Vanishing Roads and Other Essays

serpent. The ancient name for it was the Midgard serpent, and doubtless, for the old myth-maker, it had ano

ts foul spawn squirm and sting and poison in nests of hidden noisomeness, myriad as the spores of corruption in a putrefying carcass, varying in size from some hydra-headed in

any history whatsoever. The fame of great personages may be literally compared to the heroic figures in the well-known group of the Laoco?n, battling in vain with the strangling coils of the

of evil operating through nature, everywhere doing battle with the good? Even from the courts of heaven, as we learn from the Book of Job, the gossip was not excluded; and how

o present themselves before the Lord, and Satan

n Satan answered the Lord, and said: "From going to and

nt Job, that there is none like him in the earth, a perfect

Lord, and said, "Doth

business. "Going to and fro in the earth, walking up and down in it," everywhere peering and listening, smiling and shrugging, here and there dropping a hint, sowing a

serve. Affirms nothing. Only innocently wonders.

hters, and suffered no little inconvenience from a loathsome plague of boils. Actually-life not being, like the Book of Job, an allego

re exists to this day, as one of its show places, the famous "Jew's House," associated with the gruesome legend of "the boy of Lincoln"-a child, it was whispered, sacrificed by the Jews at one of their p

the holocausts of human lives, and all the attendant agony of which his diabolical inventi

with the deliberate invention of lying tongues, delighting in evil for its own sake, or taking advantage of a ready weapon to pay off scores of personal enmity. At any time to a period as near to our own day as the early eighteenth century, noth

the nearest horse-pond. Statement and proof were one, and how ready, and indeed eager, human nature was to believe the wildest nonsense told by witless fool or unscrupulous liar, the records of such manias as the famous Salem trials appallingly evidence. Men h

on under consideration. If the prosperity of a jest be in the ears that hear it, the like is certainly true of any piece of gossip. Whoever it may be that sows the evil seed of

l, that gives a willing ear and a ready welcome to calumny, a sor

sip has found the widest scope for his gleeful activity, sowing broadcast dissensions and misunderstandings which have persisted for centuries. They are the fruitful caus

narrow strait, "natural enemies" and misunderstood monsters to each other. In a less degree, the friendship of England and America has been retarded by international

les of the Orient as human beings at all. And all this misunders

ers, who said or wrote what they pleased, and had no compunction about lying in the interests of entertainment. The proverbial "gaiety of nations" has always, in a great degree, consisted in each nation believing that it was s

on their guard in believing all that the telegraph or the wireless is willing to tell them about other countries. Electricity, many as are its advantages for cosmopolitan rapprochements, is not invaria

ividuals, the disposition of human nature to relish discrediting rum

himself do

ew, and dog wi

ag

ste as ice, as

not escap

to resent the one and only half believe in the other. At all events, nothing is more to its taste than the rumour that de

aesar, has this to say

to discover or invent faults which shall show that he is or was but a little man after all. Our vanity is soothed by evidence that those who have eclipsed us in the race of life are no better than ourselves, or in some respects worse than ourselves;

no more than a lightness of mind, and a less pardonable wish that it may be true. But the idle tale float

of Caesar and Cleopatra is probably such an "illustrative fiction," representing something that might very well have happened to Caesar, whether it did so or not. At all events, it does his fame no great harm, unlike another calumny, which, as it does not seem "illustrative"-that is, not in keeping with his gene

gram of the poet Catullus was to ask him to dinner-but even so, at what extra cost, what "expense of spirit in a

isonous tongues and the licking jaws. Even Caesar himself had to fall at last, his strong soul perhaps not sorry to escape through his dagger-wounds fro

head of Marie Antoinette must bow at last upon the scaffold, the true guillotine was the guillotine of gossip. It was such lying tales as that of the diamond necklace that

in the courts of law? But gossip laughs at such tribunals. It knows that where once it has affixed its foul stain, the mark remains forever, indelible as that imaginary stain which not all the multitudinous seas could wash from the little hand of Lady Macbeth. T

he dramatic possibilities of the legend, picturesquely elaborates it in Le Vicomte de Bragelonne. Never, probably, was so impudent an invention, and surely never one so successful; for it is in vain that historians expose it over and over again. Learned editors have

g is that, whenever a doubt of the truth is expressed, it is never the victim, but always the scandal, to which the ben

onfidence of the dead in the justice of posterity is one of the most pathetic of illusions. "Posterity will see me righted," cries

ains to grow blacker with time, and welcomes proof of fallibility and frailty in its immortal exemplars. For rehabilitation

first biographer. On the contrary, it prefers to perpetuate the lying portrait; and no consideration of the bequests of Poe's genius, or of his tragic struggles with ad

nothing to Poe now. It is

tness and goodness are ever found willing to serve humanity at all, and that any but scoundrels can be found to dare the risks of the high places of the world. For this social disease of gossip resembles that distemper which, at

worm-eaten, and may suddenly go down with a crash, but it will look around in vain for the social vermin that have brought about its fall. It is the cowa

big as a rou

the lazy fing

or one thing, they do not often speak at first hand. They profess only to repeat something that they have heard-some

become altogether impossible if each one of us were to constitute ourselves a sort of social police to arraign every accuser before the accused. We should thus, it is to be feared, only ma

e sure but that the rumour was true, and when we next meet the person c

e else if what So-and-so hinted of So-and-so can possibly be true. And so it will go on ad infinitum. The formula is simple, and it is only a matter of a

at must be forever talking or listening to fill the vacuity of its existence, to supply its lack of really vital interests. This demand naturally creates a supply of idle talkers, whose social existence depends on their ability t

talk evil from sheer lack of subject-matter. When we know why man talks so much, apparently for the mere sake of ta

rather than the reverse, but for the melancholy fact that he would thus be left without an audience. For the w

er than angered by its attentions; for, at all events, it argues their possession of gifts and qualities transcending the common. At least it presupposes individuality; and,

him. The artist has his genius, the beautiful woman has her beauty. 'Tis in ourselves that we are thus and thus; and if fame mu