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LECTOR. It is the human story... the daily task! AUCTOR. Very true, my dear Lector... the common lot... Now let me tell my story. It is about the Hole that could not be Filled Up. LECTOR. Oh no! Auctor, no! That is the oldest story in the AUCTOR. Patience, dear Lector, patience! I will tell it well. Besides which I promise you it shall never be told again. I will copyright it.
Faith in the life here! Let our poets sing us that. And such as would deny it I would hang them as enemies of society. LECTOR. But, at all events, to keep to our point you at least hope for immortality. If Edison, say, were suddenly to discover it for us as a scientific certainty, you would welcome the news? SCRIPTOR. Well, yes and no! Have you seen the 'penny' phonographs in the Strand?
LECTOR. But do you really mean, Scriptor, that you have no desire for the life after death? SCRIPTOR. I never said quite that, Lector, though perhaps I might almost have gone so far. What I did say was that we have been accustomed to exaggerate its importance to us here and now, that it really matters less to us than we imagine. LECTOR. I see. But you must speak for yourself, Scriptor.
LECTOR. But does not old age spend most of its thought in dwelling fondly on its lost youth, hanging like a remote sunrise in its imagination? Is it not its one yearning desire just to live certain hours of its youth over again? and would the old man not give all he possesses for the certainty of being born young again into eternity? SCRIPTOR. He would give everything but the certainty of rest.
After seventy years of ardent life one needs a long sleep to refresh us in. Besides, age may not be so sure of the advantages of youth. All is not youth that laughs and glitters. Youth has its hopes, which are uncertain; but age has its memories, which are sure; youth has its passions, but age has its comforts. LECTOR. Your answers come gay and pat, Scriptor, but your voice betrays you.
These young fellows catch up with the world's ideas one after another, they have been tamed a long while, but they find them running loose in their minds, and think they are ferae naturae. They remind me of young sportsmen who fire at the first feathers they see, and bring down a barnyard fowl. But the chicken may be worth bagging for all that, he said, good-humoredly. Caveat Lector.
AUCTOR. But remember, Lector, that the artist is known not only by what he puts in but by what he leaves out. LECTOR. That is all very well for the artist, but you have no business to meddle with such people. AUCTOR. How then would you write such a book if you had the writing of it? All that is meant by culture! The brown photographs! Oh! Above all, I would be terse. AUCTOR. I see.
Not a bottle of good wine or bad; no prints inherited from one's uncle, and no children's books by Mrs Barbauld or Miss Edgeworth; no human disorder, nothing of that organic comfort which makes a man's house like a bear's fur for him. They have no debts, they do not read in bed, and they will have difficulty in saving their souls. LECTOR. Then tell me, how would you treat of common things?
Take, for instance, the Life of Man, which is the Difficulty of Birth, the Difficulty of Death, and the Difficulty of the Grand Climacteric. LECTOR. What is the Grand Climacteric?
Two years later, Ruaidri Ua Concobar "granted ten cows every year from himself and from every king that should follow him for ever, to the Lector of Ard Maca, in honor of Patrick, to instruct the youths of Ireland and Alba in Literature."
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