In Canto One of his poem John Shade (the poet in VN's novel Pale Fire, 1962) speaks of his childhood and says that his God died young:
My God died young. Theolatry I found
Degrading, and its premises, unsound.
No free man needs a God; but was I free?
How fully I felt nature glued to me
And how my childish palate loved the taste
Half-fish, half-honey, of that golden paste!
My picture book was at an early age
The painted parchment papering our cage:
Mauve rings around the moon; blood-orange sun
Twinned Iris; and that rare phenomenon
The iridule - when, beautiful and strange,
In a bright sky above a mountain range
One opal cloudlet in an oval form
Reflects the rainbow of a thunderstorm
Which in a distant valley has been staged -
For we are most artistically caged. (ll. 99-114)
Gott ist tot (God is dead) is a metaphor used by the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), appearing in Die fröhliche Wissenschaft ("The Gay Science," 1882) and Also sprach Zarathustra: Ein Buch für alle und keinen (Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None, 1883-1885). Nietzsche does not claim that a supernatural being has perished, nor does he offer an argument for atheism as a doctrine. Rather, the phrase is a diagnostic claim about the condition of Western civilisation. Nietzsche used "God" as a symbol representing Christian morality and its metaphysical worldview that, for centuries, provided Europe with its foundation for morality, meaning, and value. Nietzsche is the author of Jenseits von Gut und Böse: Vorspiel einer Philosophie der Zukunft ("Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future," 1886). Gut is the Zemblan word for "God" (Gut mag alkan, Pern dirstan, God makes hungry, the Devil thirsty). In Canto Four of his poem, Shade says that now he will speak of evil and despair as none has spoken before. According to Kinbote (Shade’s mad commentator who imagines that he is Charles the Beloved, the last self-exiled king of Zembla), Shade's former lawyer called the contract signed by Sybil Shade (the poet's widow) "a fantastic farrago of evil:"
Immediately after my dear friend's death I prevailed on his distraught widow to forelay and defeat the commercial passions and academic intrigues that were bound to come swirling around her husband's manuscript (transferred by me to a safe spot even before his body had reached the grave) by signing an agreement to the effect that he had turned over the manuscript to me; that I would have it published, without delay, with my commentary by a firm of my choice; that all profits, except the publisher's percentage, would accrue to her; and that on publication day the manuscript would be handed over to the Library of Congress for permanent preservation. I defy any serious critic to find this contract unfair. Nevertheless, it has been called (by Shade's former lawyer) "a fantastic farrago of evil," while another person (his former literary agent) has wondered with a sneer if Mrs. Shade's tremulous signature might not have been penned "in some peculiar kind of red ink." Such hearts, such brains, would be unable to comprehend that one's attachment to a masterpiece may be utterly overwhelming, especially when it is the underside of the weave that entrances the beholder and only begetter, whose own past intercoils there with the fate of the innocent author.
As mentioned, I think, in my last note to the poem, the depth charge of Shade's death blasted such secrets and caused so many dead fish to float up, that I was forced to leave New Wye soon after my last interview with the jailed killer. The writing of the commentary had to be postponed until I could find a new incognito in quieter surroundings, but practical matters concerning the poem had to be settled at once. I took a plane to New York, had the manuscript photographed, came to terms with one of Shade's publishers, and was on the point of clinching the deal when, quite casually, in the midst of a vast sunset (we sat in a cell of walnut and glass fifty stories above the progression of scarabs), my interlocutor observed: "You'll be happy to know, Dr. Kinbote, that Professor So-and-so [one of the members of the Shade committee] has consented to act as our adviser in editing the stuff." (Foreword)
In R. L. Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), Mr Hyde (Dr Jekyll's alter ego) is pure evil. In his review of The Works of Edgar Allan Poe, Academy (London), vol. VII, no. 1, January 2, 1875, R. L. Stevenson (a Scottish writer and poet, 1850-1894) calls E. A. Poe's story King Pest (1835) "this pointless farrago of horrors:"
WITH just so much of the author’s works before us, it would be too soon to speak definitively of his character, either as a man or a writer; and hence, although Mr. Ingram’s memoir is prefixed, duly enough, to the first volume, I do not think it falls to be considered here in any detail. Mr. Ingram has done his best to clear Poe’s name from the calumnies of Rufus Griswold (a gentleman, grim by name, who makes so repulsive a figure in literary history, that he might well have been coined in the morbid fancy of his victim); but when all is said, it is not in the power of man to make Poe altogether sympathetic. I cannot find it in my heart to like either his portrait or his character; and though it is possible that we see him more or less refracted through the strange medium of his works, yet I do fancy that we can detect, alike in these, in his portrait, and in the facts of his life as now most favourably told, a certain jarring note, a taint of something that we do not care to dwell upon or find a name for.
The tales themselves are all before us in these two volumes; and though Mr. Ingram does not tell us whether they are there printed in chronological order, I fancy we shall not be mistaken in regarding some of the last stories in the second volume, as being also among the last he wrote. There is no trace, in these, of the brilliant and often solid workmanship of his better moments. The stories are ill-conceived and written carelessly. There is much laughter; but it is a very ghastly sort of laughter at best — the laughter of those, in his own words, “who laugh, but smile no more.” He seems to have lost respect for himself, for his art, and for his audience. When he dealt before with horrible images, he dealt with them for some definite enough creative purpose, and with a certain measure and gravity suitable to the occasion; but he scatters them abroad in these last tales with an indescribable and sickening levity, with something of the ghoul or the furious lunatic that surpasses what one had imagined to oneself of Hell. There is a duty to the living more important than any charity to the dead; and it would be criminal in the reviewer to spare one harsh word in the expression of his own loathing and horror, lest, by its absence, another victim should be permitted to soil himself with the perusal of the infamous “King Pest.” He who could write “King Pest” had ceased to be a human being. For his own sake, and out of an infinite compassion for so lost a spirit, one is glad to think of him as dead. But if it is pity that we feel towards Poe, it is certainly not pity that inspires us as we think of Baudelaire, who could sit down in cold blood, and dress out in suitable French this pointless farrago of horrors. There is a phase of contempt that, if indulged, transcends itself and becomes a phase of passionate self-satisfaction; so for the weal of our own spirits, it is better to think no more of Baudelaire or “King Pest.”
Describing IPH (a lay Institute of Preparation for the Hereafter) in Canto Three of his poem, Shade says that he tore apart the fantasies of Poe:
We heard cremationists guffaw and snort
At Grabermann's denouncing the Retort
As detrimental to the birth of wraiths.
We all avoided criticizing faiths.
The great Starover Blue reviewed the role
Planets had played as landfalls of the soul.
The fate of beasts was pondered. A Chinese
Discanted on the etiquette at teas
With ancestors, and how far up to go.
I tore apart the fantasies of Poe,
And dealt with childhood memories of strange
Nacreous gleams beyond the adults' range. (ll. 623-634)
At the end of his essay Aes Triplex (1878), R. L. Stevenson quotes the Greek saying "those whom the gods love die young:"
And, after all, what sorry and pitiful quibbling all this is! To forego all the issues of living in a parlour with a regulated temperature—as if that were not to die a hundred times over, and for ten years at a stretch! As if it were not to die in one's own lifetime, and without even the sad immunities of death! As if it were not to die, and yet be the patient spectators of our own pitiable change! The Permanent Possibility is preserved, but the sensations carefully held at arm's length, as if one kept a photographic plate in a dark chamber. It is better to lose health like a spendthrift than to waste it like a miser. It is better to live and be done with it, than to die daily in the sickroom. By all means begin your folio; even if the doctor does not give you a year, even if he hesitates about a month, make one brave push and see what can be accomplished in a week. It is not only in finished undertakings that we ought to honour useful labour. A spirit goes out of the man who means execution, which outlives the most untimely ending. All who have meant good work with their whole hearts, have done good work,[23] although they may die before they have the time to sign it. Every heart that has beat strong and cheerfully has left a hopeful impulse behind it in the world, and bettered the tradition of mankind. And even if death catch people, like an open pitfall, and in mid-career, laying out vast projects, and planning monstrous foundations, flushed with hope, and their mouths full of boastful language, they should be at once tripped up and silenced: is there not something brave and spirited in such a termination? and does not life go down with a better grace, foaming in full body over a precipice, than miserably straggling to an end in sandy deltas? When the Greeks made their fine saying that those whom the gods love die young,[24] I cannot help believing they had this sort of death also in their eye. For surely, at whatever age it overtake the man, this is to die young. Death has not been suffered to take so much as an illusion from his heart. In the hot-fit of life, a tip-toe on the highest point of being, he passes at a bound on to the other side. The noise of the mallet and chisel is scarcely quenched, the trumpets are hardly done blowing, when, trailing with him clouds of glory,[25] this happy-starred, full-blooded spirit shoots into the spiritual land.
[Note 23: All who have meant good work with their whole hearts, have done good work. See Browning's inspiring poem, Rabbi Ben Ezra, XXIII, XXIV, XXV:—
"Not on the vulgar mass
Called "work," must sentence pass,
Things done, which took the eye and had the price;
O'er which, from level stand,
The low world laid its hand,
Found straightway to its mind, could value in a trice:
But all, the world's coarse thumb
And finger failed to plumb,
So passed in making up the main account;
All instincts immature,
All purposes unsure,
That weighed not as his work, yet swelled the man's amount:
Thoughts hardly to be packed
Into a narrow act,
Fancies that broke through language and escaped;
All I could never be,
All, men ignored in me,
This, I was worth to God, whose wheel the pitcher shaped."]
[Note 24: Whom the Gods love die young. "Quem di diligunt adolescens moritur."—Plautus, Bacchides, Act IV, Sc. 7.]
[Note 25: Trailing with him clouds of glory. This passage, from Wordsworth's Ode on the Intimations of Immortality (1807), was a favorite one with Stevenson, and he quotes it several times in various essays.]
The title of R. L. Stevenson's essay, Aes Triplex, is taken from Horace, aes triplex circa pectus, "breast enclosed by triple brass," "aes" used by Horace as a "symbol of indomitable courage." Shade's murderer, Gradus is a member of the Shadows (a regicidal organization). Chapter 71 of Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra is entitled Der Schatten ("The Shadow").