o snarl, yelp, whimper and grunt, who are the
parasites of death; who choke themselves with their beards; to the
timorous ones who vomit invective upon all that confuses them, who
vituperate, against all their non-existent intelligence cannot grasp; to
the martyr ones who disembowel themselves on the battlefield, who
crucify themselves upon their stupidities; to the serious ones who
mistake the sleep of their senses and the snores of their intellect for
enviable perfections; to the serious ones who suffocate gently in the
boredom they create (God alone has time to laugh at them); to the virgin
ones who tenaciously advertise their predicament; to the virgin ones who
mourn themselves, who kneel before keyholes; to the holy ones who
recommend themselves tirelessly and triumphantly to God (I have never
envied God His friends, nor He, mine perhaps); to the never clean ones
who bathe publicly in the hysterias of the mob; to the never clean ones
who pander for stupidity; to the intellectual ones who play solitaire
with platitudes, who drag their classrooms around with them; to these
and to many other abominations whom I apologize to for omitting, this
inhospitable book, celebrating the dark mirth of Fantazius Mallare, is
dedicated in the hope that their righteous eyes may never kindle with
secret lusts nor their pious lips water erotically from its reading--in
short in the hope that they may never encounter the ornamental phrases I
have written and the ritualistic lines Wallace Smith has drawn in the
pages that follow._

MALLARE

[Illustration: First Drawing]

FANTAZIUS MALLARE

[I]

Fantazius Mallare considered himself mad because he was unable to behold
in the meaningless gesturings of time, space and evolution a dramatic
little pantomime adroitly centered about the routine of his existence.
He was a silent looking man with black hair and an aquiline nose. His
eyes were lifeless because they paid no homage to the world outside him.

When he was thirty-five years old he lived alone high above a busy part
of the town. He was a recluse. His black hair that fell in a slant
across his forehead and the rigidity of his eyes gave him the appearance
of a somnambulist. He found life unnecessary and submitted to it
without curiosity.

His ideas were profoundly simple. The excitement of his neighborhood,
his city, his country and his world left him unmoved. He found no
diversion in interpreting them. A frien