MONSIEUR SATAN

The French have strange names. There are Monsieur Brave-Man, Remy Funny-Man, Man-God, and so on. It is probably part of the Gallic imagination — these names. So when I went to see the celebrated Monsieur Satan in Paris I was no more astonished to find that that was really his name than that the name of the greatest poet in the world to-day is Gabriel the Announcer.

Monsieur Satan fascinated me, but did not astound me. Probably because I had known him always — or fancied I did. He had a negligent, self-revealing manner. He would pronounce dogmatically the most astonishing paradoxes in a tone of voice such as one would use when one would say, "plate of buckwheats, please."

He had, apparently, lived everywhere, travelled everywhere, knew everybody, knew everything. A person de rigueuer. He went through life seeing, recognizing, uttering, drinking. His impersonality was frightful. He said he was the right-angle of a circle, the fraction of a cipher, an eternally movable horizon — then he'd smile at my puzzled air and order another absinthe.

Beautiful summer night at the Pré-Catelan before the war. Paris gleamed in the distance like a monstrous convention of fire-flies. You could look right through the stars into the Néant beyond, the night was so clear.

We were on the question of the cinematograph. I was bound to hear something original, as the third person present (no less a person, by the way, than Remy de Gourmont) had informed me— no matter what Monsieur Satan touched on.

"Yes", he began suddenly, as if answering a question that had been asked about a thousand years before, "the Truth is out. We have discovered the Great Secret. The method of the Mysterious Force is known."

"In the screenless 'movies', unperfected as yet, wherein with the aid of a powerful light phantoms are projected on a dark stage, we have the secret of ourselves revealed. For we, sir, are phantoms, condensed etheric rays of varying degrees of ponderability, thrown on the dark stage of the world, and made visible to one another by a Light. This Light emanates from a Universal Mind, and if it ever ceases to be, we — the phantoms — shall cease to be with it, and the little playlets that we call our experiences will be no more. Voilà tout."

"Nothing has ever given us the sense of pleasure in the tragedies of existence like the moving picture. It has deepened the aesthetic consciousness of the race more than anything else. By aesthetic consciousness I mean the ability to enjoy life as a work of art, as a sublime tragi-comedy, or a farcical tragedy, or ironical drama — it is merely a matter of temperament whatever you call it."

"The Producer-in his Hidden Box sees life exactly as we see it in the screenless 'movies'. His (or Its) emotion is always pleasurable no matter what happens to these puppets that we are."

After this piece of pure Spinozism fired into the night from the piazza of the Pré-Catelan he poured in his absinthe, and continued:

"Have you ever tried to analyze why we enjoy the woes of Oedipus, Hamlet, Lear, Phédre? Why we love the diabolic and inhuman in art? Why the Borgias, the Neros and the Napoleons fascinate us? It is the triumph in us of the artistic sense over the personal bias. It is the 'movie' instinct in the human brain dominating the pity and whimper in the human heart. We are passionately in love with life as life — the more complex, the harder, the more terrible, the profounder the fatality that it reveals to us the greater the ultimate pleasure."

"When a man applauds the acting of Iago he is something of a god."

"Whether it is the adventures of Robinson Crusoe, the 'Inferno' of Dante, the human hells of Dostoevsky or Balzac, or the satanism of Poe, it is the great spectacle that we demand."

"And the nerves and the brain must be feasted. We are all pagans in this sense."

"Did not the author of the Book of Job and Goethe in 'Faust' (a clean filch of the latter from the former) make of life a 'frame-up' — un coup monté, as we say in French? Here we are doing our bit while we are being filmed on the endless running screen of Time."

"The plots of life are infinitely various. We are only posed phantoms. We are in a studio — call it the Universe if you will; and the Director you will never know here."

And Monsieur Satan let a smile rove over his face. Had he remembered some past meeting somewhere with that frosty smile?

"But, Monsieur Satan," I broke in on that frosty smile, "where are all the films of these playlets kept?"

"Why," he replied, "in the pigeon holes and cylinders of the air."

"And where may they be?" I asked, while Remy de Gourmont drew invisible arabesques on the serviette with a fork.

"All around us," replied this man in the secrets of the Infinite. "All light photographs; that we know, and the Light that we call consciousness — do you not think that that photographs and registers everything also?"

"Every movement here on earth is registered in Space materially; and its metaphysical motive is registered in the mind — the Light — of the Supreme Consciousness."

"Space is an immense, unimaginable collection of scenarios. It is at the present moment, through the operations of light, putting this scene into etheric waves or boxes of ether. Some day when an apparatus I am working on is complete I'll show you the firing on Fort Sumpter, the Siege of Paris, the Neanderthal man at home en famille. They are all up there, and long after the earth with its pomp and vanities and phantoms has crumbled to cosmic dust or vanished into some strange sun the light waves, flashing eternally through space, will continue to carry the immaterial — if you like that word — record of all that was done here on this sun-flake, itself purely phantasmagoric."

"And the Unknowable enjoys it all, for some times, I imagine, the plot gets beyond its foresight, and its characters get strangely mixed up. Then it feels surprise."

"But you see, do you not, that we are all in the 'movies'?"

Just then a pony cart in which were seated two children bolted down the road. Monsieur Satan was at the reins quicker than a flash of light (I say this literally) and with a frosty smile brought the two children to the table of the half-crazed mother.

And was that act being recorded, too, in the ether—in favor of Monsieur Satan?