VIII

Walking home from Jael’s house Fitzjerald passed again through Washington Square. The sky was hard and clear, the moon was full, and still the harpy raged. The waste of a city’s castoff day was running to the second and third cornice lines. Chewing gum wrappers, metallic dust, scurrilous particles, absurdities of waggish matter, news and ideas. Soiled newspapers astride the wind in guilty, obscene shapes, moving in a plane of dimness above the lights. They might even seem to be making evil gestures, like—

“Like witches,” said Fitzjerald. “What a witches’ night!”

That set him on a train of thought.

Witchcraft had been real, as the church well knew, because it was an idea—an idea the witches had of themselves, an idea people had of witches. Notions of good and evil. Notions of magic. Notions of flying. Videlicet, ideas.

Here were ideas literally flying. Vehicle, once printed matter, or, that was to say, trees converted into woodpulp, instead of the New England broomstick or the imaginary animal of the Scottish witch. It was the Scandinavian witches flew on trees, trees as they grew.

One might see, too, that these objects had a sense of direction, some trick of dirigibility, hither-bound from Bank street, Grove street, Waverly place, Third street, Jones street, all those bias environs west and south where every cult of disaffection had its coven, priest or priestess.

As to who than he should know them better?

Youth in its radical, self-conscious phase, and not very vital, else it would not have time to invent for itself a symbol of flame to worship. Much of that. Ego stuff. Innocuous....

Then those making it a point of difference with society to live romantically in obsolete tenements under some fanciful sign of protest. A good deal of that. Boredom, mostly, increasing with wealth....

Artists pretending to be scornful of Puritanical opinion, to which they were not indifferent, since they spent all their strength to shock it....

Writers, too, bulging their eyes at the key hole, reporting life as a peep-show. Not that they were dirty. The great ancients were dirty, only they did not know it....

Free unions wearing the soiled garment of revolt because otherwise they should be naked; they must pay respectability the homage to keep feud with it. Silly stuff....

Others, however, such as ego-mad communists; self-chosen saviours of the proletariat, avoiding work; anarchists, jealous of the law’s protection; pacifists, dreaming of a war to exterminate militarists; idealists, living grossly; Jack Cades, thinking themselves Cromwells; political refugees from Europe, thinking themselves Lenines and liberators. Economic perverts, living by what they denounced, trading on the evil eye, setting their incantations adrift on woodpulp paper, pretending in their ideas to possess the sorcery to plow a rich man’s field with toads and reap barley from his thistles.

Imagine them overcome by faith in their ideas, as the witches were by their belief in the power of the blood-suckled creatures they kept in their imp pots. Then the parallel. On a night like this their ideas take possesion and carry them off to a Devil’s Sabbath where anything you will is true. No harm to the witches, old or new. They were sure to come awake again where and as they were. No harm to the furtive old man, walking carefully and looking always behind him, who came every morning an hour before dawn to gather up all the old newspapers in Washington square, folding and sorting them particularly. No harm either to capitalistic society, never to be destroyed by spells and curses, never from without, but only, if ever, from within.

How infantile, how circular, this human intelligence!

What was it the old witches bargained with Satan for? Power—the power to redistribute good and evil in the world. This had turned out to be a power of evil only, because, first, it was an impotent power, except as it might act upon human fear, and because, secondly, its possessors, unable to do good, became wholly intent upon doing evil to others, in envy, malice and disappointment. And so still in this day of artificial light.

What was the faith of old witches? Faith in the power of a phrase to change realities. “Thout, tout, throughout and about.” Merely that, and anything might happen as you wished it. True still in the age of applied science.

What was then as now the greatest common delusion? That you could overcome the disagreeable facts by the simple rite of denying their existence.

And the greatest of all human passions? The passion for martyrdom....

For a moment he was pleased, even a little admiring of his mind. What he had just been thinking was not altogether bad. Not bad at all. Good, in fact. Very good. He would turn it to some account in an essay. Then his critical faculty reviewed it and it went to pieces. It was bad. Intrinsically bad. Not that any part of it was false but that as a whole it represented a fatal confusion of illusion and idea as he conceived them. This always happened. It was his curse. Nothing he did with his creative power ever escaped the destructive acid of his critical judgment. He knew too much; he was knowledge-foundered and he knew eren that.