction, on that old, beaten track we have not had courage enough to leave, and which we perceive now more clearly than before to be but the arid way of the grave.
    The convert, the man capable of grace (I am speaking here in a secular sense), is not discreet.  His pride is of another kind; he jumps gladly off the track — the touch of grace is mostly sudden — and facing about in a new direction may even attain the illusion of having turned his back on Death itself.
    Some converts have, indeed, earned immortality by their exquisite indiscretion.  The most illustrious example of a convert, that Flower of chivalry, Don Quixote de la Mancha, remains for all the world the only genuine immortal hidalgo.  The delectable Knight of Spain became converted, as you know, from the ways of a small country squire to an imperative faith in a tender and sublime mission.  Forthwith he was beaten with sticks and in due course shut up in a wooden cage by the Barber and the Priest, the fit ministers of a justly shocked social order.  I do not know if it has occurred to anybody yet to shut up Mr. Luffmann in a wooden cage. {4}   I do not raise the point because I wish him any harm.  Quite the contrary.  I am a humane person.  Let him take it as the highest praise — but I must say that he richly deserves that sort of attention.
    On the other hand I would not have him unduly puffed up with the pride of the exalted association.  The grave wisdom, the admirable amenity, the serene grace of the secular patron-saint of all mortals converted to noble visions are not his.  Mr. Luffmann has no mission.  He is no Knight sublimely Errant.  But he is an excellent Vagabond.  He is full of merit.  That peripatetic guide, philosopher and friend of all nations, Mr. Roosevelt, would promptly excommunicate him with a big stick.  The truth is that the ex-autocrat of all the States does not like rebels against the sullen order of our universe.  Make the best of it or perish — he cries.  A sane lineal successor of the Barber and the Priest, and a sagacious political heir of the incomparable Sancho Panza (another great Governor), that distinguished littérateur has no mercy for dreamers.  And our author happens to be a man of (you may trace them in his books) some rather fine reveries.
    Every convert begins by being a rebel, and I do not see myself how any mercy can possibly be extended to Mr. Luffmann.  He is a convert from the creed of strenuous life.  For this renegade the body is of little account; to him work appears criminal when it suppresses the demands of the inner life; while he was young he did grind virtuously at the sacred handle, and now, he says, he has fallen into disgrace with some people because he believes no longer in toil without end.  Certain respectable folk hate him — so he says — because he dares to think that “poetry, beauty, and the broad face of the world are the best things to be in love with.”  He confesses to loving Spain on the ground that she is “the land of to-morrow, and holds the gospel of never-mind.”  The universal striving to push ahead he considers mere vulgar folly.  Didn’t I tell you he was a fit subject for the cage?
    It is a relief (we are all humane, are we not?) to discover that this desperate character is not altogether an outcast.  Little girls seem to like him.  One of them, after listening to some of his tales, remarked to her mother, “Wouldn’t it be lovely if what he says were true!”  Here you have Woman!  The charming creatures will neither strain at a camel nor swallow a gnat.  Not publicly.  These operations, without which the world they have such a large share in could not go on for ten minutes, are left to us — men.  And then we are chided for being coarse.  This is a refined objection but does not seem fair.  Another little girl — or perhaps the same little girl — wrote to him in Cordova, “I hope Poste-Restante is a nice place, and that you are very comfortable.”  Woman again!  I have in my time told some stories which are (I hate false modesty) both true and lovely.  Yet no little girl ever wrote to me in kindly terms.  And why?  Simply because I am not enough of a Vagabond.  The dear despots of the fireside have a weakness for lawless characters.  This is amiable, but does not seem rational.
    Being Quixotic, Mr. Luffmann is no